On the one hand, shake off all the fears and servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there be one, He must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson
We had been at sea two weeks before I opened Petit’s letter. With trembling hands, I untied the ribbon and broke the seals one night around midnight when I had already been asleep and had awakened, as if I were myself a burglar and a thief, or as if, at any moment, someone would come bursting into the cabin demanding to know who I was and what I was doing here. My heart had accelerated and pounded in my ears. Perhaps Petit, in a paroxysm of guilt, had confessed my false identity to Thance. Or perhaps in a pique, he was abandoning me to my fate, refusing ever to see me or help me again.
PHILADELPHIA
MIDNIGHT, SEPTEMBER 23, 1825
My dearest Harriet,
These are copies of letters your uncle James wrote to me during his two stays in Paris after his emancipation. They are in turn sad, funny, brilliant, morose, dejected, and full of hope. Very much as you must feel now. Perhaps you will read them before you reach that city. Even if you don’t go, they will allow you to know your uncle and his life a little better, and in turn that of your mother and yourself. Enclosed also is the scarf James wore the day of the Bastille. As you can see, it is perfectly preserved. It scaled the ramparts of the Invalides and the moat of the Bastille and rode about his neck all the way to Versailles. Cherish it.
I imagine you have been on the high seas several weeks now before you open this; I don’t know why, but I know you well, Harriet. Perhaps you’ve changed your mind about your decision. If so, do not hesitate to take the next boat home from London. There will be no reproaches, neither from me nor from Thance, poor boy. You are the light of our lives, and leaving you on the Montezuma was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I had imagined you on my arm, walking down the aisle at the St. Paul’s Unitarian Congregation Church in a few weeks. I cannot write of it without pain and even tears. It is a good thing Thor Wellington is home to help Thance, who has taken this even harder than I feared, although I don’t think that Thor will allow him to harden his heart against you. But beware, Harriet, you are gambling high and wide. Life is not made only for your convenience, although there are those in it who would wish it so for your joy. I am one of those who misses you and prays for your health and happiness every day.
I have made my last will and testament. It is, along with my other papers, at the notary public Sillbourne and Brothers at Front and Arch. If anything should happen to me, I have left you all my worldly goods except the farm in Champagne, France, where my mother still lives. I would expect that you provide for her in the last few years, nay months, of her already long life. I depend upon it. And I remain, your uncle Adrian and your adopted father. Remember your work. Remember Thance. And remember your parents who love you.
Yours in service and tenderness,
Petit
Slowly I threaded the long red silk scarf around my neck, pulling it tight. I turned the letters over and over in my hand. They were the originals. Petit had kept only copies for himself. I brought them close, under my nose. They had a charred, moldy smell like burned leaves after a rainstorm. The signature was huge, bold, and scrawled across the page. Every free space was crowded with small, meticulous writing, even the margins, which James Hemings used after filling the page itself. When he ran completely out of paper, he wrote between the lines.
The first was dated Paris, 1796. It described how he found the city after the Reign of Terror and his search for his old aristocratic masters, destroyed by the Revolution. “I’ve found work in one of the great houses not far from the Hôtel de Langeac, but everyone is afraid that the government will soon fall into the hands of an obscure Corsican general named Napoléon Buonaparte.”
How I lament the passing of the great houses where I had hoped to find work hut which have been gutted and burned during the Terror, their occupants either in exile or guillotined like the poor Queen. “Citizens, “ as Frenchmen now called themselves, are beginning to look askance at the servant class as well. Traitors and spies abound. Many cooks’ heads have come off along with their masters’. I congratulate you for having had the good sense to escape when you did.
Robespierre is dead, but nothing can bring back the Hermitage to glory and beauty, or the Tuileries or Marly—all destroyed. Maria Cosway has left her husband run away with an Italian castrato by the name of Luigi Marchese ... the big London scandal of this year.
In letter after letter, James followed the chaos and civil war of the Directory and the rise of Napoléon, as his own career progressed from kitchen to restaurant. He was now working in a restaurant on the Quai d’Orsay called the Varaine. His dream was to open a catering establishment of his own. He kept a strict diary of all his ideas, recipes, and culinary-decorative inventions for that future time. Each letter, I realized, had its own particular flavor and atmosphere, from funereal to burlesque; from melancholy shades of purple to bright magenta; in them, he poured out his hopes and dreams to Petit. But there was one letter which struck me like a blow, for in it he spoke of his love for my mother.
It was dated at the end of 1799 and had been written to tell Petit that he was returning to our shores to reclaim his sister.
PARIS
DECEMBER, 1799
Old friend Adrian,
I’ve finally booked passage on the Tartaguilla for home the beginning of the year. I should have written to you before now, for I may already be on the high seas when this reaches you, which means I will see your ugly face sooner than you expect me.
These past years have been hard and I am resolved, at last, to take my destiny and that of Sally into my own hands. In all this time, just as I’ve never ceased to love her, I’ve never ceased to writhe with shame at her concubinage and resent her slavery with rancor, as I never did my own.
Between us and in the most profound secrecy, I hope soon to tell her this. I should never have left Monticello without her, for without the twin spirit of my sister, I am less than alone, I am desolate, I think of her continuously. If she dies, I die. If she lives in bondage, I live in bondage. For years now, the very sanctuary of my soul has been on fire. My brotherly love trails behind my relation to God, for it was Sally, not God, who always lavished her love on me as a slave, a love all at once simple, faithful, and material. Our hearts merged in childhood, where as a boy I stood my ground against all the mute, incessant attacks against her beauty, her inner fire, her inner self. She was exceptional, Petit, and her betrayal of our childhood, at the behest of Thomas Jefferson, was my extinction as a man. If the person you love most on this earth and in whom you have placed all your confidence betrays you, it produces in you doubt in any divine justice.
Ever since that night at the Hôtel de Langeac, I’ve never had a quiet place; where none have access, even though the very thing I search for, solitude, is the very thing that is killing me, like the bloody sheets in my nightmare.
And so, to resuscitate my life, I must take a stand against this kidnapping. To love as I love is difficult. It is difficult because it is the highest testimony of your own self. It is the masterpiece that everything else prepares us for . . . and the only emancipation.
Pray for me, Adrian, as I pray for myself. I would gladly kill Thomas Jefferson if I thought that would assassinate her love for him, which rightly belongs only to me, but alas, a murder might even fix it more strongly in her heart. No, she must see him for what he is and despise him.
If I should fail at this, I am lost. Perhaps I’m lost at any rate, but, oh God, how I love her.
Jimmy
MASSON’S, PHILADELPHIA
1800
Adrian, old friend,
She despises me. Me! Not him.
She accused me of making her world a bordello when all I have ever wanted was the opposite. “My whoredom,” she said, “is yours and you know it.” She is right, and it never leaves me, even in sleep.
What will become of me, who needs her freedom more than I need my own? I am not a man, if I cannot free her.
Have booked passage for Barcelona, on the English ship Supreme in three days. I must think. I only despair on American soil.
Jimmy
A series of letters from the capitals of Europe followed. Letters full of descriptions of Madrid and Barcelona, of great houses in Calabria and Avignon. All with the same refrain. How could he free my mother? What could he do to persuade her to leave Monticello? And then . . .
RICHMOND
1801
Adrian,
I’m home for good this time. I’ve got a plan. Think back to our conversation on the quay. I’ve decided to go through with it. I’m compelled to. As it is, my life is worth nothing. She’ll thank me in the end.
Love me as I love her,
Jimmy
It was dawn before I slipped the letters back into their envelope.
Mr. Fitzgerald ignored a visible pull on his fishing line, which he had cast over the railing amidships. “One day, very soon, your country will spread from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific Ocean. On the east and west, its limits are those of the continental shelf. On the south it advances to the tropics, and it extends upward to the icy regions of Newfoundland. But Americans do not form so many branches of the same stock as in Europe. The three races of Americans are naturally distinct and, I might add, naturally hostile to each other. Insurmountable barriers have been raised between them by education and law, origin and characteristics, but fortune has placed them on the same continent where they do not amalgamate.”
We were sitting side by side. The light danced on the water and, far out at sea, we could see the backs of dolphins.
“I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish, and that by the time the Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race of men will have ceased to exist. They had only two alternatives, war or civilization—in other words, to destroy the Europeans or become their equals. The Narragansetts, the Mohicans, the Pequots—who formerly inhabited New England—exist now only in memory. The Lenapes, who received William Penn upon the banks of the Delaware only a hundred and fifty years ago, have disappeared. The last of the Iroquois begged alms from me. I penetrated more than a hundred leagues into the interior of the continent without finding a single Indian. They are destroyed.
“But the Negroes’ destiny is interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are unlikely to separate entirely or combine entirely. The presence of a black population upon its territory is the most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union.”
“How can you say that, Mr. Fitzgerald? It is not a black problem, but a white one. The two races arrived here at the same time. It is plainly not blacks who threaten the Union. And if slavery were not black, it would still threaten a democracy and a republic. I repeat, it is not the blacks; it is slavery.”
“Miss Petit, in the state of Maine,” Mr. Fitzgerald continued, “there is one Negro in three hundred inhabitants; but, in South Carolina, Mr. Hammond’s home state, fifty-five percent of the inhabitants are black. It is evident that the more southern states of your Union cannot abolish slavery without incurring great dangers which the North had no reason to apprehend when it emancipated its black population. The North managed this feat by keeping the present generation in chains and setting their descendants free. But it would be difficult to apply this method to the South. To declare that all the Negroes born after a certain period shall be free is to introduce the principle of liberty into the heart of slavery; imagine, for one moment, a person maintained in a state of slavery from which his children are delivered! The North had nothing to fear because blacks were few in number there. But if this faint dawn of freedom were to show three million black men of the South their true position, the oppressors would have reason to tremble. After having enfranchised the children of their slaves, the South would very shortly have to extend the same benefit to all black men.”
Imagine, for one moment, a person maintained in a state of slavery from which his children are delivered. . . .
“Little Miss Virginia—why so gloomy? This won’t happen in our lifetime, but I believe it will happen with violence and in war. If I were called on to predict the future, I should say that the abolition of slavery in the South, however it comes about, will, in the common course of things, increase the repugnance of the white population for the blacks. I base my opinions upon my observations throughout your country. I have seen that northern whites avoid Negroes with increasing care as the legal barriers of separation are removed by the legislature; and why shouldn’t the same result take place in the South? In the North, the whites are deterred from mingling with the blacks by an imaginary danger; in the South, where the danger would be real, I cannot believe the fear would be less.”
“And you believe slavery will not last forever?” I whispered.
“It appears probable that in the West Indies islands, the white race is destined to be subdued. Upon the continent, the blacks. Do you believe slavery will persist, Miss Virginia?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, your own origins are showing at last!”
“No, Mr. Fitzgerald. I believe slavery will last because it is black. If it were white, it would have been abolished long ago—like indentured servitude.”
“America is all a parody,” said Lorenzo, “a mimicry of her parents; it is, however, the mimicry of a child, tetchy and wayward in its infancy, abandoned to bad nurses and educated in low habits. The South considers itself the frontier, the guardians of the cherished ideals of laissez-faire and private property, of small government and fierce independence. They think they can roll back time or stop it, but they can’t.
“It is a nation derived from so many fathers that in commingling the thoughtless, the dissolute, and the turbulent of all nations, they neutralize one another, resulting in a people without wit or fantasy. And without fantasy, the race problem will never be solved.
“Whatever may be the efforts of Americans in the South to maintain slavery, Miss Virginia, they will not succeed. Slavery is now confined to a single track of the civilized earth, attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as prejudicial and by the principles of democratic liberty and the intelligence of our age as inhuman and criminal. By the act of the master or the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case, great calamities will ensue. My indignation does not light upon men of our own times, who are instruments of these outrages, Miss Virginia. I reserve my execution for those who, after a thousand years of freedom, brought slavery back into the world.”
We sat, as we always did, Lorenzo with his face toward the sun, mine turned away to protect my complexion, extracting its last feeble warmth as we drew farther north and farther into autumn weather. Our large hats were no longer of straw but of felt. Mine was tied securely with James’s scarf, which wound around the crown of the hat and under my chin. Mr. Fitzgerald’s was secured by a leather strap attached to his brim. As we watched for seagulls, whales, and shark fins, I felt very close to unburdening myself. I dragged the melancholy weight of my uncle’s fate with me everywhere on the ship. My throat closed and I murmured Lorenzo’s curse under my breath: “God damn the man who brought slavery back into the world after a thousand years.”
The Montezuma was in sight of the cliffs of Dover before I found the courage to open Charlotte’s package to find a gold locket and a letter from Thance. The packet had lain on my night table next to Uncle James’s letters night after night for almost six weeks, forbidding and accusingly silent.
Now that there were, according to Lorenzo Fitzgerald, three thousand miles between me and Thance, perhaps it was safe at last to open his letter. I turned it over slowly in my hand then shoved it deep in my skirt pocket next to my dagger. No, I thought. Not yet. I’ll think about it tomorrow. . . .
The locket contained a portrait of Charlotte’s pretty face, and opposite hers was the image of Thance, staring up at me forlornly. When had they had time to order expensive miniatures? Surely as a wedding present, I thought, not as a farewell. But even so, Thance didn’t look happy, or was I simply reading sorrow into a face retrospectively, as one does when one gazes at a portrait of a someone you loved who has died. It was in his eyes. Death. Abandonment. Pain.
I placed the locket around my neck. I was glad I hadn’t worn it until now, the end of the journey. I walked up to the weather deck and there, almost blocking the sky, were the cliffs: a mountain of deathly white stone that sprang out of the sea like towers of salt, their tips lost in the mist, their fogged silhouette like dagger points, piercing the surrounding blue of the Atlantic. Suddenly the whiteness loomed down on me, and I stepped back in terror, my hand on my throat.
“Magnificent, are they not, Miss Petit?” said Lorenzo Fitzgerald, who had joined me on the weather deck.
I wanted to be alone, yet I put my arm through his. “Please. Call me Harriet. We’re almost to London.”
He said nothing, but I felt a tremor of surprise run through him. It was unfair, I thought. I would never love anyone but Thance Wellington. Nothing would change that. Lorenzo could draw me all the continents in the world. Tonight, my last night aboard, I would read Thance’s letter.
An eerie light struck the massive cliffs as the sun disappeared, turning them a navy blue, and we passed between them into the North Sea. We passed so close I smelled their hoary breath. A flaky ash settled upon the boat and melted into the waves from the chalk boulders above me, distributing a fine veil of powder on my ungloved hand, so white, resting on the rail next to the chamois-sheathed one of Lorenzo’s.
For now, I had passed through the straits into the singular identity of a white American.
I suppose Lorenzo Fitzgerald felt me shiver, for he put his hand over mine and squeezed it gently. It was a brotherly gesture, intimate only in its human warmth, but I withdrew my hand quietly, hoping not to offend him, but determined to keep my distance from him. I had let down my guard once and fallen in love just as I’d dreamed. The rude awakening was more than I could bear a second time. I loved Thance with an aching, desperate certainty that I could never love anyone else.
PHILADELPHIA
THE LAST NIGHT
Harriet,
It seems that I should not despair. At least that is what Thor tells me. I will leave with him for Cape Town as soon as we can book passage. This will put even more miles between us, which God knows is necessary. Africa, my brother tells me, is God’s cradle for pain—especially for white men. He created it so.
And I release you from your promise to marry me. You are free. Because I love you.
Thance