Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“What are you talking about?”

He smiles again. “I don’t know. I’m waiting for you to tell me. All I’m saying is that you look like you’ve been up to no good.”

“I haven’t done anything,” she says angrily. She wants to leave, but she can’t.

“Well, something happened.”

“No.” She picks up her apron absently and wraps both hands in it. “I have to go.” She takes a step away, then turns around. “Something happened, but I didn’t do anything.”

His smile is gone. “Oh, Sal.”

Her eyes grow hot with tears. She squeezes her lips together and shakes her head.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he tells her.

She wipes her fingers across her eyes, then says, “I can’t talk here.”

She walks toward the door and out into the yard, where the powdery light is going pinkish. She hurries between beds of the rotted leaves and stems of last year’s peas and squash, pressed flat by a winter of snow, and she doesn’t turn around until she is behind the toolshed. Once Jimmy joins her, she leans forward and speaks in a voiced whisper beside his ear.

“Mr. Jefferson came to my room the other night.”

Jimmy pulls his head away from hers and covers his mouth with both hands. “Oh, no!” After a moment he lowers his hands and says, “You mean that he… that… that he…” He cannot complete his sentence.

“He came to my door,” says Sally Hemings. “He was drunk, and he wouldn’t go away.”

“Did he force himself in?”

“No. Not really. He just kept saying all these things…. I didn’t know what to do, but… And when I realized he was already in the room, I didn’t know how I was going to get him out.”

“Did he—” Jimmy cuts off his own question. He gives Sally a firm, interrogatory glance but then cannot bear to look at her.

When he looks back, she is staring him straight in the eye. Then she nods slowly.

He makes a small gasp but says nothing.

She realizes that he has probably misunderstood what actually happened, but she can’t bear to speak any of the words she would have to use to make that clear — and maybe it doesn’t matter. It was bad, that’s all. Just bad.

After a long moment of silence, Jimmy moves his open hands back and forth horizontally, as if sweeping something off a table. “You can’t talk about this to anyone ,” he says. “Anybody finds out about Mr. Jefferson or if Mr. Jefferson finds out you been talking—” He doesn’t complete his sentence.

“But what am I going to do?”

“I don’t know.” He makes the sweeping gesture again. “You best hope Mr. Jefferson doesn’t come around again. The best thing you could have done was never open up your door in the first place.”

“Jimmy!” She puts both hands on top of her head, as if she has just been struck.

“I’m sorry.” He comes back to her, throws his arms around her and crushes her against his chest. Then he lets her go. “I’ve got to think about this. The main thing is, we’ve got to see what’s going to happen. Maybe nothing’s going to happen… and then everything will be all right… and we can just forget about it.”

“I’ll never forget about it.”

“Well…” Jimmy backs away. “Just wait, and we’ll see.”

For almost a week, Sally Hemings keeps to her room as much as she can stand to and as much as she can manage without neglecting her duties to such a degree that everyone in the house will guess what has happened.

She cannot bear the idea of anyone’s knowing, partly because if no one finds out, then it is almost as if nothing actually did happen, but mainly because she knows the conclusions that everyone will draw: Some will blame her for having led on the good Mr. Jefferson, or for having lacked the fortitude to make clear to him the inviolability of her virtue, and the rest (the majority, she believes) will simply be indifferent to what she has suffered. She is a slave, after all, and a young woman; it is her duty to serve her master in any way he requires. All of these conclusions fill her with such fury and dread that she sometimes feels insane.

So by day she is careful to respond to every greeting, question and command exactly as she would have responded had nothing happened and to devote exactly her ordinary level of attention to her every task and action — even to actions as simple as walking down the hall (in fact, she devotes much more attention than normal to how she places each foot as she walks, and how she holds her hands, and where she allows her eyes to stray).

By night she jams a wooden peg into the slot above the latch of her bedroom door so that it can’t be opened.

By night she looks up into the swirling plasma of darkness between her bed and the ceiling and hears the tick of every contracting or expanding floorboard and the whisper of every breeze, and she thinks only of the danger gathering force in every corner too dark to see.

By night she does battle with her memory and her imagination and with her rigid, sweating, sleepless body, which wants to do nothing but run from her room and out into the streets and never see the Hôtel de Langeac again, or Paris.

“Come with me, child,” says Madame Gautier, the laundress, a potato-shaped woman of about sixty, with very small eyes and an imperious pout. She visits the Hôtel twice weekly, to drop off cleaned linens, towels, undergarments and shirts and to pick up dirty ones. She is speaking in French. When Sally Hemings greets her command with only an uncomprehending stare, Madame Gautier asks, “Are you not Mademoiselle Sally?” Sally Hemings answers in the affirmative, and Madame Gautier takes her by the hand, saying, “Good. You must come with me. Monsieur Jefferson desires that you should live in my house.”

Sally Hemings yanks her hand free. “One moment! I know nothing about this.”

“I am afraid that is none of my affair.”

“Did he tell you this himself?”

“Yes. Just now, when Madame Dubois was paying me. Monsieur Jefferson came into the kitchen and asked if he might rent a room for you.”

Many thoughts are shooting through Sally Hemings’s mind, most of them concerning the significance of Thomas Jefferson’s decision. Is she being banished from the Hôtel de Langeac? Will this impatient and stupid woman be her new mistress? Will she never be able to see her brother again? Or Patsy and Polly?

“I’m sorry,” she tells Madame Gautier. “I must speak to my brother.”

The old woman seems on the verge of scolding her, but then her scowl softens. “Very well,” she says. “But hurry. I have many things to do.”

She knows, Sally Hemings thinks as she hurries to find Jimmy. Everybody knows.

She has to pass through the dining room on her way to the kitchen, and this is where she spots her brother, who rushes right up to her.

“Jimmy!”

“Oh, Sally!” He holds out a small envelope. “He gave me this.”

She takes it, removes the single page inside, on which she recognizes her own name and Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting. She stares at it a long moment, her trembling hand making a blur of the page’s edges.

“Do you want me to?” asks Jimmy.

She hands him the letter, and he reads:

“‘Miss Hemings, I am writing to inform you that I have procured a room for you with Madame Gautier, which shall be your refuge whenever your services are not needed here by Patsy and Polly. During the days that my daughters are in residence at the Hôtel, I think it best that you reside in your present chamber, though if that should not be agreeable to you, alternate arrangements can certainly be made. Whether you wish to continue your duties at the Hôtel in the absence of my daughters is also a matter I leave to your better judgment. I hope you will understand that I have made this arrangement only in the interest of your greater comfort. If I have erred in my judgment, or if you have any questions or requirements, please do not hesitate to express them to me through the good offices of your brother. Respectfully yours, Th. Jefferson.’”