William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (161 page)

But even as I watched him I heard him suddenly exclaim: “Ha!” Then he paused and said: “Ha! Ha! Jesus bloody Christ! Come out and say it!” And then I realized that despite his yawns and rude noises, he was listening to Dr. Ballard and so then I too turned and gazed at the minister, who was explaining: “—and so the Bishop is marking time, as he says. We are at the crossroads—that is the Bishop’s own expression—we are at the crossroads, marking time, awaiting some
providential wind
to guide us in the right direction. The Bishop is so gifted in his choice of expressions. At any rate, he is aware that the Church all too soon must make some decision. Meanwhile, as his visitants, we are able to send him reassuring news as to the condition of the slaves on at least
one
plantation.” He paused, with the bleak and wintry suggestion of a smile.

“It will be so reassuring for the Bishop,” said the younger minister. “He will be interested, too, in knowing your general views.”

“General views?” Marse Samuel inquired.

“General views on the institution itself,” Dr. Ballard explained. “He is greatly concerned to know the general views held by—how shall we say it?—the more
prosperous
landowners of the diocese.”

For a long moment Marse Samuel was silent, his face drawn and reflective as he sucked at a long clay pipe. It was becoming dark. A mild gust of wind, feather-light upon my own brow, sent an oily curl of smoke across the veranda. In the distant swamp, frogs sang and throbbed in a wild, passionate monotone. Little Morning approached Dr. Ballard with a silver tray balanced on the tips of black fingers. “Is you gwine have some mo’ port wine, mastah?” I heard him ask.

Still Marse Samuel remained silent, then finally he said in a slow and measured voice: “Doctor, I will be as direct with you as I can. I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the source of all our misery, individual, political, and economic. It is the greatest curse a supposedly free and enlightened society has been saddled with in modern times, or any other time. I am not, as you may have perceived, the most religious of men, yet I am not without faith and I pray nightly for the miracle, for the divine guidance which will somehow show us the way out of this terrible condition. It is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed. They must be educated! To free these people without education and with the prejudice that presently exists against them would be a ghastly crime.”

Dr. Ballard did not immediately answer, but when he did his voice was detached and indistinct. “How interesting,” he murmured.

“Fascinating,” said the other minister, sounding even more far away.

Suddenly Benjamin lurched erect from his chair and walked to the far edge of the veranda. There in the shadows, unfastening himself, he commenced to piss into a rosebush. I could hear the noise of a lordly stream of water, urgent, uninterrupted, a plashing cascade upon leaf and thorn and vine, and now Benjamin’s voice above the spatter: “Oh, my beloved brother! Oh, my brother’s bleeding heart! What a trial, what a tribulation to dwell with such a saint, who would try to alter the mechanism of history! A
saint
he is, reverend visitants! You are in the presence of a living, breathing saint! Yas!”

Dr. Ballard blushed, murmuring something I could not understand. Watching from behind the smudge pot, I was suddenly tickled and I had to smother my amusement behind my hand. For the minister, in a desperate fidget, was obviously unaccustomed to conversing with anyone who was in the process of taking a piss, which Benjamin did without a flicker of a thought and in the most public way whenever he drank in the company of men. Yet now Dr. Ballard, though agitated, had to pay even more deference to Benjamin than he did to Marse Samuel, for distant and apart as Benjamin may have been this evening he was still the older brother and the plantation’s titled owner. I watched joyfully as the minister’s lips became puckered and bloodless, bespectacled eyes gazing in wild discomfort at Benjamin’s back. Suddenly the torrent ceased and Benjamin wheeled about, languidly lacing up his fly. Weaving a little, he crossed the porch, drawing near Marse Samuel and letting his hand fall upon the back of his brother’s neck; as he did so, Marse Samuel glanced up at him with a sour-sweet look, rueful, glum, yet touched with quiet affection. Although they were so dissimilar as to seem born of different families, even the most unobservant house servant was aware of the strong bond between them. They had quarreled many times in the past in their fraternal and peaceable way, seeming oblivious of all eavesdropping (or more likely they did not care) and many a black servant gliding around the dinner table had divined enough of their talk to know where each brother stood, philosophically, at least about his body if not his soul.

“My brother is as sentimental as an old she-hound, Doctor,” Benjamin said in an amiable voice. “He believes the slaves are capable of all kinds of improvement. That you can take a bunch of darkies and turn them into shopowners and sea captains and opera impresarios and army generals and Christ knows what all. I say differently. I do not believe in beating a darky. I do not believe, either, in beating a dog or a horse. If you wish my belief to take back to the Bishop, you can tell him that my belief is that a darky is an animal with the brain of a human child and his only value is the work you can get out of him by intimidation, cajolery, and threat.”

“I see,” Dr. Ballard murmured, “yes, I see what you mean.” The minister was paying Benjamin close attention, with a squint-eyed look yet still very deferential. “Yes, I do see clearly what you mean.”

“Like my sentimental and most gentle-hearted brother,” Benjamin continued, “I am against the institution of slavery too. I wish to Jesus it had never come to these shores. If there was some kind of steam engine you could invent to plant corn or cut timber, another to pull suckers, another fine machine to set out in the field and chop tobacco, still another big grand machine to come chugging through the house, lighting the lamps and setting the rooms in order—”

There was an attentive burst of laughter from the two ministers, the younger one tittering behind his fingers while Dr. Ballard made small chuckles and Benjamin himself continued, appreciatively grinning, with one hand resting friendly and familiar on his brother’s shoulder. Still the sour-sweet expression lingered on Marse Samuel’s face and the faintest outline of a sheepish little smile. “Or a machine, I fancy,” Benjamin went on, “that when the mistress of the household prepared herself for an afternoon’s outing, would harness up the mare and bring Old Dolly and the gig around to the front entrance, and then with its strange mechanism set the lady down on one seat and itself on another and prod Old Dolly into a happy canter through the woods and fields— Invent a machine like that, I vow, invent a machine like that, furthermore, that won’t eat you out of house and home, that won’t lie and cheat and thieve you blind, that is efficient instead of being a paragon of blockheadedness and sheer stupidity, that you can lock away at dark in its shed like a pumping engine or a spinning jenny without fear that this machine is going to get up in the dead of night and make off with a prize goose or your fattest Guinea shoat and that when this machine is worn out and beyond its usefulness, you can discard it and buy another instead of being cursed with a no-account old body that conscience dictates you’ve still got to supply with shoes and molasses and a peck of corn a week until the age of ninety-five— Hey! Invent a machine like any of these, gentlemen, and I will say a happy adieu to slavery the moment I can lay my hands on the likes of such a mechanism!” He paused for a moment, taking a swallow from his tumbler, then he said: “Needless to say, I do not see in the near future the possibility of such a machine eventuating.”

There was a brief spell of silence among the company. Dr. Ballard continued to chuckle faintly. Miss Elizabeth had ceased singing, and now in the deep shadows of evening I could hear only the whine of mosquitoes at bay beyond the cloud of dark smoke, and nearby the soft insistent cooing of a mourning dove, a dull fretful sigh—
weehoo-hoo-hoo
—like a sleepy child in pain. Dr. Ballard crossed his legs abruptly, then said: “Well, from the general tenor of your remarks, Mr. Turner, I presume—well, how shall I say it?—I presume that you feel that the institution of slavery is—well, something we must
accept.
Would that be a proper interpretation of your remarks?” When Benjamin failed to reply immediately, still gazing down with a crooked bemused smile at Marse Samuel, the minister went on: “And would it also be accurate to discern in what you have just said a conviction that perhaps the Negro lags so far behind the rest of us—I mean, the white race—in
moral
development that, well, for his own welfare it might be best that he—well, be kept in a kind of benevolent subjection? I mean, is it not possible that slavery is perhaps—how shall we say?—the most
satisfactory
form of existence for such a people?” He paused, then said:
“Cursed be Canaan. A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
Genesis, ninth chapter, twenty-fifth verse. Certainly the Bishop is not completely disinclined to take this viewpoint. I myself—”

But he hesitated, falling silent then, and the whole veranda was quiet, disturbed only by the creaking of chairs. As if his mind for a moment had wandered far away, Benjamin stood there and made no reply, gazing gently down at Marse Samuel, who sat very still in the gathering dark, calmly chewing on his pipe but with a woebegone expression, strained and pinched. He made a movement with his lips, thought better of it, said nothing.

Then Benjamin looked up and said: “You take a little slave like that one there—” And it was an instant before I realized he was speaking of me. He made a gesture toward me with his hand, turning about, and as he did so the others turned too and suddenly I could feel their eyes upon me in the fading light.
Nigger, Negro, darky,
yes—but I had never heard myself called a
slave
before. I remember moving uneasily beneath their silent, contemplative gaze and I felt awkward and naked, stripped down to bare black flesh, and a wicked chill like cold water filled the hollow of my gut as the thought crashed in upon me: Yes,
I am a slave.

“You take a little slave like that one there,” Benjamin went on, “my brother here thinks he can take a little slave like that and
educate
him, teach him writing and arithmetic and drawing and so on, expose him to the masterpieces of Walter Scott, pour on the Bible study, and in general raise him up with all the amenities of learning. Gentlemen, I ask you, in all seriousness, ain’t that a
whangdoodle
of a notion?”

“Yaanh-s,” said Dr. Ballard. The “yes” was a thin whickering sound high in the nose, vaguely distant and amused,
yaanh-s.

“Although, gentlemen, I do not doubt that given my brother’s belief in colonization and emancipation and his faith in education and God knows what all, given his passion to prove that a darky has the native gifts granted to the average college professor, he could take a little slave like that one there and teach him the alphabet and his sums and the outlines of geography and right before your eyes you’d think his case was proved. But, gentlemen, let me tell you, my brother does not know darkies like I do. Either that or his saintly belief in reform prevents him from seeing the truth. For, gentlemen, I know better, I know darkies better. I’ll swear to you that if you show me a little darky whom you’ve taught to read the complete works of Julius Caesar forward and backward in the original Latin tongue, I will show you a darky who is
still
an animal with the brain of a human child that will never get wise nor learn honesty nor acquire any human ethics though that darky live to a ripe old age. A darky, gentlemen, is basically as unteachable as a chicken, and that is the simple fact of the matter.” He halted, then slowly yawned: “Ah, time for bed!”

The ministers and Marse Samuel rose, murmurously chatting, but now as night fell and the bright globe of a full moon rose radiant above the distant woods, I felt Little Morning squeeze me hard on the flesh of my arm, a signal, and I ceased listening to anyone talk, turning to help the old man carry bottles and glasses from the veranda, dousing the smudge pot with sprinkled water, busying myself with a mop against the planks of the pine floor. The chill in my bones would not leave nor was I able for a long time to banish from my mind the thought which hung there as if written on a banner:
I am a slave.
After some minutes, returning from the pantry, I saw that Benjamin had disappeared, and then I spied Marse Samuel lingering alone at the edge of the veranda. He leaned with one hand propped against the railing and his eyes seemed to follow the two ministers as they made their slow way, black against a blacker black, into the shadows of the night. “God watch over your dreams, Mr. Turner!” the younger one called in a tone girlish and clear.

“And your dreams too,” Marse Samuel replied, but his voice was the thinnest murmur and they could not have heard it. Then he was gone from the veranda and I stood suddenly afraid, listening to Little Morning all agrumble, in gloomy discussion with himself as he limped stiffly among the chairs. A fragrance of tobacco smoke still hung sweetly on the hot still air. For a moment the two ministers, groping their way across the lawn toward the wing of the house, were illumined in a shaft of moonlight, then they vanished for good among the shadows, while the moon itself, rising behind a black frieze of sycamore trees thick with summer leaves, was suddenly obscured, pitching house and lawn into smothering darkness.
Well, I am a slave,
I thought, and I shivered in the windless, sultry night which seemed—just for an instant—to surround me cold and treacherous and, more somberly, beyond the hope of ending, as if its long ticking course through the hours might lead only to a deeper darkness, without waking, without green glimmerings of dawn or the sound of cockcrow.