Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Thomas Jefferson’s entire expression is tremulous with worry — so much so that Sally Hemings wonders if he might shed a tear.

All at once the rigidity goes out of her body. She sinks into the chair in front of his desk — but not out of sympathy. She knows something — something she can never say, and yet that, at this moment, she wants desperately to reveal. The terrific intensity of her desire to speak is what has taken the strength out of her legs.

Thomas Jefferson looks at her, then smiles sadly. She senses that he is about to reach out and touch her arm, which is resting on the edge of the desk. She pulls the arm away.

“I’m sorry, Sally.” The worry has returned to his face. “I know that I am putting you in a difficult position. But I am concerned for other reasons as well.” He takes a deep breath, leans forward and speaks in a low, emphatic voice. “The truth is that there is a tendency toward melancholy on both sides of our family. As you may know, Maria’s dear mother was very delicate and sometimes so exhausted by sorrow that she could not rise from bed in the morning. I have often thought this susceptibility of hers contributed to her early death. And on my side… well, on my side there is an even more pronounced tendency. And I can hardly bear to think that poor little Polly may be laboring under a similar affliction.”

What Sally Hemings knows but cannot say is that during the weeks after Lucy’s death Polly came to hate her father, partially for leaving her behind when he went to France but mainly because, when she needed him most, after little Lucy’s death, he didn’t care enough to come to her side. During the three years before Polly boarded the ship to London, she waited every day for a letter from him telling her that he was coming home. When at last she woke from her drugged sleep and found herself miles out at sea, her first coherent words were, “I don’t want to go live with Papa. I hate him!” And she expressed exactly the same sentiment every day until Monsieur Petit escorted them down the gangplank and onto French soil. After that, Polly allowed herself to love her father again with an almost pathetic servility, but Sally Hemings knows that the hate has never left her heart and that she was, in fact, very sullen and unhappy throughout his stay in New York.

And this is what she wants to tell Thomas Jefferson — because he has no idea of it and because he has no idea how enraged she herself is this very moment, sitting across from him at his desk.

But she doesn’t speak the words that have gathered on her tongue. Instead she says, “I don’t know if you have to worry about that. Everybody gets sad from time to time. The world is a sad place — that’s all. You get sad for a little bit, then you get happy. I’ve seen Maria happy plenty of times.”

“So you think”—Thomas Jefferson smiles wryly—“that I am just being a worried old fool?”

“Not exactly,” says Sally Hemings. “But maybe.”

Thomas Jefferson laughs out loud and flings himself back into his squeaking seat.

“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?” he says.

“No.” Her face grows pale, and when she speaks again, her voice is trembling. “But there is one thing I am going to say to you. You’ve got to stop thinking so much about yourself. And you’ve got to think a great deal more about how the things you do affect other people.”

Sally Hemings can no longer speak, because anger has choked off her voice. Her eyes are fixed and hard, her mouth a yellow seam.

Thomas Jefferson looks thoughtful but says nothing for a long time. Then he gives his head a barely detectable shake. His voice, when he speaks, is so low it is almost a moan.

“Oh, Sally.”

Sally Hemings stands up, then steps away from the desk. “I’ve got things I should be doing.”

“No, wait!” He leans across his desk, one hand extended.

She doesn’t move. She doesn’t speak. Her blue-gray eyes so filled with fury and yet so beautiful.

Thomas Jefferson’s hand falls to the desktop, and he leans back again.

“I’m sorry, Sally.” He covers his nose and mouth with both hands, then lets them fall into his lap. “I’m so sorry. And if it is any comfort to you, I, too, have been suffering—”

“I’m not talking about that!” she says. “You made perfectly clear how wrong all of that was, and I agree with you. So that’s over. You don’t even have to think about that anymore.”

This last sentence is spoken as she turns toward the door, which she pulls open so rapidly it flies from her hand and bangs a chair against the wall. She walks straight out into the dark corridor and leaves the door swaying behind her.

“Well, all right,” Betty says to her daughter. “You do what you got to do. I just hope you don’t make things worse, that’s all. Mr. Jefferson’s not a bad man. There’s lots of worse men out there, colored or white.”

“Stop it!” shouts Sally Hemings. “You don’t know anything about Mr. Jefferson! You don’t know one single thing! Everybody around here talks about him like he’s some kind of saint or god or Jesus Christ himself! But I won’t do that! Thomas Jefferson can roast in hell for all I care!”

“Hush, child! Somebody’ll hear you, talking so loud.”

“I don’t care who hears me! I hope he hears me himself! I hope he roasts in hell! And when he dies, I’m going to dance on his grave! I promise you that! And I hope he just heard every word I said!”

… I could insult Mr. Jefferson, I could hate him, I could reject his overtures and acts of kindness, I could cast him cold stares for weeks on end, but in the back of my mind I always knew that these were mere pretense and nothing that would actually satisfy my rage or quell my pain. The only way that I could be truly rid of Mr. Jefferson would have been to flee Monticello, but that would have meant leaving all the people I loved most and abandoning myself to a future that at the very best would have been decidedly uncertain.

It is possible that I could have convinced Mr. Jefferson to sell me, as had my sisters Mary and Thenia when they wanted to be with their husbands and children. But I had no husband to go to, and I had buried my only child under shards of frozen earth. And from a purely practical point of view, it was almost impossible to imagine that I might find a more comfortable situation with another owner and very easy to imagine that I might end up subjected to the sort of barbarities that every southern Negro dreads and that for too many are simple facts of life.

I did often think about running away, however. Between my appearance, my Parisian clothing and my accent — to say nothing of the fact that I was almost fluent in French — I could easily have passed for white, at least once I had put sufficient distance between myself and this place so that no one could recognize me. But I had no illusions about how a penniless woman might fare, even if all the world saw her as white and even in so enlightened a city as Philadelphia. I had heard the tales of deception, sorrow, shame and lonely death told by Reverend Hodder. I had even seen such women standing on the streets of Paris with their rouged cheeks, their all-but-naked bosoms and their bitter, alcohol-dimmed gazes. When, many years after this time, we sent off our Harriet, it was with fifty dollars, a coach ticket and a letter of introduction to Mr. Jefferson’s dear friends the Wentworths. Even had I known when I was seventeen that he could do such a thing, I would never have dared hope that he would want to so facilitate my northern migration.

Many times during the months after I lost La Petite, I had raged at the injustice of my life and endured many a moment of strangled panic, as if I had been sealed up inside a wall. Such feelings certainly contributed to my rage at Mr. Jefferson, the arbiter of my confinement, but at the same time, the human heart being impervious to reason, the pain and anger I suffered after our departure from France were also evidence of how desperately I still needed Mr. Jefferson, though less perhaps for his physical consolations than for his mind. In our conversations I had felt as if I were in a vast palace and he was constantly opening up doors onto strange and beautiful rooms, corridors, gardens and garrets through which I could wander in endless fascination….