Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

At last he asks, “Is something wrong?”

The three women exchange glances and lick their lips, but none of them actually speak.

“I assure you,” he says, “that I am not the least bit angry. I only want to find out what might be disturbing you.”

“Who are you?” Bet asks sharply. At fourteen she is by far the youngest of the three. The other two shush her instantly, and Nance shoves her away.

Thomas Jefferson is so disconcerted by this entire exchange that he simply turns and walks to his chambers, a sinking hollowness in his chest.

That night, when he rings the bell to have a cut of ham and some bread and wine delivered to his chambers, no one responds, although not long afterward he does hear whispering and a shoe scuff outside his door. He attempts to cross the room in perfect silence, but when a floorboard creaks beneath his foot, he dashes to the door and whips it open, only managing to catch sight of a hunched shadow in the dark to his right disappearing atop a thunder of footfalls down the kitchen stairs. Straight ahead he hears the thump-thump-thump of someone running barefoot across the entrance hall and then the slam of the front door.

When additional tugs on the bell cord evoke no response, Thomas Jefferson descends to the kitchen himself, which he finds utterly deserted and dark, except for the ash-dimmed orange of coals smoldering in the hearth and the flicker of his own candle in the night breeze. He pulls a linen-wrapped smoked ham out of the larder and hacks off a slice, which he eats with his fingers while rat talons click back and forth across the bare floor along the wall just opposite.

At four-thirty in the morning, he saddles a sturdy horse and rides off to visit James Madison at Belle Grove and arrives at the plantation just before sunset, a journey that ought to have taken two days but feels as if it transpired in a matter of hours. He doesn’t bother with the approach road but cuts across a field and mounts the lawn, tying his exhausted horse to a juniper bush at the back of the mansion, just outside the doorway to Madison’s library. He is already in the middle of the room when Madison, investigating the unexpected noise, emerges from his adjoining office. No sooner does he catch sight of Thomas Jefferson than his face goes gray and his mouth hangs open. “No!” he gasps.

“Jim,” says Thomas Jefferson, holding out both open hands in a calming gesture.

“This can’t be!” says Madison, staggering a step backward and grabbing hold of the doorjamb.

“Jim, please!” Thomas Jefferson takes a step forward and turns his palms upward in supplication.

“No! You have to go!” says Madison. “I can’t talk to you. I must not. You don’t make sense. You are a fantasy of my youth, a cloud of impossibility and hypocritical sanctimony. Please go, Tom. You must go. If I even allow my eyes to stray toward that place you still seem to occupy I feel utterly mad.”

With that he retreats into his study and slams the door.

This is when Thomas Jefferson finally understands that the nexus of perception, emotion, action and belief that has always seemed so simply and obviously his self no longer makes sense to other people, and so he has become unbelievable. After a moment of shocked contemplation, during which his pulse whooshes loudly in his ears, he leaves Madison’s library by the door though which he entered. As he steps outside, his lungs are filled with the sweetness of warm hay and dust. A yellow-orange sun is just touching the treetops on the hills to the west, and he can feel a new coolness rising out of the lengthening shadows.

His horse stands with its head low and eyes closed, clearly asleep. For some reason Thomas Jefferson doesn’t feel the least bit tired. On the contrary, he feels as if he has just risen from a restorative nap after a day of good exercise. He leaves the horse where it is tethered and walks across the lawn, with no particular destination in mind. After a while he finds himself wandering along a dirt road between two wheat fields. A dozen laborers being marched back to their quarters by an overseer squint at him with the uncertainty with which one might contemplate an optical illusion or an incipient hallucination. But as the light goes blue and particulate, the few stragglers he passes along the road hardly even glance in his direction and perhaps don’t even see him.

The longer he walks, the more Thomas Jefferson begins to suspect that the final stage of his unbelievability might be nonexistence — just as the flat world (once a matter of common sense) has ceased to exist and those giants who once roamed the countryside snacking on maidens and knights are now confined to fairy stories told to lull children to sleep.

And yet Thomas Jefferson doesn’t see how this can be possible. He is as filled with desire, hope and dread as he has ever been, and the night air is so fresh in his lungs, and breezes buffet his hair and cool his cheeks, and pinprick glints, one by one, appear in the metallic blue over his head. How is it that a man who seems so fully alive and complexly real to himself might fade from existence as rapidly as a lie exposed by truth?

It is October 1798.

In the warm weather, Moak Mobley tends the vegetable garden. In the cold he helps Ursula around the kitchen and splits wood for the fires. His eyes are huge and black, his skin a coppery brown, and when he smiles, he seems so merry and content that it is hard not to smile with him. He is married to Patty, and they have a little girl. Although Sally Hemings knows she shouldn’t, she can’t help paying attention to the ropelike muscles rippling in his arms whenever he lowers a load of fragrant wood onto the brick apron of the kitchen fireplace, and when he smiles, she smiles, too.

Moak is five years younger than Sally Hemings — which is to say that he is twenty-one — a man doing a man’s work but not quite done yet with being a boy, and that is something Sally Hemings particularly likes about him. She has been aware of him all his life, though she had almost no contact with him prior to last summer, when Mr. Richardson transferred him from fieldwork to the garden. At first he seemed too shy to even look at her, but as the summer wore on, he went from giving her surreptitious glances whenever their paths crossed to smiling and saying, “Morning, Miz Sally!” or “Afternoon!”

One morning, not long after Thomas Jefferson has gone to spend a fortnight with James Madison in Belle Grove, Sally Hemings is sitting in the kitchen with six-month-old Beverly, who is screaming and purple-faced with rage. She offers him her breast, which he sucks for a few seconds, then spits out. She checks his clout, which is hardly even wet. She tries bouncing him on her knee and walking him around the room. Ursula is muttering to herself as she butchers a chicken on the hacked tabletop. After a while she starts casting pointed glances over her shoulder. Sally Hemings knows that she should go outside, but it is cold and she doesn’t want to be alone in her cabin with the miserable boy.

Finally Ursula reels around from the table and almost shouts, “Why don’t you feed him?”

Just exactly at that instant, Moak kicks open the door and comes into the kitchen with that day’s supply of wood.

“I have been,” Sally Hemings tells Ursula, “but he doesn’t want any.”

“Well, maybe your titty’s gone dry.”

Sally Hemings knows by the weight and the ache in her breasts that they are anything but dry, yet there is no point arguing with Ursula. So as Moak stands motionless just inside the door, a sling of wood across his broad back, she wraps Beverly up in a blanket, pulls him close to her breast and walks out into the cold. By the time she gets to her cabin, the little boy is asleep, and when he wakes two hours later, whatever was troubling him is long past.