There was a book beside the bed: Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles, of which Mr. Jefferson had had a very high opinion. I was the one to bring it to the lodge, however, having foolishly concluded that such a slender volume would be perfect for teaching myself to read French. I had probably left it behind out of sheer frustration and had so forgotten its existence that I was startled to discover it on the night table. As soon as I saw it, I snatched it up, clutched it to my breast and sank down upon the bed, suddenly overwhelmed by memories of all the afternoons and nights that Mr. Jefferson and I had spent in this small house.
I sat rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed, tears streaming down my face, crying, “No. No. No. No.” For what did this book represent but my own selfishness? Even then, the day before the brutality of this world was revealed to me in such stark relief, I understood that whatever I might have gained from reading and my conversations with Mr. Jefferson had served only for my own enjoyment, and to advance my own opinion of myself, and, most repellant of all, to legitimize my fantasies that I was an exception, that I could somehow live in this world without being either colored or white. I had done nothing to help anyone else, nothing to correct the manifold injustices on which my own privilege depended. I could hardly have been more selfish.
I placed the book back on the clear rectangle amid the dust haze covering the top of the night table. I wiped away my self-indulgent tears and straightened the bodice of my gown. As I leaned forward to get to my feet, I noticed a gleam. Bending over, I found an old shoe buckle resting against one of the night table’s legs. I picked it up and polished it with my sleeve. It had to have been Mr. Jefferson’s, though I had no memory of his ever having ridden home with a loose shoe. I held the buckle in my hand as I left the lodge and locked the door. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It occurred to me that by rights I ought to just throw the buckle into the river. But I didn’t. I clutched it tightly in my fist as I walked away from the little house. Sometime later I slipped it into my pocket. It is still there….
~ ~ ~
“The roof is still solid,” says Thomas Jefferson. “It would be easy enough to bring a pallet out here, and other necessaries.”
The river makes its rustles and clicks just outside their open door. He and Sally Hemings are lying on a horse blanket and their heaped clothes. Flies buzz, settle, suck the sweat off their bodies and then buzz some more. He admires the blue sheen of indirect daylight spilling through the door across her thighs and belly and the small darkness of her mussed pubic hair. Her head is on his shoulder. With his fingertips he can feel the smooth, soft weightiness of her breast. He circles his middle finger around the tip of her nipple and feels it grow hard. He is not sure he has ever known moments more beautiful than these. “How did this ever happen, Sally?”
Sally Hemings heaves a long sigh.
The cabin they are in — built by Thomas Jefferson’s father as a hunting lodge — stands on a high, wooded bank of the Rivanna River and is entirely overshadowed by ancient oaks and beeches, amid which sunbeams illumine brilliant emerald clusters.
“I just want to lie here,” she says, “and let this be the whole world.”
Thomas Jefferson also sighs. “You’re right. This is perfect.” He sighs again and for a long moment is silent. Then he says, “I’m happy, Sally. Are you happy?”
She doesn’t answer.
There are rapids just in front of them. As the water clatters onto itself, its sound echoes off the trees on the far bank. A small animal rustles in the leaves beside the porch. A catbird runs through a stream of liquid whistles — its song, too, echoing off the trees on the far bank.
Thomas Jefferson slides his shoulder out from under Sally Hemings’s head and sits up cross-legged on the blanket. His neck is stiff, his head having been pillowed only by his shirt wadded against the wall. He cranks his head right, then left, feeling muscles cracking down the length of his back.
Sally Hemings rolls onto her left side and supports her head with her crooked arm, watching him as he stretches. Pursing her lips in discomfort, she pushes herself into a seated position. Her breasts wobble, then still. That vacant, lost expression is on her face again — and it hurts him, even as he feels he has never seen anyone more beautiful.
“I wish we never had to leave here,” he says.
“We don’t.” She smiles weakly, then sweeps her long brown hair away from her face and looks out the door. A jay makes its cold, piercing cry.
“A week ago,” he says, “as I was climbing the hill toward home and that big storm was brewing, I promised myself that I would not even think of doing this. I simply would not allow it. And now—” He shakes his head. “I don’t even know how this happened!”
What happened was that Sally Hemings came to his chambers shortly before lunch to tell him that Maria would be having a picnic with her cousin Jack in the copse at the top of a bluff above the South Road. Thomas Jefferson thanked her for the message and asked if she wouldn’t mind bringing his laundry down to the kitchen for Nance. As she crouched to pull the basket of soiled clothing out from under his bed, he pretended — to himself, mostly — that he was entirely engrossed by his reading and that he hadn’t even noticed her lithe back stretching beneath her bodice nor how her gown, clipped tight between the floor and her knee, revealed the long arc of her thigh. Nothing might have happened had she not, as she got to her feet and shifted the basket onto her hip, cast him such a shy and knowing glance under her lowered brow — at which point he threw his book onto the floor and raced to take her hand.
He doesn’t remember their speaking a single word, only that they kissed for a very long time. When his hand strayed under her skirts and he discovered how ready she was for him, he murmured into her ear with a quivering voice that she should meet him on the bridle path to the lake in twenty minutes. And then, as a sort of promise, when he withdrew his hand, he put his middle finger into his mouth and sucked it clean. Twenty minutes later she was waiting exactly where instructed. He pulled her up onto the back of his horse and took her to this cabin — a place where he had imagined being with her since they were first together in Paris.
“I made those same promises,” she tells him now. She shakes her head and gives him another of her knowing smiles. “But… well, the truth is, Mr. Jefferson”—her smile broadens, and Thomas Jefferson, still sitting cross-legged, feels his penis stretching in spurts along the instep of his right foot—“that Miss Maria never told me to let you know where she would be eating.”
Sally Hemings laughs. She leans forward, and as they kiss, she places her hand between his legs.
A little later he is sitting up again and she is still lying down. He puts his hands to his temples and says, “I think I am insane.”
“You are.” Her smile is obliterated by a sigh.
“This is serious, Sally. What are we going to do?”
She doesn’t say anything. She looks up at him from the floor, her narrow eyes suddenly weary.
“I am the secretary of state,” he says. “I am President Washington’s representative and the representative of this country — the world’s first true democracy. The monarchs of Europe are watching us and want nothing but to see us fail. And the revolutionaries in France are looking to us to give them courage. What this means is that every one of us in the government must be beyond reproach, not just in our political lives but in our private lives.”