Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

And I was lucky, of course, in many ways, but there were aspects of my good fortune that I could not bear to face — privileges that had been granted to me not by fate but by Mr. Jefferson, privileges that I did not truly deserve but that I worked hard to maintain by taking his attentions only at face value and by living in an incomplete world.

I didn’t, for example, merely avoid conversations about slavery, I did my best not to see or comprehend proofs of the institution’s cruelty, injustice and pain that were manifestly evident near at hand. When I could not turn away from them, I tried to find ways in which Mr. Jefferson might remain untainted and pure — in which he did not fully comprehend what was being done in his name and in which none of it was what he intended. And so I became a wretched paradox, filled with fury at what I knew to be the willful blindness and indifference of the man with whom my life had become so inextricably tied and yet adopting that very blindness and indifference myself.

I am only a woman, I would tell myself. I am only a slave. What can I possibly do? I don’t understand. Nobody understands. There is nothing anyone can do. That’s just the way things are. I have to accept it. I have to be realistic. I can’t be blamed….

James T. Callender says, “Mute! Mute! Mute! Yes, very mute!”

July 12, 1797. There is a moan from the corner. Sally Hemings leans back from the table and pulls a curtain aside just enough to see almost two-year-old Harriet flopped on her back, legs and arms akimbo, as if she has fallen out of the sky. Sleeping next to her, brown legs drawn up under her bunched-up shift, single pigtail lying across her neck, is eight-year-old Aggy, the servant Thomas Jefferson sent to live with Sally Hemings so that she might have help with Harriet at all hours of the day and night. Aggy is the one who moaned. Her legs give a doglike twitch. A wince flickers at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

“Just dreaming,” Sally Hemings says to Thomas Jefferson, who is seated across the table from her, his cheek and temple a soft yellow-green in the lamp glow, tiny bent lamps in each of his eyes. He is fifty-three, and Sally Hemings is twenty-three.

She leans forward and lowers the wick, in case the light is what disturbed Aggy.

Thomas Jefferson arrived unexpectedly twenty minutes ago, with a crooked-necked bottle of wine, asking if she would like a bit of company, and now the bottle is half empty and so is her glass. She finishes it and puts it down on the table with a firm smack.

“Anyhow,” she says, “that’s wonderful that the Republican side is finally publishing lies about Colonel Hamilton.”

“They’re not lies.”

“Articles, I mean.”

Thomas Jefferson refills her glass, then his own.

“It’s good that you are fighting back,” she says. “That’s what I mean.”

“What’s especially good is exactly that they are not lies. There is no question whatsoever that Colonel Hamilton was behaving improperly with his Mrs. Reynolds. He’s admitted it. And it is certain that he has used secrets that have come to him as treasury secretary to make his friends and himself rich, and that he has thereby not merely cheated the American public but stolen from it as well.”

“Can’t you throw him in jail for that?”

Thomas Jefferson laughs. “That will never happen.”

“But it should! He’s broken the law.” Sally Hemings also laughs. “He’s broken all kinds of laws — human and divine.”

“Hamilton has far too much influence to ever end up in prison.” Thomas Jefferson smiles wryly and looks directly into her eyes. “And, of course, one of his transgressions is perhaps just a bit too common for people to get up in arms about.”

Sally Hemings sips from her glass, and Thomas Jefferson sinks down in his chair. He slides one foot a few inches across the floor.

“In any event,” he says, “I think this may put an end to his chances of ever becoming president.”

“Is this man going to write some more articles about Colonel Hamilton?”

“Callender?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I’ve had very little communication with him.”

“You should get him to,” she says. “Maybe he could sink Hamilton with one more article. Or President Adams. You should get him and other journalists to expose all the lies and corruption of the Federalists. If the journalists do the dirty work, the public will finally understand the evil that has been done in their name, and you will only look better for having stayed above the mud fight.”

“We shall see,” says Thomas Jefferson. He is smiling broadly as under the table he presses the inside of his right knee against the outside of Sally Hemings’s left. Now she is smiling, too. They fall silent and only look at each other. In the lamplight her eyes seem twin disks of steel.

… Of course, I could not entirely avoid discussing such matters with him. But when I did, my arguments — so potent in my mind — would come out as a series of peevish complaints or feeble suppositions. Only as I lay sleepless in a dead, dark hour of the night would my arguments come back to me in all their clarity and force — but too late, and so they would only fill me with self-loathing and a sense of helplessness.

I hated myself when I spoke, and I hated myself when I was silent — so I labored to lose myself in the pleasures of Mr. Jefferson’s company. Throughout my twenties and thirties, he was almost childishly attentive to me whenever he was home, or at least whenever we could evade the alert and judging eyes of his daughters and much of Albemarle society. And his attentions were not only physical — though he could be both energetic and tender in that regard. We talked more than anything else, and as time went by, he increasingly sought out my advice on matters of government. I was more practical than he and was better able to reduce some of the complex dilemmas he faced to their most essential elements. He often joked that I was the natural-born politician while he was a natural-born parson — or he would be, were it not for his congenitally equivocal faith….

Thomas Jefferson says, “We must be patient, Sally.”

He says, “Our enemies are determined, united and strong, and the immoral practice is so well established in the southern states that it would not end in a generation, even were it outlawed today.”

He is standing on the porch, where the rain, atomized by fierce wind, coats his cheeks in trembling droplets. He is shouting, “All right, you are free! I will give you your papers as soon as we get back to the house. Then go off into this world ruled by vicious and bigoted whites and see how precious your freedom is!” But I am white! Look at me! Who would not think that I am white! “You are not so white as you would like to believe.” I hate you! You are a monster! “I am sorry. I am sorry. Forgive me. I am sorry.”

He refills her glass. “You are right. I can’t disagree. You are absolutely right.”

For a while Sally Hemings thinks her secret life is not only her best life but her real life. Then things change.

At first she thinks it is her fault. Thomas Jefferson is the vice president and so must continue to be away at least half the year, especially as President Adams, despite having been a dear friend, now seems to want to ascribe many of the powers of a monarch to himself — in particular the power to jail his political enemies — an ambition Thomas Jefferson is combatting with every tool he can muster. She is lonely when he is away, and she worries from time to time that he might have another woman in Philadelphia or New York. But on the other hand, the fact that he is such an important man has always loomed so large in her sense of him that she cannot object when he is doing the very work that has made him important. And there are still days when it thrills her to remember that this man known all over the world has held her in his arms and that he is the father of her little Harriet and of the new baby inside her.