The President's Daughter (33 page)

Harriet told me a strange story about fingerprints. How they are unique and untransferable, embossed forever like a silhouette of one's soul ... like love, the ultimate identity. Because I am a Catholic, it is easy for me to believe this. And because I am an abbess, Harriet's confession makes me responsible for her salvation, which is in your hands, between father and daughter.

Vespers begins. Too bad you will never see the fourth corner of the world.

Adieu

FLORENCE

MAY 19, 1826

My Thance,

It's my birthday. Whatever hurt I've done you, you may inflict on me tenfold for the rest of our existence.

Great love produces great puddles of discontent. Whoever told you I was perfection?

I'm coming home to you if you'll have me. I'm coming home, anyway.

Harriet

Harriet Petit could be the daughter I, Maria Cosway, abandoned, then lost to death in my folly to live the life I thought I deserved. This cold-blooded President's daughter also wants to live the life she thinks she deserves, and she has had the tenacity to knock at my door, intrude upon my life, and even demand from me retroactive restitution for being free and white!

Fathers. Daughters. I've worked far into the night sketching my perjurious operatic libretto: my ex-lover's enchanted mountain, the Holy Grail of freedom; exiler of emancipation; the black knight James; the blind prince Thance; the white knight Lorenzo; the charmed dagger; Adrian the magician; Dorcas the fairy godmother; Martha the villainous half sister; Sally the black queen; Harriet the bewitched princess; and King Thomas exorcist of color. And there, just under the patch of sky, is Maria Louisa Cecilia Hatfield Cosway, sixty-five, widow, recluse, and notorious adventuress and prostitute, procuress, abbess, and mother superior, educator
par excellence
of the next female generation. What more can a woman hope, but to love once more?

Tonight I shall pray that Harriet's life be not one all of falseness. There are people destined to live history. She's one of them. I believed once I was, too, but I realize now I'm only one of those noughts, a footnote to the biography of my dead husband, my dying lover, even to the Negress. All of them own the earth I only rent. And I so wanted to walk upon this planet like a heroine of old, to be a player in life's fable.

I the undersigned, Baroness Maria Louisa Cecilia Cosway, née Hatfield, abbess of the Convent of the Dames Inglesi College della Grazie in the duchy of Lodi, Piedmont, Italy, white female, born in Genoa the sixteenth of June 1760, English citizen, widow, age sixty-five, do hereby swear that on Sunday, the nineteenth of May 1826, the bastard child of Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Hemings of Monticello, did leave my convent after a visit of a fortnight, to return to America. That same day, I did add the above postscriptum to a letter I addressed to Thomas Jefferson Esquire, Monticello, Albemarle County, Virginia, United States of America, and did post said letter by packet boat on the twentieth, 1826.

BARONESS MARIA LOUISA CECILIA COSWAY

The problem has just enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the people and to fantasize them; while with the knowing ones, it is simply a question of power … real morality is on the other side.

Thomas Jefferson

A squall of seagulls hazed the bright summer sky and circled around the sailors perched on each rail and mast as we sailed into the Delaware estuary just before noon on the twenty-ninth of June 1826. Brice, Mrs. Willowpole, and I stood on deck and watched the low Philadelphia skyline come into view: the two-storied warehouses and clapboard stores, the shipyard with its scores of masts, new red brick factories, and the gray-green hills and farmlands just beyond the steeple of St. Martin's Episcopalian Church. After the magnificent harbors of London, Calais, and Genoa, this was an unprepossessing landscape in which to begin the second quarter-century of my life. Even in her own comfortable circumstances, Dorcas Willowpole was as I—a lone woman with suspicious motives. My protector squeezed my arm, as delighted to be home as I was apprehensive.

I felt as old as the hills. Thanks to Mrs. Willowpole's generous stipend, I was wearing a pale green-and-white-checkered calico suit trimmed in navy blue piping and bows. Skirts were slowly getting wider and wider; the narrow, petticoatless dresses of a few years earlier had been replaced by lavish, tight-bodiced canisters, below which yards and yards of material fell to below the ankle and spread at least a foot on each side. From now on the skirts would spread like tar on water in ever-greater circles until they were as stiff
as sails and measured five feet in diameter. Waistlines, too, had dropped and were now compressed with bone or ivory into a smaller and smaller circumference by the growing width of the crinoline. My hand went to my head, on which perched a wide, pale green Borsalino fedora, named after the most famous hatter in Italy. It was almost as wide as my skirt and lined in a deeper shade of green silk. The floppy brim slanted rakishly over one side of my face, and a long chiffon scarf held it in place, the scarf's ends wrapped around my chin and down my back. I carried a green suede carpetbag and a small purse of white kid which matched the white kid gloves I wore.

As I descended the gangplank of the
Aurora,
I saw the lone figure of Adrian Petit, with Independence, waiting for me on the quay. Thance was not there. Nor was Charlotte. We embraced and he handed me a letter from Monticello. It was from my mother and it was more than three weeks old. My father was dying and wanted to see me for the last time.

“You know about this, Adrian?”

“Yes. Joe Fossett, who delivered the letter, told me. I was afraid to forward it to London in case it crossed you.…Harriet, you look magnificent—older and wiser, but such splendor!”

I knelt down to embrace Independence; then Petit lifted me to my feet and beamed, happiness screwing up his face like a withered peach.

“My little girl's come back!”

To trouble, I thought.

“I've a lot to tell you, Uncle. A lot I didn't write.”

“I've read between many a line, Harriet. Everything can wait. You must get back to Monticello.”

“I've vowed never to return to Monticello.”

“Perhaps you can finish what your uncle James tried to do and never succeeded. Rescue your mother. There is nothing more to hold her there with your father gone.”

Petit, with his shrewd French mentality, had hit on what he thought would be the only argument that would make me return home.

“You didn't tell Charlotte I was arriving?”

“I told no one. That way your trip home doesn't have to be explained, not even to Mrs. Latouche.”

“And Thance?”

“Thance is not here, Harriet. He and Thor are still in Cape Town, though I believe they will be back on these shores before the summer's gone.” His eyes seemed to warn me: one thing at a time.

“But I wrote to him … from Italy.”

“Then his mother has forwarded it to him. Perhaps; or perhaps not …”

“I saw Maria Cosway in Lodi. She still lives,” I blurted out suddenly. “She gave me this.” I took the miniature of my father off the waistband of my skirt, where it hung next to my watch and Thance's portrait.

“Now everybody's got one, thanks to that devilish romantic Trumbull,” said Petit mysteriously. He cradled the miniature in his hand tenderly, as if it evoked a thousand memories.

I was able to book passage that same day on a ship to Richmond. Taking only my small carpetbag with me on the steamer that ran between the two cities, I said my good-byes to Brice and Dorcas, who were themselves taking a steamer for New York.

I intended to find my brother Thomas, who had lived in Richmond since I was a little girl. He had a house in the suburbs, far from the center of the city. Upon arriving in Richmond, I went straight to his house. As I entered the front gate, the door of the pale green clapboard facade swung open noiselessly without my knocking and closed just as silently behind me. I had been three years old when Thomas ran away from Monticello, and I had not seen him since. I was greeted by a strange, blond, curly-headed giant of a man with a somber countenance and sour disposition. He was thirty-six years old.

“How do you know I am, who I say I am?” I said, smiling, as he stood there without speaking.

“Who else could you be, Harriet?” he responded. “You're here because he's dying.”

“Have you seen him?”

“I haven't seen him in twenty-two years, and I don't expect to see him, living or dead. I've even changed my name to Woodson, the name of the man I work for, so I don't have to acknowledge him as my progenitor. Just like you've changed yours, as you've told me. You're Petit now. Miss White Petit. You didn't have to pass, Harriet.”

“What choice did I have, Thomas?”

“Same choice as me. I've stayed on the black side of the color line.”

“You wouldn't know it to look at you.”

His laugh was harsh and bitter. “Obviously you think you'll be happier in the white community. But that's your idea of happiness—a high social status, a safe home and family that no one can take away from you. Things white people take for granted. What I don't understand is how you would want these things enough to sacrifice your true family for them. If you are willing to repudiate your family, your past, your history, and everyone you love just to be white, I won't cause you any more pain than you have already
caused yourself by hating you … you're already living in an insane asylum.”

“You can't live in dignity as a Negro …” I began.

“My salvation from complete despair is in my belief, the belief of our forefathers, that hatred is not directed against me as a man, but against my race, my color, my pigmentation.
I
can live in dignity as an individual, even though as a Negro I cannot.”

“Oh, Thomas.”

“It's funny about passing. We disapprove of it, yet condone it. It excites our contempt, and yet some admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but protect it.” He paused. “What you're doing is very dangerous, Harriet. Once Father's dead, your cousins could kidnap you, hold you against your will. Put you in chains.”

“They wouldn't dare!”

“What! Martha? Jeff? The Carrs? Who the hell do you think you are, Harriet, with your store-bought clothes and your English accent and finishing-school airs? You're a nigger down here! Movable property. Up north, too! You are being precipitous, Sister.”

“I had to come back. I came back for Mama, to take her away from here. Otherwise, what's to become of her?”

Thomas looked at me with such charged pity that a wave of seasickness overtook me.

“You think because he's dying, he's going to set you free, don't you? You think on his deathbed he'll redeem himself and say the words you've dreamed of all these years. ‘My little girl, I'm sorry I enslaved you. I apologize for what I did to you. Please forgive me. I love you … I hereby free you and your mother because I love you.' Poor dunce! He's not going to do it,” Thomas continued softly. “He can't. It's against his principles. It's against the principles of his country.”

Silence.

“You realize,” he continued dully, “that if anything happens to you, I'm responsible. I'm your oldest brother. And the only free one around. Eston and Madison can't raise a hand against their masters. I'm the one who'll have to come and get you … with a shotgun.”

Thomas accompanied me as far as the Pantops plantation and then left me abruptly, saying that he hadn't set foot on Monticellian soil for twenty-two years and he had no intention of doing so now. My father's mansion was only a quarter of a mile's ride from there, and I spurred my borrowed horse onward to what I still imagined was home. I reached the ridge that overlooked Monticello just before sundown and caught my breath as I breached its craggy frontier.

Distance and golden light masked the decrepitude of the scaling paint and crumbling brickwork, the still unrepaired planks of the veranda steps, and Robert's rusting ironwork. The house sat in its triangular square of soft green, with its mighty shade trees and the serpentine wall of its gardens. Behind it ran the pale beige line of Mulberry Row, the regular square fields of sassafras, which stretched into the larger fields of not-yet-harvested tobacco. The Rivanna River flowed along the northern frontier in a silvery curved highway and branched off into the tear that was Blair Creek. There were already lights in the windows and smoke from the chimneys. There were merino lambs grazing on the west lawn and a loaded wagon parked there. I could even see shadowy figures behind the sash windows, children playing on the front lawn, people still working in the fields, and horses grazing.

The world that slavery had made lifted itself from the valley below and rose to clutch at my throat. It seemed it wanted the very life I had snatched away from it down there.

With its pretensions, plain masonry, and wooden pillars, the structure seemed so much smaller than in my imagination that I wondered that it hadn't been magically replaced by a smaller replica. The loneliness I had staunchly denied these four years overwhelmed me, not for slavery but for this place, which was the only place to which I belonged, the only place on earth that knew my real name.

“Maman,”
I whispered.

“You've turned into a beautiful woman, Harriet.”

“Thank you,
Maman.”

It could have been four days rather than four years since I had seen my mother. Not a day of my absence showed on the surface of her face or body.

She was dressed not in her black homespun with her linen apron and her white turban, but in red-and-green plaid taffeta, with a yellow apron and a small bustle or “cushion,” as if she had dressed to please me. The yellow background of the plaid picked up the tones of her golden skin and golden eyes, and the ruby earrings from Paris that she always wore gleamed in the torchlight.