Sally Hemings lifts the latch and leaves.
~ ~ ~
… I knew I could say no — and yet I didn’t. My reasons were shameful and obvious. I was vain. I was weak. I had been the baby of my family and, of course, nothing more than a poor colored serving girl — a slave. No one had ever listened to what I had to say. As a child, whenever I had ventured to speak some idea I might have had while wandering in the woods, my mother would laugh and tell me my head was “stuffed with foolishness.” My brothers and sisters just told me I was stupid — and I really was stupid around children my own age. My jokes always seemed obvious; my insults seemed to have been translated from another language. I would rehearse them inside my mind, but the words never came out in the right order.
But there was something about the quality of Mr. Jefferson’s attention that made me eloquent. Even when I was swooning in disbelief that such an important man was listening to me, I was still able to speak what I actually thought. And, of course, the fact that he didn’t laugh, that he took seriously what I had to say, that he constantly drew out more of my thoughts, proffered his own and wanted to know what I made of them — all of this filled me with such exhilaration that I would have to work to calm myself, sometimes for hours afterward. And this was true, even in those instants when I suspected that he was condescending to me. (At sixteen I hardly dared expect more than condescension from a man of Mr. Jefferson’s stature.) I was always a little afraid in conversation with him, but it was the best sort of fear, the kind that inspired me to make the most of my abilities. The truth is that I don’t think I had ever felt so completely myself — the self I most wished to be — as when he and I were talking.
I was much less easy regarding that other aspect of Mr. Jefferson’s attention, but I cannot say that it, too, did not also work a sort of glamour upon me. I had always seen myself as gawky and ratlike and thought I could never compare with the beauty of my two older sisters — Thenia especially, who was tall, graceful and possessed of all the female attributes most attractive to the male eye and who had always seemed entirely delighted by the attentions of boys and young men. Not only had I never received such attention, but in Paris, where the fact that I was a slave made me an objet de scandale, I had been the target of disparaging remarks about my supposedly African features, and once an extremely handsome young man had subjected me to a torrent of barbarous and filthy adjectives, most of them appended to the nouns “négresse” and “noir.” And so it was hard for me not to feel flattered by Mr. Jefferson’s adoration, even as I was also frightened and disgusted.
Thus I didn’t say no. I would smile and nod at Mr. Jefferson’s greetings; I would blushingly accept his offers of chocolate or apricot preserves; I would talk to him for as long as he would seem interested in talking to me and feel grateful for every instant; and when he told me that he wanted to teach me to read, I came at the appointed time, even though I knew in advance that I would be sitting so close to him that I would have to concentrate to avoid brushing his arm with my own or letting my knee fall against his….
~ ~ ~
Sally Hemings is sleeping. She has been turning over and over in her bed. Her shift is twisted around her waist, and her ankles are twisted in her sheets. A minute ago — maybe two — she tugged one of the top corners of her sheet up to her throat, but now her hand lies limply on her breast and the corner of the sheet curls like a stilled wave beneath her fingertips. Odd noises are coming out of her throat, toneless bird squeaks. She is dreaming of Thomas Jefferson. She is dreaming that he has taken hold of her hand and is licking her palm, again and again. She can feel the slick wetness of his tongue and its warmth. His tongue is exceedingly large, so large she cannot imagine how he will ever be able to get it back into his mouth. When his tongue has finished licking her palm and every one of her fingers, it moves to her wrist and then forearm. When it touches that soft, blue-veined hollow on the inside of her elbow, she awakes with a start. She is gasping in the night. Her eyes are wide open, but she sees nothing at all.
~ ~ ~
The servants’ stairway lets out onto the hallway just outside the upstairs parlor, and every night on her way to her bedchamber on the third floor, Sally Hemings has to walk past the parlor door. One night Thomas Jefferson looks up from his reading and sees her standing in the doorway, candle in hand. As soon as their eyes meet, she makes a tiny noise and is gone.
On another night he looks up and she is standing in the doorway again. He looks at her for what seems a very long time, but she doesn’t move.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jefferson.”
“Is something wrong, Sally?”
She doesn’t answer. She is as still as a painting of herself. He wonders if she is looking at him. He tries to determine where her eyes are focused. One instant he thinks she is looking at him, the next instant no. Her eyes glitter in the firelight.
“Not really,” she says. “I just wanted to say good night.”
“Good night, Sally.”
~ ~ ~
… All the while I told myself that Mr. Jefferson’s struggle with his darker nature was entirely sincere and that he was sure to win, because he so thoroughly regretted what he had attempted that night, now months in the past, and he entirely understood how frightened I had been. But even as I worked so hard to deceive myself, I understood that the longer I failed to say no, the more my silence would come to seem like assent and that if I remained silent too long, my apparent assent would ultimately make this dreaded eventuality inevitable.
Every night when I lay in bed, I would remember the weight of Mr. Jefferson’s huge body lying on top of me and his smell — repulsive in memory — filling my nostrils. I would go rigid all over again, and cold with dread. Often I would surge upright amid my covers or even leap out of bed and pace the floor, devising elaborate speeches to Mr. Jefferson, in which I insisted upon my virtue and condemned his dishonorable inclinations.
And yet when I would once more be lying with my covers to my chin, my mind would race with assertions that directly contradicted my imaginary speeches. I would remind myself that this eventuality I so feared was the signal act of womanhood, that far from loathing it, many women smile with a private satisfaction as they talk about it or laugh loudly. My own mother made no secret of her enjoyment of what she always called “a little poke.” She had had three husbands in addition to my father, and at the time I was leaving for France, she seemed to be contemplating a fourth. I could hardly imagine ever feeling as my mother and so many other women so obviously did, and I could only assume that, in my profound ignorance, I was unaware of something essential in the carnal act — the very thing that evoked those loud laughs and private smiles. There were times, in fact, when I would despair at what I took to be my utter unfitness for womanhood.
I simply could not stop such bewildering suppositions from streaming through my brain. I had absolutely no intentions of ever acting upon them, but still they filled my head, leaving me deeply confused and afraid.