Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (6 page)

T
homas Jefferson is not able to stop his dream. He lies, flushed and sweating in the frigid darkness, willing his mind to be clear, his thoughts to be practical and significant—
Should a democracy grant citizens the right to resist subpoenas?
But the dream moves within his thoughts as if it were their true nature.

And in his dream Sally Hemings's invention has become a countryside of steel wheels, leather bellows and chains. And she herself is so resplendent it is almost impossible to look at her as she leads him across shuddering metal bridges, between house-high pistons that plunge and surge and jet shrieking towers of steam, between massive brass cauldrons, the polished flanks of which reveal his face as a gnarled dab of pink that smears and shrinks with his every step and his arms and legs as the ungainly stilts of a mantis or a giraffe.

Up diamond staircases that ring underfoot, past rows of copper clocks whose numbered faces tell something other than time. Smell of oil and dust and steam. Ceaseless throbbing. A kettledrum rumble. Bangs and clanks and rattles. And through it all, Sally Hemings, her white shift little more than a mist about her dazzling body, drifts up ladders, down corridors, across humming fields as if she herself were only a shred of steam, while Thomas Jefferson must wrench his feet off the ground with every step and feel his throat go raw from lack of breath and his heart kick in his chest.

At last she leads him out onto a steel balcony with a riveted floor, from the center of which rises something like a wagon wheel, but made entirely out of brass. He knows that if he can only turn this wheel, the machine will stop; he will be able to leave. But the wheel is jammed. He cannot budge it. Neither left nor right.

“Let me try,” says Sally Hemings, and with a single finger she sets the wheel spinning. Her machine lurches, then rises into the air.

“What are you doing?” Thomas Jefferson asks.

“I don't know,” she replies, the ever-quickening wind whipping her hair straight back behind her head. “I don't know why any of this is happening.”

She is smiling. Her storm gray eyes are radiant with delight.

. . . I have had to pace the room for some minutes in order that I might summon the resolution to finally write about Mr. Jefferson. My head is throbbing, I feel bile rising in my throat and my fingers are cold with sweat. This man is the author of the evil that has ruined the lives of so many good people. It is not possible to forgive him. Nor can I forgive myself. He is my shame, and
yet—

I don't know what to say.

My mother's words come to me: “Well, he is a man, but the Lord didn't make many men as fine as Mr. Jefferson.”

The problem is that I cannot conceive of Mr. Jefferson as only one man. So many of the memories I have of him are entirely incompatible with the man I know him to be. And perhaps this is only the mirror image of the way I see myself. Never once did I imagine myself to be evil, and yet I have lived a life in which I can no longer discover the girl who once looked back at me from every mirror with such artless contentment. . . .

T
he movie seems to go on forever. Thomas Jefferson wants to leave, but he is in the middle of a row in the middle of a crowded theater, and James and Dolley Madison are seated on either side of him, their expressions somewhere between stupefaction and worship, as they each stare at the wall where brilliant colors swirl and pool and are replaced every instant by other colors or by utter blackness, which, in an instant, explodes into light again—and into noise!

The noise is staggering. Voices thunder and wail. Tiny sounds—chains jingling on a wagon's undercarriage, dry leaves scraping across a slate roof—are like cannonades and banshee shrieks piercing the skull from ear to ear. And the music! This must be what music would sound like to a mouse trapped inside the reverberation chamber of his violin.

Thomas Jefferson slumps in his seat and wants to slide all the way to the floor. He wonders if, in fact, it would be possible to escape the room by crawling between the seats.

After a long period of looming, booming and frenzied flashing, as well as yet more shockingly intimate behavior on the part of the actors (do they know they are being watched? can they see him in the audience?—Thomas Jefferson finds everything related to these scenes profoundly disconcerting), all at once he is watching a far more static scene, set in a huge room—illuminated, it would seem, only by a full moon—in which the man in the copper-colored wig (now purple) is writing the Declaration to the accompaniment of a stately movement from a concerto grosso by Corelli. This is not so bad, except that Thomas Jefferson's many days and nights of solitary labor all seem to take place within a single moment and in a room that gradually fills with people, who look over his shoulder as he writes, then cheer when he is done. Also the hand sliding so glibly across the page never hesitates, never crosses out a word and writes in the perfect script of Timothy Matlack.

J
efferson proposed to me to make the draft. I said, “I will not,” “You should do it.” “Oh! no.” “Why will you not? You ought to do it.” “I will not.” “Why?” “Reasons enough.” “What can be your reasons?” “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.” “Well,” said Jefferson, “if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.” “Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.”

A meeting we accordingly had, and conned the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose. . .

We reported it to the committee of five. It was read, and I do not remember that Franklin or Sherman criticized anything. We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson's handwriting, as he first drew it. Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was. I have long wondered that the original draft had not been published. I suppose the reason is the vehement philippic against Negro slavery.

—John Adams to Timothy Pickering

1822

. . . In my mother's opinion, all white people—the males especially—were lazy, irritable, corrupt and foolish children whom we, like so many Brother Rabbits, were constantly outsmarting—but Mr. Jefferson was the exception. “He's the smartest man who ever lived,” she used to tell me. “He's read every book ever written and knows how everything works—and if he doesn't know, he can figure it out.” And then, of course, he was famous—so much so that, as she put it, “When he walks down the street in Philadelphia, everybody clears out of his way”—an image that when I was a little girl did a good deal more to confirm my fear of Mr. Jefferson than to help me share her veneration.

My mother, however, had only the most indefinite idea of what Mr. Jefferson had done to become so famous—and she wasn't alone. I remember her telling my sister Mary that he was the king of Virginia and Mary saying, “No, he's the burgess. General Washington is the king.” My brother Bobby was Mr. Jefferson's body servant in those days, and he once told us that Mr. Jefferson was a “delegate” and a “governor,” but I had no idea what either of these words meant, and Bobby was unable to explain them in a way that made sense to me or, I think, to anyone else in our family.

One thing that everyone at Monticello knew very well, however, was that Mr. Jefferson was important. We knew that he was written about in the newspapers almost every day and that he was visited by other important men, like General Washington and Mr. Madison. Elegant carriages were always pulling up in front of the great house, and they were filled with men and women dressed in silks and lace and wearing shoes so highly polished they gleamed like the sun on water. Some of these people came from as far away as Boston and New York, and they were clearly thrilled to be in the presence of our master, some so thrilled they were reduced to blushing and stuttering. I remember once helping my mother serve water to guests at a particularly large dinner party and seeing a woman so entranced by what Mr. Jefferson was saying that she kept her full fork hovering over her plate the entire time it took me to make a circuit of the table.

And even we servants shared a small portion of our master's fame. On Sundays when we were allowed to go into town for prayer meetings or to sell our livestock and the products of our gardens, men, women and children would point at us and stare. They'd ask in low, hushed voices, “You're Mr. Jefferson's people, aren't you?” They'd want to know what he was like or how it felt to work for such a man.

There were those among us who hated Mr. Jefferson—the wisest, I now know. But many more were prone to say things like, “Mr. Jefferson is a good master” and “We're lucky.” My mother told me many times, “Don't you forget how lucky you are to have Mr. Jefferson for a master!”

This all seems so pathetic to me now. And cowardly. Yes, we were lucky to be able to go into town on Sundays, and to sell what we grew and raised, and to keep the profits. Yes, Mr. Jefferson had a genuine abhorrence for the cowskin and a desire to be just, even kind. But there was still that dank precinct in his heart and that part of his brain that saw Negroes as more animal than man. Yes, we were lucky, but such luck is a mere drop in an ocean of misfortune. That we counted it as more than that only shows how impossible it was to keep off the deadness. . . .

P
rudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

—Thomas Jefferson

Declaration of Independence

“W
hat is the matter? Why do you look so sorrowful?”
I don't know. I was just staring at my hand and thinking that it is not my hand. I have been having such odd thoughts.
“You have been too much indoors. I will ask Jupiter to saddle Castor and Diomede. It is a fine, clear day. The new leaves are like a green mist on the mountains.”
No. I would rather not. I just want to stay here. For the moment, at least. I can't even imagine getting out of this chair.
“You must be catching something. Go to your cabin. I will bring you hot chocolate and biscuits, and I will read to you from Henry Fielding.”
I keep having the feeling that I am not myself. That I am not even here. I wonder if I am going mad.
“I have often felt a spectator at my own life, that the person I am is only what the world expects of me and that the real me is standing to one side.”
Yes. It is something like that. I feel as if I can't do anything.
“It is fancy. It will pass.”
I am not sure.
“Go lie down and I will read to you from Henry Fielding.”

. . . I was not myself. Is that possible? For almost my whole life I was not the person I imagined myself to be. . . .

I
am Thomas Jefferson. I have Thomas Jefferson's flowing, frizzed, red hair. I have his ocher eyes. And I look down on the world from a height that is greater than my own. I am on trial. And John Marshall is standing in front of me, in his black robe, his thick black eyebrows arrowed in contempt. “Prove yourself,” says Marshall.

“What is there to prove?” I say, my voice spreading wavelike to the four corners of the room, where it crashes and returns to my ears as a complex echo. “Do you doubt that I stand before you?”

“I doubt everything about you,” says Marshall. “You are incoherent. I don't believe in you at all.” He has several loose sheets of paper on the desk in front of him. He shuffles them, scowling at each in turn as it passes before his eyes. Then he stands them on end, lifts, drops and pats them until their edges are aligned. “You hear only the sounds of words,” he says, “and care nothing about their sense. A word without sense is only so much gas passing through the vocal cords. It is nothing.”

It is true that I am listening to the sounds of my words—or Thomas Jefferson's. They have a capacity to boom and reverberate in a way that I am not accustomed to. They are a sort of weapon, but I am not sure how to use them. “I stand for liberty,” I say experimentally, “and for equality.” As these words pass my lips, they have the effect of increasing my stature. Marshall has to crane his head back in order to reply.

“Whose liberty?” he says. “Whose equality?” His own words cause him to shrink. He is shouting, but his voice grows tinny and small.

“I stand for the liberty and equality of all men.”

“All men are as nothing to you!” Marshall shouts in his tinny voice. “They are a concept entirely devoid of meaning. You care about no one's liberty but your own. And no man can be equal to you by definition. ‘Equality' in your parlance is a rock, a cudgel, a battering ram! A cannibal in the raiment of a patriarch!”

“You are a monarchist!” I tell him, my voice rattling the windows, causing plaster dust to sprinkle from the ceiling cracks. “You are a corrupt artifact of an obsolete era! A monocrat! A tyrant! A consolidationist!”

Marshall, gray-haired, storm-browed, is nevertheless a child sitting at a child's desk. He folds his papers impatiently, stuffs them into a leather satchel and stands. “We are judged,” he says as he moves toward the door, “not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.” He opens the door, then slams it behind him, but its sound is obliterated by my booming laughter.