William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (144 page)

Through the window I watched the curled and golden sifting of sycamore leaves. The immobility in which I had sat for so many hours had caused oblong shadowy images to flutter across the margin of my consciousness like the dim beginning of hallucinations. I began to get these mixed up with the leaves. I didn’t reply to his question, finally saying only: “Did you say there was a trial for the others?”

“Trial?” he said. “Trials, you mean. Hell, we had a million trials. Had a trial pretty near every day. September and this past month, we had trials runnin’ out our ears.”

“But trials? Then you mean—” An image came to mind like an explosion of light: myself, the day before, hurried toward Jerusalem along the road from Cross Keys, the booted feet thudding into my back and behind and spine and the fierce sting of the hatpins in my shoulders, the blurred infuriated faces and the dust in my eyes and the gobs of their spit stringing from my nose and cheek and neck (even now I could feel it on my face like an enormous scab, dried and encrusted), and, above all, one anonymous wild voice high and hysterical over the furious uproar: “Burn him! Burn him! Burn the black devil right here!” And through the six-hour stumbling march my own listless hope and wonder, curiously commingled: I wish they would get it over with, but whatever it is they’re going to do, burn me, hang me, put out my eyes, why don’t they get it over with right now? But they had done nothing. Their spit seemed everlasting, its sourness a part of me. But save for this and the kicks and the hatpins, I had come out unharmed, wondrously so, thinking even as they chained me up and hurled me into this cell: The Lord is preparing for me a special salvation. Either that, or they are working up to some exquisite retribution quite beyond my power of comprehension. But no. I was the key to the riddle, and was to be tried. As for the rest—the other Negroes, as for
their
trials—suddenly as I gazed back at Gray it became more or less clear. “Then it was to separate the wheat from the chaff,” I said.

“Bien sure, as the Frenchies put it. You couldn’t be more correct. Also you might say it was to protect the rights of property.”

“Rights of property?” I said.

“Bien sure again,” he replied. “You might say it was a combination of both.” He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and drew out a fresh plug of dark brown tobacco, examined it between the tips of his fingers, then gnawed off a cheekful. “Offer you a chaw,” he said after a moment, “except I imagine a man of the cloth like you don’t indulge in Lady Nicotine. Very good idea too, rot the tongue right out of your head. No, I’ll tell you somethin’, Nat, and that somethin’ is this. Speakin’ as a lawyer—indeed, speakin’ as
your
lawyer, which to some degree I am—it’s my duty to point out a few jurisprudential details which it might be a good idea to tuck under your bonnet. Now, of two items, item in the first part is this. Namely: rights of property.”

I stared at him, saying nothing.

“Allow me to put it crudely. Take a dog, which is a kind of a chattel. No, first take a wagon—I want to evolve this analogy by logical degrees. Now let’s take some farmer who’s got a wagon—a common, ordinary dray wagon—and he’s got it out in the fields somewhere. Now, this farmer has loaded up this wagon with corn shucks or hay or firewood or somethin’ and he’s got it restin’ on a kind of slope. Well, this here is a rickety old wagon and all of a sudden without him knowin’ it the brake gives way. Pretty soon that old wagon is careerin’ off down the road and across hill and dale and before you can say John Henry—
kerblam!
—it fetches up against the porch of a house, and there’s a little girl peaceably settin’ on the porch—and
kerblam!
the wagon plows right on across the porch and the poor little girl is mashed to death beneath the wagon wheels right before her stricken mother’s eyes. Matter of fact, I heard of this very thing happenin’ not long ago, somewhere up in Dinwiddie. Well, there’s a lot of boo-hooin’ around, and a funeral, and so on, but pretty soon thoughts inevitably turn back to that old wagon. How come it happened? How come little Clarinda got mashed to death by that old wagon? Who’s responsible for such a horrible dereliction? Well, who do you think’s responsible?”

This last question was addressed to me, but I didn’t choose to answer. Perhaps it was boredom or exasperation or exhaustion, or all three. At any rate, I didn’t reply, watching him shift the quid in his jaws, then send a coppery jet of tobacco juice to the floor between our feet.

“I’ll tell you what,” he went on. “I’ll tell you where responsibility lies. Responsibility lies clean and square with the farmer. Because a wagon is an
in-an-i-mate
chattel. A wagon can’t be held culpable for its acts. You can’t punish that old wagon, you can’t take it and rip it apart and throw it on a fire and say: ’There, that’ll teach you, you miserable misbegotten wagon!’ No, responsibility lies with the unfortunate
owner
of the wagon. It’s
him
that’s got to pay the piper, it’s
him
that’s got to stand for whatever damages the court adjudicates against him—for the demolished porch and the deceased little girl’s funeral expenses, plus possibly whatever punitive compensation the court sees fit to award. Then, poor bugger, if he’s got any money left, he fixes the brake on the wagon and goes back and minds his land—a sadder but a wiser man. Do you follow me?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s clear.”

“Well then, now we come to the heart of the matter—which is to say,
an-i-mate
chattel. Now, animate chattel poses a particularly tricky and subtle jurisprudential problem when it comes to adjudicating damages for loss of life and destruction of property. I need not say that the problem becomes
surpassin’
tricky and subtle in a case like that of you and your cohorts, whose crimes are unprecedented in the annals of this nation—and tried in an atmosphere, I might add, where the public passions are somewhat, uh, inflamed to say the least. What’re you fidgetin’ for?”

“It’s my shoulders,” I said. “I’d be mighty grateful if you could get them to ease off these chains. My shoulders pain something fierce.”

“I told you I’d have them take care of that.” His voice was impatient. “I’m a man of my word, Reverend. But to get back to chattel, there are both similarities and differences between animate chattel and a wagon. The major and manifest
similarity
is, of course, that animate chattel
is
property like a wagon and is regarded as such in the eyes of the law. By the same token—am I speakin’ too complex for you?”

“No sir,” I said.

“By the same token, the major and manifest
difference
is that animate chattel, unlike inanimate chattel such as a wagon,
can
commit and may be tried for a felony, the owner being absolved of responsibility in the eyes of the law. I don’t know if this seems a contradiction to you. Does it?”

“A what?” I said.

“Contradiction.” He paused. “I guess you don’t comprehend.”

“Oh yes.” Actually, I simply hadn’t heard the word.

“Contradiction. That means two things that mean one and the same thing at the same time. I reckon I shouldn’t be quite so complex.”

I didn’t reply again. There was something about the tone of his voice alone—the wad of tobacco had thickened it, making it sound moist and blubbery—that had begun to grate on my nerves.

“Well, nem’mine that,” he went on, “I ain’t even goin’ to explain it. You’ll hear all about it in court. The point is that
you
are
animate
chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth. You ain’t a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that’s how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that’s how come you’re goin’ to be tried next Sattidy.”

He paused, then said softly without emotion : “And hung by the neck until dead.”

For a moment, as if temporarily spent, Gray took a deep breath and eased himself back away from me against the wall. I could hear his heavy breathing and the juicy sound his chewing made as he regarded me through amiable, heavylidded eyes. For the first time I was aware of the discolored blotches on his flushed face—faint reddish-brown patches the same as I had seen once on a brandy-drinking white man in Cross Keys who had rapidly fallen dead with his liver swollen to the size of a middling watermelon. I wondered if this strange lawyer of mine suffered from the same affliction. Sluggish autumnal flies filled the cell, stitching the air with soft erratic buzzings as they zigzagged across the golden light, mooned sedulously over the slop bucket, crept in nervous pairs across Gray’s stained pink gloves, his waistcoat, and his pudgy hands now motionless on his knees. I watched the leaves merging with the shadow shapes swooping and fluttering at the edge of my mind. The desire to scratch, to move my shoulders had become a kind of hopeless, carnal obsession, like a species of lust, and the last of Gray’s words seemed now to have made only the most dim, grotesque impression on my brain, the quintessence of white folks’ talk I had heard incessantly all my life and which I could only compare to talk in one of my nightmares, totally implausible yet somehow wholly and fearfully real, where owls in the woods are quoting price lists like a storekeeper, or a wild hog comes prancing on its hind legs out of a summer cornfield, intoning verses from Deuteronomy. I looked steadily at Gray, thinking that he was no better, no worse—like most white men he had a lively runaway mouth—and Scripture leaped to my mind like a banner:
He multiplieth words without knowledge, whoso keepeth his tongue keepeth his soul.
But finally I said again only: “It was to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

“Or, to switch around the parable,” he replied, “to separate the chaff from the wheat. But in principle you’re dead right, Nat. Point is this: some of the niggers, like yourself, were up to their eyes in this mess, guilty as sin itself with nothin’ to mitigate their guilt whatsoever. Pack of the other niggers, however—and I guess I don’t have to
drive home
this melancholic fact to you—was either youngly and innocently dragooned or mere tagalongs or they out-and-out
balked
at this crazy scheme of your’n. It was the owners of
them
niggers these assizes were designed to protect …”

He was still talking now, and as he talked he removed a sheet of paper from his pocket, but I was no longer listening, attending rather to a sudden miserable, corrosive bitterness in my heart which had nothing at all to do with this jail or the chains or my aching discomfort or that mystifying, lonesome apartness from God which was still a bitterness almost impossible to bear. Right now I had this other bitterness to contend with, the knowledge which for ten weeks I had so sedulously shunned, buried in the innermost recesses of my mind, and which Gray had casually fetched up ugly and wriggling right before my eyes:
them other niggers, dragooned, balked.
I think I must have made a quick choked noise of distress in the back of my throat, or perhaps he only sensed this new anguish, for he looked up at me, his eyes narrowing again, and said: “It was them other niggers that cooked your goose, Reverend. That’s where you made your fatal error. Them others. You could not dream of what went on in their philosophy—” And for a moment I thought he was going to continue, to elaborate and embellish this idea, but instead now he had flattened the paper against the plank and was bending down above it, flattening and smoothing the document as he went on in his bland, offhand garrulous way: “So like I say, you can get a good idea from this list how little chaff there was amongst all that wheat. Now listen—Jack, property of Nathaniel Simmons. Acquitted.” He slanted an eye up at me—a questioning eye—but I didn’t respond.

“Stephen,” he went on, “property of James Bell, acquitted. Shadrach, property of Nathaniel Simmons, acquitted. Jim, property of William Vaughan, acquitted. Daniel, property of Solomon D. Parker, discharged without trial. Ferry and Archer, property of J. W. Parker, ditto. Arnold and Artist, free niggers, ditto. Matt, property of Thomas Ridley, acquitted. Jim, property of Richard Porter, ditto. Nelson, property of Benjamin Blunt’s estate, ditto. Sam, property of J. W. Parker, ditto. Hubbard, property of Catherine Whitehead, discharged without trial … Hell, I could go on and on, but I won’t.” He peered up at me again, with a knowing, significant glance. “If that don’t prove that these trials were fair and square right down the line, I’d like to know what does.”

I hesitated, then spoke. “All it proves to me is that—a certain observance. The rights of property, like you done already pointed out.”

“Now wait a minute, Reverend,” he retorted.
“Wait
a minute! I want to advise you not to
get impudent
with me. I still say it proves we run a fair series of trials, and I don’t need none of your lip to show me the contrary. You set here givin’ me a line of your black lip like that and you’ll wind up draggin’ more iron ruther than less.” The idea of even more restraint being unsettling to me, I immediately regretted my words. It was the first time Gray had shown any hostility, and it didn’t rest too well on his face, causing his lower lip to sag and a trickle of brown juice to leak from one corner of his jaws. Almost instantly, though, he had composed himself, wiped his mouth, and his manner again became conversational, casual, even friendly. Somewhere outside the cell, somewhere distant beneath the sparse November trees, I could hear a prolonged shrill woman’s cry, uttering jubilant words of which only one I could understand: my own name,
N-a-a-t,
the single syllable stretched out endlessly like the braying of a mule across the tumult and the hubbub and the liquid rushing of many voices. “Sixty-odd culprits in all,” Gray was saying. “Out of sixty, a couple dozen acquitted or discharged, another fifteen or so convicted but transported. Only fifteen hung—plus you and that other nigger, Hark,
to be
hung—seventeen hung in all. In other words, out of this whole catastrophic ruction only round one-fourth gets the rope. Dad-burned mealy-mouthed abolitionists say we don’t show justice. Well, we do. Justice! That’s how come nigger slavery’s going to last a thousand years.”