Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

The lodge is filled with sunlight, birdsong and river noise. “Oh!” says Thomas Jefferson. His voice is husky, low, almost a grunt.

“What?” says Sally Hemings, who has only just this instant discovered she has been asleep.

“Oh, God!”

“What?” she says. Her eyes are open, but she wants to close them again.

“Come here.” He slips his arm under her pillow and across her back.

As he draws her near, she rolls onto her side, puts her arm across his chest and touches the silky skin along his ribs with her fingertips. She slides her thigh across his thigh.

He speaks into her hair. “I had a terrible dream.”

“Oh?” she murmurs, and looks up at his face, but he is looking out the window. She kisses his sleep-fragrant chest.

“I dreamed you and I were walking on a bridge over the Seine. Only the bridge was very high, hundreds of feet above the water. Something had happened on it. A battle, I think. There was broken stone everywhere, and parts of the bridge had fallen away. ‘Be careful,’ I said, and you smiled at me sweetly, the way a mother smiles at the foolish fears of a child. I took hold of your hand so that you wouldn’t fall. But then something happened, and you did fall. I was lying on my belly on the bridge, still holding your hand as you dangled in empty space. Only the bridge wasn’t over the Seine anymore. It was over a rocky canyon, with a small stream at its bottom, hundreds of feet below. I remember thinking that everything would be all right because I was still holding your hand. But you were terrified. Your legs and your free arm were flailing as you tried to grasp on to something, but there was nothing there. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m going to pull you up.’ But then you were falling. I don’t know how that happened. I just watched you falling away from me. You had such a look of terror on your face, and you were falling and falling. There was nothing I could do. I just watched you get smaller and smaller as you fell toward the rocks.”

… That lodge! How it haunts me. When we were there, we seemed in a different world, one not ruled by a cruel or incompetent God, a world in which we hadn’t been created master and slave, in which slavery itself had never perverted the human heart or was, at worst, a faint rumor of a distant time and place; and in this better world, our tender murmurings, our delight at touching and being touched, our jokes, our hopes, our conversations and even our fights, our domestic tedium, our aging — all of these things were only themselves, never the means by which we betrayed our souls or those we loved; and we were simply one woman and one man, whose sorrows and joys together were only the product of their intermingled humanness, unprofaned by botched grace….

Two tin plates, heaped with steaming carrots and parsnips, a bowl of salt, a bottle of wine and two glasses. The wavering orange glow of a burning pine knot. “What would you have me do, then?” I don’t see why you can’t just free everyone and let those who want to leave take their chances. They are human beings, capable of making their own decisions. Why should you feel responsible for the decisions they make? “Everything would be ruined.” Why do you say that? “Everything would be ruined.” Stop saying that! And besides, I’m not finished. “Finish, then.” You have often told me that people work harder if they feel that it is their choice to work and that they have something to gain by their labor. So if you were to pay Negroes at the same rate you pay whites, you would have the best Negro workers flocking to you from miles around, and they would work far harder for you than your present laborers, not merely because they would be choosing to work and getting adequately paid for their efforts but because they would be grateful to you for doing what is right. That is the main thing. You would be doing what is right. There would be no need to wait for a general emancipation. Tomorrow, with the stroke of a pen, you could transform Monticello into a beacon of justice and good fellowship for the whole of Virginia. “That is a beautiful dream. But should I tell you what would really happen? I have thought this through many times. Monticello, as we know it, would collapse in a minute. The curse of slavery is that it makes itself indispensable. There are no farms such as this north of Chesapeake Bay. We have our own world here, not just laborers in the ground and house servants but coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters, furniture makers. Were I to run Monticello as you propose, I could not employ the eighth part of these people, and I would lose, first of all, the craftsmen, who — as you know — are the very men best trained to make good lives for themselves in the event that it is practical and desirable for them to be free. And by losing them I would also be losing the ability to train others, so that they, too, might have valuable skills and a means of making a living in freedom.” But they could be apprenticed to the white craftsmen. “I would have to let the white craftsmen go, too. There simply wouldn’t be enough money to pay them. Yet that is nothing. The most immediate tragedy would befall the seventy laborers in the ground whom I would also have to let go, because I couldn’t pay them either. Yes, some few of these might escape north or find a way of eking out a living in Virginia, but what proportion do you think would end up reenslaved, in prison or dead? Almost all of them, I would wager. So what would be the gain? A few effectively imprisoned on a northern-style farm here, a few more finding uncertain futures in the north and the rest condemned to fates far worse than they enjoy now. Is this what you want? Is this what you think would be ‘right’?” So you are saying it is impossible.

… For a while I had a joke. Whenever he and I fell into a discussion about slavery or race, I would put it to an end by shouting, “Stop! You will make me hate you!” I would always smile as I made this remark; sometimes I would laugh, and he would laugh, too. I used to think that this was a clever way of keeping the peace — which it did, to an extent; Mr. Jefferson always heeded my implicit warning, and we would move on to more congenial topics. But it was nevertheless the case that I was, in fact, already hating him even as I smiled, and the hatred would take a while to go away — if it ever truly did.

And so the hatred silenced me.

Because I thought my anger would destroy my life….

It is September 14, 1792, and Sally Hemings is nineteen years old. She is standing beside the counter of the dry-goods shop owned by her sister Mary and Colonel Thomas Bell. Mary worked for Colonel Bell while the Jeffersons were in Paris and had two children with him. Five months ago, at her request, Thomas Jefferson sold her and the children to Bell, who freed them and married Mary. Now she looks after the shop while Bell spends most of his day managing the plantation he owns east of town. Her two oldest children, Joey and Betsy, remain at Monticello.

Sally Hemings has come to the shop to buy ribbon for a nightgown she is making for Martha’s two-day-old first child. She is trying to choose between two ribbons — a satiny rose pink and a coarser but more beautiful pale lavender — when she hears her name called and looks over to see Mary, standing in the doorway between the shop and her house, a troubled expression on her face. Mary gestures for her sister to come and begins to back away from the door. Sally Hemings holds up the lavender ribbon and tells the girl who has been helping her, “I’ll take a yard of this.” No sooner has she spoken than she decides the pink would have been better, but it is too late.