Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  “. . . I will make it good. . . . Good . . .”

  The fire shimmers copper and orange along the planes of Thomas Jefferson’s forehead and cheeks and gleams gold on the tiny droplets adhering to the stubble on his upper lip. A freestanding candelabra behind his chair lights the pages of his book, and there is an empty wine bottle on the table beside him. His elbows rest on the arms of his chair, while he cups a full glass with both hands in front of his belly. A solitary creak sounds in the hallway just outside the parlor door.

  “Sally?” calls Thomas Jefferson. After a short wait, he calls again. “Sally.”

  Sally Hemings appears in the dark doorway, her face a wavering orange in the firelight—except for her right cheek, which is lit a steady sand yellow by the candle she is holding.

  “I was wondering if that was you,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  Sally Hemings doesn’t speak. Her lips purse in something that might be a smile.

  “Is everything all right?” he asks.

  “I’ve just finished for the day.” She lifts her candle as if it is evidence.

  “Good,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Good.” He sips from his glass. “It’s cold tonight, don’t you think?”

  The expression that might be a smile becomes something more like a grimace.

  “For April, I mean,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “There’s a draft downstairs,” says Sally Hemings.

  “It’s very warm here by the fire, if you’d like . . .” He gestures to the empty chair opposite his own.

  Now the expression is very definitely a smile, but an uneasy one. “Thank you, Mr. Jefferson . . . but . . .” She shrugs and lifts her candle a second time.

  “Certainly,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “Good night.” The uneasiness has vanished, and her smile is only happy—and radiant with her generous spirit. Sally Hemings doesn’t always look beautiful, but right now she seems a vision to Thomas Jefferson.

  “Good night, Sally.”

  “Good night,” she says.

  And then he is alone.

  In Thomas Jefferson’s mind, there is only one thought, and when Sally Hemings is kneeling before the fireplace, stirring the embers; when she stops by the window in the hallway and sweeps a strand of hair off her forehead as she looks out into the morning light; when he sees her down on the street talking to the knife sharpener, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur”—at such moments his one thought grows until it is like a mob storming the capital of a failed nation. Thomas Jefferson knows that he has rights, but he also knows that not all rights are equal. Yes, he thinks as paving stones fragment the window glass of the capital. You can do as you please. There is no reason not to.

  . . . When I first arrived in France, I was indeed everything that is meant by “innocent.” I was lonely and afraid. I understood nothing of what was around me and had no taste for any of it. I kept to myself and longed for the day when I might return to Virginia and my family, whom I missed terribly. Even as I began to enjoy the world in which I was now living, my delights were entirely childlike. It seemed a simple wonder to me that Paris should contain so many beautiful and beautifully dressed people and that I could not only move among them but actually talk to them, that their language should turn out to be not the assemblage of grunts, groans, belches and throat-clearings that it had seemed to me at first but a wonderfully textured mechanism for expressing oneself, understanding others and making sense of and savoring the world. Even before I could put more than ten words of French in a comprehensible row, I had already adopted the Gallic sense of humor and would puff out my lip and blow in that classic expression of French mocking surprise, or I would utter that singsong “Oo-la!” which has almost the same meaning, and I became particularly attracted to the phrase “C’est la vie,” perhaps because I took the same comfort as the Parisians in the notion that the most extraordinary actions and events were, in fact, entirely commonplace and therefore incapable of disrupting one’s daily existence. During those months and years when every new increment of my burgeoning Frenchness was a sheer delight to me, I was, in so many ways, exactly like a child who has wandered into a primeval wilderness and who can do nothing but exclaim at the brilliant flowers, the massive trees, the strange and beautiful birdsongs, having no inkling of the crocodiles lurking under the lily pads, the snakes coiling in the branches, the panthers stalking at her heels, the vultures circling above the treetops.

  And yet I have come to fear that I may never have been entirely as innocent as I would like to believe. While I was certainly deeply flattered and even touched by what I viewed as Mr. Jefferson’s kindly and paternal interest in me, I was also always keenly aware of his physical presence—as evidenced by my otherwise unaccountable blushes and quickenings of the pulse when he might walk into the room or when I felt his attention upon me. My mother had, of course, warned me about the possible consequences of the attention any white man might pay to me, but I simply could not imagine that Mr. Jefferson could harbor such crude desires. No doubt my naïveté was partly the natural result of my ever-growing awareness (from the things I overheard, from the deference with which he was treated by visitors to the Hôtel) that he was a famous and very important man, but the fact remains that I was not merely thrilled by his glances and smiles, I actually longed for them.

  At the very least, I fear that these involuntary responses were misinterpreted by Mr. Jefferson and encouraged inclinations that perhaps he might not otherwise have indulged. But I also fear that they made me susceptible within my own being to those particular attentions that ultimately brought me to what I can now only think of as my damnation. And it is this possibility, perhaps above all others, that makes me writhe with shame. . . .

  Thomas Jefferson is forty-six and Sally Hemings is sixteen. They are in Paris, and it is late April 1789. Patsy and Polly are at school, and Jimmy is in Le Havre, picking up a shipment of books, surveying equipment and seeds that have been sent from Virginia. Thomas Jefferson finds Sally Hemings in the scullery cleaning the breakfast dishes.

  “Mademoiselle Sally,” he says, “j’ai une petite surprise pour toi.”

  “Oui?” She puts the dish has just finished into a rack and picks up another. “Est-ce que Patsy et Polly—”

  Thomas Jefferson cuts her off. “Non, non, ce n’est pas ça!”

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est, alors?”

  “Un miracle!”

  “Ah, non!” Sally Hemings crinkles the bridge of her nose. The last “miracle” Thomas Jefferson presented to her was a lump of cheese that looked and smelled exactly like clotted matter scraped out from under a toenail.

  Thomas Jefferson laughs. “Non, non! Nothing like that!” He laughs again, remembering how, during the instant she held that morsel of cheese in her mouth, he could see the white all the way around her gray-blue irises and how, in the next instant, she spat the cheese onto Madame d’Arnault’s Persian rug and ran straight out onto the street. “Je te le promets,” he says. “This will be like nothing you have ever experienced. A real miracle—you’ll see!” Thomas Jefferson observes suspicion doing battle with curiosity on Sally Hemings’s forehead and lips. “Come along,” he says. “Allons-y!” And then he tells her, “Perhaps you should put on that yellow gown. And your embroidered cape. You will want to look your best.”

  After an interval of muddy streets and a brisk trot along a country road, during which Sally Hemings sits beside the driver, she finds herself in a mown field, at the center of which a crowd surrounds a bonfire. Something like a gigantic purse—blue, yellow and red silk, frilled on the seams—is stretched out on the grass.

  At first she cannot imagine why Thomas Jefferson asked her to wear her finest clothes to this rural ceremony (or whatever it might be), but then she notices that the crowd contains a substantial representation of Parisian high society. Although Thomas Jefferson steers her well away from them, she sees the Princess Lub
omirsky, and Monsieur and Madame de Corny, and Baron Clemenceau, with his crooked mustache. What on earth could draw such men and women to some peasant’s hacked pasture? And why is it that they are all chattering with such excitement and staring at the activities of the men around the bonfire?

  The mouth of the purse stretched out on the grass is propped open by a six-foot-high wicker ring that two men hold on edge, while four others blow smoke into it by waving sailcloth fans. There seem to be other men inside the purse, because a sort of dome—mounted on poles, perhaps—keeps rising and falling within its far end. As the men blowing the smoke grow tired, they are replaced by others, while still more men keep heaping wood on the fire. The dome, rising and falling inside the purse, grows larger and looms higher with every new waft of smoke.

  “Now look!” says Thomas Jefferson, leaning so close that his lips practically touch her ear. “It is about to happen. You will see. A true miracle!”

  But Sally Hemings cannot pay attention. She is trying to figure out if Thomas Jefferson’s lips might, in fact, have touched her ear. And she is still feeling the low burr of his voice inside her head. She looks around to see if anyone is staring at her, but all eyes are on the enormous purse.

  “It is happening!” Thomas Jefferson says, standing tall again, entirely removed from the vicinity of her ear. “Watch! A man is going to fly!”

  Sally Hemings does not believe him, of course. A man flying? Impossible!

  But then, with a sound like the earth itself heaving a sigh, the giant purse lifts off the flattened grass, and guided by shouting men pulling ropes and pushing with poles, it swings, bottom up, directly over the fire, some ten yards above the flame tips, where it is held in place by four strong ropes tied to four stout stakes. Sally Hemings waits for the men inside the purse to tumble into the fire, and when they never appear, she imagines them hovering within the purse’s shadowy interior, just as the purse is hovering in the air.

  There is a platform beside the fire and, on top of the platform, a wicker canoe connected by slender lines to the inverted purse. A young man, also wearing blue, yellow and red silk, climbs a ladder and steps gingerly into the canoe. His curly chestnut brown hair falls well past his shoulders.

  Thomas Jefferson touches his forehead to Sally Hemings’s temple. His breaths puff against her ear, and his voice is low. “That is le Comte de Toytot.”

  The man sitting in the canoe is making a speech, but Sally Hemings’s French has vanished. She understands nothing—except that he is about to fly.

  And then, in a single instant, four men with swords cut the four ropes and the inverted purse lifts from the earth with the fluid grace of a wave at sea. As the wicker canoe swings off the platform and also begins to rise, the foolish young count with the long brown hair laughs—as if he has not committed an abomination, and is not about to die, as if he has never, in fact, been happier in his life.

  “What is he doing!” Sally Hemings cries, grabbing Thomas Jefferson’s sleeve.

  “Nothing.” Thomas Jefferson smiles. “Just this: He is going to fly like a bird. And then, when the air inside the ballon cools, he will sink slowly to the earth. It is all safe. All under control.”

  This time she believes Thomas Jefferson, not only because he knows more than any man on earth but because she can see that what he is saying is true. The man and the ballon continue to rise with a breathtaking grandeur, sideways, drifting with the breeze.

  But then something changes: A hollowness comes into her throat, and the whole of her body goes cold, and all at once she becomes aware that Thomas Jefferson has taken hold of her hand, the one with which she had grabbed his sleeve.

  The hollowness in her throat expands and becomes a sort of dizziness. What is happening makes no sense. Why would he do such a thing? Again and again she wonders if the pressure she feels on her fingers could possibly be the pressure of his hand, and again and again she tells herself, No, it can’t be.

  But then her hand is empty, and Thomas Jefferson is running. The entire crowd is running. She can still feel the pressure of his hand and the sweat their hands made together, but now he is far enough away that she would have to shout for him to hear. She lifts the skirt of her yellow gown and runs across the field after him, along with the rest of the crowd, until finally, at the edge of a wood, they must all stop, while the ballon—now higher than several houses piled one atop the other—glides silently over the trees.

  Over the trees! A man flying over the trees!

  Now Thomas Jefferson is next to her again. “Should I ask le comte to take us with him next time?” he says, his lips once again beside her ear. “Would you like to fly with le Comte de Toytot?”

  “Oh, no!” says Sally Hemings. “I’d be too afraid!” Then, almost immediately, she thinks, Yes! I do want to fly with le comte! I do! I do! Oh, please ask him! Please take me with you!

  But these words never pass her lips.

  Sally Hemings is dead. The yard behind her house in Charlottesville is loud with the braying of mockingbirds. The rag-and-bone man’s cart clatters on the cobblestone street out front. Her children are gathered around her bed: her three slump-shouldered sons and her daughter, who has not been back to Virginia in thirteen years and who arrived only minutes after her mother breathed her last.

  Sally Hemings’s dead children are there also: the daughter taken by fever after she had learned to walk but before she could ever run; the daughter who, small enough to cradle between elbow and palm, never recovered from the trial of being born; and the one Sally Hemings always called “La Petite,” who had been conceived in Paris and who, no bigger than her mother’s fist, came into this world on a river of blood and was buried at Monticello in a ceramic pot.

  The dead children grieve, but their grief is gentle, like a winter fog over a yellow field. The grief of her living children has turned them to stone. They do not talk. They are waiting for something to change, and nothing will ever change. The youngest son is holding a violin, but he has left the bow in the front room.

  Outside the window the trees heave in a sudden wind. The sky grows dark, and the mockingbirds fall silent. For long moments rain is about to fall, but after a rumble of thunder the wind recedes and the sun returns.

  Now Thomas Jefferson, who has been dead himself for more than eight years, is also in the room. Sally Hemings looks at him but doesn’t say a word.

  Minutes pass before he finds the strength to tell her, “I wanted you to be happy, but you were never happy.”

  “I was happy,” she says.

  “With me?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I was happy.”

  But Thomas Jefferson does not believe her. He does not believe her because he himself was never happy. There were many, many times when he pretended otherwise: the time when she acted out the story of Cinderella with a teacup, a soup spoon and two forks, and the two of them laughed and laughed and laughed; or the time they spent the whole day riding, then cooled off with a swim in Johnson’s Creek and then made love on a horse blanket spread over a bed of mint; or that afternoon when he was sitting beside her on her bed, bouncing three-month-old Beverly on his knee, and suddenly the tiny boy’s delighted squeaks and coos came together in a chuckle and then a full belly laugh—his first ever. Thomas Jefferson knew many such moments with Sally Hemings and managed to believe, each time, that he was happy, that Sally Hemings was happy, that no two people could be happier. But now he knows that on every one of those occasions his own happiness had been infected by fear, by his sense that what he believed was happiness could not, in fact, ever exist in this world and that in a moment he would have to live in the world as it actually was: a place of unending loss and shame.

  He takes the empty chair between two of their living sons and across the bed from the third son and their daughter. “No,” he says. “You were never happy. There is no need to lie anymore.”

  “I
am not lying,” she says, but after that she can think of nothing else to say.

  For a long time the silence in the room only deepens. Then a mockingbird launches into a fleet and fragmentary improvisation.

  “You cannot pretend to be ignorant of the effect you have upon me,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  It is the evening following le Comte de Toytot’s flight. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings are seated across a corner of the dining-room table, before the fire. There are two wine bottles between them, one empty, the other not quite. There are also two glasses. Thomas Jefferson has just finished his. Sally Hemings’s is almost full. This is her third glass. He has been counting. Or maybe her fourth.

  “And what is more,” he says, smiling tenderly, “you cannot pretend that you do not share my feelings. I can see it in your eyes.”

  Sally Hemings is not, in fact, looking at Thomas Jefferson. She is looking at her hands, her right thumb massaging repeatedly the center of her left palm.

  “I could see it,” he says, “when you took my hand out on the field. Do you remember? Just as le Comte de Toytot was borne into the air?”

  Thomas Jefferson wants her to look at him again. He reaches across the table, places the edge of his bent index finger beneath her chin and lifts.