TYAGTA "Slavery" Chapter 2

2

Martha Jefferson sat in her rocking chair reading Franklin’s latest edition of wise sayings, “Brother Benny’s Bon Mots.” A portly middle-aged housewife with a faded jaw, she always wore her dour mood as a scowl. Martha was a woman of thoughts and aspirations, the kind to devour the wealth of humanity’s knowledge yet never construct her own written wisdoms. To pen down an idea tainted the human wonder of imagination; the shackles of language chained thought to the earth.

And no imagination could fly freely without a tidied thought-space. Too busy with her high-minded endeavors, she employed a slew of house servants who earned a modest penny from her inherited wealth. This freed Martha from the duties of womanly labor and shackled her to the chair in which she sat, reading another of Franklin’s witty remarks: “The most exquisite folly is wisdom spun too fine.”

She snorted.

“Problem, Missus Jeffuhsun?”

Martha leaned back and hummed, eyes closed. She sighed, “I’ve been pondering physics again, Sally. You know that takes a toll on my psyche.”

“Ah, too right. You think too much, Missus Jeffuhsun.”

Martha chuckled. Could there be such a thing?

“It’s these damned electrons. If we merely know that their existence around the nucleus of an atom is all reducible to probability, then there must be an inherent probability that those electrons cease to exist. Could such a thing occur? Energy disappearing and reappearing in an instant?”

“I don’t reckon’ that’s what it means, Missus Jeffuhsun.”

Martha sighed, “Well I don’t suppose you would, Sally. We are all blind, some more than others it would seem, to the world in which we live. It is the limit of all human understanding. How can we ever truly know what occurs in the heavens, or beyond the stars, or even down the street past the walls in which we live?”

Sally looked out the window, “Massah Jeffuhsun’s a-comin’.”

Martha raised a pointed finger, “Ah yes, but do we know for certain that he is coming?”

Jefferson opened the door, “Martha, I’m home from the pub. Is Sally around?”

Jefferson and Sally’s eyes met.

“Hello Thomas,” she said.

“Sally,” Jefferson bowed. He shouted down the hall, “Martha? Martha are you here?”

“Thomas,” Martha called, not budging from her seat. “You’re just in time. I had stumbled upon an enlightened question, yet Sally’s mind seems as fertile as a rotting horse.”

Jefferson sighed, “Oh really.”

“Yes, Mistuh Jeffuhsun.” Sally curtsied back into the room, her voiced doubled-over in her ‘house speak.’ “We was debatin’ – well you tell it, Missus Jeffuhsun.” Sally laughed, shaking her head as she walked away, “I don’t seem to know what you’s sayin’ half the time.”

Sally whispered to Jefferson, “Goodbye, Thomas.” She walked further down the hall and muttered, “Fat bitch.”

“Yes, well, thank you Sally.” Jefferson cleared his throat and eased his way into the living room. The crinkling of Horehound’s hard candies wrapping paper followed an avalanche of colorful tissues as he waded through the living room. “Martha, what has you so concerned this early? You know it isn’t good for your health.”

“I was reading over this treatise on physics, and I was wondering: we only know by a certain probability where an electron will be when it is orbiting the nucleus of an atom.”

“Of course, dear. It’s 1775; everyone knows that.”

Martha leaned over her armrest and shouted, “I guess some people don’t!”

“Where are the children?”

“In a moment; you never let me finish a thought, Thomas.”

“Yes dear. Electrons?”

“And probability. Does that not imply that there is a certain probability that the electron ceases to exist at all?”

There was a silence in the room, pregnant ellipses punctuated by commas from the ticking of the clock.

“…Martha, I don’t think that’s what that means–”

A ceramic vase flew across the room, shattering against the wall next to Jefferson’s head.

“How would you know?!” Martha cried, leaping from her seat. Candy wrappings rolled to the floor from her lap. “What have you ever read or studied on the subject of physics? Hrm?”

Martha stomped to her husband and threw up her hands. She kicked a waste bin across the room, “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you? Well I’ll have you know that I’m–”

“No, Martha.”

“Don’t patronize me, you fuckuseless dandy of a two bit treason queer!”

“I taught you that word, Martha.”

“You’re just blind, Jefferson. We all are. You can’t possibly see the world beyond your own viewpoint. It’s always about you, which is why you can’t see the truths I see.”

Jefferson bunted, “Well if we’re all blind, aren’t you blind too?”

Martha smiled, straining her eyes out more as she shook a fist at the ceiling, “Of course! And I can see beyond because I know I am blind!”

Sally crept in to sweep up the broken vase, ducking under Martha’s arm as she spun in place, cackling.

“And when my work is done you will ALL see!” Martha stumbled back and collapsed in her chair. “You’ll all see,” she whispered, eyes closed.

“Martha, you should get out more.”

She chuckled, “Oh Thomas, you know my symptoms confine me to this chair.”

“What symptoms?”

“I have diabetes, restless leg syndrome, fibromyalgia–”

Jefferson folded his arms, “Those aren’t real diseases, Martha. Those are just the symptoms of being fat. Probably lazy, too.”

Martha’s face tempered to a glare, “How could you – you know obesity runs in my family.”

“Obesity doesn’t run in your family, Martha; obesity doesn’t run at all!”

“I can’t speak to you when you’re like this. You’ve been drinking with Franklin again, haven’t you?”

“We weren’t drinking.” Jefferson thought for a moment. “I wasn’t drinking.”

“Oh, Benjamin Franklin’s drunk and on the town? Alert the militia.”

“You know they won’t go near him, Martha. Not since that mangling he gave to John. It will be a miracle if he can ever write with that hand again.”

“The man is a beast, Thomas.”

“He just kept stabbing John’s hand, shouting, ‘Where’s the cock? Where’s the cock?’ But that was just the cocaine talking, I would wager.”

“You can’t keep hanging around with those boys, Jefferson. Think of your career.”

“What career? We inherited all of this Martha; and what should a man with such luxuries do but fight for the freedom of his fellow citizens?”

“Thomas.”

“And it is why we fight, for freedom! For liberty! For truths we decided were self-evident–”

“Thomas.”

“That all men, and women dear my dearest Martha–”

“I’m leaving you, Thomas.”

“–are created – what?”

“You know,” Martha laughed, “I was so worried about saying that. I didn’t think I had the courage to do it, frankly. But now that I’ve said it…it’s so easy; I’m leaving you, Thomas. Wow, look at me!”

“But,” Jefferson stammered, “but Martha, why?

“I’ve met someone, Thomas. Someone who understands my vital needs as an intellectual and a woman.”

Jefferson grabbed a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed at his cheeks, “Who is he?”

“His name is Ashwin. Ashwin Downing-Beaver.”

“…You’re leaving me for an Indian?”

“He’s a real man, Jefferson; an unbridled, earthly Cherokee who kindles the ember of my loins, mind, and somewhere between those two, my heart. He’s not a pasty, half-assed statesman in a backwater English colony like some men.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s out.”

Jefferson looked around the room, “Where are the children? Patsy?” He shouted to the house, “Jane? Bellerophon?”

“Patsy and Jane left when I told them about the arrangement. Bellerophon went with them. Said something about leaving the tempestuous chimeras of bourgeois life; educating that one may have been a mistake.”

“And the girls?”

“Ashwin is with Lucy One and Lucy Two now. They should be back any minute.”

“Martha, this is absurd. Let’s talk about this before either of us does something we’ll regr–”

The door opened and the Jeffersons’ two remaining daughters scuttled in, followed by a barrel-chested Indian wearing an ascot and feathered headdress. Deer bones sewn into his three-piece suit rattled with his steps.

Jefferson hugged his daughters, “Lucy One, Lucy Two. Where were you?”

Lucy Two burbled, “Hulloo Duhddy!”

Lucy One chimed in, “We went to see the Chief Duhnce, Duhddy!”

Jefferson arched an eyebrow at Martha, “The Chief Dance?”

Ashwin stepped forward and shook Jefferson’s hand, “Ashwin Downing-Beaver. You must be Thomas, Martha has told me… much about you.”

Jefferson grimaced, shaking Ashwin’s hand as a reluctant gentleman would. “Likewise.”

“See?” Martha pled from her seat, nudging away licorice sticks and wrapping foils. “I told you about his unsavory temper.”

Ashwin nodded.

Jefferson bent over to look at Lucy Two, “What’s this Chief Dance, Lucy?”

“All the tribes were thuhre, and they were singing and duhncing.”

Jefferson grinned and reached for an air of multiculturalism by belching out, “How rustic.”

Lucy One bounced up and down, “Then the strongest men cuhrried the Chief uhround in a chair, and the ladies all cuhrried ribbons and gourds.”

The two girls grinned and declared, “Then they burned uh lady uhlive and ate her heart!”

Jefferson quacked, “They did what?!”

“It’s a beautiful ceremony, actually,” Ashwin said for the girls. “It marks the unity of all tribes of man as one.”

“…so they burn a kid alive and eat her heart?”

Martha sighed, “You’re fighting a losing battle, Ashwin. My husband…,” she smiled, “…former husband, is just too petty and narrow-minded to grasp the intricacies of earthly living.” Martha rubbed her loins, wriggling with ecstasy.

Jefferson countered, “It simply isn’t right for the girls to witness such… things.”

“It’s okay Duhddy,” Lucy One assured her father.

“Well, I suppose you girls are wise enough to handle these affairs.”

Lucy Two added, “Yea, I wuhs afraid to eat her heart uht first but when I saw everybuddy else doing it, I–”

“My God!”

“Why don’t you girls take Ashwin around the town?” Martha cooed. “Your father and I have more to discuss.”

“No, Martha I don’t think we do,” Jefferson said as he walked over to the stairs. “If you’re leaving I can’t stop you.”

“No, that isn’t it, Thomas.” Martha waved the girls and Ashwin goodbye, “I’m not leaving.”

“But you just said–”

“Yes, I’m leaving you. So now you are leaving Monticello.”

Jefferson stepped back, “What? But I built–”

“The land belonged to my father. And where would Ashwin and I raise the girls? Would you want your own daughters to live on the streets, Thomas?”

“No…that is I,” Jefferson stopped. “…fine. I’ll be back for my things in the morning.”

Jefferson stepped out, but before he could close the door Martha shouted, “Thomas, wait!”

Jefferson turned.

Martha spit, hurtling a glob at Jefferson’s cheek. It landed as she snapped, “Let’s see your long-haired fuckbuddy help you now.”

Jefferson wiped the spittle from his face and sighed, closing the door and stepping back out into the bustling village of Philadelphia. A stagecoach passed and he wondered if they might grant him a ride to the woods where Franklin lived.

Then Jefferson realized: he was planning to go to Franklin’s, to march headlong into the inferno of Skyfather’s Deist Hell. But he shrugged off that concern. Sure, Franklin was a heartless, uncouth demon in the skin of a man, but he couldn’t turn out a friend in need.

“Thomas, wait,” Sally called from the door. “Are you really leaving?”

“Sally,” Jefferson sighed. “Yes, it appears I must.”

“Then take me with you.”

Jefferson chuckled, “Would that I could, Sally. Were I Emperor I would free all the slaves from their shackles, but alas you belong to Martha.”

“I belong to myself, Thomas. I don’t care what some contract says. We could make a run for it, be out of the city before sunset, the fat bitch won’t even notice we’re gone before we’re out West. The militia won’t even be sober for another four days; they’d never find us–”

“Sally, really. Martha may be a tad cheeky but–”

“She’s a lazy, fat bitch just like her mother.”

Jefferson chuckled, “Oh Sally. You’ve really been there for all of us, haven’t you? Raising the children, caring for our home, drying out Martha’s folds – if there’s anything I can do for you just say the word and it’s yours.”

“Oh really?” Sally smirked, tracing her finger down Jefferson’s cheek, “Anything I might ask?”

Jefferson stammered, “Why – why yes, Sally.” He took her by the hand. “But for now it appears I must be off.”

“Oh come on now, Thomas.” Sally leaned in to whisper into Jefferson’s ear, “She’s probably passed out in the chair by now. We could go upstairs and nobody would hear us.”

She cooed, breathily, “Mistuh Jeffuhsun.”

Jefferson stepped back, “Well yes, Sally but I must be off. Goodbye, Sally!” He waved as he hustled away to the woods outside town.