The President's Daughter (66 page)

I was thirteen, skinny, bandy-legged, spidery-eyed, and up till then not yet a woman, having budding breasts and narrow hips and a high behind. I can see that red block now. My cousin Doll, daughter of Critta Hemings, was a pretty girl, really good looking. Her father was Peter Carr. The day they sold her, they stripped her to be bid off and looked over. She cried bitterly. Howled, really. A sound I'll never forget as she tried in vain to cover herself. People complained about how the slave prices had fallen. Well, she fetched
a huge amount of money and was sold to a man from New Orleans.

Our family was all kind of huddled up together in a corner of the yard away from the rest. Old Whispering Joe Taylor, the trader, came along. He was the crier. He was huge and seemed even bigger to someone so small. They said you could hear him knock down a slave five miles away. He was carrying a bullwhip and a pepperbox pistol and he was with another man. He made my sister stand up, and said to the man, “Here's just the girl you want.” Mama begged Mr. Taylor not to separate us folks, and hugged Mary and Jane and me to her. The traders and the man talked for a while and then came back and pulled Mary away from Mama and he and the man took her off. Mama started screaming, and just then they knocked my daddy down and dragged him off to another corner of the yard.

Man, man—folks that didn't go through slavery ain't got no idea what it was. There must have been a hundred colored folks in that yard, and the dust and smell of fear was terrible, terrible. It's like it happened yesterday— husbands sold away from wives, children from mothers. A trader didn't think no more of pulling a baby away from its mother than taking a calf away from a cow. A stockyard. The same smell of blood in the air. They came and got my other sister, then my mother. When she was taken away, I clung to her and got dragged a few feet before I got kicked. It was like a shellburst in my head; a terrible pain ripped through my groin, with her screams still in my ears. I remember suddenly feeling the trickle of blood—my menses, though I didn't know what it was. One of my aunts, the last to be sold, hiked up my dress into a ball between my legs and tied her shawl around my hips. She wiped away the blood on my legs, but why had she bothered to wipe away the blood? Why must this particular wound be hidden or held more shameful? It had come, after all, from the entrails of my soul, which had just been murdered. They took my aunt away and then my little brother. Then Whispering Joe came back for me.

“Get your bundle together,” he said, then looked at me queerly. “No one told me this heifer was pregnant,” he said. “I advertised her for a virgin.”

He pulled my dress down around my waist and sold me.

That's why I stutter like a lamb. For a while I couldn't talk at all. Even when I was safe with Harriet.

Harriet's imposture never really bothered me, in point of man's law or God's law, but I never envied her, either. As a practical matter, it gave me many sleepless nights. I loved Mrs. Wellington, but I found her reckless and selfish. I admired her as an Underground Railroad conductor, as a wife, as a mother, as a musician, but her obsession with her master, whom she insisted upon calling Father, and the way she treated her mother stuck in my craw.
I could never have left my mother the way she left hers. And Harriet was so lonely—she was truly an orphan. Imagine being free and white and having brothers one hadn't seen or heard from in twenty years!

Harriet was smart, too. And hard and ambitious and dangerous. At Gettysburg she killed a man. Emily told me. I'll never forget that. Without blinking an eye. She said, “Huh. She didn't tell you about that, did she?” Well, nobody can go around armed for fifty years without once using a deadly weapon, can they? He was a Reb deserter about to rob and slaughter a wounded and helpless Union soldier boy, out of fury or vengence or blood thirst or just plain craziness, who knows. Harriet sent him to hell. And she could have, I do believe, done it in cold blood instead of the heat of battle. In a way, I guess she killed the Reb that killed James, and in another she killed the Rebel in herself that was her father and the Old South. She had one of those old-time constitutions nothing could destroy, like him. Nothing was going to kill Harriet Wellington. Not even a bath in acid.

Which brings me to Abe. I loved the soul out of that man. Whatever I am today, I owe to him or Harriet. If Harriet taught me nerve, he taught me pride. We had a good sex life, too. Times we would lie in bed all day making love. Times I would lie beside him and just watch him sleep—trace the contours of his body with my fingertips, kiss him all over, suck the little soft folds behind his ears or the tendons in back of his knees. He knew how to please a woman, too. Oh, Abe, resting under your grassy knoll so far away. Twenty years now. I never ever really wanted another husband. Abe gave me Raphael and Willy, and Raphael has given me Aaron. I can't complain.

I've always been grateful to Harriet for what she did for me. Like Harriet Tubman, she crossed the line and went back down south to save one of her kin. She gave me what she could of a new life, or what she could spare of her double one.

I gave my services willingly for two years and four months to the United States government without receiving a dollar. I taught the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment of ex-slaves to read and write. And when I got a chance to work for Mr. Pinkerton and the government as a Union spy behind Confederate lines, well, I did that, too. It was General Folksin at the fort who recruited me. He said the government needed black spies who were literate and who could pass as slaves. He warned me that capture meant instant death. I made three forays into General Johnson's camp. I posed, of course, as a laundress. My favorite profession. I worked for General Bragg and, in my shirts and underwear, smuggled coded messages from Union spies who had infiltrated the army. I learned to handle a gun. I shot straight. I could take a gun apart, clean it, and put it together again and
reload it in eighteen minutes. I could also read handwriting upside down. And God knows blackness is the best disguise the Almighty ever invented, and not just at night. Even my Union informant never learned to recognize me. Had to tell the bugger every time who I was. Why, another black woman, working for the Confederacy, could have walked in and taken my place without his ever knowing it. I was proud anyway and called myself the black Rose Greensboro.

I never told Harriet about my activities. During the war, I wasn't allowed to, and afterward we didn't see each other for a long time. Anyway, spying is very personal. Something that belongs only to yourself. Of course there was that one thing she never told
me
about her war, either.

Only the auction haunts me. Harriet had sworn to God to curse the day she was born standing on her father's grave if God took another son. Well, God took Beverly. The army surrenders at Appomattox and quick as a flash she's in Albermarle County. No baggage, no notice. Alone.

I was there, looking for my family. My grandson Aaron and I left Fort Monroe and took the road from there to here: the road everybody who was looking for somebody took, William Tecumseh Sherman's army's road.

So there, always by chance or destiny or whatever you choose to call it, I met Harriet. It was as if a silent call had gone out from her to me to gather. The roads were clogged with refugees looking for ex-slaves, and ex-slaves looking for other refugees.

Harriet and I decided to return to the cemetery of Monticello together. We found Betty Hemings's grave. We never did find Sally Hemings's grave. It must have been an uneasy grave, for when we got to the slave cemetery, we found no tomb, no headstone, nothing.

Sally Hemings's cabin was still standing, a lopsided lean-to near the south boundary. As Harriet and I approached, we saw that it was inhabited. Smoke was coming from the chimney. We drew closer, making our way on foot up the slope to the porch steps, and a woman holding a child took fright and ran inside. We followed her and stood smack in the middle of Sally Hemings's poor, mean, ramshackled house. The cabin was made of square-hewn logs, chinked with small rocks and daubed with white clay, then covered with cypress clapboards.

The walls were bare, and the roof had been repaired with old newspapers. There were several children inside, sitting on two benches hewn out of logs padded with gray moss and corn husks. There were three or four rolled-up pallets in one corner, and beyond the front room I could see a bedroom with a four-poster bed and a cradle. There was a table behind which the woman
was standing for protection. They were squatters, a family who had moved in during the war.

“This is my mother's house,” said Harriet stupidly, not addressing the woman but advancing toward her. The woman backed away, clutching the baby. Another, older woman entered the room from the back.

“Aw, mist'ess,” she said. “Please don't evict us from here. We've been here for almost two years wait'en for the white people to show up or something. We can pay you all rent, mist'ess. You the old master's daughter?”

“I'm not going to evict you, and I'm not your mistress,” said Harriet. “It's just that this . . . this was my mother's house and I've never seen it.”

They looked at each other, then at me uncomprehendingly. The older woman fell to her knees and pleaded, “Aw God, have mercy, mist'ess. We got sick children in the back there. We can't move ‘em. They can't sleep in the fields.”

“Get up off your knees,” screamed Harriet. “Get up. Get up. You don't have to kneel to me anymore.”

But one had grabbed the Confederate money from the mantelpiece. It was mixed with the Union scrip that the government issued to ex-slaves.

“You don't understand,” Harriet began, realizing that the woman had taken her to be what she appeared to be, by dress and manner. Suddenly there was a scraping on the roof. A kind of
tap, tap,
and then a hoarse screech like a trapped cat.

“Maman?”
Harriet cried, cocking her head to one side. My hands flew to my breast. The two women fled the house. One squeezed by me to rescue the baby in the back room; the other hightailed it with the one she had in her arms.

“Maman,
is that you?” said Harriet cooly. My eyes popped with fright. The more courageous of the two women sneaked back to the doorway minus the baby.

“Sally Hemings, is that you?” insisted Harriet. “It's me, Harriet. Harriet! I'm me,
Maman.
Harriet. I'm Harriet. Me. Harriet. Harriet. See?” She held up her palms to the ceiling.

“I'm me,” Harriet screamed to the south. “I'm me, Harriet Hemings of Monticello,” she shrieked to the east. And to the west she bellowed,
“Est-ce que tu viens?
I'm never coming back here for you again.”

Her hair was undone; her green eyes blazed; her voice was an animal growl.

“I'm me, Harriet Hemings of Monticello. I'm me!”

“Oh, Lord, that white lady crazy as a loon,” I heard a voice behind me say. To which another voice answered, “That ain't no white lady, Ethel. You don't have to
be
black to be black.”

Harriet Hemings of Monticello bellowed as if she had been given the voice of a bullfrog. Her cheeks swelled up and turned as scarlet as Philadelphia brick. The noise on the roof increased, rattling the shingles like a hurricane. Even the floor moved. Then everything was still.

“I'm not coming back here for you again,
Maman”
she whispered, and slowly Harriet turned and with a kind of wave, a kind of small, royal movement of her blank and naked fingertips, she took leave of everything.

“My family is from Philadelphia, you know,” she sighed into the uncomprehending faces before her.

That was the last time I saw Harriet Wellington alive. That was the day they assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

I, Thenia Hemings Boss of Monticello, colored female, age fifty-two, daughter of Ursula and granddaughter of Mary Elizabeth Hemings, born the third of June 1813, midwife and apothecary, did on the night of the fourteenth of April 1865 start out again for South Carolina with my grandson Aaron Boss. I followed the path carved out by the victorious Union Army marching to war under Sherman. Hordes of slave refugees clogged the roads, all searching for lost loved ones. Lord God, it seemed like everyone was on the road and nobody had found anyone they loved. It seemed as if the entire race were in motion and in search of that one thing that would make it whole again. But that was never to be. On the twenty-second of August 1865, I found my mother and sister on the Mount Crawford road, just outside of Waynesboro, North Carolina. It did not seem to me as if I were living in the same country in which I was born.

THENIA HEMINGS BOSS

Iam persuaded; were she to lose you, it would cost her oceans of blood, and years of confusion and anarchy.

Thomas Jefferson

I fled my mother's ghost and ran to the white cemetery and my father's grave. From where I knelt, the naked, windswept, ruined facade of Monticello rose up in the distance through the haze like his shoulder blades: pink, emaciated, inflamed with death's agonies. The President who had enslaved me and the President who had freed me were both history now. The country that had always despised me, be it North or South, had just shorn itself of its double life and was to be “reconstructed.” Why not I?

It seemed to me that the world, as on the night of the military ball, was once again divided into dark halves and light halves. The dead President's eyes, melancholy Dalmatian eyes, liquid, long, and narrow; Mongol eyes, Negro eyes that had alighted on mine only once and only for a split second, looked out at me from my father's obelisk. Perhaps it hadn't been my mother's ghost I had run away from, but my father's. For had I not come here to this grave
not
as a daughter but as part of the occupying army? Hadn't I sworn that night that if God took another grandson, I would come back and haunt this grave? Well, God took Beverly and so I'm back, Father. Grandma had a name for it; she called it
sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
But I hear the music as a dog hears, as all underdogs hear, only the inaudible high notes. I hear wolves crying, their curses melding in the air. Yes, this is my return. There can be a homecoming without a home.