Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (44 page)

T
he more Sally Hemings reads, the more she becomes aware that the difficulty she has making sense of words is not just a matter of her own ignorance but also of certain weaknesses of the alphabet. She finds it particularly illogical that two letters should combine to make a sound entirely unrelated to the sounds each letter makes on its own, with
th
being the worst example, but
sh
being almost as bad. She is also bothered that the letter
c
can sometimes make the same sound as
s
and other times as
k
, and she is of the opinion that
c
is an entirely superfluous letter that should simply be dropped from the alphabet.

Be that as it may, her skill at decoding letters and the tiny marks in between them has progressed to the point that she has little trouble reading newspapers and has become particularly adept at spotting the name Jefferson. The newspapers keep her up to date about what Thomas Jefferson does while he is away, and they portray him as leading a heroic battle against the Federalists and the Alien and Sedition Acts. While she is never sure that she fully grasps all she reads, she finds it hard to believe that John Adams is truly the villain and fool that the newspapers declare him to be. She very much liked Mr. Adams during the fortnight she lived with him and Mrs. Adams in London. One time he came into the house carrying a tiny white rose that he had just picked in the garden. “For you, my dear Miss Sally-Bump,” he said as he handed her the flower. He always called her “Sally-Bump,” though she never understood why. At the time she thought that he was referring to a pimple on her chin, but now she can't imagine that could be true.

Despite her progress with the newspapers, Sally Hemings still finds
Notes on the State of Virginia
almost entirely impenetrable, not so much because it is difficult to read—although she does have trouble with words like “latitude,” “commonwealth,” “suffrage”—as because it seems to consist only of long catalogs of geographical features, plants, animals, products, laws and so on, all of which she finds entirely boring. Nevertheless, she remains determined to finish this book before moving on to others, and so every now and then she will pull it off the shelf over her bed and open it to
a random page, in the hope of finding something she might actually want to read.

During one such attempt, she flips the book open to the middle and instantly spots three words that interest her very much indeed: “emancipate all slaves.” She glances over the succeeding pages to see if Thomas Jefferson is, in fact, advocating emancipation and happens upon a passage where he seems to be comparing Negroes and whites, in the midst of which she reads: “in memory they are equal to whites; in reason much inferior.” She snaps the book shut, her head pounding, a nausea whirling in her stomach and radiating up her throat.

O
ver the next month, she is constantly seeking out and avoiding Moak, flushing with delight in his presence or going cold with anxiety. Finally, one afternoon two days after Thomas Jefferson has gone to Philadelphia, she lets Moak raise her skirt in a locked storage closet and have his way with her. They start out with her back against the wall, but after only a few moments he lifts her into the air without pulling out of her and stretches her atop Polly's sea chest, where he pounds into her with a speed and a force she finds so thrilling it is all she can do to keep silent.

When he finishes—far sooner than she would have liked—he bends over, wraps his arms around her and—still panting—murmurs into her ear, “I always wondered what white pussy felt like.”

For some reason this statement doesn't bother her in the least.

“How was it?” she asks.

“Good,” he says. “Deep and tight.”

Deep and tight.
She smiles. And she smiles again and again over the next few days, whenever those words come back into her head. She doesn't know why they please her so. Maybe it's just the notion that she can satisfy so young and good-looking a man. Maybe it's because there was something in the way he spoke those words that made her feel like she was his possession, and somehow she welcomes being his possession—a feeling she has never remotely had in connection with Thomas Jefferson.

They meet three more times over the next week—once more in the storage room, once in a woodshed and once in the cloakroom. And every time he uses her with the same delirium-inspiring vigor but then quits just as her own orgasm approaches. On each occasion she is left in such an agony of desire that she can hardly wait to be alone in a privy or her bed, where she might satisfy herself with her fingers. But that never really satisfies her, and she only grows more desperate for the moment when she will have her orgasm with him.

Often, when she is alone in her bed, either after they have made love
or late in the night when she needs to relieve herself simply so that she can sleep, she imagines saying to him, “I want you to give me a gift,” and that is the very instant when her orgasm surges from that slippery nub beneath her fingers all the way up into her throat and cheeks and head.

S
ally Hemings feels people's eyes linger on her as she moves about Monticello. But at the same time, she thinks that people are avoiding her—most obvious is Patty, Moak's wife, whose head jerks around as if she's been punched whenever she sees Sally Hemings approach. But even people with whom Sally Hemings would normally stop and have a quick chat avoid her gaze or walk past with only a grunted greeting or a somber nod. Ursula tells her straight out, “I'm not talking to you no more!”

She knows why, of course. And she tells herself she doesn't care. She tells herself she wouldn't care even if Thomas Jefferson were to find out. Sometimes she worries that he might sell her, but on the whole she thinks that possibility highly improbable. He could banish her from the great house perhaps, but most likely he would act as if she were so far beneath his notice as to be invisible.

She imagines what life would be like if she were Moak's wife. She'd have to work harder, of course, but she wouldn't have to feel so out of place all the time. She could just be herself. Patty is a pretty woman. She'd find herself another man. There'd be bad blood between them for a while, but in the end it would all work out.

S
ally Hemings is in the storage room again, this time belly down over the sea chest, and Moak is grunting behind her. When he finishes, she grabs his thigh and says, “Don't stop.”

He pushes her hand aside, pulls out of her and bends to grab his breeches, which are collapsed around his ankles. “Sorry, baby, that's all I got.”

“Use your fingers, then.”

“What's the matter?” he says, pulling up his breeches. “My willy ain't good enough for you?”

“Please.” She turns around and grabs his hand. “I want you to give it to me.” She pulls his hand between her legs, but he yanks free.

“I thought white women was crazy for black willy,” he says.

“Only my skin is white.”

“How come you so stuck up, then?”

Moak is not so much angry as contemptuous. Sally Hemings is so shocked that she cannot speak.

“That's what everybody say about you.” He gives her a smug, close-lipped smile. “You know that, don't you? Everybody say you so stuck up 'cause you think you white, when really you just a black nigger, same as the rest of us.”

S
ally Hemings's period is only a couple of days late, but there is an unusual fullness in her breasts and a sensation in her belly that she thinks of as an opening-up, as if her womb were a flower within a bud and on the verge of bursting. She is sure she is pregnant. She knows there is no way she can be certain, but she is certain anyway—and filled with dread.

As soon as Thomas Jefferson has returned from Philadelphia, after being away for three months, she knocks on the door to his chambers and kisses him before he has completely closed the door behind her. She tells him how much she's missed him. She caresses his cheek and runs her hand across his chest. Clearly he is surprised by her behavior, and equally clearly he is exhausted and is not really in the mood, so she slides her hand down his belly and, in a matter of seconds, knows that she will get what she wants.

But it repulses her. He is still redolent of the road: horse, dust and sweat, and once she has gotten him out of his clothing, he is so pale, mottled and flaccid-fleshed that he seems diseased. His muscles creak. The bones in his wrists and shoulders feel as if they are rolling against each other. As soon as she gets him inside her, she cups her hand over his testicles because she knows he loves that and that it will make him come almost instantly, which he does.

And once this has happened, she finds herself repulsed by the very trait she found so lacking in Moak. Thomas Jefferson's unhappiness that she has not had an orgasm now seems fawning and unmanly to her, and it fills her with such a visceral abhorrence that she cannot bear to have him inside her or to be touched in an erotic way by his hands.

“That's all right,” she tells him. “I'm not really in the mood,” assertions that clearly disconcert him, given her previous behavior. “Let's just lie here together,” she says. “This feels nice. It's good to have you back.”

In fact, even lying there beside him doing nothing at all makes her skin crawl, and she does not see how she will ever be able to make love with him again.

U
rsula has fallen ill, and Sally Hemings is in the kitchen garden gathering feverfew to make tea for her. As she stuffs a handful of the ragged leaves into the pocket of her apron, she notices a shadow on the ground at her feet. Reeling around, she finds that Moak is standing not one foot behind her.

“Afternoon, Miz Sally,” he says, lifting his straw hat off his head.

“What are you doing?” Her voice is low, but furious.

He smiles, her anger only seeming to amuse him. “I was just passing—”

“How dare you come up behind me like that!”

She tries to step around him, but he moves directly in front of her. “Aw, come on, Miz Sally.” Still smiling, he reaches for her hand.

The stalks of feverfew are as fibrous as ropes, so she has had to use a knife to cut them. Now she is holding the knife between her face and Moak's.

She is shouting.

“Don't you touch me!”

“Hey!” Moak takes a step back, laughing.

Sally Hemings cannot believe that she is actually brandishing the knife in front of him. The gesture makes her feel more weak than strong. She worries that he will snatch the knife out of her hand.

“I'm sick of you!” She takes a step back. “I don't ever want to see you again!”

“But, Sally, I just—”

She slashes the knife in the empty air, then turns and runs toward the kitchen.

“You stay away from me!” she shouts. “You just stay away from me.”

She glimpses Moak as she slams the kitchen door. He has not followed her. He has stopped smiling. He is standing exactly where she left him, his hands open, outturned and slightly lifted.

 

On Power

Thomas Jefferson's primary political objective throughout his career was to limit the power of any one group—including the very government he helped found. In 1778 he opened a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge by declaring, “Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

Nearly a decade later, he was in a decided minority among the Founding Fathers in not being troubled by the Shays' Rebellion, a revolt by poor farmers that led to the suspension of habeas corpus by Massachusetts's governor. “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion,” he wrote from Paris in 1787. “What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? . . . The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.”

His bill for the Diffusion of Knowledge concerned the establishment of a public school system, which, along with a free press, he saw as essential for the preservation of democracy—a linkage made clear in one of his most famous (or infamous) statements, also written in 1787: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

His idea was that grammar schools should be paid for by the state and open to all economic classes. Latin (or high) schools and universities would charge tuition, but poor students who showed exceptional promise would be eligible for full scholarships. Public education didn't gain much
traction in the United States until the the mid-nineteenth century, but Thomas Jefferson sought to help it along in the Land Ordinance of 1785, a plan for the development of the western territories. The ordinance decreed that all newly settled land should be divided into a grid of townships, each measuring six miles square, which in turn should be divided into a grid of thirty-six sections, with one of those reserved for a public school. The effects of this grid system can be plainly seen by anyone flying over the Midwest and the West, and, indeed, to this very day the public schools in many localities are in exactly the section of the grid (number 16) that Thomas Jefferson reserved for them.

The only element of his education plan that he saw through to fruition in his home state was the University of Virginia—a project with which he was involved on every level, including as architect. Perhaps nothing more clearly distinguishes this university as the product of his ideals than the fact that its campus, unlike those of all other American universities of that era, is centered on a library rather than a church.

Thomas Jefferson's religious views were always controversial, with his critics commonly denigrating him as a “confirmed infidel” and even as a “howling atheist.” While he probably did believe in God—at least most of the time—he was decidedly not orthodox and wanted to put strict limits on the ability of any one denomination to wield governmental power or dictate the conscience of individuals. In 1777, during an era when the Anglican Church had such sway over Virginia society that children not baptized in the faith could be taken from their parents, he wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, both to prohibit the establishment of state religion and, as he put it in his
Autobiography
, to protect the rights of “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel of every denomination.”

Believing commerce to be governed by “a selfish spirit” that “feels no passion or principle but that of gain,” Thomas Jefferson also sought to minimize the power of business, especially within government, an agenda at the heart of his opposition to the policies of Alexander Hamilton, which he felt would enslave Congress to the ambitions—and bribes—of New York bankers. He strongly preferred temporary local militias to a standing national army, because he believed that the latter could all too easily be deployed against the people by a tyrant. And, lastly, he was an advocate of the dispersal of governmental responsibility to the states as a check against the power of the federal government.

Thomas Jefferson rarely hewed to any of his ideals with perfect consistency, however. He became rather less sanguine about freedom of the press once he was subjected to vicious attacks by the Federalist papers, and he asserted entirely unconstitutional executive authority when, as president, he pushed the Louisiana Purchase through Congress. Nevertheless, he remained skeptical of institutionalized power to the very end of his life.

In the epitaph he composed only weeks before he died, he said nothing about having been president, governor of Virginia, ambassador to France or about any of his official positions within government. Instead he wanted to be remembered only as the author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and as the “father” of the University of Virginia.