Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

He takes her hand in both of his and speaks tenderly. “Dear, dear Sally. You are a very good woman, but you worry too much.”

“The House of Delegates is having one of its monarchist moments, but they will come round in the end.” Are you sure?

“It is done,” he says. “I have arranged it. It is done, it is done, it is done.”

And since Sally Hemings is doing an entirely adequate job of steering, Thomas Jefferson lays his oar across the canoe’s gunwales and looks around. It seems that they have traveled very far from Virginia — west, for hundreds and hundreds of miles. The quality of the forest has changed. The trees have grown massive, their boughs are like roads going off into a wilderness of foliage, air and sun, and above the trees are mountains that ascend jaggedly to such a height that their peaks shred the clouds. There is a low trumpeting along the banks, a splintering of wood and a sound that makes Thomas Jefferson think of stones being uprooted and slammed back into the earth, over and over. It takes him a while to see through the tangle of shadows and sun-shot foliage, but then everything comes clear: Walking along both banks are hirsute creatures so enormous that they are like moving hillsides, and they have long, arcing tusks and proboscises that slither and curl in the manner of snakes. These creatures are mammoths, and Thomas Jefferson is so excited that he cannot help but turn to Sally Hemings and tell her he had always known that mammoths still traversed the American continent. “I specifically directed Meriwether Lewis to bring me back one of these creatures,” he tells her, “but he disappointed me.” Sally Hemings says not a word. She has been silent throughout the entire trip, and now her silence has become a towering absence that he hardly dares to contemplate. Time passes. The mountains grow more distant, and the forest gives way to plains of such robust fertility that in the time it takes the canoe to pass, apples burst from branch tips in a shower of petals and go from green to purple-red; vines rise out of the earth, writhe along the ground and sprout pea pods, pumpkins and tomatoes; and acre after acre bristles with green blades that burgeon and elaborate until they make an ocean of shoulder-high wheat, glinting, hissing and swaying under restless breezes. And in the midst of these fields are villages of fountains and tree-shaded plazas, where each house is so perfectly proportioned it seems as light as an idea, and the citizens are all tall and broad-shouldered, strolling at their ease, strangers to poverty, illness and vice. “Such incredible beauty!” says Thomas Jefferson. “Are we not blessed to inhabit a continent so abundantly and spectacularly beautiful? Is there any doubt that here is where humanity shall finally be fashioned in God’s image?” Sally Hemings has lifted her oar out of the water, and the canoe begins to drift in slow circles. “I have no use for beauty,” she says. “It is only the mask by which we hide from ourselves the barbarity of life on this earth and the coldness of our own hearts. You think it enough to speak beautiful words, but that beauty is nothing unless those words are lived.” And now it is Thomas Jefferson whose silence becomes monumental. The canoe rotates slowly on the water as the sky darkens. It is night, then more than night, and soon nothing can be perceived but the sound of water over rocks.

June 20, 1826. He grows birdlike with time. The flesh melts away, and his bones grow light, his gestures tentative, even when he intends to be forceful. He covers his good ear with his right hand and points to the door with his left, telling Martha, “Go! Go! Why are you bothering me with such trivialities!” Where once there would have been rage and hurt in his daughter, who is now fifty-four, there is only a flicker of irritation. And she leaves, not out of respect, or even a desire to save herself from further pain, but out of pity.

He is eighty-three. His eyes have grown larger in his shrinking skull and are often filled with the bewilderment of someone who has found himself in a place and among people he neither recognizes nor comprehends. When Martha has pulled the door shut behind her with an impatient bang, he brings the pursed fingertips of his hands together in that habit he has developed recently, the fingertips of the right nibbling at the fingers of the left, in the way that birds kiss.

“Now, what were we doing, Sally?” he says after a moment of looking off into the dimness of his shuttered study.

“Boots or shoes?” says Sally Hemings, holding a pair of each in either hand. “It’s muddy outside. I think the boots would be better.”

A wrinkle of consternation interrupts the pink space between his white eyebrows. Without looking, he reaches behind and touches the counterpane of the bed. “Neither,” he says, sitting down and sighing heavily. “I’ve changed my mind. The boys can get on without me. There’s reading I have to do.”

He adjusts the pillows at the head of the bed, and, fully dressed, with even his coat on, he leans against the pillows and lifts his bare feet onto the counterpane. The nails on his big toes are exactly the color and texture of corn husks in October.

Sally Hemings puts the boots and the shoes back into the closet from which she has just taken them. Then she takes a woolen blanket from the chair by the fire and covers his feet.

“Thank you, Sally,” he says contentedly, looking up at her as a boy might look up at his mother just before taking her hand. “Could you get me my Vergil?” He gestures in the direction of his desk. “And my spectacles.”

Sally Hemings walks around to his study and then pauses, looking down at the several volumes on his desk.

“It’s the red one,” he said.

She knows. How could she not know? He has read to her from it so many times, in Latin and in English, especially that beautiful passage about the stars and spring planting, and she has even browsed the translation herself, more than once, and she has talked to him about it. But now she only picks up the book and the silver spectacles.

“Thank you,” he says when she hands them to him. He places them on his belly and then takes hold of her hand. “You are very patient with me. I’m sorry.” He gives her hand a squeeze, then lets it go.

As he pushes his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose, he says, “Could you ask Burwell to record the exact weight of each boy’s rod and bring it to me before lunch.”

“Certainly, Mr. Jefferson.”

Again he says, “Thank you, Sally.”

His face brightens, and he looks almost his old self.

“I’m thinking of having Eagle and Tecumseh saddled first thing in the morning,” he says. “The weather’s going to be wonderful, I believe. We could go out before anyone is up and watch the sun rise over the lake, then ride down the valley and along the river as far as Castle Rock? How would you like that?”

She tells him she would like it fine. He is still smiling.

After that, her throat becomes so constricted that she cannot speak.

And if he notices, he never says a word.

… Mr. Henderson nailed a list on the stable wall of all the slaves’ names in the order in which they would be sold. As Mr. Jeff had promised me, Critta and Peter went first. I wasn’t worried about Peter. He had been thrown by a horse two years previously, and ever since then his right leg had been so lame he could hardly put weight on it. Indeed, he couldn’t climb up onto Mr. Broomfield’s cart without the aid of both Mr. Henderson and Mr. Evans. The only bid was from Daniel Farley, and so my brother gained his freedom for a mere dollar.