Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (57 page)

C
ol. Jones had by this time become very fond of me, and would not arrange any terms by which I could gain my freedom. He respected me, and would not let me see him take his “bitters.” He was surprised and pleased to find that I did not touch liquor. Being with and coming from such a family as Mr. Jefferson's, I knew more than they did about many things. This also raised me in their esteem. My sister Isabel was also left a slave in Virginia. I wrote her a free pass, sent her to Boston, and made [an?] attempt to gain my own freedom. The first time [I fai?]led and had to return. My parents were here in Ohio and I wanted to be with them and be free, so I resolved to get free or die in the attempt. I started the second time, was caught, handcuffed, and taken back and carried to Richmond and put in jail. For the second time I was put up on the auction block and sold like a horse. But friends from among my master's best friends bought me in and sent me to my father in Cincinnati, and I am here to-day.

—The Reverend Peter Fossett

“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

New York Sunday World

January 30, 1898

T
he movie once seemed it would never end, but now the actor who wore the copper-colored wig is wearing a skinlike skullcap: pink, freckled and crossed by cobwebs of white. A pinkish putty has been attached to his face, and it does look remarkably like aged flesh, though unnaturally inflexible. The putty and skullcap are good enough, though, that the actor is clearly portraying a man in his mid-eighties, possibly even his nineties—which strikes Thomas Jefferson as a respectable life span; to want to live longer would be to ask for more than one's fair allotment, unseemly in a democracy where all are meant to be equal.

Thomas Jefferson finds himself strangely content as he watches the actor compose his character's end. There is something geological in the swirl of white sheets on the bed, and there is a dawnlike luminescence in the death chamber, as if the actor were a mountain range catching the first silver beams of a sun returning after a long season of darkness, so that his death seems a new beginning.

There is, indeed, much beauty in this death. The aesthetic dimensions of every detail have been maximized: The hands on the sheets, for example, approach each other upon the axes of a tilted 125-degree angle—they approach but never touch. Within these hands is the potential for a clasp, but that potential will be eternally unrealized. Likewise, strength is latent in their musculature, but they are the quintessence of frailty. The actor's half-closed eyes, granted a bluebird brilliance by the silver light, appear the most flawless visual organs imaginable, and yet the images projected onto their internal concavity can only be mere shadows, unaccompanied by answering projections within the mind. And those putty-covered lips are so clearly poised to pronounce a word— What is it?
Freedom? Sorrow? Equality? I?

No one will ever know.

Yet the true beauty of this scene is not in its splendidly articulated and suggestive composition but in its relationship to everything that has preceded it—a realization that throws Thomas Jefferson into perplexity. For what has this movie been to him besides an unending ordeal of humiliation, betrayal, idiocy and insult? And yet with all of its drawbacks,
the life portrayed by the actor in the copper-colored wig and now the pink skullcap has a significance and sweep that Thomas Jefferson's own life has never had and that he can only envy.

At first the tableau of the actor, the silver luminescence and the geological sheets seem to be disintegrating, but then Thomas Jefferson realizes that phrases composed of bronze letters affixed to stone are drifting in front of the tableau, or perhaps right through it, like ghosts. He recognizes the phrases as his own: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” . . . “All men are created equal” . . . “Commerce between master and slave is despotism” . . . “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship” . . . “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”

What Thomas Jefferson envies is the unity of these words and the man portrayed by the actor. They are one with the sweep and sentiment of his life, and he will live within them, in every way that matters, for at least as long as the words are remembered. The man within the movie is both the musician and the music, while Thomas Jefferson is only noise and a maker of noises. Yes, these words may have trailed behind his pen, but they are no closer to his essence than his ripping flatulence, his fearful shouts in the night, his groans, his burps, his donkey laughs, his exhausted panting, his moronic limericks and puns, his sobs, his lustful moans, his shouts of fury, his envious muttering, his lies, his dissimulations, his unrelenting inability to unite his words and his life.

Perhaps this death is exactly what Dolley Madison had thought so uplifting, but the longer its manifold beauty works upon Thomas Jefferson, the more profoundly he feels himself undone. There is a lie between himself and the man who is passing on with such quiet grandeur, but he doesn't know whose lie it is, and he doesn't know what the existence of the lie means—although he worries that it means that nothing good is true, that nothing he believes is real, that his very love is a betrayal of everyone and everything he wants so much to be happy or the occasion of happiness.

He looks for Dolley Madison so that he might tell her what the movie has done to him, but her seat is empty. And so is the seat where James Madison once sat stupefied and wonder-filled. And so, Thomas Jefferson soon discovers, is every other seat in the theater, from those in the very front row to those all but lost in obscurity beneath the single flickering blue beam. He is alone in the dark and the brilliance and the noise, the only one left to witness the actor achieve his ultimate significance.

B
everly Hemings is a white man and has been since 1822, when their father gave Harriet and him coach tickets and fifty dollars each so they could “run off” to Washington City. It is July 4, 1834, exactly eight years since his father's death. When Beverly agreed to return to Virginia for the first time in more than a decade, he saw himself as fulfilling a promise. He wrote to his brothers, Madison and Eston, hoping they would bring their mother when they came, but only Madison stands among the crowd of upturned faces on Poplar Lawn. At the last minute, their mother said she didn't have the strength. She told her boys to go without her, but Eston stayed behind.

As the earth falls away and Beverly's wicker gondola swings gently beneath a huge sack of hydrogen gas, he looks toward the hazy silhouette of the mountains where he was born, and when he looks back, he can no longer distinguish his brother amid the crowd, which has begun to run. A smooth breeze has caught him and is sending him across Jefferson Street and out over the open countryside east of the city. The foremost members of the crowd have leapt a rail fence and are charging down through a meadow toward Great Run, but they will never keep up. Beverly Hemings is some two hundred feet above their heads and moving ever faster. He has already passed the meadow and is over a wooded valley. In seconds he will be looking down again on fields and streams and houses and barns. Farmers on their hay wagons, farmwives flinging potatoes to pigs, barefoot boys and old men trailing fishhooks in glinting creeks will look up and shield their eyes to be sure of what they see. Beverly will lean out over the rim of his gondola and give them each a wave, as if there were nothing more natural than to be drifting in the sunshine between treetop and cloud.

T
homas Jefferson sways in the middle of the hammering subway car. The lights flicker out again, and when they come back, he knows that Sally Hemings has seen him. How could she not? He is standing so close. The screech abates for a moment, then starts all over, drilling his ears. He is looking down at the tip of Sally Hemings's boot. He doesn't know what to do or say. He has no idea what will happen when, at last, his eyes meet hers.

. .
.

There is no greater gap in the record of Thomas Jefferson's life than his relationship with Sally Hemings. The direct references to Hemings in the writings of people who actually knew her don't add up to more than several hundred words, most of these being in Madison Hemings's two-thousand-word memoir, and none of the references provide anything like a full portrait of her character, her appearance or her relationship with Jefferson; indeed the majority consist only of a sentence or two.

Beyond these references, her name, birth year and an account of the food, clothing and bedding she was given at Monticello are noted in Jefferson's record books, as is the same information about her mother, siblings and children, but not in a way that significantly distinguishes Hemings or her family from any of the other enslaved people who also appear in the record books. We know how much Jefferson paid for her clothing while she was in France and that he boarded her for five weeks with his laundress in the spring of 1789, but we know nothing about the motives or consequences of either of these expenditures. She comes up in two Charlottesville censuses after she left Monticello following Jefferson's death. In 1830 she and her sons Madison and Eston are classified as white, and in a special 1833 census of black residents of the parish, the family is listed among the “free Negroes & Mulattoes.” And lastly, a 1998 genetic test established that Eston Hemings was the child of a man bearing a Jefferson Y chromosome. The Jefferson family had long maintained that Sally Hemings's children had been fathered by Thomas Jefferson's brother or by Peter and/or Samuel Carr, his nephews, all of whom would indeed have had the crucial chromosome, but there is no evidence that these men were ever at Monticello when Hemings's children were conceived, whereas Jefferson always was—a detail supported by numerous documents.

And that is just about all we have in the way of facts specifically concerning Sally Hemings. While it is hard to imagine that Jefferson would never have mentioned her in a letter during the thirty-seven years of their relationship, the twenty thousand pages of correspondence that he or his white family saw fit to preserve contain not even one clear reference to Hemings—although it is true that the letters he exchanged with his wife, Martha, are also absent from the trove. If Sally Hemings herself ever put a word to paper, it, too, has not survived, though we do have writing by two of her brothers—none of it mentioning her. And although there are dozens of paintings, drawings, etchings and statues of Thomas Jefferson, no image of Sally Hemings taken from life has ever been identified.

While biographers and historians are expected to be rigorously factual, in novels the primary function of fact is to facilitate readers' suspension of disbelief. Factual accuracy is somewhat more important in realistic novels that purport to represent significant historic or political events, but even so, fiction writers are generally given license to do whatever they want in the gaps between facts. Under such circumstances, the dearth of verifiable information concerning Jefferson and Hemings's relationship ought to have given me a field day, but, as it happens, Thomas Jefferson presents rather specific challenges to any writer.

With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, he is the most written-about and well-documented figure in American history, and his relationship with Sally Hemings has also made him one of the most controversial. I was terribly worried when I first began working on this novel that the sheer volume of information concerning Jefferson would so dominate my thinking that the book would end up as hackneyed and plodding as a dutiful docudrama. And I was even more afraid that the intense political debate regarding his relationship with Hemings (of which I was reminded every single time I told anyone what I was writing) would make it impossible for me to give my characters enough psychological and moral complexity to feel like living, breathing, passionate and perplexed human beings.

The first thing I did when I began to work on this novel was read three biographies: Annette Gordon-Reed's
Hemingses of Monticello
, Fawn M. Brodie's
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History
and Joseph J. Ellis's
American Sphinx.
But as soon as I felt I had grasped the basic facts of my protagonists' lives, I stopped research and leapt straight into writing, composing
scenes entirely out of chronological order and switching randomly between realism, fabulism, essay, prose poetry and quotation. My hope was that by never knowing what I was going to write next or how these pieces might link up in the finished work, my mind would be freer to imagine Jefferson and Hemings in fresh and surprising ways and with minimal influence from other people's narratives or opinions. And, indeed, it was during this phase that Jefferson became an ape, a blimp and an art student in New York and that Sally Hemings created an invention that eventually became the world that Jefferson would have to inhabit. It was also during this phase that I “discovered” my protagonists' lonely childhoods and the extremity of their passions, be they love, loathing, fury or fear.

Once I had staked out what seemed sufficiently fertile and fresh imaginative territory to guarantee my novel a margin of originality (or so I hoped), I felt free to return to my research. I found two biographies especially useful:
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
, by Jon Meacham, and
Master of the Mountain
, by Henry Wiencek—a pair of books that could hardly have diverged more radically in their portrayal of their subject, with Meacham's Jefferson corresponding fairly closely to the familiar figure of the brilliant if excessively idealistic Founding Father, while the most direct precursor to Wiencek's Jefferson is Simon Legree—the cruel slaveholder in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. The stark contradiction of these portraits was instructive all on its own, because it helped solidify my sense that Jefferson was an amalgam of opposites—which is not to say that he occupied any sort of bland midpoint between the extremes of virtue and monstrosity but that he was brilliant, idealistic, ignorant and evil all at once. And while I had many problems with Wiencek's often absurd interpretations of decidedly cherry-picked facts, his book nevertheless forced me to confront Jefferson's dark side over and over—a process that turned out to be immensely productive.

In addition to these and other biographies, I also read Jefferson's
Autobiography
, his most significant political writings (including
Notes on the State of Virginia
) and two especially revealing collections of his letters:
The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson
, edited by his great-granddaughter, Sarah N. Randolph, and
Jefferson in Love: The Love Letters Between Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway
, edited by John P. Kaminski. Apart from Annette Gordon-Reed's masterful account of the whole Hemings family, the book that best helped me envision Sally Hemings's experience was
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
, a memoir by Harriet Jacobs, first
published in 1861, although I also gathered extremely useful insights and background details from
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
(both books are included in
The
Classic Slave Narratives
, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.). The brief memoirs by Madison Hemings, Peter Fossett and Isaac Jefferson also deepened my understanding of Hemings, of course, but, more important, they gave me a rich sense of life at Monticello, even if all three of these men clearly allowed their narratives to reflect many of the interests and prejudices of their white interlocutors or readers. And lastly, I visited the places where Jefferson and/or Hemings had lived—Monticello, Poplar Forest, Williamsburg, Philadelphia, London and Paris—and I wrote substantial portions of my novel at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, not far from Charlottesville, where I came to have an intimate sense of the smells, sounds, weather and beauties of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

One of the reasons I was so anxious about the effects of the intense political passions regarding Hemings and Jefferson was that I shared those passions to a very considerable extent, especially concerning race and gender. During the early improvisatory phase of my writing, however, I did my best to put such issues out of my mind and just write what seemed most natural and necessary for each individual scene or meditation as it came along. But once I had that first draft, and ever more so as I wrote my final ones, I constantly interrogated myself to be sure that my vision had not been clouded by unconscious prejudice or simple ignorance. I also gave successive drafts to trusted friends—black and white, male and female—and listened carefully to what they said, making corrections where I felt I had misunderstood the reality of the experiences I was trying to render. My goal always was to add depth and specificity to my portrayal of my protagonists, without ever confining them to any preexisting ideas of who they were or what their lives might mean—and I can only hope that I succeeded in this regard.

My understanding of my characters and their story evolved considerably over the course of my research and writing. At the beginning I assumed that Jefferson and Hemings's relationship had commenced with rape and amounted to, at best, a grudging submission on her part to demands she was powerless to resist. But the more I read, the more I encountered evidence suggesting that the relationship might have been much more complicated. I was struck, in particular, by the fact that when Sally Hemings finally left Monticello, she took three items that
had belonged to Thomas Jefferson: his inkwell, a pair of his spectacles and a shoe buckle. It just didn't seem possible that if her life with him had been nothing but sexual torture, she would have wanted to possess such intimate belongings, nor that she would have passed them on to her son Madison, who gave them, in turn, to his daughter.

Eventually I came to believe that Hemings's feelings for Jefferson might well have fallen somewhere along the spectrum between love and Stockholm syndrome—the latter being that tendency of kidnap victims to identify with their captors and even to develop extremely positive feelings for them. There is no way I can know whether this supposition is correct, but I did think it made for a much more interesting story than had my original understanding. A narrative in which Sally Hemings was simply tortured and abused by her master would be only a recapitulation of very familiar ideas about the nature of slavery (which is not to say that such ideas should ever be forgotten), whereas a novel in which she felt—or even only believed she felt—something closer to love for her master would amount to an exploration of the mysterious and disturbing underside of an emotion that many of us consider the chief source of human happiness.

While I did my best to make the relationships and events of the realistic segments of my narrative consistent with the historical record (to the point that I hope my book might give readers some insight into what Hemings and Jefferson might actually have been like), there are several elements of the story that have almost no basis in fact. I think it highly unlikely, for example, that Sally Hemings was literate (if that were the case, then
she
would have been the one to teach Madison Hemings to read, rather than Jefferson's grandchildren), yet I felt that if I made her not just literate but well read, I would be intensifying the fundamental equality between her and Jefferson and thereby adding illuminating moral complexities to both sides of their relationship. I also felt that by having her write her own confession, I would be giving her a much more powerful voice—one that might help counterbalance the imposing gravity that Jefferson possesses merely by virtue of his historical significance.

The scene in which Hemings and Jefferson watch a hot-air balloon take off from a farmer's field outside of Paris is complete invention. While Jefferson did witness a balloon flight in Philadelphia, there is no evidence that he or Hemings ever attended such a spectacle in France. I wrote the scene partly because the idea simply delighted me, but also because I knew early on that toward the end of the novel I would describe Beverly
Hemings's balloon flight (for which there is some historical evidence), and I thought this earlier flight might give his experience greater emotional and thematic power. The lodge to which Hemings and Jefferson retreated to be alone is also an invention. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever as to where they conducted their sexual relationship.

Moak Mobley and Sam Holywell are likewise products of my imagination, as are all the street vendors and white servants in Paris (apart from Adrien Petit) and the white servants and shopkeepers in Virginia. Some of the stewards and overseers at Monticello bear the names of real people, but when I was unable to discover the names of the people who actually held these jobs during a particular period of my story, I simply made up a name. Otherwise all the characters with “speaking parts” are based to some extent on real people in Hemings's and Jefferson's lives.

And lastly, all of the statistics relating to fertility and life expectancy cited
here
are not from the late eighteenth century but from the 1850s, the earliest era at which such data was compiled. I chose not to indicate the provenance of these figures when I cited them, because I felt there was only so much scholarly awkwardness a novel could stand. And I had similar reasons for not revealing that estimates of maternal mortality rates during the mid-nineteenth century range from 1 to 16 percent, depending on the structure of the study and the source of the underlying data. I settled on 4 percent, a figure cited by more than one source, primarily because I wanted to err on the side of caution.