Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Batting the earth flecks from his hands, he stands up and takes a step back to survey his work, not noticing the rake lying teeth-down directly behind him. His left foot steps on the rake handle, and he staggers, catching his right heel on the uneven pavement and toppling backward into the next vegetable bed, where he attempts to halt his fall with his right hand — which is to say with the arm he broke so badly not long before Sally Hemings’s arrival in Paris.

He remains seated in the vegetable bed, rocking back and forth, clutching his right wrist in his left hand. After a couple of moments, he rocks onto his knees and, still clutching his wrist, gets to his feet. When he is vertical, he gingerly lets go of his wrist, opens and closes his fingers several times, then rotates his hand. From where she is standing, Sally Hemings can see no sign of pain, but he does clutch his wrist again as he walks toward the kitchen and disappears from sight.

… The erosion of my virtue began, paradoxically, with my diminished regard for Mr. Jefferson. From my very first days at the Hôtel de Langeac, I had never quite seen the awkward and morose Mr. Jefferson as a real human being. He was more like a creature out of a nursery story, a prince put under a curse or pining away for a lost love — and, indeed, I attributed most of his sorrow to the death of his dear wife. It was only after he had committed the unthinkable that he became a mere man in my eyes and thereby became both pitiful and, eventually, capable of being pitied.

The transformation of my feelings from contempt to something much closer to sympathy occurred during the month or so I lodged with Mr. Jefferson’s laundress, an arrangement he made on my behalf. I would return to the Hôtel de Langeac only when Miss Martha and Miss Maria were home from school, and inevitably, from time to time, I would be forced to stand in the same room with Mr. Jefferson, while he and his daughters discussed arrangements or merely chatted. He would never look in my direction on these occasions and seemed reluctant to even meet the girls’ gazes, afraid perhaps that I might have said something to them or that they might have heard rumors from some other quarter. I never breathed a word to either daughter of what had happened between their father and myself, though they clearly had intuited that something was wrong, Miss Martha in particular. Whenever Mr. Jefferson caught sight of me, his face would blanch and his voice would go low and soft, devoid of those modulations of pitch that signify joy, enthusiasm or even anger.

I must confess that I relished these manifestations of his discomfort, in part because they seemed just retribution for what he had done but more because they increased my own stature — in my eyes at least. After a period during which I would tremble in his presence (though more out of humiliation and suppressed rage than fear; I am not sure I ever truly feared Mr. Jefferson, and I never felt physically endangered), I began to take delight in intensifying his discomfort. I would stare at him whenever I was in his presence, and anytime he would glance my way and then wince or avert his gaze, I would have to struggle to keep myself from smiling.

Perhaps it was my growing sense of my power to unsettle Mr. Jefferson that transformed my contempt to pity — though I don’t know; emotions are like a stew, the taste of which is determined by no one ingredient but by all together. What I do know is that one night when I was lying in my bed at the laundress’s house, it occurred to me that Mr. Jefferson had shown true consideration for my feelings by arranging this refuge for me and that had he been the debauched brute I’d been imagining, he never would have allowed me out of his sight, let alone made it possible for me to regain my sense of decency and composure. And as soon as these ideas came into my head, all of Mr. Jefferson’s winces, shrinkings, averted gazes, blanches and troubled expressions — the very things that had filled me with a self-satisfied contempt for him — began to seem manifestations of his tender nature and of his remorse, and thus of his desire to be good. And with this recognition, I began to feel his sufferings and humiliation as if they were my own and to remember how, on the night he had come into my room, no sooner had he realized that I truly did not share his desires than he cried out, clutched his head in shame and ran from the room. And now I, too, felt ashamed. My body was possessed by a paroxysm of tearful remorse, and for some hour or so during the darkest time of the night I imagined that I, myself, was heartless and evil.

In the morning, of course, all of this seemed nonsense, and I resumed my determination to cut Mr. Jefferson no quarter and to preserve my dignity and modesty above all else….

Thomas Jefferson is walking amid the lush stench of the open sewers and the rankness of butcher shops and slaughterhouses, the smoke of coal and tobacco, the smell of wet wool and of houses hollowed by fire, then drenched by rain. But mostly he is walking among faces. So many faces.

Although he is reluctant to cede any advantage to Europe, he feels that the variety of faces he sees on the streets of Paris is vastly beyond that of any city in America, even Philadelphia. The variety is almost entirely due to disease, however, and to the fundamental cruelty of life under a monarch. The pitted, leathery faces of the pox sufferers, for example, or the dwarf-eyed faces of the blind-since-birth, or the toothless and the potato-nosed, or the mad and the aghast.

But there are also noble faces. He cannot deny this. The hawk-sharp gaze of the broad-shouldered ironmonger. The creamy cheeks and blue-eyed concern of the barefoot mother, hurrying her two small children out of the path of the clattering phaeton. And even the face of the duchess riding in that phaeton, who, lost in her own musings, her head and shoulders shaken in the shuddering of wheels over cobbles, lets her eyes fall on Thomas Jefferson’s and gives him a glance that cuts like a cool arrow straight into his heart. And then she is gone.

Just that morning Thomas Jefferson looked at his own face in the mirror above his washstand, and he believed he was looking at himself. But now he thinks that he was mistaken. Our faces are not ourselves. They are only the façades behind which our selves perpetrate their histories, shrouded in obscurity and human wishes.

Thomas Jefferson’s heart pounds, and he is sweating.

That plump woman smiling blandly as she stands behind her board table in the market square: What secret sufferings lurk behind those brown button eyes? What does she long for and fear as she stokes the fires under her pots of fruit? As she seals her preserves in porcelain jars under layers of wax, paper and twine?

Strawberry. Red currant. Apple. Apricot.

Thomas Jefferson’s fingertips have gone slick with sweat.

He has conceived the desire to buy a jar of the apricot preserves from the woman, and now, mysteriously, he cannot breathe. A nugget of pain throbs in each of his temples. What is happening? he wonders. Then he remembers one sunny morning some two or three months past, when Sally Hemings licked her fingers, laughed and proclaimed, “Nothing on earth was so delicious as French apricot preserves!” He turns his back on the woman and her preserves and strides empty-handed out of the market square.

And then, minutes later, his fingertips having gone ice cold, he is hurrying home with a jar of apricot preserves in the pocket of his greatcoat.

He has to wipe his hands on his breeches before taking up his pen to write on a scrap of paper torn off the bottom of a cobbler’s bill: “For Sally.”