“I’m glad you kept these,” he says. “The inkwell especially.”
She smiles hesitantly and nods. She cannot answer. She lets go of his arm.
“I don’t recognize the buckle, though,” he says. “Are you sure it’s mine?”
“It was in the lodge. I went there not long before I left Monticello. It was under the night table.”
Thomas Jefferson’s smile has vanished. He gives her hand a long, firm squeeze. “Oh, God, Sally.”
“Do you want to go?”
“No. That would be a waste. We’ve come all this way.”
Some of the displays are amusing—particularly the dioramas. One shows Thomas Jefferson standing in front of a fireplace playing a violin while mannequins representing his granddaughters, Ellen and Cornelia, both looking about eleven years old, whirl, elbows linked, in a merry jig. Almost everything is wrong with this exhibit. First of all, Cornelia absolutely hated dancing, in part because her actual proportions—unlike the mannequin’s—verged on the elephantine. Second of all, no one’s clothes make sense. Thomas Jefferson is wearing a braided, gold-buttoned, royal blue frock coat, which is far too formal for so humble and domestic an occasion. And his waistcoat is an absurd geranium red, such as a tavern keeper might wear. The girls, by contrast, are in mauves and pigeon gray, which they would have considered too dour and old-fashioned even for their grandmothers.
Most ludicrous of all are the faces of the mannequins, ostensibly based on portraits painted “from life.” Thomas Jefferson, at least, looks as if he belongs to his own family—though not any closer to himself than a second or third cousin, and the grin on his face is the sort that only accompanies intense discomfort of the lower intestine. The mannequins representing the girls both look like demented elves, neither bearing the faintest resemblance to the actual Ellen and Cornelia.
Sally Hemings is also in the scene, though her face is not visible, since she is shown watching the family merriment from a dark hallway.
In every single one of the dioramas and modern illustrations, Sally Hemings’s face is either in shadow or turned away from the viewer. This is because, as the captions to the displays repeat time and again, if any portraits of her were ever made, none has survived. She understands that the absence of her face represents the museum curator’s desire both for historical accuracy and to make a statement about her “invisibility” in Thomas Jefferson’s world, yet she can’t help but feel affronted that she alone, of all the people represented, is deprived of the most significant physical manifestation of identity, especially since the faces of every other member of the Jefferson family and social circle could hardly be less historically accurate.
She is also disturbed to see the knives, forks and spoons she remembers as shiny copper and silver looking black and withered, and the blue china plates off which she ate thousands of meals now only partially reconstructed assemblages of variously discolored fragments. Particularly disturbing is a display of miscellaneous bits of pottery unearthed at Monticello, in which she notices two arced pieces of the jam jar in which she buried La Petite. Thomas Jefferson passes right over this display without even noticing what it contains, and she doesn’t bother to inform him. She lingers behind as he moves on to other exhibits, however, and it is a long while before she can bring herself to stand near or talk to him again.
In the end she is moved to return to his side and, finally, to take hold of his hand by the responses of the other people in the gallery—about half of whom obviously have African ancestry. The overwhelming message of the show, rendered anew in exhibit after exhibit, is that when it came to the Africans with whom he spent almost every day of his life, Thomas Jefferson was a selfish and spitefully prejudiced hypocrite—which, indeed, he was, Sally Hemings realizes far more clearly now than she ever did at the time, though that is not all that he was. As he and she move between pools of illumination in the twilit rooms, people are constantly murmuring sourly to one another and making comments like, “What a bastard!” Or, “I used to admire this guy!”
Thomas Jefferson gets few second glances, however, and maybe one or two stares, but no one comes up to him, no one cups a hand over his or her mouth and whispers into a neighbor’s ear while glaring at him fiercely. But as he and Sally Hemings are watching a video in which some of his writings on slavery are read aloud by an actor, a man of African descent does look directly at Thomas Jefferson, and says in a loud voice, “This country would have been a hell of a lot better if all the white people had been sent to Ohio or Canada!”
Thomas Jefferson responds to this man’s words and, indeed, to every other overt or implicit disparagement he receives that day, as he always responds to criticism: by pretending not to notice it.
As he and Sally Hemings are leaving the video, she takes his hand in both of hers, moves her lips next to his ear. “I hope this is not more than you can bear,” she says.
At first he only sighs heavily without speaking. But after a long moment, he says, “It seems that I never . . .” He is silent another long moment, then shrugs and pats her hand. He doesn’t look her in the eye.
As they draw near the end—which is to say the beginning—of the show, they come to a vitrine displaying the very gown that Sally Hemings was wearing the day they went to see le Comte de Toytot fly in a hot-air balloon and that she was also wearing later that night, when Thomas Jefferson forced himself into her room.
They stand side by side in front of the vitrine, as if before an apparition, their faces tremulous with the repeated impacts of possibility and doubt. The gown, suspended in midair by nearly invisible fishing line, is the only item in the whole exhibit that seems untarnished by time, its yellow silk radiant in the spotlight and its white underskirts as brilliant and luxurious as clouds.
After a moment they notice a guard standing next to them. He is dark-skinned and heavyset, and he is smiling at Sally Hemings. “Would you like to try it on?” he says.
“Is that allowed?” she asks.
The guard nods beneficently. “For you, of course.”
He pulls out a set of keys, attached to his belt by a chain, unlocks the back of the vitrine and detaches the gown and its underskirts from the fishing line. As he hands them to Sally Hemings, he nods wordlessly toward the door of a women’s room.
She takes the gown and skirts into her arms as if they are the wasted body of a child. When she emerges from the women’s room, her expression is solemn and intent. She is barefoot, clutching her raincoat against her chest.
The guard has left the room, and for the first time since they entered the museum, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson are entirely alone. “You have to do me up,” she tells him, and turns her back. “The stays are missing, and there is no hoop. I’m sure I’ll look terrible.”
“It will be fine,” says Thomas Jefferson as he fastens the many little buttons from just below her waist to the nape of her neck.
And, indeed, when she hands him her raincoat and turns to face him, she seems hardly to have changed since she last wore the gown so many years ago.
She is looking into his eyes, waiting, still solemn and intent. He is afraid to speak. He is feeling so many different kinds of sorrow, but also a lightening of spirit—something very like hope.
She swallows and parts her lips, as if to form a word. But then she clamps her mouth into a thin seam, and the skin around it goes yellow. She is still looking into his eyes, and he is looking into hers.
The guard has returned, stepping sideways through the door, glancing over his shoulder toward the room he has just left. Then he looks directly at Sally Hemings, tilting his head to one side, his brow furrowing and his lips going into the lumps and twists of someone who wants to smile. Finally he shrugs and parts his open hands in the gesture that signifies helplessness. There are murmurs in the next room, and the whisper of shoe soles on polished wood.
Col. Jones had by this t
ime become very fond of me, and would not arrange any terms by which I could gain my freedom. He respected me, and would not let me see him take his “bitters.” He was surprised and pleased to find that I did not touch liquor. Being with and coming from such a family as Mr. Jefferson’s, I knew more than they did about many things. This also raised me in their esteem. My sister Isabel was also left a slave in Virginia. I wrote her a free pass, sent her to Boston, and made [an?] attempt to gain my own freedom. The first time [I fai?]led and had to return. My parents were here in Ohio and I wanted to be with them and be free, so I resolved to get free or die in the attempt. I started the second time, was caught, handcuffed, and taken back and carried to Richmond and put in jail. For the second time I was put up on the auction block and sold like a horse. But friends from among my master’s best friends bought me in and sent me to my father in Cincinnati, and I am here to-day.
—The Reverend Peter Fossett
“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”
New York Sunday World
January 30, 1898
The movie once seemed it would never end, but now the actor who wore the copper-colored wig is wearing a skinlike skullcap: pink, freckled and crossed by cobwebs of white. A pinkish putty has been attached to his face, and it does look remarkably like aged flesh, though unnaturally inflexible. The putty and skullcap are good enough, though, that the actor is clearly portraying a man in his mid-eighties, possibly even his nineties—which strikes Thomas Jefferson as a respectable life span; to want to live longer would be to ask for more than one’s fair allotment, unseemly in a democracy where all are meant to be equal.
Thomas Jefferson finds himself strangely content as he watches the actor compose his character’s end. There is something geological in the swirl of white sheets on the bed, and there is a dawnlike luminescence in the death chamber, as if the actor were a mountain range catching the first silver beams of a sun returning after a long season of darkness, so that his death seems a new beginning.
There is, indeed, much beauty in this death. The aesthetic dimensions of every detail have been maximized: The hands on the sheets, for example, approach each other upon the axes of a tilted 125-degree angle—they approach but never touch. Within these hands is the potential for a clasp, but that potential will be eternally unrealized. Likewise, strength is latent in their musculature, but they are the quintessence of frailty. The actor’s half-closed eyes, granted a bluebird brilliance by the silver light, appear the most flawless visual organs imaginable, and yet the images projected onto their internal concavity can only be mere shadows, unaccompanied by answering projections within the mind. And those putty-covered lips are so clearly poised to pronounce a word— What is it? Freedom? Sorrow? Equality? I?
No one will ever know.
Yet the true beauty of this scene is not in its splendidly articulated and suggestive composition but in its relationship to everything that has preceded it—a realization that throws Thomas Jefferson into perplexity. For what has this movie been to him besides an unending ordeal of humiliation, betrayal, idiocy and insult? And yet with all of its drawbacks, the life portrayed by the actor in the copper-colored wig and now the pink skullcap has a significance and sweep that Thomas Jefferson’s own life has never had and that he can only envy.
At first the tableau of the actor, the silver luminescence and the geological sheets seem to be disintegrating, but then Thomas Jefferson realizes that phrases composed of bronze letters affixed to stone are drifting in front of the tableau, or perhaps right through it, like ghosts. He recognizes the phrases as his own: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” . . . “All men are created equal” . . . “Commerce between master and slave is despotism” . . . “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship” . . . “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”
What Thomas Jefferson envies is the unity of these words and the man portrayed by the actor. They are one with the sweep and sentiment of his life, and he will live within them, in every way that matters, for at least as long as the words are remembered. The man within the movie is both the musician and the music, while Thomas Jefferson is only noise and a maker of noises. Yes, these words may have trailed behind his pen, but they are no closer to his essence than his ripping flatulence, his fearful shouts in the night, his groans, his burps, his donkey laughs, his exhausted panting, his moronic limericks and puns, his sobs, his lustful moans, his shouts of fury, his envious muttering, his lies, his dissimulations, his unrelenting inability to unite his words and his life.
Perhaps this death is exactly what Dolley Madison had thought so uplifting, but the longer its manifold beauty works upon Thomas Jefferson, the more profoundly he feels himself undone. There is a lie between himself and the man who is passing on with such quiet grandeur, but he doesn’t know whose lie it is, and he doesn’t know what the existence of the lie means—although he worries that it means that nothing good is true, that nothing he believes is real, that his very love is a betrayal of everyone and everything he wants so much to be happy or the occasion of happiness.
He looks for Dolley Madison so that he might tell her what the movie has done to him, but her seat is empty. And so is the seat where James Madison once sat stupefied and wonder-filled. And so, Thomas Jefferson soon discovers, is every other seat in the theater, from those in the very front row to those all but lost in obscurity beneath the single flickering blue beam. He is alone in the dark and the brilliance and the noise, the only one left to witness the actor achieve his ultimate significance.
Beverly Hemings is a white man and has been since 1822, when their father gave Harriet and him coach tickets and fifty dollars each so they could “run off” to Washington City. It is July 4, 1834, exactly eight years since his father’s death. When Beverly agreed to return to Virginia for the first time in more than a decade, he saw himself as fulfilling a promise. He wrote to his brothers, Madison and Eston, hoping they would bring their mother when they came, but only Madison stands among the crowd of upturned faces on Poplar Lawn. At the last minute, their mother said she didn’t have the strength. She told her boys to go without her, but Eston stayed behind.
As the earth falls away and Beverly’s wicker gondola swings gently beneath a huge sack of hydrogen gas, he looks toward the hazy silhouette of the mountains where he was born, and when he looks back, he can no longer distinguish his brother amid the crowd, which has begun to run. A smooth breeze has caught him and is sending him across Jefferson Street and out over the open countryside east of the city. The foremost members of the crowd have leapt a rail fence and are charging down through a meadow toward Great Run, but they will never keep up. Beverly Hemings is some two hundred feet above their heads and moving ever faster. He has already passed the meadow and is over a wooded valley. In seconds he will be looking down again on fields and streams and houses and barns. Farmers on their hay wagons, farmwives flinging potatoes to pigs, barefoot boys and old men trailing fishhooks in glinting creeks will look up and shield their eyes to be sure of what they see. Beverly will lean out over the rim of his gondola and give them each a wave, as if there were nothing more natural than to be drifting in the sunshine between treetop and cloud.
Thomas Jefferson sways in the middle of the hammering subway car. The lights flicker out again, and when they come back, he knows that Sally Hemings has seen him. How could she not? He is standing so close. The screech abates for a moment, then starts all over, drilling his ears. He is looking down at the tip of Sally Hemings’s boot. He doesn’t know what to do or say. He has no idea what will happen when, at last, his eyes meet hers.
. . .
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There is no greater gap in the record of Thomas Jefferson’s life than his relationship with Sally Hemings. The direct references to Hemings in the writings of people who actually knew her don’t add up to more than several hun
dred words, most of these being in Madison Hemings’s two-thousand-word memoir, and none of the references provide anything like a full portrait of her character, her appearance or her relationship with Jefferson; indeed the majority consist only of a sentence or two.
Beyond these references, her name, birth year and an account of the food, clothing and bedding she was given at Monticello are noted in Jefferson’s record books, as is the same information about her mother, siblings and children, but not in a way that significantly distinguishes Hemings or her family from any of the other enslaved people who also appear in the record books. We know how much Jefferson paid for her clothing while she was in France and that he boarded her for five weeks with his laundress in the spring of 1789, but we know nothing about the motives or consequences of either of these expenditures. She comes up in two Charlottesville censuses after she left Monticello following Jefferson’s death. In 1830 she and her sons Madison and Eston are classified as white, and in a special 1833 census of black residents of the parish, the family is listed among the “free Negroes & Mulattoes.” And lastly, a 1998 genetic test established that Eston Hemings was the child of a man bearing a Jefferson Y chromosome. The Jefferson family had long maintained that Sally Hemings’s children had been fathered by Thomas Jefferson’s brother or by Peter and/or Samuel Carr, his nephews, all of whom would indeed have had the crucial chromosome, but there is no evidence that these men were ever at Monticello when Hemings’s children were conceived, whereas Jefferson always was—a detail supported by numerous documents.
And that is just about all we have in the way of facts specifically concerning Sally Hemings. While it is hard to imagine that Jefferson would never have mentioned her in a letter during the thirty-seven years of their relationship, the twenty thousand pages of correspondence that he or his white family saw fit to preserve contain not even one clear reference to Hemings—although it is true that the letters he exchanged with his wife, Martha, are also absent from the trove. If Sally Hemings herself ever put a word to paper, it, too, has not survived, though we do have writing by two of her brothers—none of it mentioning her. And although there are dozens of paintings, drawings, etchings and statues of Thomas Jefferson, no image of Sally Hemings taken from life has ever been identified.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 53