Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (30 page)

S
ally Hemings is cleaning out the bottom drawer in Maria's dresser when she finds the very same primer that Thomas Jefferson bought for her in Paris. How did it get here? Why would Maria have bothered to pack a child's book? And why would she put it at the bottom of her dresser under all of her outgrown petticoats?

The thin volume is partially wedged under the board at the back of the drawer, and as Sally Hemings slides it out, she feels that the paper is far softer than when she was reading it with Thomas Jefferson. The pages turn without resistance and fall flat upon one another without even a whisper. There are dark stains on some of them, and next to the picture of a dog biting a man there is a child's pencil drawing of an angry face with big teeth. Clearly this is
not
the primer she had in Paris but perhaps the one from which Maria learned to read, and Martha too, and possibly even their mother before them, or even Thomas Jefferson himself. She is touched that he sought out this particular book for her in Paris, but she is also excited to discover that she remembers almost all of the couplets on the first two pages.

She brings the primer back to her cabin, and that night, by the light of a pine knot burning in a tin bowl, she tries, once again, to read the title of
Notes on the State of Virginia
—the very volume that Martha employed in her hasty reading lesson and that she subsequently gave to Sally Hemings as a gift. Almost immediately, however, she encounters two formidable obstacles: The first is that she no longer remembers what the book's title might be, except that one of the words is Virginia. And the second is that almost all of the letters that she will need to read the title's first word would seem to belong to the couplets that Thomas Jefferson skipped over because they contained biblical names.

Since Jimmy and Bobby are both away with Thomas Jefferson in New York, the only person she knows who can help her read is her half brother John, whom Thomas Jefferson arranged to have tutored while they were in Paris, so that he could make sense of treatises on carpentry and joinery. John opens the primer on a table in the joinery shop where he is an
apprentice and reads off the mysterious couplets one after another as easily as if he were reciting a prayer. He has Sally Hemings repeat them with him until she, too, is able to rattle them off as if she is actually reading. He also explains that some of the letters—which Sally Hemings thinks he calls “owls”—can be pronounced in many ways, and these he rehearses with her until she, too, has mastered the pronunciations of all five “owls.”

For some reason she is able to absorb John's lessons far more easily than Thomas Jefferson's, and as she senses this new knowledge expanding within her mind, she feels as if she is experiencing a revelation on the magnitude of Eve's when she first bit into the apple. John tells her that Thomas Jefferson's book is far too difficult for her and offers to give her the very first book he ever read, but she is determined that by the time Thomas Jefferson has returned from New York, she will have mastered his book.

Back in her cabin, she finds that the title's first three letters (corresponding to Noah, Oak and Timothy) reveal their secrets to her instantly. She has more trouble with the fourth letter (corresponding to Eagle), because she thought the first word was “Note,” but now it seems to be “No-tee,” a word she has never heard of before. (It turns out that the full range of sounds designated by the “owls” did not last in her memory the length of time it took to walk from the joinery to her cabin.) The final letter (one she knows very well) solves the problem. The word is “Notice,” though she thinks it strange that it should be spelled as if it is pronounced “No-teese.” The next word is easy: “own”—though she is not sure how that word might connect to “notice,” a secret she hopes will be revealed by the following word. That word, however, utterly flummoxes her. She can think of no way the sounds for Timothy, Hat and Eagle might be combined into a word. The same is true for the next word: “Staa-tee”—what on earth is that? She thinks she understands the following word—“oaf”—but when she adds all the words together—“Notice own ??? Staa-tee oaf”—she sounds like a madwoman muttering on a Paris street. So now she experiences a new revelation on the magnitude of Eve's: that she is utterly stupid, that reading is much too hard for her and unimaginably boring.

She wants to tear Thomas Jefferson's book into tiny pieces, but instead she flings it into the hidey-hole under her bed, flings the primer after it and covers the hole with the trunk containing all of her fine clothing from France.

H
eaps of creamy clouds fill the sky from horizon to horizon, hazy sunbeams fanning diagonally between them. It is September, the season of goldenrod and fat cattle, of orange dust, balmy afternoons and faintly tarnished skies; a time when the orioles and bobolinks are gone and the cries of the jays and crows grow louder.

Thomas Jefferson has been in New York for six months, serving as secretary of state, and the first Sally Hemings knows of his return is when she sees Goliah carrying a pair of scuffed and mud-splattered riding boots down to the stable to be cleaned and polished.

A little later she is hanging her own wet gowns and shifts on the line in front of the kitchen and hears the clatters and clinks of china and silverware coming from a porch that looks down onto the yard.

She turns her back to the porch and sings as she works, softly, her voice hardly more than a vibration between palate and tongue. Once the last shift has been pegged to the line and is shedding droplets into the red dust, she puts her basket against her hip and turns toward the kitchen door.

There is a darkness overhead.

“Good afternoon, Sally,” Thomas Jefferson calls out heartily. He is resting his elbows on the porch railing, and their faces are not more than three yards apart.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Jefferson.” Her voice is flat, merely polite. She circles the basket with both arms and pulls it tighter against her pelvis.

He seems to be waiting.

“Welcome home,” she says.

“It's good to be home.” He smiles broadly, looking directly into her eyes.

She turns away for an instant, toward the sun-mottled eastern plain. “Beautiful day,” she says.

“Yes! Very beautiful.”

He is still looking into her eyes, but his smile is more vulnerable.

“Well . . .” She lifts her empty basket, as if to signify some urgent duty, then turns her back and enters the kitchen.

A brown darkness presses on her eyes once she is out of the daylight,
and she waits just inside the door as the obscurity slowly sorts itself into the fireplace, the wall and the rose glints on the copper pots.

Her entire body is gripped by something between trembling and alertness, as if she has just been slapped or has heard some terrible news. Yet she feels as if she has acquitted herself well.

Thomas Jefferson got nothing out of her.

Not one thing.

T
he following morning she is seated beside Maria in the back of a carriage. Jupiter is driving. Maria has just turned twelve and has grown three inches over the last year. Sally Hemings has been stitching lace frills to the ends of the girl's sleeves and skirts, but now the buttons on the backs of her gowns can no longer be fastened, and she can only keep decent through the use of brooches and shawls. She is on her way to see Mrs. Mickel, the mantua maker in Charlottesville, to have a new gown made and her old ones let out. She wants Sally Hemings to help her choose the best materials and design.

The carriage is not moving.

Thomas Jefferson hailed them as they were departing from the great house, and now he is giving his daughter strict instructions not to order a gown in green or red. The former color, he says, will make her “Welsh complexion” seem pallid, while with the latter the slightest infusion of color in her cheeks will make her seem feverish.

In the presence of his daughter, Thomas Jefferson can do no more than glance intermittently at Sally Hemings, and so she is able to examine him at length in daylight, something she has not done for a very long time. There are bluish bags under his eyes, and the first puckering of an insipient dewlap beneath his chin. So much gray has filtered into his hair that there is a streak just over his left eye that seems more yellow than red. And during the rare moments when he listens to rather than lectures Maria, his long, thin lips form a straight line across his face that seems simultaneously pompous and weak.

How is it, Sally Hemings wonders, that she could ever have wanted to cover that deflated face with kisses? Or yearned to pull that lank and bandy body between her thighs? All of the cravings, worries and delicious aches that had once filled her every minute apart from him now seem a sort of insanity.

This is good
, she thinks.

When Thomas Jefferson gives her one last inquiring glance after
bidding his daughter good-bye, she tells herself,
I am free now. Finally free.

She looks him straight in the eyes, hoping he will intuit the words she is speaking inside her head:

Free.

I am free.

“A
h, Sally—come in!” Thomas Jefferson is seated at his desk, in that strange chair of his own devising in which she once spun until she became nauseated. (She has kept well away from it ever since.) As he watches her cross the room from the door, he sways slightly from side to side, his chair making mouse squeaks.

“Please sit down.” He gestures at an ordinary chair in front of his desk.

“I'm all right standing,” she says.

Thomas Jefferson makes a laughlike noise, but his expression is serious. “Well,” he says. He looks down at his hands. “Yes.” He stares into the middle distance for a long moment, as if he has forgotten what he means to say. At last he looks at Sally Hemings. “I'm wondering if we might have a frank discussion about Maria.”

He pauses, as if waiting for a confirmation.

Sally Hemings neither moves nor speaks. She blinks to disengage her gaze from his.

“I understand entirely that, as her maid, you must have certain . . . I don't know . . .
confidences
with her, young though she may be—things that you should feel under no obligation to mention. It is not right, after all, that a father know everything about his daughter's affairs.”

Thomas Jefferson attempts something like a smile, which Sally Hemings does not return.

“I do hope, however, that in our shared affection for Poll we might be able to help her in what I feel may be a difficult period for her.”

Again he looks to Sally Hemings for confirmation. She gives her head a slight nod and says, very softly, “Yes.”

“So you agree that she's not happy?”

“I didn't say that.”

He leans back in his chair, puts his hands together as if praying and rests his fingertips momentarily against his upper lip. Then he leans forward again.

“What do you think, Sally? I have no idea what to make of Maria. Sometimes I tell myself that I am ridiculously oversensitive, other times—”
He flings his hands, palms up, signifying helplessness. “
You're
with her every single day. Do you know if there is anything wrong?”

Sally Hemings shrugs.

“What?” he asks, his voice and brow expressing frustration. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing, just . . . you know: Sometimes people get sad.”

“So you agree that she is sad?”

“Sometimes.”

The fingertips of Thomas Jefferson's pressed-together hands are touching his lips again. He lowers them.

“Listen, Sally, let me tell you why I'm worried. The entire time I was in New York, Maria hardly wrote to me. And when she did, her letters were models of filial decorum, but they were so brief—none even a page long—and they contained not one single word expressing anything like true feeling. All I could gather from them was that she was trying to conceal from me how seriously remiss she was being in her studies. And since I've been home, I've found that the situation was even worse than I had intuited. I don't think that in six long months she's read more than two chapters in
Don Quixote
, and she is unable to utter a single grammatical sentence in Spanish. She even seems to be losing her French. But none of that really matters. The main thing is that I have yet to see a hint of joy, or even of childish enthusiasm, in her countenance. Her gaze is always on the floor, she hardly speaks above a whisper and she prefers the solitude of her room to all other occupations.”

Thomas Jefferson's entire expression is tremulous with worry—so much so that Sally Hemings wonders if he might shed a tear.

All at once the rigidity goes out of her body. She sinks into the chair in front of his desk—but not out of sympathy. She knows something—something she can never say, and yet that, at this moment, she wants desperately to reveal. The terrific intensity of her desire to speak is what has taken the strength out of her legs.

Thomas Jefferson looks at her, then smiles sadly. She senses that he is about to reach out and touch her arm, which is resting on the edge of the desk. She pulls the arm away.

“I'm sorry, Sally.” The worry has returned to his face. “I know that I am putting you in a difficult position. But I am concerned for other reasons as well.” He takes a deep breath, leans forward and speaks in a low, emphatic voice. “The truth is that there is a tendency toward melancholy
on both sides of our family. As you may know, Maria's dear mother was very delicate and sometimes so exhausted by sorrow that she could not rise from bed in the morning. I have often thought this susceptibility of hers contributed to her early death. And on my side . . . well, on my side there is an even more pronounced tendency. And I can hardly bear to think that poor little Polly may be laboring under a similar affliction.”

What Sally Hemings knows but cannot say is that during the weeks after Lucy's death Polly came to hate her father, partially for leaving her behind when he went to France but mainly because, when she needed him most, after little Lucy's death, he didn't care enough to come to her side. During the three years before Polly boarded the ship to London, she waited every day for a letter from him telling her that he was coming home. When at last she woke from her drugged sleep and found herself miles out at sea, her first coherent words were, “I don't want to go live with Papa. I
hate
him!” And she expressed exactly the same sentiment every day until Monsieur Petit escorted them down the gangplank and onto French soil. After that, Polly allowed herself to love her father again with an almost pathetic servility, but Sally Hemings knows that the hate has never left her heart and that she was, in fact, very sullen and unhappy throughout his stay in New York.

And this is what she wants to tell Thomas Jefferson—because he has no idea of it and because he has no idea how enraged she herself is this very moment, sitting across from him at his desk.

But she doesn't speak the words that have gathered on her tongue. Instead she says, “I don't know if you have to worry about that. Everybody gets sad from time to time. The world is a sad place—that's all. You get sad for a little bit, then you get happy. I've seen Maria happy plenty of times.”

“So you think”—Thomas Jefferson smiles wryly—“that I am just being a worried old fool?”

“Not exactly,” says Sally Hemings. “But maybe.”

Thomas Jefferson laughs out loud and flings himself back into his squeaking seat.

“You're not just saying that to make me feel better?” he says.

“No.” Her face grows pale, and when she speaks again, her voice is trembling. “But there is one thing I am going to say to you. You've got to stop thinking so much about yourself. And you've got to think a great deal more about how the things you do affect other people.”

Sally Hemings can no longer speak, because anger has choked off her voice. Her eyes are fixed and hard, her mouth a yellow seam.

Thomas Jefferson looks thoughtful but says nothing for a long time. Then he gives his head a barely detectable shake. His voice, when he speaks, is so low it is almost a moan.

“Oh, Sally.”

Sally Hemings stands up, then steps away from the desk. “I've got things I should be doing.”

“No, wait!” He leans across his desk, one hand extended.

She doesn't move. She doesn't speak. Her blue-gray eyes so filled with fury and yet so beautiful.

Thomas Jefferson's hand falls to the desktop, and he leans back again.

“I'm sorry, Sally.” He covers his nose and mouth with both hands, then lets them fall into his lap. “I'm so sorry. And if it is any comfort to you, I, too, have been suffering—”

“I'm not talking about that!” she says. “You made perfectly clear how wrong all of that was, and I agree with you. So that's over. You don't even have to think about that anymore.”

This last sentence is spoken as she turns toward the door, which she pulls open so rapidly it flies from her hand and bangs a chair against the wall. She walks straight out into the dark corridor and leaves the door swaying behind her.