William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (171 page)

“Yassuh,” I sighed wretchedly.

We rode for a long time in silence. We had taken a side turning off the trace and passed now through country I had never seen before. It was poor, eroded land with weed-choked red-clay fields bare of habitation. Scraggly pine groves stretched across the landscape, and high in the blue above us turkey buzzards swooped and wheeled, touching me with gloom and with visions of bleached skeletons, decayed flesh, and slow suffering deaths. A smoky haze hung over the land, and crows cried dismally from afar. It was as if all the people had suddenly vanished from the earth.

“Tell me something, boy,” he said finally, the reedy voice suddenly strained, hesitant yet fraught with some terrible decision. “I hear tell a nigger boy’s got an unusual big pecker on him. That right, boy?”

I became feeble with anxiety and could make no reply. The buggy had stopped and we rested in the shade of a spindly old oak, half dead in a shroud of leaves prematurely yellowing and withering, the great hulk of its trunk smothered in the green fecund moist embrace of honeysuckle and Virginia creeper. Dizzy with apprehension, I kept my eyes fixed toward my feet. A fragrance of honeysuckle mingled with the presence now of the Reverend Eppes; he was sweating in streams, and I could see the sweat as it drained from beneath his black shiny cuff and onto the back of the great ungainly sun-blistered hand which now tensely clutched his knee.

“You know what I hear tell, boy?” he went on, placing the same tight and tormented hand on the fleshy part of my upper leg. His voice trembled, his old ugly red fingers trembled, and I too felt myself trembling inwardly as I made a silent, urgent plea to the heavens:
Lord? Are you there, Lord? A
cloud passed over the day then, and a sudden breath of coolness came, borne as if on the air freshening in the treetops; now with a leafy tremor the coolness fled, light blossomed blindingly, and the stench of the Reverend Eppes once more was sour and close. “I hear tell your average nigger boy’s got a member on him inch or so longer’n ordinary. That right, boy?”

I remained as silent as the space within a tomb, feeling the quivering fingers on my thigh. When I made no reply, he fell somberly quiet, then after a long moment he squeezed down remorselessly on my flesh and whispered: “You goin’ to mind me, boy?”

But this time when I failed to answer, he removed his hand from my leg and we started off anew, squeaking dustily along northward through the sullen and woebegone countryside. Perhaps half an hour passed before he spoke again, and his dry ageless cricket’s voice was filled with despair and hatred and love and misery and retribution as he said: “You
better
mind me! You jest
better
mind me, that’s all, you hear!”

Time grows brief in this chronicle of my early years. My residence with the Reverend Eppes was short-lived. There remains need to tell only of the way in which the Reverend Eppes’s stewardship of my fortunes led me not toward that freedom I had for so long anticipated as a natural consequence of the transfer of my person into his custody, but toward something entirely and surprisingly different.

It had been Marse Samuel’s intention, I believe, that I labor only for a short while in the service of the minister. However, it turned out that I worked there for less time than Marse Samuel must even have imagined. As you have doubtless seen, one of Marse Samuel’s characteristics was a fetching ingenuousness and faith in human nature; being a poor judge of people anyway, it was especially unfortunate that abstaining as he did from formal religious observance, he should still retain a traditional respect for and trust in the goodness of the clergy. This trust was a central mistake. I think that in handing me over to the Reverend Eppes he envisioned a charming, benign, and mutually satisfying relationship between an adorable old bachelor preacher and his black acolyte—already “religious-minded” and learned in the Scripture—the two of us dwelling in perfect Christian concord as I celebrated with honest labor the spiritual harvest that his age and wisdom might shower upon me. What a splendid vision. What tender dreams of charity one hopes blessed my late master’s slumber amid the balmy Alabama night!

Well, old Eppes ceased trying to ravish me (and this is one of the few tolerable aspects of my stay) fairly early on, so that by the time autumn arrived I was free at least of that worry, which for a spell had been a burdensome one. There had been a few days after my arrival at Shiloh when he had ambushed me in the sagging, pestilential two-hole outhouse which served both his own pitiful dwelling and the church; there, cosseting me loudly again with proverbs and other suasions from Holy Writ, he tried to break me down by the same route he had traveled on the day of our first encounter, his big old beak leaking the dew of frustration onto his upper lip and his voice a paradigm of anguish as he clutched at me amid the swarming flies. But one day he made a great and defeated shudder, and with wormwood in his mouth, abandoned the quest, to my relief and puzzlement. Only much later, when I grew older and considerably more reflective, did it occur to me that his desire for me, intense as it was, must have been at war with and was finally exceeded by his desire for my domination. Had he reached his lesser goal, had I submitted to his malodorous gropings, he would have gained a pet but lost a slave; it is not easy totally to master someone you’ve buggered behind the woodpile, and if I had become the compliant vessel of his cravings he might have found it much harder to run me until my legs felt like stumps.

Which is what he did—eighteen and twenty hours a day, seven days a week,
especially,
I should add, on Sunday—and for the first time in my life I began to sense the world, the
true
world, in which a Negro moves and breathes. It was like being plunged into freezing water. Further, I soon realized that my predicament was made even more onerous by the fact that I was the only slave in Shiloh, a grim and pious little crossroads community of some thirty-five souls. Small farmers for the most part, scratching for life itself in arid patches of corn and sweet potatoes, these were the leftovers and castoffs from the same cataclysmic depression which had sent the more prosperous of their fellow citizens, like Marse Samuel, to the far South: failed overseers, one-armed tinkers, bankrupt country storekeepers, reformed drunks, God-maddened paralytics, they were a bleak and undone brotherhood of true believers with scarcely a dollar to divide among them and only the hope of the soul’s rescue through total immersion to preserve them and their goiterous women and pale, straw-haired, worm-infested children from absolute disintegration.

As the only two-legged chattel in Shiloh, then, it befell my lot not only to do the chores for the Reverend Eppes—to chop kindling and haul spring water and feed Beauty, the sway-backed mare, and shell corn and slop the three pigs and build the morning fires, acting both as a sort of grotesque valet to the preacher in the shack he called a parsonage and as a sexton at the rickety church—but to be of service to the rest of the congregation as well. As I deviously learned, the good pastor had never been in possession of a Negro before (that I must have become, however briefly, the answer to a lifelong prayer is a fact which often touched me in later years), and in the first flush of enthusiasm over the bonanza that I represented, he obviously had a deep Christian urge to share me equally with the members of his flock. Thus all that fall and winter—one of the most frigid years within living memory—I found how swiftly the body loses its sap and the soul its optimism through having one’s energies split three dozen ways. It seemed to me that I had been plunged into a hallucination in which I had parted from all familiar existence and was suddenly transformed into a different living creature altogether—half-man, half-mule, exhausted and without speech, given over to dumb and reasonless toil from the hours before dawn until the dead of night. In the tiny three-room parsonage I slept in what was called the kitchen, on a straw tick covered with rags near the back door. Bitter winds moaned through all the cracks in the house; even stoked to the limit the fireplace gave scant warmth; when banked at night it gave no heat whatever, and as I lay shivering on the floor in the dim light I could see ice congealing on the surface of the preacher’s chamber pot. He snored cavernously all night long, throbbing like a mill wheel through my restless dreams. Sometimes he would give a great strangled noise and wake up chattering disconnected words from the gospel. “I also
am
of Christ!” he howled once, and another night I saw his white nightshirted shape lurch upright as he wailed:
“Lewdness, O
ye Jews!” Even in the unbelievable cold the house was fetid and rank like a chicken pen in summer.

Lord, what a time! How I yearned for the days and months to pass and for the winter to end; how I waited for the moment to come when I would be delivered from this pesthole, to Richmond and into freedom. But it became an endless and wicked season, with no relief in sight. Thrice monthly the post coach came through from the South, but the mail it dropped off was scanty anyway, and there was never a letter from Marse Samuel—certainly not a word for me nor (at least so far as I was able to tell) any message to the Reverend Eppes. And so I labored through icy months, sustained by the gloomy comfort of Ecclesiastes, whose words I managed to put to memory in the few moments wrested each day from sleep and work. It was good to realize, as I hauled away the contents of the privy in a leaky bucket, that all is vanity; the great Preacher succored me through hours of ceaseless toil.

In the mornings I sweated for the Reverend Eppes, chopping wood, toting water, sweeping, whitewashing the outer timbers of the house and the church—an unending task not made easier by the fact that the whitewash often froze on the brush. After midday dinner (we bowed our heads together in blessing and then ate in silence in the kitchen, he on the single chair, I crouched on my haunches on the floor, devouring a meal that was unvaryingly terrible—fatback and corn pone drenched in molasses—but at least abundant: in that fearsome weather my protector could not afford to have his labor source lose power through meager victualing) there would come a rattling of wagon wheels outside on the frozen rutted ground, and a cry: “It’s me, George Dunn, Parson! I’ve got the nigger this afternoon!” And off I would go to the Dunn place three miles away at the edge of the pinewoods, there to work for another six hours felling trees, burning brush, emptying privies, shelling corn or performing any of a dozen low and muscle-wrenching chores it might strike a doomed, chilblained red-necked Baptist farmer needed doing. Other days I often walked to my afternoon’s labor, trudging two miles or more along some snow-covered woodland path, to arrive finally with freezing toes at a shack or cabin in a clearing and hear a woman’s voice from the front stoop:
“Leander!
The nigger’s here!” I began to feel myself loutishly half existing, my identity fading, as a Percheron must feel if it feels, never more so than those times when after hours of frostbite and sweat on the roof of a barn, I was compelled to carry back to the Reverend Eppes the actual rental for my labor—a silver dollar rarely, most often a cramped, brain-tormented:

Rev. Eppes I. O. U.
$0.50 U.S.
Use of nigro 5 hours
Ashpenaz Groover. 12 Jan.

on a scrap of coarse brown paper, or a crock of pickled okra, a pound of goat cheese wrapped in a flannel rag, or a jar of candied sweet potatoes—delicacies, moreover, I never got to taste. No one beat me, and I was rarely even scolded. Generally speaking, I was accorded the cheerful respect due any superbly efficient mechanism.

My despair and loneliness grew until the existence I led seemed a nightmare from which I was frantically trying to arouse myself; the burden of my daily wretchedness felt an actual weight, heavy and immovable, bearing down like a yoke upon my shoulders. For the first time in my life I considered the extremity of running away (following honorably in my father’s barefooted path), but I was dissuaded from such a course not alone by the two hundred miles of trackless and freezing wilderness which lay between myself and Pennsylvania, but by the fear, of course, that in so doing I would simply forfeit the very liberty I had been assured was soon to be mine. Yet all remained the same. With a fingernail purchase on freedom, I found myself laboring like an ox. Every ten days the mail coach came up from the South, and departed, leaving no advice from Marse Samuel. Despair and gloom pressed down upon me like merciless hands. Each morning I awoke praying that on
this
day I would be taken to Richmond, there to be delivered into the hands of that civilized and enlightened master whose only concern was eventually to obtain my freedom. The moment never arrived. I squatted silently with the Reverend Eppes in the draughty kitchen, choking down my corn pone and molasses. Overhead, day after sullen day, the sun was a wafer of light barely visible, wanly tracing the hours across a creepy black sky dreamed by Jeremiah.

I cannot calculate what my value was in cheese and okra but I made a mental accounting of the hard cash I brought in, and figured that between October and the middle of February I earned for the Reverend Eppes a total of $35.75.

About the services in the ramshackle church (keeping four stoves fueled all afternoon and evening with hickory logs made Sunday one of my most arduous days) it is best to remain for the most part quiet, drawing over these mysteries—as Sir Walter Scott might say—a prudent veil. For although I myself in later years acquired great power in preaching and exhortation, and found myself deeply stirred by the way in which people took flame from the Word and became exalted by it, sometimes losing possession of all their senses; and although through total abandonment it is often possible to obtain a close communion with the Spirit—nonetheless these white people at Shiloh were a scandal, whooping and shouting and bubbling at the mouth as the Reverend Eppes raked them through hellfire in his dry cracked voice, and amid the sweat and steam, falling into a kind of ultimate frenzy, stripping to their underdrawers, male and female, and riding each other bareback up and down the aisles. It seemed to me Babylonian, a mockery, and I was always glad when the Sunday night service was over and I could clean up the mess they made and go to bed.