Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (29 page)

S
ally Hemings is down in the kitchen early the following morning with her mother and Ursula when the bell, attached by wire to a brass ring beside Thomas Jefferson's bed, jingles. Betty casts her daughter a worried glance. She saw Sally Hemings's red eyes at supper yesterday. And she heard her sighing all night long and filling the cabin with the hisses and whispers of dried corn husks as she turned again and again on her tick. Betty is pretty sure she knows what's wrong, even though her daughter has been protesting that it is only her monthly.

Betty climbs the steep staircase to the hall outside Thomas Jefferson's chambers, and when she returns, there is worry on her face and in her voice. “He wants his molasses tea. And he says you the one got to bring it to him. He says you and no one else.”

Betty gives her eyes a weighty roll and goes over to the fire, where a bucket-size copper kettle is always on a low boil.

Minutes later Sally Hemings is standing in the dark hallway knocking on Thomas Jefferson's door. Her first knock is too soft, so she knocks again.

“Come in,” she hears from the other side of the door.

Balancing the tray bearing the teapot, cup and bowl of molasses in her left hand, she lifts the latch with her right. Thomas Jefferson, who always rises with the sun, is seated at his desk in shirtsleeves and waistcoat. Pen in hand, he seems preoccupied. “Thank you, Sally.” He clears a space amid his papers so she can put down the tray. When she has done so, she notices that he is looking right at her.

“I'm wondering,” he says, “if we might have a word.”

She neither moves nor speaks.

He gestures at a chair. “Please sit down, Sally.”

She feels as if she is falling as she sits—falling through the chair, through the floor, falling and falling.

Thomas Jefferson's brow is wrinkled. He meets her gaze, then turns away. As he speaks, his eyes are on the pen that he has placed beside the letter he was writing. “You told me yesterday that you do not lie. So I am not going to lie to you. I think it best, given that we will continue to
occupy the same house whenever I am not called away by my duties, that I am completely honest with you regarding my thoughts about what has passed between us.”

His eyes lift. He holds her gaze. Her mind is reeling, and she is hardly aware of her own words. “I think that is good.”

He looks down again. “You understand, of course, that what has happened between us is wrong. I accept full responsibility for it. I took advantage of you . . . of your innocence . . . to an extent that I had never thought myself capable of.” He sighs. “And everything that happened afterward was, in a sense, my attempt to convince you, and myself, that my feelings that first time had been more honorable than they seemed.” He looks at her again, smiles sadly, then makes a small laugh. “But I'm lying again! You are a good and caring girl, Sally. And one day you will make some man a fine wife. Soon, I hope. I have never been insensible to your virtues, and nothing would have happened between us had I not had such a high opinion of you. But that is no excuse. In fact, your many virtues only compound my transgression. Especially since my attempts to make good the first wrong I did you only caused you further injury. The fact that my own actions nearly resulted in the issue of a child so troubled me that I was incapable of . . . well, of behaving toward you as I ought.”

He looks straight at her again, and she has to fight to hold back her tears.

He pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, then gives his head a shake. “I took the coward's way out. I know that. I pretended that what had happened was no concern of mine. I somehow believed that if I acted like a man who had done no wrong I would actually be such a man. That was cruel. A grave wrong in itself. And I am deeply, deeply sorry.”

He looks at her under a folded brow, waiting.

She is filled with rage.

He continues, “But my multiplying transgressions only make more clear how wrong our association is and thus why that association must end, especially now that we are home. In France, distance and the custom of that place gave us a certain freedom. But here in our United States, especially as I am about to participate in the first administration of this new country . . .” He frowns. His hand twitches, as if he is about to reach across his desk for hers. Instead his words spill out all in a rush. “Please understand, Sally, that I like you very much—too much. I think you are an utterly wonderful girl. And I have had to struggle mightily with my own
feelings to reach this resolve. What we have been doing is wrong, and so it simply must stop. That is our only choice. I hope you understand.”

She doesn't reply, and she hardly hears anything he proceeds to tell her—that he has informed Mr. Lewis that from now on she will have no other duties than to attend to Maria's personal needs. He seems to feel that these arrangements are adequate compensation for all that she has lost—or that
he
has taken from her. He jokes about her having lots of free time, in which she might teach herself to read or find a husband.

At last he falls silent.

As she, also silent, gets to her feet, he reaches across his desk and grabs her hand. “Dear Sally,” he says. He kisses the back of her hand, then, looking ill and old, tells her she'd better go.

She stands for a long time in the dim hallway, then straightens her apron, and, willing herself to manifest none of the feeling in her breast, she grips the railing of the steep stairs and descends to the kitchen.

“W
ell, you know how it is with men,” says Betty Hemings. “White men in particular.” She is sitting at the table, letting gravy soften her biscuit, sipping a glass of cider. “They only think with their little head. You know what I'm talking about? Right? You know what I mean. They say all kinds of things with their big head, but their little head makes all the decisions. Little head's the master. So you can count on it; he ain't done with you yet. You'll see. Meanwhile you got it good. Most days you can go back to bed after breakfast, sleep till noon if you want. And when he comes back, the fact that he been so hard on himself most likely means he'll go easy on you. Most masters act like God gave them you so they can do what they like. And if you object, they say you got the Devil in you and they got to punish you. Mr. Jefferson's not like that. He treats you like a lady. So you lucky, and I wager you'll be luckier when he come back. And meanwhile you get to live like a princess.”

 

On Slavery (Public)

In 1770, when he was twenty-seven years old, Thomas Jefferson served as a pro bono attorney in two suits for freedom by mulatto teenagers and argued in one of the cases, “Under the law of nature, all men are born free, everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.” These sentences were Thomas Jefferson's first public articulation of principles he would express so memorably six years later. He lost both cases.

In his instructions to the Virginia delegation to the first Continental Congress in 1774, he represented the abolition of slavery as one of the primary goals of the American colonies, and in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence he asserted that George III had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” This passage was struck from the final document in response to objections from representatives from the southern colonies.

Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Virginia constitution, which he wrote in Philadelphia just before the Declaration of Independence, stipulated, “No person hereafter coming into this country shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever.” This draft arrived in Virginia too late to have an effect on the version of the constitution adopted on June 29, 1776—although it is doubtful that its antislavery provision would have been adopted even had it arrived in time, given that the constitution his fellow Virginians did approve denied slaves any guarantee of civil rights by declaring them not a part of civil society.

In 1777 Thomas Jefferson proposed a bill to prevent the importation of slaves to Virginia, which decreed that anyone brought into the state for
the purpose of enslavement after the passage of the bill would “thenceforth become free and absolutely exempted from all slavery or bondage.” That bill was passed in 1781, during his term as governor.

In a new draft of the Virginia constitution, which he wrote in 1783, he extended his original ban on the enslavement to include not just those “coming into” the state after 1800 but anyone born in Virginia after that date, and once again this provision was struck from the document finally adopted.

In 1784, as a member of the Continental Congress, he developed a plan for the government of the western territories that declared, “After the year of 1800 of the Christian aera there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states,” but this provision met the same fate as its predecessors, and for the same reasons.

On December 2, 1806, during his second term as president, he denounced the international slave trade as a “violation of human rights” and called on Congress to make it illegal. The resulting law, which passed on March 2, 1807, and took effect on January 1, 1808 (the first day on which it was constitutionally possible to outlaw the slave trade), was the most unambiguously antislavery initiative of the federal government prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Unfortunately, the law was never adequately enforced, and over the course of the next fifty years (until the start of the Civil War) more than a quarter of a million Africans were brought to the United States and sold into slavery.

T
he blue of the sky before sunrise makes the earth blue. The air is cold, sharp on the tongue, but there is a dry-grass sweetness in it that tells Thomas Jefferson it will be warm by noon. Lots of sun. A good day for traveling, if the roads are not too muddy. He is seated in his landau, which, with the lanterns mounted on either side, is good for night travel. He hopes to make it to New York in less than a week. Jimmy is hunched against the cold on the box in front, and Bob is at his side, holding the whip upright, like a fishing pole.

Thomas Jefferson told everyone who would listen that Washington would have to throw him in irons to get him to serve in this administration, yet now he is looking forward to assuming his duties. Now he is wondering if government isn't, in fact, the life that he was born for, and not farming. Yet no sooner does he resolve this question in the affirmative than a hollowness seems to open inside him.

He is passing the cabin where at this very moment Sally Hemings is asleep beside her mother and sister. She is angry at him, and the rift between them is what makes him feel so empty and alone. Still, it is better that he has concluded their intimate relationship. He hopes she will soon realize that her life will be happier this way. He wants nothing for her but her happiness. She is a good girl, and he will never be able to give her the happiness she deserves.

I
n Sally Hemings's dream, she is wrestling a bear, although at first she does not know it is a bear. It seems like a wall of fur: dense, soft, warm and enveloping. But then she understands that what she is actually doing is trying to get the bear to put on a frock coat and a pointed hat. In the end it is the bear's very astonishment that anyone should want to do such a thing that causes it to go still and let her manipulate its enormous paws down one sleeve and the other and then put a red hat—something like an elongated flowerpot—atop its head. And now, at this very moment when it would seem certain that she has succeeded in clothing the bear, she is suddenly unsure of what she has done. She knows that a crowd has gathered—a crowd of old women and men with the glossy, toothless mouths of infants—and they are all staring at something at the center of a cobbled square, and leering, and making low hooting noises that would seem to be laughter but that might just be something else. She doesn't know what, but maybe something obscene.

F
or a long time after La Petite's death, Sally Hemings has trouble staying asleep and so falls into the habit of leaving her bed at the faintest hint of pink in the eastern sky and going for a walk, partly to talk herself out of a roiling tangle of bitterness, sorrow and longing that come to her in a different configuration every day and partly to lose herself in the movement of her muscles, the sweet chill of the air in her throat and the thrum of the wind in bare branches.

There is a new building on Mulberry Row. The cockeyed, rain-grayed log cabin that everyone called the “toolshed” (in fact, it was where Thomas Jefferson and a team of workers lived while constructing the first section of the great house) has been replaced by a tall white clapboard building with a stout stone chimney on one side—a smithy.

Most mornings, as Sally Hemings sets out on her walk, she can hear the urgent huffing of the bellows as the blacksmith gets his fire going and, as she returns an hour or so later, the clink and clang of a hammer on steel. She has seen the blacksmith from time to time, resting on a box in front of his shop at midday or lumbering with his head lowered toward his cabin somewhere down the East Road. He is in his thirties, she thinks, though with a patch of completely white hair above his left eye. His shoulders are massive and his forearms as thick as her calves. His skin is middle dark—the color of glazed stoneware—and he has a round, heavy-cheeked face with large, weary eyes. She has never said a word to him. Her mother tells her he is “simple.”

One day in early March, just after Thomas Jefferson has left for New York City, Sally Hemings is coming back from her walk and notices that for the first time (perhaps because the weather is warm) the smithy's front door is open. Peering into the dark interior, she sees what looks like a red-hot bar of iron floating in midair and gracefully twisting itself into a knot. She wants to walk up to the door to get a better look, but she is too self-conscious so keeps walking. The next day, however, when she sees the door open again, she feels less timid.

The heat of the forge warms her nose and cheeks before she is even an
arm's length from the door. At first all she can see inside the building is the glow of the burning coals, but then a low, merry voice calls out, “Don't be shy, pretty lady,” and an orangish smear in the darkness coalesces into the round-faced blacksmith looking straight at her and smiling. “Come on in!” he says. “Ain't nothing to be afraid of in here.”

“I don't want to disturb you,” she says.

“Pretty girl like you can't never disturb nobody! Come on in. Come on in.
Je vous en prie!
” He laughs. “I know you know what that means!
Je vous en prie!
”

The air inside the smithy is so hot it dries out her nostrils and the back of her throat. She wants to take off her coat but doesn't think that would be proper. The blacksmith is in shirtsleeves, with his collar open to the top of his greasy leather apron. The skin on his neck and chest is glossy with sweat.

“I bet you know all kinds of French after living in Paree,” he says. “My mammy came up to Virginia with a family from New Orleans, so I been speaking French practically since the day I was born.
Je vous en prie! Je vous en prie!
”

The blacksmith's name is Sam Holywell.

When Sally Hemings starts to introduce herself, he cuts her off. “I know who you are! Everybody talking about Miz Sally this, Miz Sally that. You pretty near famous around here.”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” she says, rather unhappy at the news.

“Oh, no! That's a fact!” He laughs. “You just about famous as Mr. Jefferson.”

She coughs, in part because of the dryness in her throat. “I was wondering if I might watch you work for a moment.”

“Sure,” he says. “Make yourself at home. Most likely you'll get bored, though. Ain't been making nothing but horseshoes the last two days.” He nods at the jumbled heap against the wall behind him, then picks up a hammer and a pair of tongs. “You best stand back, now. Sparks be flying. Wouldn't want to spoil that beautiful coat!”

Sally Hemings takes a step back and half sits on a barrel.

The work is nothing like what she thought she saw through the door. It's all banging and flipping and banging some more. No graceful twisting in midair. Nothing graceful at all, in fact. And so noisy she has to keep her fingers in her ears. But even so, she is amazed by how rapidly and precisely all that clangorous hammering knocks the bar into an arc and then tapers that arc into a perfect horseshoe.

After a final inspection, he flings the still-glowing shoe into a barrel of water, where it hisses and sends up bubbles of steam as it sinks to the bottom. “So that's it,” he says. “Not much of a show.”

“I thought it was amazing,” she says. “You make it look so easy, but it must be so hard.”

He smiles shyly as he puts down his tools, and Sally Hemings decides he has a lovely mouth. “Thanks,” he says, glancing at her in the eye. “It's not all that hard, but it sure makes a body thirsty!” He mops his forehead with the back of his arm, then dips a ladle into the same barrel where the horseshoe is still sending white bubbles to the surface. He lifts the ladle to his lips, slurps the water down, then dips the ladle in again and holds it out to Sally Hemings. “Want some?”

“Oh, no, no,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Ain't nothing wrong with it!” He smiles. “Tastes a bit from the iron. But that's good for you. Makes you strong. Go ahead.”

She takes a sip and gags at first but manages to swallow it. “Thank you,” she says. The water is warm. It tastes like ash.

“My pleasure!” He smiles at her happily, his large, dark eyes aglint with the daylight pouring in through the open door. “You sure is a pretty woman! Hope you don't mind me saying that!”

Sally Hemings blushes and looks at her feet. “Well, I guess I better be going. Got my own work to do.” As she moves toward the door, she smiles and says, “That was wonderful. Thank you so much.”

“
Je vous en prie!
” he says, with a big grin.
“Je vous en prie!”

“
Merci bien
,” she replies, stepping sideways out the door. As she turns toward the great house, where it is time for her to wake Maria with a cup of hot chocolate, she feels a surprising pang of sorrow.
Sam's not simple
, she tells herself,
he's just kind.

The next day, on her way out for her walk, she carries a tin pitcher of fresh water over to the smithy. No one answers her knock, so she leaves the pitcher on the ground. By the time she comes back, the door is open and the pitcher is gone. She knocks again, sticks her head in the door and says, “Morning, Sam!”

“That you, Miz Sally?” He glances over his shoulder as he dumps a shovelful of coal into his forge. Then he leans the shovel against the wall, wipes his hands on his apron and walks toward her.

“I just wanted to make sure you got that pitcher I left you.” She looks over his shoulder but can't see the pitcher anywhere.

“I figured that was you!” He laughs. “I surely did! And thank you very much. Nothing wrong with my water here, but it don't hold a candle to water straight from the well.” The pitcher is on a shelf just beside the door.

Sam is looking right at her with his big dark eyes and smiling so appreciatively that she feels another pang in her breast, but this one is warm, and it makes it hard for her to talk. “Well, all right,” she says. “Maybe I'll come by for it later in the day, so I can bring you some more tomorrow.”

“Ah, you don't have to do that!”

“It's nothing.” She blushes. “See you later.”

When she stops back at the smithy on her way to have supper with her mother, Sam hands her the pitcher and tells her, “Now, you hold on a minute! Don't you go anywhere!” He hurries over to the water barrel, rolls up his sleeve, plunges in his arm nearly up to the shoulder and pulls something out that he immediately wraps in an old rag. As he walks back toward her, he pats and rubs the rag over the object it conceals. “You know what this is?” He pulls back the rag and holds up what look like two horseshoes joined tip to tip so that one shoe opens to the right and the other to the left.

Sally Hemings is stumped. “A hook?”

“It's an
S
!” he says proudly. “The letter
S.
And do you know what name starts with
S
?”

She laughs. “I know one name that does!”

“I bet you do!” he says. “And the other one is Sam. Sally and Sam! Thought you should have something to remember me by!”

She wants to give him a hug, but doesn't dare. So she just shrugs her shoulders and smiles. “Thanks, Sam. That is so kind of you!” As he hands her the
S,
she gives his thick, hard hand a quick squeeze. “I'm truly touched.”

That night at supper, as she is telling the story of her encounters with Sam, her mother frowns smugly and starts shaking her head.

Sally Hemings cuts herself off in midsentence. “What?”

Her mother just keeps shaking her head.

“What?”

“Nothing,” says Betty. “Just don't let yourself get all sweet on him.”

“I'm not!” Sally Hemings declares, though her face turns crimson.

“Well, that's good. One thing I know about this life is you ain't never gonna be happy if you let yourself want things that just can't be.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You know
exactly
what that means.” Betty folds her arms, tilts her head to one side and gives her daughter a hard stare. “Men gonna keep talking their sweet talk. Nothing they can do about that. That's just the way they is. But no man with half a brain's gonna let himself get caught plowing the master's field—that's one thing you can count on.” She gives her head a firm, slow shake. “And I
know
what I'm talking about.”

“You don't know anything!” Sally Hemings snatches the
S
off the table and grips it in her lap.

“Oh, baby girl,” her mother says sadly.

“Don't talk to me!” She leaps up from the table, knocking the chair over backward. “My life is nothing like your life!” She is at the door before she has even realized that is where she is headed, and then she is striding away from her cabin, still not knowing where she is going but thinking she might walk down the East Road.

Her mother is a spineless fool. She always talks about herself as if she is strong and wise and independent, but, in fact, she is constantly collaborating with her own enslavement. Sally Hemings is never going to let herself be like that. She is done with Thomas Jefferson. She was stupid enough to let herself be swept along by
his
sweet-talking, his sentimentality and his white-man's blindness to the realities of slavery. But never again! If he comes back to her on his knees, she's just going to turn her shoulder and say she is finished with him, and she'll keep on saying she is finished until he finally gives up and goes away. And she knows he will go away. Because he's not one of those men who's led around by his little head; he's led around by his heart. And that's why she has a power over him. And that's why—in this one way, at least—she is free. People may not know it now, but they will soon. They'll see that she's not the master's woman. Not anymore. And then everything will be different. That's when her real life will begin.

When she sees Sam Holywell the following morning, he smiles at her, tells her how pretty she is, but when she stands close to him, he backs away. And when she looks him straight in the eye so that he might know all the feeling that is in her heart, he looks right over her shoulder. And that is when she understands that he was only flirting with her because he wanted to feel like a big man—a man who isn't afraid to get back at the master through his woman. The problem, of course, is that he
is
afraid—and knowing that, Sally Hemings loses all respect for him.