Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“The roof is still solid,” says Thomas Jefferson. “It would be easy enough to bring a pallet out here, and other necessaries.”

The river makes its rustles and clicks just outside their open door. He and Sally Hemings are lying on a horse blanket and their heaped clothes. Flies buzz, settle, suck the sweat off their bodies and then buzz some more. He admires the blue sheen of indirect daylight spilling through the door across her thighs and belly and the small darkness of her mussed pubic hair. Her head is on his shoulder. With his fingertips he can feel the smooth, soft weightiness of her breast. He circles his middle finger around the tip of her nipple and feels it grow hard. He is not sure he has ever known moments more beautiful than these. “How did this ever happen, Sally?”

Sally Hemings heaves a long sigh.

The cabin they are in — built by Thomas Jefferson’s father as a hunting lodge — stands on a high, wooded bank of the Rivanna River and is entirely overshadowed by ancient oaks and beeches, amid which sunbeams illumine brilliant emerald clusters.

“I just want to lie here,” she says, “and let this be the whole world.”

Thomas Jefferson also sighs. “You’re right. This is perfect.” He sighs again and for a long moment is silent. Then he says, “I’m happy, Sally. Are you happy?”

She doesn’t answer.

There are rapids just in front of them. As the water clatters onto itself, its sound echoes off the trees on the far bank. A small animal rustles in the leaves beside the porch. A catbird runs through a stream of liquid whistles — its song, too, echoing off the trees on the far bank.

Thomas Jefferson slides his shoulder out from under Sally Hemings’s head and sits up cross-legged on the blanket. His neck is stiff, his head having been pillowed only by his shirt wadded against the wall. He cranks his head right, then left, feeling muscles cracking down the length of his back.

Sally Hemings rolls onto her left side and supports her head with her crooked arm, watching him as he stretches. Pursing her lips in discomfort, she pushes herself into a seated position. Her breasts wobble, then still. That vacant, lost expression is on her face again — and it hurts him, even as he feels he has never seen anyone more beautiful.

“I wish we never had to leave here,” he says.

“We don’t.” She smiles weakly, then sweeps her long brown hair away from her face and looks out the door. A jay makes its cold, piercing cry.

“A week ago,” he says, “as I was climbing the hill toward home and that big storm was brewing, I promised myself that I would not even think of doing this. I simply would not allow it. And now—” He shakes his head. “I don’t even know how this happened!”

What happened was that Sally Hemings came to his chambers shortly before lunch to tell him that Maria would be having a picnic with her cousin Jack in the copse at the top of a bluff above the South Road. Thomas Jefferson thanked her for the message and asked if she wouldn’t mind bringing his laundry down to the kitchen for Nance. As she crouched to pull the basket of soiled clothing out from under his bed, he pretended — to himself, mostly — that he was entirely engrossed by his reading and that he hadn’t even noticed her lithe back stretching beneath her bodice nor how her gown, clipped tight between the floor and her knee, revealed the long arc of her thigh. Nothing might have happened had she not, as she got to her feet and shifted the basket onto her hip, cast him such a shy and knowing glance under her lowered brow — at which point he threw his book onto the floor and raced to take her hand.

He doesn’t remember their speaking a single word, only that they kissed for a very long time. When his hand strayed under her skirts and he discovered how ready she was for him, he murmured into her ear with a quivering voice that she should meet him on the bridle path to the lake in twenty minutes. And then, as a sort of promise, when he withdrew his hand, he put his middle finger into his mouth and sucked it clean. Twenty minutes later she was waiting exactly where instructed. He pulled her up onto the back of his horse and took her to this cabin — a place where he had imagined being with her since they were first together in Paris.

“I made those same promises,” she tells him now. She shakes her head and gives him another of her knowing smiles. “But… well, the truth is, Mr. Jefferson”—her smile broadens, and Thomas Jefferson, still sitting cross-legged, feels his penis stretching in spurts along the instep of his right foot—“that Miss Maria never told me to let you know where she would be eating.”

Sally Hemings laughs. She leans forward, and as they kiss, she places her hand between his legs.

A little later he is sitting up again and she is still lying down. He puts his hands to his temples and says, “I think I am insane.”

“You are.” Her smile is obliterated by a sigh.

“This is serious, Sally. What are we going to do?”

She doesn’t say anything. She looks up at him from the floor, her narrow eyes suddenly weary.

“I am the secretary of state,” he says. “I am President Washington’s representative and the representative of this country — the world’s first true democracy. The monarchs of Europe are watching us and want nothing but to see us fail. And the revolutionaries in France are looking to us to give them courage. What this means is that every one of us in the government must be beyond reproach, not just in our political lives but in our private lives.”

Sally Hemings rolls away from him, onto her belly, her head pillowed on her folded arm, her face toward the floor. “If you want to stop,” she says, her voice reverberant against the floorboards, “just stop.”

She doesn’t look around at him. She doesn’t move.

His eyes run the length of her body. There are two pink ovals of unequal size at the top of her buttocks, where her pelvis was pressed against the floor.

“I can’t stop,” he says. “You know that.”

She neither moves nor speaks.

“I live in fear,” he says. “All it would take—” He doesn’t finish.

Sally Hemings rolls onto her back and looks up at him ruefully for a long time. Then she sits up.

“Why does anyone have to know?” she says. “I can keep a secret, and so can you. Up at the house, you are the famous Thomas Jefferson and I am just your servant — one of a hundred and seventeen. All we have to do is be careful. We never do anything dangerous there. We never do anything that will attract anyone’s attention. That’s not so difficult. We can just wait until we are here, alone. This will be our own little country. No one will see what we do here, because no one will even know it exists.”

She leans forward, smiling, and puts a hand on the inside of each of his thighs, just above the knee.

“Oh, Sally Hemings!” He shakes his head, but he, too, is smiling. “You are a most wonderful and persuasive girl!”

Y ou will make me hate you.

They are lying on a horse blanket on a bed of mint. They are wearing no clothes. A waterfall pours like a leaden fog off a broken rock into the cold pool where they have just been swimming. Thomas Jefferson laughs. “I cannot end slavery all by myself.”

Sally Hemings refills his tin cup from a tin coffeepot. He says, “The sentiment against emancipation among the general public is so strong that we can only proceed in small steps. The first is to end the importation of slaves from Africa, so that the crime may not be enlarged. The next is to outlaw the practice in all states added to the Union after 1800, so that eventually the southern states will be so outnumbered that they will not be able to oppose the will of the majority. And then we must work upon the consciences and pocketbooks of the masters— ” So you are saying it is impossible. “Not at all. I am saying the opposite.” You are saying that we must wait so long and meet so many conditions that it cannot possibly happen. “Be reasonable, Sally. There is no other way. I am only telling you how it must come to pass. And it will!”