Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  Women’s finances were controlled by their fathers before marriage and, afterward, by their husbands. If a widow or unmarried woman was not independently wealthy or being supported by relatives, she could become a governess, shop clerk, seamstress, domestic servant, field-worker or prostitute. The wages for most legitimate jobs were so low, however, that many single women, especially if they had children, had no choice but to make money on the side by prostitution. It is also true that female domestic servants were commonly expected to grant their masters sexual favors—discreetly, of course. Those who were not discreet enough generally lost their jobs and, their reputations ruined, often could find no other work than prostitution. On average a woman lived four years after becoming a prostitute, with the most common causes of death being venereal disease, murder, suicide and alcoholism.

  The male head of a household was called “master,” as were male shopkeepers and teachers. One attribute all of these men had in common was that they were allowed to beat their subordinates. Although violence within the home was generally looked down upon, husbands were understood to have the right to physically punish their wives for such transgressions as adultery and persistent insubordination, and most people considered the occasional beating a necessary incentive in children’s moral and even academic education, so much so that teachers often had a rack of canes behind their desk or a paddle leaning against the wall in the corner.

  Shopkeepers—craftsmen especially—were allowed to beat their employees for moral failings such as laziness or stealing—although the term “employee” does not adequately represent the relationship between the master and the one or more boys or girls who worked for him as apprentices or indentured servants and who were bound to him, generally until the age of twenty-one, receiving no compensation for their work other than food, clothing and a place to sleep—often just the floor of the shop. Industrial workers of the time got a mere pittance for their labors and worked in brutal and dangerous conditions that could make today’s sweatshops seem luxurious.

  This was the context in which slavery existed during Sally Hemings’s lifetime and which conditioned her attitude toward her own servitude and her relationship to Thomas Jefferson. Although freedom was always preferable to the brutality, indignity and injustice of slavery, the actual difference in the quality of life between the free and the enslaved was not as dramatic as we are prone to imagine today—especially when we consider that as hard as life could be for the white working class and poor, it was massively harder for African Americans, even those who had gained their freedom.

  And while according to our own standards, marriage during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might also seem close to slavery, people of Sally Hemings’s time still cried for joy at weddings, and Jane Austen, who was Sally Hemings’s almost exact contemporary, could write as if marriage were the greatest happiness that could befall a woman. People adjust to their circumstances. People subject to the most barbaric cruelty can still delight in a baby’s laugh or feel moments of perfect contentment lying on a grassy hillside in the sun. There is something beautiful in our capacity to accommodate atrocity, even if it can also be our undoing.

  “I will make it good. . . . I will be gentle. You will see. . . .”

  . . . It was impossible, of course, that I could remain in ignorance of my true situation for very long. The first person to tell me that I was a slave was a girl named Elsie, who was a year older than me. I must have been close to seven at the time. I knew instantly that what she said was true, but I denied it anyway. She laughed and said, “Are you stupid! Don’t you know all colored folks are slaves?”

  Not long afterward I began hearing tales from other children about masters putting their slaves in iron collars or whipping them until the skin was torn off their backs. Most of these stories were told by boys, who wanted nothing more than to see me shriek, gag or burst into tears. I resolutely deprived them of that satisfaction by gritting my teeth behind an expression of world-weary indifference, but of course I could not help being affected. The most horrifying tale I heard was of a master who hung his slaves from hooks on the rafters as if they were meat. The image of those poor people impaled and writhing seized control of my thoughts and kept me awake for nights on end.

  I did not, at first, give these tales much credit—in part because of the salacious delight with which the other children told them. It seemed clear to me that if these boys believed the tales they were telling, they would have been aghast and afraid for their own skins. I also didn’t believe the tales because I had never heard of anything comparable at Monticello. There were no iron collars here, no meat hooks; there wasn’t even a whipping post. Yes, there were thrashings from time to time, but nothing like the senseless and extreme cruelty of the masters in the stories the boys told me.

  People were thrashed for stealing, for being drunk and belligerent, for not doing their work. While there were some overseers who were excessively assiduous in the detection of such crimes, or in the execution of punishment, a semblance of order prevailed at Monticello that, although it might only have resembled actual justice, nevertheless did make the punishments predictable and therefore substantially avoidable (“Keep out of the woods and the bear won’t bite,” was how my brother Peter put it). But more to the point, whatever excesses did occur never seemed extreme enough to transgress common notions of ordinary human cantankerousness.

  Yet, as today’s events have shown only too clearly, while Mr. Jefferson was not without principle, he was nevertheless criminally self-indulgent and self-deceived, and as repulsive as it is for me to consider—indeed, I am again overcome by nausea as I commit these words to paper—such horrors could never have come to pass were there not some cold and dank precinct of his heart impervious to even the faintest sympathy for those who labored and suffered so that he might live in comfort. . . .

  In an 1806 letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson writes that when he was fourteen and his father died, “the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on my self entirely, without a relative or friend qualified to advise or guide me.” What is notable about this statement is that at his father’s death Thomas Jefferson’s mother was still very much alive, and he was living with her, although he would very shortly board at the Reverend Maury’s school in Williamsburg. The fact that she is not listed as a relative “qualified to advise or guide him” is not, however, surprising, because among his nearly twenty thousand surviving letters there is only one reference to his mother, in a note to her brother informing him of her death: “This happened on the last day of March,” Thomas Jefferson writes, “after an illness of not more than an hour. We suppose it to have been apoplectic.” There is also a single sentence in his account book, dated March 31, 1776: “My mother died at eight o’clock this morning, in the 57th year of age.”

  The m in “morning” in this entry is malformed as a result of a violent drilling sensation in his temple. By the time Thomas Jefferson has finished the sentence, he is so overcome by pain that he thinks he might vomit. As he pushes away from his desk and staggers to his bed, radiant white, purple and pink globes begin to hover on the right side of the room, bobbing slightly, like shy, silent ghosts. And, indeed, as he feels his right hand and leg going numb, his first thought is that the ghost of his mother has come to take her revenge by afflicting him with the very illness that killed her.

  This is the first of what he will come to call his “periodical head-aches,” which will strike him every few years during the spring (almost always in March) until the end of his presidency—with the most notable perhaps being the one that confined him to his chambers for thirteen days after Martha’s death.

  This particular bout, however, is the most intensely painful. Every day for a week, from the moment the sun glimmers orange amid the trees over the eastern mountains until it settles beneath layers of gold, rose and lavender in the west, he has to lie in his bed with a moist towel across his face and
a porcelain spittoon on his bedside table, waiting to catch his watery vomit. Only when the fields outside his window are lit by stars can he draw his curtains and breathe fresh air. Sometimes he steps barefoot onto the dew-chilled grass, so that he might feel the breezes on his body and hear them whispering in the budding tree branches. He wants to know again what it is like to be a living man in a living world. But mostly, even out on the lawn or as he walks after midnight through his own pitch-dark house to the table where Ursula has left him a glass of water, a cut of meat and a slice of bread, he feels that his mother has succeeded after all, that his illness has left him a mere ghost, haunting the places where he used to live.

  It is April 16, 1757. The Reverend Maury is about to climb the stairs to fetch a nightshirt with a missing button when he spots fourteen-year-old Thomas Jefferson slouched in the parlor window seat, knees up, a heavy book spread across his thighs. Maury lingers a moment just outside the parlor door, watching his young student absently coiling locks of his red hair about his finger as he reads, apparently oblivious of the fact that he is being observed. Maury has to acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson is very clever, possibly brilliant, but he finds the boy sullen and odd.

  Just the previous evening, Maury happened to be pacing in the front yard, enjoying a pipe, when a carriage pulled up, returning Thomas Jefferson from an Easter visit with his family. As Maury helped the boy drag his heavy satchel off the seat, he said, “I hope you had a fine stay with your dear mother.” But Thomas Jefferson gave him no other response than to turn his back and walk toward the house, clutching his satchel with both arms.

  “Young man!” Maury called after him. “Is that how you behave when you have been addressed by your master?”

  The boy stopped but didn’t turn around.

  Maury walked up beside him. “What have you to say for yourself?”

  Still not meeting the older man’s eye, Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m sorry.”

  “What made you think you had the right to behave so rudely?”

  “I didn’t have the right. It was only . . .” The boy lowered his head and pinched his lips together before finishing his sentence. “. . . that I did not have a good visit.” As he pronounced the word “not,” the boy finally lifted his head and looked his master in the eye. And then, with a disconcerting coldness, he announced, “And what is more, I have resolved never to return home again. Henceforth I would prefer to lodge here with you and Mrs. Maury during all school vacations.”

  “What happened?”

  “That is my own affair,” the boy said firmly. “If it would not be possible for me to stay with you, I shall look for temporary lodging in the village.”

  With that, Thomas Jefferson walked into the house, climbed the stairs to the dormitory and refused to come down for supper.

  Needless to say, the Reverend Maury dispatched a letter to Mrs. Jefferson that very night.

  In the morning he received word from his wife that the boy wouldn’t take so much as a cup of tea, and during church services (it was a Sunday), Maury noticed him staring vaguely into space, a distraught expression on his face, not even moving his lips when it was time to sing. And now here the boy is, slumped by himself in the window, staring into a book with a crumpled brow.

  Last night Maury had been irritated by the boy’s rudeness, but now he is beginning to worry.

  Only once his master steps into the parlor does Thomas Jefferson look up with a start and realize he is not alone. He snaps his book shut and swings his feet to the floor. “Sorry,” he says.

  “Don’t worry, Jefferson,” says Maury. “Window seats are made for reading.”

  Just past the boy’s head, Maury can see Carr, Molyneux and some of the other boys kicking an inflated cow’s bladder around on the muddy green across the road.

  “But it’s a beautiful spring day,” Maury says. “You should be out there playing football with your classmates.

  “I don’t like football.”

  “Don’t be silly. Every boy likes football. Best thing in the world for the lungs.”

  “I don’t like sports. I think they encourage the worst tendencies in human character. They’re all about who can dominate whom.”

  It is a long moment before Maury knows how to respond to this objection. Finally, deciding that the boy is showing signs of melancholia, he says, “But you must take care to amuse yourself.”

  “I have Don Quixote to amuse me.” Thomas Jefferson pats the book balanced on his knees. “I think it is much more amusing to read about a mad old man doing battle with wineskins in his sleep.”

  “Very well,” says Maury, thinking that the Lord will only help those who help themselves. He nods, backs out the door and continues on his mission to fetch his buttonless nightshirt for his housemaid.

  . . . I was a melancholy child. I did not have many friends, and I grew unhappy in groups, largely because I lacked a quick wit. Whenever other children mocked me, I would merely stand there, wagging my tongue in my open mouth, unable to utter a single word and feeling more ashamed every instant. But I could be happy on my own. As a little girl, I had great fun playing with a doll that Bobby carved for me. It had wool for hair, a painted face and hinged arms and legs, so I could make it walk, run, turn somersaults. The doll’s name was Parthenia, and her closest friend was a sea captain, who happened to be invisible to everyone but her and with whom she would travel around the world, riding lions and enormous fishes, climbing mountains and having dinners with kings and queens.

  As I grew older, I found most of my joy by having my own adventures. From the age of four or five, I would steal away from whichever sister was supposed to be watching me to wander alone through the woods for hours, listening to robin song, crow cries and the ghostly piping of owls. I made houses for myself under bushes and in the branches of trees and would sing myself songs and tell myself stories. My mother scolded me for spending so much time in the woods. She said it was dangerous for a girl, that I might lose my soul.

  Apparently, there was one time when I returned from my wandering and told my mother that I had met a talking groundhog who had taken me to an underground world lit by flowers that had flames for petals. This world was ruled by two golden snakes—a king and queen—who sat on thrones shaped like wagon wheels and hissed their commands to all their subjects: groundhogs, moles, voles, mice and foxes. I have no memory whatsoever of telling this story, but when I refused to admit for several days that I had not actually visited this world, my mother decided I had been possessed and took me to see an old man who lived on another plantation—and him I remember vividly.

  His name was Popo, and his fingers were so misshapen they looked as if they were made entirely out of chestnuts. He had my mother take off my clothes and lay me faceup upon the ground in a copse behind his cabin. With a foul-smelling greenish paste, he drew a cross on my breast, and then, as he chanted in an African language, he grabbed my shoulders so fiercely that I thought my arms were going to snap off. After some minutes he let me go, and then, still chanting, he slaughtered a chicken and poured its blood into a small bottle that he told my mother to bury in front of our cabin door. Years later, when my mother brought up my story about the underground world and I told her I had no memory of it, she said, “That’s because it went right out of you with the Devil.”

  When I first thought to tell this story, I intended to conclude by saying that although I never believed for a second that I had been possessed, there was a way in which I did lose my soul on my walks, because all on my own in the sun-shot green dimness under the trees it was a simple matter to surrender to the illusion that my life was easy and full and that I was entirely free. But just now I remembered that during those nights when the ordinary events of my life would seem shrouded by the deadness, my solitary walks were never among them, which is to say that my walks never seemed pale and unreal. And so, as I prepared to condemn them as a soul-stealing
delusion, a voice cried out in my heart, saying, “You cannot deprive a poor slave girl of her only joy!” . . .

  Not hours before Martha dies, her voice hardly above a whisper, she draws Thomas Jefferson’s attention to a strange beetle with a tiger-striped cowl that is crawling across her bedclothes. “Look, Tom. I’ve lived all this time, and yet every day I see an insect unlike any I’ve ever seen before.” He tells her that as soon as he has a moment, he will find its name in a cyclopedia of insects that he has recently acquired. That moment never comes. Not long after Thomas Jefferson has taken the beetle between his thumb and forefinger and deposits it on the window ledge, Martha closes her eyes and her soap-white skin goes ash gray. Soon her breathing becomes irregular, with the gaps between breaths growing longer and longer, until finally, just before noon, she takes three enormous breaths, each followed by an impossibly long silence, the last of which never ends.

  The flame stretches, and its tip flaps into a rippling wisp of smoke as an elderly white servant lowers a lamp chimney into place. The atmosphere inside the yellow room, already dense with the sausage-and-tobacco odor of ceaselessly yammering men, is cut by the thin acridity of whale oil. It is nearly eight on an evening in June 1775, and Thomas Jefferson is thirty-two. Although he washed his face on arrival in Philadelphia, his fingertips detect finely granulated road dust along his jaw in front of his ear. He has been standing against the back wall for nearly half an hour, clutching his right elbow with his left hand, and keeping his right hand aristocratically poised against his cheek in an attempt to look contemplative and at ease, but thus far he has spoken to no one. He is perhaps the youngest of the thirty or so men present and feels something of an interloper, given that he is at this meeting—the Second Continental Congress—only as a replacement for his cousin Peyton Randolph.