The President's Daughter (37 page)

The value of the slaves had gone down, he lamented. They were worth nothing. I found myself thinking the only one worth something was me, but Jeff protested that he wasn't a master. He was, he said, only a man with feelings. “It was bad enough being responsible for my grandfather,” he said, “without being responsible for the world.” He shook his head with some despondency and went back to his accounts. “Lord Almighty, Harriet,” Jeff said to my back, “it's all gone …”

I the undersigned, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, white male, age thirty-four, eldest son of Thomas Mann and Martha Randolph, grandson of my namesake, Thomas Jefferson, do hereby swear I advertised for the auction sale in the county of Albemarle the whole of the residue of the personal property of Thomas Jefferson, dec, consisting of valuable Negroes, stock, crops, etc., household and kitchen furniture. The Negroes are believed to be the most valuable for their number ever offered in the state of Virginia. The household furniture, many valuable historical paintings, busts of marble and plaster of distinguished individuals, one of marble of Thomas Jefferson by Ceracci with its pedestal and truncated column, a polygraph or copying instrument used by Thomas Jefferson for the past twenty-five years, with a set of steel writing pens made in London. I do declare that the sale being inevitable is a sufficient guarantee to the public that it will take place at the times and places appointed.

THOMAS JEFFERSON RANDOLPH

EXECUTOR OF THE ESTATE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, DEC'D.

I am permitted by the innocence of the scenes around me to learn to practice innocence toward all, hurt to none, and help to as many as I am able.

Thomas Jefferson

“The sale being inevitable,” I read, “is a sufficient guarantee that it will take place at the times and places appointed.” Veiled and thus disguised, I stood beside my mother in the voracious crowd and watched every other Hemings sold on the block to the highest bidder. Critta's daughter Maria, who had been omitted by Jeff as belonging to Aunt March on the list, so white she was mistaken for me, fetched the highest price and gave birth to the rumor that the President's daughter herself had been sold away from her birthplace to New Orleans. It was a legend that would grow with time and be amplified, causing me to read of it in strange places and at strange moments in my life.

I bought Burwell's wife for him; then I concentrated on saving the little girl I considered my niece, Thenia Hemings, a fragile thirteen-year-old granddaughter of my aunt Bet, whose whole family had just been sold away. I paid seventy-five dollars for her, all that was left of my wages from Dorcas Willowpole. My mother and I could only watch the dispersal of the rest of our family on the pine floorboards of the auction stand erected on the west lawn. As Thenia was led away, my uncle Peter stepped on the block. I rushed from the crowd, gagging. James's ferocious voice followed me.

You think I would spill my seed as a slave? To father other slaves! You think I would enrich some white master by breeding more slaves for him? In Paris I vowed I would never touch a woman. My life has been celibate, Sister. I have never
known a woman … known a woman … known a woman …

“Oh, Thance,” I moaned, “Thance, answer me.”

But it was James's laughter that answered.
Since when do slaves marry?

“I'm never coming back here for you again,
Maman”

“I know. I've still got Madison and Eston.”

“They want to go west,
Maman.
They've got to get out of Virginia by next year or risk being sold back into slavery!”

“No, Martha fixed that. She's petitioned the Virginia legislature to let them and me stay.”

“I know,” I conceded wearily. “Jeff told me. I tried to buy you, but you weren't for sale. Martha probably got some satisfaction out of keeping it from me.”

“She tried … she freed me just before the auction. She had manumission papers all made out, waving them around. I told her what she could do with those papers.” My mother's face darkened. “She called me a receptacle and a whore. She said you weren't his children. That you'd never be his children.”

“So Papa told Martha to do it. What a coward!”

“Don't talk about the dead that way.”

“The dead! He's made me a thief of myself!”

“Hush,” said my mother. “He always considered you free, even here. All you children. It was me he kept. Only me.”

“And now?” I said.

“It's me that's staying. I'm too old to go west with the boys. They'll have to wait until I leave in my little pine box. Monticello won't be sold. Martha has managed to keep a few acres and the empty mansion. I am finally the mistress of Monticello. She's let us keep a cabin down on the south boundary and three acres.”

“Is that fair?”

“Fair or not, that's it. You'd better leave here, Harriet. Martha's on the warpath along with Cornelia and Ellen. Your father's freeing of Eston and Madison is an open admission of their birth. Your running here as if you were a free white woman is another. If they find you in Richmond, they'll have you arrested out of spite.”

“Don't worry; I told you I'm never coming back here again.”

“I know. But I'm glad you came back this last time. Think how you would have felt if your father had died with your curse on him.”

“You never heard me curse him.”

“Yes. But I did.”

I looked at my mother in amazement.

“I visited Maria Cosway when I was in Italy,” I said. “She gave me this.”

I took out the miniature and showed it to her, and she took out an exact replica and showed it to me. We gazed at them both in silence. Nothing ever seemed to surprise her.

“It's fitting that you and Martha, his only two living daughters, should have his image. The third locket belongs to me. I guess we'll never know how many more John Trumbull made, will we?”

“Don't you want to hear about Maria Cosway?” I wasn't going to tell her about the unopened letter.

My mother turned to me, her eyes pure yellow metal.

“What does Maria Cosway have to do with me?”

The two portraits turned slowly on their chains like twins. The light struck them, bouncing off the delicate filigree of the cases.

I knew that the Father could no more detach himself from the Daughter than the Daughter from the Father. Harriet believed that her father's death meant that she was rid of him. She believed that if she dragged me North, to so-called freedom, she was
rid
of me. But she was mistaken, just as James was mistaken. Like a multiheaded beast, we cannot divorce our destinies one from the other. Whoever sacrifices truth to illusion lives only for the next day. I knew this, for I had lived my whole life this way. Assuming false roles, double identities, duplicate emotions was the vocation of slavery. Everybody led a counterfeit life down here. But in the real world? I'd never asked myself whether Harriet was an imitation white or an imitation Negro. In my fictitious world of dreams and visions, it hardly mattered, because all of it was, frankly and hypocritically, insane.

But where was Harriet to turn, divided as she was to the vein? Her master Thomas Jefferson lies dead. Does he lie buried as an imitation father or a real one? Harriet had to face him alone, her will against his naked power. But is Harriet an imitation slave or a real one?

It seemed to me that this was between Father and Daughter. Between WHITE PEOPLE.

Why are daughters so unforgiving? Oh, Harriet was an armed camp: cautious, secretive, proud. She'd been that way ever since Sykes. She'd carried that grudge against me, Sally Hemings, against her father, against the world since she was knee-high. I do believe my daughter drank in all that bitterness
and anger with my milk. She had been conceived the summer when, ballot by ballot, Thomas Jefferson was being elected President of the United States. The scent of fear, power, and machinations had swirled around her infant head. Fear because of James T. Callender. Power because envious men like John Hamilton coveted the highest office in the land. Machinations because of my master's own naivete and the ambitions of our old enemy, Aaron Burr. Then, too, Harriet had been born in the shadow of death. First Jupiter, her father's body servant of fifty-seven years, then her father's nemesis, Callender, which at least shut him up. And finally James's self-murder.

Her infant ears must have heard my screams when Thomas Mann Randolph announced that James had hanged himself in Philadelphia. She might even have heard Meriwether Jones's hoots of joy as he danced a jig on the front lawn upon hearing that Callender had been silenced forever. Or perhaps her small face had shriveled in the heat of my curses when my eldest son, Thomas, was banished from Monticello to dampen the gossip about his birth.

All these truths Harriet had grown up with, and she had taken them with her in the lilac phaeton on May 19, 1822. But what exactly was the truth? Truth in Virginia had the life of a blossom: it grew from a long-forgotten seed. A fact like assassination or suicide had scarcely happened before the genuine historical kernel of it had disappeared—annihilated by fabrication, rhetoric, imagination, pride, and self-interest. The passions, self-delusions, and fantasies of the South, both black and white, simply flung themselves over poor truth and devoured it. It always happened to truth around here. Virginians tended so much toward virility that skepticism, an essential to clear thinking and, in consequence, a realistic appreciation of life, did not exist. That is to say we were constantly driven back upon our own imagination, and our belief was limited only by our capacity to conjure up the unbelievable.

And so, although everybody knew Harriet was a bastard, knew she was a slave, knew she wasn't by fact or fiction white, knew she would have to annihilate all these facts by
fraud
if she were ever to be free, that little grain of veracity had disappeared into the lilac carriage. A whole race of liars lived down here in Virginia: black, white, and mulatto liars whose only subject of conversation was Truth and Beauty. They were the ones who had set up our greatest pillar of falsehood: that with every gesture and emotion, with every breath we took, with the very pollen we inhaled, we had not entered into white people as deeply as white people had entered into us.

I the undersigned, Sally Hemings of Monticello, colored female, age fifty-three, born on my father John Wayles's plantation, Bermuda
Hundred, in 1773, daughter of Elizabeth Hemings, wardrobe mistress, slave wife, and sister-in-law to Thomas Jefferson, mother of Harriet Wayles II, 1801 : and six other children by the President: Thomas Jefferson, 1790; Harriet I, 1796 (deceased); Beverly, 1798; Thenia, 1799 (deceased); Madison, 1805; and Eston, 1808; do hereby declare that this affidavit is a true representation of my state of mind the day of the auction, the fifteenth ofJanuary, 1827.

SALLY HEMINGS

Things were very different this time as I stood on Market Street, which was covered in deep snow, at the public coach depot, clutching Thenia's hand, waiting for Petit and Charlotte to come fetch us. I still wasn't free. Thomas Jefferson's power over me persisted even in death. I still lived on the edge of an abyss, confronted by the same dangerous world in which my identity challenged my dead father in solitary combat. But I was no longer afraid. What I intended to do, I intended to do for love, not in spite of it. It was, I thought, no more despicable than reenslaving oneself. As if in mockery of my brave resolution, I spied the glorious colored lady gliding toward me, her cabbage-rose hat rising and falling amongst the crowd as on the crest of waves. She approached me obliquely, as if she had been perched on my shoulder all the time, or under the crook of my arm. Her derisive laughter carried across the veil of whiteness that hid the red brick square.

I looked down at the voiceless Thenia. She hadn't uttered a word since she had been adjudged for seventy-five dollars. How was I going to drill into this small piece of wreckage from the past that I was passing for white? That I had a false identity, a false name, and a false color? Thenia gazed back at me, her dark brown eyes wide, her hair drawn back neatly, her new wool coat with its tiny lace collar and bell sleeves like shiny, bright armor in the sun. I was determined to keep her with me for as long as I could. She was my anchor, my fetish, my conscience, my witness. She was also my fire bell in the night, my eternal threat of betrayal and exposure. I needed her.

“You must never call me Harriet again. Or Aunt. I've freed you. You are no longer anyone's property.”

Thenia shook her head from side to side in silence.

“Not to my face and not behind my back … someone may be listening. Not even in your sleep. Who am I?”

Thenia tried to answer. I saw the muscles in her face screw up in two little bunches; her eyes became even wider with the effort, so great that they filled with tears. Still no sound came.

“Who am I?”

She pursed her lips and grimaced, her smooth cheeks filled like apples, her eyes squeezed shut.

“Mmmm-iss Pe-Pe-Petit.”

She was breathing heavily with the effort of speaking. There was an unwritten law amongst runaways that a darker-skinned relative could never betray a family member who was passing for white. She was as afraid as I was.

“It's all right, my Thenia,” I whispered. “You never have to say another word to white people if you don't want to.”

The colored lady swept by, contemptuously, trailing her musical guffaw, which bounded after her like Independence chasing a cherished rat.

Thenia and I had no sooner begun to unpack when Mrs. Latouche knocked at our rooms and announced that Mr. Wellington was downstairs. The color that rose to my cheeks must have confirmed what she had already guessed. I had sailed three thousand miles to find him again. As if I were bound for the auction block, I descended the stairs, Independence at my heels. The parlor door was open, and the shock of seeing Thance's familiar silhouette almost made me recoil. He turned, and as I took several steps toward him, he held up his left hand, as if to ward off a stranger. His eyes held astonishment and surprise, and there was something unfamiliar about them, as if the passage of time had somehow redrawn his features, but only by a fraction.