This is what Sally Hemings thinks: She is practical. She sees things as they really are. Thomas Jefferson is a dreamer who doesn’t know he is dreaming. Because he is white and wealthy and has so often been lucky, his dream is a beautiful dream, in which he himself is beautiful and his work is to rebuild the world as the beautiful place he believes it has always actually been. He is almost done, he thinks. Every morning he rises convinced that with just a little more effort the world he is building will be perfect. Only the details need to be attended to. The beautiful world exists. In essence. History is on his side.
This is what Sally Hemings thinks: Thomas Jefferson is ruthless, corrupt and completely self-centered. He does nothing that he does not see as advancing his own interests, and he works to maintain a reputation for thoughtfulness and moral backbone only so that people will be less likely to recognize his naked grabs for power. He condemns the aristocracy as corrupt, trivial and effeminate, and yet he wants nothing so much as to possess aristocratic comforts and tastes. And so he is entirely willing to have a pianoforte sent all the way from London for Maria, who shares little of his own love for music, and he is willing to tear down a perfectly good house for no other reason than that he is unhappy with its proportions. And, of course, although he announces to the world that “all men are created equal” and have claim to certain “unalienable rights” and he proclaims repeatedly that slavery is an abomination and a curse upon the nation, he is nevertheless content, at night, by candlelight, to tot up the appreciation of his human property.
This is what Sally Hemings thinks: As a child Thomas Jefferson learned that living is synonymous with pain, and so, for all of his life, he has sought not to live. He has sought to exist in a child’s drawing, where each thing is only one color and each color is only a variety of happiness. He has sought to divide the world into that which might be celebrated and that which must be forbidden, and he has worked tirelessly to believe that what he wants forbidden has never actually existed in the first place. For Thomas Jefferson belief is a form of blindness, or paralysis. He is like an infant rabbit, separated from its mother, so demented by fear that it can only tremble in the grass as a hawk circles high overhead or as a dog comes out the back door of the house and sniffs the breeze.
While Thomas Jefferson reads from the pages that tremble in his hands, Sally Hemings notices a plump brown mouse sit up on its haunches and put its front paws to its cheeks. Then, in an instant, it has dropped to the floor and disappeared behind the night table. She says nothing.
Thomas Jefferson says, “‘. . . to express my grateful thanks for the favor with which they have been pleased—’”
“Louder!” says Sally Hemings. “I’m sitting right here in the room with you, and I can hardly hear a word.”
They are in the lodge. It is a late afternoon at the end of February. The western rims of the trunks and bare branches outside the window seem furred with gold. Sally Hemings is sitting in a plain wooden chair beside the crackling fireplace. Her legs are slightly spread to accommodate the modest bulge of her belly, and her hands are folded on top of it. She will have another baby in less than three months.
Thomas Jefferson reads, “‘. . . grateful thanks for the favor with which they have been pleased to look toward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments—’”
“I still can’t hear you.”
“I can’t! This is impossible!” His hand falls, and the pages snap against his thigh. There is a wild sorrow in his eyes. His mouth is open and downturned at the corners, as if he can’t breathe.
“Of course you can. You are the president of the United States! Reading a speech is nothing—”
“No. I can’t.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! You can talk for hours—”
“With friends. I have no problem with friends. But formal addresses—”
“And dinner parties. I’ve seen you myself lecture a whole table.”
“But that’s different. In my own home, it’s different.” He smiles nervously. “And, of course, the wine always makes it easier.”
“Then have a couple of glasses before—”
“I can’t do that.” He drops onto the bed and flings his speech across the counterpane. The pages scatter. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“You’re going to go to Washington, you will be sworn in as president and then you will give this beautiful address.”
As she speaks, Sally Hemings sees that the plump mouse has ventured out from behind the night table. It veers suddenly in the direction of Thomas Jefferson’s left boot, and then, when it is not six inches from his heel, it darts back toward the wall and disappears from sight.
Sally Hemings says, “How can you possibly worry about it, given all you have accomplished? Remember how afraid Mr. Madison was that there would be open rebellion in the streets?”
“Yes, but—”
“Stop it! Your election is a tremendous accomplishment. Not just because you won but because the government you helped to found is succeeding. You have changed history. You, Thomas Jefferson—”
“Please! That’s making it worse.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m filled with uneasiness. It’s as if my arms and legs are crammed with insects.” He heaves a sigh and shakes his head. “It’s because I’m not that man. The Thomas Jefferson whom everyone in that room will be looking at is a fabrication. It’s as if someone has been out in the world doing an impersonation of me, and now I have to live up to his reputation.” He laughs and looks sheepishly at Sally Hemings. “It’s true,” he says.
Sally Hemings gets up from her chair and gathers together the scattered pages of his address. “Here.” She puts them onto his lap, and he grabs hold of them before they slip to the floor. “You’re behaving like a child,” she says.
Thomas Jefferson looks up at her with a child’s expression. He takes hold of her left hand by the tips of her index and middle fingers, lifts them to his lips and kisses them.
“It’s easy,” she says. “The words are here on the page. All you have to do is read them one after the other. And read them in a voice loud enough for people to hear.” She pulls her hand away. “The problem is that I’ve been sitting too close. I’m going to go out on the porch, and you’ll have to read loudly enough for me to hear you there.”
“It’s freezing!”
“No it isn’t.” She smiles and caresses her belly with both hands. “And besides, I have my little stewpot to keep me warm.”
Thomas Jefferson smiles and stands up.
Sally Hemings crosses the room, opens the door and steps out onto the porch, leaving the door open behind her.
In fact, it is freezing outside. A sharp breeze blowing across the porch immediately chills her shoulders and neck, even though she is wrapped in a shawl. She won’t be able to stand the cold for terribly long.
“Start where you left off,” she says. “Read it loud enough that I can hear it out here.”
Grim worry comes onto Thomas Jefferson’s brow and lips. He lifts the sheets of foolscap covered with his own handwriting, and after clearing his throat a couple of times, he begins to read, “‘. . . I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire. . . .’”
Sally Hemings can hardly make out his words, but she is only half listening. She hears the clattery rush of the river at her back and the thrumming of wind high in the bare branches of the trees. Her baby is stirring inside her. A jay squawks a few feet over her head. A chickadee is balanced atop the porch railing on its toothpick legs, its head shifting in spurts: now left, now right, now up, now down. Then, with another spurt, it reverses its position on the railing. A chipmunk or a squirrel rustles in the winter-grayed leaves on the for
est floor just behind her.
How vital and alert she feels—her body filled with life: her own and that of this yet-to-be-known person inside her. From the soles of her feet to her nose and her fingertips—she is made of life, and life is all around her: the birds, the trees, the animals, near and far; even the breeze and the endlessly noisy river—the whole world is alive, and the life of the world is indistinguishable from the life that has always been her own and from the life that is inside that life. She feels this with such purity and simplicity that it is as if her spirit is filtering out into the world and there is no difference between her and every moving, striving, perceiving thing.
“‘. . . During the contest of opinion through which we have passed,’” says Thomas Jefferson, but his voice has grown so soft now that she wouldn’t know what he was saying had she not read his speech herself.
Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. He is in a gigantic room within the half-built Capitol Building, where barn swallows dart to and from their muddy nests on cornices and gables, copper sunbeams angle through the interstices of labyrinthine wooden scaffolds and pigeons turn in circles on dusty floorboards making their fretful whurrs. Thomas Jefferson is the newly elected president. His mouth is moving, but he cannot speak. His eyes pass from word to word—“‘the task is above my talents’”—and those same words vibrate in his throat and between his palate and tongue, but they become nothing in the open air. He knows this from the sympathetic entreaty in James Madison’s eyes, Alexander Hamilton’s happy sneer and John Marshall’s buckled brow and open mouth. He knows this from the coughs that echo in a room where his words do not, and from the rainlike rustle of scores of shifting feet, and from the creaking of at least as many chairs. “‘A rising nation spread over a wide and fruitful land . . .’” The words echo within Thomas Jefferson’s whirling skull, but they cannot pass his lips. His sweating fingers slick the wooden podium and warp the paper when he turns a page. He tries to raise his voice, but his throat only constricts. His voice is a duck’s voice, and he can hardly breathe. He knows that the most important words are coming soon: We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. He knows that for the first time in history, the rule of a nation has passed from enemy to enemy without bloodshed and that this is a cause both for celebration and for grave concern, because there is no guarantee that the peace will prevail. And he knows that his primary challenge will be to act according to his own principles without offending too many of those who find his principles abhorrent. The most important words are coming closer and closer. They loom and they loom. Now, here they are: “‘We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.’” But the words do not pass his lips. He knows because the rainlike rumble has grown thunderous, and the coughs are hard to distinguish from guffaws. “‘Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?’” With every word the veracity of his opening remarks—which he had thought merely ceremonial humility—only becomes more clear: Yes, it is true; his talents really are entirely inadequate to the task with which he has been charged. “‘Equal and exact justice to all men,’” he reads, and “‘freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus . . .’” These are all mere murmurs in a room resounding with disappointment and happy mockery. He is not even halfway through his address, and he doesn’t know how he will ever make it to the end.
Only days into his presidency, Thomas Jefferson decreed that henceforth he would deliver all official addresses, including the State of the Union, only in writing, a practice that was honored by all succeeding presidents, up until Woodrow Wilson, who reestablished the tradition of orally presenting the State of the Union address in 1913. Over the remainder of his life, Thomas Jefferson would deliver only one more formal address, at his second inauguration, but this address, like its predecessor, was barely audible.
The festive strains of a handful of violins commence as a glowering, white-wigged, bulldog-mouthed man—Chief Justice John Marshall, it would seem—administers the oath of office to the young actor, whose copper-colored wig now has patches of gray at the temples. But almost instantly, the young actor’s stoic, handsome face fades into a field of yellow, which turns out to be the wall of a brilliantly lit room drifting from right to left like the hull of a ship leaving a dock. A cluster of musicians looms into view, all of them wearing trim blue frock coats and white wigs, and tilting prissy, V-shaped smiles at one another over the strings of their instruments, and then just as suddenly the musicians shrink and fall away, until it becomes clear that they occupy only one corner of an enormous room aglitter with silver, crystal, hundreds of candle flames and the jewelry of women, whose wedding-cake gowns billow and sway around their invisible legs, as they themselves are swirled around the room by yet other trim, bewigged men in blue-and-gray frock coats.
Now it is the actor in the copper-colored wig who looms into view, and he is clearly the tallest and most handsome man in the room and the only one not wearing a white wig. For a moment his face is so large and the room behind him is hurtling so dizzyingly from left to right that Thomas Jefferson feels as if he is an infant being carried in the man’s arms. But then the man’s head swings around, and he is revealed to be dancing with a very young woman, who is also very beautiful in a faintly comical way involving a towering hairstyle and a large black beauty dot stuck to her skin a little below and to the right of her perfect mouth. The beautiful woman’s eyes gleam as she whirls in the light of ever-multiplying candelabras, and her lips are pressed together in a smile unlike any that Thomas Jefferson has ever witnessed, but one that would seem to indicate her smug certainty that she will bed the widower president once the music has ended, the guests have departed and the last of the candles has been snuffed by a less-than-approving servant.
Just as Thomas Jefferson is becoming alarmed at what might happen next, the woman’s towering coiffure looms so large that it makes the whole theater go black, while the notes of a single violin rise above the rest. When, at last, the head whirls away, it turns out to be not that of the woman but of the actor in the copper-colored wig, who is coatless, in an open-necked white shirt, playing a violin—although the balletic movements of his bow are entirely unrelated to the notes resounding in the darkness.
As he shrinks and the room around him grows larger, it becomes clear that he is not dancing with his violin but is seated on a stool at an ordinary wooden table in a mud-chinked log cabin, lit by a solitary candle. Swatches of calico are nailed over the window, and a battered, long-handled frying pan hangs from a rafter.
Finally the room has loomed so large that Thomas Jefferson is able to see that the beautiful young woman with the honey-brown skin is also sitting at the table, smiling guardedly as she watches the actor in the copper-colored wig play the melody he has only just been dancing to. She has no beauty spot. Her loose hair makes a gold-tinged cloud around her face, which is a celebration of convexities and dimples. If the beauty of the woman dancing at the inaugural ball might be characterized by the odor of a very fine French perfume, this young woman’s beauty is like the smell of a forest when rain has just begun to fall.
“There you have it, Sal,” the actor in the copper-colored wig says as he lowers violin and bow to his lap. “You didn’t miss a thing.”
The golden young woman’s smile momentarily broadens but then all at once shuts off. “You play beautifully,” she says as she gets up from the table and turns her back.
She hurries to a window, and now the dark theater is loud with the noises of crickets, peepers and a bullfrog. When the actor in the copper-colored wig comes up to her, his handsome brow furrowed intelligently, she pushes him away. “No,” she says, and hurries to a corner, where she lowers her face into her hands.
All at once the actor in the copper-colored wig is standing behind her. He hesitates f
or a long moment before lifting his hands lightly to her shoulders. “Oh, Sal,” he says sorrowfully, and for another long moment she seems determined to reject him. But then, in an instant, she has turned, and, revealing just the faintest flash of a smile, she presses her forehead against his chest.
He wraps his arms around her, shifting her head so that now her cheek is against his chest, and she pulls him suddenly closer, until, in silhouette, they form, together, that classic tableau of masculine protectiveness and grateful female vulnerability.
It turns out that Thomas Jefferson is neither dirigible nor cloud nor breeze, but a bronze monument hundreds of feet high, and all of us are trapped inside him, though some of us claim to have come here voluntarily. “He is a great man,” these people argue. “We should be honored to live inside him.” But how can any of us know what sort of man he might be? To us he is only darkness and other people. The air in here is dense with the breath of those who do not eat well and with the corporeal emanations of those who do not wash. We do a lot of blind stumbling, sometimes over the bodies of people who are exhausted, or who have fallen to the floor in a drunken stupor, or who, perhaps, will never again get to their feet. There are a lot of curses, mumbled prayers, grumbles, wails and shocked, infuriated and orgasmic shouting. We are a shabby species, capable of gallows humor, perhaps, but little in the way of greatness. We are venal. We are ignorant. Most of all we are terrified. And we are almost always self-deceived. Why should anyone imagine that Thomas Jefferson might be any different? “Because we fabricated him ourselves,” say those who wish to be hopeful. “Because we built him out of our desires and dreams and our disgust with who we are.”
My brothers, sister Harriet and myself, were used alike. We were permitted to stay about the “great house,” and only required to do such light work as going on errands. Harriet learned to spin and to weave in a little factory on the home plantation. We were free from the dread of having to be slaves all our lives long, and were measurably happy. We were always permitted to be with our mother, who was well used. It was her duty, all her life which I can remember, up to the time of father’s death, to take care of his chamber and wardrobe, look after us children and do such light work as sewing, and Provision was made in the will of our father that we should be free when we arrived at the age of 21 years. We had all passed that period when he died but Eston, and he was given the remainder of his time shortly after. He and I rented a house and took mother to live with us, till her death, which event occurred in 1835.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 43