Considering history as a moral exercise, her lessons would be too infrequent if confined to real life. Of those recorded by historians, few incidents have been attended with such circumstances as to excite in any high degree this sympathetic emotion of virtue. We are therefore framed to be as warmly interested for a fictitious as for a real personage. The spacious field of imagination is thus laid open to our use, and lessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home to the mind, every moral rule of life. …
Thomas Jefferson
I contemplated Roxanne, whose voluptuous, well-made body radiated a kind of pure, untested sensuality of which she seemed unaware, but that would someday be as awesome as my mother’s. Yet unlike Sally Hemings, Roxanne was the freest person I had ever known. She was the modern, the new American woman, ready to take responsibility for her own life, ready to reinvent the past. I released my granddaughter’s hand while the silent appraisal I had just made of her hovered in the air between us.
The years of my life seemed to flutter away like the lace panels that stirred at the tall windows of my bedroom. Roxanne. It hadn’t been blackmail. There would never be another anonymous letter. Only Sarah knew. Why, then, did I have to tell Roxanne? I had never told anyone I loved who I was. All of them would be downstairs in a little while. My public. WHITE PEOPLE.
I put all hope in Roxanne, with all the desperate, sheltering love of a fading, dying woman. In the next word from me, she would encompass all the incomprehension, contradiction, and pain of the great American taboo: tainted, impure blood. That one drop of blackness which evoked the disdain, contempt, and ambivalence of a whole country. Her own.
“Grandma?” It was Roxanne’s voice, tremulous and expectant.
I began with no preamble, and my story unraveled like silk cords, chapter by chapter, love by love, terror by terror, deception by deception. “Deceptions intended solely for others gradually grew into self-deception as well; the counterfeit rift between imitation slave and imitation master widened and widened and became an abyss,” I ended. I implored her to transmit this knowledge only to her own grandchildren, those distant twentieth-century descendants who would probably be more bemused than devastated.
“Promise me that if you ever reveal your true identity to your future family, never tell your own children. Choose a female of your second generation, a granddaughter. Grandchildren are easier to talk to than your own children, and any secret is safer with our own sex. “
“Why is that, Maman?”
“Women carry their secrets in their wombs, hidden and nourished by their vital fluids and blood, while men carry their secrets like they carry their genitals, attached by a thin morsel of mortal flesh unable to resist either a caress or a good kick.”
No sound came from the shadowed recess as Roxanne struggled to find a way of addressing a woman she no longer recognized; a creature who did not exist, who was the negation of everything she had been taught to believe. There were no white slaves. There could be no white ex-slaves. There were no women like me who had been sired by a great man who had never freed or recognized her. I couldn’t exist because miscegenation didn’t exist. It was a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment. A crime against America.
It was Roxanne’s country, not I, who insisted that one drop of black blood made one a slave and an alien. And that this was necessary in order to perpetuate the myth of racial purity that was the cornerstone of its identity —that her country was, indeed, a white man’s country.
“You mean you are . . . were . . .” She struggled with the words.
“The President’s daughter.” I bowed my head. I so pitied her. I stared at my fingertips.
But Roxanne’s eyes had widened in astonishment, then narrowed in, of all things, laughter. She didn’t believe a word of what I had just told her. She lifted up her head in a cascade of ladylike giggles that turned raucous, filling every corner of the room. She exhaled.
“Now, Grandma, isn’t this some old slave narrative you’ve heard?”
The one thing my mother hadn’t warned me against was disbelief. My granddaughter thought I was lying, but who in America would lie about being black? Who, having been born with the inestimable advantage of being white, would cast herself in the defamatory hell of being black, here?
Slowly she circled me, stalking me as one would a wild animal.
“Now, Grandma,” she said, her voice caressing me, “you know you’re not colored! You’re not colored, and neither am I. Nobody in this family is colored! I’m white. Let me . . . let me get Grandpa.”
But I held her. “No,” I cried. “I’ve never told him. I’ve never told anyone I loved,” I lied. “I always said to myself that I’d think about it later, when I was calmer, but that day never came. It’s like the secrets that slave women must transmit to their daughters of the next generation so that they will survive. I couldn’t die without someone I loved knowing and remaining on this earth with that knowledge. It wouldn’t be fair to Sally Hemings ... to him ... to them. … Look,” I cried out. “Look at my hands! I have no fingerprints. See? Look!”
“How can you love me,” my granddaughter cried, “and repeat such a lie?”
I started toward her, but Roxanne backed away in fear.
“I’m going to get a doctor,” she whispered.
“But no, darling, really, I don’t need a doctor. I feel fine . . . look!”
I knelt down beside the hearth and stuck my hands into the ashes. They came up black.
“Look, no fingerprints.” I pressed my fingers onto the white marble surface of the mantelpiece. “See?” I started toward her, but she drew her arms around herself for protection from me. Her splendid eyes had become a muddy, confused brown in horror or despair, I couldn’t tell which. I found myself smiling stupidly. The same smile I had had on my face the day my father died. She didn’t believe me. She would never believe me. I had fifty-two diaries, and she still didn’t believe me. Nothing on this entire earth would make her recognize me. She’d rather die. Just like him. I thought I heard Sarah’s laughter, but it was Roxanne’s, and it was plainly, insanely hysterical.
“Is this still some kind of game? Some kind of birthday game?” she said in the voice of a child.
“This—” But before I could answer, Roxanne had fled the room, slamming the door. From behind it I heard her insufferable Philadelphia voice.
“I’m going to get some laudanum.”
Where is your medicine, Father?
Then I began to laugh. She must have heard me behind the door. The joke of my life was on me. I was what people perceived me to be, and there was nothing I could do about it. Who would believe me? Who in the ballroom tonight would believe me? It meant, I thought suddenly, redefining the United States of America. It meant moving the furniture around, opening the doors, looking under the bed; it meant rewriting the law of the land; it meant fighting a war; it meant changing their ways. Who was going to do all that for a mere woman—a Negro one, at that?
I would quit this earth a white woman, whether I wanted to or not. I would die with my skin on. That was my predicament, and this was my punishment: the sentence of oblivion. Roxanne would never tell any of her descendants. I was invisible. Forever.
I lifted my head, accepting heaven’s verdict. However I found myself “reconstructed,” the result was the same. Quite simply, a woman like me couldn’t exist. I was, on all levels, simply unbelievable.
My blackened hands raked the walls and sullied the delicate silk draperies, the pale ethereal canopied bed, the enameled woodwork. I left my mark on everything I could touch.
I had autographed my life by telling my most precious grandchild who I was. I now made upon the walls of my room the fingerprints that hung me, claiming it as my own: claiming the life I had lived within. I rewrote history. Black or white be damned, I was Harriet. Hemings. Wellington. A kind of frenzy of exaltation smote me, and tears of liberation from a woman who never cried flowed down my cheeks. My solitary heart contained all the world’s colors: all. I refused to be “created” black or white. Whatever I was, my life, my freedom, my loves, were downstairs, waiting. My sin of omission no longer burned at the center of confusion and obsession; instead it burned with the steady carbon of humanity that refused to be extinguished, smothered, or asphyxiated: my mother’s, my grandmother’s, the African’s, my grandfather’s, my father’s, my husbands’, my children’s. I was matriarch of a mighty clan, seven times seven; every color, every shade, every nuance, struggling through lives filled with the identical terrors and sublimities of the human condition. I’d be damned, damned, if I would be less.
Hadn’t a famous man once told my father that history was merely fictions of various degrees of plausibility? If I was fiction, I breathed, then this country was fiction. Was I plausible? You tell me.
I stared at the mirror over the mantelpiece, but there was no reflection of anyone in it. I pressed my eyelids red-gold, as if by force of will I could engrave my image on its silvered surface. I opened them again, but there was nobody. Then I called out of my whiteness and the edges of eternal darkness.
When I came to myself, I washed my hands carefully and languidly in the yellow-and-blue basin, turning the water inky. I dried them, and slowly they disappeared into my white lace mittens. The orchestra broke into Richard Wagner’s march. The President’s coach had arrived. I had just enough time to descend the stairway to its music, just as I had planned. Roxanne had failed to lock me in. Her crazy grandmother. I opened the door.