Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

The kitchen is empty, so Sally Hemings just leaves the basket on the table and hurries into the main part of the house, slapping the remaining particles of earth from her hands as she goes. Thomas Jefferson has not merely closed the windows to his study but drawn shut the heavy curtains. In the room’s brown dimness, Sally Hemings notices the rigidity of his shoulders and back. He steps away from her as she enters and turns toward the chair where she sat the last time she was in this cluttered, paper-strewn sanctuary of his.

She does not want to sit. She stops in the middle of the room and faces Thomas Jefferson. He takes another half step back and looks around as if he has lost something. She wants to ask him what is wrong, but she can’t bring herself to speak. So she just stands there, waiting.

“Thank you, Sally,” he says at last. “I want… I asked you to come in here because… I’ve been thinking, and I have come to some conclusions that I hope you will see the merits of.”

She remains silent, but this time because she knows she won’t like what he is going to say, and she wants to make it hard for him.

The fingers of his right hand reach unconsciously into his left coat sleeve and tug a couple of times at the cuff of his shirt. He clears his throat. “I hope you will not think there is any lack of ardor in my feelings for you. On the contrary, the conclusions I have reached are, very definitely, a response to the intensity of that ardor, as I hope will be obvious. You know, of course, what the world would think if our… current situation were to become public knowledge. Or, more to the point, if Patsy and Polly—” He stops talking, looking lost at first, but then his gaze turns severe. “We have been very fortunate, but the longer we allow things to continue, the more likely we are to be discovered. Discovery is an absolute certainty, in fact, unless we take action immediately. And since it is clear that neither of us has the power to restrain our unnatural impulses, I think we have no other recourse than that you should return to Virginia ahead of the rest of us — on the very next boat, if possible.”

Sally Hemings experiences three incompatible feelings simultaneously: She feels as if she has pitched over a precipice and is falling helplessly. She feels relieved that this exhausting and terribly confusing episode of her life might be over. And she feels outraged. This “current situation” would not have happened if he hadn’t pushed himself upon her — yet now he feels justified in dismissing her without any regard for her feelings! She wants to leap on him and put her hands around his throat.

She cannot move or speak. The blood has drained from her face.

Thomas Jefferson has taken a step in her direction. His brow is puckered and his lips parted in grief. “Oh, sweet Sally! This is so hard. I don’t want you to think this is easy for me. But it’s only temporary. I’ll be back at Monticello by August. September at the latest.” He is lifting his arms to embrace her. She takes a step back.

“What are you telling me?” Now hers is the severe voice.

Thomas Jefferson’s arms drop. She looks down at the floor.

“If you are telling me,” she says, “that we’re just going to start up all over again when you get home, then what’s the point?”

“I just thought…” He shakes his head, his eyes heavy, his lips downturned. “Perhaps, after a little time and distance, we will be more self-possessed.”

“I’m not going.” Sally Hemings turns away from him. She places her hands atop a German specimen cabinet that she can only just see over, and she rests her forehead against it. The room is swirling around her. “I’m not a slave in this country.”

“Oh, Sally!”

“You can’t force me to do anything.”

“Oh, dear Sally!” Thomas Jefferson has come up behind her. She feels his encompassing form against the length of her back. He kisses the crown of her head. “Oh, God!” he says. “I don’t know what to do.” He puts his arms around her. He kisses her ear. Then he kisses her cheek and neck. “Nothing makes sense.” She feels his hardness pressing into her, first softly and then with force.

She turns around in his arms.

“Oh, Jesus!” she says. “What has happened to me?” She seeks out his mouth with her own and slips her tongue between his lips.

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings have retreated into a dark stairway off a foyer at the end of a deserted street, not far from the market where he spotted her contemplating a pushcart heaped with walnuts. His mouth is upon hers. Her apron, skirt and petticoats are in a heap upon her belly, and he has inserted one finger into her liquid warmth. “We must stop this,” he says. “This can’t go on. It is wrong. It is just wrong.”

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson have left Paris and are walking along a yellow dirt path beside the Seine in the direction of Saint-Cloud. They are holding hands — unworried, so far outside the city, about being seen. It is one of those late-June days when the world seems to be made of sunlight, gentle breezes and birdsong. Within the city the river is constrained by steep embankments, but here its waters make liquid clucks and clicks along a narrow, stone-strewn beach. Two swans drift like water lilies near the far shore. A fisherman in a frayed straw hat stands barefoot on a boulder, his line tugged downstream at a forty-five-degree angle. Just past him half a dozen ducks paddle sociably in the shallows and every now and then tip their tails into the air to nibble morsels from the river bottom.

“I’ve missed walking in the country,” says Sally Hemings, giving Thomas Jefferson’s hand a swing. “At home I used to walk for hours all by myself.”

“I did, too.” He smiles at her. “I am never so happy as when I am walking.”

“Really?” She has always imagined him as happiest in his study and in discussions with friends.

“As a boy especially. I never felt I belonged in my own family. It was easier when I was off on my own. I could just be myself. I could live in a world that was more in accord with my natural disposition.”

Sally Hemings stops walking, her lips parted, as if around an unspoken word.

“What?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Nothing.” She swings his hand, and they resume walking. “It’s just that I felt that way, too.”

“I suppose everyone feels that way, at least to some extent.”

A fenced-in barge loaded with cattle has just emerged around a bend. With no grass to chew, the cattle all hold their heads up and look oddly alert — like a crowd of delegates on their way to a meeting. Two men at the front of the barge push long poles against the river bottom. A third at the rear holds the rudder.

“Why did you think you didn’t belong in your family?” asks Sally Hemings.

“Oh…” Thomas Jefferson heaves a deep sigh. “We weren’t much of a family, really. More like a collection of prisoners forced to live in the same cell. All any of us could think about was escape.”

“Why? What made you feel that way?”

He lets go of her hand. They stop walking. “I don’t generally talk about that.”

“I’m sorry.” She searches his face. He seems more thoughtful than upset.

“That’s all right. I’m just not used to it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“No. I’m glad you asked. It shows that you are attentive, that you want to understand. Those are excellent qualities.”

Sally Hemings does not know what to say. She is embarrassed — mainly because his words have made her feel so proud.

“It’s simple, really,” he says. “My mother was mad. She suffered delusions. And my father drank too much.” He makes a curt laugh. “That was his escape!”