The President's Daughter (35 page)

I stared at Eston. I knew what he meant, but I didn't know how to answer him. White people were still white people. He wanted to know if white people had the same contempt for us from behind our backs that they had in front of our faces.

“We think of white people as human beings, as we all are, but they think of us as somehow different …
humanly
different from them. If we pass someone who is suffering, or worse off than ourselves, or in jail, we say to ourselves, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.' White people,” I said slowly, wanting to make myself understood, “say, ‘There, but for the grace of God,
never
go I—because I'm white.' They truly believe there is a superior race and an inferior race. And even the poorest, meanest, most ignorant white man considers himself blessed because he belongs to the superior race. Because we are there on the bottom to prove his superiority. What white people see when they look at you is not visible. What they do see when they do look at you is what they have invested you with—you know, sin, death, and hell. What most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. They think that being black is a fate worse than death.”

“And, Lord, ain't it true,” Madison laughed.

“Yes. They would rather be dead than be considered like us—not human.”

“But they're the ones that invented that lie!”

“They believe the lie they invented.”

“Like you, Sister?” asked Madison.

“Yes. I believe the lie I've invented.”

“Because you're in love with one of them,” said Eston.

“No regrets, Harriet?” said Madison, always the agitator.

“Plenty of remorse, Madison. I want to take
Maman
away from here, with or without papers,” I said.

“She'll never go. And we won't go without her.”

“Surely we'll all be freed in Papa's will? He promised,” added Eston.

“He's got to free
Maman,
too,” I answered.

“I have to see it to believe it, Harriet,” said Madison.

“We'll know soon enough. But you stay out of the Randolphs' way—stay in Richmond.”

“Remember you still ain't got no papers, Harriet.” It was Madison speaking.

I pulled out my passport, signed by the President of the United States.

“I've got this, Madison. Signed by John Quincy Adams.”

Madison took the folded letter as if it were made of gold.

“It says that I am an American, a citizen of the United States, and that as such I am protected by my government, which demands my safe passage … even in Richmond, Virginia.”

“Your safe passage,” murmured Eston. “That's really something …”

“Safe passage demanded or not, Cornelia'll have your precious
President's
passport, if you don't get off Monticello—”

“Will you shut up, Madison? We have no right to tell Harriet what she should or shouldn't do!”

“And why not? We're her brothers!”

“Because,” said Eston slowly, gazing wistfully at the passport, “we've been living up our father's rump for too long, that's why,” he growled. “Harriet is free, white, and over twenty-one. This passport says so. She can do what the hell she pleases. She's one of President Adams's favored citizens.”

“Tell me, Harriet, what do white people talk about amongst themselves?”

“Us,” I said without smiling.

Thou art the most incorrigible of all the beings that ever sinned. …

Thomas Jefferson

In the early morning of the Fourth, my mother burst into the cabin, awakening me.

“Hurry,” she said. “Burwell says to come.”

He couldn't be dying, I thought. He couldn't be dying because he had not yet called me daughter. It was my passport to life.

“Hurry, Harriet! He's held on until now, but he'll never see the fifth dawn. The whole family's assembling. If you want to say good-bye, you must do it now.”

Burwell's turbulent brown face drew close to mine, and his eyes, wild with grief, held mine in a brief, hollow commiseration. Did his terrible grief have to do with my father's death or his fear, like every slave's, of being sold?

“Burwell …” I began. But he made a sign of silence.

“Five minutes, Harriet. The white family is on its way. They'll soon be outside his room, waiting for me to change him. He's awake and in great pain.”

Quickly we mounted the back stairway to the second floor, and then, just as quickly, I descended the tiny staircase that connected the bedroom with the second-floor hall. My skirts bunched up as I squeezed myself along the steps no wider than a foot. I was alone. My mother had stayed at the top of the stairs. “Remember,” she whispered, “even if he's no longer your master, he's still your
father.”

I entered the room and passed by the foot of the bed, then squeezed by his wooden clotheshorse with all his jackets hung on it, each one embroidered
by my mother with the date it had been made. A pallid ghost lay on Thomas Jefferson's bed, propped up with a dozen pillows, like a stuffed rag doll. The odors of arsenic, mercury, and opium filled the room along with another, less definable mixture of smells—mint, camphor, old skin, old breath, old bones. The eyes were sunken and closed. I set down the lamp, bent forward to kiss the pale forehead, my temples pounding. At once he opened his eyes, and I found myself drowning in two pools of foaming blue sea. Cataracts.

“Sally?”

“Master,” I whispered, “it's me, Harriet.”

“Harriet?”

“Harriet Hemings. Your very own.”

He fixed his curdled eyes on me. It was a curious, riveting gaze, as if he were trying to figure out the solution to a riddle, or a joke he'd forgotten. Then he smiled, a sweet, fascinating smile—the smile of a young man. The smile of Maria Cosway's locket.

I came nearer and nearer to the abyss. He tried to push me away, but I leaned into his withered body, and his head came to rest on my bosom. He spoke into my chest, too weak to break my embrace.

“Oh, Harriet, Harriet! It cannot be that all men must go through this horrible thing.”

I was kneeling now, and had taken his hand. All my defiant words withered on my lips. And yet I had to say what I had to say; it was essential to my life. He seemed forlorn and alone. The great hands resting on the sheets were so fragile and useless that I felt a scream knock against my windpipe. I didn't dare break the silence. Finally, he said, his smile blurred with laudanum, “You've come for your mother?”

“You've got to free her,” I whispered tensely. “You promised.”

I drew back to look into his eyes. “You've got to free her before you die.”

“Only Burwell admits that I'm dying.”

“I admit it. That's why I came.”

“And you're taking your mother?”

“Yes. If you free her.”

“You must know that to free her I would have to banish her from Virginia or relive the scandal. Don't ask me, Harriet.”

“But what does it matter now! You're dying! You're leaving her! You're leaving her to the mercy of Jeff and the others!”

“I did the best I could for you children.”

“Call us by our names! Harriet, Eston, Madison, Beverly, and Thomas! Call us by our names!”

“Oh, Harriet, Harriet, have pity on your father. I allowed you to run
away. I offered you safe passage. I proposed you for whiteness, and of what use was my generosity and good usage? You come back to harp at me on my deathbed. How can you be so cruel?”

“You sent for me. I thought you wanted to free me legally.”

“I never sent for you. It's too dangerous. You could be seized as my property.”

So, my mother had lied to get me here. …

His white hair stood up in tendrils all over his head. His breath smelled of cancer. I felt no tenderness for him at all, yet tears rose and rushed down my cheeks. Where had they come from? All the blood had drained from the top of my body and had collected in a puddle in my loins. I felt as heavy and weighted as if I were in irons. I couldn't stop crying. For him? Because of him? The knife in my pocket weighed like a log. Could I kill my father when he was already dying?

I looked at all the white chaos of plump pillows surrounding him. I was strong. It would be over in a second. A peaceful, timely death. Could I be as stupid as I must appear, standing here in this room, weeping, holding a pillow in my arms? In twenty-four hours, or thirty-six or eighty-four, he would be no more. Why was I crying? I had nothing to cry about. I was free, white, and over twenty-one.

“Harriet, don't cry, please.”

What did he believe my tears meant, I wondered, since I didn't know myself.

“Have pity on a dying man.”

A sound burst in my head and my throat at the same time. No more, I thought, no more.

“Have pity on a dying man! When did you ever have pity on me—on
Maman?
I looked for you so hard … without ever finding you. I longed for you, called after you,” I cried out. “I'm calling you now, and even with your dying breath you won't
answer
me.

“You imagine you are beyond possession, Father, but you are mine as much as I am yours. You are stuck here in this room with me, and you'll die here in this room with me—a slave to your slave daughter. You can't even pick up a glass of water without me!

“Should I tell you the story of my life, Father? How I have searched for you all over Europe? I wanted to live a double life—my life's self, reflected by myself. The great enigma was you! You! Even your ex-mistress couldn't explain you! She faltered and procrastinated and invented and lied, but she didn't explain to me why you wouldn't love me, or her, or even
Maman.
You
are neither good nor charitable. You are only
great.
You are only glory and beauty. You do not know how to love.

“I have struggled to see you apart from myself, apart from everything, from everyone. You, the elusive, the unique truth of my life. And now I'm speaking to you as if my tenderness for you were not an obsession, were not an aberration, for what daughter would love a father who
sold
her?”

He rose up off his pillows then.

“I am not a coward, and I keep my word. I am faithful to myself, impenitent with myself, and indulgent toward others. Even to you, Harriet. That is me, the man. I am the best of comrades, the most honest friend, an artist in the widest sense of this word. I am cruel in my most tender affections. I have disgust for the things that are most dear to me. Nothing sweeps me away because everything is so clear to me. I dream large; I see small; I do not know how to bend. I have not found my equal because someone who would understand me as I understand myself would be too strong a person, like you, Harriet, to need me. Like you, I am pledged to moral solitude. How much akin are those who elicit the mind rather than the heart, because under its influence all my faculties take wings, detach themselves from the daily and seek the ideal. Maria understood this. Your mother, too. Pity will never make me lovable. Not even love will make me lovable. Only to the dispassionate mind . ..”

As I listened, everything fell into place. I was not my father's legitimate
or
illegitimate property. I was only
me.

What most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence.

“Father, I have sat and dreamed and called after you. I have cried tears of deliverance, of passion, and rushed to a bedside where human love has never been seated. I escaped you, yet you still torment me with all the torments in the world: fear of the dark, fear of being left alone, fear of never finding safety … fear of being white … fear of being black … fear of never being loved …

“Is it just illusion that ties me to you? All there is is mirage, vision. I tell myself stories; I invent sympathies for myself. And each time that a part of my odd construction falls, I remain wearied because I begin to catch a glimpse of reality!”

“Things that are imaginary, desirable, dreamed, invented, feared are not only your domain, Harriet,” he answered. “Much as I believe I have loved you, it was one of those impossible things in the eye of reality.”

Perhaps he was too weak to speak further, for there was only silence from the red silk draperies and the tortured sheets. My father sank into their red and whiteness. His cobalt blue eyes pleaded for peace. But I wasn't in the
mood for peace, even as one tear started down his cheek.

“I love all things that are not. That could be the motto of my life,” he said.

I knelt down and placed the pillow on his chest. Then I laid my head upon the pillow. I could hear the
thump-thump
of his heart, feel it even through the goose feathers, surging into my inner ear.

Feebly he tried to push me away, and his hands caught in my hair. But I was, at last, much stronger than he, and I clutched him to me, holding his bony shoulders in thrall while we wrestled in a kind of silent war, locked in an embrace that was more serpent and prey than father and daughter.

“Leave me alone, Daughter. Let me die in peace.”

“No, I'll never leave you. Even death won't separate us. Because I am you. I've got your … fingerprints.”

I buried my face in the bitter, soiled bedclothes to silence my shrieks. I had done the one unforgivable thing for a slave—I had hoped.

“May your soul burn in hell, Father.” And then I pressed my lips to his, sinking into an incestuous kiss as if I could draw from him enough substance to go on living.

Suddenly it was not a sick man's voice, but the familiar patrician voice of old, high, lilting, Virginian, “Whatever my transgressions, I've made my peace with them and your mother. How dare you come here to my deathbed and contradict her own wishes. It is she who will not go.”