Dear Sally,
You could have never known me but I’ve heard of your
experiences as a slave in the Jefferson household many a time. I feel a
connection to your story, but years and circumstances have made my situation
quite distant from your own.
I was but a child when Robert Newsom purchased me and
brought me to his home. That first journey to the Newsom house is one I will
never be able to erase from memory. Knowing I had nary a prayer of seeing
whatever living family members I still had ever again, I sat in Newsom’s wagon
staring back at the slave market. I tried to look down and take deep breaths,
but the bumps and dips in the road kept jolting me back to this new reality of
mine, working for this strange white man. So lost was I in fear and thought that
I hadn’t even noticed that the wagon had stopped. I glanced up and caught
Newsom’s eye. A meanness lurked in there, something I could not identify then
but now know all too well. He lunged toward me, ripping my dress, whispering
for me to lie back and relax. I struggled against his massive weight, but my
strength was waning. I eventually closed my eyes as he tore from me what little
innocence the life of a slave girl is granted.
That was the introduction to my new life. Newsom built a
house for me on his property, almost suggesting I look upon it as a gift. A
gift- the place where he would come for me at his will, a home with walls that
would never be able to protect me. I lie awake most nights, hoping for once to
stay undisturbed, to be able to fall asleep and make it to the next morning
without another nightmarish visit from my master. When I heard footsteps on the
nearby path, I’d pray and pray that they not pause outside my door. But they
did. For years, Newsom came as often has he pleased to the home he had built
for me, this little house of horrors I called my own. Finally, I could not take
the terror anymore. I warned him. I told him I would no longer have to recoil
at his touch because he would not so much as grasp my hand again, and he
actually laughed in my face. When he came that night and started for me, I
mustered all the strength that had languished over the years, striking him
harder than you would believe. He was dead, but, as in life, my fate remained
tied to his in the most horrifying of ways. I have been sentenced to hang and
currently await my fate.
I write this letter into the past, into a time and a story
that I may never fully understand. You were only fourteen when you ventured to
Paris. A whole different world! But that great city is not the only thing you
surprisingly experienced at such a young age. Your feelings for Jefferson
remain unclear (were you a concubine? A somehow willing participant? A clear
cut victim of slavery’s dynamics?). What I know to be true is that what you
experienced was not entirely up to you, that you were so young that I doubt you
understood all that was happening. Our situations are quite different. I made
clear that I wanted nothing to do with my master, while you stand in more of a
gray area. I just wonder how these two turnouts coexist, though in different
times. How I am simply Celia but you will always know your last name. How I sit
on death row while you speak French and are treated so differently than other slaves.
Yes, our situations are different, but I have questions that concern us both
and others like us. Will we ever know a companionship, or even a love, that was
completely ours to decide upon? Will our bodies ever entirely belong to us?
Now I must focus and take deep breaths, allaying the fear
and relief that only death can inspire.
Yours in a distant sisterhood,
Celia
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