Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (48 page)

“I
heard that he had lost his job at a restaurant in Philadelphia,” Thomas Jefferson explains. “So I thought—”

“Why was he dismissed?” says Sally Hemings.

“I don't know.” Thomas Jefferson tilts his head and gives a weary shrug. “But I suppose we can both imagine. . . .”

“Yes.” She looks down into her glass.

He puts his hand on her shoulder and gives her a reassuring stroke, then pats her lightly twice and pulls his hand away. They are sitting on the porch just outside his chambers, drinking cold cider. The sun set on the far side of the house a few minutes ago, but there are small, rose-colored clouds straight overhead in an indigo sky and faint smears of green along the southern horizon.

“In any event, since I will only be making short visits home as long as I am in Washington and since Peter sometimes has to begin preparing for larger gatherings weeks in advance, it made little sense for him to come with me, so I thought that if Jimmy needed the work, it would be good to enjoy his cooking when I am home. I wrote to him a couple of times and got no response, so I decided he wasn't interested. But then six months went by and he finally wrote to me.”

“Six months?” says Sally Hemings. “What was he doing in all that time?”

“He didn't say.”

She sighs heavily. Thomas Jefferson holds out his hand in the accumulating dimness, and when she puts her hand in his, he gives her a squeeze and doesn't let go.

“How does he seem?” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I don't know.” She heaves another deep sigh. “He seems . . . I don't know how he seems.”

He gives her hand another squeeze. “I think it is good that he is home.”

“I hope so.”

F
or the first few days, Jimmy manages so well in the kitchen that Thomas Jefferson declares he doesn't know how he survived two years without Jimmy's cooking. But then one night he helps himself so liberally from the wine cellar that he forgets to take a pot of succotash off the fire and burns it to the point that it can only be used for pig feed. The next day he will not leave his pallet in John Hemings's cabin, claiming that he is beset with the same “ailment of the head” as Thomas Jefferson. But Pricilla, John's wife, says that it is only corn liquor that keeps Jimmy in bed, half the time unconscious, the other half drinking. The next day he manages to produce a passable pork dinner, but the following day he burns the trout so badly that its skin is ash and its flesh like wood splinters. The day after that, his “sauce” for the peas is only melted lard—the smell alone so sickening that Maria, who is only weeks from giving birth to her first child, must rush from the table, out into the open air, to keep from vomiting.

The next day Jimmy is once again afflicted by an “ailment of the head,” but Thomas Jefferson sends Sally Hemings for him. When brother and sister arrive in his office, Thomas Jefferson folds his hands at the center of his desk and tells Jimmy, in a voice so soft it is hard to hear, “While I had very much been looking forward to both your cuisine and your company, Jimmy, I am afraid that your susceptibility to spirits is making it impossible for you to do your job.”

Jimmy's face is slick with sweat, his eyes are red and he is visibly unsteady on his feet. “I'm fine,” he says.

Thomas Jefferson continues to speak quietly. “I am only thinking of your own good. And for that reason, I think it best that until you have regained your self-control, Edy Fossett will be the mistress of the kitchen, and you will be her sous-chef.”

“Edy!” Jimmy practically spits the name. “That ignorant bitch!”

“Jimmy!” says Sally Hemings.

“I'm just speaking the truth,” he says, his voice loud and flat. “She doesn't know anything about cooking! She's never even heard of vichyssoise! She couldn't make a wine sauce if she practiced for a month!”

“Jimmy, please!” Sally Hemings tries to calm her brother by putting both hands on the shoulder nearest her, but he only shrugs her off.

“I think you should taste one of her meals before you insult her like that,” says Thomas Jefferson.

Now Jimmy is shouting. “How dare you insult
me
like that! I am a
master
chef! I've cooked for royalty! How dare you tell me that I should be the sous-chef to that ignorant black bitch!”

“Jimmy,
please.
” Thomas Jefferson's hands, no longer folded, grip the front edge of his desk as if he is about to stand. “I am only trying to find a way that you can continue to receive your salary while you—”

“I don't want your money!” Jimmy puts both fists on Thomas Jefferson's desk, leans forward and shouts. “Do you think I have no dignity! Do you think I was only put on this earth to serve your pleasure! I am a free man, Mr. Jefferson. I worked hard for my freedom, and no one is going to tell me what to do.”

“Jimmy—” Thomas Jefferson's voice is trembling with anger.

“I don't want to talk to you!”

Jimmy turns toward the door. Sally Hemings grabs the lapel of his coat, but he shoves her aside and strides out of the room.

“Jimmy!” she calls after him, her half-closed hands hanging in the air in front of her, as if she were still clinging to his lapel. She turns to Thomas Jefferson, her gaze distraught and afraid.

“Let him go,” says Thomas Jefferson.

“I have to talk to him!” She is out the door in two steps. Her running feet resound down the corridor and across the great hall.

J
immy is gone for two days after fleeing Thomas Jefferson's study. When he returns to Monticello, he serves as Edy Fossett's sous-chef for much of a week, but always sullenly and with the slurred speech and slow-motion lunging of a drunk. One night he cuts his finger so badly that he bleeds all over a bowl of onions, and Edy tells him to leave her kitchen and not come back until he is sober. As Sally Hemings is getting into bed that night, she hears his voice drifting up the hill from where the field laborers live. First he is singing, and then he is shouting in anger.

Sometime during that very silent and black hour that just precedes the first light of dawn, she awakes with a start and realizes that someone has touched her shoulder. She hears panting in the darkness, right beside her bed, and smells the sweet rankness of corn liquor.

Jimmy is speaking, much too loud for so silent and lonely an hour. “You are loved, Sally. I just want you to know that.”

“Jimmy, quiet!” she whispers. “The children.”

“You are loved,” he says as loudly as before. “People love you. That is very important.”

“Jimmy, please.” She hears Beverly stirring in his bed across the room. Evelina cries out in her sleep, “No!”

“It's because you are good,” says Jimmy.

She hears shoe scrapes, thumps and the stretching of cloth. Jimmy is sitting on the floor and resting his hand on her belly. She can't see him at all.

“People despise me,” he says. “I can't be good in this world. Because I can't be myself.”

“What are you talking about?” Sally Hemings wants to sit up, but she is still too sleepy. She rolls onto her side, and Jimmy's hand slides from her belly to her hip. He squeezes her there as he speaks.

“I can be a black nigger. I can be an African god. I can be a slave. But I can't be loved for who I am. Do you know what I'm saying? Do you understand?”

She feels the weight of his head against her belly and his hand across her buttocks pulling her close. His voice is thick now. He is crying.

“But I can't be myself,” he says. “So nobody loves me. I can't be myself in this world.”

She reaches behind her back, takes his pressing hand in her own and brings it forward, clutching it against her ribs. “I love you, Jimmy.”

He lifts his head away from her belly. He pulls his hand out of hers. “I know you do, but it's not enough.”

She can tell from the thumps of his shoes and knees that he has shifted to a crouch.

“I have to go,” he says.

Beverly whimpers, then cries out, “Mammy!”

Jimmy is standing. Sally Hemings sits up in bed. “No,” she says. “Wait.”

“I have to go.”

By the time Sally Hemings puts both feet on the floor, Jimmy is gone.

S
ally Hemings is sitting on her porch, stitching a bonnet for baby Harriet. She hears a heavy sigh and looks up to see Goliah, the gardener, standing just before the porch step and holding his hat in his hands. “I'm sorry to disturb you, Miz Sally.” He shifts from one foot to the other and licks his lips. “But my cousin, Henry, who works over to Grand Pointe, he told me to tell you that he heard word from Baltimore about Jimmy.”

Sally Hemings drops the bonnet onto her knees but cannot bring herself to speak. It has been a month since Jimmy came to her cabin in the night and she hasn't seen or heard from him since.

Goliah looks down at the ground. “I hate to . . . Well, I'm really sorry, but Henry said . . . that Jimmy is dead.”

The bonnet slips from her lap to the porch floor. “How?” she says.

“I don't know. That's all Henry told me. Jimmy's dead. That's all he said.”

When Goliah is gone, Sally Hemings sits for a long time thinking. Thomas Jefferson has told her never to write him a letter when he is in Washington City. His enemies are always stealing his mail in the hope of finding something they can use against him. And for that reason he writes his most important letters—chiefly those to Mr. Madison—in a code generated by a device of his own invention. But Sally Hemings can't think of anyone who might be better able to get the whole story of what happened to Jimmy than Thomas Jefferson. So she leaves her sewing on her porch rocker and walks across the lawn to the great house, where she sits at Thomas Jefferson's own desk and writes, “Sir, Forgive me for writing. I have just heard that my brother J has died in Baltamor. Do you know if this is true? and if it is do you know how he came to take such a despret action? Respecfully yours, S.”

She gives the letter to Remus and asks him to go straight to Washington City and give the letter directly to Thomas Jefferson and to no one else. “Put it right into his own hand.”

Ten days later Remus returns with Thomas Jefferson's reply: “Madam, I was deeply saddened to learn the tragical news you have had of your poor
brother. I have made an inquiry of Mr. E., who lives in Baltimore and was well acquainted with your brother. I regret to inform you that the news you heard was correct. J. took his own life on the 28th of October. It seems that he had been drinking excessively for at least a week, and I am sure he had little comprehension of what he was doing. This is a very, very sad story, and I am, myself, feeling quite bereft, although I think everyone who knew J. understood that something like this might happen. I send my most sincere condolences to you, your mother and to your whole family. I am much occupied by my duties at the present, but will convey more news at my earliest convenience. My thoughts are with you.” The letter is unsigned.

When Sally Hemings has finished reading, Remus says that Peter told him to tell her that Jimmy slit his own throat.

F
or a time Thomas Jefferson can jot notes and do a sort of work involving barometers, yardsticks and magnifying glasses. But soon he discovers that he is no longer independent of the crowd overrunning Sally Hemings's invention, that he, too, is being swept across plazas and parks, down boulevards and streets, along alleys and underground corridors, ever deeper into the interstices of an ever-more-massive city, its buildings rising ever higher into an ever smaller sky.

At first he thinks of all these people as insects: ignorant, soulless, moving mindlessly toward their doom. But then he notices that they are talking—as volubly and variously as any crowd exiting a theater. And it would seem from the rhythms and tones of their speech that some members of the crowd are delivering stern lectures while others are telling jokes, or pleading, or trading gossip in voiced whispers. So many words, near and far, crossing from lips to ears, from mind to mind—yet for Thomas Jefferson they remain airborne packets of mystery. A rippling of lips and teeth. Collages of tiny sounds.

For a while he thinks that the best way to extract meaning from these words is to measure them with his yardstick, but they won't stay still long enough, and he can never quite tell where one word ends and the next begins. And then it seems that he has lost his yardstick, or maybe he never had it. The same is true of his barometer and his magnifying glass. And the last he ever sees of his notes, they are doing loop-the-loops over the heads of the crowd.

Without tools his judgments become ever harder to sustain, or even to remember, and he can offer no resistance to the human tide. And so he is swept ever deeper into Sally Hemings's invention, hoping against his every certainty that he might yet be rescued—by some strange new freedom or by some improbable variety of truth.

A
nd now the hammering car is pierced, yet again, by the screeching of steel against steel. And now, again, it is dark, and the yellow dimness of the incandescent bulbs mounted between the tunnel struts slides stroboscopically down the length of the car, lighting, for an instant, shoulders and flanks and frozen faces and then, an instant later, lighting them again. Thomas Jefferson is on his feet now, rocking as the car rocks, remembering how he never allowed himself to truly love Sally Hemings, when, in fact, he had never loved anyone more, and how she came to hate him, and to close herself off, and how he had lost her that way and had never known such excruciating pain. But now, after all this time, here she is, rocking in the darkness in which he, too, is rocking, in this steel screeching—multitonal, mounting and mounting, like an escalating feedback loop or like an insane fugue performed by an orchestra of metal birds. And then the screeching stops. And the lights are
on.