Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

It is August 16, 1801. Sally Hemings is twenty-eight, and the air this day is so heavy and hot that the sun seems tarnished and the heaps of cumulus, even at noon, are rust-tinged and indefinite through a haze of steam. It is hard to breathe. Evelina, the servant Thomas Jefferson has provided her, has taken three-and-a-half-year-old Beverly down the hill to spend the afternoon with his grandmother, as he has almost every day for the last year. Holding her three-month-old daughter against her shoulder, Sally Hemings crouches on her front porch and, with one hand, lifts the wooden cover off a bucket of greasy water and drops in the baby’s soiled clout.

A scrape of a shoe over gritty dust.

Then a voice: “At least this time it’s a white one!”

As she reels around, the bucket cover thumps to the porch floor and rolls into the yellow grass. “Jimmy! Oh, my word! Jimmy!”

“Hey there, Cider Jug!”

Jimmy stands in the middle of the road, grinning as if he’s just pulled off a very successful practical joke.

“Oh, my word!” Sally Hemings repeats as he steps up onto the porch. “Oh, Jimmy!” She flings her free arm around him. “Oh, Jimmy! Oh, Jimmy!” She hugs him as hard as she can with her one arm, but he remains inert in her grasp and has the acrid funk of someone who has gone weeks without changing clothes or washing.

She lets him go.

“When did you get here?” she says.

“Just this minute. You’re the first person I’ve seen. Been walking from Charlottesville since before sunrise.”

Despite the heat he is wearing a frock coat and a linen shirt, buttoned to the neck. His shirt is sweat-darkened and his velvet collar marked by multiple lines of salt sediment. He seems to have shrunk since the last time she saw him — coming on two years ago now (just before Thenia was born, she suddenly remembers). He’s gone gaunt, his cheeks look sucked tight against his teeth and there is a deep vertical line on the right side of his mouth. He’s only thirty-six, but he looks fifty, or older.

“Come inside,” she says. “You must want something to eat.”

“No, no, no!” he says. “Nothing for me!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jimmy! You look like a scarecrow.”

“I’m not hungry. I never eat in the morning.”

“But it’s nearly time for dinner.”

An irritated perplexity comes onto Jimmy’s face, and he is silent a moment before nodding at the infant on Sally Hemings’s shoulder. “At least this one’s white.”

Now it is Sally Hemings whose expression is perplexed and worried. She lowers her daughter and holds her with both hands so that Jimmy can see her. “Here you go, Little Bug,” she says. “Time to meet your Uncle Jimmy!”

The little girl, having been disturbed from sleep, goes red in the face, and grimaces as if she is about to cry. But then, with a gurgly peep, she settles back into slumber.

Sally Hemings laughs happily.

“Beautiful,” says Jimmy, though not with any feeling. “A boy or a girl?”

“A girl. Her name is Harriet.”

“Harriet!” Jimmy’s eyes widen, and the corners of his mouth turn down. “Don’t you think that’s bad luck?”

“No!” Sally Hemings cries. “I love that name. And I like to feel that the spirit of her sister lives on in her. Mr. Jefferson feels the same way.”

Jimmy shrugs. “Well, at least she’s white.”

Sally Hemings pulls the baby back up to her shoulder. “Stop saying that, Jimmy! Why are you saying that?”

“It’s better to be white.” Jimmy shrugs again. “That’s all I’m saying. Better for the baby and better for you. I heard about the other one.” He smiles at his sister as if they are complicit in some evil.

Sally Hemings is so angry her knees are trembling. The other one! He never even saw Thenia. How dare he talk about her that way! He’d promised to write, but he never wrote a single letter — not even to say he was sorry she had lost her baby. All this time she’d been thinking he didn’t know. But he did know — somehow — and he’d never even bothered to write.

“What are you doing here, Jimmy?” she says at last.

“I’m back!” He smiles and holds out both hands, as if he has just materialized before her eyes. “Mr. Jefferson just can’t live without me. He’s been trying to get me to come back ever since I left. But I just kept telling him, ‘No. Too busy!’ I was running my own very successful business venture in Baltimore. A restaurant, à la française . In the very best part of town. All of my customers were white — and rich. And they just loved me, even though I spat in every plate as it went out of my kitchen. I really did that. None of them ever knew, of course. I’d stir it up. I did that just so I could always remember that I was better than the whole bunch of them. I really did. They loved me, and I didn’t give a damn about them. That’s the truth. God’s own truth. But then I started to get sick of the whole thing. Didn’t know why I was doing it. And that’s when Mr. Jefferson got in touch with me again. Wrote me this letter saying, ‘Please come cook for me in Washington. Peter can’t cook worth a damn. Please come cook for me again, and I’ll give you ten dollars a month.’ I said, ‘You give me twenty dollars a month and that’s a deal.’ And he said yes, so here I am!”

Sally Hemings’s anger has turned to something much more like fear. She doesn’t believe a single word Jimmy has said — especially about being rehired. Thomas Jefferson is due back any day now, and then Jimmy’s lie will be exposed and he will be utterly humiliated. And what will that do to him? Is he still drinking so hard? He looks like a man who drinks and does nothing else. But maybe it’s good that he is back with his family. Maybe that’s the real reason he came home.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some food?” she says. “I’ve got some fresh corn bread inside. Or some water? Would you like some water? You must be thirsty.”

“No, no,” he says, holding up both flat palms as if to keep her at bay. “I’m fine. Maybe I’ll have something to eat when I go see Mammy.”

And with that he backs off the porch and sets off down the road, without saying another word.

“I heard that he had lost his job at a restaurant in Philadelphia,” Thomas Jefferson explains. “So I thought—”

“Why was he dismissed?” says Sally Hemings.

“I don’t know.” Thomas Jefferson tilts his head and gives a weary shrug. “But I suppose we can both imagine….”

“Yes.” She looks down into her glass.

He puts his hand on her shoulder and gives her a reassuring stroke, then pats her lightly twice and pulls his hand away. They are sitting on the porch just outside his chambers, drinking cold cider. The sun set on the far side of the house a few minutes ago, but there are small, rose-colored clouds straight overhead in an indigo sky and faint smears of green along the southern horizon.

“In any event, since I will only be making short visits home as long as I am in Washington and since Peter sometimes has to begin preparing for larger gatherings weeks in advance, it made little sense for him to come with me, so I thought that if Jimmy needed the work, it would be good to enjoy his cooking when I am home. I wrote to him a couple of times and got no response, so I decided he wasn’t interested. But then six months went by and he finally wrote to me.”

“Six months?” says Sally Hemings. “What was he doing in all that time?”

“He didn’t say.”

She sighs heavily. Thomas Jefferson holds out his hand in the accumulating dimness, and when she puts her hand in his, he gives her a squeeze and doesn’t let go.