Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Oh, poor Jimmy!”

Sally Hemings gets down on her knees and lifts the counterpane so that she can look under the bed. “Where is my shift? We’ve got to go back up to the house. What did I do with my shift?”

A swallow of wine. A mouthful of warm parsnip. “I have never said that it is impossible — if by ‘it’ you mean emancipation — only that it must be pursued methodically and with patience. Two things are required: first that, by moral argument and political pressure, southern landowners are persuaded to give up the practice of slavery; and second that a homeland be established in Portuguese South America or in Sierra Leone, where all the freed Negroes might be transported at the public expense and provided with sufficient acreage, animals, seeds and money to begin new lives for themselves and to found a new society. Only by the geographical separation of the races might we avoid the commencement of a cycle of assault and revenge that could last centuries and reduce all the beautiful dreams of this nation to charred rubble and pools of blood.” Stop. You are going to make me hate you.

The floor beneath Thomas Jefferson’s feet bucks and wobbles, and the heads of the seated passengers rock all in one motion. From the set of Sally Hemings’s shoulders and the grace with which she rides the heaving floor, he can see that she is more confident than she used to be, and more capable. She has come into her own , he thinks, and that fills him with both a warm appreciation and a sorrow that he has missed so much of her life.

Thomas Jefferson is an artist of silence. Into the midst of whinnies, susurrant poplars, catbird shrieks, jingling harnesses, cicada drones, coughs, field chants, foot thumps, fox cries and thunder rumbles, he introduces silences, some of them lasting half a breath, some as vast and enduring as the silence between stars. Silence is a form of freedom. In silence “ought” need never be contaminated by “is,” and what is is, simultaneously, not at all. Silence is our agreement that the world is more than we can bear. When the silent people in the silent room close their eyes, they are utterly alone. A solitary word in the midst of silence has no meaning.

It is six in the morning of May 1, 1795. Thomas Jefferson has already taken an hour’s walk along the Rivanna and has returned to the lodge with sleeves and smallclothes chilly in patches from the dew. He is sitting on a wooden footstool in front of the fireplace, pouring boiling water from a copper kettle into a tin coffeepot balanced on two bricks just beside the fire. He hears a murmur and a rustling of bedclothes.

Looking around, all he can see of Sally Hemings is the underside of one half-closed hand resting against the headboard just beside her pillow. She is four months pregnant, though the only obvious signs are a certain thickening under her jaw and the taut enlargement of her breasts. He has known of her condition for just over a month, and so far neither Martha nor Maria knows — or, at least, neither has said a word to him about it.

He is happy, but he has unhappy thoughts.

Sometimes he worries about how he will manage once the child has come into the world and there will be no plausible way to deny that it is his own. More often, however — though usually only in the darkest hour of the night — he remembers his wife’s suffering during and after childbirth, her helpless grief at the loss of Jane, their second child, and then of their third, their one and only son, who never mastered the art of breathing and never received a name. But those griefs, as unbearable as they felt at the time, came to seem innocent and even mild. It was after their lovely little Lucy Elizabeth went crimson with fever and then so pale and still that Martha succumbed entirely to despair. “Why is God so cruel?” she cried out one day. “He laughs at our hopes. He fills our life with misery.” Thomas Jefferson was shocked to hear his good and kind wife speak so bitterly, but he found himself unable to argue with her, especially as that was a moment when the British seemed to be winning the war. When she again became pregnant not four months later, he hoped that her spirits would revive, but she remained listless and melancholy, and following the birth of their second Lucy, she only grew weaker and weaker, until finally the mere weight of existence was more than she could bear. And then, of course, two years later poor Lucy herself expired in the very home where he had believed she would be most safe.

He picks up a bowl from the floor, pours the just-brewed coffee into it and brings it over to the bed. “Here you go, sweet Sally — a little liquid daylight.” He puts the bowl down on the chair that serves as a bedside table, and she makes a noise that he interprets as a sleepy thank-you. Her face is turned to one side, her eyes closed and brow pinched, as if from pain.

“How is your back feeling?” he asks.

She turns and looks up at him through squinting eyes. “How am I supposed to know? I’m not even awake!”

“Sorry,” he says. “I was just worried that it had hurt you all night.”

She closes her eyes and doesn’t respond.

He backs away from the bed and turns toward the fire. But then he looks around again. “It was just an expression of concern,” he says. “Why do you always mock me when all I am doing is expressing my concern?”

In his not-sleep, Thomas Jefferson, invisible, walks from room to room, though not always bothering with the doors. He steps so lightly as he crosses lawn and field that the grass does not bend beneath his feet and the wheat does not hiss against his shins. The hearts of those he loves and of those he does not even know are as open to him as his own, though often the feelings arising from those hearts are profoundly mysterious and thus disturbing, disorienting.

That is Maria’s cheek in the moon’s gray brilliance. He knows by the faint oval of a chicken-pox scar and by how, at the edge between moonbeam and blackness, the convexity of the cheek undulates into the concavity beside her upper lip. The feeling that comes to Thomas Jefferson is loneliness as a form of agony. It is like the howl of a wounded animal, cut off from its pack, helpless and exposed on a slope of scree.

Thomas Jefferson himself is so wounded by his daughters’ pain that he is taken by a whirlwind madness and only comes to himself half a mile away, in a cabin down the hill occupied by two families of field laborers, where a five-year-old boy in his own not-sleep is moving his lips to words voiced inside his head: “They not gonna take my pappy. They not gonna take my pappy. I got to tell them. They not gonna do that. I got to build him a house out of branches and leaves, with hay for a floor. I got to make him come back and stay in that house and not do nothing bad no more, and I got to keep him for my own till I’m old.”

And then Thomas Jefferson is walking again until it is a tiny heart, a mouse’s or a vole’s — beating like an elfin drumroll — that opens inside his own, and he is possessed by a firm, fixed innocence that wants merely to persist from this instant to the next and the next and the next, without end.

And then he is in the kitchen of his own house, vault-black, where Jimmy Hemings sleeps upon a pallet in the corner in the posture of a man who lost consciousness while crawling. There is a bed for him in the cabin where his brother John lives with his wife and child, but Jimmy refuses to stay there. He will not say why. He is a man possessed by powerful antipathies that he will never explain. Jimmy’s heart is a mansion with a broken roof. Rain warps the floorboards and embroiders the couches and beds with mold. Every room has its shameful history, and the people still dwelling in them never come out. You can hear their feet dragging in the night, and their groans.