William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (153 page)

But listen, Nat, listen to the rest …

Yes, missy, I’m listening. That’s a very fine poem, Miss Margaret
…

We’ve run about the garden walks

And searched among the dew, Sir,

These fragrant flowers, these tender stalks,

We’ve plucked them all for you, Sir.

Pray, take this bunch of buds and flowers,

Pray, take the ribbon round them;

And sometimes think, in your lonely hours,

Of the sweet little girls that bound them.

There! That’s the end of it! What do you think of it, Nat? What do you think?

That’s a very beautiful poem, missy.
The mare’s rump tawny and glistening, and slower now clipclopping past green hayfields busy with the cricketing stitch of insects; slowly I too turn, eying her face with a nigger’s tentative, cautious, evasive glance (some old black mammy’s warning ever a watchword, even now:
Look a white folks in de eye you prayin’ for trouble),
catching a glimpse of the cheekbone’s lovely swerve and the fine white skin, milky, transparent, the nose uptilted and the shadow of a saucy dimple in a round young chin. She is wearing a white bonnet, and beneath it glossy strands of hair the color of chestnut have become unloosened, which all unconsciously lends to her demure and virginal beauty the faintest touch of wantonness. Sheathed in white Sunday linen, she is sweating, and I am close enough to smell her sweat, pungent and womanly and disturbing; now she laughs her high, giggly girlish laugh, wipes a tiny bubble of perspiration from her nose, and suddenly turning to gaze straight in my eyes, takes me off guard with a look joyous, gay, and unwittingly coquettish. Confused, embarrassed, I swiftly turn away.
You should have seen the Governor, Nat. Such a fine-looking man! And oh yes, I almost forgot. There was an account of it in the Southside Reporter, and it mentions my poem, and me! I have it right here, listen.
For a moment she is silent as she gropes in her handbag, then reads rapidly, the voice breathless and excited above the drumming hooves.
The Governor was then conducted into the Academical Apartment where upwards of a hundred pupils were handsomely arranged to receive him, and where a brilliant circle of ladies had previously assembled to witness the scene. After being introduced, an address was delivered by the Principal, to which Governor Floyd made a feeling and appropriate reply. An original ode for the occasion was then sung by the young ladies, accompanied by Miss Timberlake on the piano, to the air of Strike the Cymbal. Miss Covington then delivered the committee’s address in behalf of the school, in a style of pathos and eloquence which could not easily be surpassed … (Now listen, Nat, this is about me
…)
Miss Margaret Whitehead’s ode then followed, at the close of which the youngest pupils sang, in the most charming manner, Buds and Flowers, as a sequel to the ode, and at the same time presented a wreath. The effect was electrical, and almost every eye was in tears. We doubt whether the Governor has anywhere witnessed a more interesting scene, than this one in our own Seminary, dedicated to the highest principles of Christian female education …

What do you think of that, Nat?

That’s mighty fine, missy. That’s mighty fine and grand. Yes, yes, that’s just grand.

There is a moment’s silence, then:
I thought you would like the poem. Oh, I knew you would like it, Nat! Because you
—
oh, you’re not like Mama or Richard. Every weekend I’ve come over from school you’ve been the only one I could talk to. All Mama cares about is the crops
—
I mean the timber and the corn and those oxen and all
—
and making money. And Richard is just as bad almost. I mean he’s a preacher and all but there’s nothing, oh, spiritual about him at all. I mean they don’t understand anything about poetry or spiritual things or even religious things. I mean the other day I said something to Richard about the beauty of the Psalms and he said, with that sort of scrunched-up sour look: What beauty? I mean can you imagine that, Nat? From your own brother and a preacher, too! What is your favorite Psalm, Nat?

For a moment I am silent. We are going to be late to church, and I urge the mare along at a canter, tapping her rump with the whip as the dust swarms and billows around her prancing feet. Then I say:
That’s right hard to tell, Miss Margaret. There’s a whole slew of Psalms I dearly love. I reckon though I love the best the one that begins: Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast.
I pause, then say:
I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all things for me.
And then I say:
That’s the way it begins. That is number Fifty-seven.

Yes, yes,
she says in her whispery voice.
Oh yes, that’s the one that has the verse in it that goes: Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early.
As she speaks, I feel her closeness, oppressive, disturbing, almost frightening, the flutter and tremble of her linen dress against my sleeve.
Oh yes, it is so beautiful I could just weep. You’re so good at remembering the Bible, Nat. And you have such a knowledge of, oh, spiritual things. I mean it’s funny, you know, when I tell the girls at school they just don’t believe me when I say I go home on weekends and the only person I can talk to is a
—
is a darky!

I am silent, and I feel my heart pounding at a great rate, although I do not know the reason for this.

And Mama said you were going. Going back to the Travises. And that makes Margaret so sad, because she won’t have anyone to talk to all summer. But they’re only a few miles away, Nat. You will come by sometime, won’t you, on a Sunday? Even though you won’t be carrying me to church any more? I’ll just feel lost without your society
—
I mean reciting to me from the Bible, I mean really knowing it so deeply and all …
On she prattles and chirrups, her voice joyful, lilting, filled with Christian love, Christian virtue, Christ-obsessed young awe and discovery. Did I not think that Matthew was of all the Gospels the most
sublime?
Was not the doctrine of temperance the most
noble, pure,
and
true
contribution of the Methodist Church? Was not the Sermon on the Mount the most
awe-inspiring
message in the entire world? Suddenly, my heart still pounding uproariously, I am filled with a bitter, reasonless hatred for this innocent and sweet and quivering young girl, and the long hot desire to reach out with one arm and snap that white, slender, throbbing young neck is almost uncontrollable. Yet—strange, I am aware of it—it is
not
hatred; it is something else. But what? What? I cannot place the emotion. It is closer to jealousy, but it is not even that. And why I should feel such an angry turmoil over this gentle creature baffles me, for save for my one-time master Samuel Turner, and perhaps Jeremiah Cobb, she is the only white person with whom I have experienced even one moment of a warm and mysterious and mutual confluence of sympathy. Then all at once I realize that from just that sympathy, irresistible on my part, and unwanted—a disturbance to the great plans which this spring are gathering together into a fatal shape and architecture—arises my sudden rage and confusion.

Why are you going back to the Travises, Nat, so soon?
she says.

Well, missy, I was just hired out for two months by Marse Joe. It’s what they call trade-fair-and-square.

What’s that?
she says.
Trade … what?

Well, missy, that’s why I’ve been working for your mama. Marse Joe he needed a yoke of oxen to pull stumps and Miss Caty she needed a nigger to work on her new barn. So Marse Joe traded me for two months for a yoke of oxen. That’s what they call trade-fair-and-square.

She makes a thoughtful humming noise.
Hm-m. A yoke of oxen. I mean, and you … That seems so very strange.
She is silent for a moment. Then:
Nat, why do you call yourself a nigger like that? I mean it sounds so
—
well, so sad somehow. I much prefer the word darky. I mean, after all, you’re a preacher
…
Oh, look yonder, Nat, the church! Look at how Richard has gotten one whole side whitewashed already!

Now again, the soft reverie flowing away in my mind like smoke, I heard Gray’s voice as he addressed the court: “… are doubtless familiar, perhaps actually conversant, with an even more important work by the late Professor Enoch Mebane of the University of Georgia at Athens, a study of still more commanding stature and exhaustive research than the opus by Professors Sentelle and Richards just quoted. For whereas Professors Sentelle and Richards have demonstrated, from a theological standpoint, the innate and inbred, indeed the
predestined
deficiency of the Negro in the areas of moral choice and Christian ethics, it remained the achievement of Professor Mebane to prove beyond the iota of a doubt that the Negro is a
biologically
inferior species. Certainly this court is aware of Professor Mebane’s treatise, therefore I shall refresh your honorable minds of its contents only in the barest outlines: videlicet, that all the characteristics of the nigger head—the deeply receding jaw, measurable by what Professor Mebane has termed the gnathic index; the sloping, beetle-browed cranium, with its grotesque and brutelike width between ear and ear and its lack of vertical lobal areas that in other species allow for the development of the most upwards-reaching moral and spiritual aspirations; and the extraordinary thickness of the cranium itself, resembling not so much that of any human but of the lowest beasts of the field—that all these characteristics fully and conclusively demonstrate that the Negro occupies at best but a middling position amongst all the species, possessing a relationship which is not cousin-german to the other human races but one which is far closer to the skulking baboon of that dark continent from which he springs …”

Gray halted, and as if pausing for a moment’s breath, leaned forward with both hands against the table top, resting his weight there as he contemplated the magistrates at the bench. The courtroom was silent. Quiet, blinking in the steamy air, the people seemed to attend Gray’s every word, as if each syllable was atingle with the promise of some revelation which would assuage their fright and their anxiety and even the grief which stitched them together, one and all, like the hysteric thread of that woman’s sobbing anguish still persisting in the back of the courtroom, a single noise in the stillness, out of hand now, inconsolable. The manacles had made my hands numb. I flexed my fingers, felt no sensation. Gray cleared his throat, then continued: “Now then, honorable Justices, I beg to be permitted a philosophical leap. I beg to be permitted to connect these unassailable biological theories of Professor Mebane with the concepts of an even greater figure in human thought, namely, the great German philosopher Leibnitz. Now, you are all acquainted with Leibnitz’s concept of the monad. The brains of all of us, according to Leibnitz, are filled with monads. These monads, millions and billions of them, are nothing but tiny, infinitesimal mental units
striving for development
according to their pre-established nature. Now, whether one takes Leibnitz’s theory at its face value or more or less in a symbolical fashion, as I myself am wont to do, the fact remains—and it seems indisputable—that the spiritual and ethical organization of a single mind may be studied and understood from not alone a
qualitative
standpoint but from a
quantitative
standpoint likewise. That is to say, that this
striving for development
—and I emphasize and underline that phrase—may in the end be only the product of the number of monads that a single mind is physically capable of accommodating.”

He paused, then said: “And here, your Honors, is the crux of the issue which, I submit, if we now examine it closely, can lead only to the most optimistic of conclusions. For with his unformed, primitive, almost rudimentary cranium, the Negro suffers from a grave insufficiency of monads, so grave indeed that this
striving for development
—which in other races has given us men like Newton and Plato and Leonardo da Vinci and the sublime inventive genius of James Watt—is unalterably hampered, nay, mutilated, in the severest degree; so that on the one hand we have the glorious musicianship of Mozart and on the other, pleasant but childish and uninspired croonings, on the one hand the magnificent constructions of Sir Christopher Wren and on the other the feeble artifacts and potsherds of the African jungle, on the one hand the splendid military feats of Napoleon Bonaparte and on the other—” He broke off again, with a gesture toward me. “On the other the aimless and pathetic and futile slaughter of Nat Turner—destined from its inception to utter failure because of the biological and spiritual inferiority of the Negro character!” Gray’s voice began to rise. “Honorable Justices, again I do not wish to minimize the prisoner’s atrocious deeds, nor the need for stricter controls upon this portion of the population. But if this trial is to illumine us, it must also give us room for hope and optimism! It must show us—and I submit that the defendant’s confessions have done so already—that we must not run in panic before the Negro! So crudely devised were Nat’s plans, so clumsily and aimlessly put into effect …”

Again his words fade away on my ears, and I briefly shut my eyes, half drowsing, and again I hear her voice, bell-clear on that somnolent dusty Sunday half a year past:
Oh me oh my, Nat, too bad for you. It’s Mission Sunday. This is Richard’s day that he preaches to the darkies!
Alighting from the buggy, she casts me a sweet, rueful look.
Poor Nat
… And she is gone ahead of me through the dazzling clear light, the white linen swishing as she runs on tiptoe, disappearing into the vestibule of the church, where I too now enter, cautiously, quietly, stealing up the back ladder to the balcony set off for Negroes, hearing as I climb Richard Whitehead’s voice nasal and high-pitched and effeminate as always even as he exhorts that black sweating assembly among whom I will take my seat:
And think within yourselves what a terrible thing it would be, after all your labors and sufferings in this life, to be turned into hell in the next life, and after wearing out your bodies in service here to go into a far worse slavery when this is over, and your poor souls be delivered over into the possession of the devil, to become his slaves forever in hell, without any hope of ever getting free from it …
High above the white congregation, beneath the church roof where heat as if from an oven blooms stifling and damp amid a myriad swarming motes of dust, the Negroes, seventy or more from the surrounding countryside, sit on dilapidated backless pine benches or squat helter-skelter on the gallery’s creaking floor.