Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

The next day she is once again at the table in the kitchen when Moak walks in. “Morning, Miz Sally,” he says, giving her a particularly broad smile.

“Morning, Moak.”

He lets the wood clatter-thump to the hearth apron, then comes back to her, still smiling and holding his hand in his pocket. When he reaches the table, he pulls out his hand, which is holding a plum-size gourd with a whittled piece of wood sticking up out of it. “This here’s for Master Beverly,” he says. “Make him happy next time he feel so bad!”

“What is it?” she says.

Moak holds the stick toward Beverly. “Show your mammy, Master Beverly!”

The little boy’s fingers wrap around the stick, and as he pulls it away, a hissing sounds within the gourd. Open-mouthed, open-eyed, pensive, he holds the gourd still for a couple of seconds, then shakes it and smiles when it hisses again.

“A rattle!” says Sally Hemings. “Where did you get it?”

“I made it!” Moak smiles happily, and Sally Hemings joins him. “Just had this little old gourd lying around,” he says. “So I put in a pinch of creek sand and stuck in the stick.”

“Thank you!” She looks away because she can feel her cheeks going red.

He nods and says, “Anything to oblige.”

Another morning when Moak comes into the kitchen, Sally Hemings asks him if he would like some tea. “It’ll help keep you warm out there,” she adds.

He slips the canvas sling of wood off his shoulders and lowers it ponderously to the dusty brick apron. “Don’t mind if I do.”

As he takes the wood off the sling and stacks it beside the hearth, Sally Hemings pours boiling water into a pot.

Ursula gives her a dubious glance and walks out of the room.

Beverly is lying belly down on a blanket on the floor, working hard at turning over. He hasn’t yet figured out that he needs to keep his arm at his side when he rolls, and so every time his wriggling legs get him most of the way onto his side, his outstretched arm flips him right back onto his belly. He is clearly frustrated and has been fussy all morning. Sally Hemings hopes he will stay quiet long enough for Moak to have his tea, but no sooner does she place the cup and a pot of molasses on the table in front of Moak than Beverly starts to wail.

She bends and picks him up, but he doesn’t stop wailing.

She bounces him on her hip—“Beverly, Beverly, Beverly!”—and his cries yield to fussy grunts, as he buries his head in the gap between her breast and her upper arm.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with him,” she says. “He’s been like this for the last three days.”

Over the top of his cup, Moak says, “Look at his mouth.”

Sally Hemings looks down but can’t actually see Beverly’s mouth.

“It’s all slobbery,” says Moak.

She looks down again but doesn’t quite understand what Moak is trying to tell her.

“He got teeth coming in,” says Moak.

“He’s too young for that.”

“No he ain’t.” Moak gets up from the table and walks around to Sally’s side. “His gums red? Take a look at his gums. See if they red.”

Moak is standing so close that his manly muskiness is a cloud enveloping her nose and lips.

She rocks Beverly back, so that his head is resting in the crook of her elbow, and she pulls down his lower lip with her thumb.

“Nope,” she says. “Just pink.”

“Don’t matter. He teething.” Moak smiles and nods to emphasize his certainty. “And I got just what you need.”

Ursula is back in the room with an apron full of potatoes. She is glaring at Sally Hemings, but she doesn’t say a word.

The next morning Moak holds out a piece of goldish brown wood, whittled and sanded into the shape of a smooth, blunt spear blade, with a short handle at one end. “Here you go, Master Bev!” Beverly grabs the handle and sticks the blade right into his mouth.

“There! See!” says Moak, looking at Sally Hemings with a big, satisfied grin. “Didn’t I tell you? He got teeth coming in, all right. Look at that!”

Indeed, Beverly is gnawing on the blade with particular intensity. But then again he puts absolutely everything in his mouth — so who can say for sure?

“It’s made out of sassafras wood,” says Moak. “Babies just love sassafras! If you want, you can always put a little molasses on it. That good for babies, too. But the best is rum!”

“Rum!”

“Oh, yes! Mix some rum in with the molasses, babies just love that! Make them so happy! They chew on that for a while, they have sweet dreams all night through!”

Moak seems so pleased with himself that Sally Hemings can’t help laughing right along with him.

“Well, thank you,” she says.

“Happy to do it! I like making things. I make all kinds of things!”

“Like what?”

“Oh, all kinds of things!” He screws up his mouth and looks toward one corner of the ceiling, as if there’s a list tacked up there. “Baby toys, drums, banjars—”

“Banjars?” says Sally Hemings. “What’s a banjar?”

“You don’t know what a banjar is!” Moak’s eyes go round, and his jaw hangs open in mock astonishment. “Girl, what you doing for fun? Ain’t you ever danced to a banjar? Banjars is the finest instrument there is for playing a dance tune. Banjar and a fiddle. I’ll bring it sometime and play it for you.”

“I’d love that.”

When Thomas Jefferson returns from his stay at Belle Grove, there are bluish bags under his eyes and his skin is flaccid, cod-flesh gray. Apparently he and James Madison were up late every night writing letters and briefs — the beginning of a major campaign to undermine the Sedition Act, which was passed by Congress over the summer.

Thomas Jefferson is sitting at his desk in his chambers, taking papers out of his satchel. Sally Hemings is kneeling on the floor, transferring laundry from his trunk into a basket.

“I’m destroyed,” he says. “In spirit as well as body.”

Tossing the last item of clothing into the basket, Sally Hemings gets to her feet.

“If we are not successful in our efforts,” he says, “I don’t see how this Republic will stand.”

Sally Hemings rests the edge of her basket on the corner of his desk, smiles and tells him she is sure everything will be fine.

He laughs and flings himself back in his chair, a boyish smile on his face. “Oh, Sally! You’re making me feel like a human being again!”

When he suggests that they spend the night at the lodge, she says, “But you’ve just been two days on the road. Don’t you think you ought to rest?”

“I don’t want to rest!” He leans forward and, smiling happily, pulls her hand away from the basket rim. “I need to feel that I am made for arts other than deception, blackmail and bribery!”

She wants to jerk her hand back, but instead she lets herself be drawn down for a kiss — and with that their spending the night at the lodge becomes a settled decision.

In the end, however, the night goes well — or mostly it does. She is a little self-conscious, but no more so than she has been on other occasions — which fact she takes as an indication that she need not worry about Moak. He is just a gentle and bighearted man. Her friend…

Two weeks pass, but Moak never brings the banjar. And something in his manner makes Sally Hemings feel that she shouldn’t ask him about it.

Ursula doesn’t like him — a fact she makes clear through manifold disapproving glances and, one day after Moak has left, by sitting down next to Sally Hemings and proclaiming, as she jabs the air with a rigid index finger, “I’m not gonna tell you this but one time. That Moak ain’t nothing but a sweet-talking, low-life nigger. You be too nice to him, he gonna make you pay the price, I swear as the Lord Jesus is my Savior. So you best stay away from here in the mornings, if you know what’s good for you. And that all I’m gonna say on it.”