Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“How does he seem?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I don’t know.” She heaves another deep sigh. “He seems… I don’t know how he seems.”

He gives her hand another squeeze. “I think it is good that he is home.”

“I hope so.”

For the first few days, Jimmy manages so well in the kitchen that Thomas Jefferson declares he doesn’t know how he survived two years without Jimmy’s cooking. But then one night he helps himself so liberally from the wine cellar that he forgets to take a pot of succotash off the fire and burns it to the point that it can only be used for pig feed. The next day he will not leave his pallet in John Hemings’s cabin, claiming that he is beset with the same “ailment of the head” as Thomas Jefferson. But Pricilla, John’s wife, says that it is only corn liquor that keeps Jimmy in bed, half the time unconscious, the other half drinking. The next day he manages to produce a passable pork dinner, but the following day he burns the trout so badly that its skin is ash and its flesh like wood splinters. The day after that, his “sauce” for the peas is only melted lard — the smell alone so sickening that Maria, who is only weeks from giving birth to her first child, must rush from the table, out into the open air, to keep from vomiting.

The next day Jimmy is once again afflicted by an “ailment of the head,” but Thomas Jefferson sends Sally Hemings for him. When brother and sister arrive in his office, Thomas Jefferson folds his hands at the center of his desk and tells Jimmy, in a voice so soft it is hard to hear, “While I had very much been looking forward to both your cuisine and your company, Jimmy, I am afraid that your susceptibility to spirits is making it impossible for you to do your job.”

Jimmy’s face is slick with sweat, his eyes are red and he is visibly unsteady on his feet. “I’m fine,” he says.

Thomas Jefferson continues to speak quietly. “I am only thinking of your own good. And for that reason, I think it best that until you have regained your self-control, Edy Fossett will be the mistress of the kitchen, and you will be her sous-chef.”

“Edy!” Jimmy practically spits the name. “That ignorant bitch!”

“Jimmy!” says Sally Hemings.

“I’m just speaking the truth,” he says, his voice loud and flat. “She doesn’t know anything about cooking! She’s never even heard of vichyssoise! She couldn’t make a wine sauce if she practiced for a month!”

“Jimmy, please!” Sally Hemings tries to calm her brother by putting both hands on the shoulder nearest her, but he only shrugs her off.

“I think you should taste one of her meals before you insult her like that,” says Thomas Jefferson.

Now Jimmy is shouting. “How dare you insult me like that! I am a master chef! I’ve cooked for royalty! How dare you tell me that I should be the sous-chef to that ignorant black bitch!”

“Jimmy, please. ” Thomas Jefferson’s hands, no longer folded, grip the front edge of his desk as if he is about to stand. “I am only trying to find a way that you can continue to receive your salary while you—”

“I don’t want your money!” Jimmy puts both fists on Thomas Jefferson’s desk, leans forward and shouts. “Do you think I have no dignity! Do you think I was only put on this earth to serve your pleasure! I am a free man, Mr. Jefferson. I worked hard for my freedom, and no one is going to tell me what to do.”

“Jimmy—” Thomas Jefferson’s voice is trembling with anger.

“I don’t want to talk to you!”

Jimmy turns toward the door. Sally Hemings grabs the lapel of his coat, but he shoves her aside and strides out of the room.

“Jimmy!” she calls after him, her half-closed hands hanging in the air in front of her, as if she were still clinging to his lapel. She turns to Thomas Jefferson, her gaze distraught and afraid.

“Let him go,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I have to talk to him!” She is out the door in two steps. Her running feet resound down the corridor and across the great hall.

Jimmy is gone for two days after fleeing Thomas Jefferson’s study. When he returns to Monticello, he serves as Edy Fossett’s sous-chef for much of a week, but always sullenly and with the slurred speech and slow-motion lunging of a drunk. One night he cuts his finger so badly that he bleeds all over a bowl of onions, and Edy tells him to leave her kitchen and not come back until he is sober. As Sally Hemings is getting into bed that night, she hears his voice drifting up the hill from where the field laborers live. First he is singing, and then he is shouting in anger.

Sometime during that very silent and black hour that just precedes the first light of dawn, she awakes with a start and realizes that someone has touched her shoulder. She hears panting in the darkness, right beside her bed, and smells the sweet rankness of corn liquor.

Jimmy is speaking, much too loud for so silent and lonely an hour. “You are loved, Sally. I just want you to know that.”

“Jimmy, quiet!” she whispers. “The children.”

“You are loved,” he says as loudly as before. “People love you. That is very important.”

“Jimmy, please.” She hears Beverly stirring in his bed across the room. Evelina cries out in her sleep, “No!”

“It’s because you are good,” says Jimmy.

She hears shoe scrapes, thumps and the stretching of cloth. Jimmy is sitting on the floor and resting his hand on her belly. She can’t see him at all.

“People despise me,” he says. “I can’t be good in this world. Because I can’t be myself.”

“What are you talking about?” Sally Hemings wants to sit up, but she is still too sleepy. She rolls onto her side, and Jimmy’s hand slides from her belly to her hip. He squeezes her there as he speaks.

“I can be a black nigger. I can be an African god. I can be a slave. But I can’t be loved for who I am. Do you know what I’m saying? Do you understand?”

She feels the weight of his head against her belly and his hand across her buttocks pulling her close. His voice is thick now. He is crying.

“But I can’t be myself,” he says. “So nobody loves me. I can’t be myself in this world.”

She reaches behind her back, takes his pressing hand in her own and brings it forward, clutching it against her ribs. “I love you, Jimmy.”

He lifts his head away from her belly. He pulls his hand out of hers. “I know you do, but it’s not enough.”

She can tell from the thumps of his shoes and knees that he has shifted to a crouch.

“I have to go,” he says.

Beverly whimpers, then cries out, “Mammy!”

Jimmy is standing. Sally Hemings sits up in bed. “No,” she says. “Wait.”

“I have to go.”

By the time Sally Hemings puts both feet on the floor, Jimmy is gone.

Sally Hemings is sitting on her porch, stitching a bonnet for baby Harriet. She hears a heavy sigh and looks up to see Goliah, the gardener, standing just before the porch step and holding his hat in his hands. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Miz Sally.” He shifts from one foot to the other and licks his lips. “But my cousin, Henry, who works over to Grand Pointe, he told me to tell you that he heard word from Baltimore about Jimmy.”

Sally Hemings drops the bonnet onto her knees but cannot bring herself to speak. It has been a month since Jimmy came to her cabin in the night and she hasn’t seen or heard from him since.

Goliah looks down at the ground. “I hate to… Well, I’m really sorry, but Henry said… that Jimmy is dead.”

The bonnet slips from her lap to the porch floor. “How?” she says.