“I’m sorry,” Sally Hemings says between gasps. “I’ve just been running.” She takes a step away from the wall and lifts one hand to tuck the hair splayed across her shoulder behind her ear.
“Did something happen?” says Thomas Jefferson.
“A madman.” She puts her hand to her throat.
“Were you attacked?”
“I was at the marché. I only wanted onions and flour. Then a man. He started shouting. He pulled off my bonnet and threw it into the gutter.” Sally Hemings cries, “Oh!” as if the man has attacked her again. The hand at her throat twitches, flutters. Just below her jaw, the skin is red, chafed, blood-specked.
“Come here,” says Thomas Jefferson, backing away from his study door. “You must sit down.”
“I’m sorry.” She looks at him with pleading eyes.
“I insist. Sit down. Let me give you something to drink.”
He walks into his study and pulls a chair away from the front of his desk. It is the very chair in which the Marquis de Lafayette was sitting a week or so earlier. As Thomas Jefferson goes behind his desk to open a cabinet low to the floor, Sally Hemings enters his study and sits on the front edge of the delicate, silk-upholstered chair. She hears a clinking of glass on glass. Thomas Jefferson places an etched flask of whiskey-colored liquid on his desk and a tiny tumbler, not much bigger than a thimble.
“Cognac,” he says. “Drink it all in a gulp. It will settle your nerves.”
Sally Hemings picks up the little glass and does as she is instructed. She has never tasted cognac before. It is like liquid fire against her palate and tongue and like bitter acid in her throat. But as it goes down, she can feel the muscles in her chest relax. She breathes more easily.
“Do you know why the man took your bonnet?” says Thomas Jefferson as he walks back around his desk.
“He was shouting. I could hardly understand anything he said. I think he was drunk. He kept calling me ‘une traîtresse.’ And I think he said he was going to kill me. ‘À mort!’ he kept shouting. And ‘Tiers état!’”
“Ah!” says Thomas Jefferson, now sitting at his desk. He has taken another tumbler from the cabinet and fills it with cognac.
“Other people were saying that. The man was shouting, and a whole crowd gathered. He pushed me to the ground and he spat on me. I thought—”
Sally Hemings’s mouth is open, but she makes no sound. Her eyes have grown wide again. She sits erect on the edge of the chair, then gives her head a violent shake. “I’m sorry,” she says at last. “Forgive me.”
“No, no, no,” Thomas Jefferson says kindly. “Please.” He takes the flask in his right hand and holds out his left. “Here. Give me your glass.”
Sally Hemings does as she is told. And when Thomas Jefferson returns the glass, she swallows its contents in a gulp. He pours himself a second glass. “You must have been so frightened,” he says.
Her eyes grow wide for an instant. “I thought—” Again she cannot speak.
“You don’t have to say it.”
“I thought— What they were saying. I was sure—” Her eyes brim with tears — although they do not fall. Her lips remain motionless in the shape of a word she never speaks.
Thomas Jefferson leans forward, as if he is going to get up, but then he sits upright again, holds out his hand, and she gives him the tiny tumbler.
The cognac has made her feel better. Less afraid. More herself. When he returns the tumbler to her, she sips it more slowly this time and decides that she likes the taste.
“How did you get away?” Thomas Jefferson asks.
“La dame helped me. La dame with the onion cart and the jerky. She called the man fou and cochon. And when she picked me up off the ground, the crowd called her traîtresse, too. And the man. ‘À mort! À mort!’ he kept saying. I thought he would—” Sally Hemings looks down at her glass.” But la dame said she wasn’t afraid of stupid children. ‘Crétin!’ she said. Everyone was shouting at her. They all seemed to have gone mad. But then she picked me up and helped me walk out of the market. And no one did anything or followed us. They just let us go. None of it made any sense. They just let us go, and they were still shouting when la dame bade me good-bye on the next street. I didn’t understand any of it. She didn’t either.”
“These are remarkable times, Sally,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Do you know what the tiers état is?”
“No.”
“It is the French term for common people. The French common people are rising up against their monarch. Our spirit of republicanism is a great wave rolling around the world, and right now it is cresting here in France.”
Sally Hemings is quiet. She does not meet Thomas Jefferson’s eye, and he realizes he has been insensitive.
“I’m sorry, Sally. I don’t mean to imply that what you experienced was not… terrible. I only hoped that you might… I don’t know—” Thomas Jefferson falls silent.
There is a long moment during which he wonders if it is time for her to leave.
“But why did the man attack me?” she says at last. “I am not the king. I am not a princess or an aristocrat. Moi aussi, j’appartiens au tiers état.”
“Perhaps he was only angry. Perhaps he saw your clothes and decided you were the servant of an aristocrat. Though that is still madness. Revolutions become necessary when one people is oppressed by another. But that does not mean they are an unalloyed good. There is no such thing as moral purity in history. Even the most beneficent of revolutions necessarily entails injustice and the shedding of innocent blood. Our one consolation during moments like this is that they shall be followed by the dawning of a better world—” He cuts himself off, once again feeling he has been insensitive. “I am terribly, terribly sorry, however, that you should have suffered as you did today. I feel as if it is my fault.”
Sally Hemings looks Thomas Jefferson straight in the eye. “Why?”
He is blushing. He shrugs. “Mrs. Adams and Captain Ramsey both thought that you should have returned to Virginia straight from London, and… Well, I, too, have often thought that would have been better—”
“I am glad I stayed here,” says Sally Hemings. She is still looking Thomas Jefferson straight in the eye. “I have become a different person in Paris, and I am glad of it.”
Thomas Jefferson is standing up. A restlessness has come into his legs and eyes. “I am very happy to hear that, Sally. Still, I think it might be best if you did not go to the market alone for the next week or so. I doubt that these difficulties will last very long. But caution is advisable for the time being. Venture outside only in the company of another servant. I’ll speak to Petit about it immediately.”
Sally Hemings is standing up. She puts her tumbler down on Thomas Jefferson’s desk. “Thank you. That did help me feel better.” She smiles but avoids Thomas Jefferson’s gaze. “Well, I better let Jimmy know about the onions.”
Thomas Jefferson continues to stand behind his desk for a long moment after she leaves, his smile gradually fading. He takes his frock coat off the hook behind the door. His work is done for the day. It is time to see what is happening in the streets.