The President's Daughter (36 page)

It was a suave synthesis of both the truth and a lie, something my father was a genius at creating.

“She'll be safe here at Monticello,” he pleaded.

I rose then, full of strength. I rose like an outraged goddess. I clutched one of the pillows in front of me. But in my heart I knew
I could never kill Thomas Jefferson.

“You think Monticello is safe, but it isn't. It's gone. Everything's gone. You are alone and dying. Your haven, your home, your
fortune
are gone.”

“Why this pain … why this pain? Would that it might cease a moment!” he sobbed.

I turned, defeated, love exploding in my chest.

“Where's your medicine?”

“No, no more, Harriet. No more.”

In the shadows by the medicine table, I caught sight of Burwell, who had been standing there all the time.

“You dared speak to the master like that!” he hissed at me.

“He's not my master!” I screamed. “He's my father!”
Burwell was shoving me toward the door as Thomas Jefferson half rose from his bed. I snatched a letter that was lying on his table. It was unopened and bore the return address of Maria Cosway. I tore it into small pieces and scattered them to the wind.
WHITE PEOPLE.

I walked out of the house by the front door and started down Mulberry Row in the sturdy, dreamy, orphan's stride I recognized as forever my own.

The last person I wanted to see was my half sister Martha Jefferson Randolph, but she walked into my grandmother's cabin without knocking.

“I want you off the plantation now, or I swear I'll call the patrols out on you.”

“Hello, Martha.”

I stared at my twin, or rather my twin weighted with thirty years. The same height, the same color, the same hair, bleached, faded by time. The eyes, nose, and mouth were similar, yet fate had turned one into plainness and the other its opposite. She stepped inside the door, her manner that of the proprietor of my body.

“Don't ‘hello' me! If you want to know how I found out you were here, one of your fellow slaves betrayed you.”

“I don't care. I'm not leaving until he's dead.”

“His creditors are waiting for his last breath, too. You risk sale here, Harriet. My father is bankrupt—everything is going to pay his debts. You wait until he's dead, and you may have to run for your life.”

“You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you hate me so?”

“Because you're an offense to southern white womanhood. Look at you. You don't belong here. You don't belong anywhere—not in this country. You and your kind are what we hate most. You think you can cross the line God has drawn between us.”

“It's not God that's drawn the color line. It's people like you, Martha. I only want—”

“I know what you want. You want the same thing your prostitute of a mother wants, and you'll never have it, either of you! You'll never be his, and he'll never love you. Can't you get that through your thick, woolly head? He doesn't care to love you, and even if he did, we, the Randolphs, the Carrs, the Eppeses, the Wayleses,
won't let him!”

I backed up as Martha approached until my back was against the wall and her pale face was close enough to kiss. I smelled her body and her breath and
thought: This is me when I'm old; there is no difference. We are all the same, white on white, blood on blood, and nothing will ever untie us. I did belong to her, just as she belonged to me. Two white women. We circled each other as if we were attached by invisible cords, drawing back only to be jerked forward again by an unyielding bond.

“Go back up north and fool those Yankees who don't know any better with your white face, because down here you don't fool anybody!”

“You think that would change anything!. No matter where I go, I'll still be your half sister!”

Martha clapped her hands over her ears.

“I won't listen to your lies!” she screamed.

At twelve noon he was dead. A long wail rose from the slave quarters and hovered over the plantation like the wings of bats. The President died without any of the Randolphs or the Hemingses beside him. Burwell and two men—his secretary, Alexander Garrett, and a nephew, Samuel Carr, who, many years later when he himself was in his grave, would be accused of fathering us all—had been the only people in the room.

Burwell went about the business of burying the dead. A dry-eyed Martha stomped up the steps of Monticello as if she had been personally wronged. I took refuge in my grandmother's cabin again, along with my mother, which was where Burwell found us.

“I'm freed! Robert and Robert's half brother, Joe Fossett, are freed in his will. Madison and Eston are freed in the care of Robert until they reach twenty-one.” He paused. “He didn't free no women.”

My mother continued to smile as stupidly as Burwell continued to weep. Even I smiled, along with her, grinning like a magpie as I sat there beside her in my grandmother's house. So everything had been a joke. On me. On
Maman.
On the President.

Then Burwell turned to me and handed me an object.

“The President said you should have this,” Burwell said.

I recognized it from Adrian Petit's description. It was a gold box, the
présent du roi,
a departure gift King Louis XVI had given to my father when he left Paris in 1789. On its cover was a portrait of the king and, surrounding the portrait, a constellation of empty holes. The holes, according to Petit, had been set with four hundred twenty-one diamonds. They had been removed on my father's orders because the Constitution of the United States forbade its public servants from accepting any gift from a foreign government or prince. After much procrastination and anguish, Petit had explained, and not
wishing to have the matter taken up by Congress, my father had had the diamonds removed and sold instead of returning the present. He had used the proceeds of the sale to buy his reciprocal departure gift for the French minister, expected of diplomats leaving the Court of Versailles. Petit had brought the king's box back to Monticello along with the rest of my father's luggage when he had rejoined him. The king's mutilated
présent du congé
lay in my lap. Instead of freedom, I had just inherited from my departed father a portrait of a famous decapitated man surrounded by empty spaces from which everything of any value had already been secretly and surreptitiously removed.

My only comfort and confidence is that I shall not live to see this!

Thomas Jefferson

“It's the list for the auction,” said Burwell. “It was lying on Jeff Randolph's desk.” He held out a sheet of paper. It trembled in his hand.

“Is my wife on there, Harriet? I can't read.”

Slowly I studied the list of adjudged Monticellian slaves, at least half of them Hemingses of one color or another. My mother's name was forty-second on the list. She had been estimated as being worth fifty dollars.

Now it was my hand that trembled. My voice was husky and strange to my ears.

“She's on there,” I said, but I meant Sally Hemings.

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars.”

“Thank God I got enough to buy her.” He sighed. I looked up at Burwell, squinting as if I were trying to make out the human shape at the end of a long tunnel.

“Not your wife, Burwell, my mother.”

The words hung over themselves like willow branches in a storm. I heard
my own cracked, charred voice hoarse and thick with coagulating tears. The world turned on its axis then righted itself, but I still had to cling to the doorframe of my grandmother's cabin to keep from falling. I swayed, rocking back and forth like a cradle. The tears I had not let fall all these years, nea, all these centuries poured out unbidden, unchecked, unwanted, but there was nothing I could do to stem them.

I could no longer see the list, which still quivered birdlike in my hand. My mother, my beauteous, sublime mother, was adjudged worth fifty dollars. Thomas Jefferson's wife was being sold by his grandson for fifty dollars. My mother would be sold to the world for exactly the price they had put on Old Eagle.

“Lordy,” whispered Burwell. “A slave never knows, does they?”

Without really knowing how I got there, I stood facing my nephew Jeff in my father's study.

“I've come to buy my mother,” I said.

“Harriet? I heard you were in these parts. However, as a friend I suggest you leave.”

“Not without my mother!” I raised my voice. It must have been tinged with hysteria, because Jeff rose in alarm to his six-foot-three-inch height. He was almost but not quite the facsimile of Thomas Jefferson that Eston was.

“Now you calm down, Har. There's no need for you to
buy
her. My mother's freed her and has petitioned the Virginia legislature to allow her to stay here in the state. Grandpa wanted it this way. She could do no less than bow to his wishes. And I'm bound by my honor, as a southern gentleman, to respect that. I respect that,” he repeated tentatively. Jeff kept the desk between us as if it were a river or a moat neither of us could cross. “On my honor, I'm taking her off the list. There's nothing to buy.”

I stared at him in silence. Martha hadn't even bothered to tell me she had freed
Maman.
Did she think that gesture would absolve her? Or that
she
could free my mother after a lifetime of waiting for him to do it?

“If you've
got
fifty dollars, you can buy one of the children … Louisa's hundred and fifty dollars, or what about Mary Bet's young girl, Thenia? She's thirteen. She's worth fifty dollars, I guess. Let's see here … here's the list and the adjudged prices, she's not on my list. You'll have to stay here long enough to attend the auction or get somebody to do it for you. I can't just sell anybody off the list at the estimation price, ‘cause they may go higher … you see?”

“You mean I'll have to wait for the auction?”

“Like everybody else. After that I wouldn't hang around here if I were
you, Harriet. I'm committing fraud by concealing you. Everybody knows who you are.”

I met Jeff's eyes, which had the appraising innocence of his caste. I knew what he was thinking: A Negro wench. A fancy, worth a pile of money. What a waste. Yet he didn't have the guts to do it. I knew that, too. The hatred I felt for my white nephew burned like an iridescent halo around his head. There was the sulfurous scent of it in the room.

“I swear, girl, I can't tell you what hell I've been going through. The lottery was a complete failure. Grandpa died owing more than one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. To the end he thought the lottery would save Monticello. But nothing's going to save Monticello, you understand? We're selling, ticketing, labeling, and pricing every stick of furniture, every sheet, curtain, dish, every book, rug, painting, sculpture, each vase, clock, table, horse, mule, hog, and slave that was his. All his God damned parts and particles; his choices, his favorites, his guns, his wines, his hands, his eyes. This is the sorrow and pity, I tell you, of my life. To see Grandpa's things … his people parceled and lotted and priced by old whispering Tom and his auctioneers. Him and his whole life probed, handled, weighed, and inspected, everything animal or human he possessed or loved auctioned off as if it were Old Eagle.”

I'd never heard of a horse committing suicide before. But that's what my father's stallion, Old Eagle, did. Not more than twelve hours after the President had breathed his last, Old Eagle ran himself to death in the fields and mountains where his master had ridden him every morning for thirteen years.

I stared at Jeff, watching him pretend I wasn't there. He would be happy to see me go. He was always nervous in my presence. My white ways and airs made him feel, I suppose, cheap. Small. Guilty. He always looked at me with that strange stupid gape of moral confusion, as if he had to decide every single day of his life just who I was and why. And Lord knows I had done nothing to make him feel guilty. I hadn't made this world. I hadn't made slavery. I hadn't made
him.