The golden young woman’s smile momentarily broadens but then all at once shuts off. “You play beautifully,” she says as she gets up from the table and turns her back.
She hurries to a window, and now the dark theater is loud with the noises of crickets, peepers and a bullfrog. When the actor in the copper-colored wig comes up to her, his handsome brow furrowed intelligently, she pushes him away. “No,” she says, and hurries to a corner, where she lowers her face into her hands.
All at once the actor in the copper-colored wig is standing behind her. He hesitates for a long moment before lifting his hands lightly to her shoulders. “Oh, Sal,” he says sorrowfully, and for another long moment she seems determined to reject him. But then, in an instant, she has turned, and, revealing just the faintest flash of a smile, she presses her forehead against his chest.
He wraps his arms around her, shifting her head so that now her cheek is against his chest, and she pulls him suddenly closer, until, in silhouette, they form, together, that classic tableau of masculine protectiveness and grateful female vulnerability.
~ ~ ~
It turns out that Thomas Jefferson is neither dirigible nor cloud nor breeze, but a bronze monument hundreds of feet high, and all of us are trapped inside him, though some of us claim to have come here voluntarily. “He is a great man,” these people argue. “We should be honored to live inside him.” But how can any of us know what sort of man he might be? To us he is only darkness and other people. The air in here is dense with the breath of those who do not eat well and with the corporeal emanations of those who do not wash. We do a lot of blind stumbling, sometimes over the bodies of people who are exhausted, or who have fallen to the floor in a drunken stupor, or who, perhaps, will never again get to their feet. There are a lot of curses, mumbled prayers, grumbles, wails and shocked, infuriated and orgasmic shouting. We are a shabby species, capable of gallows humor, perhaps, but little in the way of greatness. We are venal. We are ignorant. Most of all we are terrified. And we are almost always self-deceived. Why should anyone imagine that Thomas Jefferson might be any different? “Because we fabricated him ourselves,” say those who wish to be hopeful. “Because we built him out of our desires and dreams and our disgust with who we are.”
~ ~ ~
My brothers, sister Harriet and myself, were used alike. We were permitted to stay about the “great house,” and only required to do such light work as going on errands. Harriet learned to spin and to weave in a little factory on the home plantation. We were free from the dread of having to be slaves all our lives long, and were measurably happy. We were always permitted to be with our mother, who was well used. It was her duty, all her life which I can remember, up to the time of father’s death, to take care of his chamber and wardrobe, look after us children and do such light work as sewing, and Provision was made in the will of our father that we should be free when we arrived at the age of 21 years. We had all passed that period when he died but Eston, and he was given the remainder of his time shortly after. He and I rented a house and took mother to live with us, till her death, which event occurred in 1835.
— Madison Hemings
“Life Among the Lowly, No. 1”
Pike County (Ohio) Republican
March 13, 1873
~ ~ ~
It is August 16, 1801. Sally Hemings is twenty-eight, and the air this day is so heavy and hot that the sun seems tarnished and the heaps of cumulus, even at noon, are rust-tinged and indefinite through a haze of steam. It is hard to breathe. Evelina, the servant Thomas Jefferson has provided her, has taken three-and-a-half-year-old Beverly down the hill to spend the afternoon with his grandmother, as he has almost every day for the last year. Holding her three-month-old daughter against her shoulder, Sally Hemings crouches on her front porch and, with one hand, lifts the wooden cover off a bucket of greasy water and drops in the baby’s soiled clout.
A scrape of a shoe over gritty dust.
Then a voice: “At least this time it’s a white one!”
As she reels around, the bucket cover thumps to the porch floor and rolls into the yellow grass. “Jimmy! Oh, my word! Jimmy!”
“Hey there, Cider Jug!”
Jimmy stands in the middle of the road, grinning as if he’s just pulled off a very successful practical joke.
“Oh, my word!” Sally Hemings repeats as he steps up onto the porch. “Oh, Jimmy!” She flings her free arm around him. “Oh, Jimmy! Oh, Jimmy!” She hugs him as hard as she can with her one arm, but he remains inert in her grasp and has the acrid funk of someone who has gone weeks without changing clothes or washing.
She lets him go.
“When did you get here?” she says.
“Just this minute. You’re the first person I’ve seen. Been walking from Charlottesville since before sunrise.”
Despite the heat he is wearing a frock coat and a linen shirt, buttoned to the neck. His shirt is sweat-darkened and his velvet collar marked by multiple lines of salt sediment. He seems to have shrunk since the last time she saw him — coming on two years ago now (just before Thenia was born, she suddenly remembers). He’s gone gaunt, his cheeks look sucked tight against his teeth and there is a deep vertical line on the right side of his mouth. He’s only thirty-six, but he looks fifty, or older.
“Come inside,” she says. “You must want something to eat.”
“No, no, no!” he says. “Nothing for me!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jimmy! You look like a scarecrow.”
“I’m not hungry. I never eat in the morning.”
“But it’s nearly time for dinner.”
An irritated perplexity comes onto Jimmy’s face, and he is silent a moment before nodding at the infant on Sally Hemings’s shoulder. “At least this one’s white.”
Now it is Sally Hemings whose expression is perplexed and worried. She lowers her daughter and holds her with both hands so that Jimmy can see her. “Here you go, Little Bug,” she says. “Time to meet your Uncle Jimmy!”
The little girl, having been disturbed from sleep, goes red in the face, and grimaces as if she is about to cry. But then, with a gurgly peep, she settles back into slumber.
Sally Hemings laughs happily.
“Beautiful,” says Jimmy, though not with any feeling. “A boy or a girl?”
“A girl. Her name is Harriet.”
“Harriet!” Jimmy’s eyes widen, and the corners of his mouth turn down. “Don’t you think that’s bad luck?”
“No!” Sally Hemings cries. “I love that name. And I like to feel that the spirit of her sister lives on in her. Mr. Jefferson feels the same way.”
Jimmy shrugs. “Well, at least she’s white.”
Sally Hemings pulls the baby back up to her shoulder. “Stop saying that, Jimmy! Why are you saying that?”
“It’s better to be white.” Jimmy shrugs again. “That’s all I’m saying. Better for the baby and better for you. I heard about the other one.” He smiles at his sister as if they are complicit in some evil.
Sally Hemings is so angry her knees are trembling. The other one! He never even saw Thenia. How dare he talk about her that way! He’d promised to write, but he never wrote a single letter — not even to say he was sorry she had lost her baby. All this time she’d been thinking he didn’t know. But he did know — somehow — and he’d never even bothered to write.
“What are you doing here, Jimmy?” she says at last.
“I’m back!” He smiles and holds out both hands, as if he has just materialized before her eyes. “Mr. Jefferson just can’t live without me. He’s been trying to get me to come back ever since I left. But I just kept telling him, ‘No. Too busy!’ I was running my own very successful business venture in Baltimore. A restaurant, à la française. In the very best part of town. All of my customers were white — and rich. And they just loved me, even though I spat in every plate as it went out of my kitchen. I really did that. None of them ever knew, of course. I’d stir it up. I did that just so I could always remember that I was better than the whole bunch of them. I really did. They loved me, and I didn’t give a damn about them. That’s the truth. God’s own truth. But then I started to get sick of the whole thing. Didn’t know why I was doing it. And that’s when Mr. Jefferson got in touch with me again. Wrote me this letter saying, ‘Please come cook for me in Washington. Peter can’t cook worth a damn. Please come cook for me again, and I’ll give you ten dollars a month.’ I said, ‘You give me twenty dollars a month and that’s a deal.’ And he said yes, so here I am!”