by Max Byrd
He was clearly not in the mood to write. It would be far easier to read. The next installment of printer’s proofs lay in the halo of his candle, Queries VIII-XVIII of Noted on Virginia. At random he chose a page from the middle and in less than a minute saw exactly why Jefferson had kept them a secret.
Not in a better mood, James Hemings thought.
He stood by the window fiddling with the string on the curtain and watched William Short take his seat at the long dining table opposite Jefferson. It was eight o’clock, early for Short, late for Jefferson, who had already gone through his invariable morning routine of washing his feet in a basin of cold water and writing for twenty minutes in his letterbook. Then he had played his violin in his room for an hour. Then sat down to have breakfast and open his mail. Now Short comes in carrying a stack of long printed papers and staring pop-eyed like a frog at him.
James gave the string one last twist and left the room.
In Virginia by unspoken rule, Short remembered, watching the young black man go, a gentleman always refers to “my servants,” never “my slaves.”
He murmured his morning greetings to Jefferson, tucked his serviette into his collar, and waited. Two minutes later, James returned from the kitchen and began to spread out in front of him a dish of butter, a wicker basket filled with warm bread, and a wooden-handled pewter jug of coffee that Jefferson had bought on one of his excursions to the Palais Royal. While James worked, Short sat very stiff, chin back. He was acutely aware, as if for the first time in his life, of the mulatto’s bright skin, his curly brown hair like an Englishman’s, his absolutely impassive and impenetrable face.
“Yes,” Jefferson said from the other end of the table, sliding his cup forward and smiling, “thank you, James.”
Pour. Bow. Neaten the mail and papers. Where did James go after he served them each morning? Short looked at his gold pocket watch. Eight-six. James went to his culinary school in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré from nine till dusk, then returned to the house to cook and clean. He was light enough, almost, to pass for white; but anyone who looked could see the unmistakable Negroid flare to his nostrils, the sullen flat yellow of his eyes. You met blacks and mulattoes everywhere in Paris. Here they were legal French citizens, free as anybody else; in fact, if rumor could be believed, they were highly prized as sexual partners by certain ladies (and not only ladies) of the nobility. What did James Hemings think when he ran across them in the streets?
“Well, I’ve just received a mysterious note from John Paul Jones,” Jefferson said. He held up a handwritten card for Short’s inspection. “He asks me to meet him tomorrow at the Hôtel d’Orléans and inquire, if you can credit it, for ‘the gentleman just arrived.’ ”
“Meet him in a hotel, and not by name?” Short pulled his mind away from James Hemings. The heroic admiral John Paul Jones, short, muscular, and possessed of the most musical Welsh accent in the world, was much given to intrigue with French ladies; he understands their toilette better than a ship’s rigging, Abigail Adams had sniffed—but in matters of masculine business the admiral was usually candor itself.
“I will hazard a guess,” Jefferson said, laying the note aside, “that he means to tell me—in confidence—what the Russian ambassador has said about a war against the Turks. The Empress Catherine is a restless person. For months she’s been making bellicose noises, but her navy, as everyone knows, lacks experienced officers.”
“Then she means to hire Jones as a mercenary to lead her fleet.”
“In which case, since Jones’s loyalty is entirely American, we may want to ask him to report on the state of her preparations.”
“Spy for us?”
“Well, travel for us.” Jefferson slid his cup forward, and James stepped from his post by the window to refill it. Breakfast, Short had found, was the only time of day when Jefferson was willing to be leisurely and inefficient; as soon as he rose to go to his study, concentration went up around him like a wall.
“The Empress Catherine,” he continued musingly, “much covets the Black Sea, which she thinks of as a Russian lake, and she wants Constantinople as well, for its port.” He leaned back in his usual boneless, slouching way; his sandy hair caught the light from the window and seemed to turn pure white. “In 1774 she made the old Tartar Khan declare the Crimea independent. Now she clearly means to drive the Turks out of that ‘independent’ zone and push as far south as she can. But so far, her Black Sea fleet is no more than a scratch collection of ships, manned by serfs and Cossacks. She wants someone to mold a navy. Paul Jones wants a navy to mold.”
Short glanced impatiently at his stack of page proofs, then at James, who was just leaving the room.
“Sir—”
Like the musician he was, Jefferson possessed an exquisite sensibility to tones of voice. The undertones of voice, Short thought. Jefferson put down his cup and leaned forward.
“Sir, these proofs of your book …”
“They present a problem.”
“Yes, sir.” Short selected one page from the six or seven he had set apart. Silently he carried it to Jefferson’s end of the table. The sunlight fell squarely on the paragraph he had marked with his pen; the paper seemed to shimmer and burn under it like an unbodied flame.
In the very first session held under the republican government, the assembly passed a law for the perpetual prohibition of the importation of slaves. This will in some measure stop the increase of the great political and moral evil, while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature.
“Query eight,” Jefferson said dryly. “ ‘What is the number of inhabitants in Virginia?’ I went beyond the strict terms of the question, I suppose, but I wanted to make the point that Virginians recognize slavery for an evil.” He pushed the sheet away. “Many of them do,” he said.
Short started to speak, but instead chose another proof sheet.
It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.
“ ‘Extermination of the one or the other race,’ ” Short repeated. He rubbed his mouth, then looked down at Jefferson’s calm face. “This is apocalyptic. This is terrifying. ‘Deep rooted prejudices—’ ”
Jefferson picked up the sheet of paper. “It may also be true. You grew up among blacks, Mr. Short. You own slaves, if I’m not mistaken.”
Short rubbed his mouth again. “When my father died, my brother and I inherited twenty slaves. My brother controls them.”
Jefferson smiled ironically but said nothing.
Short felt his face grow warm. He sat down slowly beside Jefferson, folded a sheet of paper, and began again. “You are for abolition.”
“I am for emancipation,” Jefferson said. It was a lawyer’s distinction. “I am for emancipation and then colonization. What I want to see is every slave, every black and mulatto in America, placed in ships and returned wholesale, all of them, every one to the African coast.”
“But—” Short spread his hands at the impossibility of it.
“The great unanswered question of our times,” Jefferson said. He stopped, turned his spoon in the cup of tepid coffee, then placed it neatly on the saucer. “The great question is the nature of ‘human nature’—I used the phrase quite deliberately in the passage you marked. What is a human being? What is human nature? Tiny, insignificant, trivial, like Gulliver’s Lilliputians? Or irrational and squalid and bestial like his Yahoos? Or even noble, capable of growth? What does the phrase actually mean?”
He stood and walked to the window, where he appeared to be starin
g out at passing carriages and walkers.
“I think the black is inferior to us,” he said finally, still staring at the street. “I would willingly be proved wrong, but I do think it. Inferior in reason. Inferior in body. On the great scale of being that runs from angels to insects, I am not even certain where, as an object of science, the black man fits—are they really human like us? They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidneys, more by the glands in the skin. Their smell is disagreeable. They bear heat better, cold worse than we do. Given a choice the black male always declares in favor of the superior beauty of the white female—”
“But to say these things in a book?”
Jefferson turned back. He folded his arms. “Well, I wanted you to see them because I ask your advice. Once the book is printed, what should I do with it? A few copies I’ve already decided to distribute here in Paris.”
Short nodded. The most enlightened Parisians spoke openly for the abolition of slavery everywhere.
“But the other copies … I’ve written Madison to ask his opinion as well. My plan at the moment is to send a hundred copies to the students at William and Mary to place the question of emancipation rationally before them. Perhaps a new generation may yet succeed where all others have failed.”
Short leaned back in the chair and ran his fingers through his hair; when he looked, his hand was flecked all over with sparkling white “frizzle” powder. What could be more unreal than to sit in a gilt-papered room in Paris, three thousand miles from Virginia, from William and Mary—automatically he checked himself by glancing at the unmistakably French building across the street, with its strange gray mansards and its carved Normandy clock over the door. Last night he had dreamed he would stay in the rue Taitbout forever.
“Because whether or not the black is inferior to the white,” Jefferson said slowly, “does not bear on the right or wrong of slavery.” He chose another sheet of paper, from far down in the stack, and handed it to Short, then returned to the window. From there he added, as if to himself, “It is a matter of human nature. When you hold absolute power over another person, you are yourself corrupted. Despotism is degradation. The slave cringes. The master rots.”
Short looked down at the page Jefferson had given him. To avoid reading it, he calculated the useless fact that if Jefferson had begun to write his book in the months after Tarleton’s raid, he must have still been writing it during the long summer weeks that his wife lay dying.
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.
Short replaced the sheet on the table and stood up himself. In the cavity of his stomach, where he always felt fear strongest, a chill, blank, palpable space had opened.
“To possess a living soul,” Jefferson murmured from the window.
“This will infuriate the slaveowners and the planters.”
Jefferson crossed his arms.
“They will see it as encouraging rebellion.”
Jefferson said nothing.
“It is a very brave thing, sir, to publish this.”
But Jefferson seemed to be slipping further and further away. Any reference to his personal qualities had that effect, always. Was it coldness? Or pride? Or reserve? What was the nature of Jefferson’s nature?
Below them on the street James Hemings descended the steps. He paused on the cobblestone and lifted his face to the warm morning sun. Although it was now May, he still wore the heavy sheepskin coat he had worn throughout the winter. He flapped his arms once or twice, feeling the air and weather and pulse of the morning as a human being does.
Short, who recognized in himself more and more a man driven by emotion and impulse rather than logic, spoke daringly: “By the laws of France, James is now legally a free man, is he not, sir?”
Jefferson watched him turn the corner of the street and disappear, but made no answer.
The Ace of Spades had completely white hair on her head.
Short drummed his fingers on the wooden counter of Pierres’s print shop and wondered why on earth he had thought of that.
The association of ideas? He glanced from the counter to the long cylindrical rolls of white printing paper stacked along the back wall. Pierres himself rose like an inky Neptune from the lower shelves where he had been grappling with string and scissors and slapped a package ungraciously onto the counter, but Short ignored it. He had read in John Locke’s philosophy that our minds work by association of ideas, one idea pushing into the next like a chain of falling dominoes. What could he have just been thinking of? Women? A good bet, always—Jefferson’s favorite novelist Laurence Sterne was full of jokes about men’s risqué associations. Or white printer’s paper? Hardly. Frowning, Short paid out coins into Pierres’s palm. White rolls of paper had no logical meaning at all.
And then as he turned away, thanking Pierres and clutching his package, he saw—for the second time, he realized—the frizzled white hair of John Adams’s wig, marching past the printer’s window.
When Short reached the door, Adams had come to a halt twenty feet away, back turned, hands on the hips of his black frock coat, white wig perched like a snowball on a stump. At Short’s call he spun around.
“I thought you were in London!”
“I’m not,” Adams said, spreading his hands. “I’m lost.”
Short turned automatically to look at the street sign—rue Saint-Jacques; beneath it the usual midday chaos of wagons, horses, pedestrians: life exploding from the paddock. He grabbed Adams’s sleeve and pulled him back out of the crowd.
“But you left three days ago!”
Adams was unfolding a sheet of paper and shaking his head. “No, no. Delayed again. Miserable business with the miserable treaty. I sent a note to Jefferson—two notes—you’ve probably been gallivanting with the ladies in Saint-Germain.” Short opened his mouth to protest, but Adams pressed on in his usual brusque fashion. “I came to town an hour ago and had the fiacre let me off here”—he gestured downhill toward Notre-Dame—“now I can’t find the street.” He pursed his lips and pronounced his strongest New England expletive: “Firecrackers.”
Short squinted at the paper. “Sir, you’re on the wrong side of the river.”
“I want Verrières’s store. That’s off the Quai des Grands Augustins, yes?”
Short shook his head. Seven months had made him a complete Parisian. “It’s in the Palais Royal, on the Right Bank, one mile and two bridges from here.”
Adams groaned. Under the white wig his face blazed red with exertion and heat. He looked up at the sun, down at the crumpled note. “It’s the store where all the prices are already set,” he muttered, half to himself. “The man pins a card with the price on every item. The newest thing. Don’t have to bargain. Mrs. Adams wants bolts of silk for London.”
“Palais Royal,” Short said firmly.
“Walk me there, to the bridge at least.”
Short took his arm and started up the rue Saint-Jacques, winding left in the direction of the Pont Neuf, the “New Bridge,” which everybody made a point of saying was in fact the oldest bridge in Paris. As they pushed through the crowds, Adams raised his voice to explain the disaster of the treaty. Of all the European rulers, he said, only Frederick of Prussia had faith enough to sign a trade agreement with the thirteen squabbling, undeveloped American states. But the post crept at a French snail’s pace; the text had to be approved in two languages; all three American commissioners must sign—and Franklin and Adams would both be gone in a matter of days.
“Hopeless,” Adams declared, and came to one of his sudden, inexplicable halts. In front of them red-and-white-printed posters fluttered up a brick wall like a patchwork paper tree, two stori
es high (all commercial posters were actually illegal—“défense d’afficher,” the official posters announced at every corner—but no Parisian building escaped them). “ ‘Come see the puppet show,’ ” Adams said, reading the nearest one. “They must mean Versailles.” Then he poked a stubby finger at the package under Short’s arm.
“Mr. Jefferson’s printing work?”
“Yes, sir. New calling cards.” Adams bobbed his head knowingly; two weeks ago, on May 2, Jefferson’s official appointment as minister plenipotentiary had finally arrived from Congress. “And his book.” Short pulled aside the waxy green paper that was Pierres’s trademark to reveal a half-dozen little octavo volumes.
“Ah!” Adams seized the first volume and cracked it open, greedy for print, indifferent to the stream of jostling passersby. He had Jefferson’s addiction to books, Short thought, trying to block the crowd for him. (All of them did, he corrected himself: Franklin, Adams, Madison; even the soldier Washington would quote Cato by the yard to his lieutenants.) On the cobblestone, peering, grumbling, Adams flipped the pages with one hand, read, flipped again. Abruptly he snapped it shut and handed it back.
“Now you know, I think of writing a book myself,” he said as they resumed walking. In sight of the river now, they had to battle for every inch. A herd of oxen was rounding the corner in an armada of horns and dust. Along the walls on either side of the street, like sentinels, the licensed beggars of the quartier had set themselves up in double lines, holding their green permits to beg in one hand, gesturing and snatching at sleeves with the other. Shopgirls and matrons squeezed by Short, giggling; a ragman tilted his cart. Every few yards a chanteur stood singing—different songs—and rattling a tin cup. Over the din of voices and cattle Adams pushed his thought. “I would make it a comment on democratic government,” he said, scowling at the beggars, “on the theories of democracy, starting with the ancients.” They retreated to let a barrel-laden wagon, big as a ship, scrape through. “Jefferson has his pedantic streak, you know.” Short put a hand to his ear. “All right, all right,” Adams said impatiently, allowing himself to be dragged into the nearest doorway. “You worship him, he’s a statesman, he’s written a book. Well, I remember in the Confederation Congress, one day Robert Morris delivered his proposal for the national currency—it had got to the place one state wouldn’t accept another state’s money—and Morris came up with a new national unit, calculated down to the 1,440th part. He said it was the most mathematically perfect coin in the world. Jefferson took one look, came back himself three days later with a proposal that the national currency be called a ‘dollar’ and be divided by decimals—pennies and dimes.”
