“I hate to lose things,” she says.
“I do, too.”
“No, I’m ridiculous about it. Sometimes, when I’m coming back from the marché or from the school, I kick a stone along the street, and if I manage to kick it all the way home with me, I can’t bear to leave it outside. I feel as if I am abandoning an old friend!”
Thomas Jefferson makes a small laugh. “What do you do?”
“I take it inside with me. I have a box up in my chamber full of stones.”
He laughs again, heartily. “You have such a tender heart, Sally.”
She smiles, blushing. “It’s stupid.”
“Not at all.”
They are standing beside his writing desk. He picks up a pencil lying against the bottom edge of the desk’s sloped top and puts it into a chamois sack. His penknife is lying in the dust at her feet. Sally Hemings picks it up and hands it to him. He puts that into the sack.
“Thank you,” he says.
“It’s stupid to care so much about a stone,” she says.
“On the contrary, I think that shows how engaged with life you are and how generous you are with your affections. In my experience most people are so lazy, hurried or frightened that they close themselves off to life. That’s such a waste of our brief time on this earth.”
Thomas Jefferson is smiling with an almost paternal tenderness that embarrasses Sally Hemings. She is momentarily flustered.
“Well, I don’t know,” she says at last. “It seems to me that we should only care about little things a little bit and save our real feelings for the most important things.”
“Perhaps…” Thomas Jefferson is still smiling. “But theologians say that God cares as much for the death of a sparrow as he does for the destruction of a city.”
Now Sally Hemings is the one to laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” asks Thomas Jefferson.
“I shouldn’t say.”
He flips open the top of his portable desk and puts the chamois sack inside, then tucks the desk under his arm. “Why not?”
“I just shouldn’t.”
They are walking now, back toward place Louis XV and home. The brilliant sun heats the paving and the tops of their heads, but a mountainscape of white and slate gray clouds is advancing over the trees of the Champs-Élysées.
“But I want to know what you think,” says Thomas Jefferson.
“Well… I don’t know…. That just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Thomas Jefferson grunts. “I’d forgotten what a skeptic you are!”
“To me it just seems insane that God would feel exactly the same about the death of thousands of people as he does about one dirty little bird.”
“Well, perhaps I’ve phrased it badly. I think what theologians say is that God’s heart breaks for the death of a sparrow as well as for the destruction of a city.”
“That’s just as insane.”
“Not really. What we are talking about is feeling, not rational evaluation. The theologians want to draw our attention to the beauty — the moral beauty — of the all-powerful creator of the universe being heartbroken at the death of a dirty little bird. Don’t you find that beautiful?”
“What I want to know,” says Sally Hemings, “is if God feels so bad about the death of a little bird, why does he kill it? And it’s the same with destroying cities.”
“That’s the big mystery, of course. But still there’s the beauty. It seems to me that the idea of a God caring for a creature as insignificant and humble as a sparrow has a beauty all by itself — maybe in part because it teaches the lesson that all things of this world are important — political revolutions, great works of art, falling in love, dirty little birds and even stones one kicks home on the street.”
“But what I was saying is that I don’t care about everything. I care much more about some little gray stone than I do about half the beggars I see on the street. In fact, I hate some of those beggars and can’t bear to look at them. That’s what I meant by stupid.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Oh, yes it is.”
“But even the fact that you feel bad about hating beggars proves the point I am making. Think about Christ’s injunction to love our enemies. I find that a supremely beautiful moral challenge. It may not be possible for us to truly love our enemies, but the suggestion that we ought to love them can help guide us in life, especially if we think that what it really means is that we should try to understand our enemies, to see the world from their point of view and, most of all, to understand that they are human beings, struggling in a hard and confusing world, just as we are, and that their fundamental rights are exactly equal to ours. They may not do the right things or think the right things, but that does not mean they are inhuman or should be treated so. I think Christ’s injunction is, in fact, the foundation of all morality.”
“Well, I don’t know about all that. But I do know that it’s not possible to love your enemy. And so saying that impossible things are beautiful makes about as much sense to me as crying over a stone.”
“But you do cry over a stone.”
“And that’s stupid.”
“You don’t think there is anything good about tenderheartedness?”
“It’s good to be tenderhearted to your children. And to your mother.”
“Not to your father?” Thomas Jefferson smiles wryly.
“Your father, too.” Sally Hemings laughs. “But only if he is a good father!”
Thomas Jefferson also laughs. But after only a few seconds, their smiles fade.
They have crossed place Louis XV and are walking amid the colonnades of trees bordering the Champs-Élysées. The sky straight overhead is crystalline blue, but the sun has been obscured by the clouds. The air has grown distinctly cooler, and the wind is continuous. There is a sound in the tops of the trees like air being sucked through teeth.
After a couple of minutes, during which they only stroll, never even exchanging a glance, Sally Hemings speaks. “Mr. Jefferson, might I ask you a question?”
“Certainly.”
“You knew my father well, didn’t you?”
The center of Thomas Jefferson’s brow furrows. It is a while before he says, “I am not sure.”
Understanding that he is only trying to be discreet, Sally Hemings’s throat tightens. She feels a prickling of sweat at her temples and in her armpits. She, too, should be discreet — all the more so because she is a servant. And yet she is so curious to hear what Thomas Jefferson might have thought of this man of whom she has no memory.
“I know who he was,” she says at last. “My mother told me.”
“Oh.” Seeming both surprised and embarrassed, Thomas Jefferson falls silent, and Sally Hemings decides to let the topic drop. But after a couple of moments, he says, “Yes, I knew him, but not as well — or as long, I should say — as I would have liked.”
“Can you tell me about him?”
Thomas Jefferson is silent another extended moment. “He was a good man, and very capable. You would have had every reason to be proud of him.” Thomas Jefferson falls silent again, an indecisive expression on his face.
After a moment Sally Hemings asks, “Is there something else?”
“He was a spirited man, and possessed of many powerful enthusiasms. But like all men, he had his weaknesses…. And beyond that I do not feel qualified to speak.”
They traverse the length of the Champs-Élysées in silence, except one time when Thomas Jefferson points to a magpie and says, “That is the only animal, apart from the human race, that can recognize itself in a mirror”—a remark that Sally Hemings responds to with only a grunt.