The President's Daughter (29 page)

Harriet,

Don't despise me. I have a heart, notwithstanding my silence. As proof of it, I believe I love you more now than ever—if I do not hate you for the disdain with which you have treated the truth. As for your secret, upon my honor, it is safe with me, for I will carry it to my grave where it shall rest beside my
hacret lateri lethalis arundo.

Enzo

There are two routes from London to Paris, one by Dover and Calais and the other by Brighton and Dieppe. Since I made the arrangements, I chose the route Adrian Petit had taken with Maman and Maria. With us in that carriage sat a shadowy presence: my mother. Her voice was only one of a quartet of voices that accompanied me throughout my stay in France. Maman, languid, sweet, melancholy, and mournful, was first violin; Father, an octave lower, had a voice I had never heard before, amorous, secretive, lightheaded, and resonant. Adrian Petit, tender and earthy, cynical and funny, was the cello; and James, passionate, ominous, bitter, contagious, joined in an incessant bass. The voices wove through my consciousness, each with a line or a laugh, a cry, or a reproach, a description or an invitation, a lie or a sultry denunciation.

We slept at Dover and crossed the channel by day. The next morning we
departed from Calais and crossed the marshy valley of the river Somme to Amiens, then sped through rolling fields to the splendors of Chantilly. We stayed overnight and reached Saint-Denis at noon. The spires of its cathedral pierced the custard-colored sky, and the edifice itself lifted from the surrounding golden cloth of wheat. We reached the Hotel Meurice on the rue de Saint-Honoré the following afternoon. After leaving our luggage and Mrs. Willowpole at the hotel, Brice and I stepped onto the cobblestone street, which was within walking distance of the Louvre. I listened to a voice that seemed to be my father's speaking to me from the many shadows, the sparkling fountains, the white buildings.

FATHER:
Tell me everything. Who has died and who has married, who has hanged himself because he cannot marry.

Cannot marry.
The words seemed a prophecy and an injunction until James's voice interceded.

JAMES:
Slavery is outlawed in France. We are on French soil. That means you are emancipated. Free.

MAMAN:
I dont believe you. You make so many jokes, James, tell so many farfetched stories.

JAMES:
I slapped your mother ‘s face more in my own rage than at her disbelief. She didn't believe me! Her own brother. Freedom to Sally Hemings was a vague, glimmering place from which no one ever returned to prove it actually existed.

From the hotel I could see the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées stretching beyond the invisible mansion where my father had lived. Then James's voice returned.

JAMES:
I hadn't seen my sister for three years. She had been eleven and I nineteen when I'd left Monticello as valet to Thomas Jefferson. She would bring the sweet breath of Monticello and family news—but she would also bring the reminder of slavehood I had never forgotten. Never mind that. I was free on French soil and, thinking myself free, could even look on my master with a certain affection.

FATHER:
I told Sally I was going away to Amsterdam. Suddenly the words “Promise me “ burst from her, more a sob than anything else. I looked at her
in amazement, then drew her head up and looked deep into her eyes. Deep in their golden centers was a dark pinprick. My own reflection.

And my mother's voice, almost unrecognizable, described the anguish and ecstasy of first love.

MAMAN:
One day, six months after I'd arrived, I passed a gilded mirror in the entrance of the hotel and was pleased with what I saw. I had recovered from my smallpox, was learning French and new and independent ways of thinking, and my eyes no longer slid off the inspection of whites. I could even look them in the eye. What joy I felt when I picked up my skirts and raced as fast as I could from the Champs-Elysées, across the fields as far as the bridge of Neuilly. I would run until I had a stitch in my side and then pause, listening to the pumping of my heart, the whistling of my breath.

FATHER: I
did not consider myself a vain man, but I was quite pleased with the likeness the sculptor Houdon had begun of me. I had just seen the plaster for the first time a few days before Maria and Sally were to arrive with Petit. I had become something of a dandy in my manner of dressing, favoring creamy dun and sapphire worsted and red patent-leather high-heeled shoes.

It was Petit now who took up the theme, reminding me that I had promised to go to Paris not only to learn something about my parents but to learn something about myself. My guardian continued.

PETIT:
When we arrived, Maria Jefferson burst into tears at the sight of her father, and Sally at the sight of her brother. James finally took Sally into his arms. I do believe Jefferson was intimidated by his own daughter, mostly because, as he later told me, he would not have known her if he had met her on the street.

“Aren't you tired?” said Brice. “We've been walking for an hour— perhaps we should go back to the hotel. After all, we have all spring in France.”

But we continued along the banks of the Seine, crossing the river at the first bridge we came to and finding ourselves facing the stone mountain of Notre Dame, its twin towers gleaming in the sunlight, its slate roof catching the golden tint of sunlight which had just broken through the low-lying haze that often covered the entire valley in which the city of Paris found itself. And there, the voice of my mother caught up with me again.

MAMAN:
Perhaps I had always known that he would claim me. Hadn't the same thing happened to my mother and my sisters before me? I watched him secretly to see if he knew, but I realized he would know only when the moment arrived. I could hasten or delay that moment, but I was powerless to prevent it.

I said to Brice, “Let's go to the seven-o'clock mass before we go home.”

Notre Dame was immense. At the end of the longer nave glowed the famous stained-glass rose window, a disk of flame and color that seemed to hover like an apparition over the congregation at prayer and the crowds strolling amongst the endless arches and pillars. The darkness accentuated the luminosity of the windows behind us. The chords of the great organ filled the space, grandiose and transcendent.

It was a requiem I didn't recognize. I stood transfixed by its beauty and power, ravished by the music that had reduced the worshipers and tourists alike to tiny points on a nappe of sound surrounded by stone pillars and molten glass. Petit's voice wove itself insidiously among the notes.

PETIT: I
saw this affection between the ambassador and his slave develop. They seemed drawn to each other by mysterious threads I did not completely understand, until James explained to me that they were literally the same family, related by blood and by marriage to each other. The ambassador's wife had been her half sister. I would never understand, perfect servant that I was, discreet in my service, correct in my silence, loyal in my protection of the ruling class and their privileges, this particular American family.

I knelt then in the somber, soaring music and wondered if by the time I left Paris I'd have solved the pulsations of my own heart toward my kin any better, or understood the lineage that made me idolize and despise both the blood that made me a Hemings and that which marked me a Jefferson.

It was dark by the time we got back to the hotel, and the hotel guests in the lobby brushed past us on their way to dinner. Mrs. Willowpole was already dressed and downstairs.

“Well, where have you been, children?” she scolded. “We'll be late for dinner if you don't hurry.”

That night I lay in my bed and listened to the night sounds: carriages grinding the cobblestones, gaslights hissing, church bells striking the hours,
and at sunrise the cries of the nearby market of Saint-Honoré. My voices were at rest, but they would return.

I would have loved to share those voices with Brice or even Dorcas Willowpole, but they were too close to the truth and Lorenzo's words too livid and fresh. Each night, in the seclusion of my room, I would interrogate my voices-—first Petit, always the perfect guide and valet; then James, the angry young man; then my father, the bemused patrician, the American in Paris; and last my mother, the slave girl. Their chorus lulled me. Complex, contradictory, self-serving, or brutally honest, each presented its version of those two winters in Paris in which my father had seduced my mother and my own biography had begun.

Brice and I spent many hours with his guidebook for English tourists. Every sinew in my body was straining toward the Champs-Elysées and my father's mansion, which stood at the wrought-iron gates of the Chaillot, until one day as we started up the rue de Saint-Honoré, I said, “My father lived in Paris for a time when he was very young. He ... he had a minor diplomatic post as a secretary to the American ambassador to King Louis, just before the Revolution.”

“Who was that?”

“The ambassador?”

“Yes.”

“Thomas Jefferson.”

“Really? I'd forgotten he'd been minister before being President. Was that before Benjamin Franklin?”

“No, after. From 1784 to 1790. The embassy was just up the Champs-Elysées at the Chaillot gates.”

“Well, we'll have to see if it's still there, some thirty years later. A lot of great houses were destroyed during the Revolution, and more have been torn down by Haussmann to make his grand boulevards and roundabouts. It's a wonder Napoléon could steal enough statuary to fill them. But is not the Egyptian obelisk an awesome sight?”

We turned up the promenade of the Champs-Elysées, which bristled with multicolored flowered borders: tulips and hyacinths, lilies of the valley and crocuses spread like Oriental carpets, escorting the strolling couples and the prancing horses of the Paris gentry. We passed the Tuileries gardens, filled with children who darted about amongst the stone facades like butterflies. The elaborate lacquered carriages, equipages, calèches, and cabriolets moved
down the famous chestnut-shaded promenade behind trotting pairs. I wondered how many secrets like mine were buried under the surface of this luxurious city. There were no secrets like mine.

I stood looking up at the imposing white stone facade of the Hôtel de Langeac, which had served as the embassy. Behind the high, gilded-iron fence, the well-kept gardens spread out in a triangular form of clipped box hedges and miniature cypresses. I thought I saw a figure move fleetingly behind a window, but it could have been my imagination. Could it have been James? I wondered. This time the voices chanted a libretto.

MAMAN:
Thomas Jefferson was occupied with the mysterious Maria Cosway and rarely saw us except for Sunday dinner. I was jealous—her exquisite manners, her magnificent gowns, her radiant smile, her blondness, her haughty condescension and proprietary airs, which made James mimic her behind her back and Petit raise his eyebrows.

JAMES:
My bad nature was considered melancholy, even romantic, by the French, and they indulged me in it. Everyone thought I was so handsome, even noble, and I could disperse my latent anger with one delicious smile.

MAMAN:
Fear overwhelmed me a thousand times a day. Blood would rush to my head so that I clutched a velvet hanging on the back of an armchair. At night I fell asleep sitting upright on the side of the bed. My body would be turned away from the door, but my head and shoulders would be turned toward it. There was no lock, but I would not have dared turn a key even had there been one. Lord keep me from falling down.

FATHER: I
possessed something I had created from beginning to end without interference or objections or compromises. In a way I had birthed her. As much as I had my daughter. I had created her in my own image of womanly perfection, this speck of dust, this handful of clay from Monticello.

I had no idea how long I had been standing there. My presence seemed to be a command for her. I surveyed her like a man who, afraid of heights, scans a valley from the ledge of a tower. I rushed toward her with all my will and loneliness, with no words passing between us except those most potent of words, ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless.
“Je t'aime,”
I said, and she had answered,
“Merci, monsieur.”

MAMAN:
I was seized with a terrible yearning. Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing would ever free me of him. Nothing would erase those strange words of love which in my weakness, I had to believe. I felt around me an exploding flower, not just of passion, but of long deprivation, a hunger for
things forbidden, a darkness and unreason, of rage against the death of the other I so resembled. I became one with her, and it was not my name that sprang from him, but that of my half sister.

JAMES:
I discovered the concubinage of my sister when I turned back the counterpane of my master's bed.

MAMAN:
That day James took part in the fall of the Bastille, he had come back feverish, battered, and dirty, to dazzle the audience of the Hôtel de Langeac with the story of its fall. His eyes seemed to say: “This slave from Virginia's made history today. This slave ran with the Revolution. I am mine. We are going to take ourselves to freedom. If God let me do this, then God will let us have our freedom without stealing it. “ He smiled and I smiled back.

JAMES:
Men don't free what they love. I had surprised Thomas Jefferson more than once looking at Sally Hemings as I had often seen him contemplating some rare object he meant to keep. It was the look of a man who both coveted and had the means to possess what he coveted.