Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

At last she leads him out onto a steel balcony with a riveted floor, from the center of which rises something like a wagon wheel, but made entirely out of brass. He knows that if he can only turn this wheel, the machine will stop; he will be able to leave. But the wheel is jammed. He cannot budge it. Neither left nor right.

“Let me try,” says Sally Hemings, and with a single finger she sets the wheel spinning. Her machine lurches, then rises into the air.

“What are you doing?” Thomas Jefferson asks.

“I don’t know,” she replies, the ever-quickening wind whipping her hair straight back behind her head. “I don’t know why any of this is happening.”

She is smiling. Her storm gray eyes are radiant with delight.

… I have had to pace the room for some minutes in order that I might summon the resolution to finally write about Mr. Jefferson. My head is throbbing, I feel bile rising in my throat and my fingers are cold with sweat. This man is the author of the evil that has ruined the lives of so many good people. It is not possible to forgive him. Nor can I forgive myself. He is my shame, and yet—

I don’t know what to say.

My mother’s words come to me: “Well, he is a man, but the Lord didn’t make many men as fine as Mr. Jefferson.”

The problem is that I cannot conceive of Mr. Jefferson as only one man. So many of the memories I have of him are entirely incompatible with the man I know him to be. And perhaps this is only the mirror image of the way I see myself. Never once did I imagine myself to be evil, and yet I have lived a life in which I can no longer discover the girl who once looked back at me from every mirror with such artless contentment….

The movie seems to go on forever. Thomas Jefferson wants to leave, but he is in the middle of a row in the middle of a crowded theater, and James and Dolley Madison are seated on either side of him, their expressions somewhere between stupefaction and worship, as they each stare at the wall where brilliant colors swirl and pool and are replaced every instant by other colors or by utter blackness, which, in an instant, explodes into light again — and into noise!

The noise is staggering. Voices thunder and wail. Tiny sounds — chains jingling on a wagon’s undercarriage, dry leaves scraping across a slate roof — are like cannonades and banshee shrieks piercing the skull from ear to ear. And the music! This must be what music would sound like to a mouse trapped inside the reverberation chamber of his violin.

Thomas Jefferson slumps in his seat and wants to slide all the way to the floor. He wonders if, in fact, it would be possible to escape the room by crawling between the seats.

After a long period of looming, booming and frenzied flashing, as well as yet more shockingly intimate behavior on the part of the actors (do they know they are being watched? can they see him in the audience? — Thomas Jefferson finds everything related to these scenes profoundly disconcerting), all at once he is watching a far more static scene, set in a huge room — illuminated, it would seem, only by a full moon — in which the man in the copper-colored wig (now purple) is writing the Declaration to the accompaniment of a stately movement from a concerto grosso by Corelli. This is not so bad, except that Thomas Jefferson’s many days and nights of solitary labor all seem to take place within a single moment and in a room that gradually fills with people, who look over his shoulder as he writes, then cheer when he is done. Also the hand sliding so glibly across the page never hesitates, never crosses out a word and writes in the perfect script of Timothy Matlack.

Jefferson proposed to me to make the draft. I said, “I will not,” “You should do it.” “Oh! no.” “Why will you not? You ought to do it.” “I will not.” “Why?” “Reasons enough.” “What can be your reasons?” “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.” “Well,” said Jefferson, “if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.” “Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.”

A meeting we accordingly had, and conned the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose. .

We reported it to the committee of five. It was read, and I do not remember that Franklin or Sherman criticized anything. We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson’s handwriting, as he first drew it. Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was. I have long wondered that the original draft had not been published. I suppose the reason is the vehement philippic against Negro slavery.

— John Adams to Timothy Pickering

1822

… In my mother’s opinion, all white people — the males especially — were lazy, irritable, corrupt and foolish children whom we, like so many Brother Rabbits, were constantly outsmarting — but Mr. Jefferson was the exception. “He’s the smartest man who ever lived,” she used to tell me. “He’s read every book ever written and knows how everything works — and if he doesn’t know, he can figure it out.” And then, of course, he was famous — so much so that, as she put it, “When he walks down the street in Philadelphia, everybody clears out of his way”—an image that when I was a little girl did a good deal more to confirm my fear of Mr. Jefferson than to help me share her veneration.

My mother, however, had only the most indefinite idea of what Mr. Jefferson had done to become so famous — and she wasn’t alone. I remember her telling my sister Mary that he was the king of Virginia and Mary saying, “No, he’s the burgess. General Washington is the king.” My brother Bobby was Mr. Jefferson’s body servant in those days, and he once told us that Mr. Jefferson was a “delegate” and a “governor,” but I had no idea what either of these words meant, and Bobby was unable to explain them in a way that made sense to me or, I think, to anyone else in our family.

One thing that everyone at Monticello knew very well, however, was that Mr. Jefferson was important. We knew that he was written about in the newspapers almost every day and that he was visited by other important men, like General Washington and Mr. Madison. Elegant carriages were always pulling up in front of the great house, and they were filled with men and women dressed in silks and lace and wearing shoes so highly polished they gleamed like the sun on water. Some of these people came from as far away as Boston and New York, and they were clearly thrilled to be in the presence of our master, some so thrilled they were reduced to blushing and stuttering. I remember once helping my mother serve water to guests at a particularly large dinner party and seeing a woman so entranced by what Mr. Jefferson was saying that she kept her full fork hovering over her plate the entire time it took me to make a circuit of the table.

And even we servants shared a small portion of our master’s fame. On Sundays when we were allowed to go into town for prayer meetings or to sell our livestock and the products of our gardens, men, women and children would point at us and stare. They’d ask in low, hushed voices, “You’re Mr. Jefferson’s people, aren’t you?” They’d want to know what he was like or how it felt to work for such a man.