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 and 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.