Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

While Evelina was outside washing the soiled clouts, Sally Hemings paced between the parlor and the dining room, rocking her little girl in her arms, singing to her, kissing her, stopping every now and then to see if she would eat from bowl or breast — but nothing helped. And then there came a moment when yet another image of her daughter being ripped from her arms flashed into Sally Hemings’s mind, but this time, instead of paralytic despair, the image filled her with such terrific rage at the relentless cruelty and injustice of this life that it seemed to her there was no purpose in living, that all the care and work she lavished on her daughter was a sham and that, in fact, the greatest service she could do the little girl would be to smash her skull against the stone fireplace — and as this notion came to seem not a mere supposition but an active impulse taking control of her arms and hands and heart, Sally Hemings burst sobbing out the door, her baby in her arms. She ran around the side of the house to where Evelina was hanging the newly washed clouts on a clothesline. “I am an awful mother!” she said, thrusting Harriet into the girl’s arms, saying, “I have to go. I’ll be back. But I have to go — now!”

She strode away from the house along the wooded bank of the stream where Evelina had been doing her washing. She passed between several fields, in one of which she could just make out the bent backs and the rough, sad songs of the laborers. When, at last, the stream turned southward along the edge of a wooded bluff, she clambered to the top and entered an old-growth forest where, beneath stout and lofty maples, beeches and oaks, the passage was relatively easy.

This is where she has been walking for half an hour. This is where she has heard the wind seething in the treetops and the cries of birds and where she has begun to feel that the worst of her fears about Thomas Jefferson are exactly as unsupported by fact as the most tender of her hopes. She knows nothing , neither good nor bad. Nothing at all. And so, for the time being at least, her inescapable ignorance seems to be her only problem, the one that she must struggle with and learn how to manage.

Eventually she comes to a trail leading more or less in the direction she has already been going: west, she thinks, toward the unmapped wilderness beyond everything she has ever heard of. The trail is narrow but well trodden. She can feel how it has been worn into the forest floor by centuries of foot traffic, even in those places where it is beginning to be overgrown. This must be an Indian trail, she thinks, here since creation. If she follows it long enough, perhaps she will come to an Indian village, or to a whole country of Indians, where there are no white people at all and no colored. Maybe that would be a better place for her and her children. Maybe that would be a place where they might belong.

She is just beginning to worry about having spent so much time away from Harriet — an hour at least — when there is a furious hissing in the uppermost leaves, the tall boughs around her begin to creak and groan and a current of dank air cools her cheeks and presses her gown against her body. It is still sunny straight overhead, but in the direction she is walking, a part of the sky has gone storm dark.

She wheels around and hurries back down the path, hoping that the sky will be slow in turning, that maybe only clouds will come or that, at the very least, the rain will hold off until she has reached the house. But the sunbeams have already withdrawn from the trees. The winds grow ever more fierce. The light dims, grows dusk gray, then a strangely luminous green. All at once there is a fierce rattling at the tops of the trees, and then huge drops begin to strike her shoulders, cheeks and hands.

The problem is that Sally Hemings did not take note of the place where she turned onto the trail and thus doesn’t know where she ought to leave it so that she might make her way to the crest of the bluff and then home along the stream. When, at last, she strikes out on impulse into the trackless forest, she realizes after less than a minute that nothing around her is familiar, that she has no idea where she is going.

It is another two hours before, clothes frigid cold and hanging heavily off her body, she walks out of a field and onto the drive up to the house. For most of the last hour, she has been hoping that all of the cold, confusion and fear she has endured will be rewarded by the sight of Thomas Jefferson’s landau at the house and Peter standing at the doorway under an umbrella, watching for her.

But of course there is no landau, no horses, no brother. The drive is a river through which she must splash up to her ankles to get into the house.

Once inside, though, she sees that Evelina has lit the lamps and managed to get a good fire going — in front of which she has draped a row of Harriet’s clouts across a bench to dry. And the tiny girl herself is toddling toward her mother in nothing but a shirt, both arms upraised. “Mammy! Mammy! Mammy!”

Wet as she is, Sally Hemings scoops her daughter into her arms and covers her with kisses, the little girl’s giggles escalating from throaty glugs to breathless clicks and cackles. As she carries Harriet toward the fire, the child tugs at the neck of her gown, and so Sally Hemings undoes her bodice and slips her cold, wet nipple into her daughter’s warm and hungry mouth.

We pity her because she believes in the virtue of white people. Or because she wants to believe. Or because she is lying to herself and she doesn’t know she is lying. Or because she is lying to the world and she thinks that she is better than everyone in it. Or because she has become blind to insults and indignity and has learned to celebrate small kindnesses. Or because she worries that she is actually as incompetent and hideous and stupid as her master believes she is. Or because she, too, believes what her master believes. Or because she believes that she is white even though her master treats her as if she is black. Or because she believes that she is better than black even if she is not as good as white. Or because she has learned to feel cuffs as kisses and hear insults as sweet nothings. Or because she believes she is evil and so deserves her enslavement. Or her punishment. Or because she believes that, having turned her back on her people, she is undeserving of forgiveness. And we pity her even if she is right to believe she cannot be forgiven. We pity her because whatever she may think or feel or have done, she is one of us — a Negro and a human being. We pity her because she has become a stranger to herself, because she has lost her soul.

Hours later Sally Hemings is awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of someone moving downstairs. She slides out of the bed where Harriet and Evelina are both filling the air with their rustling snores and picks up the broken table leg she placed in the corner days ago for use as a weapon.

As she feels her way along the edge of the bed, through the darkness, toward the door, she can hear almost nothing above the urgent thudding of her own heart, and there is a moment during which she imagines that there is no one in the house, that she only dreamed those sounds or that they were only the product of old wood shrinking as it cools. But then she hears the curt rumble of a male grunt and the sound of something heavy hitting the floor, followed by the light tread of what is clearly a boot-shod foot.

She pushes her door against its jamb, so that she might lift the latch silently, but as she pulls the door open, a hinge squeaks and silence falls at the bottom of the stairs. She freezes for a long moment. There is another thump, followed by footsteps moving rapidly across the parlor and into the dining room. As she crosses to the top of the stairs, she sees an ocher luminosity wavering on the wall in the entryway.