Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

She wants to tear Thomas Jefferson’s book into tiny pieces, but instead she flings it into the hidey-hole under her bed, flings the primer after it and covers the hole with the trunk containing all of her fine clothing from France.

Heaps of creamy clouds fill the sky from horizon to horizon, hazy sunbeams fanning diagonally between them. It is September, the season of goldenrod and fat cattle, of orange dust, balmy afternoons and faintly tarnished skies; a time when the orioles and bobolinks are gone and the cries of the jays and crows grow louder.

Thomas Jefferson has been in New York for six months, serving as secretary of state, and the first Sally Hemings knows of his return is when she sees Goliah carrying a pair of scuffed and mud-splattered riding boots down to the stable to be cleaned and polished.

A little later she is hanging her own wet gowns and shifts on the line in front of the kitchen and hears the clatters and clinks of china and silverware coming from a porch that looks down onto the yard.

She turns her back to the porch and sings as she works, softly, her voice hardly more than a vibration between palate and tongue. Once the last shift has been pegged to the line and is shedding droplets into the red dust, she puts her basket against her hip and turns toward the kitchen door.

There is a darkness overhead.

“Good afternoon, Sally,” Thomas Jefferson calls out heartily. He is resting his elbows on the porch railing, and their faces are not more than three yards apart.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Jefferson.” Her voice is flat, merely polite. She circles the basket with both arms and pulls it tighter against her pelvis.

He seems to be waiting.

“Welcome home,” she says.

“It’s good to be home.” He smiles broadly, looking directly into her eyes.

She turns away for an instant, toward the sun-mottled eastern plain. “Beautiful day,” she says.

“Yes! Very beautiful.”

He is still looking into her eyes, but his smile is more vulnerable.

“Well…” She lifts her empty basket, as if to signify some urgent duty, then turns her back and enters the kitchen.

A brown darkness presses on her eyes once she is out of the daylight, and she waits just inside the door as the obscurity slowly sorts itself into the fireplace, the wall and the rose glints on the copper pots.

Her entire body is gripped by something between trembling and alertness, as if she has just been slapped or has heard some terrible news. Yet she feels as if she has acquitted herself well.

Thomas Jefferson got nothing out of her.

Not one thing.

The following morning she is seated beside Maria in the back of a carriage. Jupiter is driving. Maria has just turned twelve and has grown three inches over the last year. Sally Hemings has been stitching lace frills to the ends of the girl’s sleeves and skirts, but now the buttons on the backs of her gowns can no longer be fastened, and she can only keep decent through the use of brooches and shawls. She is on her way to see Mrs. Mickel, the mantua maker in Charlottesville, to have a new gown made and her old ones let out. She wants Sally Hemings to help her choose the best materials and design.

The carriage is not moving.

Thomas Jefferson hailed them as they were departing from the great house, and now he is giving his daughter strict instructions not to order a gown in green or red. The former color, he says, will make her “Welsh complexion” seem pallid, while with the latter the slightest infusion of color in her cheeks will make her seem feverish.

In the presence of his daughter, Thomas Jefferson can do no more than glance intermittently at Sally Hemings, and so she is able to examine him at length in daylight, something she has not done for a very long time. There are bluish bags under his eyes, and the first puckering of an insipient dewlap beneath his chin. So much gray has filtered into his hair that there is a streak just over his left eye that seems more yellow than red. And during the rare moments when he listens to rather than lectures Maria, his long, thin lips form a straight line across his face that seems simultaneously pompous and weak.

How is it, Sally Hemings wonders, that she could ever have wanted to cover that deflated face with kisses? Or yearned to pull that lank and bandy body between her thighs? All of the cravings, worries and delicious aches that had once filled her every minute apart from him now seem a sort of insanity.

This is good , she thinks.

When Thomas Jefferson gives her one last inquiring glance after bidding his daughter good-bye, she tells herself, I am free now. Finally free.

She looks him straight in the eyes, hoping he will intuit the words she is speaking inside her head:

Free.

I am free.

“Ah, Sally — come in!” Thomas Jefferson is seated at his desk, in that strange chair of his own devising in which she once spun until she became nauseated. (She has kept well away from it ever since.) As he watches her cross the room from the door, he sways slightly from side to side, his chair making mouse squeaks.

“Please sit down.” He gestures at an ordinary chair in front of his desk.

“I’m all right standing,” she says.

Thomas Jefferson makes a laughlike noise, but his expression is serious. “Well,” he says. He looks down at his hands. “Yes.” He stares into the middle distance for a long moment, as if he has forgotten what he means to say. At last he looks at Sally Hemings. “I’m wondering if we might have a frank discussion about Maria.”

He pauses, as if waiting for a confirmation.

Sally Hemings neither moves nor speaks. She blinks to disengage her gaze from his.

“I understand entirely that, as her maid, you must have certain… I don’t know… confidences with her, young though she may be — things that you should feel under no obligation to mention. It is not right, after all, that a father know everything about his daughter’s affairs.”

Thomas Jefferson attempts something like a smile, which Sally Hemings does not return.

“I do hope, however, that in our shared affection for Poll we might be able to help her in what I feel may be a difficult period for her.”

Again he looks to Sally Hemings for confirmation. She gives her head a slight nod and says, very softly, “Yes.”

“So you agree that she’s not happy?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He leans back in his chair, puts his hands together as if praying and rests his fingertips momentarily against his upper lip. Then he leans forward again.

“What do you think, Sally? I have no idea what to make of Maria. Sometimes I tell myself that I am ridiculously oversensitive, other times—” He flings his hands, palms up, signifying helplessness. “ You’re with her every single day. Do you know if there is anything wrong?”

Sally Hemings shrugs.

“What?” he asks, his voice and brow expressing frustration. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing, just… you know: Sometimes people get sad.”

“So you agree that she is sad?”

“Sometimes.”

The fingertips of Thomas Jefferson’s pressed-together hands are touching his lips again. He lowers them.

“Listen, Sally, let me tell you why I’m worried. The entire time I was in New York, Maria hardly wrote to me. And when she did, her letters were models of filial decorum, but they were so brief — none even a page long — and they contained not one single word expressing anything like true feeling. All I could gather from them was that she was trying to conceal from me how seriously remiss she was being in her studies. And since I’ve been home, I’ve found that the situation was even worse than I had intuited. I don’t think that in six long months she’s read more than two chapters in Don Quixote , and she is unable to utter a single grammatical sentence in Spanish. She even seems to be losing her French. But none of that really matters. The main thing is that I have yet to see a hint of joy, or even of childish enthusiasm, in her countenance. Her gaze is always on the floor, she hardly speaks above a whisper and she prefers the solitude of her room to all other occupations.”