Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

I did nothing, of course.

Inside the stable a couple of women began to weep, but everyone else remained silent and still.

Over Mr. Jeff’s shoulder, I saw a man named Moak Mobley standing at the back of the crowd. Just from the set of his shoulders and jaw, I knew that every muscle in his strong body was rigid with fury, and the same rigidity was in his eyes, which were looking directly at me. He was well within the shadows, but there was such ferocity in his gaze that his eyes seemed alight with white fire.

Mr. Mobley had done me a grave disservice many, many years ago, and in all the time since, I had scrupulously avoided being in his presence and had kept my head averted when our paths had happened to cross. But now I looked straight into his eyes and hoped that the intensity of my rage would be a match to his. I wanted him to know that I, too, despised the shameless duplicity of Jeff Randolph and of all his family, whose protestations of sympathy, sorrow and regret were simply their way of hiding their damnable guilt from themselves. I wanted Mr. Mobley to know that with every fiber of my heart I desired nothing more than for all Negro people to rise up as one and rid themselves of white tyranny. But the longer I looked into his eyes, the more I came to feel that he did not see me at all, that his rage was so ferocious it had blinded him and that I was nothing before his eyes but a vapor, a ghost, a last crumbling atom of a world obliterated by hate….

Just before Thomas Jefferson stepped into the subway car where he spotted Sally Hemings, he was standing on the platform furiously scribbling into his journal. “Our very perceptions are works of art,” he wrote, “but also moral acts. This is because we are the ones who create the ‘facts’ we live by. Nothing we see, or hear, or believe is given to us by God, or is even real in any straightforward way. It is all our construction. All our responsibility. Therefore every perception, even the most fleeting, is a moment of truth, during which our souls are in peril. With every perception we create one particle of the world in which we live. As perception is added to perception, we forge the context in which we act, and therefore our perceptions dictate our acts, our morality, our selves, our souls. It is all our own doing. There is no one else to credit or blame. We wrestle, in every instant of our being, with perdition.” The train was coming into the station as he scribbled the last words — so rapidly he wasn’t sure he’d be able to read them when he opened his journal again. He slipped his pen into the journal’s spiral binding. There was a roar. A wind struck his face. He flung his journal into his backpack. The train had stopped. He stepped into the car and sat down. Then he recognized those high cheekbones, those narrow cloud gray eyes, that stricken expression that was only her face at rest (she was reading) and that long arc along her rib cage to her pelvis, every inch of which he could still feel beneath his fingers. Then the car filled with the screeches of mechanical birds. She put her book under her arm and her fingers in her ears. Darkness.

Thomas Jefferson is out for a morning walk when he sees Beverly sitting on the nailery porch, his elbow on his knee, his head resting on his hand, the other hand poking at the dust with a stick. He is ten years old and seems entirely unaware of his father’s approach or of anything other than the mark his stick is making in the dusty road.

Thomas Jefferson walks straight over to him and, planting his cane firmly between his own feet, calls out, “Good day, sir!”

Beverly lifts his head and, for half an instant, seems not to recognize the man he is looking at. “Good day,” he says softly, his face the picture of melancholy.

“Is anything the matter?” Thomas Jefferson asks.

The boy shrugs.

“What have you been doing?” asks Thomas Jefferson.

“Nothing.” He has made a line in the red dust, and now he crosses it. “Thinking.”

“About what?”

“Nothing.”

Thomas Jefferson does not know whether to be concerned or to reprimand the boy for his rudeness. In the end he says, “That doesn’t sound very interesting.”

“I was thinking about a lot of things.” Beverly looks up again and squints his eye against the brilliance of the hazy sky. “Mostly I was thinking about why I can’t fly.”

Thomas Jefferson makes a bemused grunt and, clutching his cane with both hands, hunches over a bit to be closer to the boy. “Did you reach a conclusion?”

Beverly seems to think his father has just asked a very stupid question. “I don’t have wings,” he said.

“Would you like to have wings?”

“I was thinking about that, too.”

“And?”

“Only if I could still have arms. I don’t think I’d like it if I only had wings. How would I eat? I’d have to have a beak, and I don’t want to have a beak.”

Thomas Jefferson laughs. “There are other ways that people can fly than on wings.”

The boy’s brow knits with both curiosity and skepticism.

“Come along with me,” says Thomas Jefferson, “and I will tell you about the time your mother and I saw a man fly.”

Beverly flings his stick to the side of the road and gets to his feet. As he walks beside his father on the road leading back to the great house, he hears the story of le Comte de Toytot’s ascent in the ballon. Thomas Jefferson has nearly finished the story when it becomes apparent to him that the boy does not believe him.

“It is true,” Thomas Jefferson says. “The ballon rose over the treetops, and the wind carried it for many miles before the count came down in a field.”

“Did he die?”

“No. The air in the ballon cooled very slowly, so he descended to the earth as gently as a feather. Though once he was on the ground, a big wind blew the ballon into a river.”

“Did he drown?”

Thomas Jefferson laughs. “No. He was already out of the ballon. Nothing bad happened to him at all.”

Beverly stops walking. He is looking at the sky, his eyebrows lifted and his brown eyes filled with an unabashed curiosity.

All at once Thomas Jefferson realizes that what he has been interpreting as skepticism is, in fact, so fierce a desire to believe that it makes Beverly think that what he is hearing is too good to be true, and in this conflict Thomas Jefferson recognizes the two most essential qualities of the philosophical mind: a passion for beautiful ideas coupled with an entirely rational understanding that one’s own passion does not make even the most sublimely beautiful idea true.

“But why does hot air make a man fly?” asks Beverly.

Thomas Jefferson explains about hot air being lighter than cool air.

“But when I breathe,” says Beverly, “my breath is hot, but I don’t go up in the air.”

Thomas Jefferson explains how the upward force of the hot air has to be greater than the downward force created by weight. “You’re too heavy,” he says at last.

“But why is hot air lighter than cold air?” asks Beverly.

“It has something to do with the motion,” says Thomas Jefferson. “You’ve seen the way the air ripples over the brick kiln or the way smoke billows as it rises.” He stops talking, because he realizes that what he is saying does not make sense and that he does not, in fact, know why hot air is lighter.

“The best way to understand how it works,” says Thomas Jefferson, “would be for us to make our own ballon. ”

The boy’s eyes and mouth both go round.

“Not a big one,” says Thomas Jefferson. “It would take much too long to build one that we could actually fly in. But perhaps we could build a small one before dinner.”