Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  “I don’t think that . . .” (Thomas Jefferson’s mouth hangs open indecisively for a long moment.) “. . . will be . . .” (Another long pause.) “Well, let’s just say I’m not sure that would be a productive avenue of inquiry.”

  Callender doesn’t respond, only stares straight into Thomas Jefferson’s eyes, smiling all the while.

  “My concern,” says Thomas Jefferson, “is entirely for the continuance of the Republic.”

  “Of course! Of course! You know that no one has greater respect for you or is in closer accord with your political philosophy than I.”

  Thomas Jefferson crosses one leg over the other and finishes his wine in a single swallow. His contempt for Callender is palpable, but so is his helplessness.

  Callender lifts his index finger admonishingly. “Given how critical it is that we quash Adams and the Federalist traitors, we must pursue our every advantage. Anything less would show both a lack of backbone and a profound underestimation of the dangerousness of our enemies.”

  “I agree that we should stop at nothing to defeat the Federalists, but it is my firm belief that we will be most likely to succeed if we pursue only necessary efforts. Irrelevant or unsubstantiated attacks will make us seem indifferent to moral and political principles and to care for nothing but the maximization of our own power, and so could undermine rather than advance our cause.”

  “Mr. Jefferson?” Callender is holding out the bottle of wine.

  Thomas Jefferson seems at first not to understand the significance of the gesture but then extends his empty glass.

  Returning the bottle to the table, Callender sits back in his chair. “No one holds moral principle in greater estimation than I,” he says.

  Thomas Jefferson recrosses his legs and takes a sip of his wine, his gaze turned entirely away from Callender.

  “But in all due respect,” Callender continues, “you must bear in mind that our friend Colonel Hamilton was not brought down by the actions of the courts nor by any investigative body but by my revelations concerning his callous disregard for his wife’s reputation and feelings and his sordid exploitation of the poor Mrs. Reynolds.”

  Thomas Jefferson takes another swallow of his wine but still does not look at Callender.

  “I would ask you, then,” says Callender, “to consider which efforts were, in fact, necessary to rid the nation of so corrupt an influence as Hamilton.”

  “Mr. Callender, I would not be here if I did not have immense respect for your capacities as a journalist.” Thomas Jefferson speaks with bitter irony, and he looks Callender straight in the eye, as if to underline that fact.

  “Exactly,” says Callender. “And I trust, then, that you understand that as the journalist I will be taking full responsibility for what I write. What this means is that anything you have to tell me about Mr. Adams, Mr. Jay or about any other matter will be held in strictest confidence. My readers and the nation as a whole will benefit from your wisdom, but not a soul will even suspect that you were the one to advance my understanding.”

  “Yes,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Good.”

  He is weakening. James T. Callender smiles and refills his own glass with brandy.

  “But at the same time,” he says, “since I am the one taking responsibility for what I write, I am the one who will determine what that might be. You may speak to me about Mr. Adams or not, as you choose. But if I determine that a trip to Braintree is merited, I am entirely within my rights to undertake it. Mr. Leiper has informed me of the gracious contribution you have made toward the care of my ailing wife and my poor children, and I am immensely grateful. I thank you, in fact, from the bottom of my heart. But nonetheless I must still insist upon my journalistic freedom. If you have any misgivings in that regard, I will immediately return your moneys to you, with interest.”

  Thomas Jefferson has finished his second glass of wine. He is looking out the window. His voice is low. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I assure you that I hold myself to the strictest standards. My investigations will be exhaustive, and I will not make one assertion unsupported by fact.”

  “Good,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  Callender is holding out the bottle of wine once again. “Mr. Jefferson?”

  Thomas Jefferson looks at the hovering bottle, then offers his empty glass. Callender fills it, then refills his own with brandy. He smiles and lifts his glass. “We are on the verge of great things!”

  Sally Hemings says, “Is it possible that we will grow old together? That we will be purified by age? Is it possible that I will own enough of my heart that I might give it to you?”

  Sally Hemings says, “I accept your kisses, your caresses, the blunt shoving of your veined member, not because I like any of it but because you so clearly want me to like it and I don’t—that is my revenge.”

  Sally Hemings says, “You are more than a man. Other men are mere beagles sniffing your boot heels. How is it I am allowed to see your flesh float in bathwater? How is it I am allowed to make you great?”

  Sally Hemings says, “I want us always to be as we are here, where we are only our eyes, our hands, those parts of us made for each other by nature, where our only words are the ones we whisper in the little caves we make between pillow, cheek and lips.”

  Sally Hemings says, “My hope is so simple: to sit opposite you at a table we share with our children and friends. My hope is only pain. It is a mountain, airless at its peak, so it kills us. Love kills, too—that love, I mean, which is a variety of hate.”

  Sally Hemings says, “Such hopes as I have are like orphans along the byway. They are beautiful, and they will die.”

  Sally Hemings says, “Oh, I am black, I am white. I am stained to the bones by hate. Would that I had only been your trollop.”

  Sally Hemings hears Thomas Jefferson’s landau drive up to the house before dawn. His rooms were prepared for his arrival two days ago, so she is not surprised. It is March 7, 1798, exactly three months since Harriet’s death, and Sally Hemings is eight months pregnant. Her head is throbbing. She has had the most painful headaches of her life these last weeks, but today is the worst. She feels as if her head is being crushed between two pointed stones. The sun has risen a fist’s width above the trees, and she is still lying in bed when she hears Thomas Jefferson’s footsteps passing along the muddy road outside. He is singing, just above a whisper, “‘He is no gypsy, my father,’ she said, ‘but lord of these lands all over. . . .’”

  An hour or so later, she has just pulled her chamber pot out from under her bed when she hears Thomas Jefferson returning. She doesn’t dare squat over the pot until he has passed, so she stands with her legs pressed tightly together, clutching the front of her shift and winding it tightly around her fist. His footsteps slow as he approaches and stop just in front of where she is standing. For a long time, she hears nothing but the repeated screech of a catbird, but then there are quick steps on the mud and the thump of a shoe on the porch. There is a knock on her door.

  “Sally?”

  She doesn’t move or speak. She hopes he will go away. The urging of her bladder is unbearable.

  Another knock. “Sally?” With a soft thud, the door loosens from the jamb and opens. His hand still poised in midair to knock, a tremor of discomfort passes over his face as he watches the door swing inward. But when he spots her standing beside her bed, he breaks into a big smile. “Good morning. I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

  She does not answer, but, letting go of her shift, she makes a shooing gesture with her hand that she realizes he will probably construe as an invitation to enter.

  “One moment.” He backs out the door, and she hears him scraping the mud off his shoes on the edge of the porch. He stamps a couple of times, and then he is in the cabin. “Look at you!” he says, happily regarding her belly, which holds the front of her shift a good foot in front of the
tips of her toes. “Clearly you’ve been hard at work! Do you think it’s a boy? It looks like a boy to me.”

  Just at that instant, he glances at the chamber pot resting in the middle of the floor.

  “One moment,” she says, then brushes past him and out the door, so desperate now that she can’t even make it all the way to the outhouse. Around behind the cabin, she half crouches, bracing her back against the wall, hikes her shift and pees, knowing she is perfectly audible inside the cabin and taking a sort of pleasure at the affront she might be causing.

  “I’m sorry,” she says once she is back inside. “These days I can’t even wait a second.” She pushes the chamber pot back under the bed with her foot.

  His smile is both wry and uncomfortable. “Of course,” he says, then looks away for an instant. When he looks back, his expression is earnest, if not entirely at ease. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  He pulls a chair away from the table and sits down. Since her only alternatives are to sit at the table with him or to sit on the bed, she remains standing.

  “I’ve been thinking about you the whole way here,” he says. “Hoping that you haven’t suffered any—” He cuts himself off, but his words send a jolt of complex pain through her breast.

  “I’ve been fine,” she says.

  “Good,” he says. “Good. I hope you’ve been eating well. And getting plenty of sleep.”

  “I know how to take care of myself, Mr. Jefferson.”

  “Yes, of course.” His lips tense. He searches her eye a moment, then looks away. “You are looking very well.”

  “Actually, I have an awful headache.” She turns away from him and walks to the window that looks southeast, out over the fields and across the purple-and-gray flatlands. She is hoping that he will understand that she wants him to leave.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t look out the window,” he says. “Is the light hurting your eyes?”

  “No,” she says, though, in fact, she does feel a painful pressure on the sides of her eyeballs.

  She turns away from the window and sits down on the farthest corner of the bed from Thomas Jefferson. Neither of them speaks for a long moment, then he says, “I suppose you must be feeling stirrings?”

  He is looking at her belly.

  She takes a deep breath and gives him a severe stare. It is a long while before she can bring herself to speak the words she has formulated. “I don’t see why you are troubling yourself about my well-being, Mr. Jefferson.”

  Weariness comes into his eyes and hurt to his lips.

  She speaks again. “Or maybe I should say that I don’t see why you should think you actually care.”

  “Sally,” he says plaintively.

  “Don’t lie to me,” she says. “And don’t lie to yourself. You are clearly indifferent to my suffering and to all of my feelings.”

  “How can you say that!”

  “I would rather you leave right now, Mr. Jefferson. My headache really is very bad, and I need to sleep.”

  “Sally, please.”

  “I don’t want to talk. I think it would be better for both of us if you would just leave.”

  “For God’s sake, Sally, would you just listen—”

  She stands up and sweeps her arm in the direction of the door. “I am asking you to leave me alone.” Her voice is firm and low. “I know that I have no right to ask you anything, that I have no rights of any sort. But if, in fact, you care at all about how I am feeling, I hope that you will heed my request.”

  Thomas Jefferson slowly gets to his feet, his expression promising revenge. When he is standing outside the door, his face livid, he says, “You are completely wrong about me.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She closes the door. She trembles as she stands inside her dark cabin, listening to his footsteps retreat toward the house. She feels a sort of elation but at the same time a cold dread. She suspects that what she has just done is profoundly foolish and that she will soon regret it. All at once a spike of pain shoots through her skull and into her right eye. She hurries to the window and vomits into the weeds outside.

  The following morning Thomas Jefferson leaves to inspect his Poplar Forest plantation, three days distant, and he is gone two weeks. At the end of the first week, a letter from him arrives for Mr. Richardson, containing numerous recommendations and requests regarding the management of Monticello, among them that Sally Hemings be given a double food ration and that she continue to be exempt from all of her normal duties at the plantation. Thomas Jefferson also instructs that if she should go into labor before his return, Dr. Cranley should be summoned immediately.

  Spotting her in the hallway, Mr. Richardson delivers this news to her in a low, diffident voice, but when he has finished, he winks, smiles and says, “Good afternoon, your ladyship.”

  “I want us to understand each other,” says Thomas Jefferson. He has been back from Poplar Forest for two days, but this is the first time he and Sally Hemings have actually spoken. He arrives at her cabin long after dark, carrying a bottle of wine. It is clear that he has already had at least one bottle himself. He doesn’t seem drunk, but his face is flushed and glossy in the lamplight, and he has forgotten to bring a corkscrew with him, so he has to push the cork into the bottle with a rock and a twenty-penny nail. Sally Hemings drinks a cup of the wine, but alcohol has made her flushed and nauseated ever since she got pregnant, so she resolves not to touch the cup in front of her that Thomas Jefferson has just refilled. He has had two cups and is starting on his third.

  “I want you to tell me what I have done to offend you,” he says.

  Maybe he is drunk. Now, at least. His face has grown bleary, and some of his words are slurred. He and Sally Hemings are sitting directly across the table from each other, and she doesn’t know how she can tell him the truth.

  “You haven’t offended me,” she says.

  “I have, but I think only through a misunderstanding.”

  She makes a barely audible grunt but says nothing. Then she takes a swallow of the wine.

  Thomas Jefferson speaks: “I wish that I’d been able to be here when Harriet—”

  She cuts him off. “That’s not it.”

  “I’ve told you from the beginning that my responsibilities to the Republic must come first.”

  “That’s not it, I said.”

  “Everything is in the balance now. If we cannot make this government work, we will live in either chaos or tyranny.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I listen to you?”

  “What is it, then?”

  Sally Hemings looks away. “It’s too much.” Tears are falling down her cheeks. “I can’t tell you.”

  Thomas Jefferson flings himself back in his seat, the disarray of his arms and legs showing a restless irritation but his face chastened and worried.

  The phrase “her child” repeats in Sally Hemings’s mind over and over. It was so unnecessary. If Thomas Jefferson had merely wanted to maintain secrecy in a letter to his daughter, he could simply have said he was sorry and left it at that. And if he had truly cared about her, he could have made some private reference that would have revealed his love and his own grief only to her.

  “Her child.”

  Every time the phrase repeats in Sally Hemings’s mind, she grows more wildly furious.

  But she also finds her fury misplaced, or at least undignified. She can’t imagine scolding Thomas Jefferson for not loving her, especially considering all the warnings he has given her about his inability to love her publicly. She now realizes that all of her hopes and beliefs concerning their “secret life” had never been more than desperate fantasy or, worse, outright self-deception. She will not say a word about her feelings. If Thomas Jefferson truly loves her, he will understand, and if not, damn him to hell!
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br />   He leans forward, putting both arms on the table, extending his hands toward hers. Now she is the one to lean back. She puts her hands in her lap, placing them flat against the underside of her belly.

  “Dear Sally,” he says. “I wish there were a way that we could avoid such pain.”

  “What pain are you talking about, Mr. Jefferson?”

  Weary sympathy comes onto his brow. “Yours,” he says. “Mine. There are times when it seems that we are made to bring each other joy. But then . . . always . . .” He sighs. His smile is sad. He stops talking.

  Sally Hemings only looks at him without speaking. There are so many things she wants to say, but it seems to her that the best revenge is simply to keep silent.

  “Oh, Sally,” he says, “tell me what is troubling you?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “You needn’t worry about me.” And, indeed, her tears have stopped. If she ever loved him, that is over now.

  “I do worry about you.” He is smiling—stupidly. His hands still rest on the table, palms upward, waiting for hers. He sighs again. “Well, I suppose we simply have to become philosophers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have to be Stoics. If we can accept that our moments of pain are an inevitable part of life on earth, as well as of our own particular situation, they will be easier to bear and they will pass more quickly.”

  “Will they?”

  “Of course. They always have. We’re not miserable all the time, are we?” He smiles broadly, apparently thinking that what he has said is funny.

  He doesn’t understand at all. He is so utterly convinced of his own virtue and importance that he is blind to the sufferings of others, and most especially to the suffering caused by his own actions.

  He is a fool.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says. He twitches the fingers of his right hand, an invitation for her to lift her left hand and place it in his. She doesn’t move. His face is puffed and red, the gazes of his eyes don’t quite meet, and he has that easy, self-satisfied smile that means he is about to ask her for a kiss, and maybe to relieve his desire with her hand or mouth.