“These are remarkable times, Sally,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Do you know what the tiers état is?”
“No.”
“It is the French term for common people. The French common people are rising up against their monarch. Our spirit of republicanism is a great wave rolling around the world, and right now it is cresting here in France.”
Sally Hemings is quiet. She does not meet Thomas Jefferson’s eye, and he realizes he has been insensitive.
“I’m sorry, Sally. I don’t mean to imply that what you experienced was not . . . terrible. I only hoped that you might . . . I don’t know—” Thomas Jefferson falls silent.
There is a long moment during which he wonders if it is time for her to leave.
“But why did the man attack me?” she says at last. “I am not the king. I am not a princess or an aristocrat. Moi aussi, j’appartiens au tiers état.”
“Perhaps he was only angry. Perhaps he saw your clothes and decided you were the servant of an aristocrat. Though that is still madness. Revolutions become necessary when one people is oppressed by another. But that does not mean they are an unalloyed good. There is no such thing as moral purity in history. Even the most beneficent of revolutions necessarily entails injustice and the shedding of innocent blood. Our one consolation during moments like this is that they shall be followed by the dawning of a better world—” He cuts himself off, once again feeling he has been insensitive. “I am terribly, terribly sorry, however, that you should have suffered as you did today. I feel as if it is my fault.”
Sally Hemings looks Thomas Jefferson straight in the eye. “Why?”
He is blushing. He shrugs. “Mrs. Adams and Captain Ramsey both thought that you should have returned to Virginia straight from London, and . . . Well, I, too, have often thought that would have been better—”
“I am glad I stayed here,” says Sally Hemings. She is still looking Thomas Jefferson straight in the eye. “I have become a different person in Paris, and I am glad of it.”
Thomas Jefferson is standing up. A restlessness has come into his legs and eyes. “I am very happy to hear that, Sally. Still, I think it might be best if you did not go to the market alone for the next week or so. I doubt that these difficulties will last very long. But caution is advisable for the time being. Venture outside only in the company of another servant. I’ll speak to Petit about it immediately.”
Sally Hemings is standing up. She puts her tumbler down on Thomas Jefferson’s desk. “Thank you. That did help me feel better.” She smiles but avoids Thomas Jefferson’s gaze. “Well, I better let Jimmy know about the onions.”
Thomas Jefferson continues to stand behind his desk for a long moment after she leaves, his smile gradually fading. He takes his frock coat off the hook behind the door. His work is done for the day. It is time to see what is happening in the streets.
A day has passed. Sally Hemings is standing in the doorway to Thomas Jefferson’s study, but so silently that he doesn’t notice until she draws her breath to speak. “Mr. Jefferson,” she says, softly but emphatically. She looks stunned. Her eyes are wide but focused on nothing. The rest of her face seems frozen.
“Are you all right, Sally?” he says. “Is something wrong?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Certainly.” Thomas Jefferson has been writing a letter. He wipes the tip of his quill with a rag and flips shut the top of his inkwell. “Sit down.” He gestures at the chair in front of his desk.
“No, thank you.”
He places a piece of blotting paper atop the letter he has been writing and smooths it down with the side of his fist.
Sally Hemings has taken a couple of steps into the room, and when he looks at her, she takes a couple more, but not toward him, only away from the door.
“What is the matter?” he says.
She swallows. And when she speaks, her voice is trembling. “I have something to say.”
“All right.” He folds his hands on top of his desk, in part to conceal his own slight trembling. When she doesn’t speak, he asks, “What is it?”
“I have been struggling with my conscience.” She is silent a long moment, then takes a deep breath. “And I have realized that I must . . . that unless I tell you—”
Her words cut off as if she has been grabbed by the throat. Her wide eyes and still face express something closer to fear.
“Go ahead, Sally,” Thomas Jefferson says softly, his own throat going dry. “What is it you have to say?”
“I have to tell you that you shouldn’t—”
Again she stops, looking so frightened and lost.
Her face hardens. “I have to tell you,” she says, “that—” Another pause, but this time she is only gathering strength. Her words come all in a burst. “I will never forgive you for what you did.”
A tremor runs through her whole body, and then she is looking at him with a fierce alertness.
For reasons that Thomas Jefferson does not comprehend, he is glad at what she has said. He has stopped trembling.
“You are perfectly justified,” he says at last. “I neither deserve nor expect your forgiveness. But I am sorry. Very sorry.”
Sally Hemings continues to stare into his eyes, breathing heavily—and looking utterly beautiful. She says nothing.
“I don’t expect you to accept my apology,” he says. “I only want you to know what I feel.”
Once again her words come in a burst. “Why did you do it?”
Thomas Jefferson gasps. “Hah!”
“Why are you laughing?”
“I’m sorry. I was just surprised.”
Sally Hemings has taken another step toward the center of the room.
“I had no good reason,” he says. “I was a fool. And I had had too much wine. Also . . .” He looks away from her, picks up his quill and gives it a turn. Then he puts it back on its tray, looks at her and shrugs. “The most foolish thing of all, I suppose, is that I hoped that you might”—he looks away again—“welcome my . . . attentions.”
When he looks back at her, her expression has softened, though she is still looking him straight in the eyes. Her voice is so quiet he can hardly hear it.
“I didn’t.”
“I know.”
They look into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then Sally Hemings turns her gaze toward a framed map of France on the wall.
“Perhaps you had better go, Sally,” he says.
“Yes, Mr. Jefferson.”
She is gone from the room in three steps.
The air in the ballroom is dense with the odors of meat, burning whale oil and male sweat. More than twenty men are gathered at the round table at the center of the round room, the majority of them standing and all of them shouting. They are also consuming prodigious quantities of duck, salmon and potatoes—new plates of which Sally Hemings and the other servants are constantly ferrying into the room (the entire staff of the Hôtel has been impressed into service for this meeting, including Monsieur Petit), and, of course, the men are also emptying dozens of bottles of Bordeaux.
This morning Monsieur Petit told the staff that a very important meeting would be occurring at the Hôtel that night, that the most courageous and brilliant men in all of France would be coming to discuss matters of utmost importance “to the future of humanity.” He did not say what those matters might be, but as Sally Hemings has moved among the men carrying bottles and trays, she gathers that they are intending some sort of confrontation with the king, and she wonders—though she hardly dares to hope that this might be true—if this meeting isn’t like the ones that Thomas Jefferson attended in Philadelphia when she was a baby and that led to the Revolution. The thought that she might be a witness to a great moment of history fills her with an intense excitement that expresses itself as a buoyant sense of well-being—as if she has gotten mil
dly intoxicated on the fumes of the wine she’s been pouring.
Most of the men are crowded at one end of the table, where an old man whose wig rests crookedly on his bald head sits, flanked by candelabras, plume in hand, and occasionally transcribes phrases shouted to him by one or more of the men. The Marquis de Lafayette, standing just behind the old man, sometimes claps his hand on the man’s shoulder and gives him commands to write additional phrases or to cross out ones he has already set down. Most of the time, these commands are met by incredulous roars and upraised hands and then a new round of shouting, in which the marquis actively participates, his expression alternating between mischievous delight and the conviction that he is surrounded by imbeciles.
Apart from the elderly scrivener, Thomas Jefferson is the quietest man in the room. He stands beside the marquis, his arms folded tightly across his chest, although his right hand does clutch a wineglass. Every now and then, the marquis will move his mouth close to Thomas Jefferson’s ear and they will confer behind a cupped hand. Some of the other men standing around him also address remarks to him or ask questions, but none of his responses are audible above the cacophony. Sally Hemings can’t help but feel disappointed that he is not taking a more active role in this important discussion. She feels that he is letting himself down and worries that his moment in history may have passed.
At one point late in the evening, as she is walking down the dark corridor from the kitchen, a bottle of wine in each hand, she hears that the room has gone silent and that Thomas Jefferson is speaking. She stops just inside the door, in the wavery brown dimness, far from the lamps and candles on the table.
He is one of the tallest men in the room, and seems even taller standing next to the much smaller marquis, yet his stature seems diminished by a vagueness in his eyes, as if he can’t actually see the people he is addressing, and his voice is pitched higher than normal and sounds thin.
All at once Sally Hemings realizes that he is afraid.
“Le premier principe doit être que tous les hommes sont créés égaux,” he says. “Tous les droits découlent de cela.”
He is quoting his own writing: “All men are created equal.” Is he doing that because he is nervous? Do the other people notice? Do they think he is a fool for repeating a phrase they must all have heard a thousand times?
She looks around the room. A couple of men just in front of her are murmuring to each other, but she can’t hear well enough to tell if there is anything derisive in their tone. The faces of the other people in the room are unreadable masks. There is a snakelike fixity in the shining eyes of the marquis. Is that his way of trying to hide his embarrassment? Or could it be an expression of his anger that Thomas Jefferson is making a fool of them both?
Sally Hemings cannot move from her spot by the door until Thomas Jefferson, after a pause that reminds her of nothing so much as that of an old man who has forgotten what he meant to say, closes his mouth, looks down and shrugs, and then the men around the table begin to cheer and applaud. The applause isn’t so loud that it might not just be polite, but then she sees that a shy, happy smile has come onto Thomas Jefferson’s face. He suppresses the smile, looks up at the crowd and says, “Nous avons encore beaucoup de travail à faire!”—sparking a new surge of applause.
To Sally Hemings’s utter surprise, her eyes fill with tears.
A short time later, when she is pouring more wine for Lafayette, he grabs hold of her hand and says, “Merci, ma jolie Sarah! This is a very good night! You must get your friend Mr. Jefferson to tell you what we are doing.” As he lets go of her hand, he gives it a light squeeze and he smiles at her, his eyes flaring with excitement. “I think the world is changing tonight!”
She glances toward Thomas Jefferson, and, finding that he is already looking right at her, she has to turn her head away. But when she looks back, she manages to hold his gaze just long enough not to appear self-conscious—or so she hopes. “Would you like some more wine, Mr. Jefferson?”
He smiles warmly and holds out his glass. “Thank you, Sally.”
Hours later, as Sally Hemings and Anne are clearing the abandoned table, Thomas Jefferson walks back into the room after having said good-bye to the last of his guests. He seems thoughtful and contented, if very tired.
Anne fills her tray with clinking glasses and walks toward the corridor to the kitchen. Sally Hemings deliberately slows down her collection of glasses but doesn’t look in Thomas Jefferson’s direction until Anne has left the room.
He gives her a weary smile. “I’m sorry to have made so much work for you, especially so late at night.”
She shrugs and makes a smilelike crinkle of her mouth. She doesn’t know what to say.
His smile fades. He takes a step backward, as if he is ready to leave the room.
“Has the world changed?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” He pauses thoughtfully, and then his smile returns. “What do you think?”
“It doesn’t look much different to me,” she says. “Maybe a bit messier.”
Thomas Jefferson laughs, and Sally Hemings can’t stop herself from laughing, too. After a moment he says, “Do you know what we were doing here tonight?”
“Well . . . apart from eating, drinking and shouting, not really.”
“We’ve been putting together a French document that is a lot like our own Bill of Rights, about which Mr. Madison and I have been corresponding so much lately.”
Sally Hemings has heard Thomas Jefferson talk about the Bill of Rights, but she isn’t entirely clear what it is.
“So what does the document say?”
“Well, it starts out by saying, more or less, that all men are created equal. It also says that liberty is the freedom to do everything that will injure no one else.”
“Oh.” She looks away, unsure why Thomas Jefferson has chosen to refer to that very awkward night.
“So you see, Sally, that you, too, played a role in what happened here tonight.”
She is blushing. Her ears go hot. “I didn’t.”
“I don’t know about that,” says Thomas Jefferson. “I think that the marquis has had you in mind often as he has contemplated the issue of individual liberty.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” She is still blushing. “Anyhow, I didn’t do anything.”
“You’re too modest.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are,” he says firmly.
She has been looking down at her tray, but when she raises her eyes, she sees that Thomas Jefferson is looking at her with a smile that is both weary and tender.
“You make a very good impression on people,” he says. “I think you should know that.”
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. . . .
—From the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, introduced at the National Assembly by the Marquis de Lafayette on July 11, 1789
. . . What I am trying to do here is simply pin down the process by which I became complicit in the crime that has brought so much misery to the people I have known and loved—many of them for all of my life. And it becomes ever clearer to me that it happened by a process of twilit thinking—by thoughts behind the thoughts I was aware of, thoughts—a
nd feelings, too—that I could ignore or even pretend I had never had, thoughts whose immorality and gross impracticality might have been blatantly obvious had I ever had the courage or wisdom to drag them into the full light of my awareness. . . .
Near noon on a Sunday morning, Sally Hemings is walking home after having escorted Patsy and Polly back to school. It has rained, and although she is carrying an umbrella, the skirt of her gown is wet and hangs heavily against her knees and shins. The clouds have parted. The sun is brilliant white. Leaves on the treetops hiss and turn up their pale undersides in fierce gusts. Bits of blown grit sting her cheek and make her squint.
She is walking along the road between the Tuileries and the Seine when she notices a gentleman about twenty yards ahead running toward the bank of the river. The wind flips his hat off as he runs, and, turning an ungainly pirouette, he grabs it off the ground and resumes running to the edge of the quay. Only once he has stopped does she realize that the man is Thomas Jefferson. Slump-shouldered, he stares down at the water, and then his right arm twitches, as if he were uttering a curse—though Sally Hemings can hear nothing. She comes up beside him just as he is turning away from the river.
“Oh, Sally!” he exclaims. She has startled him.
“What happened?”
His mouth puckers unhappily. He points behind her, at a wooden box—his writing desk—atop a low wall on the far side of the road. “I was doing a drawing, and I’d nearly finished when I stopped to sharpen my pencil, and then a gust of wind picked the drawing up and flipped it end over end into the river.” He turns and points. “There—you see?”
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 18
