Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

His mother is gone.

Mary is not moving. Her blood is brilliant on her cheek, flowing into her hair.

Jupiter is standing in the cow stall. “You see it?” he says.

Thomas Jefferson cannot speak.

“You see it? It done happen again. She got the Devil in her good this time.”

“She killed Mary,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“She’d like to,” says Jupiter.

Thomas Jefferson is standing over his sister. He thinks maybe the blood is not coming out of her eye. There is an opening in her eyebrow that is like an eye itself, and he thinks the blood is coming out of that. Jupiter is standing beside him.

“Everything’s all right now,” says Jupiter.

And Thomas Jefferson says, “She’s not moving.”

“She’ll be all right. We get her cleaned up, she’ll be just fine.”

“She’s dead,” says Thomas Jefferson.

Jupiter puts his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s shoulder and gives him a squeeze. “Don’t you worry, Master Tom. I saw what your mammy done. Miss Mary just got whupped upside her head. She’ll be all right.”

Mary’s lips are moving. Then they stop. Then they move again and her hand lifts to her bloody temple. Her eyes are open. The left eye filled with confusion and fear, the right eye filled with blood.

“You see!” says Jupiter. “What I tell you! Everything’ll be all right.”

Thomas Jefferson cannot speak.

Thomas Jefferson is watching the movie of his courtship with Martha. He has never seen a movie before, and for a long while he is distracted by the blue beam crossing the darkness overhead. At first he wonders if the beam isn’t sunlight channeled through lenses and lighting up a stage where actors are performing. But that doesn’t make sense, partly because of the strange, twitchy flatness of the actors and their brilliant colors but mostly because they keep appearing and disappearing in instants and sometimes loom as large as houses. Perhaps the light is shining on some sort of painting in which the colors (through the influence of magnets?) constantly swirl and reassemble. But how can the images speak? Are there actors behind the huge painting? And if so, why are their voices so loud? Finally he decides that what he is looking at are colored shadows of the sort that magicians project onto clouds of smoke, although he still can’t figure out how the images move. He gives up all such ruminations when he hears his name spoken by one of the gigantic actors.

He has been brought to this dark room (a theater, it would seem) as a sort of joke by James and Dolley Madison, who are sitting on either side of him. They didn’t give him a clue as to where they were taking him but only told him he was being kidnapped so had to be blindfolded. They didn’t remove the blindfold until he was seated and loud voices had begun to boom in the darkness.

His name is spoken by a young actor in a copper-colored wig, sitting in a tree and holding an open book, on the spine of which is a single word in huge gold letters: LOCKE. The young man is looking down from his branch at an extraordinarily beautiful young woman wearing knee breeches — a shocking concept for Thomas Jefferson. She is riding a palomino along a forest path and has stopped to converse with the young man in the tree. She looks as if the sun is inside her and it is beaming out through her cheeks, eyes, lips and her brilliantly white teeth. She tells the young man that she had not known there were orangutans in this forest. When he inquires after her name, she laughs, digs her heels into the horse’s ribs and gallops down the path, her golden ponytail waving in perfect synchrony with the horse’s own golden tail.

In an instant the young woman reappears, but this time in a royal blue gown cut to expose so much of her flawless pink chest that her bodice can only be held up by some sort of adhesive applied to her skin. Chamber music is playing. She is looking with surprise into the eyes of the actor in the copper-colored wig, who asks her debonairly if anyone had informed her that orangutans would be attending this ball. It is not until the young woman at last reveals her name that Thomas Jefferson realizes, with a shock that makes him unable to draw a breath, whom the actors are portraying. It never occurred to him that these two people might be Martha and himself, in part because of their absurd appearance and strange accents and because Martha’s hair was a luxuriant chestnut brown rather than blond but mainly because the circumstances of their actual meeting could hardly have been more different.

He was twenty-seven and following the road from Monticello to Williamsburg, where he represented Albemarle County at the Virginia House of Burgesses. It was one of those warm spring days when the sky is glaring white and merely looking across the rolling fields of newly turned earth can put a dull node of pain at the center of each eyeball. Jupiter was driving, and they had been talking for more than an hour about what a sad and lonely man Thomas Jefferson’s father had been and about why he had never been able to resist his wife’s mad convictions. This conversation had exhausted them both, and they had lapsed into thoughtful silences, listening to the cuffs of the horses’ hooves on the rutted clay, the clinking harnesses and the long, buzzy drones of the cicadas.

A large brick house with dormer windows stood about twenty yards off the road. As they approached it, Thomas Jefferson thought he heard the high, clear tones of a woman singing. At first he could see no one near the house, but then a slender young woman, all in black, stepped out of a cluster of boxwoods, took hold of the front of her skirt and climbed the steps onto the portico at the front of the house. She was no longer singing and seemed entirely unaware of being observed as she opened the door and disappeared into the house.

From her slender waist and arms, and the spryness with which she mounted the steps, she seemed hardly more than twenty. But her head hung as she walked, as if she were deep in thought, and her black gown and shawl could only mean that, young as she was, she had been widowed. Her song had been filled with sorrow, yet sung so beautifully that it came to Thomas Jefferson as a perfect joy.

Her voice, her dark silhouette and her light step as she entered her house — these would come back to Thomas Jefferson many times over the remaining day and a half of his journey. And then he simply forgot the young woman — to such an extent that he never even thought to glance at her house on his return trip a month later.

He wouldn’t remember her until six months afterward, when he and John Fairfield were traveling from Williamsburg to Monticello and John asked Jupiter to turn their carriage down the muddy drive leading up to the house. When Thomas Jefferson had suggested that John spend a week with him at his mountaintop sanctuary, John had merely said that he knew some “good people” they might spend the night with along the way. He’d said nothing about where the house was or who the people were (except for mentioning that the man of the house had a “nigger wife”), and he certainly hadn’t said anything about a widowed daughter with a beautiful singing voice. As their carriage rattled up to the house, Thomas Jefferson’s pulse became audible in his eardrums and he wished that he had thought to change his linen before setting out that morning.

He didn’t catch a glimpse of the widowed daughter until he was already seated at the dinner table with several members of the Wayles family, adults and children. She arrived late, touching her lips with the middle finger of her perfectly flat hand as she apologized for having been detained. Her father, at the head of the table, looked somberly into his lap as she spoke. When she took the seat immediately to his left, he gave her a knowing, sympathetic glance and covered her hand with his own.