Patriot Hearts (56 page)

“An’ kill the whites?” Sally remembered the torrent of panic that had swept Virginia, just after her own return from France, at the news that in the wake of the French Revolution, the slaves in the French sugar-island of Saint-Domingue—who outnumbered the whites on the island ten to one—had risen in revolt. They had slaughtered not only the whites, but the free colored caste of artisans, slaveholders, shopkeepers there. Two French fleets had been defeated there so far. The blacks were still free.

Lam’s eyes shifted. “Some of ’em. I hear there’s some they won’t, those they feel are on their side and will help.”

She felt the half-truth through her skin but said nothing. No man who owned slaves, no matter what he’d written about equality and freedom, would be considered
on their side.
Nor would his family.

“Sally, I took a chance comin’ here to warn you. Because I trust you. And I don’t want to see you hurt, or your boys hurt. I don’t know when it’ll happen, but when it does, I’ll come here, me an’ my girls.” Lam had married the year after Sally had returned to Tom, the cook-girl of a Charlottesville lawyer. He’d bought their two daughters as they were born, and had saved up about half the two hundred dollars it would take to free his wife, when she’d died last year. “We’ll go back into the mountains, until it all blows past, for better or for worse. But you gotta be ready to go. We may not have more’n a few minutes to spare. Food, money—all the money you can gather. We gonna need it. An’ you cannot tell, Sally. Not your family, not anyone. Swear to me that.”

He had risked his life, to come up here and tell her. If rebellion was being planned, the community of the unfree would—and could—strike swiftly at a potential talebearer. And no white sheriff would even investigate a black man’s unexplained death.

She whispered, “I swear.” Then: “But if you honestly think a rebellion’s going to succeed, you’re mad. You really think a—a
kingdom of black men
can stand here in Virginia? That any white will help ’em? The whites got militia, Lam. They got an army up north of ten thousand—”

“That’s exactly what people said when your Mr. Jefferson an’ his friends all spit in the face of the British,” Lam said harshly. “You don’t hear anyone goin’ around these days sayin’ how stupid
that
was.” He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Whose side you on, Sally?”

She pulled her arm sharply away from his grip. “I am on my children’s side.”

“And your children look white enough to pass for white boys. Or to be killed in mistake for ’em, if killin’ starts.”

Sally knew he spoke the truth. But for years she’d heard Tom talk of the Saint-Domingue rebellion, as he’d talk to her about almost anything that was on his mind at bedtime, in the world-within-a-world that was his room. He talked the way he made music, to clarify his mind, and from things he had said, it was perfectly clear to Sally that the only reason the blacks in Saint-Domingue were still free was because Saint-Domingue was an island, and the French were too busy fighting everyone in Europe to spare an invasion force of sufficient strength.

But in Saint-Domingue, the rebelling slaves had murdered white—and free colored—children along with adults.

“I’m not sayin’ these people is smart or dumb, Sally. And I’m not sayin’ what their chances are. I’m only sayin’ they’re comin’. It could be soon. It could be
damn
soon.”

Richmond is as full as it can hold,
she heard Tom say,
of men from all over Virginia. Prominent men, men of property and power….

If they was smart,
thought Sally dizzily,
NOW would be the time to strike. An attack now would buy ’em time.

And she felt in her heart the slow hot blaze of anger, at the thought of the men and women she’d known in Eppington and Williamsburg, who had been sold away from their families or seen their wives, their husbands, their children sold away.

Who had seen their daughters or their wives or their sisters raped or seduced—who lived daily with the knowledge that any white man
could
molest them with nothing more to fear than his neighbors saying,
Tsk.
Who lived hourly with the awareness of men sizing them up, as Tom Randolph and Peter Carr and Jack Eppes sized her up each time she walked past.

Serve them right.

For the unavoidable and unquestioned fact that one day the children Young Tom and Bev played with were
all
going to be sold away from their families and friends, sent to places where they knew no one; and when they were grown, they’d see their children taken away and sold in turn.

For the sheer
unthinkability
that a white man would or could feel genuine love for her—unthinkable even by the white man himself.

Serve them right, if it was a thousand times worse.

Outside the window, she heard Young Tom whistling as he came back from the kitchen. Like his father, he was always singing, and Tom had even begun, in his casual way, to teach him to play the fiddle. She said softly, “You better go. The men’ll be up at the Big House soon and they’ll see you if you stay. I swear I’ll be ready, and I swear I’ll tell no one. Thank you, Lam,” she added, as he clapped on his hat, and opened the shed door a crack to make sure the coast was clear. “More than I can say, thank you. You’re a good man.”

He brought the door shut again, regarded her in the gloom. “And you’re a good woman, Sally. I just wish you were as happy as you deserve to be.”

She returned a crooked smile. “We’re all as happy as we deserve to be, Lam. God bless you. I’ll see you soon.”

“That you will, girl.” His eyes grew hard. “That you will.”

Bev’s fever-flush had spread over his face and body. His throat, when she carried him to the cabin’s window to look, was fiercely inflamed. Young Tom was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dish of leftovers from the Big House breakfast, his sharp face worried: “He didn’t eat anything last night, Mama, and now he won’t have anything either.”

“There grits there, sugarbaby? Mix ’em up with a lot of milk, and pour some honey in. I bet he’ll take a little of that.”

Between them, Young Tom and Sally got the toddler to eat a little, and to drink the bitter willow-bark tea against the fever. When Young Tom had gone back up to the Big House, Sally carried her younger boy over to her mother’s cabin, where Betsie told her that Jenny’s Mollie was worse that morning, and Minerva’s youngest two were showing symptoms as well. Despite all this, and between Sally’s own tasks at the Big House of keeping Tom’s room in order and feeding his three mockingbirds in their cages, she made the time during that day to discreetly scout hiding-places and exit-routes in the woods that could be used
that night,
if necessary: hiding-places that would accommodate both herself and a three-year-old boy. Young Tom, she knew, was clever enough to escape on his own and rejoin them later.

She came back from one of these scouting expeditions to find both Jeff and Annie Randolph at Betty’s cabin, with another jug of milk pilfered from the kitchen, and some extra blankets. “We heard some of the pickaninnies were sick, ma’am,” explained Annie, glancing worriedly from Betty Hemings’s face to Sally’s, and back. Since Patsy couldn’t very well order her children to shun Sally without an explanation, the golden-haired nine-year-old and her brother had never been told to keep away from her: Like the white children of most plantations, they played with the slave-children and ran in and out of the cabins as cheerfully as if they lived there. “Will they be all right?”

“We’re praying so, sugarbaby,” replied Sally, and smiled down at the girl: Tom’s granddaughter, even if she was Patsy’s child. Only a year older than Maria had been, when Sally and she had set sail for France. Unlike Jeff, she hadn’t yet grown bossy around the slave-children; she would hold the babies with the same grave care that a few years ago she’d devoted to her dolls, practicing to be a mama herself.

Even Jeff seemed cowed in the presence of sickness. To Betty he murmured, “They gonna die?” and he sounded both scared and grieved. He added, stumbling a little on the words, “My baby sister got sick and died. The first Ellen, not Ellen now.” Jeff had been not quite three years old when that fragile little girl had succumbed.

As she watched Tom’s two oldest grandchildren dart back up the slope toward the brick mansion in its tangled cocoon of scaffolding, Sally seemed to hear in her mind the distant clamor of bells ringing the tocsin, of rough voices singing
Ça Ira.

She shivered, although the afternoon was warm.

That night Sally dreamed of fire. Dreamed that Paris was burning, that the flames leaped over the customs-barrier and kindled the faubourgs beyond it, and the woods and fields beyond that, fields of tobacco and sugar. The blaze was spreading, and would soon consume the world. Sick with panic, she crouched in the shadow of a wall on the rue St.-Antoine watching the baying mob surge closer and closer, and in the lead walked a woman she knew was her grandmother, the proud black African woman who’d been raped by a sea-captain while on her way to the New World in chains. She carried a torch in one hand, and a pike in the other, and impaled on the pike was the head of Thomas Jefferson.

Sally woke with a gasp, lay in the darkness staring in the direction where she knew the window lay, half expecting to see the shutters limned by flame in the dark.

But the hot, thick night was still. The only sound she heard was the drumming of the cicadas, the skreek of the crickets, and Young Tom’s deep, even breath.

Nearly every slave conspiracy Sally had heard of had ended up betrayed by someone on the inside, some slave who’d gone running to his master with all the details. As a child Sally had sniffed with contempt at such craven treachery; and because she had loved Tom and Patsy and Polly and Miss Patty, it had never crossed her mind that one day vengeance might come knocking on
their
door.

Now she understood how people could be good and well-meaning—even shocked by the evils of the society of which they were a part—and still deserve retribution for the part they had played.

Now she understood how a man or woman could betray the freedom of all, for the sake of an oppressor who had been gentle and kind.

It is a glorious time to be alive,
Tom had said in France, his eyes shining in the candlelight, but he’d still made preparations to get his daughters out of the bloody path of the juggernaut.

In the days that followed, Sally was careful to go about her business, and avoid any show that she was listening more carefully to half-heard conversations. She’d always kept money cached in the rafters of the cabin where Jimmy wasn’t likely to find it, money Tom gave her for little luxuries for her children, like Young Tom’s secondhand fiddle. Now she began to conceal food there as well.

In this she was aided by the fact that nothing at Monticello was quite normal during that time.

Bev’s sickness was soon seen to be mild: he cried and scratched, but he always seemed to know who and where he was. But in the Big House, Patsy’s daughter Ellen was very sick indeed.