There is a platform beside the fire and, on top of the platform, a wicker canoe connected by slender lines to the inverted purse. A young man, also wearing blue, yellow and red silk, climbs a ladder and steps gingerly into the canoe. His curly chestnut brown hair falls well past his shoulders.
Thomas Jefferson touches his forehead to Sally Hemings’s temple. His breaths puff against her ear, and his voice is low. “That is le Comte de Toytot.”
The man sitting in the canoe is making a speech, but Sally Hemings’s French has vanished. She understands nothing — except that he is about to fly.
And then, in a single instant, four men with swords cut the four ropes and the inverted purse lifts from the earth with the fluid grace of a wave at sea. As the wicker canoe swings off the platform and also begins to rise, the foolish young count with the long brown hair laughs — as if he has not committed an abomination, and is not about to die, as if he has never, in fact, been happier in his life.
“What is he doing!” Sally Hemings cries, grabbing Thomas Jefferson’s sleeve.
“Nothing.” Thomas Jefferson smiles. “Just this: He is going to fly like a bird. And then, when the air inside the ballon cools, he will sink slowly to the earth. It is all safe. All under control.”
This time she believes Thomas Jefferson, not only because he knows more than any man on earth but because she can see that what he is saying is true. The man and the ballon continue to rise with a breathtaking grandeur, sideways, drifting with the breeze.
But then something changes: A hollowness comes into her throat, and the whole of her body goes cold, and all at once she becomes aware that Thomas Jefferson has taken hold of her hand, the one with which she had grabbed his sleeve.
The hollowness in her throat expands and becomes a sort of dizziness. What is happening makes no sense. Why would he do such a thing? Again and again she wonders if the pressure she feels on her fingers could possibly be the pressure of his hand, and again and again she tells herself, No, it can’t be.
But then her hand is empty, and Thomas Jefferson is running. The entire crowd is running. She can still feel the pressure of his hand and the sweat their hands made together, but now he is far enough away that she would have to shout for him to hear. She lifts the skirt of her yellow gown and runs across the field after him, along with the rest of the crowd, until finally, at the edge of a wood, they must all stop, while the ballon—now higher than several houses piled one atop the other — glides silently over the trees.
Over the trees! A man flying over the trees!
Now Thomas Jefferson is next to her again. “Should I ask le comte to take us with him next time?” he says, his lips once again beside her ear. “Would you like to fly with le Comte de Toytot?”
“Oh, no!” says Sally Hemings. “I’d be too afraid!” Then, almost immediately, she thinks, Yes! I do want to fly with le comte! I do! I do! Oh, please ask him! Please take me with you!
But these words never pass her lips.
~ ~ ~
Sally Hemings is dead. The yard behind her house in Charlottesville is loud with the braying of mockingbirds. The rag-and-bone man’s cart clatters on the cobblestone street out front. Her children are gathered around her bed: her three slump-shouldered sons and her daughter, who has not been back to Virginia in thirteen years and who arrived only minutes after her mother breathed her last.
Sally Hemings’s dead children are there also: the daughter taken by fever after she had learned to walk but before she could ever run; the daughter who, small enough to cradle between elbow and palm, never recovered from the trial of being born; and the one Sally Hemings always called “La Petite,” who had been conceived in Paris and who, no bigger than her mother’s fist, came into this world on a river of blood and was buried at Monticello in a ceramic pot.
The dead children grieve, but their grief is gentle, like a winter fog over a yellow field. The grief of her living children has turned them to stone. They do not talk. They are waiting for something to change, and nothing will ever change. The youngest son is holding a violin, but he has left the bow in the front room.
Outside the window the trees heave in a sudden wind. The sky grows dark, and the mockingbirds fall silent. For long moments rain is about to fall, but after a rumble of thunder the wind recedes and the sun returns.
Now Thomas Jefferson, who has been dead himself for more than eight years, is also in the room. Sally Hemings looks at him but doesn’t say a word.
Minutes pass before he finds the strength to tell her, “I wanted you to be happy, but you were never happy.”
“I was happy,” she says.
“With me?”
“Yes,” she says. “I was happy.”
But Thomas Jefferson does not believe her. He does not believe her because he himself was never happy. There were many, many times when he pretended otherwise: the time when she acted out the story of Cinderella with a teacup, a soup spoon and two forks, and the two of them laughed and laughed and laughed; or the time they spent the whole day riding, then cooled off with a swim in Johnson’s Creek and then made love on a horse blanket spread over a bed of mint; or that afternoon when he was sitting beside her on her bed, bouncing three-month-old Beverly on his knee, and suddenly the tiny boy’s delighted squeaks and coos came together in a chuckle and then a full belly laugh — his first ever. Thomas Jefferson knew many such moments with Sally Hemings and managed to believe, each time, that he was happy, that Sally Hemings was happy, that no two people could be happier. But now he knows that on every one of those occasions his own happiness had been infected by fear, by his sense that what he believed was happiness could not, in fact, ever exist in this world and that in a moment he would have to live in the world as it actually was: a place of unending loss and shame.
He takes the empty chair between two of their living sons and across the bed from the third son and their daughter. “No,” he says. “You were never happy. There is no need to lie anymore.”
“I am not lying,” she says, but after that she can think of nothing else to say.
For a long time the silence in the room only deepens. Then a mockingbird launches into a fleet and fragmentary improvisation.
~ ~ ~
“You cannot pretend to be ignorant of the effect you have upon me,” says Thomas Jefferson.
It is the evening following le Comte de Toytot’s flight. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings are seated across a corner of the dining-room table, before the fire. There are two wine bottles between them, one empty, the other not quite. There are also two glasses. Thomas Jefferson has just finished his. Sally Hemings’s is almost full. This is her third glass. He has been counting. Or maybe her fourth.
“And what is more,” he says, smiling tenderly, “you cannot pretend that you do not share my feelings. I can see it in your eyes.”
Sally Hemings is not, in fact, looking at Thomas Jefferson. She is looking at her hands, her right thumb massaging repeatedly the center of her left palm.
“I could see it,” he says, “when you took my hand out on the field. Do you remember? Just as le Comte de Toytot was borne into the air?”
Thomas Jefferson wants her to look at him again. He reaches across the table, places the edge of his bent index finger beneath her chin and lifts.