William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (163 page)

I suspect that it was a kind of loneliness, together with the fact that I had an amount of leisure not granted to many other slaves, which helped cause me at this time so zealously to precipitate myself into a study of the Bible, where I acquired—even at that early age—such a reverence and a sense of majesty in the presence of the Psalms and in the teachings of the great Prophets that I resolved that no matter where my destiny took me, no matter what humdrum tasks befell my lot in later years, I would become first and foremost a preacher of the Word. At Christmas time one year Miss Nell made me a gift of a Bible—one of several left at Turner’s Mill by an itinerant messenger of the Bible Society in Richmond. “Heed this good book, Nathaniel,” she said in her soft and distant voice, “and happiness shall attend you wherever you go.” I will never forget my excitement as she pressed the brown leather-covered Bible into my hands. Surely at that moment I must have been (though all unaware) the only black boy in Virginia who possessed a book.

My joy was so great that I became dizzy, and I began to tremble and sweat, though windy drafts swept through the house and the day was bitterly cold. I was overtaken by such a bewildering emotion that I could not even thank the good lady, but merely turned and went to my little room, where I sat on the corn-shuck tick in the slanting icicle light of Christmas afternoon, quite unable to lift the cover and look at the pages. I recall the scent of cedar logs burning in the kitchen beyond the wall behind me, and the kitchen warmth stealing through the cracks of the timbers at my back. I recall too the echo of the spinet piano dimly tinkling far off in the great hall of the house and the sound of white people’s voices lifted in song—
Joy to the world! the Lord is come
—while with the Bible still clutched unopened in my hands I gazed through a warped and crinkled isinglass windowpane to the sere wind-swept slope outside: there a mob of Negroes from the cabins was trooping toward the house. Muffled up against the cold in the coarse and shapeless yet decent winter garments Marse Samuel provided for them, they straggled along in a single line, men, women, pickaninnies, prepared to receive
their
gifts—a beanbag or a hunk of rock candy for the children, a yard of calico for the women, a plug of tobacco or a cheap jackknife for the men. They were a disheveled, ragged lot, and as they clumped past on the frozen ground near the window I could hear the babble of their voices, filled with Christmas anticipation, laughter high and heedless, and loutish nigger cheer. The sight of them suddenly touched me with a loathing so intense that it was akin to disgust, belly-sickness, and I turned my eyes away, throwing open the Bible at last to a passage whose meaning was lost on me then entirely but which I never forgot and now in the light of all that has since come to pass shimmers in my memory like a transfiguration:
I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I
will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction
…

Except for Marse Samuel and Miss Nell (and that single fleeting recollection of Brother Benjamin), there is little enough I seem to be able to remember about the Turner family. Miss Elizabeth—Benjamin’s widow—remains but a shadow in my mind; a bony, weepy-looking, raw-elbowed woman, she sang hopefully in a quavering voice and whenever I try to conjure her up in memory it is mainly the voice that lingers—disembodied, pining, frail as a reed, a fluty desiccated Anglo-Saxon whine. She was tuberculous, and since her ailment required her to be often on the coast near Norfolk, where it was thought by the doctors that the damp salt air was curative, I saw her infrequently and then only from afar.

Benjamin’s two sons had both studied something called Progressive Agronomy at the College of William & Mary, and soon after his father’s death the older son, Willoughby, removed himself and his bride to a smaller dwelling at the lower, thickly wooded edge of the plantation; from this house, called the New Retreat, he supervised as his father had before him the logging and timber-cutting operations of the Turner enterprise, and so him too I rarely encountered or had any dealings with.

The other agronomist, Lewis, who was a bachelor—ruddy-faced and stocky and about thirty—shared with his uncle in the management of the plantation and in effect had become the general overseer upon the abrupt departure of the inebriate McBride, whom Marse Samuel eventually fired for his lecherous ways. (I have no idea whether Marse Samuel ever learned of the Irishman’s encounter with my mother although I’m fairly certain that the man, perhaps daunted by her basic unwillingness, never dared to approach her again. Whatever, it is testimony I believe to Marse Samuel’s tolerance and patience—and is perhaps too a measure of something touchingly ingenuous in his nature—that he not only put up with McBride’s drunkenness long beyond the point when another gentleman planter would have sent him packing, but became aware of his proclivity to Negro women a full two years after everyone else on the place had noted the marvel of at least three little slaves born with a palish cast, light curly hair, and a long fat Irish lip.) Lewis was an easygoing master (though I do not believe overly bright; he made errors in his speech which I in my young black wisdom secretly sneered at), and he tended to follow his uncle’s guidance in most practical matters including the handling of Negroes, and in his treatment of those who came within his purview was more or less fair and good-humored, which is all that any slave could ask. When he was not at work he seemed to be most of the time out in the woods on horseback or shooting birds in the meadows, and thus stayed pretty much apart from the Negroes and such private affairs as they might be said (with a stretch of the imagination) to have.

Of the Turners, then, there remains only to speak of Marse Samuel’s two daughters, Miss Louisa and Miss Emmeline. The older girl, Miss Louisa, aided her mother in my earliest instruction, as I have already recounted; and the swift, assured way in which I learned to read and spell and do my sums gives me reason to believe that she was an excellent teacher. But our relationship in the end was so shortlived that it is hard for me to summon up an image of her. When I was around fourteen she got married to a young land speculator from Kentucky and moved away with him forever, leaving my tutelage completely in the hands of my protectress, her Scripture-beset mother.

Miss Emmeline was the last, the youngest. At the time I am speaking of she was twenty-five, perhaps a little more, and I worshiped her—from a great distance, of course—with the chaste, evangelical passion that could only be nurtured in the innocent heart of a boy like myself, reared in surroundings where women (at least white ladies) seemed to float like bubbles in an immaculate effulgence of purity and perfection. With her lustrous rich auburn hair parted at the center and her dark intelligent eyes and the sweet gravity of her mouth which lent to her face such an air of noble calm, she would have been a great beauty even in a society far removed from this backwater, where work and isolation and the weather tended quickly to harshen a white mistress’s charms. Perhaps city life had had something to do with this, since after attending the female seminary nearby in Lawrenceville she had gone north to Baltimore, and there she had spent several years in the home of a maternal aunt. During that time she had fallen victim (or so it was rumored—and so it was bruited about the kitchen by Prissy or Little Morning or one of the house servants, all of them by training chronic snoops) of an unhappy love affair—so grievous that it had threatened a physical decline—and thus Marse Samuel had summoned her home, where she now helped Miss Nell in the management of the household. Eventually it seemed that her spirits were restored, and she fell without strain into the routine of a young plantation mistress, attending to the ill and the feeble in the cabins, laying up preserves and making fruit cakes, and in the spring and summer taking care of the cultivation of a large vegetable garden not far from the carpenter’s shop.

The vegetable garden was her particular devotion; she planted by herself all the seeds and seedlings, and for hours on end, her head sheltered by an enormous straw hat, she would labor side by side with the two small Negro girls who were her assistants, plucking weeds beneath the hot summer sun. Working in the carpenter’s shop, I would often raise my eyes and watch her secretly, bewitched, suddenly short of breath, yearning with a kind of raw hunger for that moment which I knew was about to arrive, and did—that moment when, pausing to look upward at the sky, she let her fair and slender fingers pass lightly over her damp brow, all the while remaining motionless upon her knees, the eyes gently reflective, her teeth glinting through lightly parted lips, a vein throbbing at her temple while she offered me quite unawares the rare glimpse, face to face, of her pure, proud, astonishing smooth-skinned beauty.

Yet my passion for her was virginal, miserably and obscurely connected with my own religious strivings. I believed in purity and goodness, and there was something about her total beauty—a sadness, but a restless and lonely independence of manner, a proud serenity about the way in which she moved—which was pure and good in itself, like the disembodied, transparent beauty of an imagined angel. In later life, of course, I learned that such an infatuation for a beautiful white mistress on the part of a black boy was not at all uncommon, despite the possibility of danger, but at the time my adoration of her seemed to me eerie, unique, and almost insupportable, as if I had been afflicted at the roots of my soul by some divine sickness. I do not believe that during this year-long period of my worship she spoke ten words to me and I dared say nothing to her except to breathe once or twice a queasy “Yessum” or “No’m” to some casual question. Since I no longer worked in the house our paths crossed seldom, and I only asked the Lord that I be allowed sight of her once or twice a day. Naturally she had been aware for a number of years of my unusual standing as a privileged young servant, but her mind was on anything but a nigger boy and although her manner toward me was not unkindly she seemed only faintly conscious of the fact that I lived and breathed. Once from the veranda she called me to help her hang a flower pot; in my jangled fumbling and confusion I nearly allowed the pot to fall, and when, standing at my side, she caught my bare arm amid a shower of earth and cried in a sharp voice, “Nat! Silly goose!” the sound of my name on her lips was as cooling as a benediction and the contact with her white fingers was like the touch of fire.

Then one night in late summer about a year after Miss Emmeline’s return to the plantation from Baltimore, there was a party at Turner’s Mill—and this in itself was an event worthy of note. Social affairs at the plantation were rare (at least within the memory of my time at the big house), not only because of the remoteness of the place but because of the perilous conditions of transportation—deep fords, fallen trees, and washed-out roads making intercourse between the various Tidewater estates in each case a major venture, not to be considered lightly or to be undertaken in an impetuous mood. Once in a great while, however—every two years or so, usually in the late summer when the crops were laid by—Marse Samuel would decide to have what he called, humorously, an “assemblage,” and a score of people would come from miles around, planters and their families from the James and Chickahominy rivers and from down in North Carolina, people with names like Carter and Harrison and Byrd and Clark and Bonner arriving in elegant coaches and accompanied by a hustling, noisy entourage of black nursemaids and body servants. They would stay for four or five days, sometimes as long as a week, and daily there would be fox hunts with the hounds of Major Vaughan, whose plantation was not far away, and turkey shoots and contests in horsemanship, pistol matches and picnics and a great deal of contented, somnolent, easy palaver among the ladies on the veranda, and at least two fancy balls in the great hall, bedecked for each evening’s merriment in yards of pink and blue bunting.

It became my duty on these occasions (after I had reached the age of sixteen or thereabouts) to act in the capacity of “chief usher,” a title which Marse Samuel bestowed upon me and which involved my supervision of all the Negro help outside of the kitchen. (It is possibly a measure of Marse Samuel’s confidence in me that he entrusted me with this position, as young as I happened to be; doubtless on the other hand I simply
was
quicker and smarter than all the rest.) Caparisoned for a week in purple velvet knee-length pantaloons, a red silk jacket with buckles of shiny brass, and a white goat’s-hair wig which culminated behind in a saucy queue, I must have presented an exotic sight to the Carters and the Byrds, but I reveled in my role and took great pleasure in bustling about and lording it over the other black boys—most of them enlisted from the fields, dumb callow kids all thumbs and knobby knees and popping eyes—even though each day I was kept feverishly busy from dawn to dusk. It was I who greeted the carriages and coaches and helped the ladies dismount, I too who rode herd on Lucas and Todd and Pete and Tim, making certain that they polished each night each gentleman’s boots, that they cleaned up the litter on the lawn, that they hurried about ceaselessly, fetching ice from the ice cellar, retrieving a lady’s lost fan, tethering horses, untethering them, doing this, undoing that. I was the first to arise long before dawn (to help Little Morning prepare daily a stirrup cup of whiskey for the fox hunt was one of my most important chores) and nearly always the last to retire, and the fact that I was up and about at a truly unearthly hour was the only reason that caused me one morning, between ball and hunt, to nearly stumble over Miss Emmeline and someone else in the moonless and murky dark.

It was not the loud whisper of her voice that shocked me so much—though I instantly distinguished it—but the Lord’s name in her mouth, uttered in a frenzy, the first time in my life I had heard blasphemy on a woman’s tongue. And so astonished was I by the words that as I stood there rooted in the dark it did not just then occur to me to consider the event which occasioned them, and I thought she was in some great and nameless peril: “Oh mercy … oh God … oh Jesus … wait! … oh Jesus … now wait! … quick … put it back … now then … slowly … oh Jesus Christ … slowly! … wait!”