The President's Daughter (5 page)

From these elements let us examine their compounds. For example, let
h
and
q
cohabit, their issue will be
, wherein we find
of
a,
or negro blood.

Let
h
and
e
cohabit, their issue will be
, wherein
a
makes still a mulatto.

Let
q
and
e
cohabit, the half of the blood of each will be
, wherein
of
a
is no longer a mulatto, and thus may every compound be noted and summed, the sum of the fractions composing the blood of the issue being always equal to unit. It is understood in natural history that a fourth cross of one race of animals with another gives an issue equivalent for all sensible purposes to the original blood. Thus a Merino ram being crossed, first with a country ewe, second with his daughter, third with his granddaughter, and fourth with the great-granddaughter, the last issue is deemed pure Merino, having in fact but
of the country blood. Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the negro blood. But observe, that this does not re-establish freedom, which depends on the condition of the mother, the principle of the civil law,
partus sequitur ventrem,
being adopted here.

But if
e
emancipated, he becomes a free white man, and a citizen of the United States to all intents and purposes. So much for this trifle by way of correction.

Th. Jefferson

I wanted to stay as I was, my eyes screwed shut in this blackness which was the corollary of blindness. What else was there, really, to see? The lilac phaeton had already turned the bend out of sight. If I opened my eyes now, I would see only my reflection in the eyes of my slave wife, and I didn't want that. Perhaps this obscurity I experience now is forever. Perhaps I've fallen off my back porch and killed myself. Perhaps if I open my eyes, I won't see Sally Hemings's golden eyes, but the red-rimmed hollows of the Devil's. And
what would I say to him? That he made me do it?

I finally opened my eyes and rose from my knees, cradling my injured wrist against my chest. I shrugged off Sally's offer of help. I could see the lilac phaeton again, the wing of a tropical bird in the dense greenery, speeding away in a cloud of dust, winding its way down the mountain toward my plantation of Pantops, which had already been seized by my creditors.

Why were 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, against the world, since she was knee-high. I do believe my daughter drank in all that bitterness and anger with Sally Hem-ings's milk. She had been conceived the summer that, ballot-by-ballot, I 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 own naivete and the ambitions of my old enemy, Aaron Burr. Then, too, Harriet had been born in the shadow of death. First Jupiter, my body servant of fifty-seven years, then my nemesis Callender, which at least shut him up. And finally my slave wife's favorite brother, James's.

Her infant ears must have heard her mother's screams when Thomas Mann Randolph announced that James Hemings 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 little face had shriveled in the heat of my slave wife's curses when our eldest son, Thomas, was banished from Monticello to dampen the gossip surrounding his birth.

All these truths Harriet had grown up with, and she had taken them with her in the lilac phaeton. But what exactly was the truth? Truth in Virginia had to be cultivated like a blossom: it grew from 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, contempt, 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. That's what happened to truth around here. Virginians honored virility over skepticism, which is the essential to clear thinking. It was for that reason that 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, including myself, 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 black people as deeply as black people had entered into us.

It was the most tremendous lie we had ever told ourselves in the South: that one drop of black blood was enough to condemn an individual to slavery, which in turn protected the incredible, invincible, overwhelming myth amongst us that the crime of miscegenation had never occurred—that the purity of the two races, but especially the white race, had been preserved, forever separate, forever untainted.