Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (45 page)

I
t is September 1, 1799. Sally Hemings is twenty-seven years old, and the northern wing of Monticello is in ruins. The roof lies in heaps among the weeds a small distance from the foundation. The walls are naked brick, penetrated at intervals by rectangular holes that lack doors, jambs, casements or windows. The floors inside the wall, on which once stood mahogany tables, silk-upholstered chairs, dressers and bookcases, are warped and grayed by the rain and in some places not safe to walk on. A substantial honeysuckle vine has commandeered the fireplace and rises up the whole of the chimney like a frozen cloud of dark green and yellow butterflies.

Thomas Jefferson had intended the demolition of this wing of his house to be completed in March and for construction of a new wing to have progressed all summer, but he has been too busy with his struggles in Philadelphia to direct his mechanics, and now that he is considering standing for president, he has even less time.

Sally Hemings, six months pregnant, is sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair under the shade of the very copper beech where some two decades earlier Martha Jefferson asked her if she wanted to be little Polly's companion. She is repairing the skirt of one of her own gowns, which she accidentally stepped on and ripped as she was climbing the stairs. Seventeen-month-old Beverly is asleep on a blanket beside her, twitching his legs and arms like a dreaming dog, occasionally uttering tiny cries and moans as delicate as pigeon coos.

The door to the southern side of the house opens, and Thomas Jefferson walks out onto the terrace to pace in his shirtsleeves and riding boots, with head lowered and one hand clutching the other behind his back. He passes briskly up and down the terrace eight, nine, ten times, then goes back into his study. A moment later he is out again, with a dented and frayed yard-wide straw hat on his head. He crosses the terrace, trots down the steps into the ankle-high grass of the lawn and strides off, in exactly the posture in which he has just been pacing. At the edge of the woods, he reverses direction and recrosses the lawn, his hat brim wafting lazily on either side of his head like the wings of a great blue heron.

All at once, halfway to the house, he makes an oblique left turn, walks directly toward one of the outdoor privies, mounts the two steps in front of it, opens the door, takes off his hat, backs through and closes the door behind him. He emerges a few moments later, puts his hat on again, straightens his clothing and, hopping down the steps, seems possessed by new vigor.

At just that moment, Beverly stirs on the blanket. His little face reddens, and he makes the first stuttery cracks of his usual post-nap hunger cry. In a moment Sally Hemings will have to bring him into the kitchen for some porridge, but for the moment she settles him at her breast. Just as he begins to suck, she looks up to see Thomas Jefferson, only three yards off, walking straight toward her.

“Beautiful day!” he says as he comes to a stop. The sun reflects off the yellowing lawn, turning his eyes a buttery brown. “Can't understand how anyone can keep inside on a day like this.”

And with that he lifts the crown of his hat, turns about-face and strides off toward the woods, left hand clutching his right wrist behind his back, his hat brim wafting.

T
wo weeks before Christmas 1799, Jimmy comes to see Sally Hemings. “Now that you can read,” he tells her, “I'm going to write you letters, and you have to write me letters back.”

Jimmy is free. The previous day their brother Peter completed his first week as Monticello's cook, and Thomas Jefferson, pronouncing himself entirely satisfied, signed Jimmy's manumission papers and gave him twenty-five dollars. Jimmy's plan is to move back to Paris, or maybe to Spain, but first he is going to Philadelphia, where he can earn enough money cooking in taverns to pay for his transatlantic passage. His plans to start a French-style restaurant with Adrien Petit are long forgotten—Petit having returned to Paris some five years previously, under a cloud of disgrace that neither Jimmy nor Thomas Jefferson would ever fully elucidate to Sally Hemings.

“Why do you have to leave now?” she asks.

“I just do. I feel like if I don't go today, I'll never leave. And then what's the point of being free?”

Sally Hemings is sitting in a rocking chair by her fireplace. Her belly is so large she can't see her knees, but the baby inside her isn't moving. This baby has never moved very much, not like Beverly or little Harriet. She thought the baby would be born in mid-November, and here it is a week into December and nothing is happening. Can babies suffocate, she wonders, if they stay inside too long?

She doesn't tell her brother what she is thinking.

“Don't worry,” he tells her. “I'll be back. I just have to see the world a bit.”

She doesn't tell him that she is not sure whose baby is inside her. She doesn't tell him that she thinks the baby has been killed as a punishment.

“Maybe I'll go to Africa,” he tells her. “I think I should see Africa, find out what it's really like. You hear all kinds of things about Africa—about lions and savages and kings with golden palaces. I wonder if any of that is true.”

She doesn't tell Jimmy anything she is thinking because she thinks
he should already know. Or if he doesn't know, he should ask. But Jimmy will never ask, because he is too lost inside his own head. His head is a deep, dark cave, and he doesn't have a light to find his way out. She doesn't tell him any of this either.

“I'll be back,” he says. “You can count on that! I'll always come back and visit you.”

“I hope so,” she says.

“Someone's got to watch out for you, right? Make sure you don't get into trouble!”

Sally Hemings makes a smilelike grimace, but says nothing.

Jimmy throws his arms around her. “I love you, Cider Jug.”

She speaks into the empty air behind his back. “I love you, too.”

T
he morning after Jimmy's departure, Sally Hemings's water breaks. She is all alone in her cabin with Beverly—her mother and Aggy having gone to fetch a sack of cornmeal from Mr. Richardson. “Mammy peeing,” says the little boy as soon as he sees the fluid leaking through the chair bottom and splattering onto the floor. “Why you peeing, Mammy?” Beverly is twenty months old.

“I'm not peeing,” she says. “That just means your baby brother is coming. I'm all full of water, and he's been swimming around inside me, but now he's coming out.”

Sally Hemings is terrified. Her water has broken before she has felt a single contraction. Also, the movements of Harriet and Beverly had only become more noticeable once they were no longer cushioned in a balloon of water, but she feels no movement from this baby at all.

She leaves the mess on the floor for her mother to clean and pulls her drenched gown and shift over her head so that she can dry herself and change. The first contraction hits her when she is completely undressed, and it is so powerful that all she can do is fall onto her bed and pull her cover over her.

This is where her mother and Aggy find her when they return twenty minutes later. Betty sends Aggy to the great house to tell Mr. Jefferson what is happening and to ask him to send for Dr. Cranley and Mrs. Coombes, the midwife. He does, and Mrs. Coombes comes within the hour, but Dr. Cranley doesn't arrive until midafternoon.

The contractions come hard and fast all afternoon and evening and into the night. When he heard that Sally Hemings was delivering, Thomas Jefferson requested that Aggy come get him the instant the baby is born, but, in fact, he spends hours pacing up and down in front of the cabin, periodically approaching the door to ask for reports. He makes his last visit at midnight and is back at the cabin at five in the morning, wild-haired and unshaven, clearly having slept in his clothes.

He is startled by Sally Hemings's transformation during the few hours since he last saw her. The flush has gone entirely from her cheeks,
and her forehead is glossy, not so much with sweat as with the slime of illness. But worst of all are her eyes, which squint at him unseeingly and make her seem more animal than human.

Betty Hemings is standing next to her daughter's bed, one hand clutched fiercely in the other, a scowl upon her brow but her eyes too frightened to even meet Thomas Jefferson's.

“Sally is strong,” he tells her. “We must have faith.”

“Lord's will be done,” says Betty, so softly he can only tell by reading her lips.

Dr. Cranley also left at midnight and hasn't returned. Thomas Jefferson sends Davy to him with a message saying to come immediately.

Once the cabin is sufficiently suffused with dawn light, Mrs. Coombes asks Thomas Jefferson to wait outside. As soon as he has gone, she draws back the covers, pushes apart Sally Hemings's legs and then sees at once what the problem is. The baby is breeched.

Mrs. Coombes and Betty help Sally Hemings turn over and get onto her knees and elbows. The heel of one of the baby's feet is just visible, pressed against its buttocks, and as Sally Hemings rocks back and forth with her contractions, more and more of the little foot becomes visible until finally, with one contraction, the whole foot appears, and with the next the entire leg pops out. Mrs. Coombes glances over at Betty Hemings and shakes her head once. Betty puts her folded hands to her lips and begins to pray. It takes three and a half hours for a tiny girl to slide into Mrs. Coombes's hands. Her skull is gourd-shaped and her face swollen and purple from the brutal labor, and her right leg (the second to come out) is broken or dislocated.

Dr. Cranley arrives just exactly as the baby makes her first, bleating cry. Determining that her leg is only dislocated, he pulls and twists, causing the baby to shriek. But afterward she instantly falls into a deep sleep, and he declares the procedure a success. He waits until the afterbirth has been completely expelled, then puts on his hat and coat and orders Sally Hemings to drink nettle tea at least twice daily for a week. Just before leaving the cabin, he looks down on the poor, battered infant and shakes his head. He neither meets Sally Hemings's eye nor says a word.

Thomas Jefferson has been sitting on the porch with his head in his hands ever since Mrs. Coombes asked him to leave the cabin. He stands as Dr. Cranley comes out the door, but he doesn't dare ask what has happened. The doctor gives him a long, disapproving look, fully understanding his relationship to both mother and child. “The mother will live,” he
says, “but the infant . . . she's in the hands of the Lord.” With that he turns and makes his way back to his carriage.

Thomas Jefferson straightens his clothing and hair, then knocks on the door. Betty Hemings, her face sallow and deflated, lets him in without a word. Glancing at the infant, whose skin has a decidedly brownish cast, she ushers Aggy and Mrs. Coombes outside, then exits herself, pulling the door shut behind her.

Sally Hemings is sleeping when Thomas Jefferson draws a chair up beside the bed, but as he sits down and leans forward, she opens her eyes. “Well, you did it, Sally Girl,” he says. “That was a hard one, but it's over.”

A feeble smile comes to her lips and fades almost instantly.

“How are you feeling?”

She meets his eye and shakes her head. Then she looks up at the ceiling, and he wonders if she is praying.

He is silent until his thoughts become more than he can endure.

“So you've got a fine little girl!” he exclaims.

Again Sally Hemings meets his eye but seems not to have comprehended what he said.

“Have you chosen a name?” he asks.

“Thenia,” she says, barely above a whisper.

He's surprised at first, but then he nods. He sold Thenia to James Monroe so that she and her children could live with their father. But a year hadn't passed before she contracted pneumonia while walking to church in a snowstorm. She died in a matter of days.

“That's a good name,” says Thomas Jefferson.

Sally Hemings's lips twitch into another feeble smile, but her eyes are closed.

He looks at the swaddled infant, her eyes so purple and swollen that she has yet to open them. He, too, has noticed the brownish cast to her skin but attaches no particular significance to it, knowing that mulattoes can be almost any color, even after multiple generations of mixing only with whites. The little girl is deeply asleep—though it is hard to imagine that her injuries are not still causing her terrible pain.

“I'll let you rest,” he tells Sally Hemings as he gets to his feet.

But when she opens her eyes and looks at him, he bends down again and kisses her.

“I'm so glad you're still with me,” he says. “I had such terrible thoughts during the night. Such grim, awful thoughts.”

Her eyes are closed again. Very possibly she did not hear a word he said. He pats her hand, stands and leaves.

At dawn the following morning, Betty notices that her new granddaughter is ashen and not breathing.

A little later, lying in bed beside her weeping daughter, she murmurs, “It's for the best. There was just too much pain in that poor baby's life.”

But Sally Hemings has other thoughts.

T
wo weeks after Thenia's tiny coffin is placed into the ground, Thomas Jefferson returns to Philadelphia, less to resume his duties as vice president than to garner support for his plan to challenge Adams in the upcoming presidential election. Madison, Monroe, Burr and half the editorialists of the Republican newspapers have been saying that Thomas Jefferson alone can stop Adams and Hamilton from reestablishing the monarchy. The night before his departure he protests to Sally Hemings yet again that he has no taste for government and would much rather remain at home, attending to his family, his books and the construction of his house.

She shakes her head ruefully and pats his cheek. “Do you actually believe that you might be happy here when you can have the love of a nation?”

“Do I seem so vain as that?” he says. “Is that what you truly believe?”

She answers only with a gently mocking smile.

No sooner has his carriage lumbered out the gate and turned toward the South Road than Sally Hemings has gone to his library and stands staring at his bookshelves, her arms folded across her chest. She has no idea how many books there are in this room. Hundreds? Thousands? She breathes deeply, her sinuses filling with a thin sweetness that reminds her equally of dried oats and mice.

She has decided that she will take advantage of Thomas Jefferson's long absences to read as many of these books as she can—until, perhaps, she will have read them all. She has absolutely no idea where to begin, however, so simply walks up to the nearest shelf and pulls out the first book that catches her eye. It is black and shiny, with red bands across its narrow spine, but the letters on its pages look like tiny knots, twists and curls of string—not a one of them intelligible. She snaps the book shut and picks up its neighbor, only to find that it is written in an entirely different and equally incomprehensible alphabet—this one dark and jagged, like an army of tiny, heavily armed soldiers standing row upon row upon row. It has never occurred to her that there might be more than one alphabet. Could there be a different alphabet for every language? Will she
have to learn two, three or ten new alphabets in order to read every book that Thomas Jefferson has read?

This thought exhausts her and makes her left temple throb. She thinks of giving up and going back to her cabin. Instead she decides to try the books on the shelves on the opposite wall. But these are all filled with numbers, diagrams and drawings of buildings—none of which make any sense to her, though the words at least are written in familiar letters.

Several books on the neighboring shelf are filled with pictures of flowers, and she spends a long time looking at these, even though the drawings make the flowers look crotchety and old. But she does not want to look at pictures, she wants to read—she wants, in fact, to learn to read every word in the English language, and possibly in French, too. She wants words to flow through her eyes and into her mind as easily as air flows into her lungs.

The next book is a treatise on the art of war, which she thinks might be interesting, though grim and sad. She puts it back. Then she notices a book lying across the tops of other books, perhaps because there is not enough room on the crowded shelf. She feels sorry for this book, which is squat and brown and reminds her of a brick. It is entitled
The History of America
and by a man named William Robertson, D.D., whose picture is on the facing page. He, too, appears crotchety and old, but his eyes look straight into hers.

She closes the book and presses it against her chest, where it seems to have the effect of speeding up her heart and making it just a little hard to breathe. Suddenly she is frightened. She puts the book back in its lonely spot atop all the others, then pulls it out again and hugs it to her chest a second time.

She lifts her head and closes her eyes as if she is praying. But she is not praying, only waiting for something to feel right. In the end maybe it does or maybe it doesn't. She can't say for sure. But she slips the book into the pocket of her apron anyway, hurries to the door and steps out into the dark hall.