He is happy, but he has unhappy thoughts.
Sometimes he worries about how he will manage once the child has come into the world and there will be no plausible way to deny that it is his own. More often, however — though usually only in the darkest hour of the night — he remembers his wife’s suffering during and after childbirth, her helpless grief at the loss of Jane, their second child, and then of their third, their one and only son, who never mastered the art of breathing and never received a name. But those griefs, as unbearable as they felt at the time, came to seem innocent and even mild. It was after their lovely little Lucy Elizabeth went crimson with fever and then so pale and still that Martha succumbed entirely to despair. “Why is God so cruel?” she cried out one day. “He laughs at our hopes. He fills our life with misery.” Thomas Jefferson was shocked to hear his good and kind wife speak so bitterly, but he found himself unable to argue with her, especially as that was a moment when the British seemed to be winning the war. When she again became pregnant not four months later, he hoped that her spirits would revive, but she remained listless and melancholy, and following the birth of their second Lucy, she only grew weaker and weaker, until finally the mere weight of existence was more than she could bear. And then, of course, two years later poor Lucy herself expired in the very home where he had believed she would be most safe.
He picks up a bowl from the floor, pours the just-brewed coffee into it and brings it over to the bed. “Here you go, sweet Sally — a little liquid daylight.” He puts the bowl down on the chair that serves as a bedside table, and she makes a noise that he interprets as a sleepy thank-you. Her face is turned to one side, her eyes closed and brow pinched, as if from pain.
“How is your back feeling?” he asks.
She turns and looks up at him through squinting eyes. “How am I supposed to know? I’m not even awake!”
“Sorry,” he says. “I was just worried that it had hurt you all night.”
She closes her eyes and doesn’t respond.
He backs away from the bed and turns toward the fire. But then he looks around again. “It was just an expression of concern,” he says. “Why do you always mock me when all I am doing is expressing my concern?”
~ ~ ~
In his not-sleep, Thomas Jefferson, invisible, walks from room to room, though not always bothering with the doors. He steps so lightly as he crosses lawn and field that the grass does not bend beneath his feet and the wheat does not hiss against his shins. The hearts of those he loves and of those he does not even know are as open to him as his own, though often the feelings arising from those hearts are profoundly mysterious and thus disturbing, disorienting.
That is Maria’s cheek in the moon’s gray brilliance. He knows by the faint oval of a chicken-pox scar and by how, at the edge between moonbeam and blackness, the convexity of the cheek undulates into the concavity beside her upper lip. The feeling that comes to Thomas Jefferson is loneliness as a form of agony. It is like the howl of a wounded animal, cut off from its pack, helpless and exposed on a slope of scree.
Thomas Jefferson himself is so wounded by his daughters’ pain that he is taken by a whirlwind madness and only comes to himself half a mile away, in a cabin down the hill occupied by two families of field laborers, where a five-year-old boy in his own not-sleep is moving his lips to words voiced inside his head: “They not gonna take my pappy. They not gonna take my pappy. I got to tell them. They not gonna do that. I got to build him a house out of branches and leaves, with hay for a floor. I got to make him come back and stay in that house and not do nothing bad no more, and I got to keep him for my own till I’m old.”
And then Thomas Jefferson is walking again until it is a tiny heart, a mouse’s or a vole’s — beating like an elfin drumroll — that opens inside his own, and he is possessed by a firm, fixed innocence that wants merely to persist from this instant to the next and the next and the next, without end.
And then he is in the kitchen of his own house, vault-black, where Jimmy Hemings sleeps upon a pallet in the corner in the posture of a man who lost consciousness while crawling. There is a bed for him in the cabin where his brother John lives with his wife and child, but Jimmy refuses to stay there. He will not say why. He is a man possessed by powerful antipathies that he will never explain. Jimmy’s heart is a mansion with a broken roof. Rain warps the floorboards and embroiders the couches and beds with mold. Every room has its shameful history, and the people still dwelling in them never come out. You can hear their feet dragging in the night, and their groans.
And then Thomas Jefferson is walking upon a breeze, into the heart of Sally Hemings, who sleeps beside her mother in the cabin he might see from his bedroom window were he to rise from his not-sleep and part the curtain. Her brow, in the gray moonlight, is darkened by a cluster of V-shaped dents, and her heart is entirely occupied by the desire to get something right. It is her invention, which is constantly falling apart, and must constantly be reconstructed. The parts slip between her fingers and roll across the floor. She darts after them, sweeps them up, but she is never sure she has gotten all of them, so is never sure if her invention, once it is reassembled, will actually work. But it is never reassembled, because as she works to bolt one part to the next and the next, still other parts are falling to the floor and rolling into corners. Always. Always. Always.
And then Thomas Jefferson has passed through her heart into another within her body that although it has only just commenced beating is already possessed of a yearning so relentless it might destroy the world.
~ ~ ~
This is what Thomas Jefferson thinks: Sally Hemings has no African in her, except perhaps in the barely noticeable fullness of her upper lip and in the rondure of the tip of her nose — though, indeed, precisely these traits can also be found in people of the purest British stock. The blood of Captain Hemings and, even more so, that of Thomas Jefferson’s own father-in-law, John Wayles, has entirely overwhelmed the necessarily less robust African blood to which she might have been heir. As a result she has inherited none of the less savory traits of the race.
Although she has had no formal education, her mind is as sharp as that of any woman Thomas Jefferson has ever known, particularly in regard to her judgment of people. Her assessment of Tom Randolph, for example, has proved sadly accurate. He is just exactly as unsure of himself as she hypothesized during his first brief visit in Paris and exactly as prone to countering his weakness of character through a spiteful coldness that he fancies as dignity. There is also something vengeful in his indulgence of cider and whiskey, and poor Martha seems to be the one who most has to suffer from it. But Sally Hemings is also a shrewd judge of people she has never met. Thomas Jefferson had hardly said ten words about Alexander Hamilton before she’d pegged him as having the conscience of a rattlesnake, and Carter Braxton as a buffoon and a would-be confidence man.
Needless to say, Sally Hemings also lacks that sluggishness of the kidneys that inclines Negroes toward indolence and excessive sweating, and her skin is no more sable than a bowl of milk into which a tincture of molasses has been diffused.
This temperate evening in mid-September, Thomas Jefferson is the one who is sweat-drenched and black of face and hands, while Sally Hemings is seated in the open air outside her cabin, taking advantage of the waning sun to embroider a tiny nightcap.