Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  “I just want to lie here,” she says, “and let this be the whole world.”

  Thomas Jefferson also sighs. “You’re right. This is perfect.” He sighs again and for a long moment is silent. Then he says, “I’m happy, Sally. Are you happy?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  There are rapids just in front of them. As the water clatters onto itself, its sound echoes off the trees on the far bank. A small animal rustles in the leaves beside the porch. A catbird runs through a stream of liquid whistles—its song, too, echoing off the trees on the far bank.

  Thomas Jefferson slides his shoulder out from under Sally Hemings’s head and sits up cross-legged on the blanket. His neck is stiff, his head having been pillowed only by his shirt wadded against the wall. He cranks his head right, then left, feeling muscles cracking down the length of his back.

  Sally Hemings rolls onto her left side and supports her head with her crooked arm, watching him as he stretches. Pursing her lips in discomfort, she pushes herself into a seated position. Her breasts wobble, then still. That vacant, lost expression is on her face again—and it hurts him, even as he feels he has never seen anyone more beautiful.

  “I wish we never had to leave here,” he says.

  “We don’t.” She smiles weakly, then sweeps her long brown hair away from her face and looks out the door. A jay makes its cold, piercing cry.

  “A week ago,” he says, “as I was climbing the hill toward home and that big storm was brewing, I promised myself that I would not even think of doing this. I simply would not allow it. And now—” He shakes his head. “I don’t even know how this happened!”

  What happened was that Sally Hemings came to his chambers shortly before lunch to tell him that Maria would be having a picnic with her cousin Jack in the copse at the top of a bluff above the South Road. Thomas Jefferson thanked her for the message and asked if she wouldn’t mind bringing his laundry down to the kitchen for Nance. As she crouched to pull the basket of soiled clothing out from under his bed, he pretended—to himself, mostly—that he was entirely engrossed by his reading and that he hadn’t even noticed her lithe back stretching beneath her bodice nor how her gown, clipped tight between the floor and her knee, revealed the long arc of her thigh. Nothing might have happened had she not, as she got to her feet and shifted the basket onto her hip, cast him such a shy and knowing glance under her lowered brow—at which point he threw his book onto the floor and raced to take her hand.

  He doesn’t remember their speaking a single word, only that they kissed for a very long time. When his hand strayed under her skirts and he discovered how ready she was for him, he murmured into her ear with a quivering voice that she should meet him on the bridle path to the lake in twenty minutes. And then, as a sort of promise, when he withdrew his hand, he put his middle finger into his mouth and sucked it clean. Twenty minutes later she was waiting exactly where instructed. He pulled her up onto the back of his horse and took her to this cabin—a place where he had imagined being with her since they were first together in Paris.

  “I made those same promises,” she tells him now. She shakes her head and gives him another of her knowing smiles. “But . . . well, the truth is, Mr. Jefferson”—her smile broadens, and Thomas Jefferson, still sitting cross-legged, feels his penis stretching in spurts along the instep of his right foot—“that Miss Maria never told me to let you know where she would be eating.”

  Sally Hemings laughs. She leans forward, and as they kiss, she places her hand between his legs.

  A little later he is sitting up again and she is still lying down. He puts his hands to his temples and says, “I think I am insane.”

  “You are.” Her smile is obliterated by a sigh.

  “This is serious, Sally. What are we going to do?”

  She doesn’t say anything. She looks up at him from the floor, her narrow eyes suddenly weary.

  “I am the secretary of state,” he says. “I am President Washington’s representative and the representative of this country—the world’s first true democracy. The monarchs of Europe are watching us and want nothing but to see us fail. And the revolutionaries in France are looking to us to give them courage. What this means is that every one of us in the government must be beyond reproach, not just in our political lives but in our private lives.”

  Sally Hemings rolls away from him, onto her belly, her head pillowed on her folded arm, her face toward the floor. “If you want to stop,” she says, her voice reverberant against the floorboards, “just stop.”

  She doesn’t look around at him. She doesn’t move.

  His eyes run the length of her body. There are two pink ovals of unequal size at the top of her buttocks, where her pelvis was pressed against the floor.

  “I can’t stop,” he says. “You know that.”

  She neither moves nor speaks.

  “I live in fear,” he says. “All it would take—” He doesn’t finish.

  Sally Hemings rolls onto her back and looks up at him ruefully for a long time. Then she sits up.

  “Why does anyone have to know?” she says. “I can keep a secret, and so can you. Up at the house, you are the famous Thomas Jefferson and I am just your servant—one of a hundred and seventeen. All we have to do is be careful. We never do anything dangerous there. We never do anything that will attract anyone’s attention. That’s not so difficult. We can just wait until we are here, alone. This will be our own little country. No one will see what we do here, because no one will even know it exists.”

  She leans forward, smiling, and puts a hand on the inside of each of his thighs, just above the knee.

  “Oh, Sally Hemings!” He shakes his head, but he, too, is smiling. “You are a most wonderful and persuasive girl!”

  You will make me hate you.

  They are lying on a horse blanket on a bed of mint. They are wearing no clothes. A waterfall pours like a leaden fog off a broken rock into the cold pool where they have just been swimming. Thomas Jefferson laughs. “I cannot end slavery all by myself.”

  Sally Hemings refills his tin cup from a tin coffeepot. He says, “The sentiment against emancipation among the general public is so strong that we can only proceed in small steps. The first is to end the importation of slaves from Africa, so that the crime may not be enlarged. The next is to outlaw the practice in all states added to the Union after 1800, so that eventually the southern states will be so outnumbered that they will not be able to oppose the will of the majority. And then we must work upon the consciences and pocketbooks of the masters—” So you are saying it is impossible. “Not at all. I am saying the opposite.” You are saying that we must wait so long and meet so many conditions that it cannot possibly happen. “Be reasonable, Sally. There is no other way. I am only telling you how it must come to pass. And it will!”

  It is midnight on Christmas, and Thomas Jefferson has arrived at Sally Hemings’s cabin (drunk), having just had a fight with Martha because he thinks her husband, Colonel Randolph (also drunk), is showing signs of insanity. “Oh, you must detest me, Sally. I am a fool and a bully, and I believe almost nothing that I write or say.”

  She waits to put it to him until she is naked and he, too, is naked. They are sitting face-to-face, and his thing is sticking up between them like a gooseneck. A fire is blazing in the hearth.

  It has been two months since their first visit to the lodge, and she has been thinking about this for days. She rehearsed her words all last night.

  “I want you to promise me,” she says, “that if we have any children, they will be free.”

  Thomas Jefferson’s eyes narrow. His sultry smile is gone. His thing begins to droop.

  “I’m not asking for anything for myself,” she says. “I will stay with you as I am. But I want my children—our children, your children—to be free. That’s all I ask.”

  Thomas Jefferson’s mouth seals ti
ght. His expression says he is being taken advantage of.

  “You have to promise me,” she says.

  He pulls away from her. “I need to think. That’s a complicated—”

  “No,” she says. “There’s nothing complicated about it. Our children must be free. Why do you have to give that even one second of thought?”

  “I’m just thinking about what Martha and Maria—”

  She, too, pulls away, then shifts onto her knees. In a moment she might be standing.

  “Don’t.” He puts his hands on her thighs. “You are right. Of course, you are right.”

  “Good,” she says. But then she does get to her feet. She walks over to the dust-hazed windows and looks out at the many grays of the leafless trees.

  He has come up behind her. He is kissing the nape of her neck. He runs his hands up her belly to her breasts. After a while she lets herself be led back to the bed.

  The falling is so sudden and swift that it takes Thomas Jefferson a moment to realize what he is seeing: the earth careening away beneath the clouds, which themselves seem to be spiraling into an abyss. Clinging to the arms of his chair so that he might not also tumble down through the empty air, he feels something warm and smooth sweep along his clutching fingers and then settle atop his hand. It is the hand of Dolley Madison, whose eyes partake equally of the brilliance and blackness of this strange theater and whose mouth is stretched wide with delight. She is speaking to him, but her words are lost in the roaring throb of a thousand cellos, violas and violins.

  The earth and sky have stopped falling, and now Thomas Jefferson has the impression that he is coasting between clouds the size of mountains. The roaring strings have resolved into a dithery waltz but are still so loud that their vibration in his hair and against his cheeks seems something like a breeze. Gradually his coasting accelerates into a gently arcing dive toward a particular cloud that darkens and looms as he approaches. For an instant all he can see is fog gray and the knoblike heads of the people seated in front of him, but in the next instant he has zoomed past the silver-feathered edge of the cloud and can now see an orange-and-red balloon, emblazoned with a huge yellow sun face, drifting from behind a different cloud.

  At the bottom of the balloon is a sort of balcony on which three people stand, looking out at the landscape beneath them. As he dives (or feels he is diving) like a hawk straight toward them, they grow ever larger and ever more recognizable. The nearest of the three is a man in an enormous hat with an even more enormous panache that bends like a fountain of fluff over the hat’s brim. His facial hair consists of three black spikes arrayed about his mouth, and he is looking straight at Thomas Jefferson, smiling with what would appear to be immense self-satisfaction. Directly behind the man is the actress with the golden skin and the gold-frosted, tightly curled hair, who is not looking at Thomas Jefferson but at the actor in the copper-colored wig, who is also looking at her, his face a beacon of adoration.

  All at once Thomas Jefferson seems to be on the balloon’s balcony himself, but behind the three passengers. He sees that the couple are squeezing each other’s hands in the very narrow space between their thighs and that the man in the enormous hat has leaned back far enough to see exactly what they are doing. He looks again at Thomas Jefferson and winks.

  And now Thomas Jefferson is flying in a long, ascending arc around behind a cloud and then back, right over the top of the sideways-drifting balloon. As the violins, violas and cellos accelerate into another roaring throb, he feels as if he is shooting right toward the blue edge of the sky, and he so wishes that he had actually been able to take Sally Hemings up in a balloon or that somehow he had been able to fly as he is flying now, with her at his side.

  It is August 5, 1792. Sally Hemings has just returned to bed after drawing back the curtain on one of the lodge windows to let in some daylight. She is nineteen, and Thomas Jefferson is forty-nine.

  “What?” she says as she lifts the sheet, their only cover this hot afternoon.

  Thomas Jefferson doesn’t answer.

  She slides into the bed, and, supporting herself on one straight arm, she rests her other hand on the center of his chest. Her head is tilted sympathetically. “What’s the matter?” she says.

  Thomas Jefferson blinks, as if rousing himself from a dream. He gives her a wan smile. “Nothing.”

  She grunts dubiously and lowers her head to the pillow but keeps her hand on his chest. “Really?” she says.

  “Nothing.” He lifts his eyebrows toward the window. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  “Then why do you look so miserable?”

  He smiles, but also seems to wince. “I don’t know. I’m just feeling a little sad.”

  She rolls onto her back and lets her hand slide off his chest and onto her belly. But then, with her other hand, she takes hold of his under the sheet. “Are you missing Mrs. Bolling?”

  He sighs heavily. “I suppose.”

  “I missed my sisters terribly when I first arrived in France. Critta especially. I was so lonely those first few months.”

  He squeezes her hand but doesn’t say anything.

  “Although I did have Jimmy, of course.”

  Thomas Jefferson gives her hand a second, more urgent squeeze. “What did you think of Mary—Mrs. Bolling?”

  Sally Hemings sighs. “I could tell that she loves you.”

  “Yes. But what else?”

  Sally Hemings sighs again, heavily. She lets go of Thomas Jefferson’s hand. “I didn’t like her husband.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think he’s stupid, and he doesn’t love her.”

  “Well . . .” Thomas Jefferson smirks thoughtfully. “You’re probably right. On both accounts.”

  “I also think he only married her because of you.”

  “That, alas, may be equally true.” The branches outside the window sway in a gentle breeze. Dollops of sunlight rise and fall on the leaves. A hermit thrush makes its lonely, crystalline cry. “But I don’t think it is bad that she is married.”

  Sally Hemings rolls onto her side and faces him, her head pressed into the pillow. “The main thing is that it is hard for me to believe that she’s your sister.”

  “She has more of my mother in her, I suppose.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Sally Hemings squashes more of the pillow under her cheek, so that her head is higher. “It’s the same with your brother. Neither of them seem anything like you. It’s hard to believe you come from the same family. But Mrs. Bolling especially.”

  “Well . . .” Thomas Jefferson’s mouth hangs open for a long moment, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “Did something happen to her?”

  Thomas Jefferson grunts.

  “What?” says Sally Hemings.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. She seems to carry around this heavy weight.”

  “You mean she’s slow?”

  “Well . . . Yes. But more than that. I just feel this deep sadness in her. And that terrible scar—”

  Thomas Jefferson rests his fingertips on her thigh and stops her talking. “You’re right.” He makes a noise in his throat as if he is having trouble swallowing. “Mary wasn’t always the way she is now. When she was a girl, she was so full of life—so courageous and strong. . . . Now—”

  He doesn’t finish his sentence. He rolls toward Sally Hemings and gives her a hug and a kiss on the forehead. Their faces are so close together that there is a crisp echo when she speaks. “What happened?”

  “Oh—you know: My mad mother.” He gives Sally Hemings one more kiss on the forehead, then rolls away. She puts her hand back at the center of his chest and stirs her fingers amid the sparse hair there. “My aunt once told me,” he says, “that my mother was pretty and charming when she married my father, but I have no memory of her like that. Around the
time she began to have children, a number of manias took hold of her. She became obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to poison her, and she would go for weeks without eating anything except pickles and preserves that she had made herself and kept in a locked box under her bed. The problem was that my father never recognized her madness for what it was. He would try to reason with her. And placate her. Which he could never do for long, because her manias kept changing. For a while she believed that whoever wanted to poison her had begun poisoning the animals, and she told my father that the only way to get the poison out of a hog was to strangle it with a rope before slaughter, and he went so far as to erect a sort of gallows in the barn for that purpose. And whenever she got it into her head that one or another of our servants was her poisoner, she would insist that my father give the servant a lashing . . . and . . .”

  Thomas Jefferson sits up in the bed and lowers his head into his hands. His back is to Sally Hemings. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  Sally Hemings gives his back a reassuring pat, then gets up onto her knees and crawls around in front of him and puts one hand on his shoulder and the other on his knee. She waits for him to look up at her, but he doesn’t.

  He covers her hand with his own and grips her fingers. “It was terrible,” he says. “My father did terrible things. In truth, I think that’s what killed him. And after that my mother’s madness only became worse. And there was no one to protect—”

  Thomas Jefferson’s voice thickened just before he cut himself off, and now Sally Hemings can feel a cold sweat coming onto his shoulder. She doesn’t know what she will do if he should start to weep.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice sounding perfectly normal, although he is still looking down.

  “It’s all right,” she says. “Really.”

  “I’m just so ashamed.” Now he lifts his head, his features loosened by sorrow, but his voice matter-of-fact. “We all protected ourselves from our mother in our own ways, and mine was to lose myself in books. I learned to read with such concentration that when I had a book open in front of me, I could forget the whole rest of the world. Also, I could sit for hours in the window of my chamber when I read, not making a sound, hoping my mother would forget I was even there. But I was the only one who chose reading for protection. My brothers took up boxing and carousing with their friends and so were rarely at home. My sisters became obsequious church mice. All except for Mary. Mary was the only one in the family who would stand up to my mother and tell her that what she was doing was evil. Or mad . . . And so . . . of course—”