William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (164 page)

A man’s soft groan from the lawn behind the hedge now made me aware of the other presence, and I remained half paralyzed, fascinated yet suddenly sick nearly unto death at the sound of the Saviour’s name spoken thus, as if He had been stripped shamelessly naked by the hot urgency of her lips. “Wait, wait!” she again implored, and a gentle sigh came from the man’s throat, and once more she continued her rhythmic whispering: “Oh mercy … mercy … wait now, slowly! … oh Jesus … oh Christ … oh Christ … oh yes,
now!
… Oh mercy … mercy … mercy …”

Abruptly then, in a prolonged and dwindling little sob, the voice died and all was silent, and I could hear nothing but the piping of frogs in the millpond and a dull thumping of horses against the stable stalls and the sound of my own heart racing madly, so loud that I thought surely it must be heard above the soughing of a night wind in the sycamore trees. I stood there unable to move, my spirit a shambles from chagrin and shock and fear. And I recall thinking wretchedly: This is what comes of being a nigger. It ain’t fair. If I wasn’t a nigger I wouldn’t find out about things I don’t want to find out about. It ain’t fair.

Then after a long silence I heard the man’s voice, impassioned, tremulous: “Oh my love Em, my love, my love,
Em
my love!”

But there was no reply from Miss Emmeline and time crept by slowly and painfully like something crippled and old, causing my mouth to go dry and a numbness, premonitory with the clammy touch of death, to spread a tingling chill through my legs and thighs. At last I heard her voice again, placid now, composed, but edged with contempt and bitterness. “Finally you’ve accomplished what you’ve been after for ages. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“Oh Em, my love, my
love,”
he whispered. “Let me—”

“Stay away from me!” she said, her voice rising now in the darkness. “Stay away from me, do you hear! If you touch me, if you say another word to me I’ll tell Papa! I’ll tell Papa and he’ll
shoot
you for
ravishing
your own cousin.”

“But oh my darling Em!” he protested. “You
consented
to—Oh
Em
, my love, my dear—”

“Just stay away from me!” she repeated, and again she fell silent and there was no sound for a long while until suddenly I heard her burst out in words touched with raw and abandoned despair: “Oh God, how I hate you. Oh God, how I hate this place. Oh God, how I hate life. Oh
God,
how I hate God!”

“Oh don’t, Em!” he whispered in a frantic voice. “My love, my love, my love!”

“This God damned
horrible
place. I would even go back to Maryland and become a whore again, and allow the only man I ever loved to sell my body on the streets of Baltimore. Get your God damned hands
off
me and don’t speak another
word
to me again! If you do I’ll tell Papa! Now leave me, leave me, leave me,
leave me alone!”

I have spoken elsewhere in this narrative, and more than once, of a Negro’s ubiquity and the learning he acquires, so often unbeknownst to white people, of the innermost secrets of their hearts. That evening was one such time, but it seemed to me, too, as I watched Miss Emmeline rise from the grass and in a rustle of taffeta disappear into the blue shadows of the house and then saw her cousin Lewis rise also and slouch off miserably through the night, that no matter how much covert knowledge a Negro possessed there were questions always left unanswered and a mystery, and that therefore he should not feel himself too wise or all-knowing. Certainly this was true in regard to Miss Emmeline, who, all the while I pondered her after that evening, became ever more wrapped in a dark and secret cloak. She did not speak another word to Lewis nor, so far as I was able to observe, did he dare speak to her; her threat, her admonition triumphed, and some months later the poor man left Turner’s Mill entirely, going down to Louisiana to try to set himself up in sugar or cotton.

As for what I heard and saw that night, please do not consider my account simply—well,
mischievous
—for in truth such an episode had the effect of altering my entire vision of white women. For now the glow of saintliness which had surrounded Miss Emmeline in my mind dimmed, flickered out, disappeared; it was as if she suddenly stood disrobed and the fascination she held for me was of a different order, just as my hopeless and unending frustration was of a different kind though no less severe. For a while I was still maddened by her. I still worshiped her beauty from a distance but I could not help but be shaken to my guts by the words of blasphemy I had heard her utter, which now inflamed my thoughts, and like pinpoints of fire, pricked and agitated my very dreams. In my fantasies she began to replace the innocent, imaginary girl with the golden curls as the object of my craving, and on those Saturdays when I stole into my private place in the carpenter’s shop to release my pent-up desires, it was Miss Emmeline whose bare white full round hips and belly responded wildly to all my lust and who, sobbing “mercy, mercy, mercy” against my ear, allowed me to partake of the wicked and godless yet unutterable joys of defilement.

One day in October just after I became eighteen—a day recollected with that mysterious clarity of all days upon which transpire the greatest of events—I discovered the actual outlines of that future which Marse Samuel had envisioned for me all these weeks and months and years.

It was a Saturday, one of those dusty, ocherous autumnal days whose vivid weather never again seems so sweet and inviting after that youthful time of discovery: wood smoke and maple leaves blazing in the trees, an odor of apples everywhere like a winy haze, squirrels scampering for chinquapins at the edge of the woods, a constant stridor of crickets among the withering grass, and over all a ripe sunny heat edged with feathery gusts of wind smelling of charred oak and winter. That morning I had as usual risen early and gone to the shop, where I busied myself in loading some short two-by-fours on a barrow. Marse Samuel had only a few days before made his seasonal inspection of the field hands’ cabins, finding several of them in a state of sorry dilapidation. This day Goat and I would set up the two-by-fours as underpinning for a couple of new floors; afflicted by the summer’s seepage and rot, many of the old timbers had dissolved into a kind of crumbling splintery sawdust, the cabins themselves then exposed to the raw damp earth and infested by field mice, roaches, ants, beetles, and worms. Although I had grown very fond of my apprenticeship as a carpenter and took pride in my growing mastery of the craft, I despised with a passion that part of my job which required me to work on repairs to the cabins. For one thing alone (and this in spite of all Marse Samuel’s efforts to teach a fundamental cleanliness) there was the odor—the stink of sweat and grease and piss and nigger offal, of rancid pork and crotch and armpit and black toil and straw ticks stained with babies’ vomit—an abyssal odor of human defeat revolting and irredeemable. “
Ai,
yi, yi,” Goat would whisper to the air in his German rattle, “dese people is not animals even,” and lifting a post or beam would make a convulsive face and spit on the floor. At such moments despite myself, the blood-shame, the disgrace I felt at being a nigger also, was as sharp as a sword through my guts.

But that bright morning, appearing at the shop door with a cheery smile, Marse Samuel rescued me before I had even gotten well along on my task. “Throw a saddle on Judy, Nat,” he said, “we’re off to Jerusalem.” Behind the look of humor on his face there was something secretive, conspiratorial, and he lowered his voice to say: “Come November third, Miss Nell and I will have been married for a quarter of a century. I must needs celebrate this anniversary with an appropriate gift.” He plucked me by the sleeve of my shirt, drawing me outside the shop. “Come now, let’s saddle Judy and Tom. I need company to share this splendid day. But you mustn’t breathe a word about the gift, Nat!” He looked about him right and left, as if fearful of being overheard, then said in a whisper: “Someone sent news from over at the Vaughans’ place that a jeweler from Richmond will be passing today through town.”

I was of course wonderfully pleased—not alone because I was freed of an ugly job but because I liked riding so much and always stole a ride on the rare occasions I was given the opportunity, and also because Jerusalem itself was an exciting place for me; although it was no more than fifteen miles away, I had been there only once several years before and then the little village touched me with wonder despite the solemnity of our mission. That time too I had gone with Marse Samuel, but in a wagon, to help pick out a headstone for my mother’s grave. No cedar headboard for her, no weed-filled corner of some field splashed with tatterdemalion wild-flowers. My mother, alone among all the Negroes at Turner’s Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks (scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning in his coffin) with a marble headstone not one inch smaller nor a shade less white than theirs. I am no longer oppressed by the fact (as I was for so many years after I had grown to manhood and was able to reflect long and hard on these matters) that the name on that headstone was not a nigger woman’s forlorn though honest “Lou-Ann” but the captured, possessed, owned “Lou-Ann Turner.”

We rode out the long front lane over a carpet of fallen leaves. At the entrance to the lane half a dozen field hands supervised by Abraham were clearing a drainage canal which rimmed a part of the land; Marse Samuel greeted them with a loud halloo, and they in turn stood erect and grinned in a servile show of doffed hats and loose-limbed droll shufflings, shouting back: “Mawnin’, massah!” and “Fare ’ee well, Marse Sam!” I eyed them with aloof, privileged disdain. Their calls echoed behind us even as we set out through the woods by way of a leaf-strewn sunken wagon track leading toward the log road which would take us to Jerusalem. It was a gusty, brilliant morning alive with tossing branches and swirling eddies of leaves beneath us. Marse Samuel’s horse, a glittering black Irish hunter, quickly set the pace and took the lead and for half an hour or so we rode without speaking through the forest until finally, slackening his gait, Marse Samuel let me draw abreast and then I heard him say: “I hear that you are quite a young craftsman.” I found no way to answer these words which were both so pleasing and discomfiting, and I kept quiet, risking only a swift glance at Marse Samuel and catching his eye then shifting my gaze a bit. I saw a pleasant twinkly look on his face, a kind of half-smile as if he were on the verge of divulging a secret. He sat upon a horse with great style and presence; his flowing hair had become a silvery gray in the past few years, and more lines creased and webbed his face, adding to his dignity; for an instant I imagined I was riding in the company of a great Biblical hero—Joshua perhaps, or Gideon before the extermination of the Midianites. I could say nothing as usual; my awe of him was so great that there were moments when I could no more reply to him than if someone had sewn up my lips.

“Mr. Goat told me that you planed down and finished twenty sills and chimney girts as smooth and as clean as could be, mortice and tenons and all and not one bad joint nor a single timber to throw away in the lot! Fine work, my excellent young carpenter I What I expect I shall have to do—”

Was he on the edge then of telling me what he had to say later? Perhaps. But I do not really know, for at that instant Marse Samuel’s horse suddenly reared in a panic and the mare too heaved up beneath me, neighing with alarm, and across the wagon trace three deer bolted in high bounds from a thicket, a buck and two does dappled in the leafy morning light; they flew past us in floating shapes wild-eyed and silent until one after another they struck the blanket of leaves on the far side of the road and vanished into the woods with a clamorous diminishing storm of thudding hooves and snapping branches.
“Hoo,
Tom!” Marse Samuel shouted, reining in his horse, calming him, and I too tightened in the mare, and for a moment we stood there in the checkered flickering light, gazing at the place where the white tails of the deer had melted into the woods, listening as the sound of the plunging feet vanished far off among the trees. But it had given us both a start. “A yard farther and they’d have been on top of us, Nat!” Marse Samuel called with an uneasy laugh, and he swung Tom around and galloped ahead, saying no more until a few minutes later when the wagon trace ended, merging with the log road which led to Jerusalem.
“Then shall the lame man leap as a hart,”
he said, glancing back at me,
“and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness
—How does it go, Nat?”

“For in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert,”
I answered.
“And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.”

“Yes, yes,” he replied. We had drawn to a stop near the end of the trace, beneath a grove of gnarled and ancient apple trees once part of a large cultivated grove but now turned back to the underbrush and the wildwood. Fallen from the branches apples by the bushel lay in disordered piles and rows in a shallow ditch at the edge of the trace; scattered ranks of the red and yellowish fruit were faintly rotting with a cidery odor. Even as we stood there others fell,
plop-plopping
on the ground. Gnats swarmed over all, barely visible, and the two horses bent down their necks and began to munch at the apples with succulent crunching sounds. “Yes, yes,” Marse Samuel said, “I had forgotten. I had forgotten.” He smiled suddenly, adding: “By God’s grace I can afford to forget the Bible with
you
to rely on.
For in the wilderness shall waters break out and streams in the desert
—Lord Almighty, would that it were really so!” He looked about him for a moment, searching the distances with a hand shielding his eyes from the bright sun. “Lord Almighty!” he said again. “What a desolate prospect hereabouts!”

I looked about me too but could see nothing out of the ordinary: apple trees, road, fields, distant woodland—all seemed to be in place.

He turned and regarded me soberly. “Those deer now, Nat. Take those deer for example. Used to be you never saw any deer on this trace, up in this quarter. Too many people around that kept them down. Fifteen, sixteen years ago when you were but a small tadpole the woods would be resounding with gunfire in November, December when old John Coleman and his boys would be laying up venison. They kept the deer population down to a proper size. Let his darkies hunt, too. Had a big driver named Friday who was one of the best deer shots in all of Southampton. But it’s all gone now. When the deer come back it means poor times. It means the people have gone.” He looked around again, the expression on his face still earnest, worried, thoughtful. “This grove here,” he murmured, “John Coleman’s too. Taken care of, those trees gave the sweetest Jonathans ever you might ask for. Now look at them, all gone to pieces, fit only for the worms. God, what a pity! What a waste and a shame!”

He said little else for a while as we rode at a slow canter toward Jerusalem. Something seemed to have taken possession of his thoughts and he remained buried within himself, lost in some troubled reverie which contrasted suddenly and puzzlingly with his happy mood of the early morning but which of course I could not presume to intrude upon. We rode in silence for an hour or a little more, the log road lying straight and level as a roofbeam before us, the woods at either side like a whispery wall, wind-thrashed and afire with leaves. Here, unlike the tamed land around Turner’s Mill, it seemed a true wilderness, for the copper and gold landscape was astir with wilderness life: partridge sprang up beyond the edge of the road, and from the forest’s windswept roof fat grouse exploded, booming as they sought the sky. Squirrels and cottontails crisscrossed the road all along the way. Once a red fox considered us from his perch on the trunk of a fallen oak; seated panting, grinning, his tongue lolled out between rows of small wicked teeth.

Yet even as we rode along I was made aware—because of what Marse Samuel had said—of the strange bleak tracts of land which at intervals broke up the forest, patches of scrubby bramble-choked earth which had once been tobacco fields but now lay in fallow ruin. Scrub oak and pine saplings poked up through these meadows; the earth was raw and weedy and great stretches of chalky, storm-runneled earth upon which nothing could grow blotched the landscape like open wounds. Here and there a forlorn last growth of stripped tobacco stalks stuck up through the briers in stiff withered spines. As we rode past one of these fields I could see on the far horizon the remnant of a great old farmhouse with its roof caved in; the tumbledown outbuildings surrounding it, rotting and abandoned like the ruined offspring of something itself long dead, made the distant view even more sinister, and I turned away from it, beginning to share Marse Samuel’s pensive mood without knowing exactly why, and rode silently along behind him as the woods closed in again on either side around us.

There was little movement on the road, and such of it as there was seemed to be coming toward us, away from Jerusalem: two peddlers’ wagons, several farmers in gigs and buggies—all of whom Marse Samuel hailed, being hailed warmly in return with elaborate, deferential greetings—and a half-blind old free Negro woman named Lucy, a ragpicker well known in the region, quite drunk and crazed and astride a spavined motheaten mule, who when Marse Samuel pressed a few pennies into her bleached palm, cackled in a voice which followed us for half a mile: “Bress yo’ soul, Marse Samuel, you Jesus hisself! Yes, you des Jesus hisself … Jesus hisself …
Jesus hisself!”

In the outline of a vast arrowhead, flashing and wavering, a flock of geese raced south high in the pure blue above; a gust of wind caught Marse Samuel’s cloak, blowing it about his head, and as he reached up to recover it he said: “How old are you now, Nat? Eighteen, am I correct?”

“Yes sir, Marse Samuel, I turned eighteen first day of this month.”

“Mr. Goat has splendid things to tell me about you,” he went on. “It’s really most remarkable the progress you’ve made.” He turned to look at me with the suggestion of a smile. “You’re quite an unusual darky, I suppose you know.”

“Yes sir, Marse Samuel, I reckon I am.” I do not recall replying with immodesty; that I was in many ways both exceptional and fortunate was a fact of which I had long been well aware.

“You have by no means acquired what is known as a liberal education,” he said. “That was not my intention nor within my powers, even though I am sure that young people of your race will get that kind of learning someday. But you seem to be equipped now with the best part of an elementary schooling. You can read and write, and you can count. You have the most amazing knowledge of the Good Book of anyone within my ken, and that includes several white ministers I know. You will doubtless take on much more learning as you go forward, so long as books are within your reach. In addition to all this you have gained command of a craft, and are exceedingly skillful at everything which has been taught you. You are the walking proof of what I have tried so hard
and usually so Vainly to persuade white gentlemen, including my late beloved brother, namely, that young darkies like yourself can overcome the natural handicaps of their race and at least acquire such schooling as will allow them to enter into pursuits other than the lowest menial animal labor. Do you understand what I am getting at, Nat?”