Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  “But what am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” He makes the sweeping gesture again. “You best hope Mr. Jefferson doesn’t come around again. The best thing you could have done was never open up your door in the first place.”

  “Jimmy!” She puts both hands on top of her head, as if she has just been struck.

  “I’m sorry.” He comes back to her, throws his arms around her and crushes her against his chest. Then he lets her go. “I’ve got to think about this. The main thing is, we’ve got to see what’s going to happen. Maybe nothing’s going to happen . . . and then everything will be all right . . . and we can just forget about it.”

  “I’ll never forget about it.”

  “Well . . .” Jimmy backs away. “Just wait, and we’ll see.”

  For almost a week, Sally Hemings keeps to her room as much as she can stand to and as much as she can manage without neglecting her duties to such a degree that everyone in the house will guess what has happened.

  She cannot bear the idea of anyone’s knowing, partly because if no one finds out, then it is almost as if nothing actually did happen, but mainly because she knows the conclusions that everyone will draw: Some will blame her for having led on the good Mr. Jefferson, or for having lacked the fortitude to make clear to him the inviolability of her virtue, and the rest (the majority, she believes) will simply be indifferent to what she has suffered. She is a slave, after all, and a young woman; it is her duty to serve her master in any way he requires. All of these conclusions fill her with such fury and dread that she sometimes feels insane.

  So by day she is careful to respond to every greeting, question and command exactly as she would have responded had nothing happened and to devote exactly her ordinary level of attention to her every task and action—even to actions as simple as walking down the hall (in fact, she devotes much more attention than normal to how she places each foot as she walks, and how she holds her hands, and where she allows her eyes to stray).

  By night she jams a wooden peg into the slot above the latch of her bedroom door so that it can’t be opened.

  By night she looks up into the swirling plasma of darkness between her bed and the ceiling and hears the tick of every contracting or expanding floorboard and the whisper of every breeze, and she thinks only of the danger gathering force in every corner too dark to see.

  By night she does battle with her memory and her imagination and with her rigid, sweating, sleepless body, which wants to do nothing but run from her room and out into the streets and never see the Hôtel de Langeac again, or Paris.

  “Come with me, child,” says Madame Gautier, the laundress, a potato-shaped woman of about sixty, with very small eyes and an imperious pout. She visits the Hôtel twice weekly, to drop off cleaned linens, towels, undergarments and shirts and to pick up dirty ones. She is speaking in French. When Sally Hemings greets her command with only an uncomprehending stare, Madame Gautier asks, “Are you not Mademoiselle Sally?” Sally Hemings answers in the affirmative, and Madame Gautier takes her by the hand, saying, “Good. You must come with me. Monsieur Jefferson desires that you should live in my house.”

  Sally Hemings yanks her hand free. “One moment! I know nothing about this.”

  “I am afraid that is none of my affair.”

  “Did he tell you this himself?”

  “Yes. Just now, when Madame Dubois was paying me. Monsieur Jefferson came into the kitchen and asked if he might rent a room for you.”

  Many thoughts are shooting through Sally Hemings’s mind, most of them concerning the significance of Thomas Jefferson’s decision. Is she being banished from the Hôtel de Langeac? Will this impatient and stupid woman be her new mistress? Will she never be able to see her brother again? Or Patsy and Polly?

  “I’m sorry,” she tells Madame Gautier. “I must speak to my brother.”

  The old woman seems on the verge of scolding her, but then her scowl softens. “Very well,” she says. “But hurry. I have many things to do.”

  She knows, Sally Hemings thinks as she hurries to find Jimmy. Everybody knows.

  She has to pass through the dining room on her way to the kitchen, and this is where she spots her brother, who rushes right up to her.

  “Jimmy!”

  “Oh, Sally!” He holds out a small envelope. “He gave me this.”

  She takes it, removes the single page inside, on which she recognizes her own name and Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting. She stares at it a long moment, her trembling hand making a blur of the page’s edges.

  “Do you want me to?” asks Jimmy.

  She hands him the letter, and he reads:

  “‘Miss Hemings, I am writing to inform you that I have procured a room for you with Madame Gautier, which shall be your refuge whenever your services are not needed here by Patsy and Polly. During the days that my daughters are in residence at the Hôtel, I think it best that you reside in your present chamber, though if that should not be agreeable to you, alternate arrangements can certainly be made. Whether you wish to continue your duties at the Hôtel in the absence of my daughters is also a matter I leave to your better judgment. I hope you will understand that I have made this arrangement only in the interest of your greater comfort. If I have erred in my judgment, or if you have any questions or requirements, please do not hesitate to express them to me through the good offices of your brother. Respectfully yours, Th. Jefferson.’”

  Sally Hemings’s new room is just off the yard where Madame Gautier does her washing. The walls are fieldstone, the floor is dirt, the bed is a straw-stuffed tick on a wooden frame.

  Sally Hemings thinks the room might be pretty if she can whitewash the walls, put dried flowers on the sill in front of the folio-size window and find a small dresser or trunk for her clothes. “You can do whatever you want,” says Madame Gautier, “but Monsieur Jefferson must pay for it.”

  Sally Hemings does not want to ask any favors of Thomas Jefferson.

  Madame Gautier’s twenty-year-old daughter, Thérèse, is as big as a man. Her fingers are as thick as her thumb, her mouth is chapped purple all around from constant licking. “Who are you?” she asks Sally Hemings five times in a row, and seems satisfied with nothing Sally Hemings and her mother tell her.

  Sally Hemings goes to sleep every night to the sound of the mice stirring inside her tick and wakes every morning to steam clouds scented with lye soap.

  Her eyes water and her nostrils burn.

  She is determined to only return to the Hôtel de Langeac when she escorts Patsy and Polly home from school and to stay away when they are not there, but she has nothing to do during her days except wander the streets.

  “Monsieur Jefferson is paying for your room but not your food. If you want to eat, you must buy your own food or you must ask Monsieur Jefferson to buy it for you.”

  Sally Hemings cannot read, but she is able to add and subtract in her head, and so she figures that her wages are enough to allow her to buy bread and a piece of cheese every day.

  Jimmy gives her meat and soup during her days at the Hôtel.

  She cannot store her food. The mice eat it when she keeps it in her room, and Thérèse eats it when she keeps it in the kitchen larder.

  She is walking through Les Halles on her way to Penthemont and spots a young man lying in the street, the top quarter of his head missing. A young woman standing in a doorway tells her that he was brained by a rock thrown by a “sans-culotte.” Sally Hemings does not know what a sans-culotte is.

  “You really must take better care of yourself,” says Patsy. “How can we bring you anywhere if your linens are so gray and you smell like fish?”

  When Monsieur Gautier gets drunk, Madame Gautier makes him sleep in the yard. On those nights Sally Hemings gets no sleep, because her door does not lock and she is afraid that he will come in and because his snores are as loud and end
uring as a two-man saw cutting through an endless piece of wood.

  Polly says, “Clotilde told us you no longer live here because Papa is angry at you. That’s absurd! If you would like, Patsy and I will tell Papa he is being ridiculous this very minute.” Sally Hemings glances at Patsy, who looks away. “Don’t,” Sally Hemings tells Polly. “Thank you, but don’t.”

  Every morning Thérèse comes out into the yard and gathers her skirts into a bundle between her knees. She holds her bare buttocks over an enamel chamber pot until she has entirely voided both her urine and feces. Then she flings the contents of the pot over the rear wall into a vacant lot—or she tries to. About a third of the time, she misses and the mess remains on the wall until her mother can sluice it away with a bucket of used wash water.

  Sally Hemings feels the heat on her cheek first, then looks down a street to see a house towering with flame. A pawnshop, she discovers when she has joined the curious crowd. Black timbers enveloped in roaring orange. Bricks bursting with a sound like gunshot. Once again: the sans-culottes.

  “I insist!” says Polly. “I think Papa is just being stubborn. I am going to talk to him this instant.” “Really,” says Sally Hemings. “There is no need. I’m perfectly happy as I am.” Patsy takes no part in the conversation, but when she looks at Sally Hemings, she seems to have an extremely painful stomachache.

  Only once it has sunk its teeth into the flesh just to the left of her chin does Sally Hemings realize that the animal she woke to find sitting on her chest is a rat.

  Sally Hemings has always loved the main staircase, which descends in a crazy, angular spiral along the walls of the cockeyed space between the ballroom and the front hall, but once she resumes living at the Hôtel de Langeac after her five-week absence, she takes only the rear stairs, which let out in the narrow corridor just outside the kitchen, and she uses the Hôtel’s side entrance onto rue Neuve-de-Berri when she goes shopping for Jimmy or Clotilde or when she has to fetch the Misses Jefferson from their school.

  As a result of these practices, she only rarely catches sight of Thomas Jefferson during the days when his daughters are not present at the HÔtel. And on those occasions when she does spot him at the end of a hall or in a room she is passing, she always averts her head, pretending she doesn’t see him, but not without noticing that he, too, shifts his gaze away from her.

  One morning she descends the rear staircase and comes face-to-face with Thomas Jefferson as he is leaving the kitchen. He blushes so deeply that his hair looks yellow, and after a moment of flustered fidgeting he presses himself against the wall and gestures for her to pass. Neither of them says a word.

  True hate is effortless. It is called into being spontaneously, inevitably, by the hateful object. When the object is not purely hateful, however, hate requires effort, and if such hate regards the complexly hateful object as if it were purely hateful, then the hate itself is not pure. The world abhors purity. The world abhors most things proclaimed true. The world abhors perfection.

  And because we ourselves cannot be perfect, there are moments when the effort of hating the hateful thing is more than we can manage—moments of indifference, or of forgiveness, or even of admiration. And if the hateful thing is sufficiently deserving of our hate, those moments in which we are not sufficiently hate-filled can inspire us to hate ourselves, just a little or sometimes a great deal. This is because hate is so intertwined with morality as to make the two seem almost indistinguishable.

  Love, too, is intertwined with morality, but far less intimately. We are more than capable of loving someone without thinking him or her morally perfect. But when we hate someone, it is almost impossible for us not to think of that person as evil.

  It is a well-known fact that hate not unambiguously anchored on moral condemnation tends to degenerate over time into gentler emotions, or into no emotion at all. And it is also true that hate anchored only on fury can spontaneously flip over into love, that most capacious of emotions, that emotion which can not only thrive in the presence of hate but be intensified by it. And for this reason our tendency to think of love as life’s greatest blessing is, alas, little more than sentimentality.

  Sally Hemings is standing at the window at the top of the kitchen stairs, looking down into the garden where Thomas Jefferson is kneeling on the flagstone path between the beds of black earth that will soon be lush with cabbage, squash, beans, cucumbers and corn—all grown from seeds sent from Monticello. He licks the tip of his index finger and sticks it into an open envelope he is holding in his left hand. Carefully pulling his finger straight up out of the envelope, he peers at something on its tip and pushes his finger deep into the soft, moist earth in front of him. Then he smooths earth over the hole he has just made, licks his finger again, puts it back into the envelope and plunges it once more into the earth. He repeats this exercise twenty or thirty times before, with a childlike concentration on detail, he folds down the flap of the envelope, folds the envelope itself in half and slips it into the pocket of his frock coat.

  Batting the earth flecks from his hands, he stands up and takes a step back to survey his work, not noticing the rake lying teeth-down directly behind him. His left foot steps on the rake handle, and he staggers, catching his right heel on the uneven pavement and toppling backward into the next vegetable bed, where he attempts to halt his fall with his right hand—which is to say with the arm he broke so badly not long before Sally Hemings’s arrival in Paris.

  He remains seated in the vegetable bed, rocking back and forth, clutching his right wrist in his left hand. After a couple of moments, he rocks onto his knees and, still clutching his wrist, gets to his feet. When he is vertical, he gingerly lets go of his wrist, opens and closes his fingers several times, then rotates his hand. From where she is standing, Sally Hemings can see no sign of pain, but he does clutch his wrist again as he walks toward the kitchen and disappears from sight.

  . . . The erosion of my virtue began, paradoxically, with my diminished regard for Mr. Jefferson. From my very first days at the Hôtel de Langeac, I had never quite seen the awkward and morose Mr. Jefferson as a real human being. He was more like a creature out of a nursery story, a prince put under a curse or pining away for a lost love—and, indeed, I attributed most of his sorrow to the death of his dear wife. It was only after he had committed the unthinkable that he became a mere man in my eyes and thereby became both pitiful and, eventually, capable of being pitied.

  The transformation of my feelings from contempt to something much closer to sympathy occurred during the month or so I lodged with Mr. Jefferson’s laundress, an arrangement he made on my behalf. I would return to the Hôtel de Langeac only when Miss Martha and Miss Maria were home from school, and inevitably, from time to time, I would be forced to stand in the same room with Mr. Jefferson, while he and his daughters discussed arrangements or merely chatted. He would never look in my direction on these occasions and seemed reluctant to even meet the girls’ gazes, afraid perhaps that I might have said something to them or that they might have heard rumors from some other quarter. I never breathed a word to either daughter of what had happened between their father and myself, though they clearly had intuited that something was wrong, Miss Martha in particular. Whenever Mr. Jefferson caught sight of me, his face would blanch and his voice would go low and soft, devoid of those modulations of pitch that signify joy, enthusiasm or even anger.

  I must confess that I relished these manifestations of his discomfort, in part because they seemed just retribution for what he had done but more because they increased my own stature—in my eyes at least. After a period during which I would tremble in his presence (though more out of humiliation and suppressed rage than fear; I am not sure I ever truly feared Mr. Jefferson, and I never felt physically endangered), I began to take delight in intensifying his discomfort. I would stare at him whenever I was in his presence, and anytime he would glance my way and then wince or avert his gaze, I would ha
ve to struggle to keep myself from smiling.

  Perhaps it was my growing sense of my power to unsettle Mr. Jefferson that transformed my contempt to pity—though I don’t know; emotions are like a stew, the taste of which is determined by no one ingredient but by all together. What I do know is that one night when I was lying in my bed at the laundress’s house, it occurred to me that Mr. Jefferson had shown true consideration for my feelings by arranging this refuge for me and that had he been the debauched brute I’d been imagining, he never would have allowed me out of his sight, let alone made it possible for me to regain my sense of decency and composure. And as soon as these ideas came into my head, all of Mr. Jefferson’s winces, shrinkings, averted gazes, blanches and troubled expressions—the very things that had filled me with a self-satisfied contempt for him—began to seem manifestations of his tender nature and of his remorse, and thus of his desire to be good. And with this recognition, I began to feel his sufferings and humiliation as if they were my own and to remember how, on the night he had come into my room, no sooner had he realized that I truly did not share his desires than he cried out, clutched his head in shame and ran from the room. And now I, too, felt ashamed. My body was possessed by a paroxysm of tearful remorse, and for some hour or so during the darkest time of the night I imagined that I, myself, was heartless and evil.

  In the morning, of course, all of this seemed nonsense, and I resumed my determination to cut Mr. Jefferson no quarter and to preserve my dignity and modesty above all else. . . .

  Thomas Jefferson is walking amid the lush stench of the open sewers and the rankness of butcher shops and slaughterhouses, the smoke of coal and tobacco, the smell of wet wool and of houses hollowed by fire, then drenched by rain. But mostly he is walking among faces. So many faces.