Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (35 page)

“I
am worried you will get into the habit,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I'm not in the habit,” says Sally Hemings. “I've never once made a mistake.”

“But still, if you continue . . . If Martha were to hear you even once . . .”

“That is never going to happen. I am a completely different woman when we are around other people. But here . . . in these moments . . . everything is different. I am your Sally, and you are my Thomas. My Tom. I can't think of you any other way. . . . And this fellow here, he is our friend, Little Tom. . . . Oh, look! He was asleep, but now he seems to be waking. . . . Yes! Look! He's getting up and he's stretching. . . .”

Y
ou have to stop talking or you will make me hate you.

Every day I hear of Negroes who have gone north and made fine lives for themselves as ministers, blacksmiths, musicians.
“But that's exactly what I'm saying! You, yourself, have agreed that we should keep our children here until they have so thoroughly mastered a craft that they might have just exactly the successes you describe. Why should it be different for any other slave? Those able to make a satisfactory living as free men and women and who desire to be free can be freed posthaste. But as for those who have not acquired the necessary training or the habits of industry and foresight, I think it is far better to inculcate these virtues through encouragement and example than to abandon such people among a populace who mean them only ill, who will never pay them adequately for their labor and will clap them behind bars at the least excuse.”

So you are saying it is impossible.

S
ally Hemings sometimes believes she is many people—which is to say that she possesses within her brain and breast the capacity to lead many lives. Sometimes the other lives seem so familiar she feels as if she has actually lived them: She is walking along a street in Philadelphia, a city where she has never been but which is indistinguishable in her mind from Paris. It is a sunny spring afternoon, and her gown is a deep pine green, but made of satin, so it shimmers in the sun as she passes along sandy yellow paths beneath trees cut into the shapes of cones and boxes. Or, in another life, she is sitting at Thomas Jefferson's side, at a table of raised glasses, and she herself is raising a glass, and there are glints everywhere—on the lip and camber of each glass, on the silver candlesticks and tableware, in the eyes of the many guests, in Thomas Jefferson's eyes and her own. And sometimes the other lives could hardly be less familiar and yet feel terrifyingly easy for her to live: She is running through the great house in the darkness of night, and she is carrying an ax, which she swings at everything she passes: tables, chairs, wardrobes, the walls themselves. The ax penetrates and stops, and as she wrenches it free, a wild, guttural cry escapes her throat. Or she is herself wild: an animal dashing on all fours through the underbrush on the edge of an enormous wood. It is raining. She is hungry and cold. She hears human voices and runs from them ever faster, thorns ripping at her shoulders and ribs. And then there are all those lives she can hardly make sense of: She is a sea captain perhaps, at the helm of her ship, an infinity of air and water all around her, the wind blowing her hair off her forehead. Or maybe she is flying, but not like a bird, like a cannonball. She arcs through the clouds on a trajectory that never ends. Or she is in a loud room. There is the shriek of a hawk hurtling out of the sky. There is thunder. The floor heaves and trembles beneath her feet.

T
he lodge is filled with sunlight, birdsong and river noise. “Oh!” says Thomas Jefferson. His voice is husky, low, almost a grunt.

“What?” says Sally Hemings, who has only just this instant discovered she has been asleep.

“Oh, God!”

“What?” she says. Her eyes are open, but she wants to close them again.

“Come here.” He slips his arm under her pillow and across her back.

As he draws her near, she rolls onto her side, puts her arm across his chest and touches the silky skin along his ribs with her fingertips. She slides her thigh across his thigh.

He speaks into her hair. “I had a terrible dream.”

“Oh?” she murmurs, and looks up at his face, but he is looking out the window. She kisses his sleep-fragrant chest.

“I dreamed you and I were walking on a bridge over the Seine. Only the bridge was very high, hundreds of feet above the water. Something had happened on it. A battle, I think. There was broken stone everywhere, and parts of the bridge had fallen away. ‘Be careful,' I said, and you smiled at me sweetly, the way a mother smiles at the foolish fears of a child. I took hold of your hand so that you wouldn't fall. But then something happened, and you did fall. I was lying on my belly on the bridge, still holding your hand as you dangled in empty space. Only the bridge wasn't over the Seine anymore. It was over a rocky canyon, with a small stream at its bottom, hundreds of feet below. I remember thinking that everything would be all right because I was still holding your hand. But you were terrified. Your legs and your free arm were flailing as you tried to grasp on to something, but there was nothing there. ‘Don't worry,' I said. ‘I'm going to pull you up.' But then you were falling. I don't know how that happened. I just watched you falling away from me. You had such a look of terror on your face, and you were falling and falling. There was nothing I could do. I just watched you get smaller and smaller as you fell toward the rocks.”

. . . That lodge! How it haunts me. When we were there, we seemed in a different world, one not ruled by a cruel or incompetent God, a world in which we hadn't been created master and slave, in which slavery itself had never perverted the human heart or was, at worst, a faint rumor of a distant time and place; and in this better world, our tender murmurings, our delight at touching and being touched, our jokes, our hopes, our conversations and even our fights, our domestic tedium, our aging—all of these things were only themselves, never the means by which we betrayed our souls or those we loved; and we were simply one woman and one man, whose sorrows and joys together were only the product of their intermingled humanness, unprofaned by botched grace. . . .

T
wo tin plates, heaped with steaming carrots and parsnips, a bowl of salt, a bottle of wine and two glasses. The wavering orange glow of a burning pine knot. “What would you have me do, then?”
I don't see why you can't just free everyone and let those who want to leave take their chances. They are human beings, capable of making their own decisions. Why should you feel responsible for the decisions they make?
“Everything would be ruined.”
Why do you say that?
“Everything would be ruined.”
Stop saying that! And besides, I'm not finished.
“Finish, then.”
You have often told me that people work harder if they feel that it is their choice to work and that they have something to gain by their labor. So if you were to pay Negroes at the same rate you pay whites, you would have the best Negro workers flocking to you from miles around, and they would work far harder for you than your present laborers, not merely because they would be choosing to work and getting adequately paid for their efforts but because they would be grateful to you for doing what is right. That is the main thing. You would be doing what is right. There would be no need to wait for a general emancipation. Tomorrow, with the stroke of a pen, you could transform Monticello into a beacon of justice and good fellowship for the whole of Virginia.
“That is a beautiful dream. But should I tell you what would really happen? I have thought this through many times. Monticello, as we know it, would collapse in a minute. The curse of slavery is that it makes itself indispensable. There are no farms such as this north of Chesapeake Bay. We have our own world here, not just laborers in the ground and house servants but coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters, furniture makers. Were I to run Monticello as you propose, I could not employ the eighth part of these people, and I would lose, first of all, the craftsmen, who—as you know—are the very men best trained to make good lives for themselves in the event that it is practical and desirable for them to be free. And by losing them I would also be losing the ability to train others, so that they, too, might have valuable skills and a means of making a living in freedom.”
But they could be apprenticed to the white craftsmen.
“I would have to let the white craftsmen go, too. There simply wouldn't be enough money to pay them. Yet that is nothing. The most immediate
tragedy would befall the seventy laborers in the ground whom I would also have to let go, because I couldn't pay them either. Yes, some few of these might escape north or find a way of eking out a living in Virginia, but what proportion do you think would end up reenslaved, in prison or dead? Almost all of them, I would wager. So what would be the gain? A few effectively imprisoned on a northern-style farm here, a few more finding uncertain futures in the north and the rest condemned to fates far worse than they enjoy now. Is this what you want? Is this what you think would be ‘right'?”
So you are saying it is impossible.

. . . For a while I had a joke. Whenever he and I fell into a discussion about slavery or race, I would put it to an end by shouting, “Stop! You will make me hate you!” I would always smile as I made this remark; sometimes I would laugh, and he would laugh, too. I used to think that this was a clever way of keeping the peace—which it did, to an extent; Mr. Jefferson always heeded my implicit warning, and we would move on to more congenial topics. But it was nevertheless the case that I was, in fact, already hating him even as I smiled, and the hatred would take a while to go away—if it ever truly did.

And so the hatred silenced me.

Because I thought my anger would destroy my life. . . .

I
t is September 14, 1792, and Sally Hemings is nineteen years old. She is standing beside the counter of the dry-goods shop owned by her sister Mary and Colonel Thomas Bell. Mary worked for Colonel Bell while the Jeffersons were in Paris and had two children with him. Five months ago, at her request, Thomas Jefferson sold her and the children to Bell, who freed them and married Mary. Now she looks after the shop while Bell spends most of his day managing the plantation he owns east of town. Her two oldest children, Joey and Betsy, remain at Monticello.

Sally Hemings has come to the shop to buy ribbon for a nightgown she is making for Martha's two-day-old first child. She is trying to choose between two ribbons—a satiny rose pink and a coarser but more beautiful pale lavender—when she hears her name called and looks over to see Mary, standing in the doorway between the shop and her house, a troubled expression on her face. Mary gestures for her sister to come and begins to back away from the door. Sally Hemings holds up the lavender ribbon and tells the girl who has been helping her, “I'll take a yard of this.” No sooner has she spoken than she decides the pink would have been better, but it is too late.

“Tilly,” Mary calls to the girl. “Wrap that up for Miss Hemings, would you. And make sure you cut it straight.”

The girl lowers her head in a semi-curtsy. “Yes, ma'am.”

Sally Hemings follows her sister out the door, across a breezeway and into a laundry room. Mary closes the door behind them.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “I heard you was out there, and I couldn't wait.”

“What's the matter?”

“Oh, Sally! I just don't know what I'm going to do!”

Mary collapses onto a bench beside a long table, and Sally Hemings sits opposite her. “What?” she says, reaching across the table to take her sister's hands.

Mary is forty, with twists of silver beginning to infiltrate her dark brown hair. Her plump cheeks and habitually merry gaze have always made her seem more girl than woman but now her cheeks are drawn, her golden
brown skin has gone slack and crinkly and in her gaze there is the desperate intensity of someone who feels all alone in the world.

“It's about Joey and Betsy,” she says. She looks down at the table and lets go of Sally Hemings's hands. After a moment she speaks. “You know how grateful I am to Mr. Jefferson. You know how kind I think he is, on account of what he done.”

“He's always liked you,” says Sally Hemings.

Mary casts her sister a quick, timid glance. “I was very grateful when—you know: I told him what Colonel Bell and I wanted, and he just said yes straight out, and then he said that Bobby and Sally could come with me. I didn't even have to say a word. ‘Of course you're taking your little ones.' That's just how he said it. And I said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. I am so grateful!' And I really was grateful.” She sighs heavily. “I never been anything but grateful to Mr. Jefferson. But the thing is, I think I made a big mistake.”

Sally Hemings takes hold of one of Mary's hands again and gives it a squeeze. “I'm sure you didn't.”

“No, I did. I really did. Because I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Well, I also wanted Joey and Betsy to come with me. But when he said that about Bobby and Sally, without my even having to ask, I thought he'd be angry if I asked for Joey and Betsy too.”

“Why would he be angry?” Sally Hemings lets go of her sister's hand and folds her own hands in her lap.

“Well, I don't know. I reckon I just thought I might seem greedy.” Mary covers her face with both hands. When she lowers them, her eyes are red and she has to wipe away a gloss of tears. “Did he tell you about yesterday?”

“No.”

“That's what I'm talking about, really. Ever since I left, I been trying to work up the courage to talk to Mr. Jefferson, and I just couldn't do it. But finally, yesterday, I got so I couldn't stand living without Joey and Betsy no more, so I walked up to Monticello first thing in the morning. And when I got there, Mr. Jefferson was coming out of the stable on Caractacus. So I just walked right up to him before I lost my courage.”

Mary's lips part, but she doesn't speak. The loneliness in her expression gives way to something more fierce.

“What happened?” says Sally Hemings.

“Well, he
did
get angry. He told me he couldn't do nothing less I talked to Colonel Bell first. And I told him Colonel Bell already told me he loved my children and he wanted me to have them with me.”

Sally Hemings sits back with a furrowed brow.

“What?” says Mary.

“Did Colonel Bell really say that?”

“Of course he did! He said, ‘I love you, and I love your children, and I want you to have what makes you happy.' That's exactly what he said.”

Sally Hemings makes a dubious grunt.

“What?”

“Well, Mr. Jefferson told me that Colonel Bell said that since Joey was Mr. Fossett's son, and Betsy was Mr. Fairchild's, he didn't see why he should have to bear the expense of raising them.”

“He wouldn't ever say something like that!”

“Are you sure?” asks Sally Hemings.

“Of course! He never said that. I know that for a fact.”

“Not even to Mr. Jefferson?”

Mary is silent a long time. When tears begin to stream down her face again, she doesn't bother to wipe them away. “I don't care about that!” she says. “I just can't stand not having Joey and Betsy here with me. I think about them all the time. I just can't stand it. I tried. Been five months, and it only gets worse and worse. Sometimes it's so bad I want to kill myself.”