Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

As I pull the top of my sleeping bag back over my shoulders, I notice two perfectly round coals glowing in the gloom about a dozen yards from the fire. I hear a low noise, something between a grunt and a howl, and find another pair of coals hovering about the same distance away in the opposite direction. I grab a stout branch and drag it into my sleeping bag with me, just in case. There is no horizon here and no real dawn or daylight — just a cataract-colored luminescence that lasts about as long as a regular day.

Thomas Jefferson walks hurriedly along the sandy path through the Champs-Élysées, head down, hands in the pockets of his breeches, coattails kicked again and again by his striding calves, a grid of plane trees spreading out for acres on either side of him. He hardly slept last night and was too bleary and restless this morning to work. It is April 21, a month past the vernal equinox, but the air is dank, cold. Heaps of cloud, white and gray, drift over the rooftops, intermittently releasing showers of musket-ball-size drops, but so far never intensely enough to merit his turning around and heading home.

He is trying to convince himself that what he had wanted last night would not have been a theft but a gift, that the girl, with all the modesty that is natural to her sex, had been looking on him exactly as he had been looking on her and that, unable to acknowledge the depth of her own feeling—

But this line of reasoning is quashed by his memory of her rigid body, her averted face and the noises she had made — noises of childish fear and grief.

He veers off the path and into the geometric forest, where identical tree trunks angle through his peripheral vision in perfect diagonal and perpendicular rows. He stops, his forehead against smooth, mottled bark, and gasps in panicked despair at the impossibility of escaping his own being. But then, hearing that the sounds he is making now are the sounds he made last night, he falls silent.

This is self-pity, he tells himself. You have no right to self-pity.

Pushing away from the tree, he continues walking, his head down, hands in his pockets. He feels tears rising to his eyes, but they never come. He hasn’t cried in years, not since Martha died.

How could he have allowed himself to get so drunk? How could he have allowed such low urges and repulsive ideas to take possession of his judgment? It is true. He cannot deny it: le droit du seigneur. That foul aristocratic presumption had come to mind last night every time his resolve wavered, every time he was overcome with anticipatory shame. Who would blame you? he had thought. They all do it. Lafayette has told him that he has had un goûter of every single one of his serving girls. Even James Monroe has confessed to a dalliance with his chambermaid. No one will blame you, he had told himself time and again.

And yet once he was actually in the girl’s room, he never gave a thought to his “right,” nor did he think of himself as “taking” anything from her. All that was in his mind were his nights with Martha — especially those first nights of their marriage, by the fireplace, when the snow was falling outside the windows. Stupidly, blindly, selfishly, he had imagined that all that was needed was a little patience, some loving words, a gentle touch here and there with hand, lips and tongue, and all at once Sally Hemings’s desire would overwhelm her modesty and, as with Martha, her thighs would loosen, her arms would fly up and she would cover his neck and lips with her kisses. But instead he’d inspired nothing but her loathing, and now he feels nothing but loathing for himself.

He hears a pattery drumming in the leaves overhead. A cold drop strikes his cheek. In a matter of seconds, the rain is falling so thick and fast that it hits the sandy earth all around him with a sound like millions of tiny feet stamping.

Thomas Jefferson has never called her “Miss Hemings” before. She came upon him under the portico, squeezing water out of his sodden coat by twisting it into a thick rope. The sleeves of his white shirt were sodden, too, and perfectly transparent where the wet linen clung to the skin of his arms. As soon as he realized he was being observed, he shook out the coat and attempted to put it on. After prodding several times at the interior of a still-drenched and twisted sleeve, he gave up, flung the coat over his shoulders and pulled the lapels across his chest.

His lips were blue, his hair a mass of tarnished copper coils, his face dripping. As he looked at her, a shiver passed through his whole body. This was when he said it: “Miss Hemings, I know that I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I want you to know that I profoundly regret my actions. They were utterly inexcusable, and they will fill me with shame until the end of my days.”

Now he is silent. His clearly rehearsed speech over, there is nothing he can do save wait for her reply.

But Sally Hemings is too filled with rage to talk. Her ears roar with it, and everything turns white. By the time she comes back to herself, she is already at the bottom of the steps and making her way rapidly but unsteadily toward the gate to the street.

She has no idea what she said or did while the world was roaring and white. She has no idea what she looked like, but she feels as if she were shaken into a vibrating cloud of light and noise.

And now she is out of the gate and on the street, which smells of feces and wet stone. The tremulous weakness fades from her legs; her stride grows purposeful, strong.

It is Saturday. She is going to pick up Patsy and Polly at their school across the river, on rue de Grenelle. It will take her an hour to walk there and longer to walk back. Maybe when she returns, she will know what to do.

The guard tightens her belt. She speaks.

— Wake up.

— Uh…

— Wake up. It’s morning.

— Wha…?

— Get the fuck out of bed.

— Who are you?

— Get the fuck up, I told you!

— Why?

— Because I told you so.

— It’s the middle of the night.

— No it’s not.

— I’ve only been asleep for ten minutes.

— It’s been three hours.

— What?

— Three hours. I’ve been on duty three hours, and the whole time I’ve been sitting here watching you. So now it’s morning.

— It’s not morning.

— How do you know?

— Leave me alone.

— How do you know?

— Because I’m fucking exhausted, and I want to sleep.

— Answer my question.

— …

— Answer my question.

— I just did.

— Just because you’re tired doesn’t mean it’s morning. You think the sun rises and falls according to when you feel like sleeping?

— …

— When was the last time you saw daylight?

— How the fuck do I know?

— I rest my case.

— Why are you doing this?

— Well, there are two reasons. First of all, I’m the guard and you’re shit, so whatever I say is the law. That’s the most important reason. The second reason is that I’ve been reading your file, and I’m interested in you.

— Great.

— Don’t you want to know why?

— Why?

— Because I know you think you don’t belong here.

— Does anybody think they belong here?

— Nobody likes being here, but that’s not the same thing as thinking they don’t belong.

— …

— Some people know they don’t deserve freedom. Murderers, mostly. Even the really heinous ones. On the whole I prefer working with murderers.

— Why?

— Because they know the difference between right and wrong. They know that some people are good and some people are evil and there is no in-between.