Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

She laughs again and again during all this and leans back into his warmth, becoming ever more alert to the contours of his body and to that manly muskiness she smelled in the kitchen and which is somehow potent enough to be distinct even amid the heady smell of the tobacco. Sally Hemings is just beginning to think that maybe she could dance to the banjar after all when she notices a new hardness behind her. After only a moment, he begins to press that hard part of himself against her, and all the strength goes out of her hands. He stops trying to move them, and he stops singing, too.

He presses himself against the whole length of her body and sways slightly from side to side. “I’m wondering,” he says softly, and has to lick his lips before continuing, “if you thinking the same thing I’m thinking.”

Sally Hemings also has to lick her lips before she can speak. “I don’t know.” Her breath is trembling.

“You want to go find out?”

She doesn’t move and doesn’t speak for a long time. But then she pushes the banjar aside and steps away.

“I can’t,” she says. “I’d like to, but I just can’t.”

The more Sally Hemings reads, the more she becomes aware that the difficulty she has making sense of words is not just a matter of her own ignorance but also of certain weaknesses of the alphabet. She finds it particularly illogical that two letters should combine to make a sound entirely unrelated to the sounds each letter makes on its own, with th being the worst example, but sh being almost as bad. She is also bothered that the letter c can sometimes make the same sound as s and other times as k , and she is of the opinion that c is an entirely superfluous letter that should simply be dropped from the alphabet.

Be that as it may, her skill at decoding letters and the tiny marks in between them has progressed to the point that she has little trouble reading newspapers and has become particularly adept at spotting the name Jefferson. The newspapers keep her up to date about what Thomas Jefferson does while he is away, and they portray him as leading a heroic battle against the Federalists and the Alien and Sedition Acts. While she is never sure that she fully grasps all she reads, she finds it hard to believe that John Adams is truly the villain and fool that the newspapers declare him to be. She very much liked Mr. Adams during the fortnight she lived with him and Mrs. Adams in London. One time he came into the house carrying a tiny white rose that he had just picked in the garden. “For you, my dear Miss Sally-Bump,” he said as he handed her the flower. He always called her “Sally-Bump,” though she never understood why. At the time she thought that he was referring to a pimple on her chin, but now she can’t imagine that could be true.

Despite her progress with the newspapers, Sally Hemings still finds Notes on the State of Virginia almost entirely impenetrable, not so much because it is difficult to read — although she does have trouble with words like “latitude,” “commonwealth,” “suffrage”—as because it seems to consist only of long catalogs of geographical features, plants, animals, products, laws and so on, all of which she finds entirely boring. Nevertheless, she remains determined to finish this book before moving on to others, and so every now and then she will pull it off the shelf over her bed and open it to a random page, in the hope of finding something she might actually want to read.

During one such attempt, she flips the book open to the middle and instantly spots three words that interest her very much indeed: “emancipate all slaves.” She glances over the succeeding pages to see if Thomas Jefferson is, in fact, advocating emancipation and happens upon a passage where he seems to be comparing Negroes and whites, in the midst of which she reads: “in memory they are equal to whites; in reason much inferior.” She snaps the book shut, her head pounding, a nausea whirling in her stomach and radiating up her throat.

Over the next month, she is constantly seeking out and avoiding Moak, flushing with delight in his presence or going cold with anxiety. Finally, one afternoon two days after Thomas Jefferson has gone to Philadelphia, she lets Moak raise her skirt in a locked storage closet and have his way with her. They start out with her back against the wall, but after only a few moments he lifts her into the air without pulling out of her and stretches her atop Polly’s sea chest, where he pounds into her with a speed and a force she finds so thrilling it is all she can do to keep silent.

When he finishes — far sooner than she would have liked — he bends over, wraps his arms around her and — still panting — murmurs into her ear, “I always wondered what white pussy felt like.”

For some reason this statement doesn’t bother her in the least.

“How was it?” she asks.

“Good,” he says. “Deep and tight.”

Deep and tight. She smiles. And she smiles again and again over the next few days, whenever those words come back into her head. She doesn’t know why they please her so. Maybe it’s just the notion that she can satisfy so young and good-looking a man. Maybe it’s because there was something in the way he spoke those words that made her feel like she was his possession, and somehow she welcomes being his possession — a feeling she has never remotely had in connection with Thomas Jefferson.

They meet three more times over the next week — once more in the storage room, once in a woodshed and once in the cloakroom. And every time he uses her with the same delirium-inspiring vigor but then quits just as her own orgasm approaches. On each occasion she is left in such an agony of desire that she can hardly wait to be alone in a privy or her bed, where she might satisfy herself with her fingers. But that never really satisfies her, and she only grows more desperate for the moment when she will have her orgasm with him.

Often, when she is alone in her bed, either after they have made love or late in the night when she needs to relieve herself simply so that she can sleep, she imagines saying to him, “I want you to give me a gift,” and that is the very instant when her orgasm surges from that slippery nub beneath her fingers all the way up into her throat and cheeks and head.

Sally Hemings feels people’s eyes linger on her as she moves about Monticello. But at the same time, she thinks that people are avoiding her — most obvious is Patty, Moak’s wife, whose head jerks around as if she’s been punched whenever she sees Sally Hemings approach. But even people with whom Sally Hemings would normally stop and have a quick chat avoid her gaze or walk past with only a grunted greeting or a somber nod. Ursula tells her straight out, “I’m not talking to you no more!”

She knows why, of course. And she tells herself she doesn’t care. She tells herself she wouldn’t care even if Thomas Jefferson were to find out. Sometimes she worries that he might sell her, but on the whole she thinks that possibility highly improbable. He could banish her from the great house perhaps, but most likely he would act as if she were so far beneath his notice as to be invisible.

She imagines what life would be like if she were Moak’s wife. She’d have to work harder, of course, but she wouldn’t have to feel so out of place all the time. She could just be herself. Patty is a pretty woman. She’d find herself another man. There’d be bad blood between them for a while, but in the end it would all work out.

Sally Hemings is in the storage room again, this time belly down over the sea chest, and Moak is grunting behind her. When he finishes, she grabs his thigh and says, “Don’t stop.”