Arc d'X

10

“GREAT MAN’S WHORE,” James said to her when they were alone. Her eyes filled with tears but he wasn’t moved. “Just don’t think,” he went on, “just don’t think for a second you’re not as black as black.”

“I don’t think that,” she insisted, “I’ve never thought it. I would be even blacker, if I could.”

“Liar!” James said. They were upstairs standing in the hall of the hotel. Patsy had gone out and Thomas, who was now American ambassador, was at Versailles. Polly was in another part of the hotel with the concierge. “You’re a liar or a fool,” James said, “to wish to be even blacker in this world.” He leaned in so close it frightened her. “Remember this, little sister. He’s not your father or your husband, and never will be. So don’t get into your head any such foolishness. No silly-young-girl ideas. He’s your master, and all his white jism will not make you white enough to be the wife or daughter of a great man.”

Sally turned and ran, crying. She hurried to her own room but, looking at her bed, she could barely stand to be there. So then she ran to James’ room. When he came into the doorway she searched for anything she could throw at him; grabbing his chamber pot, she hurled it. The morning’s piss slopped all over James and the door. “Damn!” James cried, and lunged at her. He flailed at her as she covered her face with her hands. He would have kept flailing but stopped when he realized he’d have to account for the marks on her beautiful face. “Christ, I can’t even hit you,” he said disgustedly, “it would only bruise his property.”

She sat on the edge of his bed glaring up at him. “Oh, don’t let that stop you, James,” she said, “don’t you worry about that. He can’t tell anyway. He comes to me at night and I’m still black enough he can’t see me. So you just go ahead and beat me, because I’m still black enough that he’ll never know.”

In the middle of his room, looking at his sister, James put his face in his hands and let loose a convulsive sob. After a moment she got up from the bed and put her hand on his hair. He pulled her to him and they stood together, the reek of urine rising around them. They spent the afternoon washing down his room and their clothes; they didn’t talk anymore except at one point when James, on his knees scrubbing the floor, suddenly said, “We’re not slaves here.” He said it to the floor that he was scrubbing. She had wet clothes in her arms. When he looked up at her from the floor, she rushed with the clothes down the hallway.

Thomas returned from Versailles the following day. He called Sally and James into his chamber, which was still dark from the. period of his headaches; he was sitting not in his reclining chair but in an upright one, behind a desk. His hands were on his head, and all Sally could see of him was the same red-gold hair she’d clutched so fervently in the night. Thomas told Sally and James he had decided to pay each of them thirty-six francs a month in wages. He said he regretted not being able to pay them more, his debts being what they were. He rose from the desk and walked around the room, his head barely missing the low ceiling; he went on to explain that he’d arranged a tutor for Sally, who would learn French, and for one of the city’s finest chefs to teach James how to cook, so that on returning to America they wouldn’t have to leave behind them the pleasures of Parisian cuisine. Sally could see how her brother wanted to leap over the desk and kill Thomas. She saw it on James’ lips: we’re not slaves here. I could kill you, she knew he was thinking, and in Paris it wouldn’t be a slave killing his master. They might hang me for it, but in Paris it would be hanging one free black man for killing one free white one.

That afternoon Thomas and Sally rode through the city in his carriage, from one clothes shop to the next. Never concerned about his own attire, always wearing old pants and threadbare shirts and coats, Thomas was particular about choosing for Sally dresses that were elegant and simple. He bought shoes for her and an expensive pair of wine-red gloves. Sally wore the gloves in the coach on the way back to the Hotel Langeac. “Do you like them?” he said, the first words that had been spoken intimately between them, and she answered, “Yes, I like them,” and she was astounded at how his face lit up. “They’re beautiful on you,” he blurted, “all of these clothes are lovely on you,” and then, embarrassed by himself, he withdrew into silence.

She didn’t thank him for them. In the time she’d been in Paris she had come to construct the first foundation of who she was. Used as she was by him and abandoned as she was by the rest of them, the only one she could turn to was herself, and when she’d first turned there and found no one, she had no choice but to make a person where nothing but beauty had been. The person she’d made wasn’t going to thank him for a pair of gloves and a couple of dresses. They weren’t compensation for anything; they were the gestures of a man taking care of his possession. That night she wore only the wine-red gloves as she lay naked on her bed. She believed that when he came to her, when he took her wrists to bind them with the blue ribbon that hung on the bed post, the generosity of his having given her the gloves would be desecrated by their sex. Lying for hours on the bed she began to touch herself. It was in the early morning that her door opened. “Sally,” he said to her in the doorway. He’d never spoken on these occasions.

“Yes, Thomas,” she answered. The familiarity of his name shocked both of them.

“I want you to come with me,” he said, and she raised her hand to him from the bed. He took it, and as he pulled her from the bed he could feel the wetness of the glove’s fingertips. She brushed up against him as she stood and looked into his eyes to taunt him.

“Are we going somewhere?” she said.

“Get dressed,” he answered in the dark. Twenty minutes later they were in his carriage again, riding through the city with dawn still an hour away. When Sally shivered in the cold Thomas moved from the opposite seat to sit beside her, a thick blanket pulled up around them. They rode in silence beyond the city walls and then on the road east out of Paris, passing along the way the farms and villages that lay beneath the winter snow. Finally the sun came up over the trees. Sally could see an abbey on the other side of the valley. Sometimes, when she arranged the blanket around her, Thomas looked at the gloves on her hands. As they approached the abbey he broke the silence. “I received word last night,” he said, “that Patsy has requested to join the convent.” He added, “She’s angry with me.” The carriage stopped at the abbey gate. An old stooped abbess trudged wrathfully out into the snow to meet them.

“I’m Patsy’s father,” Thomas said to her in French, stepping from the carriage.

The abbess regarded him coolly. She peered at Sally over Thomas’ shoulder. “Christendom knows you too well, monsieur,” she said. “Your visit is irregular. The girls are already underway with their chores and duties.”

“I’d like to speak to my daughter, please,” Thomas said.

“For a moment,” the abbess answered. She led Thomas and Sally into the church. Sally continued to shiver in the cold. The church was also very cold, its stained windows gray on one side and colors squinting through the ice on the other side where the sun was rising. The abbess and Thomas did not speak. The abbess vanished and Sally sat in one of the pews as Thomas paced up and down the church aisle. When the abbess finally reappeared in one of the doorways, Patsy was with her. Near the altar the abbess hung back, watching. Patsy began to cry when Thomas took her in his arms. He gave her a handkerchief and, after she’d wiped her eyes, she looked at Sally. “You bought her some clothes,” she said in a small voice.

“Yes,” Thomas answered.

“Why did you bring her here?” Patsy’s face was still buried in his handkerchief.

Thomas gestured to Sally and said gently to his daughter, “This isn’t her fault. She doesn’t deserve your fury, your fury’s with me.” He took Patsy by the arm and they began to walk around the border of the church. In her pew Sally watched them circle in silence. For a long time they just walked, not talking at all, as though in the early-morning carriage ride from Paris Thomas had no luck trying to figure out what he would say at this moment. In the empty resonance of the church the buzz of their voices finally reached Sally, but it wasn’t until their third time around she made out the words. “Do you know,” she heard Patsy plead, “the way they say your name here? In the street the common people say it when they need to fill their hearts with hope. I never believed,” she said bitterly, “that my father was just another fine Virginia aristocrat, having relations with his slavewomen.”

Thomas led Patsy to a pew, where they sat down. He continued to hold her hand. “There are things,” he said, “a man can explain least of all to those whom he most owes explanations. Something happened to me after your mother died. Something happened to me after Maria left.” The abbess watched intently from the altar. “I’m not here to make you promises,” Thomas said to Patsy. “I’m here to try and dissuade you from a decision I believe you’re making not because it’s what you want but because you’re angry with me. I want to dissuade you from this decision because it will hurt you more than me, because you’re only using your own life to reproach me.”

“I’ve heard that Grandfather Wayles had many slavewomen,” Patsy said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard—” She looked at Sally.

“I believe,” Thomas said, “that Sally is Grandfather Wayles’ daughter.”

“Then she and Mother were sisters?” Patsy said angrily. “Then she’s my aunt?” Patsy asked in disbelief, pointing at Sally. “Will she next be my mother?”

The abbess hurried over from the altar now. “It’s most irregular, monsieur,” she announced in French, hovering at their side. “It’s time for the girl to return to her chores and duties.”

Thomas stood up from the pew. He looked down at Patsy and sighed. “I’m taking you home. You’re still of an age that I can make these decisions for you.”

“You should think of the child,” the abbess protested.

“Of course.”

“It’s unfortunate,” said the abbess, “that your own hatred of God blinds you to—”

“I can appreciate that she’s politically valuable to you,” Thomas said to the abbess in English. “She is after all the daughter of someone your church fears and despises. But I’m taking her back, for as long as I have something to say about it, as her father. Later Patsy may decide for herself.”

“For your daughter’s sake, let’s pray she never comes to share your contempt for God and his works.”

“I have nothing but reverence for God and his works,” Thomas answered. He was already walking toward the door with Patsy under his arm and Sally behind them. “It’s the base machinations of power conducted in the name of God for which I have contempt.” Outside, the carriage was waiting where Thomas and Sally had left it. With his daughter and lover, Thomas stepped into the carriage while the abbess seethed in the doorway. “I’ll send someone in a few days for her things,” he said.

Outside Paris they stopped at an inn to have breakfast. While Thomas and Patsy ate in the guest room by the fire, Sally sat in the servants’ quarters in back. Through the window of the kitchen she could see the snow of the winter and through the door of the kitchen she could hear Thomas’ and Patsy’s laughter. In her fine Parisian dress she quietly picked at her meal while the other servants watched; the wine-red gloves lay on the bench beside her. The servants offered cheese and bread with jam. After a while they turned their attention from Sally to discuss kings and republicans.

By the time Thomas and Patsy and Sally returned to Paris it was a gray wintry noon. Bedlam rose from the city like a swarm. The boulevard St-Germain was raucous, enraged people stopping coaches in the streets and rocking them back and forth to overturn them while the passengers frantically hurled money out the windows. Throngs made the bridges impassable. From her window Sally could see approaching on the horizon of the Seine an angry black-and-red current. The revolution was trickling in by river, a rebel navy of flaming boats advancing to seize the docks and block the king’s commerce; one by one the boats beached on the quays. Sailors stormed ashore with torches burning beneath the black winter sky.

People were reaching inside Thomas’ carriage. They grabbed at Thomas and Patsy and at Sally in her fine Parisian clothes. Someone yanked one of the gloves off her hand and, when she reached to seize it back, she was almost pulled from the coach. The turmoil became uncontrollable. The carriage was about to be pitched over the side of the bridge into the river when someone shouted, “Mais c’est Jefferson!” and then there was a hush, and the recurring murmur, “Jefferson,” over and over. A roar rose from one end of the mob to the other. “Jefferson,” men and women cried, “the people’s champion!”

The crowd grew larger, cheering his name, people dashing from shops and looking from windows. Those around the carriage now reached in not to grab Thomas but simply to touch him; soon it became clear he would have to say something to them before they’d stop. He opened the carriage door and stood on the step of the coach and the crowd shouted at the sight of him, the giant with his hair of light and his old worn disheveled clothes. For a long time this wild demonstration continued. He kept trying to talk but no one could hear him amid the furor. “My dear friends,” he said in his halting French, once the mob finally became quiet; his voice was so soft that inside the coach Sally could barely make it out. No one in the rapt crowd was so rude as to call for him to speak up. “My dear friends,” he started once more, fumbling his hands, “please forgive the poor French of an American savage,” and people laughed and the cheering began all over again.

When it faded, he went on. “My friends in this country,” he said, still stumbling and nearly inaudible, “which I’ve come to love as though it were my own … what can I say to you that wouldn’t be presumptuous? What can I say that won’t be a … small whisper against the bold shout of your streets. The witness I bear here humbles me, and I’m not worthy of it—” and someone in the crowd began to protest but Thomas continued, “—I’m not worthy of it, but I’m grateful to see it.”

He stopped. Behind him the revolution continued upriver. In the cold of the winter his words left tiny clouds before his face. “I’m a poor champion,” he finally said after a moment. No one spoke. “I’m only as bright as the whitest light in any man can be, tempered as it is in every man by whatever black impulse he can’t ignore. At my best I have only been the slave of a great idea. It’s an idea which no man holds but which rather holds him. It’s to no man’s credit that he has such an idea, it’s merely his good fortune that such an idea possesses him with such force and clarity that he can’t help but serve it. What you do here stirs the slaves of the world to life. What you do here leaves the world’s sleeping tyrants with no dreams but the endless counting of the few remaining days left to them. You should remember,” and now Sally almost thought she could hear his voice break, “that whenever a poor champion fails a great idea, it’s not the failure of the idea itself. The idea is as great as it ever was. It survives its poor champion and goes on and on. You should remember that when the final reckoning comes with God in his heaven, when the final battle of old prophecies is fought here on this sphere, it will be between those noble enough to have been slaves, and those arrogant enough to presume themselves masters. Let no one doubt on whose side God will be.”

It seemed to Sally, there in the carriage, like a very long time before the crowd responded. When they did it was with a clamor like she’d never heard before. “Jefferson, Jefferson!” they screamed and, overwhelmed by the violence of the adoration, Thomas swung himself back into the carriage as though to cower from it. He was pale. The crowd escorted the carriage on its passage across the bridge; all the way across the city back to the Hotel Langeac people ran alongside, shouting and announcing to others on every new street that it was Thomas who was in the coach. At one point he summoned just enough nerve to look to the seat across from him where Sally sat, and then he looked away, out the window to the adoring people. When he couldn’t stand to look at them, he stared down at his hands that had held Sally captive in the dark. When he couldn’t stand to look at his hands, he looked somewhere else, until he ran out of places on which he could set his gaze, and closed his eyes.