The President's Daughter (6 page)

Harriet was the killing field and the blood victim of these two strains. She was an enduring vessel, immutable and enigmatic, in which the poison and its antidote checkmated one another. Silently, I watched the lilac phaeton become smaller. Within sat my daughter, who had begun her slavery even before she had begun her existence, and who could not dispose of her life without committing some kind of fraud.

I the undersigned, Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom and Father of the University of Virginia, age seventy-nine, father of thirteen children (six deceased), grandfather of thirteen children (one deceased), tobacco planter, scientist, naturalist, musician, politician, widowed husband to Martha Wayles, erstwhile lover to her half sister Sally Hemings, head of a household containing eight free white males, eleven free white females, and ninety-three slaves, do hereby attest that I did allow my daughter Harriet to run away on her twenty-first birthday and disappear into the white population of the United States. What I felt about the destiny of my illegitimate
daughter I can reveal to no one, not even my slave wife. It had too much to do with blood ties and the intemperance of passion, of rage, really, which tarnished the image that I cultivated of Olympian detachment and a magisterial view of the world: to have been brought low by a mere snip of a girl, my own issue at that. However, I did record her departure in my farm book on this day, May 19, 1822.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

The whole of time moved on with a rapidity of which those of our carriage have but a faint idea . . . and yet in the evening, when we took a retrospect of the day, what a mass of happiness had we traveled over.

Thomas Jefferson

We drove all night, not stopping until we had crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Petit, who had taken my cold hands in his, kept up a running conversation to keep us awake as Fossett and Burwell sped us north. Fossett was the son of my mother's half sister Mary, a dark Hemings. And Burwell, my uncle, had served my father as valet for thirty years. What, I wondered, was in their minds? Shame and derision at this charade in which we were all locked? Envy or compassion for a Hemings going up the river instead of down? Petit, the ex-valet, seemed to be struggling with some overwhelming dilemma. Then, like the breaking of a great dam, he suddenly blurted out:

“Although it's hard for you to believe, Harriet, I was young once upon a time. Your mother must have told you a lot about your father's days as the American ambassador to the court of Louis XVI. We lived quite a bit of history during those years from eighty-four to eighty-nine, including the most glorious Revolution. We were all young then. Even your father. He was a tall, handsome, rich widower in his forties and an exotic American like the adored Benjamin Franklin. I was in my twenties at the time and had been in service for over a decade. Your uncle James, your father's body servant, was a year younger than I, Martha and your mother were fifteen when your mother and Maria arrived from Virginia in 1787 on command of your father,
who wanted Maria, his only other living child, with him. I believe sending your mother, who was hardly more than an adolescent herself, as her nursemaid to Paris was your grandmother's idea. And just as I am escorting you to Philadelphia, I was sent to London by your father to bring back Maria and your mother to Paris. I found them installed in the American embassy in London under the surveillance of John Adams and his wife, Abigail, a stern yet compassionate American couple of such dignity, affection, and rectitude as to have enlisted my admiration for all times. I was an unpleasant surprise. Mrs. Adams had expected your father to come and fetch his daughter in person, and she was furious that a servant had been sent instead. But your father was waiting in Paris for a lady, Maria Cosway, and I had the task of cajoling Maria, consoling your mother, whom Mrs. Adams wanted to send straight back to Virginia when she realized she was a slave, and mollifying Ambassador and Mrs. Adams. Mrs. Adams especially was appalled at having under her roof what she called a ‘white slave,' a term I had yet to understand. Mrs. Adams was an abolitionist, and she knew how white Negroes were created. I was the only one who didn't know.

“Then Maria refused to leave with me, a stranger, to join still another stranger, the father she didn't remember. Mr. Adams agreed that Polly, as she was called, would never leave with me without your mother, Sally Hemings, and that in any case they had no authority to dispose of Mr. Jefferson's property, regardless of their stand on slavery.

“It was three weeks before little Polly agreed to leave with me, and those three weeks I had spent amusing, teasing, and escorting her and your mother around London. What a wonderful time we had. It was my second time in London. I had gone the first time with the Comte d'Ashnach as his page and had been introduced to the gambling, racing, and womanizing life of the English aristocrats. I knew every nook and cranny of London, every elegant shop, restaurant, and theater, from Covent Gardens to Cambridge! The girls adored my excursions with them, and one of their favorites was Hyde Park. Your mother was a very beautiful girl. She stopped traffic and was admired by everyone. There was something that no one could put their finger on which made her special beyond her spectacular looks. A gentleness, an otherworldliness, an aura of enormous spirit—a kind of life force which bewitched you and held you in its spell. And the voice ... It was the voice of an angel—low and sweet and honeyed—your voice, Harriet. Your mother could charm the birds out of the trees.

“Maria was a fragile, beautiful child of nine, your mother almost a young woman with golden eyes and ivory skin and raven hair—the picture, I was
told, of her half sister Martha. I remember how astounded Mrs. Adams was at the resemblance.

“We left London on April twentieth, 1787, and had a fair crossing. We arrived by public coach at the Hôtel de Langeac, your father's embassy, in the late afternoon of April twenty-fifth. I'll always remember that trip from harbor to city, through Brittany and Normandy to the Ile-de-France, the modest carriage—for your father hadn't yet bought this lavish one—rumbling through the most beautiful countryside in the world, although I'm personally from Champagne . . . and prefer that landscape. . . .

“Your father and James were awaiting us in the courtyard. Maria didn't recognize her father at first, and James was hard put to realize that the young woman who descended from the carriage was his little sister. But your father remembered Sally Hemings as the daughter of Betty Hemings and from her days of nursing and running errands for his wife. It was your mother who brought welcome news from Virginia and Monticello. Your mother was very good at delivering southern gossip, and your father soon became addicted to, as he put it, ‘who has died, who has married, who has hanged themselves because they cannot marry.' They became a regular two-person salon, with your mother holding forth in dialogue and imitations, dramatic monologues, and cruel invasions of privacy. She knew something about everyone, a feat she had learned, I found out later, from another expert, your grandmother.

“But I'll never forget the moment we rolled into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeac and the girls rushed from the confines of the carriage. Your mother was scooped into the arms of her brother James, who was now an apprentice cook in the embassy kitchens, while poor Maria cowered behind the carriage not recognizing her own father! Thomas Jefferson was mortified. He finally picked his daughter up in his arms despite her protests and dragged her into the mansion, leaving your mother and James to their tearful reunion.”

Petit paused, if only to catch his breath. It seemed to me as if this last service to my father had opened an ever-widening breach in his legendary discretion, or that in escorting me to Philadelphia he had deployed his last reserves of servitude to my father.

“You're going to tell me everything, aren't you?”

“One day. Perhaps. I think I've said enough for now.”

“Mr. Petit, you're going to talk all the way to Philadelphia. I know it.”

“Call me Adrian.”

“Mr. Adrian.”

I sat opposite Adrian Petit in the dark green interior, in my yellow plaid
“strolling” outfit, my back flattened in panic against the leather upholstery, my hands clenched in my lap to stop their trembling. I watched Petit closely. The irises of his smallish eyes invaded even their whites and shone pantherlike from his face, half-hidden in the shadows. More than any other white man, he knew what had happened between my mother and father during those years they had spent in Paris. He had known my uncle James in his prime, Maria as a little girl, Martha as a young, shy convent intern. He had received the mysterious Maria Cosway on her secret visits to my father. I leaned forward, caught in the fascination I felt for the knowledge he held of my parents' past.

On that day and every day at Monticello, there existed light Hemingses and dark Hemingses. We were all the grandchildren of Elizabeth Hemings, who had died in 1807. Betty Hemings, as she was called, had had two families, just like my grandfather John Wayles; one black and one white. My grandmother's white Hemingses were my grandfather's black ones. They had together as master and slave produced six children, the last of them being my mother, Sally Hemings. John Wayles had also been the father of Martha Wayles, my father's first wife, making my mother her half sister and me her niece. I had learned the secret of my white family in bits and pieces, in whispered asides and shattering looks, but I had finally pieced it all together with a little help from my grandmother. My mother, like most slave women, had never told me anything of my origins.

The reason we were all called Hemings was that my great-grandfather, Captain Hemings, fell in love with an African named Bia Baye and they had a natural daughter together, who was my grandmother Elizabeth. The poor Captain Hemings wanted to buy Bia Baye and his daughter from John Wayles, who owned them both, but he refused to sell them since amalgamation had first begun to be studied and he wanted to see how Elizabeth would turn out. The captain tried to steal his wife and child but was betrayed by a treacherous slave. Bia Baye and Elizabeth were locked away in the big house and the captain sailed without them. The legend is that Bia Baye's wails could be heard all the way to the Chesapeake Bay and that the captain, hearing them, rang the ship's bells in response. The clearness and stillness of the night mingled the two laments into a song which the Virginia bluetail heard and copied, and so, on a clear still night, Bia Baye and her whaling captain can still be heard. Bia Baye ran away from John Wayles's plantation so many times that he finally decided to have her branded on the cheek with the
R
for runaway. But the story has it that when the hot iron of the brand came close to her flesh, he knocked the iron out of the overseer's hand and it fell upon her breast.

John Wayles took Elizabeth Hemings as his concubine after his second wife, who had given him two legitimate daughters, died. And so it was that Elizabeth remained in the big house, which she ran, and gave birth to six children by her master. But before that she had been given to a slave named Abe, by whom she had had six children. These would become known as the “dark” Hemingses, while her children by the master were the “light” Hem-ingses. Then Thomas Jefferson married John Wayles's white daughter Martha. After John Wayles died, he inherited all of Martha's half brothers and sisters, the light Hemingses. The irony was that before it was all over, Thomas Jefferson, my father, had loved and married two half sisters, one white and one black, both with the same father and different mothers. This bonded the Wayleses and the Jeffersons and the Hemingses in an infernal blood tie which still ruled Monticello, for eventually Elizabeth's dark Hemingses became my father's property as well, and my grandmother, who had raised his white wife, his housekeeper.

The twelve Hemings children all married, reproduced, and remained as slaves at Monticello. I had two favorite cousins, one the daughter of a light Hemings, Critta, and the other the daughter of a dark Hemings, Nance. Critta's daughter Dolly was as white as I, and Nance's Marie was as black as the ace of spades. But only my mother's children, Thenia and Harriet I, who had died in infancy, Thomas, Beverly, Madison, Eston, and myself, had been promised freedom at twenty-one. The rest of my family remained slaves and children of slaves.

Petit removed his hat, and revealed a matted halo of hair around a bald spot. As I leaned forward, I caught the odor of lavender, fresh bread, and wine. His strongly accented voice was alarmingly loud in the quiet of the moving vehicle, and it broke not only that silence, but the silence of years and years. Adrian Petit spoke perfect English but with a heavy French accent that he cultivated, he confessed to me, to make himself more exotic. He was in a way as much a counterfeit as I was—a lackey, passing for an aristocrat.

“Ah, Harriet. If only I could explain. This could be a quarter of a century ago . . . this is the diligence that arrived with your mother and Maria, rumbling into that sunny courtyard.”

Petit, I calculated, had spent almost fifteen years as my father's majordomo. The five years in Paris must be added to the years he had spent at Monticello when he rejoined my father's service, and the years he had served him in Philadelphia and at the White House. Petit was a walking gold mine of information!

I found myself thinking of Petit's fortune. He was a relatively rich man— at least richer at the moment than my debt-ridden father—who, in a strange
reversal of roles not unlike my own, found himself in the position to judge his ex-master.

“Your father seems to think that the greatest privilege an American can have is to be born white.”

During that night as we rumbled across the Maryland state line, Petit took me back to the days of the French Revolution, days when my mother had discovered she was free on French soil. It had not only been my uncle James, but also Petit, who had slowly led my mother through the intricacies of Parisian life and the manner in which it was lived. And there had been others: Mr. Perrault, who taught her French; Lucy, who taught her sewing; Madame Dupré, who taught her fashion; and my father, who taught her love.