The President's Daughter (3 page)

It was night before they found me. I could see the procession of lighted torches drawing closer and closer and hear my name being called over and over. It wasn't long before I looked down at a circle of fire beneath me. Mr. Treadwell, the overseer, was there. My uncle Robert, my uncle Martin, Isaac, and my father were staring up at me. I began to whimper.

“Harriet,” Martin called softly, “Harriet, it's all right, it's me, Martin. What the devil has happened to you, darlin'? I'm coming up to get you. You don't have to move. Hang onto the limb. You don't have to talk, just hold on, Sweet Jesus, hold on. . . . Lord Almighty,” he whispered as his hand
touched the blood on the tree trunk. “What happened to you, Harriet?”

I looked down at my father. He towered over the rest of the men, and his face was drawn. I saw him with a whip in his hand for the first time. Our eyes met in the flickering torchlight, mine pleading, his glacial. He blamed me! He blamed me, as if I had provoked and planned his humiliation. But I was his creature! His! And he didn't love me for it. Instead of love, I had inspired only pity. The fury and disgust in his face were directed at me. In my misery, I reached down toward him, still unable to utter a sound. Martin had me now by the waist, and his touch provoked a storm of bitter tears. He was handing me over gently to Beverly below, when almost in exasperation, my father pushed Beverly aside and took me from Martin's arms. I felt the rough shaft of the handle of the whip he still held against my back. He swept me up and carried me back to where everyone had left the horses and sat me upon Jupiter. He mounted, his back to me, pulled my arms around his waist, and started off toward the mansion. Timidly, I pulled myself closer to the broad, navy blue back. I could hear his heart through the rich wool. I sighed, then sniffled and closed my eyes. I had almost had to die to get his attention. When we arrived home, he lifted me roughly from Jupiter and carried me into the house up to my mother's room. He stopped a short distance from her inside the door, and I felt his trembling as his shoulders hunched forward in an effort to master a monumental tantrum:

“See if she is hurt or not.” Then slowly he turned, his voice clear and temperate, as if he were giving early-morning orders for the fields. “A mother should know where her child is at any moment. I beg you remember that. If you ever let her out of your sight again, you will have me to answer to. I have told Martin I want the name of the man, and I want to know what he was doing tampering with my property.”

For a split second, his eyes met mine. I saw no tenderness nor comprehension, only a deep shame. I had felt it in his arms, and it had struck me mute.

I remained dumbstruck. It was weeks before I could speak without weeping. Finally I stammered . . .

“It was Sykes.” That was when my mother gave me the long slender stiletto with the silver handle that had belonged to my uncle James.

“Keep it with you at all times. Keep it hidden deep in your skirts. Remember you were not raped. Nothing happened to you. You are still intact. It is hard to kill a man, Harriet, too hard probably. So if you can't kill, then maim. Aim low. Draw blood. That's enough to stop most men. Never hesitate. It's your life against his lust. Rape is murder in disguise. If you hesitate, Harriet, you're dead.”

Sykes was banned from the premises of Monticello and ordered never to
set foot on its soil again. My father never again allowed me to walk on the roads of the plantation alone, and my mother escorted me from the big house to the weavers' cabins and back again.

Was it, I wondered cynically, because Father cared for me or because he distrusted me around men? But Father never let Mama forget it. Was it our fault we were Negro wenches?

My ankle healed, but the thin line of the whiplash remained, a pale, slightly raised scar which encircled the joint anklebone as if I had worn a shackle or had caught my foot in a squirrel trap.

I stooped down a moment and touched the scar, then straightened and stared at my mother. The tobacco field, which surrounded us, was a good way beyond the mansion and stretched in a wide highway of feathery waves, so vast the eye couldn't take it all in. The heat had reduced everything else to wavelets of sepia and black, and the blossoms, which reached our hips, glowed iridescent, parading in long lines like soldiers to the horizon. With amazing grace, they floated in the sun-spoiled daze of light, at times gathering into small foams of purple as I stood there gazing at my mother's burnt umber figure, my skirts caught in the stems and thistles.

Early this morning I had searched for him. I had decided to ask him, beg him, to free me—legally. What if I refused to be transported out of the state like a bale of cotton with the master's ticket on it, his indigo stamp, but not his recognition? I had saddled up Ripley, an old bay nobody rode, and gone out to find him. I knew I would find him in the saddle at that time of the morning, and I was determined to have it out with him. I had vowed to look him in the eye and force him to see me for what I was, his daughter. The bastard daughter who was trying to say good-bye, trying to get him to call me by my name.

I found him over by the west frontier, near the stand of woods that divided the rise of the mountain from the first planting fields. There was a birch fence that enclosed a pasture and a narrow bridge spanning a clear-running creek. He had just taken the fence, and he sat there immobile on Old Eagle—a tall horse with wide shoulders and a heavily muscled chest—as still and luminous as a marble sculpture. The light broke all around him, shining in a domelike configuration, reflecting long yellow dashes of light, and enclosing his profile. I screwed up my courage. I was going to ask him to give me my manumission papers as a freedwoman. He could do it. I knew he could.

Old Eagle shied away as Ripley blocked his path. Both horses were steaming and their flanks touched. I drew in my breath; the cobalt eyes cut
through me as if to ask how I dared interrupt his early-morning ride.

“Master . . .”

“Harriet.” He gestured, then waited patiently for an explanation.

I shivered. I wanted to turn Ripley around and gallop off, but I forced my mount to stillness and trained my eyes level with his. Jade met sapphire.

“It's my birthday,” I said stupidly.

“Yes, Harriet.” Still his voice carried a question.

“My last day at Monticello.”

His horse began to sidestep impatiently, trying to avoid me. It wasn't Old Eagle, it was my father's knees doing it. He didn't want to listen. He didn't want to talk.

“I don't want to run, Master. I don't want to steal myself. . . .”

For a moment, his eyes seemed to flicker with a recognition or a reminiscence, I couldn't tell which, as if he had heard this plea, this desperate boast, before. He looked away from me, then, toward the mountains. I stuttered on.

“Papers, Master. I need papers to prove I'm free . . . otherwise I'm a fugitive slave, a criminal.”
You can't want jour own daughter to be a felon.

“You don't need any papers, Harriet. You're white. You must live your life without them. It's your only chance. I've arranged everything. Petit is coming to get you.”

“But what about my freedom? Mother promised me I'd be free.”

“You are free, Harriet. As free as I am. No one will challenge you. No one would dare.”

“But what if they do? What if they . . . ask?”

“Hasn't your mother told you what to do? That's her duty.”

“She said men can't keep secrets.”

“She's wrong. I've kept your secret, haven't I? I've hidden and protected all of you all these years. I've shielded you from the newspapers and a vicious campaign against all of us by our political enemies. I kept my silence. I didn't send you all away after the troubles with Callender. I resisted all sorts of pressures in order to keep the promise I made to your mother in Paris. I risked . . . everything, for you. Here at Monticello you were safe.”

“But . . .”

“I've done all I can.”

“But papers are important! Without identity papers as your slave, or recognition as your daughter, I'm twice illegitimate. I'm nobody's . . .” My complaint had cost me all my strength. I watched helplessly the frown of disapproval on my father's face. I had learned this silent language fluently. I knew by his look of petulance that I was being told to get on my way, that I had stepped beyond an invisible frontier. He pulled in Old Eagle's reins,
cutting me off, and galloped off in the opposite direction.

I watched him as he fled, taking the two-foot-high barrier in a savage jump, his whip coming down heavily on Eagle's flank. He beat his horses cruelly. It was a well-known fact about him. Nobody knew why. In his panic he would have flown, I thought, if he could have, not to answer me. And now I would never have an answer. For the rest of my life. I would live in dread, on guard against a slip, a chance encounter, a keen eye, or a sentimental confession. I was a runaway slave, in danger of recapture and sale, even if I had stolen myself. Madison had been right. It
was
worse than being auctioned on the block. I could meet my kin and would not be allowed to acknowledge them. I would never be able to stand over my father's grave and weep. I could no more recognize my white family than my black one. This was the price I had to pay for freedom.

My tears began to fall, as quiet as ashes.

“Papa . . . ,” I whispered into the early-morning mist.

Suddenly my heart began to behave strangely. It set off like an explosion, like gunpowder, and began to leap around unevenly in my chest. It began to pound in a most alarming way, then stop irresponsibly, hitting some sort of inward nerve, mocking like Madison's laughter. Then all at once, I couldn't hear it at all. As if my heart had simply stepped outside my body. And my tears stopped.

Flight had always been my father's answer to everything. Maman had told me that. Now I studied her as a breeze ruffled her black skirts. She hadn't moved. If
flight
was my father's name,
immobility
was my mother's. I felt tears of frustration and hopelessness start in my eyes. They were going to leave me all alone in this world, both of them. The blind injustice of it gripped me like a fist.

“Oh, God,
Maman, je pars.
I'm leaving. Petit is here with the carriage. Aren't you . . . even happy for me?” I cried.

“It's no victory for me, Harriet, only justice.”

Oh, Maman, tell me you love me, I begged wordlessly. Tell me he loves me, please. I think I'm dying of not being loved. But to my mother out loud I simply said,
“Adieu, Maman.”

My father was waiting for me by the time I had walked back from where I had left my mother. I saw him long before he saw me, and so I studied him from afar with all the confused loathing and yearning he had evoked in me that morning. I hated my mother for hiding. She should have come to stand beside him this once in a proper farewell to me. Instead, Petit, my father's old majordomo, was standing there. The Frenchman with his bald head and extravagant mustache had left Monticello just before my birth, but my mother had nurtured the legend of the indomitable Petit in Paris, Petit in Philadelphia, Petit at Monticello.

For the first time, I noticed the frailness under the imposing height of my master and the new physical suffering beyond his proud exuberance. My father was old, nearly eighty, and I might never see him again. Now I was standing close, looking up into his eyes. I caught his scent of old wool, lavender, ink, and horseflesh. For a moment he seemed not even to recognize me. Then he swayed slightly, clutching his left wrist. He reached down and picked up a wicker basket and held it out to me.

“Do you want one of these Monticello pups, Harriet? Clara just gave birth to a litter. She might keep you company and remind you of home.”

He held out the basket of squirming Dalmatian puppies as if it were a peace offering.

“Choose one for I shall drown the rest. I consider all dogs the most afflicting of all the follies for which we tax ourselves.”

He reached down into the basket and took out an adorable black-and-white bitch. Father seemed to recognize the necessity and utility of dogs, I thought, as he did of Negroes, but he still begrudged their existence.

For my mother's sake, I swallowed this last humiliation, matching his smile, which he never lost, and suppressing an overwhelming desire to wring the poor puppy's neck. How, I wondered, could I love and despise my father so much at the same time?

I looked down at the animal squirming in the huge outstretched hands. An apology for this morning? I wondered.

“She's beautiful.”

“Think of a good name for her.”

“I'll call her Independence.”

I took Independence in my arms, clutching her to me in the same way my father clutched his wrist against his chest. I noticed that a tear had rolled down my father's cheek. I looked away. WHITE PEOPLE! Why was he crying now? Now, when it was too late? What had he expected? That because he was the President he wouldn't have to pay someday? I turned and held
Petit's horrified gaze in a silent command to take me away from this place. I would not throw away the gift of freedom in exchange for any man's promise . . . especially white men, who never kept their promises. Had Captain Hemings married my great-grandmother? Had John Wayles freed my grandmother? Had my father ever called me daughter? Was this parting gift of Independence an acknowledgment? Well, I thought, grab it and run. Freedom, that is. Leave everything you have ever loved, start your new life as an orphan: nameless, homeless, and friendless. White. White. White.

I drew his eyes to mine.
You're asking a lot of a daughter,
I thought.

“Papa,” I whispered. “You could still change things.”

But I kept my eyes as hard as the precious stone they resembled, my thoughts tight in my womb. I wouldn't cry anymore. I was free. I was white; I was twenty-one. I had nothing to cry about.