Arc D'X (7 page)

On the other hand, some small more intimate treachery on the part of the King of France might well have saved his head. ... He needed a slave of his own. He needed some black vessel to receive the blackness in his heart and soul and leave him strong enough for the right and good. He needed to commit some trivial duplicity, betraying his vain, viperous little Austrian queen; in so identifying the part of him that cried for redemption he might have redeemed his country if not his throne. Now his blood bubbles up with all the rest, and so does his queen's.

One should not make the rash promises of one's ideals before so many witnesses. I told her I would never marry another. Perhaps I wouldn't have anyway. Perhaps I said that not so as to ease her passage into death but to deliver myself to the forbidden that I had denied myself so long even as I hungered for it. In a year I'll be fifty. I passed some time ago that point where I was closer to the end than to the beginning. I spent all the years up to that point as the slave of my head's convictions rather than my heart's passions, and never felt as alive as the first night I took her. Never felt as alive as those moments when I knew I'd done something that could A R C D'X ' 46

never be forgiven. In the nights that have passed since, I accepted such moments not as the crimes that contradicted what I believed in but as the passionate chaos that justified and liberated the god of reason living within me. I've asked myself whether I love Sally.

I believe I have come to love her, even if it's not the way I loved my wife. Sally was the woman who was there when I was closer to the end than the beginning, when I wasn't so willing to surrender my moments only to my convictions. Surrendering to passion, I came to believe my convictions not less, but more.

When I was young, the state of Virginia did not allow a man to free his own slaves. Such was the bond between the slave and the man who owned her. Such was the state that would not loosen such a bond. At the age of twenty-five I offered to the state a law that would allow a man to free his slaves, freeing not only the slave but the man who owned her. The state was outraged. Twenty years later I took her in the Paris night and cannot free myself from it: such is the bond between us. And no law will set me free of the thing I own, the thing that possesses me in return.

I believe in time the black one may be whole. The state hates me for saying so.

I've invented something. As the germ of conception in my head it was the best and wildest and most elusive of my inventions. It's a contraption halfcrazed by a love of justice, a machine oiled by fierce hostility to those who would ride the human race as though it were a dumb beast. I've set it loose gyrating across the world. It spins through villages, hamlets, towns, grand cities. It's a thing to be confronted every moment of every day by everyone who hears even its rumor: it will test most those who presume too glibly to believe in it. But I know it's a flawed thing, and I know the flaw is of me. Just as the white ink of my loins has fired the inspiration that made it, so the same ink is scrawled across the order of its extinction. The signature is my own. I've written its name. I've called it America.

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In the autumn of 1 7 8 9 Thomas left Paris with his daughters, valet, and mistress and set out for home. On the night they came within sight of the Virginia coast their ship caught fire and the entourage, with as many of their possessions as could be rescued, were loaded into small boats and rowed ashore. The ship burned behind them in the sea. On Christmas Day James drove their coach over the familiar hills of Thomas' plantation, which Thomas and Patsy and James hadn't seen in nearly seven years; and suddenly the horizon filled with the black faces of slaves rushing to welcome them. For the last mile the slaves followed the coach to the house, shouting at James and cheering when the carriage door opened and Thomas emerged, followed by the two daughters. But the commotion stopped still at the sight of the beautiful black slavegirl who took her master's hand to step from the coach, dressed in her fine European clothes. Without a word, staring straight ahead of her, Sally kissed her stunned mother and then vanished with Thomas into the house, as unmistakably pregnant as she was elegant.

The child died at birth. It was a small girl, who would have had the face of her mother and the firelike hair of her father. Over the next ten years Sally bore Thomas several children; it was the last, a son named Madison, who would later identify Thomas as his father, though Thomas' "legitimate" family—his daughters and their own children—were bound to deny it, as they would in fact deny that Sally was Thomas' mistress at all. They would have denied Sally's very existence if it had been possible to do so persua-sively. Thomas never acknowledged his children by Sally, nor did he treat them in any fashion differently from the way he treated the other slave children of the plantation. But as Madison grew older he would often, from a distance, be taken by visitors for Thomas himself; and later, as each child turned twenty-one, Thomas quietly fulfilled his agreement with Sally and gave them their freedom, at which point, one by one, they disappeared in the night, to reappear in other places and other lives.

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Her own identity, which she'd begun to construct so tentatively as a free woman in Paris, was now given back to the role of possession, without whose possessor life meant nothing. She did not completely forget the person she conspired to make in Paris, in the moments when she wouldn't thank him for a pair of gloves: now, when he returned from his travels, she'd thank him for such gifts by closing the bedroom door and dropping her dress from her shoulders. What life was solely hers she came to pass over the years making jewelry, which she'd store in a black wooden box with a rose carved on the top, or give to the other slaves who came to regard Sally with a nearly mystical awe. It didn't occur to her that this jewelry might have value. She made it for her own pleasure, often from the beads of Indians whom Thomas would sometimes take her to meet in the hills. Thomas had great respect for the Indians' resourcefulness and honor. Sometimes it seemed to her that he felt special kinship with the savagery of their existence and envied the harmony in which they lived with that savagery.

Sometimes, it seemed to her, he talked of them as though they were white. Sometimes he talked of them as though they were better than white. She noted this with wonder and rage.

She took charge of his bedchamber and the rest of the house, also as they'd agreed on the rue St-Antoine, the enormous fury of Thomas' daughters notwithstanding. She kept out of the sight of visitors to whatever extent was possible, though the visitors never stopped coming. Often they'd wait for Thomas in the parlor of the house, anxiously anticipating the appearance of the famous fiery philosopher-king while wondering with baffled alarm about the tall beggar who seemed to have wandered into the house from the woods outside and was now shuffling down the hall toward them in rags. The stories of Thomas' eccentricities and quiet outrages only grew with his fame, and inevitably became more frenzied during his campaign for political office. There were stories that he was broke and in debt, which were true. There were stories he hated the clergy, which were true, and God, which were not. There were stories he was going to ride at the head of a great slave army and lead a new revolution. And then, in the shadow of the Nineteenth Century that advanced at twilight across the Virginia hills, there were stories he kept a beautiful black woman in his bedroom. These became the currency of doggerel, newspaper articles STEVE E R I C K S O N • 49

and songs. With some variations, the name of the woman in these songs was always the same. Dashing Sally, Dusky Sally, Black Sally.

When Sally heard the stories she feared Thomas would send her away. She thought to confront him one night and ask what he was going to do with her, and to remind him of their contract that he never sell her; but she didn't have the courage and she was too afraid of what he might answer. She lay awake many nights wondering about what was going to happen to the children whom Thomas never acknowledged. Thomas, however, didn't send her away or sell her. He answered none of the charges made about Sally, either publicly or privately, and denied no rumors; the greater the controversy grew, the more his allies pressed him to answer and deny, the more his daughters now used this turn of events to try and banish Sally from their lives forever, the more he kept his silence. However he may have been haunted by the rape of Sally and the betrayal of his conscience, he would not compound these things by denying her.

One night, as she slept in his bed, the door opened and she turned and saw his silhouette in the light from the outer hall.

"Yes?" she asked.

"I'm elected" was all he said. Then he went to the window of their bedroom and sat in a chair in the dark, and was still there when she finally drifted back to sleep.

He was gone when she woke the next morning. She got up from the bed and drifted through the house, where the day had already begun; she was a little alarmed at how late she'd slept. "Have you seen Thomas?" she asked everyone, but no one had seen him at all. He didn't return in the afternoon or the evening.

He didn't return the next day, or the day after, or the following day. She stood on the porch late into the evening, staring out at the road and the wooded Virginia hills. The other members of the household watched her and whispered to each other. Visitors to the house were turned away with the news that Thomas wasn't home. The weeks passed, and then the months.

A year passed, and then another. Sally struggled to keep the plantation together but everything began to dissolve in the mists of ruin and decay. The walls of the house smeared like colors in a hot steam, and everyone at the plantation became more inert. One night she announced, "I'm going to find him." James loaded her a A R C D'X • 50

small wagon of supplies including food, blankets, the black box with the rose carved on top full of her jewelry, and the carving knife she'd wrapped in one ragged red Parisian glove. Leaving her children in the care of her mother, she set out with the wagon and two horses, down the road she'd watched so many evenings waiting for his return.

For a brief moment it occurred to her perhaps he'd returned to Paris. But Paris had been all terror and Bonaparte in the years since they'd left, and nothing was there for him anymore. She drove the wagon westward as its supplies slowly dwindled. Sometimes she slept in those inns that would give a black woman a corner to stay in; usually she slept outside. She could feel the eyes of the Indians watching her from the hills but she worried more about being raped by frontiersmen or seized by whites as an escaped slave. Finally the supplies ran out and all she had was her jewelry box and her knife. She abandoned the wagon and rode one of the horses. She tried to sell the other horse to two men in a tavern one night; when she overheard them asking each other what a lone colored woman was doing with two horses she became frightened and left, without the other horse.

Everywhere she went she asked people if they'd seen Thomas.

To her great alarm she was surprised by how many said he was dead. She was shocked by how many insisted there had never been such a man. Every once in a while someone claimed to have spot-ted him, perhaps even recently; someone told her he'd been seen with the Indians, a thin giant shadow walking with them along the ridge of the mountains.

She did what she had to do. When there was no food left she worked for those who would feed her. When there was no work she begged on the road until her voice was gone. When there was nothing but her body to give for a place to sleep then she gave it.

Twice she was captured as a slave when she couldn't produce proof of her freedom, and twice she escaped because both times her captors expended themselves in the pleasure of her. She hated both of them enough to kill them with her knife, but as she'd grown older she had become shrewder about the politics of murdering white men, about the relentlessness with which white people would hunt her down for it. So she didn't avenge her violations but fled them.

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She searched a long time. She crossed the great river that lay to the west, and continued on where neither white man nor black had gone, into the land of the red. She collapsed one winter's day from cold and exhaustion and hunger in the middle of a field of snow, and when she woke she was in an Indian tent with several women who were admiring the jewelry from her box. She stayed with the Indians through the winter. She gave them the jewelry.

Now all she had was the knife. With it she drew for the Indians pictures in the dirt of a tall man with a head of flame; but she had trouble communicating to them his whiteness, since she was now so far west some hadn't seen a white man. For a while in her own mind Sally pictured Thomas as she supposed the Indians did, black in the sun. Often in her imagination she made him blacker than she. She stripped him nude and placed irons around his ankles and chained his arms, and rode along behind him on her horse, the reins in one hand and a whip in the other.

In the spring she set out again, on a new horse and blanket, wearing the clothes the Indians had given her. She crossed land as red as the Indians, land so red she could only believe the Indians who lived on it had emerged straight from the ground made of its rich red dirt. She rode as the Indian woman of an unknown tribe, and when she met other tribes and they asked her to identify her own, sometimes she said Virginia and sometimes she said Paris, and sometimes she tried to say another word that she'd been trying to say a long time, except it had caught in the ventricles of her heart like her own name in the ventricles of a strange vision she'd once had. For the remainder of her journey the word rested there and she couldn't clear her heart or throat of it, she couldn't bring it to her lips. Under the searing sun of the summer she rode, con-centrating on nothing but saying it, and she didn't finally say it until she'd found him.