Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Martha is smiling but seems disconcerted by his lack of response. “Betty,” she says, “this is Mr. Jefferson.”

Only once he hears the affection in his wife’s voice does Thomas Jefferson remember that Betty used to be her nanny and was her confidante after the death of Bathurst Skelton. He has met her several times, in fact, though he has never spoken to her directly.

“Welcome,” he says, getting up from his desk. “I hope you had an easy trip.”

Betty attempts something like a smile.

“I was thinking she should stay in Ginny’s old cabin,” Martha says, her words more question than statement. “With her children.” Martha glances at the girl in Betty’s arms.

“That’s a good place,” says Thomas Jefferson. “On a clear day, you can look out the window and see a hundred miles.”

Betty attempts another smile but looks at the floor as she speaks. “Thank you, Master Jefferson.”

“ Mr. Jefferson,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“ Mr. Jefferson,” she repeats.

The little girl turns her head against her mother’s neck and looks at Thomas Jefferson with one eye.

“And who have we here?” he says.

The little girl rotates her face back against her mother’s neck, but Betty pulls her away and lowers her to the floor. “This here’s Sally,” Betty says. “She’s my youngest.”

As soon as the girl is standing on her plump, bare feet, she grabs her mother’s skirt and hides her face in it. “Go on, Sally. Say good morning to Mr. Jefferson.” Betty tries to tug her skirt from her daughter’s hands, but the little girl won’t let go.

“We been traveling two days,” Betty explains. “And Sally ain’t had a wink of sleep the whole time! Ain’t that true, Little Apple? You ain’t slept in two days.”

Touching the girl lightly on the shoulder, Thomas Jefferson says, “Welcome to your new home.”

She flings back her head and looks at him with a fierce scowl. “No! Not my home!”

Thomas Jefferson laughs. “Now, that’s a girl who knows her mind!”

“Sally!” scolds her mother. “Don’t you talk to Mr. Jefferson like that! What’s got into you?”

“Not my home!” She pulls her mother’s skirt entirely around her head.

Thomas Jefferson laughs.

He is thirty-one. When his wife knocked at his study door, he was supposed to have been writing “A Summary View of the Rights of British North America,” a position paper for the Virginia delegation to the first Continental Congress. His hair is the luminous red of a dawn in July; his eyes are the color of roasted peanuts.

The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was, unhappily, introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.

— Thomas Jefferson

“A Summary View of the Rights of British North America”

July 1774

In Thomas Jefferson’s dream, Sally Hemings is wearing only a white linen shift, torn at the front, and revealing an expanse of radiant skin. She does not notice him as she writes. He wants to talk to her, approach her, but is unable to move. And yet, at the same time, he has risen into the air and seems to be drawing nearer to her, although that may only be a result of his altered perspective.

The lamp on his desk has not been lit. The even, sand-yellow glow filling the entire room emanates, Thomas Jefferson realizes, from Sally Hemings’s resplendent face, her exposed breast, and even from those parts beneath her shift, beneath the desk and otherwise hidden from view.

And now he can actually see what she is writing — but it is not writing at all; it is a fierce assault of senseless scratches, blots, crossings-out, jabs, loops, squiggles, splashes, gashes, senile quaverings, lightning bolts, comets, eruptions, bullet holes and crevasses, running in all directions, superimposed, without any regard for horizontality, order or even the paper’s edge.

After a while Thomas Jefferson realizes that she is compiling notes toward an invention — an iron machine, powered by steam, that moves along an iron road and makes an unending hawk screech, so terrifically loud that anyone hearing it would be instantly struck deaf. “Why would you want to make such a thing?” he is finally able to ask. Sally Hemings fixes him in a gaze of contempt. She cannot speak. She is mute. And her muteness so terrifies him that his legs jerk and arms shoot out, he cries aloud and finds himself awake in the cold, blue night, alone in his bed.

… I cannot bear to be myself. I feel trapped inside my own body, and inside the life I have led. This day I have seen such sorrow, cruelty and injustice that my mind reels at the recollection of it, and my stomach is so sick with loathing that I can hold nothing down. Indeed, I have already vomited three times — twice on that acre of frozen earth where I witnessed the craven depravity of people I have lived with and even loved all my life, and once just now as I held my face over the top of the privy’s long, filth-gnarled tunnel. Nothing I believed seems true anymore. As late as this very morning, when I knew precisely what was going to happen, I could not grasp the enormity of it. I allowed myself to believe that I would still be possessed of dignity and decency afterward, and that there were limits to the horror my life — or any life — could contain. How could I have lived in such ignorance? How could I have believed so many lies, and lied so often to myself? Why is it that every time I glimpsed the faintest shadow of the truth, I covered my eyes and ran as far as I could in the opposite direction? I feel as if I never actually lived my life but only sleepwalked through it, dreaming….

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

— Thomas Jefferson

Notes on the State of Virginia

Written in 1781–82, published in 1787

Earth has covered the face of Martha Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson will not come out of his private chambers. Jupiter knocks on the door with the knuckle of his index finger.

“Mr. Tom,” he calls. None of the other servants dare call the master anything other than his last name, but Jupiter has served Thomas Jefferson since they were both boys at Shadwell, and is in the habit of saying they are as close as brothers. He knocks a second time. “Mr. Tom, Ursula got some soup here for you. Barley soup! You want her to come in and leave it on the table?”