The President's Daughter (39 page)

I extended my hand, but Abraham Bos'th bowed over it instead.

“Ndebele men never touch white women, except in sickness,” said Thance.

I blushed and turned to hide my shock. I hoped that Mr. Bos'th (whose name would soon be Americanized to Boss) liked me, for I admired him on the spot. For all my London campaigning, I had never met an African before.

I had brought Independence with me, and now she crowded around Thance, wagging her tail until she spied a cat, which she went darting after at maximum speed, knocking several empty produce baskets over as she went.

“Independence,” cried Thance, “come back here.” He laughed. But she had already leaped off the pier in pursuit of her prey, into a barge tied up very near us.

“I have never seen such an animal,” said Bos'th. “She must be very rare.”

“She's a purebred Dalmatian. Her race comes from Croatia, on the Adriatic Sea. Normally they're bred for hunting, but I've never indulged her in that sport, so she has to satisfy her hunting instincts on rats, water, field, or city … or cats. Her name is Independence.”

He smiled. “A very good name. A noble name, Independence.”

He was grave and shy, but a small smile hovered around his lips.

“I am very happy to be here for your wedding, madam.”

“Harriet,” I said. “Harriet Petit. Is this your first transatlantic crossing?” I asked, then stopped, confused and embarrassed, confronted by a black man who had come to America from Africa of his own free will.

“Yes. I've sailed the west coast of Africa as far as Freetown. But of course that's not the same as really crossing the ocean.”

“And how did you learn to speak English so well?”

Abraham's eyebrows rose quizzically, and his tribal scars at each temple squeezed into two black, raccoonlike holes around his eyes.

“Ah … at the mission school in Cape Town,” he said. “There I was given my English name. I also have an African name, which means ‘chosen,' or ‘enigma,' as far as I can make out in your language.” Abraham cast his eyes around our small welcoming party and lingered on Thenia, who was holding her hand over her mouth and staring at him in fascination.

I looked around the docks, with their conglomeration of people going about their business, asking me nothing and expecting no answers from me. Indifferent. Indiscriminate. Indistinguishable. What cruelty to inflict on Thance the secret my father had labored so diligently to conceal for forty years. As if my encounter with Thor had disarmed the ticking time bomb of my identity, I decided to think about it by and by, when I was calmer. After all, I had the rest of my life.

She seemed pleased.

Thomas Jefferson

I wondered if my mother would have appreciated the irony of my white knight in shining armor having been dipped in the African sun. But my mother was not here.

Thenia was the only member of my family at my wedding. She stood, her heart-shaped face with its noble forehead and oversized eyes, like a package of brown earth from Monticello. She was the stand-in for father and mother, sisters, brothers, aunts, and cousins. She was all I had. My link to the truth.

As I walked down the aisle, dressed in white, on the arm of Petit, I thought that life, which until that moment had caused me so much uncertainty, was nothing more than a long series of contracts, ceremonies, insurance policies, promissory notes, and preordained words with which humanity entertained itself in order not to commit murder. Everyone had the same terror of the unknown. The church, whose colored-glass windows looked out onto the harbor of the largest city in America, closed around me. Beyond was the vast expanse of the Atlantic, and beyond that the old world, where everything had been invented, including slavery. And a simple fact came to me like a vision, the kind of vision explorers have when they set foot on a new continent: the inhabitants were not convulsed with hatred, but paralyzed by fear. Instead of my frightening them even more, I thought, I had only to help them learn to know me as I really was, which was no different from what I wanted to be or what
they
wanted me to be. Nor was this congregation any different from what I expected of them, neither better nor worse than what I would make of them in my heart. After all, they were only white people.

As I proceeded down the aisle, an endless bridal train trailed behind me, attached to a dress of Irish lace trimmed with silk roses and satin bows. In one deep pocket lay the familiar dagger of my youth. The air hung thick with the mingled scent of many flowers, perspiring men in expensive morning coats, and artificially perfumed women, who watched as I advanced serenely into their world.

I peered into each face, and saw only the affection, honest good wishes, and sentimental effervescence that the exchanging of marriage vows inevitably evokes. My in-laws' harsh Philadelphia accent, with its broad
a
and hard
d,
seemed so unmusical to my ears that I vowed to keep my southern accent. I would remain Virginian at least in this. It was the only thing of all my past life that I would preserve. I had been married in church as I had promised myself, before God and society. I had married for love. I had chosen my husband and I had come to him a virgin.

In a stroke of irony or sentiment, Petit had arranged the wedding reception at the hotel where I had eaten my first meal as a white woman. Thance and I would spend our first night as man and wife in a room there before leaving for Saratoga Springs on our honeymoon. The orchestra, in formal dress, filled the restaurant's Palm Court, with its greenery and crystal chandeliers, with the newest waltzes, and several musicians from the conservatory joined them. There were songs and toasts and finally a prayer from the good Reverend Crocket. “May this young and beautiful couple enjoy the fruits of love and devotion, of Christian morality and Christian charity, forever after!” intoned the Reverend. At my request, he added a prayer to remove the scourge of chattel slavery from the annals of the nation by abolition.

It was Thor who gently placed the newly ironed newspaper announcement of my wedding in my lap.

On Saturday, March 1st, 1827, Miss Harriet H. Petit of Albemarle County, Virginia, married Mr. William John Thadius Wellington of this city at St. Paul's Unitarian Congregation Church on Washington Square at eleven
A.M
. in the presence of friends and family of the groom's mother, the eminent Mrs. Nathan Wellington the former Rachel Lysses du Graft of Scranton and Wilmington, member of the board of St. Paul's Church and of the Philadelphia Academy. The bridesmaids were Miss Charlotte Waverly of Waverly Place and Miss Lividia Wellington, sister-in-law
of the bride. Miss Petit is a member of the Philadelphia Conservatory Orchestra, a graduate of the Bryn Mawr Seminary for Women, and a member of the ladies' auxiliary of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. The groom is a son of the late scientist and pharmacist Dr. Nathan Wellington, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Pharmacy. The couple will honeymoon in Saratoga Springs, after which they will reside at No. 120 Church Street in South Philadelphia.

Printed on the back page of the notice of my marriage was the following advertisement:

Twenty Dollars Reward—Ran away from the subscriber, on the 14th instant, a Negro girl named Molly. She is 16 or 17 years of age, slim made, lately branded on her left cheek with an
R
and a piece is taken off her ear on the same side; the same letter
R
is branded on the inside of both her legs.

ABNER ROSE

FAIRFIELD DISTRICT, S.C.

The stark letters of the slave advertisement gave the event on the reverse side its finality: a marriage of North and South, of black and white, of fugitive criminal and pillar of society, of bastardy and white legitimacy.

That advertisement would follow me through life as the shadow of my wedding. Every time I took out that clipping, the other stared back at me like a twin.

My wedding gift from the State of Pennsylvania was a new law called the Personal Liberty Law, which made kidnapping a fugitive slave a felony. I should have been safe. But interracial marriage was still a felony in Pennsylvania. William John Thadius Wellington was a criminal like my father before him, liable to fine and imprisonment for miscegenation. I could be fined, jailed, publicly whipped, and my children sold into slavery for having accepted him.

When I saw my husband standing in our room, outlined in a white haze from the gaslight, he didn't seem like a man to me at all, but like the incarnation of a great phase of my life that had ended. He was the final approximation of it. My whole being seemed sharpened and intensified into a single spear of love. I didn't expect it, nor did I know exactly what it was. It merely took hold of me with exquisite, terrifying force and power. Drawn into this flame of love, which both enhanced me and denied me at the same time, I entirely revoked my previous existence. My husband's unknowing face above me was as pure as a priest's. His beautiful black eyes emitted such a force of will that I touched my forehead to see if I was still alive.

Thance kissed my face slowly, gently, with a kind of childish delicate happiness, surprising me with soft, blind kisses, which were like strange moths—perfectly still and sweet, setting themselves on my soul and my secret. I became uneasy for the first time since the wedding and I drew away for a moment, shame perhaps. Then, to show I was a happy, willing wife, I turned and held him tightly against me. I hadn't told him anything. I wouldn't tell him anything. Yet, in the small center of the flame he had created was the unyielding anguish I had invented by not telling him.

He drew up my chemise slowly, carefully, and buried his face in my sex, kissing my nether lips until I swooned. Far, far away I heard a small lament as he settled into me. The pain cast a new spell, then burst as Thance withdrew and lifted me with his strong arms. My damp chemise wore the small badge of triumph. I closed my eyes as tears of happiness washed away my thoughts and I was anchored by the world where he was, which was light and joy and happiness, and where he wasn't, which was gloom and fear and emptiness.

My thoughts drifted into unconsciousness. And then came back. They disappeared again and returned like ghosts, each time more faint. The colored lady with the cabbage rose drifted in and out of my line of vision. Her tinkling laughter and her mockery surrounded me. Then the image burst into a mimosa tree, and I was back at Monticello, in the little vegetable garden behind my grandmother's cabin. My mother was leading me by the hand. Fragile and delicate, cloudlike, the mimosa tree rose on its pale trunk and spread its long, level arms. My mother pointed to it. Among the trembling leaves, the feathery puffs of sweet blossoms shivered as if thousands of tropical birds were perched there. The tree seemed to light the garden, my grandmother's cabin, and all of Mulberry Row. Its heightened fragrance wafted over everything. My mother (or was it my grandmother?) pointed again, and the scent swayed like a serpent.

I had a sensation of pain; the ends of my fingers and between my legs were
stinging. Now was the time, I thought, to relinquish my soul and resist no more. My body had yielded; why not my mind? But then I knew that love was just another kind of command: a new master's voice.

“Harriet, my darling,” he whispered. “Don't be afraid … it's only the first time this happens. I'll never hurt you again in this way. My adored wife …”

Moonlight ate into the drops of tepid water, turning them to fiery diamonds that fell from the sponge I held like an offering in both hands. I held the sponge higher, letting rivulets of light flow over my neck and chest and down into the pitch blackness of the water beneath me. In the darkness, the droplets flashed and clustered, secretly dancing, dispersing and then reuniting in configurations, rocking, moving forward, then falling back as if in panic. They worked their way back again persistently, making a semblance of fleeing as they advanced, always flickering nearer to the rim of white porcelain. The cluster grew larger and brighter as gleam after gleam fell until it became the ragged cabbage rose on the colored lady's hat. The frayed moon shook down upon the basin, and I heard Thance's voice faintly calling me back to bed.

My husband never understood how a proven virgin with no past to speak of could be so wise in the ways of pleasing men, or use her body so convincingly under the imperatives of conjugal love. But conjugal love was what I had dreamed of, lived and fought for since the age of seven. Perhaps it was because I had learned so young that my body was not my own that I was now able to bestow it lavishly and freely, as if bondage had shown me whatever new thing I needed to learn. I had grown wisdom in my fingers, for I knew now with what gentleness or violence I should touch or hold, kiss or press Thance's flesh. With gravity I received the furious hunger of my husband's desire. If it was against all scientific reason for me to guess what would please him or show myself adept at physical passion, it was also against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties between them at all, with different characters, different upbringings, even different sexes, to find themselves suddenly committed to living together forever, to sleeping in the same bed, performing the most intimate of attentions, and sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated one day to run in opposite directions.

• A Notice from Virginia •

• Eston and Madison Go West •

• A Ckase in tke Streets of Philadelphia •

• The Last of the Monticellians•

• Thenia •

• The Conductor •

• Cholera and Colorphobia •

• The Accident •

• A Twin's Love •

• Thance's Affidavit •

• Thor's Affidavit •

• A Double Image •