Free The President's Daughter by Barbara Chase-Riboud Page B

eyes inspecting me from head to toe, first in friendly curiosity and then with frigid horror. I tried to speak but found that as in a dream I could not. I reached out, hoping to touch her, but the world reappeared and the lady sailed by me with no hint of recognition. In confusion I turned toward Petit. He took my arm and led me across the huge mall toward the big green-and-gold letters of a tall, imposing building.
    I gathered my courage and walked the gauntlet straight across the square to Brown’s Hotel, my step elastic, my chin high, a slight smile on my face. Didn’t I look like a young girl just out of school or a convent, hardly rich, but gently reared? Hadn’t the waiter held the door as we entered, just as my knees gave way and Petit squeezed my arm? The image of the colored lady would haunt me for the rest of my life.
    It was at Brown’s Hotel on Market Street Square that I consumed my firstmeal as a free woman. Spring vegetable soup, radishes and butter and fresh sardines, deep-fried hake, lamb chops and new potatoes sautéed in butter, poached eggs in puree of collard greens, shrimps in batter, dried fruit, sugared fruit and pineapple spring strawberries, and champagne Moèt. I memorized the menu like music. The savory words danced to the sound of Petit’s running commentary. Did I know, Petit asked, benign larceny had assured the fate of the humble potato? In order for potatoes to be accepted as a vegetable, King Louis XVI had a potato field planted in the center of Paris, then surrounded it with his republican guards as a ploy to get Parisians to steal them. Or did I realize that pineapples came from Peru? Or how truffle was loved for its taste and its characteristic as an aphrodisiac? What? Didn’t I know Aphrodite was the goddess of love? Or that a meal without cheese was like a beautiful woman missing an eye . . .
    I glanced at my own reflection in the restaurant mirrors. Even sitting I was tall, taller than many men. My bright green eyes and my auburn braid reflected back: I saw a dreamy, remote girl, somewhat countrified against this opulent crowd. Nevertheless, I could hold my own. I tilted my head, turned my gaze on Petit, and laughed at his story.
    During that long carriage ride, he had told me so much about his life in Paris with Mama and Uncle James that I felt I was his confidante.
    My uncle James refused to acknowledge the destiny of concubine for his sister, Sally Hemings. He had decided she was not going to enter that strange circle of complicity between the Wayleses, the Jeffersons, and the Hemingses. But dark forces in the guise of family ties, and crimes, entered and wreaked havoc. From the very morning of his sister’s seduction, in the winter of ‘88, James suffered from nightmares: Bloody sheets like tentacles would reach out to engulf and strangle him. They would bind him and cause him to be thrown bodily into brimstone and fire. That was my uncle’s recurring dream. He was convinced that my mother’s freedom was his own salvation and that without it, he was a doomed man. Day after day, he led her through the intricacies of life in France, in the embassy, in the grand house, in the great city. Around them swirled the rumblings of the French Revolution, and it gave a poignant counterpart to their struggle against Thomas Jefferson’s will.
    When he broke his wrist while riding with Maria Cosway and it began to heal badly, my mother took over the care and bathing of her master’s injured hand, and through these simple ministrations an intimacy grew up—innocent at first, then more complicated and darker, incestuously linking destinies. Martha the jealous daughter and Martha the dead wife, Maria the adored arrival and Maria the absent lover. And my mother herself: half sister and stepdaughter, sister-in-law and slave.
    I could tell Adrian Petit mourned James even now, twenty years after his death. And I suppose that’s why he felt