Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Just like that! It was that easy!”

“Just like that,” he says.

“Oh, Jimmy!” She gives him another hug. “So you’re free now? Actually free? I can hardly believe it!”

“Yes,” he says. “Free as a bird.” He takes a celebratory leap into the air, but when he lands, his smile has slackened and he speaks in a lower voice. “The papers have been drawn up, but they don’t take effect until I have trained my replacement.”

“How long will that be, do you think?”

“Not too long, I reckon. But it depends on how fast a learner he is.”

“Who?”

“Peter.”

“Peter!” Peter, the brother in between Jimmy and Sally Hemings, has remained at Monticello; she sees him almost every day. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He doesn’t know yet.” Jimmy laughs, but when he is finished, he is no longer smiling.

Sally Hemings remembers that it had taken Jimmy a good four years to truly master the art of cooking, and he had been studying with some of the best chefs in Paris. She gives Jimmy an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “Peter’s a hard worker. I bet he’ll pick it up in no time.”

“First he’s going to have to learn to read.”

It is cold in the lodge — the sort of cold that in a couple of months’ time will seem balmy but that now leaves Thomas Jefferson expecting to see the steam of his breath. He is naked, crouched in front of the fireplace, putting a couple of logs on top of the skeletal remains of the fire he started when he and Sally Hemings first arrived. He is fifty years old, and while he is still muscular and lean, he is aware that the skin on his belly has lost much of its resilience and makes crinkly folds when he bends over like this. He suspects that other parts of his body might be similarly flaccid. As he prods the logs into place with his fingertips, he wonders if Sally Hemings, waiting in the bed, thinks he looks old.

“You’re cold!” she says when he has rejoined her.

“You’re warm!” He pulls her toward him, and presses his chest and belly against hers, and slides his leg up between her thighs until he can feel her pasty wetness. He thinks for a moment that they will make love again, but then she kisses him on the cheekbone and rolls away.

That’s all right. He is satisfied. More than satisfied.

Her head is on his shoulder, and they lie looking up at the beams and boards of the lodge’s loft. It is the late afternoon of the day following his return from Philadelphia and still full light, though the sky above the trees is winter gray.

“Have you spoken to Jimmy yet?” he says after a bit.

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you?”

“Yes.”

“What are your thoughts?”

She cranes her head backward and smiles. “I’m very happy. Thank you.” She kisses him on the cheek. Then she sighs heavily and looks back up at the ceiling. Her feet are moving restlessly under the counterpane, and Thomas Jefferson wonders if she is about to get up.

“No,” he says, “I mean, what do you think about Jimmy?”

She looks up, an irritated expression on her face. “What else can I think? This is what he’s wanted for a very long time.” She looks away again.

“Well, yes but that’s not—” Thomas Jefferson falls silent. He sighs. “I suppose what I’m wondering is if you think it is wise.”

Sally Hemings raises her head off his shoulder and lifts herself over his left arm, which has been embracing her. She faces him on her side, elbow crooked on the mattress, hand supporting her head. She is glaring at him impatiently. “I don’t know why you are even asking that question. Is it ‘wise’ that you are free? Is it ‘wise’ that anyone is free? That question doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “I am not going to stand in the way of his desire. I told him I would give him his manumission as soon as he has trained Peter in his stead, and I will. But still, I’m concerned about him.”

“There is a great deal of cruelty in this world.” Sally Hemings is sitting up now, clutching a corner of the sheet across her breasts. “But does that mean that all the people who might suffer from it should give up their freedom?”

“That has nothing to do with it!”

“It has everything to do with it! You yourself said people should be free to pursue happiness, but you didn’t say anything about their actually having to get it!”

“You’re not letting me say what I mean.” Thomas Jefferson is sitting now, too. He puts his hand on her knee. “What I really want to know is if you think Jimmy is all right. Did he tell you about Hoff?”

There is a skeptical wrinkle at the center of Sally Hemings’s brow, but her voice is low and uneasy. “No. Who is Hoff?”

“You remember the beating Jimmy gave Monsieur Perrault?”

She nods. Monsieur Perrault was their French tutor in Paris. Jimmy thrashed him with a parasol one afternoon when the old man told him that Negroes were incapable of mastering the subjunctive because, as he put it, “There is no subjunctive in the African language.”

“Well, something similar happened twice in Philadelphia. The first time it was only a beggar boy who ran in front of his horse, and there was perhaps some justification to that. The boy needed to learn not to run heedlessly into the street. But Hoff was a different matter. Hoff is the servant of Mr. Clagget, the butcher Jimmy patronizes on Market Street. Hoff is the one who makes deliveries. So one day he arrives with a leg of lamb. I happened to be in my study at the time and could look right down at the back gate, so I saw the whole thing. The first I knew of it was when I heard Jimmy shouting, ‘This leg is crawling with maggots! How dare you insult me with this piece of rotten flesh!’ When I got to the window, he was brandishing the leg over his head like a club. ‘Do you think I am stupid!’ he was shouting. ‘Do you think I’m an absolute idiot!’ As it happens, Hoff is Dutch and has very little English. I’m not sure if he understood a single word of what Jimmy said to him, nor am I sure if any of his defenses were intelligible to Jimmy. All I know is that Jimmy became so enraged that he grabbed Hoff by his hair and started to beat him with the leg of lamb. I could see that the poor man was more startled than injured at first, but then Jimmy landed a blow that may well have broken a bone in his shoulder. He staggered and fell to the ground, and then Jimmy started to kick him—”

“Stop!” Sally Hemings is clutching the sides of her head with her hands.

“That’s all there is,” says Thomas Jefferson. “By the time I got down to the yard, Jimmy’s fit had passed. He pointed at poor Hoff, whom he called a swindler and a criminal, but he was clearly already beginning to think those charges were absurd.”

“The poor man was only the servant,” Sally Hemings says plaintively.

“Exactly. Although once I was in the yard, it was clear that the meat was anything but fresh. In any event, Hoff took advantage of that moment to run out the gate, and we never saw or heard of him again. Jimmy, of course, was filled with remorse. I think he had been drinking even before Hoff arrived, because as soon as we were alone, tears started to spill from his eyes. ‘I know there is a Devil,’ he told me, ‘because I can feel him inside my brain.’”

“Oh, no!”

Sally Hemings gets out of bed and starts looking for her clothes.

“From that day until we left, he was his kind and temperate self,” says Thomas Jefferson. “I think he was deeply shocked by what he had done, and chastened. Though I fear his drinking is beginning to get the better of him. One morning, not three days before we set off to come here, Petit and I searched the entire house and couldn’t find him anywhere, until finally I went out into the garden and discovered him lying there unconscious in a pool of his own vomit.”