William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (178 page)

I had only a glimpse of the child—a limp, shapeless tiny thing like a bundle of twigs. The mother cradled it close, with infinite and patient grief, pressing it next to her fallen breasts as if by that last and despairing gesture she might offer it a sustenance denied in life. She did not raise her eyes as we passed. Hark had ceased his tune and I looked at him as he too caught sight of the child; then I turned and glanced at Moore. He had briefly halted the team. His little puckered face had the sudden aspect of a man overcome by revulsion—revulsion and shame—and instantly turned away. In past time he had shown no charity to Isham at all; unlike one or two of the other white men in the vicinity—sorely beset themselves—who had nonetheless helped Isham by a little cornmeal, some preserves, or a pound of fatback, Moore had parted with nothing, turning Isham out after his brief stint of work without paying him the few cents which was his due, and it was plain now that the sight of the dying child had caused even his adamantine heart to be smitten by guilt.

Moore gave the lead mule a stroke with his whip, but just as he did so a gaunt Negro man appeared at the side of the team and yanked at the traces, causing the wagon to stop its lurching forward movement. This Negro I saw was none other than Isham—a sharp-faced, brown, hawk-nosed man in his forties with bald ringworm patches in his hair and with eyes ravaged and lusterless, filmed over with aching hunger. And immediately I sensed madness roving through his soul.
“Ho,
white man!” he said to Moore in a garbled, crazy voice. “You isn’t give Isham ary bit to eat! Not ary bit! Now Isham got a dead chile! You is a white fuckah! Das all you is, white man! You is a sonabitchin’ cuntlappin’ fuckah! What you gwine do ’bout some dead baby now, white fuckah?”

Both Moore and his cousin gazed down at Isham as if dumbstruck. Never in their lives, I am sure, had they been addressed in such a fashion by a Negro, bond or free, and the words which assailed them like a bullwhip left them with jaws hanging slack, breathless, as if they had found themselves in some sudden limbo between outrage and incredulity. Nor had I ever heard raw hatred like this on a Negro’s lips, and when I glanced at Hark, I saw that his eyes too were bright with amazement.

“White man eat!” Isham said, still clinging to the traces. “White man eat! Nigger baby she stahve! How come dat ’plies, white fuckah? How come dat ’plies dat white man eat bacon, eat peas, eat grits? How come dat ’plies like dat an’ li’l nigger baby ain’t got ary bit? How come dat ’plies, white cuntlappin’ fuckah?” Trembling, the Negro sought to spit on Moore but seemed disadvantaged by the intervening height and distance and by the fact that he could bring up no spit; his mouth made a frustrated smacking noise, and again he tried in vain, smacking—a defeated effort awful to watch. “Whar de twenny-fi’ cents you owes me?” he shouted in his bafflement and rage.

But now Moore did a curious thing. He did not do what a few years of proximity to such an impassioned nigger-hater made me think he would do: he did not strike Isham with his whip nor shout something back nor clout him on the side of the head with his boot. What he did was to turn toadstool-white and in a near-frenzy give the lead mule a vicious, quick lash which started the wagon to rumbling swiftly forward, tearing the mules’ harness from Isham’s hands. And as he did this and as we moved ahead as fast as the wagon’s ponderous bulk would allow, I realized that Isham’s unbelievable words had at first thrust Moore into a strange new world of consciousness which lacked a name—so strange an emotion indeed that a long moment must have passed while voice called to voice across the squalid abysm inside his skull and finally named it: Terror. Furiously he lashed the beasts and the brindle wheel-mule gave a tormented
heehaw
that echoed back from the pines like crackbrained laughter.

I learned later that after the drought had broken within a few months, Isham and his family somehow survived their plight, having been restored from a state of famine to the mere chronic destitution that was their portion in life. But that is another matter. Now such an event along the road on this ominous morning, seen through the prism of my mind’s already haunted vision, forced me to realize with an intensity I had never known before that, chattel or unchained, slave or free, people whose skins were black would never find true liberty—
never,
never so long as men like Moore dwelt on God’s earth. Yet I had seen Moore’s terror and his startled insect-twitch, a pockmarked white runt flayed into panic by a famished Negro so drained of life’s juices that he lacked even the spittle to spit. This terror was from that instant memorialized in my brain as unshakably as there was engrafted upon my heart the hopeless and proud and unrelenting fury of Isham—he who as the wagon fled him through the haze shouted at Moore in an ever-dimming voice,
“Pig shit!
Someday nigger eat meat, white man eat pig shit!” and seemed in his receding gaunt contour as majestic as a foul-tongued John the Baptist howling in the wilderness.

O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

I think it may have been seen by now how greatly various were the moral attributes of white men who possessed slaves, how different each owner might be by way of severity or benevolence. They ranged down from the saintly (Samuel Turner) to the all right (Moore) to the barely tolerable (Reverend Eppes) to a few who were unconditionally monstrous. Of these monsters none in his monsterhood was to my knowledge so bloodthirsty as Nathaniel Francis. He was Miss Sarah’s older brother, and although in physical appearance he resembled her slightly, the similarity ended there, for he was as predisposed to cruelty as she was to a genuine, albeit haphazard, kindness. A gross hairless man with a swinish squint to his eyes, his farm lay several miles to the northeast of Moore’s. There on middling land of about seventy acres he eked out a sparse living with the help of six field slaves—Will and Sam (whom I have mentioned earlier in this narrative), a loony lost young wretch, one of God’s mistakes, named Dred, and three even younger boys of about fifteen or sixteen. There were also a couple of forlorn female house servants, Charlotte and Easter, both of them in their late fifties and thus too old to be the source of any romantic tumult among the younger men.

Francis had no children of his own but was the guardian of two nephews, little boys of seven or so, and he did have a wife, Lavinia—a slab-faced brute of a person with a huge goiter and, through the baggy men’s work clothes she customarily wore, the barely discernible outlines of a woman. A winning couple. Perhaps in reaction to the wife or (it seems more persuasive to believe) goaded by her after or before or during whatever unimaginable scenes took place upon their sagging bedstead, Francis achieved pleasure by getting drunk at more or less regular intervals and beating his Negroes ruthlessly with a flexible wooden cane wrapped in alligator hide. When I say “his Negroes,” however, I should point out that this meant Will and Sam. I cannot tell why it was these two who became the victims of his savagery, unless it was only a matter of simple elimination—the three younger boys perhaps not possessing yet the stamina to take such killing abuse, the two women being likewise invulnerable on account of their advanced age.

As for poor Dred, his brains were all scrambled and he could barely speak. It may be that like a man stalking swamp bear who turns up only muskrat, Francis felt that young Dred was too lacking in distinction to be suitable prey for his ferocity. At any rate, he was able to invent for Dred other means of degradation. Dred was nineteen years old, so brainless that he was barely able to go to the privy without help. The condition of his poor addled head had been recognized by Francis only after he had bought him, sight unseen, from a trader with no more scruples than himself. Dred’s very existence was the walking, living proof of a swindle, and enough to drive his owner to a frenzy. Now responsible for Dred, unable to sell him, and refraining from murder less because of legal restraints than because unprovoked murder of a slave bore a social odium hard for even Francis to abide, he revenged himself for the swindle not by such simple and crude extremes as whipping but by tormenting Dred with unspeakable tricks like causing him once (according to Sam, whom I had no reason to doubt) to copulate with a bitch dog before an assembly of local white trash.

Francis had bought Will and Sam at the Petersburg auction block when they were both around fifteen, and by the time I first encountered them—during periodic rentals to Moore or the idle hours we might spend together in Jerusalem on market day—they had endured their owner’s thrashings for five or six years. Such abuse had caused both of them to run away more often than either of them could remember, and Francis’s alligator-hide whip had left knobs like walnuts on their shoulders, backs, and arms. Francis might have been a moderately prosperous landowner had not his roaring need to inflict misery on his Negroes smothered that logic which must have tried to tell him that halfway decent treatment would keep the pair, however reluctantly, home and busy: as it was, each time Will or Sam, anguished past endurance, took to the woods Francis lost money just as surely as if he had dropped silver dollars down a well. For Will and Sam among the field Negroes he owned were the oldest, the strongest, and most capable. To fill the gap their absence made he was compelled to hire other Negroes at substantial prices he would not have been forced to pay had he restrained his imbecile cruelty.

Furthermore, many if not most of the other farmers in the area were aware of Francis’s savage propensities. (This included Travis, his own brother-in-law, who never once allowed Hark near the Francis farm.) Even when they were not prompted by considerations solely humane (which I must confess some were) the landowners were understandably reluctant to let out any of their field hands to this ruffian who might send back to them a chattel worth five hundred dollars damaged beyond all repair. Thus whenever Sam or Will ran away, Francis was often unable to obtain replacement and he would be driven to an even greater pitch of rage. Setting off with a jug of brandy, his barbarous tublike shape jouncing and jostling astride a bay mare as he scoured the countryside, he would after several days find Sam or Will—or perhaps the fugitives would be returned to the farm by some local poor white eager for the customary reward—and once again they would be thrashed until they were bleeding and senseless and then left for a time locked in the barn until their stripes and welts began to grow scabs and they were ready for work. All in all it was a never-endingly ugly and dispiriting situation. And easily the most sinister aspect of the matter was what this treatment had done not so much to their bodies but to their minds. Of the two Negroes, Sam was the less affected. Which is to say that brutalized as he was, wounded to the depths of his being, he managed to keep a grasp on reality and—in spite of a wicked temper which caused him to lash out mindlessly from time to time at other slaves—presented more often the outward spirit of an ordinary young field hand, a frolicsome and happy-go-lucky air that among certain Negroes, I have noticed, is a kind of necessary disguise for almost unendurable affliction. But Will was altogether different. A livid stripe like a shiny eel ran the length of his face from beneath his right eye to the tip of his chin. Another blow, inflicted during the same beating, had given his nose the appearance of a black mashed-in spoon. He muttered to himself constantly, incoherently. The torture that had been imposed upon him had made him hate not just Francis, hate not just white men but all men, all things, all creation—and because I myself dwelt within the inchoate universe of that hatred I could not help but come to fear him in a way I had never feared any man, black or white, before …

The whole day after Moore’s encounter on the road with Isham we unloaded wood at various places in Jerusalem. Moore had contracted to “store” at each house we visited and at the courthouse and the jail. This meant no disorderly heap of logs thrown in a hodgepodge behind the kitchen but rather a tidy arrangement of cords which it was Hark’s and my duty to stack wherever Marse Jim or Marse Bob wished them stacked. It was monotonous and gut-wrenching labor. This strain, combined with the stifling heat of the town and my continuing fatigue and dizziness, made me stumble often and once I fell sprawling, only to be helped up by Hark, who said: “You jes’ take it easy, Nat, and let ole Hark do de work.” But I kept up a steady pace, retreating as was my custom into a kind of daydream—a reverie in which the brute toil of the moment was softened and soothed by my mind’s murmurous incantation:
Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink, let not the deep swallow me up, hear me O Lord, turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender mercies …

At noon Hark and I made our dinner in the shade of one of the wagons, eating cold hoppin’ John—mashed cowpeas mixed with rice—and sat listlessly afterward cooling ourselves while Moore and Wallace went off to visit the town whore—a two-hundred-pound free mulatto woman named Josephine. The food revived me slightly but I still felt faint and weird, with the mystery and wonder of my vision in the woods lingering not in my mind alone but as if throughout my entire being, my soul, like the shadow of a cloud that has appeared out of nowhere to smudge the bright face of the day. I shivered, the mystery haunted me as if great fingers the size of pine boughs rested on my back, ever so lightly, and a mood of evil premonition stole over me as we went back to work. I could not shake the feeling off while we sweated through the waning afternoon. That night the languor and illness returned, I ached with fever, and as Hark and I lay asleep beneath one of the wagons, parked in a field smelling of sweet mustard and goldenrod, I had dreams of giant black angels striding amid a spindrift immensity of stars.

Then late in the forenoon of the next day after another hot morning’s work, we made our delivery to the market—the last. It was a Saturday, market day, and as usual the gallery was thronged with Negroes from the country who were generally allowed a few idle hours to fritter away while their masters attended to business in the town. After we unloaded the last logs Moore and Wallace went off on some errand and Hark and I retired—he with his pine-strip banjo, I with my Bible—to a shady corner of the gallery where I could meditate on a certain passage in Job which had attracted my curiosity. Hark strummed softly, humming a tune. Quite a few of the Negroes loitering about I had become acquainted with by now, largely because of these market days. Daniel, Joe, Jack, Henry, Cromwell, Marcus Aurelius, Nelson, half a dozen more—they had arrived with their masters from all over the county, had helped load or unload their owners’ produce, and now stood about with nothing to do but ogle the passing bottoms or breasts of the Negro girls of the town, jabbering the while loudly about poontang and pussy, goosing each other and scuffling around in the dust. One or two succeeded with the girls and stole off with them into a field of alfalfa. Others played mumbletypeg with rusty stolen jack-knives, or simply drowsed in the sunlight, waking now and then to exchange their sorry belongings: a straw hat bartered for a homemade jew’s-harp, a lucky hairball from a cow’s belly for a bag of pilfered snuff. I looked at them briefly, then returned to Job’s racking, imponderable vision. But I found it difficult to concentrate, for although I had recovered somewhat from my fever I could not dislodge the sensation that I had somehow been utterly changed and now dwelt at a distance from myself, in a new world apart. It was noon and Hark offered me a biscuit from a panful he had spirited out of the kitchen of one of Moore’s customers, but I had no stomach for food. Even here in town the air was hazy, smelling of far-off fires.