Remembering Sally Hemings

Remembering Sally Hemings

November 5, 2008

Whose silken fetters all the senses bindAnd soft captivity involves the mind.Imagination! Who can sing thy force?

(Phillis Wheatley. On Imagination.)

Sally Hemings Albemarle County, Virginia.

Dear Miss Phillis Wheatley,

Or would you prefer Mrs. Phillis Peters? A name contains so much. Journey. Myth. The stuff we humans are made of. Including deception. Sally, my own name, appears slight. A girl’s attribute. But I am long a grown woman whose family name carries the weight of history and condition made complex by lovers’ promises, the first to my Grandmother. She bore the name of an African.

Kidnaped and brought across an ocean into this bay’s mouth, onto land wrested from Powhatan’s stewardship, sold in bondage to a highlander native of yet another place, come to earn his fortune in this place claimed Williamsburg, Virginia, in honor of monarch lines and land grabbing Queens. My Grandmother conceived my mother, who she called Elizabeth, with an English seaman named Hemings. He sought their liberation. The slave owner refused and held Elizabeth Hemings to sell her to another white man who had six children with my mother before he passed us all on in estate. Through a daughter by his wedded wife. To his son-in-law. A man who would soon craft a declaration of national independence.

And I? Raised between mountains and the sea’s endless meetings and partings where virgin conifer forest fell to men’s axes, woodpecker and nuthatch blacken the sky in promiscuous migration, epidemic and war birthed pirated settlements and the first women colonists arrived in tandem with the first slave ship. Corn. Squash. Bean. Blood watered. Washed in brine. Beside okra, sheep and Nicotiana. Slave on my father’s farm. Seamstress. Chambermaid. Wench. Mother. Mistress. To the father of my children. Yarn spinner. Pilgrim. Tale-teller. River drinker. Dreamer.

I came of age in the president’s house and found your poems among his library’s volumes. When we returned from France. Before he assumed the highest office. The deaths of my first born. Scandals. Fruit of seasons. I was young and, they say, pretty. He was among the world’s most powerful men. Writing history as he saw fit, dismissing you in his public writing, but keeping your verse and obituary on his desk leaving a trail I have followed like a darning stitch ever since. Let them speculate until we have all turned to dust, the voices of our offspring, on both sides of the color line, drowned in national fictions.

I was sixteen and pregnant. Returned to slavery from a peacock’s freedom. Pray pardon me. I have barely had a word to myself. The first name of a child. A surname that binds me like rope to a whaling ship and women born concubines. Loved? Like man loves beast.

She hands me needle and thread and bid me keep my head up above the chamber pots in this mansion’s many rooms. Patch an old coat. Wick castaways into ticking. Knit stockings. He had all the words. I passed mine on in stories for bedtime. Though I had dreams. Wayward mountains behind and the ocean before. Belle of the ball whirling like the dervish in the quarters upturn night with pacts. I did not want to come back but took promised freedom in return for long silence.

Some say “let them do the talking. Since there be selling demand the highest price.” My voice. My children. Those in heaven and those among all men. At twenty-one he helped them become fugitives and make what they could a patrimony. One daughter. She thought it in her interest that, on leaving Virginia, to assume the role of a white woman. My sons. Leaving me a mender rent and sewing time.

Little Sally AnnSitting in the sandcrying and weeping for her precious little manRise Sally riseWipe your dirty eyesTurn to the eastTurn to the westTurn to the one that you love best . . .

Turn. Turn. Turn. Dear Miss Phillis, can’t you remember your mother tongue? If not...