Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (26 page)

T
here are times when Sally Hemings has to fight her revulsion at Thomas Jefferson's naked body and at the things that happen when she is naked with him in her bed—and yet there are other times when those very same things feel as close as she will ever get to heavenly bliss—except that in heaven her bliss will not be followed by embarrassment to meet Thomas Jefferson's eye, or even her own eye in the mirror.
You are the woman who has done these things
, she tells herself when she looks at her reflection in the morning.
You are such a woman.
Yet she cannot tell whether she makes these pronouncements with loathing or a grim pride.

T
homas Jefferson always leaves her room in the middle of the night, and so, awoken at dawn by the shrill whistling of swallows, Sally Hemings is surprised to feel the tilt of her mattress and the warmth of another body against her back. At first she only licks her lips and watches the slow somersaulting of dust motes in the solitary sunbeam crossing her room from the small window above her bed. Then she rolls from her left side to her right.

She has never seen Thomas Jefferson sleeping before, at least not in daylight. It was hot in the night, and a few strands of his red hair are stuck to his pale forehead. His eyelids are closed, but so delicately they make her think of furled flower petals. His long, thin lips are slightly parted, and a trickle of drool gleams at the corner of his mouth, where his cheek is pressed against the mattress.

He is so peaceful and still that it is almost as if the real Thomas Jefferson has fled his body—the thinking, commanding, eternally busy Thomas Jefferson, the man looked up to by half the world. But at the same time, she wonders if this vulnerable, gently sleeping man isn't, in fact, the real Thomas Jefferson, and if, during this tranquil, fleeting moment, she has been granted the opportunity to look not at the man but at his soul.

A
nd now it seems that Thomas Jefferson has left the balcony and is walking back along the gangway, ever deeper into Sally Hemings's invention. For a while his coattails flap on either side of him and his hair whips into his mouth and eyes. But soon the wind subsides and even the violent lurching of the deck resolves, first into a gentle rocking and then into a hum.

And now he is walking between enormous steel flywheels whirling so fast that their spokes are a blur of gleaming blue and now along an avenue of copper obelisks, from the peaks of which bolts of pink and green lightning continually crackle. Tiny sparks snap between his fingers. There is a metallic sourness on his tongue.

Gradually the gangway widens until it is the size of a country road and slopes downhill through a forest of pole-thin trees hung with silver leaves that tremble with a faint ringing sound on a gentle, unceasing breeze. On the far side of the forest, he comes upon fields of brilliant silver wheat and farmhouses, also silver, that glitter so fiercely in white sunlight they make phosphorescent smears inside his eyes. Even the people working in the fields and passing him along the road have silvery faces and hair. And their voices when they speak seem to echo down long pipes.

Thomas Jefferson asks these people how it is possible that this machine, moving so rapidly hundreds of feet above the countryside, should itself be a sort of countryside, but none of them seem to hear, or even to notice him standing upon the road.

M
. de Corny and five others were then sent to ask arms of M. de Launay, governor of the Bastile. they found a great collection of people already before the place, and they immediately planted a flag of truce, which was answered by a like flag hoisted on the Parapet. the deputation prevailed on the people to fall back a little, advanced themselves to make their demand of the Governor, and in that instant, a discharge from the Bastile killed four persons, of those nearest to the deputies. the deputies retired. I happened to be at the house of M. de Corny, when he returned to it, and received from him a narrative of these transactions. on the retirement of the deputies, the people rushed forward & almost in an instant, were in possession of a fortification, defended by 100. men, of infinite strength, which in other times, had stood several regular sieges, and had never been taken. how they forced their entrance has never been explained. they took all the arms, discharged the prisoners, and such of the garrison as were not killed in the first moment of fury, carried the Governor and Lt. Governor to the Place de Grève (the place of public execution,) cut off their heads, and sent them thro' the city in triumph to the Palais royal. about the same instant a treacherous correspondence having been discovered in M. de Flesselles, prevot des marchands, they seized him in the Hotel de ville, where he was in the execution of his office, and cut off his head. These events, carried imperfectly to Versailles, were the subject of two successive deputations from the assembly to the king, to both of which he gave dry and hard answers for nobody had as yet been permitted to inform him truly and fully of what had passed at Paris. but at night the Duke de Liancourt forced his way into the king's bedchamber, and obliged him to hear a full and animated detail of the disasters of the day in Paris. he went to bed fearfully impressed.

—Thomas Jefferson

The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

January 6, 1821

“B
e reasonable,” Thomas Jefferson tells Sally Hemings. They are walking along the Seine, just beside the place Louis XV, where, less than two weeks earlier, a crowd had stoned a detachment of German cavalry and the fall of the Bastille had become inevitable. There are small piles of stones all around the square, but otherwise the horse and pedestrian traffic moves with all the tranquil chaos of an ordinary evening in July. The setting sun has turned the buildings on the far shore goldfish bright. The clouds overhead are fire-colored, and the sky behind them is tinged with green. “All I am saying,” says Thomas Jefferson, “is that in regard to the issue of slavery, French law is ambiguous.”

“But slavery is forbidden—”

Thomas Jefferson shakes his head and speaks in a low, measured voice. “The law also upholds the rights of property owners.”

“But how can two laws—”

“The law is not coherent,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Laws are enacted by different people for different reasons at different times. But once laws exist, their only function is to give us the vocabulary by which we may conduct our disputes. And when that vocabulary is ambiguous or contradictory, laws can be interpreted to mean almost anything, which is one reason this country—despite having abolished slavery—has made more money from the slave trade than any nation on earth.”

Sally Hemings's eyebrows buckle and her mouth falls open. “But the marquis—”

Thomas Jefferson silences her by giving her smooth, soft hand a quick squeeze. She turns her head away and looks out over the river. He feels a deep quiet growing within her, which is answered by an aching weakness within his own chest.

“But the law is not the chief consideration,” he says. “Think about the life you would lead were you to remain here.”

Sally Hemings swings her head back around and opens her mouth to speak, but he cuts her off.

“What sort of freedom would you actually have? As Patsy and Polly's
companion, you have friends and access to the finest drawing rooms. But were you to stay on here alone, you could not continue living at the Hôtel, nor in arrangements even remotely comparable. And do you think that Madame de Corny would invite you to her Sunday afternoons? Who would pay for your gowns and shoes once these wear out? How would you feed yourself?”

Thomas Jefferson licks his lips, which have become dry.

“But I don't want to stay here,” says Sally Hemings. “I was only asking why I could not be free.”

“What have you to gain by freedom? I have already told you that within the bounds of discretion you will live as if you are free at Monticello. Were I to formally give you freedom and you were to remain at my home, the whole world would know why, and we could have no life together. And were you to leave Monticello, it would be the same in Virginia as it is here: You would have to make your way in the world entirely alone.”

With these words Thomas Jefferson knows he has won, that Sally Hemings cannot refute any aspect of his argument. And yet merely by stating the simple facts, he feels he has done her a great cruelty and that the deep quiet within her has grown so big it has become a cold, dark world in which she might dwell but where he can never follow.

T
homas Jefferson has entirely misunderstood Sally Hemings—in part because she would not allow her true meaning to be clear, even only to herself. The real reason she broached the topic of her freedom was that she thought that only if she were free might it one day be possible for her to become his wife. And now she knows that this is one eventuality that will never come to pass.

T
he eye, like the camera, sees the idiot leers that afflict the lover's lips, the drunken discoordination between his right eye and his left and the puffing of his cheeks in the winds of speech. But all such manifestations of ungainliness and deformity transpire unperceived amid those countless other accidents and expressions that, one after another, are combined within the mind into the lover's perfect beauty.

S
ally Hemings holds on to nothing but her book on the roaring subway. Every now and then, a shimmy or lurch of the car might cause her shoulder to touch a stainless-steel pole or her back to bump against the door, but she seems oblivious. Thomas Jefferson notices the faint freckling on her cheeks and nose, the fullness of her lips and that distinct line—almost a ridge—where her upper lip meets the skin of her face. He remembers how he used to cover those lips with many tiny kisses. He remembers the taste of her mouth, and her breath, and the feeling of her tongue moving. He remembers how one time when he leaned forward to kiss her, his forehead bumped the stiff brim of her military-style cap, which afterward he took to calling her “chastity cap.” He remembers her smiling the first time he said that. He can hear the sound of her
laughter.

“C
ome in!” says Betty Hemings, stepping through the door of her own cabin. “Come in! Come in! Come in!” She is carrying a leather bag, which she puts down on the dirt floor. Sally Hemings stops in the doorway to look around the cabin, with its knocked-together furniture and mud-chinked walls.

“My Lord!” says Betty, stepping back and putting her hands on her hips to really take her daughter in, now that they are finally alone. “Look at those fine clothes you wearing! Anybody think you Mr. Jefferson's daughter, they see you wearing clothes like that!”

Sally Hemings steps into the cabin and smiles weakly. “I can't believe it,” she says, almost under her breath.

“Come here, girl. Let me put my hands on you!”

Sally Hemings doesn't move.

Betty flings out her arms and wraps them around her daughter. “My baby girl is home! My baby girl is home!” After a long hug, she stands back, holding Sally Hemings by the shoulders with her arms straight. “Look at you! I send you off a little girl and you come back a grown woman! I guess they treated you fine over there. You all filled out and grown up. Must have treated you like a princess! You probably too good for all the rest of us now.”

“Oh, no, Mammy. I'm so happy to be home.”

“Don't sound like you happy.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You must be bone tired!” Betty pulls a chair away from the table. “Sit down. Sit down.”

Sally Hemings sits, shrugs her cape off her shoulders and lets it hang over the back of the chair. “That's better.”

“Must have been hard, all that traveling. How long it been? A week?”

“A month—since we left Norfolk, I mean. But it's been three months since we left France.”

“Lord! No wonder you so tired!”

“I'm not so tired.”

“Don't tell me you ain't tired. You yellow as bread dough! You got big gray circles under your eyes. You sit right there. I got some biscuits I can give you.”

“Do you have any water? I haven't had anything to drink since we stopped in Charlottesville.”

“Course I got some water! You just sit right there. I'll get you some water.”

Betty takes a pitcher off a shelf and goes out to the rain barrel. She comes back in and puts the pitcher down on the table. “You learn how to talk French over there?” she asks as she takes a cup off a shelf in the corner.

“Oui.”

“‘We'!” Betty laughs.
“‘We'!”
She places the cup on the table beside the pitcher. “You call that French! Lord, if that's French, I been speaking French my whole life!”

Sally Hemings smiles weakly.

Betty smiles. Then her smile goes away. Softly, she says, “Oh, my Lord!”

She crosses the room and places her hand on Sally Hemings's belly. “Oh, my Lord!” She takes a step back, clutching her hands together. “Don't tell me you let some French nigger have his way with you!”

Sally Hemings's voice is so quiet that Betty can hardly hear her. “There aren't any Negroes in France, Mammy.”

Betty just stares at her daughter, but Sally Hemings keeps her eyes on the pitcher in front of her and doesn't speak. A tear runs down her cheek.

“Oh, my Lord!” says Betty. “Mr. Jefferson! Don't tell me it's Mr. Jefferson!”

Sally Hemings looks at her mother, her eyes red, tears spilling down both cheeks. When she tries to speak, she can't. She covers her face.

“Oh, my sweet baby girl!” Betty kneels on the floor with her arms around her daughter. “There's nothing wrong with a baby! Babies is nothing but a joy!” She pulls her daughter's head onto her shoulder and smooths her hair. “I was just about your age when I got pregnant with Mary.”

Sally Hemings begins to sob.

“There, there, baby girl. There ain't no reason to be so sad. It's a good thing to bring babies into the world. Be fruitful and multiply. That what the Lord says. Babies ain't nothing but a joy. Every one of you been a gift to me.” Sally Hemings continues to cry. Betty rocks her back and forth on the chair and strokes her hair. “He's not rough with you?” Betty says.

Face swollen and wet, Sally Hemings sits up and looks at her mother.

“Your father,” says Betty, “he was rough with me sometimes. Mr. Jefferson's not rough with you, is he?”

“No,” says Sally Hemings. “No, no, no, no!”

Then she is sobbing again, and Betty resumes rocking her and stroking her hair. “Then everything's all fine. You got a baby coming, and there's nothing better than a baby. And it's a good thing to have a baby with the master. That just about the best thing can happen to a colored girl, except freedom. Especially if you got a master like Mr. Jefferson. It's only you got to keep your feelings out of it. You keep your feelings out of it, everything be just fine.”

Sally Hemings buries her face against her mother's shoulder, and her sobs become grinding wails.