The President's Daughter (50 page)

Beyond the panes of glass, forces were gathering that would make even the word
war
a newly minted one. Even the heavens were holding their breath and rationing the clouds of white, lazy flakes that would soon swish out of the sky and cover everything. I suppose it was because I had been fighting the private war of my own double identity for so long that I smelled war long before it came.

Behind me, as on a stage, the semicircle of my white family made a crescent of blurry, familiar shadows against the light. Christmas had passed and New Year's Day was approaching, but the tree still stood weighted down with garlands of trinkets and pretty decorations kept from one year to the next. Like life, I thought, a chain of insignificant, glittering decorations strung together and draped in a way one could describe as “beautiful.” Suddenly I spun myself around on my stool, alarming the dog and eliciting a big smile from Maria.

“Mama, that was fantastic. To think we have Norma in our living room, thanks to Mr. Liszt.”

“He dedicated it to Marie Pleyel.”

I smiled at my middle daughter, Jane Elizabeth, who was as beautiful as the aunt after whom she was named. She was a good musician and a loving if conventional daughter. With her hair piled up and in black velvet, she looked older than her twenty-three years. Quiet, intense, obedient, she had a nascent charm; her dark good looks gave her an aura of drama that was far from her natural disposition. She had learned to enhance this effect with burgundy, black, dark purple, and somber forest green dresses. In a few months she would be married to an army lieutenant surgeon on tour in Wyoming. My son Beverly was twenty-five. Old enough, I repeated like a litany, to run. Beverly, too, reminded me of the brother he was named after: goodness itself, with a kind of diamond-hard ambition and will that belied his graceful, almost southern demeanor. He was a strawberry blond, with gray eyes and freckled skin. The only really fair person in the family except for me. Beverly looked a lot like me, but most of all, he looked a lot like his grandfather. His voice had remained high and girlish, and he had a laugh just like his. Ever since he was a child he had spent his time fixing things, growing things, taking things apart, and putting them together again. At eight he invented a miniature distillery; by ten he had already collected and named most of the flora and fauna at his grandmother's country house. He would be a good doctor. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as an M.D. in 1855. One day he brought home from college a classmate, John Hill Callender. Fate would have it that he was the grandson of my parents' nemesis, James T. Callender. I gazed at the two young men, innocent of everything.

We never forgive those whom we have wronged. . . .

As John Hill bent low over my hand, I wondered which of the three of them was twirling fastest in his grave . . . John Hill Callender was even engaged to marry a great-grandniece of Thomas Jefferson ... my grandniece.

I wouldn't think about that now; I would think about it when I was calmer.

The twenty-year-old twins sat near their sister. Madison and James were ready to enter college. William John Madison and William John James were equally tall, lanky, loose-jointed, and athletic. They were self-possessed beyond their years, and their bright cheerfulness seemed to be a hallmark of placid, rational, contained characters. In fact, they looked a great deal like their father and his twin, Thor. They had the same swarthy smoothness and black eyes with flecks of gold. They had grown several inches in the past year and had not yet learned what to do with their bodies, which made them seem suspended somewhere between the quiet competence of young men and the rollicking antics of childhood.

Sinclair, my eldest, no longer lived at home. He had married three years ago and lived several blocks away, but he often stopped by in the evenings. He was the first medical doctor in the family, and Thor was uncommonly proud of him. It was Thor, after all, who had nurtured him into brilliance and diligence, a rare combination of intellectual rigor and poetic intuition. As a matter of fact, everyone agreed Sinclair was the family poet and intellectual, as well as a scientist. Grave and somber almost to a fault, he was more like my brother Thomas Woodston than any of his nearer relations or his own brothers and sisters, who deemed him boring. But he had a quiet seductiveness and a wicked humor all his own, which, under his disguise of conventionality, was as incisive as his surgeon's scalpel.

Maria, sat on the floor next to Thor. At twelve she was still full of promise and baby fat. Her round, undefined face held the promise of great beauty, and her mind had, even now, a radical, phantasmagoric, burlesque quality that spoke of unquestioned brilliance if not real genius. She was being watched carefully by Thor, who saw in her an exceptional mind combined with the gift of synthesis and poetic conjuncture which was the mark of a true scientist and intellectual.

I had been lucky with my children. Maria and Madison seemed especially marked for exceptional achievement. My eldest daughter, Ellen, had married also and now lived with her husband and two children near Terrytown in Bucks County. I was a grandmother as well.

My skirts made circles on the carpet as my knees swung the piano stool back and forth. I took off my spectacles and drew my handkerchief out of my sleeve. I cleaned my glasses, and as I swung, the weight of James's dagger pressed on my knee. I smiled. Would I never feel free enough to lay down my sword? Would I never make peace with ... I looked over the several feet at my adored and adoring family. My white people. I adjusted my spectacles.

“Would you like to play, Maria?” I asked.

“No, Mother. I think your concert is not to be surpassed.”

“You don't have to surpass me, Maria.”

“It would only be boring.”

“It would not,” said Thor. “I hear your teachers are more than happy with your performances. They think a career as a musician is not out of the question.”

“It wouldn't be, Papa, if women were allowed to play in symphony orchestras. But they're not.”

“But this is not true in Europe,” I said. “Only the United States is so backward about such things.”

“Nevertheless, I'll never regret my training,” Maria continued, “even if I never use it for more than giving music lessons to snooty children.”

“James, will you stop that horrible habit of smoking your father's cigars? It's unhealthy!”

“Yes, Mother.”

“And come give me a kiss.”

“Yes, Mother,” he repeated reluctantly.

As I held my twin son tightly, my brightest, my favorite, and inhaled the young male sweetness, my eyes were drawn in complicity to Thor, my love, my husband, my anchor, the father of my fatherless children, the one thing that kept me sane in the world in which I lived.

Thor looked up and smiled. He was still a handsome man. The slight thickening of his jaw and the new mustache streaked with gray surrounded the same chiseled features, the same black eyes under their thick eyebrows in the
f
-shapes of a violin, the same wide high cheekbones, the same high complexion, now permanently bronzed by the sun. I had never returned to Cape Town after that one trip to see Thance's grave. But Thor had continued to conduct his expeditions, refusing to bow to my pleas, but he had curtailed the length of his trips in deference to his responsibility for his brother's children. Sometimes Sinclair went with him. And every time they went, they visited Ladysmith. Sinclair would always write to me from that grassy knoll and send me dozens of delicate watercolors of the landscape.

Thor now had years of research behind him. The material he had gathered was sufficient for hundreds of studies without ever making another trip to the Cape. There were thousands of specimens in the laboratory, and scores of experiments going on. He had even published posthumously in London all of Thance's papers and research on fingerprints. The thin volume was on the shelves of the library next to Francis Galton's definitive monograph published the same year. He often kissed my blank fingertips without mentioning the accident. I wondered if it had crossed his mind these past fourteen years. Everyone else who would remember, except Thenia, was dead.

There was now a railroad car that passed through the warehouse, taking the Wellington Drug Company's merchandise by steam engine west to Illinois and southwest as far as Arkansas. Arkansas had been added as a slave state in 1836, while Iowa had been added as a free state in 1846. Fifteen free states and fifteen slave states made up the Union. A bitter battle had raged on over the admission of Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, which had resulted in the Missouri Compromise. Now the admission of Kansas would tilt the delicate balance between slave and free states. That's what we talked about, like everyone else in America, a country of twenty-three million people, four million of whom were slaves. In South Carolina and Mississippi, slaves outnumbered whites, and in Louisiana they equaled them. In Alabama they were roughly three-sevenths of the population. Just north of Charleston, they were eighty-eight percent, and on the Georgia seacoast, eighty. In central Alabama they were seventy percent, and along the Mississippi belt they outnumbered whites nine to one. Out of a southern white population of six million, only five percent owned slaves and three or four thousand families owned most of them, lived on the best lands, enjoyed three-fourths of the income, and wielded the political and intellectual power that was concentrated in that aristocratic group to which my father had belonged.

The old issue of slavery in the territories had been torn open again by Kansas and Nebraska. By the terms of the Missouri Compromise, all this rich, fertile, empty land beyond the Missouri River was closed to slavery above the thirty-sixth parallel. The frontiers of Kansas and Nebraska touched Missouri, which would probably become a free state as well. A new bill had been introduced in Congress that enraged Free Soil men and superseded the Missouri Compromise. It left Kansas and Nebraska open to settlers bringing slaves with them, and would allow the inhabitants to decide whether they would enter the Union slave or free. The Utah and New Mexico territories were free to decide on slavery, despite New Mexico being below the thirty-sixth parallel. To open these westerly, virgin prairies to slavery struck millions of us in the North as unforgivable.

And then, a strange and obscure Supreme Court case exploded into the national conscience:
Scott v. Sandford.
The court's scandalous decision on the side of slaveholding had drawn a tighter and tighter knot around bondsmen and bestowed on slave masters new powers to recapture, pursue, and control their troublesome “property.” It had curtailed the liberties not only of free blacks in both the North and the South, but of white citizens in the North who wanted nothing to do with owning slaves.

Dred Scott had spent most of his sixty-odd years as the slave of an army surgeon, John Emerson, who had taken him into the free territory of Illinois
and to Fort Snelling, above the thirty-sixth parallel. At Fort Snelling he married a female slave of Emerson's, and had a child born free by the provisions of the Missouri Compromise. When his owner died and his widow inherited them, friends of Scott advised him to sue for freedom on the grounds of prolonged residence in a free state. Eleven years later, his simple suit for freedom had become a rallying cry of slavery and was appealed before the Supreme Court.

In 1857 the court ruled that Dred Scott was separated from the Constitution and all the rights it bestowed, and that he was not a citizen. Negroes were not included in the “all men” of my father's Declaration, men whom God had created “equal.” For that matter, claimed the court, at the time of the Constitution, Negroes were regarded as beings of an inferior order—so far inferior that they had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. The court ruled that Dred Scott's sojourn in free territory did not make him free, because a ban on slavery was unconstitutional. The justices had decided that the Constitution protected slavery and the property of slaveowners in all the states and territories. It was hereafter a slaveowner's Constitution, not a free man's. And the North cried never, never, never.

The name of Dred Scott was on all our lips that night.

“I cannot prove that the Dred Scott decision is part of a conspiracy to expand slavery, but when I see a lot of framed timbers, which I know have been gotten out at different times and places by different workmen—Stephen Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Roger Taney, and President Buchanan, for in-stance—and when I see these timbers joined together and see they exactly make the frame of a house, I, like Abraham Lincoln, find it impossible not to believe that those inspired carpenters all worked upon a common plan, trying to push slavery forward till it shall become lawful in
all
the states, north as well as south.”

Thor was glancing through the newspapers Sinclair had brought him.

“Slave power,” said Sinclair, “controls the President and fills all the offices. Not only do they count three-fourths of their slaves as electorate in order to augment their representation in the Senate and the House, which allows them to control the electoral college, I do believe they intend to extend slavery by Supreme Court decree into all the states in the Union. They're going to do it by chipping away at the Missouri Compromise and all other laws that protect the free territories.”

“No court would dare such a folly!” I cried.

“No court? What about the past steps leading to the hangman's court of Dred Scott? The silencing of the presidency, the loading of the Supreme Court with southerners, the Fugitive Slave Act, and finally the Kansas-Nebraska
Act? And what will follow?” I looked up expectantly for his response. “I'll tell you, Mother,” continued Sinclair. “The South wants the addition of Cuba and Haiti as slave territories, and the revival of the slave trade on the world market. The Dred Scott decision is an alarming prediction of things to come. If a slave is movable property in the territories, why not in the free states as well?”