Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  Now she is looking into his eyes, her own eyes tremulous in the flickering firelight.

  There is a plunging in his breast that is equally pain and joy. “My God!” he says. “You are so beautiful.”

  Sally Hemings pulls her chin away from his still-extended finger. “No.” She is looking again into her lap.

  “Yes!” he insists, allowing his finger to lightly stroke her cheek as he withdraws his hand. “You are a vision!” He refills his glass, then swirls the dark fluid once.

  “No,” she says, still not looking at him. “I didn’t take your hand.” At the word “didn’t,” her head lifts and she looks him straight in the eye. Her gaze is firm, but he can see that she is trembling, that she is afraid, that in a moment she will begin to cry.

  “I’m sorry.” He takes a deep sip from his glass. “I am sorry. I have been presumptuous.”

  “No,” she says. “You have—”

  He cuts her off: “I am sorry.” There is anger in his final word, and he is ashamed of his anger. Now he is the one looking down. “I have allowed myself to be blinded by feeling.”

  “No.”

  “Please,” he insists. “I am sorry.” This time he speaks the word with a suitable tenderness. “You are a beautiful young woman, Sally, but that does not give me the right—”

  He stops speaking when he sees that her gaze has fallen to her lap.

  “What?” he asks softly. When she doesn’t answer, he slumps in his chair. “And now I am making everything worse.”

  “No,” she says. And she looks up at him with a small, shy smile. Again that plunge of joy and pain. He wants to pull her into his arms but only takes another deep sip from his glass. She is still smiling, and he begins to wonder if he might hope.

  “What?” he says again, even more softly. He leans toward her.

  “Nothing,” she says. “I had a lovely day. I will never forget it. C’était un vrai miracle de voir un homme voler dans le ciel.”

  “Yes,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Wonderful. Vraiment.” She has stopped smiling. He sees the trouble in his own face reflected in hers. “Perhaps you had better leave me alone, Sally. I have work to do.”

  The smile returns weakly, then vanishes as she pushes her chair back from the table and stands.

  “Certainly,” she says and, as she backs away from the table, “Sorry.”

  Then she is gone.

  Alone in the warm, illuminated room, Thomas Jefferson finishes his glass and pours another.

  . . . It was a true miracle to see a man flying in the sky. . . .

  First Sally Hemings sees a golden shimmer along the top of her door, and then she hears the whisper of a leather sole on wood. A knock. So light that she is able to pretend to herself she hasn’t heard it. Then another knock. She has been lying flat on her back for more than an hour, unable to sleep. For much of that time, she felt herself listing sideways in the darkness, as if her bed were a boat swept along by the current of a mirror-smooth river. It was the wine. She has never drunk so much wine. She feels it still, as a wisp of nausea at the base of her throat. And the listing. That is still there, too.

  But it isn’t only the wine.

  No sooner did she stretch out under her covers than the moments of her day began to repeat inside her head: le Comte de Toytot waving happily as he drifted over the trees, the low vibration of Thomas Jefferson’s voice filling her ear, the feather touches of his lips, his sweating hand—but also what he said while she was drinking her wine: “You are so beautiful. You know that, Sally, don’t you?” His nose was red, his eyes and mouth drooping, as if his face were melting in the heat of the fire. “Beautiful,” he said. Over and over. At first, as she heard these words, the hot thickness in her throat felt like embarrassment, but then it hardened into a sense of something wrong—maybe something very wrong. “Beautiful,” he said. “You cannot pretend to be ignorant—”

  Another knock. “Sally?”

  Him.

  He knocks again. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  It is raining. She hears the echoey clatter of water in the gutter pipes and the gust-driven rain like sand flung against the windows.

  “Sally?”

  “One second,” she says.

  She is already standing, her bare feet on the cold floor. She doesn’t know what to do. The cold is creeping up her body inside her shift. She wants to find her yellow gown, but she doesn’t know where she left it. There is no light in her room. She can’t see anything at all except the wavering glow around the door.

  “I’m sorry,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  Maybe she threw the gown across the chair beside her chest of drawers. As she takes a step in that direction, her middle toes slam against the corner of her night table. A flare of pain illuminates the blackness. The enamel chamber pot clanks but doesn’t spill.

  “Sally?”

  “One second,” she groans, balancing on one foot, clutching her throbbing toes with both hands.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She has found the chair—nothing on it but a single stocking. Now her knee collides with the chest of drawers, but only enough to rattle the glass knobs. No pain, but somehow the fact that she keeps knocking into things leaves her feeling helpless and faint. She is trembling.

  She knows what is happening, or what seems to be happening, but she doesn’t know it at the same time. White men do such things. Her own father did. But she cannot make herself believe—even now—that so gentle, sad and wise a man as Thomas Jefferson could be like that. And the disparity between what she is able to believe and what seems manifestly to be happening makes her feel disconnected from the world.

  “I’d just like a word with you,” he says. “One word.”

  She steps toward the wavering golden outline of the door. There is something soft under her foot. Her gown. And now she remembers that in her haste to bury herself under her covers she simply threw the gown onto a chest, from which it must have slipped to the floor. She picks it up, puts it over her head and slides her hands down the sleeves. Now she is standing just inside the door, the back of her gown unbuttoned to her shoulder blades.

  “It’s late,” she says.

  “I know. It won’t take a minute.”

  The door is not locked. He could have opened it and come in at any time. Maybe everything she’s been thinking is foolish. Maybe there’s nothing at all to fear.

  She lifts the latch and pulls the door inward, peering around the edge, keeping her body out of sight, pressed flat against the paneled wood.

  “Oh, Sally!” Thomas Jefferson gasps softly, and then gives her a happy smile. His hair is a mess, as if he has been gripping it in his closed fists. His eyes look gelatinous in the glow of his candle. Even as he stands without moving, he is clearly having difficulty staying on his feet.

  “Might I come in?”

  For reasons that Sally Hemings will never be able to comprehend, she backs away from the door as soon as he asks this question, and then she runs to her bed—which she realizes instantly is exactly the wrong thing to do.

  Thomas Jefferson is in the room, and he has closed the door behind him. He hurries toward where she stands, puts the candle on the night table and takes her hand as he sits on the edge of the bed.

  “My sweet girl!” he says.

  He is holding her hand in both of his. She does not resist. She is paralyzed and feels as if she is hovering a few feet above her own head, watching what is happening and not particularly caring—feeling nothing but a hurtling sort of numbness.

  Thomas Jefferson squeezes her hand gently. “I just had to see you,” he says. “Do you understand? I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” He smiles crookedly. “I think you do understand. You are, of course, the most innocent and modest of girls, but”—he looks straight into her eyes—�
�I think you do.”

  He stands, looming so large in the darkness that he seems twice her size. Now his mouth is on hers. She feels the prickliness of his lip and chin, his tongue attempting to push between her lips. “Oh, Sally!” he gasps. “Oh, Sally! You are so lovely! So utterly lovely!”

  Now he is kissing her neck, her throat. His hands are running up and down her body, touching her in places, front and back, where no one has ever touched her before. The feeling of his fingers on her body fills her with loathing. She wants to slap his hands away. She wants to shout, “Leave me alone!” She wants to bite his tongue. But she does none of these things. Looking down from above, she sees herself as a limp rag doll. If he weren’t holding her up, she would fall to the floor.

  “I will make it good,” he says between kisses. “I will be gentle. You will see. Gentle. I will make it good.”

  And now he has lifted both her gown and her shift over her head. And now he lays her naked body on the bed. He is kissing her breasts, her belly, that part of her down below. He is making the husky groans and ripping sighs of animals.

  All at once he pulls away. He is standing beside the bed, tearing at the buttons on his breeches. She knows what is going to happen. It cannot be possible. But that makes no difference. It is happening. It is inevitable. And there it is. Like a club sticking up out of him. Like a skinned fish. Like an enormous mushroom that is practically all stem. She never imagined that it could be so repulsive.

  But now something else has happened. Her entire body has gone rigid. He tries to move her legs apart, and he can’t. He cannot move her hands from her sides.

  He laughs softly. “Sweet girl! Don’t worry. I will be gentle. You will see. I promise. I understand. I will make it good.” He is talking between kisses. And he is kissing his way up her body. She feels his blunt, hot thing bump just above her knee, then press into her thigh—lightly at first, then harder.

  When his mouth reaches hers, she keeps her lips clamped shut. She is shivering. Her whole body is icy in the icy air, and she can’t stop the shivering.

  He pulls back his head. “Sally?” He starts to smile, but then his smile fades.

  She makes a small shriek, like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog, and shakes her head once, hard. She cannot speak.

  “Are you all right?” he says.

  Again she shakes her head.

  For a long moment, he only looks at her, his disconcertion resolving slowly into something like profound exhaustion.

  “Oh, God!” he says. “Oh, God! How could I be such a fool?” He turns away from her. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he puts his elbows on his knees and his forehead into his hands, clawing at his hair. “I’m sorry! I am so sorry! Oh, God.” He stands and pulls his breeches up from around his ankles. “I can’t believe I . . . I can’t believe . . . What a fool . . . Unforgivable . . .”

  Then he is gone. The door has closed behind him.

  His candle is still on her night table. The flame drops and flutters as a gust seeps around the window casing.

  Outside her door she hears an abrupt, hollow thundering. He has stumbled on the stairs. Quiet. An exhalation. He cannot see. Unsteady foot thumps quieten as they recede. He must make his way in total blackness. By touch alone.

  Colors are illusions. Better yet: They don’t entirely exist. A particular blue will look radically different in a field of orange than in a field of green. Show ten people a blue wall. Then take them into another room, present them with a hundred cards in assorted varieties of blue and ask them to pick out the color of the wall they were just looking at. It is highly likely that each person will pick out a different blue and likelier still that none of the blues they choose will match the wall in the other room. What is blue in sunshine might be green by candlelight and purple under fluorescent light. A blue on a smooth surface will appear a different blue when the surface is rough. There is a color that, especially in its paler tints, most men see as blue and most women see as green. It is a fact that the colors we see are never actually present, and yet, at the same time, they are absolutely present, as present as our emotions, memories, hopes, desires, beliefs—our very selves. And, of course—individually, but more commonly together—colors can constitute that most vivid and immediate form of truth, that truth also known as beauty.

  The huge clamor of steel shrieking on steel recedes into the rumble and roar of the train hurtling through the soot-blackened tunnel. As Thomas Jefferson watches, Sally Hemings lowers her fingers from her ears, pulls her book out from under her arm and reopens it. She sighs, and her face settles into peaceful concentration—so maybe she hasn’t noticed him after all. Gradually a faint tribulation darkens the center of her brow, but maybe only in response to some sorrow or worry experienced by the imaginary people about whom she is reading. He remembers, years ago, watching her through a window as she sat in a wicker chair out on the porch, gazing idly into space, her feet up on the railing. He felt, as he studied her then, that he was seeing her as she actually was—which is to say, as she was in his absence. It was a moment of terrific intimacy.

  III

  Sally Hemings stands in the dim hallway thinking about different kinds of knowledge. Some things that you know leave you alone, like the way bread tastes, or your name, or the stink of butcher shops on a summer afternoon. But there are other things that once you know them won’t let you be yourself anymore. You can remember who you used to be, but you are no longer that person. And you never will be again.

  The fear came first and the disgust afterward. As she lay alone in her bed once Thomas Jefferson had gone, she was haunted by the images of his sweating, red face, distorted by drink and by the brutal, animalistic urges that had taken him over. He had, in fact, become an animal as he threw himself on top of her, grunting, groaning, clawing at her, rubbing himself against her. How is it possible that a man as dignified, gentle and wise as Thomas Jefferson could have yielded to such crude impulses?

  If she could find a way to go back to when he’d asked if she would like to see a true miracle, she would say no. And when he told her to put on her yellow gown: No. And when he asked her to get into the carriage with him, she would say it was not proper for a gentleman to ride with his serving girl. And when he offered her wine, she would say, “No. I won’t drink it. No.”

  But now, in the cold morning—gray sky in the window at the end of the hall—she thinks that as horrified as she may have been last night, it is probably for the better that she now knows that Thomas Jefferson is no different from any of the brutal men her mother warned her of, that his civility is merely a subterfuge, as it is perhaps for all men. She is wiser for this knowledge, and maybe also stronger.

  Last night she had thought that she was weak, that she was nothing, not even a leaf blowing down the street. But now she knows that Thomas Jefferson is the one who is weak—because he showed her that he needed something from her; he needed something so badly that it turned him into a wordless animal. And he also showed her his shame—which perhaps is what matters most.

  He sat there on the end of her bed, his head in his hands, talking to himself, moaning, cursing, and then he left, staggering as he pulled up his breeches in midstep. And as Sally Hemings watched his shame, all of her own went away. I am blameless, she told herself. And now, in the hallway, she says aloud, “I am better than him.” Never before did she imagine that she could be better than Thomas Jefferson. The world as she knew it simply didn’t allow for that possibility. And now it does.

  There is so much room inside Thomas Jefferson. I shout, and there is no echo. I have been walking for days and am not sure I will ever traverse the distance between his head and his feet. Nights I unroll my sleeping bag and make a fire from the dried sticks and punky logs that are scattered everywhere in here. Last night a man walked out of the darkness and asked if he could sit down and warm his hands at my fire. A fresh-killed rabbit dangled from his belt, and he said he’
d be happy to share it with me. He, too, has been walking for days and days, and he has come to the conclusion that Thomas Jefferson does not exist, that this is only a sort of purgatory or perhaps one of the upper rings of hell—the one reserved for those who can’t distinguish fact from hope.

  Tonight a different man is warming himself by my fire. He has no food to offer, but he is happy to help me cut potatoes and beets for a soup. I tell him what the man said last night, and he tells me he knows for certain that Thomas Jefferson is real and that we are inside him. It’s just that these fires of ours make him lighter than air, and so he is constantly drifting among the clouds. “That’s why you can never get to the end of him,” the man says. “He is everywhere.”

  I tell him I don’t understand why that should be true, and he tells me he has conclusive evidence. “A couple of weeks ago,” he says, “I happened to be near one of his eyes, and I could look down at the moonlight shining off the tops of the clouds. And below them I could see the orange lights of a huge city—London or Los Angeles. Or maybe Tokyo.”

  I don’t see what this proves but decide not to argue.

  After we have finished our soup, we put a couple of big logs on the fire and get into our sleeping bags. Sometime later I am awakened by the clicking of clawed feet and by soft but emphatic woofs, exhalations and semivoiced yelps, which all together sound remarkably like speech. I sit up and place a couple more logs on the fire. At first they only smoke, but after I have blown on them awhile, flags of yellow flame ripple up into the darkness.

  As I pull the top of my sleeping bag back over my shoulders, I notice two perfectly round coals glowing in the gloom about a dozen yards from the fire. I hear a low noise, something between a grunt and a howl, and find another pair of coals hovering about the same distance away in the opposite direction. I grab a stout branch and drag it into my sleeping bag with me, just in case. There is no horizon here and no real dawn or daylight—just a cataract-colored luminescence that lasts about as long as a regular day.