Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  . . . I was not myself. Is that possible? For almost my whole life I was not the person I imagined myself to be. . . .

  I am Thomas Jefferson. I have Thomas Jefferson’s flowing, frizzed, red hair. I have his ocher eyes. And I look down on the world from a height that is greater than my own. I am on trial. And John Marshall is standing in front of me, in his black robe, his thick black eyebrows arrowed in contempt. “Prove yourself,” says Marshall.

  “What is there to prove?” I say, my voice spreading wavelike to the four corners of the room, where it crashes and returns to my ears as a complex echo. “Do you doubt that I stand before you?”

  “I doubt everything about you,” says Marshall. “You are incoherent. I don’t believe in you at all.” He has several loose sheets of paper on the desk in front of him. He shuffles them, scowling at each in turn as it passes before his eyes. Then he stands them on end, lifts, drops and pats them until their edges are aligned. “You hear only the sounds of words,” he says, “and care nothing about their sense. A word without sense is only so much gas passing through the vocal cords. It is nothing.”

  It is true that I am listening to the sounds of my words—or Thomas Jefferson’s. They have a capacity to boom and reverberate in a way that I am not accustomed to. They are a sort of weapon, but I am not sure how to use them. “I stand for liberty,” I say experimentally, “and for equality.” As these words pass my lips, they have the effect of increasing my stature. Marshall has to crane his head back in order to reply.

  “Whose liberty?” he says. “Whose equality?” His own words cause him to shrink. He is shouting, but his voice grows tinny and small.

  “I stand for the liberty and equality of all men.”

  “All men are as nothing to you!” Marshall shouts in his tinny voice. “They are a concept entirely devoid of meaning. You care about no one’s liberty but your own. And no man can be equal to you by definition. ‘Equality’ in your parlance is a rock, a cudgel, a battering ram! A cannibal in the raiment of a patriarch!”

  “You are a monarchist!” I tell him, my voice rattling the windows, causing plaster dust to sprinkle from the ceiling cracks. “You are a corrupt artifact of an obsolete era! A monocrat! A tyrant! A consolidationist!”

  Marshall, gray-haired, storm-browed, is nevertheless a child sitting at a child’s desk. He folds his papers impatiently, stuffs them into a leather satchel and stands. “We are judged,” he says as he moves toward the door, “not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.” He opens the door, then slams it behind him, but its sound is obliterated by my booming laughter.

  . . . Far worse than the scars of lash or club is the theft of one’s dignity. When one’s human value is seen only in regard to how thoroughly one surrenders one’s own desires to those of the master and how effectively one’s labors contribute to the comfort, dignity and freedom of the master, and especially when one has no freedom whatsoever but to submit to this state of affairs, it is almost impossible to believe that one might be admired, loved and treated with respect in one’s own right, and that one might deserve to be treated so, and that one is equally deserving of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

  The narrow compass one is allowed for the exercise of one’s freedom—within one’s own home and mind and, under the more beneficent of masters, on one’s scant acre of land—can only confirm one’s sense of worthlessness. As every farmer knows, a man can work to the point of exhaustion every day and still end up penniless and starving, and such a fate is only more likely for the slave who can only tend his garden or his stock after he has finished his master’s work, which often lasts until after dark. Likewise, when the secrets of domestic harmony can elude even the wealthiest of men, how likely is it that they should be accessible to the poorest? And when one has been denied the basic comforts and freedoms of life, even one’s own mind offers no sanctuary. One’s very desire to live a decent and ordinary life can be an unending source of humiliation, and one’s outrage at injustice can be exhausting and all too easily transformed into self-loathing. And so the desire to lie to oneself or to make much of small blessings becomes irresistible, and thus a further humiliation. The very songs we sing to escape our chains themselves become our chains. . . .

  Thomas Jefferson is holding a candle in the corridor outside Sally Hemings’s room. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Might I come in?” He goes into the room, and the corridor is dark. Nothing can be seen. But his words are audible through the door: “My sweet girl! . . . So lovely . . . I will make it good. . . . I will be gentle. You will see. . . . Gentle . . . I will make it good. . . . Good . . .”

  James and Dolley Madison’s faces pulsate orange and red. A sound like a river of peanuts pouring over a cliff fills the dark room. Although Benedict Arnold actually set fire to Richmond in the morning, at which point Thomas Jefferson had long since resigned as governor of Virginia and fled on horseback, in the dark theater Richmond’s pulsating orange and red flames rise from the city’s crumbling rooftops to encompass the entire night sky, and the actor in the copper-colored wig—in silhouette against the towering flames, except for one handsome cheek and the flank of his noble nose—shouts “Hah!,” whips his horse with his cocked hat and rides off bareback into the impenetrable night.

  Not long afterward the actor in the copper-colored wig is again on horseback (saddled this time) and again using his hat as a whip as he careens down one slope of Monticello while a detachment of British dragoons marches up the other.

  Then comes the famous moment, the one that Thomas Jefferson has recounted with gratitude and pride scores of times and that his children will recount in their turn, as will their descendants for generations to come: Martin Hemings is standing in the dining room of the great house. One of the dragoons is holding a pistol to Martin’s chest. The British commander, who would seem to be General Cornwallis, although, in fact, Cornwallis was a hundred miles away at the time, has just told Martin he will be shot unless he confesses where his master has gone, and Martin replies, “Fire away, then.”

  After these words the British commander’s plump, pink face looms gigantically in the dark theater. It is possible, by observing the alteration of the actor’s features, to actually track the progress of Martin’s statement as it slowly makes its way to the center of the commander’s plump, pink brain. There is a moment of stillness, followed by a nod that is mainly a lowering of eyelids, and then there is a gun blast and the appearance of a single dot of blood on the rim of the commander’s right nostril.

  “What!” cries Thomas Jefferson, leaping from his seat. “No! No!”

  James and Dolley Madison have also leapt to their feet, but only to drag their friend back down into his seat. People in the back of the theater are shouting for them all to sit down.

  “That never happened!” says Thomas Jefferson. “That simply never happened!”

  A man sitting behind them taps Thomas Jefferson on the elbow. “For chrissakes! It’s only a movie! Would you just sit down?”

  Dolley Madison speaks softly into his ear. “It’s all right, Tom. Just wait, you’ll see, the ending is quite uplifting.”

  “Why did you do that?” says Max, dropping the script onto his desk. “Do what?” says Jeremy, who has been lying on the couch under the window, texting his girlfriend.

  “I liked that scene.”

  “What scene?” Jeremy rests his phone on his solar plexus.

  “The one where Sally’s brother says, ‘Fire away!’”

  “Oh.” Jeremy swings his bare feet to the floor and sits up. He puts his phone facedown on the couch beside him. “I like it better that way.”

  “So what?”

  “I think it’s better.”

  “But they didn’t shoot him.”

  Jeremy shrugs just as his phone sounds the electric clink-clonk of an incoming text. At first he seems to be ignoring
the text, but then he picks the phone up, looks at it and puts it down.

  “I want to change it back to the way I wrote it,” says Max.

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what actually happened, and I think it’s a cool scene.”

  “How do you know it happened?”

  “It’s in every single one of the books. And anyway Martin was alive until—”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “That he said that. It’s so fucking corny! So morally fucking uplifting! ‘Fire away!’ That’s like something out of a fucking Victorian children’s story. Like Sunday school.” His unanswered text clink-clonks a second time. “Hold on a second.” He thumbs a one-word message into the phone and hits SEND.

  “But you have him say it,” says Max.

  Jeremy looks at him blankly.

  “‘Fire away,’” says Max. “That’s the part you left in.”

  “Yeah, but shooting him makes it all ironic.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He gets all moralistic and full of himself, then—whammo!—he’s dead. I think that’s funny.”

  “I think you’re a fucking sick individual.”

  “It’s ironic.” There’s another clink-clonk. Jeremy picks up his phone, smiles and sets it down. “But the main thing is that it puts Jefferson in more danger. Now the audience knows that the British are these actual evil bastards, so . . . you know, everybody will be on the edge of their seats. Maybe we can even have a chase scene.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “But it also makes Jefferson look better. The way it really happened, he seems like a total coward. Quitting being governor and everything. And Martin seems way braver than him.”

  “Maybe he was.”

  “But Jefferson’s our protagonist. Who’s going to want to see a movie about a slave-owning, slave-fucking hypocrite who’s also a total coward? We’ve got to give the audience something to hang on to here. We’ve got to give them someone they can love.”

  “But he wrote the Declaration of Independence.”

  “So the fuck what!”

  “He invented the swivel chair!” Max laughs as he swivels his own chair, first left, then right.

  “Is that true?”

  “Absolutely! You can look it up on Wikipedia.”

  Jeremy laughs.

  “Let me finish this fucking thing.” Max picks up the script.

  Jeremy picks up his phone. “Clare’s mother’s hassling her again. Maybe I better just go call her.” He’s hitting keys on his phone as he walks out of the room.

  . . . When Thenia was seven, she took care of Critta, Peter and me. And when Critta turned seven, it was her turn to take care of her younger siblings, while Thenia went on to learn sewing and how to clean house. But by the time I was seven—the age at which all children begin to work at Monticello—there were no younger children for me to care for, so I was given a job in the nursery, which was where Negro children who did not have sisters old enough to care for them were watched while their mothers worked, mostly in the field.

  The nursery was a large cabin divided into two rooms, the smaller of which contained two or three cots and was for the babies. The larger room, furnished with a table and a pair of benches, was where the older children could play or sleep on the floor. The nursery was run by a pair of old women, whose infirmity had made them unsuited for labor, and there was always at least one wet nurse there to feed the babies. I was one of three girls whose primary duties were to wash the babies’ clouts and to entertain the older children.

  I was happy with this work. While I had no great fondness for washing the clouts, it did mean that I got to spend an hour by myself at the stream running behind the nursery. I very much liked being with children, however, and they liked me, I think. I would tell them stories, sing them songs, and sometimes I even took them on expeditions into the woods—the very things I would have done had I been on my own. But, in fact, it was the children themselves whom I most enjoyed. They had their moods, of course, and the boys in particular had a fondness for teasing me, but I always fell in love with at least one of the children in my care, and I disliked almost none of them. I took my work seriously, thought of myself as a little mother and looked forward to the day when I might actually be a mother. I was meant to continue at the nursery until I was ten, at which point I, too, would be taught to sew, or to cook, or any of the other female labors. But my life took a different course one hot August day when I was nine.

  I was leading three small boys past the great house on my way to a cow pond, where I hoped we could all cool off, when I thought I heard a woman calling out. I looked around, and under the shade of an enormous copper beech, lying on a couch that had been carried out of the parlor, I saw Mrs. Jefferson waving. “Sally!” she called. “Could you come here please? I’d like to have a word with you.”

  Mrs. Jefferson had been ill ever since her baby died, more than a year previously. That baby had been named Lucy, and three months ago she had had another baby, also named Lucy, and had grown even sicker. She hardly walked anymore, and a couch had been brought out under the tree for her because Mr. Jefferson believed that the fresh air would do her good.

  I had been with Mrs. Jefferson many times, but never on my own, and so the notion that she wanted a private conversation with me filled me with apprehension—especially as my mother had told me that as Mrs. Jefferson’s illness had grown worse, she had become increasingly irritable and vindictive. As I crossed the lawn, the boys trailing along behind me, I tried to think of what I could possibly have done wrong and what I might say to my mother if Mrs. Jefferson were angry with me.

  But, in fact, she only smiled as I approached—though it was one of those smiles that seem to have been born out of pain. She was in her mid-thirties but she looked almost twice her age. Her skin was the color of trout flesh, and there were purple hollows under her eyes. Despite the heat she had a woolen shawl drawn up around her neck.

  I told the boys to sit down on one of the tree’s enormous, serpentine roots and that if they were very good, I would teach them how to catch pollywogs at the pond. When at last I stood in front of Mrs. Jefferson, she reached up and caressed my cheek with her cool hand. “You’re such a pretty girl!” she said. “You have such lovely, kind eyes.”

  The intensity of her gaze disconcerted me. I lowered my head and couldn’t bring myself to speak.

  She had been lying diagonally on the couch, her slipper-shod feet not quite touching the ground, but now she sat up properly and patted the empty space beside her. “Sit down. I have something to say to you.”

  When I didn’t move, she smiled and said, “You don’t have to worry. I promise not to bite!”

  When I still didn’t move, she asked if anything was the matter, and I nodded at the boys, who had found an anthill and were looking for a twig to stick into it.

  “Oh, don’t worry about them.” She laughed. “They’ll be fine. And this won’t take a minute.”

  She stroked the silk upholstery with her pale hand, then patted it.

  I turned and sat down, but only at the very edge of the cushion. I folded my hands in my lap.

  “I’ve been watching you,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “And I see that you are very good with children. You never threaten to thrash them, you never even raise your voice, and yet the children do exactly what you say. It is because they want to please you.”

  “Thank you.” I swallowed to suppress a smile of pride.

  Mrs. Jefferson smiled and took my hand. She had grown so thin that I could feel every one of her bones, even in her palm. She looked at me for a long moment, with her soft, faintly pained smile. I wanted to pull my hand away.

  “You know that I have a very small baby,” she said.

  I nodded.

 
“Ever since she was born, it has been difficult for me to devote as much attention as I should to her sister, my dear little Polly.” Mrs. Jefferson let go of my hand and pulled up her shawl, which had begun to slip from her shoulders. Then she took my hand again and gave it a squeeze. “And so I have an offer to make to you. I am wondering if you would like to be little Polly’s companion. She is not even five years old, and I am afraid she spends too much time alone.”

  When I didn’t respond, she continued, “Do you know what a companion is?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I want you to spend the day with her and do whatever it is that she would like to do. If she would like to play a game with you, play a game. If she would like to go for a ride, you should accompany her in the carriage. And, of course, I would like you to tidy up her room and look after her clothing, as your mother does for me.” She gave my hand another squeeze. “So is that something you think you could do?”

  I knew that what I was being asked to do was only what I was already doing at the nursery, but for some reason it filled me with dread. I hardly knew Polly and didn’t understand why she should be lonely when she had another sister—Patsy—who was almost exactly my age.

  There was, however, only one answer I could give, and so I gave it.

  “I’m very happy,” Mrs. Jefferson said, although she looked anything but happy. “I think that you will be the perfect companion for little Poll. I am sure that one day you will be as dear to her as your mother is to me.”

  I thanked Mrs. Jefferson again, collected my boys and continued my journey to the cow pond, wondering if there was some way my mother could talk Mrs. Jefferson out of using me in this fashion.