William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (166 page)

Without warning a gust of wind came up, and a moment’s shadow crossed the face of the day, and the frost-tinged shuddering breeze ran down the line of Negroes, shoveling the leaves up around their decrepit lumpish shoes, flicking the edges of their cotton sleeves and the cuffs of their gray tattered trousers. I felt myself give a shiver, then as quickly as it had come the shadow vanished, the day brightened warmly like a blossom, and at that moment I heard at my elbow a voice soft and slick as satin: “Isn’t you gwine give Raymond a nice sweet potato, honey chile?”

I ignored the voice, still listening to Marse Samuel, who was saying: “I presume they are separating Negro families in Surry then, otherwise you’d have a number of women in this coffle.”

“‘Deed I couldn’t say, sir,” the drover replied. “Mr. Davenport jest hires me to drive ’em.”

“Pretty please, honey chile,” the voice below persisted, “isn’t you got a nice sweet potato for ole Raymond? Us is jes’ sick of apples. And pone. Sour apples from de road an’ pone. Us is jes’ sick of dat mess. Come on, honey, isn’t you got a nice sweet potato fo’ Raymond? Or a tiny ole piece of bacon?”

I looked down and saw a freckled ginger-colored Negro, squat and muscular, with thick lips and a sparse reddish head. Thirty-five or perhaps forty, he had the blood in him somewhere of an Irish overseer or the scion of a James River manor or a traveling Pennsylvania tinker; from the way he sat with a certain shabby yet subtle prestige—maybe it was the manner in which the two boys chained on either side had cozied up against him, or the impudence of the jew’s-harp clutched in one thick clumsy hand—I could tell that deference was paid and due him: there was a Raymond on every plantation. It was surely owing to his white blood that Raymond achieved his eminence but also to some native bankerish wit and sagacity which, however forlornly crippled, made him store up a meager authority and was ever a beacon for all the others. What caused an eclipse of the moon? Raymond knew.
Hit caused by a gret mystery cloud flyin’ up out’n de swamp.
Was there a way to cure rheumatism? Ast old Ray.
Make you a portice of turkentine wid red earthworms and de juice of a red onion, dat’s de onliest way.
Having a little trouble with your old woman at night?
Git you de cotton dat she’s thawed away when she got her monthlies and wear it sewed up inside yo’ pants, dat’ll start a woman humpin’.
When would the niggers be free?
In 1842, I seed it in a dream, niggers led by a wooden-legged white man from up in Paris, France.
And so the talk goes round among the niggers:
Ast ole Ray. Raymond he know near ’bout ev’ything in de whole wide world.
Won’t it be bad times down in Georgia?
Naw, dat’s rich peopleses’ country, dat’s why us is goin’ dar. Niggers down in Georgia eats fried eggs three times a day
…

“What yo’ name, sweet?” he whispered up at me.

“Nat,” I said. “Nat Turner.”

“Where you live at, honey chile?”

“Live at Turner’s Mill,” I said, “down-county.” So little called for were the words I uttered next that I have wondered since why the Lord did not wrench out my tongue. “My mastah’s goin’ to set me free in Richmond.”

“Well, ain’t dat jes’ de nicest thing,” said Raymond. “God’s truth,” I replied.

“Come on, sugah,” he importuned in his glossy voice, “don’ a rich nigger boy like you got a bite to eat for ole Raymond? My, dat’s a pretty bag on dat saddle. I bets dey’s all kinds of nice things to eat in dat bag. Come on, sugah, give ole Raymond a bite to eat.”

“Dey’s on’y a Bible in dat bag!” I said impatiently, though full-lapsed into a field nigger’s tongue. I gave the mare a slap behind the ears, checking her crabwise gait, and brought her about toward Marse Samuel. Late afternoon had begun to settle down upon us as we stood there, it had grown cold. Light from the descending sun fell amid the October leaves and through wood smoke and haze lay streaming upon a tangled desolation of weeds and brambles, so furiously luminous that it seemed a field ready to explode into fire. Drawing near Marse Samuel I heard the jew’s-harp again,
bunk-bunk-bunk.

“Come, we must be on our way,” he said to me, wheeling about, and we turned together then; for some reason I hesitated and stopped entirely, gazing back, and he said again:

“Quickly!
Quickly!
We must be on our way!”

Now moving again down the long line of Negroes, I was aware that the jew’s-harp had stopped playing; we came by the place where Raymond sat in his chains and I heard him call to me as we trotted past—the voice sweet and slow, high-pitched, not unkind, as ever knowing and prophetic and profound: “Yo’ shit stink too, sugah. Yo’ ass black jes’ like mine, honey chile.”

At along about this time in my life—it must have been the following spring—I came to know a Negro boy named Willis. Save for Wash and my mother and house servants like Little Morning, Willis was the first Negro I was ever close to. Two or three years younger than I, the son of a woman who had done much of the weaving at the Mill and who had died that winter of some lung complaint, he had caught Marse Samuel’s eye as a suitable replacement for me in the carpenter’s shop, now that my duties called for me to work in the shop only half a day. As soon as I saw him at work, learning how to plane and hammer under the tutelage of Goat, I could understand why Marse Samuel had chosen him to be my successor, for unlike most Negro boys—who become clumsy and ruined for anything but the sloppiest jobs after four or five years of bent-over toil chopping and hoeing in the cornfields, and in whose hands a hammer only turned into a weapon to fracture their own shins—Willis was skillful and neat, a quick learner, and he gained Goat’s favor and approval almost as quickly as I had done. He could not read or write a word, of course, but he had a sunny, generous, obliging nature and was full of laughter; despite my early suspicion of him—a hangover from my lifelong contempt of all black people who dwelt down the slope—I found something irresistible about his gaiety and his innocent, open disposition and we became fast friends. Considering my habitual scorn, I do not know why this happened: perhaps it was as if I had found a brother. He loved to sing as he worked, helping me brace a timber, the voice a soft little rhythmical chatter:

“Gonna milk my cow, gonna catch her by de tail,

Gonna milk her in de coffee pot, po’ it in de pail.”

He was a slim, beautiful boy with fine-boned features, very gentle and wistful in repose, and the light glistened like oil on his smooth black skin. His only faith, like most of the Negroes’, was in omens and conjurs: with the long hairs from the cock of a bull that had died of the bloat he had tied up three fuzzy patches on his head, to ward off ghosts; the fangs of a water moccasin he wore on a string around his neck, a charm against fever. His talk was childish and guileless and obscene. I was very fond of him; feeling thus, I was troubled for his soul and longed to bring him out of ignorance and superstition and into the truth of Christian belief.

It was not easy at first—leading this simple, unformed, and childlike spirit to an understanding of the way and an acceptance of the light—but I can recall several things working in my favor. There was his intelligence for one thing, as I have said: unlike so many of the other black boys, half drowned from birth in a kind of murky mindlessness in which there appeared not the faintest reflection of a world beyond the cabin and the field and the encompassing woods, Willis was like some eager, fluttering young bird who might soar away if only one were able to uncage him. Perhaps growing up near the big house had something to do with this, only briefly had he known the drudgery of the fields. But there was also the mere fact of his nature, which was—different. He had come into life blessed with an unencumbered, happy spirit, bright and open to learning; everything about him was lively, dancing, gay, free of that stupid and brutish inertia of children born to the plow and the hoe.

More than all this, however, was the sway I kept over him by virtue of what I had simply become. I possessed an unusual position and authority, especially for a Negro who was so young, and I was certainly fully conscious of the respect and even awe in which I was held by all the black people at the Mill now that it had become known that I was second only to Abraham in control. (Being too young, too dumb, too prideful at the time, I could not have realized—as I sat astride Judy in some noisy timber lot thronged with toiling Negroes, aloof, disdainful, intoning from a requisition in a voice ostentatiously educated and loud—how much sour resentment boiled behind those awed, respectful glances.) Owning such power and advantaging myself of Willis’s innocence and the trust he had in me, I was able eventually to bring him into an awareness of God’s great handiwork and the wonder of His presence abiding in all the firmament. Do not think ill of me when I confess that it was during these hours with Willis in that spring of my eighteenth year, praying with him in the stillness of a noontime meadow, exhorting him to belief as I clutched my Bible with one hand and with the other pressed long and hard on the smooth heft of his shoulder until I could feel him shudder and sigh in response to my whispered supplications—“Oh Lord, receive this poor boy Willis, receive him into Thy almighty care, receive him into belief, yes, Lord, yes, yes, he believes,” and Willis’s voice in a gentle fluting echo, “Das right, Lawd, Willis he believes”—do not think ill of me, I say, when I confess that then for the first time like a yellow burst of sunlight which steals out from behind a cloud and floods the day, there swept over me the mysterious sense of my own hidden yet implacable and onrushing power.

That spring I remember we went fishing together on Saturdays and Sundays. A muddy creek wound through the swamp beyond the millpond. The walnut-brown water was thick with bream and catfish and we sat long morning hours in a swarm of gnats on the slippery clay bank, angling with pine poles we made in the shop, our hooks fashioned from bent nails upon which we skewered crickets and earthworms. Far off the mill groaned, a muffled watery rushing and mumbling. The light here was diaphanous, the air warm and drowsy, astir with darting buggy shapes and the chattering of birds. One day, his finger pricked by a hook or the sharp spine of a fish, Willis cried out—“fuckin’ Jesus!” he yelled—and so swiftly that I hardly knew what I was doing I rapped him sharply across the lips, drawing a tiny runnel of blood. “A filthy mouth is an abomination unto the Lord!” I said. His face wore a broken, hurt look and he reached up to lightly finger the place where I had struck him. His round eyes were soft and childlike, trusting, and suddenly I felt a pang of guilt and pain at my anger, and a rush of pity swept through me, mingled with a hungry tenderness that stirred me in a way I have never known. Willis said nothing, his eyes were brimming with tears; I saw the moccasin fangs dangling at his neck, bone-white and startling against his shiny bare black chest. I reached up to wipe away the blood from his lips, pulling him near with the feel of his shoulders slippery beneath my hand, and then we somehow fell on each other, very close, soft and comfortable in a sprawl like babies; beneath my exploring fingers his hot skin throbbed and pulsed like the throat of a pigeon, and I heard him sigh in a faraway voice, and then for a long moment as if set free into another land we did with our hands together what, before, I had done alone. Never had I known that human flesh could be so sweet.

Minutes afterward I heard Willis murmur: “Man, I sho liked dat. Want to do it agin?”

For a time I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, averting my eyes, keeping my gaze up toward the sun through leaves atremble like a forest of green fluttering moths. Finally I said:
“The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”

Time passed and Willis said nothing, then I heard him fidget on the ground next to me, and he said, chuckling: “You know what jizzom puts me in mind of, Nat? Hit look jes’ lak buttermilk. Look dere.”

My skin still tingled with pleasure, a tired gentle luxurious feeling which at the same time I felt to be a danger and a warning. I recall a catbird high in the water oak above, swinging like a rag amid the branches, jabbering and screeching; gnats whirred madly in the air around my ears, beneath my skull the clay bank was as cold as a sliver of ice.
They kissed one another, and wept one with another,
I thought,
until David exceeded. And he rose and departed. And Jonathan went into the city
…

“Come on,” I said, rising. He pulled his pants up and I led him to the edge of the creek.

“Lord,” I said in a loud voice, “witness these two sinners who have sinned and have been unclean in Thy sight and stand in need to be baptized.”

“Das right, Lawd,” I heard Willis say.

In the warmth of the spring air I suddenly felt the presence of the Lord very close, compassionate, all-redeeming, allunderstanding, as if His great mercy dwelt everywhere around us like the leaves and the brown water and the chattering birds. Real yet unreal, He seemed about to reveal Himself, as fresh and invisible as a breath of wind upon the cheek. It was almost as if God hovered in the shimmering waves of heat above the trees, His tongue and His almighty voice trembling at the edge of speech, ready to make known His actual presence to me as I stood penitent and prayerful with Willis ankle-deep in the muddy waters. Through and beyond the distant roaring of the mill I thought I heard a murmuration and another roaring far up in the heavens, as if from the throats of archangels. Was the Lord going to speak to me? I waited faint with longing, clutching Willis tightly by the arm, but no words came from above—only the sudden presence of God poised to shower Himself down like summer rain, and the wild and many-voiced, distant, seraphic roaring. “Lord,” I cried, “Thy servant Paul has said:
And now why tarriest thou? arise and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.
That’s what he said, Lord, that’s what he said! You know that, Lord!”

“Amen!” Willis said. Beneath my fingers I could feel him begin to stir and shudder and another “Amen!” came from him in a gasp. “Das right, Lawd!”