Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  “But why does hot air make a man fly?” asks Beverly.

  Thomas Jefferson explains about hot air being lighter than cool air.

  “But when I breathe,” says Beverly, “my breath is hot, but I don’t go up in the air.”

  Thomas Jefferson explains how the upward force of the hot air has to be greater than the downward force created by weight. “You’re too heavy,” he says at last.

  “But why is hot air lighter than cold air?” asks Beverly.

  “It has something to do with the motion,” says Thomas Jefferson. “You’ve seen the way the air ripples over the brick kiln or the way smoke billows as it rises.” He stops talking, because he realizes that what he is saying does not make sense and that he does not, in fact, know why hot air is lighter.

  “The best way to understand how it works,” says Thomas Jefferson, “would be for us to make our own ballon.”

  The boy’s eyes and mouth both go round.

  “Not a big one,” says Thomas Jefferson. “It would take much too long to build one that we could actually fly in. But perhaps we could build a small one before dinner.”

  “Big enough to fly Hurly?” Hurly, a beagle, used to belong to Betty Hemings, and Beverly has been caring for him during the year since his grandmother died.

  “No, Hurly’s too heavy, I think.”

  “A mouse?”

  “Maybe a beetle,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  He sends Beverly to his Uncle John for a bit of pine glue, and crosses the lawn to his own chambers to look for a silk scarf and a sheet of vellum. By the time Beverly returns with the glue, Thomas Jefferson has cut the vellum into strips. He glues one strip into a ring and makes a small canoe of the others. Then he uses the glue to attach the four corners of the scarf to the ring and then to attach the edges of the scarf to themselves so that they form a sort of sack. And lastly he dangles the canoe from the bottom of the ring on four threads.

  They have finished making the ballon by dinner but have to wait until the afternoon to start a twig fire in the brickyard to one side of the kiln. Thomas Jefferson places two pebbles in the canoe to serve as ballast. Beverly does, in fact, manage to trap a beetle, but the only way to keep the insect from immediately crawling out of the canoe would be to kill it, and father and son agree that launching a dead beetle would be entirely beside the point.

  When at last the fire is sufficiently hot and low, Thomas Jefferson holds the ballon upside down and grips the lowest point of the scarf between his thumb and forefinger. He carefully lifts the scarf so that the ring and the canoe swing to the bottom, and then he gently draws the whole contraption over the fire, instructing Beverly to clip the vellum ring between two Y-shaped sticks. As soon as the scarf begins to inflate, Thomas Jefferson releases his grip on the top, and he and Beverly are equally excited when the scarf defies gravity and remains aloft.

  It takes no more than fifteen seconds for the scarf to completely inflate, and then, at the count of three, Beverly pulls aside the Y-shaped sticks and the ballon shoots straight into the air. It doesn’t get more than ten feet above the ground, however, before a breeze causes it to lurch onto its side and drop like a shot duck, straight to the earth, narrowly missing Beverly as he dodges to one side.

  He cries out in disappointment, then hangs his head. “I wanted it to fly over the trees,” he says.

  “Next time,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “No. It will never work.”

  “Nonsense!” Thomas Jefferson gives Beverly an encouraging pat, but the boy only shrugs his hand away. Tears sparkle in the corners of his eyes.

  “We didn’t have enough ballast,” says Thomas Jefferson. “If we’d put in another pebble, it would have gone up straight. Let’s give it another try.”

  “No,” says Beverly. “It will never work. I can tell.” He starts to walk away.

  Mystified by the sudden change in Beverly’s mood, Thomas Jefferson says, “I brought plans for the ballon your mother and I saw in Paris back with me. They must be in a trunk somewhere. If I can find them, I’ll show them to you.”

  Beverly looks around at his father but doesn’t say anything.

  “Perhaps one day,” Thomas Jefferson continues, “we can construct a real ballon together—a big one! Maybe even bigger than le Comte de Toytot’s! I’ll bet the winds could carry us all the way to Charlottesville. Perhaps we could even fly as far as Washington. Wouldn’t President Madison be surprised if we were to drop out of the sky and visit him!”

  Beverly smiles weakly, then says, “I have to go.”

  As the boy walks in the direction of his mother’s cabin, Thomas Jefferson bends and picks up the fallen ballon. He wants to put a third pebble into the canoe and make another attempt—but not on his own. He holds the top of the ballon between his thumb and forefinger, and as Beverly disappears into his mother’s door, Thomas Jefferson turns and carries the ballon to his own chambers.

  Perhaps the boy will feel differently tomorrow.

  In 1815 Francis C. Gray, a lawyer, asked how many generations of intermarriage with whites would it take for the offspring of a mulatto family to be considered white, and Thomas Jefferson replied by letter: “Our canon considers two crosses with pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of negro blood.” If we consider the relationship of Betty Hemings’s mother, Parthenia, with Captain Hemings as the first “crossing” and Betty’s own relationship with John Wayles as the second, then, by this calculus, Thomas Jefferson understood that his children with Sally Hemings more than qualified as “white.”

  As a master Jefferson was kind and indulgent. Under his management his slaves were seldom punished, except for stealing and fighting. They were tried for any offense as at court and allowed to make their own defense. The slave children were nursed until they were three years old, and left with their parents until thirteen. They were then sent to the overseers’ wives to learn trades. Every male child’s father received $5 at its birth.

  Jefferson was a man of sober habits, although his cellars were stocked with wines. No one ever saw him under the influence of liquor. His servants about the house were tasked. If you did your task well you were rewarded; if not, punished. Mrs. Randolph would not let any of the young ladies go anywhere with gentlemen with the exception of their brothers, unless a colored servant accompanied them.

  —The Reverend Peter Fossett

  “Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

  New York Sunday World

  January 30, 1898

  . . . Mr. Jeff allowed Joey to go into the stable, but only long enough to embrace Edy, tell her of the success of his plans and give her the oatcakes. Afterward, when Joey and I sat shoulder to shoulder on the mounting block just outside the stable, he told me he wasn’t sure of the success of his plans. “I don’t trust white people anymore,” he said. “Not a one of them thinks a promise to a nigger is a real promise. That Mr. Jones especially. He was just like Mr. Jeff, saying, ‘My heart is breaking. I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything I can.’ But I saw it in his eyes—all he was thinking was he was gonna get some niggers cheap.”

  Cheap because Mr. Jeff had told us that he would cut off the bidding early on our family members so that whoever had promised us to buy them would pay the lowest possible price. “Virtue never flourishes so well,” he told me, “as when it coincides with monetary reward.” This had seemed a wise strategy at the time, but now I wondered if the reward wouldn’t undermine the virtue.

  “No!” Joey cried, as if he had read my thoughts. His voice wavering, on the verge of breaking into a sob, he continued, “I’ve got to stop thinking like that. Mr. Jeff made me a promise. I’ve got to trust him. I’ve got to have faith.”

  My own anxiety and sorrow having reduced me to something close to paralytic numbness, I could only answer Joey by giving his hand a squeeze. If I spoke a single word,
I would burst into tears.

  The “viewing” began at eight o’clock; the yard around the stable and the whole of the lawn in front of the great house had filled with wagons and carriages. A crowd of forty or fifty white people—mainly men—had gathered in front of the open stable door, and when Mr. Jeff gave the word, they filed into the stable one by one. I had never seen a slave auction, so I had no clear idea of what actually happened at a viewing.

  Despite the cold, Mr. Jeff told the slaves to remove their cloaks, coats and shawls so the “visitors” could get “a better look.” And look they did, at all of these dear men, women and children, as if they were merely animals. Arms were squeezed, and thighs; stomachs were poked and grabbed. Fingers were stuck into open mouths to test the solidity of teeth. At one point a man with bushy black eyebrows and a yellowed periwig approached Joey’s second-eldest daughter, Patsy, a fine-featured and stately girl of sixteen, and yanked down the front of her shift, tearing it and exposing one of her breasts. Joey leapt off the mounting block and raced across the yard, shouting at the man in the periwig, “No! You can’t do that! Don’t you dare touch her!” He was caught and restrained by Mr. Henderson and Mr. Byrd just outside the makeshift fence, but he continued to shout, and the man who had accosted Patsy kept his back turned, as if he didn’t hear a word.

  Mr. Jeff, however, had heard Joey, and, seeing Patsy clutching the ripped neck of her shift, he immediately walked up to the man, saying, “There is no cause for you to treat a young woman like that.”

  “Don’t I have the right to see what I’m buying?” the man said.

  “If you cannot treat a woman with due respect,” Mr. Jeff said, “I must ask you to leave this plantation immediately.”

  “I thought this was an auction, not a cotillion!” the man replied, but he turned away, leaving Patsy staring fixedly up toward the rafters as if she could not bear to see anything around her.

  I had trailed after Joey and was standing speechless beside him as he—motionless now, still gripped by the two overseers—watched fiercely while the man in the periwig went on to inspect another young woman.

  White people had streamed in ever-greater numbers toward the stable after the commencement of the viewing. One of them, Mr. McFlynn, a cooper from Charlottesville, gaunt and near seventy, with a face the color of a butcher’s hands, had arrived just as Mr. Jeff had issued his ultimatum to the man in the periwig, and he had stopped in his tracks not five feet from where I was standing. He snorted at Mr. Jeff’s words, and when he saw that the man in the periwig was not going to put up a fight, he raised his arm in my direction and called out, “How much do you want for old master’s whore?” Mr. Jeff either didn’t hear him or didn’t want to dignify his question with a response, so Mr. McFlynn asked again, “How much for old master’s whore?” . . .

  It is June 1816. Thomas Jefferson is seventy-three, and sleeping. Sally Hemings, in her white shift, having just picked up her gown from the chair next to the night table, stands beside the bed looking down. Gold tinges the blue trees outside the lodge windows, and the birds are filling the quiet with their squeaks, trills, burbles and peeps.

  What she sees, not for the first time, is that Thomas Jefferson is elderly. His cheeks are like weathered canvas, sagging over the armature of his facial bones. That chin, which once had seemed the embodiment of wit and pride, now juts like a tree stump on a barren hilltop. This is how he will look when he is dead, Sally Hemings thinks.

  His eyelids flutter and open. At first he doesn’t seem to see her, but then his coppery yellow eyes focus and his thin lips lift into a one-sided smile. His voice phlegm-cracked, he asks, “What are you up to, sweet nymph?”

  “Shhh,” says Sally Hemings, who got out of bed with the intention of making a cup of tea and drinking it alone out on the porch.

  Thomas Jefferson slides his hand off his belly and pats her side of the bed. Without a word, she pulls back the covers and slips under. He lifts his arm so that she might nestle against him, her head on his shoulder, and once she has done so, he lowers his arm and lets his fingers rest on the rim of her pelvis. “I’ve finally figured out what I am going to do with my freedom,” he tells her.

  He no longer has any official responsibilities. He has been home from Washington for seven years.

  “What now?” she says.

  “A balloon!”

  Sally Hemings sighs and idly circles her fingers amid the white hairs on his chest.

  “Beverly is going to help me,” he says. “I was talking to him about it yesterday. He had an excellent idea.” Beverly is now seventeen.

  “Oh?”

  “We were talking,” says Thomas Jefferson, “about how the weight of a balloon limits the altitude to which it can ascend. And he suggested that the gondola should be fishnet on a wicker frame instead of solid wicker. I think that’s admirably practical. The fishnet’s far lighter, and there’d be no danger of falling through.”

  “What about the silk?” says Sally Hemings.

  “The silk?” says Thomas Jefferson. “You mean a silk fishnet?”

  “No. I mean how are you going to afford all that silk?”

  Thomas Jefferson remains silent.

  Sally Hemings continues, “Wouldn’t your balloon require enough silk to make one hundred gowns? Or five hundred? Or a thousand?”

  “Not a thousand,” he says. “Not five hundred either, I think.”

  “Still,” asserts Sally Hemings.

  Thomas Jefferson doesn’t speak for a long time; then he says, “You’ve grown so practical in your old age.”

  “Someone has to be.”

  “Not you!” He smiles mischievously. “You should leave practicality to Martha. She’s the mistress of Monticello, after all.”

  Sally Hemings is silent. She knows that the servants have been discussing whether Thomas Jefferson will have to sell them off to make good his debts.

  He slides his hand off her pelvis and slaps her buttock. “I’m making it for you, you know!” he says. “Didn’t I promise I’d take you up in a balloon? Remember how you wanted to fly when we were in Paris? Voler comme un oiseau! Don’t you want me to keep my promises?”

  “Only the ones you can afford to keep.”

  “I’m going to call it ‘Dusky Sal’!” he says.

  Sally Hemings laughs. “I think you should call it ‘Howling Atheist’! That’s a much better name for a balloon!”

  “Dusky Sal and the Howling Atheist,” says Thomas Jefferson. “I’m going to inscribe that in letters twenty feet high—big enough to be read from a mile away! Then you and I can ride our balloon across the Potomac and over Washington—then Philadelphia, New York, Boston. And anyone who sees us can write all the slanderous doggerel they want. We won’t care. We’ll just go up and up until we have reached the very top of the tallest cloud in the sky. I’ll fling a rug out across it. We’ll unload a basket filled with sausages, figs, bread and champagne, then lie on our rug in the warm sun, feeling gentle breezes blowing about us, and we won’t give a thought to anything anyone might be saying or thinking down below. We’ll just sip our champagne, talk nonsense, watch the birds fly.”

  Thomas Jefferson is silent a moment, then kisses Sally Hemings’s head. “How does that sound?” he asks.

  “We’ll fall through,” she answers.

  “I am making arrangements,” Thomas Jefferson says.

  “You have to trust me,” he says.

  “I already know,” he says.

  He is impatient. He is always impatient. “Please, there is no need to worry.”

  “It is an immensely complicated business, but I have everyone’s best interest at heart.”

  He pounds his hand on the table and speaks in a low, firm voice. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Why do you have so little faith in me?”

  “Sally, Sally, Sally!”<
br />
  What is the matter? Something is the matter. “No, nothing.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Then what? What did you mean? “This is a tiresome subject. I will be making the final arrangements this week.”

  He puts his hands against his temples. “I can assure you that not a day goes by when it is not on my mind.”

  “Why are you worried?”

  “It is a simple matter. There is nothing to worry about.”

  “I have had setbacks, but I will surmount them.”

  “You have to stop listening to those people.”

  “It is done.”

  “Mr. Cartney is trying to make things difficult, as usual, but the legislature is entirely on my side.”

  “It is impossible to make everyone happy, but no one can fault my arrangements.”

  He speaks so softly she can hardly hear. “Oh, Sally, I wonder if you shall ever forgive me.”

  He shouts, “I’ve told you a thousand times!”

  “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. And, in fact, I’ve already acquired all the resources I need.”

  He takes her hand in both of his and speaks tenderly. “Dear, dear Sally. You are a very good woman, but you worry too much.”

  “The House of Delegates is having one of its monarchist moments, but they will come round in the end.” Are you sure?

  “It is done,” he says. “I have arranged it. It is done, it is done, it is done.”

  And since Sally Hemings is doing an entirely adequate job of steering, Thomas Jefferson lays his oar across the canoe’s gunwales and looks around. It seems that they have traveled very far from Virginia—west, for hundreds and hundreds of miles. The quality of the forest has changed. The trees have grown massive, their boughs are like roads going off into a wilderness of foliage, air and sun, and above the trees are mountains that ascend jaggedly to such a height that their peaks shred the clouds. There is a low trumpeting along the banks, a splintering of wood and a sound that makes Thomas Jefferson think of stones being uprooted and slammed back into the earth, over and over. It takes him a while to see through the tangle of shadows and sun-shot foliage, but then everything comes clear: Walking along both banks are hirsute creatures so enormous that they are like moving hillsides, and they have long, arcing tusks and proboscises that slither and curl in the manner of snakes. These creatures are mammoths, and Thomas Jefferson is so excited that he cannot help but turn to Sally Hemings and tell her he had always known that mammoths still traversed the American continent. “I specifically directed Meriwether Lewis to bring me back one of these creatures,” he tells her, “but he disappointed me.” Sally Hemings says not a word. She has been silent throughout the entire trip, and now her silence has become a towering absence that he hardly dares to contemplate. Time passes. The mountains grow more distant, and the forest gives way to plains of such robust fertility that in the time it takes the canoe to pass, apples burst from branch tips in a shower of petals and go from green to purple-red; vines rise out of the earth, writhe along the ground and sprout pea pods, pumpkins and tomatoes; and acre after acre bristles with green blades that burgeon and elaborate until they make an ocean of shoulder-high wheat, glinting, hissing and swaying under restless breezes. And in the midst of these fields are villages of fountains and tree-shaded plazas, where each house is so perfectly proportioned it seems as light as an idea, and the citizens are all tall and broad-shouldered, strolling at their ease, strangers to poverty, illness and vice. “Such incredible beauty!” says Thomas Jefferson. “Are we not blessed to inhabit a continent so abundantly and spectacularly beautiful? Is there any doubt that here is where humanity shall finally be fashioned in God’s image?” Sally Hemings has lifted her oar out of the water, and the canoe begins to drift in slow circles. “I have no use for beauty,” she says. “It is only the mask by which we hide from ourselves the barbarity of life on this earth and the coldness of our own hearts. You think it enough to speak beautiful words, but that beauty is nothing unless those words are lived.” And now it is Thomas Jefferson whose silence becomes monumental. The canoe rotates slowly on the water as the sky darkens. It is night, then more than night, and soon nothing can be perceived but the sound of water over rocks.