William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (179 page)

Suddenly I became aware of a commotion—laughter and shouts from a cluster of white men behind the blacksmith’s stable perhaps fifty yards away across the road. The bare earthen plot at the rear of the stable was the Saturday gathering place for the poor whites of the county just as the market gallery had become the social focus for the Negroes. These white idlers were the rogues and dregs of the community: penniless drunks and cripples, scroungers, handymen, ex-overseers, vagabonds from North Carolina, harelipped roustabouts, squatters on pineland barrens, incorrigible loafers, cretins, rapscallions, and dimwits of every description, they made my present owner by comparison appear to possess the wisdom and dignity of King Solomon. There by the stable each Saturday with straw hats and cheap denim overalls they gathered in a shiftless mob, cadging from each other quarter-plugs of chewing tobacco or snorts of rotgut brandy, palavering endlessly (like the Negroes) about pussy and cooze, scheming out ways to make a dishonest half-dollar, tormenting stray cats and dogs, and allowing the slaves from their market promontory a bracing glimpse of white men worse off—in certain important respects at least—than themselves. Now when I looked up to find the source of the disturbance among them I saw that they had assembled in a rough circle. In the midst of the circle, perched upon a horse, was the squat, hunched form of Nathaniel Francis, roaring drunk, his round face besotted with swollen pleasure as he gazed down at something taking place on the ground. I was only mildly curious, thinking at first that it was a white man’s wrestling match or drunken fist fight: hardly a Saturday passed without one or the other. But through the baggy pants’ legs of one of the bystanders I saw what appeared to be two Negroes moving about, engaged in doing what I could not tell. Cackles of glee went up from the crowd, wild hoots and cries. They seemed to be egging the Negroes on, and Francis drunk in the saddle caused the horse to stamp and prance at the space within the encircling mob, raising an umbrella of dust. Hark had risen to his feet to gawk and I told him that he had better go find out what was happening; he moved slowly off.

After a minute or so Hark came back to the gallery, and the sheepish half-smile on his face—I will never forget that expression, its mixed quality of humor and gentle bewilderment—filled me with a sad foreboding, as if I had known, sensed what he was going to say the instant before his mouth opened to say it.

“Ole Francis he puttin’ on a show fo’ dem white trash,” he proclaimed, loud enough for most all of the other Negroes to hear. “He drunker dan a scritch owl and he makin’ dem two niggers Will and Sam fight each other. Don’t neither of ’em want to fight but ev’y time one of ’em draw back an’
don’t
whop de other, ole Francis he give dat nigger a stroke wid his whip. So dem niggers dey
got
to fight and Sam he done raised a bleedin’ whelp on Will’s face and Will I do believe he done broke off one of Sam’s front teeth. Hit sho is some kind of cock fight.”

At this, all the Negroes within hearing began to laugh—there was indeed something oddly comical about Hark’s
way
of describing things—but at the same time my heart seemed to shrivel and die within me. This was
all.
All! Of the indignities and wrongs that a Negro might endure—blistering toil and deprivation, slights and slurs and insults, beatings, chains, exile from beloved kin—none seemed more loathsome, at that minute, than this: that he be pitted in brutal combat against his own kind for the obscene amusement of human beings of any description—but especially those so mean and reptilian in spirit, so worthless, so likewise despised in the scheme of things and saved from the final morass only by the hairline advantage of a lighter skin. Not since the day years before when I was first sold had I felt such rage, intolerable rage, rage that echoed a memory of Isham’s fury as he howled at Moore, rage that was a culmination of all the raw buried anguish and frustration growing inside me since the faraway dusk of childhood, on a murmuring veranda, when I first understood that I was a slave and a slave forever. My heart, as I say, shrank inside me, died, disappeared, and rage like a newborn child exploded there to fill the void: it was at this instant that I knew beyond doubt or danger that—whatever the place, whatever the appointed time, whoever the gentle young girl now serenely plucking blossoms within a bower or the mistress knitting in the coolness of a country parlor or the innocent lad seated contemplating the cobwebbed walls of an outhouse in a summery field—the whole world of white flesh would someday founder and split apart upon my retribution, would perish by my design and at my hands. My stomach heaved and I restrained the urge to vomit on the boards where I sat.

But now the commotion across the road dwindled, the shouts fell away, and the circle of white men broke up as they turned their attention to other pleasures. Aslant to one side in the saddle, Francis rode off at a lurching pace down the street, exhausted by his sport, smiling a smile of gratification and conquest. And at this moment I saw Will and Sam—battered-looking, bruised, and dusty—cross the road together, weaving toward the market. Will was muttering to himself as he stroked a swollen jaw and Sam shivered while he walked, trembling in pain, misery, and in the throes of grievous shame and abasement—a short, wiry little mulatto neither too old yet nor too calloused by suffering to be prevented from sobbing bitterly like a child as he wiped the blood away from a jagged cut across his lips. Still unperceiving of anything at all, still witlessly amused by Hark’s account of the fray, the Negroes on the gallery watched Sam and Will approach and kept laughing. It was then that I rose to face them.

“My brothers!” I cried. “Stop yo’ laughin’ and listen to me! Leave off from that laughin’, brothers, and listen to a minister of the Holy Word!” A hush fell over the Negroes and they stirred restlessly, turned toward me, puzzlement and wonder in their eyes. “Come closer!” I commanded them. “This here is no time for laughin’! This is a time for weepin’, for
lamentation!
For rage! You is
men,
brothers,
men
not beasts of the field! You ain’t no four-legged dogs! You is
men,
I say! Where oh where, my brothers, is yo’ pride?”

Slowly, one by one, the Negroes drew near, among them Will and Sam, who climbed up from the road and stood gazing at me as they mopped their faces with gray slimy wads of waste cotton. Still others shuffled closer—young men mostly, along with a few older slaves; they scratched themselves out of nervousness, some eyes darted furtively across the road. But all were silent now, and with a delicious chill I could feel the way in which they had responded to the fury in my words, like blades of sawgrass bending to a sudden wind. And I began to realize, far back in the remotest corner of my mind, that I had commenced the first sermon I had ever preached. They became still. Brooding, motionless, the Negroes gazed at me with watchful and reflective concern, some of them hardly drawing a breath. My language was theirs, I spoke it as if it were a second tongue. My rage had captured them utterly, and I felt a thrill of power course out from myself to wrap them round, binding us for this moment as one.

“My brothers,” I said in a gentler tone, “many of you has been to church with yo’ mastahs and mist’esses at the Whitehead church or up Shiloh way or down at Nebo or Mount Moriah. Most of you hasn’t got no religion. That’s awright. White man’s religion don’t teach nothin’ to black folk except to obey ole mastah and live humble—walk light and talk small. That’s awright. But them of you that recollects they Bible teachin’ knows about Israel in Egypt an’ the peoples that was kept in bondage. Them peoples was Jewish peoples an’ they had names just like us black folk—like you right there, Nathan, an’ you, Joe—Joe is a Jewish name—an’ you there, Daniel. Them Jews was just like the black folk. They had to sweat they fool asses off fo’ ole Pharaoh. That white man had them Jews haulin’ wood an’ pullin’ rock and thrashin’ corn an’ makin’ bricks until they was near ’bout dead an’ didn’t git ary penny for none of it neither, like ev’y livin’ mothah’s son of us, them Jews was in
bondage.
They didn’t have enough to eat neither, just some miser’ble cornmeal with weevils in it an’ sour milk an’ a little fatback that done got so high it would turn a buzzard’s stomach. Drought an’ hunger run throughout the land, just like now. Oh, my brothers, that was a sad time in Egypt fo’ them Jews! It was a time fo’ weepin’ an’ lamentation, a time of toil an’ hunger, a time of
pain!
Pharaoh he whupped them Jews until they had red whelps on ’em from head to toe an’ ev’y night they went to bed cryin’, ‘Lord, Lord, when is you goin’ to make that white man set us free?’”

There was a stirring among the Negroes and I heard a voice in the midst of them say, “Yes, yes,” faint and plaintive, and still another voice: “Mm-huh, dat’s
right!”
I stretched out an arm slowly, as if to embrace them, and some of the crowd moved nearer still.

“Look aroun’ you, brothers,” I said, “what does you see? What does you see in the air? What does you see blowin’ in the air?” The Negroes turned their faces toward the town, raised their eyes skyward: there in amber translucent haze the smoke from the distant fires swam through the streets, touching the gallery, even as I spoke, with its acrid and apple-sweet taste of scorched timber, its faint smell of corruption.

“That there is the smoke of
pestilence,
brothers,” I went on, “the smoke of pestilence an’ death. The same smoke that hanged over the Jews in bondage down there in Egypt land. The same smoke of pestilence an’ death that hanged over them Jews in Egypt hangs over all black folk, all men whose skin is black, yo’ skin and mine. An’ we got a tougher row to hoe even than them Jews. Joseph he was at least a man, not no four-legged dog. My brothers, laughter is good, laughter is bread and salt and buttermilk and a balm for pain. But they is a time for ev’ything. They is a time for weepin’ too. A time for rage! And in bondage black folk like you an’ me must weep in they rage.
Leave off
from such dumb laughter like just now!” I cried, my voice rising. “When a white man he lift a hand against one of us’ns we must not laugh but rage and weep! ’By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion!’ That’s right!” (“Mm-huh, dat’s right!” came the voice again, joined by another.) “We hanged our harps upon the willows, for they that carried us away captive required of us a song. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’
That’s right!”
I said, the words bitter on my tongue. “White man make you sing an’ dance, make you shuffle, do the buck-an’-wing, play ’Ole Zip Coon’ on the banjo and the fiddle. They that carried us away captive required of us a song.’ Yes! Leave off from that singin’, leave off from that banjo, leave off from that buck-an’-wing! They is a time for ev’ything. This is no time fo’ singin’, fo’ laughter. Look aroun’ you, my brothers, look into each other’s eyes! You jest seen a white man pit brother ’gainst brother! Ain’t none of you no four-legged beasts what can be whupped an’ hurt like some flea-bit cur dog. You is men! You is
men,
my dear brothers, look at yo’selves, look to yo’
pride!”

As I spoke, I saw two older black men at the rear of the crowd mutter to each other and shake their heads. Glances of puzzlement and worry crossed their faces and they sidled off, disappeared. The others still listened, intent, brooding, nearly motionless. I heard a soft sigh and a gentle “Amen.” I raised my arms to either side of me and extended my hands, palms outward, as if in benediction. I felt the sweat pouring from my face.

“In the visions of the night, brothers,” I continued, “God spoke to Jacob an’ He said,
1
am God, the God of thy father: fear not to go down into Egypt, for I will there make of thee a great nation.’ An’ Jacob went down into Egypt an’ the peoples of Israel multiplied an’ Moses was born. Moses he was born in the bulrushers an’ he delivered the Jews out of Egypt an’ into the Promised Land. Well, there they had a powerful lot of troubles too. But in the Promised Land them Jewish peoples they could stand up an’ live like
men.
They become a great nation. No more fatback, no more pint of salt, no more peck of corn fo’ them Jews; no more overseers, no more auction blocks; no more horn blow at sunrise fo’ them mothahs’ sons. They had chicken with pot likker an’ spoon-bread an’ sweet cider to drink in the shade. They done got paid an honest dollar. Them Jews become
men.
But oh, my brothers, black folk ain’t never goin’ to be led from bondage without they has
pride!
Black folk ain’t goin’ to be free, they ain’t goin’ to have no spoonbread an’ sweet cider less’n they studies to love they own
selves.
Only then will the first be last, and the last first. Black folk ain’t never goin’ to be no great nation until they studies to love they own black skin an’ the beauty of that skin an’ the beauty of them black hands that toils so hard and black feet that trods so weary on God’s earth. And when white men in they hate an’ wrath an’ meanness fetches blood from that beautiful black skin then, oh
then,
my brothers, it is time not fo’ laughing but fo’ weeping an’ rage an’ lamentation!
Pride!
” I cried after a pause, and let my arms descend. “Pride, pride,
everlasting
pride, pride will make you free!”

I ceased speaking and gazed at the rapt black faces. Then I finished slowly and in a soft voice: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, an’ the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. Amen.”

The Negroes were silent. Far off in Jerusalem, through the hot afternoon, a church bell let fall a single chime, striking the half-hour. Then the Negroes one by one straggled away across the gallery, some with troubled looks, some stupid and uncomprehending, some fearful. Others drew toward me, radiant; and Henry, who was deaf, who had read my lips, came up close to me and silently clasped my arm. I heard Nelson say, “You done spoke de truth,” and he too drew near, and I felt their warmth and their brotherhood and hope and knew then what Jesus must have known when upon the shores of Galilee he said:
“Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”