Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“I don’t know. That’s all Henry told me. Jimmy’s dead. That’s all he said.”

When Goliah is gone, Sally Hemings sits for a long time thinking. Thomas Jefferson has told her never to write him a letter when he is in Washington City. His enemies are always stealing his mail in the hope of finding something they can use against him. And for that reason he writes his most important letters — chiefly those to Mr. Madison — in a code generated by a device of his own invention. But Sally Hemings can’t think of anyone who might be better able to get the whole story of what happened to Jimmy than Thomas Jefferson. So she leaves her sewing on her porch rocker and walks across the lawn to the great house, where she sits at Thomas Jefferson’s own desk and writes, “Sir, Forgive me for writing. I have just heard that my brother J has died in Baltamor. Do you know if this is true? and if it is do you know how he came to take such a despret action? Respecfully yours, S.”

She gives the letter to Remus and asks him to go straight to Washington City and give the letter directly to Thomas Jefferson and to no one else. “Put it right into his own hand.”

Ten days later Remus returns with Thomas Jefferson’s reply: “Madam, I was deeply saddened to learn the tragical news you have had of your poor brother. I have made an inquiry of Mr. E., who lives in Baltimore and was well acquainted with your brother. I regret to inform you that the news you heard was correct. J. took his own life on the 28th of October. It seems that he had been drinking excessively for at least a week, and I am sure he had little comprehension of what he was doing. This is a very, very sad story, and I am, myself, feeling quite bereft, although I think everyone who knew J. understood that something like this might happen. I send my most sincere condolences to you, your mother and to your whole family. I am much occupied by my duties at the present, but will convey more news at my earliest convenience. My thoughts are with you.” The letter is unsigned.

When Sally Hemings has finished reading, Remus says that Peter told him to tell her that Jimmy slit his own throat.

For a time Thomas Jefferson can jot notes and do a sort of work involving barometers, yardsticks and magnifying glasses. But soon he discovers that he is no longer independent of the crowd overrunning Sally Hemings’s invention, that he, too, is being swept across plazas and parks, down boulevards and streets, along alleys and underground corridors, ever deeper into the interstices of an ever-more-massive city, its buildings rising ever higher into an ever smaller sky.

At first he thinks of all these people as insects: ignorant, soulless, moving mindlessly toward their doom. But then he notices that they are talking — as volubly and variously as any crowd exiting a theater. And it would seem from the rhythms and tones of their speech that some members of the crowd are delivering stern lectures while others are telling jokes, or pleading, or trading gossip in voiced whispers. So many words, near and far, crossing from lips to ears, from mind to mind — yet for Thomas Jefferson they remain airborne packets of mystery. A rippling of lips and teeth. Collages of tiny sounds.

For a while he thinks that the best way to extract meaning from these words is to measure them with his yardstick, but they won’t stay still long enough, and he can never quite tell where one word ends and the next begins. And then it seems that he has lost his yardstick, or maybe he never had it. The same is true of his barometer and his magnifying glass. And the last he ever sees of his notes, they are doing loop-the-loops over the heads of the crowd.

Without tools his judgments become ever harder to sustain, or even to remember, and he can offer no resistance to the human tide. And so he is swept ever deeper into Sally Hemings’s invention, hoping against his every certainty that he might yet be rescued — by some strange new freedom or by some improbable variety of truth.

And now the hammering car is pierced, yet again, by the screeching of steel against steel. And now, again, it is dark, and the yellow dimness of the incandescent bulbs mounted between the tunnel struts slides stroboscopically down the length of the car, lighting, for an instant, shoulders and flanks and frozen faces and then, an instant later, lighting them again. Thomas Jefferson is on his feet now, rocking as the car rocks, remembering how he never allowed himself to truly love Sally Hemings, when, in fact, he had never loved anyone more, and how she came to hate him, and to close herself off, and how he had lost her that way and had never known such excruciating pain. But now, after all this time, here she is, rocking in the darkness in which he, too, is rocking, in this steel screeching — multitonal, mounting and mounting, like an escalating feedback loop or like an insane fugue performed by an orchestra of metal birds. And then the screeching stops. And the lights are on.

… I don’t know exactly how or when it happened, but at some point I simply defined the life I was leading as a good one, which meant that anything I did that allowed me to continue living my good life was also good. And so I became afflicted with an especially perilous form of blindness.

Where I had once seen light and dark, black and white, red, yellow, orange, purple, I now saw only gray. Everything became muted, dim. I lost my ability to feel the pain of others or to be outraged. In order to believe that I lived in a good world, I had to believe that the whole rest of the world was no good — people especially — and that my only obligation was to care for my children, my family, the people I loved.

And so I used little truths and partial truths and sometimes big truths (my love for my children) to convince myself of the very big lie that I need feel no shame, that I was as close to virtuous as I could reasonably have expected to be.

I said yes to Mr. Jefferson and yes to evasions, lies and complicity. But I could have said no. No, you may not kiss me. No, I do not want your hands on my body. No, I owe you nothing. I don’t believe you. No, I don’t. I won’t. I don’t love you. No.

Had I adopted that policy, none of yesterday’s evils would have been averted, but I would not have been complicit in them, nor in any of the other evils from which I have profited over the last forty years.

No and no and no.

I might have had a purer soul….

James T. Callender is walking up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the president’s mansion — although “avenue” is an absurd euphemism for this dirt track passing through swamp and primeval forest, along which a carriage could not travel twenty feet without jolting over a boulder or an insufficiently excised tree stump. So, too, the name “city,” when applied to these half dozen unfinished and ill-designed Palladian imitations amid a scattering of shacks and swaybacked houses belonging to trappers and fishermen and to the benighted farmers who supposed this swampland might be made to flourish under their plows.

Almost exactly a year ago, Callender was martyred for his service to Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party when John Adams had him imprisoned under the Sedition Act for the crime of publishing the truth of Adams’s own villainy and the villainy of the party he serves. No one could have been happier than Callender himself when his efforts propelled Adams out of office and Thomas Jefferson into the presidency, and no one could have been more justified in the expectation that those efforts and his consequent martyrdom would be amply compensated for by the man who had derived the greatest benefit from them. But this expectation has been revealed to have little more validity than the fantastical notion that this mosquito-infested wilderness through which he is walking might be the august capital city of a great nation.