Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Mr. Jefferson,” he said, looking down the table to where Thomas Jefferson and John Fairfield were seated on either side of the vacant chair, where the woman of the house would have sat (the last of John Wayles’s three wives had been dead a good nine years by then), “allow me to introduce my daughter, Mrs. Skelton.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Thomas Jefferson.

Mrs. Skelton nodded without quite meeting his eye and said something he couldn’t catch.

He was relieved to see that, while perfectly nice-looking, she was nowhere near as beautiful as the woman he had imagined after he heard her singing. She had broad cheekbones and a long jaw, unusually squared for a woman, but she had enormous eyes exactly the pewter gray of her father’s, though with a greenish cast by candlelight.

She and Thomas Jefferson were seated diagonally across the table and too far apart to talk. Every now and then, he would glance in her direction just as she would seem to be turning her eyes away. He could never be sure if she had, in fact, been looking at him, and so he glanced toward her with increasing frequency, hoping to catch her before she shifted her gaze — until, at last, worried that she or someone else at the table might think he was paying her undue notice, he forced himself to devote all of his attention to the elderly woman to his left: Mrs. Eppes, who seemed to know a great deal about the art of breeding sheep.

Plates of food came and went. Bottles of cider and wine were opened and emptied. Mr. Wayles’s face went redder and redder, and his nose turned a shiny purple.

“Mr. Jefferson!” he called out some two hours into the meal. “Was that your fiddle case I saw my boy bringing into the house a while ago?”

Thomas Jefferson was silent a moment, not sure what he might be getting into. “I suppose it was.”

“So you play the fiddle?”

Thomas Jefferson laughed and glanced at John. “I try.”

“Well, Martha here”—he took hold of Mrs. Skelton’s hand—“is a genius at playing the piano. What do you say you two honor us by playing a duet?”

“Oh, Pappy, no!” cried Mrs. Skelton, putting the middle finger of her flat hand against her lips again.

“Nonsense!” said her father. “I’m sure Mr. Jefferson would love to hear you play!”

Now her eyes truly did meet Thomas Jefferson’s, expressing both alarm and a plea for help.

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Wayles,” said Thomas Jefferson, “but I doubt that Mrs. Skelton or anyone else would get much enjoyment from my hapless screeching.”

Mrs. Skelton gave Thomas Jefferson a grateful glance. “Yes, Pappy,” she said. “It’s not fair to ask Mr. Jefferson to play for us after he has had such a long ride, even if he is only being modest.” She gave Thomas Jefferson another glance, and just as she seemed about to smile, she looked down at her plate.

“Well, then, you play for us, Martha!” said her father.

“Oh, no, Pappy. Really, I couldn’t.” She gave her father a long, imploring gaze, then pulled her hand away from his.

Her father looked at her skeptically for a moment, then slapped the table with his right hand. “All right, then let’s have some apple pie! Betty makes the most delicious apple pies!”

Sometime later, when almost all the lamps and candles in the house had been extinguished, except out back in the kitchen, where the slaves were doing the dishes, Thomas Jefferson returned from a visit to the outhouse to find Mrs. Skelton standing at the bottom of the main staircase, one hand on the banister, the other holding a candle. “Forgive me, Mr. Jefferson,” she said. “I hope I didn’t startle you.”

“Not at all,” said Thomas Jefferson. “I should be the one apologizing.”

She gave him a crumpled smile, then looked away. “I just—” She let go of the banister, transferred the candle from her left to her right hand, then sighed in a way that made it clear she would never finish her sentence.

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” said Thomas Jefferson.

“Yes. The same… For me , I mean.” She gave him a worried smile, then transferred the candle back to her left hand and put her right on the banister.

“Good night, Mr. Jefferson.”

“Good night.”

She took one step but didn’t turn away from him. He didn’t move at all.

“I’d love to hear you play piano,” he said.

“I don’t think you’d say that if you’d ever actually heard me.” Her face in the candlelight was orange and soft, and her smile was the happiest Thomas Jefferson had yet seen it.

“I’m sure you really are a ‘genius’ at playing.”

She laughed.

“And I also hear you are a very good singer,” he said.

“How could you ever have heard such a thing!”

“It gets around,” he said. “I’ve heard that your voice is very beautiful, as clear as a bell.”

She took her hand off the banister and wiped it against her skirt. A thickness, like discomfort, came into her smile.

“Good night, Mr. Jefferson.”

“Good night, Mrs. Skelton.”

In the movie the blond Martha undresses in the presence of the young actor in the copper-colored wig before the ball is even over. As Thomas Jefferson watches the precipitate emergence of her boyishly lean body with a horrified fascination (how could anyone so besmirch Martha’s reputation by suggesting such heedless passion!), she coughs. It would seem that she is now entirely undressed, her skin a wavery gold in the firelight to the young actor’s wavery orange — for he, too, would seem to be undressed, though it is not possible to see the whole of either of their bodies, since their heads and shoulders alone fill up the entire luminous wall. That cough is the only thing that seems real in this fevered and intolerable scene.

Martha did cough — exactly as the actress does — their first night at Monticello after their wedding, when they were in a state not unlike that of the gold and orange people on the wall, only they were under a heap of counterpanes in his two-room cabin, their breath steaming in the lamplight, the falling snow ticking at the windows. Martha coughed, and in that beautiful moment of their being together, Thomas Jefferson suddenly feared that she might be sickly and that he would lose her — this woman who had made him happier than he had ever been in his life.

As he hears that cough in the dark theater, he is bereft once again, and aghast that fate should have taken her from him a mere ten years later. He must have made some sort of sound, because he feels a warm hand stroking his own and looks over to see Dolley Madison watching him with a furrowed brow and sympathetically pursed lips. “Don’t worry,” she mouths, then turns her gaze back to the brilliant wall.

… When I was a very young child, the fact of slavery — my own enslavement and that of everyone I knew well and loved — was a sort of deadness beyond the world in which I believed myself to live. Before the age of six or seven, I don’t think I had any idea we were slaves. In part this was because we were called “servants” and “laborers” by the Jeffersons, and those were the words that we ourselves used. I can’t recall ever hearing my mother refer to herself or to any member of our family by the term “slave.” Also, I never lacked for food. I lived in a solid cabin that was kept warm in the winter by a stone fireplace, and for much of my childhood I was able to wander about Monticello as freely as a dog. This seemed a good and ordinary life to me — nothing like “slavery,” at least insofar as that word had any meaning for me.

I lived with my mother and three of my siblings (I was the youngest) just across the lawn from the great house, and our closest neighbors on the mountaintop, apart from the Jeffersons, were house servants, craftsmen and mechanics — most of them my siblings and cousins. My mother was immensely proud of our family’s elevated standing and said that we had achieved it because we were smart, hardworking, and we knew “how to get along.” By contrast she had nothing but contempt for what she called “ignorant” or “no-account niggers.” I grew up equating these people almost exclusively with the field laborers, who lived down the hill from us and who, those days, mainly picked tobacco on the hilltops a quarter mile and more to the east and south of the great house.