Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

— Madison Hemings

“Life Among the Lowly, No. 1”

Pike County (Ohio) Republican

March 13, 1873

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson are dead. The world they inhabit is the world in which they lived, except that they are all alone and things don’t seem connected in the usual way. The trees, for example, will be bare one instant, then lush and August green the next, and then outlined with snow, and then hung with whispering, copper-colored leaves. Or it will be a brilliant morning and then — in an instant — a star-crowded midnight. Or Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson will be smooth-cheeked and avid-eyed, then toothless and gray. Or they will be standing on the veranda, or in the kitchen, or on the lawn, or they will be strolling along the Rivanna, or amid meadows they don’t quite recognize — all within instants or hours (it is impossible to be sure which). But mostly they will be lying side by side in bed. It will be dark. Or it will be that slow moment when dawn becomes a blue possibility around the edges of the window curtains.

“I am not sure I like being dead,” says Sally Hemings.

Thomas Jefferson is silent a long time.

“I think I prefer it,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because there is so much to wonder at, so much to see. This is all so beautiful.” (They are in a rattling coach now, a procession of rust-orange mountains passing by its windows.) “And mysterious. Don’t you think so? But also it is only itself, so we can lose ourselves in it utterly. That’s the main thing, I think.”

Now it is Sally Hemings’s turn to be silent.

“I’m not sure I see what you mean,” she says.

“If there is nothing to hope for, or dread, or plan for, or mourn, if nothing we do or say can have any consequences, then there is nothing for us to think about except each individual moment as it happens. In an odd way, we are more alive now than we ever were when we were living.”

“But we are not alive. We are nothing. We are not actually even here.”

“I am seeing,” says Thomas Jefferson. “I am thinking. I am talking to you. So I am here.”

“But if you can do nothing, if nothing you do has any effect on the world, then from the point of view of the world you are nothing. You don’t exist.”

“Yes. Exactly. That’s what I enjoy most.”

“How can you say that? You devoted your entire life to changing the world. That was what you lived for. That was who you really were. And now you can’t be yourself anymore. There is no Thomas Jefferson. You are not him, and you never will be again.”

At first Thomas Jefferson seems to have a ready counterargument. He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. At last he sighs. “Yes,” he says. “That’s true. I do regret that aspect of it. But even so—”

Sally Hemings cuts him off. “You say you are in the world, but the world has changed several times since we began talking. So which world are you in? Or are you in any world at all? And which world am I in, for that matter? If I am not in the same world as you, then you may be talking, but you are only talking at me, not to me or with me. It is even possible that you are not with me at all. I may be somewhere else.”

“I am lying in bed with you,” says Thomas Jefferson. “We are both entirely undressed, and you are as beautiful as you have ever been. I am leaning on my elbow, looking down into your eyes. My thigh is across your thigh, and my foot rests between your feet. In a moment, perhaps, we will make love. But now we are only talking, and we could hardly be more content.”

Sally Hemings smiles, then sighs heavily.

“But what if we never make love?” she says. “Or what if we do make love but in the next instant everything changes and it turns out we have not made love at all? And what if it turns out that we have never said any of the things we are saying now and all of this never happened, even in our memories?”

“But now — in this solitary instant, at least — it is happening. Even if we never make love, now we are together in a moment in which we want to make love and in which we know that our lovemaking is imminent. This is a very good moment all by itself. Why should we need anything more?”

“But won’t it be a loss if we never do make love? Or if, all at once, we have no memory of having made love? Or even of being together? Or if, in an instant, we mean as little to each other as two people separated by a thousand years and a thousand miles?”

“It will only be a loss,” says Thomas Jefferson, “if we know what we have lost. And if we don’t, then each moment is only itself. It is absolutely pure.”

Account Book

1. While Thomas Jefferson was assiduous about listing all of his expenditures in his Memorandum Books, which he kept from the start of his law practice in 1767 until his death, he was far less assiduous about totaling up those expenditures against his income, and so, until very late in life, and despite having to pay off the occasional pressing loan from a bank, he operated on the assumption that he was a wealthy man, without serious financial worries.

2. At the time of his death, he was $107,000 in debt, which would amount to approximately $2.4 million in today’s money. The majority of his debt was inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles, who, like most southern plantation owners, had borrowed heavily from British banks and whose debt was unaffected by the Revolution.

3. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson’s salary as president was $25,000, and he spent $33,636.44—including $3,100 for a new carriage and horses that he felt were suitable for the dignity of his new office, and $2,797.38 for wine.

4. In 1815, partially in an attempt to diminish his debt, he sold his collection of 6,847 books to the Library of Congress to replace the 3,000 books burned by the British during the War of 1812. He received $23,950.

5. In 1798 Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish general who served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, drew up a will leaving Thomas Jefferson $20,000 to purchase the freedom of slaves (his own and others) and buy them land. The will was hotly contested by Kościuszko’s Polish family when he died in 1817 (and, indeed, the family ultimately won their suit), but even had the money gone to Thomas Jefferson, it would have been only enough to free roughly thirty slaves, which would have meant a 23 percent cut in Monticello’s labor force at a time when Thomas Jefferson already owed in excess of $80,000—a state of affairs that may well have entered into his decision not to claim the bequest.

6. In 1818 Thomas Jefferson guaranteed a loan of $20,000 to Wilson Cary Nicholas, a former governor of Virginia, who subsequently defaulted on his debt, leaving Thomas Jefferson responsible for that money, too, the interest payments on which amounted to $1,200 per year.

Often they are bored, in the manner of misty rain under pale cloud light, or of after-dinner whist-table restlessness, or of a head cold that makes every possibility seem pointless and squalid. Other times Thomas Jefferson might come upon Sally Hemings, momentarily looking up from her sewing, her face in that lost vacancy that so often comes over it when she is thinking, and he will ache with such tenderness that he will want to sweep her into his arms and cover her neck with kisses, even though the ever-vigilant Martha is eyeing him ruefully from her chair by the fire. Or Sally Hemings will look away from him as a means of controlling her trembling rage as he tells her yet again that the world will not allow him to love her openly and therefore that she should not expect him to show his love, and finally she will turn to him and say, “What makes you think I even want your love, Mr. Jefferson?” Or he will say, “How I wish that we could marry!” and she will put her hand on top of his and say, “Don’t,” or she will say, “But we are married!” and then feel a knot of humiliation in her chest. Or they will be walking beside a lake on an autumn morning and, with a sound like a gigantic sigh, a great blue heron will lift out of the reeds and, gathering masses of air under its huge, wafting wings, it will arc above its own reflection, then soar over the tops of the trees, and she will cry out, “Oh, Tom, look! Isn’t that so beautiful! Isn’t that the most magnificent bird!” Or they will be naked together in the bed of the lodge, and they will be gasping, tasting each other’s sweat, and each will pour through the body of the other like a wild river. Or she will be wound up tightly in the sheets, sulking, and he will be out on the porch with a headache, thinking of the farmer in Amherst who told him that when his slave mistresses get to be too much trouble, he just sells them cheap. Or she will be looking at his brown teeth, his folded neck, the vertical grooves in his cheeks, and she will be think, This is an old body. This is a body that is wearing down, getting uglier every day. Or she will be lying with her head on his shoulder, listening to the rumble inside his chest as he tells her about the letter he wrote that morning to Napoleon, and she will be thinking, How is it possible that this man was just inside my body, this man who will never be forgotten as long as there are men and women walking this earth?