Sally Hemings cannot move from her spot by the door until Thomas Jefferson, after a pause that reminds her of nothing so much as that of an old man who has forgotten what he meant to say, closes his mouth, looks down and shrugs, and then the men around the table begin to cheer and applaud. The applause isn’t so loud that it might not just be polite, but then she sees that a shy, happy smile has come onto Thomas Jefferson’s face. He suppresses the smile, looks up at the crowd and says, “Nous avons encore beaucoup de travail à faire!”—sparking a new surge of applause.
To Sally Hemings’s utter surprise, her eyes fill with tears.
A short time later, when she is pouring more wine for Lafayette, he grabs hold of her hand and says, “Merci, ma jolie Sarah! This is a very good night! You must get your friend Mr. Jefferson to tell you what we are doing.” As he lets go of her hand, he gives it a light squeeze and he smiles at her, his eyes flaring with excitement. “I think the world is changing tonight!”
She glances toward Thomas Jefferson, and, finding that he is already looking right at her, she has to turn her head away. But when she looks back, she manages to hold his gaze just long enough not to appear self-conscious — or so she hopes. “Would you like some more wine, Mr. Jefferson?”
He smiles warmly and holds out his glass. “Thank you, Sally.”
Hours later, as Sally Hemings and Anne are clearing the abandoned table, Thomas Jefferson walks back into the room after having said good-bye to the last of his guests. He seems thoughtful and contented, if very tired.
Anne fills her tray with clinking glasses and walks toward the corridor to the kitchen. Sally Hemings deliberately slows down her collection of glasses but doesn’t look in Thomas Jefferson’s direction until Anne has left the room.
He gives her a weary smile. “I’m sorry to have made so much work for you, especially so late at night.”
She shrugs and makes a smilelike crinkle of her mouth. She doesn’t know what to say.
His smile fades. He takes a step backward, as if he is ready to leave the room.
“Has the world changed?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” He pauses thoughtfully, and then his smile returns. “What do you think?”
“It doesn’t look much different to me,” she says. “Maybe a bit messier.”
Thomas Jefferson laughs, and Sally Hemings can’t stop herself from laughing, too. After a moment he says, “Do you know what we were doing here tonight?”
“Well… apart from eating, drinking and shouting, not really.”
“We’ve been putting together a French document that is a lot like our own Bill of Rights, about which Mr. Madison and I have been corresponding so much lately.”
Sally Hemings has heard Thomas Jefferson talk about the Bill of Rights, but she isn’t entirely clear what it is.
“So what does the document say?”
“Well, it starts out by saying, more or less, that all men are created equal. It also says that liberty is the freedom to do everything that will injure no one else.”
“Oh.” She looks away, unsure why Thomas Jefferson has chosen to refer to that very awkward night.
“So you see, Sally, that you, too, played a role in what happened here tonight.”
She is blushing. Her ears go hot. “I didn’t.”
“I don’t know about that,” says Thomas Jefferson. “I think that the marquis has had you in mind often as he has contemplated the issue of individual liberty.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” She is still blushing. “Anyhow, I didn’t do anything.”
“You’re too modest.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are,” he says firmly.
She has been looking down at her tray, but when she raises her eyes, she sees that Thomas Jefferson is looking at her with a smile that is both weary and tender.
“You make a very good impression on people,” he says. “I think you should know that.”
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights….
— From the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, introduced at the National Assembly by the Marquis de Lafayette on July 11, 1789
~ ~ ~
… What I am trying to do here is simply pin down the process by which I became complicit in the crime that has brought so much misery to the people I have known and loved — many of them for all of my life. And it becomes ever clearer to me that it happened by a process of twilit thinking — by thoughts behind the thoughts I was aware of, thoughts — and feelings, too — that I could ignore or even pretend I had never had, thoughts whose immorality and gross impracticality might have been blatantly obvious had I ever had the courage or wisdom to drag them into the full light of my awareness….
~ ~ ~
Near noon on a Sunday morning, Sally Hemings is walking home after having escorted Patsy and Polly back to school. It has rained, and although she is carrying an umbrella, the skirt of her gown is wet and hangs heavily against her knees and shins. The clouds have parted. The sun is brilliant white. Leaves on the treetops hiss and turn up their pale undersides in fierce gusts. Bits of blown grit sting her cheek and make her squint.
She is walking along the road between the Tuileries and the Seine when she notices a gentleman about twenty yards ahead running toward the bank of the river. The wind flips his hat off as he runs, and, turning an ungainly pirouette, he grabs it off the ground and resumes running to the edge of the quay. Only once he has stopped does she realize that the man is Thomas Jefferson. Slump-shouldered, he stares down at the water, and then his right arm twitches, as if he were uttering a curse — though Sally Hemings can hear nothing. She comes up beside him just as he is turning away from the river.
“Oh, Sally!” he exclaims. She has startled him.
“What happened?”
His mouth puckers unhappily. He points behind her, at a wooden box — his writing desk — atop a low wall on the far side of the road. “I was doing a drawing, and I’d nearly finished when I stopped to sharpen my pencil, and then a gust of wind picked the drawing up and flipped it end over end into the river.” He turns and points. “There — you see?”
A piece of foolscap rises and falls on the waves, not far from a man rowing a small boat.
“You could ask the man to get it,” she says.
“It’s not worth it. The drawing is ruined.” He turns away from the river and shrugs resignedly.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
His eyes meet hers long enough for her to feel an uncomfortable warmth pass through her breast and into her throat. She looks back at the rapidly flowing water. The foolscap is now one hundred feet downstream.
“It’s all right,” he says. “I can do another. It wasn’t good anyway.” He puts his hat on his head and crosses the road toward his writing desk. Sally Hemings follows.