The President's Daughter (7 page)

“One thing I learned years later when I came to America to work for your father at Monticello. It was not only your mother who found herself a liberated woman in France. Your father, too, found relief for a few short years from the stifling oppression of the Virginian slave society that he had grown up in and which owned him. Do you understand?

“Imagine, he had never been beyond Philadelphia before his trip to France and he was over forty years old. Any nobleman worth his salt had seen London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona before the age of twenty-five! Yet he had known only the American civilization of the backwoods plantations of Virginia. True, this society believed itself to be the very height of sophistication and planter aristocracy when they were really nothing but a bunch of provincial burghers.

“So he, too, found a kind of freedom ... a kind of escape from slavery. For what happened in Paris could never, Harriet, have happened at Monticello. By the time your parents returned to Virginia, it was too late to change anything except to hide their secret cruelly. Most cruelly.”

My mother had never spoken to me of the things Petit recounted that night. It was as if they were memories she no longer owned or wished to transmit to any of her children. Shocked, I listened to anecdote after anecdote, some funny, some sad, of my mother's education in France. Petit seemed to have been my uncle James's only friend. And between them there seemed to have been a genuine love.

“I loved James,” Petit continued. “He was born on his father's plantation in 1765 and was twenty when I met him. He had accompanied his master to Paris in eighty-four, as his body servant, but was quickly apprenticed to be trained as a master chef for Monticello. He was a beautiful boy. Very tall and muscular, with a light beige tawny complexion and wiry black hair that he wore long and straight back in a queue tied with a ribbon. He had eyes of a strange gunmetal gray flecked with yellow and disgracefully long and thick
eyelashes which gave the impression that he wore kohl, as many of the aristocratic dandies of the day did. His cheeks were as rosy as if they'd been rouged, and he had a natural beauty mark high on one cheek which had never seen a razor's edge. How I envied him that. Dressed in the livery of the Hôtel de Langeac, he was a naturally elegant, even remarkable, figure. He had long graceful hands which were in constant motion and long legs which were never still also. There was about him the aura of a forest animal, not jungle, I insist —his grace and stealth were of a pattern and shadow of cool and wooded places, not the sultry tropical jungle so mythically attributed to anyone who had African blood in his veins. He was pale enough so that none of the French aristocracy suspected he was what they would have called a blackamoor. Neither your mother. Otherwise, they would have been the talk of Paris, blackamoors were so coveted and in vogue. Maria Cosway had one, a little boy attached to her household in London.

“I can only describe the expression in James's eyes as ironic resignation. Oh, there was anger and envy and rage and malice, too, but the overriding tenor of his face was that of a very young lion, golden and tawny, posed and patient, waiting for the moment to step onstage as a king or at least a prince. That was James's nickname in the kitchen, ‘King Jimmi,' for he had turned out to be a natural cook and a natural kitchen aristocrat. He was an inventive, intelligent, talented cook, and the food that passed through his hands bore the mark of a future master chef. I suppose,” sighed Petit, “that is why everyone put up with him.

“We got on famously from the very start. I might even say we fell into each other's arms. I felt a brotherly love and protection for the younger man, and I introduced him to the entrails of high and low life in Paris. We spent almost all of our free time together, me feeling half of the time like his father and mentor and the other half like his accomplice and younger brother in a series of the most adolescent and outrageous
sottises
possible. We became in all ways inseparable, and the bond forged between us lasted until death parted us.

“Your uncle James was as close to a younger brother as I possessed. I loved him. James's tragic end was one of the greatest sorrows of my life.”

“And what of . . . my mother's tragic end—a slave whose children steal themselves away from her in the name of whiteness?” I murmured.

Petit looked shocked, and indeed I was shocked by the bitterness in my voice. Did I despise my mother, I wondered.

Petit must have sensed my unspoken question, for he looked sternly at me and said, “There are reasons under the sun for everything. Things that are unfathomable. I have never underestimated the force of love, loyalty, or
passion. I have seen them work in many men and women, including your father and mother and uncle.”

The long journey into the night continued. We had decided not to stop until we had crossed the Mason-Dixon line into the free state of Delaware.

“There was a fashionable convent for girls in Paris, L'Abbaye de Panthémont, where Martha was already in school. Your father allowed your mother to attend briefly. He also had her tutored in French and music at home. The tug-of-war between James and your father for your mother's soul began the day she set foot in that courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeac. What was most important was that we all loved your mother. James loved her. I loved her. Monsieur Perrault, her tutor, loved her; Monsieur Felin, her music teacher, loved her. Polly loved her. John Trumbull, the painter who lived at the embassy, loved her and drew portraits of her. Only poor unhappy Martha, jealous of her father, began to hate your mother. But in the scale of love, nothing would balance the weight of your father's love. Not even your mother's own desire for freedom and emancipation. Almost at once she realized, thanks to James, that on French soil she was free. But love held her. The more they struggled against it, the more it held them fast. It was a terrible thing to see. When your mother realized she was carrying your brother Thomas, she ran away from the embassy and stayed away for almost two weeks. I thought your father was going to lose his mind. He came down with one of his violent migraines, which left him in darkest pain for days. She finally returned of her own accord, after hiding out all that time at her old landlady's boardinghouse. They had a discussion and came to an agreement. Not even I know what went on behind those closed doors that day. But your father did promise to free all their children at age twenty-one. And he promised to return with your mother to France one day. Perhaps they both finally realized the awful improbability of their transgression. In the end, I tell you, it was a struggle of life and death. James couldn't live without your mother's freedom, and your father couldn't live without your mother. Her seduction, if you want to call it that, was more like two mighty oaks falling . . . and crushing a slender pine tree—my poor James. I knew or guessed everything. Men have few secrets from their valets, and I was a cynical young man. It was James, so much more vulnerable than I, who suffered. All James's hopes had been in your mother, and she betrayed him. All your father's hopes for happiness after his wife's death were in his half sister-in-law, your mother.

“Just before we left, President Jefferson said only one thing to me. He said, ‘I loved two sisters, one white and one black, to my everlasting despair.' “

“You mean my father's first wife was my aunt . . . then?”

“Yes.”

By this time night had fallen, and the dark woods and bluish trees sped by in moonlight. My mother had told me little of her life before my birth. The image I had of her had been one of a proud, secretive woman, with a room full of mysterious treasures, disillusions, and unrealized dreams. Seeing her, I had vowed that I would not live a life of imagination but of reality. I would live a life of facts, plain and simple, filled with action and decisions. A heroic life. My father had kept none of the promises he had made to my mother in Paris. Wasn't that the only thing that remained of all of Petit's stories? Broken promises? My eyes began to get heavy, but I had to stay awake until we crossed the Mason-Dixon into Delaware, I told myself. It was like crossing the Rubicon; there would be no turning back after that.

“First thing I knew, Harriet, Sally and James Hemings, your father, and Martha had left for Virginia. And in less time than it takes to shake a stick, your father was Secretary of State, then Vice President and then President of the United States. By this time I had rejoined him in America. You, Madison, and Eston were all born while he was in the White House. ... Looking back, I think that witnessing your father's passionate attachment to your mother inoculated me forever against fatal love. I have remained an unattached, unrepentant bachelor for all these years, in love with neither women nor marriage. In a way, I suppose you are as close to a daughter as anything I possess on this earth, Harriet. I was at Monticello when you were born. I held you in my arms. Your father celebrated your birth as if you had been white.”

Petit hesitated as if he were trying to decide to tell me one more horrible, fateful thing. The perfect maître d'hôtel warred with the dawning guardian angel.

“He was in the grips of one of his monumental migraines when I walked into the office. You see, I had already spoken to your mother. When I congratulated him on your birthday and your majority and freedom, he flew into a rage, the same kind of tantrum he threw in Paris when your mother left him. His last words to me about you were: ‘Since she's white enough to pass for white, then let her be white.'

“Your father showed me the most extraordinary letter he had just written to a gentleman called Gray, an ironic choice of name, but anyway this gentleman, English I think he was, had asked your father where the line between black and white was drawn, and to my total amazement, your father showed me his answer: an algebraic equation which filled a whole page and which boiled down to when he, Thomas Jefferson, decided. And Thomas Jefferson decided that a person with one-eighth black blood was no longer a Negro. And that is you, Harriet. You had a white great-grandfather, a white
grandfather, and a white father. You had an African for a great-grandmother, a mulatto for a grandmother, and a quadroon for a mother, which makes you, Harriet, an octoroon. In this way he willed you white with a mathematical equation.”

I bowed my head, imagining the sonorous, high-pitched voice of my father searching for a way out of three generations of miscegenation. Meanwhile, we passed the Mason-Dixon line. I could not even be angry with him. I felt only a profound and enduring sense of solitude.

Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambition, avarice, love, resentment, etc. possess so much metaphysical subtility, and so much overpowering eloquence, that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.

Thomas Jefferson

It was incredible that the dusty, dilapidated God walked around his desk to shake hands with me, Adrian Petit, his ex-valet, the morning I was to escort Harriet Hemings from Monticello. His pale eyes, tinged with melancholy and aquamarine, had swept across the top of my head with the same expression they had held for the past eighty years: autocratic and desperately willed serenity.

“A final service to an old friend” was all the curt invitation had said, the invitation that had resulted in my taking a public coach all the way from Philadelphia to Virginia and my now being seated opposite Harriet in this carriage. And even that invitation had been stated in terms that suggested that the writer's requests had of late been more than often refused.

And it was true that the man who had stood before me earlier this day was a man no longer either sartorially or politically in fashion. He was tall, almost six feet three, and his lined handsome face was still lightly freckled, and his mouth was stern, a narrow ridge between the deep, vertical valleys of his cheeks. His eyes were his finest feature. They were an astoundingly glacial
shade of blue, hooded and surrounded by a map of fine lines. They were fascinating eyes, full of assured and irreproachable intelligence, which looked down upon one and indeed the world itself from the Olympian heights of good birth, good breeding, and power.

My former master had been dressed in thin, soft leather shoes with pointed toes, and heels which ascended in a peak behind. He wore very short quarters and red worsted stockings and a black-and-white-checked frock coat with oversized, comic buttons of hand-carved horn. Under this was a blue waistcoat of stiff, thick, coarse material, badly manufactured from the wool of his own merino lambs and surely slave woven, and corduroy small clothes.

However, my French sensibilities were most offended by his shirt, which was made of homespun flannel and incongruously bound with red velvet. Moreover, nothing fitted. The long bony figure with the broad shoulders of a true Virginian spilled out of every item of clothing as if he were nineteen and still growing. His navy blue silhouette danced like a hinged skeleton, seemingly taking up all the space in the room as he shuffled around the cluttered writing table. I then noticed that his legs were terribly swollen and his right hand, which he absently massaged with his left, was atrophied. He held it cradled against his chest.

I had the impression I faced an absolute reliquary of pain. Not only were the twice-broken wrist throbbing and the water-logged limbs aching, but the cloud of one of my ex-employer's famous migraines flickered in his eyes.

The reason for the President's migraine and the reason I, Adrian Petit, had been called there, I decided, were the same. Startled, I had seen them lurking just outside the room, standing side by side: the Mother and, a full head taller than the Mother, the Daughter, a female version of the Father. She had his nose, lips, and eyes, and that same trick of his frown, his high, wide forehead and milk-white freckled complexion, even the valley and famous dimple of his chin. She had his smile. She even had the same mold and frame of his hand. But slender, young, and undeformed. Tall like him. Big-boned like him. Redheaded like him. She so resembled the troubled Father before me, you did not even have to ask her name.