The President's Daughter (68 page)

ESTON HEMINGS JEFFERSON

Their eyes are forever turned back to the object they have lost, and its recollection poisons the residue of their lives.

Thomas Jefferson

In 1873, a white man came down my road as if God had ordained it and as if he owned the road. That was how white men arrived in Pee Wee, even now, eight years after the war. Hadn't the Albemarle County census taker arrived at Mama's door in 1836 in just the same way, turning her white for posterity to erase my father's crime of miscegenation? Well, reader, it turned out there was another census taker in my life, the Pike County census taker of 1873 this time, and I don't know why I did it, but I told him who I was, Madison Hemings of Monticello, son of the President. I could have gotten myself lynched or torched out over that—damned near thirty lynchings this year alone in Ohio. But I just had to do it. For me it was the coda to the whole God-damned war. I told the census taker in order to give myself a father after sixty-eight years. To set the record straight. It was my own private individual emancipation, my proclamation of identity, and he believed me, just as the earlier census taker had believed Mama. “This man is the natural son of Thomas Jefferson,” he wrote beside my name without the flicker of an eyelash. The census taker must have been as shaken by those words as I, but, good functionary that he was, he had obediently written them down. But not without staring in amazement (or amusement) at me. There was a strong family resemblance: pale lashes, sandy hair, light gray eyes, the forehead and chin of my father. However, since I was a taxpayer and a property owner, it was not for him to contradict the man who paid his salary.

I slid sideways from my bay, Double Eagle, to pluck a wild eucalyptus
plant growing by the side of the road. I put it in a small linen bag at my waist. It was the best remedy for my cough. I straightened and pulled my hat farther down on my head. I had been riding the parameters of my sixty-six acres since early this morning. The heat shimmered up from the scalp of my fields. It had rained during the night, and the stalks were matted with dew. I breathed in the aroma of the wet wheat warming to the sun, drawing out pulsations of perfume the color of amber which warmed my sick lungs and reminded me of my mother's eyes.

What I liked most was to contemplate my farmhouse from afar. Some houses have expressions, just like people, and mine was like that. It sat in solitary splendor on a flat, stark prairie, like a man on a camel in the desert. The steep gabled roof sat upon the white clapboard walls like a shelter tent, and the white steps of the veranda grinned from the deep shade. Over the door hung a pair of buffalo horns like a waxed mustache, and the second-floor windows gleamed in the light like rectangular spectacles. It was not a friendly-looking house despite the two magnificent juniper trees that flanked it like General Burnside's sidewhiskers. A flagpole stood close to the rear of the house, and the American flag fluttered upon it, lifting lazily with the movement of the tall grass. I had raised the colors every morning since the death of William Beverly Hemings, thirteen years ago. And if an eye could weep, would it believe in such a poor flag as an empty sleeve?

The house stood about three hundred yards back from the road leading into the town of Pee Wee. In this eighth year of Reconstruction there were always people on the road—farmers with their produce, Chinese railroad laborers, journeymen with the tools of their trade slung over their backs, immigrant laborers, fresh off ships which had deposited them at the mouth of the Ohio. But more than any of these, there were the black domestic immigrants, born in the United States yet displaced in their own country and constantly on the move in search of the forty acres and a mule they had been promised.

Many a one I have hired for a day or a year. I always favored the war veterans, the handicapped, and the very young. How many times have I stared at or stared away from the braille of an ancient scar: shell, saber, bayonet, bullet, gunpowder, dynamite, buckshot, mortar, cannon, Bowie knife, hatchet, tomahawk, or whip. A new race of American men, perhaps the first truly American men baptized in the cauldron of the Civil War, had streamed across the western plains for the past decade like one thick ribbon of scar tissue. Then there were the wounds that were invisible: shell shock, amnesia, malnutrition, insanity, depression. Some men couldn't stay put. Had to keep roaming. Some scars were shorn of all meaning. They came hooked
up to the strangest faces: docile or rebellious. The only common denominator amongst them was that they belonged to colored people, people of color, black folks, Negroes, niggers, coons, darkies, contrabands, freedmen, ex-slaves, gorillas, jigaboos, African tarbabies. I hired one Georgia boy like that who stayed for almost six months. Ted didn't have much to say to anyone, and when asked about his scars, he'd say they belonged to another life. Well, that was true because there was a before-the-war and an after-the-war for everybody. It just wasn't the same country we were born in. You might say we were a nation of double lives. Just like Harriet.

It was a bitter irony that the country had been reconstructed, but that perpetual darkness had settled over us. Reconstruction, first a hope, had become a hope betrayed. A decade after we had captured Jacksonville and had led the way through the charred streets of Charleston and Richmond, the Union Army providentially becoming an army of liberation, we were once again crushed, terrorized, disenfranchised, and practically re-enslaved. The ex-slaves had settled back almost to their antebellum situation, and our dreams of forty acres and a mule, promised at the end of the war by the Freedman's Bureau, had been stamped into a bitter disillusion by new and terrifying oppression in the Old South. Southern whites resisted our enfranchisement, despite their own state constitutions and the Fourteenth Amendment. New Black Codes to regulate Negroes had risen along with vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The South had been reduced once more to military rule, and the Freedman's Bureau had become one of the most efficient and corrupt political machines ever known. The Knights of the White Camelia rode riot in sixteen states, burning, torturing, and lynching. America was the only civilized nation in the world that still burned men alive for a crime or an alleged crime.

My cousin Thenia Hemings Boss and her grandson Aaron got caught in that spiral of violence. They were attacked by the Knights of the White Camelia, Thenia for teaching ex-slaves to read, Aaron for registering them to vote in Waynesboro, North Carolina. It happened in 1870. Thenia perished in the flames, a shotgun in her hand. Aaron was pulled out of the house and then lynched. As I said, America is the only civilized country that still burns men at the stake.

I guess you want to know about the war. The old war, not this new one. I fought as a black man while Eston, it seems, changed his race to white to fight. Well, I wouldn't go through all that. I waited. And sure enough, when things got bad enough and dangerous enough, they conceded to the black fighting man. I joined the colored division attached to the Army of the James under General Butler. So did my sons, James Madison, Thomas
Eston, and William Beverly. I was a little long in the tooth, but nobody could prove my age, and I fought in the battle of New Market Heights in the campaign of 1864.

That's not where I got this empty sleeve. I got that in the Crater in ‘64, trying to save William Beverly. Anyway, on Palm Sunday in ‘65, when Lee surrendered at Appomattox and the “rebel yell” was heard for the last time and black Union soldiers fired their guns into the ground, the only real American present was General Grant's military secretary, a Seneca Indian. When General Lee remarked that he was glad to see one native American there, Sergeant Parker (that was his name) said, “We are all Americans.” Ain't that the truth, as I see it. Grant let the Rebs go home, not to be disturbed by U.S. authority so long as they observed their paroles and pledged allegiance to the United States. The fact that the Secesh soldiers would not be prosecuted for treason didn't bother us none. Artillery- and cavalrymen with horses were allowed to keep them to start planting, which was what we all did next. Six hundred and twenty thousand soldiers were dead for those goddamn stars on that goddamn flag, one death for every four slaves freed.

I imagined a commanding statue dedicated to those men, made of Maryland granite, surmounted by an enlisted soldier in a greatcoat, equipment, fixed bayonet, gun at parade rest, looking toward the Capitol. Beside him would be an artilleryman in full dress uniform standing by a field piece; a cavalryman in full dress with spurs and gloves and a saber unhooked at his side; a sailor in uniform standing by an anchor or mortar. The sides of the monument would be inscribed. On the first side: “A grateful nation consecrates this monument to the 37,300 Negro soldiers who died in the service of their country.” On the second side: “They earned the right to be free by deeds of desperate valor; and in the 449 engagements in which they participated, they proved themselves worthy to be entrusted with a nation's flag and honor.” On the third side: “During the American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, there were 178,985 black soldiers enrolled in the United States Voluntary Army. Of this number, 99,337 were enlisted by the authority of the government, and 79,648 were enlisted by the several states and territories. Of these 37,300 lost their lives while serving. They fought in 449 battles, of which thirty-nine were major battles. Therefore, on the fourth side, I would name the most famous battles in which black soldiers fought: Port Hudson, Fort Wagner, Homey Hill, New Market Heights, Poison Shrimp, Deep Bottom, Fort Pillow, Milliken's Bend, Olustee, Fair Oaks, Petersburg, Nashville, Fort Fisher, Fort Blakely, The Crater, Hatcher's Run.

I returned home safe and alive to my Mary McCoy. But she was the one
who left—God rest her soul. Her soul had been how I like my coffee: bitter and hot.

When we left Virginia in 1836, we brought our three-year-old daughter, Sarah, with us, leaving the dust of a son in the soil near Monticello. We've had born to us here, in this state where I homesteaded, nine children. Three are dead. The names of the living are Sarah, Harriet, Mary Ann, Catherine, Jane, Thomas Eston, and Ellen Wayles. The dead are James Madison, William Beverly, and Julia. William and Ellen are unmarried and live at home. All the others are married and raising families. My sons all fought in the war: James Madison and Thomas Eston with me, under Butler. William Beverly died outside Petersburg in the famous Crater I couldn't save him from.

Well, it happened in August 1864 at Petersburg. Imagine a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners who had the idea to build a mine shaft under the enemy lines almost five hundred feet long. General Burnside liked the idea and wouldn't let go of it. He convinced General Grant to agree. They built the tunnel, mined it, and General Grant ordered Burnside to send in a fresh division to lead the assault. The only fresh division was a black division. Our morale was high. We wanted to show the white boys what we could do. Only hours before the operation, General Meade remanded the order and told Burnside to send in a
white
division first. The explosion blew a hole as big as a warship, some one hundred and seventy feet long, sixty feet wide, and thirty feet deep, burying an entire Secesh regiment and an artillery battery under the rubble. The white soldiers, tired, scared, and disorderly, began their assault, led by a drunken commander. But instead of attacking the redoubt, they stopped to gawk at the awesome spectacle of the crater, which looked mighty like hell itself. Then they started climbing down into the crater by the hundreds, milling around down there while the Rebs regrouped and started shooting at them like sitting ducks. The men tried to take cover, but they couldn't climb up out of the hole. The walls were too steep: Crying, screaming, and clawing, they fell like maggots. The black division finally fought their way through the panic-stricken, retreating mob of soldiers and caught the brunt of the Confederate attack. The Seceshes were enraged to see black men in United States uniforms and even those who tried to surrender were executed in cold blood. The greatest dynamite explosion of the war and all we—the Ninth Corps—had to show for it was four thousand dead men. Yep. Four thousand. A lot of black boys. General Grant himself pronounced the epitaph: “The saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.” That was my opinion too.

After the war, my son Thomas Eston moved to Colorado and passed for white. His daughter, Ellen Wayles, my granddaughter, married a black man,
a graduate of Oberlin College, and now they live in California. Ellen Wayles's husband was the first man of color to be elected to the California State Assembly. What my granddaughter doesn't know is that one of the
white
senators who serves in the State Assembly along with her husband is none other than her cousin Thomas Wayles, Beverly's son, who doesn't even know he's black. His wife is white and he has no reason to believe he is otherwise. It seems that Thomas Wayles is his grandfather's child: brilliant, temperamental, ambiguous, ambitious, and self-centered. Beverly made a fortune during the Gold Rush of 1848. “Nothing,” he claimed, “purified the blood like gold,” and it also financed his son-in-law's electoral campaign.

One talks about blood—bad blood, tainted blood, the blood of our fathers —but this magical substance waters more than flesh; it waters spirit and mind as well. I lifted myself out of orphanhood because I could. But I did it for Harriet as well, since she felt her bastardy the deepest and the hardest. If she is still alive, perhaps she has reconciled herself to her fatherless state, but I doubt it. God knows, last time I saw her she was happy and ignorant in the same way white people are happy and ignorant. I marveled at that. How had she managed to feel white?

I looked down at my grandson Frederick, who had caught hold of Double Eagle's reins. He was dark like his grandmother Mary, dead eight years now, a casualty of that fratricidal war as surely as if she had fallen on the redoubt of New Market Heights.