Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  But all of this stops in the evening, when it is Thomas Jefferson’s habit to sit in front of the fire in the upstairs parlor, sipping from a bottle of wine and reading Latin or Greek. One such evening he has Vergil’s Eclogues open in his lap when Sally Hemings enters the room.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Jefferson,” she says, and when he neither looks her way nor answers, she speaks again. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Jefferson.”

  It is a long moment before he turns toward her, spectacles halfway down his nose. He seems not to have any idea who she is.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Not at all!” Thomas Jefferson is smiling now. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I was so—” He holds up his book, shrugs. “I didn’t even know you were there.”

  She explains that she has come to fetch a miniature porcelain shepherdess that Polly left on an end table and will surely want in her room tomorrow when she comes home from the Abbaye de Penthemont. As Sally Hemings walks past Thomas Jefferson to the table where the shepherdess is standing, she asks, “What is it that you are reading?”

  He lifts his book and reads, “‘Pastorem, Tityre, pinguis pascere oportet ovis, deductum dicere carmen.’”

  When he looks at her again, she is smiling uneasily.

  That’s Latin,” he tells her. “Vergil.”

  She laughs. “Je soupçonnais que ce n’était pas du français!”

  He also laughs and lowers the book into his lap. “Actually, what I read happens to be about a shepherd. A god tells him that his sheep should be fat but his poems should be lean.”

  Sally Hemings picks up the shepherdess figurine and rolls it thoughtfully between her thumb and fingers. Her lips are pursed, and one eyebrow is lifted in exactly the expression Patsy wears when she is troubled.

  “Is something the matter?” asks Thomas Jefferson.

  “Oh . . .” She looks as if she is going to make her excuses and leave, but then she says, “I was just thinking how wonderful it must be to read.”

  “Well, it is,” he says. Then he is silent, because he can see that she is sad. “You should get Jimmy to teach you. He’s an excellent reader. I taught him myself.”

  She crumples up one corner of her mouth. “I asked him to, but he says I have no head for learning.”

  “Nonsense! You’re a bright girl! It’s easy.”

  He splays his open book over the arm of his chair and turns to the table where there is a heap of correspondence that he browsed through earlier in the evening. Taking a sip from his wine, he points to the figurine. “Put that down and come over here.” He examines the letter on top of the pile, then flips it over and opens the brass lid of a star-shaped inkwell. As Sally Hemings comes up beside him, he dips his quill and writes her first name in big letters.

  She laughs. “That’s the one word I can read!”

  “Good,” he says. “That’s a good start.”

  He dips his quill again, and to the left of her name he writes, “I am.”

  “Do you know what those words are?”

  She doesn’t, so he asks if she knows what the first letter is. When she shakes her head, he tells her what the letter is called and explains the sounds it could signify, with the one in this case being the letter’s own name. Then he tells her what the names and sounds of the next two letters are and asks her to figure out what word they spell.

  She drawls the sounds out as she says them over and over: “Aaaahhhh-emmmm, aaaa-emmmm.”

  “You sound like a sheep!” he tells her. “Also, you’re trying too hard. Look at the other two words and see if that helps you.”

  No sooner has he made this suggestion than she laughs out loud and reads the sentence.

  “Brava!” cries Thomas Jefferson. “You’re already reading!”

  She claps her hands beneath her chin and laughs again.

  “Now let’s teach you to write!” Thomas Jefferson dips his quill once again and hands it to her, telling her to copy each letter.

  She squeezes the quill between her thumb and the tips of her four fingers and holds it over the page as if she is trying to balance it on its point. She knows that what she is doing is wrong, but she doesn’t know how to correct it. While she is holding the quill in midair, a droplet of ink falls to the page and lies there like a black bead.

  “No, no, no!” Thomas Jefferson laughs and takes the quill out of her hands. “Here.” He dips the quill again and puts it between her thumb and forefinger, then positions her other fingers with his own.

  Her fingers are rough, but warm and very moist. Her face is just beside his, her gray eyes glinting avidly. She is smiling. Her breath is meaty and lush, and he can feel the warmth of her shoulder and arm, which are touching his own.

  He lets go of her hand, and as she makes a rough approximation of the sentence he has written, he realizes—fully realizes for the first time—that she has become a beautiful young woman.

  When she is finished, he gives her the piece of paper and says, “Show that to Jimmy. Tell him I command him to teach you to read and write!”

  Sally Hemings clutches the page on both sides and reads it aloud over and over as she walks out of the room, leaving the porcelain shepherdess lying horizontally on the table where it was previously standing.

  Later that night Thomas Jefferson decides that his vital fluids have gotten out of balance again. But the following day he discovers that his attempt at self-regulation has had no effect. It is the same the next day and the one after. After a week he discontinues the practice, lest he endanger his sanity.

  Sally Hemings is a slave girl, he tells himself, three months younger than Patsy and partly African. How could he possibly have any sort of feeling for her? Absurd! Preposterous! He need only wait, and all will be well.

  A landscape of wooded hills, green and yellow fields and scattered brick houses accelerates from the horizon, seeming to stretch as it approaches, and then shoots in a blur beneath the steel balcony of Sally Hemings’s invention. The sky is roaring. The studded balcony bucks on irregularities in the wind. It shudders and heaves, and Thomas Jefferson has to clutch the brass railing to keep from whirling into oblivion.

  “Isn’t this wonderful!” says Sally Hemings, who is leaning out over the railing—so far out that she seems to be lying on empty air. “Come,” she says, her white shift snap-flapping ceaselessly along the length of her body. “It’s easy!” She reaches back toward him with her open hand. “Really! You’ll love it! It’s exactly like flying!”

  “No,” Thomas Jefferson wants to shout. “It’s dangerous!” he wants to tell her. “Come back! Come back! You’ll fall.” But every time he opens his mouth, the wind crams his words back down his throat. Again and again he tries to speak, and every time his lips mouth silence.

  First Sally Hemings is puzzled. Then she is hurt. Now disappointment is slowly suffusing her face. In a moment she will look away. Thomas Jefferson knows this. She will turn her face into the wind. She will forget him. It will be as if he’d never lived.

  In the days that follow their writing lesson, Thomas Jefferson notices that Sally Hemings is watching him. He walks into a room, and she instantly looks up from her sewing or dusting—sometimes it would seem expectantly, though almost always she immediately looks away, as if embarrassed or ashamed. It is perfectly ordinary, he tells himself, for one person to look up when another enters the room and mere vanity to imagine anything else afoot, especially as he is a man on the verge of old age and she but a girl of sixteen. Why would she even give him a second glance? The problem is that she does give him second glances. And third glances. If, by any chance, he and she should be in the same room for any length of time, it is perfectly common for him to look up from whatever he might be doing four, five or six times—and, on each occasion, notice her eyes darting away.

  Perhaps it is my fault, he thinks. Perhaps she has notice
d that I am always staring at her, and she only looks up involuntarily to see if my gaze—no doubt unwanted—is once again turned in her direction. On most occasions this explanation seems entirely sensible—but then there are times when their glances meet and she will hesitate a half second before looking away, or when he will think he sees a faltering smile on her lips. And on such occasions the effect upon him can be so powerful that he will have to leave the room.

  Thomas Jefferson tells Patsy that he has decided she and Polly should have a maid with them at Penthemont. Other girls have servants lodging with them, but heretofore Patsy said she didn’t want to have one herself, because she is an American, and a democrat, and so it is better that she learn to manage on her own. While Thomas Jefferson finds this sentiment wholly commendable (indeed, Patsy is only repeating what he has said to her himself), he tells her that he is worried she is not spending enough time on her Greek and Latin and believes that she would do better work if Sally Hemings were there to attend to her domestic needs.

  “What do you think, then?” he asks.

  “C’est comme vous voudrez, cher Papa,” she answers. “My duty is to accede.”

  “Excellent! I will inform the abbess of our decision this week, and Sally will return to the school with you next Sunday.”

  But Sally Hemings does not return to the school with Patsy and Polly the following Sunday, nor the one after. And on both occasions, when Patsy asks her father why, he tells her that he has been too busy to write to the abbess but that he will do so immediately. He never does do so, however, and Patsy finally concludes that either he has changed his mind or he has simply forgotten.

  Thomas Jefferson contemplates the rock that is his self. There are days when it seems massive: not a planet but possibly a lesser moon or a comet. What most troubles him about his self is a quality that might be referred to as its weight, or its rigidity, or its implacable constancy. There are times when Thomas Jefferson feels there is no greater limit on his freedom than his self.

  Here is a definition of life, or of the world, or of this medium in which being elaborates: an infinity of possibilities—and it is Thomas Jefferson’s self that prevents him from fully inhabiting this medium.

  Oh, the noble sentiments he wishes he were capable of feeling! Oh, the moments of golden contentment that he has turned into debaucheries of self-loathing! Oh, the cherubic unities of actuality and belief that his self has suffocated in the crib with a pillow!

  The Princess Lubomirsky will be throwing a ball on New Year’s Eve, and Patsy and Polly insist that they must have new gowns. Thomas Jefferson agrees—especially as Patsy has reached that age when, as he puts it, “impressions are of the highest consideration.” He also says that if Sally Hemings is going to attend them at so lavish an event, she, too, needs to make a suitable impression.

  The dressmaker, Madame Palatin, has a nose like a hawk’s beak, a figure like a pigeon and she hoots like an owl as she measures Patsy and Polly, telling Thomas Jefferson she has never seen two such pretty girls. “Comme des princesses!” she adds. “Vraiment!” Her voice descends to one of the lower mammalian registers, however, when it is time to measure Sally Hemings. “Dépêche-toi!” she grunts, and although Sally Hemings leaps from her chair by the door, the old woman grunts again, “Dépêche-toi!”

  As she jabs her thumb into Sally Hemings’s armpit and runs her measuring strip down the girl’s ribs to her waist, she complains to Thomas Jefferson about the character of modern serving girls. “Elles sont toutes si paresseuses,” she says with a sigh.

  Then she is grunting again. “Tourne-toi! Vite!” She grabs Sally Hemings by the elbow and yanks her around. “Tourne-toi donc! Tu as les oreilles bouchées, ou quoi?”

  When Thomas Jefferson suggests that it is not necessary to be so rough, Madame Palatin tells him that he is spoiling the girl and that there is only one thing servant girls understand. Then she flicks her cupped hand in the air, just missing the back of Sally Hemings’s head.

  A month later Thomas Jefferson, his daughters and Sally Hemings are back in Madame Palatin’s studio. Polly, who is now eleven, is the first to try on her gown, and when she comes out of the dressing room and takes a turn in front of the mirrors, Madame Palatin exclaims that she has never seen a more beautiful child. Polly’s gown is very plain—blue silk, with a high, square neck and a lace vest—but her father and sister applaud as she grins and rocks from foot to foot. From her seat by the door, Sally Hemings also applauds.

  Patsy’s gown is truly spectacular: rose pink silk with rose red trim, an embroidered band around the base of the petticoat and a lace bodice cut to reveal the uppermost swellings of her bosom. She swirls in front of the mirror, the skirt of her gown swaying in a waltzlike rhythm, even after she has stopped and is stepping toward her grinning, applauding family. She curtsies with a shy smile that reminds Thomas Jefferson of her mother on the night that, for the one and only time, she and he performed a duet in front of an audience. But Martha’s shyness that night was partly due to the fact that she knew she had not played her best. She hated public events of any kind, in fact. Patsy has no such anxiety. A good thing, Thomas Jefferson thinks. He cannot help but connect Martha’s almost constant fearfulness with her early death.

  Madame Palatin seems to feel that there is no need for Sally Hemings to try on her gown, but Thomas Jefferson insists she have her turn.

  “Oh, no!” the girl cries from her chair by the door. Her face is bright red, and she can’t lift her eyes from her lap. “Really! There’s no need.”

  “On the contrary,” says Thomas Jefferson. “If we find at home that something is wrong with it, then we will have to come all the way back, and that would be a waste of valuable time.”

  Madame Palatin holds the gown out by its shoulder so that its dangling skirt just clears the floor. It will fit like a second skin, she declares, but if the gentleman insists, “C’est comme vous voudrez.”

  The gown is less intricately ornamented than Polly’s and in yellow silk with a slightly higher neckline and a full, lace-frilled underskirt. Sally Hemings emerges in small steps from the dressing room, her gaze lowered to the floor, her forehead and cheeks crimson and, Thomas Jefferson can just make out, her lips crumpled and white in an attempt to suppress a grin.

  “Come, Sally, take a turn,” he says. “Let us see what it looks like from all sides.”

  “No,” she says. But then she does do a quick and graceful swirl. She is so embarrassed afterward that she bends over double and nearly backs into the mirror.

  “Beautiful!” he says. “You’ve grown into a very fine young woman, Sally.”

  The words aren’t even out of his mouth before he can feel Madame Palatin’s disapproval chilling one corner of the room. He doesn’t care about her. In fact, he is glad if he has offended her. But then he glances at the chair beside him and sees Patsy looking up, her expression an amalgam of disbelief, mockery and alarm.

  They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. . . . Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. . . . Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  Notes on the State of Virginia

  Written in 1781–82, published in 1787

&nb
sp; It is April of 1789, Thomas Jefferson is forty-six, and his mind is as busy with discontinuous thoughts as the sky is busy with birds. He knows that his constant distraction is wrong, and many times a day he wills his mind to be more disciplined. And yet it is also true that cerebration has never felt so fruitful as it has during this one year in particular. And he has, perhaps, never felt so intensely alive as at this very moment, when, strolling the shore of the lake at the Bois de Boulogne, he is in conversation with his great friend, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. They are preparing for the first meeting of the Estates-General, Louis XVI’s response to Lafayette’s call for a national assembly, and are in a delirium composed in equal parts of rhetoric, philosophy, egotism and hope.

  “Government,” Thomas Jefferson is saying, “should exist only as a mechanical apparatus with no power of its own, inert except when it is executing the public will. Its highest purpose should be to preserve the absolute freedom of its citizens.”

  “Absolute?” says Lafayette, one jet eyebrow uptilted, lips in that nearly straight smile signifying his delight at having detected an error in reasoning. “Absolute freedom? For all citizens?”

  “Absolute,” Thomas Jefferson affirms, “except insofar as the exercise of that freedom would injure other people or deprive them of their own freedom.”

  “Aha!” Lafayette points his index finger toward the clouds. “Deprive other people of their freedom!” The delight in Lafayette’s smile has multiplied considerably. “That brings to mind an old bone I have to pick with you.”

  Thomas Jefferson hopes that his own smile also expresses delight, for as much as he enjoys debate, there are many times when he feels ashamed before Lafayette, who, as a mere lad of twenty, was a general in the Continental Army and took a musket ball in the thigh in defense of Thomas Jefferson’s dearest beliefs, and who, once Thomas Jefferson had fled Richmond ahead of the British, retook the city, and then, after Cornwallis attempted to capture Jefferson at Monticello, did battle with the British on the banks of Jefferson’s own Rivanna River, and then continued to battle the British at Green Spring and Jamestown and Richmond—during which time Thomas Jefferson, hiding out in a cottage on his most remote plantation, Poplar Forest, was drafting his one and only book, Notes on the State of Virginia.