America's First Daughter: A Novel
Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie
Dedication
To friendship and perseverance
Note to the Reader
DURING HIS LIFETIME Thomas Jefferson wrote more than eighteen thousand letters. It is through these that we framed this story, and took almost all of his dialogue. Whenever possible, for Jefferson, his daughter, and other historical figures, we quote directly from letters and other primary sources, all of which reflect the biases, prejudices, and political opinions of the time period. However, because the language of the eighteenth century was so stilted and opaque, we’ve taken the liberty of correcting spelling, grammar, and otherwise editing, abridging, or modernizing the prose in the interest of clarity.
Epigraph
Monticello, 5 April 1823
From Thomas Jefferson to Robert Walsh
The letters of a person, especially of one whose business has been chiefly transacted by letters, form the only full and genuine journal of his life.
July 5, 1826
SONS OF A REVOLUTION FIGHT FOR LIBERTY. They give blood, flesh, limbs, their very lives. But daughters . . . we sacrifice our eternal souls. This I am sure of, as I stand in the quiet emptiness of my father’s private chambers.
I’m here now because my father is dead and buried.
And I’m left to make sense of it all.
My gaze drifts from the alcove bed where Papa drew his last breaths to his private cabinet beyond to the adjustable mahogany drawing desk he brought from Paris so many years before. Light filters down on me from the skylight built into the soaring ceiling and plays off the mirrors to make me feel as an actor upon a stage, playing a secret role.
Even knowing that he’ll never return, I hesitate to settle into the red leather swivel armchair upon which my father struggled to write his letters, fewer and fewer every year. His hands, his eyesight, and his endurance all failed him in the end. But never his intellect; that he had to the last.
From between the pages of a leather-bound book on his revolving book stand, I find a sketch. A drawing of an obelisk monument and tombstone to be inscribed with what he wished to be remembered for—and not a word more.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
I brush my fingertips over the sketch and imagine the coarse granite that will bear these words and stand eternal guardian over Papa’s final resting place. Alas, memories are made of more than inscriptions in stone. They’re made, too, of the words we leave behind. And my father left so many.
Most of his meticulously ordered, copied, and cataloged letters are stored in wooden cabinets here in his chambers. It will take time to go through them all, but time is all I have now. So I start with the earliest letters, warmed to hold the fading pages in my hands, overcome with pride at seeing his confident script soaring so eloquently across the yellowed paper.
A glass-paned door opens behind me from the direction of the greenhouse where my father’s mockingbirds sing, and I swivel in the chair, startled to come face-to-face with my father’s lover. Sally Hemings doesn’t knock, nor does she apologize for the intrusion. She strides into the space as if she belongs here. And she does. For as much as my father cherished the seclusion of this sanctum sanctorum, almost until his last breath, this was her domain.
But now Thomas Jefferson is gone, and Sally and I have come, at last, to the final reckoning between us. We stand, two aging matriarchs amidst his books, scientific instruments, and a black marbled obelisk clock—the one over his bed that counted down the minutes of his glorious life and now counts down the moments until we will follow him.
Sally, who bears a tawny resemblance to my lovely, petite mother, wears a crisp white apron over the gown she sewed from colorful calico. And she surveys the space much as I did moments ago. Silently, I rise to my feet, towering over her in my dark and somber gown, with hair that has gone from red to reddish brown—the image of my father.
In the reflection of the gilt mirror, we are matched reflections of the ghosts in this room. But it’s my father’s presence that we both feel now. I suppose some might say she was his beautiful mulatto slave wife and I the plain white wife of his parlor. We both birthed children for him: hers of his bed and his body; mine as a daughter of his bloodline, for his legacy.
He loved us both.