They mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange it for all the frigid speculations of their lives.
Thomas Jefferson
We arrived in London in time for a funeral. The last hero of Trafalgar, a famous lord admiral, had died, and his catafalque was being towed up the Thames by a score of harnessed black horses in silver trappings and stiff-plumed headdresses moving in unison like a sea of black wheat. As the Montezuma glided toward London Bridge, we passed white stone palace after white stone palace, each draped with black bunting. Flags flew at half-mast and the peals of hundreds of church bells filled the air, as if a thousand silver coins had been flung upward and now rained down.
The ship’s orchestra had ceased to play, and the captain had lowered his colors to half-mast. The body, we were told, was being taken to Westminster Abbey, where it would lie in state for three days, near all the other national heroes buried there.
“The only thing he regretted,” murmured a fellow passenger beside me, “was that the Napoleonic Wars only cost England forty thousand dead. ‘Cheap victory,’ he always said.
“I suppose one could call this a bad omen,” I said to Lorenzo.
“Not at all. What it means is that Napoleon’s ghost has finally been put to rest after ten years, and Europe is for the moment at peace.”
The orchestra resumed playing the prelude from La Traviata, which they had played on the wharves of Philadelphia, as the gangplank was lowered. I rushed to join Mrs. Willowpole. As we slowly descended, arm-in-arm, I tried to imagine my mother at fourteen, leading Maria toward the Adamses waiting for them on the quay, thirty-eight years ago. Carefully, I placed my foot on English soil. I brought my gloved hand to my lips and then, pretending to stumble, dropped to my knee as I placed the kiss on the terra firma of the London docks. My white gloves came away with the imprint of the sooty, wet cobblestone. I stared at them. They had hidden my fingerprints. My movements had been so speedy and disguised that Mrs. Willowpole hadn’t noticed my gesture, and thinking I hadn’t been observed, I turned toward her, only to find Lorenzo at my side. He had seen everything. What are you hiding? his eyes asked.
“Let me escort you ladies to your hotel, if no one is meeting you at the docks. My man and carriage are here, and it would be a pleasure and an honor. I can’t let you roam the streets of London in all this turmoil.”
We let ourselves be led toward an elegant dark green equipage upon which sat four coachmen in dark green livery. In less than a half hour we had turned under the soaring arch of London Bridge and were heading up Water Street toward the city, which was paralyzed by traffic. Shops were closed and it seemed as if everyone in London was out on the streets. There were hundreds of Napoleonic War veterans amongst the civilians who had swarmed into the city for the funeral. Soldiers in every kind of uniform imaginable occupied every free piece of ground. And around them and the noisy, rowdy population, rose what was surely the greatest city in the world majestically. Paris couldn’t be greater, I thought. First of all, it was a stone-and-brick city. Even the poorest of habitations were timber, brick, and stucco. And it was a tall city, many of the buildings being four or five stories high. The mansions of Richmond were laughable, I thought, as we drove at a snail’s pace past Carlton House, Burlington, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Westminster. It took us nearly three hours to cross the city.
Our rooms were as comfortable and beautiful as any I had ever seen. The walls were papered in buff-and-gilt fleur-de-lis-patterned wallpaper, and the furniture was an odd but pleasant mixture of French Empire and English. There were bookshelves, a palm tree, and an ottoman. To my delight and surprise, there was an upright piano with faded red silk fluting across the front, and in one corner stood a very fine harp. The carpet was red with a buff pattern over polished wooden floors. The beds in the two small adjoining rooms were four-posters with damask curtains that matched those at the large sash windows. There was even a water closet and a real bathroom, which did not, however, have any plumbing.
Relieved and happy, we settled in. The next Monday we set out for the opening of the convention in a hired carriage.
When we arrived at the cavernous Oxborn Hall, which was still and somewhat appropriately draped in black, Mrs. Willowpole was told she could not be seated on the floor as a delegate because she was a woman. Women, the convention manager explained, were relegated to the spectators’ gallery, in the very rafters of the hall. They had no right to vote, to speak, or to participate in the debates. Copies of the speeches were not distributed to the gallery. There were no ladies’ toilets, and women were not allowed to eat at the men’s buffet. There were no reserved or numbered seats for ladies, and they were not allowed to use the front door, but rather one side entrance and the fire staircase. If these rules were not complied with, one would be physically ejected from the hall.
For a few moments we stood there, disarmed.
“We have traveled thirty-five hundred miles,” began Mrs. Willowpole. “We have accreditation.”
“I can’t help that, madam. In our program you are listed as a man.” He looked up sternly. “Dorcas,” he said, as if he were speaking to a child, “is a man’s name. I never heard of any woman named Dorcas. And you didn’t put ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Miss’ in front of it. Dorcas Willowpole is a man’s name. You used subterfuge to accomplish your accreditation, madam.”
“That’s because the organizers of the convention have never read Shakespeare. Dorcas is the name of a shepherdess in The Winter’s Tale!”
“Well, madam, if I had been your father, I would have opposed such a name.”
“I demand to see my compatriots on the floor.”
“You’ll have to wait for them to come out of the hall into the street or use the side entrance, the same as for tradesmen. Can’t let you in the front door.”
“Now you know,” murmured Dorcas Willowpole, “what if feels like to be a Negro.”
We reached the spectators’ gallery disheveled, winded, and apprehensive. Would we be allowed to remain here at least? Despite everything, we found the cream of female British abolitionists in high good humor. There was Hannah More, the poet, and Amelia Opie, wife of the London portrait painter and a writer of romantic novels. She had written a poem I had read called “The Negro Boy’s Tale.” Hannah More, a friend of Dr. Wilberforce, moved in the fashionable circles of London, and as she did so, she carried with her a print of Clarkson’s drawing of a slave ship and its instruments of torture. She too had written several poems on the subject, the most famous of which had been published in Philadelphia.
Holding court in the cramped gallery was the formidable Elizabeth Heyrick, who had made the biggest stir of all among antislavery people on both sides of the Atlantic. She was a Quaker lady, residing in Leicester, a friend of all the prominent antislavery Friends: the Gurneys, the Buxtons, the Frys, the Hoares. Her pamphlet, entitled Immediate, Not Gradual, Abolition, called for emancipating the slaves at once as the shortest, safest, and most effective method.
“Well, Mrs. Willowpole, welcome to the slave deck.” She rose to shake hands with us like a man, then laughed good-naturedly as she handed each of us a copy of Thomas Clarkson’s latest pamphlet, Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies, with a View to Their Ultimate Emancipation, one of dozens that had been published on the occasion of the convention and the Parliamentary elections. One of her new arguments embraced the utter futility of trying to appeal to, or compromise with, slaveholders. Gradualism was the masterpiece of satanic policy, and did not materialize in anything. The only method was to take the high ground on the basis of justice, then enforce majority opinion against slaveholders.
“Those same men down there,” said Amelia Opie, “are discussing our future as well—whether we shall be allowed to go beyond writing from our homes to public meetings and public speaking. So far we have been allowed to organize ladies’ auxiliary societies only; in that, you Americans are ahead of us. I am the president of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Birmingham.”
She smiled and held out her hand. She was young and very beautiful, with clear gray eyes and a wonderful English complexion. She had so many of the attributes of what was considered beautiful in a woman, she seemed almost a cliché. She was blond and small, vivacious, with a radiant smile, perfect teeth, delicate arms, hands, and neck, a generous bosom, and a refined air of distractedness and artlessness that had the same irresistible effect on men, women, and children. If I had not known where I was, I would have imagined I was sitting at a fashionable dressmaker’s waiting for a fitting, rather than listening to a denunciation of the most violent brutalities in the world. Moreover, it was Amelia Opie’s butler who hauled a picnic lunch up to the gallery for the ladies.
Down on the floor, the convention was being called to order, and the delegates asked to take their seats. I marveled at how easily I fell into thinking about other people’s slaves, as if I were not part and parcel of that multitude. I had suffered less, it was true, but perhaps I had been more wronged.
We were, after all, not talking about the three million American slaves, who were a minority in all the states except South Carolina; we were talking about the eight hundred thousand West Indian slaves who outnumbered the British planters almost ten to one. As Lorenzo had pointed out, it was inevitable that the blacks would sooner or later eradicate the whites in the West Indies. And it was just as mathematically sure that American slaves would never achieve their emancipation through the force of numbers. In America, with the tacit support of the North, the planter class in America was the ruling political class of the whole country. This stranglehold on power would have to be broken before anything else could be accomplished.
The new antislavery zeal in Britain was at its zenith, and Wilberforce was its pope, I was told by Dorcas Willowpole. The impassioned voice of Dr. Wilberforce rose with great power and seemed to sweep away the very walls of the hall, leaving his audience amidst the sheen and motion of the Atlantic Ocean, which rolled in with a mighty whorl of current and movement. And upon it sailed a slave ship of a hundred and twenty tons, fitted with planks for three hundred blacks, with two feet of headroom and a space six feet by two feet for each man chained between decks. There were ships, it seemed, that held as many as six hundred Negroes, a quarter of whom would die or commit suicide before the rest could be loaded. So smaller, faster boats were more economical. The unnamed slaver glided away from shore into the blank universe evoked by Dr. Wilberforce’s hypnotic voice, headed for Africa, its hull filled with Liverpoolian trinkets and iron fetters for two hundred and fifty. It was a voyage for which I had no preparation. It was as if the small, frail man below were pulling me headlong into my own biography. This was no individual slave narrative, set in the familiar confines of a southern plantation. This was the mythic, cosmic legend of the Middle Passage, the triangular crisscrossing of the Atlantic between England, Africa, and America. This was the beginning of the indomitable, overwhelming voyage that had wrenched my great-grandmother from the place where she was born and inflicted on her unimaginable suffering. My throat tightened as the story’s slaver dropped anchor at the mouth of the Gambia, ready to pick and choose and load the cargo for which it had made its hazardous journey; an ordinary slaver, on an ordinary errand, navigated by ordinary men.
I sensed a prayer forming within me: Please don’t let me hear this. My lips pleaded with Dr. Wilberforce’s voice. This was no slave tale of old; this was the Book, the Bible, the Passage. But there I sat, under the burning tropical sun, listening to the thunder of the sea, waiting for our cargo from the interior. Suddenly the column burst onto the beach, a long, undulating line of fettered, bleeding, stunned, and stuttering humans, all naked, all wild-eyed with the hardship of the march. First there were ten, their heads forced upright by means of a common yoke; then there were fifty, bowed low, as still as stone, kneeling on the deck of the ship, being examined by the ship’s doctor, jumping and dancing in a strange ritual visited upon them by the captain. Then came the bartering: brass kettles, cowrie shells, looking glasses, steel knives, cases of rum and brandy, bolts of vivid cloth, and penny necklaces of colored beads in exchange for men and women.
Dr. Wilberforce’s incantation rose with the stench he described of burning flesh, “red-hot branding irons coming down on the shoulders, buttocks, backs of women, children, and warriors alike, writhing in pain, being held down by the sailors, the brazier glowing like the eye of God.” His voice had metamorphosed into the single cry of agony that issued from the living men on deck, exploding onto the sea’s undulating surface into which I and the hall and London itself had disappeared, leaving only the heads and shoulders of the audience below, as if they bobbed in the surf, their sighs of protest quieting into a pious and awed silence. But Dr. Wilberforce would not be silenced. He continued on, describing the instruments of the trade: the funnels and pliers to wrench open the mouths of those who refused to eat; the shackles and yokes of all kinds for wrists, ankles, necks; instruments to pull teeth, pluck out eyes; alligator-hide whips that tore the skin off in little coils; branding irons; plugs for dysentery that sometimes caused slaves to vomit their own feces; and instruments of pure torture — clamps, thumbscrews, garrotes, spiked collars. These were the methods that served the logic of pure brutality: the rape of women, the forced feedings, the suicides, the revolts, and the jettisoning of living cargo overboard in the wake of pursuit by British slave patrols.
Wild, demented cries rose in a maelstrom around the voice and form of the diminutive Dr. Wilberforce. The slaves, stacked two feet apart, rolled helplessly on the unplaned planks, taking the skin off their backs and sides in the suffocating darkness. The floor of the hull became slippery with blood and mucus, and men went insane and tried to bite off their shackles and irons. Like a sleepwalker I moved through this infernal slaughterhouse, chest-high among the rough planks, my skirts trailing in indescribable muck, through the putrid slave hold where a candle would not burn. Dr. Wilberforce’s saintly, intoxicating voice wound through the epidemics of smallpox and malaria and the bloody flux, outbreaks of insanity, and slave revolts. In panic, I glanced at Mrs. Willowpole, my mouth open, gasping for breath, fighting a rising nausea. There were tears standing in her eyes. She reached over and grasped my hand.
“Courage, my dear. I have heard Dr. Wilberforce’s litany many times, but no matter how many times, one is always annihilated by the horrors of his narrative,” Mrs. Willowpole whispered next to me. I took a deep breath. I was trembling uncontrollably now, in the grip of shock over this inventory of absolute evil. The tiny man below still turned and spun like a weathercock in the turbulence of his own speech.
The ship had reached Cuba now, with one-third of its cargo still alive. I had heard of the Cuban slave markets, the scramble sales, the barter for sugar and rum, and the transfer of illegal slaves with false papers to the New England schooners, which in turn transported them to the Carolinas and Louisiana. This was how my great-grandfather had transported my great-grandmother. In this evil nightmare, my grandmother had been conceived. This was who I was— what I was. This Passage was my fingerprints.
I continued to stare into the swirling, impenetrable void surrounding the doctor’s voice, from which issued the cries and screams of children being sold away from their mothers, men being manhandled in the scramble sale, women being raped on barn floors until the cries subsided into the faint, distant washing of waves on a beach, which I realized was applause from the spellbound audience. It was over.
I shifted away from the women seated in the gallery, repulsed and strangely remote from them, as if I had descended from another galaxy. The crash of the sea was still in my ears, and I felt intensely aware of my physical being, my lungs still breathing in the insupportable stench of the ships, my hands, my eyes, my shackled ankles. I drew myself back into consciousness from the depthless ocean, from the vast horror upon which I had been blown and tossed.
My own petty, indulgent occupations, my vain ambitions and longings, my selfish and egotistical strivings had disappeared in the void of Dr. Wilberforce. What did the humiliation of my own domestic slavery in the tiny confines of Monticello have to do with this immense, this cacophonous manifestation of pure evil? Even as my mind tried and tried to encompass the meaning of what I had heard, and to filter out a tiny foothold in it where my mind could rest and gather its wits, it dawned on me that comprehension was impossible. There was no way under it or over it or around it. I had to plunge into its heart like a swimmer, not knowing if I would ever rise to the surface.
I shied away from my employer’s touch as we rose. Below, people were stirring. Dr. Wilberforce had received a standing ovation, and now the men were moving about, talking to one another, greeting acquaintances, coming alive . . . relieved and happy that they were on dry land. But for me, there were only the murmurings and explosive sounds of my own dry, fervent lips praying and the click of my own tongue against the roof of my mouth and the bitter taste of God’s malevolence.
One day when Mrs. Willowpole was busy with her committee meetings and Lorenzo Fitzgerald had gone to Manchester on business, Amelia Opie took me to visit the new picture gallery at Piccadilly Square. As we walked through the large central gallery, filled with Italian pictures and Dutch still lifes, I stopped before a large framed engraving, staring at the engraved copper plate beneath. It read: THE PROGRESS OF FEMALE DISSIPATION AND THE PROGRESS OF FEMALE VIRTUE. INSPIRED BY HOGARTH—MARIA COSWAY. It was dated 1802. Suddenly there was proof that this companion of my father’s Petit had told me so much about had really existed. Everything he had said came back to me: the letters which the painter Trumbull had delivered back and forth between them; the strange, erratic wandering life for which she was notorious; and the seclusion in a convent in Lodi, Italy. Hanging next to her painting was her engraved self-portrait. It showed a beautiful and fragile lady of fashion in the elaborate hairdo of the day. Her arms were folded across her décolletage, staring out of the frame. There was much to remind me of my aunt, Maria Jefferson Eppes, and I was not being fanciful in seeing a resemblance to my mother.
“A fine if wasted talent, Maria,” Amelia said.
“You know her?”
“When I was very young. I think I saw her once or twice at balls or musicals, always exquisitely dressed. She used to affect Oriental turbans and lavish Ottoman shawls. She had a monster for a husband, but he was an extraordinary artist, a painter of miniatures. No one took Mrs. Cosway’s talent seriously. How could they, in the face of her husband’s genius? He was very close to the Prince of Wales before he became king, and kept a splendid residence at Schmberg House. They were both part of the prince’s entourage until he became regent. They had one daughter, whom Maria abandoned at six months to travel on the Continent. Six years later, the child died and Cosway fell into a deep melancholy. Maria returned, but he became more and more eccentric. Richard Cosway was dropped from the king’s society, and that’s when Maria Cosway fled abroad again. She traveled more and more frequently and finally ran away with an Italian castrato, Luigi Márchese. Richard Cosway finally died in 1821 and Maria, who was raised a Catholic (devout or not I cannot say), then removed herself permanently to Lodi, Italy, near where she was born, and returned to the religion of her childhood. She had founded a convent in 1812 called College della Grazie, part of an order known as the Dames Inglesi, and she became its abbess. Why did you stop in front of this particular painting, Harriet?”
“Nothing ... the title, I think. It is very well drawn, don’t you think, for a copy? And the portrait. It has a haunting quality, don’t you think? Such sad eyes . . .”
“Maria is sad, I think. At least her life is. She was famous for being headstrong and eccentric—a true artist. It was said that it was her father who pampered her into believing she had great talent. But her husband balked at her painting for money. She could never attract any important patrons—or if she did, she was accused of artistic improprieties rather than artistic talent, as if a woman could not attract interest except through her sex. She couldn’t have loved her husband, curious monster that he was—a dwarf: deformed, capricious, and degenerate. It seems that when they lived in Schomberg House, he had a private entrance to the king’s chambers through a tunnel built from there to Carlton House. But come, I want to show you the Van Dyck, which is truly a wonder.”
But I lingered before the melancholy portrait. My mother, buried alive at Monticello, and Maria Cosway at Lodi were both women detached from the real world. As mothers, both had abandoned their rights to their children, Maman by remaining a slave, Maria by running away. Stillborn mothers. What would Amelia Opie think, as a writer of novels, if I told her all I knew about Maria Cosway?
Slowly I turned and followed Amelia without looking back. I began to dream not only of Paris, but of Lodi.
Our work was almost done. Our reports on the conference were completed. The letters and manuscripts for publication in Philadelphia were ready. Mrs. Willowpole continued her frantic traveling and visiting, sometimes depositing twenty cards in a single day. I spent my time transposing lectures, copying letters, and writing reports. When I had a free moment, I raced out to the music shops in the Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly and browsed hungrily through all the newly published sheet music. Everything was to be completed and sent by December so that we could avail ourselves of Amelia’s invitation to spend a month in the country at Christmas.
Life had settled down to a routine. Every day, Mrs. Willowpole would do her accounts, invitations, and thank-yous at her little davenport table, writing with her new steel pen made in Birmingham, which she had bought in Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury. It was a beautiful writing instrument, decorated with a polished bone handle and necessary if one was to keep up with the times and not be thought old-fashioned. She bought one for me, and I sent two home to Monticello for Christmas, one for my mother and the other for him, although I couldn’t imagine that my father would ever write with anything except a quill pen.
We were more and more attached to our “little home,” as Dorcas Willow-pole called our furnished lodgings. Lorenzo, Brice, Mrs. Willowpole’s nephew, and his friend, Sydney Locke, another young lawyer from the city, had fallen into the comfortable routine of dining with us or inviting us to dine as often as three times a week. Or the gentlemen would pass by for sherry, or for high tea or a game of backgammon. I had continued the backgammon lessons Lorenzo Fitzgerald had begun on board the Montezuma. I had learned quickly and easily because the game was so similar to music. One had to have rhythm, be able to count and memorize, and have at least a musical notion of mathematics. Even the noise of the dice pleased me. My fingers now flew around the board as if it were piano keys. The combination of talent tempered by pure chance appealed to my double life, in which gambling was necessarily a part. More than often I beat my employer and even began to hold my own with Lorenzo. What I did not realize until my employer teasingly pointed it out to me was that I was now surrounded by three eligible young men!
LONDON
THANKSGIVING DAY
My dearest Charlotte,
Rec’d. yours of the 15th. The weather isn’t half as bad as I expected it to be at this time of the year. It is gray, of course, and night falls close after five, because we are so much to the north, but no race knows more how to live cozily in a cold climate than the English. They have invented a million comforts, not the least of them excellent chocolates, high tea, hot scones, golf, a devotion to cats and dogs, chintz material, country houses, wool tweed, umbrellas, bagpipes, cathedrals, King Edward roses, forty-branch candelabras, the men’s club, and, since inactivity is considered reprehensible, not to say immoral, a host of games even the most serious adult can indulge in. Much reading is done—novels, religious and historical works, and magazines. Travel books are also in vogue, especially those about the Grand Tour. And everyone reads the London Times—ironed. You may draw or paint, do fancywork, rolled rapper work or embroidery, make models in wax or pictures with shells, press flowers in books, paint trays, decorate bellpulls, paste postcards in albums or magazine pictures on screens, sew dresses from paper patterns cut out of The Englishwomen’s Domestic Magazine. There are kaleidoscopes to play with, and stereoscopes and zoetropes, which make pictures of animals run and jump. There are magic lanterns and folios of prints and watercolors of birds to look at. There is butterfly and beetle collecting, jigsaw puzzles, cards, board games, paper and pencil games, whist, and loo, piquet, and Pope Joan, bridge and backgammon, chess and faro. Above all, dear girl, there is music. All other games are played to running conversation and small talk, at which the English excel as no other race, except that in Italy, it seems, men actually talk to women. Anyway, every spare moment I have I devote to music. Our work here is finished, and we have several months before we leave for Europe. So I plan to profit all I can from the music, great and small, that’s in the city: concerts at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Opera at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, chamber music at a dozen associations and societies. Oh, Charlotte, everything is here, Mario and Tosca, Norma, Lucia and Rigoletto. I heard a concert by a great continental musician, George Bridgetown, a mulatto of African and Polish descent who executed divinely a violin concerto by Giornowich, another by Viotti, and a rondo by Grosse. Music is everywhere, in private homes, especially in the country, but also in the gardens and amusement parks. I attend any and all: operas, operettas, chamber music, quartets, piano concerts, musical solos . . . everything.
We have an invitation from Amelia Opie. A month in the country, with all my time for music. Sydney, Lorenzo, and Brice will be there, and God knows how many tons of people! Surely worse than any Virginian plantation. And they have as many servants as a South Carolina slaveowner, not, of course, counting agricultural workers. As many as seventy servants may sit down to dinner every day downstairs, while fifty sit down to dinner upstairs. Amelia herself employs a valet, a coachman, a postilion, a gardener, a boy, a housekeeper, a housemaid, a laundrymaid, a dairymaid, and a general maid in London. In the country she has double that number, and between the loftiest of the upper servants and the humblest of the lower, there are as many grades and ranks as in the aristocracy itself. She says more people work as domestic servants than at any other occupation, except agricultural workers: almost a million of them. And are the working-class poor worse off than the American slave? No, no, and no. Although a revolution of the poor is inevitable. Will the British arrive at abolition before we do? Yes, I would guess in less than ten years. There is a fervor here that has not reached our shores yet, but ours will surely come.
Dorcas says there are two kinds of time, real time and intellectual time; that is, the time it takes an idea to arrive to the consciousness of mankind. Immediate and worldwide emancipation’s time has come, and we will both live to see it. That first day, at the convention, when, for the first time, I heard Dr. Wilberforce speak and stared absolute evil in the face, even as my soul shriveled, Charlotte, I knew as Lorenzo had assured me on the boat: slavery was not forever. I have vowed to live to see this cancer wiped from the face of the earth. It justifies everything I’ve done.
My sisterly love, I wear your locket over my heart.
Harriet
P.S. Did you get the last packet of books? And the music? I know I forbade you to speak of him, but have you heard if they’ve arrived safely?
That winter, as cold rain and mist settled over London and we burned oil lamps in the middle of the day, merino lambs like those on my father’s plantation grazed in Hyde Park, and people sold coal and wood in Lieches-ter Square and hay in Haymarket. London was so filthy with coal soot that blackness rained down with the famous fog, and armies of laundresses labored to keep the upper class clean. The filth of London made a cult of whiteness. The gentry changed clothes several times a day in a struggle that determined social standing and made whiteness a symbol of social order and beauty. Young women flaunted white muslin dresses; young men exhibited dazzling white linen that they sometimes shipped to Holland to have starched. Veils, gloves, overshoes, hats, raincoats, fog glasses, every protection was needed in the desperate fight to keep clean. A speck of dirt was considered ungodly, and its confrontation a war on evil, anarchy, and the forces of darkness. Desperately the Englishman fought the demon soot. Pale complexions, like white dresses, were considered the Holy Grail. I was much complimented on mine.
Lorenzo had told me Amelia Opie’s country house, called Roxborough, was in Richmond, Surrey, one of the loveliest and most comfortable seats in all of southern England. We drove through the wrought-iron gates and up the mile-long drive past the clipped green velvet sward toward the white-stone and red brick manor, built in the manner of the architect Palladio, and arriving at the north entrance where an army of stewards, butlers, and housemaids was lined up at attention. I discovered for myself how vain were the pretensions of Tidewater gentry to architectural splendor.
The house was surrounded by fine pastures, splendid flocks of sheep, orchards, fields of hops and corn, dairy farms, and herds of cattle. Richmond was upriver from London, along the Thames estuary. Thousands made their living from the sea, and there were lead and coal mines in the Mendip Hills, forges in Sussex, tin mines in Cornwall, and ironworks in Birmingham. I marveled at how, on its surface, England was so rich, happy, comfortable, placid, and pleased with its lot in life and its place among nations. It was very far from what I had learned at the convention about England and its cities like Liverpool, where the very stones smelled of slaves’ blood.
Happily, country living was much simpler than life in London, and although Mrs. Willowpole and I knew that we would be obliged to change our clothes four times a day, the meagerness of our respective wardrobes would be less apparent, since the ladies would all affect “country” simplicity. But we had each brought the one article of clothing absolutely essential to country living—a red cloak in which to walk to church. They were famous in Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, and were great, ample capes of crimson or scarlet of finest wool, double-milled and of such an intense dye that they threw a phosphorescent glimmer whenever they moved. They could be seen from miles away on the heaths, and on Sundays, it was beautiful to behold the women in them, assembled for church in the yard, reflecting every ray of the sun and glimmering like a stand of poincianas. In a few years they would disappear from fashion, but in 1825 they were worn over the calicos, velvets, and silks of both the aristocracy and the gentry classes. As Americans, we were considered exotic nobility, the highest rank possible, and treated with the deference reserved for visiting sultanas.
Mrs. Willowpole and I had time to speak to each other in low voices before Amelia Opie, in a magnificent tea gown, arrived to greet us. We had been talking of what all the world might hear, but it was the common effect of such a room as we were in to oblige us to speak low, as if a loud voice would distort the painted murals on the ceiling, or shatter the excellent chandeliers hanging amongst them, or make one of the meticulous leatherbound books that lined the walls and the circular library tables to fall over on their sides.
“Children,” cried Amelia Opie, “what a lovely time we’re going to have!” This was not the antislavery, political-pamphlet Amelia Opie, but another, up until now unknown to us, creature called the English chatelaine. And we were about to embark on a ronde called the English country-house party. I use ronde, but I could have used etude, mazurka, waltz, or even variations on a theme, concerto, or symphony, for a country-house party resembled nothing if not the changing rhythm, tempos, rigorous beat, and flogging execution of a piece of music. In fact, the English country-house party was opera, sometimes more comic than anything else. As when the sandwiches left outside a countess’s door as a signal to her lover that the way was clear were eaten by another houseguest who had gotten hungry on the long road to his room. But sometimes the country house erupted in tragic little pieces of reality.
On our last day in the country, Lorenzo and I sat at the edge of the artificial lake and watched the swans sail back and forth, eyes alert for food, predatory beaks ready to strike any land creatures that moved within range. Amongst them was one magnificent black male who moved amid the others with remote and ironic dignity.
“You make fun of me. I love that, you know,” said Lorenzo.
A carefully arranged perspective fanned out behind the black swan like a tapestry, arranged in the current fashion of meticulously imitating the chaos of nature by having a slew of gardeners torture the landscape back into a vision of a primitive Eden. The ideal garden was now considered to be irregular, comprising sloping, undulating expanses of grass, sinuous walks and streams, classical temples and follies, and, if possible, at least one genuine ruin. Artificial brooks and lakes like this one abounded, spanned by romantic stone bridges and moats. Amelia Opie’s husband had spent a fortune making his park resemble the best landscape paintings.
“A swan’s bite can break the arm of a grown man,” said Lorenzo.
“Hum,” I said, staring instead at the imitation lake, in the fake landscape, surrounded by artificial ruins, all placed on a man-made knoll which then dipped into a forged wood, while swans swam about under a counterfeit Roman arch.
“I could almost wish, Harriet—” He stopped suddenly and hesitated. It was so unusual for Lorenzo to falter that I looked up at him in surprise. At that instant, something about him, although I couldn’t say what, made me wish I was back with my mother, or my father, anywhere but where I was, for I was sure he was going to ask a question to which I did not know, and would never know, the answer.
I remained calm, as if I had been condemned and was merely awaiting execution, my prayers and confessions already hanging in the air along with the noose. It was despicable of me to shrink from hearing any speech of Lorenzo’s, for I had the power to put an end to it. I would simply tell him who I was and what I was and count on his surprise and humiliation to guarantee his silence. It would be more a war cry than a confession—more a retaliation than an answer. After all, I couldn’t keep running away every time a man asked me to marry him. I pulled my red cloak around me closer, despising myself. Hadn’t I deliberately led Lorenzo into admiring me? Hadn’t I practiced on Lorenzo, on Sydney—even on Brice? I wondered idly if he had written out his proposal of marriage, or if he was going to ask me now, in person, in this fake Eden.
“Harriet, do you love anyone else?”
“Lorenzo, before you go any further, let me say this: I am not what you think I am or what I appear to be. When you find out, you’ll regret this moment as I do now. I did not know you cared for me in that way.” But of course I knew; how could I not know? “I have always thought of you as a friend, and would rather go on thinking of you as that.”
“Ah, Harriet. Forgive me . . . I’ve been too abrupt with such a subject. Only ... let me hope that one day you might accept a declaration. Give me the poor comfort of telling me you have never seen anyone else whom you could—”
“Oh, Lorenzo, if only you had not gotten this fancy into your head!”
I was shocked by my cold, calculated decision to use Lorenzo’s love as a test for confessing my secret to Thance. They were enough alike. And in my callous naiveté, I really believed I would be doing them both a favor. They were both white, weren’t they? Then their reactions would be the reactions of all white men. . . .
“I am not what you think I am,” I repeated. “I cannot listen to what you want to say without forewarning you. I am the illegitimate daughter of the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, and a slave, Sally Hemings. I am therefore, as you must realize from your travels in America, not only a bastard, but a Negro ... an African, if you like. Is there . . . anything, now, that you wish to tell me?”
It was a much more brutal revelation than even I had intended. Lorenzo’s total disbelief turned it into the punchline of a joke. I almost laughed myself.
Instead, contempt mingled with pain at my having astonished him in this way, and my lip curled in slight disdain.
With an imperious air, he said, “You, a colored woman? You’re about as black as I am.” I hung my head. “Good God, look at me. You can’t be serious, Harriet!” he exploded. “Why not King George’s bastard, while you’re at it? Is this some kind of American-style humor?”
But he knew I wasn’t joking. I had discovered a submerged streak of rage and cruelty I hadn’t known I possessed. It now blew around poor Lorenzo, someone who had become a friend and the person who understood me almost as well as Thance. Yet I wasn’t sad.
“Harriet,” he groaned, his voice a reservoir of pain. “You should make allowances for the mortification of a lover.”
“The fact of my birth is not your mortification, nor mine. I don’t feel sorry for either of us.”
And then he said something so human, so pathetic, and so pitiful, I almost loved him.
“You must love me a bit to have told me something so prejudicial.”
“To my happiness?”
“To everything. To your future ... to your very survival!” he sputtered, loosing his cool intonation.
“Do you think that all Negroes are unhappy because they are not white?” I said.
“But you are white!”
“If I’m white, then why do I see pity in your eyes?”
It was like the story of the Eastern potentate who dipped his head into a basin of water at the magician’s command, and ere he took it out, saw his whole life pass before his eyes.
“Because of your illegitimate birth,” he whispered. “That’s not to be forgiven.”
My eyes widened.
“There is an injury where reparation is impossible,” murmured Lorenzo. “Neither wealth nor education can repair the wrong of dishonored birth. It’s a matter of geography . . . illegal aliens crossing an inviolable frontier.”
This time I did laugh, because he was perfectly sincere. It was not my drop of black blood, nor even my role as an impostor; it was my rank as a bastard from which he recoiled. It was so English. And so absurd.
Illegal alien, I thought, burning with shame. What a perfect name. What a perfect name for what I was in my own country. It had been self-deception to believe I could escape. I could be as fair as a lily, as beautiful as a houri, and as chaste as ice, and I would never be anything more than black contraband.
“He . . . your father sent you away . . . here?”
“No.”
“There is another man. Someone you love, whom you are protecting as you haven’t protected me.”
Suddenly I sensed that he was as anxious to leave me as I was for him to do so. We swayed over the abyss of my revelation like two drunks.
Almost as one, like automates, we turned at the sound of the dinner gong, the silvery sound reminding me of the funeral bells that had tolled my arrival in London.
“Come,” he said, not unkindly, his voice rough with unspoken grief.
“No,” I whispered. “I’ll follow in a moment. I want a few moments alone . . . please.”
He bowed, and as he straightened, our eyes met unaccountably. There was no recrimination in his, and no recollection in mine. Only sadness. Had I, despite everything, been a little bit in love with Lorenzo? As soon as he was out of sight, I turned and leaned weakly against a juniper tree that must have been a thousand years old. Once, long ago at Montpelier, I had prayed that the bark of a juniper tree would scrape my white skin from my bones. No tears came. I felt my first streak of defiance. I was young. The world was open. There would be others.
8 P.M.
Roxborough
My dear Lorenzo,
I have never thought of you but as a friend. Nor will I ever. Please, let us both forget this afternoon ever took place. If you think my deception has tormented you heartlessly and without reason, think a bit of my dilemma and forgive me. You are grieved, but not irreparably. You are wronged, but not indelibly. I release you from the promise you made to yourself, not to me, in a moment that will never fade from my memory. What are we anyway, at this moment? A brother and sister. For you know me better now than any person on earth!
I don’t have to ask you never, never to speak of me again. Your pride will do that, and you will probably have no more opportunity. In a few weeks, I leave for Paris with Mrs. Willowpole and Brice (who are as innocent of my lie as you were). Even though I wrong them, leave me this possibility. I have trusted you with the power to ruin my life in exchange for the unhappiness I’ve caused you. I beg you only for silence. Remember I am a fugitive.
Good-bye.
H.