The President's Daughter (34 page)

“Papa?”

“Weak. We think he's had another stroke, but we can't be sure. Burwell swears he'll last until the Fourth of July.”

“Did he really ask me to come, or did you make that up,
Maman?”

“He asked. He asked, knowing what risk you ran coming here. He thinks he can still protect you from your white family while he's alive.”

“Remember,
Maman,
I've set foot on British soil. I'm emancipated.”

“As a matter of
your
conscience and for the benefit of your fiancé, but not in the eyes of Virginia, you aren't. You'll soon belong to your half sister Martha.”

My mother said this with such malicious relish, a pinprick of anger flared in my breast, despite all my promises to myself. She
liked
saying it, as if the words justified her own slavehood.

“As far as the black laws of Virginia are concerned, to a slave patrol, a sheriff, or a bounty hunter, you're still a fugitive slave. People in Mulberry Row are going to start talking,” she continued in her beautiful, honeyed voice.

“Well, let them if they don't have sense enough to keep quiet,” I replied angrily, allowing my own drawl to get deeper and more Virginian every moment.

My mother said nothing in response. Instead she reached out timidly and on tiptoes drew me into her arms, trying to enfold me with her tiny body until I squeezed her tightly against me. I felt a wave of pity and tenderness. She was so small, so fragile. My abbess of Monticello.

“After this is over, you're coming with me,” I said.

“Don't even think of it, Harriet. I'll never leave Monticello, except in a pine box.”

“We'll talk about it when the time comes,” I said, all at once feeling the fatigue of the journey, of the sea voyage, of facing my dying father, of everything.

The plantation closed in around me. I could feel the presence of my cousins, my aunts, my nephews, my brothers and half brothers-in-law of both complexions: the Carrs, the Eppeses, the Jeffersons, the Randolphs, and the eternal Hemingses. They were all still fighting and struggling in this little anthill of slavery.

“Who's at Monticello?”

“Everyone. Martha and all the children. Cornelia, Ellen. Jeff has taken over running the plantation. The Eppeses are here. Peter Carr is here to see Jamey and Critta.”

“I meant the Hemingses, Mama.”

“Peter's still cooking. Critta, Thenia, Robert, they're all here. Joe Fossett. Mary and Martin, Bette and John, and, of course, Wormley and Burwell … your brothers …”

“No one's escaped?”

“You sound like James, the time he came back from Spain to fetch me … begging me to run away from Monticello.”

“After Father's death,” I said, “there's nothing to keep you here.”

We were standing outside on the porch because my mother had not yet invited me into the house. The night sounds of Mulberry Row fell, making concentric musical murmurs escaping from the rows of sheds and wooden cabins. There were the sounds of preparation of the evening meal, mixed with work songs lifting off the fields as they emptied of laborers. The screams of children's games, mothers' commands, and an almost audible fragrance rose from the red clay road like a single note unfolding.

Why had I come home at all? To mourn or to gloat? I glanced at my mother, her elegant profile outlined against the rough wood of the kitchens. What had I expected from her? Revolt? Admiration? Fantasy? She was incapable of surprising me. She had a technique of yielding to the stronger will like a plant or an animal, without reflection. She had done this with my father, and now she was doing it with me. I sighed. There was no getting around her or over her; one had to walk through her.

Tired of standing on the porch, I brushed her aside and entered the kitchen. My mother shook her head as if to say that I had taken on all the airs of the white woman I was impersonating. But in Philadelphia, I had learned to move in a different way. My body pitched forward into space, unselfconscious and fearless, instead of holding back, bent in confusion or diffidence, balancing the pros and cons of bringing attention to oneself. I had come to expect a certain level of respect, a certain degree of attention to my voice and opinions. I had acquired with my northern education certain liberties. I believed I was entitled to them because my voice, my opinion, my person were valuable in themselves. And, of course, my mother noticed. She was very good at noticing things like that.

Inside, the very air of the kitchen, with its familiar aromas, seemed to shrivel my disguise. I became once again Harriet Hemings, errand-runner, spinner in the weaving factory down the road. I stood there for a moment, my heart beating. The kitchen's clutter and meanness seemed poorer and more sordid than ever when I compared it to the roomy, bright kitchens of English country houses, with their silver and polished copper, their porcelain-and-steel stoves and dazzling arrays of neatly displayed utensils. The door of the larder was open, an unthinkable breach of discipline in this house, and I peered at the rows of preserves and smoked meats, country cheeses and salted fish, curds and pickled cherries. From the ceiling hung a dozen smoked hams, round bacons, and links of sausage. Memories of innumerable suppers, dinners, breakfasts, and barbecues lurked in that larder. Visions of lines of carriages arriving, of bouts of cricket on the west lawn, of black and white children romping on the green, barking dogs, snorting horses, pony carts,
slave orchestras, banjos, violins, music. I turned back into the room. All that was in the past. Death and poverty had seized the soul of this house and would never relinquish their grip again. My father would leave his white family paupers and his black family with only their bodies to sell. I smelled it. I felt it. I tasted it.

“Sometimes,” my mother said, “it's so bad, he doesn't even remember who he is or who I am or any of Martha's children. Only his houses. He remembers the names of his houses. Jeff Randolph has taken over his affairs, but he should have left them in Madison's hands or Eston's, ‘cause Jeff, sweet boy that he is, doesn't know anything about running a dying plantation— or saving it. He's been forced to sell off the best slaves after having had to sell all the other plantations.”

“But Father promised Martha Wayles we would never be sold! He's letting Jeff sell her own uncles, nieces, nephews, her half sisters and brothers.”

“When,” replied my mother, “has that ever stopped a desperate master? Jeff wants to clear your father's name of debts, and he must do it by selling and selling.”

“What about what he owes us—the Hemingses? You and Uncle Robert, Martin … all of us.”

“It was always your father's weakness to imagine himself superior to the necessary art of being capable of holding one's own in the world of business. And now, in the wake of disaster after disaster, it is hard to know whether it is more dangerous to stand still or to move. The habits of your father's life, his tastes, his extravagances, his associations, his education, even the trustfulness of his character, his want of business skill, his sanguine temperament— everything that makes him a Virginian made him prey to incompetence and ingenuousness, unhappy speculations and bad loans. And now bankruptcy is staring us in the face.

“Even Eston complained that his father knew nothing of the adroit chicanery of running a property: feigning bankruptcy, fraudulent conveyances, signing over one's assets to a wife or daughter. The President has never even heard of such tricks as sending coffins to the graveyard with Negroes inside, supposedly carried off by some sudden imaginary disease, only to have them be ‘resurrected' in due time, grinning, on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. He was completely ignorant of double bookkeeping, unsecured loans from banker friends, using political influence to insure failed crops. And as Eston put it, if as a Virginian he involved himself like a fool, he suffered himself to be sold out like a gentleman. And to combat it, he frantically tried to save at least a part of his dream: the mansion and the university. Thomas had appealed like a beggar to the Virginia legislature for permission to auction
off his lands in a lottery to pay his creditors, carefully, humbly enumerating his lifetime of service to the nation. He indulged in a terrifying tantrum when he learned that his old friend General Lafayette had been given more than a hundred thousand dollars in gifts and bonuses from a grateful United States for service rendered during the Revolution on his visit here. And yet my Thomas, the creator, the inventor of the Revolution, stood there with holes in his boots. Even the lottery was a failure. Nobody bought shares.”

I was shocked.

“Don't mention the lottery to your father. He thinks it has saved his house and that he's dying solvent.”

“What does Thomas Mann say to all this?”

“Martha Jefferson's husband still refuses to step his foot over the threshold of this mansion, Harriet. He, more than anyone, has changed since you left.”

“But you haven't, Mother.”

My mother looked up, surprised, as devoid of personal vanity as ever.

“Haven't I?”

“As a little girl I remember you just as you are today,
Maman;
it's incredible how little you've changed. Time doesn't seem to touch you.”

“Sorrow does, though.”

“How can you be sorry? You'll soon be free.”

“I'll never be free.”

“Surely he'll free you with his last breath,” I said, unable to keep the crying out of my voice.

My mother said nothing. Her straight, slim back was turned away from me as she fumbled with her ring of keys and finally found the one to the larder. She pushed the door shut and locked it.

“No.”

“Then run,” I cried. “Leave with me before it's too late.”

“Oh, Harriet, I'm too old to start running.”

“Don't be silly,
Maman.
Freedom is not running—it's existing for the first time!”

I turned then, hearing someone approaching, and saw Burwell hurrying down the passageway that connected the kitchens to the main house. By now every slave at Monticello would know that Harriet Hemings had returned home.

“Quick, go down to Grandma Elizabeth's cabin until I signal that the coast is clear,” he admonished.

To my surprise, Burwell was adamant. If I was to stay at Monticello, I would have to hide like the fugitive slave I was. I was truly back in the United
States. And so I found myself in my grandmother's abandoned cabin, which served as a depot for my mother's furniture, peeping out of the boarded-up window at the moon-drenched Mulberry Row. But even distance and darkness could not disguise my brothers Eston and Madison as they hurried toward the cabin. Then I couldn't see them anymore because of the tears in my eyes.

Before I could even turn up the lamp, I was swept into a wild, brotherly embrace. Eston had grown at least three inches. He was the exact height of his father, whom he resembled like a twin. His blue eyes danced in the lamplight, which threw reflections onto his mane of red-gold curls. He smelt of clean sweat, topsoil, and wood chips, and his hard, lean body cleaved to mine as if it had just been rescued from some terrible, accidental danger. Scampering around him, barking like a puppy, was Madison, still gray-eyed and sandy-haired, waving and flailing his arms like a choir conductor. Our shadows threw themselves on the walls, packing cases, and the low ceiling in a macabre dance as we twirled around in a triple embrace, laughing and crying. I had so much to tell them that when I had finished it was dawn.

“So that's what it's like to be free,” said Eston.

“Now, what's it like to be white,” said Madison.

“Aw, Madison, let up! You're always running off at the mouth! Harriet's not passing, not tonight.”

“Same problems, Madison. Same sun. Same moon. Same rain. Same sky,” I answered. “Same—”

“Shit,” said Eston. “If there's no difference, Sister, why bother?”

“I never said there wasn't a difference. The biggest difference is not
being
white, but the white world, as I've explained to you. What do we know about anything, buried here with slavery in this tomb? We're ruled, owned, sold by people who can barely read and write. Monticello is a speck of dirt on this planet, an insignificant, provincial backwater. There's a … a whole world out there. And there's a whole movement—call it antislavery, call it abolition —to free all slaves in this hemisphere. This is what our southern masters hide from us … and there's a whole continent that exists which is ours—Africa. I can even draw you a picture of it.”

“Exists in what sense, Sister, except as an invention of white folks, a bottomless lake for thieves and abductors?”

“That won't always be so, Eston. When I left home, I believed slavery was meant to last forever. Now I know that was a lie. The slave trade is abolished. Next, slavery will be. The world is moving faster that you can imagine. American slavery is doomed in the modern world with its phenomenal new
inventions, new processes and the new mode of living created by these wonders. It's a matter of time, but I truly believe we—you, me, Jeff, Ellen, Cornelia—will live to see it.”

“Whites and blacks as equals?”

“Whites and blacks free from backbreaking labor. I've brought you every abolitionist tract I could get my hands on. The writings of Wilberforce and Clarkson and dozens of others. Give them to anyone who can read.”

“But you haven't told us what it's like to be white.”

“For God's sake, Madison, I've told you. There's no difference between white folks and us. Except … perhaps the point of view.”

Eston laughed, but I was serious.

“I know there's no difference between white folks and black folks; look at our family. No, what I want to know is what it's like to be white—that has nothing to do with differences,” he said.