Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  In an instant the young woman reappears, but this time in a royal blue gown cut to expose so much of her flawless pink chest that her bodice can only be held up by some sort of adhesive applied to her skin. Chamber music is playing. She is looking with surprise into the eyes of the actor in the copper-colored wig, who asks her debonairly if anyone had informed her that orangutans would be attending this ball. It is not until the young woman at last reveals her name that Thomas Jefferson realizes, with a shock that makes him unable to draw a breath, whom the actors are portraying. It never occurred to him that these two people might be Martha and himself, in part because of their absurd appearance and strange accents and because Martha’s hair was a luxuriant chestnut brown rather than blond but mainly because the circumstances of their actual meeting could hardly have been more different.

  He was twenty-seven and following the road from Monticello to Williamsburg, where he represented Albemarle County at the Virginia House of Burgesses. It was one of those warm spring days when the sky is glaring white and merely looking across the rolling fields of newly turned earth can put a dull node of pain at the center of each eyeball. Jupiter was driving, and they had been talking for more than an hour about what a sad and lonely man Thomas Jefferson’s father had been and about why he had never been able to resist his wife’s mad convictions. This conversation had exhausted them both, and they had lapsed into thoughtful silences, listening to the cuffs of the horses’ hooves on the rutted clay, the clinking harnesses and the long, buzzy drones of the cicadas.

  A large brick house with dormer windows stood about twenty yards off the road. As they approached it, Thomas Jefferson thought he heard the high, clear tones of a woman singing. At first he could see no one near the house, but then a slender young woman, all in black, stepped out of a cluster of boxwoods, took hold of the front of her skirt and climbed the steps onto the portico at the front of the house. She was no longer singing and seemed entirely unaware of being observed as she opened the door and disappeared into the house.

  From her slender waist and arms, and the spryness with which she mounted the steps, she seemed hardly more than twenty. But her head hung as she walked, as if she were deep in thought, and her black gown and shawl could only mean that, young as she was, she had been widowed. Her song had been filled with sorrow, yet sung so beautifully that it came to Thomas Jefferson as a perfect joy.

  Her voice, her dark silhouette and her light step as she entered her house—these would come back to Thomas Jefferson many times over the remaining day and a half of his journey. And then he simply forgot the young woman—to such an extent that he never even thought to glance at her house on his return trip a month later.

  He wouldn’t remember her until six months afterward, when he and John Fairfield were traveling from Williamsburg to Monticello and John asked Jupiter to turn their carriage down the muddy drive leading up to the house. When Thomas Jefferson had suggested that John spend a week with him at his mountaintop sanctuary, John had merely said that he knew some “good people” they might spend the night with along the way. He’d said nothing about where the house was or who the people were (except for mentioning that the man of the house had a “nigger wife”), and he certainly hadn’t said anything about a widowed daughter with a beautiful singing voice. As their carriage rattled up to the house, Thomas Jefferson’s pulse became audible in his eardrums and he wished that he had thought to change his linen before setting out that morning.

  He didn’t catch a glimpse of the widowed daughter until he was already seated at the dinner table with several members of the Wayles family, adults and children. She arrived late, touching her lips with the middle finger of her perfectly flat hand as she apologized for having been detained. Her father, at the head of the table, looked somberly into his lap as she spoke. When she took the seat immediately to his left, he gave her a knowing, sympathetic glance and covered her hand with his own.

  “Mr. Jefferson,” he said, looking down the table to where Thomas Jefferson and John Fairfield were seated on either side of the vacant chair, where the woman of the house would have sat (the last of John Wayles’s three wives had been dead a good nine years by then), “allow me to introduce my daughter, Mrs. Skelton.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Thomas Jefferson.

  Mrs. Skelton nodded without quite meeting his eye and said something he couldn’t catch.

  He was relieved to see that, while perfectly nice-looking, she was nowhere near as beautiful as the woman he had imagined after he heard her singing. She had broad cheekbones and a long jaw, unusually squared for a woman, but she had enormous eyes exactly the pewter gray of her father’s, though with a greenish cast by candlelight.

  She and Thomas Jefferson were seated diagonally across the table and too far apart to talk. Every now and then, he would glance in her direction just as she would seem to be turning her eyes away. He could never be sure if she had, in fact, been looking at him, and so he glanced toward her with increasing frequency, hoping to catch her before she shifted her gaze—until, at last, worried that she or someone else at the table might think he was paying her undue notice, he forced himself to devote all of his attention to the elderly woman to his left: Mrs. Eppes, who seemed to know a great deal about the art of breeding sheep.

  Plates of food came and went. Bottles of cider and wine were opened and emptied. Mr. Wayles’s face went redder and redder, and his nose turned a shiny purple.

  “Mr. Jefferson!” he called out some two hours into the meal. “Was that your fiddle case I saw my boy bringing into the house a while ago?”

  Thomas Jefferson was silent a moment, not sure what he might be getting into. “I suppose it was.”

  “So you play the fiddle?”

  Thomas Jefferson laughed and glanced at John. “I try.”

  “Well, Martha here”—he took hold of Mrs. Skelton’s hand—“is a genius at playing the piano. What do you say you two honor us by playing a duet?”

  “Oh, Pappy, no!” cried Mrs. Skelton, putting the middle finger of her flat hand against her lips again.

  “Nonsense!” said her father. “I’m sure Mr. Jefferson would love to hear you play!”

  Now her eyes truly did meet Thomas Jefferson’s, expressing both alarm and a plea for help.

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Wayles,” said Thomas Jefferson, “but I doubt that Mrs. Skelton or anyone else would get much enjoyment from my hapless screeching.”

  Mrs. Skelton gave Thomas Jefferson a grateful glance. “Yes, Pappy,” she said. “It’s not fair to ask Mr. Jefferson to play for us after he has had such a long ride, even if he is only being modest.” She gave Thomas Jefferson another glance, and just as she seemed about to smile, she looked down at her plate.

  “Well, then, you play for us, Martha!” said her father.

  “Oh, no, Pappy. Really, I couldn’t.” She gave her father a long, imploring gaze, then pulled her hand away from his.

  Her father looked at her skeptically for a moment, then slapped the table with his right hand. “All right, then let’s have some apple pie! Betty makes the most delicious apple pies!”

  Sometime later, when almost all the lamps and candles in the house had been extinguished, except out back in the kitchen, where the slaves were doing the dishes, Thomas Jefferson returned from a visit to the outhouse to find Mrs. Skelton standing at the bottom of the main staircase, one hand on the banister, the other holding a candle. “Forgive me, Mr. Jefferson,” she said. “I hope I didn’t startle you.”

  “Not at all,” said Thomas Jefferson. “I should be the one apologizing.”

  She gave him a crumpled smile, then looked away. “I just—” She let go of the banister, transferred the candle from her left to her right hand, then sighed in a way that made it clear she would never finish her sentence.

  “It was a pleasure to meet you,” said Thomas Jefferson.

 
“Yes. The same . . . For me, I mean.” She gave him a worried smile, then transferred the candle back to her left hand and put her right on the banister.

  “Good night, Mr. Jefferson.”

  “Good night.”

  She took one step but didn’t turn away from him. He didn’t move at all.

  “I’d love to hear you play piano,” he said.

  “I don’t think you’d say that if you’d ever actually heard me.” Her face in the candlelight was orange and soft, and her smile was the happiest Thomas Jefferson had yet seen it.

  “I’m sure you really are a ‘genius’ at playing.”

  She laughed.

  “And I also hear you are a very good singer,” he said.

  “How could you ever have heard such a thing!”

  “It gets around,” he said. “I’ve heard that your voice is very beautiful, as clear as a bell.”

  She took her hand off the banister and wiped it against her skirt. A thickness, like discomfort, came into her smile.

  “Good night, Mr. Jefferson.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Skelton.”

  In the movie the blond Martha undresses in the presence of the young actor in the copper-colored wig before the ball is even over. As Thomas Jefferson watches the precipitate emergence of her boyishly lean body with a horrified fascination (how could anyone so besmirch Martha’s reputation by suggesting such heedless passion!), she coughs. It would seem that she is now entirely undressed, her skin a wavery gold in the firelight to the young actor’s wavery orange—for he, too, would seem to be undressed, though it is not possible to see the whole of either of their bodies, since their heads and shoulders alone fill up the entire luminous wall. That cough is the only thing that seems real in this fevered and intolerable scene.

  Martha did cough—exactly as the actress does—their first night at Monticello after their wedding, when they were in a state not unlike that of the gold and orange people on the wall, only they were under a heap of counterpanes in his two-room cabin, their breath steaming in the lamplight, the falling snow ticking at the windows. Martha coughed, and in that beautiful moment of their being together, Thomas Jefferson suddenly feared that she might be sickly and that he would lose her—this woman who had made him happier than he had ever been in his life.

  As he hears that cough in the dark theater, he is bereft once again, and aghast that fate should have taken her from him a mere ten years later. He must have made some sort of sound, because he feels a warm hand stroking his own and looks over to see Dolley Madison watching him with a furrowed brow and sympathetically pursed lips. “Don’t worry,” she mouths, then turns her gaze back to the brilliant wall.

  . . . When I was a very young child, the fact of slavery—my own enslavement and that of everyone I knew well and loved—was a sort of deadness beyond the world in which I believed myself to live. Before the age of six or seven, I don’t think I had any idea we were slaves. In part this was because we were called “servants” and “laborers” by the Jeffersons, and those were the words that we ourselves used. I can’t recall ever hearing my mother refer to herself or to any member of our family by the term “slave.” Also, I never lacked for food. I lived in a solid cabin that was kept warm in the winter by a stone fireplace, and for much of my childhood I was able to wander about Monticello as freely as a dog. This seemed a good and ordinary life to me—nothing like “slavery,” at least insofar as that word had any meaning for me.

  I lived with my mother and three of my siblings (I was the youngest) just across the lawn from the great house, and our closest neighbors on the mountaintop, apart from the Jeffersons, were house servants, craftsmen and mechanics—most of them my siblings and cousins. My mother was immensely proud of our family’s elevated standing and said that we had achieved it because we were smart, hardworking, and we knew “how to get along.” By contrast she had nothing but contempt for what she called “ignorant” or “no-account niggers.” I grew up equating these people almost exclusively with the field laborers, who lived down the hill from us and who, those days, mainly picked tobacco on the hilltops a quarter mile and more to the east and south of the great house.

  As a child I had little comprehension of how much harder the laborers worked than did my mother or any of the other skilled servants among whom I lived, and so whenever I happened upon them being marched along the roads at sunrise and sunset, I tended to see their filthy clothing, their lowered heads and sullen expressions as manifestations of their fundamental character, rather than of their exhaustion, their bitterness and the injustice of their lot. I was curious about these people and especially about their children, who seemed louder, tougher and more daring than the children who lived near the great house, but I was also afraid of them and kept my distance. At night, when we would hear the laughter and songs, and sometimes the screams and angry bellowing that would come up the hill from the field laborers’ cabins, my mother would mutter, “Heathen savages,” and offer a prayer of thanks to Jesus for having saved her.

  Like most small children, I never doubted that what my mother told me was the truth, and so I shared both her pride and her disdain. If I had imagined that anyone at Monticello might have been slaves, it would have been the field laborers, but certainly not us. I considered myself lucky to have been born into a family of such intelligent and industrious men and women, and to be leading what I could only believe was a good life. When my mother told me to get down on my knees and thank Jesus, the gratitude I offered up was sincere. And yet from a very early age, a small part of me knew—or rather felt, for I could not allow myself to truly know—that my good and fortunate life was not what it seemed.

  When I was five or six, a circus came to Charlottesville and my mother decided to take me to it on a Sunday—her day off from her duties as Mrs. Jefferson’s body servant. Everyone was talking about the circus’s dancing bear and trick riders, but I was most eager to see the acrobats, who, from my mother’s description, I thought could actually fly and so must have had wings like angels. I was also very excited because my mother dressed me in my favorite gown, which was dark blue with red trim on the hems of the sleeves and skirt. It had been passed down to me from my sisters Thenia and Critta, but it had originally belonged to Mrs. Jefferson when she was a girl.

  We were in the kitchen of the great house getting some water and bread to take with us on the ride into town when Mrs. Jefferson suddenly appeared. I all but ran up to her, hoping that she would notice that I was wearing her gown.

  “Ah, Betty!” she said, not giving me a glance. “I’ve been looking for you all over. I need your help.”

  My mother put her hand on my shoulder. “But I’m taking Sally to the circus.”

  Mrs. Jefferson seemed to notice me for the first time and gave me a curt smile before speaking to my mother in a firm voice. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid this is an emergency, and there won’t be time for that.”

  My mother darted her eyes at me, and for an instant she looked shocked, as if she had just been slapped—but in the next instant she shook my shoulder, her face knotted with irritation, and said firmly, “You be good, baby girl!” She followed Mrs. Jefferson out of the room, as if the whole idea that she and I might have gone to the circus had been my own foolish fancy.

  This was the moment when I had my first intimation that my proud and strong mother was afraid of Mrs. Jefferson—a woman whom I had always thought of as elegant and kindly. And as that stunning realization dilated within my consciousness, my mother’s fear instantly became connected to dozens of other odd events, many of them ordinary (a grimace turning into a smile, a heavy sigh followed by a cheerful “I’m coming!”) and a few so troubling that they seemed inscribed with fire upon my brain (the time my sister Mary, who was already a grown woman when I was born, cried out and clutched my mother’s arm when she saw Mr. Corbet, one of the overseers, walking toward her and then calmly let him lead her awa
y; or the night my mother’s friend Johnny sat in the corner of our cabin, speechless, his face like stone, his eyes fixed on something invisible). All of these events seemed to be instances of adults not allowing themselves to admit to plain, if very troubling, facts. Even as I stood in that kitchen after my mother had gone, I experienced another such evasion, though a far more modest one: Ursula crouched beside me and said, “Don’t worry, honey pie—that circus isn’t any fun anyway!”

  All of these recognitions came together in a mind too young to make sense of them, but I do believe that they were the origin of an unsettling feeling or vision with which I became afflicted not long afterward. Night after night throughout my childhood, as I lay upon the verge of sleep, the events of my day—conversations, squabbles, games and chores—would come back to me but seem to be surrounded by something that I came to think of as “the deadness.” I didn’t have a clear conception of the deadness, except that it was bleak, dark and profoundly frightening. And in its shadow all the events of my day, which had seemed so vital and real as they were happening, would become thin and pale—a pathetic charade. There were nights when the deadness was so all-encompassing that I would writhe in panic, feeling I could not take enough air into my lungs and wanting desperately to escape. . . .

  Facts

  The average life expectancy at birth in late-eighteenth-century Virginia was thirty-eight years for males and forty-one years for females. The equivalent figures for nonwhite men and women were thirty-three and thirty-five years, respectively. If a white male were to survive adolescence, his life expectancy rose to about fifty years, whereas the female life expectancy did not increase appreciably, in part because four percent of women died in childbirth. The average woman, white or black, had six or seven children, a third of whom would die in infancy. One factor contributing to these high mortality rates is that doctors and midwives did not habitually wash their hands before procedures until the late nineteenth century.