Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings wants to be angry, but all she feels is a tightness in her head. She cannot look at him. Her eyes are on the muddy toes of his boots. “Mr. Jefferson,” she says, “I don’t think it is wise to talk like this.”

“No,” he sighs. “Not wise at all.”

Now some of her desired anger begins to rise within her. “Maybe you better think about all the trouble this has caused us.”

“I have been thinking,” he says.

“Maybe you better think some more.”

He takes her hand.

“Mr. Jefferson, please.” A rod of pain runs from one temple to the other. Her whole body is filled with an urgent feeling that is half a desire to run and half a desire that makes her body go hard and immobile.

“Oh, Sally.” He lifts her hand to his lips and kisses the knuckles of her middle and ring fingers.

The gentle suction and the warmth of his mouth are more than she can bear.

“I’m sorry!” she says. “I have to go!”

She turns and hurries in long strides back up the path.

He doesn’t follow.

All the way home, she repeats to herself, I have to be free. I have to be free. I have to be free.

During the afternoon bulbous heaps of cloud loom out of the flatlands to the east and drift toward, then over, the mountaintop, going from cream to gray to blue-gray and finally to green. The air beneath the clouds seems to tremble, and then the leaves in the trees hiss and turn up their pale undersides. Winds come from all directions at once. They bludgeon and seethe. There is a massive thunderclap, and then the rain falls with such ferocity that it snaps in spikes off the rooftops, roads and puddles. Freshets race from gutter pipes. Small ponds rise in lawn dips, and branchlike bolts of pink and purple lightning cross the whole sky — so many at once, sometimes, that they are like enormous nets of stutter-blasting light.

And then, after hardly more than an hour, the air goes dead still and oven hot. Roof edges and branch tips drip. The returned sun cooks clouds of steam, first off the roads and then out in the fields. It is hard to breathe. People begin to sweat inside their rain-moist clothes. Buttons are undone, waistcoats and underskirts dispensed with. By suppertime the dogs are lying in the shadows of the houses with their tongues hanging out.

Then it is night, and Sally Hemings is waiting for sleep in the still, steamy heat. She kicks off her blanket, then draws her shift above her knees, then to the tops of her thighs, then to midbelly. Finally it is bunched in a hot lump under her armpits, and she wrestles herself out of it and flings it to the floor. She lies back down but experiences no relief.

She is thinking about freedom.

She is thinking about the freedom she felt when she and Thomas Jefferson were naked together in bed. She is thinking about how that was not really freedom and yet how for instants and even for whole nights it very definitely was.

She wonders if it might be possible to be with him like that again — or rather, if she might be able to give him the whole of her body but absolutely nothing of her soul.

Sally Hemings says, “I have loved this man I should never have loved. My love was like a disease from which I thought I would never recover. And yet when this disease ravaged my soul most fiercely, I was the happiest I have ever been. I knew joy.”

… I don’t think I have ever had a simple thought or feeling about Mr. Jefferson, one that didn’t contain its opposite or which — more to the point — wasn’t radically intensified by having to do constant battle with its contrary. The day before yesterday, when I had almost nothing to do but wait and worry, I decided to take advantage of a thaw by going for a long walk. The roads were slick with mud, but the wooded paths were rich with that springlike musk of old leaves. The only birdsong to keep me company was the abrasive squawking of jays and crows, but even so I felt the anguish passing out of my muscles and mind, and I moved with an easy contentment that I have not known for months. The sun was a yellow-white flare and the sky forget-me-not blue. It wasn’t long before I was able to loosen my scarf and open my cloak.

I hadn’t set out with any destination in mind, but once I found myself down by the Rivanna, I knew that I was headed for the lodge. It has been four years since the last time Tom and I visited that small house, and my heart rose into my throat as I rounded the bend and saw it atop a rise just beside the river. As I drew closer, I could see that the porch railing had gone askew, and that the white clapboards had grayed from rain and dust, and that a mist of green moss was spreading up the walls. I expected to find that the house had been broken into again and reduced to a shambles by vandals and by time, but the door was solid, the key was still in the tiny cabinet Mr. Jefferson had built for it underneath the porch and the lock turned easily.

Somehow the fact that nothing whatsoever had changed inside the lodge since we last locked the door behind us only made the passage of time more clear. The bed was neatly made, the kettle was on the hob, a single spoon lay on the mantel, where it had been left by Mr. Jefferson or by me after it had been used to scrape the last of some soup off the bottom of a bowl or stir some sugar into a cup of coffee. But the spoon had gone dark with tarnish, and a layer of whitish dust lay over every item in the room, including the counterpane.

There was a book beside the bed: Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles, of which Mr. Jefferson had had a very high opinion. I was the one to bring it to the lodge, however, having foolishly concluded that such a slender volume would be perfect for teaching myself to read French. I had probably left it behind out of sheer frustration and had so forgotten its existence that I was startled to discover it on the night table. As soon as I saw it, I snatched it up, clutched it to my breast and sank down upon the bed, suddenly overwhelmed by memories of all the afternoons and nights that Mr. Jefferson and I had spent in this small house.

I sat rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed, tears streaming down my face, crying, “No. No. No. No.” For what did this book represent but my own selfishness? Even then, the day before the brutality of this world was revealed to me in such stark relief, I understood that whatever I might have gained from reading and my conversations with Mr. Jefferson had served only for my own enjoyment, and to advance my own opinion of myself, and, most repellant of all, to legitimize my fantasies that I was an exception, that I could somehow live in this world without being either colored or white. I had done nothing to help anyone else, nothing to correct the manifold injustices on which my own privilege depended. I could hardly have been more selfish.

I placed the book back on the clear rectangle amid the dust haze covering the top of the night table. I wiped away my self-indulgent tears and straightened the bodice of my gown. As I leaned forward to get to my feet, I noticed a gleam. Bending over, I found an old shoe buckle resting against one of the night table’s legs. I picked it up and polished it with my sleeve. It had to have been Mr. Jefferson’s, though I had no memory of his ever having ridden home with a loose shoe. I held the buckle in my hand as I left the lodge and locked the door. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It occurred to me that by rights I ought to just throw the buckle into the river. But I didn’t. I clutched it tightly in my fist as I walked away from the little house. Sometime later I slipped it into my pocket. It is still there….