Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  She leans forward and lowers the wick, in case the light is what disturbed Aggy.

  Thomas Jefferson arrived unexpectedly twenty minutes ago, with a crooked-necked bottle of wine, asking if she would like a bit of company, and now the bottle is half empty and so is her glass. She finishes it and puts it down on the table with a firm smack.

  “Anyhow,” she says, “that’s wonderful that the Republican side is finally publishing lies about Colonel Hamilton.”

  “They’re not lies.”

  “Articles, I mean.”

  Thomas Jefferson refills her glass, then his own.

  “It’s good that you are fighting back,” she says. “That’s what I mean.”

  “What’s especially good is exactly that they are not lies. There is no question whatsoever that Colonel Hamilton was behaving improperly with his Mrs. Reynolds. He’s admitted it. And it is certain that he has used secrets that have come to him as treasury secretary to make his friends and himself rich, and that he has thereby not merely cheated the American public but stolen from it as well.”

  “Can’t you throw him in jail for that?”

  Thomas Jefferson laughs. “That will never happen.”

  “But it should! He’s broken the law.” Sally Hemings also laughs. “He’s broken all kinds of laws—human and divine.”

  “Hamilton has far too much influence to ever end up in prison.” Thomas Jefferson smiles wryly and looks directly into her eyes. “And, of course, one of his transgressions is perhaps just a bit too common for people to get up in arms about.”

  Sally Hemings sips from her glass, and Thomas Jefferson sinks down in his chair. He slides one foot a few inches across the floor.

  “In any event,” he says, “I think this may put an end to his chances of ever becoming president.”

  “Is this man going to write some more articles about Colonel Hamilton?”

  “Callender?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know. I’ve had very little communication with him.”

  “You should get him to,” she says. “Maybe he could sink Hamilton with one more article. Or President Adams. You should get him and other journalists to expose all the lies and corruption of the Federalists. If the journalists do the dirty work, the public will finally understand the evil that has been done in their name, and you will only look better for having stayed above the mud fight.”

  “We shall see,” says Thomas Jefferson. He is smiling broadly as under the table he presses the inside of his right knee against the outside of Sally Hemings’s left. Now she is smiling, too. They fall silent and only look at each other. In the lamplight her eyes seem twin disks of steel.

  . . . Of course, I could not entirely avoid discussing such matters with him. But when I did, my arguments—so potent in my mind—would come out as a series of peevish complaints or feeble suppositions. Only as I lay sleepless in a dead, dark hour of the night would my arguments come back to me in all their clarity and force—but too late, and so they would only fill me with self-loathing and a sense of helplessness.

  I hated myself when I spoke, and I hated myself when I was silent—so I labored to lose myself in the pleasures of Mr. Jefferson’s company. Throughout my twenties and thirties, he was almost childishly attentive to me whenever he was home, or at least whenever we could evade the alert and judging eyes of his daughters and much of Albemarle society. And his attentions were not only physical—though he could be both energetic and tender in that regard. We talked more than anything else, and as time went by, he increasingly sought out my advice on matters of government. I was more practical than he and was better able to reduce some of the complex dilemmas he faced to their most essential elements. He often joked that I was the natural-born politician while he was a natural-born parson—or he would be, were it not for his congenitally equivocal faith. . . .

  Thomas Jefferson says, “We must be patient, Sally.”

  He says, “Our enemies are determined, united and strong, and the immoral practice is so well established in the southern states that it would not end in a generation, even were it outlawed today.”

  He is standing on the porch, where the rain, atomized by fierce wind, coats his cheeks in trembling droplets. He is shouting, “All right, you are free! I will give you your papers as soon as we get back to the house. Then go off into this world ruled by vicious and bigoted whites and see how precious your freedom is!” But I am white! Look at me! Who would not think that I am white! “You are not so white as you would like to believe.” I hate you! You are a monster! “I am sorry. I am sorry. Forgive me. I am sorry.”

  He refills her glass. “You are right. I can’t disagree. You are absolutely right.”

  For a while Sally Hemings thinks her secret life is not only her best life but her real life. Then things change.

  At first she thinks it is her fault. Thomas Jefferson is the vice president and so must continue to be away at least half the year, especially as President Adams, despite having been a dear friend, now seems to want to ascribe many of the powers of a monarch to himself—in particular the power to jail his political enemies—an ambition Thomas Jefferson is combatting with every tool he can muster. She is lonely when he is away, and she worries from time to time that he might have another woman in Philadelphia or New York. But on the other hand, the fact that he is such an important man has always loomed so large in her sense of him that she cannot object when he is doing the very work that has made him important. And there are still days when it thrills her to remember that this man known all over the world has held her in his arms and that he is the father of her little Harriet and of the new baby inside her.

  Often she thinks that Thomas Jefferson loves her, but this thought is not reliably comforting, because while he sometimes confesses his love when they are alone, his pretense in the company of others that she is a mere servant can be so convincing that she will feel as if he has spit at her. He is never cruel, only indifferent. “That will be all,” he will tell her. Or, “My riding boots need polishing.” Or, “The hamper in my chamber is full.” She believes—or sometimes only wants to believe—that this pretense is merely another part of their secret life, that his false indifference is his way of ensuring that he might love her freely when they are alone. She consoles herself by remembering how he calls her “sweet girl” and “Senator Sally,” and the tenderness of his fingertips on her cheeks or breasts, and all those times when he cannot bear to leave her bed, or simply those times when he is reading on the porch of the lodge or writing at his desk and his casual glance in her direction is lit with all the world’s kindness.

  The change comes, she thinks, because of her pregnancy. She is not vomiting, but she is nauseated almost all the time and is always tired, even when she first rises from bed. Also, Thomas Jefferson does not want to be with her once she starts to get a belly. He says that it is bad for the baby and that he and Mrs. Jefferson lost their only son because he couldn’t exercise proper restraint, and he will never forgive himself for that. Sally Hemings takes his desire to protect their baby as a particularly important indication of his love, but still, she is lonely now in a way that she hasn’t been for years.

  Harriet is two, and the sweetest of babies—laughing constantly, giving her mother tender, glossy-lipped kisses on the cheek, taking delight in every little thing: sparrows hopping in the dust, sneezing horses, flowers. All summer long, every time she sees a flower, she runs up to it and gives it a noisy sniff, after which she always says, “Pur-ty!”

  But once the cold weather arrives, the little girl seems to become perversely willful and heedless of peril. Sally Hemings need only forbid her to do something and she will run straight off to do it, no matter how dangerous. One time she picks up a knife and runs her finger on the blade until the blood starts to flow. Another time she tries to climb into the pigsty, even though just the day before she saw the pud
dle of blood and the bits of bone and hoof left after the sow ate her own baby. And then there are her fits. Sometimes she starts to scream and thrash and kick for no reason, and all of Sally Hemings’s hugs, kisses and consoling coos only make her scream louder and thrash more ferociously, with such a wildness in her eyes that she doesn’t seem to know her own mother.

  Sally Hemings can’t help but think of Jimmy, and she worries that her beautiful child might have a lifetime of pain and rage ahead of her. But her mother says, “When a baby’s two, that’s when the Devil tries to wrestle her soul from God. You got to seal up your heart to her and be so hard on her it makes you sick. ’Cause you let her get away with one little thing, the Devil going to get her, and then he’ll have her for the rest of her life.”

  In between Harriet’s struggles with the Devil, she is exactly the sweet, happy girl she has always been. She sings constantly, just like her father. And she loves to play a game she calls “Booteefoo Mammy,” during which she runs a comb through Sally Hemings’s hair over and over and then washes her nose and cheeks and forehead with a kitchen rag. So most of the time it is easy for Sally Hemings to love her little girl and yet be both strict and fair when she starts at some devilry.

  But the weather only gets colder, and after three months, instead of her pregnancy nausea going away, it gets worse. Also, at the start of December, Thomas Jefferson must go to Philadelphia again to resume his duties as vice president, and most likely he will be there until after her baby is born. Sally Hemings is terrified that something will go wrong while he is away. She worries that she has been too lucky with Harriet and that God will not allow her so much good fortune.

  And then one rainy day, the wood is wet and Aggy is useless at keeping the fire going. Sally Hemings has to rekindle it herself while also making Harriet her porridge and feeding it to her, because the little girl says she doesn’t like Aggy; she only likes Mammy. But then she says that she also doesn’t like the porridge, and when her mother pointedly pays her no mind, she sweeps the bowl off the table, and it shatters on the floor into a dozen pieces and splatters gray muck up the wall. There is a moment of roaring silence, and then Sally Hemings slaps her daughter across the face and starts to scream as if she is the one whose soul the Devil has snatched. Only the sight of a droplet of blood running down from the little girl’s nostril brings Sally Hemings back to her right mind. She crushes Harriet against her chest and weeps onto the top of her sweet-smelling little head. All the while Aggy is crying in the corner.

  The very next day, a bright red pimple comes up on the side of Harriet’s nose that the blood ran from. And the day after, the pimple is bigger and enflamed. Sally Hemings treats it with a mix of mud and birdlime. But the following morning it has grown shiny and purple and so swollen it encompasses Harriet’s nostril and the end of her nose. The little girl is fretful and asks her mother to make her nose stop hurting, but when Sally Hemings tries to salve it with another layer of mud and birdlime, Harriet howls with pain.

  Later that day her eyes have gone glassy, and although she doesn’t feel hot, Sally Hemings still worries that she has a fever. Then, at bedtime, her cheek is sticky with sweat and her neck is so hot it could burn Sally Hemings’s fingers.

  She puts the little girl into her own bed and sends Aggy to fetch Betty Hemings, who has been given her time and lives in a small, white clapboard house of her own, in the neighborhood reserved for the white mechanics and their families. Betty arrives with a bottle of feverfew wine that, miraculously, Harriet drinks as if it were honey milk. But it doesn’t do any good. Aggy curls up on Harriet’s empty bed and is the only one who gets any sleep that night. Sally Hemings and her mother sleep on the floor, taking turns attending to Harriet, whenever she whimpers or wails.

  The following morning, when Thomas Jefferson comes to say good-bye, Sally Hemings begs him not to go and tells him that she is terrified something awful is going to happen. “Harriet’s a good, strong girl,” he says. “A little fever is nothing to fret over, as long as she doesn’t have a cough.” He looks her long in the eyes, as if to convince her that she has no need to worry, but what she sees is his own worry, doing battle with his obligation to his office. He bends and kisses Harriet on her burning forehead, and then he kisses Sally Hemings on her cheek. “It will be fine,” he says, squeezing her hand. “I will tell Martha that if the fever should get worse, Dr. Cranley should be called.”

  It is raining when Thomas Jefferson leaves. Sally Hemings does not go up to the house to wave good-bye from the veranda, even though her own mother is there, and Critta, Ursula, Jupiter and Tom Shackelford, along with Martha, Mr. Randolph and little Anne, but she does see the landau pass by her doorstep, with Jimmy driving, shoulders hunched under an oilcloth hat and cape and Thomas Jefferson snug and dry under the leather roof. From the shape of his silhouette, she thinks he is looking at her cabin as he passes, but she is sitting in the dark, Harriet cradled against her breast, so there is no way he can see her.

  Martha and her family go back to Edgehill that afternoon, and thus, late that night, when Harriet’s temperature rises so high that Sally Hemings cannot quell her shivering, even by covering her with several blankets and lying on top of her, Jupiter has to ride through the night and rouse Martha from sleep so that she can write him a note to bring to Dr. Cranley.

  By the time the doctor arrives late the following morning, Harriet’s shivering has turned into violent shudders that culminate with her back arching and the whole of her little body going rigid before she gasps and collapses into unconscious exhaustion. And then, after less than a minute, the whole process starts over, and so it has gone since long before sunrise. In an effort to keep her temperature down, Sally Hemings has stripped the little girl naked, despite the cold weather, and bathes her body constantly with rags dipped in water straight from the rain barrel. But the fever stays high and possibly gets higher.

  It is clear that Dr. Cranley has no idea why he has been summoned all this way to treat a nigger girl—even though her skin is as white as his own and her sweaty curls are red. As soon as he walks in the door, he shakes his head pathetically and makes a tsk that is like a blade of ice plunged into Sally Hemings’s heart. “Put some water on to boil,” he tells her. Without bothering to examine his patient, he sets his satchel on the table, removes a mortar and pestle, into which he dispenses some dried herbs and a white tablet and begins to grind them into a powder.

  When the water has boiled, he pours a little into the mortar, stirring it into the powder. Once he has turned the ingredients into a gray syrup, he pours it into a tin cup that just happens to be sitting on the table. “Let this cool,” he says while wiping out the interior of his mortar. “Give her a mouthful every four hours until her fever passes.”

  “But how can I do that,” says Sally Hemings, “when she is either unconscious or grinding her teeth in her fever?”

  Something like a smile comes into the doctor’s eyes before he looks away. “Well, if you can’t get her to take her medicine,” he says wearily, “I am afraid there is no hope.”

  He packs up the rest of his belongings and puts on his oilcloth overcoat. Just as he passes through the doorway, he looks back and says, “God be with you.”

  Then he is gone.

  Sally Hemings closes the door and leans her head against it, her hands clutching her own shivering shoulders. For a long moment, she feels as if she cannot move, as if she might never move again. But when at last she turns away from the door, she finds her daughter watching her patiently, neither convulsing nor unconscious.

  “Hey, Little Apple,” Sally Hemings says. “You feeling better?”

  Harriet only looks up at her mother with her large, dark eyes that seem so deeply lonely and filled with longing.

  Sally Hemings puts her hand across the little girl’s forehead and finds her temperature unchanged. She is no longer shivering, but her pulse is visibly beating with a birdlik
e rapidity at the base of her neck.

  Sally Hemings pulls the covers up over the child’s bare body, and goes to the table, where she pours a little of the gray syrup into a spoon. Returning to the bed, she eases her daughter into a semi-seated position. “Here,” she says, holding up the spoon, “this will make you better.”

  Harriet turns her face away, grimacing as if in intense pain.

  Sally Hemings sniffs the syrup, which smells like day-old urine.

  Lowering Harriet back onto her mattress, she dumps the medicine into a bowl, adds a bit more from the tin cup, then stirs in a spoonful of molasses. “Here,” she says, holding another spoonful to her daughter’s lips, “all sweet and delicious!” But the mixture is met only by an averted face.

  When Sally Hemings tries to force the mixture into Harriet’s mouth, the little girl pushes the spoon out with her tongue and then spits out the trickle of medicine that managed to pass her lips.

  “Come on, Little Apple, you have to eat this! It’s good for you.”

  Again and again Sally Hemings tries to get her daughter to take the medicine, but either the child grimaces and turns away or she spits out whatever her mother manages to force between her lips.

  Eventually Harriet falls into an exhausted sleep, and Sally Hemings uses her fingertip to smear a bit of the syrup inside her mouth, hoping that some of it will trickle down her throat. The little girl sleeps quietly for a couple of hours, and Sally Hemings begins to wonder if the medicine has actually begun to do some good.

  She drifts into a light sleep herself, lying on the floor beside the bed, but after only seconds, or so it seems, she is awakened by a howl and finds Harriet gripped by a new kind of convulsion—one caused by or causing agonizing pain.