Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

SARAH: Jimmy!

JAMES: What? Fuck it!

Q: I—

JAMES: I told you I didn’t want to talk about it. So it’s over. Okay? Finished! Let’s just forget about it. None of that really matters anyway. That’s not how it was.

Q: I’m sorry.

JAMES: Go on, Sally. I interrupted you. Say what you were going to say.

[Long silence.]

JAMES: Go on. Really . I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted.

SARAH: Don’t be ridiculous. [Silence.] I said it all anyway. There’s nothing to say…. Mainly I was like you. I knew I was a slave, and I knew it was wrong. But… There were just these people I’d grown up with. My family. Mammy, of course. And you, Jimmy. Peter. And Critta and… Well, the Jeffersons were family, too. I mean, Martha and Maria were my nieces! And, of course, there was Mr. Jefferson—

Q: Do you mind if I ask you something?

SARAH: Uh.

Q: I’m surprised that you call him “ Mr. ” Jefferson.

SARAH: He wanted us to. He hated the term “master.” He didn’t want anybody to call him “master.”

JAMES: Maybe. But that didn’t change anything, did it?

SARAH: [Silence.]

JAMES: I mean the words we used—“mister,” “servant,” “laborer”—those were just his way of getting us to go along with the lie he was telling himself.

SARAH: Not really.

JAMES: Well, you can believe what you want to believe.

SARAH: [Silence.]

JAMES: [Lifts his flask. It is empty. He balances it on his knee. SARAH is looking at him, but he does not meet her eye.]

Q: But still. To get back to— You know: names… I’m just wondering. Didn’t you ever…? I mean, considering—

SARAH: You mean Thomas? Tom?… Sometimes… Of course there were times when I — when we were— [Silence.] Oh!… Oh!… [Weeps.]

Q: I’m sorry!

SARAH: No. Really. It’s nothing. Ridiculous! I guess I just got a little… you know: emotional. I mean, this conversation—

Q: I’m turning off the recorder.

SARAH: No. Really.

Q: I’m turning it off. Maybe tomorrow—

[End of recording.]

… During our weeks at sea, I was like a mother to Miss Maria. I scolded her for not changing her linens or for failing to wash behind her ears, and she could not sleep unless she was enfolded in my arms. But we were also like sisters: each other’s only friend on the ship, the only one who knew anything about the people and places we loved most. We were also the only children and the only females not accompanied by a man (in fact, there were only two other women on board). Our intimacy was the shield by which we warded off fear — and in truth, I, too, might not have been able to sleep were I not enfolded with my dear little Polly — as I called her then. We vomited over the gunwales together; we gossiped about the people we had left behind; we traded memories about the beauty and comfort of Monticello, which now seemed a paradise to us both; we speculated anxiously about the lives we would have in Paris and told each other jokes about this sailor’s red ears, that passenger’s dewlap and another’s fondness for the phrase “in a manner of speaking.” Amazingly, we never once fought or even got annoyed with each other during our passage, perhaps because neither of us could imagine how we might survive without the other.

Everything changed once we arrived at the Hôtel de Langeac. We would never share a bed again. I would never be her mother, sister or friend. I couldn’t even call her “Polly-Pie” or “Pollarina Bumble,” as I had during our passage, but only “Miss Polly” or, on very formal occasions, “Miss Mary,” for that was her real name.

At the end of August, she and Miss Martha went to live at l’Abbaye de Penthemont — a convent school, about an hour’s walk and on the far side of the Seine from the Hôtel. They would come home Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and return to the school early the next mornings. During their absences I would help my brother Jimmy, who was the cook, with shopping and kitchen duties, and Clotilde, the housekeeper, with dusting, mopping and making the beds. But when Miss Martha and Miss Maria were home, they were my sole concern.

At nights I helped them undress and would put away their gowns, shawls and undergarments. In the mornings I brought them cups of hot chocolate in bed, put out whatever clothes they requested and would help them fasten their stays and do up the buttons at the backs of their gowns. I would also brush and pin up their hair, a chore I particularly liked, because we would talk about their friendships at school and the young men who interested them. Mr. Jefferson had hired a tutor for Jimmy and me, and as my French improved, I was able to give Miss Martha and Miss Maria gossip I had heard from other servants about the foibles and secret loves of their friends. The girls would laugh, hoot and exclaim at my reports and ask for more when I had done.

My other main duty was to mend the sisters’ clothing and do other sorts of sewing — tasks I would usually perform in a window of whatever room the girls happened to occupy and that were no obstacle to conversation. Often we talked all morning and afternoon — about anything from types of hair powder to whether Paris or Virginia was the better place to live or how it was possible, if God controlled all things, that we were the ones thinking our own thoughts. And from time to time, I would put down my sewing and we would play at cards, charades or the Devil and the Woodman.

Such days passed swiftly and happily, and I allowed myself to believe that there prevailed between us something like the familial affection that would have existed as a matter of course had our true relationship been known — and this, I have no doubt, was one of the “ideas” my mother hadn’t wanted me to get, because, of course, there was a big difference between what I thought of as our true relationship and the one we actually lived.

The girls had the right to tell me what to do, and I had no right to refuse, or even question a command — in which fact, of course, our actual relationship was at its most naked. We might be in the midst of friendly chatter — I could even be telling a story — when one of them would feel a pang of hunger and send me off to fetch some fruit or cheese. The command might come peremptorily, yet whichever sister issued it need not have felt the slightest ill will toward me nor have any sense that she had been impolite. This was just the way one spoke to servants. And as I had long been used to doing what I was told, I would simply walk off to the kitchen — though often feeling a lonely throb deep in my breast. Those were the times when I most missed my own family, Critta and Peter especially.

There were, of course, days when the girls were consciously impolite or even cruel, days when my job seemed mainly to suffer remarks like, “How can you be so stupid?” “Faster, you layabout!” or, “Of course, you are never troubled by the admiring gazes of young men.” Most of these remarks came from Miss Martha and were particularly painful because I admired her and wished that I could be as intelligent and poised as she. Miss Maria was rarely cruel, though she was prone to sulks, during which she would claim to hate school and to detest Paris and would continually pull single hairs from the side of her head, to the point that she developed a small bald spot about an inch above her left ear that I would have to be sure to cover when I did her hair in the morning.

Worst of all was when the sisters fought, which they did frequently and, often, for no apparent reason. One of their most impassioned disputes commenced when Miss Maria referred to a bird giving itself a dust bath at the Tuileries as a “popkin” and Miss Martha laughed derisively. “How can anyone be so stupid!” she said. “That’s a sparrow!” The truth is that Miss Maria was more often the first sister to attack, but given that Miss Martha was six years the elder, her counterattacks were so sophisticated and aimed so precisely at her sister’s most tender points that it was hard not to pity the poor girl, even when she was in the wrong. Often, at Miss Maria’s lowest moments in such fights, she would throw her arms around my waist and bury her face in my lap as a means of escaping her sister’s insults and gibes.