The President's Daughter (17 page)

So this was what my mother and grandmother had meant all these years when they referred to the “troubles with Callender” and “James's tragic end.” They had been like litanies to me for so long that they had actually run together and become “TroubleswithCallender” and “James'stragicend.” I traced my fingers along the black letters. This was the real world. My father had been defamed and my mother trampled in the dust. Now an old, sick, and forgotten man, shunned by his own country, very nearly bankrupt, he was still writhing in the trap of his crime of miscegenation.

There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few know it. . . . Behold the favorite, the firstborn of republicanism! The pinnacle of all that is good and great! In open consummation of an act which tends to subvert the policy, the happiness, and even the existence of this country.

Why was my mother, I wondered, such a dangerous and overwhelming subversion of the happiness of the United States of America, which my father had invented?

The noise of the sea roared in my ears. I looked around to see who else had heard, but there was only the sordid green penumbra of recorded history prohibited to women, Jews, Negroes, and dogs.

Mute! Mute! Mute! Yes, very mute! will all these republican printers of political biographical information be upon this point. Whether they stir or not, they must feel themselves like a horse in quick-sands.

But it was I who was standing on quicksand. I had no breath left in me. I was sinking. The words and letters blurred on the page until they forced a groan like that of a woman giving birth. My hand rose to the throat which had emitted the sound. I looked around, but not one of the scattered clerks or students bent over their notes and books had heard.

“They will plunge deeper,” I read, “until no assistance can save them.”

My eyes went to the end of the article, seeking escape, seeking relief, but finding none.

We should be glad to hear of its refutation.

We give it to the world under the firmest belief that a refutation never can be made. The African Venus is said to officiate as house-keeper at Monticello. When Mr. Jefferson has read this article, he will find leisure to estimate how much has been lost or gained by so many unprovoked attacks upon

J. T. CALLENDER

“James T. Callender.” I repeated the familiar name, then rose unsteadily, leaning my weight against the open book.

I don't remember leaving the library, but my departure must have been quite ordinary, for no hand came to rest on my arm, no word restrained me, no gesture of mockery or derision followed me out of the halls. Once outside, I leaned against a tree and was violently ill.

“Don't hate your father,” Petit said.

We were sitting in the restaurant of Brown's Hotel while my guardian tried to explain.

“I think at this moment I hate everyone in the whole world.”

“Not Thance, surely.”

“Yes. Even him.”

“I know you think something like what happened to your parents can happen to you and Thance.”

“Of course I don't. We are, after all, only ordinary mortals, not the President of the United States and the famous Dusky Sally.”

“Don't hate your mother, either,” said Petit.

“I hate myself. For being afraid and lying all the same, for listening to insults hurled at my race when white people think they are amongst themselves. I hate Thance for loving me and obliging me to lie for his sake—in order to keep him. And then I'm ashamed of hating him because I truly love him and I will not lie to someone I love.”

Petit's thick eyebrows drew together in one uninterrupted line shadowing his eyes.

“You should never have read that article.”

“There was no way to avoid it. I was
born
to that article,” I said in disgust. “But to dress up like a boy!”

“I had to get into the library, Adrian! They don't allow women or dogs or Jews, or
Negroes
inside. They don't even bother
mentioning
Negroes; it's too absurd—like a monkey talking. When I exited from that bastion of hypocrisy, I threw up all over my disguise.”

“Oh, Harriet.”

“Don't you understand, Petit? Thance is just another one of them. I'm in love with the enemy . . . just like my mother. I vowed
never
to be like my mother!”

I stared defiantly at Petit, challenging him to contradict me. By this time, I had spent enough time with white people to see the side that they reveal when they were among their own color. And it was as demeaning as the side southern masters showed their slaves. They might conceal their hatred in public, but I, a fly on the wall, an alien, a black woman, had learned what white people really thought about blacks, and knew that their anger at me for having tricked them into believing I was one of them would be immutable. Hadn't this trickery been the real source of Sykes's anger all those years ago? Around us the lunchtime diners swirled in multicolor, resembling the cashmere shawl I wore. Everything fit into place. Each gesture, sound, and movement: well-fed, happy, white northerners. Only I was out of place.

“I realize the language must have shocked you.”

“Oh, it wasn't the crudeness of the language, but the intensity of the hatred . . . murderous hatred. My mother was one of the most hated women in the United States! That's what made me sick to my stomach.”

“You've grown up in one afternoon.”

“I want to go home.”

“You impersonate a white girl and then don't know how to act like one,” Petit said cruelly. “Do you really think happiness and adoration will pass this close to you again?”

“It's against the law,” I whispered.

“What's against the law?”

“Miscegenation.”

“What's that?”

“Mixed marriage. Amalgamation. The marriage of a white man to a black woman, or vice-versa, is a
crime
punishable by fine and imprisonment. A man from South Carolina invented the word. It's not in Webster's dictionary. It's not a real word at all. . . .

“One-thirty-second of black blood brands you a Negro and thus ineligible to marry a white. It's called the one-drop law.”

Petit laughed out loud, and the waiter near us turned obligingly.

“Oh, Harriet”—he lowered his voice—“there are also laws against fornication and adultery, but the world is full of prostitutes and cuckolded husbands.”

“And illegitimate children,” I added, “like me.”

“Many very great men have had illegitimate children—most princes of the blood and even some popes! It is as old as the world, Harriet.”

“I always believed that somehow, in the end, he would recognize us children. Now I know he never will.”

Petit said nothing, for he knew what I said was true.

Petit took me to an address on Vine Street not far from Brown's Hotel. “This is where your uncle James died. I have always believed his death was connected with that newspaper article Callender wrote. I have always believed that it was James who alerted Callender to the story. The story was so well protected from the outside world by everybody, white and black, in Albemarle County that it must have been a family member. Callender was a dangerous, ambitious journalist who earned his living and certain other rewards by exposing scandals concerning political figures. That's what your father hired him for in the first place.

“James had been trying to get your mother to run away for years. He was obsessed by her freedom. Twice he came back for her from Europe. He blamed himself for what happened in Paris, though he surely couldn't have prevented your father and mother from falling in love. He was determined to extricate your mother from your father's grasp. James was in Richmond
a few months before the scandal broke, and so was Callender—in jail. I believe James informed on your father to Callender in the hope that the scandal would force him to send your mother and you children away, which meant in effect freeing them. Thus James would have rescued his sister—at least in his eyes. He told me himself that his manhood was at stake and that he would never be free himself until your mother was free.

“When James realized this last strategy had failed, and that he had only succeeded in endangering your mother and contaminating the only reality of her life, he was filled with remorse. Either your father's political friends caught up with him and he didn't put up a fight, or he, in fact, took his own life before they could do it for him. James was found hung in his boarding-house room. Callender was found drowned in the Potomac in three feet of water, and
that
was no suicide. Both deaths were blamed on drunkenness. But no one has ever figured out how James could have hung himself from the rafters with no chair, or how a grown man could drown himself in a puddle.

“It was an election year for your father. The scandal spread to London and Paris. In America, the stories made front-page news, a medley of pornography, absurdity, and political satire. You were the child of that scandal, Harriet. You had just been born.”

I looked up at the blank facade of the narrow, three-story, red brick house with its long, narrow windows in white trim and its three white marble steps. The dark, mysterious windows seemed impenetrable. All my questions hurled themselves against that implacable silence, the tall lilac door, the polished brass knocker. If there were voices from the past, they didn't speak to me.

“And my father didn't do anything about it, Petit? Reply or challenge Callender to a duel? He didn't lie about it? Or get others to lie for him?”

“No.”

“Where were you?”

“In Washington, the eye of the storm! Such an avalanche of calumny. Your mother was the talk of the United States, and your father had no choice except to barricade himself behind silence in the President's House and wait for the wind to change. Your grandmother sent Martha to Washington to preside over the presidential table and dampen the gossip. James thought your father would exile your mother. But the President did no such thing. And so here you are. Here we are, twenty years later.”

“And you think someone found out it was James who had informed on my father to Callender?”

“Well ... it was hardly a secret in Richmond, all this. Nor in Charlottes
ville. Someone of the gentry broke the protective wall of silence around Monticello.”

“But you think it was James?”

“It's indeed strange that both James and Callender died violent deaths.”

“And what was he like, this Callender, when he was alive? You knew him?”

“Callender called himself the best political writer in America—a great journalist who was unjustly maligned and persecuted. He was called a drunkard even in an epoch of heroic drinkers, a coward, and a hired journalistic assassin, but, strangely enough, never an outright liar by any of his victims. He had a nose for dirt and human folly. A lust for the weaknesses of the powerful and the vulnerability of men in the throes of passionate, illicit attachment. He also had his own set of perverted rules justified by a lot of hogwash about freedom of the press and the people's right to know. He thought James Thompson Callender deserved better than what was his lot in life.

“He was a huge man physically, with blondish hair prematurely white and a handsome pugilist's face. Lord knows how many times he had been beaten up. He had the high color of a native Scotsman and of a heavy drinker. And though he was a young man, he affected a beard and spectacles and a queue of gray hair to make himself seem older. He stooped because of his height, limped because of a gunshot wound, and staggered because he was usually drunk. Most gentlemen would not pay him the compliment of challenging him to a duel. It was said he had a fine political mind, yet it is impossible to say whether he ever considered any event rationally or without prejudice. He was therefore a very dangerous man—arrogant, too—and as a specimen of white trash, he knew the American people loved reading scandal much better than dull truth.

“Callender was a kind of magnet of calumny and misfortune, a man on the outside of respectable society trying to get in, and knowing he never would. He was a classic scapegoat, yet one who could make the rich and powerful tremble. I suppose this is what appealed to James, so blinded by his own obsession and hatred of a former master who was also his half brother-in-law. At any rate, I know James and Callender knew each other in Philadelphia. James made the fatal mistake of taking him into his confidence.

“I've often noticed that the more liberal and democratic one's thinking is, the less tolerant of political attack one is. Dictators are a lot more philosophical about being dragged through the mud—at least until they decide to chop your head off. Callender's attacks threw your father into a fury. He became
even more rigid and secretive, retreating into his ivory tower and letting his subordinates take the heat. Your father was too proud ever to admit loving your mother. A man who has always had his way, as your father has, seldom finds happiness. His luck, or power, breeds unrealistic desires which can never be fully satisfied. He is progressively worn down by impatience, indignation, a sense of betrayal and injustice. During those scandal years, your father's heart was worn down minute after minute, like water wearing down a stone. And Callender could never bring himself to offer him mercy because . . . because your father ... had had his way ... for so long. Do you understand? Of course, your father and his key men considered Callender a common blackmailer. I never forgot the terrible scene I was inadvertently witness to. ‘The money is mine, not as your high-flown charity,' Callender shouted, ‘but as my due as hush money.'

“ ‘You are a damned rascal and a damned eternal mendicant—a base ingrate!' the President had retorted.

“ ‘You are the one who employed me as a writer. You have it in your power with a single word to extinguish the volcanoes of reproach! Yet with that frigid indifference, which forms the pride of your character, you stand neutral. I thought you loved me!' “