Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  Often when I was wandering in the woods, I’d imagine my father walking beside me, maybe holding my hand. Sometimes he’d be the one telling me the stories I told myself. I would even talk to him. I would ask him questions, then answer them aloud for him. Other times he would come to me in the middle of the night, especially when I had had a bad dream. He would sit beside my bed, stroke my hair and tell me in a low, kindly voice, “Don’t you worry. Your pappy’s here. Everything’s going to be just fine.” And that really would help me feel better—most of the time, at least.

  My father was never just some vague masculine presence; I saw him clearly in my mind’s eye. He was very tall and very smart and had the mahogany skin and baritone voice of Reverend Hodder, a free man who came to Monticello to hold prayer meetings. And partly because I had such a clear and vivid image of my father, when a girl named Buttercup told me, “Your pappy is a white man,” I just couldn’t believe her. “Yes he is,” she insisted. “My mammy told me. That’s how come you’re so high-toned and have white-girl hair.”

  At first the main thing that troubled me about what Buttercup said was that she used the word “is,” which meant that my father was still alive. I went straight to my mother, who told me, “Of course he’s dead! Why would I lie about a thing like that? He died when you were five months old.” And when I asked if he was white, she said, “Don’t you listen to that fool talk! Your pappy was just a man. Just a plain old man.” I tried to take my mother at her word, but even at age six, it was clear to me that if my father had been a Negro, she would have said so straight out.

  Once the idea that my father was white became lodged in my brain, I began to conceive of myself differently. Up until that point, I had hardly given a thought to my skin and hair—maybe because I knew many Negroes with pale skin and many “white” people whose skin had a decidedly dusky cast, especially in summer. For me, “white” primarily signified people other than “us,” those difficult, sometimes cruel, never reliable people with whom our life was inextricably and mysteriously intertwined. I didn’t even know what the term “race” meant at the time and never imagined that I could be anything other than Negro. But almost as soon as I identified “white” with the color of my own skin, I began to tell myself a story that I actually was white, that my mother wasn’t my real mother and that I was only being raised as a Negro by mistake. At the end of this story, the mistake would always be uncovered and I would be radiant with the sort of glory that surrounded Mr. Jefferson. I imagined everyone at Monticello, colored and white, being extravagantly happy on my behalf and staging a sort of celebration for me, after which Mr. Jefferson would adopt me, and I would live in the great house with him and his family, and I would bring my mother and siblings along as my servants, and we would all dress in silks and lace and wear the shiniest of shoes.

  This story felt like another secret I had stolen from my mother, but one so complexly shameful that I could never mention it to her and, indeed, have kept it to myself my entire life. One August night, however, when it was too hot to sleep, Critta and I took our ticks outside and spread them on the grass behind our cabin, where the faintest breeze blowing across the field cooled our sweaty limbs and faces. I had in mind a question that I had wanted to ask Critta for days but had never actually dared to speak. Now that the two of us were lying side by side, all alone under the night sky, and our privacy further ensured by the din of crickets and peepers, I drew my lips to her ear and whispered, “Buttercup said my pappy was white.”

  “So?”

  Critta’s complacent response surprised me, and it was a long moment before I could ask, “Was he?”

  “Of course!” she said. “Everybody knows that!”

  “Who told you?”

  “Jimmy. He was Jimmy’s pappy, too, and mine. He was all of our pappy.”

  This news was such a shock that I couldn’t speak. Finally I asked, “Does Peter know?”

  “Of course. Everybody knows except you, because you’re the baby!”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You know that Mammy doesn’t like us talking about things like that.”

  And that was where our conversation ended.

  Years later, when I was fourteen and packing to bring Miss Maria to live with her sister and father in France, my mother was seated at the table behind me. She didn’t talk while I packed, only sighed heavily and kept rubbing the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right. I thought she was angry at me, so I did my best to fold my belongings quietly and not disturb her with questions. When I finished, I turned around and saw that she was looking straight at me, her brow all wrinkled and her eyes two sharp points, as if I’d done something horrifying.

  “Come here,” she said firmly, nodding at the chair beside her. When I hesitated, she said, “I’ve got something important to tell you.”

  I sat beside her at the table, and she cupped both of my hands in hers and squeezed them. “I never told you this,” she said, “because I didn’t want you getting into trouble. Bobby, Jimmy and Thenia know, because they were old enough to remember him. But I thought it’d be easier—”

  “Remember who?”

  “Your pappy.”

  “I already know he was white.”

  She smiled, almost as if she were proud of me. “Well, that’s not all he was.” Her smile got thin and crooked. She looked away. When she looked back, she wasn’t smiling. “Your pappy . . .” She took a deep breath and licked her lips. “Your pappy . . . was Mrs. Jefferson’s pappy. You and Mrs. Jefferson were sisters. Miss Patsy and Miss Polly are your nieces.”

  My mother told me that she’d kept the identity of my father secret because she thought that if I knew I was a servant to my own family, I might say or do something wrong or I would get ideas that would only make me sad. There wasn’t anything she could do about Bobby, Jimmy and Thenia, but she had told them that if they ever breathed a word to Critta, Peter and me about Mrs. Jefferson being our sister, she would “whip their backsides till they caught fire!”

  “Only reason I’m telling you now,” she said, “is you’re going to France. I don’t think Miss Patsy or Miss Polly knows, but Mr. Jefferson surely does. And you’re most ways to being a young woman now, so you’ve got to understand that Mr. Jefferson most surely knows you’re his wife’s sister, and that’s a fact.”

  As she said this, I started to sob and couldn’t stop. The news was more than I could bear, especially as I had already been terrified about getting on a boat and traveling to a country where nobody would speak a word I could understand. My mother took me into her arms, pressed my head against her bosom and kissed my cheek over and over. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine. You’re such a smart girl. Everything’ll be just fine.”

  Sally Hemings is fourteen years old, and she has been in Paris for two days. Thomas Jefferson almost doesn’t see her as he enters the upstairs parlor, partly because it is five-thirty in the morning, an hour at which no one else is normally awake, but mainly because she is so silent and still, a streak of darker gray before the gray of the window. She is leaning her forehead against the wobbly, bubbled glass, looking out onto the rainy courtyard, clutching the fingers of one hand in the near fist of the other. At the sound of his shoe scuffing to a stop just inside the door, she becomes a burst of flutter and flight, like a ruffed grouse startled from a hedge. “I’m sorry!” she cries. “I’m sorry! I just—” She shoots past him and out the door so rapidly that if she ever finishes her sentence, he hears not a syllable.

  Q: When did you first find out that you were free?

  JAMES: The marquis told me.

  Q: The Marquis de Lafayette?

  JAMES: [Nods.]

  Q: When?

  JAMES: Oh, I don’t know. It must have been . . . Uh . . . I’m pretty sure it was the first time he came to dinner. I remember hearing him in the foyer. He had
such a loud voice, and he was laughing. He and Mr. Jefferson were both laughing. And then, no more than a minute later, he came into the kitchen. “Zheemmee! Zheemmee! Zheemmee!” He was so happy to see me again, he said, and why hadn’t I come out to greet him at the door? I didn’t know what to say to that, because I’d only met him once before, when I was a kid. But then he stopped shouting, and he leaned close to my ear. “I want you to know that slavery is not tolerated in this country,” he said. “It is contrary to the laws. As long as you are here, you are as free as Mr. Jefferson.”

  Q: What did you think of him telling you that?

  JAMES: I don’t know.

  Q: Did you think it was strange?

  JAMES: Well, the marquis was a strange man. I liked him, though. He was always good to me.

  Q: Maybe not to Thomas Jefferson?

  JAMES: Oh, he and Mr. Jefferson were best friends. In fact, I bet he told Mr. Jefferson what he was going to say before he even came back in the kitchen. He was just like that. The really strange thing, though, is that he had a slave himself when he was in Virginia.

  Q: Really?

  JAMES: His name was Jimmy, too, now that I think of it. There’s even a famous picture of them together, isn’t there, Sally?

  SARAH: A painting.

  JAMES: Who’s it by?

  SARAH: I don’t remember. A French painter. I think he even came to the Hôtel once, but I don’t remember his name.

  Q: What about you, Sarah? When did you find out you were free?

  SARAH: The marquis told me, too. But Jimmy told me first. Didn’t you, Jimmy? It was that first day, when you showed me my bedroom.

  Q: What did you think?

  SARAH: It was beautiful! It had red silk wallpaper, padded and soft, like a pillow. But it was freezing in the winter.

  Q: No, I mean about being free.

  SARAH: Oh! [Laughs.] I didn’t know what to think about that. It was strange, mainly.

  JAMES: You were tired.

  SARAH: Exhausted! And I was in a new country. Everything was strange. Everything was just hard to think about then. For a long time, really.

  Q: But what about after?

  SARAH: It was still strange.

  Q: Why? How? Did you really not understand?

  JAMES: I understood. I understood right away. It was easy. [Stops talking. Squeezes SARAH’s hand.] Sorry.

  SARAH: That’s okay. Go ahead.

  JAMES: No. You first. You’re the one everyone wants to hear about anyway! [Laughs.]

  SARAH: That’s not true!

  JAMES: Tell her to stop being so humble!

  Q: [Laughs.]

  SARAH: Okay. . . . [Glances at JAMES, who takes a sip from the flask he keeps in the breast pocket of his jacket.] Uh . . . What was I saying?

  Q: You didn’t understand.

  SARAH: Okay . . . well . . . The thing is, everything is so different now. Things that seem simple now just weren’t then. Even after all these years, it’s still very hard for me to put it into words. I guess the main problem is that I can’t think like that anymore. Nobody thinks like that anymore. But anyhow. For me, at the time, it was like I had two minds. In one of those minds, I knew, of course, that slavery was wrong. It’s like what Mr. Jefferson wrote: Certain truths are self-evident. Everybody just wants to be free. We’re born thinking we’re the center of the universe and that we can and should—I think it’s a moral issue for babies!—that we should get everything we want. Which we do for a while, because babies don’t actually want very much. And that’s where the second mind comes in. Because I was born a slave. Jimmy and I were both born slaves. That’s just how the world was—

  JAMES: That’s not how it was for me. [Covers his mouth.] Sorry.

  SARAH: No. Speak. You’ve got something to say.

  JAMES: [Looks at Q.]

  Q: Go ahead. If it’s all right with Sarah.

  SARAH: Speak, Jimmy.

  JAMES: I only ever had one mind about slavery, and in that mind I knew that the world had made me a slave and that slavery was wrong—a crime against humanity! Unforgivable! And I knew in my heart I wasn’t actually a slave, that I had never been a slave and that I was never going to act like a slave. I would only do what I chose to do, just like every other free man.

  Q: And were you actually able to manage that?

  JAMES: Yes. Absolutely! . . . But, of course, I was lucky. Sally and I were both lucky. Because of—you know: Mr. Jefferson. . . . But anyhow, that’s how I felt for as long as I can remember. From way before I went to France. And, of course, from way before Mr. Jefferson gave me my manumission and I really was free. In the eyes of the law, I mean.

  Q: And how was it then? After your manumission.

  JAMES: It was the same.

  Q: No. I mean . . . Well, I hadn’t actually intended to bring this up until later. But . . . I mean . . . Given what happened?

  JAMES: I don’t actually want to talk about that. [Long silence.] Okay?

  Q: I’m sorry.

  JAMES: [Takes a sip from his flask. Puts it back in his pocket.] I refuse to talk about that. . . . It was . . . Well, it was all very complicated, and there’s no way I can explain it. And I don’t want to. [Silence.] Of course, slavery entered into it, but it wasn’t really how you think—

  Q: I—

  JAMES: Anyhow, Mr. Jefferson only gave me my manumission because he wanted to get rid of me.

  SARAH: That’s not true!

  JAMES: Sure it is. He was just sick of dealing with me. I could see it in his face when I asked him. I could see how relieved he was.

  SARAH: No, Jimmy.

  JAMES: But I didn’t care. Fuck that. I thought—you know: I’d just go to Philadelphia and make a new life for myself. Friends and . . . maybe travel. I wanted to go to Spain. Back to France. But the other thing is—I mean . . . Maybe if I’d been white as Sally. And . . . Well . . . you know— [Silence.] But fuck that shit!

  SARAH: Jimmy!

  JAMES: What? Fuck it!

  Q: I—

  JAMES: I told you I didn’t want to talk about it. So it’s over. Okay? Finished! Let’s just forget about it. None of that really matters anyway. That’s not how it was.

  Q: I’m sorry.

  JAMES: Go on, Sally. I interrupted you. Say what you were going to say.

  [Long silence.]

  JAMES: Go on. Really. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted.

  SARAH: Don’t be ridiculous. [Silence.] I said it all anyway. There’s nothing to say. . . . Mainly I was like you. I knew I was a slave, and I knew it was wrong. But . . . There were just these people I’d grown up with. My family. Mammy, of course. And you, Jimmy. Peter. And Critta and . . . Well, the Jeffersons were family, too. I mean, Martha and Maria were my nieces! And, of course, there was Mr. Jefferson—

  Q: Do you mind if I ask you something?

  SARAH: Uh.

  Q: I’m surprised that you call him “Mr.” Jefferson.

  SARAH: He wanted us to. He hated the term “master.” He didn’t want anybody to call him “master.”

  JAMES: Maybe. But that didn’t change anything, did it?

  SARAH: [Silence.]

  JAMES: I mean the words we used—“mister,” “servant,” “laborer”—those were just his way of getting us to go along with the lie he was telling himself.

  SARAH: Not really.

  JAMES: Well, you can believe what you want to believe.

  SARAH: [Silence.]

  JAMES: [Lifts his flask. It is empty. He balances it on his knee. SARAH is looking at him, but he does not meet her eye.]

  Q: But still. To get back to— You know: names . . . I’m just wondering. Didn’t you ever . . . ? I mean, considering—

  SARAH: You mean Thomas? Tom? . . . Sometimes . . . Of course there were times when I—when we
were— [Silence.] Oh! . . . Oh! . . . [Weeps.]

  Q: I’m sorry!

  SARAH: No. Really. It’s nothing. Ridiculous! I guess I just got a little . . . you know: emotional. I mean, this conversation—

  Q: I’m turning off the recorder.

  SARAH: No. Really.

  Q: I’m turning it off. Maybe tomorrow—

  [End of recording.]

  . . . During our weeks at sea, I was like a mother to Miss Maria. I scolded her for not changing her linens or for failing to wash behind her ears, and she could not sleep unless she was enfolded in my arms. But we were also like sisters: each other’s only friend on the ship, the only one who knew anything about the people and places we loved most. We were also the only children and the only females not accompanied by a man (in fact, there were only two other women on board). Our intimacy was the shield by which we warded off fear—and in truth, I, too, might not have been able to sleep were I not enfolded with my dear little Polly—as I called her then. We vomited over the gunwales together; we gossiped about the people we had left behind; we traded memories about the beauty and comfort of Monticello, which now seemed a paradise to us both; we speculated anxiously about the lives we would have in Paris and told each other jokes about this sailor’s red ears, that passenger’s dewlap and another’s fondness for the phrase “in a manner of speaking.” Amazingly, we never once fought or even got annoyed with each other during our passage, perhaps because neither of us could imagine how we might survive without the other.

  Everything changed once we arrived at the Hôtel de Langeac. We would never share a bed again. I would never be her mother, sister or friend. I couldn’t even call her “Polly-Pie” or “Pollarina Bumble,” as I had during our passage, but only “Miss Polly” or, on very formal occasions, “Miss Mary,” for that was her real name.