Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Let her speak,” the marquis says firmly. “What do you think, Sarah?”

“I think,” she says, her voice trembling, “that there is a difference between the way things are and the way they should be.”

“Is that all?” says the marquis.

“Yes, my lord.”

Some days later I make my camp in a shallow declivity that gives me partial shelter from a cold wind that has been blowing steadily from the northwest since first light, though never with very much force. The wind is strong enough to keep blowing out my matches, however. And I am only able to get my fire going by first crouching to shelter the match and kindling with my body and then by standing upwind of the fire with my sleeping bag open and stretched out behind my back as a windbreak.

I sit back down once the larger logs have begun to burn steadily but soon realize that far from blowing out the fire, the steady wind is causing it to burn much faster than normal and that I am going to have to gather considerably more wood if I want to stay warm until it is light again.

I am casting a long-legged shadow at that dim fringe where the fire’s flickering light fades into the surrounding gloom when I notice two white coals hovering in the darkness some twenty or thirty yards in front of me. Acting as if I haven’t seen anything unusual, I carry the wood I have already gathered back to my camp at an unhurried pace, drop it beside the fire and sit down next to the backpack, where I have left the open buck knife I used to shave sticks into kindling.

I watch the hovering coals only out of the corner of my eye and can tell that they have come considerably closer since I first spotted them. They waver as they approach, and sometimes they disappear. Then they begin to fade into a vertical smear of lesser darkness that gradually, as it brightens, coalesces into the shape of a man. His long, wispy hair is blown across his face by the wind and looks golden in the firelight. He is barefoot. His jeans are worn through at the knees. His T-shirt is filthy and webbed with holes in the vicinity of his belt buckle. His vaguely military jacket is also filthy and missing every one of its buttons. Even before he has stepped into the full light, that lush and acrid odor of a body unwashed for weeks has begun to affect my sinuses and eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

I shrug. He sits.

Then I move my sleeping bag and belongings about a yard away from him, so that more wind can pass between us. If he notices, he doesn’t show it. For a long time, he just stares wordlessly into the fire.

Only when he sweeps his long hair — more gray than gold — out of his face do I realize that he is Thomas Jefferson.

“Oh, my God!” I say.

“What?” He looks at me with a sick-dog squint.

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know.” He shakes his head and lifts his hand in a way that indicates weary befuddlement. “I don’t know how I got here. I don’t even know where I am. Do you know where this is?”

I don’t know how to answer this question.

“I’ve just been…” he says, “… well… just walking. And… I don’t know. This place gives me the creeps. You know? It’s like… I mean I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know how I’m going to get out. I walk and walk and walk, and nothing ever changes. You know? I don’t ever get anywhere. I’m just here.” He shakes his head again, but this time expressing only weariness. “This is no way to live.” He looks me straight in the eye. “No. Way. To. Live.”

Thomas Jefferson hears the front door slam and light, hurried footsteps, then feminine exhalations in the corridor outside his study and the whispered words, “C’est pas possible!” Leaving his desk, he finds Sally Hemings, gasping with her back to the wall, bonnetless, her hair undone on one side, her eyes wide, looking right at him but showing no trace of recognition. Her hands are flat against the wall, as if in the next instant she is going to push off and flee back down the hall. “Sally?” says Thomas Jefferson, unsure if she has even heard him. “Sally, what’s happened?”

“I’m sorry,” Sally Hemings says between gasps. “I’ve just been running.” She takes a step away from the wall and lifts one hand to tuck the hair splayed across her shoulder behind her ear.

“Did something happen?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“A madman.” She puts her hand to her throat.

“Were you attacked?”

“I was at the marché. I only wanted onions and flour. Then a man. He started shouting. He pulled off my bonnet and threw it into the gutter.” Sally Hemings cries, “Oh!” as if the man has attacked her again. The hand at her throat twitches, flutters. Just below her jaw, the skin is red, chafed, blood-specked.

“Come here,” says Thomas Jefferson, backing away from his study door. “You must sit down.”

“I’m sorry.” She looks at him with pleading eyes.

“I insist. Sit down. Let me give you something to drink.”

He walks into his study and pulls a chair away from the front of his desk. It is the very chair in which the Marquis de Lafayette was sitting a week or so earlier. As Thomas Jefferson goes behind his desk to open a cabinet low to the floor, Sally Hemings enters his study and sits on the front edge of the delicate, silk-upholstered chair. She hears a clinking of glass on glass. Thomas Jefferson places an etched flask of whiskey-colored liquid on his desk and a tiny tumbler, not much bigger than a thimble.

“Cognac,” he says. “Drink it all in a gulp. It will settle your nerves.”

Sally Hemings picks up the little glass and does as she is instructed. She has never tasted cognac before. It is like liquid fire against her palate and tongue and like bitter acid in her throat. But as it goes down, she can feel the muscles in her chest relax. She breathes more easily.

“Do you know why the man took your bonnet?” says Thomas Jefferson as he walks back around his desk.

“He was shouting. I could hardly understand anything he said. I think he was drunk. He kept calling me ‘ une traîtresse. ’ And I think he said he was going to kill me. ‘À mort!’ he kept shouting. And ‘Tiers état!’”

“Ah!” says Thomas Jefferson, now sitting at his desk. He has taken another tumbler from the cabinet and fills it with cognac.

“Other people were saying that. The man was shouting, and a whole crowd gathered. He pushed me to the ground and he spat on me. I thought—”

Sally Hemings’s mouth is open, but she makes no sound. Her eyes have grown wide again. She sits erect on the edge of the chair, then gives her head a violent shake. “I’m sorry,” she says at last. “Forgive me.”

“No, no, no,” Thomas Jefferson says kindly. “Please.” He takes the flask in his right hand and holds out his left. “Here. Give me your glass.”

Sally Hemings does as she is told. And when Thomas Jefferson returns the glass, she swallows its contents in a gulp. He pours himself a second glass. “You must have been so frightened,” he says.

Her eyes grow wide for an instant. “I thought—” Again she cannot speak.

“You don’t have to say it.”

“I thought— What they were saying. I was sure—” Her eyes brim with tears — although they do not fall. Her lips remain motionless in the shape of a word she never speaks.

Thomas Jefferson leans forward, as if he is going to get up, but then he sits upright again, holds out his hand, and she gives him the tiny tumbler.

The cognac has made her feel better. Less afraid. More herself. When he returns the tumbler to her, she sips it more slowly this time and decides that she likes the taste.