Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  June 20, 1826. He grows birdlike with time. The flesh melts away, and his bones grow light, his gestures tentative, even when he intends to be forceful. He covers his good ear with his right hand and points to the door with his left, telling Martha, “Go! Go! Why are you bothering me with such trivialities!” Where once there would have been rage and hurt in his daughter, who is now fifty-four, there is only a flicker of irritation. And she leaves, not out of respect, or even a desire to save herself from further pain, but out of pity.

  He is eighty-three. His eyes have grown larger in his shrinking skull and are often filled with the bewilderment of someone who has found himself in a place and among people he neither recognizes nor comprehends. When Martha has pulled the door shut behind her with an impatient bang, he brings the pursed fingertips of his hands together in that habit he has developed recently, the fingertips of the right nibbling at the fingers of the left, in the way that birds kiss.

  “Now, what were we doing, Sally?” he says after a moment of looking off into the dimness of his shuttered study.

  “Boots or shoes?” says Sally Hemings, holding a pair of each in either hand. “It’s muddy outside. I think the boots would be better.”

  A wrinkle of consternation interrupts the pink space between his white eyebrows. Without looking, he reaches behind and touches the counterpane of the bed. “Neither,” he says, sitting down and sighing heavily. “I’ve changed my mind. The boys can get on without me. There’s reading I have to do.”

  He adjusts the pillows at the head of the bed, and, fully dressed, with even his coat on, he leans against the pillows and lifts his bare feet onto the counterpane. The nails on his big toes are exactly the color and texture of corn husks in October.

  Sally Hemings puts the boots and the shoes back into the closet from which she has just taken them. Then she takes a woolen blanket from the chair by the fire and covers his feet.

  “Thank you, Sally,” he says contentedly, looking up at her as a boy might look up at his mother just before taking her hand. “Could you get me my Vergil?” He gestures in the direction of his desk. “And my spectacles.”

  Sally Hemings walks around to his study and then pauses, looking down at the several volumes on his desk.

  “It’s the red one,” he said.

  She knows. How could she not know? He has read to her from it so many times, in Latin and in English, especially that beautiful passage about the stars and spring planting, and she has even browsed the translation herself, more than once, and she has talked to him about it. But now she only picks up the book and the silver spectacles.

  “Thank you,” he says when she hands them to him. He places them on his belly and then takes hold of her hand. “You are very patient with me. I’m sorry.” He gives her hand a squeeze, then lets it go.

  As he pushes his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose, he says, “Could you ask Burwell to record the exact weight of each boy’s rod and bring it to me before lunch.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Jefferson.”

  Again he says, “Thank you, Sally.”

  His face brightens, and he looks almost his old self.

  “I’m thinking of having Eagle and Tecumseh saddled first thing in the morning,” he says. “The weather’s going to be wonderful, I believe. We could go out before anyone is up and watch the sun rise over the lake, then ride down the valley and along the river as far as Castle Rock? How would you like that?”

  She tells him she would like it fine. He is still smiling.

  After that, her throat becomes so constricted that she cannot speak.

  And if he notices, he never says a word.

  . . . Mr. Henderson nailed a list on the stable wall of all the slaves’ names in the order in which they would be sold. As Mr. Jeff had promised me, Critta and Peter went first. I wasn’t worried about Peter. He had been thrown by a horse two years previously, and ever since then his right leg had been so lame he could hardly put weight on it. Indeed, he couldn’t climb up onto Mr. Broomfield’s cart without the aid of both Mr. Henderson and Mr. Evans. The only bid was from Daniel Farley, and so my brother gained his freedom for a mere dollar.

  Three people in addition to Mr. Eppes seemed determined to purchase Critta, and Mr. Broomfield let the bidding go for several rounds—long enough for me to become very worried—but then Mr. Eppes made another bid, and Mr. Broomfield cried “Sold!” without allowing the other interested parties time to raise their bids—with the result that those parties shouted outraged objections and the whole crowd murmured its disapproval. Looking alarmed at the crowd’s reaction to his stratagem, Mr. Broomfield silenced further protest by beginning the bidding on George’s Ginny before she had even climbed up onto the cart.

  And thus the last member of my immediate family had found a hospitable situation in which she might live out the rest of her days as if free. No other of the dozens of families who had abided at Monticello for five decades and more had been so lucky. I was well aware of the injustice of our good fortune, even as I was exceedingly grateful for it.

  Despite the cold, Joey’s broad forehead was glossy with the sweat of his anxiety for Edy and the children. When I touched his forearm, he grabbed my hand, drew his face so close to mine that I thought at first he would kiss me, and in a breathy, emphatic voice he declared, “Danny and Mr. Eppes kept their word. Mr. Jeff, too. That’s a blessing. Lord be praised! I don’t even care about Mr. Jones anymore. As long as my family stays right here in Albemarle where I can see them, that’s all I care about.”

  I squeezed his hand with my own. But when I tried to speak, my words came out in a strangled croak. “Yes, that is good. But let us hope for more.”

  His hand closed so hard upon my fingers I thought he might snap them off. “I feel like I’m going mad. I’m trying to get a hold on myself, but I don’t know how much of this I can stand.”

  “Oh, Joey.” I kissed his forehead and tasted salt on my lips. “Oh, Joey. Oh, Joey.” I was so possessed by foreboding that I couldn’t say anything else.

  The reason I had touched his forearm was to see if I might excuse myself for a minute. My hands were trembling. I was nauseated. I thought a quick walk might fortify me and restore some of my composure. There were twelve people on the list before Edy and the children, and of those twelve, only the last four, Evelina and her children, were people to whom I had been close. It seemed to me that I had easily enough time to make it out to Carter’s Bluff and back. I felt it was wrong of me to abandon Joey, though I didn’t see how I could possibly stay. I, too, felt as if I were on the verge of losing my mind. So when I asked if I might walk for ten minutes, I added that he should come with me if he wanted.

  “Oh, no!” he said. “I can’t do that. I’ve got to stay right here so I can see what’s happening.” He released my hand with a gentle pat. “You go, though. I’ll keep your spot warm.”

  I don’t know whether the walk did me any good at all. I strode along Mulberry Row away from the crowd, my head down, my arms gripping my cloak tight against my body. I was shivering, though not, I think, from the cold. I had hoped that my head might clear when I had some space around me and could feel the enlivening stirring of the open air, but my mind was roiling with sentiments and ideas, not one of which I could bear to consider—a state not unlike, I imagine, that of someone plummeting off a precipice toward a heap of jagged rocks. I strode to Carter’s Bluff and back in almost complete unconsciousness of my surroundings. Just as I was approaching the fringe of the crowd once again, I heard a voice call out my name. I looked up to see broad-faced and heavy-shouldered Burwell Colbert, who, as Mr. Jefferson’s body servant, had been at my side most days and many of the nights during our master’s last weeks. He had been a great relief to me then, for he seemed possessed of nothing but congenial spirits and could always find something to appreciate, even in the bleakest circumstances. He was also a calming presence for Mrs. Mart
ha, who couldn’t deny me my place at her father’s bedside, although she never wanted me there.

  I remember late one night, three or four days before Mr. Jefferson died, Martha had gone to bed and Burwell and I were alone. Something had gone wrong with Mr. Jefferson’s breathing, and instead of snoring his every breath came as a long, trumpeting groan, over and over and over, relentlessly, the whole night through. The sound was a torture to listen to, not merely because it put one in mind of how unsatisfying those breaths must have been (the sound could only be caused by a constriction of the throat) but because it was almost impossible to resist breathing at the same unnatural rhythm.

  There was a full moon out that night, and as Burwell and I sat side by side in the darkness, in a room lit by a solitary taper resting on the mantelpiece at our backs, Burwell made a soft, happy laugh. “I sure do hope, Mr. Jefferson’s listening to that! Ain’t nothing he like better in the world than a mockingbird song, and I ain’t never heard a mockingbird sing as fine as this one here tonight!” I didn’t know what he was talking about at first, but as soon as he mentioned the mockingbird, my mind left Mr. Jefferson’s agony, and it was as if I were out in the moonlight myself, hearing nothing but the free and happy inventions of that perky gray bird.

  I was profoundly grateful to Burwell that night and on many others, during which he alone seemed to remember that the world contained joys, even as it surrounded us with sorrow and pain. And, indeed, he was smiling as he called out to me and as he lumbered the five steps from the great house lawn onto Mulberry Row. “Hey there, Miss Sally!” he said as he drew up beside me. “Look what I got here!” He held out two framed etchings, attached by a hinge, of Mr. Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette that had been standing on a marble-topped table in a corner of the parlor for as long as I could remember. “Ain’t they wonderful! Don’t they just bring you back to your Paris days? Mrs. Martha let me have them for cheap. She saw me looking at them, and she came over. ‘How much you asking for these?’ I said, and she said, ‘How much you got in your pocket?’ ‘Not but four cents,’ I told her, and she said, ‘That’s just what I’m asking!’ Ain’t that so nice of her? Ain’t these just the perfect likeness?”

  This was one time when Burwell’s smiles brought me no cheer at all. He, too, had been freed by Mr. Jefferson. His wife was dead, but his eight children were to be sold that very afternoon. I was so aghast that I did nothing to censor my thoughts. “How can you waste your money on things like that,” I said, “when you could be buying your family out of slavery?”

  He smiled and shook his head slowly, as if amused by my stupidity. “Oh, Miss Sally, I don’t have near enough to do that now. Mrs. Martha says she can’t pay me my $300 from Mr. Jefferson until after everything’s been sold.”

  I heard a woman screaming frantically from the area of the stable. I hurried away from Burwell, loathing him for his inability to grasp the injustice that was being done to him, vowing that I would cut him out of my life, that I would never again address a single word to him.

  I had to push my way through the huge crowd that had now gathered around the stable, and when at last I reached Joey’s side, I found him clutching the top rail of the paddock fence and leaning forward so far he would have fallen if he had let go. His entire attention was directed at the stable, in the depths of which the woman was still screaming and being cursed by white male voices. Only when he felt me draw up beside him did he turn and look at me with the open, slot-shaped mouth and the wide, wavery eyes of someone on the verge of vomiting.

  “What’s happening?” I said.

  “Evelina,” was all he answered.

  “What? What are they doing to her?”

  “Her children have gone to farmers in Amherst and Petersburg, and she’s just been sold to McFlynn.”

  Only now could I understand what she was screaming: “I won’t go! You can’t take a mother from her children! You can’t take my babies away!”

  As I listened to her, I remembered a time when she was taking care of my Harriet and I had run off into the woods in such a state of confusion and despair that I wasn’t sure if I was going for a walk or to end my life. When at last, hours later, I was driven back to the house by a rainstorm, Harriet ran to greet me as she did every time we were separated, but I saw real fear in Evelina’s eyes. She was hardly more than a baby herself, but old enough to know what had driven me from the house and to worry that she had been abandoned in a world of cruel strangers.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  Joey only met my gaze with that same slot-mouthed, wide-eyed expression, then turned to look at Mr. Broomfield’s cart, onto which Edy and their two youngest children had just climbed. Evelina was still screaming.

  “All right, everybody,” said Mr. Broomfield, “while Mr. McFlynn’s talking sense to that girl, we’ll just go on with our business.”

  There was scattered, subdued laughter, and the bidding began. At first everything went as Joey had arranged. Edy and their two youngest children were bought and would be freed by Jesse Scott, a half-white, half-Indian man who had married Joey’s youngest sister. Maria and Isabella were bought by a friend of Mr. Scott, who lived not far from Shadwell. Mr. Jones bought Peter. And then, at last, it was Patsy’s turn on the block.

  The first person to bid was the man in the yellowed periwig who had ripped her shift. Mr. Scott’s friend, who had agreed to take all the older girls, bid next and was instantly topped by the man in the periwig. Other people bid, but the contest was clearly between Mr. Scott’s friend and that yellow-wigged man. And so, one after another, the other bidders dropped away. All this time Joey clutched my hands tightly in his own, crushing them every time the man in the periwig made another bid. I kept assuring Joey that Mr. Scott’s friend would not let him down, but I am not sure he heard a word I uttered.

  When at last only Mr. Scott’s friend and the man in the periwig were bidding, a terrible pattern ensued. With growing hesitancy Mr. Scott’s friend would raise his bid in increments of ten dollars, which the man in the periwig would instantly top by twenty-five. At first I thought that the man in the periwig was bidding so rapidly in order to stop Mr. Broomfield from calling out “Sold!” after Mr. Scott’s friend’s bid, but then I realized that Mr. Broomfield had not done so with any of the other Fossett children and that he must have been dissuaded from that strategy by the outcry that had followed his cutting off Critta’s bidder. After that I uttered no further encouragement.

  When the bidding reached $645, Mr. Scott’s friend took so long upping the bid that Mr. Broomfield called out, “Going once! Going twice!” before the friend finally bid $655, his face contorted and pale. He had pulled his hat off his head and was twisting the brim in his fists. When the man in the periwig bid $700, Mr. Scott’s friend flung his hat to the ground. He was done. But then Mr. Scott called out, “Eight hundred!” and with gestures indicated to the friend that they would split the price.

  “Thank the Lord!” Joey cried, but in the next instant the man in the periwig raised his bid to $1,000.

  The scant seconds while we waited for Mr. Scott or his friend to raise the bid seemed an eternity in hell. During the whole time, I heard a woman screaming and was in such a state of distraction that I thought it was Patsy, even though she was standing motionless, her eyes uplifted, as she had been in the barn. When at last Mr. Broomfield lowered his hammer, confirming the sale to the man in the periwig, Joey cried out to God, fell to his knees and began to bang his head against the frozen earth. “Stop! Stop!” I cried. “Don’t, Joey! Don’t!” I grabbed at his shoulders and tried to pull him up from the ground but could think of nothing that might give him hope—especially because it seemed to me that the outcry following the hasty conclusions of Critta’s sale had deprived Mr. Broomfield of the only means by which Patsy might have been saved from the clutches of that repulsive man.