William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (183 page)

We congregated together often, the five of us, mainly on the free Sunday afternoons we were given throughout most of the year. Sam, Henry, and Nelson all lived within four or five miles from Moore’s, so it was easy for us to gather at my hidden mossy knoll in the woods. Over the years my sanctuary had undergone great changes. What had once been a rough pine-bough shelter had now become, through the addition of scrap lumber and pine-gum caulking that I managed to borrow or extort from my various employers, a cozy tabernacle—a commodious and weatherproof refuge complete with little windows made of glass stolen from Travis by Hark, a smoothly planed plank floor, and even a rust-flaked, disintegrating but workable cast-iron stove that Nelson had carried off from a house one Sunday when its owner was at church. A barbecue pit in the shallow ravine nearby completed the hideaway; with Hark as our provider we gloried in (or at least the others did, since I preferred to remain generally abstemious) a plenitude of illicit pigs. Early on during these long afternoons as we talked among ourselves, I would always manage to steer the conversation with great craft and subtlety to the problem of a mass escape. I had fixed the Dismal Swamp already in my mind; it seemed to me even then, even before I had the map in hand, a perfect stronghold for a small band of resolute, woods-canny Negroes: though large (just how vast it really was I could not then know), trackless, forbidding, as wild as the dawn of creation, it was still profusely supplied with game and fish and springs of sweet water—all in all hospitable enough a place for a group of adventurous, hardy runaways to live there indefinitely, swallowed up in its green luxuriant fastness beyond the pursuit of white men. Biding their time in the wilderness, until at last their escape was forgotten, these fugitives might then abandon the swamp and make their way the short distance up to Norfolk, where it would be possible to hide, singly or together, on board one of the many great merchant ships bound for the North. A heady scheme, beyond doubt, swarming with problems, perils, uncertainties. But I knew that by the grace of God this escape could be achieved.

So that is how it all began. My little inner group of followers were excited about such a plan when first I outlined it to them. Bedeviled, torn apart by hatred, sick unto death of bondage, they would have cast their lot with the most evil ha’nt or phantom of the woods to be shut forever of the white man’s world. They had nothing more to lose. They were passionately eager to set out with me any night, any day. “When?” said their eyes as I told them of my conception.
“When,
man?” Nelson asked bluntly, and I saw Runaway Sam’s eyes glitter with the wildest agitation as he muttered: “Shit! C’mon, le’s
go.”
But I was able to calm them all and—counseling infinite cunning, slowness, and patience—quickly put their excited hopes to rest. “I’ve got to receive the last sign,” I explained to them. “They’s plenty time,” I added.

“Plenty time.”
And this was a phrase I found myself repeating over and over during the following months.

For what they did not know was that behind all my talk of simple flight was a grander design involving the necessity of death, cataclysm, annihilation. They could not know of my vision nor that a true escape into freedom must include not a handful of Negroes but many, and that the blood of white men must flow on the soil of Southampton. They could not know then, because my lips were sealed. But the Lord was about to remove that seal, and they would soon know—of that I was certain.

(Fragment of a memory.) It is the late spring of the next year after that gray winter day when I discovered the map. The library again. Early evening. June. Once more I have been hired out to Mrs. Whitehead, who has set me to installing new pine bookshelves against the remaining bare library wall. This is a job I enjoy—cutting the mortices and tenons and joining them, then boring straight through both pieces of wood with a cross-handled auger in order to pin them together with nails. Rising, shelf succeeds shelf. I work steadily through the twilight, laboring at a casual, rhythmic, unhurried pace. The weather is balmy, the air outside pollen-hazy, filled with the chattering of birds. That pungent smell of wood shavings which I love surrounds me as if in a piney sawdust mist, invisible and sweet. For some reason my plans for the future, which usually occupy my mind during such work, are far from my thoughts. With pleasure I think of the barbecue planned for the following Sunday in the woods. My four close disciples will be there, and in addition to them, three more Negroes whom Nelson and Sam have recruited to my scheme of flight to the Dismal Swamp. Nelson feels that they will make great converts. One of these, an older man named Joe, has told me that he wants to be baptized and I look forward to the rites with satisfaction. (It is rare enough that I encounter a Negro with spiritual aspirations, much less one who might also become, potentially, a murderer.) As I brood congenially on these matters, the auger suddenly slips from my grasp and the sharp point embeds itself in the fleshy under part of my left thumb. I give a gasp of pain. Almost immediately when I remove the point of the drill I see that the damage is slight. The pain too is not severe but I seem to be bleeding copiously. It has happened before. Unconcerned, I commence to bind up my hand with a cotton rag I carry in my tool box.

Now even as I bandage myself, I hear a voice from the hallway—Mrs. Whitehead’s: “But I shan’t let you go on that hayride, darling, without your cloak!” The tone is gently solicitous. “It’s not full summer yet, dear, and nights can still get cold. Who’s carrying you to the party?”

“Tommy Barrow,” calls Miss Margaret, close by me in the hallway. “Oh, I’ve
got
to find that poem! I’ll prove it to her yet. Where did you say the book would be, Mother?”

“On the far shelf, darling I” comes the reply. “Right next to the little whatnot near the window.”

Margaret bursts into the library. Most of the time she is away at school, I have seen her only half a dozen times before. Concerned as I am with swathing my wound I am nonetheless unable to keep from staring at her erect, graceful, seventeen-year-old back. Nor is it the glossy tumbling mass of chestnut-brown hair that captures my attention, nor the freckled young shoulders, nor the slim waist pinched tight by the first corset it has ever been my necessity to see; it is the fact that she wears no skirt at all, only the white frilly ankle-length pantalettes that the unworn skirt is destined to conceal and which, had I not been a Negro and therefore presumably unstirred by such a revealing sight, she would never be so immodest to flaunt thus beneath my nose. Garbed to the ankles, she is nowhere near naked, yet the white pants make her seem wantonly unclothed. I am filled with abrupt confusion, hot panic seizes me: Do I keep looking or do I avert my eyes? I avert my eyes—not, however, before trying to avoid, unsuccessfully, a glimpse of the dim shadowed cleft between the round promontories where fabric clings tightly to her firm young bottom.

“I just know the word is
endurance
,” she says aloud, as if to her mother again, or to space. “I’ll prove it to her yet!” She has seized a book from the shelf and now, turning about to face me where I still half squat on the floor, thumbs in a flurry through the pages. She whispers to herself, inaudibly.

“What,
dear?” Mrs. Whitehead asks from afar.

But now Margaret ignores her mother’s call. A flush of triumph comes to her face and her voice is a little squeal.
“Endurance!
I knew that was the word. Not
forbearance
at all! I told Anne Eliza Vaughan twenty times if I told her once what the right word was, but she wouldn’t
believe
me. Now I shall
prove
it.”

“What, dear?” cries the mother’s voice again. “I can’t hear you!”

“I
told
—” Margaret begins to shout but then breaks off, giving a little shiver of annoyance. “Oh, nothing,” she says to the empty air, and with perfect naturalness and poise continues—in her exuberant conquest—to talk to the only available listener: me. “Listen!” she says. “Now just listen!

“The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance,
foresight, strength, and skill.
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.

“Wordsworth!” she says to me.
“There,
I’ve won a dime from Anne Eliza Vaughan! I told the silly girl it was
endurance
not
forbearance
but she wouldn’t believe me. And I shall win another dime!”

I look up in a quick furtive glance from the ragged bandage I am pressing against my hand, catch sight of the pantalettes again, turn my eyes away. I sweat. A vein pulses at my temple. I feel split upon a sudden and savage rage. How could she with this thoughtlessness and innocence provoke me so? Godless white bitch.

“Oh, Nat, maybe you can tell me the other. And we’ll share the dime! Yes, we’ll share it!” she exclaims. “Mother says you know so much about the Bible, maybe you can answer. I’ve bet Anne Eliza that the line that goes something about ’our vines have tender grapes’ is from the Bible and she said it was from
Romeo and Juliet
. Now, tell me, Nat, isn’t it from the Bible? Just
isn’t
it?”

I shrink from looking up and continue to gaze at my right hand clasped tightly upon the other. The rage within me fades away. Controlling my voice I say finally, after a long hesitation: “You right, young missy. That part’s from Solomon’s Song. It goes:
Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.
That’s the way it goes. So you win a dime, missy.”

“Oh,
Nat!”
she cries suddenly. “Your
hand!
It’s
bleeding!”

“It ain’t anything, missy,” I reply. “It’s just a little bitty cut. Some blood, that don’t mean anything.”

Now I sense (see? feel?) the white pantalettes as she moves close to the place where I am crouched, and reaching down with a swift but gentle motion of her fingers, takes hold of my unwounded right hand. That soothing many-fingered delicacy—it is like scalding water and with a quick jerk I pull my hand away. “It ain’t anything!” I protest. “It ain’t anything, missy, I
promise
you!”

She withdraws her hand and stands motionless beside me. I listen to her breathing. Then after a pause I hear her murmur. softly: “Well, all right, Nat, but you must not fail to take care of it. And thank you about the Bible. I’ll be sure to give you five pennies as soon as I get them from Anne Eliza Vaughan.”

“Yes, missy,” I say.

“Do take care of that hand, too.
Do.”

“Yes, missy.”

“Or I won’t give you the five pennies, mind you that!”

“What
are
you up to, little Miss Peg?” I hear the mother call. “It’s seven already. They’ll be here! You’ll be late for the hayride! Hurry!”

“I’m coming, Mother!” she cries. “Bye-bye, Nat!” Gaily. Then she flits away and I watch the pantalettes receding, the firm young flesh beneath nearly visible in a pink nimbus behind teasing cotton, a translucent concealing infuriating veil. The fragrance of lavender hovers, fades, is gone. I stay crouched there on the floor in the balmy pine-smelling dusk. Outside birds cheep and chirrup, mad with spring. Through my wrists the blood rushes like a millrace. Again the rage returns and I cannot tell why my heart is pounding so nor why my hatred for Margaret is, if anything, deeper than my hatred for her mother.

“God damn her soul,”
I whisper—not an oath but a supplication.
“God damn her soul,”
I say again, hating her even more than seconds before, or maybe less—thinking of those ruffled white pantalettes—not knowing which, less or more.

While yanking a borning calf from its mother’s womb Moore suffered a bizarre and fatal accident: the cord parted abruptly, sending my owner in a sprawl backward until his head fetched up against a post and cracked open like a melon. Naturally he was good and drunk when the catastrophe happened. He lingered for half a day before he expired—a mortal leave-taking that plunged me into several seconds’ grief from which I emerged feeling the greatest consternation. Few things are so ominous to a Negro as a death in the family to which he belongs, especially the death of a pater-familias. Too often simple mad warfare breaks loose among the covetous heirs all pouncing down upon the property, and on will-reading day many a piece of property has found himself chained to a wagon bound for, say, Arkansas, sold off to some rice or cotton demesne by a relative who kept him perhaps as long as a short afternoon before handing him over to a nigger-hustler lurking like a buzzard close by. I myself was overpowered by this dark fear for a while; it went hand in hand with the intolerable notion that being sold would prevent me from fulfilling the great mission the Lord had ordained, and a few weeks passed during which my worry and gloom were almost intolerable. However, it was not long before Joseph Travis came a-courting Miss Sarah and promptly won her hand. Thus such property as I embodied, having been assigned and devised to Moore’s heirs (or heir, in this case the snot-nosed Putnam), was transferred through marriage to Travis. The unkempt household in which I had lived for nine years now dissolved, decamping to those more pleasant acres nearby, where—joining Hark in the cozy little alcove behind the wheel shop—I dwelt during that crucial and climactic time whose quality I tried to convey early on in this history.

These final two years or so (it may be recalled my telling) were all in all the most free and comfortable I had spent since I left Turner’s Mill. I do not mean to say that I found myself at total leisure. Travis certainly gave me enough to do around the wheel shop and he kept me occupied at chores which, happily, exercised my ingenuity rather than my back. I had of course worked for Travis several times in the past, so I sensed the high value he placed upon my gifts as a craftsman. At risk of gross immodesty, I must say that I was fairly well convinced that my presence in Miss Sarah’s dowry helped cause Travis to woo her in the first place. I rigged up all sorts of artful contrivances for Travis’s shop—a pole saw that could be worked with a wooden foot treadle, a new bellows for his forge, and a cluster of beautiful ashwood tool racks which Travis prized beyond anything in the shop and elicited from his otherwise laconic lips the most dazzling sort of praise. Thus supplied with a resident genius, my new owner, unlike Moore, was in no great sweat to hire out my body, and save for a few occasions that Mrs. Whitehead prevailed upon him to rent me to her (or, once or twice, when stumps needed pulling, to trade me for a yoke of her phenomenal oxen) I remained calmly in servitude with Travis, counting the days. Yet inside I was burning. Burning! Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of my life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them? Joseph Travis was at bottom a decent and sympathetic man; this I am compelled to admit despite the reservations I harbored about him during the many periods in the immediate past when he had hired me from Moore. Travis was not a native of Southampton. For reasons unknown, reversing the usual pattern of migration from east to west, he had come to the county from the wild slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A craggy, hollow-cheeked, sandy-haired loner, he had the stormy look and mood of the wilderness about him, and the insanity of solitary months and years often flickered across his face; he appeared to me then a cranky, unpredictable, snarling, intolerant creature, venting his frustration on Negroes with rotten food, hard labor, and somber, savage jibes. Hark’s life with Travis had been, in those early days, anything but pleasant. Then too, during that time, he had committed the unpardonable: he had sold Hark’s wife Tiny and their little boy south, preferring to endure Hark’s reproachful glances and sullen grief than to be faced with two extra mouths which it might have been a strain but hardly a killing sacrifice to feed. Maybe it was his mountain heritage, his lack of experience with Tidewater ways, that caused him to do something that no truly respectable slaveowner would do. It had become plain to me that white men reared outside the tradition of slavery often made the most callous taskmasters—what hordes of corrupt and ruthless overseers hailed from Connecticut and New Jersey I Who knows too but whether Travis’s harsh morality did not tell him that since Hark and his woman had merely “jumped over the broomstick,” since their “marriage” had no sanction under the law, he was bound by no rule of ethics when it came to selling “wife” and offspring—by this grim reasoning a little black bastard. It was a rationalization used without shame countless times before. At any rate, out of whatever cause—thoughtlessness, stupidity, ignorance, God only knew—Travis had done it and that was that.

Yet as I’ve said, the man had changed now in the most remarkable way. Prosperity had restored him to the craft he had learned as a boy. In the fullness of middle age he blossomed—or let us say he became unshriveled. He was genial, even generous in his behavior with me, insisting that Hark and I have comfortable accommodations in our bachelor quarters next to the shop, making certain that we ate well from the leavings of the house, permitting no abuse (at least physical) from the rest of the household, and in general comporting himself like every slave’s ideal master. Although at first I was puzzled, I did not have to ponder long the mystery of this man’s renascence. After years as a childless widower and a scrabbling dirt farmer he was now—at fifty-five and in the prime of life—anointed with good fortune: well married to a fat lady who laughed a lot and jollied his days, vigorously prospering at a skilled trade, father of a newborn son and heir, and owner of the smartest nigger in Southampton County.

I have described at length my encounter with Jeremiah Cobb in the late autumn of the year preceding the commencement of this account. This was the day that Hark was run up a tree by Putnam and Miss Maria Pope. It was several months after that strange afternoon, in the waning winter of the fateful year 1831, that I received the final mandate I had so long been hoping for, and began to elaborate upon and implement the plans I had drawn up during those cloistered moments at Mrs. Whitehead’s. It all came about in the following manner …

The winter had been unseasonably mild, with an almost complete absence of snow and ice, and as a result Travis’s shop had been exceptionally busy. The balmy climate allowed the shop to expand out of doors. Day after day not only the shop but the entire plot of bare earth surrounding it had been abustle with activity as Travis together with Hark and myself and the two apprentices, Putnam and the West-brook boy, scampered about through the smoke and the steam, heating the great metal tires over the forge and firing the hoops until they turned a dull red and sledging the hoops onto the wheels with twenty-pound hammers. It was a noisy, boisterous scene, what with the hissing of the steam as we doused the hot wheels, and the clang of the hammers, and Hark’s shouts, and the racket of tortured wood as it snapped and creaked beneath the suddenly cooled, contracting cast-iron tires. Decent, healthy, amiable work it was too—a far piece from the grime and sweat of the field—and if it had not been for Putnam’s peevish yammerings and the constant taunts he threw Hark’s way I might have actually celebrated such labor, since there was something deeply satisfying about this craft and the way in which straight lengths of nondescript rough wood and strips of crude black iron were transformed into symmetrically spoked, perfectly circular, sumptuously shellacked and polished wheels. The days were long but I relished the half-hour breaks we took morning and afternoon, when Miss Sarah would bring us from the house a plate of biscuits and mugs of sweet cider with a stick of cinnamon; such a pause in labor made the work itself more rewarding, and caused Travis to seem even more acceptable in my eyes.

With a residue of orders from all over the county (and from as far away as Suffolk and the lowland region of Carolina), Travis found it hard to keep up with the demand. Just before he acquired me he had bought a newly patented machine, hand-cranked, which could bend iron in a cold state and eliminated the old process of hammering out hot metal. This machine had merely created the need for another—a sawing contraption which might quickly reduce the growing stockpile of oak and black-gum timbers to manageable lengths—and so late in December, just after Christmas, Travis gave me some rough plans and set me to work on my most ambitious piece of carpentry to date: an enormous “apprentice mill,” complete with ripsaw and treadmill designed to utilize either large Negro or middle-sized mule. It was a challenging assignment and I set to upon it with zeal, isolating myself in a high-roofed shed next to the shop, where (with the sometime help of Hark and the boy Moses) I painstakingly worked out the architecture of the complicated mechanism, carving one by one the gears and the gear-boxes, adding such clever wrinkles as a counterweight system to minimize jamming of the saw, and in all respects carrying through the project with a smooth professionalism that gratified me more than anything I could remember. Since I anticipated that I would be finished with the machine toward the end of February, I asked Travis if I might not please have several days off when I was done. I did not linger on it in so many words, but I wanted to go out into the woods to my sanctuary, there to fast and pray for a while—during these last days at work on the mill I had felt the spirit of the Lord hovering very close.

Anyway, I went. I told my owner that I wished to set up a new trapline; the old route had worn out its lure, the rabbits were getting wary. Travis agreed; my rabbits helped augment his income, and he could scarcely refuse. Besides, as I say, there lurked in his heart a basic albeit leaden decency and he knew I had earned the leave. One afternoon late in February, after spreading on a final coat of varnish, I finished the last work on the machine. I knelt and gave thanks to God for the skill of my hands, as I always did when I completed such difficult work, and then without further ado retreated into the woods, carrying with me only my Bible, my well-worn map, and some lucifer matches with which to start a fire.

The full eclipse of the sun began in the midafternoon of the following Saturday, three days after I set out for the woods. I had been fasting ever since the first day, seated next to the fire in my tabernacle, where I immersed myself in the Bible and prayed, taking no sustenance at all except for a little water from the stream and chewing on sassafras roots only to still the cramps that racked my stomach. Usually fasting was a method by which I helped quench all fleshly longings. Whether this time it was the pressure of the work I had just completed, I do not know, but during those first days I seemed beset by devils and monsters. I walked out and sat down amid the pines, trying vainly to rid myself of coarse hot desires. Visions of the flesh of women tempted me, inflaming my passions in a way I had rarely known before. Lust stormed my senses like a sick fever. I thought of a Negro girl I had seen often in the streets of Jerusalem—a plump doxy, every nigger boy’s Saturday piece, a light-skinned kitchen maid with a rhythmic bottom and round saucy eyes. Heavy-breasted, full-bellied, she stood naked before me in my mind’s eye, thrusting at me her glossy brown midriff with its softly rounding belly-bulge and its nest of black hair. Try as I might I could not banish her, keep her away; my Bible availed me nothing.
Does you want a l’il bit ob honeycomb, sweet pussy bee?
she crooned to me with those words she had wheedled others, and as she ground her hips in my face, with delicate brown fingers stroking the pink lips of her sex, my own stiffened. In hot fancy my arms went out to encircle her slick haunch and ripe behind, my mouth was buried in her wet crotch, and godless mad words struggled on my tongue:
Lap. Lick. Suck.
“Oh, my Lord!” I said aloud, and rose to my feet, but even so the desire would not vanish, would not fade. Sweating, I kissed and embraced the cold scaly trunk of a pine tree. “What can it be
like?”
I called again, as if to the heavens. The rage I had at that moment to penetrate a woman’s flesh—a young white woman now, some slippery-tongued brown-headed missy with a sugar-sweet incandescent belly who as I entered her cried out with pain and joy and enveloped me convulsively with milky-white legs and arms—was like a sudden racking spasm or an illness so shattering to the senses that it imposed wonder, and disbelief. I thirsted to plunge myself into the earth, into a tree, a deer, a bear, a bird, a boy, a stump, a stone, to shoot milky warm spurts of myself into the cold and lonely blue heart of the sky. “Lord help me,” I said aloud once more, “what can it be
like?”
The seed left me then, squirting in warm drops along my fingers; my eyelids slammed shut against the face of the day. I slumped shivering against the pine tree’s unloving scaly breast. At last I opened my eyes, and the thought that lingered in mind was only half a prayer: Lord, after this mission is done I will have to get me a wife.