The problem has just enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the people and to fantasize them; while with the knowing ones, it is simply a question of power … real morality is on the other side.
Thomas Jefferson
A squall of seagulls hazed the bright summer sky and circled around the sailors perched on each rail and mast as we sailed into the Delaware estuary just before noon on the twenty-ninth of June 1826. Brice, Mrs. Willowpole, and I stood on deck and watched the low Philadelphia skyline come into view: the two-storied warehouses and clapboard stores, the shipyard with its scores of masts, new red brick factories, and the gray-green hills and farmlands just beyond the steeple of St. Martin’s Episcopalian Church. After the magnificent harbors of London, Calais, and Genoa, this was an unprepossessing landscape in which to begin the second quarter-century of my life. Even in her own comfortable circumstances, Dorcas Willowpole was as I—a lone woman with suspicious motives. My protector squeezed my arm, as delighted to be home as I was apprehensive.
I felt as old as the hills. Thanks to Mrs. Willowpole’s generous stipend, I was wearing a pale green-and-white-checkered calico suit trimmed in navy blue piping and bows. Skirts were slowly getting wider and wider; the narrow, petticoatless dresses of a few years earlier had been replaced by lavish, tight-bodiced canisters, below which yards and yards of material fell to below the ankle and spread at least a foot on each side. From now on the skirts would spread like tar on water in ever-greater circles until they were as stiff as sails and measured five feet in diameter. Waistlines, too, had dropped and were now compressed with bone or ivory into a smaller and smaller circumference by the growing width of the crinoline. My hand went to my head, on which perched a wide, pale green Borsalino fedora, named after the most famous hatter in Italy. It was almost as wide as my skirt and lined in a deeper shade of green silk. The floppy brim slanted rakishly over one side of my face, and a long chiffon scarf held it in place, the scarf’s ends wrapped around my chin and down my back. I carried a green suede carpetbag and a small purse of white kid which matched the white kid gloves I wore.
As I descended the gangplank of the Aurora, I saw the lone figure of Adrian Petit, with Independence, waiting for me on the quay. Thance was not there. Nor was Charlotte. We embraced and he handed me a letter from Monticello. It was from my mother and it was more than three weeks old. My father was dying and wanted to see me for the last time.
“You know about this, Adrian?”
“Yes. Joe Fossett, who delivered the letter, told me. I was afraid to forward it to London in case it crossed you.…Harriet, you look magnificent—older and wiser, but such splendor!”
I knelt down to embrace Independence; then Petit lifted me to my feet and beamed, happiness screwing up his face like a withered peach.
“My little girl’s come back!”
To trouble, I thought.
“I’ve a lot to tell you, Uncle. A lot I didn’t write.”
“I’ve read between many a line, Harriet. Everything can wait. You must get back to Monticello.”
“I’ve vowed never to return to Monticello.”
“Perhaps you can finish what your uncle James tried to do and never succeeded. Rescue your mother. There is nothing more to hold her there with your father gone.”
Petit, with his shrewd French mentality, had hit on what he thought would be the only argument that would make me return home.
“You didn’t tell Charlotte I was arriving?”
“I told no one. That way your trip home doesn’t have to be explained, not even to Mrs. Latouche.”
“And Thance?”
“Thance is not here, Harriet. He and Thor are still in Cape Town, though I believe they will be back on these shores before the summer’s gone.” His eyes seemed to warn me: one thing at a time.
“But I wrote to him … from Italy.”
“Then his mother has forwarded it to him. Perhaps; or perhaps not …”
“I saw Maria Cosway in Lodi. She still lives,” I blurted out suddenly. “She gave me this.” I took the miniature of my father off the waistband of my skirt, where it hung next to my watch and Thance’s portrait.
“Now everybody’s got one, thanks to that devilish romantic Trumbull,” said Petit mysteriously. He cradled the miniature in his hand tenderly, as if it evoked a thousand memories.
I was able to book passage that same day on a ship to Richmond. Taking only my small carpetbag with me on the steamer that ran between the two cities, I said my good-byes to Brice and Dorcas, who were themselves taking a steamer for New York.
I intended to find my brother Thomas, who had lived in Richmond since I was a little girl. He had a house in the suburbs, far from the center of the city. Upon arriving in Richmond, I went straight to his house. As I entered the front gate, the door of the pale green clapboard facade swung open noiselessly without my knocking and closed just as silently behind me. I had been three years old when Thomas ran away from Monticello, and I had not seen him since. I was greeted by a strange, blond, curly-headed giant of a man with a somber countenance and sour disposition. He was thirty-six years old.
“How do you know I am, who I say I am?” I said, smiling, as he stood there without speaking.
“Who else could you be, Harriet?” he responded. “You’re here because he’s dying.”
“Have you seen him?”
“I haven’t seen him in twenty-two years, and I don’t expect to see him, living or dead. I’ve even changed my name to Woodson, the name of the man I work for, so I don’t have to acknowledge him as my progenitor. Just like you’ve changed yours, as you’ve told me. You’re Petit now. Miss White Petit. You didn’t have to pass, Harriet.”
“What choice did I have, Thomas?”
“Same choice as me. I’ve stayed on the black side of the color line.”
“You wouldn’t know it to look at you.”
His laugh was harsh and bitter. “Obviously you think you’ll be happier in the white community. But that’s your idea of happiness—a high social status, a safe home and family that no one can take away from you. Things white people take for granted. What I don’t understand is how you would want these things enough to sacrifice your true family for them. If you are willing to repudiate your family, your past, your history, and everyone you love just to be white, I won’t cause you any more pain than you have already caused yourself by hating you … you’re already living in an insane asylum.”
“You can’t live in dignity as a Negro …” I began.
“My salvation from complete despair is in my belief, the belief of our forefathers, that hatred is not directed against me as a man, but against my race, my color, my pigmentation. I can live in dignity as an individual, even though as a Negro I cannot.”
“Oh, Thomas.”
“It’s funny about passing. We disapprove of it, yet condone it. It excites our contempt, and yet some admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but protect it.” He paused. “What you’re doing is very dangerous, Harriet. Once Father’s dead, your cousins could kidnap you, hold you against your will. Put you in chains.”
“They wouldn’t dare!”
“What! Martha? Jeff? The Carrs? Who the hell do you think you are, Harriet, with your store-bought clothes and your English accent and finishing-school airs? You’re a nigger down here! Movable property. Up north, too! You are being precipitous, Sister.”
“I had to come back. I came back for Mama, to take her away from here. Otherwise, what’s to become of her?”
Thomas looked at me with such charged pity that a wave of seasickness overtook me.
“You think because he’s dying, he’s going to set you free, don’t you? You think on his deathbed he’ll redeem himself and say the words you’ve dreamed of all these years. ‘My little girl, I’m sorry I enslaved you. I apologize for what I did to you. Please forgive me. I love you … I hereby free you and your mother because I love you.’ Poor dunce! He’s not going to do it,” Thomas continued softly. “He can’t. It’s against his principles. It’s against the principles of his country.”
Silence.
“You realize,” he continued dully, “that if anything happens to you, I’m responsible. I’m your oldest brother. And the only free one around. Eston and Madison can’t raise a hand against their masters. I’m the one who’ll have to come and get you … with a shotgun.”
Thomas accompanied me as far as the Pantops plantation and then left me abruptly, saying that he hadn’t set foot on Monticellian soil for twenty-two years and he had no intention of doing so now. My father’s mansion was only a quarter of a mile’s ride from there, and I spurred my borrowed horse onward to what I still imagined was home. I reached the ridge that overlooked Monticello just before sundown and caught my breath as I breached its craggy frontier.
Distance and golden light masked the decrepitude of the scaling paint and crumbling brickwork, the still unrepaired planks of the veranda steps, and Robert’s rusting ironwork. The house sat in its triangular square of soft green, with its mighty shade trees and the serpentine wall of its gardens. Behind it ran the pale beige line of Mulberry Row, the regular square fields of sassafras, which stretched into the larger fields of not-yet-harvested tobacco. The Rivanna River flowed along the northern frontier in a silvery curved highway and branched off into the tear that was Blair Creek. There were already lights in the windows and smoke from the chimneys. There were merino lambs grazing on the west lawn and a loaded wagon parked there. I could even see shadowy figures behind the sash windows, children playing on the front lawn, people still working in the fields, and horses grazing.
The world that slavery had made lifted itself from the valley below and rose to clutch at my throat. It seemed it wanted the very life I had snatched away from it down there.
With its pretensions, plain masonry, and wooden pillars, the structure seemed so much smaller than in my imagination that I wondered that it hadn’t been magically replaced by a smaller replica. The loneliness I had staunchly denied these four years overwhelmed me, not for slavery but for this place, which was the only place to which I belonged, the only place on earth that knew my real name.
“Maman,” I whispered.
“You’ve turned into a beautiful woman, Harriet.”
“Thank you, Maman.”
It could have been four days rather than four years since I had seen my mother. Not a day of my absence showed on the surface of her face or body.
She was dressed not in her black homespun with her linen apron and her white turban, but in red-and-green plaid taffeta, with a yellow apron and a small bustle or “cushion,” as if she had dressed to please me. The yellow background of the plaid picked up the tones of her golden skin and golden eyes, and the ruby earrings from Paris that she always wore gleamed in the torchlight.
“Papa?”
“Weak. We think he’s had another stroke, but we can’t be sure. Burwell swears he’ll last until the Fourth of July.”
“Did he really ask me to come, or did you make that up, Maman?”
“He asked. He asked, knowing what risk you ran coming here. He thinks he can still protect you from your white family while he’s alive.”
“Remember, Maman, I’ve set foot on British soil. I’m emancipated.”
“As a matter of your conscience and for the benefit of your fiancé, but not in the eyes of Virginia, you aren’t. You’ll soon belong to your half sister Martha.”
My mother said this with such malicious relish, a pinprick of anger flared in my breast, despite all my promises to myself. She liked saying it, as if the words justified her own slavehood.
“As far as the black laws of Virginia are concerned, to a slave patrol, a sheriff, or a bounty hunter, you’re still a fugitive slave. People in Mulberry Row are going to start talking,” she continued in her beautiful, honeyed voice.
“Well, let them if they don’t have sense enough to keep quiet,” I replied angrily, allowing my own drawl to get deeper and more Virginian every moment.
My mother said nothing in response. Instead she reached out timidly and on tiptoes drew me into her arms, trying to enfold me with her tiny body until I squeezed her tightly against me. I felt a wave of pity and tenderness. She was so small, so fragile. My abbess of Monticello.
“After this is over, you’re coming with me,” I said.
“Don’t even think of it, Harriet. I’ll never leave Monticello, except in a pine box.”
“We’ll talk about it when the time comes,” I said, all at once feeling the fatigue of the journey, of the sea voyage, of facing my dying father, of everything.
The plantation closed in around me. I could feel the presence of my cousins, my aunts, my nephews, my brothers and half brothers-in-law of both complexions: the Carrs, the Eppeses, the Jeffersons, the Randolphs, and the eternal Hemingses. They were all still fighting and struggling in this little anthill of slavery.
“Who’s at Monticello?”
“Everyone. Martha and all the children. Cornelia, Ellen. Jeff has taken over running the plantation. The Eppeses are here. Peter Carr is here to see Jamey and Critta.”
“I meant the Hemingses, Mama.”
“Peter’s still cooking. Critta, Thenia, Robert, they’re all here. Joe Fossett. Mary and Martin, Bette and John, and, of course, Wormley and Burwell … your brothers …”
“No one’s escaped?”
“You sound like James, the time he came back from Spain to fetch me … begging me to run away from Monticello.”
“After Father’s death,” I said, “there’s nothing to keep you here.”
We were standing outside on the porch because my mother had not yet invited me into the house. The night sounds of Mulberry Row fell, making concentric musical murmurs escaping from the rows of sheds and wooden cabins. There were the sounds of preparation of the evening meal, mixed with work songs lifting off the fields as they emptied of laborers. The screams of children’s games, mothers’ commands, and an almost audible fragrance rose from the red clay road like a single note unfolding.
Why had I come home at all? To mourn or to gloat? I glanced at my mother, her elegant profile outlined against the rough wood of the kitchens. What had I expected from her? Revolt? Admiration? Fantasy? She was incapable of surprising me. She had a technique of yielding to the stronger will like a plant or an animal, without reflection. She had done this with my father, and now she was doing it with me. I sighed. There was no getting around her or over her; one had to walk through her.
Tired of standing on the porch, I brushed her aside and entered the kitchen. My mother shook her head as if to say that I had taken on all the airs of the white woman I was impersonating. But in Philadelphia, I had learned to move in a different way. My body pitched forward into space, unselfconscious and fearless, instead of holding back, bent in confusion or diffidence, balancing the pros and cons of bringing attention to oneself. I had come to expect a certain level of respect, a certain degree of attention to my voice and opinions. I had acquired with my northern education certain liberties. I believed I was entitled to them because my voice, my opinion, my person were valuable in themselves. And, of course, my mother noticed. She was very good at noticing things like that.
Inside, the very air of the kitchen, with its familiar aromas, seemed to shrivel my disguise. I became once again Harriet Hemings, errand-runner, spinner in the weaving factory down the road. I stood there for a moment, my heart beating. The kitchen’s clutter and meanness seemed poorer and more sordid than ever when I compared it to the roomy, bright kitchens of English country houses, with their silver and polished copper, their porcelain-and-steel stoves and dazzling arrays of neatly displayed utensils. The door of the larder was open, an unthinkable breach of discipline in this house, and I peered at the rows of preserves and smoked meats, country cheeses and salted fish, curds and pickled cherries. From the ceiling hung a dozen smoked hams, round bacons, and links of sausage. Memories of innumerable suppers, dinners, breakfasts, and barbecues lurked in that larder. Visions of lines of carriages arriving, of bouts of cricket on the west lawn, of black and white children romping on the green, barking dogs, snorting horses, pony carts, slave orchestras, banjos, violins, music. I turned back into the room. All that was in the past. Death and poverty had seized the soul of this house and would never relinquish their grip again. My father would leave his white family paupers and his black family with only their bodies to sell. I smelled it. I felt it. I tasted it.
“Sometimes,” my mother said, “it’s so bad, he doesn’t even remember who he is or who I am or any of Martha’s children. Only his houses. He remembers the names of his houses. Jeff Randolph has taken over his affairs, but he should have left them in Madison’s hands or Eston’s, ‘cause Jeff, sweet boy that he is, doesn’t know anything about running a dying plantation— or saving it. He’s been forced to sell off the best slaves after having had to sell all the other plantations.”
“But Father promised Martha Wayles we would never be sold! He’s letting Jeff sell her own uncles, nieces, nephews, her half sisters and brothers.”
“When,” replied my mother, “has that ever stopped a desperate master? Jeff wants to clear your father’s name of debts, and he must do it by selling and selling.”
“What about what he owes us—the Hemingses? You and Uncle Robert, Martin … all of us.”
“It was always your father’s weakness to imagine himself superior to the necessary art of being capable of holding one’s own in the world of business. And now, in the wake of disaster after disaster, it is hard to know whether it is more dangerous to stand still or to move. The habits of your father’s life, his tastes, his extravagances, his associations, his education, even the trustfulness of his character, his want of business skill, his sanguine temperament— everything that makes him a Virginian made him prey to incompetence and ingenuousness, unhappy speculations and bad loans. And now bankruptcy is staring us in the face.
“Even Eston complained that his father knew nothing of the adroit chicanery of running a property: feigning bankruptcy, fraudulent conveyances, signing over one’s assets to a wife or daughter. The President has never even heard of such tricks as sending coffins to the graveyard with Negroes inside, supposedly carried off by some sudden imaginary disease, only to have them be ‘resurrected’ in due time, grinning, on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. He was completely ignorant of double bookkeeping, unsecured loans from banker friends, using political influence to insure failed crops. And as Eston put it, if as a Virginian he involved himself like a fool, he suffered himself to be sold out like a gentleman. And to combat it, he frantically tried to save at least a part of his dream: the mansion and the university. Thomas had appealed like a beggar to the Virginia legislature for permission to auction off his lands in a lottery to pay his creditors, carefully, humbly enumerating his lifetime of service to the nation. He indulged in a terrifying tantrum when he learned that his old friend General Lafayette had been given more than a hundred thousand dollars in gifts and bonuses from a grateful United States for service rendered during the Revolution on his visit here. And yet my Thomas, the creator, the inventor of the Revolution, stood there with holes in his boots. Even the lottery was a failure. Nobody bought shares.”
I was shocked.
“Don’t mention the lottery to your father. He thinks it has saved his house and that he’s dying solvent.”
“What does Thomas Mann say to all this?”
“Martha Jefferson’s husband still refuses to step his foot over the threshold of this mansion, Harriet. He, more than anyone, has changed since you left.”
“But you haven’t, Mother.”
My mother looked up, surprised, as devoid of personal vanity as ever.
“Haven’t I?”
“As a little girl I remember you just as you are today, Maman; it’s incredible how little you’ve changed. Time doesn’t seem to touch you.”
“Sorrow does, though.”
“How can you be sorry? You’ll soon be free.”
“I’ll never be free.”
“Surely he’ll free you with his last breath,” I said, unable to keep the crying out of my voice.
My mother said nothing. Her straight, slim back was turned away from me as she fumbled with her ring of keys and finally found the one to the larder. She pushed the door shut and locked it.
“No.”
“Then run,” I cried. “Leave with me before it’s too late.”
“Oh, Harriet, I’m too old to start running.”
“Don’t be silly, Maman. Freedom is not running—it’s existing for the first time!”
I turned then, hearing someone approaching, and saw Burwell hurrying down the passageway that connected the kitchens to the main house. By now every slave at Monticello would know that Harriet Hemings had returned home.
“Quick, go down to Grandma Elizabeth’s cabin until I signal that the coast is clear,” he admonished.
To my surprise, Burwell was adamant. If I was to stay at Monticello, I would have to hide like the fugitive slave I was. I was truly back in the United States. And so I found myself in my grandmother’s abandoned cabin, which served as a depot for my mother’s furniture, peeping out of the boarded-up window at the moon-drenched Mulberry Row. But even distance and darkness could not disguise my brothers Eston and Madison as they hurried toward the cabin. Then I couldn’t see them anymore because of the tears in my eyes.
Before I could even turn up the lamp, I was swept into a wild, brotherly embrace. Eston had grown at least three inches. He was the exact height of his father, whom he resembled like a twin. His blue eyes danced in the lamplight, which threw reflections onto his mane of red-gold curls. He smelt of clean sweat, topsoil, and wood chips, and his hard, lean body cleaved to mine as if it had just been rescued from some terrible, accidental danger. Scampering around him, barking like a puppy, was Madison, still gray-eyed and sandy-haired, waving and flailing his arms like a choir conductor. Our shadows threw themselves on the walls, packing cases, and the low ceiling in a macabre dance as we twirled around in a triple embrace, laughing and crying. I had so much to tell them that when I had finished it was dawn.
“So that’s what it’s like to be free,” said Eston.
“Now, what’s it like to be white,” said Madison.
“Aw, Madison, let up! You’re always running off at the mouth! Harriet’s not passing, not tonight.”
“Same problems, Madison. Same sun. Same moon. Same rain. Same sky,” I answered. “Same—”
“Shit,” said Eston. “If there’s no difference, Sister, why bother?”
“I never said there wasn’t a difference. The biggest difference is not being white, but the white world, as I’ve explained to you. What do we know about anything, buried here with slavery in this tomb? We’re ruled, owned, sold by people who can barely read and write. Monticello is a speck of dirt on this planet, an insignificant, provincial backwater. There’s a … a whole world out there. And there’s a whole movement—call it antislavery, call it abolition —to free all slaves in this hemisphere. This is what our southern masters hide from us … and there’s a whole continent that exists which is ours—Africa. I can even draw you a picture of it.”
“Exists in what sense, Sister, except as an invention of white folks, a bottomless lake for thieves and abductors?”
“That won’t always be so, Eston. When I left home, I believed slavery was meant to last forever. Now I know that was a lie. The slave trade is abolished. Next, slavery will be. The world is moving faster that you can imagine. American slavery is doomed in the modern world with its phenomenal new inventions, new processes and the new mode of living created by these wonders. It’s a matter of time, but I truly believe we—you, me, Jeff, Ellen, Cornelia—will live to see it.”
“Whites and blacks as equals?”
“Whites and blacks free from backbreaking labor. I’ve brought you every abolitionist tract I could get my hands on. The writings of Wilberforce and Clarkson and dozens of others. Give them to anyone who can read.”
“But you haven’t told us what it’s like to be white.”
“For God’s sake, Madison, I’ve told you. There’s no difference between white folks and us. Except … perhaps the point of view.”
Eston laughed, but I was serious.
“I know there’s no difference between white folks and black folks; look at our family. No, what I want to know is what it’s like to be white—that has nothing to do with differences,” he said.
I stared at Eston. I knew what he meant, but I didn’t know how to answer him. White people were still white people. He wanted to know if white people had the same contempt for us from behind our backs that they had in front of our faces.
“We think of white people as human beings, as we all are, but they think of us as somehow different … humanly different from them. If we pass someone who is suffering, or worse off than ourselves, or in jail, we say to ourselves, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ White people,” I said slowly, wanting to make myself understood, “say, ‘There, but for the grace of God, never go I—because I’m white.’ They truly believe there is a superior race and an inferior race. And even the poorest, meanest, most ignorant white man considers himself blessed because he belongs to the superior race. Because we are there on the bottom to prove his superiority. What white people see when they look at you is not visible. What they do see when they do look at you is what they have invested you with—you know, sin, death, and hell. What most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. They think that being black is a fate worse than death.”
“And, Lord, ain’t it true,” Madison laughed.
“Yes. They would rather be dead than be considered like us—not human.”
“But they’re the ones that invented that lie!”
“They believe the lie they invented.”
“Like you, Sister?” asked Madison.
“Yes. I believe the lie I’ve invented.”
“Because you’re in love with one of them,” said Eston.
“No regrets, Harriet?” said Madison, always the agitator.
“Plenty of remorse, Madison. I want to take Maman away from here, with or without papers,” I said.
“She’ll never go. And we won’t go without her.”
“Surely we’ll all be freed in Papa’s will? He promised,” added Eston.
“He’s got to free Maman, too,” I answered.
“I have to see it to believe it, Harriet,” said Madison.
“We’ll know soon enough. But you stay out of the Randolphs’ way—stay in Richmond.”
“Remember you still ain’t got no papers, Harriet.” It was Madison speaking.
I pulled out my passport, signed by the President of the United States.
“I’ve got this, Madison. Signed by John Quincy Adams.”
Madison took the folded letter as if it were made of gold.
“It says that I am an American, a citizen of the United States, and that as such I am protected by my government, which demands my safe passage … even in Richmond, Virginia.”
“Your safe passage,” murmured Eston. “That’s really something …”
“Safe passage demanded or not, Cornelia’ll have your precious President’s passport, if you don’t get off Monticello—”
“Will you shut up, Madison? We have no right to tell Harriet what she should or shouldn’t do!”
“And why not? We’re her brothers!”
“Because,” said Eston slowly, gazing wistfully at the passport, “we’ve been living up our father’s rump for too long, that’s why,” he growled. “Harriet is free, white, and over twenty-one. This passport says so. She can do what the hell she pleases. She’s one of President Adams’s favored citizens.”
“Tell me, Harriet, what do white people talk about amongst themselves?”
“Us,” I said without smiling.