Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  A year passes. Sally Hemings is fifteen, and now she never sees anything to be afraid of in Thomas Jefferson, only tenderness. His lips are almost womanly. His hands are huge, but his fingers are slender and their movements are so delicate that she can’t imagine him ever doing harm. He is a wounded giant, she thinks. He is a paradox of tenderness and power.

  1. Kitty Church, an American classmate of Polly’s, always makes a point of including Sally Hemings in card games when she visits the Hôtel de Langeac and seems especially interested in her opinion of the boys who are a part of their social circle. Sally Hemings is almost absurdly grateful for such attention, even though she is often humiliated when she tries to keep up with the conversation. There are many things that she doesn’t understand even in English: ironic remarks, certain jokes and especially references to literature, art and politics. There are times when she feels so profoundly stupid that she can’t help wondering if she has only been invited to join the girls’ games and conversations so that everyone might have someone to laugh at.

  2. Marie de Botidoux, one of Patsy’s best French friends, draws Sally Hemings into the corridor outside the upstairs parlor. “You must be honest with me, dear Sally,” she says in French. “Is it true that there are slaves in Virginia?”

  Sally Hemings, seeing no reason to deny the obvious, answers in the affirmative.

  “I knew it!” Marie replies. “I have inquired of your mistress a thousand times on this point, and she would never tell me the truth.”

  Sally Hemings is suddenly possessed by cold dread.

  “And now I need you to be completely honest with me on one other point,” Marie says. “Is Monsieur Jimmy your brother?”

  Sally Hemings hesitates, but again she answers in the affirmative.

  “If that is true, then you must be a Negress.”

  Sally Hemings flushes. Her mouth falls open, but she doesn’t speak.

  “Of course you are! One can see it in your lips! You are a white Negress! Who has ever heard of such a thing! A white Negress! But if you are a Negress, then you must also be a slave, is that not true?”

  Sally Hemings answers that she is as free as anyone else in France.

  3. Renaud is sixteen, one year older than Sally Hemings. He has a dimple in the middle of his chin, a fog of rust-colored freckles across his nose and cheeks, and he always seems to be thinking of something funny. She asks him why he wears his blue knitted cap tilted to the left, and he tells her it is to hide his donkey ear. Another time she spots a dead rat in the gutter, and he says, “Shhh! That’s my brother Fernand. He’s sleeping.” Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, shortly after nine in the morning, she hears the jingly clink of his milk barrow coming down rue Neuve-de-Berri and is always ready in the doorway with a pewter flagon when he reaches the Hôtel de Langeac, and he always greets her with a merry, “Good morning, Mademoiselle Salée!” (“Miss Salty”)

  Renaud’s lips are raspberry red and are often chapped. One Wednesday, Sally Hemings finds herself wondering what it would be like to kiss those cracked and flaky lips, and she is unable to stop looking at them the entire time he is ladling milk out of the ceramic pot in his barrow. It is the same when he comes again on Friday, but this time as she watches his lips pucker and stretch to form words or press together crookedly while he tilts the ladle over her flagon, a warm urgency radiates from deep within her belly all the way into her throat, and she wishes he would pull her toward him and press his lips against hers. She has never felt like this about a boy before, and she cannot tell if it is a very good or a very bad thing.

  When he comes again on Monday, the warm urgency is so powerful that she can hardly put one word coherently after the other. When she inadvertently speaks in English, she breaks off in the middle of her sentence and, after a moment of silence, says in French, “I’m looking for my French, but I’ve lost it.”

  He laughs as if she’s made a joke. “I saw it a few minutes ago running down the rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré. If it’s still there when I am done with your neighbors, I’ll grab it by the ear and bring it back to you.”

  Renaud smiles at her merrily, picks up the handles to his barrow and sets off down the muddy street, his ladle jingling against the side of the crock.

  The next time he comes, she notices a limp white tulip lying in the barrow, just in front of the crock. He picks it up and holds it out to her. When it flops over the edge of his hand, he grips the the base of the stem in one hand and then makes a whistley zip as he slides the thumb and index finger of his other hand from the base all the way to the flower. Then he holds the flower erect as he hands it to her. “I couldn’t find your French,” he says, “so I thought I’d bring you this.”

  Sally Hemings is smiling so hard as she accepts the flower that she worries she might burst into tears. A long moment passes before she can thank him. “It’s so beautiful!” she says.

  “It used to be more beautiful. But I think it’s a little thirsty.”

  Then they are both silent. Renaud is smiling, but for the first time ever he seems to be uneasy. Sally Hemings wonders if she shouldn’t thank him with a kiss. Perhaps that is what he expects. In her mind’s eye, she sees herself getting up on the tips of her toes and pressing her lips against his. That hot urgency has become so powerful it is like a magnetic force drawing her toward him. But she doesn’t budge. She is too afraid.

  “I almost forgot!” he says. “I have cheese!” He pulls a board draped with cloth from behind the crock. “My grandfather made it.” He pulls off the cloth with the finesse of a magician. “A Camembert!” The white wheel is about a foot wide. A third of it has already been cut away, and the yellow cheese is oozing onto the greasy wood. “You have never tasted a better cheese.”

  “It looks delicious,” she says, though she doesn’t actually like French cheese.

  “How much do you want?”

  “Let me go ask my brother.”

  “Your brother?” Renaud looks perplexed.

  “He is the chef.”

  “No!” Renaud laughs derisively. “The chef is not your brother!”

  “He is,” she insists—but then she realizes what is happening.

  “Monsieur Hemings?”

  “Yes,” she says weakly.

  “How can that be? He is black!”

  She gives her shoulders a helpless shrug. “He is my brother.”

  “Then you are black, too.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  He laughs incredulously. “Are you a cannibal?”

  “No!” She does not understand how Renaud could say such a thing. “Of course not!”

  “I thought all blacks were cannibals! I thought there was nothing you liked more than a plump little baby for breakfast!” He seems to think his joke is very funny. “From now on I will have to call you Miss Pepper!”

  She asks for the milk.

  The next time he comes, she puts her flagon on the doorstep with a single sol even before she hears the jingling clink from the end of the street. And when the sound has receded in the opposite direction, she opens the door and picks up the full flagon. The money is gone.

  Time passes. Sally Hemings is fifteen. She is sixteen. The food prepared by Jimmy agrees with her. She grows three and a half inches and becomes almost as tall as Patsy, at whose height everyone exclaims. Her once node-knuckled fingers grow pleasantly plump, the hollows around her eyes fill in and there is a pinkish light in her cheeks that Thomas Jefferson associates with mornings in early spring, just after the leaves have come in.

  He often thinks of his wife when he looks at her. Her eyes are exactly the zinc gray of Martha’s, and her hair is the same coffee brown. She is much taller than Martha, however; her cheekbones are higher, and her jaw is more delicate and tapered. But it is less the way she appears that reminds him of his wife than how she sounds and moves. Most striking is the way, w
hen she is between activities or when she thinks no one is looking, her expression will go inert, as if she has just received terrible news. When he was first courting Martha, this expression would make him worry that he had somehow offended her, but in the next instant she would smile or even laugh. And it is exactly the same with Sally Hemings. She has what people call “laughing eyes.” When she smiles, they narrow with delight and seem themselves to be smiling. And her laugh, like Martha’s, starts with a hoot, then tumbles into a low, merry gurgle. Every time Thomas Jefferson hears it, he cannot help but smile himself. Sometimes he, too, laughs.

  Thomas Jefferson is returning to his study from the kitchen, his cheek bulging with a ripped-off piece of bread that he is rather awkwardly trying to make swallowable without having to remove it from his mouth. On Saturdays, Jimmy always has a lavish dinner waiting for Patsy and Polly when they get home from school—but it is two o’clock; they are almost an hour late, and Thomas Jefferson simply has to put something into his stomach.

  Just as his hand touches the latch on his study door, he hears the screech of the huge front door opening and Patsy speaking loudly. He can’t make out her first words, but then he hears, “Perhaps the mothers were being punished for some evil they had done.”

  “But the babies!” says another voice. It is Sally Hemings. “The babies were punished, too. Why couldn’t he punish the mothers in some other way?”

  “Perhaps they were evil.”

  “But they were babies! Babies can’t be evil.”

  “No, I mean that they were fated to do evil and God let them die with their mothers so that that evil would not come into the world.”

  “If he knew that the babies would do evil, then why did he allow their mothers to give birth to them? What is the point of bringing them into the world only to kill them?”

  “Oh, Sally!” Patsy cries. “Stop being so thick! If you’d given it two seconds of thought, you’d know that the world is far too complicated for us to comprehend. Only God understands the millions of things that must happen so that this world can be just and the virtuous get their due reward.”

  By this point the three girls have passed through the foyer into the dining room, where Thomas Jefferson is also standing. Patsy and Sally Hemings seem so engrossed in their discussion that they haven’t noticed him, but Polly cries out, “Papa! We’re home!”

  “So you are!” he says. “And you’re late! I’ve been wasting away with hunger!”

  He walks around the big table at the center of the circular room and receives kisses from both of his daughters. Sally Hemings stands by the door with the pinched brow and turned-down lips of someone who wants to speak but has decided to remain silent. She is carrying both of the girls’ satchels.

  “But you were in the midst of quite a debate,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Don’t let me interrupt!”

  “Oh, it’s over!” says Patsy.

  “Is it really?”

  “Sally was just committing the Manichean heresy, but now there’s nothing more to talk about.”

  Sally Hemings has backed toward the door and will clearly be bringing the girls’ satchels up to their bedchambers in two seconds.

  “Is that true, Sally?”

  She looks down at the floor and doesn’t speak.

  “Have you committed the Manichean heresy?” says Thomas Jefferson.

  She looks up, blushes and looks down again. In an almost inaudible voice she says, “I don’t know, sir.”

  “She was just telling us this awful story she heard in the marché,” says Patsy.

  Thomas Jefferson turns toward Sally Hemings. “What is it?”

  Patsy speaks. “Two mothers and their babies were found dead—”

  “Let her tell it,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “Oh . . .” Sally Hemings seems about to excuse herself, but then she says, “That’s it, mostly. Except they were in a canot. Madame Aubier, who sells onions—she has a brother who is a sailor. And he was making the voyage back from Montreal when he spotted a canot floating in the empty sea. It was filled with people—the survivors of a ship that had gone down, he thought. Except when his ship drew up alongside the canot, he saw that all the people in it were dead. Frozen to death. It was winter. And there were two mothers in the boat who had frozen solid with their arms around their babies and small children. That’s what we were talking about.” She glances at Patsy.

  “And what did you make of that?” Thomas Jefferson asks Sally Hemings.

  She glances again at Patsy, who just shrugs. “Well, the main thing is that I didn’t see how a good God could allow all those people to die—especially those babies, who couldn’t have done a thing wrong in their lives. So I was just saying that either God isn’t all good or he isn’t all-powerful. I didn’t see how he could be both and let something like that happen.”

  “And I was saying that the mind of God is vast,” says Patsy, “and that it is foolish to pretend that our own weak minds can ever fathom his rationale, his motives or even the true consequences of his acts.”

  “And what do you think, Polly?” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “I wasn’t listening.” Polly casts the other two girls a worried glance.

  “But what do you think?”

  “I don’t know. . . . God moves in a mysterious way, I suppose.”

  Thomas Jefferson smiles ruefully and shakes his head. “This is what I get for letting you two be educated by nuns.” He points at Sally Hemings. “This girl has not been to school one day in her life, and yet she can see the essence of the problem more clearly than either of you. What you have both said is exactly what popes and monarchs would have us think about them and their actions. There will be no justice on this earth unless we can look plainly at the facts before our eyes and draw the most rational conclusions. Our abilities to observe and evaluate are the surest manifestation of God’s grace. Everything else is occult superstition and plays into the hands of tyrants.”

  The two sisters look down at the floor in shame, but Sally Hemings can feel their irritation—Patsy’s especially—radiating in her direction.

  “You have a good head on your shoulders, Sally,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “Thank you, sir.” She glances at Patsy, who pays her no mind. Then she lifts the two satchels she has been holding. “But if I may be excused . . .”

  Thomas Jefferson nods, and Sally Hemings, allowing herself a small smile, backs out of the room.

  Thomas Jefferson believes that he should love the world—an ambition continuously obstructed by the fact that one cannot have the good without also having the evil. Thomas Jefferson wants purity, but there is no purity, not in this world and least of all in his own heart. There is beauty, however, and mathematics—which are one and the same sometimes, as in the golden rectangle, which when manifested in architecture can make walls and whole rooms seem weightless and floating. But this impression is only a production of the mind, which is to say: an illusion. In fact, all physical manifestations of the golden rectangle are as solidly earthbound as any other existing thing. Thomas Jefferson knows that all purity is illusory, and yet he still wants his love of the world to be pure, which is to say: illusion-free.

  . . . I have tried to sleep, but it is useless. My mind whirled with infernal thoughts, and my limbs were possessed by such writhes and twitches that I could not keep them still for half a second. I have no idea what the hour is. Sometime after eleven, I imagine. The clouds have parted to reveal a low, ice-white moon that has infused the snowy lawn with pallid brilliance. A mouse is gnawing at something inside the wall.

  I finally surrendered all hope of sleep when a voice spoke inside my head, telling me that I had committed nothing but self-exculpatory lies on these pages and that the whole truth of my last forty years could be conveyed in four words: I BETRAYED GOOD PEOPLE.

  Just this instant a moonbeam so brilliant it
cancels out the wavery orange of the candle has crossed the paper-littered corner of the desk and struck the foot of a chair beside the door.

  Would I be justified in taking this as a sign?

  But of what?

  In any event, what finally got me out of bed was the thought that what I must do here is disentangle the strands of ignorance, inattention, self-deception, fear and desire out of which my life is woven so that I might see clearly and finally how truly damnable I am—and once I have laid that truth bare, these pages will be meaningless and I had best throw them onto the fire and go on to whatever life remains to me. . . .

  I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  (as quoted on the wall of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.)

  Thomas Jefferson spends his days arguing with men over pieces of paper or flattering them over plates of meat and glasses of wine. He argues interest rates with Dutch bankers, proposes trade agreements to the Spanish. He tries to convince the French not to pay ransom to the Barbary pirates. Some days are consumed entirely in journeys from palais to embassy to hôtel. On others he sits in his study dashing off letters as fast as he can think, then summons Petit and commands him to deliver the letters within the hour, only to have another packet of urgent missives waiting when Petit returns.