Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (17 page)

A
day has passed, and a night during which Sally Hemings did not sleep. Now it is morning, but so early that there is only a blue vagueness in the garden outside the kitchen door. An armful of wood has already burned down to a mound of glowing, irregularly popping and snapping coals, and a ten-gallon iron stewpot is already filling the air with onion-scented steam. Jimmy, who got back from Le Havre last night, is standing at the chopping block transforming peeled carrots into a heap of thumbnail-long cylinders. He doesn't know that Sally Hemings is standing in the doorway behind him, watching.

Her first thought is that her brother seems so gentle as he gives himself to his work, and so unhurried, even though the extraction of each new set of three or four carrots from the heap, their alignment against his knife and then the rocking chops that transform them into orange cylinders are accomplished in scant seconds. It's his grace that makes him seem unhurried, or even in a sort of trance. He hardly looks at what he's doing, his eyes turned toward the empty space above a shelf of soot-blackened copper pots, and yet his knife blade strikes with the regularity and precision of a ticking clock.

But in the next instant, all Sally Hemings sees is her brother's humiliation. His movements are not so much graceful as supremely controlled. His back is rigid, his expression blank and his head held high in the manner of a man struggling to endure the unbearable. There is a great deal of rage inside Jimmy, but it is humiliated rage—rage lacking not intensity but the power to be expressed in action.

At these last thoughts, Sally Hemings becomes so weak with sorrow that a groan escapes her throat.

Jimmy's head jerks around. “Oh, Sally!” He smiles. “Don't do that! I thought you were a ghost.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't you know better than to creep up on a man with a knife in his hand!?”

Sally Hemings can't bring herself to laugh. Jimmy's smile is replaced by the slightly parted lips and crumpled brow of concern.

“What's the matter, Cider Jug?”

“Nothing.” She looks away, then back.

Jimmy is still looking at her but doesn't say anything.

“I just heard someone in here,” she says, “so I thought I'd look in.”

“Hunh.”

“What are you making?”

“Boeuf bourguignon.”

“Oh.” Sally Hemings wasn't quite listening to his response. So after an instant she asks, “What's that?”

“Beef and wine and vegetables—potatoes mostly.” He looks back at the chopping block, lines up some carrots and places his knife across them. “Mr. Jefferson's having a whole bunch of people over tonight.” Chop.

Sally Hemings doesn't say anything for a moment. Then she says, “I better be going.”

Jimmy rests the hand holding the knife on the table. When she doesn't budge from the doorway, he says, “Come over here.”

“No. I've got to go.”

“Come over here.” He points his knife blade at the floor beside him.

She wipes her hands on her apron, then crosses the room to stand beside her brother, though not as close as he indicated.

When she still doesn't say anything, Jimmy says slowly, with a knowing smile, “You look like the dog sneaking out of the hen yard.”

“What are you talking about?”

He smiles again. “I don't know. I'm waiting for
you
to tell me. All I'm saying is that you look like you've been up to no good.”

“I haven't done anything,” she says angrily. She wants to leave, but she can't.

“Well, something happened.”

“No.” She picks up her apron absently and wraps both hands in it. “I have to go.” She takes a step away, then turns around. “Something happened, but I didn't do anything.”

His smile is gone. “Oh, Sal.”

Her eyes grow hot with tears. She squeezes her lips together and shakes her head.

“You don't have to say anything,” he tells her.

She wipes her fingers across her eyes, then says, “I can't talk here.”

She walks toward the door and out into the yard, where the powdery light is going pinkish. She hurries between beds of the rotted leaves and
stems of last year's peas and squash, pressed flat by a winter of snow, and she doesn't turn around until she is behind the toolshed. Once Jimmy joins her, she leans forward and speaks in a voiced whisper beside his ear.

“Mr. Jefferson came to my room the other night.”

Jimmy pulls his head away from hers and covers his mouth with both hands. “Oh, no!” After a moment he lowers his hands and says, “You mean that he . . . that . . . that he . . .” He cannot complete his sentence.

“He came to my door,” says Sally Hemings. “He was drunk, and he wouldn't go away.”

“Did he force himself in?”

“No. Not really. He just kept saying all these things. . . . I didn't know what to do, but . . . And when I realized he was already in the room, I didn't know how I was going to get him out.”

“Did he—” Jimmy cuts off his own question. He gives Sally a firm, interrogatory glance but then cannot bear to look at her.

When he looks back, she is staring him straight in the eye. Then she nods slowly.

He makes a small gasp but says nothing.

She realizes that he has probably misunderstood what actually happened, but she can't bear to speak any of the words she would have to use to make that clear—and maybe it doesn't matter. It was bad, that's all. Just bad.

After a long moment of silence, Jimmy moves his open hands back and forth horizontally, as if sweeping something off a table. “You can't talk about this to
anyone
,” he says. “Anybody finds out about Mr. Jefferson or if Mr. Jefferson finds out you been talking—” He doesn't complete his sentence.

“But what am I going to do?”

“I don't know.” He makes the sweeping gesture again. “You best hope Mr. Jefferson doesn't come around again. The best thing you could have done was never open up your door in the first place.”

“Jimmy!” She puts both hands on top of her head, as if she has just been struck.

“I'm sorry.” He comes back to her, throws his arms around her and crushes her against his chest. Then he lets her go. “I've got to think about this. The main thing is, we've got to see what's going to happen. Maybe nothing's going to happen . . . and then everything will be all right . . . and we can just forget about it.”

“I'll never forget about it.”

“Well . . .” Jimmy backs away. “Just wait, and we'll see.”

F
or almost a week, Sally Hemings keeps to her room as much as she can stand to and as much as she can manage without neglecting her duties to such a degree that everyone in the house will guess what has happened.

She cannot bear the idea of anyone's knowing, partly because if no one finds out, then it is almost as if nothing actually did happen, but mainly because she knows the conclusions that everyone will draw: Some will blame her for having led on the good Mr. Jefferson, or for having lacked the fortitude to make clear to him the inviolability of her virtue, and the rest (the majority, she believes) will simply be indifferent to what she has suffered. She is a slave, after all, and a young woman; it is her duty to serve her master in any way he requires. All of these conclusions fill her with such fury and dread that she sometimes feels insane.

So by day she is careful to respond to every greeting, question and command exactly as she would have responded had nothing happened and to devote exactly her ordinary level of attention to her every task and action—even to actions as simple as walking down the hall (in fact, she devotes much
more
attention than normal to how she places each foot as she walks, and how she holds her hands, and where she allows her eyes to stray).

By night she jams a wooden peg into the slot above the latch of her bedroom door so that it can't be opened.

By night she looks up into the swirling plasma of darkness between her bed and the ceiling and hears the tick of every contracting or expanding floorboard and the whisper of every breeze, and she thinks only of the danger gathering force in every corner too dark to see.

By night she does battle with her memory and her imagination and with her rigid, sweating, sleepless body, which wants to do nothing but run from her room and out into the streets and never see the Hôtel de Langeac again, or Paris.

“C
ome with me, child,” says Madame Gautier, the laundress, a potato-shaped woman of about sixty, with very small eyes and an imperious pout. She visits the Hôtel twice weekly, to drop off cleaned linens, towels, undergarments and shirts and to pick up dirty ones. She is speaking in French. When Sally Hemings greets her command with only an uncomprehending stare, Madame Gautier asks, “Are you not Mademoiselle Sally?” Sally Hemings answers in the affirmative, and Madame Gautier takes her by the hand, saying, “Good. You must come with me. Monsieur Jefferson desires that you should live in my house.”

Sally Hemings yanks her hand free. “One moment! I know nothing about this.”

“I am afraid that is none of my affair.”

“Did he tell you this himself?”

“Yes. Just now, when Madame Dubois was paying me. Monsieur Jefferson came into the kitchen and asked if he might rent a room for you.”

Many thoughts are shooting through Sally Hemings's mind, most of them concerning the significance of Thomas Jefferson's decision. Is she being banished from the Hôtel de Langeac? Will this impatient and stupid woman be her new mistress? Will she never be able to see her brother again? Or Patsy and Polly?

“I'm sorry,” she tells Madame Gautier. “I must speak to my brother.”

The old woman seems on the verge of scolding her, but then her scowl softens. “Very well,” she says. “But hurry. I have many things to do.”

She knows,
Sally Hemings thinks as she hurries to find Jimmy.
Everybody knows.

She has to pass through the dining room on her way to the kitchen, and this is where she spots her brother, who rushes right up to her.

“Jimmy!”

“Oh, Sally!” He holds out a small envelope. “He gave me this.”

She takes it, removes the single page inside, on which she recognizes her own name and Thomas Jefferson's handwriting. She stares at it a long moment, her trembling hand making a blur of the page's edges.

“Do you want me to?” asks Jimmy.

She hands him the letter, and he reads:

“‘Miss Hemings, I am writing to inform you that I have procured a room for you with Madame Gautier, which shall be your refuge whenever your services are not needed here by Patsy and Polly. During the days that my daughters are in residence at the Hôtel, I think it best that you reside in your present chamber, though if that should not be agreeable to you, alternate arrangements can certainly be made. Whether you wish to continue your duties at the Hôtel in the absence of my daughters is also a matter I leave to your better judgment. I hope you will understand that I have made this arrangement only in the interest of your greater comfort. If I have erred in my judgment, or if you have any questions or requirements, please do not hesitate to express them to me through the good offices of your brother. Respectfully yours, Th. Jefferson.'”

S
ally Hemings's new room is just off the yard where Madame Gautier does her washing. The walls are fieldstone, the floor is dirt, the bed is a straw-stuffed tick on a wooden frame.

Sally Hemings thinks the room might be pretty if she can whitewash the walls, put dried flowers on the sill in front of the folio-size window and find a small dresser or trunk for her clothes. “You can do whatever you want,” says Madame Gautier, “but Monsieur Jefferson must pay for it.”

Sally Hemings does not want to ask any favors of Thomas Jefferson.

Madame Gautier's twenty-year-old daughter, Thérèse, is as big as a man. Her fingers are as thick as her thumb, her mouth is chapped purple all around from constant licking. “Who are you?” she asks Sally Hemings five times in a row, and seems satisfied with nothing Sally Hemings and her mother tell her.

Sally Hemings goes to sleep every night to the sound of the mice stirring inside her tick and wakes every morning to steam clouds scented with lye soap.

Her eyes water and her nostrils burn.

She is determined to only return to the Hôtel de Langeac when she escorts Patsy and Polly home from school and to stay away when they are not there, but she has nothing to do during her days except wander the streets.

“Monsieur Jefferson is paying for your room but not your food. If you want to eat, you must buy your own food or you must ask Monsieur Jefferson to buy it for you.”

Sally Hemings cannot read, but she is able to add and subtract in her head, and so she figures that her wages are enough to allow her to buy bread and a piece of cheese every day.

Jimmy gives her meat and soup during her days at the Hôtel.

She cannot store her food. The mice eat it when she keeps it in her room, and Thérèse eats it when she keeps it in the kitchen larder.

She is walking through Les Halles on her way to Penthemont and spots a young man lying in the street, the top quarter of his head missing. A young woman standing in a doorway tells her that he was brained by a rock thrown by a “
sans-culotte.
” Sally Hemings does not know what a
sans-culotte
is.

“You really must take better care of yourself,” says Patsy. “How can we bring you anywhere if your linens are so gray and you smell like fish?”

When Monsieur Gautier gets drunk, Madame Gautier makes him sleep in the yard. On those nights Sally Hemings gets no sleep, because her door does not lock and she is afraid that he will come in and because his snores are as loud and enduring as a two-man saw cutting through an endless piece of wood.

Polly says, “Clotilde told us you no longer live here because Papa is angry at you. That's absurd! If you would like, Patsy and I will tell Papa he is being ridiculous this very minute.” Sally Hemings glances at Patsy, who looks away. “Don't,” Sally Hemings tells Polly. “Thank you, but don't.”

Every morning Thérèse comes out into the yard and gathers her skirts into a bundle between her knees. She holds her bare buttocks over an enamel chamber pot until she has entirely voided both her urine and feces. Then she flings the contents of the pot over the rear wall into a vacant lot—or she tries to. About a third of the time, she misses and the mess remains on the wall until her mother can sluice it away with a bucket of used wash water.

Sally Hemings feels the heat on her cheek first, then looks down a street to see a house towering with flame. A pawnshop, she discovers when she has joined the curious crowd. Black timbers enveloped in roaring orange. Bricks bursting with a sound like gunshot. Once again: the
sans-culottes.

“I insist!” says Polly. “I think Papa is just being stubborn. I am going to talk to him this instant.” “Really,” says Sally Hemings. “There is no need.
I'm perfectly happy as I am.” Patsy takes no part in the conversation, but when she looks at Sally Hemings, she seems to have an extremely painful stomachache.

Only once it has sunk its teeth into the flesh just to the left of her chin does Sally Hemings realize that the animal she woke to find sitting on her chest is a rat.