The President's Daughter (59 page)

“Harriet, I thought you'd been killed!” Emily looked up at me reproachfully as I entered the hospital tent, as if I had taken fright and run off to safety. “Where were you?”

“At the convent.”

“You missed everything. They've announced that the field is ours . . . according to the generals. God in His mercy has given the victory of today to the arms of the Union.”

“This field will never be ours,” I said. “This
day
will never be ours! I abhor the slaughter of this bloody day,” I said, finally weeping. Then I remembered why this day was bloody. The Confederates were making war for the freedom to own me. And mine.

“You must wash a bit, Harriet,” said Emily.

But I refused. My face was as black as my real color, and I intended it to stay that way—tonight.

Emily and I looked at each other. If we had hoped that what we had lived through the day before was a dream, we were deceived. Our blouses were stiff with dried blood; our muscles ached; we stank to high heaven. Matron Dix convened her civilian nurses, and whoever they had been the day before, they were no longer that person. Yet none of us had deserted. No one had fallen ill. No one was weeping. I looked around at these dry-eyed, exhausted white women, and my esteem for them moved and surprised me.

Ain't I a woman?

We washed, put on clean white aprons, and started to work, as dawn broke.

At twelve noon, July third, Emily said, “What sound was that?”

There was no mistaking it. The distinct, sharp sound of the enemy's guns, once more. Everyone turned in the direction of the sound. Directly above the crest was the smoke and then the noise of cannons. In an instant, before anyone could exchange a word, as if that were the signal for a race, began a series of startling loud boomings.

The nurses of my watch were stifling their cries; the cries of the wounded for water and help rose and fell like a musical accompaniment, the
projectiles shrieked long and sharp, men cursed, hissed, screamed, growled, sputtered with sounds of life and rage, and each had a different note that I could almost write.

I imagined the silent gray line advancing with the Union guns bellowing in their faces. The blue line approaching to within footprints of the gray line and firing point-blank. A great, magnificent passion came upon me. Not one that overpowered and confounded, but one that blanched the face and sublimated every sense and faculty. The armies did not cheer or shout. It was exactly as Beverly had described it to me; they growled. It resounded even behind the lines, the sound of that uneasy sea mixed with the roar of musketry; the muttering thunder of a storm of sounds. Later, I would know what had happened, but now the line sprang: the crest of the solid ground, with a great noise, heaved forward—they swept by, men, arms, smoke, fire, followed by a universal shout, that of the charge of Pickett's Division. The battle of Gettysburg had ended.

None of us had any notion how long a time passed from the moment of the first guns until they ceased, and all was quiet. Suffice it to say that on the night of the third of July, the Confederacy withdrew, and on the morning of the fourth of July-—the day of my father's Declaration, the day of my father's death, the day, thirty years ago, that I cursed him in fury over my bondage —that day, the Union forces again occupied the village of Gettysburg. The victory had cost sixty thousand dead, wounded, and missing. I looked about me. Where the long line of the enemy's thousands had advanced, silent men in gray were scattered and strewn amongst the trampled grass, as were other thousands of silent men in blue, all intermingled and amalgamated for eternity. Rain fell as I rode back to the convent, unable to resist the vision I had found there.

I set out on this ground which I suppose to he self-evident that the earth belongs to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

Thomas Jefferson

Watching the battle of Gettysburg from the relative quiet of an anonymous pauper's grave outside Philadelphia, I felt more like God than James Hemings of Monticello. I was pulled back almost a full century to the hour of my birth. A hundred-year-old man
is
history, and perhaps the instinctual knowledge of the Last Judgment is universal, because a life that leads to death is a perfect emblem for a history that has led to this sprawling, spanking-new killing field being consecrated as a national metaphor to insanity. Yes, this is James Hemings you're listening to. I'm contemplating my niece Harriet, who has lived her double—nay, triple—life so that she can stand there with her fake identity, sobbing for the fake sacrifice of this fake moment of (I admit) indisputable greatness of this fake nation. But why must these moments always occur on battlefields, in cathedrals, or in graveyards, and in this case, a battlefield and a graveyard? Because history favors the mass effect: plenty of action and a cast of thousands, bit players that enter and exit by the millions, the dead filling in the background so that there in the sky, the phosphorescent chariots of the great, surrounded by clouds, thunder, and lightning, can appear as drums rumble and clarinets spike. Just like now. The mist rises, the sky smells of heat and rain, the clouds part, and there it is: the terrible armada, the great surge of the mob across the moat of the Bastille, the grand Army of the Potomac. I guess historical illumination is always like that, spotlighted from the left, with lots of chiaroscuro.

My white namesake, James, has died on Seminary Ridge to free the mother he didn't even know was a slave
and
black. Like most white people, he didn't know the words of the song he had been dancing to, and I don't really have an opinion about that except that
she's
just like the mother she never wanted to be. I've followed my niece's adventures for fifty years, hopping, skipping, jumping the color line, mistrusting her father, despising her mother, lovingly deceiving her husbands; not adultery or even incest, but—woe is me—a question of color. A question which supremely irritates all black men, dead or alive.

I still have my red, white, and blue cockade from Bastille Day, Paris, 1789. Did you know that? I've just stuck my hand in my pocket and found it. I wonder, did they bury it with me (a gunnysack, some lime, and a hole in the ground) in not, I insist, a common grave? Never let it be said that I racially integrated a mass burial pit. No, the white poor and the black poor are duly separated in Philadelphia.

And you're thinking, Well, really, what really happened to him? Are we ever going to find out? I mean, was he murdered or did he commit suicide that day Thomas Mann Randolph found him, or claims to have done so? Do you really think everything should be historically redeemed from oblivion, reader? I mean, couldn't my fate just stay in the somnolent shadows? As those boys over there know, dead is dead.

Why am I carrying on this conversation, appearing on the scene, interrupting the narrative? Rage, I guess. At my own dry bones, my wormy eyes, my faded cockade, when all I wanted to be in life was one of Abraham Lincoln's three hundred thousand. One thing about being dead, you don't get any older. And at thirty-seven, I am a fine fighting man, and if they didn't let me fight as a black, well, I would have done what Harriet, Eston, and Beverly did. Pass for white, since white people don't even know what white is except it is not Negro and they are fighting for the right to be called non-Negro. I'm simply lying here itching for a gun. I've long ago forgiven my murderer. And Callender as well. Forgiven my father. Forgiven my brother-in-law. Forgiven the world. It was only politics as usual. How can I speak of assassination with fifty-nine thousand assassinated boys staring up at me. Forget it. Forget me. I feel a great tenderness for my grandnephew James down there. And I know, like all the dead, that it's not over. Only half the price is paid as of now. Only half the grief. Only half the pain. Only half the shame. Harriet's going to lose another son. The South is going to fight to the last. And the North is going to blunder on and finally grind them into the earth because America is indivisible. Forgiveness? I don't think Harriet is ever going to find it. I don't know if she wants to anymore. She has all these
other problems—being emancipated by her own white sons and all—and their being in the dark about it. But most of all, the great American nightmare of waking up one morning with a drop of black blood in their veins hangs over them.

Blood. Harriet waded in it right here without ever taking into account that her whole life has revolved around a single black drop of it for fifty years, just as mine revolved around a single drop of white sperm for one hundred. And a hundred years from now it will still matter. It makes even me, a man who is supposed to be at rest, angry every time I think that a woman would rather be a slave than miss out on almighty love.

I, James Wayles Hemings, a suicide, second son of John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings and brother to Sally Hemings, brother-in-law and manumitted slave of Thomas Jefferson, do hereby swear that I was at Gettysburg when its ground was consecrated by my namesake James Wellington, dead for the Union without ever knowing he was black, without ever knowing he was emancipating his own mother, this day God made, the Fourth of July, in the year
A.D
. 1863.

Why are colored people's triumphs always in graves?

JAMES WAYLES HEMINGS

If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present.

Thomas Jefferson

I would ride up to the cemetery on Seminary Ridge. I liked to look at the forlorn and pockmarked sign that forbade by ordinance the use of firearms within its perimeters. I wondered what all those quiet sleepers must have thought when twenty-pound Parrott shells thundered over them and solid shot crushed their headstones. Virginius shied away from a dead horse as I dismounted beside the broken pieces of a statue of a lamb that had guarded some child's grave. I tied the reins to the wheel of an abandoned gun carriage.

Surreptitiously, I took from my nurse's bag a piece of broken mirror I used to tell if unconscious men were dead or alive.

I could hardly believe what I saw. My hair had turned half-white, my eyes had faded to watery jade, my cheeks were sunken and hollow, and there were dark rings under my eyes. My fair skin was burned by the sun, and there were small lines of worry pulling at my mouth. I could hardly tell whether I was a man or a woman, since not a mite of my sex's magnetism shone out. My joints ached and my chest harbored the weight of closing scores of dead men's eyes—a load as heavy as a confession and as impossible to lift. Because of it, my heart fluttered, sometimes in a steady beat, sometimes as jerky as a flea.

As I looked over the wasteland, I saw Thor from very far striding up the ridge toward me. I recognized him from his walk, the set of his shoulders, the silhouette of his twin. My heart leapt, first in delight and then in dread.
How had he managed a furlough? I started toward him, my arms open, my eyes shining until I was close enough to see his face. It was the face of an old man. The thick thatch of dark hair still fell over one eye, but it now had an inch-wide streak of white in it, as if he had dipped it in whitewash. His step was slow and his broad shoulders stooped in the blue serge of his uniform. I noted dully that he had been promoted. There was a major general's bar on his sleeve and shoulder. Then I waited patiently like a dray horse for him to take me by the shoulders; to look at me with love and pity; and to tell me which one was dead.

Instead of a greeting, he uttered one word, “James.”

The flash of grief was like a spinning bullet. It corkscrewed through me effortlessly, trailing ingots of pain.

“There's almost nothing left of his regiment. The Twenty-fourth was on Seminary Ridge, facing Pickett's Division. Madison is alive. He was with him to the end.”

“You mean it was
here?
”

“Harriet, I'm sorry. I loved him as much as you did. Forgive me. I would gladly be dead in his place. Forgive me.”

Forgive me. That's what all white people said. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me. I couldn't forgive them anymore.

“A work gang of colored freedmen buried James near their camp,” continued Thor. “They were army laborers working on repairing the railroad. Madison and I went to their prayer meeting that night and listened while they sang. They had collected themselves under the fly of a tent and had installed a table where their leader sat—about thirty of them, so black it was as if they had brought in the darkness from outside ... or the African night all the way from the Cape. I felt ... at home. Madison knew the words to all the songs. They seemed to be under no one's orders. They set up their meeting and prayed as only black people can for James, who had died so young. I don't know why, but I went over to the quartermaster's and hunted up some army-issue yellow bandannas and took them back. We laid them on the table, and one by one the men came up and took one. I told them that the Union bandanna was proof that they were fighting for the United States and was a symbol of victory . . . and that they had prevailed over the Confederacy and that they should wear their bandannas with as much pride as a full Union army uniform.

“They tied the bandannas around their necks, or their heads, or their sleeves. They were very proud. They sang one more song, ‘Sweet Reli-gion.' “

“And Madison?” I stuttered over his name in fear.

“I left him at the field hospital. They took a bullet out of his thigh which missed, thank God, the bone. The surgeon said if he could walk he could try to reach the depot here tomorrow and get himself evacuated to Philadelphia by train.”

“But I have my horse here. I can go and fetch him, and he can stay with me.”