“All men are as nothing to you!” Marshall shouts in his tinny voice. “They are a concept entirely devoid of meaning. You care about no one’s liberty but your own. And no man can be equal to you by definition. ‘Equality’ in your parlance is a rock, a cudgel, a battering ram! A cannibal in the raiment of a patriarch!”
“You are a monarchist!” I tell him, my voice rattling the windows, causing plaster dust to sprinkle from the ceiling cracks. “You are a corrupt artifact of an obsolete era! A monocrat! A tyrant! A consolidationist!”
Marshall, gray-haired, storm-browed, is nevertheless a child sitting at a child’s desk. He folds his papers impatiently, stuffs them into a leather satchel and stands. “We are judged,” he says as he moves toward the door, “not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.” He opens the door, then slams it behind him, but its sound is obliterated by my booming laughter.
~ ~ ~
… Far worse than the scars of lash or club is the theft of one’s dignity. When one’s human value is seen only in regard to how thoroughly one surrenders one’s own desires to those of the master and how effectively one’s labors contribute to the comfort, dignity and freedom of the master, and especially when one has no freedom whatsoever but to submit to this state of affairs, it is almost impossible to believe that one might be admired, loved and treated with respect in one’s own right, and that one might deserve to be treated so, and that one is equally deserving of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The narrow compass one is allowed for the exercise of one’s freedom — within one’s own home and mind and, under the more beneficent of masters, on one’s scant acre of land — can only confirm one’s sense of worthlessness. As every farmer knows, a man can work to the point of exhaustion every day and still end up penniless and starving, and such a fate is only more likely for the slave who can only tend his garden or his stock after he has finished his master’s work, which often lasts until after dark. Likewise, when the secrets of domestic harmony can elude even the wealthiest of men, how likely is it that they should be accessible to the poorest? And when one has been denied the basic comforts and freedoms of life, even one’s own mind offers no sanctuary. One’s very desire to live a decent and ordinary life can be an unending source of humiliation, and one’s outrage at injustice can be exhausting and all too easily transformed into self-loathing. And so the desire to lie to oneself or to make much of small blessings becomes irresistible, and thus a further humiliation. The very songs we sing to escape our chains themselves become our chains….
~ ~ ~
Thomas Jefferson is holding a candle in the corridor outside Sally Hemings’s room. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Might I come in?” He goes into the room, and the corridor is dark. Nothing can be seen. But his words are audible through the door: “My sweet girl!… So lovely… I will make it good…. I will be gentle. You will see…. Gentle… I will make it good…. Good…”
~ ~ ~
James and Dolley Madison’s faces pulsate orange and red. A sound like a river of peanuts pouring over a cliff fills the dark room. Although Benedict Arnold actually set fire to Richmond in the morning, at which point Thomas Jefferson had long since resigned as governor of Virginia and fled on horseback, in the dark theater Richmond’s pulsating orange and red flames rise from the city’s crumbling rooftops to encompass the entire night sky, and the actor in the copper-colored wig — in silhouette against the towering flames, except for one handsome cheek and the flank of his noble nose — shouts “Hah!” whips his horse with his cocked hat and rides off bareback into the impenetrable night.
Not long afterward the actor in the copper-colored wig is again on horseback (saddled this time) and again using his hat as a whip as he careens down one slope of Monticello while a detachment of British dragoons marches up the other.
Then comes the famous moment, the one that Thomas Jefferson has recounted with gratitude and pride scores of times and that his children will recount in their turn, as will their descendants for generations to come: Martin Hemings is standing in the dining room of the great house. One of the dragoons is holding a pistol to Martin’s chest. The British commander, who would seem to be General Cornwallis, although, in fact, Cornwallis was a hundred miles away at the time, has just told Martin he will be shot unless he confesses where his master has gone, and Martin replies, “Fire away, then.”
After these words the British commander’s plump, pink face looms gigantically in the dark theater. It is possible, by observing the alteration of the actor’s features, to actually track the progress of Martin’s statement as it slowly makes its way to the center of the commander’s plump, pink brain. There is a moment of stillness, followed by a nod that is mainly a lowering of eyelids, and then there is a gun blast and the appearance of a single dot of blood on the rim of the commander’s right nostril.
“What!” cries Thomas Jefferson, leaping from his seat. “No! No!”
James and Dolley Madison have also leapt to their feet, but only to drag their friend back down into his seat. People in the back of the theater are shouting for them all to sit down.
“That never happened!” says Thomas Jefferson. “That simply never happened!”
A man sitting behind them taps Thomas Jefferson on the elbow. “For chrissakes! It’s only a movie! Would you just sit down?”
Dolley Madison speaks softly into his ear. “It’s all right, Tom. Just wait, you’ll see, the ending is quite uplifting.”
~ ~ ~
“Why did you do that?” says Max, dropping the script onto his desk. “Do what?” says Jeremy, who has been lying on the couch under the window, texting his girlfriend.
“I liked that scene.”
“What scene?” Jeremy rests his phone on his solar plexus.
“The one where Sally’s brother says, ‘Fire away!’”
“Oh.” Jeremy swings his bare feet to the floor and sits up. He puts his phone facedown on the couch beside him. “I like it better that way.”
“So what?”
“I think it’s better.”
“But they didn’t shoot him.”
Jeremy shrugs just as his phone sounds the electric clink-clonk of an incoming text. At first he seems to be ignoring the text, but then he picks the phone up, looks at it and puts it down.
“I want to change it back to the way I wrote it,” says Max.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what actually happened, and I think it’s a cool scene.”
“How do you know it happened?”
“It’s in every single one of the books. And anyway Martin was alive until—”
“I don’t believe it.”
“What?”
“That he said that. It’s so fucking corny! So morally fucking uplifting! ‘Fire away!’ That’s like something out of a fucking Victorian children’s story. Like Sunday school.” His unanswered text clink-clonks a second time. “Hold on a second.” He thumbs a one-word message into the phone and hits SEND.
“But you have him say it,” says Max.
Jeremy looks at him blankly.
“‘Fire away,’” says Max. “That’s the part you left in.”
“Yeah, but shooting him makes it all ironic.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He gets all moralistic and full of himself, then — whammo! — he’s dead. I think that’s funny.”