William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (159 page)

This morning, squatting in the shadow of the kitchen, I think longingly of
The Life and Death of Mr. Badman,
wondering if I can summon the courage to remove it from its hiding place and try to read it without being found out. Finally I get up and sidle toward the place where it is hidden. I have stored the book underneath the house—part of which is elevated above the ground—in a dark shelflike recess formed by one of the great oak sills. There spiders stir in the gloom and in the dim light hundreds of flying ants swarm in a pale flutter of brownish transparent wings. Protected by its flour sack,
The Life and Death of Mr. Badman
reposes in the dark. I creep forward on my knees a yard or so, reach up and remove the sack, then inch back toward the edge of the house where a splash of sunshine falls on the damp bare earth. Here I turn about and sit down with my legs crossed. I open the book and sunlight floods the white page, hurting my eyes. It is cool here, with a ferny smell of dampness, and mosquitoes moon about my ears as I begin my laborious journey through a wild strange country where words of enraging size, black and incomprehensible, blossom like poisonous flowers. My lips move silently, I trace sentences with a quivering finger. Thick words with mysterious syllables, lugubrious and fathomless, obstruct my way like great logs and boulders; small words are no better, obdurate as hickory nuts. I press on in despair, searching for the key, hunting for the soft and sweetly familiar, SUGAR, GINGER, CAPSICUM, CLOVES.

Suddenly I hear footsteps stamping up the dirt path from the cabins and I draw back underneath the house, hidden again, watching. It is the black driver, Abraham. A stout, muscular Negro, very dark, he is dressed in the green denim shirt which is the badge of his authority; he hurries along up the path, sweating in the fierce morning heat, a set, stern, indignant look frozen on his face as his broganed feet tramp the ground inches from where I lay in hiding and then clatter up the back steps into the kitchen. Moments pass and I am aware of nothing. Soon I steal out toward the patch of sunlight again, preparing myself to read, when now I hear voices from up above, in the alcove between the kitchen and the pantry. Abraham is talking to my mother and his tone is agitated, tense, severe.

“You better
had,”
he is saying, “you better jes’
had,
Lou-Ann. Dat man he mean as pizen! I knows. You better light on out ob here!”

“Shoot,”
I hear my mother say, “dat man ain’t no trouble. He gib me a bad time an’ I smack him one wid dis yere kettle—”

“But you ain’t seed him dis time!” Abraham breaks in. “He worse’n I ever seed! An’ ain’t no fambly folks aroun’ to say ary word! I jes’ tellin’ you, Lou-Ann, dat’s all I got to say!”

“Shoot,
he ain’t goin’ gib Lou-Ann no bad time. Leastwise not today …”

I hear them move from the alcove, the footsteps shuffling on the timbers above my head, their voices becoming indistinct. Presently they are silent and then I hear the door slam open and Abraham’s heavy tread as he thunders down the back stoop and past me once more, his feet sending up small puffs of dust, half trotting now in the direction of the mill.

The mystery, and my perplexity, last only a moment. As soon as Abraham has vanished around the corner of the stable, I sidle out on my behind again to the edge of the house, throwing open the book. The morning is still once more. While I bend my head down to study the open page, my mother begins to sweep in the kitchen above. I hear the steady
whisk-whisk
of the straw broom on the floor, then the sound of her voice, so faint that I can barely make it out, as she commences a lonesome song.

    “Bow low, Mary, bow low, Martha,

    For Jesus come and lock de do’,

    An’ carry de keys away …”

The song lulls and distracts me, draws me away for a moment from the maddening printed lines. I listen to her sing, and my head falls slowly against a cedar post of the house while I gaze away drowsily at the buildings and shops and stables stretching westward to the swamp, the Negro cabins below them somnolent in the morning heat, and high above all the buzzards in patient and unceasing soar and swoop and meditation, a noiseless quivering tilt of black wings over some dying thing fallen in the far-off woods, hapless and struggling. Nearby, two Negroes with a wagonless mule team shamble up from the woods toward the mill. I hear their laughter and the jingle of a harness, and they pass out of sight. Once again I smell the collard greens steaming; hunger swells inside me, then hopelessly dies.
“Bow low, Mary, bow low, Martha,”
my mother sings, rich now, and far, and I let my eyelids close together, and soon I seem to be in a kitchen—is it this one I know so well?—at Christmas, and I hear the voice of some white mistress (Miss Elizabeth? Miss Nell?) calling out
Christmas gift!
in a cheery voice, and I drink the sweet eggnog descending to me from above in short greedy gulps, which does nothing to assuage my hunger. Then Christmas fades away and I am in a honeysuckle glade, filled with the bumbling hum of bees. Wash is with me, and together we watch a horde of Negroes laboring with hoes in a steaming field of young corn. Like animals, glistening with sweat, brown backs shining mirror-bright beneath the blazing sun, they ply their hoes in unison,
chop-chopping
beneath the eyes of a black driver. The sight of their dumb toil fills me with a sickening dread. Huge and brawny, the driver looks like Abraham, even though he is not Abraham, and now he spies Wash and me and, turning about, comes toward us.
Gwine git me two little nigger boys,
he says, smiling,
Gwine git me two little boys to chop de corn.
Terror sweeps through me. Voiceless, in mad flight, I plunge through the honeysuckle, treading air as if across empty space back through a sunlit morning toward the refuge of the kitchen looming near, where now a sudden low hubbub of voices interrupts my fright, waking me with a different fright. My eyes fly open and I crouch forward beneath the house, alert, listening, heart pounding.

“Gwan outa here!” my mother cries. “Gwan away! I ain’t havin’ no truck with you!” Her voice is shrill, angry, but edged with fear, and I can no longer understand the words as she moves to another part of the room above. Now I hear another voice, this one a man’s deep grumble, thick and somehow familiar, but speaking words I am unable to make out as I scramble to my feet at the edge of the house and stand there listening. Again my mother says something, insistent, still touched with fear, but her voice is blotted out by the man’s grumble, louder now, almost a roar. Suddenly my mother’s voice is like a moan, a single long plaintive wail across the morning silence, making my scalp tingle. In panic, wishing to rush away but at the same time drawn as if by irresistible power to my mother’s side, I run around the corner of the house and up the back stoop, throwing open the kitchen door. “There, God damn, ye’ll have a taste of me big greasy,” says a voice in the shadows, and though I am blinded by the sudden darkness, seeing only two blurred shapes wrestling together near the pantry, I now know who the voice belongs to. It is the white man named McBride—since winter the overseer of the fields—a yeasty-faced, moody Irishman with a shock of oily black hair and a bad limp, also a drunkard who has whipped Negroes despite the Turner brothers’ rules to the contrary. My mother is still moaning, and I can hear McBride’s stringy breathing, loud and labored like that of a hound dog after a run.

Blinking, my eyes take in the scene, and I am aware at once of two things: of the fruity odor of apple brandy from a bottle shattered into splinters on the kitchen floor and of the broken neck of this bottle glinting in a shaft of sunlight, clutched in McBride’s hand and flourished like a dagger at my mother’s neck. She is on her back upon a table in the pantry, supporting the full weight of the overseer, who with his other hand fumbles and fights with her clothes and his own. I stand rooted at the door, unable to move. The jagged neck of the bottle clatters to the floor, shattering in a powder like greenish snow. All at once a kind of shudder passes through my mother’s body, and the moan is a different moan, tinged with urgency, and I do not know whether the sound I hear now is the merest whisper of a giggle (“Uh-huh, aw-
right,”
she seems to murmur) for McBride’s voice, thick and excited, obliterates her own—”There now, me beauty, ye’ll have
earrings,”
the words an awful sigh—and he makes a quick convulsive motion, while her brown long legs go up swiftly to embrace his waist, the two of them now joined and moving in that same strange and brutal rhythm I have witnessed with Wash through the cracks of half a dozen cabins and which in the madness of complete innocence I had thought was the pastime, or habit, or obsession, or something, of niggers alone.

I fly from the house, headed for nowhere; my only notion is to keep running. Around the stable I scamper, past the weaver’s shed, past the smokehouse and the blacksmith shop, where two ancient black codgers idling in the shade gaze at me in slow wonder. On around the barn I run, faster and faster, across the edge of the apple orchard and along the other side of the house through a shimmering white spider web that clings to my face in damp feathery strands. A stone punctures my bare toe in a tiny starburst of pain, but nothing hinders my flight; I am bound for the ends of the earth. A hedgerow blocks my way; I plunge through it, alighting upon a stretch of sunblasted brown lawn above which tiny butterflies flutter in a swarm of bleached wings like the petals of daisies, swooping up now to escape me. With pinwheeling legs, flailing arms, I hurdle a new ditch and commence rushing down the ailanthus-shaded lane leading to the country road when now, abruptly, my pace slackens, I begin a slow dogtrot which in turn becomes a walk, feet scuffing along. Finally I stop in my tracks, staring at the forest rising up like an impenetrable green wall beyond the fields. There is no place to go.

For long moments I stand in the shade beneath the ailanthus trees, panting, waiting. It is hot and still. Far off, the mill rumbles in a dull undertone, so faint I can barely hear it. Insects stir and fidget among the weeds, their swift random industry like a constant stitching noise amid the heat. I stand and wait for a long time, unable to go farther, unable to move. Then at last I turn and slowly retrace my steps up the lane and across the lawn in front of the house—taking care that Little Morning, pushing a sluggish rag mop on the veranda, will not see me—and now cautiously I part the brittle sticks and branches of the parched hedge, slipping sideways through it, and then dawdle across the lot to the kitchen.

As I come back to my hiding place beneath the house, the door of the kitchen smacks open with a clatter and McBride appears on the rear stoop, blinking in the sunlight, running a hand through his black disheveled hair. He does not see me as I creep back under the house, watching. He blinks steadily, and with his other hand he adjusts one gallus on his shoulder, then runs his fingers over his mouth—a curious, tentative motion almost of discovery, as if touching his lips for the first time. Then a slow and lazy smile steals over his face and he lurches down the steps, missing the last one or not fully connecting with it, so that the heel of his boot makes a sudden popping noise against the timber while at the same instant he sprawls forward, regains his balance and stands erect, wobbling slightly, muttering
“God blast!”
Yet he is still smiling, and now I can see that he has caught sight of Abraham, who just at this moment is rounding the corner of the stable.

“Abe!” he shouts.
“You,
Abe!”

“Yassuh!” I hear the voice call back.

“They’s ten hands pickin’ worms down in the bottom cornfield!”

“Yas, Mistah Mac!”

“Well, you fetch they black asses out of there, hear me!”

“Yas, Mistah Mac! Ah do dat!”

“Hit’s too hot even for niggers!”

“Yassuh!” Abraham turns and hustles down the slope, his green shirt plastered black with sweat against his shoulders. Then he is gone and it is McBride alone who seems to fill the entire space within my sight, prodigious even as he stands weaving, grinning to himself in the blighted, sun-baked yard, prodigious and all-powerful, yet mysterious in his terrible authority, filling me with dread. The appearance of his round, heavy face, uplifted to the sun in dreamy pleasure, sickens me inside, and I feel a sense of my weakness, my smallness, my defenselessness, my
niggerness
invading me like a wind to the marrow of my bones.

“God blast!” he says finally, with baffling glee, and lets out a soft happy cry, totters a bit, and fetches his booted foot up against the remains of a decayed bucket, which flies off in splinters across the yard. In dismay, a great old hen squawks, flees toward the shed, and a cloud of snuff-brown barnyard manure floats aloft like the finest powder, amid tiny pinfeathers bursting everywhere. “God blast!” McBride says again, in a kind of low shout, and he is off and away, limping, in the direction of his own house down the slope.
God blast!

Like something shriveled, I draw up within myself underneath the kitchen, the book shut now as I clutch it to my chest. The smell of cooking greens is still warm and pungent on the air. Presently I hear my mother’s feet on the floor above, the broom whisking against the boards, her voice again, gentle, lonesome, unperturbed and serene as before.

    “For Jesus come and lock de do’
    An’ carry de keys away …”

On another morning later that same month, the rain comes down in great whistling cataracts, whipped into spray by a westerly wind and accompanied by cracklings of lightning and thunder. Fearful for the book’s safety, I rescue it from its precarious shelf beneath the house and steal up the kitchen steps, taking refuge in the pantry behind a barrel of cider. Outside the storm rages but there is enough light to see by, and I crouch in the apple-sweet damp with the book thrown open upon my knees. The minutes pass, my legs grow numb beneath me. The book with its ant-swarm of words is like an enemy, malevolent, wearisome, incomprehensible. I draw taut, crucified on a rack of boredom, yet I know I am in the presence of a treasure; lacking the key to unlock it, I possess that treasure nonetheless, and so with grubby fingers and gritty eyes I persevere …