William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (173 page)
Authors: William Styron
I wiped the blood from my neck and crouched down shivering into my overcoat. I listened to the wheels crunching and bumping along the rutted road, uneven here and littered with fallen icy branches, so that the wagon yawed and heaved and pitched me back and forth in a soft rhythm against the boards. Moore and his cousin were silent. A cold winter wind breathed suddenly across the roof of the woods.
“Lord,” I whispered, raising my eyes. “Lord?”
Then high at the top of the icy forest I heard a tremendous cracking and breaking sound, and that voice booming in the trees:
I abide.
I clutched my Bible against my heart and leaned against the boards as the wagon, heaving and rocking like a rudderless ship amid a sea of frozen glass, bore me southward again into the dead of winter.
AN EXQUISITELY SHARPENED HATRED FOR
the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro’s soul; it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriantly everywhere. Real hatred of the sort of which I speak—hatred so pure and obdurate that no sympathy, no human warmth, no flicker of compassion can make the faintest nick or scratch upon the stony surface of its being—is not common to all Negroes. Like a flower of granite with cruel leaves it grows, when it grows at all, as if from fragile seed cast upon uncertain ground. Many conditions are required for the full fruition of this hatred, for its ripe and malevolent growth, yet none of these is as important as that at one time or another the Negro live to some degree of intimacy with the white man. That he know the object of his hatred, and that he become knowledgeable about the white man’s wiles, his duplicity, his greediness, and his ultimate depravity.
For without knowing the white man at close hand, without having submitted to his wanton and arrogant kindnesses, without having smelled the smell of his bedsheets and his dirty underdrawers and the inside of his privy, and felt the casual yet insolent touch of his women’s fingers upon his own black arm, without seeing him at sport and at ease and at his hypocrite’s worship and at his drunken vileness and at his lustful and adulterous couplings in the hayfield—without having known all these cozy and familial truths, I say, a Negro can only
pretend
hatred. Such hatred is an abstraction and a delusion. For example. A poor field Negro may once in a while be struck by the whip of an overseer riding on a tall white horse, that same Negro may be forced onto short rations for a month and feel his stomach rumble daily in the tight cramps of near-starvation, again this Negro might someday be thrown into a cart and sold like a mule at auction in pouring rain; yet if this selfsame Negro—surrounded from childhood by a sea of black folk, hoeing and scraping in the fields from dawn to dusk year in and year out and knowing no white man other than that overseer whose presence is a mean distant voice and a lash and whose face is a nameless and changing white blob against the sky—finds himself trying to hate white men, he will come to understand that he is hating imperfectly, without that calm and intelligent and unrepenting purity of hatred which I have already described and which is so necessary in order to murder. Such a Negro, unacquainted with white men and their smell and their blanched and bloodless actuality and their evil, will perhaps hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain.
During the four or five years approaching 1831, when it had become first my obsession and then my acceptance of a divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, and as far beyond as destiny might take me, it was this matter of hatred—of discovering those Negroes in whom hatred was already ablaze, of cultivating hatred in the few remaining and vulnerable, of testing and probing, warily discarding those in whom pure hatred could not be nurtured and whom therefore I could not trust—that became one of my primary concerns. Meanwhile, before telling of my years at Moore’s and of the circumstances leading up to the great events of 1831, I should like to dwell on this mysterious quality of hatred which it is possible for a Negro to cherish for white people, and to describe one of the moments in my own experience when I felt this hatred at its most deranging and passionate.
This must have been in the summer of 1825, when I had been Moore’s property for a little over three years—a time of great inner confusion and turmoil for me since I was “on the fence,” so to speak, toying with the notion of slaughter and already touched with the premonition of a great mission, yet still fearful and laden with anxiety and unwilling to formulate any definite plans or to ready myself for a firm course of action.
On this day of which I am speaking, Moore and I had driven a double wagonload of firewood into Jerusalem from the farm, and after we had unloaded our deliveries (a considerable portion of Moore’s income derived from supplying wood for private homes, also the courthouse and the jail) my owner had gone off to buy some things elsewhere, as was his custom on Saturdays, leaving me to while away several hours by myself. I had become at that time deeply involved in reading the Prophets—mainly Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, whose relevance to my own self and future I had only commenced to divine. It was my habit therefore not to waste time with the other Negroes who stood about chattering idly or wrestling in the dust of the field behind the market or quarreling over some black girl of the town one of them might manage to lure behind a shed. (Often this would lead to group fornication, but through the Lord’s grace I was never tempted.) Instead I would take my Bible to a sunny corner of the wooden gallery at the front of the market and there, some feet apart from the hubbub and the confusion, I would squat for hours with my back against the wall, immersed in the great prophetic teachings.
It was on this pleasant morning that I found myself distracted by a white woman who emerged from a corner of the gallery and suddenly paused, one hand held up against her forehead as if to shield her eyes from the dazzling sunlight. She was an extremely beautiful woman of about forty, stately and slender, dressed in blue-green silk the color of a brandy bottle, with whorls of faint pink in it which swirled and vanished and reappeared even as she stood there, stirring a little, a look of perplexity on the pale oval of her face. She carried a frilly parasol and a richly brocaded purse, and as she paused at the edge of the gallery, frowning, I suddenly knew that such lustrous finery and such delicate and unusual beauty could only mean that this was the woman whose arrival in town had caused a storm of rumor—gossip of course not unremarked by the Negroes, and in this case gossip of such a nature as to evoke only a kind of awed respect. The recently acquired fiancée of Major Thomas Ridley—one of the wealthiest landowners in Southampton, still rich enough to hold onto fifteen Negroes—the woman was from the North, resident of a place called New Haven, and it was bruited that the fortune to which she was heir was in itself of a size that would dwarf the riches of all the estates in Southampton put together. Her extraordinary beauty, her clothes, her strangeness: all of these were of such rarity that it is not remarkable that on that bright morning her appearance among the grubby mob of Negroes caused a reverential hush, sudden and complete.
I watched her step down from the gallery and onto the dusty road, the brass tip of her parasol making an agitated
tat-tat
while she gazed about again, as if searching for direction. And just at this moment her glance fell upon a Negro who was idling nearby directly below me. I knew this Negro, at least by repute, which was doleful indeed. He was a free Negro named Arnold—one of a handful of the free in Jerusalem—a gaunt grizzle-polled old simpleton black as pitch and with an aimless slew-footed gait, the result of some kind of paralysis. Years before he had been set at liberty through the will of his owner, a rich up-county widow, an Episcopal churchwoman shattered by guilt and pining for eternal bliss. I suppose one might praise this high-minded gesture, yet one must add that it was grimly misguided because Arnold was a troubling case. Rather than becoming an embodiment of the sweet fruits of freedom, he exemplified by his very being an all but insoluble difficulty.
For what could freedom mean to Arnold? Unschooled, unskilled, clumsy by nature, childlike and credulous, his spirit numbed by the forty years or more he had spent as a chattel, he had doubtless found life affliction enough while dwelling in a state of bondage. Now having been set free through the grace and piety of his late mistress (who had left him a hundred dollars—which he had squandered in brandy during his first free year—but who had not thought to teach him a trade), the oafish old fellow dwelt upon life’s furthest rim, more insignificant and wretched than he had ever been in slavery, a squatter in an unspeakably filthy lean-to shack on the outskirts of town, hiring himself out as a part-time field hand but existing mainly as a ragpicker or an emptier of privies or in the worst of times as a simple beggar, the bleached palm of his black hand extended for a penny or a worn British farthing and his lips working in a witless “Thank-ee, massah” to those townsmen no longer his masters in fact but in spirit masters more tyrannical than ever before. Of course, a few of the townspeople took pity on Arnold and his brethren but most of them resented his freedom, not because he himself was any threat but because he was in truth a symbol—a symbol of something gone asunder in the institution yet even more importantly a walking reminder of freedom itself and of menacing words, rarely spoken aloud, like emancipation and manumission, and therefore they despised him in a way they could never despise a Negro held in subjection. As for the slaves, among their company he was hardly better off, for if they had no reason actually to despise him he was still the incarnation of freedom, and such freedom was, as any fool could see, a stinking apparition of hopelessness and degradation. Thus their impulse was to rag Arnold mercilessly and play cruel tricks on him and to treat him with humorous contempt.
Surely even the poor lepers of Galilee, and all the outcasts to whom Jesus ministered in those awful times, lived no worse than such a free Negro in Virginia during the years of which I think and speak.
The woman stepped close to Arnold, who immediately bent forward in a groveling fashion, plucking from his head as he did so an absurd black wool hat several sizes too large for him and half devoured by moths. And then she spoke, the voice clear, resonant, quite gracious and polite, in rapid yet pleasantly warm Northern tones: “I seem to have lost my bearings“—the accent now touched with vague anxiety—“Major Ridley told me that the courthouse was next to the market. But all I see is a stable on one side and a dram shop on the other. Could you direct me to the courthouse?”
“Yam,” Arnold replied. His face was all nervous obsequiousness, eager, his mouth agape in a ridiculous grin. “Majah Riblees he lib dar, ap yonnah road ap yonnah.” He made an elaborate gesture with his arm, pointing away from the courthouse, down the road leading out of Jerusalem to the west. “Yam, me tek ’ee dar, missy, me tek ’ee dar.” I listened closely. It was blue-gum country-nigger talk at its thickest, nearly impenetrable, a stunted speech unbearably halting and cumbersome with a wet gulping sound of Africa in it. There were occasions when it was hard enough for some town Negroes to grasp everything in such speech; no wonder that the lady from the North stood dumbstruck, gazing at Arnold with the panicky eyes of one in sudden confrontation with a lunatic. She had understood absolutely nothing, while the Godforsaken Arnold, understanding only a fraction more, had battened upon the name Ridley and had conceived the notion that she wished to be directed to the Major’s home. He kept on gabbling away, groveling, now lowering to the ground his wreck of a hat in a servile, swooping motion. “Yam, missy, me tek ’ee Majah Riblees!”
“But—but—” the woman began to stammer, “I don’t seem to know what—” And she halted, her expression now full of chagrin, sorrow, something even more disturbing—perhaps it was horror, but it seemed even more to be akin to pity. At any rate, it was what then took place—and it had to do not alone with Arnold and the Northern lady but with the sudden upheaval in myself—that caused this encounter to be graven upon my brain as long as I was possessed of memory. For the woman said nothing more, simply stood there while her arm went limp and the parasol clattered to the road, then raised her clenched fists to her face as if she were striking herself—an angry, tormented gesture—and burst into tears. Her whole frame—backbone, shoulders, rib cage—all the bones which moments before had supported her so proudly seemed to collapse inward with a rush, and she became helpless and shrunken as she stood there in the road, fists pressed to her eyes, shaken by loud racking sobs. It was as if something long pent up within her had been loosed in a torrent. On the gallery of the market and in the street I could both see and sense a score of Negroes watching her, all of them silent now, puzzled, mouths agape as they regarded her with round wondering eyes.
I had risen in the meantime with my Bible clasped between my hands, and as I drew nearer to the edge of the gallery I was seized by a hot convulsive emotion that I had never known so powerfully before—it was like a roaring in my ears. For what I had seen on this white woman’s face was pity—pity wrenched from the very depths of her soul—and the sight of that pity, the vision of that tender self so reduced by compassion to this helpless state of sobs and bloodless clenched knuckles and scalding tears, caused me an irresistible, flooding moment of desire. And it was, you see, pity alone that did this, not the woman herself apart from pity. For there is peril enough in the first hint of a black man’s lust for a white woman, and since anyway I had striven for years to stifle all fleshly desire—feeling that it was the Lord’s command—there had been little temptation for me to covet such a wild and hazardous prize: to fornicate with a white woman in the ordinary course of events is for most Negroes so remote a possibility, and so mortally dangerous, as to remain hardly even the stirring of a shadowy idea upon the margin of consciousness. But this was something I had never seen. It was as if, divesting herself of all composure and breaking down in this fashion—exposing a naked feeling in a way I had never seen a white woman do before—she had invited me to glimpse herself naked in the flesh, and I felt myself burning for her. Burning!
And even as I stood there trying to dominate and still this passion, which I knew to be abominable to the Lord, I sensed that my thoughts had already run galloping beyond control, and in a swift fantasy I saw myself down on the road beginning to possess her without tenderness, without gratitude for her pity but with abrupt, brutal, and rampaging fury, watching the compassion melt from her tear-stained face as I bore her to the earth, my black hands already tearing at the lustrous billowing silk as I drew the dress up around her waist, and forcing apart those soft white thighs, exposed the zone of fleecy brown hair into which I drove my black self with stiff merciless thrusts. The vision would not be mastered nor leave me alone. I stood at the edge of the gallery, looking down while the sweat began to stream from my brow and my heart beat with an urgent and oppressive drumming in my throat. Far off in the back of the market I could hear a banjo plinking and the clatter and jingling of a tambourine, and a surge of nigger laughter. Still the woman kept weeping into her hands, the smooth back of her neck exposed now, white as a water lily, and as silken-tender and vulnerable; yet still in my mind’s eye I was mounted upon her in the dust of the road, hot as a coupling fox, my excitement gathering as I conceived not of any pleasure I might cause her or myself, but only the swift and violent immediacy of a pain of which I was complete overseer, repaying her pity by crushing my teeth against her mouth until the blood ran in rivulets upon her cheeks, displaying my gratitude for that feathery compassion not by murmured endearments but by clasping my hands from underneath ever more fiercely upon the firm flesh of squirming buttocks until drawn up full against my black groin she cried out in the wildest anguish while I shot off within her in warm outrageous spurts of defilement.
