The President's Daughter (10 page)

My uncle James refused to acknowledge the destiny of concubine for his sister, Sally Hemings. He had decided she was not going to enter that strange circle of complicity between the Wayleses, the Jeffersons, and the Hemingses. But dark forces in the guise of family ties, and crimes, entered and wreaked havoc. From the very morning of his sister's seduction, in the winter of ‘88, James suffered from nightmares: Bloody sheets like tentacles would reach out to engulf and strangle him. They would bind him and cause him to be thrown bodily into brimstone and fire. That was my uncle's recurring dream. He was convinced that my mother's freedom was his own salvation and that without it, he was a doomed man. Day after day, he led her through the intricacies of life in France, in the embassy, in the grand house, in the great city. Around them swirled the rumblings of the French Revolution, and it gave a poignant counterpart to their struggle against Thomas Jefferson's will.

When he broke his wrist while riding with Maria Cosway and it began to heal badly, my mother took over the care and bathing of her master's injured hand, and through these simple ministrations an intimacy grew up—innocent at first, then more complicated and darker, incestuously linking destinies. Martha the jealous daughter and Martha the dead wife, Maria the adored arrival and Maria the absent lover. And my mother herself: half sister and stepdaughter, sister-in-law and slave.

I could tell Adrian Petit mourned James even now, twenty years after his death. And I suppose that's why he felt compelled to talk about him so much, especially to me. For me, James Hemings was only a legendary and eccentric uncle who had lived abroad for most of his life and had died a suicide in Philadelphia. Adrian wanted me to know the rich comic sound of his laughter, the yeasty smell of his body, the aching loneliness in his eyes. Adrian told me James had lived the life of a monk and had been chaste all his life.

“ 'I will never spill my seed as a slave to breed more slaves,' “ Adrian had said with James's voice. “ ‘I have never known a woman, Petit, and won't until the day I'm free.' “

But James, explained Petit, added such a mischievous and freewheeling style to this priestly avowal that it was impossible to reconcile the two. It was as if he had two identities: one which existed in the shadow of slavery, invisible, menacing, and ultimately cruel; and the other, its twin of sunniness and amiability, laughter, and, above all, youth. He was the youngest twenty-year-old Petit had ever met, and the provincialism of old Virginia had not yet worn off him or my father in those days. James and Petit had made lots of plans, too. James was going to finish his apprenticeship in the kitchen of Monsieur du Tott, and then he was going to demand his freedom from my father on the basis of living on French soil, where slavery had been abolished. And then the two of them were going to start their own catering business right there under the arcades of the Palais Royale, sure that they would find both backers and clients. “Of course, neither James nor I ever realized that dream!” exclaimed Petit.

“Your mother was carrying your brother Thomas, and your uncle James had become a first-rate chef when they left Paris in eighty-nine,” Petit continued. “I remember thinking how easy it would have been for them to have remained in France. James could have commanded a first-rate position and salary as a cook, even with the exodus. I was sure he would never see the shores of France again. From one of the upper windows overlooking the courtyard, I saw Martha Jefferson calling to James and waving him into the house. He was her uncle as well as yours, and I remember that day how shocked I was, for after your mother had run away, James had told me the whole Byzantine story of your family. I, who was quite inured to the bizarre ways of the French aristocrats, had no idea of the genealogy that could exist between Virginia aristocrats and their servants—into the second and third generation. One day James had tried to extricate himself from the demands of your father, but he had been humiliated and outmaneuvered. Your father, as both master and diplomat, was unconventional, imaginative, resourceful, and tough. Poor James didn't have a chance against him. Neither did your
mother. At the end of his ‘explanation' with his master, James found himself facing seven more years of servitude: in return for his French education, he would be freed as soon as he had trained another cook at Monticello to take his place. It was the ‘least' he could do to avoid being a traitor, ‘a serpent at my breast.' “

“ ‘I'll never steal myself,' “ Petit said James had told him one day. “ ‘He has no right to force me to do so . . . to make a criminal and an outlaw out of one who served him so long and loyally. He must free me legally and openly.' That day the disappointment was too much for James. I found him weeping behind a stack of half-packed trunks,” Petit concluded. “Only two people saw him, me and your half sister Martha.”

“That's what I'm doing, isn't it?” I said. “Stealing myself. Making myself into a criminal and an outlaw because Father can't face a little unpleasantness with the Virginia legislature.”

“It's more complicated than that, Harriet. . . .”

“Not for me.”

“Even for you. Especially for you. You mustn't hate your parents for what they did or didn't do.”

“You say ‘they.' When have they ever been ‘they.' My father commanded and my mother obeyed. Something she's still doing.”

Suddenly Petit fell silent and then spoke in a tone of voice I had not heard before.

“You should change your name, Harriet . . . Harriet Petit, perhaps.”

Petit flushed at saying out loud what he obviously held dear in his heart. I looked at him in surprise. Why? I thought. But then, why not? He had guided me safely out of slavery. It was little enough to ask. The name Hemings only bound me to generations I had this day renounced.

“Yes,” I said, “Harriet Petit, orphan.”

I took Adrian Petit's surname mostly to make him happy. He was an old bachelor, he said, who would leave nothing behind when he returned to France. The Hemings name was notorious, he said, so why risk someone's remembering? “I would be honored to offer you my name as well as my protection.”

That first night in Brown's Hotel, I carried to my pillow feelings I had never experienced before. I truly believed myself to be free. I didn't care if it was because of my color—or my father. I was free because I was white. What was the feeling of whiteness? Did it simply mean I could lay my head on my pillow without the fear of its being snatched up and sold the next day? Or bashed in by a jealous mistress, an irate overseer, a petulant son or daughter of the house? Did it mean that I would not be dragged hair-first out
of bed to accommodate the lust of some white passerby or a member of the big house? Did it mean my mind could finally be used for something more than counting biscuits or bales of cotton? Or did it simply mean that my head was a valuable, unique appendix to a valuable, unique human being, with all the dreams and wishes and hopes and fears of the human condition?

At daylight I heard women crying their wares: fresh fish, berries, radishes, and all kinds of vegetables. I rose, dressed, and sat at the window to watch life go by. Philadelphia seemed a wonderful place.

I soon moved in with Monsieur Latouche, a famous caterer in Philadelphia and a friend of Petit's. He had worked for the Prince d'Ecmuhl and the Duc de Rovigo in Paris. Before settling in Philadelphia, he had served in the Russian ministry in Washington, where he and Petit had become friends. They had started their catering businesses at about the same time, and had known the same success. Monsieur Latouche was married to a Philadelphia lady named Margaritte, who took me to her fulsome bosom like a daughter and the orphan that I pretended to be. It was Mrs. Latouche who was responsible for my being accepted at Bryn Mawr Seminary for Women, a Unitarian two-year girls' college, founded just sixteen years before by a French Huguenot family.

Monsieur Latouche, who was more restaurateur than caterer, often complained of the monopoly the Negro caterers had of the ball and party business in Philadelphia: “. . . The blacks rule the catering business in Philadelphia with Henry Jones, Thomas Dorsay, and Henry Minton cutting up the pie in three slices. But that black Robert Bogle at Eighth and Sansom makes more money than all of them put together!”

I felt lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred. I knew it didn't threaten me, but it showed humans in such an inhuman light. I saw a kind of insanity, something so obscure its very obscurity terrified me.

He and Petit seemed to have a lot of friends and a lot of memories in common. As two immigrants, they had vastly different views of the United States. And many times Mrs. Latouche (who never called herself Madame Latouche—too French), Petit, and I found ourselves on one side of a discussion concerning American idiosyncrasies, with him on the other, especially about race.

These discussions upset me, for they nearly always ended with contemptuous, inhuman remarks about the Negroes, whom he would refer to by names I had never heard before: coons, apes, monkeys, gorillas, animals, jigs . . .

The first weeks, I continued to awake at dawn, sitting bolt upright in bed,
my heart pounding, frightened by the noise of a passing carriage or the toll of a bell. I got into the habit of leaving the boardinghouse before anyone was awake and wandering alone through the narrow, red brick streets to the wharf. There I would stroll amongst the stalls of merchandise being laid out under the big canvas umbrellas, lingering in front of the huge painted signs of the waterfront stores and workhouses. There was energy and enterprise in everyone's bearing, an arrogance born of being free agents. Soon, to my delight, I became a recognized part of the scene as I lingered amongst the stalls of dry goods straight off the ships from Birmingham, or purchased bread and milk for breakfast. I began to receive smiles and nods of recognition from the hawkers and vendors and became one with the throngs of housewives with their baskets, shopping early. At first the smiles were timid, reserved, and I would smile back shyly as I was handed my purchase. But soon I was greeted as “Miss,” then as “Miss Harriet.” I noticed white people's eyes no longer slid off me as if I were invisible at worst, a bale of cotton at best. They neither focused their eyes over my shoulder nor glazed them over in nonrecognition of my humanity. They now looked me square in the eye, curious, friendly, appraising, teasing. Miss Harriet, a young lady. Little Miss. And my heart almost burst with gratitude for these unthinking banalities, then shame for being grateful would engulf me.

Hands that would have recoiled from touching the Negro Harriet Hem-ings, grasped mine. Women who would have snatched their skirts back in horror if the Negro Harriet Hemings had brushed against them, smiled warmly and excused themselves. Vendors who would have snatched a bonnet out of the hand of the Negro Harriet Hemings, forbidding her to touch it with her black hands, placed it upon my head themselves, commenting on its shape, price, and becomingness.

I began to look forward to my morning stroll, my eyes no longer avoiding those of white passersby, but frank and friendly, my step light and springy, my smile spontaneous and wide. I was no longer afraid of the world.

I began to watch white faces and think about them for the first time. I had studied, thought about, and welcomed only one white face in my life up until now: my father's. I had memorized every facet, shadow, and expression in silent, secret, jealous love. But I would have had a hard time describing my white cousins precisely, since my eyes had always slid off their likeness. My memory, even for my own color, was bad. But I began viewing the features and expressions of black faces just as I did with white ones. I waded into those northern faces as into the sea, looking slowly and carefully at each one.

First I discovered that each face was amazingly different, and so when I actually began to look at people, there was no more familiarity in my world.
I wondered if this were true for everyone in hiding. I felt so strange and so lonely that the most profound, the most moving sight in my mind became strange people's white faces. Eyes and mouths concealed I knew not what and secretly asked for other things: the rapturous smile of the old man who sold peanuts by the church gate, or the young newspaper boy, whose face was as blank as an unprinted page of the broadsides he flourished over his head, but whose yellow eyes and long black lashes reminded me of my mother.

Even Petit's face came under my new scrutiny: its contours and blue-tinted lower portion, its thin, almost black mouth, its foreigner's cast, were things I had never noticed before.

To my surprise, I realized that white skin was not white at all, but gray and lavender, peach and rose, blue and green, nut and cantaloupe, the color of my pineapple dessert and the color of new potatoes. There were high complexions and sallow ones, deathly white and deep brown. My father, I realized, had a truly fair complexion with its undertones of rose and green which I had in turn inherited. I recalled the tiny blue veins at his temple and the orange-colored mole at the corner of his mouth and the delicate blue of his eyelids. The world became a kaleidoscope, revealing colors hidden under other colors.

The colored people I saw stood out like sentinels in this mass of strangers, signposts of familiarity and humanity, although their northern accents astounded me. Their colors, too, took on new, mysterious tones of bronze and copper, ebony and mahogany, lemon wood and midnight blue, the black of Virginia coal and red of Virginia clay. Some were high yellow and I couldn't separate them from whites and couldn't tell if they were black, or blacks pretending they were white, or whites with a touch of the tar brush. I was convinced that every black face recognized me for what I was and simply looked the other way. Yet despite that, looking people in the eye was the revelation of my life. The things I saw there were so monumental, so fierce and mysterious, yet so familiar, so exhilarating that I wondered why I had never tried it before. From being unable to fathom the slightest meaning in a face, I came to read them like the pages of a book. From believing it was impossible to know what people thought, I became a mind-reader of extraordinary talent. I was on intimate terms with the whole world, and with every strange face that crossed my path never to return. I was a companion to strangers, black and white. And it was purely for that vision of my father's youthful face that I examined the secret, mysterious, unique faces of the white people I met in the streets of Philadelphia.