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

  There was nothing to say.

  “Well, you was a success, all right. Up to a point. Mind you“—he jabbed a brown-stained finger at me—“up to a point. Because, Reverend, basically speaking and in the profoundest sense of the word you was a flat-assed failure—a total fiasco from beginning to end insofar as any real accomplishment is concerned. Right? Because, like you told me yesterday, all the big things that you expected to happen out of this just didn’t happen. Right? Only the little things happened, and them little things when they was all added up didn’t amount to a warm bottle of piss. Right?”

  I felt myself shivering as I gazed downward between my legs at the plank floor and at the links of cold cast iron sagging like a huge rusting timber chain in the chill dim light. Suddenly I felt the approach of my own death, and with a prickling at my scalp, considered that death with mingled dread and longing. My hands trembled, my bones ached, and I heard Gray’s voice as if from a broad and wintry distance.

  “Item,” he persisted. “By the U. S. census of last year there were eight thousand niggers in this county, all chattel, not counting around fifteen hundred niggers that were free. Of this grand total of ten thousand plus or minus whatever, you fully expected a good percentage of the male population, at least, to rise up and join you. Anyway, that’s what you have said, and that’s what the nigger Hark and that other nigger, Nelson, before we hung him, said you said. Let’s figure that, oh, maybe a little less than half of the nigger population of the county lives along the route you traversed toward Jerusalem. Lives within earshot of your clarion call, so to speak. Counting on the bucks alone, that’s one thousand black people who might be expected to follow your banner and live and die for Niggerdom, and this is only if we figure that a pathetic fifty per cent of the eligible males joined you. Not including pickaninnies and old uncles. One thousand niggers you should have collected, according to your plans. One thousand! And how many actually did join you? Seventy-five at the most! Seventy-five! Reverend, I ask you, what kind of a miser’ble-assed percentage is that?”

  I made no reply.

  “Item,” he said again. “The item of drunkenness and general unmilitary conduct among your so-called troops. This you can’t deny in spite of the picture I’m sure you’d love to present to the world of a majestic military force in full, ordered, disciplined panoply—elegant soldier boys in bully ranks and files. But we’ve got too much testimony au contraire. What you had pure and simple was not an army but a draggledy mob of drunken black ruffians who couldn’t keep out of them stills and cider presses and thus in true nigger fashion contributed further to your downfall. Why, Major Claiborne, who ran the Isle of Wight militia, told me that when he broke you up there at Parker’s field fully a third of your troops was staggerin’ aroun’ drunker’n hoot owls, some of ’em so pissy-eyed grogged up that they didn’t know the butt-end of a gun from the barrel. I ask you, Reverend, is that any way to run a proper revolution?”

  “No,” I said, “that was bad, I admit. That was one of the worst things that went wrong. I gave orders about that, but when my troops grew in size—when there was a lot of us instead of just a few—why, I somehow lost control over them. I just couldn’t keep an eye on them all at once and I—” But then I fell silent. Why try to explain anything now? Gray was right. Despite a measure of triumph, despite the single short mile that finally separated us from our goal—a nearness to Jerusalem so tantalizing that I could still feel in my flesh the remembered thrill of almost-victory—despite everything we had nearly achieved, in the end we failed beyond all hope or salvage. As he said, I had not been able to govern the boisterous black riffraff, so many of them only half grown, that had rallied behind me; neither I nor Nelson nor Henry nor anyone had been able to prevent those callow harebrained recruits from plundering the liquor cellars, just as we had been hard put to keep them from raiding attics for fancy clothes or ransacking smokehouses for hams or plunging away on horseback in the wrong direction or, more than once, with black fingers unacquainted with guns, almost shooting off their own feet or hands. But, Mr. Gray, I found myself wanting to say, what else could you expect from mostly young men deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, shackled, and hamstrung from the moment of their first baby-squall on a bare clay floor? It was prodigious that we come as far as we did, that we nearly took Jerusalem … But I said nothing, recalling only that moment in the forenoon of the second day when at some pillaged ruin of a manor house far up-county I watched a young Negro I had never seen before, outlandishly garbed in feathers and the uniform of an army colonel, so drunk that he could barely stand, laughing wildly, pissing into the hollow mouth of a dead, glassy-eyed white-haired old grandmother still clutching a child as they lay sprawled amid a bed of zinnias, and I said not a word to him, merely turned my horse about and thought: It was because of you, old woman, that we did not learn to fight nobly …

  “Last but not least,” Gray said, “item. And a durned important item it is, too, Reverend, also attested to by witnesses both black and white and by widespread evidence so unimpeachable as to make this here matter almost a foregone conclusion. And that is that you not only had a fantastic amount of niggers who did not join up with you but there was a whole countless number of other niggers who was your active enemies. What I mean in simple terms, Reverend, is that once the alarm went out, there was niggers everywhere—who were as determined to protect and save their masters as you were to murder them. They was simply livin’ too well! All the time that you were carryin’ around in that fanatical head of your’n the notion that the niggers were going to latch on to your great mission, as you put it, an’ go off to some stinkin’ swamp, the actual reality was that nine out of ten of your fellow burrheads just wasn’t buyin’ any such durn fool ideas. Reverend, I have no doubt that it was your own race that contributed more to your fiasco than anything else. It just ain’t a race made for revolution, that’s all. That’s another reason that nigger slavery’s goin’ to last for a thousand years.”

  He rose from his seat across from me. “Well, I got to go, Reverend. I’ll see you tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’ll put down in my deposition to the court which precedes your confession that the defendant shows no remorse for his acts, and since he feels no guilt his plea will be that of ’not guilty.’ Now, one last time, are you sure you feel no remorse at all? I mean, would you do it again if you had the chance? There’s still time to change your mind. It ain’t goin’ to save your neck but it’ll surer’n hell look better for you in court. Speak up, Reverend.”

  When I made no reply to him he left without further word. I heard the cell door slam shut and the bolt thud home in the slot with its slippery chunking sound. It was almost night again. I listened to the scrape and rustle of fallen leaves as the cold air swept them across the ground. I reached down to rub my numb and swollen ankles and I shivered in the wind, thinking: Remorse? Is it true that I really have no remorse or contrition or guilt for anything I’ve done? Is it maybe because I have no remorse that I can’t pray and that I know myself to be so removed from the sight of God? As I sat there, recollecting August, I felt remorse impossible to know or touch or find. All I could feel was an entombed, frustrate rage—rage at the white people we had killed and those we had failed to kill, rage at the quick and the dead, rage above all at those Negroes who refused us or fled us or who had become the enemy—those spiritless and spineless wretches who had turned against us. Rage even at our own minuscule force, which was so much smaller than the expected multitude! For although it ravaged my heart to accept it, I knew that Gray was not wrong: the black men had caused my defeat just as surely as the white. And so it had been on that last day, that Wednesday afternoon, when after having finally laid waste to twoscore dwellings and our force of fifty had rallied in the woods to storm Major Ridley’s place, I had caught sight for the first time of Negroes in great numbers with rifles and muskets at the barricaded veranda, firing back at us with as much passion and fury and even skill as their white owners and overseers who had ga
thered there to block our passage into Jerusalem. (The alarm had gone out at least by the morning of the day before, our schedule was disastrously upset, and we had met resistance everywhere for many hours. The Ridley place, which straddled the road into town, was now an ominous fortress yet it had to be taken—and quickly: it was our last chance—if we were to break through and dash the last mile on horseback, seizing Jerusalem before it became an armed camp.) Far up on the veranda of the old stately brick house now barricaded by wagons and crates and hogsheads I could see twenty-five or thirty Negroes owned by the white gentry near town—coachmen, cooks, some field hands maybe but I could tell from what they wore mostly gardeners and house nigger flunkies, even a clutch of ban-dannaed yellow kitchen girls passing ammunition. I heard the voice of Major Ridley above the steady fusillade of gunfire—“That’s the spirit, boys!” he cried to the defenders, black and white alike. “That’s the spirit! Fire away, lads! Lay on the lead! We’ll turn the rascals back!”—and the volleys swelled tempestuously down upon us with a noise like the continual crackle of lightning, ripping twigs and leaves from the green summer trees.

  Then I recall Hark saying to me as we crouched behind the great stump of a felled oak, shouting above our own rifle fire: Look at dem black fuckahs shootin’ at us! And I thought, lying to myself: Yes, they’re black but they’ve been forced, dragooned by white men who have threatened them with their very lives. Negroes would not fire back like that of their own free will, at least not in those numbers. And all this I kept thinking desperately even as I signaled and we charged the house (but far within I knew better: had not pitifully less than a hundred joined us? When I had expected hundreds? Had not I with my own eyes seen fifty more Negroes flee at our approach all along the way, scattering to the woods?)—our men now moving on foot and crouched in a ragged skirmish line behind hedged and sun-dappled boxwood and maple trees. Each of us was mercilessly exposed, the force not outnumbered but outpositioned and outgunned in a lopsided uphill assault, and intimidated nightmarishly less by white men now than by the sight of a horde of housebound and privileged town and up-county Negroes sending coolly aimed gunfire into our black ranks. At last we had to fall back and disperse into the woods. I saw my men streaming off in panic everywhere. Unmounted horses burst for the meadows. My mission had become totally shattered, blown apart like gunpowder on the wind. Then the ghastly final mortal mischief. Two of my men had made it to within twenty yards of the veranda and then were both killed as I watched: one of these was Will, raging to the end with a sublime fury beyond mere valor, beyond even madness; the other was my old great Henry, who, lacking ears to judge the whereabouts of danger, caught a musket ball in the throat. He fell like a dead tree.

  Hark too had fallen wounded far behind me as we made our withdrawal down the slope. I got up from where I had stumbled to go back for him but he was too near the veranda; as he struggled from the lawn with a hand clutched to his bloodied shoulder I saw three bare-chested Negroes who were dressed in the pantaloons of coachmen charge from the house under covering fire and kick him back to earth with booted feet. Hark flopped about in desperation but they kicked him again, kicked him with exuberance not caused by any white man’s urging or threat or exhortation but with rackety glee, kicked him until I saw droplets of blood spray from his huge and jagged wound. Then they dragged him past one of the barricade wagons and underneath the veranda and two of the Negroes kept aiming booted kicks at his shoulder even as they disappeared from sight. I fled, escaped then. And I remember feeling sick with rage and with the knowledge of defeat, and later that night after my troops dissolved forever (the twenty of us who remained in a final fire-fight with a dozen mounted Isle of Wight County militia along the rim of humid twilit woods, some of my men too weary, some too demoralized or drunk—yes, Gray was right—to refrain from slipping away once and for all into the trees, thereupon to steal back home, harboring wild hopes that in the confusion their adventure with me might not have been noticed) and I too lit off alone, hoping against hope that I could find Nelson or Austin or Jack and regroup and swim across the river for a three- or four-man attack by stealth on the armory—but knowing even as night came down over the woods and the voices of white men hallooed in the dark and the drumming of far-off cavalry hooves echoed from the roads that such a hope trembled on lunacy—an accusation kept howling somewhere in the black defeated hollow of my brain: It was the niggers that beat you! You might have took Ridley’s. You might have made Jerusalem if it wasn’t for those bootlickin’ black scum of white men’s ass-suckin’ niggers!

  The following morning after I had slept for the first time in days, alone just as sunrise shimmered up cool and hazy over the pinelands, I sneaked out of the woods in search of food and soon happened upon the Vaughans’ place where Nelson’s troops had slain four people. Kitchen fires were still smoldering from the day before, the spacious white house lay deserted and still. As I crept past the chicken shed and into the barnyard I heard a grunting and a snuffling noise, and saw two razorback wild hogs devouring the body of a man. It must have been the overseer. The corpse was parted from its head and I knew that the last face the man had ever seen had been that of Will. I watched the hogs rooting at the man’s intestines for a moment and I was without feeling; the iniquitous mud-smeared beasts may as well have been feeding upon slops or offal. Yet after I had taken some food from the plundered, littered kitchen and had prepared a sack of bacon and meal to help me through the first part of my flight to the woods, I was afflicted by fear and uneasiness. It had been my custom for many years, as I have said before, to spend part of this hour of the day in prayer and meditation, but when I went back to the border of the woods and knelt there to ask God’s guidance in the coming time of solitude—to request that He show me the ways and necessities for my salvation now that my cause in His name was irrevocably lost—I found to my terrible distress that for the first time in my life I was unable even to think. Try as I might, I could not cause a prayer to pass my lips. The God I knew was slipping away from me. And I lingered there in the early morning and felt as alone and as forsaken as I had ever felt since I had learned God’s name.

  And so while I sat shivering in the November wind I listened to the sounds of late afternoon welling up from the town, and the rage withered within me and died away. Again the emptiness and desolation returned: the same ache of loneliness that had not really left me once since that morning at the edge of the woods and during the long weeks I had hidden out in my little swampland cave—the same inability to pray. And I thought: Maybe in this anguish of mine God is trying to tell me something. Maybe in His seeming absence He is asking me to consider something I had not thought of or known before. How can a man be allowed to feel such emptiness and defeat? For surely God in His wisdom and majesty would not ordain a mission like mine and then when I was vanquished allow my soul to be abandoned, to be cast away into some bottomless pit as if it were a miserable vapor or smoke. Surely by this silence and absence He is giving me a greater sign than any I have ever known …

  I rose wearily from the cedar plank and hobbled the length of the chain to the window. I gazed out into the fading light. Faint from the end of the rutted dirt road, by the water’s edge, I heard the sound of a mandolin or a guitar and the voice of a young girl singing. Sweet and gentle, from some white, delicate throat I would never see, the song floated up along the river shore on a breath of wind. Bright pinpoints of snow flickered through the dusk and the music mingled in my spirit with a lost fragrance like that of lavender.

  “She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps …”

  Tenderly the voice rose and fell, then faded away, and another girl’s voice called out softly—”Oh, Jeanic!”—and the sweet lavender smell persisted in my memory, making me stir with longing and desire. I thrust my head into my hands and leaned against the cold bars, thinking: No, Mr. Gray, I have no remorse for anything. I would do it all again. Yet even a man without remorse, in the face of death, may have to save
one hostage for his soul’s ransom, so I say yes, I would destroy them all again, all—

  But for one …

  It had been as early as that first hour after leaving the Travis house that I began to fear that Will might actually seize control from me and disrupt my entire mission. I was not then so much afraid that he would dominate close followers like Henry or Nelson or Hark; they were safely under my influence and leaders in their own right. But as the night progressed and as we picked up new men at the half-dozen places which lay on our winding route between Travis’s and Mrs. Whitehead’s, Will’s crazy, deafening rivalry for leadership was something I could not dismiss any more than I could fight down my panic over my own inability to kill. Had not Joshua with his own sword slain the King of Makkedah? And with his own bow had not Jehu killed Joram on the field of battle? I felt premonitions of disaster. I knew I could not expect men to rally around me and to fight with bravery if I myself was unable to draw blood.