The President's Daughter (69 page)

“Grandpa, ain't it a bit early for you to be riding abroad? Mornin' mist ain't cleared yet—that dampness'll get into your chest.”

“I was just gathering some herbs for Ellen to steam.”

“Well, Mama's got your breakfast ready, so ride on in before you catch your death.”

“Lord, Frederick, my death has already been caught.”

There are two things I have always regretted—that my path never crossed that of my white cousins during the war so I could have killed one, and that I never got to shake the hand of Abraham Lincoln.

I the undersigned, Madison Hemings, colored male, American citizen, born in Virginia in 1805, the last year of my father's first term, widowed father of ten (three deceased) with the occupation of farmer in the town of Pee Wee, Pike County, Ohio, do affirm that I am the President's son and this is an accurate
account of my birth and the evil, historic, pathetic, amazing, passionate, and silent relationship between the Hemingses, the Wayleses, the Jeffersons, and the Randolphs. God will take care of the Wellingtons.

MADISON HEMINGS

•The Centennial •

• Blackmail •

• The Statue of Liberty •

• Revolt •

• The Return of the Colored Lady •

• A Guilty Secret in a Camera Obscura •

•White Mittens •

•The End of All.•

I am of a sect by myself.

Thomas Jefferson

On the morning of the Centennial celebration, May 19, 1876, I stood at the top of the stairs of my mansion at Anamacora fingering a newspaper article deep in my skirt. Every old fear I had cast away in all these years had returned. I was being blackmailed. There was a Callender who had betrayed me. There was a Sykes who stalked me once again. Except this time I didn't know who.

“Grandmother!” Roxanne's silvery voice spirited up the stairs. “The least you can do is come down and read your telegrams before we leave for the fair! They have been arriving all morning. You haven't even glanced at all your presents. You would think today wasn't your birthday. Why, there's even a bouquet of roses from the President!”

The dancing sunlight on the river's surface streaming through the bull's-eye window on the landing hurt my eyes. Time glared at me as I started stiffly down the stairs. The giant calendar upon which I wrote my agenda every day now that my eyesight had faded had a large cross over today, the nineteenth of May 1876. My seventy-fifth birthday had coincided with the Philadelphia Centennial celebrations.

I had taken a great deal of care with my toilet this day. The great mass of red and white hair was pulled back into a halo with a fine crocheted net. My ears were adorned with a pair of splendid, square-cut diamond earrings. My tall, heavy-boned body was encased from neck to ankle in royal blue taffeta. It fell over my voluminous skirts, was drawn back into an old-fashioned
bustle, and hung over tempered steel and crinoline, forming a train that dragged behind me like my years. The article in my pocket was already brown from my folding and unfolding it, and as I clutched it once more, my hand came into contact for a moment with the steel blade of James's stiletto. It had become a joke with my grandchildren. “Grandma's dagger, Grandma's dagger,” they would chant. And I would reply, “No—
poignard,
“ and then they would repeat, “Grandma's
poignard,
Grandma's
poignard.”
Only little Roxanne had once had the audacity to ask me why I carried a weapon, and I told her it was to cut my flowers. She then wanted to know why her grandmother did not carry garden shears like everybody else. I told her that I was not like everybody else and had never been.

My head swam with dates that spanned three-quarters of a century and all that had happened even before I was born: 1776, 1779, 1800, 1808, 1861, 1865. Everything was present. And now this whole carefully enunciated life, as intricate as a Bach fugue, was in jeopardy. I fingered the newspaper clipping, which someone had sent anonymously and which had arrived this morning amongst my birthday greetings. In it a black man had revealed both his identity and mine: “I never knew of but one white man who bore the name of Thomas Jefferson. He was my father and President of the United States.”

Furtively I glanced at myself in the tall gilt mirror in the stairwell. The pale, slightly freckled skin was now as transparent as foolscap. The raging vermilion of my thick wavy hair was halved with white flax. The emerald eyes had dimmed. I no longer had the graceful gait of my youth, but I tried not to favor my aching hip by limping. For years I had fought against the dawning awareness of the uncertainty of my step, my mood changes, the gaps in my memory, and my new habit of waking myself up with my own sobs. I refused to consider the evidences of senility. On the contrary, I ignored them in the most pugilistic way, running upstairs, staying up late, eating whatever I chose, smoking cigars, and drinking wine. I had long ago rejected the refuge of the laudanum, cocaine, and other narcotics that my women friends—those who were not dead—took comfort in. I was old enough to fear pity more than apoplexy.

I smiled to myself. Hypocrisy, ignorance, and blind self-satisfaction had always been on my side, just as they were today. That and silence. Silence had kept me alive and in this world, just as it had my mother. Slaves had always revealed as little as possible about their origins to their children. It was an old trick. Not to speak was not to put into words the hopelessness of having no future and no past. I slipped the article from the
Pike County Gazette
out of my pocket. I didn't have to read it; I had memorized it.

My mother was
enciente
when she returned from Paris. He always treated us children well . . .

Harriet married a man in good standing in Philadelphia, whose name I could give but will not, for prudential reasons. She raised a family of children, and so far as I know, they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived, or lives. I have not heard from her for ten years, and do not know if she is dead or alive. She thought it in her interest, on leaving Virginia, to assume the role of a white woman, and by her dress and conduct as such, I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.

The article had been written by Madison Hemings.

He had broken his silence and someone knew. I racked my brain trying to guess who in my entourage knew that the Harriet Hemings of the article and Harriet Wellington were the same. Lorenzo, the mapmaker who had turned up on Sinclair's gunboat eleven years ago? Sarah Hale? I had never forgotten the look on her face when she handed me
Clotel, or the President's Daughter.
My white cousin Ellen Randolph Coolidge, who had sat out the war in Boston and knew Sarah? Maurice Meillasoux, who might have been told by Adrian years ago? It could be Madison himself, although from the article Madison believed both Eston and I were dead. Or could it be my “biographer” himself, William Wells Brown, whom I had met face-to-face several times at Emily's receptions, once with Frederick Douglass himself. My children? Had someone sent them the article and they had passed it on to me? Then there was Thor. Had Adrian betrayed me to Thance, who had then confided in his brother? The names and faces, both dead and alive, turned themselves over in my mind like a threshing machine. It was as if every character, every personage in my individual history were arraigned before a stern tribunal to explain themselves and be acquitted or condemned according to whether they intercoursed with progress or reaction. Perhaps my silent enemy would be under my roof in a few hours. Was I to have an accusing finger pointed at me—after all these years—in front of my grand-children?

I looked back into the mirror. What was the meaning of this white face?
I took hold of the banister, ignoring the ache in my hip, the pain in my head, and the
Pike County Gazette
article in my pocket. I drew my breath in, like someone plunging into the ocean, as I descended, leaving a trail of personal dread and the breath of disaster behind me.

Deception takes on a life of its own, I mused. It is independent of your will or actions. It can make every other fact of life, even love, disappear. And now, according to someone, we all had to pay the price. Every single penny of it. And you Roxanne will pay the biggest price: learning that you can't take your whiteness for granted, that you are living the Great American Nightmare: a drop of black blood in your veins, the one drop that, by law and usage, pollutes you and your whole life. Rosanne existed in a reality I was no longer sure of. Was she really mine?

I had vowed I would never be like my mother, but was I so far from her? I saw her in my mind's eye, even now, existing on the frontiers between Monticello and a slave cabin, between power and obscurity, between history and oblivion: the distance between the race that ruled and the other that obeyed. I had always refused to obey. I had always refused to choose between my selfhood and my race. It is the same thin line I've walked all my life. I walked it as I walk down these stairs, having crossed it fifty-four years ago with the blessings of the woman I vowed never to imitate.

My doctors tell me I am dying. Either I will die without letting anyone I've ever loved know who I am, or I will honor my father and my mother and risk my family's everlasting damnation.

Roxanne, in a final irony, was the image of her unknown great-grandmother: she had her build, she had her matte skin and she had her famous amber eyes. She too wore her dark hair pulled back into a long braid, which hung down her back like a bell cord. And sometimes I noticed that her eyelids would slide like shades over her yellow eyes in exactly the same way my mother's had, flattening her pale oval face into a mask of polished ivory. Roxanne had the same deep dimples on each side of her mouth, the same round column of neck, the same heavy bosom. Roxanne's eyes even had that same question in them that Sally Hemings had carried in hers.

“Grandmother!” she cried again. “We're ready for the photograph!” The photographer had already set up his camera. My family was assembled in the foyer under the bust of Thomas Jefferson and my mother's pendulum clock.

Long, long ago I had dreamed of this birthday, surrounded by my descendants. And hadn't it come true? Around my neck hung my brother's portrait; in my left pocket was James's dagger, in my right, Madison's memoirs. At the foot of the stairs assembled my white people. I studied the handsome, placid faces around me.

I wondered how they would feel if they knew that their grandmother was not what she seemed—not the serene Philadelphia matriarch, the “Duchess of Anamacora,” but an ex-slave, legally emancipated only eleven years ago by her duped sons and husband. Would any of them accept the idea that they were the President's grandchildren at the price of admitting that they had that one drop of blood that made them black, in law and fiction?

Thor had not changed at all since the war. His hair was still as dark as it was gray, as if each strand of white had been carefully weighed and balanced with a dark one to produce a perfect blend of salt and pepper. He wore his thick hair Western-style, old-fashioned, long and tied in a queue instead of cropped short with sideburns. His face was not so much lined as reshaped with deep ravines and crevices and high plains and summits that had turned his classical features into modified American Indian. But the dark, liquid eyes with their heavy black lashes and the violin
f
-shaped eyebrows which almost grew together had remained the same. Only I knew that Thor had come back from the war addicted to opium. I had hid this from everyone. He had spent a hellish ten and a half years battling his habit, which he had confessed to me only a year ago. The butchery, the horrors, and the unrelenting exhaustion of the war that had provoked his plunge into narcotics haunted him even now. I knew that the easy access to morphine that he enjoyed as a pharmacist had done nothing to deter his monthly visits to opium dens in Philadelphia's Chinatown. His habit had damaged neither his career, his reputation, which was at its zenith, nor his home life, but the secret hung heavily between us.

My grandmother's pendulum clock struck the sixth chime of 9:00
A.M
. I took a deep breath. My dream's fabric was tearproof, and nowhere could the finespun be rent unless I chose to do it myself. Madison's memoirs ticked like a time bomb deep in my skirt pocket. How could I find a way of reconciling Mrs. Harriet Wellington of Anamacora with an obscure memoir that ended, “We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born.”

I imagined today's grandstands. On the podium, along with the local Philadelphia dignitaries, my husband amongst them, would be the President of the United States and Mrs. Grant, the Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Butler, Senators Gale and Biddle, and Don Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, the only civilized country in the world that still tolerated chattel slavery. As a member of the ladies' auxiliary committee of the Centennial, I had worked for more than a year with my society friends on the Women's Pavilion. I had seen on the list of exhibitors the name of a certain Eston H. Jefferson of Ohio, president of the Jefferson Screw and Piston Company. How many could there be in the world? He had applied to exhibit the steam engines and the steam
pistons that had made him a fortune during the war. I wondered if he had received the ambiguous invitation to my party that I had addressed to “Mr. Jefferson.”

I imagined the wide, unpaved concourse leading toward the cast-iron-and-glass building which rose from its carpet of green, reflecting the landscape like a kaleidoscope. Its ten thousand panes of cut glass shimmering like a lagoon of diamonds, two thousand feet in length and five hundred in width. Machinery Hall rose over seventy feet, all iron ribs and transparency. In it I had seen the immense Corliss Engine, the wonder of the exhibition. Vying with the Corliss Engine was Alexander Graham Bell's new telephone. Thomas Alva Edison exhibited the Quadruplex telegraph; George Westinghouse exhibited his air brake; George Pullman showed off the Pullman Palace Car.