William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (148 page)

The particular November day I met Jeremiah Cobb is clear in my memory: an afternoon of low gray clouds scudding eastward on a gusty wind, cornfields brown and sere stretching toward the distant woods, and the kind of stillness which comes with that time of autumn, the buzz and hum of insects having flickered out, the songbirds flown south, leaving the fields and woods to dwell in a vast gray globe of silence; nothing stirs, minutes pass in utter quiet, then through the smoky light comes the sound of crows cawing over some far-off cornfield, a faint raucous hullabaloo which swiftly dwindles off in the distance, and silence again, broken only by the scratching and scrabble of dead windblown leaves. That afternoon I heard dogs yapping in the north, as if they were coming down the road. It was a Saturday, Travis and Joel Westbrook had driven that morning to Jerusalem on an errand, and only Putnam was at work in the shop. I was outside at the corner of my shed cleaning some rabbits from my trapline, when in the midst of this deep and brooding silence I heard the dogs yapping up the road. They were foxhounds, but not enough of them for a hunt, and I recall being puzzled, my puzzlement vanishing just as I rose and looked up the road and saw a whirlwind of dust: out of the whirlwind came a tall white man in a pale beaver hat and gray cloak, perched on the seat of a dogcart drawn by a frisky jet-black mare. Behind and below the seat were the dogs, three flop-eared hounds yapping at one of Travis’s yellow cur dogs who was trying to get at them through the spokes of the wheels. It was, I think, the first time I ever saw a dogcart with dogs. From where I stood I saw the dogcart draw up to a halt in front of the house, then saw the man dismount; I thought he came down clumsily, seeming for an instant to falter or to stumble as if weak in the knees, but then, instantly regaining control of himself, he muttered something half aloud and at the same time aimed a kick at the yellow dog, missed wildly, his booted foot fetching up against the side of the carriage with a clatter.

It was comical to watch—a white man’s discomfiture, observed on the sly, has always been a Negro’s richest delight—but even as I felt the laughter gurgling up inside me the man turned and my laughter ceased. I was now able to observe him for the first time straight on: the face I beheld was one of the most unhappy faces I had ever seen. It was blighted, ravaged by sorrow, as if grief had laid actual hands on the face, wrenching and twisting it into an attitude of ineradicable pain. Now too I could see that the man was a little drunk. He stared somberly at the dog howling at him from the dust of the road, then raised his hollow eyes briefly to the gray clouds scudding across the heavens. I thought I heard a groan pass his lips; a spasm of coughing seized him. Then with an abrupt, clumsy gesture he drew the cloak about his gaunt and bony frame and proceeded with fumbling gloved hands to fasten the mare to the tethering post. Just then I heard Miss Sarah call from the porch. “Judge Cobb!” I heard her cry. “Sakes alive! What are you doin’ down this way?” He shouted something back to her, the cadence of his words obscure, muffled against the gusty wind. The leaves whirled around him, all the dogs kept yapping and howling, the pretty little mare chafed and tossed her mane and stamped. I managed to make out the words: a hunt in Drewrysville, he was taking his dogs there, a grinding noise in the spindle box of his wheel. He thought the axle broke, split, something; being nearby he had come here for repairs. Was Mr. Joe to home? Downwind came Miss Sarah’s voice from the porch, loud, buxom, cheerful: “Mr. Joe’s done gone to Jerusalem! My boy Putnam’s here, though! He’ll fix that wheel for you, Judge Cobb, straightaway! Won’t you come in and set a spell!” Thank you no ma’am, Cobb hollered back; he was in a rush, he’d get that axle fixed and be on his way. “Well, I ’spect you know where the cider press is,” Miss Sarah called. “Right next to the shop. They’s some brandy too! Just help yourself and drink your fill!”

I went back to the corner of the shed, attending to my rabbits, and paid no more mind to Cobb for the moment. Travis had allowed me to have the trapline, and in fact encouraged me in the enterprise since by arrangement he was to get two out of every three rabbits I caught. Such an agreement was satisfactory to me, inasmuch as this game was plentiful in the countryside and the two or three rabbits a week left for Hark and me were as much as we cared to eat, and more; nor did it matter to me that Travis sold most of the rabbits in Jerusalem and retained the money, which was clear profit, since if he was to earn interest on the capital which, body and brain, I represented anyway, I was glad to be capitalized upon in one small way which I myself took pleasure in. For after all of the dull drudgery at Moore’s, it was the greatest delight to me to be able to make use of some actual indwelling talent, to fashion the traps myself—box traps which I made out of scrap pine from the shop, sawing and planing the wood with my own hands, carving the pegs and the notched pins which tripped the doors, and uniting one after another of the neat miniature coffins into a single smoothly operating, silent, lethal assembly. But this was not all. As much as manufacturing the traps I enjoyed walking the trapline at daybreak in the silence of the countryside, when frost crackled on the ground and the hollows overflowed as if with milk in the morning mists. It was a three-mile hike through the woods along a familiar pineneedled path, and I devised a sort of cloth pouch to take along with me, in which I carried my Bible and my breakfast—two apples and a piece of streak-of-lean pork already cooked the night before. On my return, the Bible shared the pouch with a couple of rabbits, which I brained bloodlessly with a hickory club. A multitude of squirrels preceded me on these walks, in rippling stop-and-go motion; with some of them I became quite familiar and I bestowed names upon them, prophetic Hebrew names like Ezra and Amos, and I numbered them among God’s blest since unlike rabbits they could not by nature be easily trapped and could not by law be shot (at least by me, Negroes being denied the use of guns). It was a silent, gentle, pristine time of day, and as the sun shone pale through the dews and the mists and the woods hovered round me gray and still in the autumnal birdless quiet, it was like the morn of Genesis with the breath of creation fresh upon it.

Near the end of my trapline there was a little knoll, surrounded on three sides by a thicket of scrub oak trees, and here I would make my breakfast. From this knoll (though hardly taller than a small tree, it was the highest point of land for miles) I could obtain a clear and secret view of the countryside, including several of the farmhouses which it had already become my purpose eventually to invade and pillage. Thus these morning trapping expeditions also served to allow me to reconnoiter and to lay plans for the great event which I knew was in the offing. For at such times it seemed that the spirit of God hovered very close to me, advising me in this fashion:
Son of man, prophesy, and say, Thus saith the Lord; Say, a sword, a sword is sharpened, and also furbished: it is sharpened to make a sore slaughter
… Of all the Prophets it was Ezekiel with his divine fury to whom I felt closest by kinship, and as I sat there these mornings, the pork and apples devoured, the bag of brained cottontails at my side, I would for a long time ponder Ezekiel’s words because it was through his words that the wishes of the Lord concerning my destiny (even more so than through the words of the other Prophets) seemed most clearly to be revealed:
Go through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof
…
Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark
… Often as I brooded over these lines, I wondered why God should wish to spare the well-meaning and slay the helpless; nonetheless, it was His word. Great mornings, filled with hints, auguries, portents! I find it hard to describe the exaltation which seized me at such times when, crouched upon my secret knoll in gray momentous dawns, I saw in the unfolding future—fixed there as immutably as Saul or Gideon—myself, black as the blackest vengeance, the illimitable, devastating instrument of God’s wrath. For on these mornings as I looked down upon the gray and somber and shriveling landscape it seemed as if His will and my mission could not be more plain and intelligible: to free my people I must one day only commence with the slumbering, mist-shrouded dwellings below, destroying all therein, then set forth eastward across the swamps and fields, where lay Jerusalem.

But to get back to Cobb, rather meanderingly I’m afraid, and again by way of Hark. Hark had a flair for the odd, the off-center: had he been able to read and write, been white, free, living in some Elysian time when he was anything but negotiable property worth six hundred dollars in a depressed market, he might have been a lawyer; to my disappointment, Christian teachings (my own mainly) had made only the shallowest imprint upon his spirit, so that being free of spiritual rules and restraints he responded to the mad side of life and could laugh with abandon, thrilling to each day’s new absurdity. In short, he had a feeling for the crazy, the unexpected; all in all, this caused me mild envy. There was for instance the time when our shed behind the wheel shop was still uncompleted, and our master paid us a visit during a roaring thunderstorm, gazing skyward at the water cascading through the roof. “It’s leaking in here,” he said, to which Hark replied: “Nawsuh, Marse Joe, hit leakin’ outside. Hit
rainin’
in here.” Likewise, it was Hark who gave expression to that certain inward sense—an essence of being which is almost impossible to put into words—that every Negro possesses when, dating from the age of twelve or ten or even earlier, he becomes aware that he is only merchandise, goods, in the eyes of all white people devoid of character or moral sense or soul. This feeling Hark called “black-assed,” and it comes as close to summing up the numbness and dread which dwells in every Negro’s heart as any word I have ever known. “Don’ matter who dey is, Nat, good or bad, even ol’ Marse Joe, dey white folks dey gwine make you feel
black-assed.
Never seed a white man smile at me yet ’thout I didn’ feel just about twice as black-assed as I was befo’. How come dat ’plies, Nat? Figger a white man treat you right you gwine feel
white-assed
. Naw
suh!
Young massah, old massah sweet-talk me, I jes’ feel
black-assed
th’ough an’ th’ough. Figger when I gets to heaven like you says I is, de good Lord hisself even
He
gwine make old Hark feel black-assed, standin’ befo’ de golden throne. Dere He is, white as snow, givin’ me a lot of sweet talk and me feelin’ like a
black-assed
angel. ’Cause pretty soon I know His line, yas
suh!
Yas
suh,
pretty soon I can hear Him holler out: ’Hark! You dere, boy! Need some spick and span roun’ de throne room. Hop to, you
black-assed
scoundrel! Hop to wid de mop and de broom!’ ”

It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which white people dominate the conversation of Negroes, and it is with certainty I can record that these were the words that Hark (who had come out of the shed to help me dress and clean the rabbits) had been speaking on this gray November day when, like the most vaguely discernible shadow, we felt simultaneously a presence at our crouched backs and again, half startled, looked upward to see the distressed and ravaged face of Jeremiah Cobb. I don’t know whether he overheard Hark’s words, it would hardly have mattered if he had. Both Hark and I were taken unawares by the man’s magisterial, sudden, lofty figure looming above us, swaying slightly against the smoky sky; so abruptly and silently had he come upon us that it was a long instant before the face of him actually registered, and before we were able to let slip from our hands the bloody rabbits and begin to move erect into that posture of respect or deference it is wise for any Negro to assume whenever a strange white man—always a bundle of obscure motives—enters upon the scene. But now, even before we had gotten up, he spoke. “Go on,” he said, “go on, go on,” in a curiously rough and raspy voice—and with a motion of his hands he bade us to continue at our work, which we did, easing back slowly on our haunches yet still gazing up into the unsmiling, bleak, tormented face. Suddenly a hiccup escaped his lips, a sound incongruous and unseemly and even faintly comical emanating from that stern face, and there was a long moment of silence all around; he hiccuped again, and this time I was sure I sensed Hark’s huge body beginning to shudder with—with what? Laughter? Embarrassment? Fear? But then Cobb said: “Boys, where’s the press?”

“Yondah, massah,” Hark said. He pointed to the shed several yards away, directly at the side of the shop, where the cider barrels lay in a moist and dusty rank in the shadows past the open door. “Red bar’l, massah. Dat’s de bar’l fo’ a gennleman, massah.” When the desire to play the obsequious coon came over him, Hark’s voice became so plump and sweet that it was downright unctuous. “Marse Joe, he save dat red bar’l for de
fines’
gennlemens.”

“Bother the cider,” Cobb said, “where’s the brandy?”

“Brandy in de bottles on de shelf,” said Hark. He began to scramble to his feet. “I fix de brandy fo’ you, massah.” But again Cobb motioned him back with a brisk wave of his hand. “Go on, go on,” he said. The voice was not pleasant, neither was it unkindly; it had rather a distant, abstracted quality, yet somehow it remained tinged with pain as if the mind which controlled it struggled with a preoccupying disquiet. He was abrupt, aloof, but there was nothing one might call arrogant about him. Nonetheless, something about the man offended me, filled me with the sharpest displeasure, and it wasn’t until he limped unsteadily past us through the crackling brown patch of weeds toward the cider press, saying not another word, that I realized that it wasn’t the man himself who annoyed me so much as it was Hark’s manner in his presence—the unspeakable bootlicking Sambo, all giggles and smirks and oily, sniveling servility. Hark had slit open a rabbit. The body was still warm (on Saturdays I often collected my game in the afternoon), and Hark was holding it aloft by the ears to catch the blood, which we saved to bind stews. I can recall my sudden fury as we crouched there, as I looked up at Hark, at the bland, serene glistening black face with its wide brow and the grave, beautiful prominences of its cheekbones. With dumb absorption he was gazing at the stream of crimson blood flowing into the pan he held below. He had the face one might imagine to be the face of an African chieftain—soldierly, fearless, scary, and resplendent in its bold symmetry—yet there was something wrong with the eyes, and the eyes, or at least the expression they often took on, as now, reduced the face to a kind of harmless, dull, malleable docility. They were the eyes of a child, trustful and dependent, soft doe’s eyes mossed over with a kind of furtive, fearful glaze, and as I looked at them now—the womanish eyes in the massive, sovereign face mooning dumbly at the rabbit’s blood—I was seized by rage. I heard Cobb fumbling around in the cider press, clinking and clattering. We were out of earshot. “Black toadeater,” I said. “Snivelin’ black toadeatin’ white man’s bootlickin’ scum! You, Hark! Black
scum!”