Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Just as his hand touches the latch on his study door, he hears the screech of the huge front door opening and Patsy speaking loudly. He can’t make out her first words, but then he hears, “Perhaps the mothers were being punished for some evil they had done.”

“But the babies!” says another voice. It is Sally Hemings. “The babies were punished, too. Why couldn’t he punish the mothers in some other way?”

“Perhaps they were evil.”

“But they were babies! Babies can’t be evil.”

“No, I mean that they were fated to do evil and God let them die with their mothers so that that evil would not come into the world.”

“If he knew that the babies would do evil, then why did he allow their mothers to give birth to them? What is the point of bringing them into the world only to kill them?”

“Oh, Sally!” Patsy cries. “Stop being so thick! If you’d given it two seconds of thought, you’d know that the world is far too complicated for us to comprehend. Only God understands the millions of things that must happen so that this world can be just and the virtuous get their due reward.”

By this point the three girls have passed through the foyer into the dining room, where Thomas Jefferson is also standing. Patsy and Sally Hemings seem so engrossed in their discussion that they haven’t noticed him, but Polly cries out, “Papa! We’re home!”

“So you are!” he says. “And you’re late! I’ve been wasting away with hunger!”

He walks around the big table at the center of the circular room and receives kisses from both of his daughters. Sally Hemings stands by the door with the pinched brow and turned-down lips of someone who wants to speak but has decided to remain silent. She is carrying both of the girls’ satchels.

“But you were in the midst of quite a debate,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Don’t let me interrupt!”

“Oh, it’s over!” says Patsy.

“Is it really?”

“Sally was just committing the Manichean heresy, but now there’s nothing more to talk about.”

Sally Hemings has backed toward the door and will clearly be bringing the girls’ satchels up to their bedchambers in two seconds.

“Is that true, Sally?”

She looks down at the floor and doesn’t speak.

“Have you committed the Manichean heresy?” says Thomas Jefferson.

She looks up, blushes and looks down again. In an almost inaudible voice she says, “I don’t know, sir.”

“She was just telling us this awful story she heard in the marché ,” says Patsy.

Thomas Jefferson turns toward Sally Hemings. “What is it?”

Patsy speaks. “Two mothers and their babies were found dead—”

“Let her tell it,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Oh…” Sally Hemings seems about to excuse herself, but then she says, “That’s it, mostly. Except they were in a canot. Madame Aubier, who sells onions — she has a brother who is a sailor. And he was making the voyage back from Montreal when he spotted a canot floating in the empty sea. It was filled with people — the survivors of a ship that had gone down, he thought. Except when his ship drew up alongside the canot , he saw that all the people in it were dead. Frozen to death. It was winter. And there were two mothers in the boat who had frozen solid with their arms around their babies and small children. That’s what we were talking about.” She glances at Patsy.

“And what did you make of that?” Thomas Jefferson asks Sally Hemings.

She glances again at Patsy, who just shrugs. “Well, the main thing is that I didn’t see how a good God could allow all those people to die — especially those babies, who couldn’t have done a thing wrong in their lives. So I was just saying that either God isn’t all good or he isn’t all-powerful. I didn’t see how he could be both and let something like that happen.”

“And I was saying that the mind of God is vast,” says Patsy, “and that it is foolish to pretend that our own weak minds can ever fathom his rationale, his motives or even the true consequences of his acts.”

“And what do you think, Polly?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I wasn’t listening.” Polly casts the other two girls a worried glance.

“But what do you think?”

“I don’t know…. God moves in a mysterious way, I suppose.”

Thomas Jefferson smiles ruefully and shakes his head. “This is what I get for letting you two be educated by nuns.” He points at Sally Hemings. “This girl has not been to school one day in her life, and yet she can see the essence of the problem more clearly than either of you. What you have both said is exactly what popes and monarchs would have us think about them and their actions. There will be no justice on this earth unless we can look plainly at the facts before our eyes and draw the most rational conclusions. Our abilities to observe and evaluate are the surest manifestation of God’s grace. Everything else is occult superstition and plays into the hands of tyrants.”

The two sisters look down at the floor in shame, but Sally Hemings can feel their irritation — Patsy’s especially — radiating in her direction.

“You have a good head on your shoulders, Sally,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Thank you, sir.” She glances at Patsy, who pays her no mind. Then she lifts the two satchels she has been holding. “But if I may be excused…”

Thomas Jefferson nods, and Sally Hemings, allowing herself a small smile, backs out of the room.

Thomas Jefferson believes that he should love the world — an ambition continuously obstructed by the fact that one cannot have the good without also having the evil. Thomas Jefferson wants purity, but there is no purity, not in this world and least of all in his own heart. There is beauty, however, and mathematics — which are one and the same sometimes, as in the golden rectangle, which when manifested in architecture can make walls and whole rooms seem weightless and floating. But this impression is only a production of the mind, which is to say: an illusion. In fact, all physical manifestations of the golden rectangle are as solidly earthbound as any other existing thing. Thomas Jefferson knows that all purity is illusory, and yet he still wants his love of the world to be pure, which is to say: illusion-free.

… I have tried to sleep, but it is useless. My mind whirled with infernal thoughts, and my limbs were possessed by such writhes and twitches that I could not keep them still for half a second. I have no idea what the hour is. Sometime after eleven, I imagine. The clouds have parted to reveal a low, ice-white moon that has infused the snowy lawn with pallid brilliance. A mouse is gnawing at something inside the wall.

I finally surrendered all hope of sleep when a voice spoke inside my head, telling me that I had committed nothing but self-exculpatory lies on these pages and that the whole truth of my last forty years could be conveyed in four words: I BETRAYED GOOD PEOPLE.

Just this instant a moonbeam so brilliant it cancels out the wavery orange of the candle has crossed the paper-littered corner of the desk and struck the foot of a chair beside the door.

Would I be justified in taking this as a sign?

But of what?

In any event, what finally got me out of bed was the thought that what I must do here is disentangle the strands of ignorance, inattention, self-deception, fear and desire out of which my life is woven so that I might see clearly and finally how truly damnable I am — and once I have laid that truth bare, these pages will be meaningless and I had best throw them onto the fire and go on to whatever life remains to me….