Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Big enough to fly Hurly?” Hurly, a beagle, used to belong to Betty Hemings, and Beverly has been caring for him during the year since his grandmother died.

“No, Hurly’s too heavy, I think.”

“A mouse?”

“Maybe a beetle,” says Thomas Jefferson.

He sends Beverly to his Uncle John for a bit of pine glue, and crosses the lawn to his own chambers to look for a silk scarf and a sheet of vellum. By the time Beverly returns with the glue, Thomas Jefferson has cut the vellum into strips. He glues one strip into a ring and makes a small canoe of the others. Then he uses the glue to attach the four corners of the scarf to the ring and then to attach the edges of the scarf to themselves so that they form a sort of sack. And lastly he dangles the canoe from the bottom of the ring on four threads.

They have finished making the ballon by dinner but have to wait until the afternoon to start a twig fire in the brickyard to one side of the kiln. Thomas Jefferson places two pebbles in the canoe to serve as ballast. Beverly does, in fact, manage to trap a beetle, but the only way to keep the insect from immediately crawling out of the canoe would be to kill it, and father and son agree that launching a dead beetle would be entirely beside the point.

When at last the fire is sufficiently hot and low, Thomas Jefferson holds the ballon upside down and grips the lowest point of the scarf between his thumb and forefinger. He carefully lifts the scarf so that the ring and the canoe swing to the bottom, and then he gently draws the whole contraption over the fire, instructing Beverly to clip the vellum ring between two Y-shaped sticks. As soon as the scarf begins to inflate, Thomas Jefferson releases his grip on the top, and he and Beverly are equally excited when the scarf defies gravity and remains aloft.

It takes no more than fifteen seconds for the scarf to completely inflate, and then, at the count of three, Beverly pulls aside the Y-shaped sticks and the ballon shoots straight into the air. It doesn’t get more than ten feet above the ground, however, before a breeze causes it to lurch onto its side and drop like a shot duck, straight to the earth, narrowly missing Beverly as he dodges to one side.

He cries out in disappointment, then hangs his head. “I wanted it to fly over the trees,” he says.

“Next time,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“No. It will never work.”

“Nonsense!” Thomas Jefferson gives Beverly an encouraging pat, but the boy only shrugs his hand away. Tears sparkle in the corners of his eyes.

“We didn’t have enough ballast,” says Thomas Jefferson. “If we’d put in another pebble, it would have gone up straight. Let’s give it another try.”

“No,” says Beverly. “It will never work. I can tell.” He starts to walk away.

Mystified by the sudden change in Beverly’s mood, Thomas Jefferson says, “I brought plans for the ballon your mother and I saw in Paris back with me. They must be in a trunk somewhere. If I can find them, I’ll show them to you.”

Beverly looks around at his father but doesn’t say anything.

“Perhaps one day,” Thomas Jefferson continues, “we can construct a real ballon together — a big one! Maybe even bigger than le Comte de Toytot’s! I’ll bet the winds could carry us all the way to Charlottesville. Perhaps we could even fly as far as Washington. Wouldn’t President Madison be surprised if we were to drop out of the sky and visit him!”

Beverly smiles weakly, then says, “I have to go.”

As the boy walks in the direction of his mother’s cabin, Thomas Jefferson bends and picks up the fallen ballon. He wants to put a third pebble into the canoe and make another attempt — but not on his own. He holds the top of the ballon between his thumb and forefinger, and as Beverly disappears into his mother’s door, Thomas Jefferson turns and carries the ballon to his own chambers.

Perhaps the boy will feel differently tomorrow.

In 1815 Francis C. Gray, a lawyer, asked how many generations of intermarriage with whites would it take for the offspring of a mulatto family to be considered white, and Thomas Jefferson replied by letter: “Our canon considers two crosses with pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of negro blood.” If we consider the relationship of Betty Hemings’s mother, Parthenia, with Captain Hemings as the first “crossing” and Betty’s own relationship with John Wayles as the second, then, by this calculus, Thomas Jefferson understood that his children with Sally Hemings more than qualified as “white.”

As a master Jefferson was kind and indulgent. Under his management his slaves were seldom punished, except for stealing and fighting. They were tried for any offense as at court and allowed to make their own defense. The slave children were nursed until they were three years old, and left with their parents until thirteen. They were then sent to the overseers’ wives to learn trades. Every male child’s father received $5 at its birth.

Jefferson was a man of sober habits, although his cellars were stocked with wines. No one ever saw him under the influence of liquor. His servants about the house were tasked. If you did your task well you were rewarded; if not, punished. Mrs. Randolph would not let any of the young ladies go anywhere with gentlemen with the exception of their brothers, unless a colored servant accompanied them.

— The Reverend Peter Fossett

“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

New York Sunday World

January 30, 1898

… Mr. Jeff allowed Joey to go into the stable, but only long enough to embrace Edy, tell her of the success of his plans and give her the oatcakes. Afterward, when Joey and I sat shoulder to shoulder on the mounting block just outside the stable, he told me he wasn’t sure of the success of his plans. “I don’t trust white people anymore,” he said. “Not a one of them thinks a promise to a nigger is a real promise. That Mr. Jones especially. He was just like Mr. Jeff, saying, ‘My heart is breaking. I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything I can.’ But I saw it in his eyes — all he was thinking was he was gonna get some niggers cheap.”

Cheap because Mr. Jeff had told us that he would cut off the bidding early on our family members so that whoever had promised us to buy them would pay the lowest possible price. “Virtue never flourishes so well,” he told me, “as when it coincides with monetary reward.” This had seemed a wise strategy at the time, but now I wondered if the reward wouldn’t undermine the virtue.

“No!” Joey cried, as if he had read my thoughts. His voice wavering, on the verge of breaking into a sob, he continued, “I’ve got to stop thinking like that. Mr. Jeff made me a promise. I’ve got to trust him. I’ve got to have faith.”

My own anxiety and sorrow having reduced me to something close to paralytic numbness, I could only answer Joey by giving his hand a squeeze. If I spoke a single word, I would burst into tears.

The “viewing” began at eight o’clock; the yard around the stable and the whole of the lawn in front of the great house had filled with wagons and carriages. A crowd of forty or fifty white people — mainly men — had gathered in front of the open stable door, and when Mr. Jeff gave the word, they filed into the stable one by one. I had never seen a slave auction, so I had no clear idea of what actually happened at a viewing.

Despite the cold, Mr. Jeff told the slaves to remove their cloaks, coats and shawls so the “visitors” could get “a better look.” And look they did, at all of these dear men, women and children, as if they were merely animals. Arms were squeezed, and thighs; stomachs were poked and grabbed. Fingers were stuck into open mouths to test the solidity of teeth. At one point a man with bushy black eyebrows and a yellowed periwig approached Joey’s second-eldest daughter, Patsy, a fine-featured and stately girl of sixteen, and yanked down the front of her shift, tearing it and exposing one of her breasts. Joey leapt off the mounting block and raced across the yard, shouting at the man in the periwig, “No! You can’t do that! Don’t you dare touch her!” He was caught and restrained by Mr. Henderson and Mr. Byrd just outside the makeshift fence, but he continued to shout, and the man who had accosted Patsy kept his back turned, as if he didn’t hear a word.