The President's Daughter

THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER

Other Books by Barbara Chase-Riboud

From Memphis to Peking

Sally Hemings

Validé

Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra

Echo of Lions

a novel

Barbara Chase-Riboud

Cover design: Sarah Olson

Cover image:
Woman Before the Rising Sun (Woman Before the Setting Sun),
Caspar David Friedrich (1774—1840)/Museum Folkwang, Essen, West Germany/The Bridgeman Art Library

This unabridged edition is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

Copyright © 1994 by Barbara Chase-Riboud

Reader's Guide © Cherise Pollard, 2009

All rights reserved

This edition published in 2009 by

Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-55652-944-3

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

To the historical enigma of Harriet Hemings and to Thenia Hemings, 1799—1802, of Monticello

Her complexion was not brown, but it rather appeared charged with the color of rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds. And yet, there was neither coarseness nor want of shadowing in her countenance that was exquisitely regular and dignified, and surpassingly beautiful.

—-
James Fenimore Cooper,
The Last of the Mohicans,
1826

By the fiction created by herself. . . deceptions intended solely for others gradually grew into self-deceptions as well; the little counterfeit rift of separation between imitation-slave and imitation-master widened and widened, and became an abyss, and a very real one
—
and on one side of it, stood Roxy, the dupe of her own deceptions, and on the other stood her child—her accepted and recognized master.

—Mark Twain,
Pudd'nhead Wilson,
1894

—Make upon the window the fingerprints that will hang you.

—Mark Twain,
Pudd'nhead Wilson,
1894

T
HE
J
EFFERSON
-H
EMINGS
F
AMILY
T
REE

The Black Family

THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER

• The Runaway •

• The President ‘s Affidavit •

• The Lilac Phaeton •

• Adrian Petit's Affidavit •

• The Footrace •

• The Music Lesson •

• The China, India, and Orient Emporium•

• Fingerprints •

• A Marriage Proposal •

• The Troubles with Callender •

• Brown's Hotel •

• Adieu •

God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be saved and certain others to be damned: and no crimes of the former can damn them, nor virtue of the latter save them.

Thomas Jefferson

The day I ran away from Monticello as a white girl, I left my mother standing in a tobacco field filled with moths and white blossoms, a good way beyond the peach orchard and the mansion. My one thought was that her only daughter was leaving her forever, and all she did was stand there facing east, leaning into the wind as I had seen her do so many times, as I imagined explorers did, her skirts whipping around her, staring toward the Chesapeake Bay as if she could actually see the ships, in this year of 1822, quitting the harbor, leaving port.

My mother was famous in Albemarle County, and had been ever since I was born. People as far away as Richmond knew her as my father's concubine, mistress of his wardrobe, mother of his children. I was one of those children and my father, a celebrated and powerful man, had hidden us away here for twenty years because of a scandal they called “the troubles with Callender.” I was never told any more about it then, except that it made my mother the most famous bondswoman in America and put me in double jeopardy. For despite my green eyes and red hair and white skin, I was black. And despite my rich and brilliant father, I was a bastard.

As I approached, my mother remained as quiet and immobile as a monument. I walked around her as if she were one. She was the most silent woman I had ever known. Only her famous yellow eyes spoke and they spoke
volumes. Her eyes had always given her face the illusion of transparency, as if one were gazing into a lighthouse beam. Those eyes were gold leaf in an ivory mask, windows onto mysterious fires that consumed everything and returned nothing to the surface. She was caring and kind to us children, but she surrounded herself in a shell of secrecy and disappointment that we were never able to penetrate, try as we might. We loved her, adored her, but we often wondered if she loved us.

“Mama?”

“Laisse-moi.”
My mother spoke in the French she had taught me and which we used between ourselves all our lives.

“Maman, the carriage is waiting.”

“I know.
Laisse-moi,
please leave me.”

“Au revoir, Maman.”

My mother remained staring toward the bay.

“Je t'écrirai, Maman ...”

“Oui. Ecris-moi, ma fille.“

“Tu viens, Maman?”

My mother looked at me as if I were mad. The yellow light of her eyes struck me like a blow.

“Non, je ne viens pas.
I'm not coming,” my mother said.

Last night, my mother had closed my trunks readied for Philadelphia, filled with my “strolling” trousseau.

“Promise me,” she said, “that if you ever reveal your true identity to your future family, never tell your own children. Choose a female of your second generation, a granddaughter. Grandchildren are easier to talk to than your own children, and any secret is safer with your own sex.”

“Why is that, Maman?”

“Women carry their secrets in their wombs,” she said, “hidden and nourished by their vital fluids and blood, while men,” she continued, “carry their secrets like they carry their genitals, attached by a thin morsel of mortal flesh unable to resist either a caress or a good kick.”

I'm not sure what passing for white meant to me in those days, except fleeing slavery and leaving home. In reality I was doing it for other people. For Maman. For Grandma. For Papa. I had no yearning for freedom because I had no specific definition of it. I hadn't even known I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do what I wanted to. And freedom was a vague and indiscriminate thing: neither animal nor mineral, neither real nor phantom. It wasn't solid like a field or a tree or a snap of cotton. I only knew what I'd seen and what my grandmother had said: “Get that freedom . . .” It became a possibility, or rather an enticing and kind of limitless labyrinth of possibilities,
all of which I intended to explore, precisely to see what would happen. This was the prize, and I had had my eye on it ever since my grandmother had told me that once I had it, I would no longer be invisible. Once I set foot in Philadelphia, I had all my moves figured out down to a tee—the steps of a complicated dance in which I was the principal dancer and the ballet master all in one.

That morning I had already said good-bye to my youngest brother, Eston.

“You might have waited, Harriet. Mama hasn't gotten over Beverly's leaving yet.”

“Wait for what, Eston? Today, tomorrow, yesterday, what difference does it make where and when I go since I'm going? I won't stay here one day longer than I have to. Besides, Mama is never going to get over Beverly's leaving ... he didn't even tell her ...”

“Didn't tell Master, neither. Father expected him to stay.”

“He
did
stay, Eston—two years beyond his twenty-first birthday! What more did Father expect? That he wait around to be sold by his own kin like Fennel's baby? Was that what he was supposed to wait around for? Another slave father howling down Mulberry Row with a hatchet ready to kill the white man who just sold his child?”

“I think he thought Bev would stay with him ... to the end.”

“And what exactly would that have gotten him? More freedom? An inheritance? A citation for bravery? Beverly should have left the day he turned twenty-one. Even before, like Thomas did.”

“Well, it wouldn't have been for very long, Harriet. Our father's an old man—a real old man.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee, Eston. Father is as strong as a mule—still looking out for him, aren't you?”

“I still ride out behind him—keeping my distance, of course,” Eston said defensively. “Just making sure he doesn't get thrown by Old Eagle on those wild rides he takes every morning.”

“Oh, Eston. Why?”

But I knew the answer. Eston loved the father who despised him, with a wrenching, desperate love that knew no bounds and no humiliation. He was, in this sense, like me.

“I would never forgive myself if I let something happen to him—he's strong, but he's stubborn and old and Mama still loves him so. . . .”

I contemplated Eston tenderly. Of all my father's sons, Eston most resembled him physically, although of all his children I was his replica. Eston had my father's aquamarine eyes and wavy red hair. His voice, too, was high-pitched and had a feminine sweetness about it. He was as short on words as
our brother Madison was long, and he had a slight stutter when upset. At fourteen, he was almost six feet, with huge hands and wide Virginian shoulders. And he still expected some kind of love, some kind of recognition, some kind of reward he was never going to get from Father—just like Madison, who had raced down to the southern boundary and beat his head against the white birch fence until blood came because he couldn't understand why our father didn't love him.

“Maybe I can find Beverly,” I whispered, changing the subject.

“Aw, Harriet. Beverly's
gone.
He's gone clean to Papa's Louisiana Territories—as a white man. You know he always dreamed of going with Meriwether Lewis on his expedition. And he's always had land fever. He craves land. He lusts after it, and out in Louisiana is the only place he's going to get any—buy it, grab it, steal it from the Indians. And it's rough out there. There's no place for a woman unless you want to be one of those mail-order brides. . . .” He laughed, but I didn't think it was funny.

“I know,” continued Eston. “You're going to be married in a church, with music, and flowers, a preacher, and witnesses, in a white dress and you're still going to be a virgin and you're going to choose your husband . . . and he's going to be your darling—the love of your life.

“That's what I want for you, too, Harriet,” he persisted. “And honey, you'll get it. You're so surefired set on whatever you want, you'll get everything out of life—once you're free.”

He looked at me tenderly for a long, long time, his soft youthful eyes holding mine in a kind of covenant. He loved me and I loved him.

“I can't believe I'll never see you again.”