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.”
“Never is a long time,” I replied.
“Up the river or down, Harriet, it still means I’ll lose you forever. You’re a maroon—a fugitive slave.”
“Until I get to Philadelphia. Then I’ll be a nice white girl.”
“With a price on your head.”
“Better a bounty price than an auction price.”
“Father would never sell you.”
“Madison doesn’t think so.”
“Don’t listen to Madison.”
“I don’t intend to. I’m going north.”
“And then?”
“Well,” I said romantically, “maybe abroad—Paris, London, Florence.”
“Where?”
“Well, Paris anyway. I’ve promised myself that.”
“How?”
“I’ll work. I’ll marry. I’ll manage.”
“It seems that black people starve up north.”
“I’m white.”
“Not if they catch you.”
“They won’t catch me, Eston. I’m too smart.”
“What if Master sends slave catchers after you?”
“He won’t. He promised Mama long ago.”
“Well, that’s one promise he kept at least.”
“Only because of my color.”
“Don’t count on it, Harriet. If Martha Wayles inherited Mama, then Martha Randolph can inherit you,” said Eston. “They can hunt you right to your grave. They can send slave catchers after you in Philadelphia as soon as Father takes his last breath. It’s been done. This slavery stuff is for good.”
“I’d shoot the first slave catcher who tried to take me back to Monticello. And I’d kill the kin that ordered it as well.”
“Someday we’ll meet again, Sister,” Eston said quietly as he hugged me for the last time. “I promise ... maybe white and maybe not,” he added, “but certainly free.”
The night before, I had stood in the amber light that filtered out through the tall windows from the glowing chandeliers of the ballroom at Montpelier, a neighboring plantation belonging to James Madison. I stood amongst the assembly of maids, valets, outriders, lackeys, and mammies; every shape, age, and color of slavehood. In less than twenty-four hours, I would be twenty-one years old and free to follow my brothers Beverly and Thomas into white oblivion. My father had sworn and decreed this long ago in Paris, according to my mother, and we had all played the game. In my mind’s eye was always the knowledge of my special position. I was a slave about to be free, a girl about to become a woman, an individual about to be given a future. All for my birthday.
I hummed to myself as the music of the slave orchestra wafted out over the damp frosted lawn hedged with jasmine, banks of roses, and flowering magnolias. The circle of light flickered as laughing, dancing couples drifted by like Chinese-lantern shadows. The slave orchestra broke into a sprightly quadrille to the melody of “The Ballad of Gabriel Prosser,” the slave rebel. The crowd outside began to snicker as the whites continued to dance on. Wasn’t it typical of white people to dance to a tune they didn’t know the words to? They swung and looped, turned and skipped, grouped and regrouped, forming circles that broke the light like moving lace.
Suddenly, someone caught me from behind and swung me around and we too began to dance in the yellow circle of light. The servants outside continued to dance as long as the ball lasted, far into the night, laughing and flirting, cooler outside than those sweating within. We would outlast them and then drive them home, undress them if they were drunk, wash them if they had puked, pick up their clothes where they had dropped them, and put them to bed. The words of Gabriel’s song wafted out beyond the silhouettes in motion.
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.
I was the best dancer, I thought. I was the ballet master. And I was soon to be free. I was going to choose my husband. I was going to be married in a church. And I was going to the altar a virgin.
The cunning caress of cold steel touched my thigh. Since the age of sixteen, I had carried a razor-sharp stiletto deep in my petticoat pocket. It had belonged to my uncle James. Mama had given it to me for protection. No one would ever chase me up a tree again.
My dark reverie was broken by my brother’s condescending voice.
“You strolling, Harriet?”
Madison, my seventeen-year-old brother, sauntered up, his tall rangy body looming out of the darkness. I could hear the suppressed anger in his voice, the rage, see his anguished expression in the candlelight. People sensed his suppressed violence, and it bothered people, black and white.
“Yes, Madison. I am leaving tomorrow.” I tried to face Madison’s anger calmly.
“You going to pass for white?”
“Yes, Mad, I am going to pass.”
“Father knows you strolling?”
“Yes. He’s arranged everything. He’s sent for Adrian Petit to come and fetch me.”
“You got any money?”
“Papa gave me fifty dollars.”
“You know how much you worth on the slave block, Harriet?”
“You’re worth a pile of money, sweetheart! You don’t know it, but you’re a fancy. Fancy that! My sister is a fancy!”
“Madison.”
“I tell you, Father could get five thousand dollars for you in New Orleans! Five thousand dollars from some white gentleman ... at one of those quadroon balls.”
He grabbed my wrist with his strong brown hand. “I hear tell that the test of acceptance at those balls is that your veins should show blue under the skin of your wrists. Just like yours, Harriet.”
“Is that what you want for me, Mad?” I spit out the words, flashing my eyes into his.
He let go.
My flesh burned where he had held it, and the pain radiated up my arm. There were tears standing in his gray eyes.
“Oh, Madison, don’t cry; I love you. Do you think it’s easy to leave you? If I don’t take this chance, what other chance will I ever have?”
“You’ll have no family, Harriet, no kin. It’s the end of Mama. It’s oblivion, Harriet; it’s death.”
“It’s not death! Not mine or hers. Don’t put Mama on me, Mad. Anyway, I’ll always be a part of her, of you. I am you, I am your sister, I’m your flesh and blood, and I’ll always be, no matter what happens. That can’t change. No matter how far away I go, I’ll never forget you.”
“Yes, you will.”
“Madison, don’t be so hard. You know what a slave woman can expect. Your turn to stroll will come; perhaps then you’ll understand better. Wait until then.”
“Never. I’ll never pass. It’s worse than being sold. Selling yourself for whiteness.”
“It’s Papa’s doing, not mine.”
“You should love your color.”
“I would love my color if I knew what color I was. Perhaps when you turn twenty-one, Madison, you can have your freedom without stealing it!”
“Five thousand dollars you’re worth to some white man . . .”
“Whose fault is it that I am a slave, Madison? Whose fault?”
“A five-thousand-dollar fancy!” he mocked.
I stared at my bare wrists with their fragile crisscrossing veins so vulnerable, so slim that Madison had reached out and encircled them with one hand. In them coursed the warring bloods that mutually polluted each other. Whose fault is it? Whose fault?
I stood leaning weakly against the trunk of an oak tree. I felt the rough bark against my face and shoulders. One false move, I thought, and I could peel the skin right off my forehead. With one false move, I could skin this whiteness right off myself, and bleed . . . The old haunting fear came back just as the music, which had stopped, began again.
There had been a white carpenter at Monticello named Sykes who had tipped his hat to me one day in the presence of my cousin Ellen Randolph. I was on my way from the mansion to the weavers’ cabins, and Ellen was standing on the south veranda. I was fifteen. Ellen was almost twenty.
“How come you tipping your hat to a nigger, Mr. Sykes?” she had said, laughing. Sykes had stopped in his tracks.
“A nigger, Miss Ellen? I thought she was your sister!”
“That’ll be the day!” replied Ellen as she flounced by him, flinging day over her shoulder.
I was trying desperately to slip by the astonished man, but he caught me by the arm.
“How come you didn’t say nothing, gal? I’ve been doffing my hat to you for months!” Without answering, I tried to squeeze by.
“Answer me or you’ll get a taste of your mistress’s switch, by God.”
“There’s nothing to answer,” I said, my eyes pleading with Ellen, who was snickering behind her hand.
“You sassing me?”
“No, sir.”
“Master!”
“No, Master.”
“If you spoke like a nigger, I wouldn’t have mistaken myself, ain’t that so?”
“Yes, Master.”
“So I think you should say you’re sorry you deceived me.”
“Deceived him,” sneered Ellen, ready to collaborate in my humiliation.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Louder, gal.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry who?”
“Sorry, Master.”
“And from now on, talk like a nigger.”
His touch made my skin crawl and his words made my blood boil. But my true outrage was directed toward Ellen, my erstwhile playmate. She averted her eyes from my gaze, her thin mouth set in a face flushed with contempt.
A few days later, I was walking the deserted road leading toward the nearest of my father’s plantations, Edgehill, when Sykes approached, driving an empty buckboard. This situation was ideal. To his advantage he had superior speed, his sex, and his horsewhip. He could run me down with the wagon or abandon the wagon and come after me on foot. My heart accelerated; I weighed my chances.
“Hee, little Snow White,” he called down from the driver’s seat, “climb on up here! I got a present for you.”
I stared straight ahead, trying to decide if I should keep to the road in hope that a gang of returning field hands would pass—no, they could hardly stop a determined white man—or take to the woods where he would have to find me before he caught me. I knew those woods like the back of my hand. My brothers and I had tracked rabbit and squirrel, run races, picked berries, played hide-and-seek in them since childhood. And, if I could outrun Eston and Beverly, I could outrun Sykes. I kept to the edge of the road while he followed, ordering me again and again onto the buckboard.
“You deaf or something, white nigger? I said to get your butt up here!”
He quickened his mules to a trot; I broke into a sprint. Sykes laughed as he gained on me. Suddenly, I veered off the road and darted into the woods, clutching up my skirts and attaching them to my apron strings as I ran. I heard him crashing through the bushes behind me. “Hee, Snow White,” over and over. I picked up speed as he closed in behind me, and I heard the sudden crack of the horsewhip. The sound rode through me as if the lash were actually laid on my back. I reared. The whoosh and snap of it seemed to fill the whole woods, then the whole world. I bounded like a gazelle, leaping hurdles, gasping for breath, my heart thumping out of my chest as the sickening knowledge dawned on me that capture meant not only the pain and defeat of rape, but the end of safety, of wholeness, of childhood, forever. I would never dance again.
The low branches caught at my clothes and hair as I abandoned the trail and plunged into the underbrush. Sykes followed, laughing, cursing, and threatening. He gained on me as my strength ebbed. I was drenched in cold, acid sweat; tears and dirt streamed down my face. I had neither time nor force to wipe them away. Sykes’s heavy boots smashed into the scattered dead leaves along the trail I left. I could smell him and measure his breathing.
“Goddamn it, Snow White, when I catch you, I’m going to ram your ass, you whore!”
My skirt was torn and my hands and forearms were scratched and bleeding like an overworked plough horse. A white ball of saliva had formed at the corner of my mouth. Had I been running ten minutes? Twenty? My stomach turned; green bile rushed into my throat; a pain in my chest cut off my breathing. I had to stop. I gagged, my legs giving way under me as I pitched forward. My head struck a rough, gnarled tree root growing out of the moss-strewn glade. I looked up at the lowest branches. It was my only hope. I scrambled up the tree, the way my brothers had taught me, scraping my cheek and thigh against the jagged bark just as Sykes crashed into the light beams of the clearing. His whip shot out and caught my ankle. The pain seared so I thought he had taken off my foot. I screamed, hanging by the upper limbs just out of his reach, and pulled myself up into the dome of the leafy sanctuary. The whip slid off my ankle, tearing the skin and bloodying the tree trunk. With one wrench, I pulled the crippled leg out of his reach and crouched twelve feet above his head, hissing like a cornered wildcat. The whip fell back, then sliced into the trunk of the tree, shaking it, as Sykes repeatedly slashed the tree itself in anger, tearing off the bark, each blow pulling back strips as wood shavings flew and the tree bled sap. Again and again the whip fell in rhythm to Sykes’s curses, tracing white streaks along the dark crescents of the weeping hickory.
With each blow, I shuddered as if the lash had been laid on my own body. I covered my ears against the mournful screams of Sykes’s victim, which were perhaps my own.
“Come down from there, you little white nigger! I’ll show you how to obey an order!”
I crouched lower in the arch of the tree and watched as Sykes took out his sex, brandishing it like a weapon against the tree. I screwed my eyes shut.
“Come down and see what I got for you!”
All at once, there was an explosion of sound that I felt more than I heard. It scattered the perched birds and shook the leaves free around my head. Sykes had aimed his gun into the branches and fired wide. I must have lost consciousness, for a few seconds later, when I came to, still clutching the torso of the tree, Sykes had disappeared.
It was night before they found me. I could see the procession of lighted torches drawing closer and closer and hear my name being called over and over. It wasn’t long before I looked down at a circle of fire beneath me. Mr. Treadwell, the overseer, was there. My uncle Robert, my uncle Martin, Isaac, and my father were staring up at me. I began to whimper.
“Harriet,” Martin called softly, “Harriet, it’s all right, it’s me, Martin. What the devil has happened to you, darlin’? I’m coming up to get you. You don’t have to move. Hang onto the limb. You don’t have to talk, just hold on, Sweet Jesus, hold on. . . . Lord Almighty,” he whispered as his hand touched the blood on the tree trunk. “What happened to you, Harriet?”
I looked down at my father. He towered over the rest of the men, and his face was drawn. I saw him with a whip in his hand for the first time. Our eyes met in the flickering torchlight, mine pleading, his glacial. He blamed me! He blamed me, as if I had provoked and planned his humiliation. But I was his creature! His! And he didn’t love me for it. Instead of love, I had inspired only pity. The fury and disgust in his face were directed at me. In my misery, I reached down toward him, still unable to utter a sound. Martin had me now by the waist, and his touch provoked a storm of bitter tears. He was handing me over gently to Beverly below, when almost in exasperation, my father pushed Beverly aside and took me from Martin’s arms. I felt the rough shaft of the handle of the whip he still held against my back. He swept me up and carried me back to where everyone had left the horses and sat me upon Jupiter. He mounted, his back to me, pulled my arms around his waist, and started off toward the mansion. Timidly, I pulled myself closer to the broad, navy blue back. I could hear his heart through the rich wool. I sighed, then sniffled and closed my eyes. I had almost had to die to get his attention. When we arrived home, he lifted me roughly from Jupiter and carried me into the house up to my mother’s room. He stopped a short distance from her inside the door, and I felt his trembling as his shoulders hunched forward in an effort to master a monumental tantrum:
“See if she is hurt or not.” Then slowly he turned, his voice clear and temperate, as if he were giving early-morning orders for the fields. “A mother should know where her child is at any moment. I beg you remember that. If you ever let her out of your sight again, you will have me to answer to. I have told Martin I want the name of the man, and I want to know what he was doing tampering with my property.”
For a split second, his eyes met mine. I saw no tenderness nor comprehension, only a deep shame. I had felt it in his arms, and it had struck me mute.
I remained dumbstruck. It was weeks before I could speak without weeping. Finally I stammered . . .
“It was Sykes.” That was when my mother gave me the long slender stiletto with the silver handle that had belonged to my uncle James.
“Keep it with you at all times. Keep it hidden deep in your skirts. Remember you were not raped. Nothing happened to you. You are still intact. It is hard to kill a man, Harriet, too hard probably. So if you can’t kill, then maim. Aim low. Draw blood. That’s enough to stop most men. Never hesitate. It’s your life against his lust. Rape is murder in disguise. If you hesitate, Harriet, you’re dead.”
Sykes was banned from the premises of Monticello and ordered never to set foot on its soil again. My father never again allowed me to walk on the roads of the plantation alone, and my mother escorted me from the big house to the weavers’ cabins and back again.
Was it, I wondered cynically, because Father cared for me or because he distrusted me around men? But Father never let Mama forget it. Was it our fault we were Negro wenches?
My ankle healed, but the thin line of the whiplash remained, a pale, slightly raised scar which encircled the joint anklebone as if I had worn a shackle or had caught my foot in a squirrel trap.
I stooped down a moment and touched the scar, then straightened and stared at my mother. The tobacco field, which surrounded us, was a good way beyond the mansion and stretched in a wide highway of feathery waves, so vast the eye couldn’t take it all in. The heat had reduced everything else to wavelets of sepia and black, and the blossoms, which reached our hips, glowed iridescent, parading in long lines like soldiers to the horizon. With amazing grace, they floated in the sun-spoiled daze of light, at times gathering into small foams of purple as I stood there gazing at my mother’s burnt umber figure, my skirts caught in the stems and thistles.
Early this morning I had searched for him. I had decided to ask him, beg him, to free me—legally. What if I refused to be transported out of the state like a bale of cotton with the master’s ticket on it, his indigo stamp, but not his recognition? I had saddled up Ripley, an old bay nobody rode, and gone out to find him. I knew I would find him in the saddle at that time of the morning, and I was determined to have it out with him. I had vowed to look him in the eye and force him to see me for what I was, his daughter. The bastard daughter who was trying to say good-bye, trying to get him to call me by my name.
I found him over by the west frontier, near the stand of woods that divided the rise of the mountain from the first planting fields. There was a birch fence that enclosed a pasture and a narrow bridge spanning a clear-running creek. He had just taken the fence, and he sat there immobile on Old Eagle—a tall horse with wide shoulders and a heavily muscled chest—as still and luminous as a marble sculpture. The light broke all around him, shining in a domelike configuration, reflecting long yellow dashes of light, and enclosing his profile. I screwed up my courage. I was going to ask him to give me my manumission papers as a freedwoman. He could do it. I knew he could.
Old Eagle shied away as Ripley blocked his path. Both horses were steaming and their flanks touched. I drew in my breath; the cobalt eyes cut through me as if to ask how I dared interrupt his early-morning ride.
“Master . . .”
“Harriet.” He gestured, then waited patiently for an explanation.
I shivered. I wanted to turn Ripley around and gallop off, but I forced my mount to stillness and trained my eyes level with his. Jade met sapphire.
“It’s my birthday,” I said stupidly.
“Yes, Harriet.” Still his voice carried a question.
“My last day at Monticello.”
His horse began to sidestep impatiently, trying to avoid me. It wasn’t Old Eagle, it was my father’s knees doing it. He didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want to talk.
“I don’t want to run, Master. I don’t want to steal myself. . . .”
For a moment, his eyes seemed to flicker with a recognition or a reminiscence, I couldn’t tell which, as if he had heard this plea, this desperate boast, before. He looked away from me, then, toward the mountains. I stuttered on.
“Papers, Master. I need papers to prove I’m free . . . otherwise I’m a fugitive slave, a criminal.” You can’t want jour own daughter to be a felon.
“You don’t need any papers, Harriet. You’re white. You must live your life without them. It’s your only chance. I’ve arranged everything. Petit is coming to get you.”
“But what about my freedom? Mother promised me I’d be free.”
“You are free, Harriet. As free as I am. No one will challenge you. No one would dare.”
“But what if they do? What if they . . . ask?”
“Hasn’t your mother told you what to do? That’s her duty.”
“She said men can’t keep secrets.”
“She’s wrong. I’ve kept your secret, haven’t I? I’ve hidden and protected all of you all these years. I’ve shielded you from the newspapers and a vicious campaign against all of us by our political enemies. I kept my silence. I didn’t send you all away after the troubles with Callender. I resisted all sorts of pressures in order to keep the promise I made to your mother in Paris. I risked . . . everything, for you. Here at Monticello you were safe.”
“But . . .”
“I’ve done all I can.”
“But papers are important! Without identity papers as your slave, or recognition as your daughter, I’m twice illegitimate. I’m nobody’s . . .” My complaint had cost me all my strength. I watched helplessly the frown of disapproval on my father’s face. I had learned this silent language fluently. I knew by his look of petulance that I was being told to get on my way, that I had stepped beyond an invisible frontier. He pulled in Old Eagle’s reins, cutting me off, and galloped off in the opposite direction.
I watched him as he fled, taking the two-foot-high barrier in a savage jump, his whip coming down heavily on Eagle’s flank. He beat his horses cruelly. It was a well-known fact about him. Nobody knew why. In his panic he would have flown, I thought, if he could have, not to answer me. And now I would never have an answer. For the rest of my life. I would live in dread, on guard against a slip, a chance encounter, a keen eye, or a sentimental confession. I was a runaway slave, in danger of recapture and sale, even if I had stolen myself. Madison had been right. It was worse than being auctioned on the block. I could meet my kin and would not be allowed to acknowledge them. I would never be able to stand over my father’s grave and weep. I could no more recognize my white family than my black one. This was the price I had to pay for freedom.
My tears began to fall, as quiet as ashes.
“Papa . . . ,” I whispered into the early-morning mist.
Suddenly my heart began to behave strangely. It set off like an explosion, like gunpowder, and began to leap around unevenly in my chest. It began to pound in a most alarming way, then stop irresponsibly, hitting some sort of inward nerve, mocking like Madison’s laughter. Then all at once, I couldn’t hear it at all. As if my heart had simply stepped outside my body. And my tears stopped.
Flight had always been my father’s answer to everything. Maman had told me that. Now I studied her as a breeze ruffled her black skirts. She hadn’t moved. If flight was my father’s name, immobility was my mother’s. I felt tears of frustration and hopelessness start in my eyes. They were going to leave me all alone in this world, both of them. The blind injustice of it gripped me like a fist.
“Oh, God, Maman, je pars. I’m leaving. Petit is here with the carriage. Aren’t you . . . even happy for me?” I cried.
“It’s no victory for me, Harriet, only justice.”
Oh, Maman, tell me you love me, I begged wordlessly. Tell me he loves me, please. I think I’m dying of not being loved. But to my mother out loud I simply said, “Adieu, Maman.”
My father was waiting for me by the time I had walked back from where I had left my mother. I saw him long before he saw me, and so I studied him from afar with all the confused loathing and yearning he had evoked in me that morning. I hated my mother for hiding. She should have come to stand beside him this once in a proper farewell to me. Instead, Petit, my father’s old majordomo, was standing there. The Frenchman with his bald head and extravagant mustache had left Monticello just before my birth, but my mother had nurtured the legend of the indomitable Petit in Paris, Petit in Philadelphia, Petit at Monticello.
For the first time, I noticed the frailness under the imposing height of my master and the new physical suffering beyond his proud exuberance. My father was old, nearly eighty, and I might never see him again. Now I was standing close, looking up into his eyes. I caught his scent of old wool, lavender, ink, and horseflesh. For a moment he seemed not even to recognize me. Then he swayed slightly, clutching his left wrist. He reached down and picked up a wicker basket and held it out to me.
“Do you want one of these Monticello pups, Harriet? Clara just gave birth to a litter. She might keep you company and remind you of home.”
He held out the basket of squirming Dalmatian puppies as if it were a peace offering.
“Choose one for I shall drown the rest. I consider all dogs the most afflicting of all the follies for which we tax ourselves.”
He reached down into the basket and took out an adorable black-and-white bitch. Father seemed to recognize the necessity and utility of dogs, I thought, as he did of Negroes, but he still begrudged their existence.
For my mother’s sake, I swallowed this last humiliation, matching his smile, which he never lost, and suppressing an overwhelming desire to wring the poor puppy’s neck. How, I wondered, could I love and despise my father so much at the same time?
I looked down at the animal squirming in the huge outstretched hands. An apology for this morning? I wondered.
“She’s beautiful.”
“Think of a good name for her.”
“I’ll call her Independence.”
I took Independence in my arms, clutching her to me in the same way my father clutched his wrist against his chest. I noticed that a tear had rolled down my father’s cheek. I looked away. WHITE PEOPLE! Why was he crying now? Now, when it was too late? What had he expected? That because he was the President he wouldn’t have to pay someday? I turned and held Petit’s horrified gaze in a silent command to take me away from this place. I would not throw away the gift of freedom in exchange for any man’s promise . . . especially white men, who never kept their promises. Had Captain Hemings married my great-grandmother? Had John Wayles freed my grandmother? Had my father ever called me daughter? Was this parting gift of Independence an acknowledgment? Well, I thought, grab it and run. Freedom, that is. Leave everything you have ever loved, start your new life as an orphan: nameless, homeless, and friendless. White. White. White.
I drew his eyes to mine. You’re asking a lot of a daughter, I thought.
“Papa,” I whispered. “You could still change things.”
But I kept my eyes as hard as the precious stone they resembled, my thoughts tight in my womb. I wouldn’t cry anymore. I was free. I was white; I was twenty-one. I had nothing to cry about.
Petit and I drove down the mountain in broad daylight. Everyone knew we were leaving. My uncle Burwell drove the carriage, which headed toward Richmond. Another uncle, Fossett, was the outrider. People deserted the slave quarters and drifted toward the road that traversed all my master’s plantations to have a last look at Harriet Hemings leaving home. Inside the vehicle, I turned back to look only once, but that was enough to see that my mother had come to stand beside the tall stooped figure of Father, who had stepped through a hole in the rotting steps and fallen from the veranda to his knees. Steps my uncle Robert was supposed to have fixed months ago.