The President's Daughter (2 page)

“Never is a long time,” I replied.

“Up the river or down, Harriet, it still means I'll lose you forever. You're a maroon—a fugitive slave.”

“Until I get to Philadelphia. Then I'll be a nice white girl.”

“With a price on your head.”

“Better a bounty price than an auction price.”

“Father would never sell you.”

“Madison doesn't think so.”

“Don't listen to Madison.”

“I don't intend to. I'm going north.”

“And then?”

“Well,” I said romantically, “maybe abroad—Paris, London, Florence.”

“Where?”

“Well, Paris anyway. I've promised myself that.”

“How?”

“I'll work. I'll marry. I'll manage.”

“It seems that black people starve up north.”

“I'm white.”

“Not if they catch you.”

“They won't catch me, Eston. I'm too smart.”

“What if Master sends slave catchers after you?”

“He won't. He promised Mama long ago.”

“Well, that's one promise he kept at least.”

“Only because of my color.”

“Don't count on it, Harriet. If Martha Wayles inherited Mama, then Martha Randolph can inherit you,” said Eston. “They can hunt you right to your grave. They can send slave catchers after you in Philadelphia as soon as Father takes his last breath. It's been done. This slavery stuff is for good.”

“I'd shoot the first slave catcher who tried to take me back to Monticello. And I'd kill the kin that ordered it as well.”

“Someday we'll meet again, Sister,” Eston said quietly as he hugged me for the last time. “I promise ... maybe white and maybe not,” he added, “but certainly free.”

The night before, I had stood in the amber light that filtered out through the tall windows from the glowing chandeliers of the ballroom at Montpelier, a neighboring plantation belonging to James Madison. I stood amongst the assembly of maids, valets, outriders, lackeys, and mammies; every shape, age, and color of slavehood. In less than twenty-four hours, I would be twenty-one years old and free to follow my brothers Beverly and Thomas into white oblivion. My father had sworn and decreed this long ago in Paris, according to my mother, and we had all played the game. In my mind's eye was always the knowledge of my special position. I was a slave about to be free, a girl about to become a woman, an individual about to be given a future. All for my birthday.

I hummed to myself as the music of the slave orchestra wafted out over the damp frosted lawn hedged with jasmine, banks of roses, and flowering magnolias. The circle of light flickered as laughing, dancing couples drifted by like Chinese-lantern shadows. The slave orchestra broke into a sprightly quadrille to the melody of “The Ballad of Gabriel Prosser,” the slave rebel. The crowd outside began to snicker as the whites continued to dance on. Wasn't it typical of white people to dance to a tune they didn't know the words to? They swung and looped, turned and skipped, grouped and regrouped, forming circles that broke the light like moving lace.

Suddenly, someone caught me from behind and swung me around and we too began to dance in the yellow circle of light. The servants outside continued to dance as long as the ball lasted, far into the night, laughing and flirting, cooler outside than those sweating within. We would outlast them and then drive them home, undress them if they were drunk, wash them if they had puked, pick up their clothes where they had dropped them, and put them to bed. The words of Gabriel's song wafted out beyond the silhouettes in motion.

And then they called for a victory dance,

And the crowd, they all danced merrily.

The best dancer amongst them all

Was Gabriel Prosser who was just set free.

I was the best dancer, I thought. I was the ballet master. And I was soon to be free. I was going to choose my husband. I was going to be married in a church. And I was going to the altar a virgin.

The cunning caress of cold steel touched my thigh. Since the age of sixteen, I had carried a razor-sharp stiletto deep in my petticoat pocket. It had belonged to my uncle James. Mama had given it to me for protection. No one would ever chase me up a tree again.

My dark reverie was broken by my brother's condescending voice.

“You strolling, Harriet?”

Madison, my seventeen-year-old brother, sauntered up, his tall rangy body looming out of the darkness. I could hear the suppressed anger in his voice, the rage, see his anguished expression in the candlelight. People sensed his suppressed violence, and it bothered people, black and white.

“Yes, Madison. I am leaving tomorrow.” I tried to face Madison's anger calmly.

“You going to pass for white?”

“Yes, Mad, I am going to pass.”

“Father knows you strolling?”

“Yes. He's arranged everything. He's sent for Adrian Petit to come and fetch me.”

“You got any money?”

“Papa gave me fifty dollars.”

“You know how much you worth on the slave block, Harriet?”

“Oh, Madison, don't.”

“You're worth a pile of money, sweetheart! You don't know it, but you're a fancy. Fancy that! My sister is a fancy!”

“Madison.”

“I tell you, Father could get five thousand dollars for you in New Orleans! Five thousand dollars from some white gentleman ... at one of those quadroon balls.”

He grabbed my wrist with his strong brown hand. “I hear tell that the test of acceptance at those balls is that your veins should show blue under the skin of your wrists. Just like yours, Harriet.”

“Is that what you want for me, Mad?” I spit out the words, flashing my eyes into his.

He let go.

My flesh burned where he had held it, and the pain radiated up my arm. There were tears standing in his gray eyes.

“Oh, Madison, don't cry; I love you. Do you think it's easy to leave you? If I don't take this chance, what other chance will I ever have?”

“You'll have no family, Harriet, no kin. It's the end of Mama. It's oblivion, Harriet; it's death.”

“It's not death! Not mine or hers. Don't put Mama on me, Mad. Anyway, I'll always be a part of her, of you. I am you, I am your sister, I'm your flesh and blood, and I'll always be, no matter what happens. That can't change. No matter how far away I go, I'll never forget you.”

“Yes, you will.”

“Madison, don't be so hard. You know what a slave woman can expect. Your turn to stroll will come; perhaps then you'll understand better. Wait until then.”

“Never. I'll never pass. It's worse than being sold. Selling yourself for whiteness.”

“It's Papa's doing, not mine.”

“You should love your color.”

“I would love my color if I knew what color I was. Perhaps when you turn twenty-one, Madison, you can have
your
freedom without stealing it!”

“Five thousand dollars you're worth to some white man . . .”

“Whose fault is it that I am a slave, Madison? Whose fault?”

“A five-thousand-dollar fancy!” he mocked.

I stared at my bare wrists with their fragile crisscrossing veins so vulnerable, so slim that Madison had reached out and encircled them with one hand. In them coursed the warring bloods that mutually polluted each other. Whose fault is it? Whose fault?

I stood leaning weakly against the trunk of an oak tree. I felt the rough bark against my face and shoulders. One false move, I thought, and I could peel the skin right off my forehead. With one false move, I could skin this whiteness right off myself, and bleed . . . The old haunting fear came back just as the music, which had stopped, began again.

There had been a white carpenter at Monticello named Sykes who had tipped his hat to me one day in the presence of my cousin Ellen Randolph. I was on my way from the mansion to the weavers' cabins, and Ellen was standing on the south veranda. I was fifteen. Ellen was almost twenty.

“How come you tipping your hat to a nigger, Mr. Sykes?” she had said, laughing. Sykes had stopped in his tracks.

“A nigger, Miss Ellen? I thought she was your sister!”

“That'll be the day!” replied Ellen as she flounced by him, flinging
day
over her shoulder.

I was trying desperately to slip by the astonished man, but he caught me by the arm.

“How come you didn't say nothing, gal? I've been doffing my hat to you for months!” Without answering, I tried to squeeze by.

“Answer me or you'll get a taste of your mistress's switch, by God.”

“There's nothing to answer,” I said, my eyes pleading with Ellen, who was snickering behind her hand.

“You sassing me?”

“No, sir.”

“Master!”

“No, Master.”

“If you spoke like a nigger, I wouldn't have mistaken myself, ain't that so?”

“Yes, Master.”

“So I think you should say you're sorry you deceived me.”

“Deceived him,” sneered Ellen, ready to collaborate in my humiliation.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered.

“Louder, gal.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Sorry who?”

“Sorry, Master.”

“And from now on, talk like a nigger.”

His touch made my skin crawl and his words made my blood boil. But my true outrage was directed toward Ellen, my erstwhile playmate. She averted
her eyes from my gaze, her thin mouth set in a face flushed with contempt.

A few days later, I was walking the deserted road leading toward the nearest of my father's plantations, Edgehill, when Sykes approached, driving an empty buckboard. This situation was ideal. To his advantage he had superior speed, his sex, and his horsewhip. He could run me down with the wagon or abandon the wagon and come after me on foot. My heart accelerated; I weighed my chances.

“Hee, little Snow White,” he called down from the driver's seat, “climb on up here! I got a present for you.”

I stared straight ahead, trying to decide if I should keep to the road in hope that a gang of returning field hands would pass—no, they could hardly stop a determined white man—or take to the woods where he would have to find me before he caught me. I knew those woods like the back of my hand. My brothers and I had tracked rabbit and squirrel, run races, picked berries, played hide-and-seek in them since childhood. And, if I could outrun Eston and Beverly, I could outrun Sykes. I kept to the edge of the road while he followed, ordering me again and again onto the buckboard.

“You deaf or something, white nigger? I said to get your butt up here!”

He quickened his mules to a trot; I broke into a sprint. Sykes laughed as he gained on me. Suddenly, I veered off the road and darted into the woods, clutching up my skirts and attaching them to my apron strings as I ran. I heard him crashing through the bushes behind me. “Hee, Snow White,” over and over. I picked up speed as he closed in behind me, and I heard the sudden crack of the horsewhip. The sound rode through me as if the lash were actually laid on my back. I reared. The
whoosh
and
snap
of it seemed to fill the whole woods, then the whole world. I bounded like a gazelle, leaping hurdles, gasping for breath, my heart thumping out of my chest as the sickening knowledge dawned on me that capture meant not only the pain and defeat of rape, but the end of safety, of wholeness, of childhood, forever. I would never dance again.

The low branches caught at my clothes and hair as I abandoned the trail and plunged into the underbrush. Sykes followed, laughing, cursing, and threatening. He gained on me as my strength ebbed. I was drenched in cold, acid sweat; tears and dirt streamed down my face. I had neither time nor force to wipe them away. Sykes's heavy boots smashed into the scattered dead leaves along the trail I left. I could smell him and measure his breathing.

“Goddamn it, Snow White, when I catch you, I'm going to ram your ass, you whore!”

My skirt was torn and my hands and forearms were scratched and bleeding like an overworked plough horse. A white ball of saliva had formed at the
corner of my mouth. Had I been running ten minutes? Twenty? My stomach turned; green bile rushed into my throat; a pain in my chest cut off my breathing. I had to stop. I gagged, my legs giving way under me as I pitched forward. My head struck a rough, gnarled tree root growing out of the moss-strewn glade. I looked up at the lowest branches. It was my only hope. I scrambled up the tree, the way my brothers had taught me, scraping my cheek and thigh against the jagged bark just as Sykes crashed into the light beams of the clearing. His whip shot out and caught my ankle. The pain seared so I thought he had taken off my foot. I screamed, hanging by the upper limbs just out of his reach, and pulled myself up into the dome of the leafy sanctuary. The whip slid off my ankle, tearing the skin and bloodying the tree trunk. With one wrench, I pulled the crippled leg out of his reach and crouched twelve feet above his head, hissing like a cornered wildcat. The whip fell back, then sliced into the trunk of the tree, shaking it, as Sykes repeatedly slashed the tree itself in anger, tearing off the bark, each blow pulling back strips as wood shavings flew and the tree bled sap. Again and again the whip fell in rhythm to Sykes's curses, tracing white streaks along the dark crescents of the weeping hickory.

With each blow, I shuddered as if the lash had been laid on my own body. I covered my ears against the mournful screams of Sykes's victim, which were perhaps my own.

“Come down from there, you little white nigger! I'll show you how to obey an order!”

I crouched lower in the arch of the tree and watched as Sykes took out his sex, brandishing it like a weapon against the tree. I screwed my eyes shut.

“Come down and see what I got for you!”

All at once, there was an explosion of sound that I felt more than I heard. It scattered the perched birds and shook the leaves free around my head. Sykes had aimed his gun into the branches and fired wide. I must have lost consciousness, for a few seconds later, when I came to, still clutching the torso of the tree, Sykes had disappeared.