Lie Down in Darkness (61 page)

“Dey gonna holler ‘O God, de proud are risen against me, and de assemblies of vi’lent men done sought after my soul! How long, Lawd, wilt Thou be angry fo’ever, shall Thy jealousy
burn like fire?’ “

In the twilight came a hoarse “Amen! Oh yes, Jesus!” Shadows from the sheltering marshland lengthened over the water, and there was a long wild moan, a woman’s tortured wail, “Oh yes, Daddy! You
right!
” Daddy Faith put out his tiny black hands, a motion of compassion and tenderness.

“Comfort ye,” he said softly, “comfort ye, my people. Do you not know dat I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean, and a new heart also will I give you and a new sperit will I put widin you? If it were not so I would have told you.”

“Oh yes, Daddy!”

“Hallelujah!”

Then there was a vast sorrow, one somehow proud and proper and just, in his voice, as he spread his arms to heaven and lifted his round face toward the dusk. “Be not afraid, my people. De voice said, Cry! And he said, what shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all de good-liness thereof is as de flower of de field. De grass withereth and de flower fadeth, because de sperit of de Lawd bloweth upon it …

“Sho’ly de people is grass.”

He paused, gazing with benevolence upon the throng. “Sho’ly” he repeated tenderly, “sho’ly de people is grass.”

“Oh, Daddy!”

“Praise him! Praise him!”

He quieted them again with a single wave of his hand, tapped himself gently on the chest, and smiled. “De grass withereth, de flower fadeth,” he said, “but de word of your God shall stand forever.”

When their baptizing was over, drenched and exhausted, Ella and La Ruth climbed back up onto the beach, dragging behind them Stonewall and Doris, who still hadn’t found her mother. They walked up the sand a bit, to the camp tables beneath the trestle, and here they sat down. Ella still trembled with the fever of the ritual, remembered the bubbles, the salt water in her nose as she went under—yet, more than this, half-swooning when he smiled at her, as her place came in line, and the divine delight of the touch, on her turban, of his hands. She squeezed the water from her robe and then nibbled on a piece of fried chicken. She shivered with the cold and the memory of his hands. “Dat was sho’ some immersion,” she said.

La Ruth didn’t answer. She had her face in a piece of watermelon.

“Gret day, dat was an immersion,” Ella said again.

Sister Adelphia and Brother Andrew joined them, together with a light young girl who seemed to be Doris’ mother. She snatched Doris up from a sandpile, where she had been playing with Stonewall.

“Runnin’ off like dat!” She slapped the child and then, when she began to scream, kissed her until she became quiet. “Crazy little fool,” she crooned, half-sobbing herself, “runnin’ off from me. I thought you was drowned.” Then she said, “Thank you, Sister,” to Ella, and vanished with Doris up the beach.

Sister Adelphia crushed out the water from her robe and sat down on the bench next to Ella with a bottle of Seven-Up. “Whoo-ee, Sister, I seen ’em all now.”

“Amen!” said Brother Andrew.

“Dat was
one,
all right,” said Ella. “It was in dis world.” All sins washed away, her warfare accomplished, her iniquity pardoned, beneath the touch of his hands, in the flooding seas.

La Ruth let the melon rind drop from her fingers and began to moan. “I don’t know,” she said, “comin’ around to thinkin’ about all dat time an’ ev’ything, po’ Peyton, po’ little Peyton. Gone! Gone!” She thrust her head in her hands and spread out her legs, snuffling into the wet sleeves of her robe. “God knows, I don’t know …”

Sister Adelphia sniffed scornfully, rattling her beads. “Ain’t you been baptized, Sister?” she said.

Twilight fell around them; the evening became sprinkled with stars. Far off the band tooted triumphantly, around the illuminated love-lamps, amid the flare of blossoming torches. Ella thought of the touch of his hands, the sin-destroying seas. The spell was still on her, and she got up. “Yes, Jesus,” she said in a soft voice.

“Dat’s right, Sister,” said Sister Adelphia, clapping her hands together.

“Yes, Jesus!” Ella said again, louder. She began to shake all over. “I seen Him!”

“Amen!” said Brother Andrew.

“I seen Him!”

In the distance a train rumbled, approached the trestle, setting saucers in a rattle on the table. Ella whirled about in the sand, a black finger upraised to the sky. “Yes, Jesus! I seen Him! Yeah! Yeah!” The train roared, trembled, came nearer. It was a ferocious noise. Stonewall stuck his fingers in his ears; the others turned their faces toward the sea. “Yes, Jesus! Yeah! Yeah!” The voice was almost drowned out. The train came on with a clatter, shaking the trestle, and its whistle went off full-blast in a spreading plume of steam. “Yeah! Yeah!” Another blast from the whistle, a roar, a gigantic sound; and it seemed to soar into the dusk beyond and above them forever, with a noise, perhaps, like the clatter of the opening of ever-lasting gates and doors—passed swiftly on—toward Richmond, the North, the oncoming night.

A Biography of William Styron

W
illiam Styron was born on June 11, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia, to W.C. and Pauline Styron. He was one of the preeminent American authors of his generation. His works, which include the bestseller
Sophie’s Choice
(1979) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning
The Confessions of Nat Turner
(1967), garnered broad acclaim for their elegant prose and insights into human psychology. Styron’s fiction and nonfiction writings draw heavily from the events of his life, including his Southern upbringing, his mother’s death from cancer in 1939, his family history of slave ownership, and his experience as a United States marine.

Growing up, Styron was an average student with a rebellious streak, but his unique literary talent was markedly apparent from a young age. After high school, he attended Davidson College in Charlotte, North Carolina, for a year in the reserve officer training program before transferring to Duke University, where he worked on his B.A. in literature. Styron was called up into the marines after just four terms at Duke, but World War II ended while he was in San Francisco awaiting deployment to the Pacific, just before the planned invasion of Japan. He then finished his studies and moved to New York City, taking a job in the editorial department of the publisher McGraw-Hill.

W.C.’s recognition of his son’s potential was crucial to Styron’s development as a writer, especially as W.C., an engineer at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, provided financial support while his son wrote his first novel,
Lie Down in Darkness
(1951). Published when Styron was twenty-six years old,
Lie Down in Darkness
was a critical and commercial success, and the culmination of years spent perfecting his manuscript. Shortly after the book’s publication, however, Styron was recalled to military service as a reservist during the Korean War. His experience at a training camp in North Carolina later became the source material for his anti-war novella
The Long March
(1953), which Norman Mailer proclaimed “as good an eighty pages as any American has written since the war, and I really think it’s much more than that.”

Starting in 1952, after his service in the reserves, Styron lived in Europe for two years, where he was a founding member, with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, of
The Paris Review
. He also met and married his wife, Rose, with whom he went on to have four children. Styron’s second major novel,
Set This House on Fire
(1960), drew upon his time in Europe. He spent years preparing and writing the subsequent novel,
The Confessions of Nat Turner
(1967), which became his most celebrated—and most controversial—work. Published at the height of the civil rights movement, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize and was hailed as a complex and sympathetic portrait of Turner, though it was criticized by some who objected to a white author interpreting the thoughts and actions of the black leader of a slave revolt. Styron followed with another bestseller,
Sophie’s Choice
(1979), the winner of the 1980 National Book Award. The novel, which was made into an Academy Award-winning film of the same name, borrowed from Styron’s experience at McGraw-Hill as well as his interest in the psychological links between the Holocaust and American slavery.

In 1982, Styron published his first compilation of essays,
This Quiet Dust
. Three years later he was beset by a deep clinical depression, which he wrote about in his acclaimed memoir
Darkness Visible
(1990). The book traces his journey from near-suicide to recovery. His next book,
A Tidewater Morning
(1993), was perhaps his most autobiographical work of fiction. It recalled three stories of the fictional Paul Whitehurst, one of which depicted Whitehurst’s mother’s death when he was a young boy, an event that mirrored Pauline Styron’s death when Styron was thirteen years old. The book was Styron’s last major work of fiction. He spent the remainder of his life with Rose, writing letters and dividing his time between Roxbury, Connecticut, and Martha’s Vineyard. William Styron died of pneumonia on November 1, 2006.

William Styron in 1926 at ten months old. He was an only child, born in a seaside hospital in Newport News, Virginia. As an adult, Styron would describe his childhood as happy, secure, and relatively uneventful.

The Elizabeth Buxton Hospital in Newport News, Virginia, in 1927, two years after William Styron’s birth. Styron was born on the second floor, delivered by Dr. Joseph T. Buxton, whose daughter, Elizabeth, would become Styron’s stepmother in 1941.

The house where Styron grew up, in Newport News, Virginia, and where he lived with his family from 1925 until he was fifteen. Styron’s youth in Newport News instilled in him a sense of the tangibility of history that would later form the bedrock of many of his novels.

The photo from Styron’s sophomore-year high school yearbook, taken in 1939. He did poorly in school that year, earning mostly Cs and Ds and getting in trouble for disobedience. His father sent him to Christchurch boarding school in Virginia in 1940 to finish his last two years of high school, hoping the change would make Styron more focused and disciplined.