Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.

4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights….

— From the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, introduced at the National Assembly by the Marquis de Lafayette on July 11, 1789

… What I am trying to do here is simply pin down the process by which I became complicit in the crime that has brought so much misery to the people I have known and loved — many of them for all of my life. And it becomes ever clearer to me that it happened by a process of twilit thinking — by thoughts behind the thoughts I was aware of, thoughts — and feelings, too — that I could ignore or even pretend I had never had, thoughts whose immorality and gross impracticality might have been blatantly obvious had I ever had the courage or wisdom to drag them into the full light of my awareness….

Near noon on a Sunday morning, Sally Hemings is walking home after having escorted Patsy and Polly back to school. It has rained, and although she is carrying an umbrella, the skirt of her gown is wet and hangs heavily against her knees and shins. The clouds have parted. The sun is brilliant white. Leaves on the treetops hiss and turn up their pale undersides in fierce gusts. Bits of blown grit sting her cheek and make her squint.

She is walking along the road between the Tuileries and the Seine when she notices a gentleman about twenty yards ahead running toward the bank of the river. The wind flips his hat off as he runs, and, turning an ungainly pirouette, he grabs it off the ground and resumes running to the edge of the quay. Only once he has stopped does she realize that the man is Thomas Jefferson. Slump-shouldered, he stares down at the water, and then his right arm twitches, as if he were uttering a curse — though Sally Hemings can hear nothing. She comes up beside him just as he is turning away from the river.

“Oh, Sally!” he exclaims. She has startled him.

“What happened?”

His mouth puckers unhappily. He points behind her, at a wooden box — his writing desk — atop a low wall on the far side of the road. “I was doing a drawing, and I’d nearly finished when I stopped to sharpen my pencil, and then a gust of wind picked the drawing up and flipped it end over end into the river.” He turns and points. “There — you see?”

A piece of foolscap rises and falls on the waves, not far from a man rowing a small boat.

“You could ask the man to get it,” she says.

“It’s not worth it. The drawing is ruined.” He turns away from the river and shrugs resignedly.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

His eyes meet hers long enough for her to feel an uncomfortable warmth pass through her breast and into her throat. She looks back at the rapidly flowing water. The foolscap is now one hundred feet downstream.

“It’s all right,” he says. “I can do another. It wasn’t good anyway.” He puts his hat on his head and crosses the road toward his writing desk. Sally Hemings follows.

“I hate to lose things,” she says.

“I do, too.”

“No, I’m ridiculous about it. Sometimes, when I’m coming back from the marché or from the school, I kick a stone along the street, and if I manage to kick it all the way home with me, I can’t bear to leave it outside. I feel as if I am abandoning an old friend!”

Thomas Jefferson makes a small laugh. “What do you do?”

“I take it inside with me. I have a box up in my chamber full of stones.”

He laughs again, heartily. “You have such a tender heart, Sally.”

She smiles, blushing. “It’s stupid.”

“Not at all.”

They are standing beside his writing desk. He picks up a pencil lying against the bottom edge of the desk’s sloped top and puts it into a chamois sack. His penknife is lying in the dust at her feet. Sally Hemings picks it up and hands it to him. He puts that into the sack.

“Thank you,” he says.

“It’s stupid to care so much about a stone,” she says.

“On the contrary, I think that shows how engaged with life you are and how generous you are with your affections. In my experience most people are so lazy, hurried or frightened that they close themselves off to life. That’s such a waste of our brief time on this earth.”

Thomas Jefferson is smiling with an almost paternal tenderness that embarrasses Sally Hemings. She is momentarily flustered.

“Well, I don’t know,” she says at last. “It seems to me that we should only care about little things a little bit and save our real feelings for the most important things.”

“Perhaps…” Thomas Jefferson is still smiling. “But theologians say that God cares as much for the death of a sparrow as he does for the destruction of a city.”

Now Sally Hemings is the one to laugh.

“Why are you laughing?” asks Thomas Jefferson.

“I shouldn’t say.”

He flips open the top of his portable desk and puts the chamois sack inside, then tucks the desk under his arm. “Why not?”

“I just shouldn’t.”

They are walking now, back toward place Louis XV and home. The brilliant sun heats the paving and the tops of their heads, but a mountainscape of white and slate gray clouds is advancing over the trees of the Champs-Élysées.

“But I want to know what you think,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Well… I don’t know…. That just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Thomas Jefferson grunts. “I’d forgotten what a skeptic you are!”

“To me it just seems insane that God would feel exactly the same about the death of thousands of people as he does about one dirty little bird.”

“Well, perhaps I’ve phrased it badly. I think what theologians say is that God’s heart breaks for the death of a sparrow as well as for the destruction of a city.”

“That’s just as insane.”

“Not really. What we are talking about is feeling , not rational evaluation. The theologians want to draw our attention to the beauty — the moral beauty — of the all-powerful creator of the universe being heartbroken at the death of a dirty little bird. Don’t you find that beautiful?”

“What I want to know,” says Sally Hemings, “is if God feels so bad about the death of a little bird, why does he kill it? And it’s the same with destroying cities.”

“That’s the big mystery, of course. But still there’s the beauty. It seems to me that the idea of a God caring for a creature as insignificant and humble as a sparrow has a beauty all by itself — maybe in part because it teaches the lesson that all things of this world are important — political revolutions, great works of art, falling in love, dirty little birds and even stones one kicks home on the street.”

“But what I was saying is that I don’t care about everything. I care much more about some little gray stone than I do about half the beggars I see on the street. In fact, I hate some of those beggars and can’t bear to look at them. That’s what I meant by stupid.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Oh, yes it is.”

“But even the fact that you feel bad about hating beggars proves the point I am making. Think about Christ’s injunction to love our enemies. I find that a supremely beautiful moral challenge. It may not be possible for us to truly love our enemies, but the suggestion that we ought to love them can help guide us in life, especially if we think that what it really means is that we should try to understand our enemies, to see the world from their point of view and, most of all, to understand that they are human beings, struggling in a hard and confusing world, just as we are, and that their fundamental rights are exactly equal to ours. They may not do the right things or think the right things, but that does not mean they are inhuman or should be treated so. I think Christ’s injunction is, in fact, the foundation of all morality.”