Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  He doesn’t begin to recognize the pattern in what is happening until a couple of days later, when he and Sally Hemings are returning to Monticello from the lodge. They are riding side by side along a wooded path, and he reaches over to give her hand a squeeze. “I so wish that we could marry,” he says.

  She gives him an arch glance and pulls her hand away.

  “I do,” he says. “I’m so sick of all this surreptitious—”

  “Stop!” she says.

  He just stares at her, not understanding what she could possibly be objecting to.

  “Do you think that you have the right to mock me?” she shouts. “Do you think I have no feelings? I don’t know what’s come over you lately. You never mean a single thing you say anymore. You’re just an imitation of yourself!”

  “But I do mean what I say. I do wish we could—”

  “I’m sick of you!” she shouts, then gallops ahead.

  Thomas Jefferson brings his horse to a stop and, in a state of profound bewilderment, watches Sally Hemings grow smaller and smaller, then disappear around a bend in the path.

  By the time he has ridden back into the stable, he has figured out that people no longer seem to believe in his sincerity, no matter how clearly and passionately he expresses himself.

  As he dismounts, Jupiter, who has been loading a wheelbarrow with dung-matted hay from a vacant horse stall, leans his pitchfork against a post and comes to take the reins. “Thank you, Jupiter,” Thomas Jefferson says distractedly, and straightens his hat, which was knocked askew during his descent along the horse’s flank. He takes a step toward the door—then stops and turns around. “Jupiter?”

  “Yes, Mr. Tom?”

  “You’re not having any trouble understanding me now, are you?”

  Jupiter seems momentarily taken aback by the question, but then he smiles and shakes his head. “No, Mr. Tom, no trouble at all.”

  “And if I tell you that I have always valued your service, you understand that I am being entirely sincere?”

  Jupiter’s mouth hangs open a long moment. And when he says, “Oh, yes, sir. Of course, sir,” he sounds as if he himself does not mean what he is saying.

  “And I seem to you to be the same person I have ever been?”

  Once again Jupiter is silent. Sweat begins to glisten on his dark brow and nose. “If you mean, do I think you look like yourself, then yes I do.” He makes a laughlike noise in his throat.

  Thomas Jefferson chooses to be comforted by this response. He bids Jupiter good day and walks slowly back to the great house.

  As he crosses the lawn to his own chambers, he sees Lucy, Bet and Nance standing by the laundry and hears one of them hiss, “Here he is!” They begin to shift restlessly from foot to foot and touch their head scarves and the hems of their aprons, as if in preparation for going somewhere, but none of them budges.

  “Excuse me,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  The three women only stare at him silently with faintly aghast expressions on their faces.

  “How are you today?”

  Again there is no response, and Thomas Jefferson is so puzzled by their behavior that it is a while before he himself can say anything.

  At last he asks, “Is something wrong?”

  The three women exchange glances and lick their lips, but none of them actually speak.

  “I assure you,” he says, “that I am not the least bit angry. I only want to find out what might be disturbing you.”

  “Who are you?” Bet asks sharply. At fourteen she is by far the youngest of the three. The other two shush her instantly, and Nance shoves her away.

  Thomas Jefferson is so disconcerted by this entire exchange that he simply turns and walks to his chambers, a sinking hollowness in his chest.

  That night, when he rings the bell to have a cut of ham and some bread and wine delivered to his chambers, no one responds, although not long afterward he does hear whispering and a shoe scuff outside his door. He attempts to cross the room in perfect silence, but when a floorboard creaks beneath his foot, he dashes to the door and whips it open, only managing to catch sight of a hunched shadow in the dark to his right disappearing atop a thunder of footfalls down the kitchen stairs. Straight ahead he hears the thump-thump-thump of someone running barefoot across the entrance hall and then the slam of the front door.

  When additional tugs on the bell cord evoke no response, Thomas Jefferson descends to the kitchen himself, which he finds utterly deserted and dark, except for the ash-dimmed orange of coals smoldering in the hearth and the flicker of his own candle in the night breeze. He pulls a linen-wrapped smoked ham out of the larder and hacks off a slice, which he eats with his fingers while rat talons click back and forth across the bare floor along the wall just opposite.

  At four-thirty in the morning, he saddles a sturdy horse and rides off to visit James Madison at Belle Grove and arrives at the plantation just before sunset, a journey that ought to have taken two days but feels as if it transpired in a matter of hours. He doesn’t bother with the approach road but cuts across a field and mounts the lawn, tying his exhausted horse to a juniper bush at the back of the mansion, just outside the doorway to Madison’s library. He is already in the middle of the room when Madison, investigating the unexpected noise, emerges from his adjoining office. No sooner does he catch sight of Thomas Jefferson than his face goes gray and his mouth hangs open. “No!” he gasps.

  “Jim,” says Thomas Jefferson, holding out both open hands in a calming gesture.

  “This can’t be!” says Madison, staggering a step backward and grabbing hold of the doorjamb.

  “Jim, please!” Thomas Jefferson takes a step forward and turns his palms upward in supplication.

  “No! You have to go!” says Madison. “I can’t talk to you. I must not. You don’t make sense. You are a fantasy of my youth, a cloud of impossibility and hypocritical sanctimony. Please go, Tom. You must go. If I even allow my eyes to stray toward that place you still seem to occupy I feel utterly mad.”

  With that he retreats into his study and slams the door.

  This is when Thomas Jefferson finally understands that the nexus of perception, emotion, action and belief that has always seemed so simply and obviously his self no longer makes sense to other people, and so he has become unbelievable. After a moment of shocked contemplation, during which his pulse whooshes loudly in his ears, he leaves Madison’s library by the door though which he entered. As he steps outside, his lungs are filled with the sweetness of warm hay and dust. A yellow-orange sun is just touching the treetops on the hills to the west, and he can feel a new coolness rising out of the lengthening shadows.

  His horse stands with its head low and eyes closed, clearly asleep. For some reason Thomas Jefferson doesn’t feel the least bit tired. On the contrary, he feels as if he has just risen from a restorative nap after a day of good exercise. He leaves the horse where it is tethered and walks across the lawn, with no particular destination in mind. After a while he finds himself wandering along a dirt road between two wheat fields. A dozen laborers being marched back to their quarters by an overseer squint at him with the uncertainty with which one might contemplate an optical illusion or an incipient hallucination. But as the light goes blue and particulate, the few stragglers he passes along the road hardly even glance in his direction and perhaps don’t even see him.

  The longer he walks, the more Thomas Jefferson begins to suspect that the final stage of his unbelievability might be nonexistence—just as the flat world (once a matter of common sense) has ceased to exist and those giants who once roamed the countryside snacking on maidens and knights are now confined to fairy stories told to lull children to sleep.

  And yet Thomas Jefferson doesn’t see how this can be possible. He is as filled with desire, hope and dread as he has ever been, and the night air is so fresh in his lungs, and breezes buff
et his hair and cool his cheeks, and pinprick glints, one by one, appear in the metallic blue over his head. How is it that a man who seems so fully alive and complexly real to himself might fade from existence as rapidly as a lie exposed by truth?

  It is October 1798.

  In the warm weather, Moak Mobley tends the vegetable garden. In the cold he helps Ursula around the kitchen and splits wood for the fires. His eyes are huge and black, his skin a coppery brown, and when he smiles, he seems so merry and content that it is hard not to smile with him. He is married to Patty, and they have a little girl. Although Sally Hemings knows she shouldn’t, she can’t help paying attention to the ropelike muscles rippling in his arms whenever he lowers a load of fragrant wood onto the brick apron of the kitchen fireplace, and when he smiles, she smiles, too.

  Moak is five years younger than Sally Hemings—which is to say that he is twenty-one—a man doing a man’s work but not quite done yet with being a boy, and that is something Sally Hemings particularly likes about him. She has been aware of him all his life, though she had almost no contact with him prior to last summer, when Mr. Richardson transferred him from fieldwork to the garden. At first he seemed too shy to even look at her, but as the summer wore on, he went from giving her surreptitious glances whenever their paths crossed to smiling and saying, “Morning, Miz Sally!” or “Afternoon!”

  One morning, not long after Thomas Jefferson has gone to spend a fortnight with James Madison in Belle Grove, Sally Hemings is sitting in the kitchen with six-month-old Beverly, who is screaming and purple-faced with rage. She offers him her breast, which he sucks for a few seconds, then spits out. She checks his clout, which is hardly even wet. She tries bouncing him on her knee and walking him around the room. Ursula is muttering to herself as she butchers a chicken on the hacked tabletop. After a while she starts casting pointed glances over her shoulder. Sally Hemings knows that she should go outside, but it is cold and she doesn’t want to be alone in her cabin with the miserable boy.

  Finally Ursula reels around from the table and almost shouts, “Why don’t you feed him?”

  Just exactly at that instant, Moak kicks open the door and comes into the kitchen with that day’s supply of wood.

  “I have been,” Sally Hemings tells Ursula, “but he doesn’t want any.”

  “Well, maybe your titty’s gone dry.”

  Sally Hemings knows by the weight and the ache in her breasts that they are anything but dry, yet there is no point arguing with Ursula. So as Moak stands motionless just inside the door, a sling of wood across his broad back, she wraps Beverly up in a blanket, pulls him close to her breast and walks out into the cold. By the time she gets to her cabin, the little boy is asleep, and when he wakes two hours later, whatever was troubling him is long past.

  The next day she is once again at the table in the kitchen when Moak walks in. “Morning, Miz Sally,” he says, giving her a particularly broad smile.

  “Morning, Moak.”

  He lets the wood clatter-thump to the hearth apron, then comes back to her, still smiling and holding his hand in his pocket. When he reaches the table, he pulls out his hand, which is holding a plum-size gourd with a whittled piece of wood sticking up out of it. “This here’s for Master Beverly,” he says. “Make him happy next time he feel so bad!”

  “What is it?” she says.

  Moak holds the stick toward Beverly. “Show your mammy, Master Beverly!”

  The little boy’s fingers wrap around the stick, and as he pulls it away, a hissing sounds within the gourd. Open-mouthed, open-eyed, pensive, he holds the gourd still for a couple of seconds, then shakes it and smiles when it hisses again.

  “A rattle!” says Sally Hemings. “Where did you get it?”

  “I made it!” Moak smiles happily, and Sally Hemings joins him. “Just had this little old gourd lying around,” he says. “So I put in a pinch of creek sand and stuck in the stick.”

  “Thank you!” She looks away because she can feel her cheeks going red.

  He nods and says, “Anything to oblige.”

  Another morning when Moak comes into the kitchen, Sally Hemings asks him if he would like some tea. “It’ll help keep you warm out there,” she adds.

  He slips the canvas sling of wood off his shoulders and lowers it ponderously to the dusty brick apron. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  As he takes the wood off the sling and stacks it beside the hearth, Sally Hemings pours boiling water into a pot.

  Ursula gives her a dubious glance and walks out of the room.

  Beverly is lying belly down on a blanket on the floor, working hard at turning over. He hasn’t yet figured out that he needs to keep his arm at his side when he rolls, and so every time his wriggling legs get him most of the way onto his side, his outstretched arm flips him right back onto his belly. He is clearly frustrated and has been fussy all morning. Sally Hemings hopes he will stay quiet long enough for Moak to have his tea, but no sooner does she place the cup and a pot of molasses on the table in front of Moak than Beverly starts to wail.

  She bends and picks him up, but he doesn’t stop wailing.

  She bounces him on her hip—“Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!”—and his cries yield to fussy grunts, as he buries his head in the gap between her breast and her upper arm.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with him,” she says. “He’s been like this for the last three days.”

  Over the top of his cup, Moak says, “Look at his mouth.”

  Sally Hemings looks down but can’t actually see Beverly’s mouth.

  “It’s all slobbery,” says Moak.

  She looks down again but doesn’t quite understand what Moak is trying to tell her.

  “He got teeth coming in,” says Moak.

  “He’s too young for that.”

  “No he ain’t.” Moak gets up from the table and walks around to Sally’s side. “His gums red? Take a look at his gums. See if they red.”

  Moak is standing so close that his manly muskiness is a cloud enveloping her nose and lips.

  She rocks Beverly back, so that his head is resting in the crook of her elbow, and she pulls down his lower lip with her thumb.

  “Nope,” she says. “Just pink.”

  “Don’t matter. He teething.” Moak smiles and nods to emphasize his certainty. “And I got just what you need.”

  Ursula is back in the room with an apron full of potatoes. She is glaring at Sally Hemings, but she doesn’t say a word.

  The next morning Moak holds out a piece of goldish brown wood, whittled and sanded into the shape of a smooth, blunt spear blade, with a short handle at one end. “Here you go, Master Bev!” Beverly grabs the handle and sticks the blade right into his mouth.

  “There! See!” says Moak, looking at Sally Hemings with a big, satisfied grin. “Didn’t I tell you? He got teeth coming in, all right. Look at that!”

  Indeed, Beverly is gnawing on the blade with particular intensity. But then again he puts absolutely everything in his mouth—so who can say for sure?

  “It’s made out of sassafras wood,” says Moak. “Babies just love sassafras! If you want, you can always put a little molasses on it. That good for babies, too. But the best is rum!”

  “Rum!”

  “Oh, yes! Mix some rum in with the molasses, babies just love that! Make them so happy! They chew on that for a while, they have sweet dreams all night through!”

  Moak seems so pleased with himself that Sally Hemings can’t help laughing right along with him.

  “Well, thank you,” she says.

  “Happy to do it! I like making things. I make all kinds of things!”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, all kinds of things!” He screws up his mouth and looks toward one corner of the ceiling, as if there’s a list tacked up there. “Baby toys, drums, banjars—”

  “Ba
njars?” says Sally Hemings. “What’s a banjar?”

  “You don’t know what a banjar is!” Moak’s eyes go round, and his jaw hangs open in mock astonishment. “Girl, what you doing for fun? Ain’t you ever danced to a banjar? Banjars is the finest instrument there is for playing a dance tune. Banjar and a fiddle. I’ll bring it sometime and play it for you.”

  “I’d love that.”

  When Thomas Jefferson returns from his stay at Belle Grove, there are bluish bags under his eyes and his skin is flaccid, cod-flesh gray. Apparently he and James Madison were up late every night writing letters and briefs—the beginning of a major campaign to undermine the Sedition Act, which was passed by Congress over the summer.

  Thomas Jefferson is sitting at his desk in his chambers, taking papers out of his satchel. Sally Hemings is kneeling on the floor, transferring laundry from his trunk into a basket.

  “I’m destroyed,” he says. “In spirit as well as body.”

  Tossing the last item of clothing into the basket, Sally Hemings gets to her feet.

  “If we are not successful in our efforts,” he says, “I don’t see how this Republic will stand.”

  Sally Hemings rests the edge of her basket on the corner of his desk, smiles and tells him she is sure everything will be fine.

  He laughs and flings himself back in his chair, a boyish smile on his face. “Oh, Sally! You’re making me feel like a human being again!”

  When he suggests that they spend the night at the lodge, she says, “But you’ve just been two days on the road. Don’t you think you ought to rest?”

  “I don’t want to rest!” He leans forward and, smiling happily, pulls her hand away from the basket rim. “I need to feel that I am made for arts other than deception, blackmail and bribery!”

  She wants to jerk her hand back, but instead she lets herself be drawn down for a kiss—and with that their spending the night at the lodge becomes a settled decision.

  In the end, however, the night goes well—or mostly it does. She is a little self-conscious, but no more so than she has been on other occasions—which fact she takes as an indication that she need not worry about Moak. He is just a gentle and bighearted man. Her friend . . .