Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“But our minister to France must be a cultivated man. A philosopher. Dr. Franklin has set a precedent. No one can better take his place than you.”

“I said stop. ”

Madison flings himself back in his chair and sinks into brooding.

“I’m tired of political life,” says Thomas Jefferson. “And in any event, I don’t have the mettle for it. I disgraced myself as governor—”

“Tom!”

“Don’t!” Thomas Jefferson smacks the flat of his hand down onto the table. “You of all people should allow me to speak plainly.”

“You’re too hard on yourself.”

“I’m not hard enough.” Thomas Jefferson screws shut the top of his inkwell and wipes the tips of his quills. “But the main point is that I despise myself when I engage in politics. I entirely lack the stomach for bullying and bribery. Compromise so enrages me that I have not had a moment these last weeks free of headache.” He places into his satchel the remainder of the newspaper from which he has been tearing strips. “I serve my country best with my pen. And I am happiest at home, among my books. There is no point pretending otherwise.” He wraps the inkwell and the quills in a chamois bag that he also places into his satchel.

All at once Madison leans forward and touches his friend on the shoulder. “You’re too much alone,” he says. “I fear for you this winter, alone on your mountaintop.”

“Then you must come visit me.” Thomas Jefferson’s half smile fades into something like irritation.

“Stop it, Tom!”

“Stop what?”

“You’re being a fool.”

“I hate politics! I loathe politicians! I just want to return to the life I was born for. How can you forbid me that?”

Madison sinks back into his chair. Thomas Jefferson inserts a strap into the buckle of his satchel.

“Lafayette specifically asked that you be sent to Paris,” says Madison.

Thomas Jefferson stops, his fingers resting on the buckle. He does not look around. He is staring but not seeing anything. He has grown perfectly still.

The subway lights flicker and come back on, but the ragged metallic screeching continues. Thomas Jefferson knows that if he doesn’t stand up now, if he doesn’t cross the car and find a way of speaking to Sally Hemings, he will never have another chance. He knows this, but he cannot move.

In Sally Hemings’s dream, she is walking down a street of very tall buildings with jagged, glinting roofs, and she is lost. She is walking with Thomas Jefferson, but he is a shadow, and he disappears when they pass through the shadows of buildings. He is holding her hand — or she thinks he is holding her hand. “Hurry!” he says. They are going someplace very important, and only he knows the way. At first she doesn’t know where they are going, and then she realizes that she is a baby and that he is taking her to the place where she will be born. “Hurry!” he says. “You have to hurry!”

She wants to be born. If she isn’t born, she will have to be a shadow in a world of shadows. She is not a shadow now. She is a baby. Except most of the time she doesn’t look like a baby; she looks like herself: long-legged and long-armed, and with a face that is almost a woman’s face. And sometimes Thomas Jefferson is not a shadow. She can see him, or parts of him. And she can feel his hand, which is very, very strong — so strong that she worries her hand will be crushed.

“Hurry!” he tells her. “They will leave without us!”

Thomas Jefferson is angry. He is running, but she can’t run with him, because she is barefoot and the streets are covered with jagged, glinting shards and her feet are getting cut. “Run!” he tells her. “You have to run! They are almost gone!” But she can’t run. The shards slice and tear. Her feet are bloody.

She wants to call out to him, but she can’t make a noise. All she can do is clutch his hand, his arm, and claw at the lapel of his coat. Her feet are bleeding, and she knows that she is about to fall onto the shards.

But then he is holding her in his arms. She has her arms around his neck, and his arms around her are so very strong, and he is running so fast that everything is turning white, and there is this horrible noise that is also like a form of whiteness, and she wonders if this means she is being born or if she is dying.

… I am trying to tell the truth to its “teeth and forehead,” as Shakespeare says. Yet I am afraid that I am building a big lie out of tiny facts, that everything I say about who I was and how I lived will imply that I could have lived no other life, that I was entirely dispossessed of freedom of will. The simple fact that tortures me to this very instant is that I was never without freedom of will, that at any of countless junctures I could have said, “No,” and I would have lived a different life. Nothing was truly inevitable, and even when I didn’t know I was making a choice, I was —and I must bear the burden of those choices. Most troubling of all, however, are the times when I did know I was making a choice and a voice inside me told me that the choice was wrong but I didn’t listen — because I didn’t believe the voice, or I didn’t want to believe it, or because I couldn’t really hear it among a thousand other voices. But nevertheless, it spoke, and I didn’t listen, and now I am damned….

In history every fact is an element in a mathematical equation: Thomas Jefferson + John Adams + Philadelphia + skinny red ponytail over broad blue collar + pen = Declaration of Independence = the world as we know it. In history almost the entire human race exists in dusklight, murmuring inaudibly, ankle-high to Thomas Jefferson, who is perpetually effulgent with sunrise, who strides the cobbled spaces between monuments with chin raised, eyes fixed on distant prospects, and who knows cumulus clouds mounting aesthetically in ethereal blue but has never known rain.

There are other people in history. George Washington, for example, who is also dawn-effulgent, also massive, a monument in and of himself, maybe a little larger than Thomas Jefferson or a tad smaller. And that bald head, draped around the edges by long, gray hair, those wire-rimmed spectacles, that expression indicating something between peptic distress and discombobulation — that’s Ben Franklin, of course. In history the three men come together, and their speech is of such august profundity that it can never be adequately imagined.

But in life almost everything that Thomas Jefferson eats makes him sick, and so the indoor privies of his Paris mansion, the Hôtel de Langeac, are an endlessly renewed blessing, night and day.

In life Thomas Jefferson is lost. One moment he is imagining that if he were to mount a four-sided book stand on casters like those he devised for his swivel chair, he could switch from book to book with the flick of a finger, and in the next moment he is lost. The streets of Paris are so narrow, disheveled and labyrinthine that a minute’s distraction is enough to erase the connections between where he is, where he was and where he wishes to be. Thomas Jefferson spots a liveried footman, asks directions, but his French fails him so miserably that he can only pretend he has understood. And so he walks off and arbitrarily turns left, then right, and abandons himself to fate.

Semen, of course, is the most vital source of masculine energy, but it is also true that if too much semen accumulates within a man’s body, he can go insane. Dr. Richard Gem, the preeminent American physician in Paris, is concerned that, as a grieving widower, Thomas Jefferson is not adequately venting his semen and so is putting his reason at risk. Onanism is not, Gem insists, a safe method for keeping bodily fluids in balance, as it can also lead to madness, in part because of its tendency to inspire excessive indulgence (it is a well-known fact that the insane are universally addicted to this practice). According to the doctor, the only healthy way to discharge excess semen is in the embrace of a young woman. Gem prescribes weekly visits to the house of Madame Benezet. Thomas Jefferson attempts to comply with this prescription but finds the women chez Madame Benezet wholly insincere in their friendliness, and he is disturbed by the presumptions they make about his character. Lafayette and Danqueville suggest that there is no reason for him to pay for the favors of women, since, as a dashing and cultured American, he can have his pick of the belles of Parisian society. But his friends’ forthrightness and ease in female company are all but unimaginable to Thomas Jefferson, and so he takes to maintaining the proper balance of his vital fluids on his own, by expelling semen once a week, or sometimes twice, but never more often.