Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Only reason I’m telling you now,” she said, “is you’re going to France. I don’t think Miss Patsy or Miss Polly knows, but Mr. Jefferson surely does. And you’re most ways to being a young woman now, so you’ve got to understand that Mr. Jefferson most surely knows you’re his wife’s sister, and that’s a fact.”

As she said this, I started to sob and couldn’t stop. The news was more than I could bear, especially as I had already been terrified about getting on a boat and traveling to a country where nobody would speak a word I could understand. My mother took me into her arms, pressed my head against her bosom and kissed my cheek over and over. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine. You’re such a smart girl. Everything’ll be just fine.”

Sally Hemings is fourteen years old, and she has been in Paris for two days. Thomas Jefferson almost doesn’t see her as he enters the upstairs parlor, partly because it is five-thirty in the morning, an hour at which no one else is normally awake, but mainly because she is so silent and still, a streak of darker gray before the gray of the window. She is leaning her forehead against the wobbly, bubbled glass, looking out onto the rainy courtyard, clutching the fingers of one hand in the near fist of the other. At the sound of his shoe scuffing to a stop just inside the door, she becomes a burst of flutter and flight, like a ruffed grouse startled from a hedge. “I’m sorry!” she cries. “I’m sorry! I just—” She shoots past him and out the door so rapidly that if she ever finishes her sentence, he hears not a syllable.

Q: When did you first find out that you were free?

JAMES: The marquis told me.

Q: The Marquis de Lafayette?

JAMES: [Nods.]

Q: When?

JAMES: Oh, I don’t know. It must have been… Uh… I’m pretty sure it was the first time he came to dinner. I remember hearing him in the foyer. He had such a loud voice, and he was laughing. He and Mr. Jefferson were both laughing. And then, no more than a minute later, he came into the kitchen. “Zheemmee! Zheemmee! Zheemmee!” He was so happy to see me again, he said, and why hadn’t I come out to greet him at the door? I didn’t know what to say to that, because I’d only met him once before, when I was a kid. But then he stopped shouting, and he leaned close to my ear. “I want you to know that slavery is not tolerated in this country,” he said. “It is contrary to the laws. As long as you are here, you are as free as Mr. Jefferson.”

Q: What did you think of him telling you that?

JAMES: I don’t know.

Q: Did you think it was strange?

JAMES: Well, the marquis was a strange man. I liked him, though. He was always good to me.

Q: Maybe not to Thomas Jefferson?

JAMES: Oh, he and Mr. Jefferson were best friends. In fact, I bet he told Mr. Jefferson what he was going to say before he even came back in the kitchen. He was just like that. The really strange thing, though, is that he had a slave himself when he was in Virginia.

Q: Really?

JAMES: His name was Jimmy, too, now that I think of it. There’s even a famous picture of them together, isn’t there, Sally?

SARAH: A painting.

JAMES: Who’s it by?

SARAH: I don’t remember. A French painter. I think he even came to the Hôtel once, but I don’t remember his name.

Q: What about you, Sarah? When did you find out you were free?

SARAH: The marquis told me, too. But Jimmy told me first. Didn’t you, Jimmy? It was that first day, when you showed me my bedroom.

Q: What did you think?

SARAH: It was beautiful! It had red silk wallpaper, padded and soft, like a pillow. But it was freezing in the winter.

Q: No, I mean about being free.

SARAH: Oh! [Laughs.] I didn’t know what to think about that. It was strange, mainly.

JAMES: You were tired.

SARAH: Exhausted! And I was in a new country. Everything was strange. Everything was just hard to think about then. For a long time, really.

Q: But what about after?

SARAH: It was still strange.

Q: Why? How? Did you really not understand?

JAMES: I understood. I understood right away. It was easy. [Stops talking. Squeezes SARAH’s hand.] Sorry.

SARAH: That’s okay. Go ahead.

JAMES: No. You first. You’re the one everyone wants to hear about anyway! [Laughs.]

SARAH: That’s not true!

JAMES: Tell her to stop being so humble!

Q: [Laughs.]

SARAH: Okay…. [Glances at JAMES, who takes a sip from the flask he keeps in the breast pocket of his jacket.] Uh… What was I saying?

Q: You didn’t understand.

SARAH: Okay… well… The thing is, everything is so different now. Things that seem simple now just weren’t then. Even after all these years, it’s still very hard for me to put it into words. I guess the main problem is that I can’t think like that anymore. Nobody thinks like that anymore. But anyhow. For me, at the time, it was like I had two minds. In one of those minds, I knew, of course, that slavery was wrong. It’s like what Mr. Jefferson wrote: Certain truths are self-evident. Everybody just wants to be free. We’re born thinking we’re the center of the universe and that we can and should —I think it’s a moral issue for babies! — that we should get everything we want. Which we do for a while, because babies don’t actually want very much. And that’s where the second mind comes in. Because I was born a slave. Jimmy and I were both born slaves. That’s just how the world was—

JAMES: That’s not how it was for me. [Covers his mouth.] Sorry.

SARAH: No. Speak. You’ve got something to say.

JAMES: [Looks at Q.]

Q: Go ahead. If it’s all right with Sarah.

SARAH: Speak, Jimmy.

JAMES: I only ever had one mind about slavery, and in that mind I knew that the world had made me a slave and that slavery was wrong — a crime against humanity! Unforgivable! And I knew in my heart I wasn’t actually a slave, that I had never been a slave and that I was never going to act like a slave. I would only do what I chose to do, just like every other free man.

Q: And were you actually able to manage that?

JAMES: Yes. Absolutely!… But, of course, I was lucky. Sally and I were both lucky. Because of — you know: Mr. Jefferson…. But anyhow, that’s how I felt for as long as I can remember. From way before I went to France. And, of course, from way before Mr. Jefferson gave me my manumission and I really was free. In the eyes of the law, I mean.

Q: And how was it then? After your manumission.

JAMES: It was the same.

Q: No. I mean… Well, I hadn’t actually intended to bring this up until later. But… I mean… Given what happened?

JAMES: I don’t actually want to talk about that. [Long silence.] Okay?

Q: I’m sorry.

JAMES: [Takes a sip from his flask. Puts it back in his pocket.] I refuse to talk about that…. It was… Well, it was all very complicated, and there’s no way I can explain it. And I don’t want to. [Silence.] Of course, slavery entered into it, but it wasn’t really how you think—

Q: I—

JAMES: Anyhow, Mr. Jefferson only gave me my manumission because he wanted to get rid of me.

SARAH: That’s not true!

JAMES: Sure it is. He was just sick of dealing with me. I could see it in his face when I asked him. I could see how relieved he was.

SARAH: No, Jimmy.

JAMES: But I didn’t care. Fuck that. I thought — you know: I’d just go to Philadelphia and make a new life for myself. Friends and… maybe travel. I wanted to go to Spain. Back to France. But the other thing is — I mean… Maybe if I’d been white as Sally. And… Well… you know— [Silence.] But fuck that shit!