The President's Daughter (16 page)

My coldblooded appraisal of Mrs. Wellington told me that candor in all things would be appreciated. My visit had been orchestrated to the last degree. Petit had left me at the door and I had entered the front room alone, hesitant yet assured, shy yet serene. I had worn a green tartan dress with a plaited bodice, white collar and cuffs, and large mutton sleeves. My pillbox hat was green, and it had a green veil dotted in red. The outfit complemented my hair and accentuated my fairness. I had prayed I wouldn't like Mrs. Wellington, thus making it easier to deceive her. But I did like her. There was frankness in her smile and attentiveness in her face. There was warmth and welcome. I wouldn't have to lie. She would see what she wanted to see—a strange, countrified, Virginian orphan, as poor as peas and potatoes but fairly well-read, with “possibilities,” a fake pedigree, and southern sensibilities.

I had curtsied, European-style, when I entered—a long, low, graceful swoop which had pleased her—and at Petit's suggestion, I had kissed her hand as young women did with older women in Europe. She had flushed with embarrassment and pleasure and had left her small plump hand in mine.

“Come, my dear, tell me about yourself, Miss Petit. Thance has bent my ears back about you, but that isn't the same thing. I understand you and Thance would like to be married at Christmas.”

“That's Thance's wish.”

“Would it be possible for you to set a date when we know when Thor can arrive?

“Of course, we want him here for the wedding.”

Mrs. Wellington smiled proudly. “You had four brothers, I understand?”

“Yes ... all dead.”

“Oh, you poor, poor child. Life is sometimes so pitiless.” She paused then, looking me over from head to toe. “I want to be frank with you, Harriet. I have no interest in thwarting my son's desire. I admit I would have preferred a girl from Scranton to a Virginian. Not that I have a prejudice against southern women, but I have found that in general, they learn from the cradle that southern belle's Machiavellian talent for manipulation. The southern climate encourages indolence, and the proliferation of Negro servants a certain . . . shall we say, helplessness. These defects do not diminish with marriage, but are reinforced by the pampering and indulgent possessiveness of their menfolk. The climate also encourages sensuality, and owning other people and having the power of life and death over them induces a kind of reckless fatalism. I'm afraid the work ethic we instill in northern girls is greatly lacking in southern women. . . .”

“Madam, where did you learn such erroneous information concerning southern ladies? I assure you, most of them lead the lives of pioneer women, sharing the work of running farms and plantations with their men. They rise at dawn, organize large houses, have heavy social engagements, are nurses, doctors, midwives, cooks, and farmhands as well as southern belles. There are more log cabins in the South than mansions. Since most live on isolated farms and plantations where everything must be handmade and the farm self-sufficient, they must be seamstresses and weavers, candlemakers, soapmakers, honey-gatherers. When they have slaves, they must train and supervise them, rising at dawn and retiring long after their men and servants. They must give birth to their children in the wilderness, often without the assurance of even a midwife, and as always, Nature in the guise of storms, floods, bugs, drought, epidemics. ... All must be dealt with on God's terms. I do believe, Mrs. Wellington, that you do us an injustice.”

“And your family, Harriet?” she continued smoothly without thinking, while despite myself, my blood boiled in indignation.

“When I
had
a family, it was large and slaveholding, but it no longer exists, except in memory. I am a girl alone in the world who has no past and is uncertain of her future.”

Mrs. Wellington softened visibly. “Oh, I know that to keep such people as half-civilized Negroes in line takes a lot of courage. Living in such close proximity to such savages can only be accomplished by strict discipline and
segregation and violent punishment. White women who must live in constant fear of rape and revolt from Negroes must use gratuitous cruelty as a method of self-defense.

“My poor Harriet. I am here to remedy your past. My son loves you very much.”

“And I love him,” I replied defiantly.

“I do not believe you mentioned what church you attend.”

Again, I thought, this question of religion.

“Why, that of Charlotte,” I replied.

“Why, that is my church. Have I passed my future daughter-in-law without realizing it?”

“I imagine you have your pew, while I sit in the gallery.”

“It's true. I usually leave before the gallery descends.”

Imagine my gratification that Mrs. Wellington had supplied me with my excuse for never having been to church at all.

“I would like you to have a talk with Reverend Crocket soon. You must get Charlotte to sponsor your membership as soon as possible.”

As the afternoon wore on, in the safe, comfortable room furnished with solid English furniture, polished brass, and colorful throw rugs, bits and pieces of music came back to me. Not music I was practicing, nor music that was in the popular repertoire of the day; the melodies I heard that long afternoon were old slave-working songs, crying songs, half-remembered nursery rhymes and children's rounds, gospels, and even old Gabriel Prosser's stomping rhyme to which white people danced without knowing the words. The notes swelled through my mind like the sunbeams that danced through the tall white curtains. Suddenly I wanted to go home. I wanted my mother. . . .

“Maman, ”
I whispered, and then blushed scarlet when I realized I had said it out loud and that Mrs. Wellington had heard me and had risen and taken me by the shoulders.

“My dear,” she said, “come meet your future sisters.”

She rang, and her daughters Tabitha and Lividia entered. They were tall, dark, and good looking, with clear complexions and raven black hair. I was far fairer than either of them. Tabitha was married to Janson Ellsworth, a regimental doctor, and Lividia was only fifteen, yet as tall as I and as mature as her sister. I tried to sort my feelings. These Wellington women would constitute my new family. They would, as time passed, supersede my real family at Monticello: Critta and Dolly, Ursula and Bette, Peter and John, Dolly and Wormley. Eston, Beverly, Madison, and Mama. There were the whites as well—Martha and Thomas Mann, Ellen and Cornelia, Meriwether
and Francis, Virginia and the President. All of a sudden, they all seemed to crowd into the room along with Tabitha, Lividia, and Mrs. Wellington until they, and my lie, had taken up all the space, milling around the quiet room, each with indelible sets of fingerprints, touching each and any object that came under their gaze, sliding around the mantelpiece, the fireplace, the piano, the silk curtains, the waxed breakfront, the library table, the bookcase, the Chinese vases, the lacquer boxes, the Queen Anne wing chairs, the silver teapot. Gingerly I touched the metronome on the piano. My blackened fingerprints would be left on this new family as well as the old.

I sat down at the pianoforte without speaking, and played simple pieces, skimming over the ivory and ebony in time with the ticktocking metronome and with my coldblooded lie. My fingers flew over the keys as lightly as they could for I feared they would leave black stains on the clean surface. But nothing happened.

There are absurdities into which those of us run who usurp the theme of God and dictate to Him what He should have done.

Thomas Jefferson

The law library at the University of Pennsylvania had been built in 1797, as a replica of Louis XIV's Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It had a cast-iron-and-glass dome which gave it natural light, a balcony around its four sides, and a collection of forty thousand volumes. Thance had once told me that the vaulted crystal palace which now surrounded me had cost almost seven million dollars.

I was dressed in a short jacket and trousers, my braid hidden under the high collar of the wide-shouldered jacket and a wide-brimmed blue felt hat, a pair of round, steel-rimmed spectacles perched on my nose, a short lock of clipped hair falling over one eye. I looked very much like any of the other young clerks doing research for one of the many lawyers in the area, disguised as a boy as I had been that day at Thance's laboratory.

The custodian hardly looked up as I walked by, and the bored librarian simply indicated to me where to sign in. As I penned Thance's initials, my hands trembled inside leather gloves, which I wore to conceal the fact that my hands weren't those of a man. Even if women, Negroes, Jews, and dogs were prohibited, what could they do, I thought, except ask me politely to leave?

I quickly wrote out my request and silently handed it to the clerk. My heart accelerated as I slipped into the nearest stall at the end of a long row of desks screwed to the hardwood floor. Whale-oil lamps with green glass shades were poised at each stall. I must have closed my eyes, because suddenly I heard a
loud
thump
as three oversized leather volumes punched in gold slammed down beside me.

“Please sign here, sir.”

Again, I forged Thance's signature. Slowly I pulled off my gloves and pulled on the white clerk's cuffs and gloves used to protect the book pages and my jacket sleeves. I stared at the title before I lifted the cover of the first volume.
The Black Laws of the State of Pennsylvania—Status Regulating the Comportment of Free Blacks in the State of Pennsylvania.

A free black convicted of committing fornication or adultery with a white shall be sold into servitude for seven years. The white party punished as the law directs in cases of adultery or fornication to one year in prison and payment of a hundred-dollar fine. Whites who shall cohabit or dwell with any Negroes under pretense of being married shall also receive such punishment.

In cases of interracial marriage, the free black is to be sold into slavery, and children from such a marriage are to be put out to service until they reach the age of twenty-one. The minister who performs such a ceremony shall be fined one hundred dollars.

Any free black or mulatto harboring or entertaining any Negro, Indian, or mulatto slave or fugitive will be condemned to twenty-one lashes and a payment of restitution. If unable to pay the fine, he will be sold into slavery to pay his debt.

A grimace of mocking irony at my own naivete tore at my mouth, which hung open in surprise. So this was the North, was it? This was where I was to be married in a church, before God and society by an ordained minister. This was where I was to walk down the aisle, amidst music and flowers, to my bridegroom.

The book-lined walls seemed to explode into endless space. There was no escape. Wherever I went, the eternal hell of negrophobia went with me. Whatever limits there were to this planet, I would never be safe. My crime would follow me to death, and if I persisted I would carry everything and everyone I loved with me. For these pages spoke not of slaves but of freedmen. Black freedmen. There could not be, as Adrian Petit had pointed
out, a white slave, just as there could not be a black American. It was a contradiction in terms—an aberration in a white man's country.

The words danced across the page like notes of music, and a persistent tune droned on and on in my head. Stupidly, I was humming Yankee Doodle! Then I realized it was the buzz of a muffled scream against each affront on the life of a free person of color in Pennsylvania: forbidden to vote, forbidden to run for office, to bear arms, to pilot riverboats, to serve in the militia, to meet in groups, to carry a weapon, to be found on the streets after eleven
P.M
., to loiter, to be drunk in public, to be more than ten minutes from his or her residence without being accompanied by a white person, to practice medicine, to practice law, to practice usury on a white person, to own a private carriage. Free colored people had separate courts, separate schools, separate churches, separate cemeteries. They were dealt the death penalty for rape, buggery, or burglary inflicted on a white person. They were publicly whipped for robbing, stealing, perpetrating fraud, or carrying a pistol, sword, or other arm. Free Negroes were required to pay a poll tax of five hundred dollars to the state to guarantee their good behavior.

I read on, my face flushed, my chest burning, my braid slipping out of my high collar. Humiliation and foulness flooded me as if the ink on the pages flowed like poison into my blood. We, the Hemingses ... I felt naked. This was far worse than rape, this violation of one's most intimate and cherished illusions. I heard the voices of all of those I loved, of the family I missed, of those like me who loved their country despite what had been done to them. Even this secondhand knowledge of my father's country was not really mine because I didn't belong to the country of which he had been President.

The custodian threw a casual glance my way. I didn't seem to be taking any notes.

A lone tear fell. Then another, so hot, so caustic that I wondered that it didn't burn straight through the page. I had found what I had been looking for. My place.

I looked up in alarm as the library clerk approached. He was coming to get me. I half rose, then sank again into the leather armchair, almost knocking over the oil lamp.

“Here you are, sir, the bound copies of the
Richmond Recorder
for the year 1802. Would you sign this, please?”

The volume was as heavy as a child in my arms. Mechanically I opened the book, riffling the pages until the article dated September 1, 1802, emerged as if from an underground well. It was called “The President Again,” and it began:

It was well known that this man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and, for many years, has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. The name of her eldest son is Tom, who bears a striking resemblance to the President. The boy is ten or twelve. His mother went to France with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every portion of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies. . . . By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. . . .