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

  As I have already said, Marse Samuel soon found that it was not possible for me to be delivered to that Mr. Pemberton in Richmond on my twenty-first birthday as he had hoped. Through the solemn moments of one evening after supper he explained to me how the depression which afflicted the Tidewater had washed over the city too, and how the market for such clever labor as I might provide had severely diminished—indeed was “busted,” as the saying goes. Thus my master was faced with a troublesome dilemma. He could not on the one hand simply set me free without a period of “seasoning” in the hands of a responsible person: all too many young Negroes, given their freedom without sponsorship, without some protection, had found themselves one morning beaten senseless, their papers stolen, bumping about in a daze as the wagon wheels rumbling underneath their cracked skulls bore them south to the fields of cotton. At the same time to take me with him to Alabama (that is where, almost at the last moment, he decided to try the remnants of his luck) would altogether defeat his plans for me, since opportunities for the rich life of a free Negro craftsman were almost nonexistent down in those townless river-bottom swamps and stews. So finally Marse Samuel had decided upon a provisional course, entrusting my body to the good Christian shepherd of whom I have spoken, the Reverend Eppes—this devoted and pious gentleman who could be expected to complete the documents in regard to my freedom as soon as the times got better up in Richmond (as they surely would) and who as recompense for his compassion and his overseeing of my destiny would receive the fruits of my labor for a while, gratis.

  And so there came a September morning, hot and throbbing with the sound of locusts, when Marse Samuel bade me farewell for all time.

  “I told him we were leaving this morning,” he said to me, “so the Reverend Eppes should be here to fetch you sometime around noon, maybe before. As I have told you before, Nat, you need have nothing to worry about. Although a Baptist, the Reverend Eppes is a gentleman of great probity and kindliness and will treat you in exactly the manner I would wish. You will find him a man of simplicity, and of modest resources, but he will be good to you. I shall be in touch with him by post from Alabama, and I shall be in touch with my own representatives in Richmond. And thus after a year or so, no more, the Reverend Eppes will arrange for your apprenticeship in Richmond and your eventual emancipation in just the same way I would have done had I been here. It is all written up in the agreement we made in Jerusalem and its legality is unquestioned. More important, though, Nat, is the trust I have in the Reverend Eppes. He will provide for all your needs, physical and spiritual. He is truly a gentleman of humanity and honor.”

  We stood in the shade of a great sycamore tree; the day was sultry, breathless, the air close and damp like a warm mouth-enveloping hand. The four wagons with which Marse Samuel would make the long trip were ready, waiting, the mules stamping and stirring in their traces. The rest of the family—the older nephew and his wife, Miss Emmeline, Benjamin’s widow, Miss Nell—had gone away already; they had stopped down in Raleigh with cousins or (in the case of the older ladies) had begun a sojourn in Petersburg, from whence Marse Samuel would summon them once all was safely established on Alabama soil. Of the Negroes, only Prissy and Little Morning and Abraham and his family were left; house Negroes, they had memories of happy times, and they wept loudly, the mourning lot crammed into one wagon. In tears I had said good-bye to them all, kissing Prissy and clasping Abraham in a warm mute embrace and, at last, taking Little Morning’s cold old-leathery feeble hand and pressing it to my lips; hair white as frost now, palsied and totally gone in the head, he lay propped sightless and uncomprehending at the rear of the wagon, heading south at his life’s withered and weary end from the only home he had ever known. The mules stirred and stamped in their traces. Try as I might, I seemed unable to stifle my grief.

  “You mustn’t take on so, Nat,” Marse Samuel said, “it is not like a death, it is like a new life for all of us. We shall always be in touch by the post. And you—” He paused for an instant, and I knew that he too was moved. “And you—you, Nat—think of the freedom that you will have, after all! Keep that in mind always and the sorrow of this parting will fade in your memory. The future is all that matters in our lives.”

  Again he ceased speaking and then, as if struggling to choke back his own feelings, began to say all sorts of commonplace things in a forced voice touched with false cheeriness: “Come now, Nat, chin high! … The receiver of the land, Judge Bowers in Jerusalem, is sending around a man who will remain here as the custodian and he might even be here today … Meanwhile, Prissy has left noontime dinner for you in the kitchen … Chin high, Nat, chin high always and good-bye! … Good-bye! … Good-bye!”

  He embraced me awkwardly, swiftly. I felt his whiskers against my cheek, and heard Abraham’s bullwhip crack far ahead like a musket. Then he turned about and was gone, and the wagons were gone, and it is the last I ever saw of him.

  I stood in the lane until the final echo of the wheels vanished rattling in the distance. My desolation was complete. As sundered from my root and branch as a falling leaf fluttering on eddies of air, I was adrift between that which was past and those things yet to come. Great boiling clouds hung on the far horizon. For a long moment I felt myself like Jonah cast into the deep, in the midst of the seas, with floods compassing me about and all God’s billows and waves passing over me.

  And now I began to look forward to the coming of the Reverend Eppes, but it took an almighty long time for him to fetch me. All morning I sat on the steps of the bare veranda, stripped of its furniture, waiting for the clergyman to arrive, awaiting the sound of hoofbeats, the rattle of some conveyance coming up the lane. It was hot and muggy and a moist haze with a hint of storm about it blurred the greenish sky; by late morning the sun burned down through murky waves of heat, so oppressive that even the locusts became still and the birds retreated, silent, to the leafy blue sanctuary of the woods. For two or three hours I read from my Bible, committing several Psalms to memory. (My Bible was the only possession I had to take away from Turner’s Mill save for these things: a single change of denim pants, two cotton shirts, an extra pair of what are elegantly known as nigger brogans, some little bone crosses I had carved, a needle and some thread, a pewter cup left to me by my mother, and a ten-dollar gold piece which Marse Samuel had given me the day before. It was a matter of custom that the person into whose hands I was delivered would supply the rest of my needs. The gold piece I had sewn into the belt band of my pants, and I kept everything wrapped in a large blue bandanna.) It seemed appropriate to the moment, suspended as I was between two existences, troubled by abandonment and loss, heartsick at the void I felt upon the departure of all the dearest and best friends I had ever known, yet at the same time obscurely excited by the promise of a new world, liberty, the fruition of all those dreams I had entertained in the recent past of myself a freedman jauntily striding toward church or job down some Richmond boulevard—it seemed appropriate to this mingled mood, as I say, that I study a Psalm in which sorrow and exaltation were joined, and I recollect that it was Psalm go that I put to memory that morning, the one beginning, Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations, and which contains the verse that goes: A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night …

  Noon came and went, the coppery sun sank toward the afternoon: still no Reverend Eppes, and I was hungry. I remembered then (having in my absorption forgotten) the meal waiting for me, and so with my sack thrown over my shoulder I walked back through the bare, deserted halls to the kitchen. There on a shelf over the great brick hearth was the last meal ever to be served here to a Turner: four pieces of fried chicken, half a loaf of shortening bread, sweet cider in a cracked mug—decent big-house food, proper for a farewell repast, thoughtfully covered by a worn clean flour sack as a screen against flies. That I recall with great clarity such small details may have something to do with the overall sense of ominousness, the spidery disquietude and p
erplexity which, like the shadows of vines creeping up a stone wall in descending sunlight, began to finger my spine as I sat on the window sill in the empty kitchen eating that chicken and bread. The stillness of the plantation was at this instant almost complete, so oppressive and strange that I suddenly thought, jittery with a vague terror, that I had been stricken by deafness. I ceased eating for a moment, both ears cocked and straining, waiting for some sound outside—a bird call, the plashing of a duck on the millpond, a whisper of wind in the forest—to convince me that I could hear, but I heard nothing, nothing at all, and my panic swelled until just then the startling noise of my own bare callused foot scuffing roughly on the pine floor reassured me: I chided myself for my silliness and continued eating, and was further soothed by a fly’s insensate deafening mutter as it settled on the topmost edge of my ear.

  But the feeling of an ominous hush and solitude would not leave me alone, would not fade away, clung to me like some enveloping garment which, try as I might, I could not ease from my shoulders. I tossed the chicken bones down into the weed-choked flower bed below the kitchen window, and wrapping the remains of the bread carefully in my sack along with the broken mug—I thought it would become of use somehow—ventured out into the great hall of the house. Dismantled of everything that could be moved—of crystal chandeliers and grandfather’s clock, carpets and piano and sideboard and chairs—the cavernous room echoed with a tomblike roar to my sudden sneeze. The reverberation smashed from wall to wall with the sound of waterfalls, cataracts, then became silent. Only a lofty mirror, webbed with minute cracklings and bluish with age, embedded immovably between two upright columns against the wall, remained as sure proof of past habitation; its blurred and liquid depths reflected the far side of the hall, and there four immaculate rectangles marked the vanished portraits of Turner forebears; two stern gentlemen in white wigs and cocked hats, two serene ladies with modest bosoms bedecked in ribbons and flounces of pink satin, they had been nameless to me yet over the years as familiar as kin: their absence was suddenly shocking, like swift multiple deaths.

  I went back out on the veranda, again waiting for the sound of hooves and wheels, and again there was only silence. Even then I had begun to feel that I was alone, abandoned, forgotten, and that no one was going to come and fetch me; the sensation caused me fear and foreboding but part of the emotion was not unpleasant, and way down inside I felt my bowels stirring with a mysterious, queasy, voluptuous thrill. I had never felt this way before and tried to put it out of my mind, laying my sack down on the veranda steps and strolling to the small promontory at the side of the house, where in almost one glance it was possible to survey the entire prospect of abandoned dwellings, decaying shops and sheds and ruined land—an empire devastated by the hordes of Gideon. The heat had become wicked, unrelenting, pouring down from a smudged, greasy sky in which the sun pulsated like a faint pink coal through the haze. As far as my eye could reach, the cabins lay in weatherworn rows to the vast bottom cornfield, now a majestic jungle of weeds, sunflowers, and impenetrable green bramble. The sense of excitement, gut-deep, warm, squirmy, returned irresistibly as I watched the scene, as my eyes lingered on the ranks of empty cabins then returned to regard the shops close by, the outhouses and stables and sheds, and the big house looming near, unpeopled and silent in the terrible heat.

  Only a dripping of water through the cracked millpond dam disturbed the silence now—only a steady unhurried dripping and nearby the flickering hum of grasshoppers in the weeds. I tried to force back the sharp and growing excitement but even as I did so I felt my pulse pounding and the sweat flowing beneath my arms in streams. There was no wind, the trees in the surrounding woods were quiet; yet because of this very stillness they seemed a solid mass stretching out on all sides of me in perfect circumference to the last boundaries of the world, an all-pervading triumphant mass of greenery. Nothing but this still and ruined plantation existed; it was the very heart of the universe and I was the master not alone of its being at the present instant but of all its past and hence all its memories. Solitary and sovereign as I gazed down upon this wrecked backwater of time, I suddenly felt myself its possessor; in a twinkling I became white—white as clabber cheese, white, stark white, white as a marble Episcopalian. I turned about and moved to the very crest of the slope, hard by the circular drive where carriages had come and gone and ladies in crinoline and taffeta had lightly and laughingly dismounted upon carpeted footboards, their petticoats spilling on the air like snow as I steadied their outstretched arms. Now, looking down at the shops and barns and cabins and distant fields, I was no longer the grinning black boy in velvet pantaloons; for a fleeting moment instead I owned all, and so exercised the privilege of ownership by unlacing my fly and pissing loudly on the same worn stone where dainty tiptoeing feet had gained the veranda steps a short three years before. What a strange, demented ecstasy! How white I was! What wicked joy!

  But my blackness immediately returned, the fantasy dissolved, and I was again overtaken by wrenching loneliness and a pang of guilt. The Reverend Eppes did not appear, though I strained my ears for the sound of his approach on the road. I went back to my Bible once more, reading and committing to memory one of my favorite passages—the story of Samuel and the ark of the covenant—while afternoon lengthened and light dimmed on the veranda and thunder grumbled and heaved faintly on the smoky horizon.

  As it grew dark I knew that the Reverend Eppes would not arrive that day. I got hungry again and had a twitch of sharp discomfort when I realized that there was no more to eat. Then I remembered the shortening bread in my sack, and when night fell, I ate the rest of the loaf, washing it down with water from the cistern behind the kitchen. Inside the house it was as black as the swamp on a moonless night, clammy and stifling, and I stumbled aimlessly about while clouds of mosquitoes whined about my ears. My little bedroom had been stripped bare like all the rest, and there was no use sleeping there, so I lay down on the floor in the great hall near the front door with my sack as a pillow beneath my head.

  Then along about what must have been eleven o’clock a storm descended on the plantation, scaring me out of wits and sleep; titanic lightning bolts illumined the dark, in flashes of eerie green outlined the deserted mill and the millpond, where steely rain swept the surface of the water in windy sheets and torrents. Cracklings of thunder rent the heavens, and a single shaft of lightning suddenly broke in two a huge old magnolia nearby in the woods, toppling half the behemoth to earth with a squealing and a groaning like a stricken madman. The night filled me with terror, I had never known such a storm, never in my life; it seemed a special storm ordained by God, and I hid my head between my sack and the bare planks of the floor, wishing that I had never been born. At last the storm slackened, dwindled away with a soft dripping noise and I raised my head up, recollecting the flood: The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained … I whispered thanks to the Lord in a prayer, and finally went off to sleep, listening to the wet sound of an owl, blown in by the storm, as it stirred and shivered somewhere high on a ledge of the hall above me, fussing hoot-oo, hoot-oo, hoot-oo.

  Then I heard a voice—”Git on up, boy“—and I awoke in a dazzle of morning light to see and feel the toe of a black boot prodding me awake—not a gentle prod, either, but an insistent sharp boring-in between my ribs which caused me to gasp and rise instantly onto my elbows, gulping morning air as if I had been half drowned.

  “You Nat?” I heard the man say. Even as he spoke I knew it was the Reverend Eppes. He was clad from head to toe in clerical black; motheaten black preacher’s leggings he wore too, level with my eyes now, and I saw that several buttons were missing and for some reason the gaiters exuded, or seemed to exude, a sour, worn, unclean smell. My eyes traveled up the length of his long black-clad shanks and his seedy black mohair frock coat and lingered for the barest instant on the face, which had a skinny, big-nosed, pentecostal, Christ-devoured, wintry look
of laughterless misery about it; bespectacled with oval wire-framed glasses, belonging to a man of about sixty, redly wattled in the neck like a turkey gobbler’s, bitter of countenance and opaque of eye, it was a face graven with poverty, sanctimony, and despair, and both my heart and my belly suddenly shriveled within me. If nothing else, I knew I had had my last piece of white bread for some time to come.

  “You Nat?” he said again, more insistent now. It was a barren and suspicious voice, nasal, full of cold November winds, and something in it warned me that with this clergyman it would not do to display any educated airs. I scrambled to my feet and retrieved my sack from the floor and said: “Yas, massah, das right. I’se Nat.”

  “Git on in that buggy down ’ere,” he ordered.