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

  Yet after my appalling failure to dispatch Travis and Miss Sarah, there were two more separate occasions when in full view of my followers and recruits I had tried to bring death with my sword, two times when I had raised the glittering blade over some ashen white face, only to have it glance away with an impotent thud or miss by such an astonishing space that I felt that the blow had been deflected by a gigantic, aerial, unseen hand. And each time it had been Will—shouting taunts at me, jabbering, “Step aside, preacher man!”—who had shouldered me out of the way and with baleful and amorous and remorseless skill, broadax bloody and gleaming, performed the execution. Nor was I able to reprimand or control him in any way. His insatiate appetite for blood was in the eyes of others, too, awesome beyond understanding; to dispense with Will even if I was able would be to chop off my right hand. All I could do when he ordered me to step aside would be to do just that, and stepping aside, hope that the others might not notice the sick humiliation in my eyes or see me when (as I did once after watching Will’s ax cleave the skull of a young planter named William Reese) I stole off to puke my guts up for minutes in the woods.

  Mist the color of pearl hung over the countryside several hours past dawn when a dozen of us stopped to have breakfast of bacon and fruit in the woods near Mrs. Whitehead’s. The sun had begun to burn off the haze, cloaking the day in muggy heat. During the night we had successfully attacked six homesteads and plantations, and seventeen white people lay dead. Of these, Will had accounted for seven; the rest were apportioned among Hark, Henry, Sam, and Jack. No one had escaped our ax and sword, and thus no one had survived to raise the alarm. The surprise we had effected was stunning and complete. Our campaign so far had been perfectly silent, perfectly lethal. I knew that if we were by now blessed by good fortune to negotiate the upper loop of the “S” with as much thoroughness and quiet, murderous precision as we had managed so far, we might not have to risk using gunfire at all until we were very close to Jerusalem. Our present force had grown, as I had expected, to eighteen; nine of these men now had horses—including four magnificent Arabian stallions we had taken from the Reese plantation. We were bountifully supplied with swords, broadaxes, and guns. Two young Negroes who had joined us at the Newsom place were drunk and clearly terrified, but the remainder of the new recruits flexed themselves and strutted about beneath the trees in fighting mettle. Yet I was still restless and troubled. In desperation I wondered if ever a commander had been beset by such a wicked dilemma—his authority, his very being, threatened to its roots by the near-mutinous insolence of a subaltern whom he could not afford to lose, much less send away. Partly in an effort to free myself momentarily from Will’s deranging presence, but also because the place was an objective in my plans, I had just before dawn sent Will and four others under the command of Sam to sack the Bryant estate, which lay three miles or so off to the east. Sam had of course grown up with Will at Nathaniel Francis’s, and once or twice they had run off together; I thought that for a while at least, Sam might be able to control him and in the process calm him down. At the Bryant place there were half a dozen people who must be put to death, several recruits to get, and a number of swift, gallant quarter horses that would be invaluable for surprise attacks. Because of the isolation of the estate I told Sam that they could use guns. It should be easy work. We waited in the hushed hot woods for this group to rejoin us before we set out in full strength on the next stage of our attack.

  I did not feel at all well; the long siege of vomiting that overcame me at the Reese place had left me sweaty and queasy and weak, with racking recurrent spasms of pain in my stomach. A catbird squawked and chattered close by in the woods. Hush up! my mind cried. It had become fearfully hot—the sun glowering down already through a canopy of haze no longer milky-pure but leaden, oppressive, hostile. Trying to conceal from the rest of the men the tremors that had begun to shake my body, I ate no bacon or peaches but withdrew alone with my map and plans into a clump of trees. I left Nelson and Henry in charge of the troops. A creek ran nearby and as I made brief notations of our progress on the map I heard the men watering the horses with the copper buckets that were part of our plunder. There was an air of excitement and high spirits among the Negroes in the clearing. I could hear their laughter; even though some were drunk, I wished that I might share their swagger and boister-ousness, wished I could still the trepidation gnawing at the inside of me, slow the anxious beating of my heart. Finally I offered up a prayer, asking the Lord to strengthen my resolve as he had done with David, and some of the sickness and vertigo went away. When Sam’s troops reappeared in the clearing at about half past eight I felt partially revived and I rose and strode out to greet them. Those six had now become ten—several mounted on the Bryants’ dashing quarter horses—I could see by the sumptuous new leather boots which Sam wore that their errand had been successful in more ways than one. I had not actively discouraged a certain amount of looting; it was plain that to try and forbid any one of this disinherited and outcast army from grabbing baubles and trophies and plums would be like attempting to prevent a newly uncaged pigeon from seeking the air. At the same time I was determined to enforce limits: we must not be encumbered, we must not be impeded, and when I saw that Will had carried off from the Bryant place an enormous gilt-framed wall mirror I knew that it was now or never again—I had to call him down at once.

  As I walked toward the group I could tell that Will had made himself both hero and cynosure of the mission. Face and hands streaked with blood as he swung about in the saddle, he wore a blue jacket whose shoulders glittered with the epaulets of an army colonel, and an officer’s braided cap rode piratically on his head, bobbing about as he harangued the new field-hand recruits with a triumphant jabber of disconnected words and sounds: “De axes you gotta keep shahp, man!” he crowed. “Shahp as piss-ice, das what! If’n de ax am’ shahp de red juice don’ run! Das right! Das how come I got de mirrow, so’s I can see how shahp is de ax!” The men and boys around him howled with laughter. They were flecked with dry strings of gore on pants and boots and bare black arms. They leaned forward toward him from their saddles or, dismounting, gazed up at him with flashing white teeth, in thrall to his mad and singsong apostrophe. The Bryant Negroes, three of whom I had never seen before, were joyously, seraphically drunk, flourishing half-gallon jugs of brandy. The mixture of bloodshed and freedom had set them afloat upon a cloud of delirium, their laughter and hysteria seemed to soar up and blow like a gust of wind through the very trees. To them Will, not I, was the black avatar of their deliverance. One of those boys, a light-skinned lad of around eighteen with rotted teeth, had so lost control of himself in laughter that he had wet his pants in a flood.

  “I’se runnin’ de show now!” Will cried. “I’se de one dat make de ax sing ’Zip Coon.’ Will he de gin’ral now!” He spurred his mount, one of the Arabians, and at the same time checked in his reins and the great foaming stallion like Pegasus leaped skyward with a frenzied scream. “Will he de gin’ral now!” he shouted once more, and as the horse’s front legs came down to earth the satanic mirror snared the sun blindingly, threw back a shimmering vista of sky, leaves, earth, and a blur of black and brown faces that whirled in a glassy void, then vanished. “Whoa dere, Roscoe!” Will bellowed at the horse, stopping him. “I’se runnin’ de show, hawse, not you! I boss ob de ruction!”

  “No, I’se runnin’ the show!” I called then. The Negroes fell silent. “We get that straight right now. You ain’t runnin’ no show. Now drop that mirror on the ground. White people can see that two miles off. I mean what I says.”

  From the saddle he regarded me with haughtiness and disdain. Against all will or desire I felt my heart pounding, and I knew that my voice had cracked, revealing fear. In vain I tried to keep the tremor from coursing visibly along the length of my arms. For a long moment Will said nothing, casting down upon me his contemptuous gaze. Then he stuck out his tongue, red as a slice of watermelon, and made a long, slow, circular licking journe
y around the edges of his pink lips—a gesture of droll and lunatic derision. Some of the men behind me began to giggle, scuffling their feet in pleasure. “I doesn’ has to gib you no mirrow,” he said in a mincing, surly voice. “An’ I isn’t gwine gib you no mirrow. So stick dat in yo’ ass, preacher man!”

  “Drop that there mirror on the ground!” I commanded him again. I watched him tighten his grip on the haft of his broadax—naked threat—and panic swept over me in an icy wave. I saw my whole mission burnt to ashes in the fire of his madman’s insensate eyes. “Drop it!” I said.

  “Preacher man,” he drawled, rolling his eyes comically at the new men, “preacher man, you jes’ better step aside an’ let, de ax man run de show. ’Cause, preacher man, less’n you can handle de ax you cain’t handle de army.” And he gave a vicious yank upward on the thick blood-drenched haft of the ax and pulled the mirror tightly, possessively against the saddle. “Preacher man“—and his voice became a snarl—“less’n you kin make de ax sing a tune you is all done.”

  I do not know what might have happened if at that point Nelson had not intervened, bringing to a halt this confrontation which had so nearly broken me. Perhaps my other close followers would have rallied to my aid and we would then have proceeded onward in much the same fashion as we had planned. Perhaps Will might have cut me down on the spot, then in demented command ridden off with the others to chaos; surely they could not have gotten far without my knowledge of a strategic route, and my mission would have been set down as a “localized disturbance” involving “a few disgruntled darkies” rather than the earthquake it truly became. Whatever, Nelson rescued the situation by donning at the critical moment the mantle of authority which—in Will’s eyes, at least—I lacked or never had the right to own. I cannot explain his method, his charm’s workings. It might have been Nelson’s older age and manner—that methodical, muscular, laconic, self-assured air of experience he carried, his quality of brawny discretion and worldly wisdom: these were fatherly attributes in a way, and through some alchemy they had gained Will’s loony respect if not his fear. Hardly before I was aware that he had come between us, I heard Nelson’s voice and saw him reach up and clutch the bridle of Will’s horse. “Slow down dere, sweet,” he said sharply. “Nat he do run de show! Now slow down, sweet, and drap dat mirrow on de ground!” It was the tone one uses in addressing a likable but headstrong child—a voice not so much enraged as vexed, cross, severe, unmistakably meant to be obeyed. It cut through to Will like a hickory stick—“Drap it!” he again commanded, and the mirror slid from Will’s fingers and toppled unbroken to earth.

  “Nat he still de gin’ral,” Nelson rasped, bristling as he glared upward. “You better study ’bout dat, sweet, or me an’ you’s really gwine hab a rookus! Now you jes’ cool off yo’ black head!” Then he turned and lumbered back to the cooking fire beneath the trees, leaving Will briefly chastened, sulky-looking, and abashed.

  Yet although this crisis had been disposed of, I could not rest easy. I was sure that Will’s frightening competition for power had not been buried by the stand-off but simply deflected, put aside, and his bitter, contemptuous words—thrown at me, a challenge—had made me all the more panicky over the knowledge that I was unable to kill. Of the others of my force, only Nelson had failed to spill blood, and he not through any reluctance but because he had simply lacked the occasion. And as for the rest—Henry and Sam and Austin and Jack, my closest followers: was it only my imagination that caused me to feel in their manner toward me a coolness, to sense in the way they had spoken to me in the last hours a new-found suspicion and mistrust, a withdrawal, as if by failing to perform, even as ritual, that act which each of them had done I had somehow begun to lose a sure grip upon my rights and the respect due me as a commander? Certainly in days and weeks past I had never pretended that I would shirk this duty. Had I not told them so many times: To draw the blood of white men is holy in God’s eyes? Now in my impotence and irresolution I felt beleaguered not only by Will’s obscene jibes and threats but by fear that even those closest to me might abandon faith in my leadership if I persisted in this womanish failure to strike down white flesh. Heat blazed upon the clearing, still another catbird screeched in the humming woods. Dizzily, I stole off to retch dry spasms in the bushes. I felt mortally sick and the aching self beneath my skin pulsed and burned with fever. But at nine o’clock or thereabouts I returned to the clearing to assemble the company. And in this condition—shivering, ill, nearly torn apart by frights and apprehensions that I never thought God would permit—I was by providence hurried toward Margaret Whitehead, and our last meeting …

  To Richard Whitehead on his path toward the hogpen, standing alone beneath the hot morning sun in a patch of green cotton, our approach likely conjured up that of the hosts of Armageddon. Twenty Negroes and more in a jagged line—all mounted, light glistening from ax and gun and sword—who burst from the distant woods in a cloud of dust which, obscuring us at the same time that it revealed our relentless purpose and design, must have appeared to him borne from the hellish bowels of the earth: the sight was surely a re-enactment of all the fears and visions of black devils and heathen hordes that had ever imperiled his Methodist sanctity. Yet he too, like Travis, like all the others lulled by a history which had never known our kind before, was doubtless touched with disbelief at the same time that a portion of his mind grappled with the horror—and who knows but whether this was not the reason that he stood rooted to the ground like a cotton plant, his bland divine’s sun-pink face uptilted to the sky in vague bewilderment as we drew closer, perhaps hoping that this demonic apparition or vision or whatever, the result of undigested bad bacon or troubled sleep or August heat or all three, would go away. But the furor! The noise of pounding hooves and clanking steel and the panting lungs of horses and the hoots and harsh whispers of breath, closer now, from those grinning nigger faces! Merciful Lord! Such noise was a part of no apparition; besides, it was becoming almost intolerable! He seemed to raise his hands as if to stop up his ears, rattled a little in the legs, made no other motion, stood immobile and perplexed even as the two outriders, Hark and Henry, enveloped him on either side, and slackening pace only long enough to take aim, struck him dead with two swift hatchet chops to the skull. From the house I heard a woman shriek.

  “First Troop!” I cried. “Secure the woods!” I had just seen the new overseer, a man named Pretlow, and his two young white helpers jump from the steaming still and streak for the woods, the boys running, Pretlow astride a crippled barrel-bellied mule. “Git after them!” I cried to Henry and his men. “They won’t git far!” I wheeled and shouted to the others: “Second and Third Troops, take the gun room! On to the house!”

  Ah God! At that moment I was overcome again by such dizziness that I pulled in my horse and got down instantly and stood there in the hot field, leaning with my head against the saddle. I shut my eyes; needlepoints of red light floated through the dark, my lungs were filled with dust. When the horse stirred, I rocked as if in a rowboat. Across the field screams of terror came from the house; one stricken female cry, prolonged and wavering, ceased with shocking suddenness. I heard a voice nearby, Austin’s, and looked up to see him riding bareback one of the stallions, with a Bryant Negro seated behind. I gave the other boy my mount and told them both to join the troop chasing Pretlow and his helpers at the edge of the woods. I stumbled, fell to my knees, rose quickly.

  “You’s sick, Nat, isn’t you?” said Austin, peering down.

  “Go on,” I replied, “go on!” They galloped off.

  On foot now I skirted Richard Whitehead’s corpse lying face down between two rows of cotton. I walked unsteadily, following along the old familiar log fence which I myself had helped build, separating field and barnyard. My men in the house, in the stable, and in the barn, were making a barbaric racket. Still more screams erupted from the house: I remembered that Mrs. Whitehead’s summer-visiting daughters were home. I clambered over the fence, nearly fallin
g. As I grabbed for the post, I glimpsed the gross old house nigger Hubbard, at gunpoint, being forced into a wagon by Henry and another: captive eunuch, he would not go with us willingly, but tied up in the cart with other pet collected coons, would surely go. “Lawd, sweet Lawd!” he boohooed to the skies as they shoved him up into the wagon, and he sobbed as if his heart would perish. At that moment I rounded the corner of the oxen barn and looked toward the porch of the house. There deserted of all save those two acting out their final tableau—the tar-black man and the woman, bone-white, bone-rigid with fear beyond telling, pressed urgently together against the door in a simulacrum of shattered oneness and heartsick farewell—the porch seemed washed for an instant in light that flowed from the dawn of my own beginning. Then I saw Will draw back as if from a kiss and with a swift sideways motion nearly decapitate Mrs. Whitehead in a single stroke.

  And he had seen me. “Dar she is, preacher man, dey’s one left!” he howled. “An’ she all your’n! Right by de cellah do’! Go git her, preacher man!” he taunted me in his wild rage. “If’n you cain’t make de red juice run you cain’t run de army!”

  Soundless, uttering not a word, Margaret Whitehead rose up and scrambled from her hiding place beyond the sheltering wall of the cellar door and fled me—fled me like the wind. Fleet and light she ran, after the fashion of a child, with bare arms stiffly outstretched, brown hair tied with a bow and tossing this way and that above a blue taffeta dress, pressed to her back in a sweaty oblong of deeper blue. I had not caught sight of her face and realized it was she only when, disappearing around the corner of the house, the silk ribbon which I had seen before fell from her hair and rippled briefly on the air before fluttering to earth.