Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

As it happened, her reunion with Maximilien was limited to his image on the edifices and banners and statues of Paris, where he had become deity of the Revolution’s secular religion. Sally and her guards arrived at the Luxembourg Palace just in time to hear the news that, at the moment the assassin’s bullet shattered Jack’s chest, Maximilien had clutched his own heart with a cry and tumbled from his seat at the very summit of the Mountain. Only the rush of several flacks to the podium of the convention hall broke the fall, prolonging life one more day until its final agonizing rupture. In her carriage the soldier who had shot Jack took the news with relative calm. “Robespierre is dead. Citizen Saint-Just is Dictator now,” he announced. “May I drop you elsewhere, madame?” and Sally allowed as how she’d just as soon be taken across the river to the Hotel Langeac. By the time her carriage reached the rue d’X her legend had transformed yet again, from the woman who had declined a queendom of slaves and a place as mistress of the Revolution to become instead a subversive’s whore. Perpetuating this legend was not the folly of her choice but the sanguine conviction of it. In the Hotel Langeac she had a room with a fireplace and a four-poster bed, and a window that pointed the other direction from where Thomas’ balcony had looked the night he watched her run from the hotel for the last time as his slave. At night she could see from her window the streetlights of the boulevards in the distance and the carriages that brought the men to her. They left her gifts, small porcelain figures and little snowstorms imprisoned in crystal balls which adorned the shelf of her room.

During the day she made jewelry, necklaces and earrings, and recalled her greatest creation. I invented a country, she had heard Thomas say, with the arrogance of a man who thinks it’s the business of men to make countries and the business of women to make jewelry. But it had taken her all her life to realize it was she who made the country and that the country had always been hers to make, that it waited for either her yes or no that afternoon in the place de la Bastille so as to be born one thing or the other, as an embryo waits for one chromosome or another to be born man or woman. It had taken all her life to hope that in saying no, thus denying herself the chance ever to see her country again, she had made it a purer thing. But she wasn’t so sure about purity anymore, having survived a revolution so obsessed with purity of conscience that its heart had gone first to stone, then to dust, before scattering to nothing.

She couldn’t be so sure about America either. A visiting mystic brought her news in the first year of the Nineteenth Century about the slave wars and the mad philosopher general who led them after he’d sold himself to his own slaves in bondage. “No more,” Sally said, “I don’t want to hear any more.” But when her visitor was leaving and she extracted from him the obligatory gift, she begged that it be something of America; and though there was no real way for her to be certain that the deck of cards he produced was an American Tarot, as he insisted, she took his word for it, convinced of the momentousness of the sacrifice when the owner gave up a single card, without which none of the deck’s other seventy-seven had meaning. Tacking the Queen of Wands to her bedchamber wall, she looked at it the last thing on going to sleep at night and the first thing on waking in the morning and, lost in its message in between, every night and every morning for the next thirty-four years until the day she died in the Hotel Langeac on the rue d’X at the age of sixty-two. The year was 1835, or year XLIII of what was once called the Revolution but which Maximilien had renamed before his death, with the obvious self-referential implications, the Deliverance.

In 1790 her legend swept Thomas home. Halfway across the sea the ship’s crew became alarmed to find Thomas missing from his cabin and nowhere on deck. He was finally located in the ship’s hull, looking for the deepest and coolest place to soothe the blinding pain in his head. When he wouldn’t leave the hull, living there like a rat all the way back to America, James Hemings took over Thomas’ cabin, sleeping in Thomas’ bed and eating Thomas’ meals, reading Thomas’ books and drinking Thomas’ wine, making the arrangements for the rest of the voyage. At the harbor in Norfolk the ship was met by a carriage with black window shades, behind which a semiconscious Thomas hid from sunlight and America in equal measure.

When he reached home and his slaves turned out to welcome the carriage’s return, their enthusiasm dissolved into confusion as minutes passed into hours with no one emerging while the carriage sat in front of the house. Again and again James would open the carriage door and peer in, the slaves watching as whispers passed back and forth between driver and unseen passenger, each exchange concluding with James shutting the door and the master declining to appear. Occasionally the slaves would lend the situation an increasingly tepid cheer as though to encourage Thomas out of the carriage; but finally the crowd simply dispersed, returning to their labors, the carriage left alone in the yard. Darkness fell. James unhitched the horses. He spent the rest of the evening with his mother, to whom he broke the news that she would never see her daughter again. Whether it was her wails of despair or simply the cold dead of night that inspired Thomas to make an escape, in the morning the slaves found the carriage open and empty, and word spread over the plantation that the master was finally in the house.

The country was riveted by the news of Thomas’ return. Its elite flocked to his porch only to find themselves rudely rebuffed by James, who announced to all that the master would be receiving no one. The plea of the country’s government that Thomas accept a seat of power went unanswered except for the laughter heard coming from the house’s darkest quarters. James ran the affairs of the plantation as he had managed the business of the oversea voyage. Several years passed. One summer day an erstwhile visitor to the plantation, undeterred by the rumors of the Monticello Madness, rode up within sight of the house on a far hill and found his way blocked by a particularly grisly wall of wood and wire and thistle. It was the sort of fence constructed not as demarcation but barricade. Much more astonishing, the wall was guarded by armed slaves. “See here, boy,” the visitor ordered one, “let me pass that I may have an audience with Mr. Jefferson.” The slave cocked his musket with an aim as true as the light in his eyes. “Beyond this point is Free Virginia, your fucking majesty,” the black guard answered. “Go let your horse shit somewhere else.”

Free Virginia? the man thought in horror riding away. By nightfall Richmond had heard and by dawn the rest of the nation. By week’s close the realization that Thomas’ plantation had been transformed into an armed compound was supplemented by bulletins of arriving black guerrillas from Haiti and Santo Domingo slipping through the South Carolina coast. By the end of the month the world knew that a slave army of hundreds, perhaps thousands, led by their silent pale general, was camped in the heart of America. By the last days of summer the terrified white citizenry was mobilizing in haste as the country’s new president went to Virginia to talk to an old friend.

The president arrived at dusk in a carriage of his own, protected by superfluous guards who could be made short work of by the black troops that spread over the hills beyond the barricades. Watching from his carriage window the president saw bonfires on the knolls, cotton fields completely uprooted and cleared away for training grounds, free blacks and former slaves with guns and what had once been the plantation slave quarters converted to barracks, food bins and munitions sheds. A white flag flew from the president’s carriage top. Another white flag was draped across his chest, though whether it provided a better target than sanctuary became a joke that traveled so quickly among the slavesoldiers that James Hemings had already heard it by the time the president reached the door of the house.