Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

She laughs. “I know one name that does!”

“I bet you do!” he says. “And the other one is Sam. Sally and Sam! Thought you should have something to remember me by!”

She wants to give him a hug, but doesn’t dare. So she just shrugs her shoulders and smiles. “Thanks, Sam. That is so kind of you!” As he hands her the S, she gives his thick, hard hand a quick squeeze. “I’m truly touched.”

That night at supper, as she is telling the story of her encounters with Sam, her mother frowns smugly and starts shaking her head.

Sally Hemings cuts herself off in midsentence. “What?”

Her mother just keeps shaking her head.

“What?”

“Nothing,” says Betty. “Just don’t let yourself get all sweet on him.”

“I’m not!” Sally Hemings declares, though her face turns crimson.

“Well, that’s good. One thing I know about this life is you ain’t never gonna be happy if you let yourself want things that just can’t be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what that means.” Betty folds her arms, tilts her head to one side and gives her daughter a hard stare. “Men gonna keep talking their sweet talk. Nothing they can do about that. That’s just the way they is. But no man with half a brain’s gonna let himself get caught plowing the master’s field — that’s one thing you can count on.” She gives her head a firm, slow shake. “And I know what I’m talking about.”

“You don’t know anything!” Sally Hemings snatches the S off the table and grips it in her lap.

“Oh, baby girl,” her mother says sadly.

“Don’t talk to me!” She leaps up from the table, knocking the chair over backward. “My life is nothing like your life!” She is at the door before she has even realized that is where she is headed, and then she is striding away from her cabin, still not knowing where she is going but thinking she might walk down the East Road.

Her mother is a spineless fool. She always talks about herself as if she is strong and wise and independent, but, in fact, she is constantly collaborating with her own enslavement. Sally Hemings is never going to let herself be like that. She is done with Thomas Jefferson. She was stupid enough to let herself be swept along by his sweet-talking, his sentimentality and his white-man’s blindness to the realities of slavery. But never again! If he comes back to her on his knees, she’s just going to turn her shoulder and say she is finished with him, and she’ll keep on saying she is finished until he finally gives up and goes away. And she knows he will go away. Because he’s not one of those men who’s led around by his little head; he’s led around by his heart. And that’s why she has a power over him. And that’s why — in this one way, at least — she is free. People may not know it now, but they will soon. They’ll see that she’s not the master’s woman. Not anymore. And then everything will be different. That’s when her real life will begin.

When she sees Sam Holywell the following morning, he smiles at her, tells her how pretty she is, but when she stands close to him, he backs away. And when she looks him straight in the eye so that he might know all the feeling that is in her heart, he looks right over her shoulder. And that is when she understands that he was only flirting with her because he wanted to feel like a big man — a man who isn’t afraid to get back at the master through his woman. The problem, of course, is that he is afraid — and knowing that, Sally Hemings loses all respect for him.

Sally Hemings is cleaning out the bottom drawer in Maria’s dresser when she finds the very same primer that Thomas Jefferson bought for her in Paris. How did it get here? Why would Maria have bothered to pack a child’s book? And why would she put it at the bottom of her dresser under all of her outgrown petticoats?

The thin volume is partially wedged under the board at the back of the drawer, and as Sally Hemings slides it out, she feels that the paper is far softer than when she was reading it with Thomas Jefferson. The pages turn without resistance and fall flat upon one another without even a whisper. There are dark stains on some of them, and next to the picture of a dog biting a man there is a child’s pencil drawing of an angry face with big teeth. Clearly this is not the primer she had in Paris but perhaps the one from which Maria learned to read, and Martha too, and possibly even their mother before them, or even Thomas Jefferson himself. She is touched that he sought out this particular book for her in Paris, but she is also excited to discover that she remembers almost all of the couplets on the first two pages.

She brings the primer back to her cabin, and that night, by the light of a pine knot burning in a tin bowl, she tries, once again, to read the title of Notes on the State of Virginia —the very volume that Martha employed in her hasty reading lesson and that she subsequently gave to Sally Hemings as a gift. Almost immediately, however, she encounters two formidable obstacles: The first is that she no longer remembers what the book’s title might be, except that one of the words is Virginia. And the second is that almost all of the letters that she will need to read the title’s first word would seem to belong to the couplets that Thomas Jefferson skipped over because they contained biblical names.

Since Jimmy and Bobby are both away with Thomas Jefferson in New York, the only person she knows who can help her read is her half brother John, whom Thomas Jefferson arranged to have tutored while they were in Paris, so that he could make sense of treatises on carpentry and joinery. John opens the primer on a table in the joinery shop where he is an apprentice and reads off the mysterious couplets one after another as easily as if he were reciting a prayer. He has Sally Hemings repeat them with him until she, too, is able to rattle them off as if she is actually reading. He also explains that some of the letters — which Sally Hemings thinks he calls “owls”—can be pronounced in many ways, and these he rehearses with her until she, too, has mastered the pronunciations of all five “owls.”

For some reason she is able to absorb John’s lessons far more easily than Thomas Jefferson’s, and as she senses this new knowledge expanding within her mind, she feels as if she is experiencing a revelation on the magnitude of Eve’s when she first bit into the apple. John tells her that Thomas Jefferson’s book is far too difficult for her and offers to give her the very first book he ever read, but she is determined that by the time Thomas Jefferson has returned from New York, she will have mastered his book.

Back in her cabin, she finds that the title’s first three letters (corresponding to Noah, Oak and Timothy) reveal their secrets to her instantly. She has more trouble with the fourth letter (corresponding to Eagle), because she thought the first word was “Note,” but now it seems to be “No-tee,” a word she has never heard of before. (It turns out that the full range of sounds designated by the “owls” did not last in her memory the length of time it took to walk from the joinery to her cabin.) The final letter (one she knows very well) solves the problem. The word is “Notice,” though she thinks it strange that it should be spelled as if it is pronounced “No-teese.” The next word is easy: “own”—though she is not sure how that word might connect to “notice,” a secret she hopes will be revealed by the following word. That word, however, utterly flummoxes her. She can think of no way the sounds for Timothy, Hat and Eagle might be combined into a word. The same is true for the next word: “Staa-tee”—what on earth is that? She thinks she understands the following word—“oaf”—but when she adds all the words together—“Notice own??? Staa-tee oaf”—she sounds like a madwoman muttering on a Paris street. So now she experiences a new revelation on the magnitude of Eve’s: that she is utterly stupid, that reading is much too hard for her and unimaginably boring.