Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (2 page)

“. . . I will make it good. . . . Good . . .”

. . . But what could I have done? I didn't know what to do. . . .

S
ally Hemings comes to Thomas Jefferson in a dream. She is sitting at his desk, writing with one of his quills. The scratching of the inked tip across the paper makes a sort of thunder in his dream. Periodically, when the tip dries out and a squeaking comes into the thunder, Sally Hemings lifts the quill to her lips and dampens it with a quick dart of her tongue. Only when the thunder is infiltrated by squeaks a second time does she dab the tip of the quill into the ink and tap it twice on the rim of the inkwell. The result of this practice—an effort at economy, Thomas Jefferson can only imagine—is that the right corner of her mouth is surrounded by a corona of saliva-slick black, and a trail of black descends to the edge of her chin, where a droplet trembles without ever falling.

S
ally Hemings' mother Betty was a bright mulatto woman, and Sally mighty near white: she was the youngest child. . . . Sally was very handsome: long straight hair down her back. She was about eleven years old when Mr. Jefferson took her to France to wait on Miss Polly. She and Sally went to France a year after Mr. Jefferson went. Patsy went with him first, but she carried no maid with her. Harriet, one of Sally's daughters, was very handsome. Sally had a son named Madison, who learned to be a great fiddler. He has been in Petersburg twice: was here when the balloon went up—the balloon that Beverly sent off.

—Isaac Jefferson

“Memoirs of a Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840's by Isaac, one of Thomas Jefferson's Slaves”

M
r. Jefferson was a tall strait-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered: Nary a man in this town walked so straight as my Old Master: neat a built man as ever was seen in Vaginny, I reckon, or any place—a straight-up man: long face, high nose. . . . Old Master wore Vaginny cloth and a red waistcoat, (all the gentlemen wore red waistcoats in dem days) and small clothes: arter dat he used to wear red breeches too.

—Isaac Jefferson

“Memoirs of a Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840's by Isaac, one of Thomas Jefferson's Slaves”

T
he real Sally Hemings comes to Thomas Jefferson in the arms of her mother. It is the first springlike day in March, and he is at his desk trying to work out the etymological connections between “hob,” “hobnob,” “hobgoblin” and “hobnail.” There is a knock that he does not quite hear, and then Martha is standing just inside his door. “I'm sorry, Tom,” she says. “I just wanted you to know that Betty is here.”

He hears a very small child's irritated “No!” out in the hallway and then a woman speaking in a low, consoling voice. Again the child says “No,” but less emphatically. Martha steps aside, and a tall, broad-shouldered woman with skin the tawny gold of August meadow grass enters the room, carrying a tiny girl who takes one look at Thomas Jefferson and buries her face against her mother's neck.

“Ah, yes,” he says, though he is not quite sure why he is being introduced to Betty or who exactly she is.

Martha is smiling but seems disconcerted by his lack of response. “Betty,” she says, “this is Mr. Jefferson.”

Only once he hears the affection in his wife's voice does Thomas Jefferson remember that Betty used to be her nanny and was her confidante after the death of Bathurst Skelton. He has met her several times, in fact, though he has never spoken to her directly.

“Welcome,” he says, getting up from his desk. “I hope you had an easy trip.”

Betty attempts something like a smile.

“I was thinking she should stay in Ginny's old cabin,” Martha says, her words more question than statement. “With her children.” Martha glances at the girl in Betty's arms.

“That's a good place,” says Thomas Jefferson. “On a clear day, you can look out the window and see a hundred miles.”

Betty attempts another smile but looks at the floor as she speaks. “Thank you, Master Jefferson.”

“
Mr.
Jefferson,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“
Mr.
Jefferson,” she repeats.

The little girl turns her head against her mother's neck and looks at Thomas Jefferson with one eye.

“And who have we here?” he says.

The little girl rotates her face back against her mother's neck, but Betty pulls her away and lowers her to the floor. “This here's Sally,” Betty says. “She's my youngest.”

As soon as the girl is standing on her plump, bare feet, she grabs her mother's skirt and hides her face in it. “Go on, Sally. Say good morning to Mr. Jefferson.” Betty tries to tug her skirt from her daughter's hands, but the little girl won't let go.

“We been traveling two days,” Betty explains. “And Sally ain't had a wink of sleep the whole time! Ain't that true, Little Apple? You ain't slept in two days.”

Touching the girl lightly on the shoulder, Thomas Jefferson says, “Welcome to your new home.”

She flings back her head and looks at him with a fierce scowl. “No! Not my home!”

Thomas Jefferson laughs. “Now, that's a girl who knows her mind!”

“Sally!” scolds her mother. “Don't you talk to Mr. Jefferson like that! What's got into you?”

“Not my home!” She pulls her mother's skirt entirely around her head.

Thomas Jefferson laughs.

He is thirty-one. When his wife knocked at his study door, he was supposed to have been writing “A Summary View of the Rights of British North America,” a position paper for the Virginia delegation to the first Continental Congress. His hair is the luminous red of a dawn in July; his eyes are the color of roasted peanuts.

T
he abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was, unhappily, introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.

—Thomas Jefferson

“A Summary View of the Rights of British North America”

July 1774

I
n Thomas Jefferson's dream, Sally Hemings is wearing only a white linen shift, torn at the front, and revealing an expanse of radiant skin. She does not notice him as she writes. He wants to talk to her, approach her, but is unable to move. And yet, at the same time, he has risen into the air and seems to be drawing nearer to her, although that may only be a result of his altered perspective.

The lamp on his desk has not been lit. The even, sand-yellow glow filling the entire room emanates, Thomas Jefferson realizes, from Sally Hemings's resplendent face, her exposed breast, and even from those parts beneath her shift, beneath the desk and otherwise hidden from view.

And now he can actually see what she is writing—but it is not writing at all; it is a fierce assault of senseless scratches, blots, crossings-out, jabs, loops, squiggles, splashes, gashes, senile quaverings, lightning bolts, comets, eruptions, bullet holes and crevasses, running in all directions, superimposed, without any regard for horizontality, order or even the paper's edge.

After a while Thomas Jefferson realizes that she is compiling notes toward an invention—an iron machine, powered by steam, that moves along an iron road and makes an unending hawk screech, so terrifically loud that anyone hearing it would be instantly struck deaf. “Why would you want to make such a thing?” he is finally able to ask. Sally Hemings fixes him in a gaze of contempt. She cannot speak. She is mute. And her muteness so terrifies him that his legs jerk and arms shoot out, he cries aloud and finds himself awake in the cold, blue night, alone in his bed.

. . . I cannot bear to be myself. I feel trapped inside my own body, and inside the life I have led. This day I have seen such sorrow, cruelty and injustice that my mind reels at the recollection of it, and my stomach is so sick with loathing that I can hold nothing down. Indeed, I have already vomited three times—twice on that acre of frozen earth where I witnessed the craven depravity of people I have lived with and even loved all my life, and once just now as I held my face over the top of the privy's long, filth-gnarled tunnel. Nothing I believed seems true anymore. As late as this very morning, when I knew precisely what was going to happen, I could not grasp the enormity of it. I allowed myself to believe that I would still be possessed of dignity and decency afterward, and that there were limits to the horror my life—or any life—could contain. How could I have lived in such ignorance? How could I have believed so many lies, and lied so often to myself? Why is it that every time I glimpsed the faintest shadow of the truth, I covered my eyes and ran as far as I could in the opposite direction? I feel as if I never actually lived my life but only sleepwalked through it, dreaming. . . .

T
here must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

—Thomas Jefferson

Notes on the State of Virginia

Written in 1781–82, published in 1787

E
arth has covered the face of Martha Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson will not come out of his private chambers. Jupiter knocks on the door with the knuckle of his index finger.

“Mr. Tom,” he calls. None of the other servants dare call the master anything other than his last name, but Jupiter has served Thomas Jefferson since they were both boys at Shadwell, and is in the habit of saying they are as close as brothers. He knocks a second time. “Mr. Tom, Ursula got some soup here for you. Barley soup! You want her to come in and leave it on the table?”

All four servants—Betty Hemings and Sally Hemings, in addition to Jupiter and Ursula—hold their breath as they wait for a reply. Thomas Jefferson has been locked in his chambers ever since the funeral, two days ago. He hasn't addressed a word to anyone in all that time, not even his three daughters, nor has he had anything to eat or drink. The servants listen but hear only the insistent tweedle of a Carolina wren.

Jupiter knocks a third time. “Mr. Tom?”

Still no response, nor any sound that might indicate a living soul behind the door. The servants craning their ears in the dim hallway cast one another worried glances. “Maybe we should try the library,” says Jupiter.

The library is connected to Thomas Jefferson's bedroom and study but has a separate door just a few feet down the hall. Jupiter knocks on that door, waits, then says, “Mr. Tom?” He is about to knock again when a long, doglike moan sounds within the room and ends with an emphatic, “Leave . . . me . . . be!”

All of the servants, except Sally Hemings, exchange relieved glances. Sally Hemings is afraid of Thomas Jefferson. She is nine years old and she can't remember ever having said a word to him.

As they make their way to the kitchen staircase, Ursula says, “Least now we know we not going to have
two
funerals.”

“Not yet anyway,” says Jupiter.

Ursula doesn't say anything because she is descending the steep staircase and has to concentrate on not spilling the soup.

“Never in my life,” says Betty Hemings, “have I seen a man more crazy for a woman than that Mr. Jefferson.”

“That's the truth,” says Jupiter. “He worshipped the ground she walked on.” They are in the kitchen now and can speak more freely.

“She was pretty enough, I guess,” says Betty Hemings, “but I never saw the reason in it.”

“I'm sorry to speak badly of the dead,” says Ursula, putting the tureen down on the table, “but that woman didn't know nothing but how to complain.”

“She was always a sickly thing,” says Betty Hemings. “I was there the minute she came out between her mammy's legs. Seemed like forever before she figured out she got to breathe if she wants to live. And that's how it always was. That girl was never sure if she wanted to live or die.”

“And she made sure everybody knew it,” says Ursula.

Jupiter says, “But he loved her.”

“He did,” says Betty. “No denying that. Of course, he's a sad man, too.”

“Oh, yes,” says Jupiter. “But Mr. Tom got good reasons to be sad. I know that for a fact.”

This is where the conversation ends. Jupiter is always letting on that he knows all kinds of things about Thomas Jefferson, but he'll never say what they are, so there is no point in asking.

Betty Hemings calls out to her daughter, “What you doing?”

Sally Hemings is still standing on the top step of the staircase. She was the last to descend, and so the only one who heard Thomas Jefferson start up again: long, off-key moans that fall in pitch, again and again and again, sounding more like they come from a ghost than a living person. Sally Hemings's fingers are cold and filmed with sweat. Her heart is rattling in her chest.

 

 . . . I am calmer now. I have even had some sleep—on that bed so lately Mr. Jefferson's but now no one's at all. I have arisen feeling that I must solve the mystery of how I came to live this life I have no choice but to acknowledge as my own. Mr. Jefferson often said that he only knew what was true when he was writing. I am sitting at his desk, using his pen and wearing his spectacles. I can only hope they serve me better than they did him. . . .

 

T
he story of my own life is like a fairy tale, and you would not believe me if I told to you the scenes enacted during my life of slavery. It passes through my mind like a dream. Born and reared as free, not knowing that I was a slave, then suddenly, at the death of Jefferson . . .

—The Reverend Peter Fossett

“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

New York Sunday World

January 30, 1898