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love no masta if he don't promise
in writing to free your children. Don't do it. Get killed first, get beaten
first. The best is not to love them in the first place. Love your own color.
That brings pain enough. Love your own color if you can, and if you're chosen,
get that freedom for your children. I didn't get mine, nor for my children. I
can't say he promised it to me, so I can't say he didn't keep his promise. He
never promised and I never asked. I just expected. A terrible thing for a slave
to do. Expect.
    "Found myself at Monticello, property of Thomas
Jefferson. I just said to myself I weren't going to die of it. I'd just get on
with caring for Martha and my children and hers. I couldn't let go, you see, I
just had too many heads to hold. My last two children were born at Monticello.
One by a slave husband Smith. The other, I don't like to speak about. Got raped
is what happened. And not just once. Nothing to do about it. He was a white
carpenter named John Nelson. Nothing to do but to have the child and to love it.
It wasn't his fault how he got here. He was my last. My baby. When I was almost
fifty.
    "Despite all the misery, and the bondage and the hard
work, I loved life. The idea, you see, was to survive. Not go under with grief:
the game was to last out the day and the night and garner enough strength for
the next. And, Lord, I needed that strength. First, I had Bermuda Hundred to
run, that huge sprawling house and all them slaves. Then I had Monticello. The
house was smaller, but Thomas Jefferson was always tearing it up, rebuilding,
so I could never get that plantation running like I wanted. Every time things
would quiet down and I would get the house and the servants all orderly, why he
would come back from Philadelphia or New York and we would be in the brick and
plaster again. Reduce me to tears, it did. Poor Martha never did see her house
finished. She was poorly a lot of the time and she hated when he was away. She
hated that politics anyway. But she loved the man. She loved him. I kept
telling her to hold on. To try and garner her strength. Not to try to keep up
with him, because Thomas Jefferson would live to be a hundred. Strongest man I
ever did see. Twenty, thirty miles on horseback every day. He was like me in
temperament, except he sometimes got his moods or his 'depressions,' as Martha
would call them. He liked his privacy, too. Didn't want Martha sticking her
head out too much either. He was a jealous and possessive man. And he had a
temper—oh, he was sweetness and light—but I saw it. He had a monumental temper
when he was riled. Even when it didn't come out. He thought it weren't
dignified ... but he had it. I could sometimes smell that brimstone inside him.
Sometimes he would just look at me smelling it, and laugh. He stayed out of my
way. He stayed out of my household affairs, so we got on. I liked him, I did.
And I guess he did love my Martha in his way. But he never did understand
women, really.
    "When his mother died in 1776, why he did the same thing he did later with his wife's
belongings when she died; he burned everything— letters, portraits, mementos—everything. He
didn't want anyone to know him, yet I never saw a man who so much needed to be
known and loved. Well, Martha Wayles loved him, and so do you Sally. I can pass
down to you what I knowed about Thomas Jefferson, which ain't much. But nobody
can teach you how not to be hurt when you love a white man.
    "I say 'love' if that's what can pass between a slave
and a free white man, or a slave and free white woman. I loved Martha like a
mother, and I loved Wayles like a wife. Trouble was I didn't ask for nothing,
and nothing's what I got in the end. When I realized who I was or what I was, I
made up my mind I might be called a slave, but I wasn't going to live no
slavish life. I wasn't going to go out of my way to be no slave. I tried to
pass that on to all my children. One thing I always insisted was that we had a
family