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Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 590-592



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Monticello

Vesper Osborne


The wind brushed against my skin and remembered. I heard the sound of hoofs muted against the dusty dirt road. The horses seemed to be dancing to a rhythmic phrase, an allegro tempo, with four beats to a measure as they traveled six-hundred feet above the flat plains of Charlottesville, Virginia. The sun, heavy with fatigue, descended quickly over the western horizon. The smell of rain awakened a distant past. Children laughed. Babies cried. We labored from dawn to dusk. Gabriel Lilly, the cruelest of Monticello's overseers, shouted orders. We rebelled silently, but our bodies obeyed. The smell of French cuisine prepared by slave James Hemings permeated the air adjacent to the kitchen. After dark, we dined on a pinch of cornmeal and a ration of pork. The cold mountain air was unkind to the African. The slave cabins were built of stonewalls and brick floors, ten feet by ten feet, providing marginal protection from the elements. Monticello, "little mountain" in Italian, was home—refuge—for Jefferson and the white family born of his flesh and blood. For the slave, Monticello was an invisible cage. A prison. An existence with no choices, no voice.

America's third president relaxed in the parlor on his mahogany campeachy chair, hand-crafted by slave John Hemings. Warmed by a fire, candles lit, his eyes were riveted to his own words, Notes on the State of Virginia. President Jefferson rose to his feet and stretched his long legs, his eyes tired at last. He walked into the book room and gingerly placed his book on the architect desk. Restless, he walked into the entrance hall and admired John Trumbull's engraving of The Declaration of Independence delicately hanging in a gold frame. His eyes were transfixed. He wondered, for just a moment, if his words had been dishonest. He spoke aloud, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

"Masta Sir, are you in need of anything else this evening?" asked Burwell Colbert, the slave butler.

President Jefferson dismissed his slave with a familiar nod.

Out of view, Burwell waited. When President Jefferson departed the entrance hall, he opened the large door to the front portico. Burwell examined every inch; important visitors were expected in the morning.

Burwell's name rings like an echo. My ears the doorway to time, my attention cajoled to the present day.

"Now when you came up those steps, came to that door and you knocked at the door you would be met by the butler, a slave named Burwell Colbert," said Wayne Elliott, a Thomas Jefferson Foundation tour guide. [End Page 590]

Monticello inspires and angers me, simultaneously. I am torn between the ideal of a free democracy and the reality of slavery. Monticello is majestic, elegant, but a symbol of the sweat and toil of my slave ancestors. They suffered. I suffer. They endured. I endure.

I cannot separate Monticello from the man. As I enter his bed chamber, he whispers in my ear, "They [blacks] are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation." I look above his bed and see three oval windows. A door hides a step-ladder. The space above is the length of the room and approximately four feet wide. Our guide describes it as a storage area, but it was probably the sleeping alcove for his domestic slave, Sally. I can hear the sighs of Sally Hemings—slave, mistress, mother of seven children. Are they the children of Thomas Jefferson? I can see Sally's face, wrinkled with pain. Was joy a stranger? Slave Sally. Master Jefferson. As mere property, did Sally Hemings love or hate her master? Was it love that seduced a child of fifteen? Or was this "tender delicate mixture of sentiment" a simple act of rape? Sally cries in the night, but who is there for her salvation? The law? A moral and just nation? I feel the connection between the past and...

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