Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Mr. Jeff, however, had heard Joey, and, seeing Patsy clutching the ripped neck of her shift, he immediately walked up to the man, saying, “There is no cause for you to treat a young woman like that.”

“Don’t I have the right to see what I’m buying?” the man said.

“If you cannot treat a woman with due respect,” Mr. Jeff said, “I must ask you to leave this plantation immediately.”

“I thought this was an auction, not a cotillion!” the man replied, but he turned away, leaving Patsy staring fixedly up toward the rafters as if she could not bear to see anything around her.

I had trailed after Joey and was standing speechless beside him as he — motionless now, still gripped by the two overseers — watched fiercely while the man in the periwig went on to inspect another young woman.

White people had streamed in ever-greater numbers toward the stable after the commencement of the viewing. One of them, Mr. McFlynn, a cooper from Charlottesville, gaunt and near seventy, with a face the color of a butcher’s hands, had arrived just as Mr. Jeff had issued his ultimatum to the man in the periwig, and he had stopped in his tracks not five feet from where I was standing. He snorted at Mr. Jeff’s words, and when he saw that the man in the periwig was not going to put up a fight, he raised his arm in my direction and called out, “How much do you want for old master’s whore?” Mr. Jeff either didn’t hear him or didn’t want to dignify his question with a response, so Mr. McFlynn asked again, “How much for old master’s whore?”…

It is June 1816. Thomas Jefferson is seventy-three, and sleeping. Sally Hemings, in her white shift, having just picked up her gown from the chair next to the night table, stands beside the bed looking down. Gold tinges the blue trees outside the lodge windows, and the birds are filling the quiet with their squeaks, trills, burbles and peeps.

What she sees, not for the first time, is that Thomas Jefferson is elderly. His cheeks are like weathered canvas, sagging over the armature of his facial bones. That chin, which once had seemed the embodiment of wit and pride, now juts like a tree stump on a barren hilltop. This is how he will look when he is dead , Sally Hemings thinks.

His eyelids flutter and open. At first he doesn’t seem to see her, but then his coppery yellow eyes focus and his thin lips lift into a one-sided smile. His voice phlegm-cracked, he asks, “What are you up to, sweet nymph?”

“Shhh,” says Sally Hemings, who got out of bed with the intention of making a cup of tea and drinking it alone out on the porch.

Thomas Jefferson slides his hand off his belly and pats her side of the bed. Without a word, she pulls back the covers and slips under. He lifts his arm so that she might nestle against him, her head on his shoulder, and once she has done so, he lowers his arm and lets his fingers rest on the rim of her pelvis. “I’ve finally figured out what I am going to do with my freedom,” he tells her.

He no longer has any official responsibilities. He has been home from Washington for seven years.

“What now?” she says.

“A balloon!”

Sally Hemings sighs and idly circles her fingers amid the white hairs on his chest.

“Beverly is going to help me,” he says. “I was talking to him about it yesterday. He had an excellent idea.” Beverly is now seventeen.

“Oh?”

“We were talking,” says Thomas Jefferson, “about how the weight of a balloon limits the altitude to which it can ascend. And he suggested that the gondola should be fishnet on a wicker frame instead of solid wicker. I think that’s admirably practical. The fishnet’s far lighter, and there’d be no danger of falling through.”

“What about the silk?” says Sally Hemings.

“The silk?” says Thomas Jefferson. “You mean a silk fishnet?”

“No. I mean how are you going to afford all that silk?”

Thomas Jefferson remains silent.

Sally Hemings continues, “Wouldn’t your balloon require enough silk to make one hundred gowns? Or five hundred? Or a thousand?”

“Not a thousand,” he says. “Not five hundred either, I think.”

“Still,” asserts Sally Hemings.

Thomas Jefferson doesn’t speak for a long time; then he says, “You’ve grown so practical in your old age.”

“Someone has to be.”

“Not you!” He smiles mischievously. “You should leave practicality to Martha. She’s the mistress of Monticello, after all.”

Sally Hemings is silent. She knows that the servants have been discussing whether Thomas Jefferson will have to sell them off to make good his debts.

He slides his hand off her pelvis and slaps her buttock. “I’m making it for you, you know!” he says. “Didn’t I promise I’d take you up in a balloon? Remember how you wanted to fly when we were in Paris? Voler comme un oiseau! Don’t you want me to keep my promises?”

“Only the ones you can afford to keep.”

“I’m going to call it ‘Dusky Sal’!” he says.

Sally Hemings laughs. “I think you should call it ‘Howling Atheist’! That’s a much better name for a balloon!”

“Dusky Sal and the Howling Atheist,” says Thomas Jefferson. “I’m going to inscribe that in letters twenty feet high — big enough to be read from a mile away! Then you and I can ride our balloon across the Potomac and over Washington — then Philadelphia, New York, Boston. And anyone who sees us can write all the slanderous doggerel they want. We won’t care. We’ll just go up and up until we have reached the very top of the tallest cloud in the sky. I’ll fling a rug out across it. We’ll unload a basket filled with sausages, figs, bread and champagne, then lie on our rug in the warm sun, feeling gentle breezes blowing about us, and we won’t give a thought to anything anyone might be saying or thinking down below. We’ll just sip our champagne, talk nonsense, watch the birds fly.”

Thomas Jefferson is silent a moment, then kisses Sally Hemings’s head. “How does that sound?” he asks.

“We’ll fall through,” she answers.

“I am making arrangements,” Thomas Jefferson says.

“You have to trust me,” he says.

“I already know,” he says.

He is impatient. He is always impatient. “Please, there is no need to worry.”

“It is an immensely complicated business, but I have everyone’s best interest at heart.”

He pounds his hand on the table and speaks in a low, firm voice. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Why do you have so little faith in me?”

“Sally, Sally, Sally!”

What is the matter? Something is the matter. “No, nothing.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Then what? What did you mean? “This is a tiresome subject. I will be making the final arrangements this week.”

He puts his hands against his temples. “I can assure you that not a day goes by when it is not on my mind.”

“Why are you worried?”

“It is a simple matter. There is nothing to worry about.”

“I have had setbacks, but I will surmount them.”

“You have to stop listening to those people.”

“It is done.”

“Mr. Cartney is trying to make things difficult, as usual, but the legislature is entirely on my side.”

“It is impossible to make everyone happy, but no one can fault my arrangements.”

He speaks so softly she can hardly hear. “Oh, Sally, I wonder if you shall ever forgive me.”

He shouts, “I’ve told you a thousand times!”

“It’s not a question of if , it’s a question of when. And, in fact, I’ve already acquired all the resources I need.”