Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (37 page)

A
swallow of wine. A mouthful of warm parsnip. “I have never said that it is impossible—if by ‘it' you mean emancipation—only that it must be pursued methodically and with patience. Two things are required: first that, by moral argument and political pressure, southern landowners are persuaded to give up the practice of slavery; and second that a homeland be established in Portuguese South America or in Sierra Leone, where all the freed Negroes might be transported at the public expense and provided with sufficient acreage, animals, seeds and money to begin new lives for themselves and to found a new society. Only by the geographical separation of the races might we avoid the commencement of a cycle of assault and revenge that could last centuries and reduce all the beautiful dreams of this nation to charred rubble and pools of blood.”
Stop. You are going to make me hate you.

T
he floor beneath Thomas Jefferson's feet bucks and wobbles, and the heads of the seated passengers rock all in one motion. From the set of Sally Hemings's shoulders and the grace with which she rides the heaving floor, he can see that she is more confident than she used to be, and more capable.
She has come into her own
, he thinks, and that fills him with both a warm appreciation and a sorrow that he has missed so much of her life.

T
homas Jefferson is an artist of silence. Into the midst of whinnies, susurrant poplars, catbird shrieks, jingling harnesses, cicada drones, coughs, field chants, foot thumps, fox cries and thunder rumbles, he introduces silences, some of them lasting half a breath, some as vast and enduring as the silence between stars. Silence is a form of freedom. In silence “ought” need never be contaminated by “is,” and what
is
is, simultaneously,
not at all.
Silence is our agreement that the world is more than we can bear. When the silent people in the silent room close their eyes, they are utterly alone. A solitary word in the midst of silence has no meaning.

I
t is six in the morning of May 1, 1795. Thomas Jefferson has already taken an hour's walk along the Rivanna and has returned to the lodge with sleeves and smallclothes chilly in patches from the dew. He is sitting on a wooden footstool in front of the fireplace, pouring boiling water from a copper kettle into a tin coffeepot balanced on two bricks just beside the fire. He hears a murmur and a rustling of bedclothes.

Looking around, all he can see of Sally Hemings is the underside of one half-closed hand resting against the headboard just beside her pillow. She is four months pregnant, though the only obvious signs are a certain thickening under her jaw and the taut enlargement of her breasts. He has known of her condition for just over a month, and so far neither Martha nor Maria knows—or, at least, neither has said a word to him about it.

He is happy, but he has unhappy thoughts.

Sometimes he worries about how he will manage once the child has come into the world and there will be no plausible way to deny that it is his own. More often, however—though usually only in the darkest hour of the night—he remembers his wife's suffering during and after childbirth, her helpless grief at the loss of Jane, their second child, and then of their third, their one and only son, who never mastered the art of breathing and never received a name. But those griefs, as unbearable as they felt at the time, came to seem innocent and even mild. It was after their lovely little Lucy Elizabeth went crimson with fever and then so pale and still that Martha succumbed entirely to despair. “Why is God so cruel?” she cried out one day. “He laughs at our hopes. He fills our life with misery.” Thomas Jefferson was shocked to hear his good and kind wife speak so bitterly, but he found himself unable to argue with her, especially as that was a moment when the British seemed to be winning the war. When she again became pregnant not four months later, he hoped that her spirits would revive, but she remained listless and melancholy, and following the birth of their second Lucy, she only grew weaker and weaker, until finally the mere weight of existence was more than she could bear. And then, of
course, two years later poor Lucy herself expired in the very home where he had believed she would be most safe.

He picks up a bowl from the floor, pours the just-brewed coffee into it and brings it over to the bed. “Here you go, sweet Sally—a little liquid daylight.” He puts the bowl down on the chair that serves as a bedside table, and she makes a noise that he interprets as a sleepy thank-you. Her face is turned to one side, her eyes closed and brow pinched, as if from pain.

“How is your back feeling?” he asks.

She turns and looks up at him through squinting eyes. “How am I supposed to know? I'm not even awake!”

“Sorry,” he says. “I was just worried that it had hurt you all night.”

She closes her eyes and doesn't respond.

He backs away from the bed and turns toward the fire. But then he looks around again. “It was just an expression of concern,” he says. “Why do you always mock me when all I am doing is expressing my concern?”

I
n his not-sleep, Thomas Jefferson, invisible, walks from room to room, though not always bothering with the doors. He steps so lightly as he crosses lawn and field that the grass does not bend beneath his feet and the wheat does not hiss against his shins. The hearts of those he loves and of those he does not even know are as open to him as his own, though often the feelings arising from those hearts are profoundly mysterious and thus disturbing, disorienting.

That is Maria's cheek in the moon's gray brilliance. He knows by the faint oval of a chicken-pox scar and by how, at the edge between moonbeam and blackness, the convexity of the cheek undulates into the concavity beside her upper lip. The feeling that comes to Thomas Jefferson is loneliness as a form of agony. It is like the howl of a wounded animal, cut off from its pack, helpless and exposed on a slope of scree.

Thomas Jefferson himself is so wounded by his daughters' pain that he is taken by a whirlwind madness and only comes to himself half a mile away, in a cabin down the hill occupied by two families of field laborers, where a five-year-old boy in his own not-sleep is moving his lips to words voiced inside his head: “They not gonna take my pappy. They not gonna take my pappy. I got to tell them. They not gonna do that. I got to build him a house out of branches and leaves, with hay for a floor. I got to make him come back and stay in that house and not do nothing bad no more, and I got to keep him for my own till I'm old.”

And then Thomas Jefferson is walking again until it is a tiny heart, a mouse's or a vole's—beating like an elfin drumroll—that opens inside his own, and he is possessed by a firm, fixed innocence that wants merely to persist from this instant to the next and the next and the next, without end.

And then he is in the kitchen of his own house, vault-black, where Jimmy Hemings sleeps upon a pallet in the corner in the posture of a man who lost consciousness while crawling. There is a bed for him in the cabin where his brother John lives with his wife and child, but Jimmy refuses to stay there. He will not say why. He is a man possessed by powerful antipathies that he will never explain. Jimmy's heart is a mansion with a broken
roof. Rain warps the floorboards and embroiders the couches and beds with mold. Every room has its shameful history, and the people still dwelling in them never come out. You can hear their feet dragging in the night, and their groans.

And then Thomas Jefferson is walking upon a breeze, into the heart of Sally Hemings, who sleeps beside her mother in the cabin he might see from his bedroom window were he to rise from his not-sleep and part the curtain. Her brow, in the gray moonlight, is darkened by a cluster of V-shaped dents, and her heart is entirely occupied by the desire to get something right. It is her invention, which is constantly falling apart, and must constantly be reconstructed. The parts slip between her fingers and roll across the floor. She darts after them, sweeps them up, but she is never sure she has gotten all of them, so is never sure if her invention, once it is reassembled, will actually work. But it is never reassembled, because as she works to bolt one part to the next and the next, still other parts are falling to the floor and rolling into corners. Always. Always. Always.

And then Thomas Jefferson has passed through her heart into another within her body that although it has only just commenced beating is already possessed of a yearning so relentless it might destroy the world.

T
his is what Thomas Jefferson thinks: Sally Hemings has no African in her, except perhaps in the barely noticeable fullness of her upper lip and in the rondure of the tip of her nose—though, indeed, precisely these traits can also be found in people of the purest British stock. The blood of Captain Hemings and, even more so, that of Thomas Jefferson's own father-in-law, John Wayles, has entirely overwhelmed the necessarily less robust African blood to which she might have been heir. As a result she has inherited none of the less savory traits of the race.

Although she has had no formal education, her mind is as sharp as that of any woman Thomas Jefferson has ever known, particularly in regard to her judgment of people. Her assessment of Tom Randolph, for example, has proved sadly accurate. He is just exactly as unsure of himself as she hypothesized during his first brief visit in Paris and exactly as prone to countering his weakness of character through a spiteful coldness that he fancies as dignity. There is also something vengeful in his indulgence of cider and whiskey, and poor Martha seems to be the one who most has to suffer from it. But Sally Hemings is also a shrewd judge of people she has never met. Thomas Jefferson had hardly said ten words about Alexander Hamilton before she'd pegged him as having the conscience of a rattlesnake, and Carter Braxton as a buffoon and a would-be confidence man.

Needless to say, Sally Hemings also lacks that sluggishness of the kidneys that inclines Negroes toward indolence and excessive sweating, and her skin is no more sable than a bowl of milk into which a tincture of molasses has been diffused.

This temperate evening in mid-September, Thomas Jefferson is the one who is sweat-drenched and black of face and hands, while Sally Hemings is seated in the open air outside her cabin, taking advantage of the waning sun to embroider a tiny nightcap.

He has decided that the proportions of his house are entirely lacking in grace and that he must extend it on both the north and south and replace the top floor with a dome. For six weeks he has been attempting to
come up with the right combination of clay, sand, water and heat to produce durable bricks, and just this afternoon he made the first batch that neither exploded in the kiln nor turned to grit on the application of the least weight. He is happy as he walks, soot-blackened and smelling of charcoal, along Mulberry Row back toward his house. When he has amassed a suitable number of bricks—by the spring, ideally—the new construction can begin.

Sally Hemings is so immersed in her work that she does not see him, even though he is only a few steps away. She is seated with her back partly turned to the sun so that it might better light her sewing. Her cheek and shoulder are gilded with it, and her loose dark hair is streaked with auburn glints. She is seven and a half months pregnant, and her forearms rest lightly on the sides of her enormous belly.

He stops walking. He will stand in the road until she looks up and notices him. Every time she pushes her needle through the gathered cloth, she purses her lips, and as she pulls the thread through, she tilts her head slowly to the left, then straightens it and repurses her lips as she prepares to jab the needle into the cloth another time. It is true that these little motions make her look ridiculous, but even so, Thomas Jefferson has never seen her more beautiful.

A
s Thomas Jefferson contemplates the identity of color, which can never be separated from the relationship between colors, he also contemplates the relationship between horror, consolation and beauty. Since his arrival in New York City, he has been thinking about Rilke's notion that beauty is “nothing but the beginning of terror,” which he interprets to mean that we feel beauty most intensely in the presence of that which, if only by its transcendent magnificence, would seem capable of destroying us and yet does nothing of the kind. Our fear combined with our sense that we have nothing to fear translates into the sort of elevation we call beauty.

For most of his adult life, he has applied this notion primarily to the beauty of such things as mountains and dazzlingly starry skies. But lately he has been thinking about those instances when he has experienced joy of such terrific intensity that it is barely distinguishable from sorrow. In every case the joy has arisen out of the simultaneity of two contradictory impressions. The first took him years to recognize, because it is so at odds with the sort of person he has always wanted to be and who, even now, he tends to think that he actually is. He wants to be an idealist and an optimist, but, in fact, at the deepest level of his being, he sees ideals as nothing more than sad delusions and existence as the theater in which we are shown our utter selfishness, perversity and insignificance. And thus when he perceives, against the backdrop of this grim conviction, even the smallest instance of human decency—an act of simple kindness, for example—he experiences such an upwelling of joy that it is all he can do to hold back tears. Every time it's exactly the same: our earthly loathsomeness intersecting with a minute or fleeting suggestion that we might not be entirely damnable—nothing else fills Thomas Jefferson with such joy or seems so profoundly beautiful.

This beauty is, of course, consolatory—but not falsely so. An instance of beauty endures only so long as it seems manifestly real and true. At the faintest tremor of doubt, it reverts to sad delusion or to hypocrisy. And so as he walks the streets of New York City and rides in metal boxes
underground, among glum and oblivious strangers, Thomas Jefferson has come to define beauty as that which gives us joy without blinding us to truth.

But what about the beauty of color? When we get lost in that deep red, which is also red next to zenith-blue, and red and blue together beside a matte gold-brown—do we secretly feel ourselves to be truly lost and so become afraid? And do we then experience a sort of consolation insofar as we know that we are not, in fact, lost, that a mere blink is enough to liberate us from that complex red and restore us to our world of nothing much, in which we feel at home? Or is the beauty of color only the product of color's simplicity, of the fact that it is entirely uninflected by selfishness and perversity, or by morality and meaning, and that when we are lost within it, it is only itself and we are only ourselves, happily, childishly and deeply alive in our being? Is color so beautiful simply because it is perfectly innocent and pure?