The President's Daughter (4 page)

Petit and I drove down the mountain in broad daylight. Everyone knew we were leaving. My uncle Burwell drove the carriage, which headed toward Richmond. Another uncle, Fossett, was the outrider. People deserted the slave quarters and drifted toward the road that traversed all my master's plantations to have a last look at Harriet Hemings leaving home. Inside the vehicle, I turned back to look only once, but that was enough to see that my mother had come to stand beside the tall stooped figure of Father, who had stepped through a hole in the rotting steps and fallen from the veranda to his knees. Steps my uncle Robert was supposed to have fixed months ago.

It is difficult to determine on the standard by which the manners of a nation may be tried, whether Catholic, or particular. It is more difficult for a native to bring to that standard the manners of his own nation, familiarized to him by habit. There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery.

Thomas Jefferson

My boot went through a rotten plank in the veranda as the lilac phaeton disappeared down the mountain. I pitched forward to my knees, falling on my bad wrist and fracturing it again. I cursed Robert for not having repaired the step as I had told him to. I cursed Sally for not having made sure her brother did it. I cursed Harriet, for without her, I, Thomas Jefferson, wouldn't have been standing out here in the first place. I cursed all the Hemingses and their abominable, secretive burden. The pain was exactly as it had been that long ago day in June 1787, in the Bois de Boulogne, when another phaeton containing another forbidden woman had ridden out of my life. I hardly heard the jerky cry of pain my fall exacted from me, unbidden and humiliating—an old man's cry for help. I sensed rather than saw my slave wife hovering over me. I squeezed my eyes shut to make her invisible. I hated her. I hated Harriet, who had forced me to relinquish a part of myself against my will.

Despite myself, I thought about a June afternoon in 1805, after the trouble with Callender and my reelection. I was home from the President's House,
free of all the fracas of Washington politics and happily astride my old bay Jupiter. I had swept four-year-old Harriet into my arms and tossed her high in the air, while her mother screamed with fright and the child with delight. The perfectly weighted little body had risen in the air like a painted
putto
in an Italian fresco, her arms outstretched, her wings the Blue Ridge Mountains, a halo of fluffy clouds around her head, displacing the tepid air which approached the temperature of the human body. Harriet hovered overhead, static, immobile, her golden curls bobbing, her fern green eyes shining, her laughter babbling like a brook before she came rushing down toward me like a whirlwind, sure of my waiting arms. At that moment, I saw Harriet's life beyond Monticello. I kissed the incredibly fresh puckered lips, the blond tendrils of hair, the warm cheeks.

“This one will live,” I boasted to her mother, thinking of our dead infants Harriet the First and Thenia.

That had been the same year I had written Francis Gray from Washington about when black became white. The letter, which I had mistakenly shown to Petit this morning, glowed before me in the darkness.

THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE

1805

M
R
. F
RANCIS
C. G
RAY

Sir,

You asked me in conversation, what constituted a mulatto by our law. And I believe I told you four crossings with the whites. I looked afterwards into our law, and found it to be in these words: “Every person, other than a Negro of whose grandfathers or grandmothers anyone shall have been a Negro, shall be deemed a mulatto, and so every such person who shall have one-fourth part or more of Negro blood, shall like manner be deemed a mulatto”; L. Virga 1792, December 17: the case put in the first member of this paragraph of the law is
exempli gratia.
The latter contains the true canon, which is that one-fourth of Negro blood, mixed with any portion of white, constitutes the mulatto. As the issue has one-half of the blood of each parent, and the blood of each of these may be made up of a variety of fractional mixtures, the estimate of their compound in some cases may be intricate, it becomes a mathematical problem of the same class with those of the mixtures of different liquors or different metals; as in these, therefore, the algebraical notation is the most convenient and intelligible. Let us express the pure blood of the white in capital letters of the printed alphabet, the pure blood of the negro in the small letters of the printed alphabet, and any given mixture of either, by way of abridgment in MS. letters.

Let the first crossing be of
a,
pure negro, with
A,
pure white. The unit of blood of the issue being composed of the half of that of each parent, will be
. Call it, for abbreviation,
h
(half blood).

Let the second crossing be of
h
and
B,
the blood of the issue will be
, or substituting for
its equivalent, it will be
, call it
q
(quarteroon) being
negro blood.

Let the third crossing be of
q
and
C,
their offspring will be
, call this
e
(eighth), who having less
than of
a,
or of pure negro blood, to wit
only, is no longer a mulatto, so that a third cross clears the blood.