Sally Hemings smiles, then sighs heavily.
“But what if we never make love?” she says. “Or what if we do make love but in the next instant everything changes and it turns out we have not made love at all? And what if it turns out that we have never said any of the things we are saying now and all of this never happened, even in our memories?”
“But now — in this solitary instant, at least — it is happening. Even if we never make love, now we are together in a moment in which we want to make love and in which we know that our lovemaking is imminent. This is a very good moment all by itself. Why should we need anything more?”
“But won’t it be a loss if we never do make love? Or if, all at once, we have no memory of having made love? Or even of being together? Or if, in an instant, we mean as little to each other as two people separated by a thousand years and a thousand miles?”
“It will only be a loss,” says Thomas Jefferson, “if we know what we have lost. And if we don’t, then each moment is only itself. It is absolutely pure.”
Account Book
1. While Thomas Jefferson was assiduous about listing all of his expenditures in his Memorandum Books, which he kept from the start of his law practice in 1767 until his death, he was far less assiduous about totaling up those expenditures against his income, and so, until very late in life, and despite having to pay off the occasional pressing loan from a bank, he operated on the assumption that he was a wealthy man, without serious financial worries.
2. At the time of his death, he was $107,000 in debt, which would amount to approximately $2.4 million in today’s money. The majority of his debt was inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles, who, like most southern plantation owners, had borrowed heavily from British banks and whose debt was unaffected by the Revolution.
3. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson’s salary as president was $25,000, and he spent $33,636.44—including $3,100 for a new carriage and horses that he felt were suitable for the dignity of his new office, and $2,797.38 for wine.
4. In 1815, partially in an attempt to diminish his debt, he sold his collection of 6,847 books to the Library of Congress to replace the 3,000 books burned by the British during the War of 1812. He received $23,950.
5. In 1798 Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish general who served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, drew up a will leaving Thomas Jefferson $20,000 to purchase the freedom of slaves (his own and others) and buy them land. The will was hotly contested by Kościuszko’s Polish family when he died in 1817 (and, indeed, the family ultimately won their suit), but even had the money gone to Thomas Jefferson, it would have been only enough to free roughly thirty slaves, which would have meant a 23 percent cut in Monticello’s labor force at a time when Thomas Jefferson already owed in excess of $80,000—a state of affairs that may well have entered into his decision not to claim the bequest.
6. In 1818 Thomas Jefferson guaranteed a loan of $20,000 to Wilson Cary Nicholas, a former governor of Virginia, who subsequently defaulted on his debt, leaving Thomas Jefferson responsible for that money, too, the interest payments on which amounted to $1,200 per year.
~ ~ ~
Often they are bored, in the manner of misty rain under pale cloud light, or of after-dinner whist-table restlessness, or of a head cold that makes every possibility seem pointless and squalid. Other times Thomas Jefferson might come upon Sally Hemings, momentarily looking up from her sewing, her face in that lost vacancy that so often comes over it when she is thinking, and he will ache with such tenderness that he will want to sweep her into his arms and cover her neck with kisses, even though the ever-vigilant Martha is eyeing him ruefully from her chair by the fire. Or Sally Hemings will look away from him as a means of controlling her trembling rage as he tells her yet again that the world will not allow him to love her openly and therefore that she should not expect him to show his love, and finally she will turn to him and say, “What makes you think I even want your love, Mr. Jefferson?” Or he will say, “How I wish that we could marry!” and she will put her hand on top of his and say, “Don’t,” or she will say, “But we are married!” and then feel a knot of humiliation in her chest. Or they will be walking beside a lake on an autumn morning and, with a sound like a gigantic sigh, a great blue heron will lift out of the reeds and, gathering masses of air under its huge, wafting wings, it will arc above its own reflection, then soar over the tops of the trees, and she will cry out, “Oh, Tom, look! Isn’t that so beautiful! Isn’t that the most magnificent bird!” Or they will be naked together in the bed of the lodge, and they will be gasping, tasting each other’s sweat, and each will pour through the body of the other like a wild river. Or she will be wound up tightly in the sheets, sulking, and he will be out on the porch with a headache, thinking of the farmer in Amherst who told him that when his slave mistresses get to be too much trouble, he just sells them cheap. Or she will be looking at his brown teeth, his folded neck, the vertical grooves in his cheeks, and she will be think, This is an old body. This is a body that is wearing down, getting uglier every day. Or she will be lying with her head on his shoulder, listening to the rumble inside his chest as he tells her about the letter he wrote that morning to Napoleon, and she will be thinking, How is it possible that this man was just inside my body, this man who will never be forgotten as long as there are men and women walking this earth?
But mostly this will be their life together:
She will pour him a glass of water and then pour one for herself, and then their throats will make glugging clicks while they both drink deeply, and when at last they take the glasses away from their mouths, they will both make crisp, satisfied sighs. Or they will both be reading on the porch, and she will be aware of the loud flap every time he turns a page, which sometimes will annoy her, other times not at all. Or seated diagonally across the table, he will tell her again, between bites, that he has little taste for lamb, and she will tell him again that lamb is her favorite among meats. Or they will be sitting on the slanted rock on the edge of the Rivanna. She will dive in and a moment later he will follow, and when their heads rise above the surface, they will already be several yards downstream, and they will continue to slide between the wooded riverbanks as they chat, trade splashes, swim.
~ ~ ~
I was born… at Monticello, Jefferson’s beautiful Virginia home, on June 6, 1815, just before Waterloo. Jefferson was an ideal master. He was a democrat in practice as well as theory, was opposed to the slave trade, tried to keep it out of the Territories beyond the Ohio river and was in favor of freeing the slaves in Virginia. In 1787 he introduced that famous “Jefferson proviso” in Congress, prohibiting slavery in all the Northwestern Territory, comprising the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. He had made all arrangements to free his slaves at his death by making three prizes of his property, &c.
— The Reverend Peter Fossett
“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”
New York Sunday World
January 30, 1898
~ ~ ~
It is 1809, and the world is white, particulate, hurtling and loud. First Thomas Jefferson cannot feel his fingertips, then his feet fade away, and then the outside of his right leg. His lead horse leaves bloody tracks in the snow.