America's First Daughter: A Novel(159)

Yet, we fiddled and danced and laughed because it would have done no good whatsoever to cry.





WHEN EVENING FELL, I followed my father into the house, leaving the young people to their festivities. We stopped together in the empty book room, alone together for the first time in a good while.

“He’s twenty-one,” Papa said. Beverly, he meant. The boy’s birthday had come and gone in the chaos of stabbings and debt. I hadn’t remembered it. My father obviously had. Papa was kind to Sally’s children, but he wasn’t in the habit of showing them fatherly affection. At least not in front of me. So I was surprised to hear him say, “He can read and write and play music. He takes as much joy in science as I do. And if he’s pressed, he knows carpentry, and how to make nails and how to be useful on a farm. Beverly’s grown to be a fine man, hasn’t he?”

“I believe so,” I said, cautiously, wondering if I’d feel the pull of jealousy at my father’s pride in his son. But all I felt was the truth of the sentiment. Beverly was a fine young man. “The overseer complained about him not going to the carpenter’s shop for about a week or so, but I’ve never heard another word spoken against him by anyone.”

My father’s expression betrayed great anxiety. “Beverly knows his freedom has been promised. It’s time, but I worry. . . .”

I refused to let myself calculate Beverly’s monetary worth and the loss it would mean to my father’s estate. “What worries you?”

Papa looked stricken. “I’m worried about the explanations that’ll be demanded of me when I petition the legislature to grant Beverly permission to live and work in the state of Virginia as a free man.”

That’s when his anxiety infected me. Since the last slave revolt years ago, freed Negroes couldn’t live in Virginia without special dispensation. And the moment my father asked for that dispensation, there’d be a thousand questions. Beneath my sheer linen cap, a cold sweat broke across my brow. “You mean to acknowledge him?”

My father’s lips tightened into a grim line. He knew—surely a man of his political genius knew—that to ask for dispensation would be to acknowledge Beverly as his son. And every old story about his Congo harem would be splashed again on the front page of every paper in the country. Had pleas from men like William Short finally reached into my father’s guilty heart and shaken something loose that he would want to admit to his relationship with Sally after all these years?

“Papa, after all the denials . . .” He’d left his friends and family to deny it. I’d have denied it and defended him anyway, but a great many people were likely to feel deceived. They’d never forgive any of us. It’d taint his legacy and our whole family. “You chose to keep this secret long ago.”

He lifted his tired blue eyes to mine. “I also made a promise to Sally.”

Did he think me so heartless that I’d want him to break it? Somewhere inside me was still the naive girl in Paris who so ardently wished for all the poor slaves to go free. But my concern was my father. He’d promised to let Sally’s children go free, but he hadn’t promised to sacrifice himself on the altar of public opinion. If Beverly wanted his freedom, there were other ways to get it. “Can’t you just . . . let him walk off this mountain?”

“I’ve considered that,” Papa said, quietly. “I could call him a runaway and never send anyone looking for him. But then he could never return and this is the only home he’s ever known. Where else could he go and make his way?”

Beverly was a capable young man, I thought. He could make his way anywhere. Washington, maybe. He might enjoy living as a free man in a city that our father brought into being. “The capital isn’t so very far away.”

“Far enough we’ll likely never see him again,” Papa snapped.

Was he angry with me, with Beverly, or himself? Papa had always been possessive; he’d never forgiven Sally’s brothers for insisting upon the formality of their freedom, when he’d allowed them to live as free men in practice. Did he resent Beverly for insisting upon the same?

But when Papa turned his head to hide a sudden welling of tears, I realized it wasn’t resentment of Beverly’s freedom that upset him. It was love. Beverly shared his looks, his temperament, his taste in music, and his interest in science. Beverly was a young man who was always aware—much as I was—that our father had penned the lines that began: All men are created equal.

My father would’ve been a monster not to feel a prick of pride that his son wanted liberty. But the price of that liberty was steep. “Papa, Beverly can live as a freed black man here in Virginia, with your reputation in tatters, or he can forge a new identity as a white man anywhere else. It seems to me that you ought to ask Beverly his preference. It’s his future, after all.”

That had seemingly not occurred to Papa, so I left him pondering, congratulating myself that I’d handled the situation with as much grace as might be expected of me and done right by Beverly besides.

So it was with alarm that I awakened the next morning to find Sally Hemings inside my bedroom, her back stiff against the door, her hands behind her on the handle, as if to steel her nerve, and her eyes filled with fury.

“Mistress Randolph,” she said, instead of Miss Patsy, as was her habit since our childhood. “I realize the sight of me offends you, but I beg you not to take it out on my son.”