Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Come, Sally, take a turn,” he says. “Let us see what it looks like from all sides.”

“No,” she says. But then she does do a quick and graceful swirl. She is so embarrassed afterward that she bends over double and nearly backs into the mirror.

“Beautiful!” he says. “You’ve grown into a very fine young woman, Sally.”

The words aren’t even out of his mouth before he can feel Madame Palatin’s disapproval chilling one corner of the room. He doesn’t care about her. In fact, he is glad if he has offended her. But then he glances at the chair beside him and sees Patsy looking up, her expression an amalgam of disbelief, mockery and alarm.

They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them…. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous…. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.

— Thomas Jefferson

Notes on the State of Virginia

Written in 1781–82, published in 1787

It is April of 1789, Thomas Jefferson is forty-six, and his mind is as busy with discontinuous thoughts as the sky is busy with birds. He knows that his constant distraction is wrong, and many times a day he wills his mind to be more disciplined. And yet it is also true that cerebration has never felt so fruitful as it has during this one year in particular. And he has, perhaps, never felt so intensely alive as at this very moment, when, strolling the shore of the lake at the Bois de Boulogne, he is in conversation with his great friend, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. They are preparing for the first meeting of the Estates-General, Louis XVI’s response to Lafayette’s call for a national assembly, and are in a delirium composed in equal parts of rhetoric, philosophy, egotism and hope.

“Government,” Thomas Jefferson is saying, “should exist only as a mechanical apparatus with no power of its own, inert except when it is executing the public will. Its highest purpose should be to preserve the absolute freedom of its citizens.”

“Absolute?” says Lafayette, one jet eyebrow uptilted, lips in that nearly straight smile signifying his delight at having detected an error in reasoning. “ Absolute freedom? For all citizens?”

“ Absolute ,” Thomas Jefferson affirms, “except insofar as the exercise of that freedom would injure other people or deprive them of their own freedom.”

“Aha!” Lafayette points his index finger toward the clouds. “Deprive other people of their freedom!” The delight in Lafayette’s smile has multiplied considerably. “That brings to mind an old bone I have to pick with you.”

Thomas Jefferson hopes that his own smile also expresses delight, for as much as he enjoys debate, there are many times when he feels ashamed before Lafayette, who, as a mere lad of twenty, was a general in the Continental Army and took a musket ball in the thigh in defense of Thomas Jefferson’s dearest beliefs, and who, once Thomas Jefferson had fled Richmond ahead of the British, retook the city, and then, after Cornwallis attempted to capture Jefferson at Monticello, did battle with the British on the banks of Jefferson’s own Rivanna River, and then continued to battle the British at Green Spring and Jamestown and Richmond — during which time Thomas Jefferson, hiding out in a cottage on his most remote plantation, Poplar Forest, was drafting his one and only book, Notes on the State of Virginia.

“… I will make it good…. Good…”

The fire shimmers copper and orange along the planes of Thomas Jefferson’s forehead and cheeks and gleams gold on the tiny droplets adhering to the stubble on his upper lip. A freestanding candelabra behind his chair lights the pages of his book, and there is an empty wine bottle on the table beside him. His elbows rest on the arms of his chair, while he cups a full glass with both hands in front of his belly. A solitary creak sounds in the hallway just outside the parlor door.

“Sally?” calls Thomas Jefferson. After a short wait, he calls again. “Sally.”

Sally Hemings appears in the dark doorway, her face a wavering orange in the firelight — except for her right cheek, which is lit a steady sand yellow by the candle she is holding.

“I was wondering if that was you,” says Thomas Jefferson.

Sally Hemings doesn’t speak. Her lips purse in something that might be a smile.

“Is everything all right?” he asks.

“I’ve just finished for the day.” She lifts her candle as if it is evidence.

“Good,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Good.” He sips from his glass. “It’s cold tonight, don’t you think?”

The expression that might be a smile becomes something more like a grimace.

“For April, I mean,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“There’s a draft downstairs,” says Sally Hemings.

“It’s very warm here by the fire, if you’d like…” He gestures to the empty chair opposite his own.

Now the expression is very definitely a smile, but an uneasy one. “Thank you, Mr. Jefferson… but…” She shrugs and lifts her candle a second time.

“Certainly,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Good night.” The uneasiness has vanished, and her smile is only happy — and radiant with her generous spirit. Sally Hemings doesn’t always look beautiful, but right now she seems a vision to Thomas Jefferson.

“Good night, Sally.”

“Good night,” she says.

And then he is alone.

In Thomas Jefferson’s mind, there is only one thought, and when Sally Hemings is kneeling before the fireplace, stirring the embers; when she stops by the window in the hallway and sweeps a strand of hair off her forehead as she looks out into the morning light; when he sees her down on the street talking to the knife sharpener, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur” —at such moments his one thought grows until it is like a mob storming the capital of a failed nation. Thomas Jefferson knows that he has rights, but he also knows that not all rights are equal. Yes , he thinks as paving stones fragment the window glass of the capital. You can do as you please. There is no reason not to.

… When I first arrived in France, I was indeed everything that is meant by “innocent.” I was lonely and afraid. I understood nothing of what was around me and had no taste for any of it. I kept to myself and longed for the day when I might return to Virginia and my family, whom I missed terribly. Even as I began to enjoy the world in which I was now living, my delights were entirely childlike. It seemed a simple wonder to me that Paris should contain so many beautiful and beautifully dressed people and that I could not only move among them but actually talk to them, that their language should turn out to be not the assemblage of grunts, groans, belches and throat-clearings that it had seemed to me at first but a wonderfully textured mechanism for expressing oneself, understanding others and making sense of and savoring the world. Even before I could put more than ten words of French in a comprehensible row, I had already adopted the Gallic sense of humor and would puff out my lip and blow in that classic expression of French mocking surprise, or I would utter that singsong “ Oo-la! ” which has almost the same meaning, and I became particularly attracted to the phrase “ C’est la vie ,” perhaps because I took the same comfort as the Parisians in the notion that the most extraordinary actions and events were, in fact, entirely commonplace and therefore incapable of disrupting one’s daily existence. During those months and years when every new increment of my burgeoning Frenchness was a sheer delight to me, I was, in so many ways, exactly like a child who has wandered into a primeval wilderness and who can do nothing but exclaim at the brilliant flowers, the massive trees, the strange and beautiful birdsongs, having no inkling of the crocodiles lurking under the lily pads, the snakes coiling in the branches, the panthers stalking at her heels, the vultures circling above the treetops.