Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Jupiter looks up at Thomas Jefferson as if he doesn’t recognize him.

“I may go down there later,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I don’t know.” Jupiter’s brow is convoluted and dark. “I think maybe I can’t.”

Thomas Jefferson sighs. “Well, maybe I can’t either.” He takes the watch out of his pocket. “You know what I did?” He hands the watch to Jupiter. “Listen.” Jupiter takes the watch and puts it to his ear, but he doesn’t say anything.

“I broke it,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Your grandpappy’s watch!”

“I wanted to see what it looked like inside, and I broke it. Now I have to tell my father. So maybe I won’t be able to go fishing later.”

“Oh.” Jupiter hands back the watch.

“If I can, I’ll come find you.”

Jupiter doesn’t reply, only wraps both hands around the handle of the shovel.

“What are you doing in here?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I don’t know.”

“You just going to stay in here all day!”

“I’m resting.”

Thomas Jefferson shrugs. “All right. I’ll see you later.”

Jupiter doesn’t say anything. But as Thomas Jefferson backs out the door, Jupiter calls, “Don’t tell nobody I’m in here.”

“All right.” Thomas Jefferson lets the door swing shut on its own.

Once he has passed through the garden gate, he walks between the barns and down the creek road. He wonders if he should tell his father that he merely dropped the watch. No. If his father were to have the watch repaired, the watchmaker would certainly notice the missing parts. Maybe he should say that he dropped it, the back popped open and parts spilled everywhere. But how could a mere jolt unfasten all four screws?

Thomas Jefferson’s hands are clammy and his throat is constricted. He has to tell the truth. That’s all. A lie would only make everything worse.

The sulfur-yellow flank of the mill is now in sight. Captain is still barking, but not the way he does when he’s treed a squirrel — more like when he scents a wolf passing in the night. Thomas Jefferson can’t see him anywhere.

His father said yesterday that one of the wheel shafts in the mill had split and that he was going to repair it. But the mill’s lofty, churchlike interior is empty, and there is no sign that anyone has been working there. It is hard to tell over the hissing rumble of the water in the millrace and Captain’s barking, but Thomas Jefferson thinks he hears his father’s voice in the yard out back. As he approaches the open rear door, he hears a woman’s voice, but then, very definitely, his father says, “One more time.” There follows a hoarse whistle and a sharp splat.

At first Thomas Jefferson thinks a side of beef is hanging in midair, but it is a shirtless man, dangling by his wrists from a rope tied to the winch sticking out of the mill loft. The man’s slack feet hover two or three inches above the ground, so that he looks as if he leapt into the air and never came down. A lace of red crosses the pale soles of his feet and has made a burgundy mud of the dust below. Captain is running in circles around him, barking.

“Again,” says a woman, just out of sight to the left of the door, and it takes Thomas Jefferson half a second to realize that she is his mother. His father speaks. “All right, Jack.” Then Mr. Mumphry, who was also out of sight, rushes at the dangling man, swinging his right arm forward. Another hoarse whistle and splat, and the dangling man’s whole body arches as if he were a trout leaping out of a pond. Then he goes limp, his body swinging right, then left, at the end of the rope.

Captain ran off when Mr. Mumphry charged. But now he is back, head low. He is barking not at the dangling man but at Mr. Mumphry, who twitches the snakelike coil of his whip in the dust and pays the dog no mind.

The dangling man is Dorsey, Jillery’s husband. His back is crossed by bleeding gashes, some bordered with yellowish flecks of fat. “Once more,” says Thomas Jefferson’s mother. His father grunts, and again there is that hoarse whistle of the whip racing through the air.

Thomas Jefferson does not stop running until he is in the middle of the bridge over Shadwell Creek. He takes the watch out of his pocket and flings it as far as he can downstream. When his father asks what happened to it, he will say he doesn’t know; maybe he lost it in the woods.

“… I will make it good…. Good…”

… But what could I have done? I didn’t know what to do….

Sally Hemings comes to Thomas Jefferson in a dream. She is sitting at his desk, writing with one of his quills. The scratching of the inked tip across the paper makes a sort of thunder in his dream. Periodically, when the tip dries out and a squeaking comes into the thunder, Sally Hemings lifts the quill to her lips and dampens it with a quick dart of her tongue. Only when the thunder is infiltrated by squeaks a second time does she dab the tip of the quill into the ink and tap it twice on the rim of the inkwell. The result of this practice — an effort at economy, Thomas Jefferson can only imagine — is that the right corner of her mouth is surrounded by a corona of saliva-slick black, and a trail of black descends to the edge of her chin, where a droplet trembles without ever falling.

Sally Hemings’ mother Betty was a bright mulatto woman, and Sally mighty near white: she was the youngest child…. Sally was very handsome: long straight hair down her back. She was about eleven years old when Mr. Jefferson took her to France to wait on Miss Polly. She and Sally went to France a year after Mr. Jefferson went. Patsy went with him first, but she carried no maid with her. Harriet, one of Sally’s daughters, was very handsome. Sally had a son named Madison, who learned to be a great fiddler. He has been in Petersburg twice: was here when the balloon went up — the balloon that Beverly sent off.

— Isaac Jefferson

“Memoirs of a Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840’s by Isaac, one of Thomas Jefferson’s Slaves”

Mr. Jefferson was a tall strait-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered: Nary a man in this town walked so straight as my Old Master: neat a built man as ever was seen in Vaginny, I reckon, or any place — a straight-up man: long face, high nose…. Old Master wore Vaginny cloth and a red waistcoat, (all the gentlemen wore red waistcoats in dem days) and small clothes: arter dat he used to wear red breeches too.

— Isaac Jefferson

“Memoirs of a Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840’s by Isaac, one of Thomas Jefferson’s Slaves”

The real Sally Hemings comes to Thomas Jefferson in the arms of her mother. It is the first springlike day in March, and he is at his desk trying to work out the etymological connections between “hob,” “hobnob,” “hobgoblin” and “hobnail.” There is a knock that he does not quite hear, and then Martha is standing just inside his door. “I’m sorry, Tom,” she says. “I just wanted you to know that Betty is here.”

He hears a very small child’s irritated “No!” out in the hallway and then a woman speaking in a low, consoling voice. Again the child says “No,” but less emphatically. Martha steps aside, and a tall, broad-shouldered woman with skin the tawny gold of August meadow grass enters the room, carrying a tiny girl who takes one look at Thomas Jefferson and buries her face against her mother’s neck.

“Ah, yes,” he says, though he is not quite sure why he is being introduced to Betty or who exactly she is.