Once at dusk, coming back from a weary afternoon’s work at a farm deep in the pinewoods, I paused for a short while in the middle of a clearing. Heavy snow lay over the floor of the woods and in the trees, and there was not a sound anywhere. Darkness was pressing on fast, and I knew that if I did not get back to the parsonage before nightfall I would surely lose the way and just as surely freeze to death in the forest. Yet for some reason I was not frightened by the notion; it seemed a friendly and peaceable idea, to fall asleep amid the snow and the pines and never wake up—delivered into the bosom of eternity, forever safe from mean and dishonorable toil. It was a blasphemous, faithless vision but somehow I thought God might understand. And for a long moment I loitered there in the cold, silent clearing, watching the gray twilight descend, half yearning for the night to overtake me and enfold me close within its benign, chill, indifferent arms.
But then I recalled the new life which awaited me in Richmond and the grand future I would have as a free man, and a sudden panic seized me. I began to run through the snow, faster and faster, and reached the parsonage just before the last light faded from the sky.
On February 21, 1822, in the village of Sussex Courthouse, Virginia, the Reverend Eppes sold me into bondage for $460. I’m certain that this sum is true because I watched Evans or Blanding—I do not know which one—of Evans & Blanding, Incorporated, auctioneers, pay that amount in twenty-dollar bills as we stood in the anteroom of the nigger pen that the traders had set up in a crumbling brick tobacco warehouse on the outskirts of the village. The date, too, I know to be exact because it was outlined in flagrant red upon a big corporate wall calendar, not ten feet from where we stood, along with the inscription in ragged journeyman printer’s type:
$ $ $
PLAY SAFE WITH “E. & B.”
SPOT CASH PAID FOR
LIKELY NEGROES
$ $ $
The fifteen-mile trip by buggy up across the county line from Shiloh, the sale itself—everything had taken less than half a day. It had all happened before I could even think about it. And I stood there in the windy barnlike building, clutching my sack and watching the old preacher convey me into a trader’s hands.
I recall crying out: “But you can’t do this! You and Marse Samuel had a written agreement. You was to take me to Richmond! He told me so!”
But the Reverend Eppes said not a word, counting bills, each golden second climbing from penury to riches, his spectacles frosting up as with wettened forefinger and eagerly moving lips he verified his booty.
“You can’t!” I shouted. “I’ve got a trade, too! I’m a carpenter!”
“Somebody hush the nigger up!” I heard a voice say nearby.
“That nigger boy, gentlemen,” the preacher explained, “is a little tetched in the head about that one item. But he jest bully where it matters. He jest a bully worker. Got right smart strength for one so slender, and a good mind on him—can actual spell out some words, and has a God-fearin’ spirit. Reckon he might be a likely stud, too. Mercy, ain’t this been a winter?” Then without further comment he turned and on a frosty blast of air was gone.
I cannot make sense out of most of the rest of that day. I do recollect, however, that in the evening, as I lay slumped in the crowded, noisy pen with fifty strange Negroes, I experienced a kind of disbelief which verged close upon madness, then a sense of betrayal, then fury such as I had never known before, then finally, to my dismay, hatred so bitter that I grew dizzy and thought I might get sick on the floor. Nor was it hatred for the Reverend Eppes—who was really nothing but a simple old fool—but for Marse Samuel, and the rage rose and rose in my breast until I earnestly wished him dead, and in my mind’s eye I saw him strangled by my own hands.
Then from that moment on (until the occasion of beginning this account of my life) I banished Marse Samuel from my mind as one banishes the memory of any disgraced and downfallen prince, and I refused to give him ten seconds’ thought ever again.
One night soon after this there was a thaw and it started to rain. Torrents of water came down, lashed by a bitter west wind. Later the temperature began to fall and the rain turned to sleet, so that by the next morning all of the countryside was sheathed in a glistening, crystalline coverlet of ice, as if dipped in molten glass. Finally the sleet stopped, but the sky remained leaden and overcast, and the ice-encrusted woods seemed to merge without definition into the glassy and brittle underbrush of the fields, casting no shadow. That day, after I had been sold at auction to Mr. Thomas Moore, we rode back south out of Sussex Courthouse in a wagon drawn by two oxen, and the wheels squealed and crackled against the white troughs of ice in the rutted road and the iron-shod hooves of the oxen crunched cumbersomely on the hard frozen earth.
Moore and his cousin, another farmer whose first name was Wallace, sat hunched up on the seat behind the oxen, and I leaned up to the rear of them on the wagon’s open tailboard with my feet dangling over the edge. It was fearsomely cold and as we creaked along I shivered, although the frayed woollen overcoat which was the single legacy of my stay at the Reverend Eppes’s gave me a certain protection against the wind. Yet it was not the weather which now concerned me, but an irreparable and still, to me, inconceivable violation of my all too meager property. For less than an hour before, after having bought me, Moore had found and grabbed the ten-dollar gold piece I had so carefully sewn up inside my extra pair of pants. Like some avid little weevil or roach he had homed as if by the sheerest primitive instinct upon my few possessions and within seconds had extracted the gold piece from the belt band, ripping the seam, his round small pockmarked rustic’s face puckered with sly relentless triumph—”I figgered a nigger once’t lived at Turner’s Mill ud steal him some loot,” he muttered to his cousin—as he bit down on the coin then thrust it into the pocket of his jeans.
All my life I had never owned so much as a tin spoon, and the gold piece had been the only real treasure I had ever possessed; that I had kept it so briefly and had parted with it so quickly was something I could barely comprehend. I had wanted to save it against the time when I might start a church in Richmond, now it was gone. Coming as it did after three days’ and nights’ wait in the nigger pen—my limbs poorly warmed and even more poorly nourished on cold cornmeal mush—and joined with the quick disposal of my body to Mr. Thomas Moore, this final act of piracy left me numb and beyond outrage, and I sat stiff, bolt upright on the tailboard of the wagon, clutching my sack tight against my lap with one hand and with the other holding the Bible pressed against my chest. I felt a dull ache around the edge of my jaw and wondered in a distant way at the reason for it, then recollected that it had been caused by Moore’s begrimed and knobby fingers when he had thrust them into my mouth to ascertain the soundness of my teeth.
I listened vaguely to the conversation between Moore and his cousin Wallace, the words coming as if from yards and yards away, from the treetops or across the margin of a remote and snow-covered field.
“They was this hoor I knowed in Norfolk, on Main Street, name Dora,” the cousin was saying, “she would do it three ways if’n you’d pay a dollar-fifty—fifty cents each way and take all afternoon.” He began to snort and chuckle, his voice thickening. “Second time you shoot, hit jest like a covey of quail flyin’ straight out yo’ ass—”
“Sho,” Moore put in, chuckling too, “sho, I knowed this other hoor who done it three ways, name of Dolly—”
I put their godless talk out of my mind and stared at the glassy and desolate woods, silent now save for the remote noise, every so often, of a branch cracking beneath the weight of ice or the patterning faint sound of a hare as it scampered through the frozen meadows. I shivered suddenly and felt my teeth clicking together in the fierce cold. We had approached a fork in the road, and as I turned my head slightly I glimpsed a wooden signpost sparkling beneath transparent ice and two crude painted signs, one pointing to the southwest:
N. CAROLINA VIA HICK’S FORD
The other to the southe
ast:
SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY LINE 12 MI.
All of a sudden the wagon stopped and I heard Moore say: “Hit’s the right-handed fork to Southampton, ain’t it, Wallace? I recollect that’s what Pappy said to take when we come back out of Sussex. Ain’t that what he said, Wallace?”
Wallace was silent for a moment, then he murmured in a puzzled voice: “Goddam me, I can’t recollect what he said.” He paused again, finally adding more confidently: “If’n we hadn’t come up here by way of that trace through the marsh, I’d know for sure, but now hit do seem to me he said take the right-handed fork comin’ back. Yah, I could swear he said the right-handed fork. The left-handed fork’ll end you up in Carolina. Gimme ’nother suck on that jug.”
“Yah,” said Moore, “that’s what he said now, I know for sure, the right-handed fork. That sho is what Pappy said.”
A whip cracked on the cold air, the hooves of the oxen resumed their crunching on the rutted road, and as we took the right fork southwest toward Carolina, I thought: Trouble is, since neither of them ignorant scoundrels can read we’re likely to get into worse problems if I don’t set them straight right away, right now. We’ll sure end up lost twenty miles south of here. Anyway, I might get warm sooner.
I turned around and said: “Stop the wagon.”
Moore’s head swiveled about to face me, the wicked little eyes bloodshot, bulging, incredulous. I could smell an odor of brandy the length of the wagon. “What did you say, boy?” he murmured.
“Stop the wagon,” I repeated, “this way goes to Carolina.”
The wagon stopped, wheels sliding and squealing against the ice. Then the cousin turned about, incredulous too, silent, staring, licking his pink peeling lips amid a scraggle of reddish beard.
“How you know this way goes to Carolina?” Moore said. “Jest how do you know?”
“The sign said so,” I replied quietly. “I can read.” Moore and his cousin glanced at each other, then back at me.
“You can read?” said Moore.
“Yes,” I said, “I can read.”
Again they exchanged quick suspicious glances, and the cousin turned to me, glaring, and said: “Try him, Tom. Try him with the writin’ on that shovel.”
Moore held up a shovel which had lain clotted with earth below them at the front of the wagon. Along its ashwood shaft ran an inscription burnt large and deep with a branding instrument.
“Read them words there, boy,” said Moore.
“It says, ’Shelton Tool Works, Petersburg, Virginia,’ ” I replied.
The shovel clattered back onto the floor of the wagon, and as I once more turned around I saw the white woods roll before my eyes in a slow blurred procession of glittering icecrowned trees while the wagon itself wheeled about in a clumsy half-circle then moved briefly north to the signpost, pivoted, and resumed its ponderous journey southeast now, toward Southampton. An emptiness clutched my stomach as I realized suddenly how hungry I was, after three days on cornmeal mush. Never had I known such hunger before, never in my life, and I was astonished at the urgency of its pain, the desperation of its clamorous appeal deep within my guts.
Moore and his cousin brooded quietly for a long while, then at last I heard Wallace say: “Onliest nigger I ever knowed about could read was a free nigger up in Isle of Wight. Had him a little shoe-cobblin’ business in Smithfield and wrote out letters and such for some of the white folks. When he died they cut open his head and looked at his brain and it had wrinkles in it just like a white man’s. And you know, they was a story ’bout how some of the niggers got holt of a part of that brain and actual et some of it, hopin’ they’d git smart too.”
“Hit don’t do no good for a nigger to git learning,” Moore said somberly, “hit don’t do no good in any way whichever. Like Pappy says, a nigger with a busy head is idle with the hoe. That’s what Pappy says.”
“A nigger with learning bound to git uppity,” Wallace agreed.
“Hit don’t do no good in any way whichever.”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
Like the hunger, I had never felt a whip before, and the pain of it when it came, coiling around the side of my neck like a firesnake, blossomed throughout the hollow of my skull in an explosion of light. I gasped and the pain lingered, penetrating to the inside of my throat, and I gasped again, feeling that the pain might throttle me to death. Only at that moment, seconds later, did the noise of the whip impress itself on my mind—oddly quiet, a sedate whickering like a sickle slicing through air—and only then did I raise my hand to touch the place where the rawhide had cut my flesh, sensing on my fingertips a warm sticky flow of blood.
“When I gits ready to feed I’ll tell ye, hear me?” said Moore. “And say master!”
I was unable to speak, and now again the whip struck, in the same place, blinding me, sending me afloat outside myself on a reddish cloud of pain.
“Say master!” Moore roared.
“Mastah!” I cried in terror. “Mastah! Mastah! Mastah!”
“That’s better,” said Moore. “Now shut up.”
Once in the last days before my trial, when I was pondering my own death and was filled with a sense of the absence of God, I remember Mr. Thomas Gray asking me what had been the various things in time past that God had spoken to me. And although I was trying to be truthful I had been unable to answer him exactly, for it was the most difficult kind of question and had to do with a mysterious communion which was almost impossible to explain clearly. I told him that God had spoken to me many times and had surely guided my destiny but that He had never really given me any complicated messages or lengthy commands; rather He had spoken to me two words, and always these words alone, beginning on that day in the back of Moore’s wagon, and that it was through these words that I was strengthened and that I made my judgments, absorbing from them a secret wisdom which allowed me to set forth purposefully to do what I conceived as His will, in whatever mission, whether that of bloodshed or baptism or preaching or charity. Yet just as they were words of resolution they were words also of solace. And as I told Gray, God had a way of concealing Himself from men in strange forms—in His pillar of cloud and His pillar of fire, and sometimes even hiding Himself from our sight altogether so that long periods on earth would pass during which men might feel that He had abandoned them for good. Yet all through the later years of my life I knew that despite His hiding Himself for a while from me, He was never far off and that more often than not whenever I called He would answer—as He did for the first time on that cold day: “I abide.”
I wiped the blood from my neck and crouched down shivering into my overcoat. I listened to the wheels crunching and bumping along the rutted road, uneven here and littered with fallen icy branches, so that the wagon yawed and heaved and pitched me back and forth in a soft rhythm against the boards. Moore and his cousin were silent. A cold winter wind breathed suddenly across the roof of the woods.
“Lord,” I whispered, raising my eyes. “Lord?”
Then high at the top of the icy forest I heard a tremendous cracking and breaking sound, and that voice booming in the trees:
I abide.
I clutched my Bible against my heart and leaned against the boards as the wagon, heaving and rocking like a rudderless ship amid a sea of frozen glass, bore me southward again into the dead of winter.
Part
III
STUDY WAR
AN EXQUISITELY SHARPENED HATRED FOR the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro’s soul; it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriantly everywhere. Real hatred of the sort of which I speak—hatred so pure and obdurate that no sympathy, no human warmth, no flicker of compassion can make the faintest nick or scratch upon the stony surface of its being—is not common to all Negroes. Like a flower of granite with cruel leaves it grows, when it grows at all, as if from fragile seed cast upo
n uncertain ground. Many conditions are required for the full fruition of this hatred, for its ripe and malevolent growth, yet none of these is as important as that at one time or another the Negro live to some degree of intimacy with the white man. That he know the object of his hatred, and that he become knowledgeable about the white man’s wiles, his duplicity, his greediness, and his ultimate depravity.
For without knowing the white man at close hand, without having submitted to his wanton and arrogant kindnesses, without having smelled the smell of his bedsheets and his dirty underdrawers and the inside of his privy, and felt the casual yet insolent touch of his women’s fingers upon his own black arm, without seeing him at sport and at ease and at his hypocrite’s worship and at his drunken vileness and at his lustful and adulterous couplings in the hayfield—without having known all these cozy and familial truths, I say, a Negro can only pretend hatred. Such hatred is an abstraction and a delusion. For example. A poor field Negro may once in a while be struck by the whip of an overseer riding on a tall white horse, that same Negro may be forced onto short rations for a month and feel his stomach rumble daily in the tight cramps of near-starvation, again this Negro might someday be thrown into a cart and sold like a mule at auction in pouring rain; yet if this selfsame Negro—surrounded from childhood by a sea of black folk, hoeing and scraping in the fields from dawn to dusk year in and year out and knowing no white man other than that overseer whose presence is a mean distant voice and a lash and whose face is a nameless and changing white blob against the sky—finds himself trying to hate white men, he will come to understand that he is hating imperfectly, without that calm and intelligent and unrepenting purity of hatred which I have already described and which is so necessary in order to murder. Such a Negro, unacquainted with white men and their smell and their blanched and bloodless actuality and their evil, will perhaps hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 137