Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  —I don’t see any reason why I should talk to you.

  —Well then, maybe you haven’t learned your lesson.

  —What lesson?

  —That you have no rights.

  —It’s not in your power to deprive me of my rights.

  —On the contrary. I can do absolutely anything I want to you.

  —I won’t deny that you can treat me any way you want to, but that doesn’t mean you can deprive me of my rights. My rights are given by God and exist independently of anything you do. You may make it impossible for me to enjoy my rights, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have them.

  —Don’t get all academic on me.

  — . . .

  —If you can’t exercise your rights, then you don’t have them. End of story.

  — . . .

  —You idiot! You haven’t learned a fucking thing. You still don’t know that you’re a fucking piece of shit. A disgrace to humanity.

  —Leave me alone.

  —Hah! Fat chance! I’m your judge, jury and executioner. You got that? And I am not going to let you get away with one fucking thing. You won’t be able to touch your dick or pick your nose without me seeing it. I’m going to catch you out on your every lie, your every evasion, your every attempt to escape your own conscience.

  —Leave me alone, I said!

  —No way. I’m with you to the end.

  —You’re a fucking lunatic! This is so fucking insane!

  —Of course it’s insane! Justice is relentless. And monomaniacal. It has to be. I mean, do you think that once you commit an evil act it can ever be undone? Give me a fucking break!

  The guard laughs. She speaks.

  —You can do a thousand good deeds and make a thousand apologies, but the evil is still there. It never changes, and it never ends, and you can never escape it. Justice, too. Justice never ends; it is eternal, universal and implacable. That’s the lesson I’m teaching you. I’m going to strip you of every shred of dignity and pride until you are so desperate you fall on your knees and beg forgiveness. And guess what? There will be no forgiveness. But you know that, don’t you? You always have. That’s why you trembled when you thought that God is just. And actually, that’s the beauty of all this. You are condemned, not merely by your most evil acts but by your finest words, those self-evident truths of yours that created a whole new world—a world that will never forgive you for your sins.

  Maria is halfway through embroidering an image of a ship at sea for a pillow cover and has run out of all three of the shades of blue thread she is using for the water and the sky. Sally Hemings is walking down to the stable, a list of the needed shades in hand, hoping to catch Jupiter before he heads into Charlottesville for provisions.

  As she nears the stable, she sees Thomas Jefferson’s horse rear its head, then leap out into the yard, as if over a snake stretched out in the doorway. Thomas Jefferson pulls the horse’s reins tight to steady it, then leans forward, strokes its neck with a gloved hand and murmurs a brief consolation into its ear.

  Sally Hemings veers off the road and strides across the crusted snow beside the stable, although she could have no possible business in that direction. She keeps walking even after Thomas Jefferson calls her name but then stops because she realizes her ruse is transparent and she is only humiliating herself.

  He calls her name a second time and says, “Could you please come here for a moment?”

  She turns about-face and retraces her footsteps without ever lifting her head high enough to meet his eyes. She stops close enough to the horse to smell its breath and keeps her gaze on the red mud, ice and snow beneath the horse’s hooves.

  Thomas Jefferson’s voice is gentle. “Sally, please.” She can feel him looking at her. She knows, even, that his expression is tender, in that way she once thought she loved. “I only want to inquire as to how you are doing,” he says. “I know these last weeks have been . . . especially with Martha’s wedding—”

  “Fine,” she says.

  “I’m sorry?” He is not apologizing.

  In a soft but trembling voice she says, “I said I’m fine.”

  “Oh, Sally.” He speaks her name so tenderly. “You’re not being fair.”

  “I’m fine, I said!” Her voice is sharper now, though still trembling. “I know exactly what I am to you, and I don’t care! Not that I have any say in the matter.”

  She won’t lift her eyes above Thomas Jefferson’s shoulder, but she can tell by his silence and by the way his hands clench the reins that she has shocked him.

  “Sally,” he says, but it is a moment before he can speak. “You are being entirely unfair—to me and, worst of all, to yourself.”

  She, too, is silent a moment, then says firmly, “I don’t think so.” Now she looks into his mud-and-gold eyes and sees that his tenderness has given way to anger. “I don’t believe in telling lies, Mr. Jefferson, especially to myself.”

  He says nothing, but she is no longer looking at him, so has no idea what expression he may have on his face.

  “Excuse me,” she says. “I am on an errand for Polly.” She cuts a wide arc behind his horse and makes for the stable entrance.

  He calls her once, but she doesn’t reply or look around. Only after she has entered the stable does she hear him make a double suck-click in his cheek, and horse’s hooves begin to drum out of the yard.

  Jupiter is standing toward the rear of the stable, buckling Lulabelle into the cart harness. His skin is dark enough that his features are hard to make out in the dimness, but she can tell from the weary set of his eyes that he has heard every word of her exchange with Thomas Jefferson and that he doesn’t know what to say.

  “Polly asked me to give you this.” She hands him the list. “Maria, I mean.” And then she starts to cry.

  Sally Hemings is down in the kitchen early the following morning with her mother and Ursula when the bell, attached by wire to a brass ring beside Thomas Jefferson’s bed, jingles. Betty casts her daughter a worried glance. She saw Sally Hemings’s red eyes at supper yesterday. And she heard her sighing all night long and filling the cabin with the hisses and whispers of dried corn husks as she turned again and again on her tick. Betty is pretty sure she knows what’s wrong, even though her daughter has been protesting that it is only her monthly.

  Betty climbs the steep staircase to the hall outside Thomas Jefferson’s chambers, and when she returns, there is worry on her face and in her voice. “He wants his molasses tea. And he says you the one got to bring it to him. He says you and no one else.”

  Betty gives her eyes a weighty roll and goes over to the fire, where a bucket-size copper kettle is always on a low boil.

  Minutes later Sally Hemings is standing in the dark hallway knocking on Thomas Jefferson’s door. Her first knock is too soft, so she knocks again.

  “Come in,” she hears from the other side of the door.

  Balancing the tray bearing the teapot, cup and bowl of molasses in her left hand, she lifts the latch with her right. Thomas Jefferson, who always rises with the sun, is seated at his desk in shirtsleeves and waistcoat. Pen in hand, he seems preoccupied. “Thank you, Sally.” He clears a space amid his papers so she can put down the tray. When she has done so, she notices that he is looking right at her.

  “I’m wondering,” he says, “if we might have a word.”

  She neither moves nor speaks.

  He gestures at a chair. “Please sit down, Sally.”

  She feels as if she is falling as she sits—falling through the chair, through the floor, falling and falling.

  Thomas Jefferson’s brow is wrinkled. He meets her gaze, then turns away. As he speaks, his eyes are on the pen that he has placed beside the letter he was writing. “You told me yesterday that you do not lie. So I am not going to lie to you. I think it best, given that we will continue to occupy the s
ame house whenever I am not called away by my duties, that I am completely honest with you regarding my thoughts about what has passed between us.”

  His eyes lift. He holds her gaze. Her mind is reeling, and she is hardly aware of her own words. “I think that is good.”

  He looks down again. “You understand, of course, that what has happened between us is wrong. I accept full responsibility for it. I took advantage of you . . . of your innocence . . . to an extent that I had never thought myself capable of.” He sighs. “And everything that happened afterward was, in a sense, my attempt to convince you, and myself, that my feelings that first time had been more honorable than they seemed.” He looks at her again, smiles sadly, then makes a small laugh. “But I’m lying again! You are a good and caring girl, Sally. And one day you will make some man a fine wife. Soon, I hope. I have never been insensible to your virtues, and nothing would have happened between us had I not had such a high opinion of you. But that is no excuse. In fact, your many virtues only compound my transgression. Especially since my attempts to make good the first wrong I did you only caused you further injury. The fact that my own actions nearly resulted in the issue of a child so troubled me that I was incapable of . . . well, of behaving toward you as I ought.”

  He looks straight at her again, and she has to fight to hold back her tears.

  He pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, then gives his head a shake. “I took the coward’s way out. I know that. I pretended that what had happened was no concern of mine. I somehow believed that if I acted like a man who had done no wrong I would actually be such a man. That was cruel. A grave wrong in itself. And I am deeply, deeply sorry.”

  He looks at her under a folded brow, waiting.

  She is filled with rage.

  He continues, “But my multiplying transgressions only make more clear how wrong our association is and thus why that association must end, especially now that we are home. In France, distance and the custom of that place gave us a certain freedom. But here in our United States, especially as I am about to participate in the first administration of this new country . . .” He frowns. His hand twitches, as if he is about to reach across his desk for hers. Instead his words spill out all in a rush. “Please understand, Sally, that I like you very much—too much. I think you are an utterly wonderful girl. And I have had to struggle mightily with my own feelings to reach this resolve. What we have been doing is wrong, and so it simply must stop. That is our only choice. I hope you understand.”

  She doesn’t reply, and she hardly hears anything he proceeds to tell her—that he has informed Mr. Lewis that from now on she will have no other duties than to attend to Maria’s personal needs. He seems to feel that these arrangements are adequate compensation for all that she has lost—or that he has taken from her. He jokes about her having lots of free time, in which she might teach herself to read or find a husband.

  At last he falls silent.

  As she, also silent, gets to her feet, he reaches across his desk and grabs her hand. “Dear Sally,” he says. He kisses the back of her hand, then, looking ill and old, tells her she’d better go.

  She stands for a long time in the dim hallway, then straightens her apron, and, willing herself to manifest none of the feeling in her breast, she grips the railing of the steep stairs and descends to the kitchen.

  “Well, you know how it is with men,” says Betty Hemings. “White men in particular.” She is sitting at the table, letting gravy soften her biscuit, sipping a glass of cider. “They only think with their little head. You know what I’m talking about? Right? You know what I mean. They say all kinds of things with their big head, but their little head makes all the decisions. Little head’s the master. So you can count on it; he ain’t done with you yet. You’ll see. Meanwhile you got it good. Most days you can go back to bed after breakfast, sleep till noon if you want. And when he comes back, the fact that he been so hard on himself most likely means he’ll go easy on you. Most masters act like God gave them you so they can do what they like. And if you object, they say you got the Devil in you and they got to punish you. Mr. Jefferson’s not like that. He treats you like a lady. So you lucky, and I wager you’ll be luckier when he come back. And meanwhile you get to live like a princess.”

  On Slavery (Public)

  In 1770, when he was twenty-seven years old, Thomas Jefferson served as a pro bono attorney in two suits for freedom by mulatto teenagers and argued in one of the cases, “Under the law of nature, all men are born free, everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.” These sentences were Thomas Jefferson’s first public articulation of principles he would express so memorably six years later. He lost both cases.

  In his instructions to the Virginia delegation to the first Continental Congress in 1774, he represented the abolition of slavery as one of the primary goals of the American colonies, and in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence he asserted that George III had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” This passage was struck from the final document in response to objections from representatives from the southern colonies.

  Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Virginia constitution, which he wrote in Philadelphia just before the Declaration of Independence, stipulated, “No person hereafter coming into this country shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever.” This draft arrived in Virginia too late to have an effect on the version of the constitution adopted on June 29, 1776—although it is doubtful that its antislavery provision would have been adopted even had it arrived in time, given that the constitution his fellow Virginians did approve denied slaves any guarantee of civil rights by declaring them not a part of civil society.

  In 1777 Thomas Jefferson proposed a bill to prevent the importation of slaves to Virginia, which decreed that anyone brought into the state for the purpose of enslavement after the passage of the bill would “thenceforth become free and absolutely exempted from all slavery or bondage.” That bill was passed in 1781, during his term as governor.

  In a new draft of the Virginia constitution, which he wrote in 1783, he extended his original ban on the enslavement to include not just those “coming into” the state after 1800 but anyone born in Virginia after that date, and once again this provision was struck from the document finally adopted.

  In 1784, as a member of the Continental Congress, he developed a plan for the government of the western territories that declared, “After the year of 1800 of the Christian aera there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states,” but this provision met the same fate as its predecessors, and for the same reasons.

  On December 2, 1806, during his second term as president, he denounced the international slave trade as a “violation of human rights” and called on Congress to make it illegal. The resulting law, which passed on March 2, 1807, and took effect on January 1, 1808 (the first day on which it was constitutionally possible to outlaw the slave trade), was the most unambiguously antislavery initiative of the federal government prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Unfortunately, the law was never adequately enforced, and over the course of the next fifty years (until the start of the Civil War) more than a quarter of a million Africans were brought to the United States and sold into slavery.

  The blue of the sky before sunrise makes the earth blue. The air is cold, sharp on the tongue, but there is a dry-grass sweetness in it that tells Thomas Jefferson it will be warm by noon. Lots of sun. A good day for traveling, if the roads are not too muddy. He is seated
in his landau, which, with the lanterns mounted on either side, is good for night travel. He hopes to make it to New York in less than a week. Jimmy is hunched against the cold on the box in front, and Bob is at his side, holding the whip upright, like a fishing pole.

  Thomas Jefferson told everyone who would listen that Washington would have to throw him in irons to get him to serve in this administration, yet now he is looking forward to assuming his duties. Now he is wondering if government isn’t, in fact, the life that he was born for, and not farming. Yet no sooner does he resolve this question in the affirmative than a hollowness seems to open inside him.

  He is passing the cabin where at this very moment Sally Hemings is asleep beside her mother and sister. She is angry at him, and the rift between them is what makes him feel so empty and alone. Still, it is better that he has concluded their intimate relationship. He hopes she will soon realize that her life will be happier this way. He wants nothing for her but her happiness. She is a good girl, and he will never be able to give her the happiness she deserves.

  In Sally Hemings’s dream, she is wrestling a bear, although at first she does not know it is a bear. It seems like a wall of fur: dense, soft, warm and enveloping. But then she understands that what she is actually doing is trying to get the bear to put on a frock coat and a pointed hat. In the end it is the bear’s very astonishment that anyone should want to do such a thing that causes it to go still and let her manipulate its enormous paws down one sleeve and the other and then put a red hat—something like an elongated flowerpot—atop its head. And now, at this very moment when it would seem certain that she has succeeded in clothing the bear, she is suddenly unsure of what she has done. She knows that a crowd has gathered—a crowd of old women and men with the glossy, toothless mouths of infants—and they are all staring at something at the center of a cobbled square, and leering, and making low hooting noises that would seem to be laughter but that might just be something else. She doesn’t know what, but maybe something obscene.