Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings by Stephen O'Connor Page A

white. Droplets tremble on his upper lip.
    â€œI’m sorry,” says Adams, a sharp concern in his large brown eyes. “Are you ill?”
    â€œNo . . . I just . . .”
    Adams leans yet closer and turns his right ear toward Thomas Jefferson. “Yes?”
    â€œThe address . . . I . . . Thank you, but . . .” Thomas Jefferson has to lick his lips before he can continue. “But . . . I . . . I . . . can’t.”

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.
    â€œLet me try,” says Sally Hemings, and with a single finger she sets the wheel spinning. Her machine lurches, then rises into the air.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Thomas Jefferson asks.
    â€œI 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