William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (180 page)

On another Saturday in Jerusalem, a month or so later, a curious thing happened which—although it bears only indirectly upon the great events I must soon describe—produced an important enough effect on me to compel its recounting. During the intervening weeks I had, on these Saturdays, formed a Bible class composed of seven or eight Negroes, including Daniel, Sam, Henry, and Nelson. Hark had returned to Travis, so he no longer accompanied me to town. I held this class in the shelter of a large maple tree behind the market. There, seated on the cool earth with the Negroes crouching or squatting in a ragged arc around me, I had the opportunity to bring some of these people into the presence of the Holy Word for the very first time in their lives. Few of them had the ability to become what one might call devout; none of them was disposed to really cease from foul language or to abstain from drinking whatever brandy could be filched from a white man’s wagon. (Only Henry, owned by a pious master and walled up in his deafness, possessed what might be called a spiritual nature.) But as slaves who had had nothing to fill their heads save for old grannies’ scare-stories about conjurs and ha’nts and omens, they responded eagerly to my description of the events in Genesis and Exodus—the tales of Joseph and his brothers and the passage of the Red Sea and Moses smiting the rock in Horeb—and each Saturday morning I noted with pride and pleasure that they had begun to greet me with the looks of those for whom my arrival marked their most treasured hour. After the lesson, which might last until well past noon, I bade them all a friendly good-bye and then retired by myself to the shade beneath Moore’s wagon where I would have my midday dinner of pone and bacon. Already I had resolved to adopt an air of aloofness and mystery, believing that such a distant pose would work to my advantage when the time came at last to reveal to my followers the great plans in the offing.

On this particular Saturday, I had just left the group when a strange white man sidled up to me and tapped me lightly on the elbow of my shirt.

“Oh, preacher,” said a tremulous voice, “a word with you, if’n you please.”

The tone was gentle; save for Moore’s sarcastic thrusts I had never heard myself called “preacher” before and I looked down, startled, to behold a slope-shouldered little man who became known to me as Ethelred T. Brantley.

“I heerd you preach to the niggers t’other Sattidy,” he murmured to me with a furtive, urgent sound. The voice was touched with desperation. “Oh, you preaches so good,” he said. “What kin I do to be saved?”

Ethelred T. Brantley was a round womanish man of about fifty, with soft plump white cheeks upon which tiny sores and pustules congregated like berries amid a downy fringe of red hair. Dressed in a ragged gray denim jacket and pants, he stirred sluggishly on wide hips and his pale dirty little fingers fluttered as he talked. Now he pressed me to go with him behind the market; his eyes darted nervously, as if he were fearful that we might be seen together. There amid the weeds he told me about himself in a burst of words, his squeaky, piteous voice seeming at any moment about to crack and to dissolve into sobs. At present without regular employ or money, he had until the year before been third assistant overseer on a failing plantation down in Beaufort County, in Carolina. After having lost his position he had come back to Jerusalem to live in a shack with his elderly sister, who supported him on a pittance and who was dying of consumption. He did odd jobs but was in no way to do much. He had a bad cough himself; asthma, consumption too? Brantley didn’t know. He hoped it was asthma. He might not die of asthma. The eruptions on his cheeks wouldn’t go away, he’d had them since he was a boy. He was tormented by some kind of ailment in his guts that caused him to go to the privy a dozen times a day, frequently in his pants. He had been sent to jail once in Carolina. Now he was afraid again. Because— He had taken a woman—
No!
He hesitated, his eyes anxious behind flickering eyelids, a pink flush rising beneath the pustuled skin. That was wrong. No, he—He had done something
bad,
yesterday, with a boy. The son of a local magistrate. He had paid the boy a dime. The boy had told. He thought the boy had told. He wasn’t sure. He was afraid.
“Oh Lord God,”
he exclaimed. He broke wind with a plaintive hiss and for an instant his exhalations filled my nostrils like air from a swamp bottom.

“I has always keered for niggers, tucken good keer of niggers,” said Brantley. “I has never beat a nigger in my life. You preaches so good. I done heerd you. I’m so afeared. I’m so miser’ble. Oh, how can I be saved?”

“By baptism in the Spirit,” I replied sharply.

“If’n I could read,” he said, “maybe I’d know ’bout religion like you does. But I cain’t read nor write neither, not ary word. Oh, I’m so miser’blel I jest wants to
die.
But I’m skeered of dyin’. Kin all men have pride? Kin
all
men be redeemed?”

“Yes,” I said, “all men can have pride. And all men can be redeemed—by baptism in the Spirit.” Then in a rush it occurred to me that this might be some kind of white man’s trap, a joke, a ruse. “But when you overheard me preach—” I paused. “When you heard me preach that day I was saying things that wasn’t for white men’s ears.” A sudden apprehension overtook me, and I started to turn away from him. “I was preaching for black folk,” I said in a harsh voice.

“Oh no, preacher,” he implored me, plucking at my sleeve, “I needs he’p so bad, please.”

“Why don’t you go to your own church?” I retorted. “Why don’t you go to the white man’s church?”

He hesitated, then finally he said: “I cain’t. I mean, I used to go at Nebo. That’s where my sister worships at. On’y Reverend Entwistle, the preacher there, he—” Halting, he seemed unable to go on.

“He what?” I said.

“Oh, he done throwed me out,” he blurted in a choked voice. “He said I was—” Again he paused, and with a sigh, cast his eyes toward the ground. “He said—”

“He said
what?”
I demanded.

“He said they will be no sotomite of the sons of Isr’el in the house of the Lord. He tole me the Bible said so. That’s what he done said, I ’members ever’ word of it. He said I was a sotomite. So I cain’t go to Nebo. I cain’t go nowheres.” He looked up at me in anguish, tears swimming in his eyes. “Oh, preacher,
how
can I be redeemed?”

I was suddenly swept by pity and disgust, and I have wondered since why I said to him what I did but have failed to come up with a sure answer. It may be only that Brantley at that moment seemed as wretched and forsaken as the lowest Negro; white though he might be, he was as deserving of the Lord’s grace as were others deserving of His wrath, and to fail Brantley would be to fail my own obligation as minister of His word. Besides, it gave me pleasure to know that by showing Brantley the way to salvation I had fulfilled a duty that a white preacher had shirked. Anyway—

“Then listen,” I told him. “Fast for eight days until next Sunday. You must eat nothing except that once every two days you can have as much corn pone as you can fill the palm of one hand. Then next Sunday I will baptize you in the Spirit and you will be redeemed.”

“Oh Lord have mercy, preacher!” Brantley cried, all asnuffle. “You done saved my life! I’m so happy I” He tried to clutch my hand and kiss it but I drew away, squirming.

“Fast, as I say,” I repeated, “and meet me at Mr. Thomas Moore’s next Sunday. We will be baptized together in the Spirit.”

The following day was a Sunday, when it was customary for Negroes to be let off for most of the time between late morning and dusk. Early that afternoon I walked the four miles up the road and presented myself at the front door of

Mrs. Catherine Whitehead’s. Set back from the road several hundred yards, the house was a comfortable, rambling place made of smooth-planed clapboard (unlike Moore’s, put together with rough-hewn timbers), freshly whitewashed, shuttered, surrounded by a pleasant lawn of clover humming with bees. A dusty field of budding cotton stretched to the far woods. In the front yard reposed a gilt and cherrywood English brougham; it was drawn by a thoroughbred filly, plump, beautifully currycombed, that now stood feeding placidly in the deep grass and broke the hot afternoon silence with her champing sound. Zinnias bloomed in neat red boxes on the front porch, I smelled a warm odor of roses from a trellis. Mrs. Whitehead was a gentlewoman, a lady of some wealth. There was nothing fancy about the place but it was far better than Moore’s; I knew that she even owned books. Not since my days at Turner’s Mill had I brushed close to white people of means, and as I stood on the porch, awaiting some response to my knock, I was made hurtfully aware of my descent in life and suddenly suspected that I reeked of mule dung. Idly I wondered how in the midst of this drought a place could retain such green grace, such color and lushness; then I spied in the field a windmill—which brought up water from a well—the only one for miles and a marvel to all who beheld it. Its weathered blades made a faint sad clack and flutter across the afternoon quiet.

My knock at the door was answered by Margaret Whitehead; it was our first encounter, and one that should retain momentous syllables, intonations, recollected cadences, glances, hues, harmonies, curvatures, refractions of late summer light. But I remember only a dim pretty pale girl’s face—she must have been thirteen or so—and a gentle voice that replied, “Why yes, he’s here,” unsurprised as if my skin had been alabaster-white, when I said: “Please, young missy, may I have a word with yo’ brother the preacher?”

When Richard Whitehead appeared he had the crumbs of midday dessert still on his lips; he lost no time in directing me around to the rear door. There I waited fifteen minutes before he came back again—a slender youngish man, rather frail, with a prim hostile mouth and the same petrified eyeballs I had seen once years before in a Turner library sketchbook, amid the hell-ravaged face of John Calvin. His voice was reedy, thin, touched with all of the Sabbath’s hushed and purple melancholy. I realized I should not have come. Queasy, I was stricken with the old familiar nigger fear, and could not help but avert my glance.

“What is it that you want?” he demanded.

I hesitated for a moment—Out with it quick, I thought—then I said: “Please, mastah, I’m a minister of the gospel. I wonders if after all the folks is gone next Sunday I couldn’t baptize a white gentleman down in yo’ church.”

A startled look came over his face, then faded. “Who are you?” he said.

“I’m Nat Turner,” I replied. “My mastah’s Mr. Thomas Moore, down by Flag Marsh.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” he said shortly. “What is it you want again?”

Once more I made my request. He regarded me with unblinking eyes, then he said: “What you are asking is ludicrous. How can a darky claim to be an ordained minister of the gospel? Pray tell me where you acquired your background in divinity. Washington College? William & Mary? Hampden-Sydney? What you are asking—”

“I don’t have to be ordained, mastah,” I put in. “In God’s sight I am a preacher of His Word.”

He pursed his lips and I could tell that his incredulity was being slowly converted into anger. “I’ve never heard of such tomfoolery from a darky in my life,” he exclaimed. “What are you up to, anyway? What sort of white gentleman do you propose to baptize in church?”

“Mr. Ethelred T. Brantley,” I said.

“Brantley!” At the name he seemed to go ashen with outrage. “A
gentleman! I
know of that scum! Jailed in Carolina for an abominable, unnatural crime against nature! He has been turned out of one congregation in this county, and now he would pollute the sacred altar of a Methodist temple through seeking baptism by the likes of you! What did he pay you to solicit me for such blasphemy?”

“Brantley is a poor man,” I said. “He hasn’t got ten cents. And he is very sick. And lost. Doesn’t the Bible say that the Son of man is come to save that which was lost?”

“Get out of here!” Richard Whitehead cried, his voice shrill now. I hopped sideways as he aimed a kick at me through the door. “Get your devilish black self off of this property, and don’t come back! And tell that Brantley I have better things to do than be made a fool of by a degenerate and by an uppity nigger! Your master will hear of this, I promise
you-u-u!
”

His reedy voice trailed me as I departed by the way I came, a hysteric wail upon which my imagination played while I walked—the sound changing from that of a young woman to something else, a trapped rabbit, a bird, and finally to the scream a man emits at that last instant before the club descends and obliterates together prim mouth and scream.

That week I decided that Brantley and I would be baptized in Persons’ millpond, which lay on an abandoned plantation a few miles from Moore’s. I sent this word to Brantley by a Negro going into Jerusalem, and late in the afternoon on the following Sunday he met me near the pond, where I was waiting with Hark, Sam, and Nelson. Although obviously weak from his fast, Brantley looked somehow healthier: a pink glow of anticipation suffused his face, and he confided to me that his bowels, for the first time in years, were notably under control. “Oh, I’m so happy!” he whispered as the five of us walked down the wooded lane toward the millpond. Rumor of the baptism had, however, spread throughout the county, and when we arrived a mob of forty or fifty poor white people—including some pie-faced females in sunbonnets—rimmed the far banks, waiting for the show. When we reached the water’s edge they began to hoot and jeer at us but kept their distance. Brantley shivered with excitement. “Oh Lordy,” he whispered over and over again, “I’m goin’ to be saved!” While my followers looked on from the near bank I waded out with Brantley, fully clothed, to a place in the pond where the water was chest-deep. There I recited the passage from Ezekiel about the resurrection of the dry bones: “I
will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and ye shall know that I am the Lord
…”

I pushed Brantley down. He slid under like a wet sack of beans; after he came up, spluttering and choking, his face took on a look of bliss such as I have rarely seen on any man, of any shade.