He has decided that the proportions of his house are entirely lacking in grace and that he must extend it on both the north and south and replace the top floor with a dome. For six weeks he has been attempting to come up with the right combination of clay, sand, water and heat to produce durable bricks, and just this afternoon he made the first batch that neither exploded in the kiln nor turned to grit on the application of the least weight. He is happy as he walks, soot-blackened and smelling of charcoal, along Mulberry Row back toward his house. When he has amassed a suitable number of bricks — by the spring, ideally — the new construction can begin.
Sally Hemings is so immersed in her work that she does not see him, even though he is only a few steps away. She is seated with her back partly turned to the sun so that it might better light her sewing. Her cheek and shoulder are gilded with it, and her loose dark hair is streaked with auburn glints. She is seven and a half months pregnant, and her forearms rest lightly on the sides of her enormous belly.
He stops walking. He will stand in the road until she looks up and notices him. Every time she pushes her needle through the gathered cloth, she purses her lips, and as she pulls the thread through, she tilts her head slowly to the left, then straightens it and repurses her lips as she prepares to jab the needle into the cloth another time. It is true that these little motions make her look ridiculous, but even so, Thomas Jefferson has never seen her more beautiful.
~ ~ ~
As Thomas Jefferson contemplates the identity of color, which can never be separated from the relationship between colors, he also contemplates the relationship between horror, consolation and beauty. Since his arrival in New York City, he has been thinking about Rilke’s notion that beauty is “nothing but the beginning of terror,” which he interprets to mean that we feel beauty most intensely in the presence of that which, if only by its transcendent magnificence, would seem capable of destroying us and yet does nothing of the kind. Our fear combined with our sense that we have nothing to fear translates into the sort of elevation we call beauty.
For most of his adult life, he has applied this notion primarily to the beauty of such things as mountains and dazzlingly starry skies. But lately he has been thinking about those instances when he has experienced joy of such terrific intensity that it is barely distinguishable from sorrow. In every case the joy has arisen out of the simultaneity of two contradictory impressions. The first took him years to recognize, because it is so at odds with the sort of person he has always wanted to be and who, even now, he tends to think that he actually is. He wants to be an idealist and an optimist, but, in fact, at the deepest level of his being, he sees ideals as nothing more than sad delusions and existence as the theater in which we are shown our utter selfishness, perversity and insignificance. And thus when he perceives, against the backdrop of this grim conviction, even the smallest instance of human decency — an act of simple kindness, for example — he experiences such an upwelling of joy that it is all he can do to hold back tears. Every time it’s exactly the same: our earthly loathsomeness intersecting with a minute or fleeting suggestion that we might not be entirely damnable — nothing else fills Thomas Jefferson with such joy or seems so profoundly beautiful.
This beauty is, of course, consolatory — but not falsely so. An instance of beauty endures only so long as it seems manifestly real and true. At the faintest tremor of doubt, it reverts to sad delusion or to hypocrisy. And so as he walks the streets of New York City and rides in metal boxes underground, among glum and oblivious strangers, Thomas Jefferson has come to define beauty as that which gives us joy without blinding us to truth.
But what about the beauty of color? When we get lost in that deep red, which is also red next to zenith-blue, and red and blue together beside a matte gold-brown — do we secretly feel ourselves to be truly lost and so become afraid? And do we then experience a sort of consolation insofar as we know that we are not, in fact, lost, that a mere blink is enough to liberate us from that complex red and restore us to our world of nothing much, in which we feel at home? Or is the beauty of color only the product of color’s simplicity, of the fact that it is entirely uninflected by selfishness and perversity, or by morality and meaning, and that when we are lost within it, it is only itself and we are only ourselves, happily, childishly and deeply alive in our being? Is color so beautiful simply because it is perfectly innocent and pure?
~ ~ ~
… I engaged in a constant debate with myself, arguing that Mr. Jefferson merely suffered from the white man’s constitutional incapacity to speak sensibly on matters of slavery or race, but that even so he was a good man, a brilliant man, a sad and kind man, and he loved me deeply. I am lucky, I would tell myself. I am very lucky.
And I was lucky, of course, in many ways, but there were aspects of my good fortune that I could not bear to face — privileges that had been granted to me not by fate but by Mr. Jefferson, privileges that I did not truly deserve but that I worked hard to maintain by taking his attentions only at face value and by living in an incomplete world.
I didn’t, for example, merely avoid conversations about slavery, I did my best not to see or comprehend proofs of the institution’s cruelty, injustice and pain that were manifestly evident near at hand. When I could not turn away from them, I tried to find ways in which Mr. Jefferson might remain untainted and pure — in which he did not fully comprehend what was being done in his name and in which none of it was what he intended. And so I became a wretched paradox, filled with fury at what I knew to be the willful blindness and indifference of the man with whom my life had become so inextricably tied and yet adopting that very blindness and indifference myself.
I am only a woman, I would tell myself. I am only a slave. What can I possibly do? I don’t understand. Nobody understands. There is nothing anyone can do. That’s just the way things are. I have to accept it. I have to be realistic. I can’t be blamed….
~ ~ ~
James T. Callender says, “Mute! Mute! Mute! Yes, very mute!”
~ ~ ~
July 12, 1797. There is a moan from the corner. Sally Hemings leans back from the table and pulls a curtain aside just enough to see almost two-year-old Harriet flopped on her back, legs and arms akimbo, as if she has fallen out of the sky. Sleeping next to her, brown legs drawn up under her bunched-up shift, single pigtail lying across her neck, is eight-year-old Aggy, the servant Thomas Jefferson sent to live with Sally Hemings so that she might have help with Harriet at all hours of the day and night. Aggy is the one who moaned. Her legs give a doglike twitch. A wince flickers at the corners of her mouth and eyes.
“Just dreaming,” Sally Hemings says to Thomas Jefferson, who is seated across the table from her, his cheek and temple a soft yellow-green in the lamp glow, tiny bent lamps in each of his eyes. He is fifty-three, and Sally Hemings is twenty-three.
She leans forward and lowers the wick, in case the light is what disturbed Aggy.
Thomas Jefferson arrived unexpectedly twenty minutes ago, with a crooked-necked bottle of wine, asking if she would like a bit of company, and now the bottle is half empty and so is her glass. She finishes it and puts it down on the table with a firm smack.