Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (33 page)

C
lose to a year has passed. Clouds tower in the burnished sunlight of an unnaturally warm September afternoon. First deep stillness, then a wind gathers in the trees and rushes across the lawn and into the house. Doors slam. Someone inside cries out “Oh!” The treetops hiss and thrash. The clouds darken. The sound of shattering glass.

Sally Hemings, coming up from the orchard with a basket of peaches for Ursula, thinks that before going to the kitchen she should check Thomas Jefferson's chambers to make sure none of his windows are open and that none of his precious objects have been damaged.

She is just about to enter his doorway when she hears a voice in the front hall. Unable to believe she has heard right, she takes a few steps down the hall and sees a tall, slim man in a sweat-soaked yellow riding jacket. It is Thomas Jefferson, who was not expected for another two weeks.

His back is to her, and he is talking to Monsieur Petit, whom she hasn't seen since Paris. Jimmy and Bobby must also be home, though she can't see them or hear their voices.

As she hesitates in the hallway, torn between the desire to flee and another desire she can't define (she tells herself it's to see Monsieur Petit, whom she didn't even know was coming to this country), Thomas Jefferson turns suddenly and looks right at her. “Sally!” he exclaims. His face is radiant. His hair is windswept from the road. He looks as if he is about to laugh. Just then there is a cool rushing of air through the house, and the front door slams with a bang. “It seems we're in for a big storm!” says Thomas Jefferson, still looking straight at Sally Hemings. And then he does laugh.

I
t is night, and Sally Hemings, candle in hand, is descending the narrow staircase from the second floor, where she has just put away Maria's clothing of the day, laid out her gown, shift, stays and petticoats for the morning and bade the girl herself sweet dreams.

Her candle just barely illuminates the white balusters and a moving sphere of bare wall, so she makes her way downstairs more by memory than sight. Just as her foot touches the floor at the bottom of the stairs, the door to her left cracks and opens. Another candle hovers in the darkness, accompanied by a crimped thumb and the knuckles of a forefinger, and then she sees Thomas Jefferson's temple, cheek and the rightmost plane of his nose. “Oh!” he exclaims under his breath, and starts to push the door closed. Then he pulls it open again.

“Sorry, Sally! I didn't know anyone was there.”

She has stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Good night, Mr. Jefferson.”

He, too, has stopped, with one arm, shoulder and leg through the doorway. “Yes,” he says. “You, too.” And then he smiles. “Sweet dreams, Sally.”

T
his morning is as steamy and hot as every morning of the last week, but the air is restless, and so it feels cooler—as if something like ordinary life might be lived again.

Sally Hemings steps out of her door, barefoot, in nothing but her shift and a shawl, on her way to fetch some water from the rain barrel. Thomas Jefferson, just passing by on his favorite horse, Eagle, calls out, “Morning, Sally.” Giving her a smile and a curt wave, he continues down Mulberry Row, toward the western woods and the riding trail that winds north, then down along the Rivanna and back along the East Road.

Later that morning, Maria's beloved Aunt Eppes and her son Jack arrive for a visit of several days. After lunch, on Thomas Jefferson's recommendation, they, too, go for a ride, and Sally Hemings decides to make the best of her free time by taking a walk down to the lake. She has only just crossed the field and begun to descend the steep, wooded path when she hears footsteps coming up rapidly behind her.

She turns and sees Thomas Jefferson striding down the path. His cheeks are flushed, his eyes bright, his step loping and strong.

“Good afternoon, Mademoiselle Sally,” he says cheerfully, doffing his hat. “A beautiful day for a walk.”

“Yes,” she says, then blushes and is silent, as he falls into step beside her.

“I have spent my morning,” he says, “devising ways to keep that petty Caesar, Hamilton, from handing our government over to bankers and speculators.”

“Why would he want to do that?” she asks.

“I don't want to talk about it!” He smiles at her as if he is about to break into laughter—but in the next instant he is scowling and his voice is loud. “That man wants Congress to serve no one but his wealthy friends! He intends to establish a national bank, and I am certain that his entire purpose is to make beggars and sycophants out of the people's representatives. He doesn't care a fig for democracy, and won't be satisfied until a king has been crowned in this country!” Thomas Jefferson falls silent a moment, then shakes his head and smiles. “I'm sorry. This morning I
wrote a dozen letters to President Washington warning him about Hamilton, but consigned every one of them to the fire, and now I feel as if I am on the verge of another of my periodical headaches. I was, in fact, feeling no small degree of despair on that account when I saw you walking past and then I thought, ‘That's exactly what I should be doing!'”

“Oh.” Sally Hemings doesn't look at him. Her step quickens without her realizing it. But he keeps pace.

After a moment he says, “I think there is no better way to relax the brain than walking. The trick is to empty the mind and to give oneself over entirely to the landscape and to the physical exercise of the body. In my observation, people who walk at least two hours a day lead happier and longer lives.”

Sally Hemings is silent awhile. Then she says, “Is it working?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Your headache. Has it gone away?”

“Oh.” He crumples his lips and shakes his head. “No. Not really. Well, maybe a little. But at least it's not getting worse.”

They both fall quiet, and after a while some of the vitality seems to drain from his step. Sally Hemings wonders how long he plans to walk beside her and if she shouldn't make an excuse to go back to the house.

Finally she says, “I didn't know Monsieur Petit was coming.”

“Oh, yes. He's going to be my chief of staff.”

“When did he arrive?”

Thomas Jefferson is silent a moment, then says, “A while ago.” After another moment he adds, “July, I mean. He arrived July nineteenth.”

The corners of his mouth turn down, and his brow rumples with consternation.

Sally Hemings doesn't know what to say, and neither, apparently, does he.

They walk along without talking, and then he stops abruptly, and she does, too. He is smiling, but it is the sort of smile that is used to cover uneasiness. He seems about to reach for her hand but ends up clasping his own.

“I am afraid,” he says, “that you are going to think me the most incoherent of men.” His smile has shifted, almost to a boyish earnestness. “But I have a confession to make. I suspect you already know what I am going to say.”

Sally Hemings's own head has begun to ache. A heat floods into her cheeks. “Then maybe there is no need for you to say it.”

“I want to,” he says. “I have to.” He looks into her eyes. “It's just that over these many months I have been away, I thought of you constantly. I tried to stop myself, but there was nothing I could do.”

Sally Hemings wants to be angry, but all she feels is a tightness in her head. She cannot look at him. Her eyes are on the muddy toes of his boots. “Mr. Jefferson,” she says, “I don't think it is wise to talk like this.”

“No,” he sighs. “Not wise at all.”

Now some of her desired anger begins to rise within her. “Maybe you better think about all the trouble this has caused us.”

“I have been thinking,” he says.

“Maybe you better think some more.”

He takes her hand.

“Mr. Jefferson, please.” A rod of pain runs from one temple to the other. Her whole body is filled with an urgent feeling that is half a desire to run and half a desire that makes her body go hard and immobile.

“Oh, Sally.” He lifts her hand to his lips and kisses the knuckles of her middle and ring fingers.

The gentle suction and the warmth of his mouth are more than she can bear.

“I'm sorry!” she says. “I have to go!”

She turns and hurries in long strides back up the path.

He doesn't follow.

All the way home, she repeats to herself,
I have to be free. I have to be free. I have to be free.

D
uring the afternoon bulbous heaps of cloud loom out of the flatlands to the east and drift toward, then over, the mountaintop, going from cream to gray to blue-gray and finally to green. The air beneath the clouds seems to tremble, and then the leaves in the trees hiss and turn up their pale undersides. Winds come from all directions at once. They bludgeon and seethe. There is a massive thunderclap, and then the rain falls with such ferocity that it snaps in spikes off the rooftops, roads and puddles. Freshets race from gutter pipes. Small ponds rise in lawn dips, and branchlike bolts of pink and purple lightning cross the whole sky—so many at once, sometimes, that they are like enormous nets of stutter-blasting light.

And then, after hardly more than an hour, the air goes dead still and oven hot. Roof edges and branch tips drip. The returned sun cooks clouds of steam, first off the roads and then out in the fields. It is hard to breathe. People begin to sweat inside their rain-moist clothes. Buttons are undone, waistcoats and underskirts dispensed with. By suppertime the dogs are lying in the shadows of the houses with their tongues hanging out.

Then it is night, and Sally Hemings is waiting for sleep in the still, steamy heat. She kicks off her blanket, then draws her shift above her knees, then to the tops of her thighs, then to midbelly. Finally it is bunched in a hot lump under her armpits, and she wrestles herself out of it and flings it to the floor. She lies back down but experiences no relief.

She is thinking about freedom.

She is thinking about the freedom she felt when she and Thomas Jefferson were naked together in bed. She is thinking about how that was not really freedom and yet how for instants and even for whole nights it very definitely was.

She wonders if it might be possible to be with him like that again—or rather, if she might be able to give him the whole of her body but absolutely nothing of her soul.

S
ally Hemings says, “I have loved this man I should never have loved. My love was like a disease from which I thought I would never recover. And yet when this disease ravaged my soul most fiercely, I was the happiest I have ever been. I knew joy.”

. . . I don't think I have ever had a simple thought or feeling about Mr. Jefferson, one that didn't contain its opposite or which—more to the point—wasn't radically intensified by having to do constant battle with its contrary. The day before yesterday, when I had almost nothing to do but wait and worry, I decided to take advantage of a thaw by going for a long walk. The roads were slick with mud, but the wooded paths were rich with that springlike musk of old leaves. The only birdsong to keep me company was the abrasive squawking of jays and crows, but even so I felt the anguish passing out of my muscles and mind, and I moved with an easy contentment that I have not known for months. The sun was a yellow-white flare and the sky forget-me-not blue. It wasn't long before I was able to loosen my scarf and open my cloak.

I hadn't set out with any destination in mind, but once I found myself down by the Rivanna, I knew that I was headed for the lodge. It has been four years since the last time Tom and I visited that small house, and my heart rose into my throat as I rounded the bend and saw it atop a rise just beside the river. As I drew closer, I could see that the porch railing had gone askew, and that the white clapboards had grayed from rain and dust, and that a mist of green moss was spreading up the walls. I expected to find that the house had been broken into again and reduced to a shambles by vandals and by time, but the door was solid, the key was still in the tiny cabinet Mr. Jefferson had built for it underneath the porch and the lock turned easily.

Somehow the fact that nothing whatsoever had changed inside the lodge since we last locked the door behind us only made the passage of time more clear. The bed was neatly made, the kettle was on the hob, a single spoon lay on the mantel, where it had been left by Mr. Jefferson or by me after it had been used to scrape the last of some soup off the bottom of a bowl or stir some sugar into a cup of coffee. But the spoon had gone dark with tarnish, and a layer of whitish dust lay over every item in the room, including the counterpane.

There was a book beside the bed: Diderot's
Lettre sur les aveugles
,
of which
Mr. Jefferson had had a very high opinion. I was the one to bring it to the lodge, however, having foolishly concluded that such a slender volume would be perfect for teaching myself to read French. I had probably left it behind out of sheer frustration and had so forgotten its existence that I was startled to discover it on the night table. As soon as I saw it, I snatched it up, clutched it to my breast and sank down upon the bed, suddenly overwhelmed by memories of all the afternoons and nights that Mr. Jefferson and I had spent in this small house.

I sat rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed, tears streaming down my face, crying, “No. No. No. No.” For what did this book represent but my own selfishness? Even then, the day before the brutality of this world was revealed to me in such stark relief, I understood that whatever I might have gained from reading and my conversations with Mr. Jefferson had served only for my own enjoyment, and to advance my own opinion of myself, and, most repellant of all, to legitimize my fantasies that I was an exception, that I could somehow live in this world without being either colored or white. I had done nothing to help anyone else, nothing to correct the manifold injustices on which my own privilege depended. I could hardly have been more selfish.

I placed the book back on the clear rectangle amid the dust haze covering the top of the night table. I wiped away my self-indulgent tears and straightened the bodice of my gown. As I leaned forward to get to my feet, I noticed a gleam. Bending over, I found an old shoe buckle resting against one of the night table's legs. I picked it up and polished it with my sleeve. It had to have been Mr. Jefferson's, though I had no memory of his ever having ridden home with a loose shoe. I held the buckle in my hand as I left the lodge and locked the door. I didn't know what I was going to do. It occurred to me that by rights I ought to just throw the buckle into the river. But I didn't. I clutched it tightly in my fist as I walked away from the little house. Sometime later I slipped it into my pocket. It is still there. . . .