Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

This was the context in which slavery existed during Sally Hemings’s lifetime and which conditioned her attitude toward her own servitude and her relationship to Thomas Jefferson. Although freedom was always preferable to the brutality, indignity and injustice of slavery, the actual difference in the quality of life between the free and the enslaved was not as dramatic as we are prone to imagine today — especially when we consider that as hard as life could be for the white working class and poor, it was massively harder for African Americans, even those who had gained their freedom.

And while according to our own standards, marriage during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might also seem close to slavery, people of Sally Hemings’s time still cried for joy at weddings, and Jane Austen, who was Sally Hemings’s almost exact contemporary, could write as if marriage were the greatest happiness that could befall a woman. People adjust to their circumstances. People subject to the most barbaric cruelty can still delight in a baby’s laugh or feel moments of perfect contentment lying on a grassy hillside in the sun. There is something beautiful in our capacity to accommodate atrocity, even if it can also be our undoing.

“I will make it good…. I will be gentle. You will see….”

… It was impossible, of course, that I could remain in ignorance of my true situation for very long. The first person to tell me that I was a slave was a girl named Elsie, who was a year older than me. I must have been close to seven at the time. I knew instantly that what she said was true, but I denied it anyway. She laughed and said, “Are you stupid! Don’t you know all colored folks are slaves?”

Not long afterward I began hearing tales from other children about masters putting their slaves in iron collars or whipping them until the skin was torn off their backs. Most of these stories were told by boys, who wanted nothing more than to see me shriek, gag or burst into tears. I resolutely deprived them of that satisfaction by gritting my teeth behind an expression of world-weary indifference, but of course I could not help being affected. The most horrifying tale I heard was of a master who hung his slaves from hooks on the rafters as if they were meat. The image of those poor people impaled and writhing seized control of my thoughts and kept me awake for nights on end.

I did not, at first, give these tales much credit — in part because of the salacious delight with which the other children told them. It seemed clear to me that if these boys believed the tales they were telling, they would have been aghast and afraid for their own skins. I also didn’t believe the tales because I had never heard of anything comparable at Monticello. There were no iron collars here, no meat hooks; there wasn’t even a whipping post. Yes, there were thrashings from time to time, but nothing like the senseless and extreme cruelty of the masters in the stories the boys told me.

People were thrashed for stealing, for being drunk and belligerent, for not doing their work. While there were some overseers who were excessively assiduous in the detection of such crimes, or in the execution of punishment, a semblance of order prevailed at Monticello that, although it might only have resembled actual justice, nevertheless did make the punishments predictable and therefore substantially avoidable (“Keep out of the woods and the bear won’t bite,” was how my brother Peter put it). But more to the point, whatever excesses did occur never seemed extreme enough to transgress common notions of ordinary human cantankerousness.

Yet, as today’s events have shown only too clearly, while Mr. Jefferson was not without principle, he was nevertheless criminally self-indulgent and self-deceived, and as repulsive as it is for me to consider — indeed, I am again overcome by nausea as I commit these words to paper — such horrors could never have come to pass were there not some cold and dank precinct of his heart impervious to even the faintest sympathy for those who labored and suffered so that he might live in comfort….

In an 1806 letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson writes that when he was fourteen and his father died, “the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on my self entirely, without a relative or friend qualified to advise or guide me.” What is notable about this statement is that at his father’s death Thomas Jefferson’s mother was still very much alive, and he was living with her, although he would very shortly board at the Reverend Maury’s school in Williamsburg. The fact that she is not listed as a relative “qualified to advise or guide him” is not, however, surprising, because among his nearly twenty thousand surviving letters there is only one reference to his mother, in a note to her brother informing him of her death: “This happened on the last day of March,” Thomas Jefferson writes, “after an illness of not more than an hour. We suppose it to have been apoplectic.” There is also a single sentence in his account book, dated March 31, 1776: “My mother died at eight o’clock this morning, in the 57th year of age.”

The m in “morning” in this entry is malformed as a result of a violent drilling sensation in his temple. By the time Thomas Jefferson has finished the sentence, he is so overcome by pain that he thinks he might vomit. As he pushes away from his desk and staggers to his bed, radiant white, purple and pink globes begin to hover on the right side of the room, bobbing slightly, like shy, silent ghosts. And, indeed, as he feels his right hand and leg going numb, his first thought is that the ghost of his mother has come to take her revenge by afflicting him with the very illness that killed her.

This is the first of what he will come to call his “periodical head-aches,” which will strike him every few years during the spring (almost always in March) until the end of his presidency — with the most notable perhaps being the one that confined him to his chambers for thirteen days after Martha’s death.

This particular bout, however, is the most intensely painful. Every day for a week, from the moment the sun glimmers orange amid the trees over the eastern mountains until it settles beneath layers of gold, rose and lavender in the west, he has to lie in his bed with a moist towel across his face and a porcelain spittoon on his bedside table, waiting to catch his watery vomit. Only when the fields outside his window are lit by stars can he draw his curtains and breathe fresh air. Sometimes he steps barefoot onto the dew-chilled grass, so that he might feel the breezes on his body and hear them whispering in the budding tree branches. He wants to know again what it is like to be a living man in a living world. But mostly, even out on the lawn or as he walks after midnight through his own pitch-dark house to the table where Ursula has left him a glass of water, a cut of meat and a slice of bread, he feels that his mother has succeeded after all, that his illness has left him a mere ghost, haunting the places where he used to live.

It is April 16, 1757. The Reverend Maury is about to climb the stairs to fetch a nightshirt with a missing button when he spots fourteen-year-old Thomas Jefferson slouched in the parlor window seat, knees up, a heavy book spread across his thighs. Maury lingers a moment just outside the parlor door, watching his young student absently coiling locks of his red hair about his finger as he reads, apparently oblivious of the fact that he is being observed. Maury has to acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson is very clever, possibly brilliant, but he finds the boy sullen and odd.

Just the previous evening, Maury happened to be pacing in the front yard, enjoying a pipe, when a carriage pulled up, returning Thomas Jefferson from an Easter visit with his family. As Maury helped the boy drag his heavy satchel off the seat, he said, “I hope you had a fine stay with your dear mother.” But Thomas Jefferson gave him no other response than to turn his back and walk toward the house, clutching his satchel with both arms.