The President's Daughter (43 page)

The deaths of Sally Hemings and Martha Randolph, the last Monticellians, convinced Adrian Petit that he should return to France. Old and fragile at seventy-six, he would do what he had been threatening to do for eleven years —retire to his village in Champagne and his now-legendary ninety-two-year-old mother. He even came to ask my permission to go, as if he were still employed by Thomas Jefferson. Still the perfect valet—loyal, discreet, cynical, an exceptional liar, a genius of subterfuge and everybody's friend.

I sometimes wondered if Petit's notorious sideburns weren't actually the wings of Mercury, so much of his life had been spent as a go-between for others. He had no wife, no children (except me), and no home. He neither smoked nor drank, played neither cards nor horses, and if he had ever been in love, no one that I knew had ever discovered with whom. His only sin had been that of gluttony, and old age had taken care of that.

“Look what I have for you, Petit.” I opened the specially made box. Inside was James's newly cleaned and polished stiletto. The dull steel gleamed and the modest silver-worked handle did nothing to relieve its lethalness. I had wanted to surprise him with a going-away gift. To do it, I had disarmed myself.

“I want you to have this,” I said. “It's your
present du congé.
I've carried it with me every day since the age of sixteen. It belonged to James. I don't need it anymore. Take it to France with you. Take him back to where he was free.”

Adrian's eyes widened. “How did you get it? I recognize it, my dear. I gave it to James myself.”

“It was one of the few possessions Thomas Mann sent back with Burwell when he found James's body. When I … at sixteen, my mother gave it to me. I have carried it as a weapon ever since.”

Adrian looked sharply at me. “And you think that now you don't need it —will never need it again?”

“For what?” I smiled. “I'm protected by law, by society, by Thance. And by my white children. Why should I need it?”

Petit caressed the dagger lovingly. “I would never relieve you of it. It was James's banner, his declaration of independence, his cry, his chic, his grief, his warning, and his protection. A talisman, if you like. It should stay on this side of the ocean—with you, where it belongs. It is James's proclamation that he defends you, that his claim to familyhood is legitimate, that he's your uncle. Your protector. I had no idea it had fallen into your hands. How strange life is. It was my present to him at Christmas in 1796.”

He closed the box and handed it back to me.

“So long as slave power exists in this country, so long as this land is divided into free and slave, you, my dearest Harriet, can no more lay down James's arm than you can come out of hiding, confess to Thance, recross the color line, go back to the beginning, emancipate your children who are not, in justice, even yours. As long as slave power exists, there is no resting place for the fugitive, no end of the journey. I pray that day will come, Harriet, but for the moment it is not on the horizon. Instead, there is a rather bleak dawn with new travails, I fear, new confrontations, and if I understand anything about the slave oligarchy I once served, it will
take
arms—and a second revolution—to resolve it.”

“The famous southern duel with pistols?” I smiled.

“Yes.” And he did not smile. “James knew this. And so,” he continued, “I leave James's warning in your keeping. Of mementos of him, I have quite enough.” He paused. “I often wonder what my life would have been if I hadn't answered your father's summons … twice.”

“You, not answer a bell, Adrian?”

He laughed. “Ah, well, you're right. At least you are safe, as I promised your father. And my will is in order.”

“Don't worry about me, Petit. I'm rich.”

“Yes. Isn't that incredible? Something neither of us planned on, did we?” He laid a gnarled hand on mine. I smiled and took it in my own and laid it on my cheek.

“You saved my life.”

“I did it … for Sally Hemings.”

“I thought you did it for him.”

“I …”

“It's all right, Petit. They're all dead now. All the Monticellians.”

“You forget yourself and your brothers and the Hemingses who are still in slavery, scattered all over the South,” he said that day.

“I don't forget, Petit,” I replied with passionate coolness. “I'll never forget. Slavery won't last forever. I'll find every one of our kin. And together we'll find all the ones we've lost—even those lost to whiteness.”

After all, we're all Monticellians … aren't we?

The whole damned country.

We have the wolf by the ears … and we can neither subdue him nor turn him loose.

Thomas Jefferson

I'd been a “white” member of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society for three years, under the presidency of Lucretia Mott, the same Lucretia Mott who had arranged my voyage to London with Dorcas Willowpole. There were black members—Sarah, Harriet, and Marguerite Forten, Hetty Burr, and Lydia White—but none of them suspected me of passing. The society sponsored antislavery fairs and were an auxiliary of the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, which had been organized by Robert Purvis to aid destitute fugitives, providing room and board, clothing and medicines, informing them of their legal rights, and giving them protection, both moral and legal, from kidnappers. By acting as if I were a fly on the wall, I had found out what white people really thought of us.

All of them were so open about how they felt about black people. That they were beneath contempt; a race so low in morality, sensibility, and intelligence that nothing said to them or behind their backs could offend them. As my white acquaintances vented all their secret fears, anxious sexual fantasies, and unconscious hatreds, oblivious of my true identity, I felt an indulgent superiority. This evidence of white frailty thrilled me, because I could send them scurrying for cover. I became famous for my wicked and upbraiding tongue in defense of the colored man. I spoke out from my invincible armor of whiteness, and I spoke for every black man, woman, and child that had ever been born. For every injustice they suffered, every death they witnessed.

It was a dangerous, reckless game. Misplaced respect offered to an impostor of the white race, I had learned from Sykes, could elicit murderous anger in a deceived white man. Sykes had decided to kill me over that affront.

But neither death nor punishment frightened me anymore. I had become impervious to my mixed blood—indifferent to it. I no longer fought or defied it. I was simply the composite of the two races which had made me.

Thor was coming home after an absence of two years. I decided I would plead for a new and dangerous enterprise as soon as his ship dropped anchor. Thance and I had been thinking of moving both the laboratories and ourselves out of the city to Anamacora, giving up the house in West Philadelphia, which, with the twins, had become too small for our family. The seclusion of the country would allow me to organize an underground station for fugitives escaping from Virginia and Maryland over the Blue Ridge Mountains and by canal and the Susquehanna River.

I believed myself invincible.

“The risks involved,” I began, “are minimal in relation to the great cause we would be serving.” We were in the library, just the three of us, having coffee.

“You know I've never opposed you, Harriet, in your devotion to the antislavery cause. I've respected your wishes ever since you came back from London a convinced abolitionist. But this, this is going too far! An underground station at Anamacora, under Mother's nose, is out of the question! Think of
her.
Think of the children. Think of me. What if something happened to you? There's been more than one shootout at these stations, and informers and spies are everywhere. I imagine there's a file on us down at City Hall anyway, between your memberships in subversive organizations and Thor's mysterious operations in Africa. Remember you had a bad scare last year with Passmore Williamson. He could have implicated you in the Johnson scandal, and you would have been sitting in the Old Moyamensing Prison! And what about your friend Lucretia Mott? When she left that antislavery meeting in Norristown arm-in-arm with William Lloyd Garrison, she could have been killed by that crowd. No, Harriet. For the sake of your children, you cannot go any further in this … Underground Railroad than you already have!”

Thor was strangely quiet as he lit his pipe and studied me curiously.

“Anamacora is already surrounded by stations,” I said. “The slaves are sent from Reading Pine Forge and Whitebar to Philadelphia. From Philadelphia through the towns of Bristol, Bensalem, Newtown, Quakertown, Doylestown, Buckingham, and New Hope, our backyard.”

“Harriet, I don't want you repeating those names. Suppose one of the children were to wander in.”

“Harriet,” said Thor slowly, “just how involved are you in this clandestine operation? How much do you know? Or can you even tell us that?”

Thor stood leaning against the fireplace, his long body curled around it as if seeking a memory of the tropical heat he had abandoned nine weeks earlier. His long supple hands were in continual motion, as if he gathered medicinal herbs even in his sleep. There was no hostility in his voice, only concern for his nephews and nieces and mother. Surely he who had experienced the slave trade firsthand would understand, I thought, so I plunged ahead.

“For your own sake and the children's, I can't tell you everything. I can say this, however. New Jersey is closely allied with Pennsylvania and New York as a center in the fugitive slave network. The main route leads across the Delaware River to Camden, through Mount Holly, Broadtown, Penning-ton, Hopewell, Princeton, and New Brunswick. I cannot name the conductors of these stations. Slave hunters in search of runaways operate headquarters there. At the Raritan River Bridge, east of New Brunswick, they sometimes stop the trains to search for runaways. To prevent this, local train conductors (real ones, that is) serve as lookouts, warning their coworkers when to transport the slaves in boats to Perth Amboy. Some sea captains take the risk of hiding fugitives, and hire them to pump water from their canal boats. Others transport runaways to safe ports in New England or New York. A small but steady stream have thus entered New York. Five thousand of the twenty thousand blacks in this city are fugitives. One of the best-known conductors is the Quaker Isaac T. Hopper, who is backed by Arthur and Lewis Tappan's fortune. Some of these men and women have been in hiding since Gabriel Prosser's conspiracy in Virginia, the Denmark Vesey uprising of 1822 in South Carolina, and Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia.”

I took a deep breath and tried to control the tremor in my voice.

“The railroad's underground routes center in cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In each of these three cities, for example, exist vigilance committees, sometimes composed of Negroes alone, sometimes of both Negroes and whites, to aid the fugitives. The vigilance committees work with underground conductors in Maryland and Delaware, who carry more than a hundred fugitives a year and who are in constant fear of being betrayed. The committee also has ties with two or three sea captains who, for a fee, bring passengers hidden in their ships from more southerly parts to Wilmington or here. The various committees hide fugitives usually in the Negro sections of the city, provide them with clothes, and if they wish to seek more security
farther north, pay their expenses to move on by carriage, wagon, train, or ship. The vigilance committees try to keep track of the arrival of slave catchers from the South and if possible warn their intended victims. When Negroes are seized without adequate proof that they are slaves, the committees try to obtain court orders to free them.

“Many who get as far as New York resume their journey toward Canada, and they pass through the shore towns to New Haven; from there, two routes extend northward, one to Southampton, Southwick, and Westfield, Massa-chusetts, the other through North Guilford, Meriden, and Hartford, Connecticut, to Springfield, Massachusetts. The two routes join at Northampton, Massachusetts. In every one of these towns, there are people or organizations of pronounced pro-slavery ideas, people glad to see the slaves sent back to the masters they are fleeing and not adverse to putting hunters and dogs on their tracks. Shall I go on and lead you all the way to New Brunswick and across the border to Canada?”

I stopped and took another deep breath. I had a stitch in my side, as if I had just run a marathon race.

“God Almighty, Harriet!” Thor whistled low and shifted position. “Now tell me what you know about Captain Denmore and Shaka Zulu, and Lord Brunswick, and the Cape Town Riders.”

I was trembling.

Thance walked over to me then, and wiped away a tear, which had slipped unheeded down my cheek. But Thor just stood there, his eyes riveted, as if he could see straight through me. Was he wondering what or who had gotten into his family?

“My God, Harriet, you are up to your neck in this,” exclaimed Thance. “You are not Dorcas Willowpole, who has no responsibilities except for herself, or Emily Gluck, who has been fanaticized by her husband's guilty conscience, or Thenia, who was a slave herself—you are a white woman with the responsibility of six children, plus, if you'll be so kind, a husband and your in-laws.”

“As a white woman,” I continued, “I can do a lot that, for instance, Harriet or Sarah Forten, or Lydia White, cannot do. I can go anywhere, do anything, within sane reason—”

There was a great snort from Thor.

“Remember Prudence Crandell? She's white, too, and reasonably sane. She tried to start a school for little colored girls in Massachusetts. They burned her down, sent her to jail, and nigh lynched her!”

“I'm not a heroine, Thor. I only want to do my duty as I see it. I realize my first duty is to Thance and the children. But I do feel at least a willing
mind to encounter reproach and suffering, almost to any extent, to advance this cause. If Anamacora is out, it's out. If you will let me one barn, let me one. But nothing I've said leaves this room, I must insist.”