The President's Daughter (65 page)

Indeed, as I gazed at my Christmas candles, I realized the defeat of the South and very old enemies was a matter of months if not weeks. General Thomas's Army of the Cumberland, including an entire Negro division, had annihilated the Army of Tennessee at Nashville and was now chasing the remnants of the Rebel army back to Mississippi. The war had killed one-quarter of all the Confederacy's white men of military age. It had killed two-fifths of southern livestock, ruined ten thousand miles of railroads, and destroyed forever the labor system on which southern riches depended. Two-thirds of southern wealth had vanished in the wair—it had simply strolled away, as I had done forty years ago.

“Play something, Grandma!” I looked down at three-year-old Roxanne. Her eyes danced in the reflected light of the lighted tree. I picked her up in
my arms, a warm, living bundle of my flesh, and carried her over to the piano. There would be no romping mazurkas, or lilting waltzes or polonaises tonight. No Wagner or Beethoven, or Verdi transcriptions. I played “Tenting on the Old Campgrounds” as a dirge and “When This Cruel War Is Over” as a lullaby. I played “Bear This Gently to My Mother” for Beverly and “I Would the War Were Over” for James and “Tell Me, Is My Father Coming Back?” for myself.

Because I knew she was dying, and because I had never told anyone I loved who I was, I told Charlotte. My Christmas gift to her was the trust I had denied her all these years. What else could I give her except the gift of my black soul?

“I know.” Charlotte gently interrupted the end of my recital.

“You
know
”

“Thance wrote to me from Africa; his letter arrived after his death. Thance's secrets have always been my province, ever since Thor's accident. On the voyage of the
Rachel,
Abe Boss inadvertently let it be known that Thenia was your niece. Of course, Thance didn't know who your father was.

“And you do?”

“Yes. I met your cousin Ellen Wayles Coolidge in Boston through Sarah Hale. She and her husband fled the South when Virginia joined the Confederacy.”

“Don't tell me Ellen is opposed to slavery!”

“No. She's opposed secession from the Union. She loves the South. The stories she told me about her childhood at Monticello were the same stories you told me about
yours.
Was not her grandfather your father? She told me there were ‘yellow children' at Monticello who were allowed to run away. It was common knowledge. Their name was Hemings. She confessed that when she was a child, she often envied you your freedom to run wild and do what you wanted while she was forced to act out a role and comply with all the conditions and expectations of her sex and her class. She always believed you went to Washington City. You know her son Sidney was killed in ‘63 fighting for the Union at Chattanooga. And his brother Algernon is a Union surgeon . . . like Beverly.”

I squinted hard against the light, which seemed to be streaming into the room from all directions. Like a white miasma, it surrounded me. Even my soul squinted. My arm rose as if I were drowning in the undertow of a thousand unspoken years. Too late.

By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe this story, and not a few who know it.

“And Thor knows?” My overtaxed heart accelerated.

“If he does,” Charlotte said firmly, “I didn't tell him.”

“Forgive me,” I begged.

“There's nothing to forgive.” She turned her head away then. “I understand the color line doesn't stop even at the grave. Still, I've waited for the grave to hear you tell me. All these years.”

I cried out then. I had broken her heart with my secrecy and lies, my mistrust and cruelty. And mine broke in return. I had no safe harbor now, not even my children. I was a stranger to them.

Charlotte died shortly after that, her hand in mine, of an overdose of morphine. She begged me to help her, and I raided my own storeroom for the lethal dose.

I was as mute in life as she was in death. No sound of the human voice could express the pain I felt. My grief for Charlotte was as boundless, immense, and inconsolable as hunger, anguish, and the sea. My lack of trust in her solely because of her color haunted me, and stung me, because she died believing she had never understood me, and that was a lie.

I bathed Charlotte's body and draped the furniture in white silk, then filled the room with hothouse flowers. Even though their life insulted her death, I filled every vase with them and stood them on every surface I could find. Only then did I open the door for Andrew and her children.

I, Charlotte Waverly Nevell, white American matron, age sixty, wife of Andrew Nevell of Nevellville, mother of four children (none deceased), member of the Sanitary Commission Nursing Corps which served at Gettysburg, do swear I always knew Harriet's real name and never saw in her anything but what she was, and I loved her for what I saw. I detest Lorenzo Fitzgerald's idea that the accident of birth is irrevocable—an uncrossable frontier. No frontier for an American is uncrossable, including the so-called color line, and no person in the United States is an alien because of his color. I made Harriet's fears my fears, her loves my loves, her
desires my desires, because I choose, of my own free will, to love Harriet as my own kind—womankind—humankind. I waited almost fifty years for Harriet to tell me her secret—to trust me and love me as much as I trusted and loved her. I know Harriet considered me unfit for revolutionary love. In her mind, I was too weak, too sheltered as a white woman to assume her identity. By protecting me, by sheltering me with her own body from a fact of life she considered too dangerous for me, she, too, practiced a kind of racism against my color. I should have been Thenia. I wished many times that I had been Thenia. You say perhaps it is I who should have taken the first step and told her what I knew, but what if I had lost her over this? What if the despicable and insignificant fact of my whiteness had been enough to drive her away, separate her from me forever, if she had known that I knew? What strange people we are . . . willing to live sequestered from a person who might be our heart's desire, because of a label, a taboo, a stigma, a fear we ourselves invented.
Since I have wronged you, I can never like you.
What Harriet and I had together, no one can destroy. I refuse dying as I refused living, to segregate myself from her, from my better half, simply for the sake of my country. Love is stronger than race, passion is stronger than race, esteem is stronger than race, even Race is stronger than race. Nothing can do all for us that we expect race to do. Love songs are scarce and fall into two categories; the frivolous and light and the sad. Of deep successful love, there is only silence. My soul is rested. May God rest Harriet's. Amen.

I died this day of December thirty-first, 1864, in the arms of Harriet Hemings

CHARLOTTE WAVERLY NEVELL

On the last day of January of the last year of the war, the House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery by a vote of 119 to 56.

“The rebellion is not over yet, although slavery is,” reported Robert Purvis, sitting in my office at the Wellington Drug Company, drinking Wellington imported tea and holding little Roxanne on his knee. He was accompanied by Jean Pierre Burr. I studied Mr. Burr, the natural son of Aaron Burr and a Haitian freedwoman called Eugenia Bearharni. Jean Pierre was a founder of the Moral Reform Society, a member of the Banneker Institute, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and the fair spitting image of his famous father.

Purvis himself was now the son-in-law of a rich Philadelphia sailmaker, James Felton, mulatto half brother of the famous abolitionists, the Grimké sisters.

Not long ago, Purvis had confided in me that for the past twenty years many natural children of mixed blood had been sent from the South, and in a few cases their parents had followed and had been legally married here. Descendants of such children, he said, in many instances forsook their mother's race; one had become principal of a city school, one a prominent sister in a Catholic church, one a bishop, and two, officers in the Confederate Army.

“There exists,” said Robert, “a penal law, deeply written in the
minds
of the whole white population; which subjects their colored fellow citizens to unconditional, unwarranted, and never-ceasing insult. No respectability, however unquestionable; no property, however large; no character, however unblemished will gain a man whose body is cursed with even a thirty-second portion of the blood of his African ancestry admission into their society.

“Why, Harriet? Why this ever-present obscene obsession with the color of a human being's skin? Why this
irrational fear
of color? This unsubstantiated horror of blackness? Is this repugnance learned or innate? Based on philosophy, science, or morals? On the Bible and scriptures? On ancient knowledge or ancient ignorance? Edmund Burke, in
On the Sublime and Beautiful,
says that, though the effects of Black be painful originally, we must not think they always continue so. Custom, he says, reconciles us to everything. After we have been used to seeing black objects, the terror abates, and the smoothness, the beauty, or some agreeable accident of bodies so colored softens the sterness of their original nature. Black has been with us from the very beginning, but fanaticism against it has never abated one iota, never. Burke ends by saying black will always have something melancholy about it, but is this metaphysic or literary in our country? Why is it that the worst
thing that can happen to an American is to be born
not
white? Because it means to be thrust out of all identity and recognition, to become a negation of everything America has appropriated as her banner—purity, power, whiteness. And so everything she does—rape, exploit, commit violence and war—she transfers to those dark subjects she so abhors. Yet this war proves that we are the center, the very center, of her soul, her history, her dream, her nightmare, her fantasies, her past, and her future. This war, Harriet, is the very watershed of American identity, and black people, we domestic aliens, are its very incunabula—the black, black soul of the United States. I marvel at how you cannot see it. You white people with all your knowledge, logic, money, morals, and enlightenment cannot see it.”

“I see it, Robert. Perhaps our very negation is a kind of recognition.”

“And you want to hear something else funny?” he continued. “Robert E. Lee has asked Jefferson Davis to draft two hundred thousand Negroes into the Confederate Army! We, who are manifestly and confessedly the cause of the war, are now the hope of both Union and the Seceshes!”

The war finally came to an end with the surrender of Richmond. There, amid the confusion and consternation, the disorder, the panic, and the flames, only the colored population stood still, waiting, as Lincoln entered the conquered city escorted by units from the Twenty-fifth Corps and with ten Negro sailors as bodyguards, only forty hours after Jefferson Davis had evacuated his White House. Thor, on behalf of the Sanitary Commission, went with him. The tall, silk-hatted emancipator found himself surrounded by a cordon of black people shouting and crying, “Glory, Glory to God. Father Abraham. The day of Jubilee is arrived!” Overwhelmed, the President pleaded with his fellow citizens not to prostrate themselves: “Don't kneel to me,” he said. “That is not right. One must only kneel to God and thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The air burned blue with the nine-hundred-gun salute the Union Army gave to celebrate its victory.

Thor had written for me to join him, and in Richmond, I felt an obsessive longing to see Monticello, even in smoldering ruins. Perhaps I could find my brother Thomas. Perhaps I wanted to crow over my prostrate white family huddled together at Edgehill. I felt as an old war veteran might feel—I wanted to go home even if it wasn't there anymore. I wanted to end my incessant war with myself and my life. Peace was something I could achieve only by going back to the beginning, even if it meant deceiving Thor once more.

With the excuse of joining Thenia, I left Thor with the President and set
out on the road to Monticello on the fourteenth of April, Good Friday, five days after the Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse the day after my father's birthday. My buckboard and driver fought the clogged roads leading out of Richmond, which were filled with refugees, black and white, all desperately searching for someone or something lost. Until at last, I stood arm-in-arm with Thenia at the top of the knoll on which stood the log cabin of my mother. I had been compelled by all I lived for to return to Albemarle County and the past, a displaced southerner, a domestic alien, a white Negro come home, the fourteenth of April 1865.

For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another: lock up the faculties of his nature . . . contribute to the evanishment of the human race. …

Thomas Jefferson

April fourteenth, 1865. Everybody remembered where they were that Good Friday, for the rest of their lives.

I had traveled up from Fort Monroe, where I was still teaching contrabands to read, to join Harriet at Monticello. Standing beside her, I stared at the empty, decaying gray facade. Burwell's paint had peeled off, Joe Fossett's iron balconies were rusted and crumbling. John Hemings's shingles were warped or missing. It no longer belonged to Thomas Jefferson or any of his heirs. I couldn't believe that I, Thenia Boss, a free woman, was standing before the crumbling, decaying ruins of my former prison, Monticello. Evil rose around it like a miasma. My entrails cramped and the old forgotten terror of the sale drew over me, as if all this time it had lain dormant in my soul without ever diminishing in size or sound or grief.