The magic of her twenty-first year, when she would be freed. Free, as her father had promised her mother long ago in Paris.
And so she had played the game, but always in her mind was the knowledge of her reward, the breaking of the evil spell cast on her by … by whom? Whose fault was it that she was a slave? Her father’s? Her country’s? God’s? Her mother had never been able to explain this to her satisfactorily, and she had never dared ask her father.
Hope had been her birthday. Now she was slave about to be free, black about to be white; girl about to become woman; without a past, about to be given a future; all for her birthday. She looked up at the sky. The moon was no more than a white sliver in the immensity of blackness. And what if the sky were white and the moon black? she thought.
Harriet had come into the circle of light from the ballroom windows, where she stood with the rest of the servants, entranced with the scene unfolding inside. The slave orchestra broke into a sprightly quadrille. Without the knowledge of the dancing white people it was playing Gabriel Prosser’s song. Harriet shook her head and laughed with the rest of the servants while the whites continued to dance. Wasn’t it typical, she thought, of white people to dance to a tune they didn’t even know the words of. The whole South was dancing to a tune they didn’t know the words of. The ladies and their escorts swung and looped, turned, skipped, grouped, and regrouped, forming circles and breaking like water on a creek bed.
Harriet’s slender foot tapped to the music; her hips began to move. Suddenly, someone caught her from behind and swung her around. The maids and the lackeys had begun to dance in the circle of white light. They would continue to dance as long as their masters, far into the night, laughing and flirting, cooler outside than their sweating masters inside. They would outlast them, and then have to drive them home, undress them if they were drunk, wash them if they puked, pick up their clothes where they had dropped them, and put them to bed.
Harriet’s skirts bobbed and swayed as her feet kept time and she sang the words of Gabriel Prosser’s song:
There was two a-guarding Gabriel’s cell
And then more in the jail about;
And two a-standing at the hangman’s tree
And Billy was there to get Gabriel out.
There was musket shot and musket balls
Between his neckbone and his knee,
But Billy took Gabriel up in his arms
And he carried him away right manfully.
They mounted a horse and away they went,
Ten miles off from that hanging tree,
Until they stopped where the river bent
And there they rested happily.
And then they called for a victory dance,
And the crowd they all danced merrily:
The best dancer amongst them all
Was Gabriel Prosser who was just set free!
Harriet Hemings carried a razor-sharp stiletto deep in her petticoat pocket. It had been her Uncle James’s. She would kill the man, black or white, who tried to force her. As her Uncle John had explained how difficult it was to kill, she had decided if she could not kill, then she would maim. She would die, but there would be one slave, or one master, who would never rape again.
She was going to be free. She was going to choose her husband. She was going to be married in a church. And she was going to her husband a virgin. She picked up her skirts and whirled in familiar black arms.
Everything was ready, and soon she would leave. It was November, already six months past her birthday. It was as good a time as any. Her mother had been working on her trunks for over a year. She had sweated and sewn until her hands were raw and swollen. Not only her mother, but her Aunt Critta, Aunt Bett, Cousin Betsy, Aunt Nance, Mammy Dolly, Cousin Ursula. Her Uncle John had made her three wooden trunks of the finest rosewood, with leather and copper fittings, lined in scarlet linen. Little by little, the trunks had been filled with dresses, linens of all sorts, petticoats, underwear, sheets.
Her mother had cut up everything she owned, either for the material or the trimmings. Even her yellow cloak had been torn apart, cleaned and recut into the most elegant yellow-and-black-velvet redingote she had ever seen. Her mother didn’t dare let any of the white women of the house see it, for fear it would be confiscated. It was her strolling trousseau.
Her mother.
A slave inherited the condition of the mother. Was it her mother’s fault that she was a slave? But why was her mother a slave? Wasn’t that her father’s fault?
More than any of her brothers, she had endured her temporary evil spell, her temporary slavehood, if not happily, then without rancor, and without suffering, grooming herself for the moment she would shed it, as her father had promised.
What no one had told her, and what she had had to fathom for herself, was that there was no freedom without whiteness; that to shed her slavehood was also to shed her color. If she were to escape the dangerous, persecuted, and harassed life of a freed slave, she would have to pass from one race to the other, from black to white.
Her mother.
Her mother still lived on memories of France while sitting in her secret room at the top of the mansion at Monticello, year after year, unable even to call her body her own!
Harriet Hemings had seen that room. It was filled with private treasure: silk dresses and petticoats, satin and kid shoes, and gloves, muslin and lawn dressing gowns, books, sheet music, a beautiful onyx pendulum clock, a green morocco leather chest, tooled in intricate designs and filled with linens, silk, and lace. There was also a delicate French writing table, a coiffeuse, bolts of velvet, and, most extraordinary of all, a hammered copper bathing tub called a baignoire. Her father had made a drawing of the baignoire her mother had used in France and Joe Fosset had built her one. All jammed into this one room: a whole secret life, full of beautiful treasures.
Most of it would be hers, her mother had told her. It was, she had reminded her daughter, her only dowry. She didn’t need to indulge in her passion for beautiful clothes and beautiful things any longer.
Harriet Hemings was young and she was selfish. She would not throw away the gift of freedom as had her mother. She would grab it and run. Harriet’s heart was heavy as she thought about the stagecoach that would take her away from everything she loved. But unlike her brothers, she would say good-bye to her father.
Adrien Petit had already arrived from Washington City to escort his former master’s daughter to Philadelphia. He had left Monticello long before she was born, but Harriet had heard all about the indomitable Petit in Paris, in Philadelphia, at Monticello. Now her father had asked him to come and get her, and as a last service to his former master, he had arrived: a prosperous gentleman farmer and caterer, and, if the truth be known, richer than his former employer by many thousands of dollars.
Petit had prospered and bought land cheap around Washington and watched it double, then quadruple in value as the city thrived. He had tried, in the beginning, to persuade James Hemings to join him as a partner and chef, but James had had other ideas and had finally left for Spain, saying he would never live in a slave country again. Petit had wondered why James ever returned. But when he learned of James’s death, he forbade himself to ever wonder again.
Petit sat now with his former master, receiving instructions about his daughter’s settling in Philadelphia.
“You ‘strolling,’ Harriet?”
Madison Hemings was seventeen years old, tall and rangy with the bitter, suppressed violence of his uncle. He was trembling with rage.
“Yes, Madison. I’m leaving at nightfall.”
“You going to pass for white?”
“Yes, Mad, I’m going to pass.”
“Father knows you strolling?”
“Yes, Mad. He’s arranged everything. He sent for Monsieur Petit to come and fetch me to Philadelphia.”
“Who’s that? A friend of Papa’s? You got any money?”
“Papa, he gave me fifty dollars, and Petit, he�
��s seeing to the rest.”
“You know how much you worth on the slave block, Harriet?”
“Oh, Madison, don’t. Mad. Mad.”
“You worth a pile of money, sweetheart. I tell you. You a fancy!”
“Madison …”
“I tell you Father could get five thousand dollars for you on the block! Five thousand dollars in New Orleans … at one of those Quadroon Balls …”
“Oh, Madison. Don’t cry. I love you so. I’ll always love you. Do you think it’s easy to leave you? If I don’t take this chance, what other chance do I have? What future if I don’t?”
“You’ll be alone with no family, Harriet … the end of Mama. You’re deserting her.”
“I know, Madison, but I’ll always be a part of you. I’m you; you. I’m your sister. I’m your flesh and blood, and I’ll always be, no matter what happens. No matter how far away I go. I’ll never forget you.”
“Yes, you will.”
“Madison, please. Don’t be so hard. Don’t be so hard on me … I’m a girl … a woman. You don’t know what it means to be a slave woman. Wait until your turn to stroll comes! Perhaps you’ll understand better.”
“Never. I’ll never pass. It’s worse than being sold. Selling yourself for whiteness.”
“Perhaps when your turn comes, Madison, you can have your freedom without stealing it!”
“Perhaps when my turn comes, I can even kill for it.”
“I have no choice, Madison.”
“Five thousand dollars you worth to some white man …”
Madison’s voice followed Harriet as she turned and walked away from him down Mulberry Row. When she was out of sight, Harriet leaned against the nearest cabin and was violently ill. But she refused to weep.
Harriet found her mother in a wheat field, far from the house, beyond the orchards. She was standing facing east toward the Chesapeake Bay and the sea two hundred miles away, as if she could see the tall clipper ships in the harbor. She did not turn as Harriet approached.
“Mama?”
“Laisse-moi”. Sally Hemings spoke the French she had taught her daughter.
“Mama, the carriage is waiting.”
“I know. Laisse-moi, leave me.”
“Au revoir, Maman.”
Sally Hemings remained staring toward the sea. Her daughter walked around her as if she were a monument of stone, until she faced her.
“Je t’ecrirai, Maman. . . .”
“Oui. Ecris-moi.”
“Tu ne viens pas?”
Sally Hemings looked at her daughter as if she were mad. The yellow light of her eyes struck Harriet like a lighthouse beam.
“Non, je ne viens pas. I’m not coming …” her mother said.
She knew Harriet’s father would sit down at his writing table this night. He would light his candle and meticulously inscribe in his Account Book, “Run” after Harriet’s name, just as he had written “Run” after Beverly’s. As with Beverly, he would put the date, she decided, since the age of flight had been written long ago in their heart.
Harriet’s father was waiting for her when she arrived at the carriage. It was almost dark. She had changed into her traveling clothes, the yellow-and-black redingote. Although she was almost as tall as Martha Randolph, she had to stand on tiptoe to embrace her father. She felt the frailty under the still imposing height and breadth. He was old, her father. Almost eighty, and she would never see him again. He trembled, and she held him fast, much longer than she had intended. She caught his scent: old wool, lavender, ink, and horse. When she saw him crying, she averted her eyes, but they met those of Petit, so she bowed her head and waited for her father to gain control of himself.
Harriet was young, and her young heart hardened with childlike logic. Why was he crying now? Now, when it was too late? What did he expect? Why hadn’t he cried twenty-one years ago when he could have saved them all? She would never understand him. Had he thought that because he was Thomas Jefferson he would not have to pay someday?
She would start her new life without home, without family, without friends. She would be white. White. For the rest of her life she would live this lie. She would live in dread, on guard against slips, against chance encounters, against a keen eye. She was, after all, a runaway slave. A fugitive. Madison was right. It was worse than being sold away, she thought. She could meet her kin over the grave of her mother and still she could not recognize them. She would not even be able to stand over her father’s grave and grieve. And what of her white family? She could no more recognize the whites than the blacks. This was the price.
Harriet’s green eyes turned hard. So be it. Don’t cry. Don’t cry over it. Crying was done with forever. She was white now. She had nothing to cry about.
Adrien Petit looked on the scene with much the same horror as he had looked on the Christmas emancipation of James Hemings twenty-eight years ago. But, perfect servant to the last, he showed nothing. He was stunned by the beauty of this daughter: a wilder, more violent beauty than that of her mother. She had inherited the looks of her mother, and the flamboyance of the Jeffersons and the Randolphs; their height, their big bones, their presence. The combination was so remarkable it was difficult not to stare at her. She had her father’s incredible hair and his creamy complexion, unvexed by Thomas Jefferson’s freckles. Her eyes were a perfect combination of the yellow of her mother and the blue of her father. She had his pride, his stubbornness, and his vanity. This one was hard. And she was superb. She would never cry, and she would never bend. She would die first. How could his former master bear to lose her?
He understood that she would now pass for white. She would have to change her name, he supposed. What would she call herself? Harriet Petit, perhaps. . . . He flushed as if he had said it out loud.
He was leaving America for good—rich, old, and still a bachelor. He would return to the Champagne region and live out the few years remaining to him. He would not mind at all leaving his name behind.
Harriet Hemings lifted her head and looked at her father for the last time. She wanted to tell him that she was his. His daughter. She would always be his daughter. But she said nothing. Then she turned her gaze, hard and candid and green, on Petit, imploring him to take her away from this place forever.
He straightened instinctively under the command of those eyes, then bowed and helped her into his carriage. His last service to Thomas Jefferson.
Darkness was descending as they drove down the mountain.
Adrien Petit and Harriet Hemings rode away and never knew that within hours of their departure, Thomas Jefferson slipped on a decayed step of one of his terraces at Monticello, breaking his forearm and dislocating the bones of his right wrist for the second time.
Harriet would not have known its significance, and even Sally Hemings, rushing to the aid of her injured master, could not have savored the special irony of this fall. Only Petit, opposite a violently trembling, but dry-eyed young orphan, would have remembered his master’s original fall from grace, in the Paris of Maria Cosway, the year of Our Lord, 1787.
CHAPTER 42
OCTOBER 1825
“SALLY!”
It was Martha’s voice, sharp with anxiety. I didn’t know why I had come down the east stairs from my room as if I had been summoned, but I was in the hallway when she called. I saw her leading her father from the dining room, where he had—as usual—been entertaining a group of young students from the University of Virginia.
The door had been left ajar, and I could see the assembled young men, several of whom I didn’t recognize.
As was his custom, Thomas Jefferson’s place had been set separately, at a small table which was now empty, the chair pushed back. The young men were all on their feet, and several were peering anxiously through the opening of the doorway.
“Sally, he’s been taken with a malaise,” Martha said.
“No, Martha, I’m perfectly all right now.”
“Here, let me help you.”
; He leaned heavily on me. I felt the tremor of his hand on my shoulder. How fragile and weak it was. Those hands that had had so much strength, that had guided, shaped, designed, and caressed. Now they rested, palsied and without weight, on my shoulder. I turned my back to open the door, and slowly we made for his room across the hall.
“Get Burwell,” he murmured.
Burwell’s gone to Charlottesville, I thought in panic as I looked over my shoulders beyond the open door into the glare of the candle-lit dining room.
Then I thought without surprise, He is dying.
From Harriet’s departure on, misfortune had plagued us. No sooner had my master recovered from his fall from the terrace than he had ridden and had been thrown again by Brimmer. Stubbornly, he had ridden once again, and this time it had been Eagle that had slipped while fording a river and my master, entangled in the reins with his crippled wrists, had almost drowned. Next had come a fever that had confined him to his bed for three weeks. Then a flash flood had swept away the dam he had been building for over a year. He began to sink under the weight of his debts, which seemed to have no end. He had had to borrow from his son-in-law Jack Eppes and had pledged Varina, Martha’s estate. Then his eldest and favorite granddaughter, the lovely and gentle Anne, whom we called Nancy, died, believed by everyone to have been killed by the brutality of her husband. Charles Bankhead, a young, handsome aristocrat, had turned out to be a drunkard, a bully, a coward, and a wife-beater. Many a time one of the overseers, or Burwell himself, had saved her from a beating by her husband.
Six years earlier, Jefferson Randolph had accosted Bankhead on the courthouse steps in Charlottesville and accused him of abusing his sister. Bankhead had responded by stabbing Jeff several times with a long knife. When Thomas Jefferson had heard the news, at nightfall, he had mounted his horse and galloped down the mountain the several miles to Charlottesville. Then, before I could stop Beverly, he, too, had saddled up and ridden out to find his father. “He’ll kill himself in this weather,” he had said. Fear in his face, he had taken Brimmer and sped. When Beverly arrived at the store where Jeff had been taken, he saw his father kneeling by the head of his wounded grandson, weeping. Jefferson Randolph had been conscious and when he saw his grandfather crying, he too had started to cry. Burwell and Beverly had watched in silence. Jeff, unlike his sister, had survived.
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