Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (5 page)

I
n an 1806 letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson writes that when he was fourteen and his father died, “the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on my self entirely, without a relative or friend qualified to advise or guide me.” What is notable about this statement is that at his father's death Thomas Jefferson's mother was still very much alive, and he was living with her, although he would very shortly board at the Reverend Maury's school in Williamsburg. The fact that she is not listed as a relative “qualified to advise or guide him” is not, however, surprising, because among his nearly twenty thousand surviving letters there is only one reference to his mother, in a note to her brother informing him of her death: “This happened on the last day of March,” Thomas Jefferson writes, “after an illness of not more than an hour. We suppose it to have been apoplectic.” There is also a single sentence in his account book, dated March 31, 1776: “My mother died at eight o'clock this morning, in the 57th year of age.”

The
m
in “morning” in this entry is malformed as a result of a violent drilling sensation in his temple. By the time Thomas Jefferson has finished the sentence, he is so overcome by pain that he thinks he might vomit. As he pushes away from his desk and staggers to his bed, radiant white, purple and pink globes begin to hover on the right side of the room, bobbing slightly, like shy, silent ghosts. And, indeed, as he feels his right hand and leg going numb, his first thought is that the ghost of his mother has come to take her revenge by afflicting him with the very illness that killed her.

This is the first of what he will come to call his “periodical head-aches,” which will strike him every few years during the spring (almost always in March) until the end of his presidency—with the most notable perhaps being the one that confined him to his chambers for thirteen days after Martha's death.

This particular bout, however, is the most intensely painful. Every day for a week, from the moment the sun glimmers orange amid the trees over the eastern mountains until it settles beneath layers of gold,
rose and lavender in the west, he has to lie in his bed with a moist towel across his face and a porcelain spittoon on his bedside table, waiting to catch his watery vomit. Only when the fields outside his window are lit by stars can he draw his curtains and breathe fresh air. Sometimes he steps barefoot onto the dew-chilled grass, so that he might feel the breezes on his body and hear them whispering in the budding tree branches. He wants to know again what it is like to be a living man in a living world. But mostly, even out on the lawn or as he walks after midnight through his own pitch-dark house to the table where Ursula has left him a glass of water, a cut of meat and a slice of bread, he feels that his mother has succeeded after all, that his illness has left him a mere ghost, haunting the places where he used to live.

I
t is April 16, 1757. The Reverend Maury is about to climb the stairs to fetch a nightshirt with a missing button when he spots fourteen-year-old Thomas Jefferson slouched in the parlor window seat, knees up, a heavy book spread across his thighs. Maury lingers a moment just outside the parlor door, watching his young student absently coiling locks of his red hair about his finger as he reads, apparently oblivious of the fact that he is being observed. Maury has to acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson is very clever, possibly brilliant, but he finds the boy sullen and odd.

Just the previous evening, Maury happened to be pacing in the front yard, enjoying a pipe, when a carriage pulled up, returning Thomas Jefferson from an Easter visit with his family. As Maury helped the boy drag his heavy satchel off the seat, he said, “I hope you had a fine stay with your dear mother.” But Thomas Jefferson gave him no other response than to turn his back and walk toward the house, clutching his satchel with both arms.

“Young man!” Maury called after him. “Is that how you behave when you have been addressed by your master?”

The boy stopped but didn't turn around.

Maury walked up beside him. “What have you to say for yourself?”

Still not meeting the older man's eye, Thomas Jefferson said, “I'm sorry.”

“What made you think you had the right to behave so rudely?”

“I didn't have the right. It was only . . .” The boy lowered his head and pinched his lips together before finishing his sentence. “. . . that I did
not
have a good visit.” As he pronounced the word “not,” the boy finally lifted his head and looked his master in the eye. And then, with a disconcerting coldness, he announced, “And what is more, I have resolved never to return home again. Henceforth I would prefer to lodge here with you and Mrs. Maury during all school vacations.”

“What happened?”

“That is my own affair,” the boy said firmly. “If it would not be
possible for me to stay with you, I shall look for temporary lodging in the village.”

With that, Thomas Jefferson walked into the house, climbed the stairs to the dormitory and refused to come down for supper.

Needless to say, the Reverend Maury dispatched a letter to Mrs. Jefferson that very night.

In the morning he received word from his wife that the boy wouldn't take so much as a cup of tea, and during church services (it was a Sunday), Maury noticed him staring vaguely into space, a distraught expression on his face, not even moving his lips when it was time to sing. And now here the boy is, slumped by himself in the window, staring into a book with a crumpled brow.

Last night Maury had been irritated by the boy's rudeness, but now he is beginning to worry.

Only once his master steps into the parlor does Thomas Jefferson look up with a start and realize he is not alone. He snaps his book shut and swings his feet to the floor. “Sorry,” he says.

“Don't worry, Jefferson,” says Maury. “Window seats are made for reading.”

Just past the boy's head, Maury can see Carr, Molyneux and some of the other boys kicking an inflated cow's bladder around on the muddy green across the road.

“But it's a beautiful spring day,” Maury says. “You should be out there playing football with your classmates.

“I don't like football.”

“Don't be silly. Every boy likes football. Best thing in the world for the lungs.”

“I don't like sports. I think they encourage the worst tendencies in human character. They're all about who can dominate whom.”

It is a long moment before Maury knows how to respond to this objection. Finally, deciding that the boy is showing signs of melancholia, he says, “But you must take care to amuse yourself.”

“I have
Don Quixote
to amuse me.” Thomas Jefferson pats the book balanced on his knees. “I think it is much more amusing to read about a mad old man doing battle with wineskins in his sleep.”

“Very well,” says Maury, thinking that the Lord will only help those who help themselves. He nods, backs out the door and continues on his mission to fetch his buttonless nightshirt for his housemaid.

. . . I was a melancholy child. I did not have many friends, and I grew unhappy in groups, largely because I lacked a quick wit. Whenever other children mocked me, I would merely stand there, wagging my tongue in my open mouth, unable to utter a single word and feeling more ashamed every instant. But I could be happy on my own. As a little girl, I had great fun playing with a doll that Bobby carved for me. It had wool for hair, a painted face and hinged arms and legs, so I could make it walk, run, turn somersaults. The doll's name was Parthenia, and her closest friend was a sea captain, who happened to be invisible to everyone but her and with whom she would travel around the world, riding lions and enormous fishes, climbing mountains and having dinners with kings and queens.

As I grew older, I found most of my joy by having my own adventures. From the age of four or five, I would steal away from whichever sister was supposed to be watching me to wander alone through the woods for hours, listening to robin song, crow cries and the ghostly piping of owls. I made houses for myself under bushes and in the branches of trees and would sing myself songs and tell myself stories. My mother scolded me for spending so much time in the woods. She said it was dangerous for a girl, that I might lose my soul.

Apparently, there was one time when I returned from my wandering and told my mother that I had met a talking groundhog who had taken me to an underground world lit by flowers that had flames for petals. This world was ruled by two golden snakes—a king and queen—who sat on thrones shaped like wagon wheels and hissed their commands to all their subjects: groundhogs, moles, voles, mice and foxes. I have no memory whatsoever of telling this story, but when I refused to admit for several days that I had not actually visited this world, my mother decided I had been possessed and took me to see an old man who lived on another plantation—and him I remember vividly.

His name was Popo, and his fingers were so misshapen they looked as if they were made entirely out of chestnuts. He had my mother take off my clothes and
lay me faceup upon the ground in a copse behind his cabin. With a foul-smelling greenish paste, he drew a cross on my breast, and then, as he chanted in an African language, he grabbed my shoulders so fiercely that I thought my arms were going to snap off. After some minutes he let me go, and then, still chanting, he slaughtered a chicken and poured its blood into a small bottle that he told my mother to bury in front of our cabin door. Years later, when my mother brought up my story about the underground world and I told her I had no memory of it, she said, “That's because it went right out of you with the Devil.”

When I first thought to tell this story, I intended to conclude by saying that although I never believed for a second that I had been possessed, there was a way in which I did lose my soul on my walks, because all on my own in the sun-shot green dimness under the trees it was a simple matter to surrender to the illusion that my life was easy and full and that I was entirely free. But just now I remembered that during those nights when the ordinary events of my life would seem shrouded by the deadness, my solitary walks were never among them, which is to say that my walks never seemed pale and unreal. And so, as I prepared to condemn them as a soul-stealing delusion, a voice cried out in my heart, saying, “You cannot deprive a poor slave girl of her only joy!” . . .

N
ot hours before Martha dies, her voice hardly above a whisper, she draws Thomas Jefferson's attention to a strange beetle with a tiger-striped cowl that is crawling across her bedclothes. “Look, Tom. I've lived all this time, and yet every day I see an insect unlike any I've ever seen before.” He tells her that as soon as he has a moment, he will find its name in a cyclopedia of insects that he has recently acquired. That moment never comes. Not long after Thomas Jefferson has taken the beetle between his thumb and forefinger and deposits it on the window ledge, Martha closes her eyes and her soap-white skin goes ash gray. Soon her breathing becomes irregular, with the gaps between breaths growing longer and longer, until finally, just before noon, she takes three enormous breaths, each followed by an impossibly long silence, the last of which never ends.

T
he flame stretches, and its tip flaps into a rippling wisp of smoke as an elderly white servant lowers a lamp chimney into place. The atmosphere inside the yellow room, already dense with the sausage-and-tobacco odor of ceaselessly yammering men, is cut by the thin acridity of whale oil. It is nearly eight on an evening in June 1775, and Thomas Jefferson is thirty-two. Although he washed his face on arrival in Philadelphia, his fingertips detect finely granulated road dust along his jaw in front of his ear. He has been standing against the back wall for nearly half an hour, clutching his right elbow with his left hand, and keeping his right hand aristocratically poised against his cheek in an attempt to look contemplative and at ease, but thus far he has spoken to no one. He is perhaps the youngest of the thirty or so men present and feels something of an interloper, given that he is at this meeting—the Second Continental Congress—only as a replacement for his cousin Peyton Randolph.

When Thomas Jefferson first arrived, a small man in spectacles with an almost feminine voice was saying that he would not be able to take a position on the resolution—a funding matter as far as Thomas Jefferson could tell—until he had consulted with the people back in Carlisle who had elected him.

“Good God, man!” shouted another delegate (from New York, Thomas Jefferson thought). “Don't you have your own mind? Do you think the good people of Carlisle sent you here to be a stuffed pillow?”

The original speaker replied mildly, seeming nauseated with disdain, “I thought this body was meant to be a democratic assembly of representatives, not a parliament of petty monarchs.” With that, he left the lectern and took a seat at one of the tables, where a neighbor gave him a pat on the back. The New York delegate flung both hands in the air and said something that Thomas Jefferson couldn't hear but that inspired a round of hoots and guffaws at his table.

After that, a bemused-looking man of about forty walked to within an arm's length of the lectern and spoke in a voice that reminded Thomas Jefferson of the jingling of sleigh bells. “The committee will be making its
report momentarily. Please don't leave!” This announcement was met with groans, but the words were heeded. No one left. Servants were summoned. Bottles of cider and wine were brought to the tables. Pipes were lit. And very soon the urgent matters this meeting had been convened to discuss were entirely abandoned in favor of tales about the catastrophes and feats of athleticism known to have occurred in and around bordellos.

At present, the only people who truly seem to be considering matters of war and independence are seated at the table in the corner to which the bemused-looking man retired. Thomas Jefferson would like to eavesdrop on their conversation, but, having suffered his whole life from a morbid shyness in large groups, he doesn't dare go anywhere near. At the mere thought, a trembling comes into his fingertips and he is taken by an irresistible restlessness.

He lowers his hand from his cheek, sticks his thumbs into the waist of his breeches and begins to pace along the wall, keeping his head lowered and his brow furrowed, in the hope that anyone observing him might think he is deep in cogitation. Each time he stops and reverses direction, he cannot help but glance toward the corner table, and on one such occasion notices the bemused man scrutinizing him. Feeling that he has been unmasked as a charlatan, a twist of dizziness comes into his skull and his whole body breaks into a hot sweat. He has to leave the room.

A door at the end of the hallway leads into the dark garden behind the State House. No sooner is he standing in the moist coolness of the deepening evening than his head begins to clear. Already he hates Philadelphia. He wonders if he shouldn't just have Jupiter and Bob Hemings pack his carriage in the morning and take him back to Virginia.

The sky is a metallic navy blue directly overhead and lightening toward a deep teal in the west. Thomas Jefferson can make out the silhouette of the roofs of the buildings across the street and of the trees and bushes in this very yard—which is surrounded by a high brick wall, faintly visible in the gloaming. He hears the mumble-grunt of two men talking to his right and a splattering of urine on bare earth. He cannot make out a word either is saying, but he also feels the need to urinate, so he walks toward the opposite wall, where he waits, legs spread, his penis in the evening air, until the two men have gone back inside. Once his own urine begins to flow, the relief is so great that he groans aloud.

As he rebuttons his breeches, he contemplates walking right through the building and back out onto the street, where he might perhaps find a
hospitable tavern. He is now distinctly hungry. But instead he returns to the yellow room.

He is not even through the door when the bemused man—no longer seeming remotely bemused—is eyeing him again. As Thomas Jefferson makes his way back to the spot against the wall that he occupied for most of his time in the room, he wishes he knew someone well enough to ask for a glass of wine.

He reinserts his thumbs beneath the waist of his breeches and prepares to resume his contemplative pacing. But now the man who has been watching him has gotten to his feet. As the man starts across the room, the bemused expression comes back onto his face. Thomas Jefferson looks away, his entire body simultaneously heating and chilling with sweat. The man is smiling as he walks, though perhaps there is a faint perturbation on his brow. Attempting a smile of his own, Thomas Jefferson wipes his palms against his waistcoat and takes a step in the direction of the advancing man.

“Pardon me,” says the man. “You wouldn't by any chance be Peyton Randolph's nephew?”

“Cousin,” says Thomas Jefferson, having to force himself to speak above a whisper.

The man wrinkles his brow and leans his head closer. “Pardon?”

“Randolph's
cousin
,” Thomas Jefferson says more loudly. “I'm his cousin.”

“Ah!” says the man. “But you're Jefferson, are you not?”

Thomas Jefferson nods. “Yes.”

The man's eyes squeeze into arcs of delight, and his small mouth forms a distinctly U-shaped smile between his heavy cheeks. “Welcome! Welcome! I am so happy to meet you!” He shakes Thomas Jefferson's hand vigorously with both of his. “I'm Adams. John Adams.”

Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. There is no person he has been more eager to meet than this very man still clutching his hand so forcefully.

“I must confess to being a great admirer of your ‘Summary' for the Virginia delegation,” says Adams. “I don't think that anyone has argued our cause half so memorably and succinctly as you have. It is masterful work—absolutely masterful!”

Thomas Jefferson can hardly believe that he has even met John Adams, let alone that he is hearing such praise. It is a long moment before he can bring himself to utter a quiet “Thank you.”

“I think we would all be much enlightened if you were to honor us
with an address concerning your ideas.” At last Adams lets go of Thomas Jefferson's hand. “Tomorrow afternoon perhaps?”

A small noise comes out of Thomas Jefferson's throat.

“Excuse me?” says Adams.

The younger man's lips move, but still no words emerge. His face has gone paper white. Droplets tremble on his upper lip.

“I'm sorry,” says Adams, a sharp concern in his large brown eyes. “Are you ill?”

“No . . . I just . . .”

Adams leans yet closer and turns his right ear toward Thomas Jefferson. “Yes?”

“The address . . . I . . . Thank you, but . . .” Thomas Jefferson has to lick his lips before he can continue. “But . . . I . . . I . . . can't.”