Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  She turns away for an instant, toward the sun-mottled eastern plain. “Beautiful day,” she says.

  “Yes! Very beautiful.”

  He is still looking into her eyes, but his smile is more vulnerable.

  “Well . . .” She lifts her empty basket, as if to signify some urgent duty, then turns her back and enters the kitchen.

  A brown darkness presses on her eyes once she is out of the daylight, and she waits just inside the door as the obscurity slowly sorts itself into the fireplace, the wall and the rose glints on the copper pots.

  Her entire body is gripped by something between trembling and alertness, as if she has just been slapped or has heard some terrible news. Yet she feels as if she has acquitted herself well.

  Thomas Jefferson got nothing out of her.

  Not one thing.

  The following morning she is seated beside Maria in the back of a carriage. Jupiter is driving. Maria has just turned twelve and has grown three inches over the last year. Sally Hemings has been stitching lace frills to the ends of the girl’s sleeves and skirts, but now the buttons on the backs of her gowns can no longer be fastened, and she can only keep decent through the use of brooches and shawls. She is on her way to see Mrs. Mickel, the mantua maker in Charlottesville, to have a new gown made and her old ones let out. She wants Sally Hemings to help her choose the best materials and design.

  The carriage is not moving.

  Thomas Jefferson hailed them as they were departing from the great house, and now he is giving his daughter strict instructions not to order a gown in green or red. The former color, he says, will make her “Welsh complexion” seem pallid, while with the latter the slightest infusion of color in her cheeks will make her seem feverish.

  In the presence of his daughter, Thomas Jefferson can do no more than glance intermittently at Sally Hemings, and so she is able to examine him at length in daylight, something she has not done for a very long time. There are bluish bags under his eyes, and the first puckering of an insipient dewlap beneath his chin. So much gray has filtered into his hair that there is a streak just over his left eye that seems more yellow than red. And during the rare moments when he listens to rather than lectures Maria, his long, thin lips form a straight line across his face that seems simultaneously pompous and weak.

  How is it, Sally Hemings wonders, that she could ever have wanted to cover that deflated face with kisses? Or yearned to pull that lank and bandy body between her thighs? All of the cravings, worries and delicious aches that had once filled her every minute apart from him now seem a sort of insanity.

  This is good, she thinks.

  When Thomas Jefferson gives her one last inquiring glance after bidding his daughter good-bye, she tells herself, I am free now. Finally free.

  She looks him straight in the eyes, hoping he will intuit the words she is speaking inside her head:

  Free.

  I am free.

  “Ah, Sally—come in!” Thomas Jefferson is seated at his desk, in that strange chair of his own devising in which she once spun until she became nauseated. (She has kept well away from it ever since.) As he watches her cross the room from the door, he sways slightly from side to side, his chair making mouse squeaks.

  “Please sit down.” He gestures at an ordinary chair in front of his desk.

  “I’m all right standing,” she says.

  Thomas Jefferson makes a laughlike noise, but his expression is serious. “Well,” he says. He looks down at his hands. “Yes.” He stares into the middle distance for a long moment, as if he has forgotten what he means to say. At last he looks at Sally Hemings. “I’m wondering if we might have a frank discussion about Maria.”

  He pauses, as if waiting for a confirmation.

  Sally Hemings neither moves nor speaks. She blinks to disengage her gaze from his.

  “I understand entirely that, as her maid, you must have certain . . . I don’t know . . . confidences with her, young though she may be—things that you should feel under no obligation to mention. It is not right, after all, that a father know everything about his daughter’s affairs.”

  Thomas Jefferson attempts something like a smile, which Sally Hemings does not return.

  “I do hope, however, that in our shared affection for Poll we might be able to help her in what I feel may be a difficult period for her.”

  Again he looks to Sally Hemings for confirmation. She gives her head a slight nod and says, very softly, “Yes.”

  “So you agree that she’s not happy?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He leans back in his chair, puts his hands together as if praying and rests his fingertips momentarily against his upper lip. Then he leans forward again.

  “What do you think, Sally? I have no idea what to make of Maria. Sometimes I tell myself that I am ridiculously oversensitive, other times—” He flings his hands, palms up, signifying helplessness. “You’re with her every single day. Do you know if there is anything wrong?”

  Sally Hemings shrugs.

  “What?” he asks, his voice and brow expressing frustration. “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing, just . . . you know: Sometimes people get sad.”

  “So you agree that she is sad?”

  “Sometimes.”

  The fingertips of Thomas Jefferson’s pressed-together hands are touching his lips again. He lowers them.

  “Listen, Sally, let me tell you why I’m worried. The entire time I was in New York, Maria hardly wrote to me. And when she did, her letters were models of filial decorum, but they were so brief—none even a page long—and they contained not one single word expressing anything like true feeling. All I could gather from them was that she was trying to conceal from me how seriously remiss she was being in her studies. And since I’ve been home, I’ve found that the situation was even worse than I had intuited. I don’t think that in six long months she’s read more than two chapters in Don Quixote, and she is unable to utter a single grammatical sentence in Spanish. She even seems to be losing her French. But none of that really matters. The main thing is that I have yet to see a hint of joy, or even of childish enthusiasm, in her countenance. Her gaze is always on the floor, she hardly speaks above a whisper and she prefers the solitude of her room to all other occupations.”

  Thomas Jefferson’s entire expression is tremulous with worry—so much so that Sally Hemings wonders if he might shed a tear.

  All at once the rigidity goes out of her body. She sinks into the chair in front of his desk—but not out of sympathy. She knows something—something she can never say, and yet that, at this moment, she wants desperately to reveal. The terrific intensity of her desire to speak is what has taken the strength out of her legs.

  Thomas Jefferson looks at her, then smiles sadly. She senses that he is about to reach out and touch her arm, which is resting on the edge of the desk. She pulls the arm away.

  “I’m sorry, Sally.” The worry has returned to his face. “I know that I am putting you in a difficult position. But I am concerned for other reasons as well.” He takes a deep breath, leans forward and speaks in a low, emphatic voice. “The truth is that there is a tendency toward melancholy on both sides of our family. As you may know, Maria’s dear mother was very delicate and sometimes so exhausted by sorrow that she could not rise from bed in the morning. I have often thought this susceptibility of hers contributed to her early death. And on my side . . . well, on my side there is an even more pronounced tendency. And I can hardly bear to think that poor little Polly may be laboring under a similar affliction.”

  What Sally Hemings knows but cannot say is that during the weeks after Lucy’s death Polly came to hate her father, partially for leaving her behind when he went to France but mainly because, when she needed him most, after little Lucy’s death, he didn’t care enough to come to her side. During the three years befo
re Polly boarded the ship to London, she waited every day for a letter from him telling her that he was coming home. When at last she woke from her drugged sleep and found herself miles out at sea, her first coherent words were, “I don’t want to go live with Papa. I hate him!” And she expressed exactly the same sentiment every day until Monsieur Petit escorted them down the gangplank and onto French soil. After that, Polly allowed herself to love her father again with an almost pathetic servility, but Sally Hemings knows that the hate has never left her heart and that she was, in fact, very sullen and unhappy throughout his stay in New York.

  And this is what she wants to tell Thomas Jefferson—because he has no idea of it and because he has no idea how enraged she herself is this very moment, sitting across from him at his desk.

  But she doesn’t speak the words that have gathered on her tongue. Instead she says, “I don’t know if you have to worry about that. Everybody gets sad from time to time. The world is a sad place—that’s all. You get sad for a little bit, then you get happy. I’ve seen Maria happy plenty of times.”

  “So you think”—Thomas Jefferson smiles wryly—“that I am just being a worried old fool?”

  “Not exactly,” says Sally Hemings. “But maybe.”

  Thomas Jefferson laughs out loud and flings himself back into his squeaking seat.

  “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?” he says.

  “No.” Her face grows pale, and when she speaks again, her voice is trembling. “But there is one thing I am going to say to you. You’ve got to stop thinking so much about yourself. And you’ve got to think a great deal more about how the things you do affect other people.”

  Sally Hemings can no longer speak, because anger has choked off her voice. Her eyes are fixed and hard, her mouth a yellow seam.

  Thomas Jefferson looks thoughtful but says nothing for a long time. Then he gives his head a barely detectable shake. His voice, when he speaks, is so low it is almost a moan.

  “Oh, Sally.”

  Sally Hemings stands up, then steps away from the desk. “I’ve got things I should be doing.”

  “No, wait!” He leans across his desk, one hand extended.

  She doesn’t move. She doesn’t speak. Her blue-gray eyes so filled with fury and yet so beautiful.

  Thomas Jefferson’s hand falls to the desktop, and he leans back again.

  “I’m sorry, Sally.” He covers his nose and mouth with both hands, then lets them fall into his lap. “I’m so sorry. And if it is any comfort to you, I, too, have been suffering—”

  “I’m not talking about that!” she says. “You made perfectly clear how wrong all of that was, and I agree with you. So that’s over. You don’t even have to think about that anymore.”

  This last sentence is spoken as she turns toward the door, which she pulls open so rapidly it flies from her hand and bangs a chair against the wall. She walks straight out into the dark corridor and leaves the door swaying behind her.

  “Well, all right,” Betty says to her daughter. “You do what you got to do. I just hope you don’t make things worse, that’s all. Mr. Jefferson’s not a bad man. There’s lots of worse men out there, colored or white.”

  “Stop it!” shouts Sally Hemings. “You don’t know anything about Mr. Jefferson! You don’t know one single thing! Everybody around here talks about him like he’s some kind of saint or god or Jesus Christ himself! But I won’t do that! Thomas Jefferson can roast in hell for all I care!”

  “Hush, child! Somebody’ll hear you, talking so loud.”

  “I don’t care who hears me! I hope he hears me himself! I hope he roasts in hell! And when he dies, I’m going to dance on his grave! I promise you that! And I hope he just heard every word I said!”

  . . . I could insult Mr. Jefferson, I could hate him, I could reject his overtures and acts of kindness, I could cast him cold stares for weeks on end, but in the back of my mind I always knew that these were mere pretense and nothing that would actually satisfy my rage or quell my pain. The only way that I could be truly rid of Mr. Jefferson would have been to flee Monticello, but that would have meant leaving all the people I loved most and abandoning myself to a future that at the very best would have been decidedly uncertain.

  It is possible that I could have convinced Mr. Jefferson to sell me, as had my sisters Mary and Thenia when they wanted to be with their husbands and children. But I had no husband to go to, and I had buried my only child under shards of frozen earth. And from a purely practical point of view, it was almost impossible to imagine that I might find a more comfortable situation with another owner and very easy to imagine that I might end up subjected to the sort of barbarities that every southern Negro dreads and that for too many are simple facts of life.

  I did often think about running away, however. Between my appearance, my Parisian clothing and my accent—to say nothing of the fact that I was almost fluent in French—I could easily have passed for white, at least once I had put sufficient distance between myself and this place so that no one could recognize me. But I had no illusions about how a penniless woman might fare, even if all the world saw her as white and even in so enlightened a city as Philadelphia. I had heard the tales of deception, sorrow, shame and lonely death told by Reverend Hodder. I had even seen such women standing on the streets of Paris with their rouged cheeks, their all-but-naked bosoms and their bitter, alcohol-dimmed gazes. When, many years after this time, we sent off our Harriet, it was with fifty dollars, a coach ticket and a letter of introduction to Mr. Jefferson’s dear friends the Wentworths. Even had I known when I was seventeen that he could do such a thing, I would never have dared hope that he would want to so facilitate my northern migration.

  Many times during the months after I lost La Petite, I had raged at the injustice of my life and endured many a moment of strangled panic, as if I had been sealed up inside a wall. Such feelings certainly contributed to my rage at Mr. Jefferson, the arbiter of my confinement, but at the same time, the human heart being impervious to reason, the pain and anger I suffered after our departure from France were also evidence of how desperately I still needed Mr. Jefferson, though less perhaps for his physical consolations than for his mind. In our conversations I had felt as if I were in a vast palace and he was constantly opening up doors onto strange and beautiful rooms, corridors, gardens and garrets through which I could wander in endless fascination. . . .

  ELIZABETH: Why do you say Sarah?

  Q: [Silence.]

  ELIZABETH: Nobody ever called her Sarah. I didn’t name her Sarah. Jack— Well, it’s true that Jack wanted to name her Sarah, after his daughter who died. But I wouldn’t hear of that. I thought that was bad luck. So the closest I would come was Sally. So that’s what her name was, and nobody ever called her different.

  Q: Sorry.

  ELIZABETH: That’s all right. I was just wondering.

  Q: I just thought—

  ELIZABETH: That’s okay. I was just . . . you know . . .

  Q: Still . . . can we go on?

  Elizabeth: Sure.

  Q: So . . . one thing I’ve been . . . uh . . . that I think people will be curious about is . . . uh . . . why you encouraged your daughter to continue her affair—

  ELIZABETH: Did she tell you that?

  Q: Yes. I’d have to take a look at my notes, but . . . well, yes.

  ELIZABETH: That’s not how it was. No. I don’t remember that.

  Q: What do you remember?

  ELIZABETH: Maybe I just didn’t want her to feel bad. It wasn’t like she had a whole lot of choice.

  Q: Do you mean that Mr. Jefferson . . . Thomas forced himself on her?

  ELIZABETH: No. Well . . . at first I guess he did. But it wasn’t really like that.

  Q: What do you mean?

  ELIZABETH: Things were just different in those days. Men just presumed.

 
Q: Presumed?

  ELIZABETH: Right. If you were a woman—especially if you were colored—you didn’t have a choice. Men just presumed you were there for whatever they wanted.

  Q: That can’t always have been true. What about courtship? I mean, at least for the upper classes . . . for white—

  ELIZABETH: Oh, yeah. Men had to do their song and dance. There was always a little bit of song and dance. But basically they just presumed. And the women presumed they presumed. So that made it easier for everybody.

  Q: For the women?

  ELIZABETH: Absolutely. Take, for example, Martha Jefferson. Martha Wayles, I mean. Sally’s sister. She used to talk like she wished she had absolutely nothing between her legs. Just blank there, like a field on a snowy day. But, of course, she didn’t really want anything like that at all. So it made her happy that Mr. Jefferson presumed. That way she could just lie back and enjoy it and feel like it was all his doing.

  Q: So what you mean is that Sarah, Sally felt that way, too?

  ELIZABETH: No. Not really. Well, maybe a little bit, but not really.

  Q: I don’t understand.

  ELIZABETH: Well, it was easier for all women, sometimes, to just put it on the man. But Sally wasn’t really like that.

  Q: [Silence.]

  ELIZABETH: She wasn’t really like Mrs. Martha.

  Q: I guess what I still want to know is if Thomas forced himself upon Sally.

  ELIZABETH: Of course. But not really. He wasn’t really the forcing kind.

  Q: I’m still confused.

  ELIZABETH: Well . . . look at it this way: Jack—now he was the kind of man who forced a woman. I had been married for eight years when his third wife died. And one day he called me in and he told me he was going to sell Lonny. (Lonny was my husband.) He was going to sell Lonny to Bath Skelton. (That was his ex-brother-in-law. And later on he married Mrs. Martha, before Mr. Jefferson.)

  Q: That’s terrible!

  ELIZABETH: You mean Lonny?