by John Hersey
I was stirred by the fierce eyes into a boldness that urged me to say, “I saw a woman under the trees in front of the house….”
The appalling stare was rigid, perhaps surprised, perhaps disapproving, perhaps furious. Peace did not answer this but moved on. Silence. My heart racing.
In the evening Auntie cooked a supper of cow peas with a chunk of pork for the unmarrieds—the widow; the young mix, Harlot; a girl about my age, named Bliss; besides herself and me. It grew dark and I was exhausted….
A sad bellowing sound: it was Top Man, the white slaveherd, blowing the curfew on a water-buffalo horn. He stopped at our door a minute later and said, “All counted?”
“They’re all here,” Auntie said.
I could not sleep. The mud k’ang, which I shared with Bliss and the snoring widow, was uneven, bumpy, and damp.
Stumps
No time at all had passed, it seemed, when the deep, mournful bawl of the buffalo horn sounded again. What alarm could it be? I jumped out of bed in the dark; the hard-packed dirt floor was cool to the soles of my feet. Auntie’s husky voice: “All up. Morning call. Out! Out! Out!” Heaves and groans came from the k’angs; Auntie coughed and wheezed.
The children of the slave compound soon arrived, or were delivered in arms, for the care, during the day while mothers worked in the fields, of Auntie and the girl Bliss. Auntie told me that she had asked Top Man to assign me to the gang headed by Peace, who, though a blacksmith, worked “out,” too; this was the old master’s economical way, still honored.
At good daylight Top Man blew the carabao horn a second time, and we started along to the woods and fields. I was given a basket of millet meal to carry, and I put my shoes in it, on top of the grain. Harlot walked with me and explained what was in sight. I did not see Peace yet. There were three field gangs of about a dozen slaves each; Mink was not in mine.
We walked, speaking only in murmurs, along a foggy lane at first, past the great wooden tobacco house with slotted walls, a sweet odor drifting to us from within, and past the pounding and threshing mills on a dusty cart road, with now a pungent scent of crushed kernels of grain. The whole gang exclaimed almost in unison, a delighted shout, when we came over a rise and suddenly saw the amazing sun, grindstone-size, made to seem as cool as the moon by the mists that came steaming up off a fallow field ahead.
Where was I? I had a sensation of being suspended in some vague moist midspace and of urgently wanting to get to a goal that was so far unnamed, unclear. All that life in the Northern Capital, those humiliations and bitter frights and losses—what had I learned? An uneasy craving stirred in me now as I remembered my arrival at this vivid farm the previous day, and thought of the huge man with the piercing stare. I felt young as a tottering calf; I had painfully much to learn.
At a crossroads each slave bent down, traced an X in the dust with his forefinger, and spat on it, and for my safety I did the same, pretending I had always done so.
Ahead we saw a train of three donkey carts and a pair of oxen being driven out in a double yoke, and there was Peace. I thought of his blazing eyes as he had stared me down; and then I thought of that voracious stare in Chao-er’s the day when Nose had taken me into the small, dark room, and I was overcome by the difference between those two glances. This man Peace looked as if he had just seen Preacher Honing’s hell.
We arrived at our working place. For some days the gangs had been clearing a forest area to make new fields, and I saw a waste of fallen, untrimmed carcasses of trees, and stumps, and conical heaps of damp leaf mold. Following Harlot’s lead I sat on a felled trunk and put on my shoes. Top Man set the gangs to work. The men cut logs with two-handled saws; the oxen hauled out prepared stumps; the women gathered brush. The sun climbed into a glorious morning. The ringing of axes and mattocks, the gentle protests of the oxen, birdsong in the woodlot, the slaveherd’s commands, the sweet voice of Harlot “encouraging” us with song, bursts of laughter among the slaves—all these peaceful sounds together gave me feelings, first of relief, then of unrestrained celebration. Every time I turned my head I saw Peace. The cooks, one for each gang, lit fires, and their kettles steamed, and in midmorning Top Man called out the order to eat. The warm cereal was like thick cream in my mouth, and now and then a morsel of salted fish pleasantly stung away the blandness. Back to our labor! Harlot began, in our old language strongly touched with South-of-the-River tones, a hymn that almost made me weep for the faraway life of our Arizona village:
“By cool Siloam’s shady rill
How sweet the lily grows!”
The yellow overseer, Li, rode out into the clearing on a large donkey toward our gang. He stopped beside Peace, who was fastening the bullock ropes around a stump, the roots of which had been mostly chopped through.
“Where are you heaping those stumps?”
Peace straightened up. “Where you said.”
“Not where I said.” Li knew the answer to his own question, then.
“Where you said. We are hauling them where you said.”
“Maybe the slaveherd said. Not I. I never said to haul the stumps right to the place where we must clear a new field next year.”
“You said it last week.”
“I never said such a thing.”
All of us were silently going through the motions of work but intently listening, for neither man would give ground, and there seemed no way for this lock to be released. The yellow man looked down from his awkward perch on the cloth-saddled donkey; the slave stood with one foot up on the stump.
“Last week, when we came out here the first time,” Peace said.
“What made you think I said over there?”
“The way I remember it.”
I managed to notice, sweeping my eyes across the pair in mid-motion, that Peace had not fastened his hypnotic stare on the face of his adversary, and I could hear that he was not speaking in his booming prophet’s voice of the slave quarters, and he looked at the ground, or at the donkey’s flank, frowning, and in his voice were notes of not very clever stubbornness, of deference underlying his opposition to the overseer’s authority, of amiable stupidity, of a desire to please at odds with a servile self-defense—a tone surely far more baffling and infuriating to the overseer than frank contradiction would have been.
“Come along here,” the overseer said, jerking his donkey’s head. “I’ll show you again where I said. Top Man! Get over here…. The old big one would have had you two bambooed skinless.” He pointed out the proper place.
Then Li, his face livid with the frustrating moral defeat he seemed to be suffering, rode away to check on another gang, and our work took on a new willingness, Harlot’s songs a wilder beat.
That evening in the quarters, when it was deep dark and time for our second meal of the day, Peace came to our hut to eat a supper of millet gruel, white cabbage, and persimmon wine prepared for him by the women he called his handmaidens, Auntie and Harlot.
In the midst of the meal Peace, seated cross-legged on a k’ang, facing the flickering fire of the open cooking pit, whose starts and surges, reflected in his eyes, made his intense stare seem to flash and burn, roared at the circle of cringing women his contempt for the yellow overseer, Li:
“I pity the man! He is a captive in Egypt himself. Must not be absent any night, or any daytime, either, without the son’s say-so. Has to get a chit for absences just like a slave. We call him master, but he’s no master. See the mules and donkeys watered! Rub down! Hay in the stalls! Doors locked up! Sheep. Fowl. Pigs. Watch out that the slaves don’t steal anything! He’s locked up by having to lock up. Keeps the keys in a safe place, but Peace knows where they are. I tell you, Peace knows just where the key to the master’s gun box lies. I tell you I do. The gun box key! I pity him. No one but that man can unlock the smokehouse, vegetable cellar, stable door. Supposed to see us every one in bed—leaves that to t
he slaveherd—never comes down here in the hands’ quarters at night; you notice that?—leaves all that to Top Man. The yellow Matriarch—she stands behind him in her fashion, but the old master’s dead. It’s the weak young Pharaoh now. I pity the man. Stumps! Haul Stumps. Here! No, no, no, over here, Small Peace! No no no no no, small boy!”
And Peace threw his long-haired head back and rocked off in a terrifying thunder-bellied bombardment of laughter.
A Laundering
I had been a Yen slave a whole month before I even saw the courtyards of the big house again. On a market-day afternoon I went up with Harlot to the laundering shed within the house slaves’ yard to wash my clothes.
I was afraid of the walled-in big house, and of the owner—the invisible power, the more awesome because unseen. I had no sense of the master except by hearsay. Big Venerable Shen had been all too close at hand—bumping into me as I tried to pass the bowl of duck; this young Yen was a figure in some sort of sorrowful legend, and even in moments out in the clearing when I lost myself in work (Harlot’s thin swooping treble: “Over the fields of glory, over the jasper sea”) I had a queer empty feeling of being owned by a spirit with a floating misty mother.
Harlot ran with me through the orchard and past the garden, toward the house slaves’ postern gate. I was happy with Harlot. She had been a house hand but had asked, for reasons of her own, to be shifted to the fields; some said this mixie was the old man’s by-the-way daughter, and once the widow in our hut whispered to me on a dank exhalation of garlic that I would never guess whose sister Harlot was. My friend was playful and tricky, and she delighted in teasing up my ignorant fears. Her singing voice drew its intense emotional effect—its impression of a swimming gaiety almost dragged under the surface by an undertow of pain—from a swift, insistent trembling of the tones, a fluttering as of helplessness. When, along with Auntie, she was “at Peace’s side,” a handmaiden, she was distant, stiff, and haughty, and she had a hollow-eyed look, as if harking to inner voices.
As we hurried through the tall brown weeds with bundles of soiled clothing in our arms, Harlot—building on her days of work in the big house—fanned my superstitious fear of the figure I had seen in the grove. The Matriarch! “She has a sharp tooth in the middle that can make a hole in a person’s neck!” Harlot giggled and spurted ahead of me.
“Wait!” I pleaded.
We entered the house slaves’ courtyard; this seemed to be the heart of the farm. Along the postern side were a vegetable cellar, a talkative poultry coop and a murmuring pigeon cote, a cowshed and swine wallow, and a smokehouse for the curing and storage of hams and flitches of bacon. Up one side stood a sheepfold, a cart house and stables, and storerooms for feed, hemp, flax, and tools. The house slaves’ rooms edged the third side. At the far end were the kitchens, three or four rods from the rear entrance to the main courtyard, to spare the yellows’ nostrils and ears, and, to one side of the yard, our goal—the well, with a pair of buckets slung from long bamboo levers, and beside it the washing shed, a roof on posts over a pair of stone tubs and stone blocks.
Harlot showed me how to draw water, and we half filled the tubs; we soaked the clothes and took them out and put them on the blocks and pounded the dirt out of them with battling sticks.
Across the way at an open stall of the stables we saw Peace and Solemn shoeing a horse.
I wanted to know from Harlot exactly what it meant to be a handmaiden to Peace. Where did she and Auntie go toward the forest with him in evening hours? Did Peace possess them there? On moss beds? Did that staring power of his release itself in some incredible gentleness? “Why,” I asked, “does Peace wear his hair that way?”
Harlot balked—changed from a bubbling companion halfway to the rigid, vision-stiffened priestess she seemed to be when at Peace’s side. “It comes from Smart’s book,” she said in a low voice. I was silent. “Peace,” she said later, so softly I could barely hear her, “has another name. A Bible name. But it has to be a secret. Anyone who even whispers his secret name will get sick in the lungs. If you speak out Peace’s secret name you’ll spoil everyone’s luck. It would be a curse on everyone.” Harlot was pale; her whispers were rushed.
I was afraid, as it was, of the strange Biblical phrases in the old white language: Woman of Timnath, Harlot of Gaza. I had no more questions and pounded angrily at my soiled shift.
A circle of house slaves squatting outdoors on their heels around the compound entrance to the kitchens began to eat. We knew that they filched food from the Matriarch’s stores, cooked too much, and ate the yellows’ leftovers; three meals a day. They were better dressed than we—some wore castoffs from the yellow Matriarch and from the son. Several of them were mixes, for the masters liked slaves near them to have yellowish skins and folded eyelids. The house slaves had airs and manners; I peeked askance at them as I worked. Evenings in the hut Harlot had told us of our Yen house slaves’ realization that theirs was a third-rate aristocracy, for on pass days they had seen the high-style plantations downriver, and they knew that our Yen place was sketchy and crass. The house slaves liked the young master’s wanting to show more. It was said that the yellow Matriarch, stubborn in honoring the dead old man’s ways, would not let the son have the big house plastered or its wooden trim painted. The father had tolerated “necessities”—cook, laundress, seamstresses, dairy maid, gardener, handyman, hostler; the son had bought slaves to be uniformed sedan-chair-bearers, body servants, coachmen, housemaids, and houseboys. But this “elegance” was all halfhearted, dissatisfied, lowlife, and unpainted; the hoe hands laughed at the pretensions that Harlot made so vivid in the telling.
A young man, a mix, the young owner’s body servant, Jug, whom young Yen had won in a lottery at a party given for the entire countryside at the Fan Tu-fu estate the previous spring, strolled over to the tubs to tease Harlot. “Are you well, Harlot?” he said. “How are your blisters, small girl?”
Harlot flapped her paddle at Jug as if to strike his buttocks. “I’ll show you,” she said. “I have a strong hand now, Jug.”
“I hear you’ve been promenading around with bigwig,” Jug said, pointing with his thumb backward over his shoulder at Peace across the yard. I myself stiffened at Jug’s condescension to all field hands, and even to Peace. Harlot pounded her wash with flat sharp smacks, and so did I.
“This the new chicken-biddy?” Jug asked, taking two or three steps toward me.
“Go suck the yellow Matriarch’s tit,” I said, smarting.
Jug laughed hard, and he wandered away.
We drew fresh water and rinsed and wrung our things, to the pinging of Solemn’s hammer on the new shoes; Peace was paring a hoof. The hostler and handyman were idly watching the work.
“Want to try to see her?” Harlot mischievously asked me.
I nodded, frightened but thrilled.
“We’ll run through the front courtyards,” Harlot said. With deliberate care she lined up the twisted rolls of her wash over the clean stone lip of her tub, and I put mine with hers. “She may be in the trees, look sharp,” she whispered, then pulling up her coolie gown she sped away through the connecting gate to the main courtyard, and I ran after her in a giggling panic.
At the spirit screen of the side courtyard I saw a figure, and I almost tripped and fell: it was huge, I saw no face, something glittered on the form.
We had run only a few paces farther when this figure flew after us, shouting, “Harlot! You, Harlot!” We stopped. It was the big white man who had inspected me in the office—Duke, the yellow mistress’s Number One Boy. He was wearing a wornout mandarin coat with dull, tarnished gold braid on it. “Where do you think you’re running, you fool girls?”
Harlot was now deferential, humble. “White Lotus here said she was going to kill me,” she answered, panting. “I had an accident, I spilled a well bucket on her—see her gown sopping there? She lost her temper, Duke. She’s an ugl
y one, Duke. She said she was going to kill me, and I was just trying to get away.”
It was easy to see that Duke did not believe this excuse.
In a pretended fury I said, “She claims she spilled it! She threw it at me!”
Duke came up to us and took us each by an upper arm and walked us deliberately across the main courtyard—and there, at the far side, under the trees, I saw the yellow Matriarch standing. I wondered: Had Duke understood the real reason for our running, and was he letting us see her? I even saw the yellow face: plain, long-jawed, wistful. At a steady pace Duke paraded back through into the house slaves’ courtyard, and there at the stables he said, speaking smoothly as the owners’ proxy, “These two are getting out of their place, Peace. Trying to spy on the Matriarch. See to them.”
Peace’s eyes suddenly seemed to go behind a shield of thought, and in a hollow voice he began to recite—in the yellow’s language—a passage from “Smart’s book,” which was obviously a secret translation of parts of our white Bible: “So Esther’s maids and her chamberlains came and told it—none might enter into the king’s gate clothed with sackcloth…” And with a brilliance that took my breath away he recited more and more—the gnarled language of the prophets, strange in the yellow tongue, interpreting this yellow Matriarch to us, really to me, because I was new, so that I saw the Matriarch as a captive, a Philistine enslaved by her own enslavement of Israelites—pitiable, wandering in the grove in despair, or in her workrooms sewing endlessly at slaves’ coolie-cloth gowns. Peace’s manner was grandiose; his mind seemed to be in the grip of a self-steering clairvoyance; I began to tremble.