I’d never deny my father anything that would add to his happiness. If he wanted a dance, he’d have a dance. So we gathered on the terrace with a mountaintop view of the countryside below so clear that it was as if we could see the whole nation my father helped build. A nation as beautiful, imperfect, and unfinished as every other project my father ever undertook.
And it was there we gathered to listen to Beverly Hemings play his violin. While Beverly worked his bow and filled the air with music, from the corner of my eye, I caught Papa staring at Beverly with fatherly pride. Sally watched with pride, too—and it broke my heart, because the servants didn’t know what was coming.
If Papa was forced to pay even half of the twenty-thousand-dollar debt, slaves would have to be sold. Jeff would have to undertake it on Papa’s behalf; he’d start with the field hands, but what about the families on Mulberry Row? Not the Hemingses, of course. Papa would never agree to sell them if it weren’t by their own choice. But what of those who worked in the textile mills or Papa’s nailery? Those slaves we knew, we saw their faces every day. The idea of selling them was barbarous.
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.