Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Read online

  ALSO BY STEPHEN O’CONNOR

  SHORT FICTION

  Here Comes Another Lesson

  Rescue

  NONFICTION

  Orphan Trains:

  The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed

  Will My Name Be Shouted Out?

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Stephen O’Connor

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 978-0-698-41033-6

  This is a work of fiction based on real events.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Stephen O’Connor

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  To Evan and Brenda Turner, my other parents

  What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro’ his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

  —Thomas Jefferson to Jean Nicolas Démeunier

  June 26, 1786

  Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then the evil?

  —David Hume (paraphrasing Epicurus)

  Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

  So, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

  —Martin Luther King Jr.

  August 28, 1963

  In some ways Thomas Jefferson finds death more appealing than life. Nothing he does matters anymore, and so he is able to lose himself more completely in the moment. Now he is lost in the emerald translucency of locust leaves in dawn light. Now in a cloud of indigo butterflies fluttering over meadow grass. And now his heart is broken by the contest between joy and despair in every note of birdsong. Birds have three springs inside their heads, and seven cogs, and are not actually capable of choice, and yet, all day, every day, they sing of joy’s inability to outlast despair. There is something in this that Thomas Jefferson finds unspeakably beautiful.

  I

  Thomas Jefferson is on his knees in a window seat, looking down a long reddish road shaded by two rows of poplar saplings. He is ten years old and holding a pocket watch to his ear. He hears a dog bark, the whispery commotion of wind in leaves, a crow’s caw—but only silence from the watch. As he lowers it to take another look, he can hear and feel the tiny impacts of minute gears and screws tumbling through its complex interior. “This watch used to belong to my father,” Thomas Jefferson’s own father told him only three days ago. “He gave it to me so that, by marking time, I might learn not to waste it. I hope you will learn the same lesson.”

  During the first two days after receiving the watch, Thomas Jefferson enjoyed timing things: the length of his sleep—eight hours and sixteen minutes; the time it took to walk from his house to the Rivanna River—thirty-three minutes; the time between the bottom edge of the sun touching the western mountains and the top edge vanishing from sight—three and a half minutes. Yesterday afternoon, however, he noticed along the rim of the watch a small groove, into which he inserted the tip of his penknife. With a quick twist, he popped off the watch’s back and discovered an intricate assemblage of twitchily rotating brass wheels partially concealed by a pair of engraved nickel brackets shaped like the scapulae of a mouse. Curious to find the source of the watch’s ticking, he used his penknife to unscrew first one of the nickel brackets and then the other, revealing the very heart of the watch: a tiny coiled spring that—at the touch of his gaze—snapped and sent two gear wheels flying into the air. There followed a moment of panicked thrashing, during which he not only failed to capture the flying wheels but scattered the watch parts he had already removed. After much crawling about on the dark rug, and then a good hour of sweaty, groan-punctuated labor, he was forced to admit that he could neither remember nor deduce where all the loose gears and brackets belonged, and he had three pieces (a rod, a sprocketless wheel and a J-shaped wafer of metal) that he had no idea what to do with at all.

  Those three pieces lie on the window ledge beside his open penknife. He was thinking he would make one last attempt at repairing the watch before confessing his transgression to his father, but now, with a voiced sigh, he sweeps the tiny pieces off the ledge into his palm, then slips them into his waistcoat pocket, followed by the watch itself.

  As he makes his way downstairs, he can see the look of disappointment on his father’s face, and he can hear his father’s reprimands: “I didn’t give you the watch, I entrusted it to you”; “You have betrayed your grandfather’s memory”; “I would never have believed that you could be so imprudent.”

  Thomas Jefferson knocks on the door to his father’s study. Hearing no answer, he lifts the latch and pushes. The chair at the desk is empty. A window is open about an inch, and the breeze blowing through it flips up one corner of a piece of paper on the desktop again and again. Another piece of paper lies in the middle of the rug in front of the desk. The big chair by the hearth where his father is wont to read historical and scientific books is also empty.

  Jillery is sitting motionless at the kitchen table with her forehead resting on the knuckles of her lifted and folded hands. She doesn’t turn when Thomas Jefferson walks up behind her. He waits a long moment before he dares to speak, and when he asks where his father might be, she says, “You best not be looking for him right now, Master Tom.” She speaks so softly, and with such a weighty expression on her face, that it is a moment before Thomas Jefferson can fully take in what she has said.

  “But I need to talk to him,” he says. “It is important.”

  She looks at him for a long time with that same weighty expression, then only shrugs.

  He walks out the kitchen door into the garden. That dog he heard when he was kneeling at the window is still barking. It’s Captain, he realizes now, from the squeaky yelp in the middle of each bark. No doubt Captain has treed another squirrel. He is seventeen years old and much too slow to actually catch a squirrel, but that doesn’t stop him from trying, or from spending an hour barking hopefully at the base of a tree. The barks seem to be coming from the mill, which is where Thomas Jefferson is headed. But there aren’t any trees near the mill.

  The freshly turned soil in the kitchen garden is black, moist and redolent of what he always
thinks of as the smell of earthworms. Someone has been cutting bean stakes on the stool by the toolshed. A small tepee of them leans against the weathered wall, and yellowish whittled slivers make a corona around the base of the stool. All at once Thomas Jefferson hears the low rasp of something sliding along the shed’s inner wall, the clank of metal against metal and a soft grunt.

  “Jupiter?” Thomas Jefferson stops in his tracks. “Jupiter?”

  He opens the door and sees a Negro boy his own age, crouched at the back of the shed, the long handle of a shovel across his knees. “What are you doing in here?” Thomas Jefferson says.

  “Nothing.” Jupiter pushes the shovel handle up toward the wall, but it swings right back down on top of him.

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

  Jupiter gives the handle another push, but it falls back down again. Were he only to stand, he could easily rest the shovel against the wall, but he remains crouching in the corner, the handle angled across his knees.

  “Just resting,” he says softly. He doesn’t meet Thomas Jefferson’s eyes.

  “I saw three big trout by Castle Rock yesterday.”

  Jupiter looks up at Thomas Jefferson as if he doesn’t recognize him.

  “I may go down there later,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “I don’t know.” Jupiter’s brow is convoluted and dark. “I think maybe I can’t.”

  Thomas Jefferson sighs. “Well, maybe I can’t either.” He takes the watch out of his pocket. “You know what I did?” He hands the watch to Jupiter. “Listen.” Jupiter takes the watch and puts it to his ear, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “I broke it,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “Your grandpappy’s watch!”

  “I wanted to see what it looked like inside, and I broke it. Now I have to tell my father. So maybe I won’t be able to go fishing later.”

  “Oh.” Jupiter hands back the watch.

  “If I can, I’ll come find you.”

  Jupiter doesn’t reply, only wraps both hands around the handle of the shovel.

  “What are you doing in here?” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You just going to stay in here all day!”

  “I’m resting.”

  Thomas Jefferson shrugs. “All right. I’ll see you later.”

  Jupiter doesn’t say anything. But as Thomas Jefferson backs out the door, Jupiter calls, “Don’t tell nobody I’m in here.”

  “All right.” Thomas Jefferson lets the door swing shut on its own.

  Once he has passed through the garden gate, he walks between the barns and down the creek road. He wonders if he should tell his father that he merely dropped the watch. No. If his father were to have the watch repaired, the watchmaker would certainly notice the missing parts. Maybe he should say that he dropped it, the back popped open and parts spilled everywhere. But how could a mere jolt unfasten all four screws?

  Thomas Jefferson’s hands are clammy and his throat is constricted. He has to tell the truth. That’s all. A lie would only make everything worse.

  The sulfur-yellow flank of the mill is now in sight. Captain is still barking, but not the way he does when he’s treed a squirrel—more like when he scents a wolf passing in the night. Thomas Jefferson can’t see him anywhere.

  His father said yesterday that one of the wheel shafts in the mill had split and that he was going to repair it. But the mill’s lofty, churchlike interior is empty, and there is no sign that anyone has been working there. It is hard to tell over the hissing rumble of the water in the millrace and Captain’s barking, but Thomas Jefferson thinks he hears his father’s voice in the yard out back. As he approaches the open rear door, he hears a woman’s voice, but then, very definitely, his father says, “One more time.” There follows a hoarse whistle and a sharp splat.

  At first Thomas Jefferson thinks a side of beef is hanging in midair, but it is a shirtless man, dangling by his wrists from a rope tied to the winch sticking out of the mill loft. The man’s slack feet hover two or three inches above the ground, so that he looks as if he leapt into the air and never came down. A lace of red crosses the pale soles of his feet and has made a burgundy mud of the dust below. Captain is running in circles around him, barking.

  “Again,” says a woman, just out of sight to the left of the door, and it takes Thomas Jefferson half a second to realize that she is his mother. His father speaks. “All right, Jack.” Then Mr. Mumphry, who was also out of sight, rushes at the dangling man, swinging his right arm forward. Another hoarse whistle and splat, and the dangling man’s whole body arches as if he were a trout leaping out of a pond. Then he goes limp, his body swinging right, then left, at the end of the rope.

  Captain ran off when Mr. Mumphry charged. But now he is back, head low. He is barking not at the dangling man but at Mr. Mumphry, who twitches the snakelike coil of his whip in the dust and pays the dog no mind.

  The dangling man is Dorsey, Jillery’s husband. His back is crossed by bleeding gashes, some bordered with yellowish flecks of fat. “Once more,” says Thomas Jefferson’s mother. His father grunts, and again there is that hoarse whistle of the whip racing through the air.

  Thomas Jefferson does not stop running until he is in the middle of the bridge over Shadwell Creek. He takes the watch out of his pocket and flings it as far as he can downstream. When his father asks what happened to it, he will say he doesn’t know; maybe he lost it in the woods.

  “. . . I will make it good. . . . Good . . .”

  . . . But what could I have done? I didn’t know what to do. . . .

  Sally Hemings comes to Thomas Jefferson in a dream. She is sitting at his desk, writing with one of his quills. The scratching of the inked tip across the paper makes a sort of thunder in his dream. Periodically, when the tip dries out and a squeaking comes into the thunder, Sally Hemings lifts the quill to her lips and dampens it with a quick dart of her tongue. Only when the thunder is infiltrated by squeaks a second time does she dab the tip of the quill into the ink and tap it twice on the rim of the inkwell. The result of this practice—an effort at economy, Thomas Jefferson can only imagine—is that the right corner of her mouth is surrounded by a corona of saliva-slick black, and a trail of black descends to the edge of her chin, where a droplet trembles without ever falling.

  Sally Hemings’ mother Betty was a bright mulatto woman, and Sally mighty near white: she was the youngest child. . . . Sally was very handsome: long straight hair down her back. She was about eleven years old when Mr. Jefferson took her to France to wait on Miss Polly. She and Sally went to France a year after Mr. Jefferson went. Patsy went with him first, but she carried no maid with her. Harriet, one of Sally’s daughters, was very handsome. Sally had a son named Madison, who learned to be a great fiddler. He has been in Petersburg twice: was here when the balloon went up—the balloon that Beverly sent off.

  —Isaac Jefferson

  “Memoirs of a Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840’s by Isaac, one of Thomas Jefferson’s Slaves”

  Mr. Jefferson was a tall strait-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered: Nary a man in this town walked so straight as my Old Master: neat a built man as ever was seen in Vaginny, I reckon, or any place—a straight-up man: long face, high nose. . . . Old Master wore Vaginny cloth and a red waistcoat, (all the gentlemen wore red waistcoats in dem days) and small clothes: arter dat he used to wear red breeches too.

  —Isaac Jefferson

  “Memoirs of a Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840’s by Isaac, one of Thomas Jefferson’s Slaves”

  The real Sally Hemings comes to Thomas Jefferson in the arms of her mother. It is the first springlike day in March, and he is at his desk trying to work out the etymological connections between “hob,” “hobnob,” “hobgoblin” and “hobnail.” There is a knock that he does no
t quite hear, and then Martha is standing just inside his door. “I’m sorry, Tom,” she says. “I just wanted you to know that Betty is here.”

  He hears a very small child’s irritated “No!” out in the hallway and then a woman speaking in a low, consoling voice. Again the child says “No,” but less emphatically. Martha steps aside, and a tall, broad-shouldered woman with skin the tawny gold of August meadow grass enters the room, carrying a tiny girl who takes one look at Thomas Jefferson and buries her face against her mother’s neck.

  “Ah, yes,” he says, though he is not quite sure why he is being introduced to Betty or who exactly she is.

  Martha is smiling but seems disconcerted by his lack of response. “Betty,” she says, “this is Mr. Jefferson.”

  Only once he hears the affection in his wife’s voice does Thomas Jefferson remember that Betty used to be her nanny and was her confidante after the death of Bathurst Skelton. He has met her several times, in fact, though he has never spoken to her directly.

  “Welcome,” he says, getting up from his desk. “I hope you had an easy trip.”

  Betty attempts something like a smile.

  “I was thinking she should stay in Ginny’s old cabin,” Martha says, her words more question than statement. “With her children.” Martha glances at the girl in Betty’s arms.

  “That’s a good place,” says Thomas Jefferson. “On a clear day, you can look out the window and see a hundred miles.”

  Betty attempts another smile but looks at the floor as she speaks. “Thank you, Master Jefferson.”

  “Mr. Jefferson,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “Mr. Jefferson,” she repeats.

  The little girl turns her head against her mother’s neck and looks at Thomas Jefferson with one eye.