He lifts his head, and Sally Hemings can see that although his eyes are red, they are completely dry and that the expression on his face looks less like grief than a panicked restlessness.
He hugs her close and speaks into the air behind her head. “And after that,” he says. “And after that,” he repeats, and has to repeat the phrase twice more before, all in a burst, he says, “She was never the same.”
And then he goes limp and falls over sideways, and Sally Hemings falls with him. She kisses his temple and cheek. She strokes his hair and says, “Oh, Thomas. My poor Thomas. My poor, poor Tom.”
And then he puts his arm around her and pulls her tight against his body, and they both lie side by side in silence for a very long time.
~ ~ ~
“I am worried you will get into the habit,” says Thomas Jefferson.
“I’m not in the habit,” says Sally Hemings. “I’ve never once made a mistake.”
“But still, if you continue… If Martha were to hear you even once…”
“That is never going to happen. I am a completely different woman when we are around other people. But here… in these moments… everything is different. I am your Sally, and you are my Thomas. My Tom. I can’t think of you any other way…. And this fellow here, he is our friend, Little Tom…. Oh, look! He was asleep, but now he seems to be waking…. Yes! Look! He’s getting up and he’s stretching….”
~ ~ ~
You have to stop talking or you will make me hate you.
Every day I hear of Negroes who have gone north and made fine lives for themselves as ministers, blacksmiths, musicians. “But that’s exactly what I’m saying! You, yourself, have agreed that we should keep our children here until they have so thoroughly mastered a craft that they might have just exactly the successes you describe. Why should it be different for any other slave? Those able to make a satisfactory living as free men and women and who desire to be free can be freed posthaste. But as for those who have not acquired the necessary training or the habits of industry and foresight, I think it is far better to inculcate these virtues through encouragement and example than to abandon such people among a populace who mean them only ill, who will never pay them adequately for their labor and will clap them behind bars at the least excuse.”
So you are saying it is impossible.
~ ~ ~
Sally Hemings sometimes believes she is many people — which is to say that she possesses within her brain and breast the capacity to lead many lives. Sometimes the other lives seem so familiar she feels as if she has actually lived them: She is walking along a street in Philadelphia, a city where she has never been but which is indistinguishable in her mind from Paris. It is a sunny spring afternoon, and her gown is a deep pine green, but made of satin, so it shimmers in the sun as she passes along sandy yellow paths beneath trees cut into the shapes of cones and boxes. Or, in another life, she is sitting at Thomas Jefferson’s side, at a table of raised glasses, and she herself is raising a glass, and there are glints everywhere — on the lip and camber of each glass, on the silver candlesticks and tableware, in the eyes of the many guests, in Thomas Jefferson’s eyes and her own. And sometimes the other lives could hardly be less familiar and yet feel terrifyingly easy for her to live: She is running through the great house in the darkness of night, and she is carrying an ax, which she swings at everything she passes: tables, chairs, wardrobes, the walls themselves. The ax penetrates and stops, and as she wrenches it free, a wild, guttural cry escapes her throat. Or she is herself wild: an animal dashing on all fours through the underbrush on the edge of an enormous wood. It is raining. She is hungry and cold. She hears human voices and runs from them ever faster, thorns ripping at her shoulders and ribs. And then there are all those lives she can hardly make sense of: She is a sea captain perhaps, at the helm of her ship, an infinity of air and water all around her, the wind blowing her hair off her forehead. Or maybe she is flying, but not like a bird, like a cannonball. She arcs through the clouds on a trajectory that never ends. Or she is in a loud room. There is the shriek of a hawk hurtling out of the sky. There is thunder. The floor heaves and trembles beneath her feet.
~ ~ ~
The lodge is filled with sunlight, birdsong and river noise. “Oh!” says Thomas Jefferson. His voice is husky, low, almost a grunt.
“What?” says Sally Hemings, who has only just this instant discovered she has been asleep.
“Oh, God!”
“What?” she says. Her eyes are open, but she wants to close them again.
“Come here.” He slips his arm under her pillow and across her back.
As he draws her near, she rolls onto her side, puts her arm across his chest and touches the silky skin along his ribs with her fingertips. She slides her thigh across his thigh.
He speaks into her hair. “I had a terrible dream.”
“Oh?” she murmurs, and looks up at his face, but he is looking out the window. She kisses his sleep-fragrant chest.
“I dreamed you and I were walking on a bridge over the Seine. Only the bridge was very high, hundreds of feet above the water. Something had happened on it. A battle, I think. There was broken stone everywhere, and parts of the bridge had fallen away. ‘Be careful,’ I said, and you smiled at me sweetly, the way a mother smiles at the foolish fears of a child. I took hold of your hand so that you wouldn’t fall. But then something happened, and you did fall. I was lying on my belly on the bridge, still holding your hand as you dangled in empty space. Only the bridge wasn’t over the Seine anymore. It was over a rocky canyon, with a small stream at its bottom, hundreds of feet below. I remember thinking that everything would be all right because I was still holding your hand. But you were terrified. Your legs and your free arm were flailing as you tried to grasp on to something, but there was nothing there. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m going to pull you up.’ But then you were falling. I don’t know how that happened. I just watched you falling away from me. You had such a look of terror on your face, and you were falling and falling. There was nothing I could do. I just watched you get smaller and smaller as you fell toward the rocks.”
~ ~ ~
… That lodge! How it haunts me. When we were there, we seemed in a different world, one not ruled by a cruel or incompetent God, a world in which we hadn’t been created master and slave, in which slavery itself had never perverted the human heart or was, at worst, a faint rumor of a distant time and place; and in this better world, our tender murmurings, our delight at touching and being touched, our jokes, our hopes, our conversations and even our fights, our domestic tedium, our aging — all of these things were only themselves, never the means by which we betrayed our souls or those we loved; and we were simply one woman and one man, whose sorrows and joys together were only the product of their intermingled humanness, unprofaned by botched grace….
~ ~ ~
Two tin plates, heaped with steaming carrots and parsnips, a bowl of salt, a bottle of wine and two glasses. The wavering orange glow of a burning pine knot. “What would you have me do, then?” I don’t see why you can’t just free everyone and let those who want to leave take their chances. They are human beings, capable of making their own decisions. Why should you feel responsible for the decisions they make? “Everything would be ruined.” Why do you say that? “Everything would be ruined.” Stop saying that! And besides, I’m not finished. “Finish, then.” You have often told me that people work harder if they feel that it is their choice to work and that they have something to gain by their labor. So if you were to pay Negroes at the same rate you pay whites, you would have the best Negro workers flocking to you from miles around, and they would work far harder for you than your present laborers, not merely because they would be choosing to work and getting adequately paid for their efforts but because they would be grateful to you for doing what is right. That is the main thing. You would be doing what is right. There would be no need to wait for a general emancipation. Tomorrow, with the stroke of a pen, you could transform Monticello into a beacon of justice and good fellowship for the whole of Virginia. “That is a beautiful dream. But should I tell you what would really happen? I have thought this through many times. Monticello, as we know it, would collapse in a minute. The curse of slavery is that it makes itself indispensable. There are no farms such as this north of Chesapeake Bay. We have our own world here, not just laborers in the ground and house servants but coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters, furniture makers. Were I to run Monticello as you propose, I could not employ the eighth part of these people, and I would lose, first of all, the craftsmen, who — as you know — are the very men best trained to make good lives for themselves in the event that it is practical and desirable for them to be free. And by losing them I would also be losing the ability to train others, so that they, too, might have valuable skills and a means of making a living in freedom.” But they could be apprenticed to the white craftsmen. “I would have to let the white craftsmen go, too. There simply wouldn’t be enough money to pay them. Yet that is nothing. The most immediate tragedy would befall the seventy laborers in the ground whom I would also have to let go, because I couldn’t pay them either. Yes, some few of these might escape north or find a way of eking out a living in Virginia, but what proportion do you think would end up reenslaved, in prison or dead? Almost all of them, I would wager. So what would be the gain? A few effectively imprisoned on a northern-style farm here, a few more finding uncertain futures in the north and the rest condemned to fates far worse than they enjoy now. Is this what you want? Is this what you think would be ‘right’?” So you are saying it is impossible.