Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

He pushes her hand aside, pulls out of her and bends to grab his breeches, which are collapsed around his ankles. “Sorry, baby, that’s all I got.”

“Use your fingers, then.”

“What’s the matter?” he says, pulling up his breeches. “My willy ain’t good enough for you?”

“Please.” She turns around and grabs his hand. “I want you to give it to me.” She pulls his hand between her legs, but he yanks free.

“I thought white women was crazy for black willy,” he says.

“Only my skin is white.”

“How come you so stuck up, then?”

Moak is not so much angry as contemptuous. Sally Hemings is so shocked that she cannot speak.

“That’s what everybody say about you.” He gives her a smug, close-lipped smile. “You know that, don’t you? Everybody say you so stuck up ’cause you think you white, when really you just a black nigger, same as the rest of us.”

Sally Hemings’s period is only a couple of days late, but there is an unusual fullness in her breasts and a sensation in her belly that she thinks of as an opening-up, as if her womb were a flower within a bud and on the verge of bursting. She is sure she is pregnant. She knows there is no way she can be certain, but she is certain anyway — and filled with dread.

As soon as Thomas Jefferson has returned from Philadelphia, after being away for three months, she knocks on the door to his chambers and kisses him before he has completely closed the door behind her. She tells him how much she’s missed him. She caresses his cheek and runs her hand across his chest. Clearly he is surprised by her behavior, and equally clearly he is exhausted and is not really in the mood, so she slides her hand down his belly and, in a matter of seconds, knows that she will get what she wants.

But it repulses her. He is still redolent of the road: horse, dust and sweat, and once she has gotten him out of his clothing, he is so pale, mottled and flaccid-fleshed that he seems diseased. His muscles creak. The bones in his wrists and shoulders feel as if they are rolling against each other. As soon as she gets him inside her, she cups her hand over his testicles because she knows he loves that and that it will make him come almost instantly, which he does.

And once this has happened, she finds herself repulsed by the very trait she found so lacking in Moak. Thomas Jefferson’s unhappiness that she has not had an orgasm now seems fawning and unmanly to her, and it fills her with such a visceral abhorrence that she cannot bear to have him inside her or to be touched in an erotic way by his hands.

“That’s all right,” she tells him. “I’m not really in the mood,” assertions that clearly disconcert him, given her previous behavior. “Let’s just lie here together,” she says. “This feels nice. It’s good to have you back.”

In fact, even lying there beside him doing nothing at all makes her skin crawl, and she does not see how she will ever be able to make love with him again.

Ursula has fallen ill, and Sally Hemings is in the kitchen garden gathering feverfew to make tea for her. As she stuffs a handful of the ragged leaves into the pocket of her apron, she notices a shadow on the ground at her feet. Reeling around, she finds that Moak is standing not one foot behind her.

“Afternoon, Miz Sally,” he says, lifting his straw hat off his head.

“What are you doing?” Her voice is low, but furious.

He smiles, her anger only seeming to amuse him. “I was just passing—”

“How dare you come up behind me like that!”

She tries to step around him, but he moves directly in front of her. “Aw, come on, Miz Sally.” Still smiling, he reaches for her hand.

The stalks of feverfew are as fibrous as ropes, so she has had to use a knife to cut them. Now she is holding the knife between her face and Moak’s.

She is shouting.

“Don’t you touch me!”

“Hey!” Moak takes a step back, laughing.

Sally Hemings cannot believe that she is actually brandishing the knife in front of him. The gesture makes her feel more weak than strong. She worries that he will snatch the knife out of her hand.

“I’m sick of you!” She takes a step back. “I don’t ever want to see you again!”

“But, Sally, I just—”

She slashes the knife in the empty air, then turns and runs toward the kitchen.

“You stay away from me!” she shouts. “You just stay away from me.”

She glimpses Moak as she slams the kitchen door. He has not followed her. He has stopped smiling. He is standing exactly where she left him, his hands open, outturned and slightly lifted.

On Power

Thomas Jefferson’s primary political objective throughout his career was to limit the power of any one group — including the very government he helped found. In 1778 he opened a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge by declaring, “Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

Nearly a decade later, he was in a decided minority among the Founding Fathers in not being troubled by the Shays’ Rebellion, a revolt by poor farmers that led to the suspension of habeas corpus by Massachusetts’s governor. “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion,” he wrote from Paris in 1787. “What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?… The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”

His bill for the Diffusion of Knowledge concerned the establishment of a public school system, which, along with a free press, he saw as essential for the preservation of democracy — a linkage made clear in one of his most famous (or infamous) statements, also written in 1787: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

His idea was that grammar schools should be paid for by the state and open to all economic classes. Latin (or high) schools and universities would charge tuition, but poor students who showed exceptional promise would be eligible for full scholarships. Public education didn’t gain much traction in the United States until the the mid-nineteenth century, but Thomas Jefferson sought to help it along in the Land Ordinance of 1785, a plan for the development of the western territories. The ordinance decreed that all newly settled land should be divided into a grid of townships, each measuring six miles square, which in turn should be divided into a grid of thirty-six sections, with one of those reserved for a public school. The effects of this grid system can be plainly seen by anyone flying over the Midwest and the West, and, indeed, to this very day the public schools in many localities are in exactly the section of the grid (number 16) that Thomas Jefferson reserved for them.

The only element of his education plan that he saw through to fruition in his home state was the University of Virginia — a project with which he was involved on every level, including as architect. Perhaps nothing more clearly distinguishes this university as the product of his ideals than the fact that its campus, unlike those of all other American universities of that era, is centered on a library rather than a church.