William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (174 page)

“I don’t understand!” I heard the woman cry. “Oh God, I don’t understand!” And then she raised her head from her hands, and at that instant it was as if my hot vision and her sudden seizure had simultaneously dissolved, vanished. She shook her head in a quick furious motion, paying no attention to Arnold, her pale and beautiful face tear-streaked yet no longer haggard with pity but quite proud, with a kind of buried exultancy, and angry; and as she said it again now—“Oh, no, I
just don’t understand!
”—her voice was calm with a flat emphatic outrage and she reached down and retrieved her parasol from the road then turned and strode very briskly but with stately and composed steps up the street, the resplendent silk of her dress making a slippery swishing as she disappeared, erect and proud, past the corner of the market. I later learned that soon she left town and never came back. But now I watched her go, my body still hot and swollen and agitated, even though the power of the emotion and my raging heartbeat had begun to slacken as the woman had gained control of herself. Suddenly she was gone. I was left depleted, beaten, and with a choked sensation in my throat as if, trying to utter a single word at that moment, I would find myself bereft of speech.

Below me I saw Arnold shuffle away, mumbling to himself, nodding his head in woolly bewilderment. There was a buzz and yammer among the Negroes around the gallery, cackles of nervous uncomprehending laughter, and then the rhythms of the old Saturday morning market commotion started up again, and all was as it had been before. I stood there for an instant, watching the place in the road where I had taken the woman. It seemed so real in my imagination that I felt there should be some scuffed, trampled place in the dust, marking our struggle. Though the fever of my excitement had passed, I heard a Negro youth snicker nearby and I saw that he was eying me; then I realized that I was still in the virile state and that this showed through my trousers, and so in embarrassment I sidled away to the rear of the gallery, where I squatted down again in a patch of sunlight. For a long while I was unable to shake the memory of what had just happened and I felt a deep shame, closing my eyes and breathing a prayer to the Lord, supplicating His pardon for this terrible moment of lasciviousness.
Thine eyes shall behold strange women and thine heart shall utter perverse things
…
He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.

I prayed for a bit with passionate contrition; it was a prayer from the soul and I felt that the Lord had understood and had granted me forgiveness for this lapse. Even so, the intensity of my passion troubled me greatly, and all the rest of the morning I searched my Bible, trying to discover some key to this powerful emotion and the reason for my thinking these savage thoughts when the woman broke down so pathetically, drowned in her sympathy. But the Bible offered me no answer, and I remember that later this day, when Moore fetched me from the market and we drove back to the farm in the wagon through waning summer fields growing yellowish and parched, I was filled with somber feelings that I was unable to banish, deeply troubled that it was not a white person’s abuse or scorn or even indifference which could ignite in me this murderous hatred but his pity, maybe even his tenderest moment of charity.

My years with Mr. Thomas Moore lasted nearly a decade and seemed to me twice as long, filled as they were with sweaty and monotonous toil. Yet I must say that those same years were in certain ways the most fruitful I ever spent, since they offered many occasions for reflection and spiritual contemplation and presented opportunities in the field of evangelism such as I had never known even within the lenient world where I had spent my early life. I suppose the truth is simply that it was possible for benefits like these to accrue only to a Negro lucky enough to remain in the poor but relatively benign atmosphere of Virginia. For here in this worn-out country with its decrepit little farms there was still an ebb and flow of human sympathy—no matter how strained and imperfect—between slave and master, even an understanding (if sometimes prickly) intimacy; and in this climate a black man had not yet become the cipher he would become in the steaming fastnesses of the far South but could get off in the woods by himself or with a friend, scratch his balls and relax and roast a stolen chicken over an open fire and brood upon women and the joys of the belly or the possibility of getting hold of a jug of brandy, or pleasure himself with thoughts of any of the countless tolerable features of human existence.

To be sure, it was a way of life far from, let us say, Elysian but it was also not Alabama. Even the most childlike, ignorant, and benighted Negroes in Virginia had heard that name, and its lovely liquid syllables could arouse only a sickening chill; likewise they had all heard of Mississippi and Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas, and by way of scary tales shuddering up through the vast black grapevine which spread throughout the South, had learned to fear those names like death. Indeed, I must confess that I myself never was totally free of this dread even when my ownership by Moore seemed the most secure or when later, owned by Travis, I was safer still. Often during those years I reflected upon the mysterious providence of God which on that icy cold day of a February past had seen to it that I not be swallowed up into the ant-swarm and the faceless extinction of a nigger-crawling 10,000-acre plantation in the deepest South but that I be delivered instead into the dilapidated but homey surroundings which were the result of my sale to this pinched, pucker-faced little Southampton farmer named Moore.

As for Moore, never again did he lift a hand against me after that day when he struck me with his bullwhip. Not that he didn’t still thoroughly detest me with a profound detestation that lasted, I’m certain, until the moment of his premature and unlamented death. He hated all Negroes with a blind, obsessive hatred which verged upon a kind of minor daily ecstasy, and I was certainly not exempt, especially in the light of my book-learning. Even so, he possessed a countrified shrewdness, the vestige of a native intuition which must have warned him that it could only work to his own disadvantage to mistreat or vent his generalized hatred upon the compliant, exemplary, honey-tempered piece of property I determined early to become. And such property I became—a paragon of rectitude, of alacrity, of lively industriousness, of sweet equanimity and uncomplaining obedience. Nor do I exaggerate all this, even though never a day went by when I was not conscious of the weird unnaturalness of this adopted role. For now as all the promise and hope I had ever known flickered out and died and as I sank into the smothering night of bondage, it seemed plain that I must patiently suffer the evil things in store for me, gaining time to meditate upon such possibilities as the remote future might offer and to consult the Scriptures for guidance as to an endurable way of life. Above all I realized that I must not take panic, lashing out in futile retaliation at this analphabetic, squinty-eyed new owner of mine, but instead, like one caught in swamp quicksand who stays each muscle to avoid sinking deeper in the mire, must steel myself to accept without blinking all indignities, all befoulment, all mean hurts forthcoming—at least for the present time. There are occasions, as I have pointed out, when in order to buy some advantage from a white man it is better not even to say “please” but to silently wrap oneself up in one’s niggerness like the blackest of shrouds.

Certain Negroes, in exploiting their own particular niggerness, tell dumb jokes on themselves, learn to shuffle and scrape for their owners, wallowing in the dust at the slightest provocation, midriffs clutched in idiot laughter, or they master the rudiments of the banjo and the Jew’s-harp or endear themselves to all, white and black, through droll interminable tales about ha’nts and witches and conjurs and the cunning little creatures of the swamp and woods. Others, by virtue of some indwelling grittiness and strength, reverse this procedure entirely and in
their
niggerness are able to outdo many white people at presenting to the world a grotesque swagger, becoming a black driver who would rather flog a fellow Negro than eat Smithfield ham, or at the most tolerable limit becoming a tyrannical, fussy, disdainful old kitchen mammy or butler whose very security depends upon maintaining without stint—safely this side of insolence—an aspect of nasty and arrogant dominion. As for myself, I was a very special case and I decided upon humility, a soft voice, and houndlike obedience. Without these qualities, the fact that I could read and that I was also a student of the Bible might have become for Moore (he being both illiterate and a primitive atheist) an insufferable burden to his peace of mind. But since I was neither sullen nor impudent but comported myself with studied meekness, even a man so shaken with nigger-hatred as Moore could only treat me with passable decency and at the very worst advertise me to his neighbors as a kind of ludicrous freak.

“I done bought me a black gospeler,” he would announce in those early days, “a nigger that done learnt the Bible near ’bout by heart. Recite us about Moses, boy.” And I, confronting a circle of brandy-fragrant sun-scorched snaggle-mouthed anus-scratching farmers, would intone in a soft and placid voice a chapter or so from Numbers, which I did indeed know from memory, all the while returning with unfaltering pious glance their looks of mingled wonder, malevolence, suspicion, and shifty-eyed respect, all the while counseling myself to patience, patience,
patience
to the end. At such moments, though Moore’s hatred for me glittered like a cold bead amid the drowned blue center of his better eye, I knew that somehow this patience would get me through. Indeed, after a while it tended to neutralize his hatred, so that he was eventually forced to treat me with a sort of grudging, grim, resigned good will.

So all through the long years of my twenties I was, in my outward aspects at least, the most pliant, unremarkable young slave anyone could ever imagine. My chores were toilsome and obnoxious and boring. But with forbearance on my part and through daily prayer they never became really intolerable, and I resolved to follow Moore’s commands with all the amiability I could muster.

Moore’s farm was a humble one, lying ten miles or so to the southeast of Jerusalem near the settlement of Cross Keys and abutting in part upon the property of Mr. Joseph Travis, whom, it may be recalled, I have mentioned earlier in this narrative and into whose ownership I ultimately passed after Moore’s death. (The contiguity of Moore’s and Travis’s farm land was of course one of the fateful reasons for the marriage to Travis by Moore’s widow, Miss Sarah, and also for my coming to know Hark, as will be seen.) Aside from a ramshackle and unwhitewashed raw-timbered farmhouse, Moore owned twenty acres in corn and cotton and truck crops and fifty more in the woodland which supplied such a generous part of his otherwise meager income. Since I was the only Negro Moore possessed (though from time to time he had to hire other Negroes to supplement my muscle power) and since it was a dirt farm in the dirtiest sense of the word, my carpenter skills were almost never needed—save for crude jobs like patching the pigpen or boarding up a shattered window—and I fell into that daily grind of nigger work which only short months before I had foolishly believed could not ever become my lot, not in a thousand lifetimes. As an efficient, smoothly operating, all-purpose chattel, then, I was engaged at Moore’s in a score of jobs: plowing the wet fields behind a team of mules in the spring, chopping weeds in the cotton patch throughout half the summer, shelling corn, slopping the pigs, getting up hay for the stock, spreading manure, and when all this was done or during spells of gloomy weather, helping Miss Sarah in various scullery and scrubbing chores or at any number of other housemaidenly tasks around the farm.

Nor was there any such thing as “nothing to do,” for looming like a bleak wall above and beyond all this work, no matter what the season, was the stand of pine and gum and poplar and oak which I had to help Moore cut down and drag by ox-team half a mile to the farmyard, there to be hacked up into firewood lengths and thrown upon the growing mountain of logs which regularly went to stoke the Jerusalem hearths and forges and stoves. Though one might not forever plow or hoe, there was always time to chop. Some days the broadax I used seemed an extension of my hands, a still-moving phantom part of me, and at night I went to sleep with its rhythmic pounding aquiver along the muscles of my back and arms. Never to my recollection was I driven beyond endurance—doubtless because I set a productive, industrious pace for myself the final gain of which my owner could hardly in good sense abuse by demanding more. Nonetheless, it was loathsome, unrewarding toil and I do not know how I would have survived those days and months and years without the ability to fall into meditation upon spiritual matters even when enduring the most onerous and gut-wrenching labor. This habit, which I had developed a long time before even as a boy, proved to be my salvation. It would be hard to describe the serenity I was able to attain—the rapt and mysterious quality of peace I knew—when amid the stinging flies and the chiggers and the fierce September heat, there in the depths of the woods, tugging at a log chain while Moore nattered and nagged in my ear and his cousin Wallace’s ripe obscenities filled the air like small godless black bugs and I heard from afar, across the withering late summer meadows, the jingle of a cowbell like eternity piercing my heart with a sudden intolerable awareness of the eternity of the imprisoning years stretched out before me: it is hard to describe the serene mood which, even in the midst of this buzzing madness, would steal over me when as if in a benison of cool raindrops or rushing water I would suddenly sink away toward a dream of Isaiah and dwell on his words—
Ye shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble, for ye are the seed of the blessed of the Lord
—and for a long time, as in a trance, dream of myself safe in the new Jerusalem beyond all toil or heat or misery.

During most of those years I slept on a corn-shuck tick on the floor of a dark little cupboard off the kitchen, sharing the space with some emaciated mice and several bustling and friendly spiders for whom I trapped flies and lived with on the most genial terms. The food at Moore’s may best be described as middling, depending upon the season, always far removed from the bounteous kitchen at Turner’s Mill but a good cut above the animal rations served up by the Reverend