Would the world be more beautiful were all our faces alike? Were our tempers and talents, our tastes, our forms, our wishes, aversions, and pursuits cast exactly in the same mold? If no varieties existed in the animal, vegetable, or mineral creation, but all more strictly uniform, catholic, and orthodox, what a world of physical and moral monotony it would be.
Thomas Jefferson
“I strenuously contend,” Purvis told us at the next meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, “for the immediate emancipation of our slave population. I will be as harsh with the truth and as uncompromising as justice itself. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard. I take it for granted slavery is a crime—a damning crime. I am a crime. Therefore, my efforts shall be directed to the exposure of those who practice it.”
I stared in horror at Robert Purvis. No one had ever told me in so many words that slavery was a crime.
“And,” he added, “if anyone objects that the Constitution—the beloved Constitution—stands in the way of such a program, I can only reply that if the Constitution sanctions slavery, then the Constitution is wrong. The Constitution is in league with death and in covenant with hell.”
I looked around in alarm. Father’s Constitution. It was like damning the Bible. It was like predicting the end of the world. Slavery was God’s will. Slavery was eternal!
“And,” he continued, “I regard all slaveowners, including my own father, as guilty of that crime and therefore as vile, despicable men.”
Purvis had not recognized a fellow traveler in color, if I could be so called. I had nothing to fear from him, even if he knew the truth. A man without guile and incorruptible, his life was laid out in a grid as straightforward as William Penn’s city.
“Generally speaking,” he said, “men must make great and unceasing efforts before permanent evils are created, but there is one calamity which penetrated furtively into the world. At first scarcely distinguishable amid the ordinary abuse of power, it originated with an individual whose name history has not preserved, then wafted like an accursed germ and spread within the society. This calamity is slavery.
“Christians of the sixteenth century reestablished it as an exception, indeed, to the social system, and restricted it to the race of mankind; but the wounds thus inflicted upon humanity, though less extensive, are far more difficult to cure. This arises from the circumstance that among the moderns, slavery is fatally united with color. No African has ever voluntarily immigrated to the New World, whence it follows that all blacks who are now here are either slaves or freedmen. Thus the Negro transmits the eternal mark of his ignominy to all his descendants, even though the law will abolish slavery. Wherever the Negroes have been strongest, they have destroyed the white; this has been the only balance that has taken place between the two races. I see that in a certain portion of the United States, the legal barrier separating the two races is falling away, but not that barrier existing in the manners of the country: slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable. In those parts of the Union where Negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn closer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it exists; and no states are so intolerant as those where servitude has never been known.”
I began to study abolitionist literature and the narratives of escaped slaves. I read memoirs of reformed slave traders and ship captains like my greatgrandfather. Mesmerized, I stared at posters of slave auctions, rewards for fugitives, and maps upon which were traced the contours of the continent called Africa. I realized how small the world of Monticello was, and how enormous the wound that poisoned the wholeness of my country. I learned of slave revolts in Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Jamaica. For the first time, I contemplated my father’s double life, as dangerous in its own way as my own. I plundered books, newspapers, and pamphlets for news of him. I memorized his public life, looking for clues to myself. I read about him as ambassador, as Secretary of State, as President, trying to assimilate the image of the stranger who had written the Declaration of Independence, bought half of the United States, and never freed my mother.
One day, Mrs. Latouche took me to task over attending so many meetings.
“My dear, as much as I partake of the progressive ideas of abolitionism and antislavery, I must, in the name of your guardian who is not here at the moment, point out to you that these meetings are no place for young girls. You and Charlotte should think seriously about how you compromise your reputation as serious and sheltered young ladies by attending them.
“The conservatory is one thing, and bad enough, I might add. But that Library Company! It is a hotbed of abolitionism and radicalism. I know you follow Charlotte in everything, but being a member of one of Philadelphia’s first families, the equal of the Biddies, the Ingersolls, the Girards, the War-tons, and the Rittenhouses, Charlotte can do what she well pleases and get away with it. You, an orphan with no fortune, must be a lot more careful. You have only your beauty, your health, and your respectability. Your talent as a musician is simply nice icing on the cake. There’s no question of your getting mixed up in any radical movements with ... mixed public meetings.”
“You mean interracial meetings, Mrs. Latouche.” My voice took on its most lush and seductive sweetness.
“I mean meetings where the two sexes are represented promiscuously in the same hall.”
I see.
In spite of my boldness in attending the abolitionist meetings, fear was never far from me. One day I turned into Hamilton Alley having slipped out of the house early for a walk along the quay, my only moment of the freedom of movement I had enjoyed as a slave, for now I had to be chaperoned everywhere. I sensed a tall man following me. Sykes! I tried not to hurry, so as not to provoke him into a pursuit. His footsteps echoed along the long, painted brick corridor with high, shuttered windows and hitching posts of white marble. It was broad daylight: I knew I would soon hit the wharf with its milling crowds and merchandise stocked stories-high to be loaded into the waiting clippers. My heels clicked on the fired-brick pavement, my hand went deep into my pocket, my fingers clutched the knife as I stopped short, took a deep breath, and turned around. The man stopped ten paces in front of me. I was almost faint with fright.
“Miss Petit. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“Well, I don’t know who has frightened whom,” I said, my heart pounding.
“I’ve seen you many times in this neighborhood.”
“Well, I live around here. What are you doing in this . . . neck of the woods?” I said, trying to control the tremor in my voice.
“The pharmacy school of the University of Pennsylvania is just at the corner there”—he pointed behind him. “I’m a teaching assistant there, and that’s where I have my laboratory. Our . . . our warehouse and apothecary is down on Front Street, about a five-minute walk. My father founded our company in 1789 ... if you walk by you’ll see the sign, ‘Wellington Druggist and Apothecary Supplies.’ Isn’t it fortunate we met that day of the rehearsal? Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to address you on the street. God bless Charlotte Waverly.”
He said this with such fervor and such sincerity that I laughed in relief.
“I thought you were about to attack me.”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God—so I did frighten you. How stupid. How cowardly of me. I just couldn’t get up the nerve to speak to you. Let me walk you home .. . but first let me restore your good spirits with a .. . water ice? Tea? Chocolate?”
“Tea, please. I love tea.”
“There’s a place near the depot called the China, India, and Orient Emporium, which has a tearoom where they serve their own teas, hot or iced or in sherbet.”
“I know it,” I said, delighted to go to a favorite place.
“You do forgive me?”
“Yes,” I replied, almost bursting with joy.
Arm in arm, we turned into Chestnut Street at Sixth and started toward Dock Street, walking beneath the canopied stalls of the booksellers and publishers that were concentrated along those six blocks. We passed Independence Hall and the United States Post Office to arrive at the Wharf and Walter Street, where excursion boats sailed for New York and Cape May. Mansions, warehouses, and tradesmen’s shops were all crowded into the block running south along Front Street. There we found Beck’s China, India, and Orient Emporium along the waterfront overlooking the harbor, bearing on its top story the iron plates advertising the Insurance of Houses from Loss of Fire Company. Under the awnings, which stretched out to the thoroughfare, sat ladies and gentlemen, sampling Mr. Beck’s teas from around the world.
The harbor, in the early-morning light, was a forest of masts and furled sails. The sailcloth awnings cast a golden hue over the crowd, the rough board tables and chairs. The tables were covered with white tablecloths, and on them sat huge blue-and-white porcelain samovars which were filled with the customers’ special order. The heavy traffic of merchants, insurers, dockers, hawkers, strollers, gentlemen, ladies, washerwomen, and sailors glided on foot between the bales, crates, and cargoes of the world: rice and cotton and tobacco from Virginia, spermaceti oil from New Bedford, horsehides from Montevideo, coffee from Brazil, dollhouses from Cologne, linen from Finland, rum from St. Croix, brandy from France, and opium from Turkey. Bales of tea were stacked about everywhere in front of the Emporium— Hyson and Indian, Gunpowder, Imperial, and Souchong.
Seated, we too took on the amber color of the awnings. I was happy I had taken, for no particular reason, great pains with my toilet. I wore a Scottish plaid taffeta of green, black, and gray, trimmed in black grosgrain, and a porcupine hat trimmed with green ribbon and a whale green swallow which curved around my ear. The dress had a white Irish lace cravat and white ruffles at the sleeves. I had bought some music from Can’s Publishing House and now put it down on the extra seat beside me. Its bright yellow cover turned ochre in the light.
“The pharmacy school is just down there,” repeated Mr. Wellington, pointing northward toward Swanson Street. “The school’s only ten years old and the first in the United States. Pharmacy is just now being recognized as part of the medical profession, thanks in part to my father. Before, we were just druggists selling tea like Mr. Beck.”
“At home, we had quite an apothecary.”
“You southern girls are so well versed in herbal medicine. I always listen to home remedies. You learn a lot.”
“My grandmother was the expert in our family.” Stick as close as you can to the truth, I thought. Then I thought: Oh Lord. One day I’m going to have to tell him.
“Country medicine holds a great many surprises for us.”
Thance Wellington was wearing a top hat and his heart on his sleeve. He looked baffled yet happy as he set his hat down on top of my sheet music. His strong, handsome face held an expression not far from that of Independence, that same puppy-dog warmth to his grin. A single black lock of hair strayed over his forehead, and I noticed how brown his face, hands, and wrists appeared, set off and surrounded by his white linen. Even seated, his long, rangy body seemed to spring from the ground with a force of its own. Nothing in my life had prepared me for the effect this somber, innocent-eyed northerner had upon me.
“Please don’t laugh at me, Miss Petit.”
“I’m not laughing, Mr. Wellington.”
“There’s something so final about this,” he said mysteriously. His magnificent voice was low and tentative, as if he were transmitting a precious secret.
“I know,” I replied just as mysteriously, although I was thinking, with utter tenderness, this was a final resting place. “How long have you been following me?” I asked.
“Oh, months—ever since that day at the conservatory.”
I see.
“No, you don’t. This, this kind of thing ... is not an ordinary occurrence ... at least not for me. It blasts one’s soul. The piece of membrane and gristle we call the brain. The organ which separates us from other primates because it recognizes death, this”—he tapped his head—“has gone as charred as coal because of you.” Mr. Wellington looked around the teahouse dramatically.
“Of course, I wouldn’t change anything,” he said, smiling. A magnificent row of even white teeth appeared in the brown face.
Ah, my dearest, I thought, but I would. I would. But not you. Not you, Mr. Wellington.
“I know this is most irregular, but I hope you’ll allow me to call upon you, now that I’ve frightened you half to death. I’ve got tickets for the last concert of the season at the Music Fund Hall. I’ve seen the program. I know you’ll like it. Leon Bukovsky is conducting for the first time in Philadelphia. I know your tastes in music ... please say you’ll go with me....” His hand trembled. It was a beautiful hand, long and squarish, with veins that stood on the surface and inspired a well of tenderness in me.
“I’ll have to ask my guardian.”
“Of course. I would like permission to write to you formally.”
“Yes. I should show it to Uncle Adrian.”
“Of course.”
A shadow passed. Whether it was overhead in the sky or in the interior of my soul, I don’t know.
“You won’t change your mind, Miss Petit?”
“I won’t change my mind, Mr. Wellington.”
An hour passed. As we sat amongst the other couples, sipping our tea, I was grateful for Charlotte’s coaching in the ways and formalities of the Philadelphia gentry. School had taught me manners, comportment, and polite conversation. Reading and being with Charlotte these last two years had polished my pretensions into something resembling the white girl I was impersonating. There would be, I knew, no major mistake, no untoward behavior. Harriet Hemings of Monticello was only a fleeting image that I caught in the mirror from time to time in a gesture or a thought, but firmly relegated to the past. Not only had I forgotten myself, I had forgotten my mother, my father; I played the orphan perfectly. I realized everyone was pretending about one thing or another. And everyone had secrets. Not necessarily something to hide, as I did, but thoughts, events, and disappointments that they would just as soon not tell the world. The simplicity of Virginian life now held a bemused charm as I realized how intricate, dangerous, and full of subterfuge the North was.
Moreover, being the first city north of the Mason-Dixon line, Philadelphia had its southern sympathies. Many southern families vacationed and shopped here. And as merchants and shipbuilders, Philadelphians did a great deal of their business with the southern states. I fretted over the slight chance that a Tidewater family with sharp eyes and a good memory might unmask me. Or was I being melodramatic? Whom could I possibly meet? And where?
“You’re a cousin of Charlotte’s, Mr. Wellington?” I asked him.
“Yes indeed.”
“She’s my best friend. I have no relatives.”
“No family at all?”
“No family since a yellow fever epidemic in the Tidewater several years ago. My entire family was wiped out. My uncle Adrian is not really my uncle, but he’s the closest kin I have left. In this world there are few so alone as I,” I said with sincere feeling.
“Oh, my dear . . . Miss Harriet.”
Words were no longer needed. A lassitude took hold of me as if I had swum a great distance or climbed a huge mountain, or drunk a great deal of Madeira. Perhaps it was only the intoxicating smell of Beck’s China, India, and Orient Emporium, with its thousands of spices and hundreds of teas, amalgamated with an overwhelming, worldless odor of mystery, distance, and dreams. Perhaps it was Thance Wellington.
After that first invitation, the Music Fund Hall became one of the few places Thance and I were allowed to go alone. Petit and Mrs. Latouche considered it cultured enough and public enough not to create a problem of propriety for a modern couple, for that is what we had quickly formed. If older men, Charlotte’s brother Amos, colleagues from the conservatory had harbored ideas about Harriet Petit, Thance Wellington quickly put them straight. Miss Petit was his girl.
After the last concert of the season, which ended on July 4, most families moved from the sweltering confines of the city to the outlying counties, Germantown, Cape May, Lemon Hill, Anamacora. I had been invited to Charlotte’s family’s house in Cape May for the summer. On the way to the concert, Charlotte had warned me, with some amusement on her part, what to expect.
“My mother thinks she ought to have a heart-to-heart talk with you at the Cape, since you are practically engaged. Since you have no womenfolk of your own, she’s elected to explain ... sex to you.”
“But Mrs. Latouche has decided to explain sex to me.”
“She doesn’t like Mrs. Latouche, the caterer’s wife.”
Charlotte turned in her seat and left me to contemplate the idea of Mrs. Rupert Waverly telling me anything about the opposite sex. My lips twitched. I had my hands full trying to control Thance’s passion and my more stubborn doubts. Charlotte scrutinized my face and screwed hers up prettily.
“To tell you the truth, I believe I shall never be seriously in love. I always discover something comical in a man, and then it is all over. If he doesn’t seem ridiculous, he is awkward, or stupid, or tiresome. In short, there is always something that discovers the ass beneath the lion’s skin ... I shall not let myself be caught by any charm. Thank heaven the mania I have of finding out people’s faults will prevent my falling in love with one and all of the Adonises on earth.”
At the concert a certain abstracted calm took hold of me as I sat as close to Thance as I dared. I reveled in the voluptuous knowledge that I held him in such thrall that he would never renounce me, never substitute another for me, and never leave me. I thought less of my own yearning than of the torture I could inflict.
“You’ve never told me you love me,” he whispered, as the orchestra began.
I felt Thance’s panic as I withdrew myself, as I always did when he mentioned love. It was not a physical withdrawal, but a mental one, a sudden, slavish renegation of hope. It would come on me suddenly and without warning and could blind me like a bursting shell and cut my breath like a blizzard wind. I stared at the flickering stage lights. Tonight was one of those nights. Love with the joy drawn out of it: loneliness.
I turned away and concentrated on the stage. My middle finger touched every hairpin on my head as if each were a note of music. The gaslights lit the edges of my hair and made the fine edges burn like a bush. I looked at the score in my lap. The pristine notes on the white-ruled paper stared back mockingly. How could I love him and keep lying to him? Why was his suffering my joy and my shame?
The stage lights intensified and ghostly shadows spread like Chinese lacquer onto the singers, who floated on the music, pale as milk. I put my hand out and touched his knee gently.
“Don’t be angry with me.”
“I’m not angry with you; I’m in love with you.”
“So you say.”
Thance grasped my arm, encompassing it in his one hand, leaning forward. “Damn you,” he said, holding me prisoner.
I shook my head and glanced at the silhouettes of Charlotte, Daniel, and Luivicia that stirred with the flickering light. Then I studied Thance’s profile outlined by the stage lights. I knew at least one of his secrets. Thance suffered badly. He had injured his twin in a terrible accident as a child and felt himself apart, marked like Cain.
“Kiss me before the lights come up.” His voice came softly out of the shadow by my left shoulder, as if he had moved away from me.
“Why?” I exclaimed in surprise.
“Why?” he echoed sardonically.
I turned and looked at him fixedly, despairingly, for some moments. Then I leaned sideways and kissed him slowly. He pulled back, shocked, while I sat transfixed by the fire he had ignited in my joints. We couldn’t touch, but my voice caressed him.
“Now what’s wrong?” I drawled.
“There’s a space between us,” he said in a low, unconscious voice, as if he were speaking despite himself.
“But I’m very near,” I whispered, gaily raising the tonality of my voice to pure chromatic sweetness, like a singer. For once, I felt really happy. I smoothed the score on my lap.
“You’re distant. Always distant,” he said, sulking.
“Well, we can’t very well change that now,” I said triumphantly, having him completely at my mercy. I could discern his face in the darkness as he leaned back in his chair. I found him beautiful in his stillness. His masculinity surrounded him like perfume, emanating from the dense, molded contours of his evening clothes, and I loved looking at him. I imagined the music circulating through his veins like blood. My hands slumbered on my open score.
The notes fell like soft raindrops, mingling with the slight rustling of my skirts. I deliberately suppressed the formidable attentiveness and unyielding concentration of Thance’s presence and submerged myself in the music. I felt myself drifting into a profound sleep, the first great sleep of my life.
“It’s fine for you,” Thance whispered resentfully. “You aren’t in love. But this wound, this infinite opening of my soul, Harriet, this unfolding of my own self, leaving me unfinished, homeless, dissected like a piece of flesh under my own microscope, is the cruelest of events. I can’t analyze it or slice it or study it. I will have to take hold of myself. I will have to keep the unfinished business of this yearning through everything you can inflict upon me, but I will never give up. I will not leave you alone, whatever you say or do. When I contemplate you, Harriet, I feel the same as when I look into my microscope and find the quenching knowledge of life’s possibilities, the magic of every molecule of matter there, squirming under my eyes. You hold the key to the riddle of my own existence. You may just think I’m tearing at your heart like a little boy who pulls off flies’ wings or tears open flower pods just to see what’s inside.”
I looked up, barely aware of Thance’s words. Why, I wondered, was an icy wind blowing through my heart?
In the close dimness that smelled faintly of whale oil and perfume, the music swelled to its climax. I read the notes off my score, my face flushed and burning, immobile in the velvet plush armchair of Charlotte’s mother’s box.
“It’s beautiful ... beautiful,” I sang in a strange, rhapsodic voice. “There’s something so final about it,” I whispered. “Like the end of myself. The final resting place. My home. Do you see what I mean, Thance? The music seems so fragile, golden, soft, heavy, yet like gossamer made only of warmth, its brightness burns the pith of my mind ... blasts my soul. Oh, Thance. You’re left helpless, sightless, mindless. You don’t want to be free—for anything to be different. Utterly enslaved, you suffer. Do you know what it’s like to suffer when you are a woman? A silk whip tears you, and every stroke cutting into your flesh.”
“Oh God,” groaned Thance. “You sound like a victim of some magical rite, torn apart and given to the heavens!”
But I wasn’t talking about the music.
“Other men have fallen in love, Wellington; you’re not the first. Nor the last. Beware of southern girls, my friend.” I laughed.
The lights rose and applause broke out as if for my last line. I looked around, fingering my gloves, searching the face I so adored, proud and afraid at the same time. Perhaps I could exasperate him to death, I thought. But he simply smiled weakly, shaking his head, his tranquil, dark eyes shining with love.
I wasn’t always so cruel. Thance and I had wonderful times that year. We walked Independence past Philadelphia Hall, took boat rides together at the Fairmount Waterworks, or returned to sip tea at Beck’s Emporium. Charlotte, Daniel, Amos, Thance, Cornelius, Robert, Frederick, Susy, and Clyde and I ran in a pack that spring. A few weeks before graduation from Bryn Mawr in June, Thance invited me to visit his laboratory at the university.
“I’ve been researching something fantastic. I must show you.”
“How shall I get in?” I said. “They won’t let a woman in.”
“Why don’t you dress up like a boy?” Thance said without thinking. “You’d make a pretty apothecary’s assistant. Haven’t you ever wanted to be a boy?”
“Always. There’s not a woman alive who hasn’t wanted to be a man at some point in her life,” I replied without smiling.
Apothecaries and their assistants wore long, saffron-colored smocks, cut like double-breasted butchers’ smocks, with huge buttons and tiny pillbox hats of the same heavy sailcloth cotton. Often they wore them over street clothes; unbuttoned, they billowed like yellow fins. They sometimes wore white cuffs on the bottoms of their sleeves to protect their wrists from various compounds and minerals, like the corrosive acids and, above all, mercury. I was entitled, as an assistant, to an indigo smock only, with a matching hat. This was how Thance and I were dressed as we raced up the steps of the Pharmacy School building at First and Sansom streets. A nonchalant concierge waved us both in, and I tried to keep a straight face as we marched down the corridor to his office, our hands clasped behind our backs, my feet pinched in Petit’s two-sizes-too-small boots. Thance’s reading spectacles hung around his neck, and as the light from the overhead skylights struck them from time to time, they flashed like a coded message.
“Har . . . Harry!” he said, laughing. “Come,” he continued as he seized me by the arm. “I’ve been reading some incredible articles on a new criminal science called digital fingerprinting. You take an imprint in ink of the fingertips of each hand of any person. Each individual can be identified precisely and scientifically in one hundred percent of cases, for no two people’s fingerprints are the same . . . isn’t that incredible? The lines of your fingertips have never been duplicated in another human being in a million years—not once, and they never will! They are more personal, more exact than . . . your intimate soul . . . and they are scientific.”
“You mean,” I said slowly, wrapped in my own dilemma, “that no one can ever really change the identity they were born with?”
“Identity is not a matter of change or chance. It is a fixed particularity given at birth to every human being. And it is inimitable. Let me show you.”
Thance led me toward a pile of books and papers on a desk illuminated even in broad daylight by a beaconlike gas lamp. Gently he took my index finger and brought it down upon an ink pad and then pressed it upon a piece of white paper. The minuscule swirls and lines of the tip of my finger were reproduced on the paper. I stared in astonishment. Then he did the same with the remaining fingers of my left hand.
“The ancient Chinese and Egyptians both knew about fingerprints as a means of identification, but they never connected it with differentiating each man from all the rest of the human species, never saw it extended far beyond anything human imagination had invented up until then. Now I have just received a copy of the thesis of the scientist Johannes Purkinje, a professor of physiology at Breslau University in Austria who has just published a fantastic paper on this incredible phenomenon of nature. He has demonstrated that fingerprints can establish the identity of a person at different stages of his life from babyhood to old age and for some time after his death.
“Look, Harriet. These are my fingerprints, and I asked my brother Thor to send me his. They are not identical even though we are twins! We can be different morally, intellectually, and biologically. By nature of our fingerprints, we are as distinct as if one of us was black and the other one white.”
“You mean you and your brother are identical in every way, except for your fingerprints?”
“Fingerprints have the unique merit of retaining all their particularities throughout life, and so afford a more infallible criterion of identity than any other bodily feature. My twin could try to impersonate me, and he could in many ways, but his fingerprints would betray him.
“These,” he said, holding up my hand, “are your fixed human personality, given to you at birth, an individuality that can be depended upon with absolute certainty. You can only be you! Lasting, unchangeable, always recognizable, and easily proven. This autograph cannot be counterfeited or disguised or hidden away; it never fades, becomes illegible, or changes shape or form by the passage of time—incredible.”
Thance pressed my hand against his cheek, perhaps in affection, perhaps forgetting the ink remaining on my fingers, resulting in my leaving five black marks on his cheek. I looked up in horror, and Thance, realizing what he had done but never dreaming of what he had really done, began to laugh. Then he raised my hand to my own face and left upon it the same black marks.
“There,” he said, “now we are truly and scientifically one—even after death—for we carry the same fingerprints.”
A chill ran up my spine as I turned and looked into the laboratory mirror. Could those marks prove I was a black fugitive slave instead of a free white Virginian? Almost reading my thoughts, Thance went on, “Great expectations were raised and then dashed, namely that fingerprints could indicate race and temperament.”
“You mean Nature invented this inviolable differentiation, but not according to race?”
“Exactly.” Thance looked surprised.
“You can’t tell if a man is black or white ... or Chinese?”
“No.”
“And yet it is the only true identity fixed by God?”
“Nature,” said Thance, confused yet moved.
“God has created us separate, with a separate, unique destiny, and then given us proof of it—given us proof of our own uniqueness of soul, our own God-given peculiarity, right here in our hands.”
“Why, Harriet, that’s beautiful.”
“It’s proof of God’s infinite variety—of the infinite possibilities given to man for discovery . . . like music . . . like mathematics.”
I turned away as fear stole my breath and turned my forehead dewy.
And I had thought I could hide. . . .
Slowly I took out my handkerchief and methodically, without rushing, removed the black spots from Thance’s face, then from my own, and lastly from my fingers. As I replaced my handkerchief, my hand touched my dagger. No man on earth would ever know I was the President’s daughter.
“Marry me, Harriet.”
I looked full at him. He had not sensed my terrible panic.
“Thance, no.” I looked at my smudged fingerprints. They were proof— proof of my dishonesty and fraud. They couldn’t prove I was black, but they proved I was a bastard for all times. ... an uncontrollable desire to scream or to laugh engulfed me.
“Please don’t laugh at me.”
“It is I who doesn’t want to be laughed at,” I whispered.
“Do you love me?”
Defiantly I lifted my mouth. Thance’s lips were soft, deep, and delicate. He waited a few minutes, lost in the kiss. Then I felt a shade of sadness come over him.
“I shouldn’t even be with you in public without a chaperon, let alone kissing you in the middle of the University of Pennsylvania,” he said. “My God! I’ve just kissed a man!”
We both began to laugh.
At the same moment, a grimace of mocking irony at my own charade tore at my mouth.
Which disguise, I wondered, was the funniest? White or male? I smiled enigmatically. Thance grinned happily, filling me with contagious delight because that was how a baby smiled.
“Thance, oh, Thance,” I laughed helplessly.
I pulled his head down and kissed him into bewilderment. Dressed like a man, free from encompassing corsets and heavy skirts, my body molded itself along the length of his, and I felt his own contours blend into mine. I was more like some powerful, fitful sigh than a woman, my muscles elastic, my body mindless, my spirit soulless, fitting into Thance in one perfect forceful line. How strange, I thought, this breathless awful freedom. Not far away somebody was singing in a voice that resembled his.
And so, being young and dipt in folly
I fell in love with melancholy.
My heart to joy at the same tone.
And all I loved—lov’d alone
“He is asking you! He’s bought the ring! A magnificent ruby!”
I bit my lip. “Charlotte, it’s not true.”
“Oh, but it is. There’s nothing like Philadelphia Unitarians to keep a secret. Of course, you’ll be the last to know. But if you don’t choose me as your best maid, I’ll kill you.”
“Charlotte!”
“My mother says that of course everything must be discussed, the marriage contract, the engagement. But the widow Wellington was most comprehensive and most generous. She realizes these are modern times and one can no longer choose one’s children’s spouses.”
“But she hardly knows me.”
“It seems you made a great impression on her, and she thinks you are a fine musician and very beautiful. But she’s frankly weary of what she calls southern belles, spoiled, indolent, useless creatures that they are.” Charlotte giggled at this, and I let out a snort that rocked her back on her heels.
“A southern belle ...”
“A poor southern belle—it seems they are the worst . . .”
“Who has died, I thought, who has married, who has hanged himself because they cannot marry ...”
“Well, his mother is under the impression he did ask and that you have said yes—that day in the laboratory.”
“Charlotte, I said no.” I turned away from her to try to get my bearings.
“Well, if you did, nobody heard you. And you’re not serious! You wouldn’t turn down Thance. A boy like that—”
“Charlotte, I can’t . . .”
“Oh, it’s so exciting!” she rattled on. “The only missing element is what the mysterious, reclusive Thor will think.”
“I understand he is abroad.”
“In Africa. He joined an expedition to the Natal to gather medicinal plants. It seems there are more specimens in the Natal than anywhere else in the world. The Sutos and the Zulus are famous for their pharmacopoeia.”
“Africa . . .”
“He’s been gone for almost three years.”
“Is he really Thance’s double?”
“Oh yes, although he’s older by twenty minutes.”
“What’s he like? Thance never speaks of him.”
Charlotte lowered her voice.
“Thance blames himself, but it wasn’t his fault.”
“What wasn’t his fault?”
“The accident.”
“What accident?”
“We were adolescents of fourteen or fifteen. Thance and Thor had been playing in the barn of the family farm at Anamacora, and their play had turned a little rough. Half quarreling, Thance pushed Thor off the hayloft and he fell quite a distance. Under normal circumstances it would have been a harmless fall for a strong boy, but hidden under the hay was a pitchfork that had been forgotten or abandoned by someone. Thor fell on it—it punctured one of his testicles. It was a terrible wound. He almost bled to death. According to the doctors, it has rendered him sterile. Thance feels he castrated his twin and murdered his progeny. It has tormented him. The accident came not more than a year after their father had died of typhoid while treating American sailors in the naval squadron patrolling the Barbary Coast.”
I stared at Charlotte and thought how much the accident sounded like some sorrowful tale of slavery.
I asked Charlotte how she had found out such details, which should have been kept hidden from a young girl of her age and station.
“Thance talked to me as a sister when he was trying to come to grips with his own remorse.”
“And Thor?”
“We know Thor is a survivor. In many ways he prevailed. He finished school and signed on for his first scientific expedition. He’s been gone more or less ever since. He recognized Thance as the head of the family. No one really knows what he’s like. I do remember that the twins had telepathy between them. They could communicate with each other without uttering a word. I know Thor will like you, but never let him know that you know, or that I told you, about the accident. He hates to be pitied.”
So do I, I thought.
“Of course not. I thank you for telling me. It ... it explains many things about Thance,” I said, but what I thought was that Thor’s wound was one of those unyielding, incomprehensible sorrows that only a slave woman had the power and the knowledge and the will to assuage—one of those slaverylike mutilations that never healed, never ceased, to throb unendingly in unfathomable grief.
I gazed at Charlotte with new respect.
“You’re right,” I said, “about being sheltered and spoiled, of thinking the world owes you happiness.”
I took Charlotte’s hand and drew it against my breast. I listened to my own heart and the stillness around us.
The parlor of the Wellingtons’ house, which stood on the waterfront near Bainbridge Street, was ostentatiously simple. Every object in the large, airy rooms had its place and enough space to set it off. The Wellingtons were people of good circumstances. The druggist Wellington had left his widow a large, flourishing pharmacy and laboratory and several pharmaceutical patents and licenses. His twin sons had followed in their father’s footsteps. He had two daughters—one married, one unmarried—and his youngest son had entered the medical profession. The widow Wellington resembled no one if not my father. It was as if I were staring at a female Thomas Jefferson. Her hair was dead-white flax, and she wore it crimped into a pompadour in front and swept back into a net behind. She had sea blue eyes like him, except they bordered on violet instead of aquamarine, and she had a low, melodious voice shorn of the familiar harshness I had come to recognize as upper-class Philadelphian. She sat in a large, cherry-colored, covered armchair, and the reflections from the harbor stroked her face with gold and green. She was not old, perhaps fifty-three or -four, but her body must have settled early into stoutness and middle age. She had rosy cheeks and was dressed all in black, with a cameo pinned at her throat. As I remembered her, she had none of the energy or vibrancy of my mother, or even my grandmother. Why I thought of Elizabeth Hemings at that moment I will never know, but my grandmother’s face came back to me and her voice resounded in the quiet room.
Get that freedom for your children.
Of course, I had not for one moment thought about my children—never considered their status in this deception. The one-sixteenth of black blood which constituted the one drop that condemned them to the condition of their mother.
“You are not a Catholic.”
It was not a question but a statement.
“No, Mrs. Wellington, I grew up without a formal religion.”
“I don’t believe in mixed marriages.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“In marriages between Roman Catholics and Protestants or Jews. I thought because of your Creole blood you might be Catholic.”
“Thance told me that as a scientist, he was attached to no religion.”
“Exactly, Harriet. I may call you Harriet? His father believed the same. They are both deists.”
“So was mine. But I am not opposed to converting if this would make you happy. The Unitarian faith is, I feel, the religion of the future.”
My coldblooded appraisal of Mrs. Wellington told me that candor in all things would be appreciated. My visit had been orchestrated to the last degree. Petit had left me at the door and I had entered the front room alone, hesitant yet assured, shy yet serene. I had worn a green tartan dress with a plaited bodice, white collar and cuffs, and large mutton sleeves. My pillbox hat was green, and it had a green veil dotted in red. The outfit complemented my hair and accentuated my fairness. I had prayed I wouldn’t like Mrs. Wellington, thus making it easier to deceive her. But I did like her. There was frankness in her smile and attentiveness in her face. There was warmth and welcome. I wouldn’t have to lie. She would see what she wanted to see—a strange, countrified, Virginian orphan, as poor as peas and potatoes but fairly well-read, with “possibilities,” a fake pedigree, and southern sensibilities.
I had curtsied, European-style, when I entered—a long, low, graceful swoop which had pleased her—and at Petit’s suggestion, I had kissed her hand as young women did with older women in Europe. She had flushed with embarrassment and pleasure and had left her small plump hand in mine.
“Come, my dear, tell me about yourself, Miss Petit. Thance has bent my ears back about you, but that isn’t the same thing. I understand you and Thance would like to be married at Christmas.”
“That’s Thance’s wish.”
“Would it be possible for you to set a date when we know when Thor can arrive?
“Of course, we want him here for the wedding.”
Mrs. Wellington smiled proudly. “You had four brothers, I understand?”
“Yes ... all dead.”
“Oh, you poor, poor child. Life is sometimes so pitiless.” She paused then, looking me over from head to toe. “I want to be frank with you, Harriet. I have no interest in thwarting my son’s desire. I admit I would have preferred a girl from Scranton to a Virginian. Not that I have a prejudice against southern women, but I have found that in general, they learn from the cradle that southern belle’s Machiavellian talent for manipulation. The southern climate encourages indolence, and the proliferation of Negro servants a certain . . . shall we say, helplessness. These defects do not diminish with marriage, but are reinforced by the pampering and indulgent possessiveness of their menfolk. The climate also encourages sensuality, and owning other people and having the power of life and death over them induces a kind of reckless fatalism. I’m afraid the work ethic we instill in northern girls is greatly lacking in southern women. . . .”
“Madam, where did you learn such erroneous information concerning southern ladies? I assure you, most of them lead the lives of pioneer women, sharing the work of running farms and plantations with their men. They rise at dawn, organize large houses, have heavy social engagements, are nurses, doctors, midwives, cooks, and farmhands as well as southern belles. There are more log cabins in the South than mansions. Since most live on isolated farms and plantations where everything must be handmade and the farm self-sufficient, they must be seamstresses and weavers, candlemakers, soapmakers, honey-gatherers. When they have slaves, they must train and supervise them, rising at dawn and retiring long after their men and servants. They must give birth to their children in the wilderness, often without the assurance of even a midwife, and as always, Nature in the guise of storms, floods, bugs, drought, epidemics. ... All must be dealt with on God’s terms. I do believe, Mrs. Wellington, that you do us an injustice.”
“And your family, Harriet?” she continued smoothly without thinking, while despite myself, my blood boiled in indignation.
“When I had a family, it was large and slaveholding, but it no longer exists, except in memory. I am a girl alone in the world who has no past and is uncertain of her future.”
Mrs. Wellington softened visibly. “Oh, I know that to keep such people as half-civilized Negroes in line takes a lot of courage. Living in such close proximity to such savages can only be accomplished by strict discipline and segregation and violent punishment. White women who must live in constant fear of rape and revolt from Negroes must use gratuitous cruelty as a method of self-defense.
“My poor Harriet. I am here to remedy your past. My son loves you very much.”
“And I love him,” I replied defiantly.
“I do not believe you mentioned what church you attend.”
Again, I thought, this question of religion.
“Why, that of Charlotte,” I replied.
“Why, that is my church. Have I passed my future daughter-in-law without realizing it?”
“I imagine you have your pew, while I sit in the gallery.”
“It’s true. I usually leave before the gallery descends.”
Imagine my gratification that Mrs. Wellington had supplied me with my excuse for never having been to church at all.
“I would like you to have a talk with Reverend Crocket soon. You must get Charlotte to sponsor your membership as soon as possible.”
As the afternoon wore on, in the safe, comfortable room furnished with solid English furniture, polished brass, and colorful throw rugs, bits and pieces of music came back to me. Not music I was practicing, nor music that was in the popular repertoire of the day; the melodies I heard that long afternoon were old slave-working songs, crying songs, half-remembered nursery rhymes and children’s rounds, gospels, and even old Gabriel Prosser’s stomping rhyme to which white people danced without knowing the words. The notes swelled through my mind like the sunbeams that danced through the tall white curtains. Suddenly I wanted to go home. I wanted my mother. . . .
“Maman, ” I whispered, and then blushed scarlet when I realized I had said it out loud and that Mrs. Wellington had heard me and had risen and taken me by the shoulders.
“My dear,” she said, “come meet your future sisters.”
She rang, and her daughters Tabitha and Lividia entered. They were tall, dark, and good looking, with clear complexions and raven black hair. I was far fairer than either of them. Tabitha was married to Janson Ellsworth, a regimental doctor, and Lividia was only fifteen, yet as tall as I and as mature as her sister. I tried to sort my feelings. These Wellington women would constitute my new family. They would, as time passed, supersede my real family at Monticello: Critta and Dolly, Ursula and Bette, Peter and John, Dolly and Wormley. Eston, Beverly, Madison, and Mama. There were the whites as well—Martha and Thomas Mann, Ellen and Cornelia, Meriwether and Francis, Virginia and the President. All of a sudden, they all seemed to crowd into the room along with Tabitha, Lividia, and Mrs. Wellington until they, and my lie, had taken up all the space, milling around the quiet room, each with indelible sets of fingerprints, touching each and any object that came under their gaze, sliding around the mantelpiece, the fireplace, the piano, the silk curtains, the waxed breakfront, the library table, the bookcase, the Chinese vases, the lacquer boxes, the Queen Anne wing chairs, the silver teapot. Gingerly I touched the metronome on the piano. My blackened fingerprints would be left on this new family as well as the old.
I sat down at the pianoforte without speaking, and played simple pieces, skimming over the ivory and ebony in time with the ticktocking metronome and with my coldblooded lie. My fingers flew over the keys as lightly as they could for I feared they would leave black stains on the clean surface. But nothing happened.