Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  A piece of foolscap rises and falls on the waves, not far from a man rowing a small boat.

  “You could ask the man to get it,” she says.

  “It’s not worth it. The drawing is ruined.” He turns away from the river and shrugs resignedly.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  His eyes meet hers long enough for her to feel an uncomfortable warmth pass through her breast and into her throat. She looks back at the rapidly flowing water. The foolscap is now one hundred feet downstream.

  “It’s all right,” he says. “I can do another. It wasn’t good anyway.” He puts his hat on his head and crosses the road toward his writing desk. Sally Hemings follows.

  “I hate to lose things,” she says.

  “I do, too.”

  “No, I’m ridiculous about it. Sometimes, when I’m coming back from the marché or from the school, I kick a stone along the street, and if I manage to kick it all the way home with me, I can’t bear to leave it outside. I feel as if I am abandoning an old friend!”

  Thomas Jefferson makes a small laugh. “What do you do?”

  “I take it inside with me. I have a box up in my chamber full of stones.”

  He laughs again, heartily. “You have such a tender heart, Sally.”

  She smiles, blushing. “It’s stupid.”

  “Not at all.”

  They are standing beside his writing desk. He picks up a pencil lying against the bottom edge of the desk’s sloped top and puts it into a chamois sack. His penknife is lying in the dust at her feet. Sally Hemings picks it up and hands it to him. He puts that into the sack.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “It’s stupid to care so much about a stone,” she says.

  “On the contrary, I think that shows how engaged with life you are and how generous you are with your affections. In my experience most people are so lazy, hurried or frightened that they close themselves off to life. That’s such a waste of our brief time on this earth.”

  Thomas Jefferson is smiling with an almost paternal tenderness that embarrasses Sally Hemings. She is momentarily flustered.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she says at last. “It seems to me that we should only care about little things a little bit and save our real feelings for the most important things.”

  “Perhaps . . .” Thomas Jefferson is still smiling. “But theologians say that God cares as much for the death of a sparrow as he does for the destruction of a city.”

  Now Sally Hemings is the one to laugh.

  “Why are you laughing?” asks Thomas Jefferson.

  “I shouldn’t say.”

  He flips open the top of his portable desk and puts the chamois sack inside, then tucks the desk under his arm. “Why not?”

  “I just shouldn’t.”

  They are walking now, back toward place Louis XV and home. The brilliant sun heats the paving and the tops of their heads, but a mountainscape of white and slate gray clouds is advancing over the trees of the Champs-Élysées.

  “But I want to know what you think,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “Well . . . I don’t know. . . . That just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  Thomas Jefferson grunts. “I’d forgotten what a skeptic you are!”

  “To me it just seems insane that God would feel exactly the same about the death of thousands of people as he does about one dirty little bird.”

  “Well, perhaps I’ve phrased it badly. I think what theologians say is that God’s heart breaks for the death of a sparrow as well as for the destruction of a city.”

  “That’s just as insane.”

  “Not really. What we are talking about is feeling, not rational evaluation. The theologians want to draw our attention to the beauty—the moral beauty—of the all-powerful creator of the universe being heartbroken at the death of a dirty little bird. Don’t you find that beautiful?”

  “What I want to know,” says Sally Hemings, “is if God feels so bad about the death of a little bird, why does he kill it? And it’s the same with destroying cities.”

  “That’s the big mystery, of course. But still there’s the beauty. It seems to me that the idea of a God caring for a creature as insignificant and humble as a sparrow has a beauty all by itself—maybe in part because it teaches the lesson that all things of this world are important—political revolutions, great works of art, falling in love, dirty little birds and even stones one kicks home on the street.”

  “But what I was saying is that I don’t care about everything. I care much more about some little gray stone than I do about half the beggars I see on the street. In fact, I hate some of those beggars and can’t bear to look at them. That’s what I meant by stupid.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “Oh, yes it is.”

  “But even the fact that you feel bad about hating beggars proves the point I am making. Think about Christ’s injunction to love our enemies. I find that a supremely beautiful moral challenge. It may not be possible for us to truly love our enemies, but the suggestion that we ought to love them can help guide us in life, especially if we think that what it really means is that we should try to understand our enemies, to see the world from their point of view and, most of all, to understand that they are human beings, struggling in a hard and confusing world, just as we are, and that their fundamental rights are exactly equal to ours. They may not do the right things or think the right things, but that does not mean they are inhuman or should be treated so. I think Christ’s injunction is, in fact, the foundation of all morality.”

  “Well, I don’t know about all that. But I do know that it’s not possible to love your enemy. And so saying that impossible things are beautiful makes about as much sense to me as crying over a stone.”

  “But you do cry over a stone.”

  “And that’s stupid.”

  “You don’t think there is anything good about tenderheartedness?”

  “It’s good to be tenderhearted to your children. And to your mother.”

  “Not to your father?” Thomas Jefferson smiles wryly.

  “Your father, too.” Sally Hemings laughs. “But only if he is a good father!”

  Thomas Jefferson also laughs. But after only a few seconds, their smiles fade.

  They have crossed place Louis XV and are walking amid the colonnades of trees bordering the Champs-Élysées. The sky straight overhead is crystalline blue, but the sun has been obscured by the clouds. The air has grown distinctly cooler, and the wind is continuous. There is a sound in the tops of the trees like air being sucked through teeth.

  After a couple of minutes, during which they only stroll, never even exchanging a glance, Sally Hemings speaks. “Mr. Jefferson, might I ask you a question?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You knew my father well, didn’t you?”

  The center of Thomas Jefferson’s brow furrows. It is a while before he says, “I am not sure.”

  Understanding that he is only trying to be discreet, Sally Hemings’s throat tightens. She feels a prickling of sweat at her temples and in her armpits. She, too, should be discreet—all the more so because she is a servant. And yet she is so curious to hear what Thomas Jefferson might have thought of this man of whom she has no memory.

  “I know who he was,” she says at last. “My mother told me.”

  “Oh.” Seeming both surprised and embarrassed, Thomas Jefferson falls silent, and Sally Hemings decides to let the topic drop. But after a couple of moments, he says, “Yes, I knew him, but not as well—or as long, I should say—as I would have liked.”

  “Can you tell me about him?”

  Thomas Jefferson is silent another extended moment. “He was a good man, and very capable. You would have had every reason to be proud of him.” Thomas Jefferson falls silent again, an indecisive expre
ssion on his face.

  After a moment Sally Hemings asks, “Is there something else?”

  “He was a spirited man, and possessed of many powerful enthusiasms. But like all men, he had his weaknesses. . . . And beyond that I do not feel qualified to speak.”

  They traverse the length of the Champs-Élysées in silence, except one time when Thomas Jefferson points to a magpie and says, “That is the only animal, apart from the human race, that can recognize itself in a mirror”—a remark that Sally Hemings responds to with only a grunt.

  At the Chaillot Gate, immediately beyond which they can see a southern wall of the Hôtel de Langeac, Thomas Jefferson stops and turns to face Sally Hemings.

  “Miss Hemings, there is something on my mind that I suspect I should keep to myself, but . . . Well, I can only hope that it might actually be better for you and . . . for both of us . . . if I speak. . . .”

  Sally Hemings looks down at the toes of his black boots on the yellow sand and waits for him to continue.

  “. . . I simply want you to know that despite my unforgivable behavior several weeks ago, I have the utmost respect for you. You are a charming and very intelligent young woman, and I regret deeply that my utter foolishness might have led you to believe I had any other opinion.”

  Sally Hemings allows her gaze to meet his for half an instant before she says, “Thank you.”

  . . . I could have said no to Mr. Jefferson. Even at sixteen, when I knew so little of him, I still understood this essential fact. If I had said no, emphatically, and on every occasion when he first began to broach his intentions, he would have respected my virtue, both because he himself was ashamed of his desires, particularly when he considered the feelings of his daughters and dearest friends, and because, as ardently carnal as his nature might have been, he was ultimately less interested in sensual pleasure than in love. This was one of his greatest weaknesses. He craved adoration, not just of the people he knew but, in a very real sense, of the entire world—which was why he couldn’t stay away from politics, even though he detested political life.

  But I didn’t say no—“no,” of course, being a word Negroes simply never speak to white people. That said, I could easily have conveyed my feelings without having to actually speak the word. I could have pretended, for example, to be indifferent to his small kindnesses and continual readiness to engage in conversation. Had I done so, then none of the events that now seem a poison in my soul would have come to pass. The difficult relations that followed his having come into my bedchamber would certainly have continued a while longer, but I still would have been his daughters’ maid throughout the remainder of our time in Paris and, most likely, at Monticello as well.

  And what is more, even had I rejected him when his expressions of desire became more emphatic and overt, I knew that the worst I would have had to suffer would have been life as a scullery maid or a washerwoman. Mr. Jefferson would never have sold me away from my family or subjected me to any form of severe punishment. Had he done so, he would have had to face the fact that his supposed love for me was a sentimental sham and that he was as capable as the most brutal slaveholder of acting out of revenge, cruelty and spite. It was essential to Mr. Jefferson’s self-esteem that he believe himself to be nothing like the majority of his neighbors. . . .

  One morning, as Sally Hemings is walking past Thomas Jefferson’s study on her way to the kitchen, he calls out, “Mademoiselle Sally!” And when she looks in his door, he says, “I’ve been thinking. . . .” He makes a circular gesture with his hand. “Come in! Come in!” She takes a step inside the door but goes no farther, and he does not insist. “I’ve been thinking,” he says, “that you have too good a mind to be so entirely unlettered. What’s happened with Jimmy? Has he been teaching you to read and write?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “I did, but he didn’t seem very interested.” She sighs. “I think he doesn’t see the point of a girl learning to read.”

  Thomas Jefferson slaps his hand down on the table. “That’s absurd! Go ask him again. And if he continues to be so contrary, you must tell him that I order him to teach you reading and writing.”

  Four or five times over the next several days, Thomas Jefferson asks Sally Hemings if she has commenced her reading lessons, and on each occasion her answer is the same, that her brother has agreed to teach her but that he never seems to have the time. “Nonsense!” Thomas Jefferson invariably replies. “All you need is fifteen minutes a day. He must have fifteen minutes!”

  But then one day, when Sally Hemings gives him the same report, he says, “Well, I suppose I’ve got fifteen minutes. Come by the parlor after you have finished your duties, and let’s see what we can do.”

  Sally Hemings finishes her labors at 9:00 P.M. and arrives at the parlor to find that Thomas Jefferson actually went out that day to buy her a primer, which he has placed open on the same table where he showed her how to write her name. There are two chairs beside the table, so close to each other that she could barely fit her fingers between them. The table is lit with a candelabra and an oil lamp.

  Thomas Jefferson commences by going through the alphabet letter by letter, explaining the possible sounds that each might make. When it becomes clear that she is confused by all the variations, he assures her that it will be much clearer when she actually tries to read.

  The primer consists of twenty-six rhymed couplets, each featuring a different letter of the alphabet. He begins by reading aloud several of the easier ones—those without biblical or classical names in them. First he reads the couplet and then goes through it a second time, making the sound of each letter as he passes a pen point underneath it. The sounds he makes, especially as he exaggerates them for clarity, are nothing like English, and Sally Hemings cannot help laughing. “You sound like you’re talking in your sleep!” she says.

  Thomas Jefferson also laughs. “I’ll get my revenge when it’s your turn!”

  And, indeed, when he asks her to read “Whales in the sea / God’s voice obey,” the only words she manages to read on her own are “in” and “God’s” and even those require a lot of help. By the time they have decoded the couplet together, she is exhausted and embarrassed.

  “It takes time,” says Thomas Jefferson, smiling. “You’ll catch on after a while.”

  “Maybe it would be easier if the words weren’t so silly,” she says.

  His brows buckle. “My dear Miss Hemings, I am beginning to suspect you are something of an atheist.”

  “A what?”

  “An atheist. Someone who doesn’t believe in God.”

  “Oh.” She is not entirely sure he is joking. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you have laughed at every one of the religious couplets!”

  He is smiling. She smiles, too.

  “That’s because they are so funny. What language does God speak to fish? Bubble language? And what does he say, ‘Thou shalt love the man with the harpoon’?”

  Thomas Jefferson leans back in his chair and tugs on the bottom of his waistcoat as if he has just finished a good meal. He looks her straight in the eyes—his own coppery bright in candlelight. “So you do believe in God?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “I think so.” She is worried that she shouldn’t have spoken so freely, that she might come off as impious, but Thomas Jefferson seems pleased by her remarks.

  “Do you believe that God is good?” he asks.

  “Perhaps. In his heart.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean God wants to be good. And he tries to be good. And he is good a lot of the time. He made this beautiful world, after all. He made babies. He made sunsets and roses. But he also makes mistakes. He created diseases. Earthquakes. He made it possible for people to be cruel. People are cruel all the time.”

  “But is that God’s fault? Or are
people alone to blame?”

  Thomas Jefferson continues to look at her intently, a slight smile on only one half of his face. Sally Hemings blushes.

  “You must think what I am saying is stupid,” she says.

  “Not at all. In fact, I have just been reading a dialogue by an eminent philosopher who seems to share your opinions, though he is not nearly so forthright.”

  Her blush intensifies, and her right ear goes hot.

  Thomas Jefferson smiles, leans forward and lifts his hand in her direction, but then he draws it back and folds his arms across his chest. “So what do you think: Is God the cause of cruelty?”

  “Well . . .” For a moment Sally Hemings doesn’t know what to say, but then her original point comes back to her: “The preachers are always saying that God controls everything. And that he knows all, sees all. So if that’s true, then God is making people do cruel things, and so their cruelty is God’s fault. But that’s the thing I’m not sure I believe. I can’t believe that God would intentionally make people do cruel things. So maybe God doesn’t control everything. And people do cruel things on their own. But even if that is true, I still think that God is partly to blame, since he put the ability to be cruel into human beings.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t really make sense. That’s what I mean about mistakes. Maybe God wasn’t paying attention when he made people. Or he didn’t think it all the way through.” She glances at Thomas Jefferson, then looks away. “Or maybe he was just in a bad mood.”

  “That makes him sound a lot like a human being.”

  “I suppose. Except that he can do so much more than a human being can. He’s just not perfect.”

  “But if he’s not perfect, then why worship him?”

  “Because he made so many beautiful things, too. How could I not be thankful for those things? But maybe ‘worship’ is the wrong word. Maybe all I really feel is thankful. Though sometimes I’m also angry and disappointed.” She looks down into her lap, where she is massaging the center of her left palm with the thumb of her right hand. She glances up and shrugs. “But I probably shouldn’t say that.”