The President's Daughter (75 page)

Callender was finally found dead in three feet of water under mysterious circumstances, on July 17, 1803. He was buried hurriedly the same day without autopsy or inquest, the verdict being that he accidentally drowned while inebriated.

If the claims in Madison Hemings's memoirs are to be ludicrously dismissed as self-serving hearsay “concerning things that happened before his birth,” then Virginia Randolph's assertions about the Carrs are just as much hearsay and also must be dismissed as self-serving.

Harriet Hemings had one-sixteenth of “black blood” in her veins. This was enough to make her black in law and fiction, and therefore a slave. Passing for white in order to escape slavery and later racial harassment and discrimination is particularly American—although certainly mixed-bloods did so in every society, but not with such tremendous ramifications as in the United States, where the national punishment for being black was not only
slavery or potential slavery or the threat of slavery, but an almost mystical denigration of any humanity and all visibility—as if the condition itself also struck people deaf, dumb, and blind.

Moreover the idea of “passing” offends both blacks and whites and is one of the most tenacious of American taboos.

The pathos of Harriet's dilemma and the tragedy of Harriet's enigma is just one more episode in the continuing story of love, race, and identity in America.

So, what should the reader gain from my Harriet? I hope an American heroine who embodies our central national obsession, and psychosis: race and color. For I have created, as I did with Sally Hemings, out of my imagination a historical woman who is a part of our national patrimony and a symbol of the metaphysics of race in this country. In creating her I took into consideration every historical reality, contemporary element, every document, attitude, and atmosphere available and viable to me. I also took considerable poetic license. In creating the many characters that surround Hemings, I have used as models and quoted historical personages of the epoch: for example, Alexis de Tocqueville for Maurice Meillasoux; Frederick Douglass for Robert Purvis, who is himself historical; Mary Wollstonecraft for Dorcas Willow-pole; Abraham Lincoln for Abraham Lincoln; Marie BashkirtsefFs diaries for Maria Cosway. The letters of John G. Perry for Beverly Wellington; the diary of First Lieutenant Frank Haskell for Harriet's battle of Gettysburg. Although the reader might consider words such as
colorphobia
and
negro-phobia
anachronisms, both Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown mentioned them as a social phenomenon as early as 1853. The most interesting chronology on fingerprints I established with the help of the French fingerprint experts of the Criminal Brigade, Paris. As early as 1820, the first scientific study was published by an Austrian, Johannes University Evangelista Purkinje (1787—1869), a Bohemian physiologist and professor of physiology at Breslau and later Prague. In 1858 an English functionary in Bengal, India, William Herschel, used fingerprints as a method of identification to pay out army pensions. In 1878, Faulds, an English doctor in Japan, published a study on the traces of fingerprints on lacquer furniture, and in 1892, Sir Francis Galton published his famous report, which inspired Mark Twain's
Pudd'n Head Wilson.
About the same time, Inspector Vucetich, an Argentinian policeman, discovered the criminal investigative uses of finger-prints. Abraham Lincoln did refer to the “electric cord between us” before the electric cord actually existed. And it was Karl Marx who stated that the American Revolution of 1776 freed the bourgeoisie while the American Revolution of 1861 freed the working class. “Any emancipation,” he insisted,
“is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.” This is what I intended when I placed Harriet at Gettysburg.

From the beginning, I wanted Harriet to find herself there, confronting her father's Declaration and Lincoln's Proclamation with the idea of juxtaposing or amalgamating, if not miscegenating, the two voices into Harriet's and our American credo. I had no idea how powerful that intermarriage would be until I actually did it by counterpointing the two texts directly. I therefore read Gary Wills's brilliant analysis of Lincoln's Gettysburg address and its relation to the Declaration with great emotion.

Harriet's insistence that she would think about her troubles later is not a
clin d'oeil
to Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara, but to Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, for whom he invented the phrase.

A bibliographical note: I used the
Official Government Records of War of the Rebellion of the Union and Confederate Armies,
of which I possess an incomplete set, found in a flea market in Milan, Italy along with a rare mezzotint self-portrait of Maria Cosway. I have used the standard and most popular Civil War histories: Bruce Catton's
Mr. Lincoln's Army, Glory Road,
and
A Stillness at Appomattox; The Civil War, a Narrative,
by Shelby Foote; and the awesome one-volume Oxford history,
Battle Cry of Freedom,
by James M. McPherson, as well as his
The Negro's Civil War.
I must of course acknowledge Fawn Brodie's
Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate Biography
and her archives on the Hemings children and descendants which remain for the most part unpublished. I refer you also to my own novel
Sally Hemings
and to Helen Duprey Bullock's biography of Maria Cosway,
My Head and My Heart.

Civil War literature, Jeffersonian literature, Lincolnian literature, and literature on slavery and abolition are practically boundless. For source material, I must have touched on more than a thousand books and documents. Abolition and slavery historiographies and bibliographies run into the twenty thousands. In sifting through all this information, any errors or misinterpretations are, of course, my own.

There are great and rich and still, after two hundred years, unmined sources of our national history and destiny in the archives of the unwritten, the unexplored relations between the races of America waiting to be told.

¹
Michael Durey:
With the Hammer of the Truth: James Thomson Callender and America's National Heroes
(Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990).

²
The Recorder,
September 22, 1802; October 13, 27, 1802; March 19, 1803; May 28, 1803 as cited in Durey,
With the Hammer of Truth.

Sally Hemings

“Sally Hemings was the quadroon slave with whom Thomas Jefferson lived for 38 years.... This is one of the great American stories.... Vastly enjoyable ... This is the kind of book that gives new luster to the words ‘historical novel.'”

—
New York Times

“A totally engrossing novel... . Riboud follows meticulously not just the history of the times, but the psychology of these intensely interesting and complex human beings. She goes to the heart of the matter.” —
Publishers Weekly

“An act of great daring. . . . Deeply moving. . . .
Sally Hemings
illuminates not only the miscegenation of Thomas Jefferson but that of every American family in which whites and blacks are kin.”

—Fawn M. Brodie (author of
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History), Chicago Sun-Times

“Barbara Chase-Riboud made me believe in her Sally Hemings and gave me a sturdy sense of the character's presence: no flimsy maiden, this heroine, but an important version of the gritty American pioneer woman who wills her own survival and that of her children.”

—
Washington Post