Head Note: In late September 1789, a little more than two months after the storming of the Bastille, Sarah Hemings (or Sally as we know her), 16 at the time, and her brother James, 24, began their journey back to Virginia from Paris, where she had worked for Thomas Jefferson as governess to his youngest daughter and James as chef de cuisine in-training. While in Paris, both siblings earned salaries. Although they might have remained in Paris and claimed a legal right to freedom, they returned to Monticello with Jefferson. Afterwards, Sally lived in one of the small rooms underneath the big house at Monticello adjacent to the south staircase under Jefferson’s bedroom and library. The contradictions inherent in James and Sally’s return mirrored the essential contradictions of Monticello—including two different approaches to the grand house on the mountain: one traversing a portico to an entrance hall; one exposing “dependencies” connected by cellars and passageways where enslaved people worked. Monticello struck me in the way a dream strikes the waking dreamer. Everything is itself and also something else. Everyone in the dream is oneself. The poems here are part of a longer series powered by history, dreams and imaginings. Wilderness is its working title. — JB
A slight pricking of the skin and nothing until bedtime when her arm was sore. All next day she lay in bed, drank tisane, something like tea and broth, smelled like lemons. Third day, no one knocked— she walked in a park, far off mountain called Louis after the king, nurses in mist, puddings of rice and plum, and then, a vile serum dropped her into fevered sleep. Forty days in the strange ark of her body, her own brother a ghost in white jacket buttoned from waist to neck, carried a tray with jam and toast, sucre, James said (lifted her chin). Seas after, taste swept her back, hemming linen, fitting hats she tasted lemons, drank from porcelain.
Hôtel de Langeac, 1788
Jefferson, returned from the court
of Louis XVI, burgundy
wines, bonhomie thick
as fog, removes his gloves.
In the kitchen, James Hemings
studies copper pots and béchamel,
his sister Sally folds
linen for master’s bed.
James and Sally plot—
stay in Paris and free
then this moment:
master’s ungloved hand
finds the ruching around her waist—
he has purchased her linen,
its blooming irises,
a ship will carry bolts of it
home to Virginia.
The baby of this moment
will not survive the crossing.
One day a daughter with her name
will ride north
in master’s carriage.
She will absorb his light,
she will be made of glass,
she will pass
out of the story.
April 1788
Window glass bangs with rain, horsemen pass, perhaps Marquis de la Fayette rounds the corner, Rue de Berri and Champs-Elysées, looks up— girl in the window. By now, she has learned to speak the language of the court, by now, his old friend has touched her skin, gown on the floor, spot on her Irish linen, she will have extra livres for silk. The city is trembling.
Autumn 1801
You’d never know how dull
lilac trees in winter. Cold
sun, we shot at deer.
He had no qualms
about my holding a gun.
Voyage home (if one could call
a tomb home), we tried to keep
food down, distracted ourselves
(detail by detail queen’s gowns),
clutched our dreams.
Point a rifle here—is that odd?
It’s men I’d rather kill.
Citizens called me Monsieur.
Wine-colored seats, arm
of a jeune fille grazing mine,
her skin dusted with orange-peel
powder, which I taste later,
as I tongue the channel of her back.
If it’s the last thing I hear
I don’t mind. A heart
shattered makes
a muffled sound.
Though I will never meet my son,
he will be called boy by no one.
Disappeared into the North, 1822
Folks say he came home— drifted down in a basket tied to a balloon, three miles east of Charlottesville in a tobacco field, hitched a ride with a white couple in a carriage, right up to his mama’s door. Folks say he wore a fine suit, carried cases with velvet hats and nine yards of French silk for his mama. Next day, gone again, rode out of town in a chariot, reins in his hands. Stormy wind blew out of the north a great cloud.
She read: letters, pamphlets, labels, lists, Notes on the State of Virginia, learned her fine mixture (he noted), the expression of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color were preferable to eternal monotony of black. I note, she memorized the faces of her palest children, sent them North in master’s carriage (family witness noted). Long before children, her feet in sand at Cowes, tide tugging backward and forward, salt on her lips, did she note she was the second Hemings to taste sea salt, after her grandmother, last Hemings to have no European blood? (Note: name from Captain Hemings: I want my daughter back), Captain Hemings returning to England, shuddered at the note America had struck on its terrible instrument. Had the winds blown another way, history would not have taken note of Sarah Hemings; and youngest child of the youngest child of the czar’s serf in tobacco fields at Popov would be noting here another name, not Jayne. Nothing is true, it is true I have dreamed. I sign my name to these notes.
Jayne Benjulian is the author of Five Sextillion Atoms. Her poems and essays appear widely in literary and performance journals in the U.S. and abroad. She was an Ossabaw Island Project Fellow; teaching fellow at Emory University; lecturer in the Graduate Program in Theater at San Francisco State University; and Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Lyon, France. In addition, she served as chief speechwriter at Apple; investigator for the public defender in King County, WA; and director of new play development at Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Her MFA is from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. You can find out more about her and her work by visiting her website at: jaynebenjulian.com.