Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (19 page)

S
ome days later I make my camp in a shallow declivity that gives me partial shelter from a cold wind that has been blowing steadily from the northwest since first light, though never with very much force. The wind is strong enough to keep blowing out my matches, however. And I am only able to get my fire going by first crouching to shelter the match and kindling with my body and then by standing upwind of the fire with my sleeping bag open and stretched out behind my back as a windbreak.

I sit back down once the larger logs have begun to burn steadily but soon realize that far from blowing out the fire, the steady wind is causing it to burn much faster than normal and that I am going to have to gather considerably more wood if I want to stay warm until it is light again.

I am casting a long-legged shadow at that dim fringe where the fire's flickering light fades into the surrounding gloom when I notice two white coals hovering in the darkness some twenty or thirty yards in front of me. Acting as if I haven't seen anything unusual, I carry the wood I have already gathered back to my camp at an unhurried pace, drop it beside the fire and sit down next to the backpack, where I have left the open buck knife I used to shave sticks into kindling.

I watch the hovering coals only out of the corner of my eye and can tell that they have come considerably closer since I first spotted them. They waver as they approach, and sometimes they disappear. Then they begin to fade into a vertical smear of lesser darkness that gradually, as it brightens, coalesces into the shape of a man. His long, wispy hair is blown across his face by the wind and looks golden in the firelight. He is barefoot. His jeans are worn through at the knees. His T-shirt is filthy and webbed with holes in the vicinity of his belt buckle. His vaguely military jacket is also filthy and missing every one of its buttons. Even before he has stepped into the full light, that lush and acrid odor of a body unwashed for weeks has begun to affect my sinuses and eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

I shrug. He sits.

Then I move my sleeping bag and belongings about a yard away from
him, so that more wind can pass between us. If he notices, he doesn't show it. For a long time, he just stares wordlessly into the fire.

Only when he sweeps his long hair—more gray than gold—out of his face do I realize that he is Thomas Jefferson.

“Oh, my God!” I say.

“What?” He looks at me with a sick-dog squint.

“What are
you
doing here?”

“I don't know.” He shakes his head and lifts his hand in a way that indicates weary befuddlement. “I don't know how I got here. I don't even know where I am. Do you know where this is?”

I don't know how to answer this question.

“I've just been . . .” he says, “. . . well . . . just walking. And . . . I don't know. This place gives me the creeps. You know? It's like . . . I mean I don't know how I got here. I don't know how I'm going to get out. I walk and walk and walk, and nothing ever changes. You know? I don't ever get anywhere. I'm just here.” He shakes his head again, but this time expressing only weariness. “This is no way to live.” He looks me straight in the eye. “No. Way. To. Live.”

T
homas Jefferson hears the front door slam and light, hurried footsteps, then feminine exhalations in the corridor outside his study and the whispered words,
“C'est pas possible!”
Leaving his desk, he finds Sally Hemings, gasping with her back to the wall, bonnetless, her hair undone on one side, her eyes wide, looking right at him but showing no trace of recognition. Her hands are flat against the wall, as if in the next instant she is going to push off and flee back down the hall. “Sally?” says Thomas Jefferson, unsure if she has even heard him. “Sally, what's happened?”

“I'm sorry,” Sally Hemings says between gasps. “I've just been running.” She takes a step away from the wall and lifts one hand to tuck the hair splayed across her shoulder behind her ear.

“Did something happen?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“A madman.” She puts her hand to her throat.

“Were you attacked?”

“I was at the
marché.
I only wanted onions and flour. Then a man. He started shouting. He pulled off my bonnet and threw it into the gutter.” Sally Hemings cries, “Oh!” as if the man has attacked her again. The hand at her throat twitches, flutters. Just below her jaw, the skin is red, chafed, blood-specked.

“Come here,” says Thomas Jefferson, backing away from his study door. “You must sit down.”

“I'm sorry.” She looks at him with pleading eyes.

“I insist. Sit down. Let me give you something to drink.”

He walks into his study and pulls a chair away from the front of his desk. It is the very chair in which the Marquis de Lafayette was sitting a week or so earlier. As Thomas Jefferson goes behind his desk to open a cabinet low to the floor, Sally Hemings enters his study and sits on the front edge of the delicate, silk-upholstered chair. She hears a clinking of glass on glass. Thomas Jefferson places an etched flask of whiskey-colored liquid on his desk and a tiny tumbler, not much bigger than a thimble.

“Cognac,” he says. “Drink it all in a gulp. It will settle your nerves.”

Sally Hemings picks up the little glass and does as she is instructed. She has never tasted cognac before. It is like liquid fire against her palate and tongue and like bitter acid in her throat. But as it goes down, she can feel the muscles in her chest relax. She breathes more easily.

“Do you know why the man took your bonnet?” says Thomas Jefferson as he walks back around his desk.

“He was shouting. I could hardly understand anything he said. I think he was drunk. He kept calling me ‘
une traîtresse.
' And I think he said he was going to kill me.
‘
À mort!'
he kept shouting. And
‘Tiers état!'”

“Ah!” says Thomas Jefferson, now sitting at his desk. He has taken another tumbler from the cabinet and fills it with cognac.

“Other people were saying that. The man was shouting, and a whole crowd gathered. He pushed me to the ground and he spat on me. I thought—”

Sally Hemings's mouth is open, but she makes no sound. Her eyes have grown wide again. She sits erect on the edge of the chair, then gives her head a violent shake. “I'm sorry,” she says at last. “Forgive me.”

“No, no, no,” Thomas Jefferson says kindly. “Please.” He takes the flask in his right hand and holds out his left. “Here. Give me your glass.”

Sally Hemings does as she is told. And when Thomas Jefferson returns the glass, she swallows its contents in a gulp. He pours himself a second glass. “You must have been so frightened,” he says.

Her eyes grow wide for an instant. “I thought—” Again she cannot speak.

“You don't have to say it.”

“I thought— What they were saying. I was sure—” Her eyes brim with tears—although they do not fall. Her lips remain motionless in the shape of a word she never speaks.

Thomas Jefferson leans forward, as if he is going to get up, but then he sits upright again, holds out his hand, and she gives him the tiny tumbler.

The cognac has made her feel better. Less afraid. More herself. When he returns the tumbler to her, she sips it more slowly this time and decides that she likes the taste.

“How did you get away?” Thomas Jefferson asks.

“
La dame
helped me.
La dame
with the onion cart and the jerky. She called the man
fou
and
cochon.
And when she picked me up off the ground, the crowd called her
traîtresse
, too. And the man.
‘À mort! À mort!'
he kept saying. I thought he would—” Sally Hemings looks down at her glass.” But
la dame
said she wasn't afraid of stupid children.
‘Crétin!'
she said.
Everyone was shouting at her. They all seemed to have gone mad. But then she picked me up and helped me walk out of the market. And no one did anything or followed us. They just let us go. None of it made any sense. They just let us go, and they were still shouting when
la dame
bade me good-bye on the next street. I didn't understand any of it. She didn't either.”

“These are remarkable times, Sally,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Do you know what the
tiers état
is?”

“No.”

“It is the French term for common people. The French common people are rising up against their monarch. Our spirit of republicanism is a great wave rolling around the world, and right now it is cresting here in France.”

Sally Hemings is quiet. She does not meet Thomas Jefferson's eye, and he realizes he has been insensitive.

“I'm sorry, Sally. I don't mean to imply that what you experienced was not . . .
terrible.
I only hoped that you might . . . I don't know—” Thomas Jefferson falls silent.

There is a long moment during which he wonders if it is time for her to leave.

“But why did the man attack me?” she says at last. “I am not the king. I am not a princess or an aristocrat.
Moi aussi, j'appartiens au tiers état.
”

“Perhaps he was only angry. Perhaps he saw your clothes and decided you were the servant of an aristocrat. Though that is still madness. Revolutions become necessary when one people is oppressed by another. But that does not mean they are an unalloyed good. There is no such thing as moral purity in history. Even the most beneficent of revolutions necessarily entails injustice and the shedding of innocent blood. Our one consolation during moments like this is that they shall be followed by the dawning of a better world—” He cuts himself off, once again feeling he has been insensitive. “I am terribly, terribly sorry, however, that you should have suffered as you did today. I feel as if it is my fault.”

Sally Hemings looks Thomas Jefferson straight in the eye. “Why?”

He is blushing. He shrugs. “Mrs. Adams and Captain Ramsey both thought that you should have returned to Virginia straight from London, and . . . Well, I, too, have often thought that would have been better—”

“I am glad I stayed here,” says Sally Hemings. She is still looking Thomas Jefferson straight in the eye. “I have become a different person in Paris, and I am glad of it.”

Thomas Jefferson is standing up. A restlessness has come into his legs and eyes. “I am very happy to hear that, Sally. Still, I think it might be best if you did not go to the market alone for the next week or so. I doubt that these difficulties will last very long. But caution is advisable for the time being. Venture outside only in the company of another servant. I'll speak to Petit about it immediately.”

Sally Hemings is standing up. She puts her tumbler down on Thomas Jefferson's desk. “Thank you. That
did
help me feel better.” She smiles but avoids Thomas Jefferson's gaze. “Well, I better let Jimmy know about the onions.”

Thomas Jefferson continues to stand behind his desk for a long moment after she leaves, his smile gradually fading. He takes his frock coat off the hook behind the door. His work is done for the day. It is time to see what is happening in the streets.

A
day has passed. Sally Hemings is standing in the doorway to Thomas Jefferson's study, but so silently that he doesn't notice until she draws her breath to speak. “Mr. Jefferson,” she says, softly but emphatically. She looks stunned. Her eyes are wide but focused on nothing. The rest of her face seems frozen.

“Are you all right, Sally?” he says. “Is something wrong?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Certainly.” Thomas Jefferson has been writing a letter. He wipes the tip of his quill with a rag and flips shut the top of his inkwell. “Sit down.” He gestures at the chair in front of his desk.

“No, thank you.”

He places a piece of blotting paper atop the letter he has been writing and smooths it down with the side of his fist.

Sally Hemings has taken a couple of steps into the room, and when he looks at her, she takes a couple more, but not toward him, only away from the door.

“What is the matter?” he says.

She swallows. And when she speaks, her voice is trembling. “I have something to say.”

“All right.” He folds his hands on top of his desk, in part to conceal his own slight trembling. When she doesn't speak, he asks, “What is it?”

“I have been struggling with my conscience.” She is silent a long moment, then takes a deep breath. “And I have realized that I must . . . that unless I tell you—”

Her words cut off as if she has been grabbed by the throat. Her wide eyes and still face express something closer to fear.

“Go ahead, Sally,” Thomas Jefferson says softly, his own throat going dry. “What is it you have to say?”

“I have to tell you that you shouldn't—”

Again she stops, looking so frightened and lost.

Her face hardens. “I have to tell you,” she says, “that—” Another pause, but this time she is only gathering strength. Her words come all in a burst. “I will never forgive you for what you did.”

A tremor runs through her whole body, and then she is looking at him with a fierce alertness.

For reasons that Thomas Jefferson does not comprehend, he is glad at what she has said. He has stopped trembling.

“You are perfectly justified,” he says at last. “I neither deserve nor expect your forgiveness. But I am sorry. Very sorry.”

Sally Hemings continues to stare into his eyes, breathing heavily—and looking utterly beautiful. She says nothing.

“I don't expect you to accept my apology,” he says. “I only want you to know what I feel.”

Once again her words come in a burst. “Why did you do it?”

Thomas Jefferson gasps. “Hah!”

“Why are you laughing?”

“I'm sorry. I was just surprised.”

Sally Hemings has taken another step toward the center of the room.

“I had no good reason,” he says. “I was a fool. And I had had too much wine. Also . . .” He looks away from her, picks up his quill and gives it a turn. Then he puts it back on its tray, looks at her and shrugs. “The most foolish thing of all, I suppose, is that I hoped that you might”—he looks away again—“welcome my . . . attentions.”

When he looks back at her, her expression has softened, though she is still looking him straight in the eyes. Her voice is so quiet he can hardly hear it.

“I didn't.”

“I know.”

They look into each other's eyes for a long moment. Then Sally Hemings turns her gaze toward a framed map of France on the wall.

“Perhaps you had better go, Sally,” he says.

“Yes, Mr. Jefferson.”

She is gone from the room in three steps.