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

by Styron, William

  All of a sudden a searing heat seizes me from underneath; my bare bottom and balls feel set on fire and I leap up from the seat with a howl, clutching at my scorched nether parts while smoke floats up through the hole in a greasy white billow. “Ow! Ow! Daggone!” I shout, but it is mainly from surprise—surprise and mortification. For even as I cry out, the pain diminishes and I gaze back down through the hole, beholding the grinning light-brown face of a boy my age. He stands off at the edge of the mire below, grasping in one hand a blazing stick. With his other hand he is clutching his stomach in an agony of delight, and his laughter is high, loud, irrepressible. “Daggone you, Wash!” I yell. “Jest daggone yo’ no-good black soul!” But my rage is in vain, and Wash keeps laughing, doubled up amid the honeysuckle. It is the third time in as many months that he has tricked me thus, and I have no one but myself to blame for my humiliation.

  THE LIFE AND DEATH

  OF

  MR. BADMAN

  PRESENTED TO THE WORLD IN

  A FAMILIAR DIALOGUE BETWEEN

  MR. WISEMAN

  &

  MR. ATTENTIVE

  • WISEMAN. Good morrow, my good neighbour, Mr. Attentive; whither are you walking so early this morning? Methinks you look as if you were concerned about something more than ordinary. Have you lost any of your cattle, or what is the matter?

  • ATTENTIVE. Good sir, good morrow to you. I have not as yet lost aught, but yet you give a right guess of me, for I am, as you say, concerned in my heart, but it is because of the badness of the times. And, Sir, you, as all our neighbours know, are a very observing man, pray, therefore, what do you think of them?

  • WISE. Why, I think, as you say, to wit, that they are bad times, and bad they will be, until men are better; for they are bad men that make bad times; if men, therefore, would mend, so would the times. It is a folly to look for good days so long as sin is so high, and those that study its nourishment so many …

  The life of a little nigger child is dull beyond recounting. But during one summer month when I am nine or ten a couple of curious events happen to me, one causing me the bitterest anguish, the other premonitions of joy.

  It is midmorning in August, hot and stifling, so airless that the dust-stained trees along the edge of the distant woods hang limp and still, and the grinding of the mill seems blurred, indistinct, as if borne sluggishly through heat waves trembling like water above the steaming earth. High in the blue heavens, buzzards by the score wheel and tilt and swoop in effortless flight over the bottomlands, and I lift my eyes from time to time to follow their somber course across the sky. I squat in the shadow of the little room projecting from the kitchen, where my mother and I live. From the kitchen comes the odor of collard greens cooking, the smell faintly bitter and pungent; midday dinner is far off, I feel my insides churning with hunger. Although I am not underfed (to be the child of the cook is to be, as my mother constantly points out, the “luckiest little nigger ’live”) I seem nonetheless to exist at the edge of famine. On the sill of the kitchen window above me, a row of muskmelons, half a dozen pale globes, stand ripening in the shade, unattainable as gold. I consider them gravely and with a yearning that brings water to my eyes, knowing that even to touch one of them would fetch upon me calamity like the crack of doom. Once I stole a pot of clabber cheese, and the walloping my mother gave me left me sore as a carbuncle.

  It is my duty to wait here near the door, to carry water and bring up things from the cellar, to run errands for my mother whenever she commands. My chores today are light, for it is a slack moment in the year when the corn crop has been laid by awaiting harvest and the mill works at half-time. During such a lull it has always been the custom of the brothers Turner, together with their wives and children, to make their annual trip to Richmond, leaving the place for a week or so in the hands of the overseer. Since with the family away my mother has only to cook for ourselves and the house servants—Prissy and Little Morning and Weaver and Pleasant—time hangs heavy for me, and the boredom is like a knife-edge at the back of my skull. It is not an unusual situation, because for a Negro child, denied the pleasures of schooling, there is generally nothing to do, nothing at all; reading no books, taught no real games, until twelve or so too small to work, black children exist in a monotony like that of yearling mules at pasture, absorbing the sun, feeding, putting on flesh, all unaware that soon they will be borne down for life with harness, chain, and traces.

  My own condition is more than unusually solitary, since the Turner children with whom I might ordinarily be expected to play are a good deal older than I, and either help run the plantation or are off at school; at the same time, I feel myself set apart from the other Negro children, the children of the field hands and mill hands who are so scorned by my mother. Even Wash (who is the son of one of the two Negro drivers, Abraham—almost the only Turner slave with any responsibility at all) I have drawn away from as I have grown older, in spite of the fact that his circumstances put him a notch above the common cornfield type. At six or seven we played crude games together—climbed trees, hunted for caves in the dark ravine, swung on grapevines at the edge of the woods. Leaning over the brink of the ravine, we tried to see who could pee the farthest. Once we stood in a shadowed clearing near the swamp, and with skinny black arms outstretched, in self-inflicted torture, marveled as a swarm of fat mosquitoes engorged themselves on our blood, finally dropping to earth like tiny red grapes. We built a fort of mud and then smeared our naked bodies with the liquid clay; drying, it became encrusted, a dull calcimine, ghostly, and we howled in mad delight at our resemblance to white boys. Once we dared to steal ripe persimmons from the tree growing behind Wash’s cabin, and were caught in the act by his mother—a light West Indian woman, part Creole, with black ringlets around her head like writhing wet serpents—and were thrashed with a sassafras switch until the welts stood up on our legs. Wash’s sister had a doll that Abraham had made for her; fashioned of jute sacking, its head was an old split maple doorknob. Whether it was meant to be a white baby or a nigger child I could never tell, but I regarded it with wonder; aside from a cast-off cracked wooden top I had gotten at Christmas from one of the young Turners, it was the first toy I can remember. On gray winter days when rain streamed from the heavens, Wash and I crouched in the poultry shed, with pointed sticks tracing patterns upon the white damp crust of chickenshit. For a while it became my favorite kind of play. I drew rectangles, circles, squares, and I marveled at the way two triangles placed together in a certain way formed that mysterious star I had seen so often when (curiosity getting the better of me as I trailed my mother through Samuel Turner’s library) I risked a glimpse of the pictures in a gigantic Bible:

  I scratched this design over and over again on the lime-cool, bittersweet-smelling white floor of the chicken shed, a hundred interlocking stars engraved in the dust, quite heedless of Wash, who stirred and fidgeted and mumbled to himself, bored quickly, unable to draw anything but aimless lines.

  But these were dumb little games, the brainless play of kittens. As I grow older now there steals over me the understanding that Wash has almost no words to speak at all. So near to the white people, I absorb their language daily. I am a tireless eavesdropper, and their talk and comment, even their style of laughter, vibrates endlessly in my imagination. Already my mother teases me for the way I parrot white folks’ talk—teases me with pride. Wash is molded by different sounds—even now I am aware of this—nigger voices striving clumsily to grapple with a language never taught, never really learned, still alien and unknown. With such a poor crippled tongue, Wash’s way of speaking comes to seem to me a hopeless garble, his mind a tangle of baby-thoughts; so gradually that I barely know it, this playmate floats away out of my consciousness, dwarfish and forgotten, as I settle deep into my own silent, ceaselessly vigilant, racking solitude.

  I cannot as yet read The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, not even the title; my possession of it terrifies me, because I have stolen it, yet at the same
instant the very idea of the book fevers me with such insupportable excitement that I can feel a loosening in my bowels. (Although I have come late to the joys of reading and still cannot properly “read,” I have known the crude shapes of simple words ever since I was six, when Samuel Turner, a methodical, tidy, and organized master, and long impatient with baking alum turning into white flour and cinnamon being confused with nutmeg, and vice versa, set about labeling every chest and jar and canister and keg and bag in the huge cellar beneath the kitchen where my mother dispatched me hourly every day. It seemed not to matter to him that upon the Negroes—none of whom could read—these hieroglyphs in red paint would have no effect at all: still Little Morning would be forced to dip a probing brown finger in the keg plainly marked MOLASSES, and even so there would be lapses, with salt served to sweeten the breakfast tea. Nonetheless, the system satisfied Samuel Turner’s sense of order, and although at that time he was unaware of my existence, the neat plain letters outlined by the glow of an oil lamp in the chill vault served as my first and only primer. It was a great leap from MINT and CITRON and SALTPETRE and BACON to The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, but there exists both a frustration and a surfeit when one’s entire literature is the hundred labels in a dim cellar, and my desire to possess the book overwhelmed my fear. Even so, it had been a dismal moment. In Samuel Turner’s library, where my mother had gone to fetch a new silver ladle for the kitchen, the books had been locked up behind wire, row after row of lustrous leather-swaddled volumes imprisoned as in a cage. On the morning I accompanied her there, I lingered long enough to be captured by the sight of two volumes, almost exactly alike in size and shape, lying together on a table. Opening one of them, seeing that it was aswarm with words, I was seized with the old queasy excitement in my guts, and fright clashed with greedy desire. My yearning won out, however, so that later that day I crept back to the library and took the book, covering it with a flour sack and leaving behind its companion—something which I later learned was called Grace Abounding. Just as I had expected, and to my wild anxiety, the fact that the book was missing was gossiped throughout the house. Yet I was not alarmed as I might have been, since I think I must have instinctively reasoned that although white people will rightly suspect a nigger of taking almost anything that is not nailed down, they would certainly not suspect him of taking a book.)

  This morning, squatting in the shadow of the kitchen, I think longingly of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, wondering if I can summon the courage to remove it from its hiding place and try to read it without being found out. Finally I get up and sidle toward the place where it is hidden. I have stored the book underneath the house—part of which is elevated above the ground—in a dark shelflike recess formed by one of the great oak sills. There spiders stir in the gloom and in the dim light hundreds of flying ants swarm in a pale flutter of brownish transparent wings. Protected by its flour sack, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman reposes in the dark. I creep forward on my knees a yard or so, reach up and remove the sack, then inch back toward the edge of the house where a splash of sunshine falls on the damp bare earth. Here I turn about and sit down with my legs crossed. I open the book and sunlight floods the white page, hurting my eyes. It is cool here, with a ferny smell of dampness, and mosquitoes moon about my ears as I begin my laborious journey through a wild strange country where words of enraging size, black and incomprehensible, blossom like poisonous flowers. My lips move silently, I trace sentences with a quivering finger. Thick words with mysterious syllables, lugubrious and fathomless, obstruct my way like great logs and boulders; small words are no better, obdurate as hickory nuts. I press on in despair, searching for the key, hunting for the soft and sweetly familiar, SUGAR, GINGER, CAPSICUM, CLOVES.

  Suddenly I hear footsteps stamping up the dirt path from the cabins and I draw back underneath the house, hidden again, watching. It is the black driver, Abraham. A stout, muscular Negro, very dark, he is dressed in the green denim shirt which is the badge of his authority; he hurries along up the path, sweating in the fierce morning heat, a set, stern, indignant look frozen on his face as his broganed feet tramp the ground inches from where I lay in hiding and then clatter up the back steps into the kitchen. Moments pass and I am aware of nothing. Soon I steal out toward the patch of sunlight again, preparing myself to read, when now I hear voices from up above, in the alcove between the kitchen and the pantry. Abraham is talking to my mother and his tone is agitated, tense, severe.

  “You better had,” he is saying, “you better jes’ had, Lou-Ann. Dat man he mean as pizen! I knows. You better light on out ob here!”

  “Shoot,” I hear my mother say, “dat man ain’t no trouble. He gib me a bad time an’ I smack him one wid dis yere kettle—”

  “But you ain’t seed him dis time!” Abraham breaks in. “He worse’n I ever seed! An’ ain’t no fambly folks aroun’ to say ary word! I jes’ tellin’ you, Lou-Ann, dat’s all I got to say!”

  “Shoot, he ain’t goin’ gib Lou-Ann no bad time. Leastwise not today …”

  I hear them move from the alcove, the footsteps shuffling on the timbers above my head, their voices becoming indistinct. Presently they are silent and then I hear the door slam open and Abraham’s heavy tread as he thunders down the back stoop and past me once more, his feet sending up small puffs of dust, half trotting now in the direction of the mill.

  The mystery, and my perplexity, last only a moment. As soon as Abraham has vanished around the corner of the stable, I sidle out on my behind again to the edge of the house, throwing open the book. The morning is still once more. While I bend my head down to study the open page, my mother begins to sweep in the kitchen above. I hear the steady whisk-whisk of the straw broom on the floor, then the sound of her voice, so faint that I can barely make it out, as she commences a lonesome song.

  “Bow low, Mary, bow low, Martha,

  For Jesus come and lock de do’,

  An’ carry de keys away …”

  The song lulls and distracts me, draws me away for a moment from the maddening printed lines. I listen to her sing, and my head falls slowly against a cedar post of the house while I gaze away drowsily at the buildings and shops and stables stretching westward to the swamp, the Negro cabins below them somnolent in the morning heat, and high above all the buzzards in patient and unceasing soar and swoop and meditation, a noiseless quivering tilt of black wings over some dying thing fallen in the far-off woods, hapless and struggling. Nearby, two Negroes with a wagonless mule team shamble up from the woods toward the mill. I hear their laughter and the jingle of a harness, and they pass out of sight. Once again I smell the collard greens steaming; hunger swells inside me, then hopelessly dies. “Bow low, Mary, bow low, Martha,” my mother sings, rich now, and far, and I let my eyelids close together, and soon I seem to be in a kitchen—is it this one I know so well?—at Christmas, and I hear the voice of some white mistress (Miss Elizabeth? Miss Nell?) calling out Christmas gift! in a cheery voice, and I drink the sweet eggnog descending to me from above in short greedy gulps, which does nothing to assuage my hunger. Then Christmas fades away and I am in a honeysuckle glade, filled with the bumbling hum of bees. Wash is with me, and together we watch a horde of Negroes laboring with hoes in a steaming field of young corn. Like animals, glistening with sweat, brown backs shining mirror-bright beneath the blazing sun, they ply their hoes in unison, chop-chopping beneath the eyes of a black driver. The sight of their dumb toil fills me with a sickening dread. Huge and brawny, the driver looks like Abraham, even though he is not Abraham, and now he spies Wash and me and, turning about, comes toward us. Gwine git me two little nigger boys, he says, smiling, Gwine git me two little boys to chop de corn. Terror sweeps through me. Voiceless, in mad flight, I plunge through the honeysuckle, treading air as if across empty space back through a sunlit morning toward the refuge of the kitchen looming near, where now a sudden low hubbub of voices interrupts my fright, waking me with a different fright. My eyes fly open and I crouch forward benea
th the house, alert, listening, heart pounding.

  “Gwan outa here!” my mother cries. “Gwan away! I ain’t havin’ no truck with you!” Her voice is shrill, angry, but edged with fear, and I can no longer understand the words as she moves to another part of the room above. Now I hear another voice, this one a man’s deep grumble, thick and somehow familiar, but speaking words I am unable to make out as I scramble to my feet at the edge of the house and stand there listening. Again my mother says something, insistent, still touched with fear, but her voice is blotted out by the man’s grumble, louder now, almost a roar. Suddenly my mother’s voice is like a moan, a single long plaintive wail across the morning silence, making my scalp tingle. In panic, wishing to rush away but at the same time drawn as if by irresistible power to my mother’s side, I run around the corner of the house and up the back stoop, throwing open the kitchen door. “There, God damn, ye’ll have a taste of me big greasy,” says a voice in the shadows, and though I am blinded by the sudden darkness, seeing only two blurred shapes wrestling together near the pantry, I now know who the voice belongs to. It is the white man named McBride—since winter the overseer of the fields—a yeasty-faced, moody Irishman with a shock of oily black hair and a bad limp, also a drunkard who has whipped Negroes despite the Turner brothers’ rules to the contrary. My mother is still moaning, and I can hear McBride’s stringy breathing, loud and labored like that of a hound dog after a run.