by John Hersey
“A society,” Peace said with a profound meekness, “to kill the yellow people. He and I, and all these men, we are bound under a pledge to fight the yellow people until we die, for our freedom—and yours, too.”
“O Lord, have mercy,” the drunk from Anhwei said, falling to his knees. “You the General?” Like Ku the Usher earlier in the day, this man broke into sobs.
A Sense of Mink
Our young master Yen was away, over in West-of-the-Mountains Province, formally courting a girl his mother had chosen for him, and a secret meeting was called.
The meeting that night was pervaded with a sense of Mink. The crookback was not in the smithy himself, but the dark room was filled to its sooty peak—or so it seemed to me—with his perverse, heavy indifference, and with that appalling stiffness of Peace’s that Mink kept poking at: his unwillingness, or inability, to swerve, to adapt, to improvise if need might be.
Peace and his “brothers,” Smart and Solemn, were the only ones who seemed not to have lost their inner fire.
Someone asked, “Are there enough arms?”
Wang’s Judge said he had been trying to make crossbows, but this was the season for topping the tobacco plants, he was a topper, from dawn to dark he was out there pinching back the flower buds and the stems of the tobacco plants to the proper number of leaves, and pulling out the sucker growths, and he simply did not have fingers or forearms left for night work on the crossbows; he had brought eighteen over this night, the best he could do.
Ch’eng’s Candy said he was ready with his pistol, but it was in need of repair; could Solemn fix it?
“Give it to me, indeed I will,” Solemn said, but the feeling in the room was down.
Then there was a bad question from Ditcher: Did we have enough military knowledge for this war?
“There is a good old man from over in West-of-the-Mountains Province,” Peace said, “who was at the siege of Taiyuan. He has promised to come over and meet me at the brook when we begin it. He is going to advise me. Sheep Wu, you went over there enlisting, you met him, I suppose.”
But at first Sheep Wu was silent. “I’m afraid they may find us out before we begin it,” he then suddenly said. “There were two men down in Pochow, I forget their names, they said they did not like it, they would communicate with a master down there. Well, Lin’s Runner and some others pursued them, had the intention to put them to death with a hog knife in the slave quarters, teach all the others a lesson, but those two were all smiles when they were cornered, never had any idea of communicating—so they said—and Runner let them off. It’s the truth! How many others may have had such thoughts?”
“You have house servants all over that know about the war,” Ch’eng’s Candy said. “And slaveherds. And women. A man told me your own slaveherd Top Man knows all about it. Some idiot of a slave tried to enlist him.”
“House servants, that’s bad,” Ditcher said.
Then Fan, the mix, asked in a complaining tone, “How are we supposed to do it, Peace? What’s the whole plan?”
“You know your orders,” Peace said.
“I know what I am supposed to do, but you never told your captains the whole war.”
“Why, here it is, then.” And here it was: Three thousand slave soldiers, foot and donkey, were going to meet at the bridge of Favorable Wind Brook the following market-day eve, at midnight. Divided into three columns, whose officers had already been designated, these were all to march on Twin Hills in the dark. The right and the left, armed with sticks and staves, were to head for the new prison and the yamen. A party of fifty, under the warehouse boy, Mandarin King, was to set fire to the godowns and houses in the district of the Canal Bund, and at the sight of the fires, Widow Chou’s Heaven-Loved at the penitentiary would hand out arms to the right wing, and Ku the Usher at the yamen to the left wing. The center column, armed with scythe-swords, scythe-pikes, pistols, and muskets, would meanwhile descend on the town by way of the tanbark paths into West Dragon Street and begin the slaughter. The city slaves would convene with the left and right columns. Every unit was ready. A blockade would be thrown across the canal bridge. A thorough massacre, street by street, would be carried out after dawn. Then proclamations would be issued calling all friends of humanity to our standard, and in a week we would have fifty thousand. Ail The capture of Tsinan was already planned; a slave named Hsiao’s Gong was the colonel over there. We aimed to have Honan, Shansi, and Anhwei in a month!
But the sooty cavern of the smithy was dead. No one cheered or hugged or wept.
“I’ll show you our standard,” Peace said, and he went into a corner and fetched a shredded old banner that had belonged, he told us, to a secret society on Peach Mountain Island during the uprising there: a purple square with gold fringe.
I felt torn. I was shocked by the apathy of these trusted officers; yet the iron automatism of Peace, his stiff way of telling of his set plan, troubled me even more. Peace seemed inwardly deaf; nothing these men said reached him.
Wang’s Judge said, “I’m not ready in my mind. I say wait. I say let’s delay.”
What a frightening calm on Peace’s face!
“We scarce can wait,” Solemn said, in his dull, practical voice, almost as if it did not matter.
But Sheep Wu, too, cast for a postponement. “I heard at a preaching that in the old days, when Pharaoh held the people down, so their backs were chafed, they were finally freed away from him by the power of God, and Moses led them away. But look—God gave him an angel to guide him. I can see nothing of that kind here, Peace. I have seen no angel. Do you have a sign?”
Peace’s eyes were moving from face to face.
It was a sign they wanted, but Smart, in the same leaden voice as Solemn had used, tried reason. He said that the summer was almost over, the thing must be done before it got too cold; that the Emperor’s warlords had stood down the provincial militias for the season, and this was why all the arms were propped in little haystacks in the new prison and the yamen—and what if the yellows should call the troops out again?
Then I saw the jawbone in Peace’s hand. It was slowly rising. His hand was shaking.
Smart’s voice moved at a faster pace. “Sheep Wu, speaking of angels, I saw in my book where it says, ‘Delay breeds danger.’ And where it says, ‘Worship God and you shall have peace in all the land.’ Where it says, ‘Five of you shall conquer an hundred, and an hundred a thousand of thine enemies.’ ”
The roar that now broke from Peace’s lips was one of such agony that I wanted to run, or hide, or die, and the reason it terrified me so much was that it released in me an impulse to violence which I did not feel I could control.
“I will not wait!” he shouted. “Rather than bear any longer what I’ve borne, I’ll turn out alone and fight with this…this stick in my hand!”
He shook the jawbone high above his head.
But Wang’s Judge said in a dead level voice, “It would be better on a market day. Our people can move about on a market day. Why start the day before a market day?”
Peace bellowed, “We will go ahead! We will go ahead! Everyone has his orders! Do as I say!”
I felt the heavy care-naught spirit of the crookback lurking in the room. The men were silent and gloomy.
The War
The morning of the day of the beginning of the war was sullen. A solid dry-cloud cover of an extraordinary darkness moved, or appeared to skid, too fast (for there was little wind on the ground) low across our sky, almost brushing the limp treetops, it seemed. The air was oppressive, hot, electric, still, like the fur of a huge dark cat waiting to pounce. My eyes were sticky, the cap of my head felt heavy, I was dull and uneasy. I had slept scarcely at all. We had been up late at the blacksmith shop, dispatching messages to Widow Chou’s Heaven-Loved, Ku the Usher, Mandarin King, and the other key men, to confirm the start the following night; counting
weapons and assigning them to captains; making some last desperate prayers to the white-skinned God. All of us in the dark room except Peace had been tense and irritable; he had maintained his astonishing meekness and sweetness, which, exuding like a fragrance from his gigantic, muscular body, seemed to emphasize, to multiply in our minds almost beyond belief, the impression of his inner strength—and of his immovable stubbornness, too.
Peace had at last sent us all to bed and had stayed in the smithy alone, to meditate and pray, he said.
I had lain down naked and thrashed on my straw mat all the hot night; if I dipped into sleep it was only to waken twitching and bathed in sweat. I was not afraid of dying; no, it was more shameful—I was afraid of audacity. This was the deepest horror of having been a slave: I had lost the capacity for impudence, I was willing to let life happen to me. A hundred times in the night I pictured myself standing, a scythe-sword in hand, face to face with the master’s mother, who was defenseless, and I would raise my arm, and she would look sternly at me, as if from behind a pane of glass far too thick for my blade to smash, and the strength would trickle down out of my arm, and the arm would go flaccid, and it would fall, and the sword would clatter on the floor, and I would drop to my knees and beg for forgiveness, forgiveness. Was I asleep? Was I awake? Over and over the picture repeated itself, until my self-loathing was so profound that I had to sit up in bed to stop my nausea and dizziness.
What a relief the mournful squall of the slaveherd’s buffalo horn had been!
Upon hearing its first flatulent moan I had leaped to my feet—only to find that Auntie and Harlot had already started up like a pair of deer.
“Guh! What a witch night!” Auntie groaned, and all three of us laughed crazily, as if the whole mare’s nest of darkness had been some kind of bad joke.
With the second deep bleat of the horn fear swept back into my body, as I thought of our worried talk at the smithy the night before about our slaveherd. Top Man had indeed been enlisted by some fool from another place, and he had been asking questions. Some thought that he wanted ferociously to be with us—that he hated himself so bitterly for being the master’s and the overseer’s tongue and eyes, and rod hand, too, that he would be the very one to kill those two yellows; others thought that he loved his measly power too much to jeopardize it, and that he might inform. “Stay away from Top Man,” Peace had finally ordered. “Tell the fellow not a word, do you hear?”
I ran all the way to the blacksmith shop to make sure that Peace had heard the horn. My breathing came hard, the clouds pressed so low that I almost felt I had to stoop as I ran.
Solemn and Smart and two captains from other farms who had bought their hire for the day were already at the smithy; and also a city slave, Ma’s Brass. A messenger, as he said, from a captain of foot in town, Brass had come for last-minute instructions.
Solemn was asking Brass as I entered whether, on his way out from the city in the night, he had seen any provincial guardsmen.
“Yes, a squad of six drinking at Lü’s tavern.”
“Did they have horses?”
“Yes, inferior ponies.”
“But not paying mind to their duties?”
“It was late, awfully late, Solemn. Nearly morning.”
“True.”
Peace calmly said, “Don’t fret, Solemn. We’ll do away with all of them.”
Brass’s eyes were big; I dare say he had never seen General Peace before.
“The only worry,” Solemn said, “is if they double the guard for any reason, or put on extra men.”
“No matter what you say,” Peace said, “our plans are so far advanced that we are compelled to go ahead, even if they find us out…. You have four swords to finish, Solemn.”
“They’ll be done,” Solemn irritably said. “I told Overseer Li I had hoops to do today, and he said to go ahead.” Solemn stooped to build a fire; he angrily clattered the grate.
Brass left, and I was able at last to say that the second horn had been blown.
“I am coming, dear handmaiden,” Peace gently said. “This will be our last day in the fields—think of that, child.”
But what a long day!
It was a hoeing day. Such a miserable claw is a hoe. Head down, back bent, arms forever pulling the same way; broad snout strikes a stone, and the jar of the unyielding handle runs all the way through to the top of the skull. The only relief is time: crut, crut, crut, the blade chips away at the morning, at the hump of the day’s heat, at the long afternoon, at the slanting shadows, crut…crut…crut…crut…crut…
We tried to sing ourselves along, but Harlot could not find the right hymn; we dared not be mournful, we were agitated and out of tune.
I felt a kind of numbness all day long, perhaps from having slept such shallow naps the night before.
Peace worked as on any other day—steady, patient, strong, enduring. His eyes were veiled. I heard him humming once when there was no gang hymn going.
The dark plate of cloud semed to push down lower and lower; the wind rose from the direction of the Yellow River until the woodlots hushed at us, and the broad leaves of Chekiang fan-leaf, in the field where I was working, began to bow and clap. But the wind was not a relief, it simply revolted one, like an old person’s bad breath.
Mink talked away as if it were an ordinary day, until we were all annoyed with him and tried to dam him up, but he kept overflowing where we least expected; he did not care.
Overseer Li came by. I thought: You are going to die tonight, we are going to kill you. He walked close to my task, and I hoed hard, because even though I wanted him dead I also wanted to please him. Yes, I would have this one last chance to show that I was a good worker. When he had passed, not even having looked at me, I was humiliated, furious with myself, and therefore quite at peace with the idea of killing this yellow man, and every other one.
My master. As the overseer walked away, I felt a surge of blind hatred for Yen the son; I had seen the young owner, over the months, not more than six or eight times—only once close at hand, that day in the tobacco house, otherwise crossing a field on horseback at a distance, or on a round of inspection with Li. He used my existence but denied it. He did not know me at all.
At our eating pause Top Man came to Peace and in a quiet voice said, “Will you tell me your plan, friend?”
Peace turned vacant eyes on the slaveherd. “What plan was that, friend?” Giving back “friend” for “friend,” he set Top Man off his balance.
“I heard you were ready to begin it.”
“Begin what, Top Man? You mean, begin the new pigpen in the back of Solemn’s room?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I am an ignorant hand, Top Man. I do not know what you mean. Be a kind man and tell me.” This was obviously a dare.
“I mean,” Top Man said, nearly weeping with rage, “the thing you mean to do.”
“What thing is that?”
“You know.”
“I am at a loss. Brother Smart, you have a better head than I. Do you know what this mystery of Top Man’s is?”
“Why, I can’t fathom it,” Smart said.
“I can be as good as any of them,” Top Man said.
“You are a fine slaveherd. As slaveherds go, you are excellent.”
“I mean the other. For what you intend to do.”
“Top Man, you’re a riddle. I give up to you. I cannot puzzle out what you mean.” A sudden gust blew at Peace’s hair; the seven queues shook.
“I mean that I hate them just as you do.”
“ ‘Them’? What is that, Top Man? Hornworms?”
“I could have told them. I have known for weeks. I could have informed.”
“I believe that. Anything could have come to pass. You could have been found stark chilly dead in Favorable Wind Brook Swamp any night, Top Man. A
slave hardly knows what to expect these days.”
“You could be making a mistake,” Top Man said.
“My soul, I think I could. I know I could. My body is big, Top Man, it’s as big as a maize crib, it could hold a whole harvest of error. I make no claim to being without error. I’m full of it, Top Man. My bones ache with it. I’m a very mistaken man. Everyone knows that. But I swear I cannot see what you are trying to say to me.”
“Ayah, Peace, you turtle,” Top Man said. “I’ve never seen you bambooed. I’m tempted today.”
“Today’s your best and last chance,” Peace said, pushing out his chest and advancing toward the slaveherd.
Top Man clutched his horn, which was slung over his shoulder on a length of twine, and raised it to his lips and blew a blast, the mournfulness of which was enough to drag out the spirits of the dead in the daytime. “All right,” he hoarsely shouted, and I thought there were tears in the red rims of his eyes. “Hoe out! Finish your tasks and you go in. Brisk now, you hands. Hoe out! Hoe out!”
Crut…crut…crut…the day was so long!
Late in the afternoon there sounded a single, deep, distant rumble.
Every hoe hand’s head came up; eyes darted to eyes. My heart began to pound—at the edge of my mind a distorted picture of the clumps of slaves praying on the deck of the East Garden for a cataclysmic storm, the yellow sailors grinning down on our nakedness….
For the first time all day, after that faraway growl, Peace showed signs of feeling. He chopped harder with his hoe, his locks bounced, his eyes were—afraid!
Ayah, white God, this made me nervous.
As each hand completed his task, which was marked out with stakes, he was excused; some, who finished early, helped others to get theirs done, and we walked back to the quarter in groups of half a dozen at a time, at about an hour before dark. Peace had gone ahead of the group with which I was working in one corner of the field, and I felt uneasy at his going off without Harlot and me in train—Auntie was with the children in the slaves’ compound. He had walked off alone.