grandmother, and a quadroon for a mother, which makes you, Harriet, an octoroon. In this way he willed you white with a mathematical equation.â
I bowed my head, imagining the sonorous, high-pitched voice of my father searching for a way out of three generations of miscegenation. Meanwhile, we passed the Mason-Dixon line. I could not even be angry with him. I felt only a profound and enduring sense of solitude.
4
Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak and that it is doing Godâs service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambition, avarice, love, resentment, etc. possess so much metaphysical subtility, and so much overpowering eloquence, that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.
Thomas Jefferson
It was incredible that the dusty, dilapidated God walked around his desk to shake hands with me, Adrian Petit, his ex-valet, the morning I was to escort Harriet Hemings from Monticello. His pale eyes, tinged with melancholy and aquamarine, had swept across the top of my head with the same expression they had held for the past eighty years: autocratic and desperately willed serenity.
âA final service to an old friendâ was all the curt invitation had said, the invitation that had resulted in my taking a public coach all the way from Philadelphia to Virginia and my now being seated opposite Harriet in this carriage. And even that invitation had been stated in terms that suggested that the writerâs requests had of late been more than often refused.
And it was true that the man who had stood before me earlier this day was a man no longer either sartorially or politically in fashion. He was tall, almost six feet three, and his lined handsome face was still lightly freckled, and his mouth was stern, a narrow ridge between the deep, vertical valleys of his cheeks. His eyes were his finest feature. They were an astoundingly glacialshade of blue, hooded and surrounded by a map of fine lines. They were fascinating eyes, full of assured and irreproachable intelligence, which looked down upon one and indeed the world itself from the Olympian heights of good birth, good breeding, and power.
My former master had been dressed in thin, soft leather shoes with pointed toes, and heels which ascended in a peak behind. He wore very short quarters and red worsted stockings and a black-and-white-checked frock coat with oversized, comic buttons of hand-carved horn. Under this was a blue waistcoat of stiff, thick, coarse material, badly manufactured from the wool of his own merino lambs and surely slave woven, and corduroy small clothes.
However, my French sensibilities were most offended by his shirt, which was made of homespun flannel and incongruously bound with red velvet. Moreover, nothing fitted. The long bony figure with the broad shoulders of a true Virginian spilled out of every item of clothing as if he were nineteen and still growing. His navy blue silhouette danced like a hinged skeleton, seemingly taking up all the space in the room as he shuffled around the cluttered writing table. I then noticed that his legs were terribly swollen and his right hand, which he absently massaged with his left, was atrophied. He held it cradled against his chest.
I had the impression I faced an absolute reliquary of pain. Not only were the twice-broken wrist throbbing and the water-logged limbs aching, but the cloud of one of my ex-employerâs famous migraines flickered in his eyes.
The reason for the Presidentâs migraine and the reason I, Adrian Petit, had been called there, I decided, were the same. Startled, I had seen them lurking just outside the room, standing side by side: the Mother and, a full head taller than the Mother, the Daughter, a female version of the Father. She had his nose, lips, and eyes, and that same trick of his frown, his high, wide forehead and milk-white freckled
I bowed my head, imagining the sonorous, high-pitched voice of my father searching for a way out of three generations of miscegenation. Meanwhile, we passed the Mason-Dixon line. I could not even be angry with him. I felt only a profound and enduring sense of solitude.
4
Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak and that it is doing Godâs service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambition, avarice, love, resentment, etc. possess so much metaphysical subtility, and so much overpowering eloquence, that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.
Thomas Jefferson
It was incredible that the dusty, dilapidated God walked around his desk to shake hands with me, Adrian Petit, his ex-valet, the morning I was to escort Harriet Hemings from Monticello. His pale eyes, tinged with melancholy and aquamarine, had swept across the top of my head with the same expression they had held for the past eighty years: autocratic and desperately willed serenity.
âA final service to an old friendâ was all the curt invitation had said, the invitation that had resulted in my taking a public coach all the way from Philadelphia to Virginia and my now being seated opposite Harriet in this carriage. And even that invitation had been stated in terms that suggested that the writerâs requests had of late been more than often refused.
And it was true that the man who had stood before me earlier this day was a man no longer either sartorially or politically in fashion. He was tall, almost six feet three, and his lined handsome face was still lightly freckled, and his mouth was stern, a narrow ridge between the deep, vertical valleys of his cheeks. His eyes were his finest feature. They were an astoundingly glacialshade of blue, hooded and surrounded by a map of fine lines. They were fascinating eyes, full of assured and irreproachable intelligence, which looked down upon one and indeed the world itself from the Olympian heights of good birth, good breeding, and power.
My former master had been dressed in thin, soft leather shoes with pointed toes, and heels which ascended in a peak behind. He wore very short quarters and red worsted stockings and a black-and-white-checked frock coat with oversized, comic buttons of hand-carved horn. Under this was a blue waistcoat of stiff, thick, coarse material, badly manufactured from the wool of his own merino lambs and surely slave woven, and corduroy small clothes.
However, my French sensibilities were most offended by his shirt, which was made of homespun flannel and incongruously bound with red velvet. Moreover, nothing fitted. The long bony figure with the broad shoulders of a true Virginian spilled out of every item of clothing as if he were nineteen and still growing. His navy blue silhouette danced like a hinged skeleton, seemingly taking up all the space in the room as he shuffled around the cluttered writing table. I then noticed that his legs were terribly swollen and his right hand, which he absently massaged with his left, was atrophied. He held it cradled against his chest.
I had the impression I faced an absolute reliquary of pain. Not only were the twice-broken wrist throbbing and the water-logged limbs aching, but the cloud of one of my ex-employerâs famous migraines flickered in his eyes.
The reason for the Presidentâs migraine and the reason I, Adrian Petit, had been called there, I decided, were the same. Startled, I had seen them lurking just outside the room, standing side by side: the Mother and, a full head taller than the Mother, the Daughter, a female version of the Father. She had his nose, lips, and eyes, and that same trick of his frown, his high, wide forehead and milk-white freckled
Similar Books
