The President's Daughter (12 page)

“I was hunting with my father one day, you see, and I caught my ankle in a squirrel trap,” I replied. Somehow the pathos of my answer brought unbidden tears to my eyes.

Everything that pointed to happiness seemed to come at once, at the end of 1823. First, there was Petit's offer of Thursday-afternoon piano lessons at the Philadelphia Conservatory. Music, which had been my refuge for so long, became the only truthful thing in my life.

The music I had discovered as a child at Monticello had always nurtured in me an ideal universe, a universe pure, perfect, and free of prejudice. Music was so just and fair in its application (everyone, after all, played the same notes, from the same page, with the same instrument, and it was only their individual talent which delineated a good performance from a bad one) that it seemed a parable. Facing a sheet of music, I felt myself free, on equal terms with anyone to extract its essence, unravel its mystery, and conquer its difficulties. Music was its own master and belonged only to itself.

One day, I had accompanied my mother to Bermuda Hundred, my grandfather's plantation. While playing in the barn there, I discovered, in an old crate, a whole book of sheet music. When I asked my mother what it was, for it was clear it was not a real book, she said, “Why, that's music written down.” From the moment I realized that one could read music and reproduce it from notes printed on a page, my world changed. My father later explained
to me the singular integrity and inviolability of a written score. “You can equivocate and interpret the written word,” he had said, “but a note on a page means one thing and one thing only, just as a number represents only its own unique measurement. A two can never be a four and a six is not a nine turned upside down. There is no second chance in music, Harriet. And there is no forgiveness.”

From that moment I knew what I wanted! No forgiveness. I already knew I would never have a second chance.

It was the discovery that one could read and write music as one could read and write books that changed my way of thinking. I discovered my mother had been taught to read music, and she taught me. It was my first notion that my mother was more than she appeared to be, that she had had a different life in the past than she had at Monticello. Even though Eston had learned to play by ear—a flute, then a guitar—and surpassed me in virtuosity and finesse, my ability to read, assimilate, and memorize music was far superior. I was soon able to transcribe a simple melody and play it back on whatever instrument was at hand. I drew score music and began to reproduce the music in my head. Eston repaired my mother's cordless spinet, which had been shipped from Paris by mistake. It opened the door into a world of fixed, mathematical perfection where nothing, nothing could touch me.

The Latouche house, where I stayed when I came home from school, was only a few doors away from Fourth and Vine streets, where the conservatory stood on the corner with the University of Pennsylvania's Anatomy Hall, the leading medical center of the United States, which took up the rest of the city block. The Latouche family had a music room in which resided a harp and a Thomas Loud piano. The floors were painted black, and there were gold-painted chairs along the walls, and potted ferns and palm trees. I thought it the most elegant and beautiful room I had ever seen. There was a glorious Persian carpet in the center of the room, and a Waterford crystal chandelier hung from the high ceiling. Venetian blinds and yellow satin curtains trimmed in green silk hung at the windows, and painted garlands of flowers decorated the upper walls and ceilings, which were tapestried in yellow-and-white-striped silk. Mrs. Latouche played neither of the instruments. The room had been the decorator's idea, and Mrs. Latouche had simply acquiesced because she liked the idea.

The first time I saw the Loud piano, I burst into tears.

“Why, child,” she asked me, “do you play?”

I was too excited to answer. I walked over to the gleaming instrument in my slow, dreamy orphan's gait and sat down. Sat carefully and flung my skirts behind me with a double swimming motion. Still without a word, I
started to play by memory. I played firmly, smoothly, my face at rest, now more forcibly, but never loudly. The piano was an excellent one, rich and round in tone, like my breathing. Trancelike, I played everything I knew until I had been playing for several hours. Mrs. Latouche had gone out to get her husband, and the housekeeper had come in to listen. Then Petit had come in and remained perched on one of the gilded chairs like a little monkey, transfixed.

He had said little that day, and it wasn't until the end of the year that he announced that he had acquired an audition for me at the conservatory next door. My lessons and instruments and sheet music would be paid for by him. The conservatory was the only one in America that accepted women musicians, he said.

For the next year, Charlotte and I would take the public diligence into the city on Thursday mornings, when I would have my weekly lunch with Petit and Charlotte would visit her family on Waverly Place. Afterwards we would meet in front of the white stone Palladian building, surrounded by its tall, gilded iron fence, our music sheets under our arms, and walk through the gates into what I considered heaven. Here I could forget everything, even the lie. I became as anonymous as the black notes dancing across the scored paper. I had been accepted in piano and piano scoring, and had been asked to choose another instrument. Rather than the fiddle, which I knew I would never play with any finesse, I had chosen the violoncello, a somber, ponderous, and supremely beautiful instrument. The weight, the bulk, and the size made one feel as if one were lugging a dead body around, but I loved even this. I was a strong girl who had hauled more than a few cotton bales. I named it Alexia, and often spoke to it in the same tone of voice I used for Charlotte.

At the conservatory, only sound existed, not color. Life itself was made up of it. Discipline came so easy to me that I could never understand Charlotte's complaints over music practice or her chronic lack of attention.

In the year I had been at school with Charlotte, we had forged a passionate friendship like those one acquires in early adolescence. We fell in love without ever unraveling the mystery that had attracted us to each other. We spent so much time together, we were like a single person in two bodies who guessed each other's thoughts and anticipated what the other would say. We had overcome the petty jealousies and reciprocal cattiness that characterized feminine friendships. Charlotte was the anchor in my vastly changed and troubling world. Without blackness to set me apart or whiteness to persecute me, I began to experience the natural rhythm of my mind and body. I began to
breathe differently, to hold my head at a different angle, to look outside the small antediluvian world that had been mine.

But secretly I was obsessed with notions of concealment. I became, in fact, attached to a dual life as observer and dreamer. I existed in perpetual alertness, ever fearing the untoward to happen. Only with Charlotte did I let my guard down, and, in doing so, induced a series of events that were as unpredictable as they were unpremeditated.

“Solitary pleasure,” said Charlotte, in her usual abrupt way of beginning a discussion.

“Solitary pleasure,” I repeated, putting a period at the end so as not to laugh.

“There's nothing like it, Harriet. You'll never have to depend on your husband for satisfaction.”

“And what do you know, Charlotte Waverly, about solitary pleasure?”

“I want to know if you think it is a sin.”

“In the eyes of our professors and the pastor, it is.”

“Oh, well, I know that. But boys do it all the time—my brothers do it until their tongues hang out like puppies'. I've seen them.”

“I . . . had brothers, too. I know what they do.”

“Females,” began Charlotte importantly, “are capable of giving each other extreme pleasure independently of the male sex. . . .”

“Hum ...” I said, wondering just how far Charlotte was going to go. I knew she loved me. I loved her, and I knew how easy it was to confuse the senses and substitute one yearning for another.

We were lying on the banks of a shallow brook that ran through the woods in back of the college. The water shone like steel, so motionless that one could see one's image in it as if it were a mirror. The feathery curl of a flying wasp cut across its surface and then was gone. I felt listless and reckless and almost annoyed that Charlotte's infatuation was to become a ritual of passing from girlish friendship to a new stage of whatever was in store for us as grown white women.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too, Charlotte.”

Lazily, she placed her hand on my cheek. I closed my eyes and let the tepid breeze off the cool water sweep over my face and neck. We were shoeless and stockingless and had pulled our petticoats up so that the weak April sun could warm our legs. One of Charlotte's limbs had entwined in mine, and lazily I turned my head to follow her caress. I lay there opening and closing my eyes. The brilliance and then the blackness were like the world as I saw it: divided into halves, one of light and one of darkness. The half where she was, was
all of joy, hope, and light; the half where she was not was of gloom and darkness.

The world I knew also was divided into those who had a choice and those who had none.

Charlotte began to kiss me with sweet, simple kisses.

“Do you know what to do?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I turned my head away from her lips for a moment, as a swimmer taking in air would do. I had no intentions of resisting Charlotte; on the contrary, there had always been a deep sensuality in our sisterly affection, and as her lips and hands moved over me, untying, loosing, stroking, pulling, releasing, I tried to fathom my true feelings for Charlotte. I realized it was as it had been at Monticello: my will against her power. I was determined that my will would overcome her whiteness. Our lovemaking became a sedate combat to see which of us would emerge as the winner. We were, surprisingly, as equally matched in this as in footraces. In the end, as we waded out into the silent sheen of the brook, our skirts bunched around our waists, neither of us had achieved the upper hand.

“Look down, Harriet. You are so beautiful.”

And indeed, in the mirror of the creek, I made out the wavering burgundy triangle trembling on the surface of the darkness. Charlotte was so blond, one could hardly tell where her belly ended and her sex began. We began to laugh then, long, sumptuous laughter that floated on the water like skimming butterflies and echoed out into the tepid spring air. It was the kind of raucous laughter that females indulge in only between themselves, adagios of breathless sounds that come from the throat, the bosom and belly, the sex. Laughter we never showed men.

Our complicity lasted, with gaps of years in between, well into our middle age. We confided in no one. We feigned indifference to the point where we earned the reputation of coldness and prudery. We read forbidden novels, collected methods of avoiding pregnancy, studied medical journals. We formed our own secret erotic society of two from that day. We were to grow old together, marry, survive our children, lapse quietly into that transcendent peace of matched couples, through three marriages.

My goal up until now had been an individual one, a promise, a special dispensation, a private purgatory. When I learned that my desire was the foundation of a whole movement to set every member of my race free, I felt as if I had fallen from another planet. I had never read an antislavery tract
or witnessed a slave whipping. I had heard that two white cousins in Kentucky had murdered a slave by amputating his limbs and then burning the torso in the fire he hadn't made just right, but Kentucky seemed far away, and the story more like legend than reality. I didn't know what black laws were, nor could I find Mississippi on a map. Of the danger of my father's double life or the sorrow of my mother's broken dreams, I had but an inkling. As for the white cousins I was now impersonating, I knew them best for their ignorance, careless cruelty, and greedy need for affection.

Then I met Robert Purvis. I was in the hall of the conservatory, and he was on his way to a rehearsal of the gentlemen's choir. He was a pale, light-haired young man who greeted Charlotte by name, being a friend of her brother Dennis. He was accompanied by a very tall man in the somber medical clothes of an apothecary, named William John Thadius Wellington. The two friends were in great contrast to each other. Purvis was blond, loquacious, and self-assured. Wellington was dark, with the awkward aloofness of a scientist and dreamer. Both were handsome. Purvis, assuming I was white, quickly proceeded in the merriest way to explain to me that he was not. It seemed to be a standing joke with his friend, whom he called Thance.

“I am not, nor ever have been, a white man,” he drawled, his mouth quirking with suppressed laughter at my surprise. His blue eyes were full of sharp light, which seemed to narrow his face into one concentrated beam. He was the son of a slave and a repentant Louisiana plantation owner who had freed him and his mother and sent them north, where he had attended Oberlin College in Ohio. The fortune left him by his father Purvis had dedicated to the cause of antislavery. He now attended the University of Pennsylvania despite, he said, its prohibition of Negroes, women, and Jews. There was no recognition of my own duplicity in the clear, candid eyes, only friendly curiosity and the mild look of contempt from a man who has decided never to give his heart or his fortune to a woman.

“What actually is the use of being a powerful, rich white man when there are so many of them? A powerful, rich Negro, however, is another story. He can move a whole race toward emancipation. I can move my own mother's brothers and sisters and my own grandmother's brothers and sisters out of bondage. That's real power. I have a great deal of money and I intend to use all of it to agitate for the end of slavery in the United States of America.