Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“You poor thing,” she says.

“That’s all behind me now.” He lifts her hand and gives it a couple of meditative pats. “I never think about it.” They start walking again, holding hands. The barge with the cattle is out of sight around another bend. “What about you? Why didn’t you belong?”

“Oh, I don’t really know. Maybe it was my fault. My family just thought everything I said was stupid.”

“Why?”

“They were just more practical than me, I suppose. I think I preferred the world inside my head to the one in which I actually lived.”

“Why do you speak of that with shame?” He gives her a sideways glance, one half of his mouth smiling. “What is philosophy but the mind’s desire to see beyond the world of sense?”

She makes a small laugh but doesn’t speak.

“Where would you go in your explorations?” he asks.

“Oh, everywhere! But along the Rivanna mostly. I loved to walk by the river.”

“I did, too. There was so much to see. Deer would come down to drink. Once I saw a bear fishing.”

“I’ve never seen that.”

“It was most impressive,” he says. “I didn’t know what he was doing at first. He was completely still, staring at the water. Then he just splashed with one paw, and this silver thing went flying onto the rocks. He lumbered over, picked it up and made a meal of it while the poor thing was still wriggling.”

“That’s disgusting!” Sally Hemings laughs. Thomas Jefferson’s eyes are avid, bright. She can see him reliving his memories. She can see him as the boy he used to be.

“My favorite place was Castle Rock,” he says, “though I don’t think anybody else called it that. It was a big, squarish rock, about two stories high — like a tower, or really like a château fort. ”

“I know that rock! I’ve been there.” As she says this, she wonders if she is telling the truth. “It’s on the east side of the river?”

“Yes.”

“Near Shadwell?” This, however, is at least partly a guess. She knows that he grew up at Shadwell.

“Not really. It’s about a half mile downriver.”

“That’s what I meant.” And now she has a clear memory of the rock. She is standing at its base, looking up. “I’ve been there. I love it, too.”

“Have you ever jumped off?”

Sally Hemings searches her memory but can only come up with an image of the rock from that one point at the water’s edge — although maybe she was actually standing in the river. She thinks she can remember cold water swirling around her knees while she looks up at the rock, squinting against the sun. And now a new memory comes: She is clambering up a steep bluff beside the rock, clinging to scraggly dwarf oaks. “I’m not sure,” she says.

“The water is very deep right there, so it’s not dangerous to jump. But it took me about a year to work up the courage.”

“I think I was always too scared.” She is seeing Thomas Jefferson as a boy, maybe nine years old, naked and bone-pale, his eyes and mouth wide with terrified delight the instant before he hits the water.

“I loved it!” he says. “I would jump off over and over again. And when I got tired, I’d climb out onto this slanted rock and lie there until the sun had dried me.”

“I used to lie there, too. I remember lying flat on my back and looking up at Castle Rock.” In fact, what she remembers, or she thinks she remembers, is standing on that rock looking up. Perhaps that’s what she was actually remembering before. She was standing on that rock, not knee-deep in the river. But now she does see herself knee-deep in that river, or waist-deep, or perhaps she is even swimming, and she is looking at a pale, redheaded boy spread-eagled on the slanted rock. She is holding her breath so that he doesn’t notice her, but she knows that in the next second he will turn his head and see her.

“How amazing,” she says, “that we both used to go to the same place when we were children. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if we had been able to meet each other there?”

Thomas Jefferson stops walking and turns toward her, smiling. “That would have been lovely.” He kisses her on the forehead and then on the lips.

A little later, when they are walking again and have mounted the crest of a rise, she watches the golden reeds below her bow down in rolling waves as a breeze crosses them and then shivers the glinting, brown-green surface of the Seine, and she feels suddenly happy, so extraordinarily happy. She doesn’t know why; she only wishes they could stay in this beautiful place forever and never have to return to Paris.

There are times when Sally Hemings has to fight her revulsion at Thomas Jefferson’s naked body and at the things that happen when she is naked with him in her bed — and yet there are other times when those very same things feel as close as she will ever get to heavenly bliss — except that in heaven her bliss will not be followed by embarrassment to meet Thomas Jefferson’s eye, or even her own eye in the mirror. You are the woman who has done these things , she tells herself when she looks at her reflection in the morning. You are such a woman. Yet she cannot tell whether she makes these pronouncements with loathing or a grim pride.

Thomas Jefferson always leaves her room in the middle of the night, and so, awoken at dawn by the shrill whistling of swallows, Sally Hemings is surprised to feel the tilt of her mattress and the warmth of another body against her back. At first she only licks her lips and watches the slow somersaulting of dust motes in the solitary sunbeam crossing her room from the small window above her bed. Then she rolls from her left side to her right.

She has never seen Thomas Jefferson sleeping before, at least not in daylight. It was hot in the night, and a few strands of his red hair are stuck to his pale forehead. His eyelids are closed, but so delicately they make her think of furled flower petals. His long, thin lips are slightly parted, and a trickle of drool gleams at the corner of his mouth, where his cheek is pressed against the mattress.

He is so peaceful and still that it is almost as if the real Thomas Jefferson has fled his body — the thinking, commanding, eternally busy Thomas Jefferson, the man looked up to by half the world. But at the same time, she wonders if this vulnerable, gently sleeping man isn’t, in fact, the real Thomas Jefferson, and if, during this tranquil, fleeting moment, she has been granted the opportunity to look not at the man but at his soul.

And now it seems that Thomas Jefferson has left the balcony and is walking back along the gangway, ever deeper into Sally Hemings’s invention. For a while his coattails flap on either side of him and his hair whips into his mouth and eyes. But soon the wind subsides and even the violent lurching of the deck resolves, first into a gentle rocking and then into a hum.

And now he is walking between enormous steel flywheels whirling so fast that their spokes are a blur of gleaming blue and now along an avenue of copper obelisks, from the peaks of which bolts of pink and green lightning continually crackle. Tiny sparks snap between his fingers. There is a metallic sourness on his tongue.

Gradually the gangway widens until it is the size of a country road and slopes downhill through a forest of pole-thin trees hung with silver leaves that tremble with a faint ringing sound on a gentle, unceasing breeze. On the far side of the forest, he comes upon fields of brilliant silver wheat and farmhouses, also silver, that glitter so fiercely in white sunlight they make phosphorescent smears inside his eyes. Even the people working in the fields and passing him along the road have silvery faces and hair. And their voices when they speak seem to echo down long pipes.