Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

All four servants — Betty Hemings and Sally Hemings, in addition to Jupiter and Ursula — hold their breath as they wait for a reply. Thomas Jefferson has been locked in his chambers ever since the funeral, two days ago. He hasn’t addressed a word to anyone in all that time, not even his three daughters, nor has he had anything to eat or drink. The servants listen but hear only the insistent tweedle of a Carolina wren.

Jupiter knocks a third time. “Mr. Tom?”

Still no response, nor any sound that might indicate a living soul behind the door. The servants craning their ears in the dim hallway cast one another worried glances. “Maybe we should try the library,” says Jupiter.

The library is connected to Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom and study but has a separate door just a few feet down the hall. Jupiter knocks on that door, waits, then says, “Mr. Tom?” He is about to knock again when a long, doglike moan sounds within the room and ends with an emphatic, “Leave… me… be!”

All of the servants, except Sally Hemings, exchange relieved glances. Sally Hemings is afraid of Thomas Jefferson. She is nine years old and she can’t remember ever having said a word to him.

As they make their way to the kitchen staircase, Ursula says, “Least now we know we not going to have two funerals.”

“Not yet anyway,” says Jupiter.

Ursula doesn’t say anything because she is descending the steep staircase and has to concentrate on not spilling the soup.

“Never in my life,” says Betty Hemings, “have I seen a man more crazy for a woman than that Mr. Jefferson.”

“That’s the truth,” says Jupiter. “He worshipped the ground she walked on.” They are in the kitchen now and can speak more freely.

“She was pretty enough, I guess,” says Betty Hemings, “but I never saw the reason in it.”

“I’m sorry to speak badly of the dead,” says Ursula, putting the tureen down on the table, “but that woman didn’t know nothing but how to complain.”

“She was always a sickly thing,” says Betty Hemings. “I was there the minute she came out between her mammy’s legs. Seemed like forever before she figured out she got to breathe if she wants to live. And that’s how it always was. That girl was never sure if she wanted to live or die.”

“And she made sure everybody knew it,” says Ursula.

Jupiter says, “But he loved her.”

“He did,” says Betty. “No denying that. Of course, he’s a sad man, too.”

“Oh, yes,” says Jupiter. “But Mr. Tom got good reasons to be sad. I know that for a fact.”

This is where the conversation ends. Jupiter is always letting on that he knows all kinds of things about Thomas Jefferson, but he’ll never say what they are, so there is no point in asking.

Betty Hemings calls out to her daughter, “What you doing?”

Sally Hemings is still standing on the top step of the staircase. She was the last to descend, and so the only one who heard Thomas Jefferson start up again: long, off-key moans that fall in pitch, again and again and again, sounding more like they come from a ghost than a living person. Sally Hemings’s fingers are cold and filmed with sweat. Her heart is rattling in her chest.

… I am calmer now. I have even had some sleep — on that bed so lately Mr. Jefferson’s but now no one’s at all. I have arisen feeling that I must solve the mystery of how I came to live this life I have no choice but to acknowledge as my own. Mr. Jefferson often said that he only knew what was true when he was writing. I am sitting at his desk, using his pen and wearing his spectacles. I can only hope they serve me better than they did him….

The story of my own life is like a fairy tale, and you would not believe me if I told to you the scenes enacted during my life of slavery. It passes through my mind like a dream. Born and reared as free, not knowing that I was a slave, then suddenly, at the death of Jefferson…

— The Reverend Peter Fossett

“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

New York Sunday World

January 30, 1898

After an unimaginable length of time, Thomas Jefferson has enrolled in art school. His goal his first year is to do a taxonomy of color, which amounts to an inventory of things — for what is the reality of that red but a sunset in October beyond the steel mills? And of that pale brown — or is it gold — but a muddy road in Thailand? And of that blue but a flash on a raven’s back?

He has just taken his seat on the subway, when he spots Sally Hemings standing by the door a bit down and across from him. There is no mistaking that tapering jaw, that long arc between shoulder and pelvis, those narrow eyes, so deeply gray — the summer-storm gray of newborns, which also contains the potential for brown. Her head is bent over a book, but she doesn’t seem fully absorbed by what she is reading. Has she, perhaps, noticed him and decided to act as if she hasn’t? Should he get up and walk over and pretend that running into her on the subway is only happy coincidence? Would she walk away? Would she join in his pretense? What if he can’t speak?

All the while Thomas Jefferson is watching Sally Hemings, their train is rounding a bend, the steel of its wheels grinding against the steel of the tracks and setting off a ragged shriek that mounts and mounts inside the tunnel to such a degree that Sally Hemings tucks her book into her armpit and puts her fingers into her ears. At that moment the lights go out, but the shriek continues, unabated.

Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. He is eleven. His sister Mary is thirteen. Her feet are on a mound of hay. Her back is bent over a hacked beam. Her hair is in the dirt. Blood is filling her eye. His mother is shouting, “Get up! Get up, I say!”

She has been shouting for a long time. Thomas Jefferson heard her from the house. She was shouting, “Do you think I’m so stupid! Do you think I don’t know about the sheep!” He was reading a book about India. And in that book it said that trees in India have loaves of bread hanging from their branches. He wanted to keep reading. The loaves are a kind of fruit, the book said. But Mary was shouting, “No, Mammy! No, Mammy! No! No!” But it wasn’t really a shout. There is strength in a shout. All Thomas Jefferson heard in his sister’s voice was her weakness. All he heard was that she was going to let herself die.

But then the screams started. Like the sound a hinge might make but so loud they cut right into his head. He also heard a sound he could not bear to hear. A very small sound. It was the sound of splitting flesh. He heard it, but he could not bear to hear it, so he didn’t hear it. But he saw it. He saw it as he sat over his book. His sister’s flesh tearing. The blood flowing out of her body. Later he will remember putting a length of ribbon between the pages and closing his book, but nothing more until the moment he is standing in the doorway of the barn, his back against the jamb. He cannot speak.

“Malingerer!” his mother shouts. She is holding the rake above her head, looking down at his sister, whose blood is overflowing her eye. “For the last time!” The rake jerks high above her head. Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. “Get up! Get up! Get up!” It was a mistake to have come. Nothing good is going to happen now. Now he has been caught in the same weakness as his sister. His mother is looking at him.

“You!” she says. “You!” Her eyes are so wide and fierce they seem to have irises within irises within irises. The eyes say, You are the one to blame! You!

Now the rake is falling. Its teeth strike the dust and hay fragments. It balances on edge an instant, then falls flat, teeth up, between his sister and himself.