A Sparks of Liberty Short Read

In the summer of 1776, in a rented room on Market Street in Philadelphia, a boy of fourteen carried the water, shaved the master, and kept the rooms quiet so a tall, fox-haired man could think. What the man did not know was that the boy had taught himself to read. And night after night, alone with a single candle, the boy bent over the pages drying on the table and read the words the man was writing.

The boy was Robert Hemings. The man was Thomas Jefferson. The words became the Declaration of Independence.

This is the story of what one of them saw that the other never knew he saw. It is told in the boy’s own voice, years later, on a snowy Christmas Eve, with his freedom finally in his hand and a candle burning down beside him.

The opening

The paper weighed nothing in my hand, yet I could not set it down. I had carried heavier things. Trunks up the mountain at Monticello with straps cutting my shoulders. A basin of hot water up the back stairs every morning for years, and never a drop spilled. This was one sheet, folded once, the ink dry for only an hour. It weighed nothing, yet my fingers would not let go.

What the Candle Witnessed is a Sparks of Liberty Short Read, a forty-five-minute read, by Christopher B. Gordon.