~ ~ ~
Sally Hemings has always loved the main staircase, which descends in a crazy, angular spiral along the walls of the cockeyed space between the ballroom and the front hall, but once she resumes living at the Hôtel de Langeac after her five-week absence, she takes only the rear stairs, which let out in the narrow corridor just outside the kitchen, and she uses the Hôtel’s side entrance onto rue Neuve-de-Berri when she goes shopping for Jimmy or Clotilde or when she has to fetch the Misses Jefferson from their school.
As a result of these practices, she only rarely catches sight of Thomas Jefferson during the days when his daughters are not present at the HÔtel. And on those occasions when she does spot him at the end of a hall or in a room she is passing, she always averts her head, pretending she doesn’t see him, but not without noticing that he, too, shifts his gaze away from her.
One morning she descends the rear staircase and comes face-to-face with Thomas Jefferson as he is leaving the kitchen. He blushes so deeply that his hair looks yellow, and after a moment of flustered fidgeting he presses himself against the wall and gestures for her to pass. Neither of them says a word.
~ ~ ~
True hate is effortless. It is called into being spontaneously, inevitably, by the hateful object. When the object is not purely hateful, however, hate requires effort, and if such hate regards the complexly hateful object as if it were purely hateful, then the hate itself is not pure. The world abhors purity. The world abhors most things proclaimed true. The world abhors perfection.
And because we ourselves cannot be perfect, there are moments when the effort of hating the hateful thing is more than we can manage — moments of indifference, or of forgiveness, or even of admiration. And if the hateful thing is sufficiently deserving of our hate, those moments in which we are not sufficiently hate-filled can inspire us to hate ourselves, just a little or sometimes a great deal. This is because hate is so intertwined with morality as to make the two seem almost indistinguishable.
Love, too, is intertwined with morality, but far less intimately. We are more than capable of loving someone without thinking him or her morally perfect. But when we hate someone, it is almost impossible for us not to think of that person as evil.
It is a well-known fact that hate not unambiguously anchored on moral condemnation tends to degenerate over time into gentler emotions, or into no emotion at all. And it is also true that hate anchored only on fury can spontaneously flip over into love, that most capacious of emotions, that emotion which can not only thrive in the presence of hate but be intensified by it. And for this reason our tendency to think of love as life’s greatest blessing is, alas, little more than sentimentality.
~ ~ ~
Sally Hemings is standing at the window at the top of the kitchen stairs, looking down into the garden where Thomas Jefferson is kneeling on the flagstone path between the beds of black earth that will soon be lush with cabbage, squash, beans, cucumbers and corn — all grown from seeds sent from Monticello. He licks the tip of his index finger and sticks it into an open envelope he is holding in his left hand. Carefully pulling his finger straight up out of the envelope, he peers at something on its tip and pushes his finger deep into the soft, moist earth in front of him. Then he smooths earth over the hole he has just made, licks his finger again, puts it back into the envelope and plunges it once more into the earth. He repeats this exercise twenty or thirty times before, with a childlike concentration on detail, he folds down the flap of the envelope, folds the envelope itself in half and slips it into the pocket of his frock coat.
Batting the earth flecks from his hands, he stands up and takes a step back to survey his work, not noticing the rake lying teeth-down directly behind him. His left foot steps on the rake handle, and he staggers, catching his right heel on the uneven pavement and toppling backward into the next vegetable bed, where he attempts to halt his fall with his right hand — which is to say with the arm he broke so badly not long before Sally Hemings’s arrival in Paris.
He remains seated in the vegetable bed, rocking back and forth, clutching his right wrist in his left hand. After a couple of moments, he rocks onto his knees and, still clutching his wrist, gets to his feet. When he is vertical, he gingerly lets go of his wrist, opens and closes his fingers several times, then rotates his hand. From where she is standing, Sally Hemings can see no sign of pain, but he does clutch his wrist again as he walks toward the kitchen and disappears from sight.
~ ~ ~
… The erosion of my virtue began, paradoxically, with my diminished regard for Mr. Jefferson. From my very first days at the Hôtel de Langeac, I had never quite seen the awkward and morose Mr. Jefferson as a real human being. He was more like a creature out of a nursery story, a prince put under a curse or pining away for a lost love — and, indeed, I attributed most of his sorrow to the death of his dear wife. It was only after he had committed the unthinkable that he became a mere man in my eyes and thereby became both pitiful and, eventually, capable of being pitied.
The transformation of my feelings from contempt to something much closer to sympathy occurred during the month or so I lodged with Mr. Jefferson’s laundress, an arrangement he made on my behalf. I would return to the Hôtel de Langeac only when Miss Martha and Miss Maria were home from school, and inevitably, from time to time, I would be forced to stand in the same room with Mr. Jefferson, while he and his daughters discussed arrangements or merely chatted. He would never look in my direction on these occasions and seemed reluctant to even meet the girls’ gazes, afraid perhaps that I might have said something to them or that they might have heard rumors from some other quarter. I never breathed a word to either daughter of what had happened between their father and myself, though they clearly had intuited that something was wrong, Miss Martha in particular. Whenever Mr. Jefferson caught sight of me, his face would blanch and his voice would go low and soft, devoid of those modulations of pitch that signify joy, enthusiasm or even anger.
I must confess that I relished these manifestations of his discomfort, in part because they seemed just retribution for what he had done but more because they increased my own stature — in my eyes at least. After a period during which I would tremble in his presence (though more out of humiliation and suppressed rage than fear; I am not sure I ever truly feared Mr. Jefferson, and I never felt physically endangered), I began to take delight in intensifying his discomfort. I would stare at him whenever I was in his presence, and anytime he would glance my way and then wince or avert his gaze, I would have to struggle to keep myself from smiling.
Perhaps it was my growing sense of my power to unsettle Mr. Jefferson that transformed my contempt to pity — though I don’t know; emotions are like a stew, the taste of which is determined by no one ingredient but by all together. What I do know is that one night when I was lying in my bed at the laundress’s house, it occurred to me that Mr. Jefferson had shown true consideration for my feelings by arranging this refuge for me and that had he been the debauched brute I’d been imagining, he never would have allowed me out of his sight, let alone made it possible for me to regain my sense of decency and composure. And as soon as these ideas came into my head, all of Mr. Jefferson’s winces, shrinkings, averted gazes, blanches and troubled expressions — the very things that had filled me with a self-satisfied contempt for him — began to seem manifestations of his tender nature and of his remorse, and thus of his desire to be good. And with this recognition, I began to feel his sufferings and humiliation as if they were my own and to remember how, on the night he had come into my room, no sooner had he realized that I truly did not share his desires than he cried out, clutched his head in shame and ran from the room. And now I, too, felt ashamed. My body was possessed by a paroxysm of tearful remorse, and for some hour or so during the darkest time of the night I imagined that I, myself, was heartless and evil.