Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

But mostly this will be their life together:

She will pour him a glass of water and then pour one for herself, and then their throats will make glugging clicks while they both drink deeply, and when at last they take the glasses away from their mouths, they will both make crisp, satisfied sighs. Or they will both be reading on the porch, and she will be aware of the loud flap every time he turns a page, which sometimes will annoy her, other times not at all. Or seated diagonally across the table, he will tell her again, between bites, that he has little taste for lamb, and she will tell him again that lamb is her favorite among meats. Or they will be sitting on the slanted rock on the edge of the Rivanna. She will dive in and a moment later he will follow, and when their heads rise above the surface, they will already be several yards downstream, and they will continue to slide between the wooded riverbanks as they chat, trade splashes, swim.

I was born… at Monticello, Jefferson’s beautiful Virginia home, on June 6, 1815, just before Waterloo. Jefferson was an ideal master. He was a democrat in practice as well as theory, was opposed to the slave trade, tried to keep it out of the Territories beyond the Ohio river and was in favor of freeing the slaves in Virginia. In 1787 he introduced that famous “Jefferson proviso” in Congress, prohibiting slavery in all the Northwestern Territory, comprising the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. He had made all arrangements to free his slaves at his death by making three prizes of his property, &c.

— The Reverend Peter Fossett

“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

New York Sunday World

January 30, 1898

It is 1809, and the world is white, particulate, hurtling and loud. First Thomas Jefferson cannot feel his fingertips, then his feet fade away, and then the outside of his right leg. His lead horse leaves bloody tracks in the snow.

He has a boiled egg and two glasses of cider at the posthouse while his horses are being changed. The hostler stamps the snow off his boots, scattering white chunks across the gray floorboards. “Everything’s ready, Your Excellency.”

“No,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Don’t call me that.”

“Sorry,” says the hostler, his nose claret red, his cheeks the unsteady red of a not-quite-ripe peach. After half a breath’s hesitation, he adds, “President Jefferson,” and lowers his head.

Thomas Jefferson is not the president either. Not anymore. He will never return to Washington. One last swallow. The tankard comes down on the hacked tabletop with a satisfying bang. He thanks the hostler and the innkeeper.

The hostler follows Thomas Jefferson outside and watches from the porch as he is taken apart by the hurtling snow. The harness clinks, the muffled thumps of eight hooves grow ever quieter. Thomas Jefferson diminishes. Grays. His body fragments. And between the fragments is a fierce gray-white. The fragments whirl away. Vanish. First one. Then another. Then another and another. Then dozens at once. Finally there is nothing left but that gray snow, which is only white snow in the shadows of the numberless flakes hurtling sideways between the earth and that clean, clear emptiness above the clouds.

Account Book

1. After having refused to pursue Tadeusz Kościuszko’s bequest of $20,000 to buy his slaves freedom, Thomas Jefferson, desperate to pay off some of his debt, sold a large number of them to Francis Eppes, his daughter Maria’s only surviving child, for $3,500—an arrangement that kept the slaves within his own family and the slave families relatively intact.

2. On February 20, 1826, the Virginia state legislature agreed to allow Thomas Jefferson to pay his debts by disposing of most of his land and buildings — the Monticello great house excluded — through a lottery, which he expected would bring him $112,500. The plan was put aside when a committee of New Yorkers convinced his grandson, Jefferson Randolph, that more money could be raised through contributions from wealthy patriots throughout the country. Unfortunately, this effort returned only $16,500, though Thomas Jefferson never learned of this fact, and went to his grave believing that his grandson’s efforts to save the plantation had been successful.

3. After Thomas Jefferson’s death, Jeff Randolph attempted to hold the lottery after all, but people were far less interested in helping the Jefferson family than in helping Thomas Jefferson himself, and so the effort failed, leaving the family only one alternative.

4. On November 3, 1826, Jeff Randolph placed the following advertisement in local newspapers:

EXECUTOR’S SALE

Will be sold on the premises, on the first day of January, 1827, that well known and valuable estate called Poplar Forest, lying in the counties of Bedford and Campbell, the property of Thomas Jefferson, dec. within eight miles of Lynchburg and three of New London; also about 70 likely and valuable negroes, with stock, crops, &c. The terms of the sale will be accommodating and made known previous to the day.

On the fifteenth of January, at Monticello, in the county of Albemarle; the whole of the residue of the personal property of Thomas Jefferson, dec., consisting of 130 valuable negroes, stock, crop, &c. household and kitchen furniture. The attention of the public is earnestly invited to this property. The negroes are believed to be the most valuable for their number ever offered at one time in the State of Virginia….

… Joey touched my shoulder and said, “Aunt Sally,” his voice an urgent whisper. I turned around and saw a man walking toward the stable with two sets of shackles, one in his hand, the other draped over his shoulder. Two other men walked behind him. One of them had an antique musket slung through the crook of his arm; the other carried a coiled cowskin in his hand and had a pistol in his belt.

The sun had barely risen, and we were standing in front of the solitary open stable door. The opposite door had been nailed shut and was fortified by having a wagon backed against it. The wagon was also to serve as the auction platform, and Mr. Broomfield, the auctioneer, was standing on it issuing instructions concerning the arrangement of crates into a sort of staircase to make ascent and descent more expeditious. A rough fence, with a gate only wide enough to allow the passage of one person at a time, had been built inside the open stable door. And behind that fence stood all the good people whom I had known since they or I were born. A couple of babies were crying, but most everyone else was silent or murmuring in the lowest of voices. Even the children were silent, clutching at their mothers’ skirts or standing alone, eyes wide in infantile astonishment, hugging themselves against the cold.

An acrid tang, such as I had never smelled outside of a slaughterhouse, hung densely in the dim air inside the stable. Even before I fully apprehended the nature of that odor, I became wild with the desire to flee — not out of any fear for my person but simply because I knew that the world was about to be revealed to me as a miasma of agony and shame. Yet I could not, for I had promised Joey that I would stand by him — dear Joey, whom I had thought of as my own child during the years after his mother, my sister Mary, was sold to her husband, Colonel Thomas Bell. Joey and I were among the handful whom Mr. Jefferson had chosen to free — as were my own two boys, who were in Charlottesville with Joey’s mother, looking for a house in which they and I might live. Of my immediate family, only Critta and Peter were to be sold, but Miss Maria’s son had solemnly promised that he would buy and free Critta, and Danny Farley (who was Joey’s brother and who had already bought his own freedom) agreed to do the same for Peter. Joey had returned from Charlottesville only an hour earlier, having received similar promises regarding his wife and nine children, and he had come to the stable door to give his family the news, as well as a parcel of oatcakes made by Mary.