The President's Daughter (72 page)

But when I asked the colored lady, who was drinking a glass of champagne under the offended eyes of the black waiter, if she was a relative of my grandmother, she answered a surprised no. My grandmother had helped her escape to the North with the Underground Railway in 1836, and had given her a present. She had vowed to return one day to thank her. So how could
she be Grandma's niece? She wore a pair of magnificent earrings that caught the light and threw off red sparks in the gaslight. I couldn't very well walk up to Mr. Jefferson and ask him if he was the illegitimate son of the third President of the United States. But I did ask him if he was related to the Virginia Jeffersons, to which he admitted “a passing connection.” Moreover, I was certainly not going to discuss Grandma's grotesque confession and dangerous behavior with, Lord Almighty, my future husband, so I abandoned the investigation for the night, thinking I might ask Sarah Hale one of these days when I was calmer.

For, to tell you the truth, I was shaken as only a sane person is shaken when face-to-face with lunacy. For there is a hard, unyielding core of
conviction
in insanity that has a logic all its own and that disconcerts and unnerves normal people. It is like climbing a wall of smooth granite on which there are no footholds, no pick marks of reality to clutch on its surface, upon which one's mind slips and slides helplessly off the edges of its lunatic logic. At her party, my grandmother had been beautiful, so luminous, so elegant. Never had she shone more brilliantly in the configuration of society and her class. Never had Grandpa surveyed her so adoringly, or been so indomitably proud. Yet never had my grandmother been so utterly crazy.

Grandma had promised her mother, she said, to reveal her secret only to a second-generation female of her own family. That was why I, Roxanne, must hear her confession. Secrets were not to be exposed to men, who would wear them the way they wore their sex, so spoke Sally Hemings. And so, the next day, I read her diaries, fifty years of them. They revealed an astonishing secret life of the imagination, with numerous references to Negroes and slavery and emancipation, which proved to me that she was obsessed with race and color and was a staunch negrophile, at least in her imagination. She claimed to have numerous Negro relatives, to have conducted scores of fugitive slaves to freedom. She had even returned to the South herself, she claimed, to rescue her mother. She had letters, she claimed, from Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, but alas, none of them was signed except one. The provocative signature “Th. J.” might have been Thomas, but also might have been Theodore, Thadius, Tabitha, Thenia. . . .

There was a fantastic aura to her writing that convinced me that this life Grandma had created for herself was indeed totally imaginary. No. It was impossible that any of this had anything to do with me. She even claimed that she was the only person in the world who had no fingerprints, and indeed she showed me the tips of her fingers, which were as smooth and blank as ivory. And yet, what of the relics? How to explain the locket she gave me, or the exquisite box with the portrait of a French king? From whence had they
come, and how had they gotten into her quiet bedroom? They were not ethereal words to be explained away, but objects of substance and weight: gold and enamel and diamonds. And what about the eerie blue-eyed gaze of the man in the locket portrait, which mimicked that of my grandmother? It didn't resemble at all the bust of President Jefferson downstairs. Then there were the names, the dates, the coincidences. It was impossible to prove or disprove. It was simply unbelievable.

Grandma had an accident shortly after that. She took Tamar instead of her own mount one morning, and while Grandma was riding along the riverbank, something or someone frightened the speckled bay. She bolted, reared, and fell into the shallows. Grandma's wrists got tangled in the reins and she couldn't get free. Tamar rolled over on her, and she drowned in less than three feet of water.

In a way, Grandmother's death saved her own grandchildren, for the bay had been bought as a docile, safe mount for them, but after Grandma's accident we learned that Tamar had thrown and killed her previous owner, and had been sold to us without her owner revealing this incident. We shot her the same day, although it pained us to do it, as her pedigree could be traced back to an aristocratic Virginia thoroughbred named Old Eagle.

I will never forget the open-eyed, surprised, even pleased look on Grandma's face, as if this accident had solved all her unfinished business. She was dead without having had time to repent of anything or ask forgiveness or say good-bye. To be sure, death had finally put an end to her life as an imaginary Negro! Grandpa thought that it came from her childhood exposure to them as the daughter of a rich southern planter, and that she had substituted this fantasy family of blacks for the white family she had lost in an epidemic at a young age. And what better father could she have chosen than Thomas Jefferson himself, the father of our national identity.

Grandpa thought Grandma was really afraid of Negroes, as she had been afraid of death, of loneliness, of being abandoned, and this negrophobia was transformed in Grandma's fantasy into abnormal love for them.

He believed Sally Hemings was probably some beloved nurse my grandmother had at a very early age, when she had already been deprived of her own, real mother.

I thought Grandma's diaries, with their obsessive mentioning of colored people, pure-white Negroes, and their neurotic negrophilia, should be destroyed for the sake of our posterity. Grandpa agreed. And before he died, we did it. But Grandpa cried as he did it, as if, he said, he were taking Grandma's life a second time. That was when I began to have my doubts.

I often wonder, even now, if there was a kernel of truth in her ravings. And
I brood sometimes over the miniature of my great-grandfather, whoever he was, which I've always kept. Had this mysterious great-grandfather played a colossal joke on his descendants, on his country, on history, on human nature and the nature of love? Was he laughing at us? I brood too with the fear and dread of a secret murderer, over the obscure and dangerous maggot of black babies.

I, Roxanne Wayles Wellington, white spinster, American citizen, age eighty, born the eighteenth of January 1862, do swear this is the true and concise accounting of the last days of my maternal grandmother, Harriet Wellington, alias Petit, alias Hemmings [sic], alias Jefferson, who with her dying breath claimed with all the vigor, contradictions, and exuberance of her soul to be the President's daughter.

ROXANNE WAYLES WELLINGTON

PHILADELPHIA, MAY
19, 1942

As was the title character in my historical novel,
Sally Hemings,
published in 1979, in the present work, Harriet Hemings, her daughter, is a nonfictional personage with a “fictional” biography. Harriet Hemings spent her whole life after age twenty-one as a white woman, hiding under another identity. She was, according to both state and federal law, a “black” fugitive slave, subject to arrest, sale, and re-enslavement, and after January 1, 1863, she was an emancipated “contraband.” Such were the contradictions of life in America in the nineteenth century in matters of color.

The poetical, political, metaphysical, historical, and technical complexities of rendering such a situation are, understandably, daunting. As in the case of
Sally Hemings,
a novel historical enough to have been quoted, discussed, and attacked and defended as history, at least forty years of Harriet's life is a mystery: how she felt, what she did and said, how she resolved the crushing contradictions of her secret life. I have tried to project a life that, on the one hand, might have happened and, on the other, is larger than life and encompasses all the themes of filial love, power, enslavement, and legitimacy, both familial and national—in all their implications. Harriet Hemings was not at Gettsyburg—or was she?—or could she have been?—or would she have been?—or should she have been?

Harriet Hemings, like Sally Hemings, is one of those minor historical figures caught up in the major flow and major themes of our myths, dreams, and history: censored, scorned, ignored, contested, yet who is also an archetype as much as Jefferson, adored and revered, is. To speak of American myths and the House of Monticello, as one would speak of the House of
Atreus in Greek mythic drama, is not too strong a way to put it. I have, as Harriet Hemings would say, had to move around the furniture of our preconceived notions and precepts of acceptable and standard history in order to accommodate her story, but the story itself is as real as any of the other myths that make up our identity and history, and to which we cling so tenaciously.

Anyone who writes historical fiction knows that life often imitates art. Some of the things that happen to people and that people do to one another are simply too incredible and amazing to be encompassed by fiction, i.e., by someone's imagination. That's what I thought when, just as I was handing in this book, I received word from Monticello that a new child of Sally Hemings had been identified through a letter from Thomas Jefferson to his son-in-law Jack Eppes, in which he announces obliquely and pointedly this birth. This brought the number of Hemings children to seven. I hardly blinked. Somehow the search for the truth is always more absorbing and dangerous than the truth itself. But even my hair stood on end when I asked the name of the newly discovered Hemings daughter, born the seventh of December 1799, nine months after Jefferson returned from Philadelphia. I was told the daughter had been named Thenia. But Thenia already existed! In the pages of the manuscript I had just sent! I had invented her from whole cloth, as a major character, because I needed her as a kind of twin, an alterego to Harriet's false whiteness. My choice of her name had been the purest of accidents. Thenia, the real Thenia, died before she was two years old. If she hadn't existed, I would have had to invent her, or, conversely, if she hadn't been invented, she would have had to exist.

A novel is a legitimate illumination of the ambiguities of historical reality. Written history is
always
interpreted through a writer's sensibility and therefore inevitably fictionalized. One has only to read a biography of Napoléon written by a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a Russian to recognize that with the same acts, and the same facts, a personage can differ so dramatically from one book to the other as to be practically unrecognizable. A fact can be white in one book and black in another. Oral history is closer to truth and to reality, but depends on the fragility of humankind's collective memory. We can only hope to find a grain of truth in the ocean of desert sand which is humanity's written memorial. As Voltaire noted and Harriet reminds us: “There is no history, only fictions of various degrees of plausibility.”

Barbara Chase-Riboud is a Carl Sandburg Prize—winning poet and the bestselling, prize-winning author of five acclaimed historical novels—
Sally Hemings, Valide: A Novel of the Harem, Echo of Lions, The President's Daughter,
and
Hottentot Venus
—and three collections of poetry—
From Memphis and Peking, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra,
and the forthcoming
Love Perfecting.
Her books have been translated into nine languages worldwide and also include the French-language novel
Roman Egyptian.
A critically acclaimed sculptor, she has had a long international career of one-person exhibitions in major museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Her award-winning monuments grace Lower Manhattan, and she has participated in more than a hundred museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad. In 1996 she received a knighthood from the French government. Born in Philadelphia of Canadian American descent, she was educated at Yale University, was the first American woman to visit China after the Revolution (in 1965), has received numerous fellowships and honorary degrees, and divides her time between Paris, Rome, and New York. Her Web site is
www.barbara-chase-riboud.com
.

by Cherise A. Pollard, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

In this sequel to
Sally Hemings,
a novel about Thomas Jefferson's slave and concubine, author Barbara Chase-Riboud imagines the life of Sally's fifth child, Harriet. According to the historical record, Harriet was their only daughter to survive childhood. She was allowed to run away, or “stroll,” from Monticello at the age of twenty-one, at which time she chose to pass for white and was, in effect, lost to history. Harriet's story has become part of the lore surrounding the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, and Chase-Riboud continues to explore the personal and national toll of their decades-long relationship in this novel.

The novel assesses the damage that Jefferson's myopic perspective on race and slavery had on both his literal and figurative progeny. Because he was unable to define the Negro as a free citizen when he drafted the Declaration of Independence and because he was unwilling to keep his promises to free his enslaved children when they turned twenty-one or to free his slave wife at the time of his death, Chase-Riboud contends that neither his family nor the nation has been able to resolve Jefferson's deeply personal conflict in regards to race.

Each chapter begins with an epigraph from Thomas Jefferson's writings. Framed by her father's canonical prose, Harriet Hemings's story resonates with Jefferson's complicated historical and familial legacy. In Chase-Riboud's
imagination, Jefferson is the architect of his daughter's passing narrative in three ways: first, he creates an algebraic equation that defines his children as white due to their status as octoroons; second, he had agreed, according to the oral historical record, to free the children he fathered with Sally Hemings on their twenty-first birthdays; and third, he does not give any of the children who leave free papers, instead simply looking the other way when they “stroll” from Mon-ticello. He thus constructs Harriet's life as a free white woman consumed by secrets, lies, and race.