Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“I’ll be back,” he says. “You can count on that! I’ll always come back and visit you.”

“I hope so,” she says.

“Someone’s got to watch out for you, right? Make sure you don’t get into trouble!”

Sally Hemings makes a smilelike grimace, but says nothing.

Jimmy throws his arms around her. “I love you, Cider Jug.”

She speaks into the empty air behind his back. “I love you, too.”

The morning after Jimmy’s departure, Sally Hemings’s water breaks. She is all alone in her cabin with Beverly — her mother and Aggy having gone to fetch a sack of cornmeal from Mr. Richardson. “Mammy peeing,” says the little boy as soon as he sees the fluid leaking through the chair bottom and splattering onto the floor. “Why you peeing, Mammy?” Beverly is twenty months old.

“I’m not peeing,” she says. “That just means your baby brother is coming. I’m all full of water, and he’s been swimming around inside me, but now he’s coming out.”

Sally Hemings is terrified. Her water has broken before she has felt a single contraction. Also, the movements of Harriet and Beverly had only become more noticeable once they were no longer cushioned in a balloon of water, but she feels no movement from this baby at all.

She leaves the mess on the floor for her mother to clean and pulls her drenched gown and shift over her head so that she can dry herself and change. The first contraction hits her when she is completely undressed, and it is so powerful that all she can do is fall onto her bed and pull her cover over her.

This is where her mother and Aggy find her when they return twenty minutes later. Betty sends Aggy to the great house to tell Mr. Jefferson what is happening and to ask him to send for Dr. Cranley and Mrs. Coombes, the midwife. He does, and Mrs. Coombes comes within the hour, but Dr. Cranley doesn’t arrive until midafternoon.

The contractions come hard and fast all afternoon and evening and into the night. When he heard that Sally Hemings was delivering, Thomas Jefferson requested that Aggy come get him the instant the baby is born, but, in fact, he spends hours pacing up and down in front of the cabin, periodically approaching the door to ask for reports. He makes his last visit at midnight and is back at the cabin at five in the morning, wild-haired and unshaven, clearly having slept in his clothes.

He is startled by Sally Hemings’s transformation during the few hours since he last saw her. The flush has gone entirely from her cheeks, and her forehead is glossy, not so much with sweat as with the slime of illness. But worst of all are her eyes, which squint at him unseeingly and make her seem more animal than human.

Betty Hemings is standing next to her daughter’s bed, one hand clutched fiercely in the other, a scowl upon her brow but her eyes too frightened to even meet Thomas Jefferson’s.

“Sally is strong,” he tells her. “We must have faith.”

“Lord’s will be done,” says Betty, so softly he can only tell by reading her lips.

Dr. Cranley also left at midnight and hasn’t returned. Thomas Jefferson sends Davy to him with a message saying to come immediately.

Once the cabin is sufficiently suffused with dawn light, Mrs. Coombes asks Thomas Jefferson to wait outside. As soon as he has gone, she draws back the covers, pushes apart Sally Hemings’s legs and then sees at once what the problem is. The baby is breeched.

Mrs. Coombes and Betty help Sally Hemings turn over and get onto her knees and elbows. The heel of one of the baby’s feet is just visible, pressed against its buttocks, and as Sally Hemings rocks back and forth with her contractions, more and more of the little foot becomes visible until finally, with one contraction, the whole foot appears, and with the next the entire leg pops out. Mrs. Coombes glances over at Betty Hemings and shakes her head once. Betty puts her folded hands to her lips and begins to pray. It takes three and a half hours for a tiny girl to slide into Mrs. Coombes’s hands. Her skull is gourd-shaped and her face swollen and purple from the brutal labor, and her right leg (the second to come out) is broken or dislocated.

Dr. Cranley arrives just exactly as the baby makes her first, bleating cry. Determining that her leg is only dislocated, he pulls and twists, causing the baby to shriek. But afterward she instantly falls into a deep sleep, and he declares the procedure a success. He waits until the afterbirth has been completely expelled, then puts on his hat and coat and orders Sally Hemings to drink nettle tea at least twice daily for a week. Just before leaving the cabin, he looks down on the poor, battered infant and shakes his head. He neither meets Sally Hemings’s eye nor says a word.

Thomas Jefferson has been sitting on the porch with his head in his hands ever since Mrs. Coombes asked him to leave the cabin. He stands as Dr. Cranley comes out the door, but he doesn’t dare ask what has happened. The doctor gives him a long, disapproving look, fully understanding his relationship to both mother and child. “The mother will live,” he says, “but the infant… she’s in the hands of the Lord.” With that he turns and makes his way back to his carriage.

Thomas Jefferson straightens his clothing and hair, then knocks on the door. Betty Hemings, her face sallow and deflated, lets him in without a word. Glancing at the infant, whose skin has a decidedly brownish cast, she ushers Aggy and Mrs. Coombes outside, then exits herself, pulling the door shut behind her.

Sally Hemings is sleeping when Thomas Jefferson draws a chair up beside the bed, but as he sits down and leans forward, she opens her eyes. “Well, you did it, Sally Girl,” he says. “That was a hard one, but it’s over.”

A feeble smile comes to her lips and fades almost instantly.

“How are you feeling?”

She meets his eye and shakes her head. Then she looks up at the ceiling, and he wonders if she is praying.

He is silent until his thoughts become more than he can endure.

“So you’ve got a fine little girl!” he exclaims.

Again Sally Hemings meets his eye but seems not to have comprehended what he said.

“Have you chosen a name?” he asks.

“Thenia,” she says, barely above a whisper.

He’s surprised at first, but then he nods. He sold Thenia to James Monroe so that she and her children could live with their father. But a year hadn’t passed before she contracted pneumonia while walking to church in a snowstorm. She died in a matter of days.

“That’s a good name,” says Thomas Jefferson.

Sally Hemings’s lips twitch into another feeble smile, but her eyes are closed.

He looks at the swaddled infant, her eyes so purple and swollen that she has yet to open them. He, too, has noticed the brownish cast to her skin but attaches no particular significance to it, knowing that mulattoes can be almost any color, even after multiple generations of mixing only with whites. The little girl is deeply asleep — though it is hard to imagine that her injuries are not still causing her terrible pain.

“I’ll let you rest,” he tells Sally Hemings as he gets to his feet.

But when she opens her eyes and looks at him, he bends down again and kisses her.

“I’m so glad you’re still with me,” he says. “I had such terrible thoughts during the night. Such grim, awful thoughts.”

Her eyes are closed again. Very possibly she did not hear a word he said. He pats her hand, stands and leaves.

At dawn the following morning, Betty notices that her new granddaughter is ashen and not breathing.

A little later, lying in bed beside her weeping daughter, she murmurs, “It’s for the best. There was just too much pain in that poor baby’s life.”