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Steve Erickson is one of my favourite authors. He's both a novelist and essayist and has done political coverage for Rolling Stone now and again. Among other things, he has an obsession with Sally Hemmings. He sees her everywhere. She speaks to him. Both in the fiction and the non -- there's a lack of distinction to it that fascinates me, that I _know_.

One of Erickson's books that I feel fortunate to own is Leap Year. It's an odd account of the 1988 election season and still a great, relevant read. It's out of print and probably the hardest of his out of print books to find. The following is a passage from it:

My train was bound to go to New Orleans sooner or later, or I was bound to wind up on a train that did. I arrive at nght, in a peculiarly empty station; New Orleans is a town schizophrenic in its fullness and emptiness of life. The cab takes me to the Quarter and I take a room at the St. Peter's Guest House. Considering that a number of the guests have been stashed away by the hotel management in the old servants' quarters of the house, I'm lucky to have a room on the courtyard. I eat dinner at Tujague's and dessert at a place across the street near the Mississippi where they serve the fried holes of donuts. These fried donut holes are quite the thing in New Orleans. Down the street is Storyville, where you can hear blues and jazz. Every bar in the Quarter is teeming with people listening to blues and jazz and sooner or later you're bound to run into someone you know even in this city where you don't know anyone. A few hours before dawn everyone goes home and pulls closed the curtains and sleeps so as to survive the daylight, hoping in the meantime no one invades this sanctum to pound a stake through his heart. By the second night I realize on the banks of the Mississippi that this is one of those places and times where north might be any direction at all; across the river beyond the banks on the other side is a void the extent of which no instinct can determine. When I've been in New Orleans forty-eight hours and will be gone in another thirty-six, I leave Storyville one night having had enough music. The silence of the leaving is uncommon and I relish it, the night having had to fall down its own deep well to get that quiet. I turn off Decatur onto St. Peter Street and walk along the Square....

She could be any age. She could be any color. Sally stands in a hallway behind a pair of shuttered doors not unlike the ones to my own room at my hotel; she calls. Except it isn't me she means. She wears a cape and earrings in the shape of masks at the end of small scepters, as if they came from France two hundred years ago. Thomas. "No," I say, "sory." I think she's working but when she steps into the street, in as dim a light as the street would offer, I see it isn't like that, it's not in her eyes that she's selling anything. Thomas? she says again. "No, I'm not Thomas." She has long straight black hair and under the cape her dress is plain. When she sees I'm not who she wants, she turns quickly to leave and I hear a small metal sound in the road at my feet; that's when I pick up the earring, the mask on the end of the scepter. I think she hears me when I call her, I think she keeps going because she thinks I have the wrong idea, that I've taken her inquiry for something else. She picks up her pace and disappears. Back in my hotel room there is on the small cepter part of the jewel of her blood, still slightly wet, as thought she pierced her own ear herself.

I see her again two days later, or maybe it's the day after. It's my last day in New Orleans anyway.