Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (23 page)

T
he eyeball is as dispassionate as the camera. Spectroscopically speaking, the colors that strike the retina are true. The pale green between the orange and the purple is pale green. It is only in the mind that the pale green becomes gray. Artists depend upon the lies the brain tells the mind to create that muted luminosity of fog out of purple and orange and black and yellow and white, or to turn that cool red, that winter zenith blue, that brown (or is it gold) into the piercing sorrow of joy displaced by loneliness. The eye, like the camera, contains everything within its field of focus, albeit inverted in each of its two dimensions. The magician tucking a card into his cuff is plainly obvious in the eye, though in the mind there is only the card's disappearance from the magician's hand. In the eye the bush on the edge of the campfire glow is clearly just a bush, while in the mind it is making a journey from smoke puff to hovering dove to red dwarf to bush. All too often, however, the mind fixes on the dove or the red dwarf, and that is how the bush will remain in memory for minutes, months or years until the brain goes cold and dark.

T
homas Jefferson does not see Sally Hemings until sometime after eleven the following morning when she passes in front of his study window, walking from the root cellar to the kitchen and holding a basket of parsnips and beets against her hip. It would be natural for her to glance through the window and for their eyes to meet, but she does not do that. She seems lost in thought as she walks, her eyes looking inward more than out, her pink lower lip pushed forward, as if she is about to make a statement after long deliberation. She is gone in an instant, but he continues to see her contemplative expression in his imagination: those eyes fixed on something not in this world, the urgency of her lower lip, the perfect smoothness of her cheek, undulating from temple to jaw.

A goddess in her youth
, he thinks.

He can hear the tones and rhythms of her voice as she talks to Jimmy in the kitchen and then a series of pauses and mono- and bisyllabic utterances that indicate the conversation is about to end. He gets up from his desk and waits by his door, hoping to catch her eye as she steps into the corridor on her way to the servants' staircase.

He feels an uneasy sinking in the pit of his stomach, and his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. It is utterly ridiculous that a man of his age and position should be waiting in such agitation for a mere girl, but he can't help himself.

It seems to him that he has waited too long, that she must have gone back into the garden or out onto rue Neuve-de-Berri, but then there she is: a mere three yards down the corridor, eyes alert, looking straight at him, faint uncertainty on her brow.

“Sally,” he calls, hoping to sound surprised to see her there. And then, more softly, “Do you have a moment? I'd like a word.” As soon as she steps in his direction, the uncertainty on her brow intensifying, he backs into his study and waits in front of his desk, feeling dizzy and short of breath.

She enters the room tentatively, as if she expects to be punished. “Yes, Mr. Jefferson?”

Thomas Jefferson smiles broadly, hoping to put her at ease. “You're looking very well this morning,” he says. “I hope you had a good night's sleep.”

She smiles, perhaps at the patent absurdity of these remarks, shrugs and then says, almost as an afterthought, “It was all right.”

He laughs, as if she has made a joke. “Well,” he says, and then his expression grows serious and he speaks very softly so that he should not be heard by anyone who might be in the corridor. “Actually, I called you in here because I wanted to be sure I didn't offend you last night. I felt afterward that I had been inexcusably forward.”

She doesn't speak, only looks at him with pursed brows and a partially open mouth, seeming abjectly vulnerable.

“You are so very lovely,” he says in a low and emphatic voice.

When she blushes and smiles, he smiles, too.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

She shrugs. Her smile fades.

He reaches out and takes hold of her hand by only her index and middle fingers. “Sally,” he says, barely above a whisper.

He draws her into his arms, and when she presses her face against his chest, he kisses the top of her head. He holds her in his arms for a long time, feeling that what he has just done is wrong. And when she pulls back her head, he is ready to let her go, but she doesn't move away. She waits with her eyes closed, her lips uplifted. And when he kisses her this time, he knows his kiss is returned.

Some minutes later he is the one to break the embrace, all but pushing her away. “And now you really must go, Sally, because in another instant I won't be able to control myself.”

She backs to the door, touching her lips with the fingertips of her left hand.

And then she is gone.

T
hat night Thomas Jefferson waits in his chair before the fire in the upstairs parlor with a book in his lap that he only intermittently comprehends. The silver- and gold-faced clock on the mantelpiece wheezes and clangs out nine o'clock, which is when Sally Hemings usually appears. But then it is ten o'clock, and he is certain that she went up to her third-floor bedchamber by way of the front rather than the servants' stairs—yet still he waits. . . .

It is nearly eleven. He closes his book, hammers the cork back into a nearly empty bottle of Ledanon with the side of his fist and separates the charred and glowing logs with a poker.

There is a light knock behind him. Sally Hemings is standing in the doorway, a pained vacancy on her face, one hand wringing the other in front of her skirt.

“Yes, Sally,” says Thomas Jefferson, smiling and leaning the poker against the brick edge of the fireplace.

“I'm sorry,” she says—mere speech seeming to cost her immense effort. “I think that I lost something. Left it, I mean. My bonnet. I think I left it here. Yesterday. This afternoon.”

“I haven't seen it.” Thomas Jefferson glances around the room. “But please come in. I'll help you look for it if you wish.”

. . . I told myself that I was only yielding to the inevitable, that I merely wanted to get it over with. But even so, I was making a choice. . . .

A
s Martha had already been married and given birth to two children by the time Thomas Jefferson met her, he had assumed that there would be few impediments to her succumbing to desire in advance of their wedding. And, indeed, whenever he went to see her at the Forest, after his first visit there with John Fairfield, she seemed as eager as he to steal a moment of privacy amid the boxwood hedges, in the closet under the stairs or in a deserted horse stall. Her kisses matched his for passion, and she was happy to let his hands stray anyplace they wanted—insofar as her stays allowed—but only on the outside of her clothing. Whenever he tried to lift up her skirts, or even just slide his hand beneath them, she would grab him by the wrist and say, “Wait.” Then she would answer his surprised disappointment with a lascivious smile, saying, “I want you to have something to look forward to.”

One day he arrived for a visit, and Martha, laughing, told him that her family was spending the afternoon with some neighbors and that he and she were alone. Her darting and mischievous glances told him clearly that she had made a decision. No sooner did Betty Hemings go off to fetch him some tea than Martha took him by the lapels and kissed him. When Betty returned, Martha told her that she could have the afternoon off.

But once they were alone, she grew restless and pale. When he finished his tea and gave her a smile she could not help but understand, she held out the pot and asked if he'd like some more. He answered by getting up from his chair, kissing her and then leading her up the stairs. But once they were in her bedchamber, Martha broke from his embrace and went over to the window, saying, “Why don't we talk first?” When he asked what was the matter, she replied, “I don't know. I'm just suddenly so nervous.” So they sat in two chairs by the window and talked. Then he stood behind her and massaged her neck and shoulders. Eventually he led her to the bed and helped her to remove her clothing one item at a time. But even once they were both naked and under the covers, she wouldn't let him do more than kiss her neck and cheek. In the hope of further relaxing her and evoking her desire, he began to run his fingertips lightly
over her body, from her breasts down to her thighs, over and over, constantly approaching but always, in the end, avoiding that one area he wanted most to touch, because every time his fingers drew near, he could feel her whole body tense.

“Ooh, this is lovely!” she said after a while. “Don't you think this is lovely, just lying here like this?”

He did and he didn't, but all he said was, “I love you.”

And so it became a habit, throughout the eleven years of their courtship and marriage, for Thomas Jefferson to commence making love to Martha with a massage and a menu of caresses. Although most of the time this prelude did nothing to diminish the ultimate satisfaction of their lovemaking, it is also true that sometimes the prelude was as far as things would go.

Thus, when, some half hour after Sally Hemings arrives late at the upstairs parlor, and Thomas Jefferson confesses breathlessly that he would very much like to lie with her as a man lies with his wife, and she whispers that she would like that, too, he is prepared for the possibility that this first time might consist of nothing more than a massage and patient caresses. He is determined to prove to her that he is not the selfish brute he all too recently seemed, but he also wants (as he did even that first terrible night) to make her initiation into the pleasures of womanhood as gentle and beautiful as it can possibly be.

Thomas Jefferson has never had sex with a virgin. His first erotic encounters, when he was a law student, were with prostitutes, and all three of the women he has loved had already been married when he first slept with them—indeed, Maria Cosway and his first real love, Betsy Walker, were married during the whole of his affairs with them. And so he is not entirely sure what sex might be like for a virgin. How afraid will she be? How much will it hurt? Is there anything special he should do?

Although he has never seen anything more beautiful than Sally Hemings's long-waisted and luxuriantly hipped body, he decides to err on the side of caution and spends much of an hour stroking, caressing and kissing her, breathing in the sweet and musky odors that hover like an atmosphere just above her skin—which itself is so marvelously soft that he feels as if he is running his fingers and lips across a warm and continuous rose petal.

He waits for a sign that she is ready to go further, but the gasps, soft moans and gentle writhing that first accompany his attentions gradually
dissipate, and he begins, reluctantly, to contemplate scenarios in which he tells her that he doesn't mind, that he can wait until she is ready, that he has loved what they have been doing, that she is beautiful, oh, so beautiful. . . .

But then her hand closes around his penis. “Aren't you going to put this in me?” she says.

Smiling, he pulls his head back. “Is that what you would like?”

“Isn't that what we're supposed to do?”

He laughs. She is still holding his penis, and it is feeling very good. “Well, that is the usual procedure under these circumstances.”

“All right,” she says, and rolls from her side onto her back.

He kisses her on her breast, neck and lips. “Are you sure? We can wait if you would rather.”

“No. Go ahead. I want to find out what it is like.”

It is hard to get into her, in part because she doesn't have a clear idea where the opening to her vagina actually is and so can't help him. But finally, after a fair bit of groping and prodding, he slips into her warm wetness and is surprised that nothing he feels would indicate she is a virgin.

She makes a short, loud cry, however, and grips his arm and back to keep him from moving. She is holding her breath.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

She releases her breath in a quivery gasp. “Yes,” she says, though she sounds as if she's in pain.

“Are you sure?”

“I'm fine.” She lets out a long sigh, perhaps more to make herself relax than because she actually is relaxed. “So is that it?”

“What?” He kisses her top lip lightly, then her bottom lip.

“Is this all we do?”

“No.”

“Well, what then?”

“This.” He pulls most of the way out, then pushes gently back into her.

She makes something between a grunt and a moan.

“How does that feel?” he asks.

“It's nothing like I expected. It's . . .”

He is sliding in and out, in and out, in a slow rhythm.

Her mouth falls open. “Ahh,” she sighs. And then a little later, “It's just so different.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A little.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No. Keep doing that. I like the way it feels.”

“You're wonderful!” he says.

“Why?” She looks him straight in the eye, her expression bemused, but maybe also slightly challenging.

“You just are.” He laughs and moves more forcefully inside her.

“Oh!”

“Did I hurt you?”

“No. Not really. Just keep doing that. I don't want you to stop.”

And so he doesn't stop, not even after his own orgasm has rushed up inside him and then receded. He keeps going as long as he can manage it, hoping that she, too, will come. Mostly she is silent underneath him. She grips his upper arm with one hand and runs her other up and down his back and has intertwined her legs with his. Every now and then, she lets out an “ah,” an “oh” or a grunt, but most of the time she seems to be studying what is happening with the intensity of a scientist.

When at last his penis has slipped out of her and it is too limp for him to get it back in, he rolls onto his side with a happy groan.

“Are we done?” she says, still lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling.

They are in her chamber, which is on a small alcove on the opposite side of the stairway from all the other servants' rooms and thus so much more private than his.

“For now,” he says. “We can do it again in a little bit if you would like.”

She rolls onto her side and faces him. She smiles. “No. Now that you've stopped, I'm feeling kind of sore.”

“It's always like that the first time.”

“I know.” She puts her hand between her legs, then looks at her fingers and shows them to him. “Blood.”

“Yes.”

“That's not too much?”

He takes her hand and examines it in the flickering candlelight. “No,” he says. “I don't think so.” He doesn't really know, of course, but he considers it unlikely that anything could have gone seriously wrong. He puts her hand down on the mattress between them and pats it.

She lifts it up and looks at it again. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” He smiles. “It's not just blood. There are secretions. From you, and from me. They make it seem that there is more blood than there really
is.” He rolls backward, gropes around on the floor and reaches into the pocket of his waistcoat for a handkerchief. “Here. You can mop it up with this.”

“Thank you.” She takes the handkerchief and tucks it between her legs. “I'll get up in a minute and use the basin.”

“You're beautiful,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“How are you feeling?”

She rolls onto her back and sighs heavily. “I'm fine but . . . I don't know. I feel strange. Restless.”

“Do you feel as if you've changed?”

She lets her head fall to the side and looks at him. Another smile. “Maybe.”

He lifts his head and props it up with his crooked arm. He looks into her eyes and smiles.

“How are you?” she says.

He laughs. “I'm happy. Just happy. I am so happy.”

“Good,” she says.

“I know I shouldn't be. But I am.”

“Good.”

They lapse into silence for a while, and in a few minutes they are both asleep.