Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  At the end of August, she and Miss Martha went to live at l’Abbaye de Penthemont—a convent school, about an hour’s walk and on the far side of the Seine from the Hôtel. They would come home Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and return to the school early the next mornings. During their absences I would help my brother Jimmy, who was the cook, with shopping and kitchen duties, and Clotilde, the housekeeper, with dusting, mopping and making the beds. But when Miss Martha and Miss Maria were home, they were my sole concern.

  At nights I helped them undress and would put away their gowns, shawls and undergarments. In the mornings I brought them cups of hot chocolate in bed, put out whatever clothes they requested and would help them fasten their stays and do up the buttons at the backs of their gowns. I would also brush and pin up their hair, a chore I particularly liked, because we would talk about their friendships at school and the young men who interested them. Mr. Jefferson had hired a tutor for Jimmy and me, and as my French improved, I was able to give Miss Martha and Miss Maria gossip I had heard from other servants about the foibles and secret loves of their friends. The girls would laugh, hoot and exclaim at my reports and ask for more when I had done.

  My other main duty was to mend the sisters’ clothing and do other sorts of sewing—tasks I would usually perform in a window of whatever room the girls happened to occupy and that were no obstacle to conversation. Often we talked all morning and afternoon—about anything from types of hair powder to whether Paris or Virginia was the better place to live or how it was possible, if God controlled all things, that we were the ones thinking our own thoughts. And from time to time, I would put down my sewing and we would play at cards, charades or the Devil and the Woodman.

  Such days passed swiftly and happily, and I allowed myself to believe that there prevailed between us something like the familial affection that would have existed as a matter of course had our true relationship been known—and this, I have no doubt, was one of the “ideas” my mother hadn’t wanted me to get, because, of course, there was a big difference between what I thought of as our true relationship and the one we actually lived.

  The girls had the right to tell me what to do, and I had no right to refuse, or even question a command—in which fact, of course, our actual relationship was at its most naked. We might be in the midst of friendly chatter—I could even be telling a story—when one of them would feel a pang of hunger and send me off to fetch some fruit or cheese. The command might come peremptorily, yet whichever sister issued it need not have felt the slightest ill will toward me nor have any sense that she had been impolite. This was just the way one spoke to servants. And as I had long been used to doing what I was told, I would simply walk off to the kitchen—though often feeling a lonely throb deep in my breast. Those were the times when I most missed my own family, Critta and Peter especially.

  There were, of course, days when the girls were consciously impolite or even cruel, days when my job seemed mainly to suffer remarks like, “How can you be so stupid?” “Faster, you layabout!” or, “Of course, you are never troubled by the admiring gazes of young men.” Most of these remarks came from Miss Martha and were particularly painful because I admired her and wished that I could be as intelligent and poised as she. Miss Maria was rarely cruel, though she was prone to sulks, during which she would claim to hate school and to detest Paris and would continually pull single hairs from the side of her head, to the point that she developed a small bald spot about an inch above her left ear that I would have to be sure to cover when I did her hair in the morning.

  Worst of all was when the sisters fought, which they did frequently and, often, for no apparent reason. One of their most impassioned disputes commenced when Miss Maria referred to a bird giving itself a dust bath at the Tuileries as a “popkin” and Miss Martha laughed derisively. “How can anyone be so stupid!” she said. “That’s a sparrow!” The truth is that Miss Maria was more often the first sister to attack, but given that Miss Martha was six years the elder, her counterattacks were so sophisticated and aimed so precisely at her sister’s most tender points that it was hard not to pity the poor girl, even when she was in the wrong. Often, at Miss Maria’s lowest moments in such fights, she would throw her arms around my waist and bury her face in my lap as a means of escaping her sister’s insults and gibes.

  As servant to both sisters it was in my interest never to appear to take sides, although I had to be especially careful not to offend Miss Martha, since as the elder and her father’s clear favorite she was the one who could do me more damage. Even if my heart were breaking for poor Miss Maria, I would do my best to seem mystified by the girl’s embraces. That strategy had only limited effectiveness, however, since Miss Martha found the fact that Miss Maria should want to embrace me exceedingly irritating all on its own—particularly as it was not uncommon for Miss Maria, even in her most contented moods, to throw her arms around my neck and declare, “I love you!” Not since both sisters were in Virginia had Miss Maria made such a declaration to her sister, nor had Miss Martha to her.

  I know that in many ways I was fantastically lucky. Miss Maria truly did love me, and I loved her. My relations with Miss Martha were always more complex and have remained so until this very day. But in Paris she and I were in a position not unlike Miss Maria’s and mine during our Atlantic passage. As fluent as Miss Martha was in French, she would never be truly accepted by the French girls at school. As gracious and erudite as she might have been, and as expensive and fine as the gowns her father bought her most certainly were, in her own heart she would never cease to see herself as a rustic from a crude settlement in a savage wilderness, whereas with me she never had to feel the least self-conscious. We had known each other practically since birth; our toes had squelched in the same mud; we missed the same balmy summer nights, the heady fragrances of magnolia and jasmine and the dry sweetness of sun-warmed pine needles. . . .

  It is the voice that stops Thomas Jefferson in the dark hallway outside the kitchen. “Juh voo dray sal-ly see.”

  “Non, non, non,” says Clotilde. “Encore: Je voudrais celui-ci.”

  “Juh voo dray sil-ly see,” says Sally Hemings.

  When Thomas Jefferson hears that voice, he remembers Martha on the veranda at the Forest. She was still wearing black, Bathurst Skelton only nine months dead, but already she was nothing like a widow. “In three weeks exactly,” Thomas Jefferson told her, “you must send me a letter consisting of one word, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and on that very day, I will send you a letter consisting of only one of those same words.”

  It was then that Martha laughed, and fifteen years later, in this dark hallway, Thomas Jefferson hears that laugh again.

  “But what if we each write a different word?” Martha said.

  “That’s the beauty of it!” he replied. “When ‘no’ and ‘yes’ are read together, they spell ‘noyes,’ and noise is not an adequate answer, so we will have to try again until we get it right.”

  They were talking about whether, when he returned from Monticello, they would perform a duet—he on violin, she on piano, a prospect that terrified them both—but as she laughed, Thomas Jefferson understood that she had, in fact, agreed to marry him, although she would never have admitted this, not even to herself.

  “Mr. Jefferson,” she said, “I had not realized you could be so silly!” And she laughed again.

  “Juh voo dray sil-ly see,” says Sally Hemings.

  “Non,” says Clotilde. “Je . . . je . . . Répète: je . . . je . . . Et: ce . . . ce . . . celui-ci.”

  “Zhuh . . . zhuh,” says Sally Hemings. “Zhuh voo dray suh-ly see.”

  That voice on the soft air of an evening in June so many years ago. Martha was so happy when she laughed, and so was he. It was as if happiness were something they had discovered together, something no one else in all the history of humankind had ever experienced, their secret, their gift to each other.

&nbs
p; And now that voice again. In the dark hallway. From the throat of a fourteen-year-old servant girl. That voice of silk and sand. Thomas Jefferson stops in midstep, and for a moment he cannot move, he cannot even breathe.

  “Mieux,” says Clotilde. “Mieux, mais pas tout à fait correct, ma jolie petite sotte!”

  Sally Hemings laughs and laughs.

  What is the truth of blue but midocean under a storm cloud? But that flash on a bird’s back as it skims a field of sunlit grass? Blue is not a word, not 631 THz, nor 668 THz, not a chip or a pie slice. It is a funeral suit. It is sobriety. It is one’s share of divinity as one stands on a shard of granite underneath an empty sky, a hundred mountains at one’s feet. Swimming-pool blue. Policeman blue. The actual blue on the wall of one’s childhood bedroom and the blue that one remembers. Ice blue. Moon blue. The truth of blue is inexhaustible, and Thomas Jefferson knows that his taxonomy will never be finished, not even if he devotes his every remaining minute of life to it. His taxonomy is a form of obeisance, a way of humbling himself before truth. Eye blue. M&M’s blue. Blue under black light . . .

  The Marquis de Lafayette has a face like a naughty fox and cannot keep still. Even when seated, he constantly flings his hands into the air, as if to give shape to his words, and his feet move so restlessly on the floor that he seems perpetually on the verge of leaping into a jig.

  Sally Hemings has been in Paris only a month the first time he visits the Hôtel de Langeac. She stands against the wall while Thomas Jefferson introduces the marquis to Polly. After kissing Polly’s hand and then Patsy’s, the marquis announces that seeing the two girls side by side the image of their dear and beautiful mother has arisen so vividly within his imagination that it is as if she herself were in the room. Then he walks over to Sally Hemings and kisses her hand as well.

  “What is your name?” he asks. When she tells him, he says, “I can see that you, too, have a beautiful mother, but”—he raises his index finger with a flourish—“I also think you have a beautiful gown!” He leans toward her, his brows lifted in impish delight, and looks her directly in the eye.

  Merely fourteen, and unused to being spoken to so familiarly by a dinner guest, let alone by an aristocrat, Sally Hemings can only blush and giggle, and then, embarrassed by her embarrassment, she blushes even more deeply. But the marquis continues to smile and look into her eyes.

  “Do you know why I think your gown is so beautiful?” he says.

  When she shakes her head and blushes yet again, he tells her, “Because I wore one exactly like it, with a wig et un grand chapeau, when I first set sail to your country! I was forbidden to go, you see, and the soldiers of the king were looking for me everywhere. So as I walked down the hill to the quay”—he walks in a small circle, with one hand on his exaggeratedly swaying hips and the other near his face, wrist bent, fingers dangling—“every time I saw a soldier, I would say, ‘Bonjour, Monsieur! Vous êtes très beau!’ I do not think I was a very beautiful woman, pas comme vous, les trois jolies filles. But soldiers are so vain, and they can never receive enough compliments—even from ladies who look like pigs in fancy dress! So every single soldier smiled and let me pass. And that is the story of how I had to become a woman so that I might be a general in your Continental Army!”

  Everybody laughs at the marquis’s pantomime—Thomas Jefferson included, although he ends by shaking his head and saying, “I don’t think we should take our good friend entirely at his word.”

  After that evening, every time the Marquis de Lafayette sees Sally Hemings, he goes straight to her and says, “And how is my beautiful little Sah-rah?” And she always laughs and feels a trembly warmth inside her chest that robs her of the power of speech.

  One afternoon Thomas Jefferson overhears Patsy tell Sally Hemings, “If you are to make a good impression in society, the first requirement is that your speech be flawless, in both English and French,” and it is soon clear that the girl has taken this advice completely to heart. On more than one occasion, he has seen her at the kitchen table gazing with fierce intensity at her French tutor as he clarifies some nuance of the language, and she even asked if she might have three rather than two lessons a week. By October—barely two months after her arrival—she is able to hold rudimentary conversations with Clotilde and other French servants—and in this regard is far more advanced than Polly, even though all of Polly’s classes at school are in French. And while Sally Hemings is never able to completely banish the kitchen from her consonants and vowels in English, she listens carefully to Patsy and Polly, with the result that her vocabulary expands rapidly, and she gains complete mastery of her verbs.

  Another afternoon Thomas Jefferson hears Sally Hemings exclaiming out in the garden, “Oh, look! It’s like an emerald! Even the bugs are beautiful in Paris! They’re all made out of jewels!”

  And then he hears her laughter amid the rolling pigeon coos and the wind seething in the plane trees.

  And now the actor in the copper-colored wig is on horseback amid a crowd of Negroes in spotless rags, who are speaking all at once in a dialect that Thomas Jefferson finds almost impossible to comprehend—all of the language assaulting his ears in this dark room has sounded jagged and warped, but none has been as impenetrable as this. The one word he can understand is “Massa!”—and these people shout it incessantly, many of them smiling, their eyes avid, wide.

  This would seem some sort of joyous celebration, but the voices of the people are so loud, their cries come so thick and fast and they press so close upon the actor in the copper-colored wig that his horse whinnies, snorts and lurches away. And then, in an instant, the illuminated wall is entirely filled by the face of a young Negro man, whose expression morphs from jovial good-spiritedness to stone-eyed fury.

  In the next scene, this same young man—who can’t be more than sixteen—is high in an apple tree with half a dozen other boys and one extremely pretty girl, whose skin is almost the same honey gold as her glinting, tightly curled hair. A cocked hat is visible, bobbing up and down as it drifts just over the top of a nearby hedge. The young man snatches an apple off a branch, and, his face now filled with devilry, he flings the apple and knocks the bobbing hat right off its owner’s head—which immediately rises (along with the head of a rearing, whinnying horse) a good yard above the top of the hedge and inspires new cries of “Massa! Massa!”—for the man rising above the hedge is, of course, none other than the actor in the copper-colored wig.

  There are images of boys leaping and bare feet striking the ground, then a cluster of backs disappearing over a grassy hillside. But the solitary girl has had the misfortune of catching the hem of her dress on a sharp branch of the apple tree. Her shocked face dropping between leafy branches yields to the bemused expression of the man in the copper-colored wig, who has rounded the hedge on his horse and is in the process of dismounting.

  The girl is now hanging upside down, only her head, arms and shoulders visible beneath the lowest branches of the tree. “I’m sorry!” she shouts as her arms flail in the empty air. “I’m sorry! I didn’t do it! I’m sorry!” The actor in the copper-colored wig’s bemusement is clearly inflected by an appreciation of the girl’s beauty, absurd as her position may be.

  “Let me help you,” he says, reaching over his head and seeming to fly into the tree. With one hand he supports the girl beneath her shoulders, while the other lifts her impaled hem off the sharp branch. The struggle to get her safely to the ground, with her feet down and her head up, involves something very like an embrace. The embarrassed girl continues to apologize, making liberal use of that word, “massa.” But finally the actor in the copper-colored wig silences her with a handsome smile and asks her name.

  “Sally,” she says. “Sally Hemings!”

  “Oh, no!” cries Thomas Jefferson.

  Dolley is patting his arm. “It’s all right, Tom,” she says. “Everything turns out all right. You’ll see.”

 
The man seated behind them leans his head between theirs and says to Dolley, “Could you please keep this guy under control!”

  Dolley gives Thomas Jefferson a wry smile and a final pat on the forearm, then resumes her expression of idiot’s wonder.

  During her first weeks at Hôtel de Langeac, Sally Hemings is afraid of Thomas Jefferson. He is always so quiet, and his quietness seems like anger to her—or, at the very least, like the claustrophobia-inducing stillness before a summer storm. But soon she comes to understand that he is quiet only because he is shy. She watches him in society and sees that he is always doing an imitation of himself. He wears a wide, fixed smile, but he never displays much of a sense of humor and is never relaxed, even though he often drinks prodigious quantities of wine. He is far happier when he is with just one other person. Often, when he is sitting with Mr. Short or with the Marquis de Lafayette in the upstairs parlor, she will hear their laughter spilling out into the corridor, sometimes until late at night. But he seems happiest of all when he is entirely alone in his study with his books and his writing and drawing (his desk is always covered with sketches of buildings and machines). When she brings him tea in his study, he often greets her with a light in his eye, as if he is keeping a secret he cannot wait to reveal. On these occasions his gestures are easy and unstudied. He seems entirely at home and to have no wish to ever be anyplace else.

  But most of the time, Sally Hemings thinks Thomas Jefferson is sad.

  During those days that Patsy and Polly are at their school, there are many occasions when she can observe him without his knowing she is present. Often when she is sitting in the parlor window, restitching Patsy’s and Polly’s fallen hems and split seams, she watches him passing from room to room like a ghost. Other times she will catch sight of him looking up from a book by the fire, and he seems so lost, as if he has entirely forgotten where he is. This is a man who owns so much, who can do almost anything and who knows more than anyone she has ever met, but there is something wrong in his life. Something is missing.