Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

And yet I have come to fear that I may never have been entirely as innocent as I would like to believe. While I was certainly deeply flattered and even touched by what I viewed as Mr. Jefferson’s kindly and paternal interest in me, I was also always keenly aware of his physical presence — as evidenced by my otherwise unaccountable blushes and quickenings of the pulse when he might walk into the room or when I felt his attention upon me. My mother had, of course, warned me about the possible consequences of the attention any white man might pay to me, but I simply could not imagine that Mr. Jefferson could harbor such crude desires. No doubt my naïveté was partly the natural result of my ever-growing awareness (from the things I overheard, from the deference with which he was treated by visitors to the Hôtel) that he was a famous and very important man, but the fact remains that I was not merely thrilled by his glances and smiles, I actually longed for them.

At the very least, I fear that these involuntary responses were misinterpreted by Mr. Jefferson and encouraged inclinations that perhaps he might not otherwise have indulged. But I also fear that they made me susceptible within my own being to those particular attentions that ultimately brought me to what I can now only think of as my damnation. And it is this possibility, perhaps above all others, that makes me writhe with shame….

Thomas Jefferson is forty-six and Sally Hemings is sixteen. They are in Paris, and it is late April 1789. Patsy and Polly are at school, and Jimmy is in Le Havre, picking up a shipment of books, surveying equipment and seeds that have been sent from Virginia. Thomas Jefferson finds Sally Hemings in the scullery cleaning the breakfast dishes.

“Mademoiselle Sally,” he says, “j’ai une petite surprise pour toi.”

“Oui?” She puts the dish has just finished into a rack and picks up another. “Est-ce que Patsy et Polly—”

Thomas Jefferson cuts her off. “Non, non, ce n’est pas ça!”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est, alors?”

“Un miracle!”

“Ah, non!” Sally Hemings crinkles the bridge of her nose. The last “miracle” Thomas Jefferson presented to her was a lump of cheese that looked and smelled exactly like clotted matter scraped out from under a toenail.

Thomas Jefferson laughs. “ Non, non! Nothing like that!” He laughs again, remembering how, during the instant she held that morsel of cheese in her mouth, he could see the white all the way around her gray-blue irises and how, in the next instant, she spat the cheese onto Madame d’Arnault’s Persian rug and ran straight out onto the street. “ Je te le promets ,” he says. “This will be like nothing you have ever experienced. A real miracle — you’ll see! ” Thomas Jefferson observes suspicion doing battle with curiosity on Sally Hemings’s forehead and lips. “Come along,” he says. “ Allons-y! ” And then he tells her, “Perhaps you should put on that yellow gown. And your embroidered cape. You will want to look your best.”

After an interval of muddy streets and a brisk trot along a country road, during which Sally Hemings sits beside the driver, she finds herself in a mown field, at the center of which a crowd surrounds a bonfire. Something like a gigantic purse — blue, yellow and red silk, frilled on the seams — is stretched out on the grass.

At first she cannot imagine why Thomas Jefferson asked her to wear her finest clothes to this rural ceremony (or whatever it might be), but then she notices that the crowd contains a substantial representation of Parisian high society. Although Thomas Jefferson steers her well away from them, she sees the Princess Lubomirsky, and Monsieur and Madame de Corny, and Baron Clemenceau, with his crooked mustache. What on earth could draw such men and women to some peasant’s hacked pasture? And why is it that they are all chattering with such excitement and staring at the activities of the men around the bonfire?

The mouth of the purse stretched out on the grass is propped open by a six-foot-high wicker ring that two men hold on edge, while four others blow smoke into it by waving sailcloth fans. There seem to be other men inside the purse, because a sort of dome — mounted on poles, perhaps — keeps rising and falling within its far end. As the men blowing the smoke grow tired, they are replaced by others, while still more men keep heaping wood on the fire. The dome, rising and falling inside the purse, grows larger and looms higher with every new waft of smoke.

“Now look!” says Thomas Jefferson, leaning so close that his lips practically touch her ear. “It is about to happen. You will see. A true miracle!”

But Sally Hemings cannot pay attention. She is trying to figure out if Thomas Jefferson’s lips might, in fact, have touched her ear. And she is still feeling the low burr of his voice inside her head. She looks around to see if anyone is staring at her, but all eyes are on the enormous purse.

“It is happening!” Thomas Jefferson says, standing tall again, entirely removed from the vicinity of her ear. “Watch! A man is going to fly!”

Sally Hemings does not believe him, of course. A man flying? Impossible!

But then, with a sound like the earth itself heaving a sigh, the giant purse lifts off the flattened grass, and guided by shouting men pulling ropes and pushing with poles, it swings, bottom up, directly over the fire, some ten yards above the flame tips, where it is held in place by four strong ropes tied to four stout stakes. Sally Hemings waits for the men inside the purse to tumble into the fire, and when they never appear, she imagines them hovering within the purse’s shadowy interior, just as the purse is hovering in the air.

There is a platform beside the fire and, on top of the platform, a wicker canoe connected by slender lines to the inverted purse. A young man, also wearing blue, yellow and red silk, climbs a ladder and steps gingerly into the canoe. His curly chestnut brown hair falls well past his shoulders.

Thomas Jefferson touches his forehead to Sally Hemings’s temple. His breaths puff against her ear, and his voice is low. “That is le Comte de Toytot.”

The man sitting in the canoe is making a speech, but Sally Hemings’s French has vanished. She understands nothing — except that he is about to fly.

And then, in a single instant, four men with swords cut the four ropes and the inverted purse lifts from the earth with the fluid grace of a wave at sea. As the wicker canoe swings off the platform and also begins to rise, the foolish young count with the long brown hair laughs — as if he has not committed an abomination, and is not about to die, as if he has never, in fact, been happier in his life.

“What is he doing!” Sally Hemings cries, grabbing Thomas Jefferson’s sleeve.

“Nothing.” Thomas Jefferson smiles. “Just this: He is going to fly like a bird. And then, when the air inside the ballon cools, he will sink slowly to the earth. It is all safe. All under control.”

This time she believes Thomas Jefferson, not only because he knows more than any man on earth but because she can see that what he is saying is true. The man and the ballon continue to rise with a breathtaking grandeur, sideways, drifting with the breeze.

But then something changes: A hollowness comes into her throat, and the whole of her body goes cold, and all at once she becomes aware that Thomas Jefferson has taken hold of her hand, the one with which she had grabbed his sleeve.

The hollowness in her throat expands and becomes a sort of dizziness. What is happening makes no sense. Why would he do such a thing? Again and again she wonders if the pressure she feels on her fingers could possibly be the pressure of his hand, and again and again she tells herself, No, it can’t be.