The President's Daughter (40 page)

That a change in the relations in which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong, is neither new, nor particular to the color of the blacks. Homer tells us it was so 2,600 years ago. But the slaves of which Homer speaks were white.

Thomas Jefferson

Nine years had passed. At the point where I take this story up again, six children had been born to me and were alive. There were my newborn, golden-haired twins, William John Madison and William John James, their weight like a hush in my arms; Jane Elizabeth, three; Beverly, five; Ellen Wayles, seven; and Sinclair, my eldest, nine. I had lost no child to illness or accident. My labors had all been easy, even with the twins, and my children were without blemish or handicap. None of them knew they had inherited the condition of their mother and were legally American slaves.

My worldly identity had been established as the younger Mrs. Wellington, Philadelphia matron, mother of six, wife, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, abolitionist, and musician. I owed much of my success to my mother-in-law, who had stepped aside to allow me my own social circle, and the rest to Charlotte Waverly Nevell of Nevellstown, who had remained my closest friend. My impersonation suited me well, my family was in good circumstances, and my children adored me for myself, not my color. I considered myself a happy woman. I believed myself safe. The turning point in my double life arrived in 1836 when two things happened. One was the result of the inevitable ax of time; the other, so unexpected and so incredible that even today I wonder if I dreamed it.

We had moved from our house on Church Street to a large house in West Philadelphia. The Wellington Drug Company had its establishment at Front and Arch streets. Thance had his laboratory next to the Wellington ware-house, where the new pharmaceuticals and the medicines he developed with Thor were manufactured. Patents had made my mother-in-law and the company rich, and Thor returned regularly from his African expeditions with new ideas, plants, and formulas.

I had continued my antislavery work, and Thance never objected to our involvement in the illegal activities of the Underground Railroad. After that first fateful meeting with Emily and Gustav Gluck, a German couple we met on our honeymoon, they remained our friends and an important part of our lives. Emily Gluck had begun by asking me if my maid was slave or free, since she recognized me by my accent as a Virginian. “Oh, Mrs. Wellington,” she had said, “please don't be offended. My object is to speak to you about the great and heroic role the southern woman has in this titanic struggle for the soul of the United States of America.”

I had sat shocked and speechless. Here was a white woman, pleading with me to consider the wrongs of chattel slavery. The potential slave catcher had turned into a shining Joan of Arc, ready to lead white women and their slaves to freedom and mutual recognition. Dumbfounded, I listened to Mrs. Gluck, her voice trembling with conviction, her eyes shining with indignation, as she pleaded the cause of immediate emancipation for the southern Negro.

“We must denounce not only those who are guilty of the positive acts of oppression, but also those who connive at its continuance. I am truly uneasy at my having suffered so much time to pass away without having done anything for relaxing the yoke of the most degrading and bitter bondage that ever ground down the human species.”

I had flushed deeply. I had been free for almost three years. Yet all my efforts had been directed toward my own egotistic security and comfort and worries about my crime of miscegenation, my father's guilt, my husband's trust. I had crossed the color line to escape the fate of slavery and I had left everyone I loved on the other side to face the consequences, without much thought. Here had been my conscience speaking to me across the starched white tablecloth of a luxurious spa in the Adirondocks foothills on a pale September morning. I learned that the Glucks were members of a German pacifist group called the Druids, very similar to the Pennsylvania Quakers. They abhorred violence against either humans or nature, weapons of destruction like guns and cannons, and armed warfare for whatever reason. They condemned organized religion as the perpetrator of more violence than any
other institution and believed that only the natural sciences, not philosophy, would save the world. The Glucks, in a way, saved me. For they were the ones who set my feet squarely on the path of active abolitionism. Dorcas Willowpole had prepared my mind, and Emily Gluck would prepare my actions.

Thanks to Emily, I was more involved in the abolition movement as it grew and expanded into a world movement, fighting the gangrene of American slavery, which marred the surface of a prosperous North, an intransigent South, and a booming West. After the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, when hundreds of hunted slaves had to flee Virginia for their lives, Emily and Gustav established an Underground Railroad station on their farm in Potts-town. The station signal was a lighted oil lamp held in the painted hand of a wooden black groom that stood outside their barn. There was a hiding place in the cellar under their house which connected to the barn and from which a tunnel ran to a deserted barge on the Schuylkill River. From there the fugitives escaped by river or canal to the northwest and Canada, aided by sympathetic barge and steamer captains who plied the waterways between Philadelphia and the Erie Canal.

One Indian summer day in September, a manumitted slave couple presented themselves for an interview at Emily's Philadelphia Committee for the Protection of Freedmen and Fugitive Slaves. The committee had established an office close by Thance's apothecary, and I worked there as a volunteer twice a week. The couple's name was Marks. But when I looked up, I gazed into the eyes of Eugenia, whom I hadn't seen in fourteen years. Eugenia had been born at Monticello in 1801, the same year as I, a slave of Thomas Jefferson.

Strangely, I felt no alarm or panic; I waited calmly for a sign of recognition. Eugenia couldn't be standing before me without realizing who I was! She was my birth twin! Yet not a flicker of acknowledgment passed between us. I was a white woman, and she and her husband were manumitted slaves in danger of recapture. His name was Peter Marks, and he had been born in Charlottesville in 1793, a slave of James Monroe, my father's friend and the fifth President of the United States. He had been freed in 1831 by the Monroes' daughter, in accordance with her father's deathbed wish. Peter Marks had then entered into the employ of an army officer, Alfred Mordecai. This same Captain Mordecai had bought Eugenia for two hundred fifty dollars from my cousin Cornelia in 1833. Under the captain's roof, Peter and Eugenia had fallen in love and married. The captain had formally freed
Eugenia, but was obsessed with the idea that at his death, or while he was called to active duty, Eugenia or Peter or both would somehow fall into the hands of bounty hunters and be reenslaved.

“Mr. Monroe's daughter never petitioned the Virginia legislature for permission for me to stay in Virginia, as Mr. Jefferson's daughter did for the Hemingses. And neither did the captain when he freed me,” said Peter Marks. “By law, after a year we could no longer stay in Virginia as freedmen. That's why we left. Rumor was, that's what killed the most notorious slave in Virginia, Sally Hemings. It was said they had tried to run her and her sons out of Albemarle County. But that isn't so. She died of heart failure when word got to her that Monticello had been sold out from under her to a Hebrew druggist in Charlottesville, and that he had cut down all of Thomas Jefferson's shade trees.”

“Died?”

To them this is only another slave story, I told myself over and over, as the room whirled like a tornado.

“And when did this happen, Mr. Marks?”

“About two weeks ago,” said Eugenia Jefferson, speaking for the first time.

“She dropped dead on the west lawn of Monticello after the new owners cut down all the shade trees. Census-taker named Nathan Langdon found her. You would have thought it was his mother, the way he carried on. I just hope those new tradespeople who own the mansion now won't decide to dig up the cemetery as well.

“We've been here since Saturday. That happened Thursday a week. We hightailed it out of Charlottesville. It seemed like a sign to me—my being born at Monticello and all, like the Hemingses …”

It was only, I repeated to myself, a slave story of old to them.
I didn't have a mother. I was an orphan. But I had renounced my mother just as I had renounced everything black, brown, or beige. If she no longer existed, how could she be dead?

I trained my eyes on Eugenia, concentrating on her yellow-and-black-checkered dress, the wooden buttons, the poor quality of the homespun. It was slave-woven—probably in the weaving cottage on Mulberry Row where my nonexistent mother had sent me every morning for sixteen years. Maman. I felt the nauseating rising of a howl like a wolf cub.
You died without ever seeing any of your grandchildren.

I sat there in a daze, continuing to write as Eugenia and Peter took their leave, their precious freedman's papers in order, thanks to me.

Then the nascent sense of desolation I must have carried within me all
these years, but denied with every fiber of my body, engulfed me with loneliness, and dislocation. Thomas had already said it. So much denying. So much severing. My happiness dissolved before my startled eyes. This was a bad dream. Stand up, Sally Hemings. Stand up! You couldn't have died while I laughed, fed the twins, listened to music, played my piano, sorted laundry, arranged bouquets, set the table with white linen and silver and wine. My heart was a pilot light of rage and shame. I had abandoned my mother to her fate at Monticello,
without ever thinking about her again.
In my greed for my own life, I had been crueler than any slave master, cruder than my father. I heard the distant flapping of wings and a faraway
tap-tap,
which sounded like my metronome but was my foot under the table, beating wildly, trying to run. I realized I had the same frozen smile on my face that my mother had the day my father died. Had I believed she would live forever? I had believed slavery would last forever. The ballad they used to sing about Sally Hemings was a far, far away refrain.

Her spirit haunts that place all cover'd with wool
And patiently waits for Thomas to pull
The tongue by its roots from her head …
Behold me, false Ethiopi, behold me, he cried,
Learn the cause and effect of the evil.
God grant that to punish your falsehood and pride
My ghost, with a message from hell cut and dried,
Should come at this moment, stand close by your side.

Passing had given me a worse burden than any slave's because theirs could be lifted, but mine never would. I had left her for what I considered a more important life, and now she had left me—alone in this white, white world. I had struggled all my life against everything that was hostile to me. Now I gave way—surrendered. But no tears came for my mother, just as she had not wept for my father. We were tearless women. But still the rhythmic
tick-tock, tick-tock
of my feet running in place, running, running … drum-ming on the sides of the huge partner's desk at which I sat, replaced them.

“How could you have waited so long to get word to me?” I screamed at Eston, who showed up at my door a few days later in a covered wagon, posing as a traveling Bible salesman.

“Sister, there was nobody to send. There aren't any Burwells or Fossetts to send flying up the East Coast with messages. We've been on the road for a week, and we're dead tired. Before that, we were too busy packing the wagons to head west. We
did
make the long detour for you. We could have crossed the Appalachians at Knoxville instead of coming all this way to Pennsylvania and having to cross at Ferryville. Everything happened so fast. One day she was there, in perfect health, talking, cooking, gardening, and the next morning she was gone.”

“Nevertheless—” I protested.

“If you had stayed in touch, Harriet … but then, there was no warning. Believe me, she wasn't sick, Harriet. Not a day.”

“Does Beverly know?”

“Couldn't find Beverly. Not yet. But we'll find him. You don't happen to know where he is?”

“No.”

“And Thomas?”

“Thomas refused to attend his father's funeral and he refused to attend his mother's funeral. Said he didn't belong either to the Hemingses or the Jeffersons.”

“She wasn't sick a day,” Eston insisted. “She had been uneasy and suffering from melancholy, ever since I took her to Jerusalem for Nat Turner's trial.”

“You were there?”

“She
was there. There like I've never seen her before. Her decline started then. She would compose these long soliloquies on how she had loved the enemy, how her life had been wasted. She began visiting the cemetery every day, alternating between Grandma's grave and our father's. The word got to her about the straits the Randolphs were in, living like poor white trash at Edgehill, with all that brood of children, without a cent.”

“Cornelia sold Eugenia,” I said, “for two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“No wonder.”

“Eugenia and her husband, who had belonged to James Monroe, showed up at the Freedman's Protection Committee office while I was on duty. Eugenia didn't recognize me. She told me about Mother's death as a part of the story of their escape. Like an old slave story.”

“What do you mean, Eugenia didn't recognize you?” said Eston.

“What I said. People see what they want to see.”

“And what do you see before you?”

“My brother,” I said.

“A white man,” said Eston. “I'm going to pass for white out west, Harriet.
Madison has decided to remain on the black side of the color line. We'll part ways at the Missouri. He's going to buy land in northern Wisconsin. I'm moving on to points west. You were right, Harriet. It's easy to reinvent yourself once you've made up your mind. And what does it change, really? You're still you.”