Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

It is September 6, 1786. Thomas Jefferson has drunk two bottles of wine over dinner and believes that he is in love with Maria Cosway, who is a portrait painter, seventeen years his junior and married, and who has drunk nearly as much wine as he has. He wants to prove to her that his love is a mad joy and that he is as vigorous and adept as a man half his age, so he leaps a cistern in the place Louis XV, but his toe catches on the far rim and he descends to the flagstones in an inverted position, breaking his right wrist so badly that he will have to write with his left hand for much of a year and suffer, for the rest of his life, unpredictable squawks whenever he plays even the simplest tunes on his violin.

Maria Cosway laughs and laughs, thinking, What a silly man! thinking he is only playacting as he rolls back and forth on the flagstones, howling. And as he howls, Thomas Jefferson thinks that Martha would never have laughed at the sight of him in such pain, and he thinks that he doesn’t, in fact, love Maria Cosway. And as she comes to realize that he is not playacting, she, too, thinks that she does not love him — this clumsy American, with his farmer’s accent — that he is pompous, and a bore, and that she was a fool to have betrayed her husband for him, though, in fact, she will continue to write to Thomas Jefferson long after he has left France and returned to Virginia and long after she has left her prodigiously unfaithful husband and moved into a convent in Italy, and Thomas Jefferson will write to her — two letters a year, three, sometimes more — and their correspondence will continue until she is an old woman and he is a much older man, and there will, in fact, be an unfinished letter to him on her desk the day she receives word from John Trumbull that Thomas Jefferson has died.

But that drunken night in Paris, Thomas Jefferson cannot see Maria Cosway as she bends over him making sympathetic noises that he knows to be insincere. There are no streetlights, and he and she only dared take a walk after their dinner because the sky was cloudless and there was a gibbous moon — although now that moon is pumpkin orange and steeple-pierced, and in a minute it will have been absorbed by its own flickery fire on the Seine. Thomas Jefferson can see stars around the amorphous obscurity that is Maria Cosway, bent over him, uttering low coos and singsong consolations such as are normally addressed to children, and he is not so drunk that he doesn’t know that the darkness on the streets soon will be of such profundity that he will be all but blind after he has seen her to her hotel and then as he makes his way home, in agony, by starlight, and that the journey will take hours.

But those hours, unrecorded, will never exist in history, nor will the starlight and the pumpkin moon, nor those bottles of wine, nor Thomas Jefferson’s laughter, nor Maria Cosway’s, nor their kisses across the dinner table, nor those deeper kisses just before he tells her, “Watch this!” and begins to run toward the cistern.

It is June 26, 1787. Sally Hemings is fourteen and has arrived in a country where the air smells of rancid meat and of flowers too long in the vase, and all the people speak in grunts, coughs and fluting whinnies. In one hand she holds the canvas bag that contains her every possession in the world. Her other hand is on the shoulder of Polly Jefferson, whom she clutches against her side. Beside them on the stone quay is a waist-high sea chest stuffed with Polly’s belongings. Her little sister, Lucy, is dead of the whooping cough, and Polly has come from Virginia to live with her father and her big sister, Patsy, in France. But this mud- and gravel-colored city is not France. Sally Hemings does not know what this city is. She thinks it might be London.

“What’s happened to Captain Ramsey?” says Polly, who is nearly nine years old but so small and frail she looks six. Her hair is exactly the rich earth-brown of Sally Hemings’s, and the two girls have done their hair in an identical fashion, with hanks drawn back loosely from the temples and framed by the ruffle of their cotton bonnets. Sally’s bonnet, however, is topped by a straw hat, partially eaten by mice during their passage (at the crown and the back), and pinned, through the bonnet, to her hair.

“He’ll be right back,” she says.

“But where did he go?”

“Didn’t you listen?” Sally Hemings is irritated, but she knows she shouldn’t be, so she gives Polly’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze and speaks softly. “He’s just looking for the porter. He’ll be right back.”

“But why didn’t he send Mr. George?” says Polly. “Or one of the mateys?”

“They’re busy, I reckon.” Sally Hemings gives Polly’s shoulder another squeeze, but more for her own encouragement this time.

She doesn’t like Captain Ramsey. Throughout their five weeks at sea, he was always coming up behind her, slapping her on the bottom and shouting, “Get along there, girl!” One night when she was on her way back from emptying Polly’s chamber pot over the gunwale, he stopped her at the top of the companionway and put his hand on her bodice, just over her left breast. When she pushed his hand away, he said, “What’s the matter! I just want to see how healthy you are.” That is the worst he ever did, and he has never been anything but grandfatherly to Polly — who loves him as if he actually were her grandfather — but Sally Hemings suspects he’s one of those white men her mammy has told her about, the ones you have to keep your eye on.

She looks down the long marble quay toward the building with the huge windows into which Captain Ramsey disappeared. He ought to have been back ages ago; it can’t take that much time to find a porter.

When their ship docked, brilliant silver and white clouds with gray undersides were scattered across a powder blue sky, but since then the clouds have grown steadily denser and darker, and she can see a heron-blue smear of rain falling diagonally beyond the big building.

A sudden chilly gust blows down the quay, and she has to hold on to her hat. This is a cold country, she thinks. It is nearly July, and yet she and Polly have to wear their shawls tight across their shoulders if they want to keep from shivering. France will be nicer, she hopes.

Polly makes a small noise and flings her arms around Sally Hemings’s shoulders.

A bearded man in a black coat is standing just behind Polly, holding the grips of a wooden wheelbarrow and shouting, in a low, angry voice, words that sound like English chopped into pieces and rearranged in a nonsensical order. The front edge of his wheelbarrow is actually touching Polly’s skirts, and the girl seems to want to climb into Sally Hemings’s arms.

“Did Captain Ramsey send you?” asks Sally Hemings, thinking the man may be the porter. But her question only makes the chopped-up English tumble ever more rapidly and loudly out of his three-toothed mouth.

He keeps jerking his wheelbarrow back and forth on the cobbles. It is stacked high with oil casks and has no room at all for Polly’s chest.

“He just wants us out the way,” Sally Hemings says, and pulls Polly back until they are both standing with their heels half over the quay’s edge. The bearded man grunts and pushes his wheelbarrow through the gap between their toes and Polly’s sea chest.

“Where’s my papa!” cries Polly. “I hate this country! I wish we stayed with Aunt and Uncle Eppes.”

“There, there.” Sally Hemings pulls the weeping girl into her arms, feeling that it will be only a matter of seconds before she, herself, will be crying.

Polly was furious at being left behind when her father and Patsy went to France, and she only became more so when little Lucy died of whooping cough, a disease she might never have gotten had she and Polly gone to Paris, too. And when her father finally wrote to Aunt Eppes saying that he wanted Polly to join him, she said that she wouldn’t go. “Don’t you want to see Patsy?” her Aunt Eppes asked her. “Don’t you want to live in a real castle and see real princesses walking the streets?” No! Polly was determined. If her father didn’t love her enough to come and take her to Paris himself, then she wouldn’t go, and no one could force her.