Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  Thomas Jefferson walks hurriedly along the sandy path through the Champs-Élysées, head down, hands in the pockets of his breeches, coattails kicked again and again by his striding calves, a grid of plane trees spreading out for acres on either side of him. He hardly slept last night and was too bleary and restless this morning to work. It is April 21, a month past the vernal equinox, but the air is dank, cold. Heaps of cloud, white and gray, drift over the rooftops, intermittently releasing showers of musket-ball-size drops, but so far never intensely enough to merit his turning around and heading home.

  He is trying to convince himself that what he had wanted last night would not have been a theft but a gift, that the girl, with all the modesty that is natural to her sex, had been looking on him exactly as he had been looking on her and that, unable to acknowledge the depth of her own feeling—

  But this line of reasoning is quashed by his memory of her rigid body, her averted face and the noises she had made—noises of childish fear and grief.

  He veers off the path and into the geometric forest, where identical tree trunks angle through his peripheral vision in perfect diagonal and perpendicular rows. He stops, his forehead against smooth, mottled bark, and gasps in panicked despair at the impossibility of escaping his own being. But then, hearing that the sounds he is making now are the sounds he made last night, he falls silent.

  This is self-pity, he tells himself. You have no right to self-pity.

  Pushing away from the tree, he continues walking, his head down, hands in his pockets. He feels tears rising to his eyes, but they never come. He hasn’t cried in years, not since Martha died.

  How could he have allowed himself to get so drunk? How could he have allowed such low urges and repulsive ideas to take possession of his judgment? It is true. He cannot deny it: le droit du seigneur. That foul aristocratic presumption had come to mind last night every time his resolve wavered, every time he was overcome with anticipatory shame. Who would blame you? he had thought. They all do it. Lafayette has told him that he has had un goûter of every single one of his serving girls. Even James Monroe has confessed to a dalliance with his chambermaid. No one will blame you, he had told himself time and again.

  And yet once he was actually in the girl’s room, he never gave a thought to his “right,” nor did he think of himself as “taking” anything from her. All that was in his mind were his nights with Martha—especially those first nights of their marriage, by the fireplace, when the snow was falling outside the windows. Stupidly, blindly, selfishly, he had imagined that all that was needed was a little patience, some loving words, a gentle touch here and there with hand, lips and tongue, and all at once Sally Hemings’s desire would overwhelm her modesty and, as with Martha, her thighs would loosen, her arms would fly up and she would cover his neck and lips with her kisses. But instead he’d inspired nothing but her loathing, and now he feels nothing but loathing for himself.

  He hears a pattery drumming in the leaves overhead. A cold drop strikes his cheek. In a matter of seconds, the rain is falling so thick and fast that it hits the sandy earth all around him with a sound like millions of tiny feet stamping.

  Thomas Jefferson has never called her “Miss Hemings” before. She came upon him under the portico, squeezing water out of his sodden coat by twisting it into a thick rope. The sleeves of his white shirt were sodden, too, and perfectly transparent where the wet linen clung to the skin of his arms. As soon as he realized he was being observed, he shook out the coat and attempted to put it on. After prodding several times at the interior of a still-drenched and twisted sleeve, he gave up, flung the coat over his shoulders and pulled the lapels across his chest.

  His lips were blue, his hair a mass of tarnished copper coils, his face dripping. As he looked at her, a shiver passed through his whole body. This was when he said it: “Miss Hemings, I know that I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I want you to know that I profoundly regret my actions. They were utterly inexcusable, and they will fill me with shame until the end of my days.”

  Now he is silent. His clearly rehearsed speech over, there is nothing he can do save wait for her reply.

  But Sally Hemings is too filled with rage to talk. Her ears roar with it, and everything turns white. By the time she comes back to herself, she is already at the bottom of the steps and making her way rapidly but unsteadily toward the gate to the street.

  She has no idea what she said or did while the world was roaring and white. She has no idea what she looked like, but she feels as if she were shaken into a vibrating cloud of light and noise.

  And now she is out of the gate and on the street, which smells of feces and wet stone. The tremulous weakness fades from her legs; her stride grows purposeful, strong.

  It is Saturday. She is going to pick up Patsy and Polly at their school across the river, on rue de Grenelle. It will take her an hour to walk there and longer to walk back. Maybe when she returns, she will know what to do.

  The guard tightens her belt. She speaks.

  —Wake up.

  —Uh . . .

  —Wake up. It’s morning.

  —Wha . . . ?

  —Get the fuck out of bed.

  —Who are you?

  —Get the fuck up, I told you!

  —Why?

  —Because I told you so.

  —It’s the middle of the night.

  —No it’s not.

  —I’ve only been asleep for ten minutes.

  —It’s been three hours.

  —What?

  —Three hours. I’ve been on duty three hours, and the whole time I’ve been sitting here watching you. So now it’s morning.

  —It’s not morning.

  —How do you know?

  —Leave me alone.

  —How do you know?

  —Because I’m fucking exhausted, and I want to sleep.

  —Answer my question.

  — . . .

  —Answer my question.

  —I just did.

  —Just because you’re tired doesn’t mean it’s morning. You think the sun rises and falls according to when you feel like sleeping?

  — . . .

  —When was the last time you saw daylight?

  —How the fuck do I know?

  —I rest my case.

  —Why are you doing this?

  —Well, there are two reasons. First of all, I’m the guard and you’re shit, so whatever I say is the law. That’s the most important reason. The second reason is that I’ve been reading your file, and I’m interested in you.

  —Great.

  —Don’t you want to know why?

  —Why?

  —Because I know you think you don’t belong here.

  —Does anybody think they belong here?

  —Nobody likes being here, but that’s not the same thing as thinking they don’t belong.

  — . . .

  —Some people know they don’t deserve freedom. Murderers, mostly. Even the really heinous ones. On the whole I prefer working with murderers.

  —Why?

  —Because they know the difference between right and wrong. They know that some people are good and some people are evil and there is no in-between.

  —How can you say that?

  —You see! That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

  —No in-between. How can you say that?

  —Because that’s the way it is.

  The prisoner makes a vocalization that commonly precedes speech. The guard speaks.

  —Shut up! I’m still talking. I know what you are going to say. You’re going to tell me about complexity, ambiguity, our muddy human souls. But none of that matters. So what if you wanted to do the right thing? So what if you thought you were doing the right thing? Or if you had a terrible childhood? Or even if you were insane? If the th
ing you did was evil, that’s all that matters: You’re evil. You belong here. End of story.

  —How can you say that?

  —Hah!

  —What?

  —Didn’t I just tell you? You’re shit in here. And I’m God. Right? I’m the big, fucking, all-powerful mystery. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Didst thou create Behemoth? Leviathan? Have the gates of death been open unto thee? Get down on thy knees! Repent in dust and ashes!

  The prisoner is laughing. The guard speaks.

  —What’s so funny?

  —Nothing.

  —Then shut up!

  — . . .

  — . . .

  The prisoner speaks.

  —But still, there’s a flaw in your reasoning.

  —I knew you’d say that.

  —So you know what I’m talking about?

  —Why don’t you tell me?

  —You said if the thing you did was evil. That implies that you have to have a way of distinguishing evil from ordinary wrongdoing, or even from virtue—because, after all, sometimes evil is just a matter of perspective. The theft of a loaf of bread might seem evil to the baker, but to the starving man—

  —Just like I said: Complexity. Ambiguity. Our muddy human souls. You’re like a robot.

  —Don’t evade the point.

  —What is the point?

  —The point is that conclusions about whether a person is good or evil have to be based on evidence, and evidence can be misleading, or just hard to interpret. And then there’s the matter of terminology. How exactly do you define evil? And where do you draw the line—

  —Are you actually paying attention to what you are saying?

  — . . .

  —I mean, do you actually think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that a man who buys and sells human beings is evil?

  — . . .

  —Well? What have you got to say for yourself?

  —That’s not what I . . .

  —You think there’s any way that trading in human beings isn’t evil?

  —I’m just talking about what you said, about there being no in-between.

  —Well, you know what? I don’t give a fuck about what you were talking about. If you’re evil, you’re evil. That’s all there is to it. We’re not talking garden variety screwup here, or even mean fucking bastard. We’re talking evil. There’s no such thing as being a little bit evil. Evil is an all or nothing proposition. That’s it. And all your talk about ambiguity, definitions and all that other bullshit is just a way of avoiding the simple truth.

  —And I’m saying that there is no such thing as simple truth. For better or for worse, reality is always complex and ambiguous, and a failure to recognize that fact leads straight to tyranny.

  The guard shakes her head and smiles. The prisoner speaks.

  —What?

  —If that’s what you think, then it looks like you’ve got a lot to learn about tyranny.

  She bangs her billy club against the bars of the cell. The prisoner leaps backward. He speaks.

  —What the fuck!

  —Get down on your knees!

  — . . .

  —You heard me! Get down on your knees!

  The guard pulls a ring of keys out of her pocket and unlocks the cell door. The prisoner speaks.

  —What are you doing?

  The guard bangs her billy club against the cell bars once again, but far more forcefully. The bars ring. The ringing reverberates down the corridor. The prisoner speaks.

  —What are you doing?

  —I’m going to teach you a lesson about tyranny.

  The door swings open as if of its own accord. The guard and the prisoner look into each other’s eyes. She speaks.

  —And about your fucking pursuit of happiness and your fucking created equal.

  The guard enters the cell. The prisoner backs away. The guard speaks.

  —That is so fucking over.

  A day has passed, and a night during which Sally Hemings did not sleep. Now it is morning, but so early that there is only a blue vagueness in the garden outside the kitchen door. An armful of wood has already burned down to a mound of glowing, irregularly popping and snapping coals, and a ten-gallon iron stewpot is already filling the air with onion-scented steam. Jimmy, who got back from Le Havre last night, is standing at the chopping block transforming peeled carrots into a heap of thumbnail-long cylinders. He doesn’t know that Sally Hemings is standing in the doorway behind him, watching.

  Her first thought is that her brother seems so gentle as he gives himself to his work, and so unhurried, even though the extraction of each new set of three or four carrots from the heap, their alignment against his knife and then the rocking chops that transform them into orange cylinders are accomplished in scant seconds. It’s his grace that makes him seem unhurried, or even in a sort of trance. He hardly looks at what he’s doing, his eyes turned toward the empty space above a shelf of soot-blackened copper pots, and yet his knife blade strikes with the regularity and precision of a ticking clock.

  But in the next instant, all Sally Hemings sees is her brother’s humiliation. His movements are not so much graceful as supremely controlled. His back is rigid, his expression blank and his head held high in the manner of a man struggling to endure the unbearable. There is a great deal of rage inside Jimmy, but it is humiliated rage—rage lacking not intensity but the power to be expressed in action.

  At these last thoughts, Sally Hemings becomes so weak with sorrow that a groan escapes her throat.

  Jimmy’s head jerks around. “Oh, Sally!” He smiles. “Don’t do that! I thought you were a ghost.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t you know better than to creep up on a man with a knife in his hand!?”

  Sally Hemings can’t bring herself to laugh. Jimmy’s smile is replaced by the slightly parted lips and crumpled brow of concern.

  “What’s the matter, Cider Jug?”

  “Nothing.” She looks away, then back.

  Jimmy is still looking at her but doesn’t say anything.

  “I just heard someone in here,” she says, “so I thought I’d look in.”

  “Hunh.”

  “What are you making?”

  “Boeuf bourguignon.”

  “Oh.” Sally Hemings wasn’t quite listening to his response. So after an instant she asks, “What’s that?”

  “Beef and wine and vegetables—potatoes mostly.” He looks back at the chopping block, lines up some carrots and places his knife across them. “Mr. Jefferson’s having a whole bunch of people over tonight.” Chop.

  Sally Hemings doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she says, “I better be going.”

  Jimmy rests the hand holding the knife on the table. When she doesn’t budge from the doorway, he says, “Come over here.”

  “No. I’ve got to go.”

  “Come over here.” He points his knife blade at the floor beside him.

  She wipes her hands on her apron, then crosses the room to stand beside her brother, though not as close as he indicated.

  When she still doesn’t say anything, Jimmy says slowly, with a knowing smile, “You look like the dog sneaking out of the hen yard.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He smiles again. “I don’t know. I’m waiting for you to tell me. All I’m saying is that you look like you’ve been up to no good.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” she says angrily. She wants to leave, but she can’t.

  “Well, something happened.”

  “No.” She picks up her apron absently and wraps both hands in it. “I have to go.” She takes a step away, then turns around. “Something happened, but I didn’t do anything.”

  His smile is gone. “Oh, Sal.”<
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  Her eyes grow hot with tears. She squeezes her lips together and shakes her head.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” he tells her.

  She wipes her fingers across her eyes, then says, “I can’t talk here.”

  She walks toward the door and out into the yard, where the powdery light is going pinkish. She hurries between beds of the rotted leaves and stems of last year’s peas and squash, pressed flat by a winter of snow, and she doesn’t turn around until she is behind the toolshed. Once Jimmy joins her, she leans forward and speaks in a voiced whisper beside his ear.

  “Mr. Jefferson came to my room the other night.”

  Jimmy pulls his head away from hers and covers his mouth with both hands. “Oh, no!” After a moment he lowers his hands and says, “You mean that he . . . that . . . that he . . .” He cannot complete his sentence.

  “He came to my door,” says Sally Hemings. “He was drunk, and he wouldn’t go away.”

  “Did he force himself in?”

  “No. Not really. He just kept saying all these things. . . . I didn’t know what to do, but . . . And when I realized he was already in the room, I didn’t know how I was going to get him out.”

  “Did he—” Jimmy cuts off his own question. He gives Sally a firm, interrogatory glance but then cannot bear to look at her.

  When he looks back, she is staring him straight in the eye. Then she nods slowly.

  He makes a small gasp but says nothing.

  She realizes that he has probably misunderstood what actually happened, but she can’t bear to speak any of the words she would have to use to make that clear—and maybe it doesn’t matter. It was bad, that’s all. Just bad.

  After a long moment of silence, Jimmy moves his open hands back and forth horizontally, as if sweeping something off a table. “You can’t talk about this to anyone,” he says. “Anybody finds out about Mr. Jefferson or if Mr. Jefferson finds out you been talking—” He doesn’t complete his sentence.