Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  But it repulses her. He is still redolent of the road: horse, dust and sweat, and once she has gotten him out of his clothing, he is so pale, mottled and flaccid-fleshed that he seems diseased. His muscles creak. The bones in his wrists and shoulders feel as if they are rolling against each other. As soon as she gets him inside her, she cups her hand over his testicles because she knows he loves that and that it will make him come almost instantly, which he does.

  And once this has happened, she finds herself repulsed by the very trait she found so lacking in Moak. Thomas Jefferson’s unhappiness that she has not had an orgasm now seems fawning and unmanly to her, and it fills her with such a visceral abhorrence that she cannot bear to have him inside her or to be touched in an erotic way by his hands.

  “That’s all right,” she tells him. “I’m not really in the mood,” assertions that clearly disconcert him, given her previous behavior. “Let’s just lie here together,” she says. “This feels nice. It’s good to have you back.”

  In fact, even lying there beside him doing nothing at all makes her skin crawl, and she does not see how she will ever be able to make love with him again.

  Ursula has fallen ill, and Sally Hemings is in the kitchen garden gathering feverfew to make tea for her. As she stuffs a handful of the ragged leaves into the pocket of her apron, she notices a shadow on the ground at her feet. Reeling around, she finds that Moak is standing not one foot behind her.

  “Afternoon, Miz Sally,” he says, lifting his straw hat off his head.

  “What are you doing?” Her voice is low, but furious.

  He smiles, her anger only seeming to amuse him. “I was just passing—”

  “How dare you come up behind me like that!”

  She tries to step around him, but he moves directly in front of her. “Aw, come on, Miz Sally.” Still smiling, he reaches for her hand.

  The stalks of feverfew are as fibrous as ropes, so she has had to use a knife to cut them. Now she is holding the knife between her face and Moak’s.

  She is shouting.

  “Don’t you touch me!”

  “Hey!” Moak takes a step back, laughing.

  Sally Hemings cannot believe that she is actually brandishing the knife in front of him. The gesture makes her feel more weak than strong. She worries that he will snatch the knife out of her hand.

  “I’m sick of you!” She takes a step back. “I don’t ever want to see you again!”

  “But, Sally, I just—”

  She slashes the knife in the empty air, then turns and runs toward the kitchen.

  “You stay away from me!” she shouts. “You just stay away from me.”

  She glimpses Moak as she slams the kitchen door. He has not followed her. He has stopped smiling. He is standing exactly where she left him, his hands open, outturned and slightly lifted.

  On Power

  Thomas Jefferson’s primary political objective throughout his career was to limit the power of any one group—including the very government he helped found. In 1778 he opened a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge by declaring, “Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

  Nearly a decade later, he was in a decided minority among the Founding Fathers in not being troubled by the Shays’ Rebellion, a revolt by poor farmers that led to the suspension of habeas corpus by Massachusetts’s governor. “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion,” he wrote from Paris in 1787. “What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? . . . The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”

  His bill for the Diffusion of Knowledge concerned the establishment of a public school system, which, along with a free press, he saw as essential for the preservation of democracy—a linkage made clear in one of his most famous (or infamous) statements, also written in 1787: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

  His idea was that grammar schools should be paid for by the state and open to all economic classes. Latin (or high) schools and universities would charge tuition, but poor students who showed exceptional promise would be eligible for full scholarships. Public education didn’t gain much traction in the United States until the the mid-nineteenth century, but Thomas Jefferson sought to help it along in the Land Ordinance of 1785, a plan for the development of the western territories. The ordinance decreed that all newly settled land should be divided into a grid of townships, each measuring six miles square, which in turn should be divided into a grid of thirty-six sections, with one of those reserved for a public school. The effects of this grid system can be plainly seen by anyone flying over the Midwest and the West, and, indeed, to this very day the public schools in many localities are in exactly the section of the grid (number 16) that Thomas Jefferson reserved for them.

  The only element of his education plan that he saw through to fruition in his home state was the University of Virginia—a project with which he was involved on every level, including as architect. Perhaps nothing more clearly distinguishes this university as the product of his ideals than the fact that its campus, unlike those of all other American universities of that era, is centered on a library rather than a church.

  Thomas Jefferson’s religious views were always controversial, with his critics commonly denigrating him as a “confirmed infidel” and even as a “howling atheist.” While he probably did believe in God—at least most of the time—he was decidedly not orthodox and wanted to put strict limits on the ability of any one denomination to wield governmental power or dictate the conscience of individuals. In 1777, during an era when the Anglican Church had such sway over Virginia society that children not baptized in the faith could be taken from their parents, he wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, both to prohibit the establishment of state religion and, as he put it in his Autobiography, to protect the rights of “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel of every denomination.”

  Believing commerce to be governed by “a selfish spirit” that “feels no passion or principle but that of gain,” Thomas Jefferson also sought to minimize the power of business, especially within government, an agenda at the heart of his opposition to the policies of Alexander Hamilton, which he felt would enslave Congress to the ambitions—and bribes—of New York bankers. He strongly preferred temporary local militias to a standing national army, because he believed that the latter could all too easily be deployed against the people by a tyrant. And, lastly, he was an advocate of the dispersal of governmental responsibility to the states as a check against the power of the federal government.

  Thomas Jefferson rarely hewed to any of his ideals with perfect consistency, however. He became rather less sanguine about freedom of the press once he was subjected to vicious attacks by the Federalist papers, and he asserted entirely unconstitutional executive authority when, as president, he pushed the Louisiana Purchase through Congress. Nevertheless, he remained skeptical of institutionalized power to the very end of his life.

  In the epitaph he composed only weeks before he died, he said nothing about having been president, governor of Virginia, ambassador to France or about any of his official positions within government. Instead he wanted to be remembered only as the author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia St
atute for Religious Freedom and as the “father” of the University of Virginia.

  It is September 1, 1799. Sally Hemings is twenty-seven years old, and the northern wing of Monticello is in ruins. The roof lies in heaps among the weeds a small distance from the foundation. The walls are naked brick, penetrated at intervals by rectangular holes that lack doors, jambs, casements or windows. The floors inside the wall, on which once stood mahogany tables, silk-upholstered chairs, dressers and bookcases, are warped and grayed by the rain and in some places not safe to walk on. A substantial honeysuckle vine has commandeered the fireplace and rises up the whole of the chimney like a frozen cloud of dark green and yellow butterflies.

  Thomas Jefferson had intended the demolition of this wing of his house to be completed in March and for construction of a new wing to have progressed all summer, but he has been too busy with his struggles in Philadelphia to direct his mechanics, and now that he is considering standing for president, he has even less time.

  Sally Hemings, six months pregnant, is sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair under the shade of the very copper beech where some two decades earlier Martha Jefferson asked her if she wanted to be little Polly’s companion. She is repairing the skirt of one of her own gowns, which she accidentally stepped on and ripped as she was climbing the stairs. Seventeen-month-old Beverly is asleep on a blanket beside her, twitching his legs and arms like a dreaming dog, occasionally uttering tiny cries and moans as delicate as pigeon coos.

  The door to the southern side of the house opens, and Thomas Jefferson walks out onto the terrace to pace in his shirtsleeves and riding boots, with head lowered and one hand clutching the other behind his back. He passes briskly up and down the terrace eight, nine, ten times, then goes back into his study. A moment later he is out again, with a dented and frayed yard-wide straw hat on his head. He crosses the terrace, trots down the steps into the ankle-high grass of the lawn and strides off, in exactly the posture in which he has just been pacing. At the edge of the woods, he reverses direction and recrosses the lawn, his hat brim wafting lazily on either side of his head like the wings of a great blue heron.

  All at once, halfway to the house, he makes an oblique left turn, walks directly toward one of the outdoor privies, mounts the two steps in front of it, opens the door, takes off his hat, backs through and closes the door behind him. He emerges a few moments later, puts his hat on again, straightens his clothing and, hopping down the steps, seems possessed by new vigor.

  At just that moment, Beverly stirs on the blanket. His little face reddens, and he makes the first stuttery cracks of his usual post-nap hunger cry. In a moment Sally Hemings will have to bring him into the kitchen for some porridge, but for the moment she settles him at her breast. Just as he begins to suck, she looks up to see Thomas Jefferson, only three yards off, walking straight toward her.

  “Beautiful day!” he says as he comes to a stop. The sun reflects off the yellowing lawn, turning his eyes a buttery brown. “Can’t understand how anyone can keep inside on a day like this.”

  And with that he lifts the crown of his hat, turns about-face and strides off toward the woods, left hand clutching his right wrist behind his back, his hat brim wafting.

  Two weeks before Christmas 1799, Jimmy comes to see Sally Hemings. “Now that you can read,” he tells her, “I’m going to write you letters, and you have to write me letters back.”

  Jimmy is free. The previous day their brother Peter completed his first week as Monticello’s cook, and Thomas Jefferson, pronouncing himself entirely satisfied, signed Jimmy’s manumission papers and gave him twenty-five dollars. Jimmy’s plan is to move back to Paris, or maybe to Spain, but first he is going to Philadelphia, where he can earn enough money cooking in taverns to pay for his transatlantic passage. His plans to start a French-style restaurant with Adrien Petit are long forgotten—Petit having returned to Paris some five years previously, under a cloud of disgrace that neither Jimmy nor Thomas Jefferson would ever fully elucidate to Sally Hemings.

  “Why do you have to leave now?” she asks.

  “I just do. I feel like if I don’t go today, I’ll never leave. And then what’s the point of being free?”

  Sally Hemings is sitting in a rocking chair by her fireplace. Her belly is so large she can’t see her knees, but the baby inside her isn’t moving. This baby has never moved very much, not like Beverly or little Harriet. She thought the baby would be born in mid-November, and here it is a week into December and nothing is happening. Can babies suffocate, she wonders, if they stay inside too long?

  She doesn’t tell her brother what she is thinking.

  “Don’t worry,” he tells her. “I’ll be back. I just have to see the world a bit.”

  She doesn’t tell him that she is not sure whose baby is inside her. She doesn’t tell him that she thinks the baby has been killed as a punishment.

  “Maybe I’ll go to Africa,” he tells her. “I think I should see Africa, find out what it’s really like. You hear all kinds of things about Africa—about lions and savages and kings with golden palaces. I wonder if any of that is true.”

  She doesn’t tell Jimmy anything she is thinking because she thinks he should already know. Or if he doesn’t know, he should ask. But Jimmy will never ask, because he is too lost inside his own head. His head is a deep, dark cave, and he doesn’t have a light to find his way out. She doesn’t tell him any of this either.

  “I’ll be back,” he says. “You can count on that! I’ll always come back and visit you.”

  “I hope so,” she says.

  “Someone’s got to watch out for you, right? Make sure you don’t get into trouble!”

  Sally Hemings makes a smilelike grimace, but says nothing.

  Jimmy throws his arms around her. “I love you, Cider Jug.”

  She speaks into the empty air behind his back. “I love you, too.”

  The morning after Jimmy’s departure, Sally Hemings’s water breaks. She is all alone in her cabin with Beverly—her mother and Aggy having gone to fetch a sack of cornmeal from Mr. Richardson. “Mammy peeing,” says the little boy as soon as he sees the fluid leaking through the chair bottom and splattering onto the floor. “Why you peeing, Mammy?” Beverly is twenty months old.

  “I’m not peeing,” she says. “That just means your baby brother is coming. I’m all full of water, and he’s been swimming around inside me, but now he’s coming out.”

  Sally Hemings is terrified. Her water has broken before she has felt a single contraction. Also, the movements of Harriet and Beverly had only become more noticeable once they were no longer cushioned in a balloon of water, but she feels no movement from this baby at all.

  She leaves the mess on the floor for her mother to clean and pulls her drenched gown and shift over her head so that she can dry herself and change. The first contraction hits her when she is completely undressed, and it is so powerful that all she can do is fall onto her bed and pull her cover over her.

  This is where her mother and Aggy find her when they return twenty minutes later. Betty sends Aggy to the great house to tell Mr. Jefferson what is happening and to ask him to send for Dr. Cranley and Mrs. Coombes, the midwife. He does, and Mrs. Coombes comes within the hour, but Dr. Cranley doesn’t arrive until midafternoon.

  The contractions come hard and fast all afternoon and evening and into the night. When he heard that Sally Hemings was delivering, Thomas Jefferson requested that Aggy come get him the instant the baby is born, but, in fact, he spends hours pacing up and down in front of the cabin, periodically approaching the door to ask for reports. He makes his last visit at midnight and is back at the cabin at five in the morning, wild-haired and unshaven, clearly having slept in his clothes.

  He is startled by Sally Hemings’s transformation during the few hours since he last saw her. The flush has gone entirely from her cheeks, and her forehead is glossy, not so much with s
weat as with the slime of illness. But worst of all are her eyes, which squint at him unseeingly and make her seem more animal than human.

  Betty Hemings is standing next to her daughter’s bed, one hand clutched fiercely in the other, a scowl upon her brow but her eyes too frightened to even meet Thomas Jefferson’s.

  “Sally is strong,” he tells her. “We must have faith.”

  “Lord’s will be done,” says Betty, so softly he can only tell by reading her lips.

  Dr. Cranley also left at midnight and hasn’t returned. Thomas Jefferson sends Davy to him with a message saying to come immediately.

  Once the cabin is sufficiently suffused with dawn light, Mrs. Coombes asks Thomas Jefferson to wait outside. As soon as he has gone, she draws back the covers, pushes apart Sally Hemings’s legs and then sees at once what the problem is. The baby is breeched.

  Mrs. Coombes and Betty help Sally Hemings turn over and get onto her knees and elbows. The heel of one of the baby’s feet is just visible, pressed against its buttocks, and as Sally Hemings rocks back and forth with her contractions, more and more of the little foot becomes visible until finally, with one contraction, the whole foot appears, and with the next the entire leg pops out. Mrs. Coombes glances over at Betty Hemings and shakes her head once. Betty puts her folded hands to her lips and begins to pray. It takes three and a half hours for a tiny girl to slide into Mrs. Coombes’s hands. Her skull is gourd-shaped and her face swollen and purple from the brutal labor, and her right leg (the second to come out) is broken or dislocated.

  Dr. Cranley arrives just exactly as the baby makes her first, bleating cry. Determining that her leg is only dislocated, he pulls and twists, causing the baby to shriek. But afterward she instantly falls into a deep sleep, and he declares the procedure a success. He waits until the afterbirth has been completely expelled, then puts on his hat and coat and orders Sally Hemings to drink nettle tea at least twice daily for a week. Just before leaving the cabin, he looks down on the poor, battered infant and shakes his head. He neither meets Sally Hemings’s eye nor says a word.