Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  Although he is reluctant to cede any advantage to Europe, he feels that the variety of faces he sees on the streets of Paris is vastly beyond that of any city in America, even Philadelphia. The variety is almost entirely due to disease, however, and to the fundamental cruelty of life under a monarch. The pitted, leathery faces of the pox sufferers, for example, or the dwarf-eyed faces of the blind-since-birth, or the toothless and the potato-nosed, or the mad and the aghast.

  But there are also noble faces. He cannot deny this. The hawk-sharp gaze of the broad-shouldered ironmonger. The creamy cheeks and blue-eyed concern of the barefoot mother, hurrying her two small children out of the path of the clattering phaeton. And even the face of the duchess riding in that phaeton, who, lost in her own musings, her head and shoulders shaken in the shuddering of wheels over cobbles, lets her eyes fall on Thomas Jefferson’s and gives him a glance that cuts like a cool arrow straight into his heart. And then she is gone.

  Just that morning Thomas Jefferson looked at his own face in the mirror above his washstand, and he believed he was looking at himself. But now he thinks that he was mistaken. Our faces are not ourselves. They are only the façades behind which our selves perpetrate their histories, shrouded in obscurity and human wishes.

  Thomas Jefferson’s heart pounds, and he is sweating.

  That plump woman smiling blandly as she stands behind her board table in the market square: What secret sufferings lurk behind those brown button eyes? What does she long for and fear as she stokes the fires under her pots of fruit? As she seals her preserves in porcelain jars under layers of wax, paper and twine?

  Strawberry. Red currant. Apple. Apricot.

  Thomas Jefferson’s fingertips have gone slick with sweat.

  He has conceived the desire to buy a jar of the apricot preserves from the woman, and now, mysteriously, he cannot breathe. A nugget of pain throbs in each of his temples. What is happening? he wonders. Then he remembers one sunny morning some two or three months past, when Sally Hemings licked her fingers, laughed and proclaimed, “Nothing on earth was so delicious as French apricot preserves!” He turns his back on the woman and her preserves and strides empty-handed out of the market square.

  And then, minutes later, his fingertips having gone ice cold, he is hurrying home with a jar of apricot preserves in the pocket of his greatcoat.

  He has to wipe his hands on his breeches before taking up his pen to write on a scrap of paper torn off the bottom of a cobbler’s bill: “For Sally.”

  After he has left the jar of preserves atop his note on the table in the empty kitchen and has walked halfway down the hall, he decides he must return and retrieve his pathetic and shameful offering. He ventures back as far as the kitchen door, but then the notion that he should be ashamed of so innocent a gesture only seems more pathetic and incriminating, so once again he hurries down the hall.

  And then: the bemused surprise of Clotilde when, an hour later, she comes across the jar and the note.

  And then: Jimmy’s somber gaze when, some hours after that, his sister walks into the kitchen.

  “What’s the matter?” asks Sally Hemings, stopping in the doorway.

  He nods in the direction of the jar.

  She recognizes not just the one word she can read but the handwriting.

  What she cannot make sense of is the blue scrawl on the label glued to the jar.

  “What flavor?” she asks her brother, and he tells her. She picks up the jar, and then she puts it down and leaves the room.

  But Jimmy has not had time to skin an onion before she is standing again beside the table. “It won’t hurt to taste,” she says.

  Fingertips glossed with sweat, she tugs at the twine and paper, then picks up a knife and breaks the wax seal.

  It is nine at night, and Sally Hemings has just finished washing and putting away the pots used by her brother and Clotilde when she hears the Marquis de Lafayette’s laughter coming down the corridor from the direction of Thomas Jefferson’s study. It would have been faster for her to go up to her room via the staircase just outside the kitchen, but she decides to take the main staircase instead, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the funny and kind marquis.

  As she passes, candle in hand, in front of Thomas Jefferson’s door, she sees a paper-strewn desk, a lit oil lamp and, just to the right of the lamp, somebody’s knee, but she doesn’t dare hesitate long enough to determine whose knee it is.

  No sooner has she passed the door than she hears the marquis’s voice: “Is that my beautiful little Sarah?”

  “Sally!” Thomas Jefferson calls. “Sally! Would you mind coming here for a moment?”

  Straightening her hair and her apron with her one free hand, she returns to the door. “Yes, Mr. Jefferson.”

  The two men are leaning forward to get a better view of the door, Thomas Jefferson behind the desk, the Marquis de Lafayette in front of it. (His was the knee she had glimpsed.) Both have shiny red faces and glittering eyes. A half-empty bottle of wine and two full glasses are on the desk. Two empty bottles stand beside the marquis’s chair. He is looking at Sally Hemings with his usual merry smile. Thomas Jefferson is also smiling, but less easily. Sally Hemings feels a piercing sorrow as she looks at him, but she is not sure why.

  “Thank you, Sally,” says Thomas Jefferson. “You remember the marquis?”

  “Mais oui,” says Sally Hemings. “Bien sûr.”

  “And how is my beautiful Sarah?” says the marquis.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” Sally Hemings knows that she should say, “And how are you, my lord?” but she can’t bring herself to ask him a question.

  “We need your advice!” the marquis announces, his smile growing just a touch mischievous. “Your good friend, le philosophe”—he gestures at Thomas Jefferson, who has ceased smiling altogether—“and I are trying to come up with a document that will help this benighted monarchy acquire some of the virtues of your wise and civilized country.”

  “Gilbert,” Thomas Jefferson says reprovingly.

  “Nonsense,” says the marquis. “Je veux vraiment savoir ce qu’elle pense.”

  Thomas Jefferson takes a deep sip from his glass and leans back in his chair. His face grows darker as it recedes from the lamp glow, but the flame still gleams in his eyes.

  “Come in, chère Sarah,” says the marquis. “Would you like a chair?” He looks around the room. Every other chair is stacked with books, papers, surveying equipment or other mechanical devices.

  “That’s all right,” says Sally Hemings.

  “Mais non!” He turns to Thomas Jefferson. “We can clear off one of these chairs for the young lady, can’t we, Tom?”

  “No, really,” insists Sally Hemings.

  The marquis is leaning forward to rise from his chair but now hesitates.

  “Are you sure, Sally?” says Thomas Jefferson. His voice is kindly, and there is a tenderness in his gaze that brings back her sorrow. Her sorrow and something else. This is the first time he has looked into her eyes for more than an instant in the six weeks since the night he came into her room. Her knees are trembling beneath her petticoats and gown.

  “Yes,” she says. “I was just on my way upstairs.”

  The marquis leans back in his chair. “Well, we won’t keep you.” He takes a sip from his own glass. “But we would both like to know what you think about something.” He glances at Thomas Jefferson, who presses his hands flat together as if he were praying and holds the tips of his fingers against his mouth. “We’d like to know,” the marquis continues, “what you think of an idea that we have been discussing. It concerns the definition of liberty or, more exactly, the liberty of people living together under one government. We would like to define liberty as the freedom to do whatever one wants, as long as that does not cause injury to anyone else or deprive people of their basic rights, including the right to liberty. Wh
at do you think of that idea?”

  Sally Hemings is silent. She feels Thomas Jefferson looking at her, but she doesn’t look in his direction. Her knees are trembling so violently now that the skirt of her dress has begun to shake.

  “It’s all right,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “Let the girl answer,” says the marquis. He is not smiling now. He no longer seems the least bit funny or kind.

  “Sally,” says Thomas Jefferson, “you don’t have to say anything if you would rather not.”

  “It’s a simple question,” says the marquis. “Should people be free to do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else?”

  After a long moment, Sally says, “I suppose that would be all right. If they don’t hurt anybody, I mean. But I don’t know. I’d have to think about it for a bit. It seems to me that there are a lot of things that don’t hurt anybody else, but I’m not sure if people should really do all of them. Like hurt animals. I don’t know if people should be able to do that if there isn’t a good reason.”

  “Well said,” says Thomas Jefferson, who is leaning forward now, his hands still pressed together in front of his mouth.

  “What about depriving people of their liberty?” says the marquis. “Do you think that one man should be free to deprive another man of his freedom?”

  Thomas Jefferson falls back into his chair again, his forehead gnarled with uneasiness, his eyes still gleaming.

  “What do you think?” says the marquis. “Do we have the right to deprive other people of their liberty if they have not committed a crime?”

  “Gilbert,” says Thomas Jefferson. “I think you are being inconsiderate.”

  “Let her speak,” says the marquis.

  “I think . . .” says Sally Hemings. “I think that’s another question I have to think about some more.”

  “But you must have an opinion!” the marquis says impatiently. “Do you think that someone should have the right to deprive you of your liberty if you haven’t broken the law?”

  Sally Hemings’s eyes are hot with tears. Her vision blurs.

  “Gilbert!” Thomas Jefferson slaps his hand down on the desk. “This is pointless and cruel.”

  “Let her speak,” the marquis says firmly. “What do you think, Sarah?”

  “I think,” she says, her voice trembling, “that there is a difference between the way things are and the way they should be.”

  “Is that all?” says the marquis.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Some days later I make my camp in a shallow declivity that gives me partial shelter from a cold wind that has been blowing steadily from the northwest since first light, though never with very much force. The wind is strong enough to keep blowing out my matches, however. And I am only able to get my fire going by first crouching to shelter the match and kindling with my body and then by standing upwind of the fire with my sleeping bag open and stretched out behind my back as a windbreak.

  I sit back down once the larger logs have begun to burn steadily but soon realize that far from blowing out the fire, the steady wind is causing it to burn much faster than normal and that I am going to have to gather considerably more wood if I want to stay warm until it is light again.

  I am casting a long-legged shadow at that dim fringe where the fire’s flickering light fades into the surrounding gloom when I notice two white coals hovering in the darkness some twenty or thirty yards in front of me. Acting as if I haven’t seen anything unusual, I carry the wood I have already gathered back to my camp at an unhurried pace, drop it beside the fire and sit down next to the backpack, where I have left the open buck knife I used to shave sticks into kindling.

  I watch the hovering coals only out of the corner of my eye and can tell that they have come considerably closer since I first spotted them. They waver as they approach, and sometimes they disappear. Then they begin to fade into a vertical smear of lesser darkness that gradually, as it brightens, coalesces into the shape of a man. His long, wispy hair is blown across his face by the wind and looks golden in the firelight. He is barefoot. His jeans are worn through at the knees. His T-shirt is filthy and webbed with holes in the vicinity of his belt buckle. His vaguely military jacket is also filthy and missing every one of its buttons. Even before he has stepped into the full light, that lush and acrid odor of a body unwashed for weeks has begun to affect my sinuses and eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  I shrug. He sits.

  Then I move my sleeping bag and belongings about a yard away from him, so that more wind can pass between us. If he notices, he doesn’t show it. For a long time, he just stares wordlessly into the fire.

  Only when he sweeps his long hair—more gray than gold—out of his face do I realize that he is Thomas Jefferson.

  “Oh, my God!” I say.

  “What?” He looks at me with a sick-dog squint.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” He shakes his head and lifts his hand in a way that indicates weary befuddlement. “I don’t know how I got here. I don’t even know where I am. Do you know where this is?”

  I don’t know how to answer this question.

  “I’ve just been . . .” he says, “. . . well . . . just walking. And . . . I don’t know. This place gives me the creeps. You know? It’s like . . . I mean I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know how I’m going to get out. I walk and walk and walk, and nothing ever changes. You know? I don’t ever get anywhere. I’m just here.” He shakes his head again, but this time expressing only weariness. “This is no way to live.” He looks me straight in the eye. “No. Way. To. Live.”

  Thomas Jefferson hears the front door slam and light, hurried footsteps, then feminine exhalations in the corridor outside his study and the whispered words, “C’est pas possible!” Leaving his desk, he finds Sally Hemings, gasping with her back to the wall, bonnetless, her hair undone on one side, her eyes wide, looking right at him but showing no trace of recognition. Her hands are flat against the wall, as if in the next instant she is going to push off and flee back down the hall. “Sally?” says Thomas Jefferson, unsure if she has even heard him. “Sally, what’s happened?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sally Hemings says between gasps. “I’ve just been running.” She takes a step away from the wall and lifts one hand to tuck the hair splayed across her shoulder behind her ear.

  “Did something happen?” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “A madman.” She puts her hand to her throat.

  “Were you attacked?”

  “I was at the marché. I only wanted onions and flour. Then a man. He started shouting. He pulled off my bonnet and threw it into the gutter.” Sally Hemings cries, “Oh!” as if the man has attacked her again. The hand at her throat twitches, flutters. Just below her jaw, the skin is red, chafed, blood-specked.

  “Come here,” says Thomas Jefferson, backing away from his study door. “You must sit down.”

  “I’m sorry.” She looks at him with pleading eyes.

  “I insist. Sit down. Let me give you something to drink.”

  He walks into his study and pulls a chair away from the front of his desk. It is the very chair in which the Marquis de Lafayette was sitting a week or so earlier. As Thomas Jefferson goes behind his desk to open a cabinet low to the floor, Sally Hemings enters his study and sits on the front edge of the delicate, silk-upholstered chair. She hears a clinking of glass on glass. Thomas Jefferson places an etched flask of whiskey-colored liquid on his desk and a tiny tumbler, not much bigger than a thimble.

  “Cognac,” he says. “Drink it all in a gulp. It will settle your nerves.”

  Sally Hemings picks up the little glass and does as she is instructed. She has never tasted cognac before. It is like liquid fire against her palate and tongue and like bitter acid in her throat. But
as it goes down, she can feel the muscles in her chest relax. She breathes more easily.

  “Do you know why the man took your bonnet?” says Thomas Jefferson as he walks back around his desk.

  “He was shouting. I could hardly understand anything he said. I think he was drunk. He kept calling me ‘une traîtresse.’ And I think he said he was going to kill me. ‘À mort!’ he kept shouting. And ‘Tiers état!’”

  “Ah!” says Thomas Jefferson, now sitting at his desk. He has taken another tumbler from the cabinet and fills it with cognac.

  “Other people were saying that. The man was shouting, and a whole crowd gathered. He pushed me to the ground and he spat on me. I thought—”

  Sally Hemings’s mouth is open, but she makes no sound. Her eyes have grown wide again. She sits erect on the edge of the chair, then gives her head a violent shake. “I’m sorry,” she says at last. “Forgive me.”

  “No, no, no,” Thomas Jefferson says kindly. “Please.” He takes the flask in his right hand and holds out his left. “Here. Give me your glass.”

  Sally Hemings does as she is told. And when Thomas Jefferson returns the glass, she swallows its contents in a gulp. He pours himself a second glass. “You must have been so frightened,” he says.

  Her eyes grow wide for an instant. “I thought—” Again she cannot speak.

  “You don’t have to say it.”

  “I thought— What they were saying. I was sure—” Her eyes brim with tears—although they do not fall. Her lips remain motionless in the shape of a word she never speaks.

  Thomas Jefferson leans forward, as if he is going to get up, but then he sits upright again, holds out his hand, and she gives him the tiny tumbler.

  The cognac has made her feel better. Less afraid. More herself. When he returns the tumbler to her, she sips it more slowly this time and decides that she likes the taste.

  “How did you get away?” Thomas Jefferson asks.

  “La dame helped me. La dame with the onion cart and the jerky. She called the man fou and cochon. And when she picked me up off the ground, the crowd called her traîtresse, too. And the man. ‘À mort! À mort!’ he kept saying. I thought he would—” Sally Hemings looks down at her glass.” But la dame said she wasn’t afraid of stupid children. ‘Crétin!’ she said. Everyone was shouting at her. They all seemed to have gone mad. But then she picked me up and helped me walk out of the market. And no one did anything or followed us. They just let us go. None of it made any sense. They just let us go, and they were still shouting when la dame bade me good-bye on the next street. I didn’t understand any of it. She didn’t either.”