Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

There were those among us who hated Mr. Jefferson — the wisest, I now know. But many more were prone to say things like, “Mr. Jefferson is a good master” and “We’re lucky.” My mother told me many times, “Don’t you forget how lucky you are to have Mr. Jefferson for a master!”

This all seems so pathetic to me now. And cowardly. Yes, we were lucky to be able to go into town on Sundays, and to sell what we grew and raised, and to keep the profits. Yes, Mr. Jefferson had a genuine abhorrence for the cowskin and a desire to be just, even kind. But there was still that dank precinct in his heart and that part of his brain that saw Negroes as more animal than man. Yes, we were lucky, but such luck is a mere drop in an ocean of misfortune. That we counted it as more than that only shows how impossible it was to keep off the deadness….

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

— Thomas Jefferson

Declaration of Independence

“What is the matter? Why do you look so sorrowful?” I don’t know. I was just staring at my hand and thinking that it is not my hand. I have been having such odd thoughts. “You have been too much indoors. I will ask Jupiter to saddle Castor and Diomede. It is a fine, clear day. The new leaves are like a green mist on the mountains.” No. I would rather not. I just want to stay here. For the moment, at least. I can’t even imagine getting out of this chair. “You must be catching something. Go to your cabin. I will bring you hot chocolate and biscuits, and I will read to you from Henry Fielding.” I keep having the feeling that I am not myself. That I am not even here. I wonder if I am going mad. “I have often felt a spectator at my own life, that the person I am is only what the world expects of me and that the real me is standing to one side.” Yes. It is something like that. I feel as if I can’t do anything. “It is fancy. It will pass.” I am not sure. “Go lie down and I will read to you from Henry Fielding.”

… I was not myself. Is that possible? For almost my whole life I was not the person I imagined myself to be….

I am Thomas Jefferson. I have Thomas Jefferson’s flowing, frizzed, red hair. I have his ocher eyes. And I look down on the world from a height that is greater than my own. I am on trial. And John Marshall is standing in front of me, in his black robe, his thick black eyebrows arrowed in contempt. “Prove yourself,” says Marshall.

“What is there to prove?” I say, my voice spreading wavelike to the four corners of the room, where it crashes and returns to my ears as a complex echo. “Do you doubt that I stand before you?”

“I doubt everything about you,” says Marshall. “You are incoherent. I don’t believe in you at all.” He has several loose sheets of paper on the desk in front of him. He shuffles them, scowling at each in turn as it passes before his eyes. Then he stands them on end, lifts, drops and pats them until their edges are aligned. “You hear only the sounds of words,” he says, “and care nothing about their sense. A word without sense is only so much gas passing through the vocal cords. It is nothing.”

It is true that I am listening to the sounds of my words — or Thomas Jefferson’s. They have a capacity to boom and reverberate in a way that I am not accustomed to. They are a sort of weapon, but I am not sure how to use them. “I stand for liberty,” I say experimentally, “and for equality.” As these words pass my lips, they have the effect of increasing my stature. Marshall has to crane his head back in order to reply.

“Whose liberty?” he says. “Whose equality?” His own words cause him to shrink. He is shouting, but his voice grows tinny and small.

“I stand for the liberty and equality of all men.”

“All men are as nothing to you!” Marshall shouts in his tinny voice. “They are a concept entirely devoid of meaning. You care about no one’s liberty but your own. And no man can be equal to you by definition. ‘Equality’ in your parlance is a rock, a cudgel, a battering ram! A cannibal in the raiment of a patriarch!”

“You are a monarchist!” I tell him, my voice rattling the windows, causing plaster dust to sprinkle from the ceiling cracks. “You are a corrupt artifact of an obsolete era! A monocrat! A tyrant! A consolidationist!”

Marshall, gray-haired, storm-browed, is nevertheless a child sitting at a child’s desk. He folds his papers impatiently, stuffs them into a leather satchel and stands. “We are judged,” he says as he moves toward the door, “not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.” He opens the door, then slams it behind him, but its sound is obliterated by my booming laughter.

… Far worse than the scars of lash or club is the theft of one’s dignity. When one’s human value is seen only in regard to how thoroughly one surrenders one’s own desires to those of the master and how effectively one’s labors contribute to the comfort, dignity and freedom of the master, and especially when one has no freedom whatsoever but to submit to this state of affairs, it is almost impossible to believe that one might be admired, loved and treated with respect in one’s own right, and that one might deserve to be treated so, and that one is equally deserving of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The narrow compass one is allowed for the exercise of one’s freedom — within one’s own home and mind and, under the more beneficent of masters, on one’s scant acre of land — can only confirm one’s sense of worthlessness. As every farmer knows, a man can work to the point of exhaustion every day and still end up penniless and starving, and such a fate is only more likely for the slave who can only tend his garden or his stock after he has finished his master’s work, which often lasts until after dark. Likewise, when the secrets of domestic harmony can elude even the wealthiest of men, how likely is it that they should be accessible to the poorest? And when one has been denied the basic comforts and freedoms of life, even one’s own mind offers no sanctuary. One’s very desire to live a decent and ordinary life can be an unending source of humiliation, and one’s outrage at injustice can be exhausting and all too easily transformed into self-loathing. And so the desire to lie to oneself or to make much of small blessings becomes irresistible, and thus a further humiliation. The very songs we sing to escape our chains themselves become our chains….

Thomas Jefferson is holding a candle in the corridor outside Sally Hemings’s room. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Might I come in?” He goes into the room, and the corridor is dark. Nothing can be seen. But his words are audible through the door: “My sweet girl!… So lovely… I will make it good…. I will be gentle. You will see…. Gentle… I will make it good…. Good…”

James and Dolley Madison’s faces pulsate orange and red. A sound like a river of peanuts pouring over a cliff fills the dark room. Although Benedict Arnold actually set fire to Richmond in the morning, at which point Thomas Jefferson had long since resigned as governor of Virginia and fled on horseback, in the dark theater Richmond’s pulsating orange and red flames rise from the city’s crumbling rooftops to encompass the entire night sky, and the actor in the copper-colored wig — in silhouette against the towering flames, except for one handsome cheek and the flank of his noble nose — shouts “Hah!” whips his horse with his cocked hat and rides off bareback into the impenetrable night.