I had begun to feel surely that he was not being sarcastic, that he was somehow trying to express mad, hulking, terrifying feelings beyond anyone’s surmise. I felt blood pounding at my temples and the cold sweat of fear and anxiety clammy beneath my arms. “Don’t mock me, mastah, I pray you,” I breathed in a whisper. “Kindly please, mastah. Don’t mock me.” Time crept past and we were both silent, gazing at each other, and the November wind boomed behind us in the forest, crashing like giant, diminishing footfalls across the graying waste of cedar and cypress and pine; for a moment my compliant lips trembled on a broken wisp of air, faltering—”Ca-, Ca-“—and a grief-haunted sense of futility, childish, lifelong, nigger-black, welled up in me like a sigh of pain. I stood there sweating in the blustery wind, thinking: So this is the way it is. Even when they care, even when they are somehow on your side they cannot help but taunt and torment you. The palms of my hands slimy, and my mind roaring, thinking: I do not want to, but now, now if he forces me to spell the word I will have to try to kill him. I lowered my eyes again, saying more distinctly: “Don’t mock me, mastah, please.”
Yet now Cobb, adrift in his brandy haze, seemed to have forgotten what he had said to me and turned away, staring madly toward the forest where the wind still thrashed and flayed the distant treetops. He clutched the bottle as if with desperation at a lopsided angle against his chest, and a trickle of brandy oozed out against his cloak. With his other hand he began to massage his thigh, holding the leg so tightly that above the knuckles the flesh grew bone-white. “Almighty God,” he groaned, “this everlasting mortal ache! If a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. God, God, my poor Virginia, blighted domain! The soil wrecked and ravaged on every hand, turned to useless dust by that abominable weed. Tobacco we cannot any longer raise, nor cotton ever, save for a meager crop in these few southern counties, nor oats nor barley nor wheat. A wasteland! A plump and virginal principality, a cornucopia of riches the like of which the world has never seen, transformed within the space of a century to a withering, defeated hag! And all to satisfy the demand of ten million Englishmen for a pipeful of Virginia leaf! Now even that is gone, and all we can raise is horses! Horses!” he cried as if to himself now, stroking and kneading his thigh. “Horses and what else, what else? Horses and pickaninnies! Pickaninnies! Little black infants by the score, the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands! The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain—what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney’s infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard’s name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand!”
Groaning in pain now, fiercely stroking his thigh with one hand while with the other he elevated the bottle to his lips and drained it to the dregs, Cobb seemed, for once, oblivious of me, and I recall thinking that wisdom dictated my stealing out of his presence, if only I could find a decent way to do it. In scattered, disordered riot, all manner of emotions had run through me as he had spoken; not in years having heard a white man talk in this crazy fashion, I would not be honest if I did not admit that what he said (or the drunken gist of it, stealing in upon my consciousness like some unreal ghostly light) caused me to feel a shiver of awe and something else, dim and remote, which might have been a thrill of hope. But for some reason I cannot explain, both awe and hope swiftly retreated in my mind, dwindled, died, and even as I looked at Cobb, I could only smell the musky scent of danger—flagrant, imminent danger—and feel a sense of suspicion and mistrust such as I had rarely ever known. Why? It is perhaps impossible to explain save by God, who knows all things. Yet I will say this, without which you cannot understand the central madness of nigger existence: beat a nigger, starve him leave him wallowing in his own shit, and he will be yours for life. Awe him by some unforeseen hint of philanthropy, tickle him with the idea of hope, and he will want to slice your throat.
Yet now before I could make any kind of move, a cracking noise sounded behind us as once again the shop door opened, swung wide, and drove itself with windy force against the wall. And as we turned then, Hark emerged with shirttail flying, scrambling away from the shop, plunging in panicky headlong flight toward the fields and the woods beyond. Legs churning, his great black body moved at a furious gallop; his eyes rolled white with alarm. Scant yards behind him now came Putnam, his leather apron flapping as he brandished a stick of lightwood, bawling at the top of his voice. “You, Hark, come back here! Come back here, you dad-dratted no-good an’mal! I’ll get hold of you at last, black bastard!” Fleet as a deer, Hark scampered across the open lot, bare black feet sowing puffs of dust, the barnyard cat fleeing his approach, goose and gander too, cumbersomely flapping their flightless wings, emitting dismal honking sounds as they waddled from his path. On he came past us, looking neither left nor right, eyes round and white as eggshells, and we could hear the voice panting ah-ah-ah as he sprinted for the woods, moving now with such nimble-footed speed that he seemed whisked forward like a sail on the wind. Far behind, losing ground each second, came the pimpled boy, still howling. “Stop! You, Hark! Black wretch! Stop!” But Hark’s great legs were churning as if propelled by steam; vaulting the pump trough, he soared through the air in a gigantic leap like something suspended by wire or wings, struck the earth with a thumping sound, and without breaking stride, bounded on toward the distant forest, the inside of his bare soles flashing splendidly pink. Then all of a sudden it was as if he had been felled by a cannon ball: his head snapped back, and the rest of him including his pinwheeling legs sailed out and forward, and he came down flat on his back with a bladdery, sacklike thud, directly beneath the clothesline which, at gullet level, had intercepted his flight. But as Cobb and I stood watching, watched him shake his head and try to rise up on his elbows, we saw now not one but two forces, though equally sinister and somber, converging on Hark from opposite directions: Putnam, still waving his lightwood stick, and Miss Maria Pope, who had appeared as if from nowhere like some augury of frustrate bitchery and vengeance, bearing down upon Hark with a hobbled spinster’s gait amid black snapping yards of funereal gingham. Blown back on the wind, her voice already was hysteric with shrill malevolence. “It’s up the tree for you, nigger!” she screeched. “Up the tree!”
“Now,” I heard Cobb murmur, “now we are about to witness a ritual diversion indigenous to this Southern clime. We are about to witness two human beings whipping another.”
“No, mastah,” I said. “Marse Joe don’t ’low his niggers to be beaten. But there’s ways around that, as you will surely see. You about to witness something else, mastah.”
“Not a speck of charcoal in the shop!” Putnam was shouting in a kind of wail.
“And not a drap of water in the kitchen pail!” Miss Maria shrilled. As if vying with each other to be the chiefest victim of Hark’s enormity, they surrounded him, encompassed the prostrate form, squawking like birds. Hark staggered to his feet, shaking his head with the slow, stunned, dizzy bewilderment of an about-to-be-slaughtered ox that has received a faulty glancing blow. “It’s up the tree with him this time, impudent black scoundrel!” Miss Maria cackled. “Putnam, get the ladder!”
“Hark’s most dreadful feared of heights,” I found myself explaining to Cobb. “This for him is worse than a hundred beatings.”
“A fantastic specimen!” Cobb breathed. “A regular gladiator, a veritable black Apollo. And swift as a race horse! Where did your master get him?”
“From up Sussex way,” I said, “about ten, eleven years ago, mastah, when they broke up one of the old plantations.” I paused for a moment, half wondering to myself why I was proffering all this information.
“Hark’s all forlorn now,” I went on, “heartsick and forlorn. On the outside he’s very cheery, but inside he’s just all torn up. He can’t keep his mind on anything. That’s how come he forgets his chores, and how come he gets punished. Poor old Hark …”
“Why is that, preacher?” said Cobb. Putnam had fetched a ladder now from the barn, and we watched the procession as it made its way across the windswept lot, bleak and gray in the fading autumnal light—Miss Maria in the lead, grim, hands clenched, her back stiff and straight as a poker, Putnam behind with the ladder, and between them Hark in his dusty gray denim, shuffling along with his head bent in total dejection, looming over the two of them like some huge Goliath, a giant towering above a pair of vengeful, hurrying dwarfs. In Indian file, straight as an arrow, they made their way toward an ancient and enormous maple whose lowermost branch, leafless now, stretched across the pale sky like a naked arm twenty feet above the earth. I could hear Hark’s bare feet scuffing across the ground, scuffing like the feet of a reluctant child. “Why is that?” Cobb said again.
“Well, mastah, I’ll tell you,” I said. “Couple years ago, afore I became Marse Joe’s property, Marse Joe had to sell off most all of his niggers. Sell them off down to Mississippi, where you know they are planting considerable cotton. Hark told me Marse Joe was in a misery about this, but he just couldn’t do anything else. Well, amongst these niggers was Hark’s wife and Hark’s child—little boy about three or four years old he was then. Hark cared for that little boy almost more than anything.”
“Yah, yah, yah,” I could hear Cobb murmur, making little clucking sounds beneath his breath.
“So when that little boy was gone, Hark near about went mad with grief, couldn’t think about anything else.”
“Yah, yah, yah, yah.”
“He wanted to run away and follow them all the way down to Mississippi, but I talked him out of it. See, he’d already run off once years ago and hadn’t gotten anywhere. Besides, it’s always been my idea that a nigger should follow all the rules and regulations so far as he was able.”
“Yah, yah, yah.”
“Anyway,” I went on. “Hark ain’t been quite right ever since then. You might say he’s just been distracted. That’s why he does things—or doesn’t do things—that get him punished. And I’ll be quite truthful with you, mastah, he doesn’t do his chores, but I tell you he just can’t help it.”
“Yah, yah,” Cobb muttered, “yah, great God, the logical outcome … the ultimate horror!” He had begun to hiccup again and the sound came forth in intermittent gasps, almost like sobs. He started to say something else, thought better of it, turned away, whispering over and over again: “God, God, God, God, God.”
“Now about this here,” I explained. “Like I say, Hark’s most dreadful feared of high places. Last spring the roof leaked and Marse Joe sent Hark and me up to fix it. But Hark got halfway up and he just froze there. Begun to whimper and mumble to hisself and wouldn’t go an inch further. So I had to fix that roof myself. Anyway, Marse Putnam and Miss Maria caught ahold of this fear of Hark’s—you might say they found out his weak spot. Like I said, Marse Joe won’t tolerate anyone to mistreat his niggers, to beat them or anything like that. So whenever Marse Joe’s away, and Marse Putnam and Miss Maria figger they can get away with it, why, they run old Hark up a tree.”
Which is what they were doing even as I spoke, their voices muffled, remote, indistinct now on the blustery wind. Putnam propping the long ladder against the tree trunk, then jerking his arm furiously upward as he bade Hark to climb. And Hark began climbing, reluctantly, at the third rung turning his frightened face imploringly back as if to see whether they might not have had a change of heart, but this time Miss Maria’s arms jerked upward—up, nigger, up—and again Hark continued his climb, knees quaking beneath his trousers. At last arrived at the lowermost branch, Hark swung himself off the ladder, clutching the tree so tightly that I could see even from this distance the veins standing out against the muscles of his arms, then with a sort of scrounging, sliding motion of his rump, deposited himself in the crotch formed by trunk and branch, and sat there embracing the tree with his eyes squeezed shut—dizzy, windy yards above the earth. Then Putnam removed the ladder and laid it flat on the ground beneath the tree.
“Five, ten minutes will go by, mastah,” I said to Cobb, “and then old Hark will commence crying and moaning. Just wait and see. Then pretty soon he’ll start swaying. Crying and moaning and swaying there on that branch like he’s about to fall off. Then Marse Putnam and Miss Maria’ll set that ladder up against the tree and Hark’ll climb down. I reckon they get scared Hark will fall off and break his neck, and they wouldn’t want that to happen. No, they just want to give old Hark a poor time for a while.”
“Yah, yah, yah,” Cobb murmured, distantly now.
“And that for Hark is a poor time indeed,” I said.
“Yah, yah, yah,” he replied. I don’t know whether he was listening to me or not. “Great God! Sometimes I think … sometimes … it is like living in a dream!”
Then suddenly, without another word, Cobb was gone, limping in gaunt strides toward the house, the empty brandy flask still clutched in his hand, cloak flapping, shoulders hunched against the wind. I crouched down again above my rabbits, watching Cobb limp and sway across the lot and up to the front porch, his voice faint and weary as he called out: “Hallo, Miz Travis, think I’ll come in and set a spell after all!” And Miss Sarah’s voice way off within, high and full of cheer, and the sound of the door slamming as Cobb vanished inside the house. I stripped the white translucent inner skin from a rabbit, separating it from the pinkish flesh, and plunged the corpse into the cool water, feeling the guts squirming wet and slimy beneath my fingers. Blood mingled with the water, turning it a muddy crimson. Gusts of wind swept through the cotton patch, whistling; an army of dead withered leaves marched along the edge of the barn, rolled with a husky scrabbling noise across the vacant yard. I gazed down into the bloody water, thinking of Cobb. Go through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations, that be done in the midst thereof … Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark …
Suddenly I found myself thinking: It is plain, yes, plain, plain. When I succeed in my great mission, and Jerusalem is destroyed, this man Cobb will be among those few spared the sword …
Across the roof of the woods the wind rushed in hissing, majestic swoop and cadence, echoing in far-off hollows with the thudding sound of footfalls. Gray and streaked, boiling, in ponderous haste, the clouds fled eastward across the lowering heavens, growing darker now in the early dusk. After a bit I heard Hark begin to moan, a soft disconsolate wordless wail, filled with dread. For long minutes he moaned, swaying high in his tree. Then I heard the tap-tap-tapping of the ladder as they set it against the tree trunk and let him down.
It is curious how sometimes our most vivid dreams take place when we are but half asleep, and how they occupy the briefest space of time. In the courtroom this day, dozing off for several seconds at the oaken table to which I had been bound by a length of chain, I had a terrifying dream. I seemed to be walking alone at the edge of a swamp at nightfall, the light around me glimmering, crepuscular, touched with that greenish hue presaging the onslaught of a summer storm. The air was windless, still, but high in the heavens beyond the swamp thunder grumbled and heaved, and heat lightning at somber intervals blossomed against the sky. Filled with panic, I seemed to be searching for my Bible, which strangely, unaccountably I had left there, somewhere in the depths and murk of the swamp; in fear and despair I pressed my search into the oncoming night, pushing now deeper and deeper into the gloomy marshland, haunted by the ominous, stormy light and by a far-off pandemonium of thunder. Try desperately as I might, I could not find my Bible. Suddenly another sound came to my ears, this time the frightened outcry of voices. They were the voice
s of boys, hoarse and half grown and seized with terror, and now instantly I saw them: half a dozen black boys trapped neck-deep in a bog of quicksand, crying aloud for rescue as their arms waved frantically in the dim light and as they sank deeper and deeper into the mire. I seemed to stand helpless at the edge of the bog, unable to move or to speak, and while I stood there a voice echoed out of the sky, itself partaking of that remote sound of thunder: Thy sons shall be given unto another people and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long, so that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes … Screaming their mortal fright, black arms and faces sinking beneath the slime, the boys began to vanish one by one before my eyes while the noise of a prodigious guilt overwhelmed me like a thunderclap … “The prisoner will …” The sharp rapping of a mallet interrupted the horror, and I snapped awake with a start.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 119