William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (184 page)

I slept the rest of the afternoon and through the night. The next day, which was Saturday, I awoke feeling groggy and weak. I drank some water and chewed on a sassafras root, and later dragged myself outside, where I sat reading, propped against a tree. It was while I was studying a few chapters from Jeremiah (for some reason, during a fast, I always savored Jeremiah, whose sour and mirthless temper was an appropriate companion for hunger) that I sensed a change in the atmosphere. The light paled, the stark shadows of the barren wintry trees grew hazy and dull, lost definition; far off in the woods a flock of ragamuffin sparrows, late winter visitors, ceased their cheeping, became still in the false dusk. Around me the leafless gray trees, bleak as skeletons, were plunged into evening shade. I looked up then to see the sun wink slowly out as it devoured the black shape of the moon. There was no surprise in my heart, no fear, only revelation, a sense of final surrender, and I rose to my knees and shut my eyes in prayer, wood smoke sweet in my nostrils, half drowned in the cavelike sudden silence of the woods. For long minutes I knelt there in the somber unearthly hush; sightless, I felt the dark like a vapor around me, cold like the edge of zinc and touched with the graveyard’s mossy damp. “
O Lord God to whom vengeance belongeth,”
I whispered, “
O God to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself.
”

Lift up thyself, thou judge of the earth: render a reward to the proud …

In the distance, like a signal, I heard the noise of a gun, a single faint booming that echoed back and forth amid the hollows of the bare and wintry forest, dwindled, died, then fell quiet. Some solitary hunter: had he too seen the sun darken, fired in terror at the haloed black sphere floating in the heavens? Now when I opened my eyes the sun appeared to be disgorging the moon at the same grave and stately pace with which it had swallowed it up. Light moved softly back across the floor of the woods, daubing the carpet of fallen leaves with yellow bursts of sunshine. Warmth flooded over me, the sparrows in the trees resumed their clamor; the sun rode across the blue sky triumphant and serene. I was suddenly touched by a wild anticipation and excitement.

“Now, Lord,” I said aloud, “the seal is removed from my lips.”

That evening just before sunset Hark came up through the woods and paid me a visit, bringing me a pan of grits and bacon which I was still too agitated to eat. I could only insist that he go back and get in touch with Henry and Nelson and Sam, that he tell them that at noon the next day—a Sunday—they must all assemble here at my sanctuary. With some reluctance because of his concern for my stomach (“Nat, you jes’ gwine shribble up an’ blow clean away,” he said) he obeyed me. The following day Hark and the others came as I had ordered. I bade them sit around the fire next to me. Then after a session of prayer I turned to the subject at hand. I told them the seal had been removed from my lips and that I had received the last sign. I said that the Spirit had appeared to me in the form of the eclipse of the sun, which they themselves had witnessed. The Spirit had informed me that the Serpent was loosened and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men. I went on patiently to explain that the Spirit had commanded that I should take on the yoke and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

Then as we sat there in the chill afternoon I unfolded to them my great plans. I made it clear that it was neither wise nor sufficient that our group of five (plus the score or so of Negroes I felt confident would join us) simply run off and get lost in the Dismal Swamp. In the first place, I pointed out, there was no possibility at all of a mob of twenty and more Negroes banding together and passing, even by night, thirty-five miles through two counties and part of another without being apprehended. Furthermore, even a smaller group would likely be doomed to failure. “Us five,” I said, “we run off to the swamp together, those white men’ll catch our asses before we get ten miles past Jerusalem. One or two niggers run off an’ they send out the dogs. Three niggers run off an’ they sent out the army.” Also, how could even Negroes survive long in the swamp without weapons and supplies? In addition, there was a seller’s market in Negroes at the moment, I explained; half a dozen traders were snooping around all over the county, and although I myself was doubtless safe

I could not say that I felt the same about the other slaves I knew— including those present—and feared that only a clock-tick and some owner’s necessity or greed might separate any of them from Mississippi or Arkansas.

“Faithful followers, dear brothers,” I said finally, “I believe they ain’t none of you can live like this any longer. Therefore, they is only one thing to do …”

Here I stopped speaking altogether for a while, allowing these last words to enter their consciousness. Minutes passed and they said nothing, then Henry’s voice broke the silence, his deaf man’s bleat hoarse and cracked, a shock in the stillness: “Us gotta
kill
all dem white sonsabitches. Ain’t dat what de Lawd done told you? Ain’t dat right, Nat?”

It was as if by those words we were committed.
Us gotta kill
… I talked on, detailing my plans. I showed them the map; although they could not read it, they understood my projected route. Later I asked questions, and found that none of my followers shrank from the idea of killing; I made it plain that murder was an essential act for their own freedom and they welcomed this truth with the stolid acceptance of men who, as I have shown, had nothing on earth to lose. And so I spoke to them throughout the afternoon and into the early evening. In my excitement the weakness I had suffered from my long fast, the drowsiness and vertigo, all seemed to dissolve into the wintry air. I was gripped by a sense of exaltation, of mastery and of perfect assurance, that sent great cries and shouts of gladness throughout my being. I wondered if even Joshua or Gideon had felt such an ecstasy, or had heard that knowledge like a voice in the brain: “The first shall be last.”

“An’ de last shall be first,” they replied. These lines became our password and our greeting, our benediction.

That evening after I dismissed my followers—swearing each to secrecy and silence as I sent them on their way back through the woods—I fell asleep by the fire and dreamed the most placid dreams I had dreamt in a lifetime. And when I awoke the next day and found a king snake, recently aroused from hibernation, sunning himself in my clearing, I blessed its presence in the Lord’s name and saw it as a good omen.

Even so, there had begun to dwell in my mouth a sinister taste of death—a sweetish-sour and corrupt flavor that rose thickly up through the nostrils like tainted pork—which I had never experienced before and which I could not rid myself of; it persevered through all the great events of the following summer, and even to the very end of the upheaval. Moreover, I began to suffer from that strange illusion or dislocation of the mind that from then on I could not shake loose or avoid. In short, not always but often when I encountered a white person after that day—man, woman, or child—there was an instant when his living presence seemed to dissolve before my eyes and I envisioned him in some peculiar attitude of death. On the morning following my revelation to my followers, for example, when I came back out of the woods as I returned to Travis’s, I was smitten by this hallucination to an intense degree. Now overtaken with weakness again from my fast, I headed east to the farm just before noon. As I walked unsteadily along the path which straggled out of the last clump of pine trees I saw that the place was a hive of activity and work. From the distance I could see the two boys, Putnam and young Joel Westbrook, carrying between them a sheaf of strip iron toward the wheel shop. Farther away, on the front porch of the house, Miss Sarah waddled about with a busy broom, sending up puffs of dust. Still farther off in the barnyard the angular, aproned form of Miss Maria Pope hunched along, strewing handfuls of corn amid a crowd of chickens. The big treadmill saw I had built stood outside the wheel shop; it drove across the field a singsong rasp of metal on wood, and a monotonous clatter. Below the treadmill Travis occupied himself with a hammer and chisel, while above him on the treadmill itself, looming naked to the waist and enormous through a cloud of steam, Hark plodded at a slant toward the sky, his great legs moving as if in some ageless pilgrimage toward an ever-receding and unattainable home.

As I approached the farm I saw that Travis, turning about, had caught sight of me; he shouted something to me in words that were lost on the wind, then pointed at the treadmill and threw me a welcoming, amiable wave with his hand. He shouted again, and now I caught the words. “Durned good job!” was what I heard; but I stopped then—stock-still and with the taste of death sweet and yellow beneath my tongue—seized for the first time by that hallucination. For like the moment once in a far corner of childhood when at Turner’s Mill I had happened on a white child’s book in which the woodcut-shapes of small human beings were hidden among the trees, or in a grassy field, and I was teased by the captions to know, “Where is Jacky?” or “Where is Jane?”—now the distant people before me leaped out similarly from their benign and peaceable scene and I discerned them instantly in the postures of death, prefigured in attitudes of bloody immolation: the two boys sent sprawling with heads bashed in, Miss Sarah disemboweled upon the quiet porch, Miss Maria Pope hacked down amid her chickens, and Travis himself impaled upon a pike, the ice of incomprehension freezing his eyes even while he raised his arm, now, in beneficent greeting.

Only Hark endured as he strode ceaselessly upon his treadmill—
Ah, Hark!
—high above the dead, paddling like a glorious black swan toward the plains of heaven.

“Well yes, Nat,” Hark told me once late that spring. “I reckon I kin kill. I
kin
kill a white man, I knows dat now. Like I done
tol’
you, I done had some hard times thinkin’ ’bout killin’ white folks when we start de ruction. I ain’t neb-ber killed nobody in all my bo’n days. Sometimes at night I done woked up all asweat and atremble wid dese yere terrible dreams in my head, thinkin’ ’bout how it gwine be when I got to kill dem white folks.

“But den I gits to thinkin’ ’bout Tiny and Lucas an’ Marse Joe sellin’ dem off like dat, sellin’ dem off widout no nem’mine fo’ how
I
feels ’bout it, den I knows I kin kill. Hit like de Lawd
ax
me to kill, ’cause it plain long
sinful
to sell off a man’s own fambly, like you say.

“Lawd, Nat, hit sho done cause me a powerful misery, de lonesomeness I done had in my heart after Tiny and Lucas was gone. Like Lucas now—I mean, you know hit kind of funny, de way I tried to figger out ways
not
to grieve over dat little boy. After dey took him away wid Tiny de lonesomeness got so bad I could hardly stan’ it. An’ so I begun to think ’bout all de
mean
things dat Lucas done. I begun to think ’bout all dem times dat he screeched an’ hollered an’ kep’ me fum sleep an’ de time he done got mad an’ whopped me wid a hoe handle or dat time he th’owed a mess of grits right in Tiny’s face. An’ I’d think about all dese times an’ I’d say to myse’f: ‘Well, he was a mean young’un anyway, hit good to git shet of him.’ An’ dat ud make me feel better for mebbe a little bit. Den, Lawd, I’d think of de mean things I done to
him,
an’ dat ud make me feel bad other way aroun’. But hard as I’d try I couldn’t keep feelin’ mad about dat little boy, an’ by an’ by I’d think about him a-chucklin’ an’ ridin’ on my back an’ us playin’ together behin’ the shed, an’ de grief ud come back an’ pretty soon I’d get so lonesome I could almost die …

“No, Nat, you right. Hit sinful to do dat to folks. So when you ax me kin I kill, I figgers I kin, easy ’nough. Thout Tiny an’ Lucas I wouldn’ like to hang roun’ dis yere place any longer noways …”

That I chose Independence Day as the moment to strike was of course a piece of deliberate irony. It seemed clear to me that when our eruption was successful—with Jerusalem seized and destroyed and our forces soon impregnably encamped in the Dismal Swamp—and when word of our triumph spread throughout Virginia and the upper southern seaboard, becoming a signal for Negroes everywhere to join us in rebellion, the fact that it had all arisen on the Fourth of July would be an inspiration not alone to the more knowledgeable slaves of the region but to men in bondage in even more remote parts of the South who might take flame from my great cause and eventually rally to my side or promulgate their own wild outbreaks. Yet the choice of that patriotic extravagancy which I made in the spring also involved a very practical consideration. For many years the Fourth of July had been the largest, noisiest, and most popular of all general celebrations in the country. The festivities had always been held at the camp meeting grounds several miles from Jerusalem, and were attended by nearly every white person in the region save for the feeble, the ailing, and those already too drunk to travel. As has been seen, it was my purpose to slaughter without hesitation each man, woman, and child who lay in my path. Needless to say, however, I was sure that the Lord wished me to take Jerusalem by the most expedient means, and hence if I were able eventually to enter the town by stealth and seize the armory when most of the people were away at their jubilee, then so much the better—especially if, in addition to the advantageous momentum such a thrust would give me, it might result in naturally fewer casualties among my men. Although Joshua’s initial concept had been a planned ambush—luring the people out—it was through a somewhat similar maneuver of capturing an empty town that he defeated the cities of Ai and Bethel—and this led after all to the ultimate downfall of Gibeon and to the Children of Israel’s inheritance of the land of Canaan. Timing my assault for the Fourth of July likewise seemed to me for a while to be strategy inspired by the Lord.

But early in May my plans along such a line were dashed to pieces. One Saturday while at the market in Jerusalem conferring with my inmost four disciples, I learned from Nelson that for the first time in local history it had been decided that the Independence Day to-do would be held not at the outlying meeting grounds but within the town itself. That of course made the prospect of attacking Jerusalem on July Fourth even more hazardous than it ordinarily might, and so in great consternation I abruptly canceled my plans. Now in a near-panic, unaccountably, I felt that the Lord was playing with me, taunting me, testing me, and shortly after that Saturday, I fell ill with a bloody flux and a racking fever that lasted nearly a week. During this interval I was wrenched with anxiety. In my despair I began to wonder if the Lord had really called me to such a great mission after all. Then I recovered from my seizure almost as quickly as I had been stricken. Pounds lighter but somehow feeling stronger, I rose from bed in my shed adjoining the wheel shop (where I had been nursed and fed, alternately, by Hark and the ever-ebullient Miss Sarah, soon to cease her existence) to learn of a new development that made me feel—in joyous relief mingled with shame at my faithlessness—that the Lord had not misused me; instead in His great wisdom He had caused me to wait for a grander day and the beginnings of an even more propitious design.