Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 7

Poor Mrs. Jefferson. She was never anything but kind to me. Even when she could no longer speak, she would still cast me lingering glances and smiles.

  In less than a month, she was dead. . . .

  It is 1784. In the months after Martha died, Thomas Jefferson lost three stone, and now, more than a year later, he is still so thin that the contours of his teeth are visible through his cheeks, and multiple deep creases fan vertically on either side of his mouth. He arrives late for every session of Congress and leaves early whenever he can manage it. For several weeks he throws himself into preparing a bill that will determine how the Northwest Territory is to be managed, but when his provision banning slavery within the territory after 1800 is deleted under pressure from southern delegates, his exhaustion is total, and more spiritual than physical. He is through with politics. He will return to farming. If he never sets foot in a congressional meeting again, he will count himself a lucky man.

  He is sitting at the table of the Virginia delegation, dull-eyed, staring into space, tearing strips from a newspaper, crumpling them into balls, then unfolding them. James Madison is seated beside him. They are alone. Night has fallen so recently that they are unaware of it. The panes on the windows all around them wobble and swirl, like a full stream in April frozen midflow. The light from their solitary oil lamp and their illuminated faces is broken into yellow twists on the glass, like the topmost flames in a fireplace, just before they vanish into black.

  “I don’t want to,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “You will be working with Adams,” says Madison. “And Dr. Franklin loves Paris.”

  “Then why is he leaving?”

  “He’s not,” says Madison. “Not yet. At least not officially. He’s old, though. Eighty if he’s a day. And if he waits much longer, he won’t be strong enough for the return voyage.”

  “I get seasick in a canoe.”

  Thomas Jefferson places a ball of paper on the table, then flicks it away with his middle finger.

  Madison speaks in the low voice of reproach. “Tom.” And then his eyes widen and he slaps his hand on the table. “It’s Paris, Tom! Paris! There’s no more beautiful city in the world! And when Adams goes to London and Dr. Franklin returns home, you are certain to be minister.”

  Thomas Jefferson gives Madison a leaden glance. “And spend my days negotiating tobacco duties with fat aristocrats and singing the praises of our blubber oil to quartermaster generals across the Continent?”

  Madison leans close, his voice thrumming in Thomas Jefferson’s ear. “The French women, you know, are very fond of Americans and very free with their affections. Dr. Franklin is an old man, but by all reports, he has no shortage of female company.”

  Thomas Jefferson places another crumpled ball of paper on the tabletop.

  “And the wine!” says Madison. “The French wine!”

  Flick. The crumpled ball arcs off the edge of the table and hits the shadowy floor just in front of the vacant speaker’s desk.

  “Please stop,” says Thomas Jefferson.

  “But our minister to France must be a cultivated man. A philosopher. Dr. Franklin has set a precedent. No one can better take his place than you.”

  “I said stop.”

  Madison flings himself back in his chair and sinks into brooding.

  “I’m tired of political life,” says Thomas Jefferson. “And in any event, I don’t have the mettle for it. I disgraced myself as governor—”

  “Tom!”

  “Don’t!” Thomas Jefferson smacks the flat of his hand down onto the table. “You of all people should allow me to speak plainly.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself.”

  “I’m not hard enough.” Thomas Jefferson screws shut the top of his inkwell and wipes the tips of his quills. “But the main point is that I despise myself when I engage in politics. I entirely lack the stomach for bullying and bribery. Compromise so enrages me that I have not had a moment these last weeks free of headache.” He places into his satchel the remainder of the newspaper from which he has been tearing strips. “I serve my country best with my pen. And I am happiest at home, among my books. There is no point pretending otherwise.” He wraps the inkwell and the quills in a chamois bag that he also places into his satchel.

  All at once Madison leans forward and touches his friend on the shoulder. “You’re too much alone,” he says. “I fear for you this winter, alone on your mountaintop.”

  “Then you must come visit me.” Thomas Jefferson’s half smile fades into something like irritation.

  “Stop it, Tom!”

  “Stop what?”

  “You’re being a fool.”

  “I hate politics! I loathe politicians! I just want to return to the life I was born for. How can you forbid me that?”

  Madison sinks back into his chair. Thomas Jefferson inserts a strap into the buckle of his satchel.

  “Lafayette specifically asked that you be sent to Paris,” says Madison.

  Thomas Jefferson stops, his fingers resting on the buckle. He does not look around. He is staring but not seeing anything. He has grown perfectly still.

  The subway lights flicker and come back on, but the ragged metallic screeching continues. Thomas Jefferson knows that if he doesn’t stand up now, if he doesn’t cross the car and find a way of speaking to Sally Hemings, he will never have another chance. He knows this, but he cannot move.

  II

  In Sally Hemings’s dream, she is walking down a street of very tall buildings with jagged, glinting roofs, and she is lost. She is walking with Thomas Jefferson, but he is a shadow, and he disappears when they pass through the shadows of buildings. He is holding her hand—or she thinks he is holding her hand. “Hurry!” he says. They are going someplace very important, and only he knows the way. At first she doesn’t know where they are going, and then she realizes that she is a baby and that he is taking her to the place where she will be born. “Hurry!” he says. “You have to hurry!”

  She wants to be born. If she isn’t born, she will have to be a shadow in a world of shadows. She is not a shadow now. She is a baby. Except most of the time she doesn’t look like a baby; she looks like herself: long-legged and long-armed, and with a face that is almost a woman’s face. And sometimes Thomas Jefferson is not a shadow. She can see him, or parts of him. And she can feel his hand, which is very, very strong—so strong that she worries her hand will be crushed.

  “Hurry!” he tells her. “They will leave without us!”

  Thomas Jefferson is angry. He is running, but she can’t run with him, because she is barefoot and the streets are covered with jagged, glinting shards and her feet are getting cut. “Run!” he tells her. “You have to run! They are almost gone!” But she can’t run. The shards slice and tear. Her feet are bloody.

  She wants to call out to him, but she can’t make a noise. All she can do is clutch his hand, his arm, and claw at the lapel of his coat. Her feet are bleeding, and she knows that she is about to fall onto the shards.

  But then he is holding her in his arms. She has her arms around his neck, and his arms around her are so very strong, and he is running so fast that everything is turning white, and there is this horrible noise that is also like a form of whiteness, and she wonders if this means she is being born or if she is dying.

  . . . I am trying to tell the truth to its “teeth and forehead,” as Shakespeare says. Yet I am afraid that I am building a big lie out of tiny facts, that everything I say about who I was and how I lived will imply that I could have lived no other life, that I was entirely dispossessed of freedom of will. The simple fact that tortures me to this very instant is that I was never without freedom of will, that at any of countless junctures I could have said, “No,” and I would have lived a different life. Nothing was truly inevitable, and even when I didn’t know I was making a choice, I was—and I must bear the burden of those choices.
Most troubling of all, however, are the times when I did know I was making a choice and a voice inside me told me that the choice was wrong but I didn’t listen—because I didn’t believe the voice, or I didn’t want to believe it, or because I couldn’t really hear it among a thousand other voices. But nevertheless, it spoke, and I didn’t listen, and now I am damned. . . .

  In history every fact is an element in a mathematical equation: Thomas Jefferson + John Adams + Philadelphia + skinny red ponytail over broad blue collar + pen = Declaration of Independence = the world as we know it. In history almost the entire human race exists in dusklight, murmuring inaudibly, ankle-high to Thomas Jefferson, who is perpetually effulgent with sunrise, who strides the cobbled spaces between monuments with chin raised, eyes fixed on distant prospects, and who knows cumulus clouds mounting aesthetically in ethereal blue but has never known rain.

  There are other people in history. George Washington, for example, who is also dawn-effulgent, also massive, a monument in and of himself, maybe a little larger than Thomas Jefferson or a tad smaller. And that bald head, draped around the edges by long, gray hair, those wire-rimmed spectacles, that expression indicating something between peptic distress and discombobulation—that’s Ben Franklin, of course. In history the three men come together, and their speech is of such august profundity that it can never be adequately imagined.

  But in life almost everything that Thomas Jefferson eats makes him sick, and so the indoor privies of his Paris mansion, the Hôtel de Langeac, are an endlessly renewed blessing, night and day.

  In life Thomas Jefferson is lost. One moment he is imagining that if he were to mount a four-sided book stand on casters like those he devised for his swivel chair, he could switch from book to book with the flick of a finger, and in the next moment he is lost. The streets of Paris are so narrow, disheveled and labyrinthine that a minute’s distraction is enough to erase the connections between where he is, where he was and where he wishes to be. Thomas Jefferson spots a liveried footman, asks directions, but his French fails him so miserably that he can only pretend he has understood. And so he walks off and arbitrarily turns left, then right, and abandons himself to fate.

  Semen, of course, is the most vital source of masculine energy, but it is also true that if too much semen accumulates within a man’s body, he can go insane. Dr. Richard Gem, the preeminent American physician in Paris, is concerned that, as a grieving widower, Thomas Jefferson is not adequately venting his semen and so is putting his reason at risk. Onanism is not, Gem insists, a safe method for keeping bodily fluids in balance, as it can also lead to madness, in part because of its tendency to inspire excessive indulgence (it is a well-known fact that the insane are universally addicted to this practice). According to the doctor, the only healthy way to discharge excess semen is in the embrace of a young woman. Gem prescribes weekly visits to the house of Madame Benezet. Thomas Jefferson attempts to comply with this prescription but finds the women chez Madame Benezet wholly insincere in their friendliness, and he is disturbed by the presumptions they make about his character. Lafayette and Danqueville suggest that there is no reason for him to pay for the favors of women, since, as a dashing and cultured American, he can have his pick of the belles of Parisian society. But his friends’ forthrightness and ease in female company are all but unimaginable to Thomas Jefferson, and so he takes to maintaining the proper balance of his vital fluids on his own, by expelling semen once a week, or sometimes twice, but never more often.

  It is September 6, 1786. Thomas Jefferson has drunk two bottles of wine over dinner and believes that he is in love with Maria Cosway, who is a portrait painter, seventeen years his junior and married, and who has drunk nearly as much wine as he has. He wants to prove to her that his love is a mad joy and that he is as vigorous and adept as a man half his age, so he leaps a cistern in the place Louis XV, but his toe catches on the far rim and he descends to the flagstones in an inverted position, breaking his right wrist so badly that he will have to write with his left hand for much of a year and suffer, for the rest of his life, unpredictable squawks whenever he plays even the simplest tunes on his violin.

  Maria Cosway laughs and laughs, thinking, What a silly man!, thinking he is only playacting as he rolls back and forth on the flagstones, howling. And as he howls, Thomas Jefferson thinks that Martha would never have laughed at the sight of him in such pain, and he thinks that he doesn’t, in fact, love Maria Cosway. And as she comes to realize that he is not playacting, she, too, thinks that she does not love him—this clumsy American, with his farmer’s accent—that he is pompous, and a bore, and that she was a fool to have betrayed her husband for him, though, in fact, she will continue to write to Thomas Jefferson long after he has left France and returned to Virginia and long after she has left her prodigiously unfaithful husband and moved into a convent in Italy, and Thomas Jefferson will write to her—two letters a year, three, sometimes more—and their correspondence will continue until she is an old woman and he is a much older man, and there will, in fact, be an unfinished letter to him on her desk the day she receives word from John Trumbull that Thomas Jefferson has died.

  But that drunken night in Paris, Thomas Jefferson cannot see Maria Cosway as she bends over him making sympathetic noises that he knows to be insincere. There are no streetlights, and he and she only dared take a walk after their dinner because the sky was cloudless and there was a gibbous moon—although now that moon is pumpkin orange and steeple-pierced, and in a minute it will have been absorbed by its own flickery fire on the Seine. Thomas Jefferson can see stars around the amorphous obscurity that is Maria Cosway, bent over him, uttering low coos and singsong consolations such as are normally addressed to children, and he is not so drunk that he doesn’t know that the darkness on the streets soon will be of such profundity that he will be all but blind after he has seen her to her hotel and then as he makes his way home, in agony, by starlight, and that the journey will take hours.

  But those hours, unrecorded, will never exist in history, nor will the starlight and the pumpkin moon, nor those bottles of wine, nor Thomas Jefferson’s laughter, nor Maria Cosway’s, nor their kisses across the dinner table, nor those deeper kisses just before he tells her, “Watch this!” and begins to run toward the cistern.

  It is June 26, 1787. Sally Hemings is fourteen and has arrived in a country where the air smells of rancid meat and of flowers too long in the vase, and all the people speak in grunts, coughs and fluting whinnies. In one hand she holds the canvas bag that contains her every possession in the world. Her other hand is on the shoulder of Polly Jefferson, whom she clutches against her side. Beside them on the stone quay is a waist-high sea chest stuffed with Polly’s belongings. Her little sister, Lucy, is dead of the whooping cough, and Polly has come from Virginia to live with her father and her big sister, Patsy, in France. But this mud- and gravel-colored city is not France. Sally Hemings does not know what this city is. She thinks it might be London.

  “What’s happened to Captain Ramsey?” says Polly, who is nearly nine years old but so small and frail she looks six. Her hair is exactly the rich earth-brown of Sally Hemings’s, and the two girls have done their hair in an identical fashion, with hanks drawn back loosely from the temples and framed by the ruffle of their cotton bonnets. Sally’s bonnet, however, is topped by a straw hat, partially eaten by mice during their passage (at the crown and the back), and pinned, through the bonnet, to her hair.

  “He’ll be right back,” she says.

  “But where did he go?”

  “Didn’t you listen?” Sally Hemings is irritated, but she knows she shouldn’t be, so she gives Polly’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze and speaks softly. “He’s just looking for the porter. He’ll be right back.”

  “But why didn’t he send Mr. George?” says Polly. “Or one of the mateys?”

  “They’re busy, I reckon.” Sally Hemings gives Polly’s shoulder another squeeze, but more for her own enc
ouragement this time.

  She doesn’t like Captain Ramsey. Throughout their five weeks at sea, he was always coming up behind her, slapping her on the bottom and shouting, “Get along there, girl!” One night when she was on her way back from emptying Polly’s chamber pot over the gunwale, he stopped her at the top of the companionway and put his hand on her bodice, just over her left breast. When she pushed his hand away, he said, “What’s the matter! I just want to see how healthy you are.” That is the worst he ever did, and he has never been anything but grandfatherly to Polly—who loves him as if he actually were her grandfather—but Sally Hemings suspects he’s one of those white men her mammy has told her about, the ones you have to keep your eye on.

  She looks down the long marble quay toward the building with the huge windows into which Captain Ramsey disappeared. He ought to have been back ages ago; it can’t take that much time to find a porter.

  When their ship docked, brilliant silver and white clouds with gray undersides were scattered across a powder blue sky, but since then the clouds have grown steadily denser and darker, and she can see a heron-blue smear of rain falling diagonally beyond the big building.

  A sudden chilly gust blows down the quay, and she has to hold on to her hat. This is a cold country, she thinks. It is nearly July, and yet she and Polly have to wear their shawls tight across their shoulders if they want to keep from shivering. France will be nicer, she hopes.

  Polly makes a small noise and flings her arms around Sally Hemings’s shoulders.

  A bearded man in a black coat is standing just behind Polly, holding the grips of a wooden wheelbarrow and shouting, in a low, angry voice, words that sound like English chopped into pieces and rearranged in a nonsensical order. The front edge of his wheelbarrow is actually touching Polly’s skirts, and the girl seems to want to climb into Sally Hemings’s arms.