Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (3 page)

A
fter an unimaginable length of time, Thomas Jefferson has enrolled in art school. His goal his first year is to do a taxonomy of color, which amounts to an inventory of things—for what is the reality of that red but a sunset in October beyond the steel mills? And of that pale brown—or is it gold—but a muddy road in Thailand? And of that blue but a flash on a raven's back?

He has just taken his seat on the subway, when he spots Sally Hemings standing by the door a bit down and across from him. There is no mistaking that tapering jaw, that long arc between shoulder and pelvis, those narrow eyes, so deeply gray—the summer-storm gray of newborns, which also contains the potential for brown. Her head is bent over a book, but she doesn't seem fully absorbed by what she is reading. Has she, perhaps, noticed him and decided to act as if she hasn't? Should he get up and walk over and pretend that running into her on the subway is only happy coincidence? Would she walk away? Would she join in his pretense? What if he can't speak?

All the while Thomas Jefferson is watching Sally Hemings, their train is rounding a bend, the steel of its wheels grinding against the steel of the tracks and setting off a ragged shriek that mounts and mounts inside the tunnel to such a degree that Sally Hemings tucks her book into her armpit and puts her fingers into her ears. At that moment the lights go out, but the shriek continues, unabated.

T
homas Jefferson cannot speak. He is eleven. His sister Mary is thirteen. Her feet are on a mound of hay. Her back is bent over a hacked beam. Her hair is in the dirt. Blood is filling her eye. His mother is shouting, “Get up! Get up, I say!”

She has been shouting for a long time. Thomas Jefferson heard her from the house. She was shouting, “Do you think I'm so stupid! Do you think I don't know about the sheep!” He was reading a book about India. And in that book it said that trees in India have loaves of bread hanging from their branches. He wanted to keep reading. The loaves are a kind of fruit, the book said. But Mary was shouting, “No, Mammy! No, Mammy! No! No!” But it wasn't really a shout. There is strength in a shout. All Thomas Jefferson heard in his sister's voice was her weakness. All he heard was that she was going to let herself die.

But then the screams started. Like the sound a hinge might make but so loud they cut right into his head. He also heard a sound he could not bear to hear. A very small sound. It was the sound of splitting flesh. He heard it, but he could not bear to hear it, so he didn't hear it. But he saw it. He saw it as he sat over his book. His sister's flesh tearing. The blood flowing out of her body. Later he will remember putting a length of ribbon between the pages and closing his book, but nothing more until the moment he is standing in the doorway of the barn, his back against the jamb. He cannot speak.

“Malingerer!” his mother shouts. She is holding the rake above her head, looking down at his sister, whose blood is overflowing her eye. “For the last time!” The rake jerks high above her head. Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. “Get up! Get up! Get up!” It was a mistake to have come. Nothing good is going to happen now. Now he has been caught in the same weakness as his sister. His mother is looking at him.

“You!” she says. “You!” Her eyes are so wide and fierce they seem to have irises within irises within irises. The eyes say,
You are the one to blame! You!

Now the rake is falling. Its teeth strike the dust and hay fragments. It
balances on edge an instant, then falls flat, teeth up, between his sister and himself.

His mother is gone.

Mary is not moving. Her blood is brilliant on her cheek, flowing into her hair.

Jupiter is standing in the cow stall. “You see it?” he says.

Thomas Jefferson cannot speak.

“You see it? It done happen again. She got the Devil in her good this time.”

“She killed Mary,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“She'd like to,” says Jupiter.

Thomas Jefferson is standing over his sister. He thinks maybe the blood is not coming out of her eye. There is an opening in her eyebrow that is like an eye itself, and he thinks the blood is coming out of that. Jupiter is standing beside him.

“Everything's all right now,” says Jupiter.

And Thomas Jefferson says, “She's not moving.”

“She'll be all right. We get her cleaned up, she'll be just fine.”

“She's dead,” says Thomas Jefferson.

Jupiter puts his hand on Thomas Jefferson's shoulder and gives him a squeeze. “Don't you worry, Master Tom. I saw what your mammy done. Miss Mary just got whupped upside her head. She'll be all right.”

Mary's lips are moving. Then they stop. Then they move again and her hand lifts to her bloody temple. Her eyes are open. The left eye filled with confusion and fear, the right eye filled with blood.

“You see!” says Jupiter. “What I tell you! Everything'll be all right.”

Thomas Jefferson cannot speak.

T
homas Jefferson is watching the movie of his courtship with Martha. He has never seen a movie before, and for a long while he is distracted by the blue beam crossing the darkness overhead. At first he wonders if the beam isn't sunlight channeled through lenses and lighting up a stage where actors are performing. But that doesn't make sense, partly because of the strange, twitchy flatness of the actors and their brilliant colors but mostly because they keep appearing and disappearing in instants and sometimes loom as large as houses. Perhaps the light is shining on some sort of painting in which the colors (through the influence of magnets?) constantly swirl and reassemble. But how can the images speak? Are there actors behind the huge painting? And if so, why are their voices so loud? Finally he decides that what he is looking at are colored shadows of the sort that magicians project onto clouds of smoke, although he still can't figure out how the images move. He gives up all such ruminations when he hears his name spoken by one of the gigantic actors.

He has been brought to this dark room (a theater, it would seem) as a sort of joke by James and Dolley Madison, who are sitting on either side of him. They didn't give him a clue as to where they were taking him but only told him he was being kidnapped so had to be blindfolded. They didn't remove the blindfold until he was seated and loud voices had begun to boom in the darkness.

His name is spoken by a young actor in a copper-colored wig, sitting in a tree and holding an open book, on the spine of which is a single word in huge gold letters:
LOC
KE
. The young man is looking down from his branch at an extraordinarily beautiful young woman wearing knee breeches—a shocking concept for Thomas Jefferson. She is riding a palomino along a forest path and has stopped to converse with the young man in the tree. She looks as if the sun is inside her and it is beaming out through her cheeks, eyes, lips and her brilliantly white teeth. She tells the young man that she had not known there were orangutans in this forest. When he inquires after her name, she laughs, digs her heels into the horse's ribs and gallops down the path, her golden ponytail waving in perfect synchrony with the horse's own golden tail.

In an instant the young woman reappears, but this time in a royal blue gown cut to expose so much of her flawless pink chest that her bodice can only be held up by some sort of adhesive applied to her skin. Chamber music is playing. She is looking with surprise into the eyes of the actor in the copper-colored wig, who asks her debonairly if anyone had informed her that orangutans would be attending this ball. It is not until the young woman at last reveals her name that Thomas Jefferson realizes, with a shock that makes him unable to draw a breath, whom the actors are portraying. It never occurred to him that these two people might be Martha and himself, in part because of their absurd appearance and strange accents and because Martha's hair was a luxuriant chestnut brown rather than blond but mainly because the circumstances of their actual meeting could hardly have been more different.

He was twenty-seven and following the road from Monticello to Williamsburg, where he represented Albemarle County at the Virginia House of Burgesses. It was one of those warm spring days when the sky is glaring white and merely looking across the rolling fields of newly turned earth can put a dull node of pain at the center of each eyeball. Jupiter was driving, and they had been talking for more than an hour about what a sad and lonely man Thomas Jefferson's father had been and about why he had never been able to resist his wife's mad convictions. This conversation had exhausted them both, and they had lapsed into thoughtful silences, listening to the cuffs of the horses' hooves on the rutted clay, the clinking harnesses and the long, buzzy drones of the cicadas.

A large brick house with dormer windows stood about twenty yards off the road. As they approached it, Thomas Jefferson thought he heard the high, clear tones of a woman singing. At first he could see no one near the house, but then a slender young woman, all in black, stepped out of a cluster of boxwoods, took hold of the front of her skirt and climbed the steps onto the portico at the front of the house. She was no longer singing and seemed entirely unaware of being observed as she opened the door and disappeared into the house.

From her slender waist and arms, and the spryness with which she mounted the steps, she seemed hardly more than twenty. But her head hung as she walked, as if she were deep in thought, and her black gown and shawl could only mean that, young as she was, she had been widowed. Her song had been filled with sorrow, yet sung so beautifully that it came to Thomas Jefferson as a perfect joy.

Her voice, her dark silhouette and her light step as she entered her
house—these would come back to Thomas Jefferson many times over the remaining day and a half of his journey. And then he simply forgot the young woman—to such an extent that he never even thought to glance at her house on his return trip a month later.

He wouldn't remember her until six months afterward, when he and John Fairfield were traveling from Williamsburg to Monticello and John asked Jupiter to turn their carriage down the muddy drive leading up to the house. When Thomas Jefferson had suggested that John spend a week with him at his mountaintop sanctuary, John had merely said that he knew some “good people” they might spend the night with along the way. He'd said nothing about where the house was or who the people were (except for mentioning that the man of the house had a “nigger wife”), and he certainly hadn't said anything about a widowed daughter with a beautiful singing voice. As their carriage rattled up to the house, Thomas Jefferson's pulse became audible in his eardrums and he wished that he had thought to change his linen before setting out that morning.

He didn't catch a glimpse of the widowed daughter until he was already seated at the dinner table with several members of the Wayles family, adults and children. She arrived late, touching her lips with the middle finger of her perfectly flat hand as she apologized for having been detained. Her father, at the head of the table, looked somberly into his lap as she spoke. When she took the seat immediately to his left, he gave her a knowing, sympathetic glance and covered her hand with his own.

“Mr. Jefferson,” he said, looking down the table to where Thomas Jefferson and John Fairfield were seated on either side of the vacant chair, where the woman of the house would have sat (the last of John Wayles's three wives had been dead a good nine years by then), “allow me to introduce my daughter, Mrs. Skelton.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Thomas Jefferson.

Mrs. Skelton nodded without quite meeting his eye and said something he couldn't catch.

He was relieved to see that, while perfectly nice-looking, she was nowhere near as beautiful as the woman he had imagined after he heard her singing. She had broad cheekbones and a long jaw, unusually squared for a woman, but she had enormous eyes exactly the pewter gray of her father's, though with a greenish cast by candlelight.

She and Thomas Jefferson were seated diagonally across the table and too far apart to talk. Every now and then, he would glance in her direction just as she would seem to be turning her eyes away. He could never
be sure if she had, in fact, been looking at him, and so he glanced toward her with increasing frequency, hoping to catch her before she shifted her gaze—until, at last, worried that she or someone else at the table might think he was paying her undue notice, he forced himself to devote all of his attention to the elderly woman to his left: Mrs. Eppes, who seemed to know a great deal about the art of breeding sheep.

Plates of food came and went. Bottles of cider and wine were opened and emptied. Mr. Wayles's face went redder and redder, and his nose turned a shiny purple.

“Mr. Jefferson!” he called out some two hours into the meal. “Was that your fiddle case I saw my boy bringing into the house a while ago?”

Thomas Jefferson was silent a moment, not sure what he might be getting into. “I suppose it was.”

“So you play the fiddle?”

Thomas Jefferson laughed and glanced at John. “I try.”

“Well, Martha here”—he took hold of Mrs. Skelton's hand—“is a genius at playing the piano. What do you say you two honor us by playing a duet?”

“Oh, Pappy, no!” cried Mrs. Skelton, putting the middle finger of her flat hand against her lips again.

“Nonsense!” said her father. “I'm sure Mr. Jefferson would love to hear you play!”

Now her eyes truly did meet Thomas Jefferson's, expressing both alarm and a plea for help.

“That's very kind of you, Mr. Wayles,” said Thomas Jefferson, “but I doubt that Mrs. Skelton or anyone else would get much enjoyment from my hapless screeching.”

Mrs. Skelton gave Thomas Jefferson a grateful glance. “Yes, Pappy,” she said. “It's not fair to ask Mr. Jefferson to play for us after he has had such a long ride, even if he is only being modest.” She gave Thomas Jefferson another glance, and just as she seemed about to smile, she looked down at her plate.

“Well, then,
you
play for us, Martha!” said her father.

“Oh, no, Pappy. Really, I couldn't.” She gave her father a long, imploring gaze, then pulled her hand away from his.

Her father looked at her skeptically for a moment, then slapped the table with his right hand. “All right, then let's have some apple pie! Betty makes the most delicious apple pies!”

Sometime later, when almost all the lamps and candles in the house
had been extinguished, except out back in the kitchen, where the slaves were doing the dishes, Thomas Jefferson returned from a visit to the outhouse to find Mrs. Skelton standing at the bottom of the main staircase, one hand on the banister, the other holding a candle. “Forgive me, Mr. Jefferson,” she said. “I hope I didn't startle you.”

“Not at all,” said Thomas Jefferson. “I should be the one apologizing.”

She gave him a crumpled smile, then looked away. “I just—” She let go of the banister, transferred the candle from her left to her right hand, then sighed in a way that made it clear she would never finish her sentence.

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” said Thomas Jefferson.

“Yes. The same . . . For
me
, I mean.” She gave him a worried smile, then transferred the candle back to her left hand and put her right on the banister.

“Good night, Mr. Jefferson.”

“Good night.”

She took one step but didn't turn away from him. He didn't move at all.

“I'd love to hear you play piano,” he said.

“I don't think you'd say that if you'd ever actually heard me.” Her face in the candlelight was orange and soft, and her smile was the happiest Thomas Jefferson had yet seen it.

“I'm sure you really are a ‘genius' at playing.”

She laughed.

“And I also hear you are a very good singer,” he said.

“How could you ever have heard such a thing!”

“It gets around,” he said. “I've heard that your voice is very beautiful, as clear as a bell.”

She took her hand off the banister and wiped it against her skirt. A thickness, like discomfort, came into her smile.

“Good night, Mr. Jefferson.”

“Good night, Mrs. Skelton.”