The President's Daughter (9 page)

“I'm too old to have a predicament,” he had said when I had commiserated with him. “At this stage in my life, Petit, I am only allowed a ‘situation.' My predicament, like my life itself, is a long way behind me. And that was that I loved two sisters, one white and one black, one my better half and the other my slave, one my wife and the other my sister-in-law, to my everlasting despair.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Despair, Petit. Like praying to Jesus Christ from the same rock of Abraham that Mohammed ascended into heaven from.

“When I look over the ranks of those whom I have loved, it is like looking over a battlefield. All fallen . . . away,” the small voice had said.

“There are few men I could trust with this.”

There are few men, I thought, who would understand why such a thing was necessary. “Consider this my last duty to you as the majordomo of the Hôtel de Langeac.”

“L'Hôtel de Langeac. Promises go back a long time, don't they?”

I, too, I thought, have obligations and promises to keep, have ghosts from the past to assuage. All because of the Mother. And that sunlit Parisian courtyard.

“I have seen her, Your Excellency,” I said, finally. “How can you bear to part with her?”

“Because I always lose everything I love. I've always lost everything I've loved.

“Oh God,” a half-sob, half-groan exploded out of the looming, shadowy figure, now caught in the delitescence of his own ominous mountain, “since she is white enough to pass for white, then let her be white.”

Thomas Jefferson turned away from me then, almost eagerly. From the cluttered desk he drew out an oversized ledger bound in red leather, which I recognized as his farm book. The turning of the pages, his heavy old man's breathing, and the fluttering sigh of a lighter more breathless beating, which could have been my heart or the hearts of the Mother and Daughter just beyond the door, were the only sounds in the room. The President found
what he was looking for, as he absently massaged his crippled wrist, holding it close to him like a gift. Then he wrote her name with his left hand, laboriously and deliberately in his fine, clever calligraphy:
Harriet. Sally's. Run. '22.

I had good reason to wonder at the strange ways of Virginians. They had their own world, and in a sense I had been excluded from it by caste and color, something I realized at Monticello the day of James's emancipation, Christmas Day, 1795.

Sally Hemings had been holding an infant in her arms that Christmas afternoon. That child symbolized her lost dream of Paris: its happiness and promise, of which she no longer spoke. As if she sensed what I was thinking, our eyes met. Affection? Pity? Horror at this Monticellian “family” with all the inhabitants and servants of the big house circled around the tree? I didn't know what to think. I had never understood the “crime” of miscegenation up until that moment. I shrugged and, with a wry smile, looked slowly to my right, following the circle from dark to light, from slave to free, from cradle to old age. So intricate and so intimate were all those different shades of color, caste, and blood that I flushed with embarrassment. It was the most naively promiscuous assembly I had ever attended. There was no way that these intertwined families could unravel or disengage themselves from all the unspoken obligations that I felt emanating from each in one resounding, melodious chord.

The Mother stood next to my beloved James, holding Martha's first Ellen in her arms, the five-year-old Thomas Hemings clutching her skirts. Spreading in a circle were nine of his eleven aunts and uncles, five of them fathered by John Wayles and the others by a slave, including Martin the majordomo. Sally Hemings was either daughter, stepdaughter, sister, half sister, aunt, niece, or half sister-in-law to practically everyone present.

The white side of the circle consisted of two of her white half sisters, Tabitha Wayles Skipwell and Elizabeth Wayles Eppes. There were Polly Jefferson, and her fiancé Jack Eppes, her cousin, and Martha, already married to Thomas Mann Randolph, who stood next to her. Then came James Madison, small, birdlike, insignificant, and his unexpected prize, the widow Dolly Todd, whom he had captured from the attentions of Aaron Burr and who, as Dolly Madison, would have a resplendent career as First Lady. Next to Dolly stood George Wythe and his mulatto son, Michael Brown.

I winked at my black equivalent, Martin, one in the net of blood ties that

wove itself in and across and around the two parts of the circle, binding one half to the other in arabesques as twisted and complicated as the hanging strands of silver on the tree.

Then I, the indomitable and imperturbable Petit, joined the circle, unwittingly attaching the white half of the circle around the Christmas tree to the black half. It was at that moment that Thomas Jefferson offered James Hemings the manumission James had extracted in writing from him in Paris.

Watching those faces at that moment, I finally understood those convoluted family ties so completely that I could calmly sit there facing a weeping fugitive named Harriet Hemings II, who was not even an idea that Christmas Day, and contemplate offering her my name and my fortune. I felt suddenly as if I were perched backwards on a galloping horse going backwards, far back. The anger at what I was doing drifted away into vague anxiety. I faced the splendid girl with eyes of bottle glass.

I could not interrupt her solitude; I seemed to have lived this before: It was in this damned lilac phaeton again after all these years.

The passports with the king's signature had been delivered. Thomas Jefferson, his two daughters, and his two servants were going home.
I had packed up this phaeton myself for the trip back to Virginia. It had stood in solitary splendor in the bustling courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeac while I tried to cope with eighty-two crates of Jefferson's baggage and a slave boy's grief. I shrugged as I had that day, dreading the next image, which I knew would be of James Hemings in his shirtsleeves. He had been busily supervising the closing of the wine crates, making sure that no bottles found their way out of the crates and into the workmen's smocks. There were dark sweat spots on his back and under his arms. His hair was plastered to his forehead as he struggled with the crates and trunks piling up in the courtyard. We were not the only ones in a paroxysm of flight. The fall of the Bastille had been the signal for the first great exodus of aristocrats toward England, Belgium, and America. And James and Sally Hemings, now pregnant, were returning with their master to Virginia and slavery.

I wonder if I was right to have blurted out so much of the past and private life of Thomas Jefferson to his Daughter on that long trip to Philadelphia. A lot of what I said must have shocked or hurt her, yet I forged ahead, determined to justify my role in her parents' secret life. All through it she remained silent, determined, unfathomable.

I rambled on and on, and despair in the guise of Harriet continued to sit facing me, dressed in a yellow plaid redingote surrounded by green velvet, the basket with her ironic black-and-white spotted Dalmatian puppy at her feet. She reminded me so much of my beloved James. There was the same
defiance, the same vulnerability, the same prodigious courage in the face of annihilation. Yes.
Annihilation
is a good word. A better one I can't find.

Had I simply assumed that, being an ex-slave, she had more resilience than a white girl of the same age? Did I think Harriet was stronger or wiser being black? Did her one-eighth of Negro blood count for everything and her seven-eighths of white blood count for nothing? Could blackness be that potent, or had the President simply made it all up in that letter to Mr. Gray?

I the undersigned, Hugues Petit, my real name, alias Adrian Petit, my “historical” name of Reims, age fifty-eight, caterer and ex-majordomo of His Excellency, President Thomas Jefferson in Paris, France, ex-overseer of his plantation Monticello from 1794 to 1796, ex-butler to the President at the White House, Washington, from 1800 to 1802, did escort his natural daughter Harriet Hemings from Monticello to Philadelphia, where she disappeared into the white population. Adrian Petit de Reims, in the carriage to Philadelphia, May 19th, 1822.

HUGHES PETIT

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

Thomas Jefferson

Philadelphia! I laughed as I stepped from the phaeton onto Market Street Square and was drawn into the hurly-burly of people of more colors than I had ever seen in my life. These were to be the people that I, Harriet Hemings, the dancer and the ballet master, would have to conquer. Around me swirled a host of horse-drawn vehicles, farmers' wagons, vegetable carts, live animals, and mounted police. When I looked around at the busy, hard-faced crowd, I realized that no one had noticed my arrival.

I looked up at Burwell and Fossett, still seated in the driver's seat of the phaeton. They had been to Philadelphia countless times, and I imagined that countless times they had had the chance to slip away and disappear into the throngs of people that surged back and forth across the red brick square. Why hadn't they done it? Why hadn't my mother escaped when she had disembarked in London, a far greater city than Philadelphia? Then I realized that Burwell and Fossett were as much prisoners in Philadelphia as if they had had chains on their hands and a padlock on their boots. Their whole family was held hostage at Monticello. Burwell had left his wife, my aunt Betty, and his children; Fossett was married to Edy, and their children Simpson, Martin, Beth, and Robert belonged to my father. Fossett could no more leave them than leave his eyes or his legs. Our eyes met in silent comprehension as Fossett's arms swept me into an embrace that lasted only a second, but was long enough for me to breathe in his dusty smell and feel the power of his accelerated heart.

“You free now, gal. Never lower that head. Look everyone in the eye. There's no need to be afraid. There's no slave catchers looking for you ‘cause I would know if they were. Besides, you're sent here by your father, as a white girl. If you ever see me on the street, you don't have to speak. People in Philadelphia will think it strange for a white girl to speak to a Negro unless he works for her.”

“I saw you come into a world of slavery, Harriet,” added Burwell, “and now I've taken you out of that world. Rejoice and be reborn; that's what God had in mind for you.”

I understood that it was not fear nor search for freedom that had driven me out of the Negro race. I knew it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being part of a race of people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals.

“Is that what he really had in mind for me, a lie?” I whispered.

“A white lie,” Burwell answered with a grin and a thunderous explosion of laughter that made people stop and turn their heads. That was the moment I saw an unforgettable lady of color come toward me as if she knew me. I stood petrified. Of course she recognized me! How could she not? I was as black as she was, wasn't I? She had on a wide straw hat trimmed with pink King George roses and green ribbons and lace. She was dressed all in deep bottle green striped with black, and her wide skirts were pulled back into a gigantic bustle, which fell in a train and gave her the look of the gentry. She held a matching umbrella over her head, and she navigated the busy square like a superb and stately ship that slipped past me in serene magnificence, so close I could have touched her but I didn't dare. The crowd around her faded and the noise ceased and the lady of color and I were alone in the square. She smiled in recognition and then shook her head in regret, her eyes inspecting me from head to toe, first in friendly curiosity and then with frigid horror. I tried to speak but found that as in a dream I could not. I reached out, hoping to touch her, but the world reappeared and the lady sailed by me with no hint of recognition. In confusion I turned toward Petit. He took my arm and led me across the huge mall toward the big green-and-gold letters of a tall, imposing building.

I gathered my courage and walked the gauntlet straight across the square to Brown's Hotel, my step elastic, my chin high, a slight smile on my face. Didn't I look like a young girl just out of school or a convent, hardly rich, but gently reared? Hadn't the waiter held the door as we entered, just as my knees gave way and Petit squeezed my arm? The image of the colored lady would haunt me for the rest of my life.

It was at Brown's Hotel on Market Street Square that I consumed my first
meal as a free woman. Spring vegetable soup, radishes and butter and fresh sardines, deep-fried hake, lamb chops and new potatoes sautéed in butter, poached eggs in puree of collard greens, shrimps in batter, dried fruit, sugared fruit and pineapple spring strawberries, and champagne Moèt. I memorized the menu like music. The savory words danced to the sound of Petit's running commentary. Did I know, Petit asked, benign larceny had assured the fate of the humble potato? In order for potatoes to be accepted as a vegetable, King Louis XVI had a potato field planted in the center of Paris, then surrounded it with his republican guards as a ploy to get Parisians to steal them. Or did I realize that pineapples came from Peru? Or how truffle was loved for its taste and its characteristic as an aphrodisiac? What? Didn't I know Aphrodite was the goddess of love? Or that a meal without cheese was like a beautiful woman missing an eye . . .

I glanced at my own reflection in the restaurant mirrors. Even sitting I was tall, taller than many men. My bright green eyes and my auburn braid reflected back: I saw a dreamy, remote girl, somewhat countrified against this opulent crowd. Nevertheless, I could hold my own. I tilted my head, turned my gaze on Petit, and laughed at his story.

During that long carriage ride, he had told me so much about his life in Paris with Mama and Uncle James that I felt I was his confidante.