Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Well…” Thomas Jefferson’s mouth hangs open for a long moment, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Did something happen to her?”

Thomas Jefferson grunts.

“What?” says Sally Hemings.

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. She seems to carry around this heavy weight.”

“You mean she’s slow?”

“Well… Yes. But more than that. I just feel this deep sadness in her. And that terrible scar—”

Thomas Jefferson rests his fingertips on her thigh and stops her talking. “You’re right.” He makes a noise in his throat as if he is having trouble swallowing. “Mary wasn’t always the way she is now. When she was a girl, she was so full of life — so courageous and strong…. Now—”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. He rolls toward Sally Hemings and gives her a hug and a kiss on the forehead. Their faces are so close together that there is a crisp echo when she speaks. “What happened?”

“Oh — you know: My mad mother.” He gives Sally Hemings one more kiss on the forehead, then rolls away. She puts her hand back at the center of his chest and stirs her fingers amid the sparse hair there. “My aunt once told me,” he says, “that my mother was pretty and charming when she married my father, but I have no memory of her like that. Around the time she began to have children, a number of manias took hold of her. She became obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to poison her, and she would go for weeks without eating anything except pickles and preserves that she had made herself and kept in a locked box under her bed. The problem was that my father never recognized her madness for what it was. He would try to reason with her. And placate her. Which he could never do for long, because her manias kept changing. For a while she believed that whoever wanted to poison her had begun poisoning the animals, and she told my father that the only way to get the poison out of a hog was to strangle it with a rope before slaughter, and he went so far as to erect a sort of gallows in the barn for that purpose. And whenever she got it into her head that one or another of our servants was her poisoner, she would insist that my father give the servant a lashing… and…”

Thomas Jefferson sits up in the bed and lowers his head into his hands. His back is to Sally Hemings. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

Sally Hemings gives his back a reassuring pat, then gets up onto her knees and crawls around in front of him and puts one hand on his shoulder and the other on his knee. She waits for him to look up at her, but he doesn’t.

He covers her hand with his own and grips her fingers. “It was terrible,” he says. “My father did terrible things. In truth, I think that’s what killed him. And after that my mother’s madness only became worse. And there was no one to protect—”

Thomas Jefferson’s voice thickened just before he cut himself off, and now Sally Hemings can feel a cold sweat coming onto his shoulder. She doesn’t know what she will do if he should start to weep.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice sounding perfectly normal, although he is still looking down.

“It’s all right,” she says. “Really.”

“I’m just so ashamed.” Now he lifts his head, his features loosened by sorrow, but his voice matter-of-fact. “We all protected ourselves from our mother in our own ways, and mine was to lose myself in books. I learned to read with such concentration that when I had a book open in front of me, I could forget the whole rest of the world. Also, I could sit for hours in the window of my chamber when I read, not making a sound, hoping my mother would forget I was even there. But I was the only one who chose reading for protection. My brothers took up boxing and carousing with their friends and so were rarely at home. My sisters became obsequious church mice. All except for Mary. Mary was the only one in the family who would stand up to my mother and tell her that what she was doing was evil. Or mad… And so… of course—”

Again he stops talking, and after a moment he turns to Sally Hemings, wraps his arms around her and lowers his head again, placing the top of his forehead against her shoulder, just beside her neck, as if he means to keep her at a distance. He speaks into the enclosure created by their two bodies. “One time, when Mary… when she… I don’t know what she said or did…. But one time my mother became so enraged that she beat Mary… savagely… with a rake…. That scar… that’s why… the rake… And I heard what was happening… but—”

And now Thomas Jefferson does seem to be doing something like crying. Sally Hemings hears him swallowing again and again, and breathing heavily. And she feels the heat building up in the space between them, and his shoulder going slick with sweat.

“That’s all right,” she says. She shushes him gently. “Everything’s all right. You don’t have to worry.”

“No.” The word comes out as a gasp. “I heard what was happening, but I didn’t do anything…. I went out to the barn… and she was still beating Mary…. Her eye was filled with blood… and I thought she was dead… but I just stood there. I didn’t do anything. ”

He lifts his head, and Sally Hemings can see that although his eyes are red, they are completely dry and that the expression on his face looks less like grief than a panicked restlessness.

He hugs her close and speaks into the air behind her head. “And after that,” he says. “And after that,” he repeats, and has to repeat the phrase twice more before, all in a burst, he says, “She was never the same.”

And then he goes limp and falls over sideways, and Sally Hemings falls with him. She kisses his temple and cheek. She strokes his hair and says, “Oh, Thomas. My poor Thomas. My poor, poor Tom.”

And then he puts his arm around her and pulls her tight against his body, and they both lie side by side in silence for a very long time.

“I am worried you will get into the habit,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I’m not in the habit,” says Sally Hemings. “I’ve never once made a mistake.”

“But still, if you continue… If Martha were to hear you even once…”

“That is never going to happen. I am a completely different woman when we are around other people. But here… in these moments… everything is different. I am your Sally, and you are my Thomas. My Tom. I can’t think of you any other way…. And this fellow here, he is our friend, Little Tom…. Oh, look! He was asleep, but now he seems to be waking…. Yes! Look! He’s getting up and he’s stretching….”

Y ou have to stop talking or you will make me hate you.

Every day I hear of Negroes who have gone north and made fine lives for themselves as ministers, blacksmiths, musicians. “But that’s exactly what I’m saying! You, yourself, have agreed that we should keep our children here until they have so thoroughly mastered a craft that they might have just exactly the successes you describe. Why should it be different for any other slave? Those able to make a satisfactory living as free men and women and who desire to be free can be freed posthaste. But as for those who have not acquired the necessary training or the habits of industry and foresight, I think it is far better to inculcate these virtues through encouragement and example than to abandon such people among a populace who mean them only ill, who will never pay them adequately for their labor and will clap them behind bars at the least excuse.”

So you are saying it is impossible.

Sally Hemings sometimes believes she is many people — which is to say that she possesses within her brain and breast the capacity to lead many lives. Sometimes the other lives seem so familiar she feels as if she has actually lived them: She is walking along a street in Philadelphia, a city where she has never been but which is indistinguishable in her mind from Paris. It is a sunny spring afternoon, and her gown is a deep pine green, but made of satin, so it shimmers in the sun as she passes along sandy yellow paths beneath trees cut into the shapes of cones and boxes. Or, in another life, she is sitting at Thomas Jefferson’s side, at a table of raised glasses, and she herself is raising a glass, and there are glints everywhere — on the lip and camber of each glass, on the silver candlesticks and tableware, in the eyes of the many guests, in Thomas Jefferson’s eyes and her own. And sometimes the other lives could hardly be less familiar and yet feel terrifyingly easy for her to live: She is running through the great house in the darkness of night, and she is carrying an ax, which she swings at everything she passes: tables, chairs, wardrobes, the walls themselves. The ax penetrates and stops, and as she wrenches it free, a wild, guttural cry escapes her throat. Or she is herself wild: an animal dashing on all fours through the underbrush on the edge of an enormous wood. It is raining. She is hungry and cold. She hears human voices and runs from them ever faster, thorns ripping at her shoulders and ribs. And then there are all those lives she can hardly make sense of: She is a sea captain perhaps, at the helm of her ship, an infinity of air and water all around her, the wind blowing her hair off her forehead. Or maybe she is flying, but not like a bird, like a cannonball. She arcs through the clouds on a trajectory that never ends. Or she is in a loud room. There is the shriek of a hawk hurtling out of the sky. There is thunder. The floor heaves and trembles beneath her feet.