She looks up, an irritated expression on her face. “What else can I think? This is what he’s wanted for a very long time.” She looks away again.
“Well, yes but that’s not—” Thomas Jefferson falls silent. He sighs. “I suppose what I’m wondering is if you think it is wise.”
Sally Hemings raises her head off his shoulder and lifts herself over his left arm, which has been embracing her. She faces him on her side, elbow crooked on the mattress, hand supporting her head. She is glaring at him impatiently. “I don’t know why you are even asking that question. Is it ‘wise’ that you are free? Is it ‘wise’ that anyone is free? That question doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “I am not going to stand in the way of his desire. I told him I would give him his manumission as soon as he has trained Peter in his stead, and I will. But still, I’m concerned about him.”
“There is a great deal of cruelty in this world.” Sally Hemings is sitting up now, clutching a corner of the sheet across her breasts. “But does that mean that all the people who might suffer from it should give up their freedom?”
“That has nothing to do with it!”
“It has everything to do with it! You yourself said people should be free to pursue happiness, but you didn’t say anything about their actually having to get it!”
“You’re not letting me say what I mean.” Thomas Jefferson is sitting now, too. He puts his hand on her knee. “What I really want to know is if you think Jimmy is all right. Did he tell you about Hoff?”
There is a skeptical wrinkle at the center of Sally Hemings’s brow, but her voice is low and uneasy. “No. Who is Hoff?”
“You remember the beating Jimmy gave Monsieur Perrault?”
She nods. Monsieur Perrault was their French tutor in Paris. Jimmy thrashed him with a parasol one afternoon when the old man told him that Negroes were incapable of mastering the subjunctive because, as he put it, “There is no subjunctive in the African language.”
“Well, something similar happened twice in Philadelphia. The first time it was only a beggar boy who ran in front of his horse, and there was perhaps some justification to that. The boy needed to learn not to run heedlessly into the street. But Hoff was a different matter. Hoff is the servant of Mr. Clagget, the butcher Jimmy patronizes on Market Street. Hoff is the one who makes deliveries. So one day he arrives with a leg of lamb. I happened to be in my study at the time and could look right down at the back gate, so I saw the whole thing. The first I knew of it was when I heard Jimmy shouting, ‘This leg is crawling with maggots! How dare you insult me with this piece of rotten flesh!’ When I got to the window, he was brandishing the leg over his head like a club. ‘Do you think I am stupid!’ he was shouting. ‘Do you think I’m an absolute idiot!’ As it happens, Hoff is Dutch and has very little English. I’m not sure if he understood a single word of what Jimmy said to him, nor am I sure if any of his defenses were intelligible to Jimmy. All I know is that Jimmy became so enraged that he grabbed Hoff by his hair and started to beat him with the leg of lamb. I could see that the poor man was more startled than injured at first, but then Jimmy landed a blow that may well have broken a bone in his shoulder. He staggered and fell to the ground, and then Jimmy started to kick him—”
“Stop!” Sally Hemings is clutching the sides of her head with her hands.
“That’s all there is,” says Thomas Jefferson. “By the time I got down to the yard, Jimmy’s fit had passed. He pointed at poor Hoff, whom he called a swindler and a criminal, but he was clearly already beginning to think those charges were absurd.”
“The poor man was only the servant,” Sally Hemings says plaintively.
“Exactly. Although once I was in the yard, it was clear that the meat was anything but fresh. In any event, Hoff took advantage of that moment to run out the gate, and we never saw or heard of him again. Jimmy, of course, was filled with remorse. I think he had been drinking even before Hoff arrived, because as soon as we were alone, tears started to spill from his eyes. ‘I know there is a Devil,’ he told me, ‘because I can feel him inside my brain.’”
“Oh, no!”
Sally Hemings gets out of bed and starts looking for her clothes.
“From that day until we left, he was his kind and temperate self,” says Thomas Jefferson. “I think he was deeply shocked by what he had done, and chastened. Though I fear his drinking is beginning to get the better of him. One morning, not three days before we set off to come here, Petit and I searched the entire house and couldn’t find him anywhere, until finally I went out into the garden and discovered him lying there unconscious in a pool of his own vomit.”
“Oh, poor Jimmy!”
Sally Hemings gets down on her knees and lifts the counterpane so that she can look under the bed. “Where is my shift? We’ve got to go back up to the house. What did I do with my shift?”
~ ~ ~
A swallow of wine. A mouthful of warm parsnip. “I have never said that it is impossible — if by ‘it’ you mean emancipation — only that it must be pursued methodically and with patience. Two things are required: first that, by moral argument and political pressure, southern landowners are persuaded to give up the practice of slavery; and second that a homeland be established in Portuguese South America or in Sierra Leone, where all the freed Negroes might be transported at the public expense and provided with sufficient acreage, animals, seeds and money to begin new lives for themselves and to found a new society. Only by the geographical separation of the races might we avoid the commencement of a cycle of assault and revenge that could last centuries and reduce all the beautiful dreams of this nation to charred rubble and pools of blood.” Stop. You are going to make me hate you.
~ ~ ~
The floor beneath Thomas Jefferson’s feet bucks and wobbles, and the heads of the seated passengers rock all in one motion. From the set of Sally Hemings’s shoulders and the grace with which she rides the heaving floor, he can see that she is more confident than she used to be, and more capable. She has come into her own, he thinks, and that fills him with both a warm appreciation and a sorrow that he has missed so much of her life.
VI
~ ~ ~
Thomas Jefferson is an artist of silence. Into the midst of whinnies, susurrant poplars, catbird shrieks, jingling harnesses, cicada drones, coughs, field chants, foot thumps, fox cries and thunder rumbles, he introduces silences, some of them lasting half a breath, some as vast and enduring as the silence between stars. Silence is a form of freedom. In silence “ought” need never be contaminated by “is,” and what is is, simultaneously, not at all. Silence is our agreement that the world is more than we can bear. When the silent people in the silent room close their eyes, they are utterly alone. A solitary word in the midst of silence has no meaning.
~ ~ ~
It is six in the morning of May 1, 1795. Thomas Jefferson has already taken an hour’s walk along the Rivanna and has returned to the lodge with sleeves and smallclothes chilly in patches from the dew. He is sitting on a wooden footstool in front of the fireplace, pouring boiling water from a copper kettle into a tin coffeepot balanced on two bricks just beside the fire. He hears a murmur and a rustling of bedclothes.
Looking around, all he can see of Sally Hemings is the underside of one half-closed hand resting against the headboard just beside her pillow. She is four months pregnant, though the only obvious signs are a certain thickening under her jaw and the taut enlargement of her breasts. He has known of her condition for just over a month, and so far neither Martha nor Maria knows — or, at least, neither has said a word to him about it.