Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

He pulls back his head. “Sally?” He starts to smile, but then his smile fades.

She makes a small shriek, like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog, and shakes her head once, hard. She cannot speak.

“Are you all right?” he says.

Again she shakes her head.

For a long moment, he only looks at her, his disconcertion resolving slowly into something like profound exhaustion.

“Oh, God!” he says. “Oh, God! How could I be such a fool?” He turns away from her. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he puts his elbows on his knees and his forehead into his hands, clawing at his hair. “I’m sorry! I am so sorry! Oh, God.” He stands and pulls his breeches up from around his ankles. “I can’t believe I… I can’t believe… What a fool… Unforgivable…”

Then he is gone. The door has closed behind him.

His candle is still on her night table. The flame drops and flutters as a gust seeps around the window casing.

Outside her door she hears an abrupt, hollow thundering. He has stumbled on the stairs. Quiet. An exhalation. He cannot see. Unsteady foot thumps quieten as they recede. He must make his way in total blackness. By touch alone.

Colors are illusions. Better yet: They don’t entirely exist. A particular blue will look radically different in a field of orange than in a field of green. Show ten people a blue wall. Then take them into another room, present them with a hundred cards in assorted varieties of blue and ask them to pick out the color of the wall they were just looking at. It is highly likely that each person will pick out a different blue and likelier still that none of the blues they choose will match the wall in the other room. What is blue in sunshine might be green by candlelight and purple under fluorescent light. A blue on a smooth surface will appear a different blue when the surface is rough. There is a color that, especially in its paler tints, most men see as blue and most women see as green. It is a fact that the colors we see are never actually present, and yet, at the same time, they are absolutely present, as present as our emotions, memories, hopes, desires, beliefs — our very selves. And, of course — individually, but more commonly together — colors can constitute that most vivid and immediate form of truth, that truth also known as beauty.

The huge clamor of steel shrieking on steel recedes into the rumble and roar of the train hurtling through the soot-blackened tunnel. As Thomas Jefferson watches, Sally Hemings lowers her fingers from her ears, pulls her book out from under her arm and reopens it. She sighs, and her face settles into peaceful concentration — so maybe she hasn’t noticed him after all. Gradually a faint tribulation darkens the center of her brow, but maybe only in response to some sorrow or worry experienced by the imaginary people about whom she is reading. He remembers, years ago, watching her through a window as she sat in a wicker chair out on the porch, gazing idly into space, her feet up on the railing. He felt, as he studied her then, that he was seeing her as she actually was — which is to say, as she was in his absence. It was a moment of terrific intimacy.

Sally Hemings stands in the dim hallway thinking about different kinds of knowledge. Some things that you know leave you alone, like the way bread tastes, or your name, or the stink of butcher shops on a summer afternoon. But there are other things that once you know them won’t let you be yourself anymore. You can remember who you used to be, but you are no longer that person. And you never will be again.

The fear came first and the disgust afterward. As she lay alone in her bed once Thomas Jefferson had gone, she was haunted by the images of his sweating, red face, distorted by drink and by the brutal, animalistic urges that had taken him over. He had, in fact, become an animal as he threw himself on top of her, grunting, groaning, clawing at her, rubbing himself against her. How is it possible that a man as dignified, gentle and wise as Thomas Jefferson could have yielded to such crude impulses?

If she could find a way to go back to when he’d asked if she would like to see a true miracle, she would say no. And when he told her to put on her yellow gown: No. And when he asked her to get into the carriage with him, she would say it was not proper for a gentleman to ride with his serving girl. And when he offered her wine, she would say, “No. I won’t drink it. No.”

But now, in the cold morning — gray sky in the window at the end of the hall — she thinks that as horrified as she may have been last night, it is probably for the better that she now knows that Thomas Jefferson is no different from any of the brutal men her mother warned her of, that his civility is merely a subterfuge, as it is perhaps for all men. She is wiser for this knowledge, and maybe also stronger.

Last night she had thought that she was weak, that she was nothing, not even a leaf blowing down the street. But now she knows that Thomas Jefferson is the one who is weak — because he showed her that he needed something from her; he needed something so badly that it turned him into a wordless animal. And he also showed her his shame — which perhaps is what matters most.

He sat there on the end of her bed, his head in his hands, talking to himself, moaning, cursing, and then he left, staggering as he pulled up his breeches in midstep. And as Sally Hemings watched his shame, all of her own went away. I am blameless , she told herself. And now, in the hallway, she says aloud, “I am better than him.” Never before did she imagine that she could be better than Thomas Jefferson. The world as she knew it simply didn’t allow for that possibility. And now it does.

There is so much room inside Thomas Jefferson. I shout, and there is no echo. I have been walking for days and am not sure I will ever traverse the distance between his head and his feet. Nights I unroll my sleeping bag and make a fire from the dried sticks and punky logs that are scattered everywhere in here. Last night a man walked out of the darkness and asked if he could sit down and warm his hands at my fire. A fresh-killed rabbit dangled from his belt, and he said he’d be happy to share it with me. He, too, has been walking for days and days, and he has come to the conclusion that Thomas Jefferson does not exist, that this is only a sort of purgatory or perhaps one of the upper rings of hell — the one reserved for those who can’t distinguish fact from hope.

Tonight a different man is warming himself by my fire. He has no food to offer, but he is happy to help me cut potatoes and beets for a soup. I tell him what the man said last night, and he tells me he knows for certain that Thomas Jefferson is real and that we are inside him. It’s just that these fires of ours make him lighter than air, and so he is constantly drifting among the clouds. “That’s why you can never get to the end of him,” the man says. “He is everywhere.”

I tell him I don’t understand why that should be true, and he tells me he has conclusive evidence. “A couple of weeks ago,” he says, “I happened to be near one of his eyes, and I could look down at the moonlight shining off the tops of the clouds. And below them I could see the orange lights of a huge city — London or Los Angeles. Or maybe Tokyo.”

I don’t see what this proves but decide not to argue.

After we have finished our soup, we put a couple of big logs on the fire and get into our sleeping bags. Sometime later I am awakened by the clicking of clawed feet and by soft but emphatic woofs, exhalations and semivoiced yelps, which all together sound remarkably like speech. I sit up and place a couple more logs on the fire. At first they only smoke, but after I have blown on them awhile, flags of yellow flame ripple up into the darkness.