Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Nora is only twelve, and as she speaks, she keeps her eyes on the ground. “Mrs. Mickel told me to tell you,” she says, “that she is sorry, but she will no longer be able to serve you in her store.” After a moment of silence, the girl looks up with her almost-Oriental, coffee-brown eyes. “I’m sure she doesn’t mean it,” she says. A nervous smile flashes across her face, and then a wince of sorrow and shame.

Sally Hemings’s only response to the message is to ask whether Nora thinks it would be possible to make her way to Market Street via mewses and alleys.

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, miss,” says the girl, and Sally Hemings decides to give it a try.

There is nothing in her head. Nothing in her heart. She walks because she has nothing to do. Sometimes she turns in a circle, like a leaf in a breeze, watching a sky full of clouds swirl around her head. Sometimes the yellow fields, buzzing with cicadas, seem to rise and fall as she breathes. We pity her. She thinks her fancies are her real, true life. She thinks she is free. We know that nothing good is ever given, only taken. We know that a master’s promises are equal to a snake’s hiss. We know that forgiveness is surrender and that the road to freedom runs through hate.

It is normal for Thomas Jefferson to have up to twenty visitors a day when he is at Monticello, but ever since the publication of Callender’s articles, his visitors have numbered fifty or more, with many of them not actually wanting formal audiences but only to spot “the African Venus” and “Tom,” her supposed child. Every time Sally Hemings steps out of her cabin or the great house, she sees at least one person looking at her, sometimes two or three and, once, a small crowd. So far no one has actually approached or called out to her, but often people point or whisper into one another’s ear, and she worries that it is only a matter of time before she is accosted once more, as she was in Charlottesville, or that something worse will happen to her or her children.

When there is no letup in the number of visitors after a week, Thomas Jefferson decides to send Sally Hemings to Poplar Forest, the most distant of his plantations, eighty-three miles southwest of Monticello. He tells her that she will be “more comfortable” there while the scandal is still raging. Not only do very few people know that he owns the property, it is practically on the frontier. Nobody there has much interest in Federalist newspapers, or in any other form of printed matter, so she is far less likely to be troubled by curiosity seekers.

She leaves the following morning, as soon as there is enough light for Tom Shackelford to see the road. In her arms she holds sixteen-month-old Harriet. And seated at her side is nine-year-old Evelina, Harriet’s “nurse.” Beverly has stayed behind with his grandmother. The journey takes three days. They spend the first night lying on a tarpaulin underneath the carriage and the second in the servants’ quarters behind Flood’s tavern in Appomattox. They arrive at Poplar Forest just before sundown, and Tom Shackelford heads back to Monticello before the sun has risen the following morning.

There is no great house at Poplar Forest, only the former steward’s cottage, built half a century earlier by Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law when the plantation was an acre of stumps in an interminable forest at the edge of the known world. The present steward, Mr. Chambliss, built himself a brick house on a small rise, from which he can survey most of the plantation, and so the original house, unoccupied eleven or more months out of the year, is neglected and moldering. Its roof leaks, and many of its clapboards, especially on the southern side, are paintless and weathered gray. Thomas Jefferson recently had the inside painted teal, sage green and liver pink, but the furnishings are all boxy and rough-hewn — built by farmers rather than a joiner. The whole house smells of termites and mice, and the sheets on the beds feel moist against the skin and have the acrid tang of mildew.

There are no servants living in the house, but Mr. Chambliss sends his cook, Mag, in the mornings to make dinner, portions of which Sally Hemings saves for that night’s supper and the following morning’s breakfast. Every couple of days, Jemma comes to dust and otherwise make sure the house is, as she puts it, “in fine shape for Mr. Jefferson”—which phrase is only one of the many ways by which she expresses her resentment at having to serve Sally Hemings and her daughter (though not Evelina) as if they were white. Mag feels the same way, as do all of the other Negroes with whom Sally Hemings comes into contact at Poplar Forest. The worst are the field laborers, who never speak to her when she encounters them on her walks but only cast her sullen gazes and seem to be awaiting with a preternatural patience for the first opportunity to take revenge upon her for her privilege. She is lonely most of the day and frightened all of the night. Every creak and thump in the darkness sends her bolt upright in bed, her whole body trilling with the cold electricity of fear.

She has met Mr. Chambliss several times at Monticello, where he struck her merely as bland and unintelligent, and embarrassingly deferential to Thomas Jefferson. Here, however, he is not the least bit deferential, but self-possessed to the point of being imperious. His every motion seems calculated, and his expressions emerge only gradually on his face, as if they are rising from primordial depths. He smiles a lot, but with his eyes averted, and he seems always to be in the process of executing some secret plan that he believes is going exceptionally well. He is unfailingly polite in a superficial sense — he even addresses her as “Mrs.” Hemings — but every now and then she catches him looking at her, and she can see in his eyes not only that he has mentally removed every stitch of clothing from her body but that he wants her to know he is relishing everything he sees.

The servants and laborers never meet his eye when he gives orders but listen with their heads bent and don’t even glance at his back when he walks away. They do exchange weighty glances with one another, however, and they sometimes lift their eyes to Sally Hemings. Then they just do what they were told.

On their second day at Poplar Forest, when she and the children take a shortcut behind the barns on their way to a duck pond, she spots a post with a rope lashed around it just about as high as a man might reach, with the two lengths of the rope dangling down about a yard on one side of the post. They are twisted and kinked in a way that indicates they have been knotted many times. The lower half of the post is stained a brownish black with what can only be blood. As soon as she understands what, in fact, this post is, she picks up toddling Harriet and grabs Evelina by the hand. “Where are we going?” the older girl says in surprise. “I forgot something,” says Sally Hemings. “We have to go back. I have to get something.” Once they are all in the house, she slams and locks the door and tells Evelina that she is too tired to go to the pond. Maybe they will go another day.

She walks. We watch her from the fields, our hands salty, yellowed and stinging from tobacco leaves. We watch her as we swing picks along the road. She walks because she has nothing to do. She holds down her straw hat against the wind, so that she might preserve her precious whiteness. Her step is light. She sings. She is a bauble. She believes that she lives outside the world created by the cowskin, but nothing she believes is true.

In this world — our world — everything is simple. The cowskin is our Devil. The cowskin uses our fear to teach us helplessness. The cowskin uses our rage to teach us silence. It eats our souls as it eats our flesh. It blends our sweat with our tears and causes our blood to run in rivers. And yet it gives us a justice unknown to the white man. It teaches us that in a world of evil, the evil in our hearts is innocence. It tells us that we are angels because we live in hell. We are beatified by pain. We are beatified by hate. Hate is our hope. Even as our lives drip into the dust, we have entered the Promised Land.