Free The President's Daughter by Barbara Chase-Riboud

unexpected prize, the widow Dolly Todd, whom he had captured from the attentions of Aaron Burr and who, as Dolly Madison, would have a resplendent career as First Lady. Next to Dolly stood George Wythe and his mulatto son, Michael Brown.
    I winked at my black equivalent, Martin, one in the net of blood ties that
    wove itself in and across and around the two parts of the circle, binding one half to the other in arabesques as twisted and complicated as the hanging strands of silver on the tree.
    Then I, the indomitable and imperturbable Petit, joined the circle, unwittingly attaching the white half of the circle around the Christmas tree to the black half. It was at that moment that Thomas Jefferson offered James Hemings the manumission James had extracted in writing from him in Paris.
    Watching those faces at that moment, I finally understood those convoluted family ties so completely that I could calmly sit there facing a weeping fugitive named Harriet Hemings II, who was not even an idea that Christmas Day, and contemplate offering her my name and my fortune. I felt suddenly as if I were perched backwards on a galloping horse going backwards, far back. The anger at what I was doing drifted away into vague anxiety. I faced the splendid girl with eyes of bottle glass.
    I could not interrupt her solitude; I seemed to have lived this before: It was in this damned lilac phaeton again after all these years.
    The passports with the king’s signature had been delivered. Thomas Jefferson, his two daughters, and his two servants were going home.
I had packed up this phaeton myself for the trip back to Virginia. It had stood in solitary splendor in the bustling courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeac while I tried to cope with eighty-two crates of Jefferson’s baggage and a slave boy’s grief. I shrugged as I had that day, dreading the next image, which I knew would be of James Hemings in his shirtsleeves. He had been busily supervising the closing of the wine crates, making sure that no bottles found their way out of the crates and into the workmen’s smocks. There were dark sweat spots on his back and under his arms. His hair was plastered to his forehead as he struggled with the crates and trunks piling up in the courtyard. We were not the only ones in a paroxysm of flight. The fall of the Bastille had been the signal for the first great exodus of aristocrats toward England, Belgium, and America. And James and Sally Hemings, now pregnant, were returning with their master to Virginia and slavery.
    I wonder if I was right to have blurted out so much of the past and private life of Thomas Jefferson to his Daughter on that long trip to Philadelphia. A lot of what I said must have shocked or hurt her, yet I forged ahead, determined to justify my role in her parents’ secret life. All through it she remained silent, determined, unfathomable.
    I rambled on and on, and despair in the guise of Harriet continued to sit facing me, dressed in a yellow plaid redingote surrounded by green velvet, the basket with her ironic black-and-white spotted Dalmatian puppy at her feet. She reminded me so much of my beloved James. There was the samedefiance, the same vulnerability, the same prodigious courage in the face of annihilation. Yes.
Annihilation
is a good word. A better one I can’t find.
    Had I simply assumed that, being an ex-slave, she had more resilience than a white girl of the same age? Did I think Harriet was stronger or wiser being black? Did her one-eighth of Negro blood count for everything and her seven-eighths of white blood count for nothing? Could blackness be that potent, or had the President simply made it all up in that letter to Mr. Gray?
    I the undersigned, Hugues Petit, my real name, alias Adrian Petit, my “historical” name of Reims, age fifty-eight, caterer and ex-majordomo of His Excellency, President Thomas Jefferson in Paris, France, ex-overseer of his plantation Monticello from 1794 to 1796,