Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings steps into the cabin and smiles weakly. “I can’t believe it,” she says, almost under her breath.

“Come here, girl. Let me put my hands on you!”

Sally Hemings doesn’t move.

Betty flings out her arms and wraps them around her daughter. “My baby girl is home! My baby girl is home!” After a long hug, she stands back, holding Sally Hemings by the shoulders with her arms straight. “Look at you! I send you off a little girl and you come back a grown woman! I guess they treated you fine over there. You all filled out and grown up. Must have treated you like a princess! You probably too good for all the rest of us now.”

“Oh, no, Mammy. I’m so happy to be home.”

“Don’t sound like you happy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You must be bone tired!” Betty pulls a chair away from the table. “Sit down. Sit down.”

Sally Hemings sits, shrugs her cape off her shoulders and lets it hang over the back of the chair. “That’s better.”

“Must have been hard, all that traveling. How long it been? A week?”

“A month — since we left Norfolk, I mean. But it’s been three months since we left France.”

“Lord! No wonder you so tired!”

“I’m not so tired.”

“Don’t tell me you ain’t tired. You yellow as bread dough! You got big gray circles under your eyes. You sit right there. I got some biscuits I can give you.”

“Do you have any water? I haven’t had anything to drink since we stopped in Charlottesville.”

“Course I got some water! You just sit right there. I’ll get you some water.”

Betty takes a pitcher off a shelf and goes out to the rain barrel. She comes back in and puts the pitcher down on the table. “You learn how to talk French over there?” she asks as she takes a cup off a shelf in the corner.

“Oui.”

“‘We’!” Betty laughs. “‘We’!” She places the cup on the table beside the pitcher. “You call that French! Lord, if that’s French, I been speaking French my whole life!”

Sally Hemings smiles weakly.

Betty smiles. Then her smile goes away. Softly, she says, “Oh, my Lord!”

She crosses the room and places her hand on Sally Hemings’s belly. “Oh, my Lord!” She takes a step back, clutching her hands together. “Don’t tell me you let some French nigger have his way with you!”

Sally Hemings’s voice is so quiet that Betty can hardly hear her. “There aren’t any Negroes in France, Mammy.”

Betty just stares at her daughter, but Sally Hemings keeps her eyes on the pitcher in front of her and doesn’t speak. A tear runs down her cheek.

“Oh, my Lord!” says Betty. “Mr. Jefferson! Don’t tell me it’s Mr. Jefferson!”

Sally Hemings looks at her mother, her eyes red, tears spilling down both cheeks. When she tries to speak, she can’t. She covers her face.

“Oh, my sweet baby girl!” Betty kneels on the floor with her arms around her daughter. “There’s nothing wrong with a baby! Babies is nothing but a joy!” She pulls her daughter’s head onto her shoulder and smooths her hair. “I was just about your age when I got pregnant with Mary.”

Sally Hemings begins to sob.

“There, there, baby girl. There ain’t no reason to be so sad. It’s a good thing to bring babies into the world. Be fruitful and multiply. That what the Lord says. Babies ain’t nothing but a joy. Every one of you been a gift to me.” Sally Hemings continues to cry. Betty rocks her back and forth on the chair and strokes her hair. “He’s not rough with you?” Betty says.

Face swollen and wet, Sally Hemings sits up and looks at her mother.

“Your father,” says Betty, “he was rough with me sometimes. Mr. Jefferson’s not rough with you, is he?”

“No,” says Sally Hemings. “No, no, no, no!”

Then she is sobbing again, and Betty resumes rocking her and stroking her hair. “Then everything’s all fine. You got a baby coming, and there’s nothing better than a baby. And it’s a good thing to have a baby with the master. That just about the best thing can happen to a colored girl, except freedom. Especially if you got a master like Mr. Jefferson. It’s only you got to keep your feelings out of it. You keep your feelings out of it, everything be just fine.”

Sally Hemings buries her face against her mother’s shoulder, and her sobs become grinding wails.

Red is a lie, as are blue, gold, alizarin, sage, cyan, indigo and brown. These words are lies we tell ourselves, because we want to mean something definite and real by them, but we can’t. No single color can be described by red, only an infinite and borderless spectrum of hues whose profound and essential differences are obscured by the word. Likewise with the names we call every other color. All we can have of color is the color before our eyes, which is both itself and never itself, which exists only in that split instant we define as now, and never again, nor ever before, but which also does not exist, insofar as it is ungraspable, unreliable, always hurtling away from us and never more than a complexly enticing and beautiful void.

Sally Hemings is ashamed, because while she was in France, she forgot that nothing she experienced was real. The Patsy and Polly she knew there, the Thomas Jefferson and, maybe most of all, the person she believed herself to be — none of these people were real, or at least none of them has survived the weeks at sea and the month on the road from Norfolk to Monticello.

Well, maybe Jimmy was real. Maybe Jimmy was the only one who always knew about the huge gaps between the way things seemed, the way they actually were and the way they ought to have been. And maybe that’s why he’s always so sad. Jimmy is sad all the time now, and she doesn’t know what she can do to help him.

… There was a time, not long after our return from France, when I saw Mr. Jefferson as he truly was. I remember that moment with a nightmarish vividness, and yet it had no more effect on me than if it had never happened. How is this possible? How is it that from that very moment I did not become an entirely new woman?

That return was very hard on us all. After Paris, Monticello seemed a gray heap of lumber, brick, blurred china and boredom, where no truly beautiful gown had ever swirled and where no silk-shod foot had ever danced. Our spirits were buoyed by the fact that through significant glances, shared reminiscences and by simply speaking French, we were able to pay homage to the beauty, intelligence and grace that we each saw as the essence of Paris. But in the end, all of our nostalgia could do little to preserve us from the knowledge that we were living on a tiny island in the midst of a vast wilderness populated by the brutish and the dim.

Things between Mr. Jefferson and me had grown very distant. We had never been alone during our travels so never had an opportunity to be anything to each other apart from master and servant. Matters were not helped by the fact that everybody in our party — Miss Martha, Miss Maria and Jimmy — suspected, at the very least, the true nature of my association with Mr. Jefferson. Not a word was said by anyone, but every now and then I would find myself the object of an emphatic gaze, or of a double entendre — for example, Miss Martha’s remark that it was a “perfect bore” the way young women would throw themselves at her father. “One would think they had no sense of their own dignity,” she added, without ever even glancing in my direction. And neither did Miss Maria, her solitary auditor apart from me. There was very little of friendship between the three of us now, although at the same time the sisters seemed to find it extremely difficult to treat me as their servant. They were incapable of issuing me a direct request, and so, to keep the peace, I did my best to anticipate their needs.