Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

All Sally Hemings can hear in Thomas Jefferson’s voice is contempt. And when she replies, her voice, too, expresses nothing but contempt. “Of course!” she says. “Do you think I am an idiot!”

As soon as she has spoken, sounds go tinny and the walls around her start to whirl. She is not sure she will ever be able to get up from her chair. She feels as if her grasp on being has grown so feeble that she could easily, in the next instant or the one after, expire.

… Over the years people have intimated to me, sometimes with words but more often with glances and lingering expressions, that they know why I did what I did, that they think I have had a very fortunate life and that they would have done the same thing had they had the choice. But such commiseration, which I have gotten most frequently from my own mother, has always made me sick at heart, because it means people are seeing me in the worst way, as if I am just an animal, living in a world where only the shameless and cruel survive — although I suppose that is exactly what I am and exactly where I do live.

The most effective way of dealing with my hateful sympathizers has always been to concede some of what they say, and so the only part of my association with Mr. Jefferson that I have talked about is our children. And I have to say that even after all that I witnessed today — or is it yesterday? — I do not remotely regret having these four good and kind people in my life. They have been, and will always be, the purest happiness I have ever known. I also do not have one regret that now all of my children are free and that their children and their grandchildren and all the generations that shall follow them will grow up as independent and proud as any citizens of this great Republic and will never have to suffer the humiliation, pain and fear of the cousins left behind in Virginia.

As for the rest of my life…

Well, I’ve said it all. I don’t even know why I’m still writing.

What more is there to say?…

A week passes, and then it happens again. It seems so simple this time. A glance. A smile. A hesitation. Then a touch. After a while he tells her he wants to do something for her. He wants to give her a gift. “Turn your back to me,” he says. And when she does, he places his hand between her legs, and with his finger he touches that place that only he, of all other people, has ever touched, that place where even she had been ashamed to put her fingers. But this time she feels no shame. This time she only feels a delicious heat radiating from that tiny organ into her thighs and up her belly and spine, into her mouth and throat and all along the surface of her breasts. It comes in waves, and then she begins to make noises that sound to her like the cries of deer and foxes and kittens. And when she feels that he has pushed into her, she thinks that she has never known anything so wonderful. And then they are both making those noises together, and they are thrashing and writhing and rocking, and then all at once a feeling starts in that place where he has filled her up and where he has his hand, and it is like a wave surging all through her body and suffusing her head with light and breaking down the walls around her and the ceiling and the floor so that there is nothing but her own body trilling, humming, surging in the midst of a trilling, humming, surging void, and as soon as the huge wave that has taken hold of her seems to recede, it comes back again, and then again, and all the while he is making his noises as she is making her noises, and he is driving his thing into her again and again and again, until finally his noises are so loud the whole house must hear, and he stops moving, and starts again, and stops, then starts, until finally he curls around her back and makes a soft moan into her ear and holds her tight, and this is all like nothing she has ever known before.

Weeks later… It’s hard to keep track of time here, where the “daylight” comes from nowhere in particular and is little more than a repeating interval of blue dimness amid gloom…. So maybe only days later. Or months. But, in any event, eventually I come across a couple sitting on a log beside a low-burning fire. I have, in fact, been walking in their direction for some time now, drawn by the odors of sage, crispy skin and liquid chicken fat. By the time I am close enough to see their slick chins as they each gnaw happily on drumsticks, I am so hungry that my stomach seems to be digesting itself. I haven’t eaten in a very long time.

As I approach the fire, the man raises his hand and calls out, “Hello! My friend!”

It is Thomas Jefferson, and the woman sitting beside him is Sally Hemings, though her skin is much darker than I ever imagined it would be — coffee with just a dollop of milk. Perhaps she has spent time in the sun.

“This is my friend,” Thomas Jefferson tells her. “The one I told you about. Remember?”

Sally Hemings stops chewing. Her face goes entirely blank.

“I told you about him,” says Thomas Jefferson. “There was that terrific wind? I sat down next to him on this very log?”

“Nope,” says Sally Hemings. “Gone.”

“Sit down! Sit down!” Thomas Jefferson pats the log beside him. “Help yourself!” He points at the half-eaten chicken, still on a spit over the fire. “Take as much as you want.”

I rip a handful of white meat off the hot carcass and take the proffered seat. I do so with some reluctance, remembering the potent stench that emanated from Thomas Jefferson’s person and clothing the last time I saw him, but now a faint freshness of shampoo and toothpaste settles over me like a tropical drizzle.

For a good minute and a half, I can think of nothing but what is happening in my mouth, throat and stomach.

“Might I have a little more?” I ask when there is nothing else to do but lick my lips and ferret flesh fragments out of my teeth with my tongue.

“Of course!” says Thomas Jefferson. “We’re done. Aren’t we, love?”

“Just one more nibble,” Sally Hemings says, cracking a thighbone off the cadaver. “Okay — all yours.”

I pull the chicken off the skewer, and while I hold it between my knees and tear strips of flesh off the gray bones, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings talk to me.

“We’ve figured it out!” he declares. “Everything is so vague here because our minds are dominated by probability.”

“It’s like truth being stranger than fiction,” Sally Hemings says.

I have no idea what they are talking about.

“The probable world is like a world created by a committee,” says Thomas Jefferson. “It’s all compromises and averages, guaranteed not to offend anybody, so of course it’s vague and boring and doesn’t make any sense.”

“Whereas in the real world,” says Sally Hemings, “probable things happen and so do improbable things, and they are equally real, so everything is much more vivid—”

“Though sometimes a bit harder to take,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Which is exactly how you know it is real,” says Sally Hemings.

“The point is,” says Thomas Jefferson, “it’s not vague, only confusing. There’s a difference.”

Sally Hemings nips a last meat shred off her thighbone. “Now all we have to do is figure out how to get there from here.”

“Where?” I say.

“The place where things are actually real.”

“The problem is,” I say, “that I’ve seen the place you are talking about”—I can’t bear to tell Thomas Jefferson that I have seen it through his own eyes—“and it’s not any more real than this place.”

“What do you mean?” says Sally Hemings.