William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (157 page)

“Let us adjourn to the veranda,” he says to the traveling man, pushing back his chair. “We usually retire more or less promptly at eight, but tonight you and I will share a bottle of port while we make out a requisition for my needs.” His hand falls lightly on the shoulder of the traveling man, who is rising now. “I hope you will forgive me if it sounds presumptuous,” he continues, “and it is a most unusual thing for me to say, but for a peddler who has the difficulties of so much travel, you sell an extremely reliable line of wares. And this, sir, as you must be aware, is of the greatest importance in a region like ours, removed so far from the centers of commerce. Since last year I have taken the opportunity of commending you to my friends.” The traveling man shines with pleasure, wheezing a little as he bows to the women and the young men, then moves on toward the door. “Well, thank you, sir …” he begins, but my owner’s voice interrupts, not rude, not even abrupt, but in continuation of his praise: “So that they shall be as satisfied as I have been in the past. And what did you say was your tomorrow’s destination? Greensville County? Then you must stop by Robert Munson’s place on the Meherrin River …”

The voices fade, and while I busy myself around the table, helping the old man Little Morning and the young woman Prissy clear the dishes, the rest of the family rises, slowly scattering in the last brief hours before bedtime: the two nephews to attend to a mare ready to foal, Miss Nell to take a poultice to a sick Negro child in the cabins, the three other women—all astir with gay anticipation as they bustle toward the parlor—to read aloud from something they call
Marmion.
Then these voices too fade away, and I am back in the kitchen again amid the clumping of crudely shod Negro feet and the sharp stench of a ham hock steaming on the stove, back with my tall, beautiful mother banging and grumbling in a swirl of greasy smoke—“ ’Thaniel, you better get dat butter down in de cellar lak I told you!” she calls to me—back in my black Negro world …

But that evening in the early darkness while I lie awake on my straw bed, the word
columbine
is like a lullaby on my tongue. I caress the word, whispering it over and over again, letting each letter form its own shape, as if suspended magically above me in the night. I lie at the drowsy edge of sleep, listening to the sounds of evening, to the feathery fuss and clumsy stir of chickens in their shed, a far-off howling dog, and from the millpond a steady passionate shrilling of frogs numberless as stars. All around me the smell of manure is rank and strong like the earth itself. Presently I hear my mother’s footsteps as she moves with a tired
slat-slat
of bare calloused feet from the kitchen, enters our tiny room, and lies down beside me in the dark. Almost at once she is fast asleep, breathing in a gentle rhythm, and I reach out and lightly touch the rough cotton shift above her ribs, to make certain that she is there. Then at last the spring night enfolds me as if with swamp and cedar and with drowsy remembrance, and dimly I hear a whippoorwill call through the dark, the word
columbine
still on my lips as I sink away into some strange dream filled with inchoate promise and a voiceless, hovering joy.

It was memories like this which stayed with me all through the few days left until my death. During the night just after the trial I came down with some kind of fever, and when I awoke the next morning my arms and legs were trembling with the cold, even though I was soaked in sweat and my head was afire and swollen with pain. The wind had risen and in the sunless morning light, pale as water, a blast of cold air howled through the open window, bringing with it a storm of gritty dust and pine needles and flying leaves. I started to call out to Kitchen, to ask him to fetch a blanket to stop up the window, but then I thought better of it, remained quiet: the white boy was still too scared of me even to answer. So again I lay back against the plank, shivering, and fell into a feverish doze when once more I was lying in the little boat, my spirit filled with a familiar yet mysterious peace as I drifted through the afternoon quiet of some wide and sunlit river toward the sea. In the distance I heard the ocean booming with the sound of mighty unseen breakers crashing on the shore. Far above me on its promontory stood the white temple, as ever serene and solitary and majestic, the sunlight bathing it as if with the glow of some great mystery as I moved on downriver past it, without fear, to the sandy cape and the tumultuous groaning sea … Then this vision glimmered out and I awoke, raging with fever, and I fell asleep again, only to awake sometime later in the day with the fever diminishing and my brow cold and dry and the remnant of something frail and unutterably sweet, like a bird call, lingering in my memory. Then not very long after this the fever commenced again and my mind was a wash and flow of nightmares, nightmares filled with unending moments of suffocation …

And so in this way, between waking and oblivion, with these reveries, voices, recollections, I passed the days and nights before the day of my execution …

My mother’s mother was a girl of the Coromantee tribe from the Gold Coast, thirteen years old when she was brought in chains to Yorktown aboard a schooner sailing out of Newport, Rhode Island, and only a few months older when she was sold at auction beneath a huge live oak tree in the harborside town of Hampton, to Alpheus Turner, who was Samuel Turner’s father. I never laid eyes on my grandmother—nor for that matter a Coromantee girl—but over the years I heard about her and her kind, and in my mind’s eye it is easy to see her as she squats beneath the live oak tree so many years ago, swelled up with child, panting in a slow fright, lifting her face slightly at Alpheus Turner’s approach to reveal a mouth full of filed teeth and raised tattoos like whorls of scattered birdshot on her cheeks, patterns blacker even than her tar-black skin. Who knows what she is thinking at the moment Turner draws near? Although his face is illumined by a beneficent smile, to her it is a fiendish smirk, and besides he is white, white as bone or skulls or deadwood, whiter than those malevolent ancestral ghosts that prowl the African night. And his voice is the voice of a ghoul.
“Gnah!”
he roars as he touches her, feeling the soundness of her limbs.
“Fwagh!”
He is saying only “Good!” and “Fine!” to the trader, but in her terror she believes she is about to be eaten. The poor thing nearly takes leave of her senses. She falls from her perch on the block and her mind reels back in space and time toward some childhood jungle memory of warm, enveloping peace. As she lies asprawl, the dealer’s line of talk is to her a witch doctor’s jabber of disconnected croaking sounds, having to do with ritual chops and stews. “They all take such fright, Mr. Turner, never mind! A fine little heifer! Aye, look at them fat tits! Look how they spring! I’ll wager she pops a ten-pound boy!”

But that same summer it was my mother who was born (publicly begat upon the same slave ship by some unknown black father) and it became well known around Turner’s Mill that when my young grandmother—who by this time had been driven crazy by her baffling captivity—gave birth to my mother, she was sent into a frenzy, and when presented with the babe, tried to tear it to pieces.

I expect that if my grandmother had not died soon after this, I would have later become a field or timber hand at the Turner place, or maybe a mill hand, which was only a small cut better. But on account of my grandmother I was lucky and became a house nigger. My grandmother died within days of my mother’s birth, refusing to eat, falling into a stupor until the moment of her last breath, when it was said that the black skin turned to the gray of ashes, collapsing in upon the inhabiting bones until the body of the child (for that is what she was) seemed so fragile as to be almost weightless, like a whitened, burnt-out stick of lightwood ready to crumble at the softest touch. For years there was a cedar headboard in the Negro graveyard, not far from the mill, with carved letters which read:

“TIG”
AET. 13
BORN AN
HEATHEN
DIED BAPTISED
IN CHRIST
A.D. 1782
R.I.P.

That graveyard is in an abandoned corner of a meadow, hard by a scrubby grove of juniper trees and loblolly pine. A plain pole fence, dilapidated to begin with but long since fallen into splintery ruin, sets off the place from the rest of the field; many of the headboards have toppled over to rot and mingle with the loamy earth, while in the spring those that remain become half hidden in a jungle of wild coarse greenery—skunk cabbage and cinnamon fern and a prickly tangle of jimson weed. In the summer the underbrush grows so thickly that you can no longer see the mounds where the Negroes are laid to rest. Grasshoppers sail through the weeds with small scaly whickerings, and ever so often a blacksnake slithers among the green, and on August days the odor is ripe and rank and very close, like a hot handful of grass. “How come you all de time studyin’ dat grabeyard, ’Thaniel?” my mother says. “Ain’t no place fo’ chillun to go studyin’ ’bout.” And it is true: most of the Negroes avoid the place, filled with superstitious dread, and this in some measure (the rest being lack of time; attention to the dead requires leisure) is the reason for the unsightly disrepair. But there is a leftover savage part of me that feels very close to my grandmother, and for a couple of years I am drawn irresistibly back to the graveyard, and often I steal away from the big house during the hot break after midday dinner, as if seeking among all those toppled and crumbling wood markers with their roll call of sweetly docile and abbreviated names like so many perished spaniels—“Peak” and “Lulu” and “Yellow Jake”—some early lesson in mortality. How strange it is, after all, at age thirteen to ponder the last resting place of your own grandmother, dead at thirteen herself …

But the next spring it is all gone. A new graveyard will be laid out at the edge of the woods, but before that—because it is drained and level and easy to get at—even this tiny remnant of crop land is needed, to raise sweet potatoes. I am filled with wonderment at how quickly the graveyard vanishes. It takes less than half a morning—burnt off by a gang of black field hands with casks of turpentine and blazing pine fagots, the weatherworn cedar headboards consumed by flame, the dry underbrush crackling and hissing as the bugs spring up in a swarm and the field mice scuttle away, the cooling black char leveled down by mule team and harrow, so that nothing remains of “Tig,” not the faintest trace nor any vestige of the rest—of the muscle, sleep, laughter, footsteps, grimy toil and singing and madness of all those black unremembered servitors whose shaken bones and dust, joining my grandmother’s in the general clutter underground, are now made to complete the richness of the earth. Only when I hear a voice—the voice of a Negro man, an old field hand standing by amid the swirling smoke, slope-shouldered, loose-lipped, grinning with a mouthful of blue gums, gabbling in that thick gluey cornfield accent I have learned to despise: “Dem old dead peoples is sho gwine grow a nice passel of yams!”—only when I hear this voice do I begin to realize, for nearly the very first time, what the true value of black folk is, not just for white men but for niggers.

So because my mother was motherless, Alpheus Turner brought her up out of the cabins and into his own home, where she was reared by a succession of black aunts and grannies who taught her nigger-English and some respectable graces and where, when she grew old enough, she became a scullery maid and then a cook, and a good cook to boot. Her name was Lou-Ann, and she died when I was fifteen, of some kind of tumor. But I am ahead of myself. What matters here is that the same happenstance that caused my mother to be brought up in Alpheus Turner’s house caused me in the course of events to become a house nigger, too. And that may or may not have been a fortunate circumstance, depending upon how you view what came to pass in Jerusalem so many years later.

“Quit
pesterin’
‘bout yo’ daddy,” says my mother. “What make you think
I
knows where he done run off to? What his name? I done tol’ you dat twenty times. He name Nathaniel jes’ like you! I done tol’ you dat, now quit pesterin’ ’bout yo’ daddy! When he run off? When de las’ time I seen him? Law me, chile, dat so long ago I ain’t got no rec’lection. Les’ see. Well, Marse Alpheus he died ’leven years ago, bless his name. And seem lak ’twarn’t but a year after dat when me an’ yo’ daddy was cou’tin’. Now dere was some fine-lookin’ man! Marse Alpheus done bought him in Petersburg fo’ to work strippin’ logs in de mill. But yo’ daddy he too smart fo’ dat kind of low nigger work. And he too good-lookin’, too, wid dem flashin’ bright eyes, and a smile—why, chile, yo’ daddy had a smile dat would light up a barn! No, he too good fo’ dat low kind of work, so Marse Alpheus he brung up yo’ daddy to de big house and commenced him into buttlin’. Yes, he was de number-two butteler helpin’ out Little Mornin’ when first I knowed yo’ daddy. Dat was de year before Marse Alpheus died. And me an’ yo’ daddy lived right here together dat time—a whole year it was—right in dis room …

“But quit
pesterin
’ ’bout dat, I tells you, boy! How I know
where
he done run off to? I don’ know nothin’ ’tall ’bout dat mess. Why sho he was angered! Ain’t no black man goin’ run off less’n he’s angered! Why? How I know? I don’ know nothin’ ’bout dat mess. Well, awright, den, if you really wants to know, ’twas on account of Marse Benjamin. Like I tol’ you, when Marse Alpheus die ’twas Marse Benjamin come to own ev’ything on account of he was de oldest son. He five years older dan Marse Samuel so he gits to own ev’ything, I mean de house an’ de mill an’ de land an’ de niggers an’ ev’ything. Well, Marse Benjamin he a good massah jes’ like Marse Alpheus, only he kind of young an’ he don’ know how to talk to de niggers like his daddy. I don’ mean he nasty or wicked or nothin’ like dat; no, he jes’ don’ know how to ack
easy
with nobody—I means white folks
an’
niggers. Anyways, one evenin’ yo’ daddy he buttlin’ at de table an’ he do somethin’ dat Marse Benjamin think ain’t quite right an’ he
hollers
at yo’ daddy. Well, yo’ daddy he ain’t used to havin’ no one
holler
at him like dat, an’ he turns aroun’ still smilin’, see—he always smilin’, dat man—an’ he mock Marse Benjamin right back. Marse Benjamin he done said somethin’ like, ‘Nathaniel, dis yere silver is filthy!’ An’ yo’ daddy, he say: ‘Yes, dis yere silver is filthy!’ Only he
hollerin’
at Marse Benjamin back, smilin’ jes’ as pretty as you please. Well, Marse Benjamin he jes’ fit to be tied, an’ he gits up right dere in front of Miss Elizabeth an’ Miss Nell an’ Marse Samuel and all de chilluns—dey jes’ young things den, ’bout yo’ age—and what he does, he whops yo’ daddy across de mouf with his hand. Dat’s all he does. One time—he jus’ whop him one time across de mouf an’ den he sit down. I’se lookin’ in at de door by dat time an’ all de family’s in an awful commotion at de table, Marse Samuel stewin’ an’ fussin’ an’ sayin’ to Marse Benjamin, ’Lawd knows he was uppity but you didn’ have to whop him like that!’ an’ all, an’ de chilluns all a-cryin’, leastwise de girls. ’Cause you see, Marse Alpheus he didn’ like to smite no niggers anyways an’ he never done it much, but whenever he done it he always took keer to do it way off in de woods out of sight of de white folks an’ de black folks, too. So de fambly dey ain’t never seen a black man hit. But dat ain’t no nem’mine fo’ yo’ daddy. He jes’ come on out of dere and he march straight through de kitchen with dis yere smile still on his face an’ a little bitty strick of blood rollin’ down his lip, an’ he jes’ keep marchin’ on back to de room where we stays at—dis yere room right yere, chile!—an’ he packs up some food in a sack, an’ dat night he done light out fo’ good …