I set out on this ground which I suppose to he self-evident that the earth belongs to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.
Thomas Jefferson
Watching the battle of Gettysburg from the relative quiet of an anonymous pauper’s grave outside Philadelphia, I felt more like God than James Hemings of Monticello. I was pulled back almost a full century to the hour of my birth. A hundred-year-old man is history, and perhaps the instinctual knowledge of the Last Judgment is universal, because a life that leads to death is a perfect emblem for a history that has led to this sprawling, spanking-new killing field being consecrated as a national metaphor to insanity. Yes, this is James Hemings you’re listening to. I’m contemplating my niece Harriet, who has lived her double—nay, triple—life so that she can stand there with her fake identity, sobbing for the fake sacrifice of this fake moment of (I admit) indisputable greatness of this fake nation. But why must these moments always occur on battlefields, in cathedrals, or in graveyards, and in this case, a battlefield and a graveyard? Because history favors the mass effect: plenty of action and a cast of thousands, bit players that enter and exit by the millions, the dead filling in the background so that there in the sky, the phosphorescent chariots of the great, surrounded by clouds, thunder, and lightning, can appear as drums rumble and clarinets spike. Just like now. The mist rises, the sky smells of heat and rain, the clouds part, and there it is: the terrible armada, the great surge of the mob across the moat of the Bastille, the grand Army of the Potomac. I guess historical illumination is always like that, spotlighted from the left, with lots of chiaroscuro.
My white namesake, James, has died on Seminary Ridge to free the mother he didn’t even know was a slave and black. Like most white people, he didn’t know the words of the song he had been dancing to, and I don’t really have an opinion about that except that she’s just like the mother she never wanted to be. I’ve followed my niece’s adventures for fifty years, hopping, skipping, jumping the color line, mistrusting her father, despising her mother, lovingly deceiving her husbands; not adultery or even incest, but—woe is me—a question of color. A question which supremely irritates all black men, dead or alive.
I still have my red, white, and blue cockade from Bastille Day, Paris, 1789. Did you know that? I’ve just stuck my hand in my pocket and found it. I wonder, did they bury it with me (a gunnysack, some lime, and a hole in the ground) in not, I insist, a common grave? Never let it be said that I racially integrated a mass burial pit. No, the white poor and the black poor are duly separated in Philadelphia.
And you’re thinking, Well, really, what really happened to him? Are we ever going to find out? I mean, was he murdered or did he commit suicide that day Thomas Mann Randolph found him, or claims to have done so? Do you really think everything should be historically redeemed from oblivion, reader? I mean, couldn’t my fate just stay in the somnolent shadows? As those boys over there know, dead is dead.
Why am I carrying on this conversation, appearing on the scene, interrupting the narrative? Rage, I guess. At my own dry bones, my wormy eyes, my faded cockade, when all I wanted to be in life was one of Abraham Lincoln’s three hundred thousand. One thing about being dead, you don’t get any older. And at thirty-seven, I am a fine fighting man, and if they didn’t let me fight as a black, well, I would have done what Harriet, Eston, and Beverly did. Pass for white, since white people don’t even know what white is except it is not Negro and they are fighting for the right to be called non-Negro. I’m simply lying here itching for a gun. I’ve long ago forgiven my murderer. And Callender as well. Forgiven my father. Forgiven my brother-in-law. Forgiven the world. It was only politics as usual. How can I speak of assassination with fifty-nine thousand assassinated boys staring up at me. Forget it. Forget me. I feel a great tenderness for my grandnephew James down there. And I know, like all the dead, that it’s not over. Only half the price is paid as of now. Only half the grief. Only half the pain. Only half the shame. Harriet’s going to lose another son. The South is going to fight to the last. And the North is going to blunder on and finally grind them into the earth because America is indivisible. Forgiveness? I don’t think Harriet is ever going to find it. I don’t know if she wants to anymore. She has all these other problems—being emancipated by her own white sons and all—and their being in the dark about it. But most of all, the great American nightmare of waking up one morning with a drop of black blood in their veins hangs over them.
Blood. Harriet waded in it right here without ever taking into account that her whole life has revolved around a single black drop of it for fifty years, just as mine revolved around a single drop of white sperm for one hundred. And a hundred years from now it will still matter. It makes even me, a man who is supposed to be at rest, angry every time I think that a woman would rather be a slave than miss out on almighty love.
I, James Wayles Hemings, a suicide, second son of John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings and brother to Sally Hemings, brother-in-law and manumitted slave of Thomas Jefferson, do hereby swear that I was at Gettysburg when its ground was consecrated by my namesake James Wellington, dead for the Union without ever knowing he was black, without ever knowing he was emancipating his own mother, this day God made, the Fourth of July, in the year A.D. 1863.
Why are colored people’s triumphs always in graves?
JAMES WAYLES HEMINGS