Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings’s new room is just off the yard where Madame Gautier does her washing. The walls are fieldstone, the floor is dirt, the bed is a straw-stuffed tick on a wooden frame.

Sally Hemings thinks the room might be pretty if she can whitewash the walls, put dried flowers on the sill in front of the folio-size window and find a small dresser or trunk for her clothes. “You can do whatever you want,” says Madame Gautier, “but Monsieur Jefferson must pay for it.”

Sally Hemings does not want to ask any favors of Thomas Jefferson.

Madame Gautier’s twenty-year-old daughter, Thérèse, is as big as a man. Her fingers are as thick as her thumb, her mouth is chapped purple all around from constant licking. “Who are you?” she asks Sally Hemings five times in a row, and seems satisfied with nothing Sally Hemings and her mother tell her.

Sally Hemings goes to sleep every night to the sound of the mice stirring inside her tick and wakes every morning to steam clouds scented with lye soap.

Her eyes water and her nostrils burn.

She is determined to only return to the Hôtel de Langeac when she escorts Patsy and Polly home from school and to stay away when they are not there, but she has nothing to do during her days except wander the streets.

“Monsieur Jefferson is paying for your room but not your food. If you want to eat, you must buy your own food or you must ask Monsieur Jefferson to buy it for you.”

Sally Hemings cannot read, but she is able to add and subtract in her head, and so she figures that her wages are enough to allow her to buy bread and a piece of cheese every day.

Jimmy gives her meat and soup during her days at the Hôtel.

She cannot store her food. The mice eat it when she keeps it in her room, and Thérèse eats it when she keeps it in the kitchen larder.

She is walking through Les Halles on her way to Penthemont and spots a young man lying in the street, the top quarter of his head missing. A young woman standing in a doorway tells her that he was brained by a rock thrown by a “ sans-culotte. ” Sally Hemings does not know what a sans-culotte is.

“You really must take better care of yourself,” says Patsy. “How can we bring you anywhere if your linens are so gray and you smell like fish?”

When Monsieur Gautier gets drunk, Madame Gautier makes him sleep in the yard. On those nights Sally Hemings gets no sleep, because her door does not lock and she is afraid that he will come in and because his snores are as loud and enduring as a two-man saw cutting through an endless piece of wood.

Polly says, “Clotilde told us you no longer live here because Papa is angry at you. That’s absurd! If you would like, Patsy and I will tell Papa he is being ridiculous this very minute.” Sally Hemings glances at Patsy, who looks away. “Don’t,” Sally Hemings tells Polly. “Thank you, but don’t.”

Every morning Thérèse comes out into the yard and gathers her skirts into a bundle between her knees. She holds her bare buttocks over an enamel chamber pot until she has entirely voided both her urine and feces. Then she flings the contents of the pot over the rear wall into a vacant lot — or she tries to. About a third of the time, she misses and the mess remains on the wall until her mother can sluice it away with a bucket of used wash water.

Sally Hemings feels the heat on her cheek first, then looks down a street to see a house towering with flame. A pawnshop, she discovers when she has joined the curious crowd. Black timbers enveloped in roaring orange. Bricks bursting with a sound like gunshot. Once again: the sans-culottes.

“I insist!” says Polly. “I think Papa is just being stubborn. I am going to talk to him this instant.” “Really,” says Sally Hemings. “There is no need. I’m perfectly happy as I am.” Patsy takes no part in the conversation, but when she looks at Sally Hemings, she seems to have an extremely painful stomachache.

Only once it has sunk its teeth into the flesh just to the left of her chin does Sally Hemings realize that the animal she woke to find sitting on her chest is a rat.

Sally Hemings has always loved the main staircase, which descends in a crazy, angular spiral along the walls of the cockeyed space between the ballroom and the front hall, but once she resumes living at the Hôtel de Langeac after her five-week absence, she takes only the rear stairs, which let out in the narrow corridor just outside the kitchen, and she uses the Hôtel’s side entrance onto rue Neuve-de-Berri when she goes shopping for Jimmy or Clotilde or when she has to fetch the Misses Jefferson from their school.

As a result of these practices, she only rarely catches sight of Thomas Jefferson during the days when his daughters are not present at the HÔtel. And on those occasions when she does spot him at the end of a hall or in a room she is passing, she always averts her head, pretending she doesn’t see him, but not without noticing that he, too, shifts his gaze away from her.

One morning she descends the rear staircase and comes face-to-face with Thomas Jefferson as he is leaving the kitchen. He blushes so deeply that his hair looks yellow, and after a moment of flustered fidgeting he presses himself against the wall and gestures for her to pass. Neither of them says a word.

True hate is effortless. It is called into being spontaneously, inevitably, by the hateful object. When the object is not purely hateful, however, hate requires effort, and if such hate regards the complexly hateful object as if it were purely hateful, then the hate itself is not pure. The world abhors purity. The world abhors most things proclaimed true. The world abhors perfection.

And because we ourselves cannot be perfect, there are moments when the effort of hating the hateful thing is more than we can manage — moments of indifference, or of forgiveness, or even of admiration. And if the hateful thing is sufficiently deserving of our hate, those moments in which we are not sufficiently hate-filled can inspire us to hate ourselves, just a little or sometimes a great deal. This is because hate is so intertwined with morality as to make the two seem almost indistinguishable.

Love, too, is intertwined with morality, but far less intimately. We are more than capable of loving someone without thinking him or her morally perfect. But when we hate someone, it is almost impossible for us not to think of that person as evil.

It is a well-known fact that hate not unambiguously anchored on moral condemnation tends to degenerate over time into gentler emotions, or into no emotion at all. And it is also true that hate anchored only on fury can spontaneously flip over into love, that most capacious of emotions, that emotion which can not only thrive in the presence of hate but be intensified by it. And for this reason our tendency to think of love as life’s greatest blessing is, alas, little more than sentimentality.

Sally Hemings is standing at the window at the top of the kitchen stairs, looking down into the garden where Thomas Jefferson is kneeling on the flagstone path between the beds of black earth that will soon be lush with cabbage, squash, beans, cucumbers and corn — all grown from seeds sent from Monticello. He licks the tip of his index finger and sticks it into an open envelope he is holding in his left hand. Carefully pulling his finger straight up out of the envelope, he peers at something on its tip and pushes his finger deep into the soft, moist earth in front of him. Then he smooths earth over the hole he has just made, licks his finger again, puts it back into the envelope and plunges it once more into the earth. He repeats this exercise twenty or thirty times before, with a childlike concentration on detail, he folds down the flap of the envelope, folds the envelope itself in half and slips it into the pocket of his frock coat.