Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Just at that instant, he glances at the chamber pot resting in the middle of the floor.

“One moment,” she says, then brushes past him and out the door, so desperate now that she can’t even make it all the way to the outhouse. Around behind the cabin, she half crouches, bracing her back against the wall, hikes her shift and pees, knowing she is perfectly audible inside the cabin and taking a sort of pleasure at the affront she might be causing.

“I’m sorry,” she says once she is back inside. “These days I can’t even wait a second.” She pushes the chamber pot back under the bed with her foot.

His smile is both wry and uncomfortable. “Of course,” he says, then looks away for an instant. When he looks back, his expression is earnest, if not entirely at ease. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

She doesn’t respond.

He pulls a chair away from the table and sits down. Since her only alternatives are to sit at the table with him or to sit on the bed, she remains standing.

“I’ve been thinking about you the whole way here,” he says. “Hoping that you haven’t suffered any—” He cuts himself off, but his words send a jolt of complex pain through her breast.

“I’ve been fine,” she says.

“Good,” he says. “Good. I hope you’ve been eating well. And getting plenty of sleep.”

“I know how to take care of myself, Mr. Jefferson.”

“Yes, of course.” His lips tense. He searches her eye a moment, then looks away. “You are looking very well.”

“Actually, I have an awful headache.” She turns away from him and walks to the window that looks southeast, out over the fields and across the purple-and-gray flatlands. She is hoping that he will understand that she wants him to leave.

“Maybe you shouldn’t look out the window,” he says. “Is the light hurting your eyes?”

“No,” she says, though, in fact, she does feel a painful pressure on the sides of her eyeballs.

She turns away from the window and sits down on the farthest corner of the bed from Thomas Jefferson. Neither of them speaks for a long moment, then he says, “I suppose you must be feeling stirrings?”

He is looking at her belly.

She takes a deep breath and gives him a severe stare. It is a long while before she can bring herself to speak the words she has formulated. “I don’t see why you are troubling yourself about my well-being, Mr. Jefferson.”

Weariness comes into his eyes and hurt to his lips.

She speaks again. “Or maybe I should say that I don’t see why you should think you actually care.”

“Sally,” he says plaintively.

“Don’t lie to me,” she says. “And don’t lie to yourself. You are clearly indifferent to my suffering and to all of my feelings.”

“How can you say that!”

“I would rather you leave right now, Mr. Jefferson. My headache really is very bad, and I need to sleep.”

“Sally, please.”

“I don’t want to talk. I think it would be better for both of us if you would just leave.”

“For God’s sake, Sally, would you just listen—”

She stands up and sweeps her arm in the direction of the door. “I am asking you to leave me alone.” Her voice is firm and low. “I know that I have no right to ask you anything, that I have no rights of any sort. But if, in fact, you care at all about how I am feeling, I hope that you will heed my request.”

Thomas Jefferson slowly gets to his feet, his expression promising revenge. When he is standing outside the door, his face livid, he says, “You are completely wrong about me.”

“I don’t think so.”

She closes the door. She trembles as she stands inside her dark cabin, listening to his footsteps retreat toward the house. She feels a sort of elation but at the same time a cold dread. She suspects that what she has just done is profoundly foolish and that she will soon regret it. All at once a spike of pain shoots through her skull and into her right eye. She hurries to the window and vomits into the weeds outside.

The following morning Thomas Jefferson leaves to inspect his Poplar Forest plantation, three days distant, and he is gone two weeks. At the end of the first week, a letter from him arrives for Mr. Richardson, containing numerous recommendations and requests regarding the management of Monticello, among them that Sally Hemings be given a double food ration and that she continue to be exempt from all of her normal duties at the plantation. Thomas Jefferson also instructs that if she should go into labor before his return, Dr. Cranley should be summoned immediately.

Spotting her in the hallway, Mr. Richardson delivers this news to her in a low, diffident voice, but when he has finished, he winks, smiles and says, “Good afternoon, your ladyship.”

“I want us to understand each other,” says Thomas Jefferson. He has been back from Poplar Forest for two days, but this is the first time he and Sally Hemings have actually spoken. He arrives at her cabin long after dark, carrying a bottle of wine. It is clear that he has already had at least one bottle himself. He doesn’t seem drunk, but his face is flushed and glossy in the lamplight, and he has forgotten to bring a corkscrew with him, so he has to push the cork into the bottle with a rock and a twenty-penny nail. Sally Hemings drinks a cup of the wine, but alcohol has made her flushed and nauseated ever since she got pregnant, so she resolves not to touch the cup in front of her that Thomas Jefferson has just refilled. He has had two cups and is starting on his third.

“I want you to tell me what I have done to offend you,” he says.

Maybe he is drunk. Now, at least. His face has grown bleary, and some of his words are slurred. He and Sally Hemings are sitting directly across the table from each other, and she doesn’t know how she can tell him the truth.

“You haven’t offended me,” she says.

“I have, but I think only through a misunderstanding.”

She makes a barely audible grunt but says nothing. Then she takes a swallow of the wine.

Thomas Jefferson speaks: “I wish that I’d been able to be here when Harriet—”

She cuts him off. “That’s not it.”

“I’ve told you from the beginning that my responsibilities to the Republic must come first.”

“That’s not it, I said.”

“Everything is in the balance now. If we cannot make this government work, we will live in either chaos or tyranny.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I listen to you?”

“What is it, then?”

Sally Hemings looks away. “It’s too much.” Tears are falling down her cheeks. “I can’t tell you.”

Thomas Jefferson flings himself back in his seat, the disarray of his arms and legs showing a restless irritation but his face chastened and worried.

The phrase “her child” repeats in Sally Hemings’s mind over and over. It was so unnecessary. If Thomas Jefferson had merely wanted to maintain secrecy in a letter to his daughter, he could simply have said he was sorry and left it at that. And if he had truly cared about her, he could have made some private reference that would have revealed his love and his own grief only to her.

“ Her child.”

Every time the phrase repeats in Sally Hemings’s mind, she grows more wildly furious.

But she also finds her fury misplaced, or at least undignified. She can’t imagine scolding Thomas Jefferson for not loving her, especially considering all the warnings he has given her about his inability to love her publicly. She now realizes that all of her hopes and beliefs concerning their “secret life” had never been more than desperate fantasy or, worse, outright self-deception. She will not say a word about her feelings. If Thomas Jefferson truly loves her, he will understand, and if not, damn him to hell!