The President's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

Callender. I resisted all sorts of pressures in order to keep the promise I made to your mother in Paris. I risked . . . everything, for you. Here at Monticello you were safe.”
    â€œBut . . .”
    â€œI’ve done all I can.”
    â€œBut papers are important! Without identity papers as your slave, or recognition as your daughter, I’m twice illegitimate. I’m nobody’s . . .” My complaint had cost me all my strength. I watched helplessly the frown of disapproval on my father’s face. I had learned this silent language fluently. I knew by his look of petulance that I was being told to get on my way, that I had stepped beyond an invisible frontier. He pulled in Old Eagle’s reins,cutting me off, and galloped off in the opposite direction.
    I watched him as he fled, taking the two-foot-high barrier in a savage jump, his whip coming down heavily on Eagle’s flank. He beat his horses cruelly. It was a well-known fact about him. Nobody knew why. In his panic he would have flown, I thought, if he could have, not to answer me. And now I would never have an answer. For the rest of my life. I would live in dread, on guard against a slip, a chance encounter, a keen eye, or a sentimental confession. I was a runaway slave, in danger of recapture and sale, even if I had stolen myself. Madison had been right. It
was
worse than being auctioned on the block. I could meet my kin and would not be allowed to acknowledge them. I would never be able to stand over my father’s grave and weep. I could no more recognize my white family than my black one. This was the price I had to pay for freedom.
    My tears began to fall, as quiet as ashes.
    â€œPapa . . . ,” I whispered into the early-morning mist.
    Suddenly my heart began to behave strangely. It set off like an explosion, like gunpowder, and began to leap around unevenly in my chest. It began to pound in a most alarming way, then stop irresponsibly, hitting some sort of inward nerve, mocking like Madison’s laughter. Then all at once, I couldn’t hear it at all. As if my heart had simply stepped outside my body. And my tears stopped.
    Flight had always been my father’s answer to everything. Maman had told me that. Now I studied her as a breeze ruffled her black skirts. She hadn’t moved. If
flight
was my father’s name,
immobility
was my mother’s. I felt tears of frustration and hopelessness start in my eyes. They were going to leave me all alone in this world, both of them. The blind injustice of it gripped me like a fist.
    â€œOh, God,
Maman, je pars.
I’m leaving. Petit is here with the carriage. Aren’t you . . . even happy for me?” I cried.
    â€œIt’s no victory for me, Harriet, only justice.”
    Oh, Maman, tell me you love me, I begged wordlessly. Tell me he loves me, please. I think I’m dying of not being loved. But to my mother out loud I simply said,
“Adieu, Maman.”
    My father was waiting for me by the time I had walked back from where I had left my mother. I saw him long before he saw me, and so I studied him from afar with all the confused loathing and yearning he had evoked in me that morning. I hated my mother for hiding. She should have come to stand beside him this once in a proper farewell to me. Instead, Petit, my father’s old majordomo, was standing there. The Frenchman with his bald head and extravagant mustache had left Monticello just before my birth, but my mother had nurtured the legend of the indomitable Petit in Paris, Petit in Philadelphia, Petit at Monticello.
    For the first time, I noticed the frailness under the imposing height of my master and the new physical suffering beyond his proud exuberance. My father was old, nearly eighty, and I might never see him again. Now I was standing close, looking up into his eyes. I caught his scent of old wool, lavender, ink, and horseflesh. For a moment he seemed not even to recognize me. Then he swayed