Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

As servant to both sisters it was in my interest never to appear to take sides, although I had to be especially careful not to offend Miss Martha, since as the elder and her father’s clear favorite she was the one who could do me more damage. Even if my heart were breaking for poor Miss Maria, I would do my best to seem mystified by the girl’s embraces. That strategy had only limited effectiveness, however, since Miss Martha found the fact that Miss Maria should want to embrace me exceedingly irritating all on its own — particularly as it was not uncommon for Miss Maria, even in her most contented moods, to throw her arms around my neck and declare, “I love you!” Not since both sisters were in Virginia had Miss Maria made such a declaration to her sister, nor had Miss Martha to her.

I know that in many ways I was fantastically lucky. Miss Maria truly did love me, and I loved her. My relations with Miss Martha were always more complex and have remained so until this very day. But in Paris she and I were in a position not unlike Miss Maria’s and mine during our Atlantic passage. As fluent as Miss Martha was in French, she would never be truly accepted by the French girls at school. As gracious and erudite as she might have been, and as expensive and fine as the gowns her father bought her most certainly were, in her own heart she would never cease to see herself as a rustic from a crude settlement in a savage wilderness, whereas with me she never had to feel the least self-conscious. We had known each other practically since birth; our toes had squelched in the same mud; we missed the same balmy summer nights, the heady fragrances of magnolia and jasmine and the dry sweetness of sun-warmed pine needles….

It is the voice that stops Thomas Jefferson in the dark hallway outside the kitchen. “Juh voo dray sal-ly see.”

“Non, non, non,” says Clotilde. “Encore: Je voudrais celui-ci.”

“Juh voo dray sil-ly see,” says Sally Hemings.

When Thomas Jefferson hears that voice, he remembers Martha on the veranda at the Forest. She was still wearing black, Bathurst Skelton only nine months dead, but already she was nothing like a widow. “In three weeks exactly,” Thomas Jefferson told her, “you must send me a letter consisting of one word, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and on that very day, I will send you a letter consisting of only one of those same words.”

It was then that Martha laughed, and fifteen years later, in this dark hallway, Thomas Jefferson hears that laugh again.

“But what if we each write a different word?” Martha said.

“That’s the beauty of it!” he replied. “When ‘no’ and ‘yes’ are read together, they spell ‘noyes,’ and noise is not an adequate answer, so we will have to try again until we get it right.”

They were talking about whether, when he returned from Monticello, they would perform a duet — he on violin, she on piano, a prospect that terrified them both — but as she laughed, Thomas Jefferson understood that she had, in fact, agreed to marry him, although she would never have admitted this, not even to herself.

“Mr. Jefferson,” she said, “I had not realized you could be so silly!” And she laughed again.

“Juh voo dray sil-ly see,” says Sally Hemings.

“Non,” says Clotilde. “Je… je… Répète: je… je… Et: ce… ce… celui-ci.”

“Zhuh… zhuh,” says Sally Hemings. “Zhuh voo dray suh-ly see.”

That voice on the soft air of an evening in June so many years ago. Martha was so happy when she laughed, and so was he. It was as if happiness were something they had discovered together, something no one else in all the history of humankind had ever experienced, their secret, their gift to each other.

And now that voice again. In the dark hallway. From the throat of a fourteen-year-old servant girl. That voice of silk and sand. Thomas Jefferson stops in midstep, and for a moment he cannot move, he cannot even breathe.

“Mieux,” says Clotilde. “Mieux, mais pas tout à fait correct, ma jolie petite sotte!”

Sally Hemings laughs and laughs.

What is the truth of blue but midocean under a storm cloud? But that flash on a bird’s back as it skims a field of sunlit grass? Blue is not a word, not 631 THz, nor 668 THz, not a chip or a pie slice. It is a funeral suit. It is sobriety. It is one’s share of divinity as one stands on a shard of granite underneath an empty sky, a hundred mountains at one’s feet. Swimming-pool blue. Policeman blue. The actual blue on the wall of one’s childhood bedroom and the blue that one remembers. Ice blue. Moon blue. The truth of blue is inexhaustible, and Thomas Jefferson knows that his taxonomy will never be finished, not even if he devotes his every remaining minute of life to it. His taxonomy is a form of obeisance, a way of humbling himself before truth. Eye blue. M&M’s blue. Blue under black light…

The Marquis de Lafayette has a face like a naughty fox and cannot keep still. Even when seated, he constantly flings his hands into the air, as if to give shape to his words, and his feet move so restlessly on the floor that he seems perpetually on the verge of leaping into a jig.

Sally Hemings has been in Paris only a month the first time he visits the Hôtel de Langeac. She stands against the wall while Thomas Jefferson introduces the marquis to Polly. After kissing Polly’s hand and then Patsy’s, the marquis announces that seeing the two girls side by side the image of their dear and beautiful mother has arisen so vividly within his imagination that it is as if she herself were in the room. Then he walks over to Sally Hemings and kisses her hand as well.

“What is your name?” he asks. When she tells him, he says, “I can see that you, too, have a beautiful mother, but ”—he raises his index finger with a flourish—“I also think you have a beautiful gown!” He leans toward her, his brows lifted in impish delight, and looks her directly in the eye.

Merely fourteen, and unused to being spoken to so familiarly by a dinner guest, let alone by an aristocrat, Sally Hemings can only blush and giggle, and then, embarrassed by her embarrassment, she blushes even more deeply. But the marquis continues to smile and look into her eyes.

“Do you know why I think your gown is so beautiful?” he says.

When she shakes her head and blushes yet again, he tells her, “Because I wore one exactly like it, with a wig et un grand chapeau , when I first set sail to your country! I was forbidden to go, you see, and the soldiers of the king were looking for me everywhere. So as I walked down the hill to the quay”—he walks in a small circle, with one hand on his exaggeratedly swaying hips and the other near his face, wrist bent, fingers dangling—“every time I saw a soldier, I would say, ‘ Bonjour, Monsieur! Vous êtes très beau! ’ I do not think I was a very beautiful woman, pas comme vous, les trois jolies filles. But soldiers are so vain, and they can never receive enough compliments — even from ladies who look like pigs in fancy dress! So every single soldier smiled and let me pass. And that is the story of how I had to become a woman so that I might be a general in your Continental Army!”

Everybody laughs at the marquis’s pantomime — Thomas Jefferson included, although he ends by shaking his head and saying, “I don’t think we should take our good friend entirely at his word.”

After that evening, every time the Marquis de Lafayette sees Sally Hemings, he goes straight to her and says, “And how is my beautiful little Sah-rah ?” And she always laughs and feels a trembly warmth inside her chest that robs her of the power of speech.