Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

He leans forward, putting both arms on the table, extending his hands toward hers. Now she is the one to lean back. She puts her hands in her lap, placing them flat against the underside of her belly.

“Dear Sally,” he says. “I wish there were a way that we could avoid such pain.”

“What pain are you talking about, Mr. Jefferson?”

Weary sympathy comes onto his brow. “Yours,” he says. “Mine. There are times when it seems that we are made to bring each other joy. But then… always…” He sighs. His smile is sad. He stops talking.

Sally Hemings only looks at him without speaking. There are so many things she wants to say, but it seems to her that the best revenge is simply to keep silent.

“Oh, Sally,” he says, “tell me what is troubling you?”

“Nothing,” she says. “You needn’t worry about me.” And, indeed, her tears have stopped. If she ever loved him, that is over now.

“I do worry about you.” He is smiling — stupidly. His hands still rest on the table, palms upward, waiting for hers. He sighs again. “Well, I suppose we simply have to become philosophers.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have to be Stoics. If we can accept that our moments of pain are an inevitable part of life on earth, as well as of our own particular situation, they will be easier to bear and they will pass more quickly.”

“Will they?”

“Of course. They always have. We’re not miserable all the time, are we?” He smiles broadly, apparently thinking that what he has said is funny.

He doesn’t understand at all. He is so utterly convinced of his own virtue and importance that he is blind to the sufferings of others, and most especially to the suffering caused by his own actions.

He is a fool.

“You’re beautiful,” he says. He twitches the fingers of his right hand, an invitation for her to lift her left hand and place it in his. She doesn’t move. His face is puffed and red, the gazes of his eyes don’t quite meet, and he has that easy, self-satisfied smile that means he is about to ask her for a kiss, and maybe to relieve his desire with her hand or mouth.

She is staggered by the degree to which he misunderstands her. How could she ever have loved such a vain and blind man?

“We’ll be fine, Sally,” he says. “We may be fools, but we’ll be fine.”

He twitches his fingers a second time, and at that very instant she feels a change. She gets up from her chair and walks around to his side of the table. She lifts the front of her shift and places the palm of his hand flat on her bare belly. “Do you feel that?” she says.

He looks up at her, uncomprehending but happy.

“Do you feel how hard it is?”

He presses her belly slightly with his fingertips. “It’s like stone,” he says.

“That means the baby is coming. When my stomach gets hard like that, it means the baby could come anytime. Tonight. Tomorrow. A week from now. But soon.”

She sees his face grow serious. For an instant she smiles — a cruel smile. Then she grows serious, too.

She takes a step away.

Before leaving Sally Hemings’s cabin, Thomas Jefferson promises that he will stay until their baby is born, but the very next day a courier arrives with a letter from Philadelphia, and the following morning he is gone. Their baby, or her baby — a boy — is born two days later, after a mere six hours of labor. Harriet was named after Tom Randolph’s sister, who lived for a while at Monticello and whom Thomas Jefferson found endearingly earnest and full of life. Before he leaves, he asks Sally Hemings if she would name their child Peter or Jane, after his parents, although Jane is also the name of his older sister, to whom he had been very close before her death. Sally Hemings is tempted by Peter, which, after all, is her own brother’s name, but in the end, as the bloody little boy lies across her deflated belly and takes his first tugs from her breast, she decides to call him Beverly.

Bev-er-ly.

When she was a little girl, she thought that was the most beautiful name in the world. Whenever she thought of it, she saw honeybees on a sunny day, sipping from yellow flowers.

Bev-er-ly.

She loves the way the first syllable buzzes on her lips and how the second comes from deep in her throat and how the last can only be said with a smile.

It is a happy name. Whenever people say it, they will be happy, which means that her little boy will be surrounded by happiness all his life.

Thomas Jefferson’s dreams are a catalog of failure and shame, histories of a world that contains no joy and can only be endured, an endless twilight of sorrow. In this dream he is sitting on the porch of the cottage at Poplar Forest looking out over the meadow. The trees are the color of shadows, and they have deeper shadows beneath them. In the obscurity under one tree, he sees a smear of darkness that might just be a human figure. No, he concludes again and again, it can’t be. But again and again he changes his mind.

Finally he descends from the porch and walks out into the high grass. It is raining, and the longer he walks, the farther away the shadow within the shadow becomes. But then he is underneath the tree, and the shadow within the shadow is Sally Hemings. She is dressed in her most beautiful gown — the yellow one he bought her for Princess Lubomirsky’s ball — but she is sitting in mud, which seeps up through the gown and its underskirts the way blood seeps through layers of gauze.

“Why are you sitting here?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“Because I was only a ghost to you,” says Sally Hemings. “And now I am a ghost in reality, and you are the one who has killed me.”

“How can you be dead if you are speaking to me?”

“I am dead, I am dead,” she says. “And I wish I had never lived.”

All at once Thomas Jefferson is so overwhelmed by sorrow that he wishes he, too, had died.

“I didn’t know,” he says. “I wish I had known.”

“He’s beautiful,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Such a perfect little boy. And look: You see that little dent? Right there, between his nostrils? He got that from you. I noticed you had that the first time I saw you.”

“Well, Mrs. Martha has it.”

“Yes, she does. And her mother had it, too, but he got it from you!” Thomas Jefferson lifts the three-month-old in his arms and smells the top of his fluffy head. “He’s a beautiful little boy, and he looks exactly like you!”

Sally Hemings smiles. “Would you like something to drink? Cider? I could make some coffee.”

“No, thank you. I’m having breakfast with Martha in a few minutes. I just wanted to see my little boy.” Thomas Jefferson glances at Sally Hemings, who is smiling so tenderly at their son, her gray eyes lit with such happy relish. It has been a long time since Thomas Jefferson has seen her so at ease. And between her pregnancy and his being away for most of the year, he had forgotten how very young she is, how her skin seems so moist and resilient, like a mushroom just sprung from loam.

He straddles the tiny boy across his knee, which he bounces up and down, as he chants, “Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!” The little boy squeaks, makes a huge toothless grin and sticks his wrist into his mouth. “Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!”

“He’s my first son,” Thomas Jefferson tells Sally Hemings. “Mrs. Jefferson had a boy, but he was not meant for this world.”

He turns back to the little boy. “Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!”

Then he says, “My father had a friend named William Beverly.” He smiles at Sally Hemings, but uneasily. “How would you feel about adding William to his name?”