Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

But then her hand is empty, and Thomas Jefferson is running. The entire crowd is running. She can still feel the pressure of his hand and the sweat their hands made together, but now he is far enough away that she would have to shout for him to hear. She lifts the skirt of her yellow gown and runs across the field after him, along with the rest of the crowd, until finally, at the edge of a wood, they must all stop, while the ballon —now higher than several houses piled one atop the other — glides silently over the trees.

Over the trees! A man flying over the trees!

Now Thomas Jefferson is next to her again. “Should I ask le comte to take us with him next time?” he says, his lips once again beside her ear. “Would you like to fly with le Comte de Toytot?”

“Oh, no!” says Sally Hemings. “I’d be too afraid!” Then, almost immediately, she thinks, Yes! I do want to fly with le comte ! I do! I do! Oh, please ask him! Please take me with you!

But these words never pass her lips.

Sally Hemings is dead. The yard behind her house in Charlottesville is loud with the braying of mockingbirds. The rag-and-bone man’s cart clatters on the cobblestone street out front. Her children are gathered around her bed: her three slump-shouldered sons and her daughter, who has not been back to Virginia in thirteen years and who arrived only minutes after her mother breathed her last.

Sally Hemings’s dead children are there also: the daughter taken by fever after she had learned to walk but before she could ever run; the daughter who, small enough to cradle between elbow and palm, never recovered from the trial of being born; and the one Sally Hemings always called “La Petite,” who had been conceived in Paris and who, no bigger than her mother’s fist, came into this world on a river of blood and was buried at Monticello in a ceramic pot.

The dead children grieve, but their grief is gentle, like a winter fog over a yellow field. The grief of her living children has turned them to stone. They do not talk. They are waiting for something to change, and nothing will ever change. The youngest son is holding a violin, but he has left the bow in the front room.

Outside the window the trees heave in a sudden wind. The sky grows dark, and the mockingbirds fall silent. For long moments rain is about to fall, but after a rumble of thunder the wind recedes and the sun returns.

Now Thomas Jefferson, who has been dead himself for more than eight years, is also in the room. Sally Hemings looks at him but doesn’t say a word.

Minutes pass before he finds the strength to tell her, “I wanted you to be happy, but you were never happy.”

“I was happy,” she says.

“With me?”

“Yes,” she says. “I was happy.”

But Thomas Jefferson does not believe her. He does not believe her because he himself was never happy. There were many, many times when he pretended otherwise: the time when she acted out the story of Cinderella with a teacup, a soup spoon and two forks, and the two of them laughed and laughed and laughed; or the time they spent the whole day riding, then cooled off with a swim in Johnson’s Creek and then made love on a horse blanket spread over a bed of mint; or that afternoon when he was sitting beside her on her bed, bouncing three-month-old Beverly on his knee, and suddenly the tiny boy’s delighted squeaks and coos came together in a chuckle and then a full belly laugh — his first ever. Thomas Jefferson knew many such moments with Sally Hemings and managed to believe, each time, that he was happy, that Sally Hemings was happy, that no two people could be happier. But now he knows that on every one of those occasions his own happiness had been infected by fear, by his sense that what he believed was happiness could not, in fact, ever exist in this world and that in a moment he would have to live in the world as it actually was: a place of unending loss and shame.

He takes the empty chair between two of their living sons and across the bed from the third son and their daughter. “No,” he says. “You were never happy. There is no need to lie anymore.”

“I am not lying,” she says, but after that she can think of nothing else to say.

For a long time the silence in the room only deepens. Then a mockingbird launches into a fleet and fragmentary improvisation.

“You cannot pretend to be ignorant of the effect you have upon me,” says Thomas Jefferson.

It is the evening following le Comte de Toytot’s flight. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings are seated across a corner of the dining-room table, before the fire. There are two wine bottles between them, one empty, the other not quite. There are also two glasses. Thomas Jefferson has just finished his. Sally Hemings’s is almost full. This is her third glass. He has been counting. Or maybe her fourth.

“And what is more,” he says, smiling tenderly, “you cannot pretend that you do not share my feelings. I can see it in your eyes.”

Sally Hemings is not, in fact, looking at Thomas Jefferson. She is looking at her hands, her right thumb massaging repeatedly the center of her left palm.

“I could see it,” he says, “when you took my hand out on the field. Do you remember? Just as le Comte de Toytot was borne into the air?”

Thomas Jefferson wants her to look at him again. He reaches across the table, places the edge of his bent index finger beneath her chin and lifts.

Now she is looking into his eyes, her own eyes tremulous in the flickering firelight.

There is a plunging in his breast that is equally pain and joy. “My God!” he says. “You are so beautiful.”

Sally Hemings pulls her chin away from his still-extended finger. “No.” She is looking again into her lap.

“Yes!” he insists, allowing his finger to lightly stroke her cheek as he withdraws his hand. “You are a vision!” He refills his glass, then swirls the dark fluid once.

“No,” she says, still not looking at him. “I didn’t take your hand.” At the word “didn’t,” her head lifts and she looks him straight in the eye. Her gaze is firm, but he can see that she is trembling, that she is afraid, that in a moment she will begin to cry.

“I’m sorry.” He takes a deep sip from his glass. “I am sorry. I have been presumptuous.”

“No,” she says. “You have—”

He cuts her off: “I am sorry. ” There is anger in his final word, and he is ashamed of his anger. Now he is the one looking down. “I have allowed myself to be blinded by feeling.”

“No.”

“Please,” he insists. “I am sorry.” This time he speaks the word with a suitable tenderness. “You are a beautiful young woman, Sally, but that does not give me the right—”

He stops speaking when he sees that her gaze has fallen to her lap.

“What?” he asks softly. When she doesn’t answer, he slumps in his chair. “And now I am making everything worse.”

“No,” she says. And she looks up at him with a small, shy smile. Again that plunge of joy and pain. He wants to pull her into his arms but only takes another deep sip from his glass. She is still smiling, and he begins to wonder if he might hope.

“What?” he says again, even more softly. He leans toward her.

“Nothing,” she says. “I had a lovely day. I will never forget it. C’était un vrai miracle de voir un homme voler dans le ciel. ”

“Yes,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Wonderful. Vraiment. ” She has stopped smiling. He sees the trouble in his own face reflected in hers. “Perhaps you had better leave me alone, Sally. I have work to do.”

The smile returns weakly, then vanishes as she pushes her chair back from the table and stands.