White Lotus

by John Hersey

  “You’re a clever one,” Mink said, “but I notice you have no man.”

  “Jacob,” I said, “he was one who saw things: a ladder, he saw a ladder. He saw a man come and fight him…touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him.”

  Mink looked afraid, but he said, “Why haven’t you a man? You’re old enough.”

  The sun was warm on my skin; I stretched my arms over my head. “What makes you want to know?” I asked.

  “Ayah!” Mink said. “It’s nothing to me.”

  I looked around and saw, approaching slowly from the lower end of the compound street, Peace, with Auntie and Harlot walking a pace behind him. There was something unnatural, formal, about their little procession; they were walking stiffly, and Peace was not turning to one side and the other to greet the flirting slaves. For the first time in months Peace was in his lightweight, elbow-length coolie tunic, and his strength seemed to be stirring under the cloth like a new season in the ground. I jumped up and gripped my broom, and I stuck my head in the door and saw the baby was still asleep; Bliss dozing on the bare k’ang beside him.

  Peace came straight up the street of the quarter toward me. His eyes burned. I felt the rough, sun-heated jamb log of the doorway between my shoulder blades; I wanted to sink in delight to the warm earth; Harlot and Auntie were singing softly.

  The trio stopped in the center of the street opposite me. Mink stood up and moved away along the wall of our room. I was in the doorway full in the sun.

  Peace took one step forward, and he spoke to me in the old white language, “Peace sayeth, ‘Blessed art thou among women.’ ”

  I shivered, my scalp crawled. Auntie and Harlot were looking at the ground.

  “Come with me,” Peace said, “from the valley of Sorek. Your name?”

  I stood frozen, wondering what he meant.

  “Your name, daughter.” His voice was impatient.

  “White Lotus. Small White Lotus,” I said as the yellows would say.

  “White Lotus means something else—a secret name, dweller in the valley of Sorek. You are chosen to be Peace’s third handmaiden. Peace needs a rememberer—getting so much to remember.”

  His speaking in the third person confused me. I was afraid, and I asked in the yellows’ language, “Are you really Peace? Who are you?”

  He answered in the old white language, “ ‘Why asketh thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret?’ ”

  I had seen those words translated; Smart had gone out of his way to show them to me.

  Peace spoke now in a low voice, still in the old tongue, “One command, daughter of the valley of Sorek: Thou shalt not touch these locks.” Peace raised a hand to his hair; his eyes were boring through my head. “ ‘For it is given unto me to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.’ ”

  I thought I would dissolve with fear and pleasure at the big man’s dizzying words.

  “Come with me, handmaiden,” Peace said, turning away down the street.

  I stepped out and took my place between Auntie and Harlot. The huge shoulders were directly before my face. We walked slowly, and I was aware of heads turning to look. I still had the broom in my hand.

  “Kill! Kill!”

  The seedlings in their beds were little inches. On a fine day in the fifth month we were drawing the new fields into hills with hoes, to ready them for transplants. The boy master was away, gone to gamble on the quail fights at the Spring of the Precious Bushel, on the Twin Hills road, though he had not, we had heard, been admitted to the rich young landlords’ secret society that presided over these and other sports; we were forced, humiliating as it might be to ourselves, to picture him as a bumpkin hanger-on—in whose weak, uncallused hand, however, our fates lay like careless dice. He was as powerful to us as God—a hateful pariah god. My own life had changed, from root to leaf. I attended Peace with Auntie and Harlot every hour away from the fields, and sometimes at work, too. New thrills each day! Smart’s teaching had been intensified; I was reading well already, and Smart gave me many passages to commit to memory. I knew plans. I knew as I hoed in the afternoon that Harlot would in time strike up a hymn which would call certain men to a meeting with other owners’ slaves that night at Yen’s water hole, a teaching, and that a line in the old-language song would announce the place:

  “I met dear Joshua down by the water…”

  And after dark that night, to be sure, some of us set out, looping around through the millet fields to the track to Twin Hills that the yellows called Favorable Wind Brook Road. Peace’s massive, work-shelled, ascetic hand was on my shoulder, and under one arm I carried three large scrolls for Smart. To no sound but the whispers of skin on sandy dirt, we made our way by the light of a greenish rind of the moon.

  Here was the spring—a black water hole in a basin of cattle-trampled ground on a sidehill, with a backdrop of twisting trees—honey locusts?—and, gradually densifying out of the murk, some sort of low plank walkway set up on stakes and laid out to the center of the pool for the dipping up of water in buckets; a long scar on the edge of the open area—a ground for the yellows’ game of pitchpot, perhaps; a dozen men squatting on their hams.

  “Have they come?” Peace asked at large.

  “Sheep Wu is bringing the fellow out from the Canal Bund,” a voice said.

  “We can go ahead, then,” Peace said.

  Auntie, Harlot, and I, the only women present, were tolerated, I sensed, as Peace’s appendages; he snapped his fingers, and Auntie drew out from her sleeve a small chimneyed lamp, and Harlot struck a flint and blew up a taper to light it with, and I handed Smart his scrolls. Then we three drew back as Smart and a freed slave, named Fan, a mix, gathered the others around them and read to them from scrolls, handbills, broadsides.

  I made out Ditcher; grunts and jokes. Some, too, whom I had seen at teachings at the smithy in Yen’s woods: Wang’s Judge, Ch’eng’s Candy, and others.

  The tiny light was poor; Fan, the free mixie, faltered reading the words: “Slavery—lives—in the—house—of—force. The white—the white man—the white man descends—therein—to the—state—of a—domestic—animal….”

  The slow, awkward diction burned in my ears. I had come to know long since that none of this was a drunken joke over a magic circle; that what seemed to be a kind of madness in Peace was, if seen in a certain dark-night way, rather an absolute clarity, an obsession, a gradual shaping of our energies. Helpless as we were, we were going to…going to…

  “Here! Look!”

  A hand picked up the little lamp, and the effulgence soared up toward a face: Wang’s Judge, I recognized him, though the face seemed to lop out in the uneven lamplight—till the lamp, a tiny star glistening on its chimneyside, moved across, and I saw that one cheek really was swollen, and that the round of the cheek had been burned with a branding iron: the character tsei, meaning “thief.” This was new, unhealed. I heard Auntie’s wheezing shocked intake of breath.

  Ditcher made a growling show of indignation. Peace hung back.

  Smart read, with greater facility than Fan, the freedman, from the famous Secret Scroll of the South Island Colony. A certain philosopher, Hsieh Fu-tzu, had advocated in this document, an aide-mémoire to the Emperor of an oral proposal Hsieh had made, that the whites be set free, colonized to South Island, off the far-southern coast, “with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of animals…a free and independent people…”

  The plan had been summarily suppressed, but far from being hanged or beheaded, Hsieh was still a loud voice in the Emperor’s ear. A man in our cluster by the water hole said he had heard that Philosopher Hsieh might be elevated to Minister of the First Rank, in charge of the writing of new laws on agriculture. Might he help us?

  Then another slave said that his owner
had called Philosopher Hsieh a coward—said he had put his tail between his legs during the sack of Tatung twenty years back. Let nine hundred Mongols simply walk in. Did nothing beforehand to mend the breach in the Great Wall. Sank the cannons in a lake. Left the slaves to flounder. Packed up and rode off with all the yellows.

  At this Ditcher rose to his feet, fists clenched, growling, as if to say in his stupid mute way: Who dares to slander this friend of the white man?

  Peace’s voice, severe and sharp: “Don’t count on Hsieh!”

  Peace’s omission of the minister’s honorific title had the most startling effect—of audacity, of authority. He seemed to be speaking directly to Ditcher, and the giant sat down, discomfited and grumbling.

  “Hsieh owns slaves,” Peace said. “Fifty. A hundred. It’s all talk. Set the whites free! If his heart bled for slaves, why didn’t he manumit his own? He could have done that. Like all their ‘scholars,’ their ‘good men.’ They talk one way and act another.”

  Now a voice at the edge of the circle said, “We’re here, Peace.”

  “Is that you, Sheep Wu?”

  “We’ve been here some time.”

  “Bring him up to the light.”

  The small lamp had been placed on the plank walkway, and now a slender white man, a sailor, to judge by his clothes, came and crouched on his knees and bare feet on the planks, the lamp between his spread legs. The light cast upwards showed the hollow of his thin chest, and veins serpentining on the drawn muscles of his neck, a cleft chin, cavernous nostrils, and deep black shadows where his eyes should have been.

  Sheep Wu, a free white who lived as a beggar in Twin Hills, with a mass of fleecelike curly hair, said in a hushed voice that the man on the planks was a free man of Peach Mountain Island off the mid-coast of the southeast, who had come to tell us of the whites’ successful revolt there, and of The Saint.

  “ ‘White brotherhood under God!’ ” the sailor began, using The Saint’s slogan. “I am glad to come here to you.” He spoke in an odd, broad dialect, which we could barely understand. “I was a sugar slave.” He started the story. “Nine years ago…” Sometimes his hands flew out, and shadows, as of scattering birds, flapped across his face—and I shuddered, seeing for the first time, as he went deeper and deeper into horror, what I was involved in, and how far. If only I could have seen his eyes!…A torch touching a silk screen in the Yew Ah plantation house. Men running with cane knives lashed to the ends of staves. A wall of flame in the dry sugar fields. Drunkenness: Kill! Kill! A yellow landlord bound between two boards and sawed into sections. Fire! A snow of fiery fragments of cane leaves carried on the wind and falling on the thatched roofs of the North Cape City. The gruesome cruelty of The Saint’s lieutenants—one of them had had a banner showing the corpse of a yellow infant impaled on a pole…. Then a word picture of The Saint: fierce yet humane, the short figure, pale pale pale face, huge eyes, upturning nose, long stained teeth, a man nearly sixty years old, master—yes, that word—master of a small island where slavery has been overthrown and the white zealot is king….

  When the amazing story was finished, Peace, in three or four short, blunt sentences, proposed to these men whom he called his brothers a war here, in South-of-the-River, against our owners, the yellows.

  “Yes! Yes!” A moanlike assent.

  “When?” A sharp tenor voice asked.

  “We will discuss that when we meet next time.”

  And that was all. That was all.

  We stood around after Sheep Wu took the Peach Mountain sailor away. I heard Ditcher muttering discontentedly; he was not fond of being put down as Peace had put him down about Philosopher Hsieh. I moved nearer. “I don’t take such things from any man! Does he think his secret name is The Saint? How many secret names does he think he has?” I sensed among the others a furtive sympathy for Ditcher, a shrinking from Peace’s fanaticism in the moment of being overpowered by it. Shaken to the edges of self-control by the sailor’s tale, and appalled by Peace’s word, “war,” I was now seized with a panic fear that Ditcher might blurt out Peace’s secret name and ruin us all. But did he know it? Could he? Would he dare if he did?

  On the way home, as the piece of moon fell low in the sky, we stopped by the road while Peace, to my terror, in a sphere of lamplight, prepared, in the name partly of our white God of wrath and partly of some horrible yellow witchery, a conjuration against Top Man—a piece of shed snakeskin, spit, a knot of the vine called devil’s shoestring—to be placed in a chink of Top Man’s hut, to prevent his reporting our absences at night, on pain of losing his manhood. Maybe the slaveherd would see the charm jammed in a crack in the straw-bound mud; maybe someone would help him by chance to see it! Then, in hysteria, Top Man would hold his tongue.

  Men of Valor

  The preaching, to slaves from the farms along the canal, the farms of Chao, the other Yen, Chi Kuo, Ma, and our Yen, was held in an abandoned tobacco house on the Chi Kuo place, near Lü’s tavern; Big Master Chi Kuo had given permission, thinking our superstitions harmless. The long shed with vented walls was crammed with slaves sitting cross-legged on the brick floor.

  Smart was the ostensible preacher, but he seemed to speak with Peace’s tongue, and the tongue spoke obliquely of the one subject that had been on my mind day and night since the meeting at Yen’s water hole. War. Peace’s war.

  With wheel-like motions of his hands describing the contours, Smart cast up before our eyes an allegorical picture of Twin Hills with its two eminences divided by the deep gulley of High Thoughts Creek: “And the white God stood with His two feet that day on the Mount of Olives, and the Mount of Olives divided in the middle toward the east and toward the west, so there was a valley, and half the mountain removed toward the one side and half toward the other, and the white God stood with one foot on each side, and He looked down and saw His white children all around the divided mountain hauling and hewing and digging and planting and transplanting and being bambooed and being cheek-branded and lifting and chopping with hoes and walking on the ice and carrying and striking the leaves and prizing the leaves and plowing and hacking at stumps and ai, white God, suffering, suffering, suffering, suffering….”

  The illusion of Smart’s turning into Peace was astonishing. Peace stood directly behind Smart, moving with Smart’s motions, his gestures precisely Smart’s; it was as if he were manipulating Smart’s lithe body, and as if Smart could only choose words Peace wanted him to use. Smart’s voice fled more and more from the mild, sweet tones of his own throat toward the deep, commanding sounds of Peace’s. Harlot had whispered to me once that Peace could change himself into a cow, a cat, a horned owl—why not into his slave companion? I was standing with Auntie and Harlot behind Peace, and I could see his left cheek pushed out, for he had in his mouth a translucent quartz pebble, taken from Favorable Wind Brook, “of the sort that David used to kill Goliath.”

  “Behold! The day of the Lord cometh in the city of two hills and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee, for the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished, and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the body servant shall…”

  My blood was pounding in my ears. I had come to the preaching desperately tired that afternoon, because it had rained the day before, and we had been put to the frantic work of drawing the finger-length seedlings of tobacco—“Chekiang fan-leaf” and “sweet-breathed”—from their beds and rushing them to the fields and setting them out in their mellow hills, and Overseer Li and Top Man, the slaveherd, nerves frayed by the insistent need to finish the transplantation while the ground was damp, had cursed, shouted, and openly struck blows. I had ached from running, bending, concentrating—but now my limbs began to lighten, my heart raced, I felt giddy with a trembling joy that was mixed with dread.

  “…Jericho straitly shut up, locked up: ‘I have given into thine hand the mighty men of valor,’ sait
h the Lord—”

  I could hear a stirring, a kind of sigh, move through the gathering.

  “—and they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword!”

  There were moans now among the listeners. With a growing understanding of Smart’s call to act, a kind of frenzy, which was appallingly reckless, spread through the crowd.

  At the height of this emotion, this burst of realization, there came a roar from Peace’s throat much like those we had heard at the beginning of his visions.

  But it was from Smart’s throat!

  Smart’s hands were stretched upward, his fists were clenched, his eyes were lifted to the joists above—and behind Smart stood Peace in exactly the same pose. Each slave in the whole house seemed rigidly frozen in mid-breath. Smart’s voice, indistinguishable from Peace’s, cried out, “He will smite them hip and thigh!”

  In the midst of the fiercest exultation I had ever felt, I had a moment’s thrust of panic: Would Smart, unhinged by this houseful of excitement, say Peace’s forbidden name?

  But then Smart’s lips were closed again, and again the same voice was heard—this time from Peace’s own mouth.

  “Yea! Yea! Yea!” the voice shouted. “The spirit of the Lord moves in me.”

  Now, with a sudden settling to earth that was startling in itself, Smart, his body relaxed, his eyes on the faces before him, spoke in his own gentle, quiet tones. “All those men who are with Peace,” he said, “stand up. All those who are not with him yet, stay seated on the floor where you are. Women remain seated.”

  A rustling. Murmurs. Enthusiasm and doubts almost visible, like mists. Just what did it mean to be “with Peace”? Changes of mind. One by one the self-elected stood, until there were about a dozen men on their feet.

  Smart said to them, “Come over to Yen’s water hole. Peace has some drams for you men that are men.” At this four or five more were emboldened and stood up.