Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  “And who have we here?” he says.

  The little girl rotates her face back against her mother’s neck, but Betty pulls her away and lowers her to the floor. “This here’s Sally,” Betty says. “She’s my youngest.”

  As soon as the girl is standing on her plump, bare feet, she grabs her mother’s skirt and hides her face in it. “Go on, Sally. Say good morning to Mr. Jefferson.” Betty tries to tug her skirt from her daughter’s hands, but the little girl won’t let go.

  “We been traveling two days,” Betty explains. “And Sally ain’t had a wink of sleep the whole time! Ain’t that true, Little Apple? You ain’t slept in two days.”

  Touching the girl lightly on the shoulder, Thomas Jefferson says, “Welcome to your new home.”

  She flings back her head and looks at him with a fierce scowl. “No! Not my home!”

  Thomas Jefferson laughs. “Now, that’s a girl who knows her mind!”

  “Sally!” scolds her mother. “Don’t you talk to Mr. Jefferson like that! What’s got into you?”

  “Not my home!” She pulls her mother’s skirt entirely around her head.

  Thomas Jefferson laughs.

  He is thirty-one. When his wife knocked at his study door, he was supposed to have been writing “A Summary View of the Rights of British North America,” a position paper for the Virginia delegation to the first Continental Congress. His hair is the luminous red of a dawn in July; his eyes are the color of roasted peanuts.

  The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was, unhappily, introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  “A Summary View of the Rights of British North America”

  July 1774

  In Thomas Jefferson’s dream, Sally Hemings is wearing only a white linen shift, torn at the front, and revealing an expanse of radiant skin. She does not notice him as she writes. He wants to talk to her, approach her, but is unable to move. And yet, at the same time, he has risen into the air and seems to be drawing nearer to her, although that may only be a result of his altered perspective.

  The lamp on his desk has not been lit. The even, sand-yellow glow filling the entire room emanates, Thomas Jefferson realizes, from Sally Hemings’s resplendent face, her exposed breast, and even from those parts beneath her shift, beneath the desk and otherwise hidden from view.

  And now he can actually see what she is writing—but it is not writing at all; it is a fierce assault of senseless scratches, blots, crossings-out, jabs, loops, squiggles, splashes, gashes, senile quaverings, lightning bolts, comets, eruptions, bullet holes and crevasses, running in all directions, superimposed, without any regard for horizontality, order or even the paper’s edge.

  After a while Thomas Jefferson realizes that she is compiling notes toward an invention—an iron machine, powered by steam, that moves along an iron road and makes an unending hawk screech, so terrifically loud that anyone hearing it would be instantly struck deaf. “Why would you want to make such a thing?” he is finally able to ask. Sally Hemings fixes him in a gaze of contempt. She cannot speak. She is mute. And her muteness so terrifies him that his legs jerk and arms shoot out, he cries aloud and finds himself awake in the cold, blue night, alone in his bed.

  . . . I cannot bear to be myself. I feel trapped inside my own body, and inside the life I have led. This day I have seen such sorrow, cruelty and injustice that my mind reels at the recollection of it, and my stomach is so sick with loathing that I can hold nothing down. Indeed, I have already vomited three times—twice on that acre of frozen earth where I witnessed the craven depravity of people I have lived with and even loved all my life, and once just now as I held my face over the top of the privy’s long, filth-gnarled tunnel. Nothing I believed seems true anymore. As late as this very morning, when I knew precisely what was going to happen, I could not grasp the enormity of it. I allowed myself to believe that I would still be possessed of dignity and decency afterward, and that there were limits to the horror my life—or any life—could contain. How could I have lived in such ignorance? How could I have believed so many lies, and lied so often to myself? Why is it that every time I glimpsed the faintest shadow of the truth, I covered my eyes and ran as far as I could in the opposite direction? I feel as if I never actually lived my life but only sleepwalked through it, dreaming. . . .

  There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  Notes on the State of Virginia

  Written in 1781–82, published in 1787

  Earth has covered the face of Martha Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson will not come out of his private chambers. Jupiter knocks on the door with the knuckle of his index finger.

  “Mr. Tom,” he calls. None of the other servants dare call the master anything other than his last name, but Jupiter has served Thomas Jefferson since they were both boys at Shadwell, and is in the habit of saying they are as close as brothers. He knocks a second time. “Mr. Tom, Ursula got some soup here for you. Barley soup! You want her to come in and leave it on the table?”

  All four servants—Betty Hemings and Sally Hemings, in addition to Jupiter and Ursula—hold their breath as they wait for a reply. Thomas Jefferson has been locked in his chambers ever since the funeral, two days ago. He hasn’t addressed a word to anyone in all that time, not even his three daughters, nor has he had anything to eat or drink. The servants listen but hear only the insistent tweedle of a Carolina wren.

  Jupiter knocks a third time. “Mr. Tom?”

  Still no response, nor any sound that might indicate a living soul behind the door. The servants craning their ears in the dim hallway cast one another worried glances. “Maybe we should try the library,” says Jupiter.

  The library is connected to Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom and study but has a separate door just a few feet down the hall. Jupiter knocks on that door, waits, then says, “Mr. Tom?” He is about to knock again when a long, doglike moan sounds within the room and ends with an emphatic, “Leave . . . me . . . be!”

  All of the servants, except Sally Hemings, exchange relieved glances. Sally Hemings is afraid of Thomas Jefferson. She is nine years old and she can’t remember ever having said a word to him.

  As they make their way to the kitchen staircase, Ursula says, “Least now we know we not going to have two funerals.”

  “Not yet anyway,” says Jupiter.

  Ursula doesn’t say anything because she is descending the steep staircase and has
to concentrate on not spilling the soup.

  “Never in my life,” says Betty Hemings, “have I seen a man more crazy for a woman than that Mr. Jefferson.”

  “That’s the truth,” says Jupiter. “He worshipped the ground she walked on.” They are in the kitchen now and can speak more freely.

  “She was pretty enough, I guess,” says Betty Hemings, “but I never saw the reason in it.”

  “I’m sorry to speak badly of the dead,” says Ursula, putting the tureen down on the table, “but that woman didn’t know nothing but how to complain.”

  “She was always a sickly thing,” says Betty Hemings. “I was there the minute she came out between her mammy’s legs. Seemed like forever before she figured out she got to breathe if she wants to live. And that’s how it always was. That girl was never sure if she wanted to live or die.”

  “And she made sure everybody knew it,” says Ursula.

  Jupiter says, “But he loved her.”

  “He did,” says Betty. “No denying that. Of course, he’s a sad man, too.”

  “Oh, yes,” says Jupiter. “But Mr. Tom got good reasons to be sad. I know that for a fact.”

  This is where the conversation ends. Jupiter is always letting on that he knows all kinds of things about Thomas Jefferson, but he’ll never say what they are, so there is no point in asking.

  Betty Hemings calls out to her daughter, “What you doing?”

  Sally Hemings is still standing on the top step of the staircase. She was the last to descend, and so the only one who heard Thomas Jefferson start up again: long, off-key moans that fall in pitch, again and again and again, sounding more like they come from a ghost than a living person. Sally Hemings’s fingers are cold and filmed with sweat. Her heart is rattling in her chest.

  . . . I am calmer now. I have even had some sleep—on that bed so lately Mr. Jefferson’s but now no one’s at all. I have arisen feeling that I must solve the mystery of how I came to live this life I have no choice but to acknowledge as my own. Mr. Jefferson often said that he only knew what was true when he was writing. I am sitting at his desk, using his pen and wearing his spectacles. I can only hope they serve me better than they did him. . . .

  The story of my own life is like a fairy tale, and you would not believe me if I told to you the scenes enacted during my life of slavery. It passes through my mind like a dream. Born and reared as free, not knowing that I was a slave, then suddenly, at the death of Jefferson . . .

  —The Reverend Peter Fossett

  “Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

  New York Sunday World

  January 30, 1898

  After an unimaginable length of time, Thomas Jefferson has enrolled in art school. His goal his first year is to do a taxonomy of color, which amounts to an inventory of things—for what is the reality of that red but a sunset in October beyond the steel mills? And of that pale brown—or is it gold—but a muddy road in Thailand? And of that blue but a flash on a raven’s back?

  He has just taken his seat on the subway, when he spots Sally Hemings standing by the door a bit down and across from him. There is no mistaking that tapering jaw, that long arc between shoulder and pelvis, those narrow eyes, so deeply gray—the summer-storm gray of newborns, which also contains the potential for brown. Her head is bent over a book, but she doesn’t seem fully absorbed by what she is reading. Has she, perhaps, noticed him and decided to act as if she hasn’t? Should he get up and walk over and pretend that running into her on the subway is only happy coincidence? Would she walk away? Would she join in his pretense? What if he can’t speak?

  All the while Thomas Jefferson is watching Sally Hemings, their train is rounding a bend, the steel of its wheels grinding against the steel of the tracks and setting off a ragged shriek that mounts and mounts inside the tunnel to such a degree that Sally Hemings tucks her book into her armpit and puts her fingers into her ears. At that moment the lights go out, but the shriek continues, unabated.

  Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. He is eleven. His sister Mary is thirteen. Her feet are on a mound of hay. Her back is bent over a hacked beam. Her hair is in the dirt. Blood is filling her eye. His mother is shouting, “Get up! Get up, I say!”

  She has been shouting for a long time. Thomas Jefferson heard her from the house. She was shouting, “Do you think I’m so stupid! Do you think I don’t know about the sheep!” He was reading a book about India. And in that book it said that trees in India have loaves of bread hanging from their branches. He wanted to keep reading. The loaves are a kind of fruit, the book said. But Mary was shouting, “No, Mammy! No, Mammy! No! No!” But it wasn’t really a shout. There is strength in a shout. All Thomas Jefferson heard in his sister’s voice was her weakness. All he heard was that she was going to let herself die.

  But then the screams started. Like the sound a hinge might make but so loud they cut right into his head. He also heard a sound he could not bear to hear. A very small sound. It was the sound of splitting flesh. He heard it, but he could not bear to hear it, so he didn’t hear it. But he saw it. He saw it as he sat over his book. His sister’s flesh tearing. The blood flowing out of her body. Later he will remember putting a length of ribbon between the pages and closing his book, but nothing more until the moment he is standing in the doorway of the barn, his back against the jamb. He cannot speak.

  “Malingerer!” his mother shouts. She is holding the rake above her head, looking down at his sister, whose blood is overflowing her eye. “For the last time!” The rake jerks high above her head. Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. “Get up! Get up! Get up!” It was a mistake to have come. Nothing good is going to happen now. Now he has been caught in the same weakness as his sister. His mother is looking at him.

  “You!” she says. “You!” Her eyes are so wide and fierce they seem to have irises within irises within irises. The eyes say, You are the one to blame! You!

  Now the rake is falling. Its teeth strike the dust and hay fragments. It balances on edge an instant, then falls flat, teeth up, between his sister and himself.

  His mother is gone.

  Mary is not moving. Her blood is brilliant on her cheek, flowing into her hair.

  Jupiter is standing in the cow stall. “You see it?” he says.

  Thomas Jefferson cannot speak.

  “You see it? It done happen again. She got the Devil in her good this time.”

  “She killed Mary,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “She’d like to,” says Jupiter.

  Thomas Jefferson is standing over his sister. He thinks maybe the blood is not coming out of her eye. There is an opening in her eyebrow that is like an eye itself, and he thinks the blood is coming out of that. Jupiter is standing beside him.

  “Everything’s all right now,” says Jupiter.

  And Thomas Jefferson says, “She’s not moving.”

  “She’ll be all right. We get her cleaned up, she’ll be just fine.”

  “She’s dead,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  Jupiter puts his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s shoulder and gives him a squeeze. “Don’t you worry, Master Tom. I saw what your mammy done. Miss Mary just got whupped upside her head. She’ll be all right.”

  Mary’s lips are moving. Then they stop. Then they move again and her hand lifts to her bloody temple. Her eyes are open. The left eye filled with confusion and fear, the right eye filled with blood.

  “You see!” says Jupiter. “What I tell you! Everything’ll be all right.”

  Thomas Jefferson cannot speak.

  Thomas Jefferson is watching the movie of his courtship with Martha. He has never seen a movie before, and for a long while he is distracted by the blue beam crossing the darkness overhead. At first he wonders if the beam isn’t sunlight channeled through lenses and lighting up a stage where actors are performing. But that doesn’t make sense, partly because of the strange, twitchy fl
atness of the actors and their brilliant colors but mostly because they keep appearing and disappearing in instants and sometimes loom as large as houses. Perhaps the light is shining on some sort of painting in which the colors (through the influence of magnets?) constantly swirl and reassemble. But how can the images speak? Are there actors behind the huge painting? And if so, why are their voices so loud? Finally he decides that what he is looking at are colored shadows of the sort that magicians project onto clouds of smoke, although he still can’t figure out how the images move. He gives up all such ruminations when he hears his name spoken by one of the gigantic actors.

  He has been brought to this dark room (a theater, it would seem) as a sort of joke by James and Dolley Madison, who are sitting on either side of him. They didn’t give him a clue as to where they were taking him but only told him he was being kidnapped so had to be blindfolded. They didn’t remove the blindfold until he was seated and loud voices had begun to boom in the darkness.

  His name is spoken by a young actor in a copper-colored wig, sitting in a tree and holding an open book, on the spine of which is a single word in huge gold letters: LOCKE. The young man is looking down from his branch at an extraordinarily beautiful young woman wearing knee breeches—a shocking concept for Thomas Jefferson. She is riding a palomino along a forest path and has stopped to converse with the young man in the tree. She looks as if the sun is inside her and it is beaming out through her cheeks, eyes, lips and her brilliantly white teeth. She tells the young man that she had not known there were orangutans in this forest. When he inquires after her name, she laughs, digs her heels into the horse’s ribs and gallops down the path, her golden ponytail waving in perfect synchrony with the horse’s own golden tail.