Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (41 page)

B
efore leaving Sally Hemings's cabin, Thomas Jefferson promises that he will stay until their baby is born, but the very next day a courier arrives with a letter from Philadelphia, and the following morning he is gone. Their baby, or
her
baby—a boy—is born two days later, after a mere six hours of labor. Harriet was named after Tom Randolph's sister, who lived for a while at Monticello and whom Thomas Jefferson found endearingly earnest and full of life. Before he leaves, he asks Sally Hemings if she would name their child Peter or Jane, after his parents, although Jane is also the name of his older sister, to whom he had been very close before her death. Sally Hemings is tempted by Peter, which, after all, is her own brother's name, but in the end, as the bloody little boy lies across her deflated belly and takes his first tugs from her breast, she decides to call him Beverly.

Bev-er-ly.

When she was a little girl, she thought that was the most beautiful name in the world. Whenever she thought of it, she saw honeybees on a sunny day, sipping from yellow flowers.

Bev-er-ly.

She loves the way the first syllable buzzes on her lips and how the second comes from deep in her throat and how the last can only be said with a smile.

It is a happy name. Whenever people say it, they will be happy, which means that her little boy will be surrounded by happiness all his life.

T
homas Jefferson's dreams are a catalog of failure and shame, histories of a world that contains no joy and can only be endured, an endless twilight of sorrow. In this dream he is sitting on the porch of the cottage at Poplar Forest looking out over the meadow. The trees are the color of shadows, and they have deeper shadows beneath them. In the obscurity under one tree, he sees a smear of darkness that might just be a human figure. No, he concludes again and again, it can't be. But again and again he changes his mind.

Finally he descends from the porch and walks out into the high grass. It is raining, and the longer he walks, the farther away the shadow within the shadow becomes. But then he is underneath the tree, and the shadow within the shadow is Sally Hemings. She is dressed in her most beautiful gown—the yellow one he bought her for Princess Lubomirsky's ball—but she is sitting in mud, which seeps up through the gown and its underskirts the way blood seeps through layers of gauze.

“Why are you sitting here?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Because I was only a ghost to you,” says Sally Hemings. “And now I am a ghost in reality, and you are the one who has killed me.”

“How can you be dead if you are speaking to me?”

“I am dead, I am dead,” she says. “And I wish I had never lived.”

All at once Thomas Jefferson is so overwhelmed by sorrow that he wishes he, too, had died.

“I didn't know,” he says. “I wish I had known.”

“H
e's beautiful,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Such a perfect little boy. And look: You see that little dent? Right there, between his nostrils? He got that from you. I noticed you had that the first time I saw you.”

“Well, Mrs. Martha has it.”

“Yes, she does. And her mother had it, too, but he got it from you!” Thomas Jefferson lifts the three-month-old in his arms and smells the top of his fluffy head. “He's a beautiful little boy, and he looks exactly like you!”

Sally Hemings smiles. “Would you like something to drink? Cider? I could make some coffee.”

“No, thank you. I'm having breakfast with Martha in a few minutes. I just wanted to see my little boy.” Thomas Jefferson glances at Sally Hemings, who is smiling so tenderly at their son, her gray eyes lit with such happy relish. It has been a long time since Thomas Jefferson has seen her so at ease. And between her pregnancy and his being away for most of the year, he had forgotten how very young she is, how her skin seems so moist and resilient, like a mushroom just sprung from loam.

He straddles the tiny boy across his knee, which he bounces up and down, as he chants, “Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!” The little boy squeaks, makes a huge toothless grin and sticks his wrist into his mouth. “Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!”

“He's my first son,” Thomas Jefferson tells Sally Hemings. “Mrs. Jefferson had a boy, but he was not meant for this world.”

He turns back to the little boy. “Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!”

Then he says, “My father had a friend named William Beverly.” He smiles at Sally Hemings, but uneasily. “How would you feel about adding William to his name?”

Before Thomas Jefferson's return, Sally Hemings swore to herself that she would fight to the death over the name Beverly, but right now that doesn't seem to matter—and not only because she knows that the name she chose has fused so firmly with her baby's identity that no one will ever call him anything else.

“All right.” Her smile is generous. “Whatever you wish.”

“Excellent! William Beverly it is.” Then Thomas Jefferson bounces the little boy to a syncopated rhythm, like the trot of a horse with an injured leg. “William Beverly! William Beverly! William Beverly!” More squeaking and a happy grin. But when Thomas Jefferson reverts to a more emphatic and bouncy version of his original chant, “Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!” the little boy bursts into a happy chortle.

“He laughed!” cries Sally Hemings.

Thomas Jefferson looks at her.

“That's his first laugh!” She claps her hands.

“Really?”

She answers with her own delighted laugh.

“How wonderful!” says Thomas Jefferson.

More bouncing, more chanting, and the tiny boy keeps laughing and laughing, as if he has always laughed and there is nothing he loves to do more.

“Beverly, Beverly, Beverly! Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!” Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings chant together.

The guard: vertical. The prisoner: horizontal, on a yellowed foam-rubber mattress. The guard: smoking. The prisoner: breathing (just barely), pale and grease-glossed, eyes closed (twitching). The guard: exhales a blue cloud, turns about-face, exits and locks the cell, sits. The prisoner: motionless. The guard speaks.

—You feeling better now?

— . . .

—I mean, of course you are! So make the most of it. Right? You got eight hours, then we start all over again.

The prisoner's eyes flutter, open, shut again. The guard exhales blue smoke through her nostrils. The guard speaks.

—Actually, I was thinking about you in there. Mostly it's pretty boring, so I have time to think. In between, I mean. And I was thinking about how they say that we only live in the present. One instant at a time. And I was thinking about how that was literally true for you. Every one of those instants seemed like it would never end, and maybe like you never lived any other life. Right? And I was thinking about how tomorrow, when you're back, these next eight hours—the hours in between—are going to seem like a glance out the window, like nothing.

—Nnynnyaygnahnn . . .

—Absolutely! And that's the problem. That's why you're in here. Or, more to the point, that's why you think you don't belong here.

The guard's lips close around her cigarette. It crackles. She sighs two long blue plumes through her nose. The guard speaks.

—The problem is that every instant of life is like an eternity. The world is just so
present
! There's so much of it, pouring into us through every sense, from every direction. Even from inside our own bodies. It's overwhelming. I mean, we're used to it and all. But if you actually think about it, it's overwhelming. And that's why we always feel like,
This is it. I'm here. This is real. Me. Who I am. Living in a world that really is
. Right? And you keep on feeling like that. Instant after instant after instant. You know what I mean?

— . . .

—That's just natural, isn't it? But the truth is, it's all bullshit.

The guard's lips close around the cigarette. Her cheeks are sucked against her teeth. Hiss. Sigh. Her head is enveloped in blue. She speaks.

—Ever notice how in the movies, when the bad guy is playing with his kid, he's never just playing with his kid? It's always ironic. Or he's being sadistic, and the kid's just too stupid to know. Or maybe there's this one second where the kid gets this tiny confused look on his face. But then he's laughing again, even when his dad bounces the rubber ball right off the top of his head. And they've got that scary music playing. You know, that music they always play in scary movies. Only in this scene, it's very quiet.

Crackle. Sigh. Smoke. The guard speaks.

—And that's how we know we're not evil. You follow me? I mean, when
we
play with our kid, we're
really
playing with our kid. And when we're taking a shit or doing the dishes, same deal. We go up in the mountains and we're like, “Wow! This is so beautiful! The air is so fresh! I feel so alive!” There's no scary music playing. There's nothing ironic. It just is what it is. You know,
innocent
. And that's how we know we're not evil. Because we have these innocent moments and the evil guy in the movie doesn't. His life is monolithic. All-evil-all-the-time.

Crackle. Sigh. Smoke. The guard studies the end of her cigarette: down to the filter. She drops it on the floor. Steps on it. The guard speaks.

—But, of course, that's not how it is at all. A real evil guy's life is practically nothing but innocent moments, just like anyone's. When he's taking a shit, he's just taking a shit. He's up in the mountains, and he can hardly believe the world could be so beautiful. When he's playing with his kid, he thinks his kid is the cutest kid who ever walked the planet. And then he goes off and . . . I don't know, pilots a drone over some country ten thousand miles away and blows the shit out of a wedding. Or he talks some old lady out of her life savings. Or he discovers that his wife is cheating on him, and he goes psycho for an hour. But even so, his life is made up almost entirely of ordinary moments: cutting his toenails, having drinks with his buddies out on the patio, ordering a bale of peat moss at the garden store.

The guard knocks another cigarette out of her pack. Click. Hiss. Odor of lighter fluid. Crackle. Sigh. The guard speaks.

—You know how that is, right? You see where I'm headed with this? I mean, there you are, screwing your sixteen-year-old girlfriend, and you're thinking, “Oh, my God! I just love this girl so much! She's the most
wonderful thing that ever happened to me!” And then you're saying, “All men are created equal,” and you're calling slavery an “abominable crime,” and you're wholly sincere. You mean that one hundred percent. Every word. And you're thinking, “I am the kind of person who thinks such things and who says them. That's who I really am.” And you are. That's true. But then you discover that you're short of cash, so instead of selling a few acres of land, or some hogs, or just doing without a shipment or two of French wine, you sell a bunch of human beings. You tear them away from their homes, everyone they know, and you consign them to a future that could well include torture and rape, murder even—the sort of things you would never perpetrate yourself. Right? Because that's not who you are. You don't do that sort of thing. And after that you go back to work designing this gigantic clock, or you're cutting open a kernel of wheat, thinking, “How wonderfully complex! How extraordinary that God should give us this miraculous vegetable.”

— . . .

—The problem is, there's no scary music in life. And we don't actually live irony. The irony gets added later. And nobody out there is monolithic, all-evil-(or whatever)-all-the-time. And since every instant that comes along overwhelms us with its presentness and its complexity, and since we're always feeling, “This is really me being real in the real world; this is who I am,” and since almost every one of those instants we live through being who we really are is an innocent instant, all of that added together makes it easy for us to lose track of the fact that we also live through not-so-innocent instants, when the me-I-really-am is a not-so-innocent me—though we almost always lie to ourselves about that fact. And so it is easy for us to pretend to ourselves that we are nothing like the evil guy in the movie. And we can allow those instants in which we are not-so-innocent to be overwhelmed by all the completely innocent ones, until they become insignificant. Or they almost don't exist.

— . . .

The guard exhales blue smoke through her nostrils. The guard speaks.

—You know where I'm going with this, right?

— . . .

—That's why no one ever thinks they belong here.

— . . .

—Except the murderers, sometimes.

— . . .

S
ally Hemings's invention grows and grows, until it stretches to the horizon in all directions. Tendrils ascend from its glittering fields, smokelike, vinelike, at once vegetal and mathematical in their proliferation; intertwining, interlocking, growing ever higher, ever denser, ever more rectangular and gray. And as they rise, the sky contracts, now to a rhomboid of blue, rose and gold, now to a wedge, now to a crevice and now a glimmering crack.

And the people!

There are so many people!

As Sally Hemings's invention grows ever more vast, ever more unruly, dirty and loud, more and more people crowd its streets; they filter out of alleyways and doors; they stream down boulevards, assemble on plazas and in parks; they arrive in roaring steel boxes and boil up stairways out of the earth. Teeming. Roiling. Millions upon millions. Sand-colored, peat-colored, the color of Virginia's iron-rich dust; moseying, marching, strolling, striding; so intent, so lost in life's prolixity, so redolent of human odor—of perfume and sweat, of tooth rot, worry and
sex.