Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 5

  When Thomas Jefferson first arrived, a small man in spectacles with an almost feminine voice was saying that he would not be able to take a position on the resolution—a funding matter as far as Thomas Jefferson could tell—until he had consulted with the people back in Carlisle who had elected him.

  “Good God, man!” shouted another delegate (from New York, Thomas Jefferson thought). “Don’t you have your own mind? Do you think the good people of Carlisle sent you here to be a stuffed pillow?”

  The original speaker replied mildly, seeming nauseated with disdain, “I thought this body was meant to be a democratic assembly of representatives, not a parliament of petty monarchs.” With that, he left the lectern and took a seat at one of the tables, where a neighbor gave him a pat on the back. The New York delegate flung both hands in the air and said something that Thomas Jefferson couldn’t hear but that inspired a round of hoots and guffaws at his table.

  After that, a bemused-looking man of about forty walked to within an arm’s length of the lectern and spoke in a voice that reminded Thomas Jefferson of the jingling of sleigh bells. “The committee will be making its report momentarily. Please don’t leave!” This announcement was met with groans, but the words were heeded. No one left. Servants were summoned. Bottles of cider and wine were brought to the tables. Pipes were lit. And very soon the urgent matters this meeting had been convened to discuss were entirely abandoned in favor of tales about the catastrophes and feats of athleticism known to have occurred in and around bordellos.

  At present, the only people who truly seem to be considering matters of war and independence are seated at the table in the corner to which the bemused-looking man retired. Thomas Jefferson would like to eavesdrop on their conversation, but, having suffered his whole life from a morbid shyness in large groups, he doesn’t dare go anywhere near. At the mere thought, a trembling comes into his fingertips and he is taken by an irresistible restlessness.

  He lowers his hand from his cheek, sticks his thumbs into the waist of his breeches and begins to pace along the wall, keeping his head lowered and his brow furrowed, in the hope that anyone observing him might think he is deep in cogitation. Each time he stops and reverses direction, he cannot help but glance toward the corner table, and on one such occasion notices the bemused man scrutinizing him. Feeling that he has been unmasked as a charlatan, a twist of dizziness comes into his skull and his whole body breaks into a hot sweat. He has to leave the room.

  A door at the end of the hallway leads into the dark garden behind the State House. No sooner is he standing in the moist coolness of the deepening evening than his head begins to clear. Already he hates Philadelphia. He wonders if he shouldn’t just have Jupiter and Bob Hemings pack his carriage in the morning and take him back to Virginia.

  The sky is a metallic navy blue directly overhead and lightening toward a deep teal in the west. Thomas Jefferson can make out the silhouette of the roofs of the buildings across the street and of the trees and bushes in this very yard—which is surrounded by a high brick wall, faintly visible in the gloaming. He hears the mumble-grunt of two men talking to his right and a splattering of urine on bare earth. He cannot make out a word either is saying, but he also feels the need to urinate, so he walks toward the opposite wall, where he waits, legs spread, his penis in the evening air, until the two men have gone back inside. Once his own urine begins to flow, the relief is so great that he groans aloud.

  As he rebuttons his breeches, he contemplates walking right through the building and back out onto the street, where he might perhaps find a hospitable tavern. He is now distinctly hungry. But instead he returns to the yellow room.

  He is not even through the door when the bemused man—no longer seeming remotely bemused—is eyeing him again. As Thomas Jefferson makes his way back to the spot against the wall that he occupied for most of his time in the room, he wishes he knew someone well enough to ask for a glass of wine.

  He reinserts his thumbs beneath the waist of his breeches and prepares to resume his contemplative pacing. But now the man who has been watching him has gotten to his feet. As the man starts across the room, the bemused expression comes back onto his face. Thomas Jefferson looks away, his entire body simultaneously heating and chilling with sweat. The man is smiling as he walks, though perhaps there is a faint perturbation on his brow. Attempting a smile of his own, Thomas Jefferson wipes his palms against his waistcoat and takes a step in the direction of the advancing man.

  “Pardon me,” says the man. “You wouldn’t by any chance be Peyton Randolph’s nephew?”

  “Cousin,” says Thomas Jefferson, having to force himself to speak above a whisper.

  The man wrinkles his brow and leans his head closer. “Pardon?”

  “Randolph’s cousin,” Thomas Jefferson says more loudly. “I’m his cousin.”

  “Ah!” says the man. “But you’re Jefferson, are you not?”

  Thomas Jefferson nods. “Yes.”

  The man’s eyes squeeze into arcs of delight, and his small mouth forms a distinctly U-shaped smile between his heavy cheeks. “Welcome! Welcome! I am so happy to meet you!” He shakes Thomas Jefferson’s hand vigorously with both of his. “I’m Adams. John Adams.”

  Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. There is no person he has been more eager to meet than this very man still clutching his hand so forcefully.

  “I must confess to being a great admirer of your ‘Summary’ for the Virginia delegation,” says Adams. “I don’t think that anyone has argued our cause half so memorably and succinctly as you have. It is masterful work—absolutely masterful!”

  Thomas Jefferson can hardly believe that he has even met John Adams, let alone that he is hearing such praise. It is a long moment before he can bring himself to utter a quiet “Thank you.”

  “I think we would all be much enlightened if you were to honor us with an address concerning your ideas.” At last Adams lets go of Thomas Jefferson’s hand. “Tomorrow afternoon perhaps?”

  A small noise comes out of Thomas Jefferson’s throat.

  “Excuse me?” says Adams.

  The younger man’s lips move, but still no words emerge. His face has gone paper white. Droplets tremble on his upper lip.

  “I’m sorry,” says Adams, a sharp concern in his large brown eyes. “Are you ill?”

  “No . . . I just . . .”

  Adams leans yet closer and turns his right ear toward Thomas Jefferson. “Yes?”

  “The address . . . I . . . Thank you, but . . .” Thomas Jefferson has to lick his lips before he can continue. “But . . . I . . . I . . . can’t.”

  Thomas Jefferson is not able to stop his dream. He lies, flushed and sweating in the frigid darkness, willing his mind to be clear, his thoughts to be practical and significant—Should a democracy grant citizens the right to resist subpoenas? But the dream moves within his thoughts as if it were their true nature.

  And in his dream Sally Hemings’s invention has become a countryside of steel wheels, leather bellows and chains. And she herself is so resplendent it is almost impossible to look at her as she leads him across shuddering metal bridges, between house-high pistons that plunge and surge and jet shrieking towers of steam, between massive brass cauldrons, the polished flanks of which reveal his face as a gnarled dab of pink that smears and shrinks with his every step and his arms and legs as the ungainly stilts of a mantis or a giraffe.

  Up diamond staircases that ring underfoot, past rows of copper clocks whose numbered faces tell something other than time. Smell of oil and dust and steam. Ceaseless throbbing. A kettledrum rumble. Bangs and clanks and rattles. And through it all, Sally Hemings, her white shift little more than a mist about her dazzling body, drifts up ladders, down corridors, across humming fields as if she herself were only a shred of steam, while Thomas Jefferson must wrench his feet off the ground with every step and feel his throat go raw from lack of breath a
nd his heart kick in his chest.

  At last she leads him out onto a steel balcony with a riveted floor, from the center of which rises something like a wagon wheel, but made entirely out of brass. He knows that if he can only turn this wheel, the machine will stop; he will be able to leave. But the wheel is jammed. He cannot budge it. Neither left nor right.

  “Let me try,” says Sally Hemings, and with a single finger she sets the wheel spinning. Her machine lurches, then rises into the air.

  “What are you doing?” Thomas Jefferson asks.

  “I don’t know,” she replies, the ever-quickening wind whipping her hair straight back behind her head. “I don’t know why any of this is happening.”

  She is smiling. Her storm gray eyes are radiant with delight.

  . . . I have had to pace the room for some minutes in order that I might summon the resolution to finally write about Mr. Jefferson. My head is throbbing, I feel bile rising in my throat and my fingers are cold with sweat. This man is the author of the evil that has ruined the lives of so many good people. It is not possible to forgive him. Nor can I forgive myself. He is my shame, and yet—

  I don’t know what to say.

  My mother’s words come to me: “Well, he is a man, but the Lord didn’t make many men as fine as Mr. Jefferson.”

  The problem is that I cannot conceive of Mr. Jefferson as only one man. So many of the memories I have of him are entirely incompatible with the man I know him to be. And perhaps this is only the mirror image of the way I see myself. Never once did I imagine myself to be evil, and yet I have lived a life in which I can no longer discover the girl who once looked back at me from every mirror with such artless contentment. . . .

  The movie seems to go on forever. Thomas Jefferson wants to leave, but he is in the middle of a row in the middle of a crowded theater, and James and Dolley Madison are seated on either side of him, their expressions somewhere between stupefaction and worship, as they each stare at the wall where brilliant colors swirl and pool and are replaced every instant by other colors or by utter blackness, which, in an instant, explodes into light again—and into noise!

  The noise is staggering. Voices thunder and wail. Tiny sounds—chains jingling on a wagon’s undercarriage, dry leaves scraping across a slate roof—are like cannonades and banshee shrieks piercing the skull from ear to ear. And the music! This must be what music would sound like to a mouse trapped inside the reverberation chamber of his violin.

  Thomas Jefferson slumps in his seat and wants to slide all the way to the floor. He wonders if, in fact, it would be possible to escape the room by crawling between the seats.

  After a long period of looming, booming and frenzied flashing, as well as yet more shockingly intimate behavior on the part of the actors (do they know they are being watched? can they see him in the audience?—Thomas Jefferson finds everything related to these scenes profoundly disconcerting), all at once he is watching a far more static scene, set in a huge room—illuminated, it would seem, only by a full moon—in which the man in the copper-colored wig (now purple) is writing the Declaration to the accompaniment of a stately movement from a concerto grosso by Corelli. This is not so bad, except that Thomas Jefferson’s many days and nights of solitary labor all seem to take place within a single moment and in a room that gradually fills with people, who look over his shoulder as he writes, then cheer when he is done. Also the hand sliding so glibly across the page never hesitates, never crosses out a word and writes in the perfect script of Timothy Matlack.

  Jefferson proposed to me to make the draft. I said, “I will not,” “You should do it.” “Oh! no.” “Why will you not? You ought to do it.” “I will not.” “Why?” “Reasons enough.” “What can be your reasons?” “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.” “Well,” said Jefferson, “if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.” “Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.”

  A meeting we accordingly had, and conned the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose. . .

  We reported it to the committee of five. It was read, and I do not remember that Franklin or Sherman criticized anything. We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson’s handwriting, as he first drew it. Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was. I have long wondered that the original draft had not been published. I suppose the reason is the vehement philippic against Negro slavery.

  —John Adams to Timothy Pickering

  1822

  . . . In my mother’s opinion, all white people—the males especially—were lazy, irritable, corrupt and foolish children whom we, like so many Brother Rabbits, were constantly outsmarting—but Mr. Jefferson was the exception. “He’s the smartest man who ever lived,” she used to tell me. “He’s read every book ever written and knows how everything works—and if he doesn’t know, he can figure it out.” And then, of course, he was famous—so much so that, as she put it, “When he walks down the street in Philadelphia, everybody clears out of his way”—an image that when I was a little girl did a good deal more to confirm my fear of Mr. Jefferson than to help me share her veneration.

  My mother, however, had only the most indefinite idea of what Mr. Jefferson had done to become so famous—and she wasn’t alone. I remember her telling my sister Mary that he was the king of Virginia and Mary saying, “No, he’s the burgess. General Washington is the king.” My brother Bobby was Mr. Jefferson’s body servant in those days, and he once told us that Mr. Jefferson was a “delegate” and a “governor,” but I had no idea what either of these words meant, and Bobby was unable to explain them in a way that made sense to me or, I think, to anyone else in our family.

  One thing that everyone at Monticello knew very well, however, was that Mr. Jefferson was important. We knew that he was written about in the newspapers almost every day and that he was visited by other important men, like General Washington and Mr. Madison. Elegant carriages were always pulling up in front of the great house, and they were filled with men and women dressed in silks and lace and wearing shoes so highly polished they gleamed like the sun on water. Some of these people came from as far away as Boston and New York, and they were clearly thrilled to be in the presence of our master, some so thrilled they were reduced to blushing and stuttering. I remember once helping my mother serve water to guests at a particularly large dinner party and seeing a woman so entranced by what Mr. Jefferson was saying that she kept her full fork hovering over her plate the entire time it took me to make a circuit of the table.

  And even we servants shared a small portion of our master’s fame. On Sundays when we were allowed to go into town for prayer meetings or to sell our livestock and the products of our gardens, men, women and children would point at us and stare. They’d ask in low, hushed voices, “You’re Mr. Jefferson’s people, aren’t you?” They’d want to know what he was like or how it felt to work for such a man.

  There were those among us who hated Mr. Jefferson—the wisest, I now know. But many more were prone to say things like, “Mr. Jefferson is a good master” and “We’re lucky.” My mother told me many times, “Don’t you forget how lucky you are to have Mr. Jefferson for a master!”

  This all seems so pathetic to me now. And cowardly. Yes, we were lucky to be able to go into town on Sundays, and to sell what we grew and raised, and to keep the profits. Yes, Mr. Jefferson had a genuine abhorrence for the cowskin and a desire to be just, even kind. But t
here was still that dank precinct in his heart and that part of his brain that saw Negroes as more animal than man. Yes, we were lucky, but such luck is a mere drop in an ocean of misfortune. That we counted it as more than that only shows how impossible it was to keep off the deadness. . . .

  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  Declaration of Independence

  “What is the matter? Why do you look so sorrowful?” I don’t know. I was just staring at my hand and thinking that it is not my hand. I have been having such odd thoughts. “You have been too much indoors. I will ask Jupiter to saddle Castor and Diomede. It is a fine, clear day. The new leaves are like a green mist on the mountains.” No. I would rather not. I just want to stay here. For the moment, at least. I can’t even imagine getting out of this chair. “You must be catching something. Go to your cabin. I will bring you hot chocolate and biscuits, and I will read to you from Henry Fielding.” I keep having the feeling that I am not myself. That I am not even here. I wonder if I am going mad. “I have often felt a spectator at my own life, that the person I am is only what the world expects of me and that the real me is standing to one side.” Yes. It is something like that. I feel as if I can’t do anything. “It is fancy. It will pass.” I am not sure. “Go lie down and I will read to you from Henry Fielding.”