Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  Thomas looks at her a long moment, then speaks in a measured voice. “I think everything you are saying is extremely courageous and rational.”

  Sally Hemings does not know how to respond.

  “Do you believe in the Devil?” Thomas Jefferson asks.

  “I don’t know. I mean, of course, that could explain why bad things happen. God and the Devil are fighting over everything. But I don’t know, I find it harder to believe that someone would want only terrible things. That just seems too pointless to me. If I think about the Devil, if I really try to imagine him existing, he ends up seeming a lot like God—or a human being. Someone with good and bad sides. Good and bad moods. Maybe wanting to do right but also wanting other things. So . . . The main thing is that I don’t see the point in there being a Devil . . . or in there being two mixed-up magical people controlling the universe. So it makes more sense that there be only one. God.”

  “Why not only the Devil?”

  “I do think that sometimes, but it scares me, so I hope that I’m wrong. But on the other hand, if the Devil is running the world, he’s still made all the beautiful things, so maybe he’s just like God, and not that scary after all.”

  “Do you ever think that there may be no God?”

  “Sometimes. But how could this world just be here? Someone had to create it.”

  “You could ask the same question about God. How could God just be here? And if it is possible for God to just be here—this being who is infinitely more complex than the earth, since he created it, just as the watchmaker is infinitely more complex than the watch—if it is possible for God to just be here, why not the earth?”

  An openmouthed half smile comes onto Sally Hemings’s face. She shakes her head. “That’s an interesting idea. I never thought about that before.” Her smile broadens, and she is silent a moment. “I guess the real reason I believe in God is that it makes me feel happier to believe that someone is there, behind everything. And sometimes I feel his presence. Every now and then, when I am in a particularly beautiful place or I am feeling especially sad or afraid, I feel that God is there somehow.”

  “Does he ever talk to you?”

  “No. Not really. I just feel that he is there. But I don’t know if he really is. Maybe I only feel him because I want to.”

  Now Thomas Jefferson is the one who seems not to know what to say. He shifts uneasily in his seat.

  “What do you think about God?” Sally Hemings asks.

  “I’m exactly the same as you. Except sometimes I think there is no God, but that God’s existence doesn’t matter, because we have the idea of God. Or rather, we still have the idea that God is good and that we should also be good. And the idea that we should worship the beauty of the world. And as long as we have such ideas, it almost doesn’t matter whether God actually exists.”

  Sally Hemings makes a small grunt and then thinks for a moment. “The only thing is that I don’t see God as good—or good enough. That’s my problem.”

  Thomas Jefferson smiles weakly, but then disconcertion crosses his face. He looks down. He pushes the primer an inch or two away with the tips of his fingers. “I’m sorry, Sally, but I think we had better stop this.”

  Her forehead darkens, and her mouth falls open. He sees that he has hurt her.

  “You must think I’m an idiot,” she says.

  “No! Not in the least. You have nothing to apologize for—on the contrary.”

  She closes the primer. “I’m sorry I have been such a bad learner. It’s just that there are so many letters and sounds.”

  “That’s not it,” he says, still looking away. “I have enjoyed our time tonight.”

  He casts her a furtive glance, and all at once she becomes aware that their calves are not more than an inch apart. She thinks that she should move her leg away from his, but she doesn’t. Instead, in a soft voice, she asks, “Then why?”

  “I just think it would be better if Jimmy taught you after all. I will speak to him myself. It’s his duty as your older brother.”

  “He won’t do it. Jimmy’s not like that. He just won’t.”

  Thomas Jefferson throws himself back in his chair. Half in despair, half in entreaty, he says, “Oh, Sally.”

  “What?”

  “I shouldn’t say this.”

  She remains silent.

  “You are so beautiful,” he says. “You are utterly beautiful, you have an excellent mind, you are so kind and full of life—but this is impossible. I had thought that I would be able to keep my feelings within the bounds of decency, but I was—” He cuts himself off, looks at her with sad and yearning eyes. “Oh, you dear girl!”

  After a moment he sits up and tugs once again at the bottom of his waistcoat.

  “So I think you had better leave, Sally. For your own good. I’m terribly, terribly sorry. I will talk to Jimmy. Or maybe Patsy. Perhaps she could be your teacher. But if neither is willing, I will hire you a tutor. I am determined that you shall read.”

  Sally Hemings feels as if something is spinning inside her head. She stands and speaks breathlessly, almost whispering. “Thank you, Mr. Jefferson.”

  Thomas Jefferson squeezes his lips together. His face is red, but the skin about his lips is yellow. His eyes look enormous. As Sally Hemings puts her hand on the latch of the door, he calls out her name. Then he says, “Please understand that this has nothing to do with you. You are a darling, darling girl and entirely innocent of blame. I am the one who is enslaved by feelings he ought never to have conceived.”

  Sally Hemings lifts the latch and leaves.

  . . . I knew I could say no—and yet I didn’t. My reasons were shameful and obvious. I was vain. I was weak. I had been the baby of my family and, of course, nothing more than a poor colored serving girl—a slave. No one had ever listened to what I had to say. As a child, whenever I had ventured to speak some idea I might have had while wandering in the woods, my mother would laugh and tell me my head was “stuffed with foolishness.” My brothers and sisters just told me I was stupid—and I really was stupid around children my own age. My jokes always seemed obvious; my insults seemed to have been translated from another language. I would rehearse them inside my mind, but the words never came out in the right order.

  But there was something about the quality of Mr. Jefferson’s attention that made me eloquent. Even when I was swooning in disbelief that such an important man was listening to me, I was still able to speak what I actually thought. And, of course, the fact that he didn’t laugh, that he took seriously what I had to say, that he constantly drew out more of my thoughts, proffered his own and wanted to know what I made of them—all of this filled me with such exhilaration that I would have to work to calm myself, sometimes for hours afterward. And this was true, even in those instants when I suspected that he was condescending to me. (At sixteen I hardly dared expect more than condescension from a man of Mr. Jefferson’s stature.) I was always a little afraid in conversation with him, but it was the best sort of fear, the kind that inspired me to make the most of my abilities. The truth is that I don’t think I had ever felt so completely myself—the self I most wished to be—as when he and I were talking.

  I was much less easy regarding that other aspect of Mr. Jefferson’s attention, but I cannot say that it, too, did not also work a sort of glamour upon me. I had always seen myself as gawky and ratlike and thought I could never compare with the beauty of my two older sisters—Thenia especially, who was tall, graceful and possessed of all the female attributes most attractive to the male eye and who had always seemed entirely delighted by the attentions of boys and young men. Not only had I never received such attention, but in Paris, where the fact that I was a slave made me an objet de scandale, I had been the target of disparaging remarks about my supposedly African features, and once an extremely handsome young man had subjected me to a torrent of barbarous and filthy a
djectives, most of them appended to the nouns “négresse” and “noir.” And so it was hard for me not to feel flattered by Mr. Jefferson’s adoration, even as I was also frightened and disgusted.

  Thus I didn’t say no. I would smile and nod at Mr. Jefferson’s greetings; I would blushingly accept his offers of chocolate or apricot preserves; I would talk to him for as long as he would seem interested in talking to me and feel grateful for every instant; and when he told me that he wanted to teach me to read, I came at the appointed time, even though I knew in advance that I would be sitting so close to him that I would have to concentrate to avoid brushing his arm with my own or letting my knee fall against his. . . .

  Sally Hemings is sleeping. She has been turning over and over in her bed. Her shift is twisted around her waist, and her ankles are twisted in her sheets. A minute ago—maybe two—she tugged one of the top corners of her sheet up to her throat, but now her hand lies limply on her breast and the corner of the sheet curls like a stilled wave beneath her fingertips. Odd noises are coming out of her throat, toneless bird squeaks. She is dreaming of Thomas Jefferson. She is dreaming that he has taken hold of her hand and is licking her palm, again and again. She can feel the slick wetness of his tongue and its warmth. His tongue is exceedingly large, so large she cannot imagine how he will ever be able to get it back into his mouth. When his tongue has finished licking her palm and every one of her fingers, it moves to her wrist and then forearm. When it touches that soft, blue-veined hollow on the inside of her elbow, she awakes with a start. She is gasping in the night. Her eyes are wide open, but she sees nothing at all.

  The servants’ stairway lets out onto the hallway just outside the upstairs parlor, and every night on her way to her bedchamber on the third floor, Sally Hemings has to walk past the parlor door. One night Thomas Jefferson looks up from his reading and sees her standing in the doorway, candle in hand. As soon as their eyes meet, she makes a tiny noise and is gone.

  On another night he looks up and she is standing in the doorway again. He looks at her for what seems a very long time, but she doesn’t move.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jefferson.”

  “Is something wrong, Sally?”

  She doesn’t answer. She is as still as a painting of herself. He wonders if she is looking at him. He tries to determine where her eyes are focused. One instant he thinks she is looking at him, the next instant no. Her eyes glitter in the firelight.

  “Not really,” she says. “I just wanted to say good night.”

  “Good night, Sally.”

  . . . All the while I told myself that Mr. Jefferson’s struggle with his darker nature was entirely sincere and that he was sure to win, because he so thoroughly regretted what he had attempted that night, now months in the past, and he entirely understood how frightened I had been. But even as I worked so hard to deceive myself, I understood that the longer I failed to say no, the more my silence would come to seem like assent and that if I remained silent too long, my apparent assent would ultimately make this dreaded eventuality inevitable.

  Every night when I lay in bed, I would remember the weight of Mr. Jefferson’s huge body lying on top of me and his smell—repulsive in memory—filling my nostrils. I would go rigid all over again, and cold with dread. Often I would surge upright amid my covers or even leap out of bed and pace the floor, devising elaborate speeches to Mr. Jefferson, in which I insisted upon my virtue and condemned his dishonorable inclinations.

  And yet when I would once more be lying with my covers to my chin, my mind would race with assertions that directly contradicted my imaginary speeches. I would remind myself that this eventuality I so feared was the signal act of womanhood, that far from loathing it, many women smile with a private satisfaction as they talk about it or laugh loudly. My own mother made no secret of her enjoyment of what she always called “a little poke.” She had had three husbands in addition to my father, and at the time I was leaving for France, she seemed to be contemplating a fourth. I could hardly imagine ever feeling as my mother and so many other women so obviously did, and I could only assume that, in my profound ignorance, I was unaware of something essential in the carnal act—the very thing that evoked those loud laughs and private smiles. There were times, in fact, when I would despair at what I took to be my utter unfitness for womanhood.

  I simply could not stop such bewildering suppositions from streaming through my brain. I had absolutely no intentions of ever acting upon them, but still they filled my head, leaving me deeply confused and afraid.

  It is also true, however—and this strikes me now as loathsome and pathetic—that I did sometimes think that if I were only able to endure whatever it was that Mr. Jefferson wanted of me, I might one day, like my sister, become his wife. . . .

  Thomas Jefferson looks up from his book when he hears Sally Hemings’s footsteps on the stairs. As her candle comes into view just outside the door, he calls, “Good evening, Sally.”

  She stops and smiles, something in the way the powdery gold of the candlelight falls upon her cheek and gleams in her eyes making her look so like Martha that he feels a sudden falling in his chest that is both sorrow and yearning.

  “Good evening, Mr. Jefferson.”

  “Everything all cleaned up downstairs?”

  “Yes, at last.” She has taken a step into the room and is standing just inside the door frame. She seems faintly distracted, maybe restless. Her eyes dart about the room.

  “I hope you are not too tired.”

  She crumples her lips and gives the ceiling a comically askew glance. “Oh, no. Not too tired. But it will be good to sleep.”

  “Good,” he says. “Thank you.”

  She smiles and looks embarrassed . . . or maybe not embarrassed. He has the feeling that if he asked her to come into the room and sit down, she would.

  “Sally?” he says.

  “Yes.” She is waiting for him to speak, her smile maybe slightly hesitant, her eyebrow lifted, alert. Again he feels that falling of sorrow and yearning.

  “Oh, well,” he says. “Never mind.”

  She looks at him quizzically a second but doesn’t say anything.

  “Good night, Sally.”

  “Good night, Mr. Jefferson.”

  As she turns and leaves, he feels that he has disappointed her.

  Then he is on his feet and hurrying toward the door, where he sees her receding along the dark corridor, her sage green gown deepening toward hemlock, then black, her head silhouetted against the wavering glow of her candle. In an instant she will reach the stairs, turn and be gone.

  He knows that he should go back to his chair by the fire and continue to read (a treatise on flight in birds), but something has just happened between him and this beautiful girl, something totally unexpected. He tells himself he is mistaken. Nothing has happened. It couldn’t have. But it did happen. He knows it did. And he would be a fool to deny it.

  He is afraid as he steps into the hallway. Her name is on his lips, but he doesn’t speak it, only hurries after her, until with a rush of crinoline she reels around, her eyes wide, her open mouth a warped O.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, drawing next to her. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh!” She touches her lips with the clutched fingertips of one hand.

  “Please excuse me.” He feels stupid. He is blushing and is thankful that the corridor is so dark. “I was just wondering . . .” He has no idea what to say. “I’m sorry I startled you.”

  “I didn’t hear you coming.” She lowers her hand, open now, to the base of her throat.

  “It’s my fault. I should have said something.”

  Sally Hemings’s eyes are still wide, though her lips have contracted to a small pucker of uncertainty. She is breathing heavily. He can see her chest rise and fall.

  “It’s just . . .” He still doesn’t know what to say. “There’s something I for
got to ask you. I’m wondering if you might come back to the parlor for a moment. It won’t take a second.”

  She swallows. “All right.”

  He turns and walks back toward the parlor door, which is flickering orange in the firelight. He has no idea what he is going to do, but he is almost certain he will make a fool of himself.

  “Do you mind if I close the door?” he asks once she has followed him into the room. He sees that the question disconcerts her, but he closes the door anyway. “It’s a personal matter. I think it best if we are not overheard.”

  She backs against the wall, just beside the door. She looks worried, but so terribly beautiful and alive, like a doe in the instant before it bounds into the forest.

  He gestures at the couch just beside her. “Please sit down.”

  Her head makes a barely detectable shake, and her back remains pressed against the wall. He should tell her to go, but he can’t. He just wants to see what will happen. His mouth is dry. He runs his fingers through the hair on the top of his head.

  “I don’t know how else to do this,” he says, “than to be completely honest.” He licks his lips. “I know that I behaved like an utter fool . . .” He is silent an instant. “. . . before. Worse than a fool.”

  There is a faint twitch at the corner of her mouth, but he cannot tell what it means.

  “As I hope you understand,” he says, “I have tried very hard to behave toward you as would be fitting, given the rules of propriety and our stations in life. But as you have probably concluded—no doubt you know this very well right now—I have mostly failed rather miserably.”