Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Young man!” Maury called after him. “Is that how you behave when you have been addressed by your master?”

The boy stopped but didn’t turn around.

Maury walked up beside him. “What have you to say for yourself?”

Still not meeting the older man’s eye, Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m sorry.”

“What made you think you had the right to behave so rudely?”

“I didn’t have the right. It was only…” The boy lowered his head and pinched his lips together before finishing his sentence. “… that I did not have a good visit.” As he pronounced the word “not,” the boy finally lifted his head and looked his master in the eye. And then, with a disconcerting coldness, he announced, “And what is more, I have resolved never to return home again. Henceforth I would prefer to lodge here with you and Mrs. Maury during all school vacations.”

“What happened?”

“That is my own affair,” the boy said firmly. “If it would not be possible for me to stay with you, I shall look for temporary lodging in the village.”

With that, Thomas Jefferson walked into the house, climbed the stairs to the dormitory and refused to come down for supper.

Needless to say, the Reverend Maury dispatched a letter to Mrs. Jefferson that very night.

In the morning he received word from his wife that the boy wouldn’t take so much as a cup of tea, and during church services (it was a Sunday), Maury noticed him staring vaguely into space, a distraught expression on his face, not even moving his lips when it was time to sing. And now here the boy is, slumped by himself in the window, staring into a book with a crumpled brow.

Last night Maury had been irritated by the boy’s rudeness, but now he is beginning to worry.

Only once his master steps into the parlor does Thomas Jefferson look up with a start and realize he is not alone. He snaps his book shut and swings his feet to the floor. “Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t worry, Jefferson,” says Maury. “Window seats are made for reading.”

Just past the boy’s head, Maury can see Carr, Molyneux and some of the other boys kicking an inflated cow’s bladder around on the muddy green across the road.

“But it’s a beautiful spring day,” Maury says. “You should be out there playing football with your classmates.

“I don’t like football.”

“Don’t be silly. Every boy likes football. Best thing in the world for the lungs.”

“I don’t like sports. I think they encourage the worst tendencies in human character. They’re all about who can dominate whom.”

It is a long moment before Maury knows how to respond to this objection. Finally, deciding that the boy is showing signs of melancholia, he says, “But you must take care to amuse yourself.”

“I have Don Quixote to amuse me.” Thomas Jefferson pats the book balanced on his knees. “I think it is much more amusing to read about a mad old man doing battle with wineskins in his sleep.”

“Very well,” says Maury, thinking that the Lord will only help those who help themselves. He nods, backs out the door and continues on his mission to fetch his buttonless nightshirt for his housemaid.

… I was a melancholy child. I did not have many friends, and I grew unhappy in groups, largely because I lacked a quick wit. Whenever other children mocked me, I would merely stand there, wagging my tongue in my open mouth, unable to utter a single word and feeling more ashamed every instant. But I could be happy on my own. As a little girl, I had great fun playing with a doll that Bobby carved for me. It had wool for hair, a painted face and hinged arms and legs, so I could make it walk, run, turn somersaults. The doll’s name was Parthenia, and her closest friend was a sea captain, who happened to be invisible to everyone but her and with whom she would travel around the world, riding lions and enormous fishes, climbing mountains and having dinners with kings and queens.

As I grew older, I found most of my joy by having my own adventures. From the age of four or five, I would steal away from whichever sister was supposed to be watching me to wander alone through the woods for hours, listening to robin song, crow cries and the ghostly piping of owls. I made houses for myself under bushes and in the branches of trees and would sing myself songs and tell myself stories. My mother scolded me for spending so much time in the woods. She said it was dangerous for a girl, that I might lose my soul.

Apparently, there was one time when I returned from my wandering and told my mother that I had met a talking groundhog who had taken me to an underground world lit by flowers that had flames for petals. This world was ruled by two golden snakes — a king and queen — who sat on thrones shaped like wagon wheels and hissed their commands to all their subjects: groundhogs, moles, voles, mice and foxes. I have no memory whatsoever of telling this story, but when I refused to admit for several days that I had not actually visited this world, my mother decided I had been possessed and took me to see an old man who lived on another plantation — and him I remember vividly.

His name was Popo, and his fingers were so misshapen they looked as if they were made entirely out of chestnuts. He had my mother take off my clothes and lay me faceup upon the ground in a copse behind his cabin. With a foul-smelling greenish paste, he drew a cross on my breast, and then, as he chanted in an African language, he grabbed my shoulders so fiercely that I thought my arms were going to snap off. After some minutes he let me go, and then, still chanting, he slaughtered a chicken and poured its blood into a small bottle that he told my mother to bury in front of our cabin door. Years later, when my mother brought up my story about the underground world and I told her I had no memory of it, she said, “That’s because it went right out of you with the Devil.”

When I first thought to tell this story, I intended to conclude by saying that although I never believed for a second that I had been possessed, there was a way in which I did lose my soul on my walks, because all on my own in the sun-shot green dimness under the trees it was a simple matter to surrender to the illusion that my life was easy and full and that I was entirely free. But just now I remembered that during those nights when the ordinary events of my life would seem shrouded by the deadness, my solitary walks were never among them, which is to say that my walks never seemed pale and unreal. And so, as I prepared to condemn them as a soul-stealing delusion, a voice cried out in my heart, saying, “You cannot deprive a poor slave girl of her only joy!”…

Not hours before Martha dies, her voice hardly above a whisper, she draws Thomas Jefferson’s attention to a strange beetle with a tiger-striped cowl that is crawling across her bedclothes. “Look, Tom. I’ve lived all this time, and yet every day I see an insect unlike any I’ve ever seen before.” He tells her that as soon as he has a moment, he will find its name in a cyclopedia of insects that he has recently acquired. That moment never comes. Not long after Thomas Jefferson has taken the beetle between his thumb and forefinger and deposits it on the window ledge, Martha closes her eyes and her soap-white skin goes ash gray. Soon her breathing becomes irregular, with the gaps between breaths growing longer and longer, until finally, just before noon, she takes three enormous breaths, each followed by an impossibly long silence, the last of which never ends.

The flame stretches, and its tip flaps into a rippling wisp of smoke as an elderly white servant lowers a lamp chimney into place. The atmosphere inside the yellow room, already dense with the sausage-and-tobacco odor of ceaselessly yammering men, is cut by the thin acridity of whale oil. It is nearly eight on an evening in June 1775, and Thomas Jefferson is thirty-two. Although he washed his face on arrival in Philadelphia, his fingertips detect finely granulated road dust along his jaw in front of his ear. He has been standing against the back wall for nearly half an hour, clutching his right elbow with his left hand, and keeping his right hand aristocratically poised against his cheek in an attempt to look contemplative and at ease, but thus far he has spoken to no one. He is perhaps the youngest of the thirty or so men present and feels something of an interloper, given that he is at this meeting — the Second Continental Congress — only as a replacement for his cousin Peyton Randolph.