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name—Hemings. Hemings. And I wanted all my children to be addressed by
it. Made them remember they had a surname! I tried to get them interested in
life. In seeing what was going to happen next. Even slaves have things happen
to them. Even in a slave's world, something got to be happening all the time. I
believe in life-preserving and love.
    "I believe in having a secret life with secret plans
and secret dreams.
    Just like having a little vegetable garden to yourself out
back of your cabin like mine. You got to work it at night or real early in the
morning, but it's yours. Same with dreams. Maybe you got to work them late at
night or real early in the morning, but nobody can take them out of your head
lest they kill you and if you work ain't nobody going to kill you, cause you
too valuable. Lord, God, I would fight the suicides."
    All through the sweltering summer afternoons, Elizabeth
Hemings ran out her life with words. They flowed on until dusk and until she
was too exhausted to speak. Many of the stories, Sally Hemings and Martha
Randolph had heard a dozen times, yet they clung to Elizabeth Hemings as to a
floating log in a rapid. And Elizabeth Hemings carried them faster and faster
down her particular river of memory. Rivulets of incidents, old family jokes,
intrigues, feuds, births, and deaths, trickled through the ramblings of each
afternoon.
    She reached back further and further, her hands hovering
over the quilts as if she were choosing the bits and pieces of a mosaic in
colored glass, each cut glass reflecting other past events which brought on
still other images of her life. Sally Hemings thought that she would never be
able to remember her own life so well, and Martha Randolph too was amazed at
the richness of this slave's recollections. For the two women tending her,
there had never been a time when there was not an Elizabeth Hemings.
     
     
    "After John Wayles's death, all of us slaves were
divided up amongst the inheritance of the four living daughters, Martha and her
three half sisters. Martha took me and ten of my children. The other two went
with Tibby. I didn't come here to Monticello until after your birth, Patsy.
Came with Sally, who was two years old, and the baby Thenia.
    "Thomas Jefferson was a rich man in those days. Yea,
rich. He inherited one hundred thirty-five slaves from John Wayles, including
us Hemingses, and eleven thousand acres. He had four plantations: Monticello,
which wasn't much to begin with, but with all his building, became the most
beautiful; Poplar Forest, where we all went after them British came 'round for
us; Elk Island; and Elkhill. Life was sweet for Martha up until all the trouble
about the independency came along. First thing, Thomas Jefferson out defending
a mulatto who claimed freedom because his great-grandmother was a white woman
who had him by a black slave father. Masta Jefferson saying the sins of the
father shouldn't be visited on the third generation, or generations without
end, and that that boy was free because he was the great-grandson of a free
white woman, and it is the mother who determines slavery in Virginia. He lost.
Didn't no Virginian wants to hear nothing about no white lady having no black
children. Used to sell any white woman and her child into slavery for it: five
or ten years for the mother, and thirty for the child. They used to believe,
back in those days, a white lady have one black baby, all her babies coming
black. Now, if that were so, why didn't it apply just as well to us? Then came
this Stamp Act. I heard all about that. This ruckus up in Boston with white men
disguised as black folks and Indians throwing tea into the water, and first
thing, Thomas Jefferson finds this thrilling and writes a 'revolutionary
document,' as Martha called it. Telling the English where they could go and
what they could do, which made him a traitor to the Crown and liable to get
himself hung and quartered. Poor Martha was fit to be tied. She told me all