“Robert Penn Warren’s Encounter with Thomas Jefferson”
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this house, for as already noted Jefferson never traveled to “his West.” R.P.W.,
however, has visited the house:
Yes, I have seen it. Or saw,
Rather, all that remained when time and fire
Had long since done their kindness, and the crime
Could nestle, smug and snug, in any
Comfortable conscience, such as mine—or the next man’s—
And over the black stones the rain
Has fallen, falls, with the benign indifferency
Of the historical imagination, while grass,
In idiot innocence, has fingered all to peace.
Anyway, I saw the house—(BD II, p. 9)
When R.P.W. again says that the house is gone, Jefferson denies this: “For
I, who never saw it/See it now.” Jefferson is haunted by the house, and can hear
its timbers creak and stair groan. (BD II, p. 12) Perhaps, too, he hears the
screams of the butchered slave boy John
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in his mind. So R.P.W. instructs
Jefferson first by literally drawing him a map in speech and providing some
historical detail. He tells Jefferson of his first automobile trip to visit Rocky Hill:
I assure you it is gone. I know the place.
Up highway 109 from Hopkinsville
To Dawson Springs, then west on 62,
Across Kentucky at the narrow neck.
. . . . .
Above Paducah, east some fifteen miles,
Upriver there, they call it Smithland.
The town, I mean. It never came to much
. . . . . .
Just out of Smithland on the Louisville road
You’ll find the monument, a simple shaft
The local DAR’s put up in ‘24
Amid the ragweed, dog-fennel, and cocklebur,
To honor Lucy Lewis for good taste
In dying in Kentucky. The stone
Does name her sister to the President,
But quite neglects her chiefest fame, that she
Gave suck to two black-hearted murderers.
(BD II, pp. 12, 13, 17)
Convention