The President's Daughter (67 page)

“Father,” I whispered, “I have built my life on the edge of an abyss, always confronting a dangerous world in which my identity challenged yours
in terrible solitary combat. Now all I want is peace. Peace. Peace. Peace. Come. Come, Papa, let me hold your head in my lap, my arms across your chest, your brow on my breast as I rock you, the vanquished. Peter has made you coffee as in the old days, with molasses, hot and sweet the way you liked. Close your eyes, beloved; let's say our prayers and reminisce about the years we spent together yet apart, equal but separate. You and I merged only in our love for Monticello, its dense forests, blooded horses, and music. We inter-coursed only in our ambitious authorship of our own lives. You've lived yours rich and powerful, full of daring and truth. I've invented mine, by the fiction created by myself, which has grown into self-deception and become an abyss. I've been imitation slave and imitation master. I've married twins and borne twins and have lost double sons to death to defeat you. I've borne in silence all my secret doublage: double identity, double indemnity, double allegiances, double color. It was you, Father,
your
fiction that made impostors and confidence men of us all—Eston and Beverly, who doubled for white; Adrian Petit, who doubled for fictitious aristocracy; Thomas, who doubled as Woodston, then tripled as a Union spy, then quadrupled as a loyal white Confederate; Thenia, who doubled as my slave; Mama, who doubled as your wife; Thor, who doubled as Thance; sisters who doubled as wives; wives as slaves; slaves as mistresses; daughters as aunts; sisters-in-law as lovers; sons as lackeys. Lincoln, as the Great Emancipator, planned to deport his Negro citizens; you, as the great democrat, subsisted on the wages of slavery; Sally Hemings, as the great slave captive, sold herself for love, and Uncle James, the watchdog, played the role of a helpless mackerel. Oh, Papa, your great and dying world spawned magnificent impersonators! WHITE PEOPLE

“All
I
ever wanted to be was the best dancer and the best ballet master. And to dance to please myself. I used to sit on the back porch of the mansion and listen to the shrieking laughter on Mulberry Row and not recognize it as despair. I sat there longing for what I thought were permanent things: dignity and respect, marriage, loyalty, a bedroom where only duty lay, because I didn't want to be a slave to love. But when I grew up to be a woman, I found respect doubled by hypocrisy, marriage by death, loyalty by geography, safety by skin color, love by twin passions. Oh. All my cannibal hearts, each doubling back on the other, gobbling up space. Life itself has been doubled by oblivion.

“Imagine, it's the day after your birthday and both my Presidents—you who gave me life and the other who gave me freedom—are dead. Imagine. You know, I've ordered my own tombstone? But what to write on it?
HERE LIES TOM JEFFERSON'S MISSING LINK, WHO DIDN'T HAVE ANY FINGERPRINTS?
I see my white grandfather's face and hear my grandmother's voice. One says,
‘No sale, Captain Hemings, I want to see how amalgamation comes out!' The other says, ‘Push down, my heart won't stop beating, and don't forget to get that freedom for your children.' I am as tired of your father-in-law's whining as I am of my grandmother's groans.

“I have survived the horror of offering my flesh and blood to war. I have been rich and poor, slave and free, black and white, daughter and orphan, a white Virginian and black fugitive; a pillar of white Philadelphia society and a no-name bastard, guilty of miscegenation, fraud, counterfeiting, and imposture. What mask have I not worn? When would a hand lift that mask and expose me for what I was?

“But from now to the azimuth, I surrender and lay down my sword, a weeping child, a new American woman.”

I, Harriet Hemings, white female American, black female American, age sixty-four, born at Monticello the year my father began his first term as President, mother of seven white children (two deceased), hid in the North as a fugitive slave by passing for white for forty-three years until my unknowing sons, husband, and President emancipated me. I, Harriet Wellington, who could not exist without committing fraud, a Virginia aristocrat by birth who is also a bastard who despised her father and abandoned her mother, who found salvation for her crime as an abolitionist, widow of my husband's brother, musician, a walking, limping panoply of contradictions, did on the day Lincoln died leave my beloved Thenia in the middle of the road to South Carolina and pass once again into the oblivion which I had built myself with nary a tremor in my soul. And it seemed to me I was not living in the same country into which I was born.

HARRIET HEMINGS

I think, with you, that life is a fair matter of account and the balance often, nay, generally, is in its favor. It is to apply a common measure, or to fix the par between pleasure and pain, yet it exists, and is measurable.

Thomas Jefferson

Eighteen sixty-nine. Eston Hemings Jefferson here. Chicago millionaire who has thrice crossed and recrossed the color line, changing like a chameleon, negating the fact and fiction of his race with one blink of his baby blue eyes. I should use the initials of my pedigree behind my name: Eston Hemings Jefferson, F.F.V., P.F.W. (First Families of Virginia, Passed for White). I was born on the twenty-first of May 1808, while my father was President of the United States. Like Harriet Wellington, I made a fortune during the war.

I'm sixty-one now; I was seventeen when I was freed by my F.F.V. bastard of a father, and then only in his will. But before I exercised my freedom, which I postponed because of my mother's refusal to leave Virginia, I helped a lot of others get theirs. Perhaps as many as ten or twelve score.

Because of my color I often posed as a white man transporting or escorting his own slaves. All this came after I was a grown man—grown enough to know a pretty girl when I saw one and go chasing after her, too. I hid what I was doing from my mother, not because of any distrust but because it was dangerous work. It was funny the way it got started, too. I didn't have any idea of getting mixed up in the Underground Railroad until one special night. I had gone to another plantation courting, and the housekeeper there told me she had a really pretty girl who wanted to escape over the state line and asked
if I would take her. I was about to refuse when I saw the girl. She was as beautiful as Harriet, and it wasn't long before I was listening to the old woman, who was telling me when to take her and where to leave her. For days back home the image of that scared girl with eyes like Harriet, pleading with me to row her across the Potomac, haunted me. And so I did it. I don't know how I ever rowed that boat across the river. The current was so strong, I was shaking. I couldn't see a thing, there in the dark, but I felt that girl's eyes. Finally, I saw a faint light and rowed toward it. When I got there, two men reached down and grabbed the girl. They looked me up and down, astonished at my appearance, but they said only, “We'll take her to Ohio. Thanks.”

It was that word of thanks, I suppose, that changed me. It was the first time anyone had ever thanked me for doing anything. I soon found myself rowing boats, driving buckboards, riding saddle, sometimes with one, sometimes with a whole gang of fugitives. I used to take three or four trips a season. Madison found out and joined me.

I didn't hear from Harriet after she strolled until practically the day Father died, in 1826. Thomas Jefferson died of all kinds of complications: a fall from his horse, Old Eagle, a pleurisy attack, heart disease, and just plain old age, but the straw that really broke the camel's back was money. I'd never known my father not strapped for money. He had outspent his official salaries in every appointment he had held from ambassador in Paris to President of the United States. He left debts of $107,000, which the Hemingses—dark, mulatto, and white—repaid with their bodies at public auction. As a businessman who pays his debts and balances his expenditures, I have always found this reprehensible and unforgivable.

When old General Lafayette visited Monticello, in 1824, showered with gifts from the government of the United States, well, Thomas Jefferson just right threw himself a tantrum, smashing a chair, going on about all his “services” to the nation that had not bestowed one gesture of thanks or recognition on him. The United States had not given him one cent in land or cash that would have kept him out of the poorhouse. I suppose you could say he died cursing the country he'd invented.

After I had been transporting slaves for almost four years, my mother died. I carried about twelve to safety on that same night. As soon as she was buried, Madison and I left for the West, and took another dozen with us, posing as our own slaves as far as the Mason-Dixon line. That was the year 1836. We passed through Philadelphia with Mary and Sarah to announce our mother's death to Harriet.

I left Monticello a white man according to the 1836 census, but arrived in
Chillicothe, Ohio, a black one. I searched high and low for that girl whose name I didn't know, who was as beautiful as Harriet. I finally found her. Her name was Julia Anne. I married her.

We had three children: John Wayles, Beverly, and Anne. We moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1850, where I changed my race to white and added Jefferson to my name. There I founded the Continental Cotton Company, which made me a rich man. Later we bought the Standard Screw Company of Chicago, which made us even richer. Then, at the outbreak of the war in 1861, I changed my race back to black in order to fight as a Negro. When I realized they were not going to allow blacks to bear arms, even in the North, I passed for white in order to fight. So did my sons. I lost one son, Beverly; my eldest, John Wayles, was a lieutenant in the Second Ohio and was wounded at Vicksburg, but he left the army a lieutenant colonel.

Our eldest brother, Thomas, who had left Monticello for Richmond in his teens, changed his name to Woodson, left Albemarle County when we did, and settled in Jackson County, Ohio. He too got rich in the forties, by discovering coal on his land, and he used the money to found his own town, an all-black community he called Woodson, Ohio. He published an abolitionist newspaper called the
Palladium of Liberty.
His lone son, Lewis Frederick, who never married, moved on to Pittsburgh where he wrote antislavery editorials for
The Colored American
under the pseudonym Augustine. Since the tumult of the war, I have lost track of him and don't know if he is living or dead.

We were an angry set of children, strangers and enemies to our father, stomping all over the color line, back and forth, from Richmond to Chicago to San Francisco. What a ragtag, mongrel presidential family we were: an invisible mother, an unnameable father, decimated by a war we fought over ourselves. Thomas, the Utopian colonist, dreaming of a Negro homeland in Woodson, Ohio, or Liberia or some mythical and still-to-be-invented country in South America. Beverly, the white soldier of fortune, who went from striking gold in California to dreaming of his son-in-law as President. Madison, the quiet farmer filled with rectitude and self-righteousness, who has put the fear of God into us all for passing for white. Me, the white capitalist from Chicago with his faith in the American Dream. And finally, Harriet, the great “Duchess of Anamacora,” believer in romantic love and race oblivion, who, having achieved one, is now terrified of the other.

Blackness. What is the reward or the justification for this unarmed challenge which brings one nothing but grief? I have voted the fifteen-sixteenths of me a white majority over the one-sixteenth of me that makes me in fact and fiction something the republic invented. The republic couldn't really
think that blackness was as potent as all that. The republic simply wanted to place me beyond the pale of my father's own Constitution, to make me invisible to maintain the romance of racial purity in the face of so much argument to the contrary, to deny me the inestimable advantages of being a white American.

This was true of my own children as well, I thought. Did I really love my children less for having no idea of whom they really were? Or did I merely love Julia more for knowing and having shared the danger? I wondered if it was the same for Harriet. Had she loved her twin husbands less or more for their not knowing? Had she felt that same strange combination of contempt and compassion I still felt at times for WHITE PEOPLE?

I often wondered: were we imitation Negroes or imitation whites or bad imitations of both? I suppose we were imitation whites, because as imitation Negroes, we didn't amount to anything.

I stood by and watched all kinds of atrocities against us every day: lynchings and beatings, segregation and discrimination, burning crosses, the Ku Klux Klan. And like a ghost, the thought occurred to me that if my brother Madison were there, he would be a victim, which struck me differently, somehow, from the thought that if I were there, and if I were not white, I would be the victim.

Perhaps, I thought, this was why I reserved my most passionate affection for my grandchildren, who were one generation removed. Did she feel this way about her own children? Would any of them ever be capable of imagining the malignant labyrinth of fear and lies and contradictions, the immeasurable cruelty and suffering that made up the slave dynasty to which we were heirs?

What we shared with one another, but would never share with our children and grandchildren, was not the insult or the suffering, but the badge of insult and suffering. And the badge without the suffering was simply skin, hair, and bone.

The truth was that there was nothing in the world that could do all that we asked race to do for us.

I, Eston Hemings Jefferson, white American male, age sixty-one, born in Virginia, married with three children (one deceased), president of the Jefferson Continental Cotton & Standard Screw Co., assets of one million dollars, did crisscross the color line several times whenever it seemed to my advantage, finally settling
permanently on the white side from which I achieved all the benefits and accruements of white citizenship in the United States of America: freedom from fear, oppression, humiliation, dehumanization, and the life-threatening hatred my fellow Americans heap on their nonwhite compatriots. I did this of my own free will, ready to pay the price of oblivion, of loneliness, of fraud, of fear, but also of safety, of esteem, of rewards for my efforts, the corollary being fame and fortune as a white man: a purebred example of the American Dream.