Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

It astounds Sally Hemings that Thomas Jefferson could ever imagine that she might be “more comfortable” under the sway of Mr. Chambliss. Sometimes she thinks this just another instance of how incompletely he comprehends the facts of his own existence. He cannot find his spectacles even when they are resting on top of his own head. He can pick up a cup of coffee that has sat on his desk for an hour or more and be genuinely perplexed that it is cold. It has often seemed to her that Thomas Jefferson’s brain is so labyrinthine that ordinary human understanding simply gets lost in it.

Yet with every day she spends at Poplar Forest, she asks herself more frequently if the comfort he was talking about was not hers at all but only his own.

As soon as she returned from her awful trip to Charlottesville, she asked Thomas Jefferson to show her the newspaper articles about him and her. “They’re just a lot of nonsense,” he told her. “There’s no need to trouble yourself over them.”

“Don’t I have a right to see what’s been said about me?”

His lips crumpled dubiously. “Really. There’s no need.”

“You’ve read them,” she said. “So why shouldn’t I?”

For a moment he seemed about to argue. Then he just shrugged and pulled a thick handful of newspapers from a drawer in his desk. “You can burn these when you’re done with them,” he said. “Better yet, tear them up and put them in the privies.”

From the newspapers she learned all the nasty and absurd things that had been said about her (among which was a cruel poem by John Quincy Adams, who, like his father had been so kind to her when she was in London), but she also learned that people were saying much more cruel things about Thomas Jefferson. He was being called a disgrace to the nation, an offense to public decency and a traitor to his race; people said that he should be impeached, tarred and feathered, driven out of Washington or locked in the madhouse at Williamsburg.

“I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble,” she said, flinging the last of the newspapers onto the table. When he only met her words with the buckled brows of incomprehension, she added in a more neutral voice, “How are you going to deal with all this?”

He puffed his lips disdainfully. “It’s nothing. It will pass.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. It was impossible for her to believe that such threats — and the outrage that inspired them — would not cause him considerable political damage, to the point where he might have to retire from the presidency. The outrage in some of the editorials and letters was so ferocious that she could imagine one of his enraged critics challenging him to a duel, or even just shooting him in the street. He had already received death threats, after all, and even had to travel around Washington with an armed guard for a whole week the previous April. Why should Callender’s articles not inspire more of such murderous intentions?

“I’m not going to worry until I have reason.” He smiled wryly and flicked his hand as if chasing away a fly. But then he became thoughtful. “We shall see what transpires.”

The next day he told her about his plan to make her “more comfortable.” He also told her that he, too, needed “a little peace and relaxation” before returning to Washington and so would be joining her after five days.

The prospect of soon having Thomas Jefferson at her side has been her one consolation during all her loneliness and anxiety at Poplar Forest. She waits for him in happy agitation the whole of the fifth day. But by nightfall he still hasn’t arrived, nor does he arrive the next day or the one after, and he sends her no word of explanation. As time passes, she finds herself increasingly defenseless against her worst fantasies: that Thomas Jefferson sent her to this foul and frightening place not just to hide her away but to get rid of her once and for all; or that Mr. Chambliss has already received instructions to set her to work in the field, where she, too, might become stooped and glowering and possessed of only one hope: revenge; or that Thomas Jefferson simply told Mr. Chambliss to sell her to whoever would be willing to pay for her; or that he should feel free to use her however he pleases.

Such grim possibilities come to her at all hours of the day, but she is generally able to quell them by devoting herself to little Harriet or by reading (she brought half a dozen books with her from Monticello, including Locke’s Conduct of the Mind and a translation of Fénelon’s Adventures of Telemachus ). But in the night her fantasies arrive as implacable certainty, and she waits, sweat-glossed and with a pounding heart, for the door to fly open and for Mr. Chambliss to drag her screaming down the stairs and shackle her into the back of a wagon that will take her away from everything she loves and all that she has ever known.

Of all the damsels on the green,

On mountain, or in valley,

A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,

As Monticellian Sally.

Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?

What wife were half so handy?

To breed a flock of slaves for stock,

A blackamoor’s the dandy.

— John Quincy Adams

She dances on a dust cloud, believing herself outside the evil. We pity her. She whirls, hand atop her head, believing she escapes black by being white and white by being black. But there is no escape, and nothing outside the evil. Not one thing. The white people know this — the real white people — but they know it only in secret. They know it in their nightmares and in their never-ending fear. They know it in their belief that all men are born evil and that only the cowskin makes them good. And the gun. And the jail cell. They know it in the cowskin’s bitter whistle and in the snap of splitting flesh. And they know it most of all in their churches, where love-your-enemy incinerates in hellfire.

It is the fourth day after the one on which Thomas Jefferson promised to arrive, and Sally Hemings is alone among trees. Sunbeams angle between slender branches and long trunks, and the air is cool and still where she walks — though from time to time there is a seething in the treetops. This is good , she tells herself. This is helping. Being immersed in the beautiful and the familiar is giving her a measure of hope. And strength.

She has been walking for half an hour and will walk an hour more. She left the house in a frenzy of anger and shame, afraid of how close she had come to doing something horrific.

Harriet had awakened, crying plaintively, every ten minutes all night. She would suckle herself back to sleep but would continue to twitch and grimace and groan, until finally her crying would start all over again. Her clout had to be changed three times during the night. The first time Sally Hemings got Evelina to do it, but after midnight it was more trouble to wake the girl than to change the clouts herself. It was only just before dawn that Harriet finally sank into a sound sleep, but by that time Sally Hemings was hot-eyed, with humming nerves and an endless stream of ghastly and sordid realizations flooding her mind.

Harriet slept later than usual but was awake by eight, and thereafter the day was the same as the night: She would suckle without being satisfied and refused to swallow even a mouthful of solid food. Over and over she would fill her clout with watery muck, which, more often than not, would leak onto the floor or the bed or wherever she happened to be sitting or lying, including, one time, Sally Hemings’s lap. Angry red pimples came up on the delicate folds between her legs — but she only shrieked when her mother tried to salve them with melted butter.