William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (186 page)

I watched Richard disappear inside the house. There was something incongruous about the idea of this delicate and enervated man of God in his lethal pursuit through the swamps of a demented unarmed black runaway, but soon he emerged from the house with a musket and a pistol, prim lips vengefully set as he adjusted a beaverskin hunting cap at a rather rakish tilt over his brow. One of the other Negroes had saddled the fat gelding. Trailing her son with a look of pale concern, Miss Caty clutched her hands together while entreaty charged her voice: “You
must
take care, Boysie! A darky like that is like a mad dog!” And now Margaret’s three married sisters, just arrived for a summer’s visit, spilled out from the house with gingham skirts ballooning on the wind; they also began to implore their brother to watch out for his safety, and as he climbed aboard his bovine steed they uttered little chirps and squeals of alarm. “Do be careful, Boysie dear!” Miss Caty cried, clinging to his hand. Then the three little grandchildren scampered from the kitchen to wave their uncle on his way, while at the same instant, like some grotesque harbinger of all in black folk gone emasculate forever, the egregious house nigger Hubbard wiggled out on sloping ladylike hips to add his blessing to the chorus of Godspeeds. “You take good care ob yo’sef, massah,” he gabbled unctuously, his hoarse caution a fawning echo of Miss Caty’s own. “Dat Will he some mean nigger, I knows! Will jes’ a
mad dog,
massah, an’ dat’s de troof!” He resembled nothing so much as some asinine fat mammy, and I could have seen him dead on the spot. Only Margaret remained detached from the scene. I glimpsed her at the doorway of the house, where she lingered among the shadows, a look of solemn annoyance engraved upon her pretty face. Then as Richard, murmuring, “Don’t worry, Muvva,” pressed a brave kiss upon Miss Caty’s outstretched knuckles and wheeled about to join the other men, Margaret’s annoyance deepened; she made a grimace of disgust and, turning, vanished from sight.

And, “Such stupid folderol!” she was saying soon after, as we rode southward toward the Vaughans’. “I mean all those guns and everything, and chasing down this poor darky Will who’s probably just half crazy with fear and everything, out there in the swamps. And they’ll probably shoot him! Oh, it’s just terrible!” She paused for an instant; out of the corner of my eye I saw her wipe a fleck of dust from her nose. Descending, my eyes caught a glimpse of the fabric of her skirt, drawn tight across her lap, jiggling to the rhythm of the buggy, while even closer to me was her hand, white as milk glass, blue-veined, twirling the bone handle of her parasol. “I mean of course he shouldn’t have done what he did,” she went on, “striking Mr. Francis back like that. But honestly, Nat! Every single solitary soul in this county knows about Mr. Francis, and how he treats his darkies. They all think it’s just terrible what he does to them. I know Mama does. And look at her! I should hardly blame Will for striking him back like that. Wouldn’t you have struck Nathaniel Francis back if he’d abused you so much like that? Just wouldn’t you, Nat?”

Now I sensed her eyes full upon me even as I escaped looking back at her, and connived in my mind at a way to answer that question which she alone among all the white people I had ever talked to would have been artless enough to ask. Such a question no Negro should be forced into a position to answer, and because it was asked in such a spirit of sympathy and innocence I resented her for it, now, somehow all the more. I was unable to refrain from stealing a glance again at the twin soft ridgelike promontories where her skirt drew tight across her thighs, the wrinkled valley of taffeta between, the stiff round bone twirling ceaselessly in the porcelain hand. I sensed her eyes again, the saucy tilt of a dimpled chin, her face turned, poised, waiting. I struggled for an answer.

“I mean just
wouldn’t
you, Nat?” she repeated, the girlish voice whispery and near. “I mean, I’m only a female, I know, but if I were a
man
and a darky and I was abused like that by that horrible old Nathaniel Francis, I’d just hit him right back. Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, missy,” I replied, choosing a tone of humility, “I don’t rightly know as how I would. That way you might just end up dead.” I paused, then added: “But I guess Will he just had about more than he could stand. And by and by when you have more than you can stand you sort of go crazy and hit back before you even know it. And I reckon that’s just what Will done with Mr. Francis. But I’d be mighty careful about retaliating against a white mastah, I would indeed, missy.”

She said nothing then, and when she spoke finally her voice was grave, pensive, filled with a kind of ample, questing, hurtful sorrow I had never before heard, or overheard, in a white person so young. “Oh
me,
I don’t know!” she sighed, and the sound rose from deep within her. “I just don’t know, Nat! I just don’t know why darkies stay the way they do—I mean all ignorant and everything, and getting beaten like that Will, and so many of them having people that own them that don’t feed them properly or even clothe them so that they’re warm enough. I mean so many living like animals. Oh, I
wish
there was some way that darkies could live decently and work for themselves and have—oh, real self-regard. Oh, guess what, Nat, let me tell you something!” Her tone changed abruptly, the quality of lament still there but now edged with indignation.

“I got in the most terrible fight with this girl at the Seminary named Charlotte Tyler Saunders. She was one of my very best friends and still is, but we got into this terrible fight in May just before school was over. Well, the fight was over darkies. Because you see this girl Charlotte Tyler Saunders’s father owns, oh, just
quintillions
of darkies on this plantation up in Fluvanna County and he’s in the legislature in Richmond and whenever the thing comes up there about emancipating the slaves he always gives these big long boring speeches about it that Charlotte Tyler finds in the
Gazette
and reads to the other girls. I mean he’s all against emancipation and he says all these things about how darkies are irresponsible and have no morals and are
bestial
and lazy and how you can’t teach them and all that balderdash. Well, this time I’m talking about she’d just finished reading this speech that her father gave and, I don’t know, Nat, I just sort of finally exploded. And I said, ‘Well listen, Charlotte Tyler Saunders, I don’t intend any disrespect to your father but that is simply folderol because it just isn’t so!’ And
oh,
she got mad at me, and said, ’It
is
so, any person with a grain of sense and eyes to see
knows
it’s so!’ And I was almost crying then, I was so mad, and I reckon I was almost screaming. And I said, ‘Well, listen to me,
Miss
Charlotte Tyler Saunders, I happen to know that where I live in Southampton my mother hires a darky slave who is almost as intelligent and refined and clean and religious and profoundly understanding of the Bible as Dr. Simpson’—Dr. Simpson is principal of the Seminary, Nat—‘and not only that, my
erstwhile
friend’—I was positively almost screaming—‘if you want my humble opinion, and I’m
certain
that I’m the only girl in school who thinks so, but
my
humble opinion is that the darkies in Virginia should be
freer!
’”

After a pause, Margaret said: “Oh, she made me so angry! And the thing is, Nat, she is
au fond
a very kind, sweet, considerate girl.
Au fond
means ’deep down’ in French. It’s just that some people—” She broke off with a sigh, saying: “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes life is so complicated, isn’t it? Anyway, Nat,” she concluded slowly, “that darky I was talking about was you. I mean, it really
was.”

I made no reply. Her closeness, her presence stifled me, even now as the summer air flowed past my face, wafting toward me her odor—a disturbing smell of young-girl-sweat mingled with the faint sting of lavender. I tried to inch myself away from her but was unable to, found instead that I could not avoid touching her, nor she me, elbow lightly kissing elbow. With a longing that made me wet beneath the arms I ached for the ride to be finished, even as I realized that we had half an hour more to go. I watched the horse’s black tail ripple and flourish, and the brown rump glistening. Along the rutted road the buggy wheels counted off the hillocks and humps in a steady clatter of iron on stone. We were riding through a deserted part of the county where fields of broom and briar and sedge and yellow mustard became interspersed with patches of dappled woodland. It was country I knew well. There were no dwellings here, no people—only a decrepit fence or, far off in an empty meadow, the shattered hulk of an ancient barn. The air was clear, the sun dazzling bright; grand pinnacles and peaks of summer clouds sent across the fields racing shadows shaped like gigantic hands. Again I smelled the warm girl-sweat, sensed her presence, soap, skin, hair, lavender. Suddenly, despite myself, the godless thought came: I could stop now and here, right here by the road in this meadow, do with her anything I wished. There’s not a soul for miles. I could throw her down and spread her young white legs and stick myself in her until belly met belly and shoot inside her in warm milky spurts of desecration. And let her scream until the empty pinewoods echoed to her cries and no one would be the wiser, not even the buzzards or the crows … The sweat poured down my sides beneath my shirt. Then I uttered a silent prayer, and furiously thrust the thought out of my mind as one thrusts away the very body and spirit of Satan. How did I dare think such disastrous thoughts with my great mission so near? Even so, I still could not help but feel my member swollen and pulsating underneath my trousers. My heart was pounding. I prodded the horse on with a snap of the reins.

And again the whispery voice in my ear: “I mean Charlotte Tyler really tries to be a very religious person—that’s the thing. That’s why I can’t understand really religious people holding such views. I mean, look at Mama! And
Richard,
for pity’s sake! And every
one
of my sisters! And that Charlotte Tyler Saunders—
au fond
she professes to believe in love when, honestly, I don’t believe she has the faintest
inkling
of what the Bible teaches about love. I mean all those beautiful teachings of John about love and how you shouldn’t fear it. Fear and torment. Oh, you know, Nat, that verse that speaks about
torment.
How does it go?”

“Well, missy,” I replied after a moment, “you must mean the verse in the first epistle that says:
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: Because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.
That’s how it goes.”

“Oh yes!” she exclaimed. “And he said:
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
Oh, it is the simplest thing in the world, is it not, Nat—the perfect Christian love of God, and of one another, yet how many people shun that blessed grace and live in fear and torment?
God is love,
John said,
and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him
… Could anything be more simple or easy or plain?”

On she prattled in her whispery voice, love-obsessed, Christ-crazed, babbling away in an echo of all the self-serving platitudes and stale insipid unfelt blather uttered by every pious capon and priestly spinster she had listened to since she was able to sit upright, misty-eyed and rapt and with her little pantalettes damp with devotion, in a pew of her brother’s church. She filled me with boredom and lust—and now, to still at least the latter emotion, once and for all, I let her constant rush of words float uncaptured through my mind, and with my eyes on the horse’s bright undulating rump, concentrated on a minor but thorny problem that was facing me at the very outset of my campaign (This concerned Travis—I should say, rather, Miss Sarah. I had resolved on a mercilessly intransigent course of action when it came to killing the white people, determined that not a single soul—no matter how friendly our relations had been—would be spared the ax or the gun. To contemplate otherwise might be fatal, for if I allowed my heart to soften in the case of one person, it would be all too easy for such clemency to overtake me with another, and another, and still another. I had granted only one exception to this rule—Jeremiah Cobb, that stern and tormented man whose encounter with me will be remembered. Now, however, despite my efforts to thwart a fondness for her in my heart, I could not help but feel that Miss Sarah—who had never regarded me with anything but kindness and who during my last illness nursed me with a motherly, sisterly, clucking solicitude—should escape the blade of my wrath. I had no qualms about the others of the house, including Travis, who although decent enough stirred in me few fraternal reverberations; the others, especially young Putnam, I heartily wished to see removed from their existence. About Miss Sarah’s fate, however, I suffered already painful guilt and misgivings, and I felt that if in some devious fashion or other I could contrive to make sure—perhaps through subtle ministerial urging—that she, a good Baptist, was shouting hallelujahs at that Carolina camp meeting on the night of my attack, out of harm’s way with her infant child—Yet was that any answer? Because then she would only return to a scene of grievous devastation—) I was pondering this difficult matter, greatly troubled and suddenly despondent, when Margaret Whitehead gave a little gasp, clutched my sleeve, and said: “Oh, Nat, stop! Please stop!”

A passing wagon or cart, hours before, had run over and crushed a turtle. Margaret had spied it from her side of the buggy and she insisted—with another tug at my sleeve—that we climb down and help it, for she had seen that it was still alive. “Oh, the poor
thing,”
she whispered as we viewed the little beast. The black and brown mosaic of the turtle’s shell had been split down the center from side to side, a pale bloody paste oozed out of the fissure and from a spiderweb of minute fracture marks that grooved the surface of the shell. Yet, indeed, the turtle still lived; it wiggled feebly and hopelessly with its outstretched legs and craned its long leathery neck and remained immobile, dying, jaws agape and hooded eyes mossed over in some dim reptilian anguish. I touched it lightly with my toe.