Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson

for Barbara Chase-Riboud and for my family, reputed to be the direct descendents of Hemings and Jefferson

Je m'appelle Sally:
How simply my first French lesson
Returns to me,
The stern and exacting gaze of my tutor,
Monsieur Perrault,
And your rich, commanding voice
--The voice of one
Both demigod and father:
Tell me Sally, what did you learn?
Master, I learned to say
My name.
Now, years later, I repeat the French,
As if to yield
All that I am,
And open the locket to find,
Cached in the tiny, gold-lined womb,
A lock of your red hair:
It happens, your face
Looms again in my lifetime.
If I could go to the doorway,
And stand, waiting for you
As you take the hall, your leonine figure
Assembling in the longest mirror
As in my eyes.
But you are dead, Thomas Jefferson,
And I can only sit,
Motionless, my heart pounding
At your phantom,
For today I learned
The census-taker made me white
To absolve you of the crime
Of having loved a slavewoman.
So I burned our correspondence
--The diaries and billet-doux an ash
Clinging to my skirts,
A smoke in my hair. Each word
A swatch of myself, a forbidden history:
The Hôtel de Langeac, the Palace of Marly,
The Capitol, Monticello--
Now I am robbed of everything,
Even of my color.

I was fifteen when you took me,
Your daughter's nursemaid;
You brushed my cheek
With your red-plumed chest,
Whispering Martha, Martha
--Piercing me with the name
Of your dead wife, my white half-sister
Whom I resembled.
I was so frightened by you then,
So overawed and unbelieving
Of your love.
I would stand before my mirror,
Cupping my breasts
In my two hands, amazed: no fledgling
But a woman--
Je t'aime, Sally, Je t'aime,
I heard you say,
And in Paris I mislaid
My slavery.
So home to Monticello, I met
My mother's loving, though accusatory face,
And knew I should have chosen freedom.

* * *

The battlecries,
Your glittering words of revolution
Have been recorded,
But in a secret wing of Monticello,
Against your will, I marked
The dreams and follies of our seven children,
The shocked faces of our foreign guests.
But O what I could not capture
Was your silence
As all the country crowned me
Black Lillith, Sooty Chatelaine.
In your pain and ravaged pride,
You clung to me.
Love me, stay with me, you whispered.
They say a man cannot free what he loves:
Is it your truth, your story,
I hear in these words?
Love me and remain a slave?

* * *

In the recurrent dream,
I stand on the steps of Monticello,
And see what blinds me:
Our children like hunted deer,
In a dead run--our children
You could never acknowledge.
I recall pausing on the Pont de Neuilly,
And absently dropping
A key into the Seine,
As I watched the word enceinte
Darken your gaze:

Return with me to Virginia,
You pleaded, a great man,
Lonely in your aegis,
But I refused, knowing I was unfettered
As long as I remained in France.
You would love me;
We would return to Paris,
And my child would be given
Freedom at adulthood
--A perilous, vouchsafed freedom, surely,
To pass from slavery
Into a forged whiteness
That begs amnesia.
I looked into your eyes, two sapphires
Set in a human face,
And met a suffering so vast, what else
But to take your hand
And whisper, Yes...
My love and master, I need to believe
I would choose this way again,
Though as property
I had no choice
'Cept to give myself
But I, Mademoiselle Sally,
Gave you my heart,
And returned to slavery.
Nothing could free me from you.

Cyrus Cassells has, in the course of his career, been a film critic, an actor, a teacher, and a translator. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including...