The whole of time moved on with a rapidity of which those of our carriage have but a faint idea . . . and yet in the evening, when we took a retrospect of the day, what a mass of happiness had we traveled over.
Thomas Jefferson
We drove all night, not stopping until we had crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Petit, who had taken my cold hands in his, kept up a running conversation to keep us awake as Fossett and Burwell sped us north. Fossett was the son of my mother’s half sister Mary, a dark Hemings. And Burwell, my uncle, had served my father as valet for thirty years. What, I wondered, was in their minds? Shame and derision at this charade in which we were all locked? Envy or compassion for a Hemings going up the river instead of down? Petit, the ex-valet, seemed to be struggling with some overwhelming dilemma. Then, like the breaking of a great dam, he suddenly blurted out:
“Although it’s hard for you to believe, Harriet, I was young once upon a time. Your mother must have told you a lot about your father’s days as the American ambassador to the court of Louis XVI. We lived quite a bit of history during those years from eighty-four to eighty-nine, including the most glorious Revolution. We were all young then. Even your father. He was a tall, handsome, rich widower in his forties and an exotic American like the adored Benjamin Franklin. I was in my twenties at the time and had been in service for over a decade. Your uncle James, your father’s body servant, was a year younger than I, Martha and your mother were fifteen when your mother and Maria arrived from Virginia in 1787 on command of your father, who wanted Maria, his only other living child, with him. I believe sending your mother, who was hardly more than an adolescent herself, as her nursemaid to Paris was your grandmother’s idea. And just as I am escorting you to Philadelphia, I was sent to London by your father to bring back Maria and your mother to Paris. I found them installed in the American embassy in London under the surveillance of John Adams and his wife, Abigail, a stern yet compassionate American couple of such dignity, affection, and rectitude as to have enlisted my admiration for all times. I was an unpleasant surprise. Mrs. Adams had expected your father to come and fetch his daughter in person, and she was furious that a servant had been sent instead. But your father was waiting in Paris for a lady, Maria Cosway, and I had the task of cajoling Maria, consoling your mother, whom Mrs. Adams wanted to send straight back to Virginia when she realized she was a slave, and mollifying Ambassador and Mrs. Adams. Mrs. Adams especially was appalled at having under her roof what she called a ‘white slave,’ a term I had yet to understand. Mrs. Adams was an abolitionist, and she knew how white Negroes were created. I was the only one who didn’t know.
“Then Maria refused to leave with me, a stranger, to join still another stranger, the father she didn’t remember. Mr. Adams agreed that Polly, as she was called, would never leave with me without your mother, Sally Hemings, and that in any case they had no authority to dispose of Mr. Jefferson’s property, regardless of their stand on slavery.
“It was three weeks before little Polly agreed to leave with me, and those three weeks I had spent amusing, teasing, and escorting her and your mother around London. What a wonderful time we had. It was my second time in London. I had gone the first time with the Comte d’Ashnach as his page and had been introduced to the gambling, racing, and womanizing life of the English aristocrats. I knew every nook and cranny of London, every elegant shop, restaurant, and theater, from Covent Gardens to Cambridge! The girls adored my excursions with them, and one of their favorites was Hyde Park. Your mother was a very beautiful girl. She stopped traffic and was admired by everyone. There was something that no one could put their finger on which made her special beyond her spectacular looks. A gentleness, an otherworldliness, an aura of enormous spirit—a kind of life force which bewitched you and held you in its spell. And the voice ... It was the voice of an angel—low and sweet and honeyed—your voice, Harriet. Your mother could charm the birds out of the trees.
“Maria was a fragile, beautiful child of nine, your mother almost a young woman with golden eyes and ivory skin and raven hair—the picture, I was told, of her half sister Martha. I remember how astounded Mrs. Adams was at the resemblance.
“We left London on April twentieth, 1787, and had a fair crossing. We arrived by public coach at the Hôtel de Langeac, your father’s embassy, in the late afternoon of April twenty-fifth. I’ll always remember that trip from harbor to city, through Brittany and Normandy to the Ile-de-France, the modest carriage—for your father hadn’t yet bought this lavish one—rumbling through the most beautiful countryside in the world, although I’m personally from Champagne . . . and prefer that landscape. . . .
“Your father and James were awaiting us in the courtyard. Maria didn’t recognize her father at first, and James was hard put to realize that the young woman who descended from the carriage was his little sister. But your father remembered Sally Hemings as the daughter of Betty Hemings and from her days of nursing and running errands for his wife. It was your mother who brought welcome news from Virginia and Monticello. Your mother was very good at delivering southern gossip, and your father soon became addicted to, as he put it, ‘who has died, who has married, who has hanged themselves because they cannot marry.’ They became a regular two-person salon, with your mother holding forth in dialogue and imitations, dramatic monologues, and cruel invasions of privacy. She knew something about everyone, a feat she had learned, I found out later, from another expert, your grandmother.
“But I’ll never forget the moment we rolled into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeac and the girls rushed from the confines of the carriage. Your mother was scooped into the arms of her brother James, who was now an apprentice cook in the embassy kitchens, while poor Maria cowered behind the carriage not recognizing her own father! Thomas Jefferson was mortified. He finally picked his daughter up in his arms despite her protests and dragged her into the mansion, leaving your mother and James to their tearful reunion.”
Petit paused, if only to catch his breath. It seemed to me as if this last service to my father had opened an ever-widening breach in his legendary discretion, or that in escorting me to Philadelphia he had deployed his last reserves of servitude to my father.
“You’re going to tell me everything, aren’t you?”
“One day. Perhaps. I think I’ve said enough for now.”
“Mr. Petit, you’re going to talk all the way to Philadelphia. I know it.”
“Call me Adrian.”
“Mr. Adrian.”
I sat opposite Adrian Petit in the dark green interior, in my yellow plaid “strolling” outfit, my back flattened in panic against the leather upholstery, my hands clenched in my lap to stop their trembling. I watched Petit closely. The irises of his smallish eyes invaded even their whites and shone pantherlike from his face, half-hidden in the shadows. More than any other white man, he knew what had happened between my mother and father during those years they had spent in Paris. He had known my uncle James in his prime, Maria as a little girl, Martha as a young, shy convent intern. He had received the mysterious Maria Cosway on her secret visits to my father. I leaned forward, caught in the fascination I felt for the knowledge he held of my parents’ past.
On that day and every day at Monticello, there existed light Hemingses and dark Hemingses. We were all the grandchildren of Elizabeth Hemings, who had died in 1807. Betty Hemings, as she was called, had had two families, just like my grandfather John Wayles; one black and one white. My grandmother’s white Hemingses were my grandfather’s black ones. They had together as master and slave produced six children, the last of them being my mother, Sally Hemings. John Wayles had also been the father of Martha Wayles, my father’s first wife, making my mother her half sister and me her niece. I had learned the secret of my white family in bits and pieces, in whispered asides and shattering looks, but I had finally pieced it all together with a little help from my grandmother. My mother, like most slave women, had never told me anything of my origins.
The reason we were all called Hemings was that my great-grandfather, Captain Hemings, fell in love with an African named Bia Baye and they had a natural daughter together, who was my grandmother Elizabeth. The poor Captain Hemings wanted to buy Bia Baye and his daughter from John Wayles, who owned them both, but he refused to sell them since amalgamation had first begun to be studied and he wanted to see how Elizabeth would turn out. The captain tried to steal his wife and child but was betrayed by a treacherous slave. Bia Baye and Elizabeth were locked away in the big house and the captain sailed without them. The legend is that Bia Baye’s wails could be heard all the way to the Chesapeake Bay and that the captain, hearing them, rang the ship’s bells in response. The clearness and stillness of the night mingled the two laments into a song which the Virginia bluetail heard and copied, and so, on a clear still night, Bia Baye and her whaling captain can still be heard. Bia Baye ran away from John Wayles’s plantation so many times that he finally decided to have her branded on the cheek with the R for runaway. But the story has it that when the hot iron of the brand came close to her flesh, he knocked the iron out of the overseer’s hand and it fell upon her breast.
John Wayles took Elizabeth Hemings as his concubine after his second wife, who had given him two legitimate daughters, died. And so it was that Elizabeth remained in the big house, which she ran, and gave birth to six children by her master. But before that she had been given to a slave named Abe, by whom she had had six children. These would become known as the “dark” Hemingses, while her children by the master were the “light” Hem-ingses. Then Thomas Jefferson married John Wayles’s white daughter Martha. After John Wayles died, he inherited all of Martha’s half brothers and sisters, the light Hemingses. The irony was that before it was all over, Thomas Jefferson, my father, had loved and married two half sisters, one white and one black, both with the same father and different mothers. This bonded the Wayleses and the Jeffersons and the Hemingses in an infernal blood tie which still ruled Monticello, for eventually Elizabeth’s dark Hemingses became my father’s property as well, and my grandmother, who had raised his white wife, his housekeeper.
The twelve Hemings children all married, reproduced, and remained as slaves at Monticello. I had two favorite cousins, one the daughter of a light Hemings, Critta, and the other the daughter of a dark Hemings, Nance. Critta’s daughter Dolly was as white as I, and Nance’s Marie was as black as the ace of spades. But only my mother’s children, Thenia and Harriet I, who had died in infancy, Thomas, Beverly, Madison, Eston, and myself, had been promised freedom at twenty-one. The rest of my family remained slaves and children of slaves.
Petit removed his hat, and revealed a matted halo of hair around a bald spot. As I leaned forward, I caught the odor of lavender, fresh bread, and wine. His strongly accented voice was alarmingly loud in the quiet of the moving vehicle, and it broke not only that silence, but the silence of years and years. Adrian Petit spoke perfect English but with a heavy French accent that he cultivated, he confessed to me, to make himself more exotic. He was in a way as much a counterfeit as I was—a lackey, passing for an aristocrat.
“Ah, Harriet. If only I could explain. This could be a quarter of a century ago . . . this is the diligence that arrived with your mother and Maria, rumbling into that sunny courtyard.”
Petit, I calculated, had spent almost fifteen years as my father’s majordomo. The five years in Paris must be added to the years he had spent at Monticello when he rejoined my father’s service, and the years he had served him in Philadelphia and at the White House. Petit was a walking gold mine of information!
I found myself thinking of Petit’s fortune. He was a relatively rich man— at least richer at the moment than my debt-ridden father—who, in a strange reversal of roles not unlike my own, found himself in the position to judge his ex-master.
“Your father seems to think that the greatest privilege an American can have is to be born white.”
During that night as we rumbled across the Maryland state line, Petit took me back to the days of the French Revolution, days when my mother had discovered she was free on French soil. It had not only been my uncle James, but also Petit, who had slowly led my mother through the intricacies of Parisian life and the manner in which it was lived. And there had been others: Mr. Perrault, who taught her French; Lucy, who taught her sewing; Madame Dupré, who taught her fashion; and my father, who taught her love.
“One thing I learned years later when I came to America to work for your father at Monticello. It was not only your mother who found herself a liberated woman in France. Your father, too, found relief for a few short years from the stifling oppression of the Virginian slave society that he had grown up in and which owned him. Do you understand?
“Imagine, he had never been beyond Philadelphia before his trip to France and he was over forty years old. Any nobleman worth his salt had seen London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona before the age of twenty-five! Yet he had known only the American civilization of the backwoods plantations of Virginia. True, this society believed itself to be the very height of sophistication and planter aristocracy when they were really nothing but a bunch of provincial burghers.
“So he, too, found a kind of freedom ... a kind of escape from slavery. For what happened in Paris could never, Harriet, have happened at Monticello. By the time your parents returned to Virginia, it was too late to change anything except to hide their secret cruelly. Most cruelly.”
My mother had never spoken to me of the things Petit recounted that night. It was as if they were memories she no longer owned or wished to transmit to any of her children. Shocked, I listened to anecdote after anecdote, some funny, some sad, of my mother’s education in France. Petit seemed to have been my uncle James’s only friend. And between them there seemed to have been a genuine love.
“I loved James,” Petit continued. “He was born on his father’s plantation in 1765 and was twenty when I met him. He had accompanied his master to Paris in eighty-four, as his body servant, but was quickly apprenticed to be trained as a master chef for Monticello. He was a beautiful boy. Very tall and muscular, with a light beige tawny complexion and wiry black hair that he wore long and straight back in a queue tied with a ribbon. He had eyes of a strange gunmetal gray flecked with yellow and disgracefully long and thick eyelashes which gave the impression that he wore kohl, as many of the aristocratic dandies of the day did. His cheeks were as rosy as if they’d been rouged, and he had a natural beauty mark high on one cheek which had never seen a razor’s edge. How I envied him that. Dressed in the livery of the Hôtel de Langeac, he was a naturally elegant, even remarkable, figure. He had long graceful hands which were in constant motion and long legs which were never still also. There was about him the aura of a forest animal, not jungle, I insist —his grace and stealth were of a pattern and shadow of cool and wooded places, not the sultry tropical jungle so mythically attributed to anyone who had African blood in his veins. He was pale enough so that none of the French aristocracy suspected he was what they would have called a blackamoor. Neither your mother. Otherwise, they would have been the talk of Paris, blackamoors were so coveted and in vogue. Maria Cosway had one, a little boy attached to her household in London.
“I can only describe the expression in James’s eyes as ironic resignation. Oh, there was anger and envy and rage and malice, too, but the overriding tenor of his face was that of a very young lion, golden and tawny, posed and patient, waiting for the moment to step onstage as a king or at least a prince. That was James’s nickname in the kitchen, ‘King Jimmi,’ for he had turned out to be a natural cook and a natural kitchen aristocrat. He was an inventive, intelligent, talented cook, and the food that passed through his hands bore the mark of a future master chef. I suppose,” sighed Petit, “that is why everyone put up with him.
“We got on famously from the very start. I might even say we fell into each other’s arms. I felt a brotherly love and protection for the younger man, and I introduced him to the entrails of high and low life in Paris. We spent almost all of our free time together, me feeling half of the time like his father and mentor and the other half like his accomplice and younger brother in a series of the most adolescent and outrageous sottises possible. We became in all ways inseparable, and the bond forged between us lasted until death parted us.
“Your uncle James was as close to a younger brother as I possessed. I loved him. James’s tragic end was one of the greatest sorrows of my life.”
“And what of . . . my mother’s tragic end—a slave whose children steal themselves away from her in the name of whiteness?” I murmured.
Petit looked shocked, and indeed I was shocked by the bitterness in my voice. Did I despise my mother, I wondered.
Petit must have sensed my unspoken question, for he looked sternly at me and said, “There are reasons under the sun for everything. Things that are unfathomable. I have never underestimated the force of love, loyalty, or passion. I have seen them work in many men and women, including your father and mother and uncle.”
The long journey into the night continued. We had decided not to stop until we had crossed the Mason-Dixon line into the free state of Delaware.
“There was a fashionable convent for girls in Paris, L’Abbaye de Panthémont, where Martha was already in school. Your father allowed your mother to attend briefly. He also had her tutored in French and music at home. The tug-of-war between James and your father for your mother’s soul began the day she set foot in that courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeac. What was most important was that we all loved your mother. James loved her. I loved her. Monsieur Perrault, her tutor, loved her; Monsieur Felin, her music teacher, loved her. Polly loved her. John Trumbull, the painter who lived at the embassy, loved her and drew portraits of her. Only poor unhappy Martha, jealous of her father, began to hate your mother. But in the scale of love, nothing would balance the weight of your father’s love. Not even your mother’s own desire for freedom and emancipation. Almost at once she realized, thanks to James, that on French soil she was free. But love held her. The more they struggled against it, the more it held them fast. It was a terrible thing to see. When your mother realized she was carrying your brother Thomas, she ran away from the embassy and stayed away for almost two weeks. I thought your father was going to lose his mind. He came down with one of his violent migraines, which left him in darkest pain for days. She finally returned of her own accord, after hiding out all that time at her old landlady’s boardinghouse. They had a discussion and came to an agreement. Not even I know what went on behind those closed doors that day. But your father did promise to free all their children at age twenty-one. And he promised to return with your mother to France one day. Perhaps they both finally realized the awful improbability of their transgression. In the end, I tell you, it was a struggle of life and death. James couldn’t live without your mother’s freedom, and your father couldn’t live without your mother. Her seduction, if you want to call it that, was more like two mighty oaks falling . . . and crushing a slender pine tree—my poor James. I knew or guessed everything. Men have few secrets from their valets, and I was a cynical young man. It was James, so much more vulnerable than I, who suffered. All James’s hopes had been in your mother, and she betrayed him. All your father’s hopes for happiness after his wife’s death were in his half sister-in-law, your mother.
“Just before we left, President Jefferson said only one thing to me. He said, ‘I loved two sisters, one white and one black, to my everlasting despair.’ “
“You mean my father’s first wife was my aunt . . . then?”
By this time night had fallen, and the dark woods and bluish trees sped by in moonlight. My mother had told me little of her life before my birth. The image I had of her had been one of a proud, secretive woman, with a room full of mysterious treasures, disillusions, and unrealized dreams. Seeing her, I had vowed that I would not live a life of imagination but of reality. I would live a life of facts, plain and simple, filled with action and decisions. A heroic life. My father had kept none of the promises he had made to my mother in Paris. Wasn’t that the only thing that remained of all of Petit’s stories? Broken promises? My eyes began to get heavy, but I had to stay awake until we crossed the Mason-Dixon into Delaware, I told myself. It was like crossing the Rubicon; there would be no turning back after that.
“First thing I knew, Harriet, Sally and James Hemings, your father, and Martha had left for Virginia. And in less time than it takes to shake a stick, your father was Secretary of State, then Vice President and then President of the United States. By this time I had rejoined him in America. You, Madison, and Eston were all born while he was in the White House. ... Looking back, I think that witnessing your father’s passionate attachment to your mother inoculated me forever against fatal love. I have remained an unattached, unrepentant bachelor for all these years, in love with neither women nor marriage. In a way, I suppose you are as close to a daughter as anything I possess on this earth, Harriet. I was at Monticello when you were born. I held you in my arms. Your father celebrated your birth as if you had been white.”
Petit hesitated as if he were trying to decide to tell me one more horrible, fateful thing. The perfect maître d’hôtel warred with the dawning guardian angel.
“He was in the grips of one of his monumental migraines when I walked into the office. You see, I had already spoken to your mother. When I congratulated him on your birthday and your majority and freedom, he flew into a rage, the same kind of tantrum he threw in Paris when your mother left him. His last words to me about you were: ‘Since she’s white enough to pass for white, then let her be white.’
“Your father showed me the most extraordinary letter he had just written to a gentleman called Gray, an ironic choice of name, but anyway this gentleman, English I think he was, had asked your father where the line between black and white was drawn, and to my total amazement, your father showed me his answer: an algebraic equation which filled a whole page and which boiled down to when he, Thomas Jefferson, decided. And Thomas Jefferson decided that a person with one-eighth black blood was no longer a Negro. And that is you, Harriet. You had a white great-grandfather, a white grandfather, and a white father. You had an African for a great-grandmother, a mulatto for a grandmother, and a quadroon for a mother, which makes you, Harriet, an octoroon. In this way he willed you white with a mathematical equation.”
I bowed my head, imagining the sonorous, high-pitched voice of my father searching for a way out of three generations of miscegenation. Meanwhile, we passed the Mason-Dixon line. I could not even be angry with him. I felt only a profound and enduring sense of solitude.