“Saith your God.”
He dropped his arms to his sides for another moment silent and contemplative, with gentle, twinkling eyes. The people stood rigidly still and expectant, waiting for his next words. The band stirred uncomfortably in the water; the elder in blue, hip-deep beneath Daddy Faith, surveyed the crowd with flashing, scornful eyes. Then Daddy Faith spoke again. They knew what he was going to say, watched him stand there relaxed and benign, and his words, a question, were hardly out of his mouth before they were crying the answer.
“Who loves you, my people?”
“You, Daddy! Daddy Faith! You loves us! You, Daddy!” Ella joined in with the rest, her arms outstretched and with blissful weeping eyes, as if she could gather him by pure force of will, and across that stretch of water, into her arms. “You, Daddy! Yes, Jesus, you loves us!” But Daddy Faith motioned politely for quiet, with a sweep of his hand. He was chuckling out loud; they could hear him, watched him put his hand slyly to his chin and chuckle happily, all the time regarding them with his friendly, humorous eyes.
“Dat’s right,” he said.
He paused, still chuckling.
“My, dat’s right.”
He ceased his laughing, but a smile lingered on his face, and he shook his head, in amusement and with a certain wonder.
“Dat sho’ is right!” he said. And everybody laughed again. Far off the horn of a freighter blew; darkness would be coming soon. The red fires had disappeared from the water, now it had only the green of dusk in it, and the palest pink from the vanished setting sun. Daddy Faith straightened himself up. His approach at first was direct but friendly, almost like that of an uncle or a raconteur engaged in conversation with children. Once or twice he paused to look at his wrist watch, and only gradually did his voice lose its soothing, intimate tone and work up to its true grandeur, its native triumph. The crowd listened, stood shuffling in the sand, and while he spoke some old women, including Ella, closed their eyes and prayed. “We seen a tough time, my people,” he said, “all dese years. We done had de wars and de pestilenches and de exiles. We had de plagues and de bondages and de people in chains. Isr’el has suffered in de land of de pharaohs and de land of Nebucherezzar. And de people have laid down in de wildiness and cried out loud: Woe is us fo’ our hurt, our wound is grievous, and where is now our hope? Dey shall go down to de bars of de pit, when our rest together is in the dust. And de people have wept out loud, My Lawd, my Lawd, why hast Thou fo’saken me? De people have been sore hurt and dey say, our inheritance is turned to strangers, our fathers have sinned and are not, and we have bo’n their iniquities. And de people have wished to see de pure river of de water of life, clear as crystal, proceedin’ outen de throne of God and of de Lamb. Dey stand in de streets of desolation and dey say, Lawd, show me dat revelation where dere shall be no night and no need fo’ candle, neither light of de sun. Show me dat, Lawd, for our hurt is grievous and our way is fenced up so we can’t pass, and dere is darkness in our paths.
“Now de people of Isr’el done gone off to war,” he went on, propping himself against one of the golden rods. Above him the lamp flickered LOVE in the dusk; Ella, rapt and with her eyes closed, moaned a quavering, “Amen!” Somewhere in the crowd a woman echoed, “War. Amen! Yes, Jesus!” and the words drifted shrilly across the darkening marsh. “Now de people done gone off to war and dey sent down de atom bomb on de Land of de Risin’ Sun and de sojers come home wid glory in dey th’oats and wid timbrels and de clashin’ of bells.” He paused again; his eyes grew sad, caressing the throng. “Well, my people, it do seem to me dat we got a long way yet. De hand of de Lawd is against de sinful and de unjust, and de candle of de wicked is put out. But mo’ time to pass yet and de eyes of de people shall see His destruction and dey shall drink of de wrath of d’Almighty. And dey shall see a time of hate and a time of war, like de preacher said, and dey shall hear de sound of battle in de land and de great destruction. ‘Oh, Lawd,’ dey’ll go on and cry still, ‘Oh, Lawd, I am oppressed, undertake fo’ me! I mou’n as a dove, my eyes fail wid lookin’ upward! Hear my prayer, Lawd, and let my prayer come unto Thee! Don’t take away my freedom again, Lawd, don’t take away dat!’
“Dey gonna holler ‘O God, de proud are risen against me, and de assemblies of vi’lent men done sought after my soul! How long, Lawd, wilt Thou be angry fo’ever, shall Thy jealousy burn like fire?’ “
In the twilight came a hoarse “Amen! Oh yes, Jesus!” Shadows from the sheltering marshland lengthened over the water, and there was a long wild moan, a woman’s tortured wail, “Oh yes, Daddy! You right!” Daddy Faith put out his tiny black hands, a motion of compassion and tenderness.
“Comfort ye,” he said softly, “comfort ye, my people. Do you not know dat I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean, and a new heart also will I give you and a new sperit will I put widin you? If it were not so I would have told you.”
“Oh yes, Daddy!”
“Hallelujah!”
Then there was a vast sorrow, one somehow proud and proper and just, in his voice, as he spread his arms to heaven and lifted his round face toward the dusk. “Be not afraid, my people. De voice said, Cry! And he said, what shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all de good-liness thereof is as de flower of de field. De grass withereth and de flower fadeth, because de sperit of de Lawd bloweth upon it …
“Sho’ly de people is grass.”
He paused, gazing with benevolence upon the throng. “Sho’ly” he repeated tenderly, “sho’ly de people is grass.”
“Oh, Daddy!”
“Praise him! Praise him!”
He quieted them again with a single wave of his hand, tapped himself gently on the chest, and smiled. “De grass withereth, de flower fadeth,” he said, “but de word of your God shall stand forever.”
When their baptizing was over, drenched and exhausted, Ella and La Ruth climbed back up onto the beach, dragging behind them Stonewall and Doris, who still hadn’t found her mother. They walked up the sand a bit, to the camp tables beneath the trestle, and here they sat down. Ella still trembled with the fever of the ritual, remembered the bubbles, the salt water in her nose as she went under—yet, more than this, half-swooning when he smiled at her, as her place came in line, and the divine delight of the touch, on her turban, of his hands. She squeezed the water from her robe and then nibbled on a piece of fried chicken. She shivered with the cold and the memory of his hands. “Dat was sho’ some immersion,” she said.
La Ruth didn’t answer. She had her face in a piece of watermelon.
“Gret day, dat was an immersion,” Ella said again.
Sister Adelphia and Brother Andrew joined them, together with a light young girl who seemed to be Doris’ mother. She snatched Doris up from a sandpile, where she had been playing with Stonewall.
“Runnin’ off like dat!” She slapped the child and then, when she began to scream, kissed her until she became quiet. “Crazy little fool,” she crooned, half-sobbing herself, “runnin’ off from me. I thought you was drowned.” Then she said, “Thank you, Sister,” to Ella, and vanished with Doris up the beach.
Sister Adelphia crushed out the water from her robe and sat down on the bench next to Ella with a bottle of Seven-Up. “Whoo-ee, Sister, I seen ’em all now.”
“Amen!” said Brother Andrew.
“Dat was one, all right,” said Ella. “It was in dis world.” All sins washed away, her warfare accomplished, her iniquity pardoned, beneath the touch of his hands, in the flooding seas.
La Ruth let the melon rind drop from her fingers and began to moan. “I don’t know,” she said, “comin’ around to thinkin’ about all dat time an’ ev’ything, po’ Peyton, po’ little Peyton. Gone! Gone!” She thrust her head in her hands and spread out her legs, snuffling into the wet sleeves of her robe. “God knows, I don’t know …”
Sister Adelphia sniffed scornfully, rattling her beads. “Ain’t you been baptized, Sister?” she said.
Twilight fell
around them; the evening became sprinkled with stars. Far off the band tooted triumphantly, around the illuminated love-lamps, amid the flare of blossoming torches. Ella thought of the touch of his hands, the sin-destroying seas. The spell was still on her, and she got up. “Yes, Jesus,” she said in a soft voice.
“Dat’s right, Sister,” said Sister Adelphia, clapping her hands together.
“Yes, Jesus!” Ella said again, louder. She began to shake all over. “I seen Him!”
“Amen!” said Brother Andrew.
“I seen Him!”
In the distance a train rumbled, approached the trestle, setting saucers in a rattle on the table. Ella whirled about in the sand, a black finger upraised to the sky. “Yes, Jesus! I seen Him! Yeah! Yeah!” The train roared, trembled, came nearer. It was a ferocious noise. Stonewall stuck his fingers in his ears; the others turned their faces toward the sea. “Yes, Jesus! Yeah! Yeah!” The voice was almost drowned out. The train came on with a clatter, shaking the trestle, and its whistle went off full-blast in a spreading plume of steam. “Yeah! Yeah!” Another blast from the whistle, a roar, a gigantic sound; and it seemed to soar into the dusk beyond and above them forever, with a noise, perhaps, like the clatter of the opening of ever-lasting gates and doors—passed swiftly on—toward Richmond, the North, the oncoming night.
A Biography of William Styron
William Styron was born on June 11, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia, to W.C. and Pauline Styron. He was one of the preeminent American authors of his generation. His works, which include the bestseller Sophie’s Choice (1979) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), garnered broad acclaim for their elegant prose and insights into human psychology. Styron’s fiction and nonfiction writings draw heavily from the events of his life, including his Southern upbringing, his mother’s death from cancer in 1939, his family history of slave ownership, and his experience as a United States marine.
Growing up, Styron was an average student with a rebellious streak, but his unique literary talent was markedly apparent from a young age. After high school, he attended Davidson College in Charlotte, North Carolina, for a year in the reserve officer training program before transferring to Duke University, where he worked on his B.A. in literature. Styron was called up into the marines after just four terms at Duke, but World War II ended while he was in San Francisco awaiting deployment to the Pacific, just before the planned invasion of Japan. He then finished his studies and moved to New York City, taking a job in the editorial department of the publisher McGraw-Hill.
W.C.’s recognition of his son’s potential was crucial to Styron’s development as a writer, especially as W.C., an engineer at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, provided financial support while his son wrote his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Published when Styron was twenty-six years old, Lie Down in Darkness was a critical and commercial success, and the culmination of years spent perfecting his manuscript. Shortly after the book’s publication, however, Styron was recalled to military service as a reservist during the Korean War. His experience at a training camp in North Carolina later became the source material for his anti-war novella The Long March (1953), which Norman Mailer proclaimed “as good an eighty pages as any American has written since the war, and I really think it’s much more than that.”
Starting in 1952, after his service in the reserves, Styron lived in Europe for two years, where he was a founding member, with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, of The Paris Review. He also met and married his wife, Rose, with whom he went on to have four children. Styron’s second major novel, Set This House on Fire (1960), drew upon his time in Europe. He spent years preparing and writing the subsequent novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which became his most celebrated—and most controversial—work. Published at the height of the civil rights movement, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize and was hailed as a complex and sympathetic portrait of Turner, though it was criticized by some who objected to a white author interpreting the thoughts and actions of the black leader of a slave revolt. Styron followed with another bestseller, Sophie’s Choice (1979), the winner of the 1980 National Book Award. The novel, which was made into an Academy Award-winning film of the same name, borrowed from Styron’s experience at McGraw-Hill as well as his interest in the psychological links between the Holocaust and American slavery.
In 1982, Styron published his first compilation of essays, This Quiet Dust. Three years later he was beset by a deep clinical depression, which he wrote about in his acclaimed memoir Darkness Visible (1990). The book traces his journey from near-suicide to recovery. His next book, A Tidewater Morning (1993), was perhaps his most autobiographical work of fiction. It recalled three stories of the fictional Paul Whitehurst, one of which depicted Whitehurst’s mother’s death when he was a young boy, an event that mirrored Pauline Styron’s death when Styron was thirteen years old. The book was Styron’s last major work of fiction. He spent the remainder of his life with Rose, writing letters and dividing his time between Roxbury, Connecticut, and Martha’s Vineyard. William Styron died of pneumonia on November 1, 2006.
William Styron in 1926 at ten months old. He was an only child, born in a seaside hospital in Newport News, Virginia. As an adult, Styron would describe his childhood as happy, secure, and relatively uneventful.
The Elizabeth Buxton Hospital in Newport News, Virginia, in 1927, two years after William Styron’s birth. Styron was born on the second floor, delivered by Dr. Joseph T. Buxton, whose daughter, Elizabeth, would become Styron’s stepmother in 1941.
The house where Styron grew up, in Newport News, Virginia, and where he lived with his family from 1925 until he was fifteen. Styron’s youth in Newport News instilled in him a sense of the tangibility of history that would later form the bedrock of many of his novels.
The photo from Styron’s sophomore-year high school yearbook, taken in 1939. He did poorly in school that year, earning mostly Cs and Ds and getting in trouble for disobedience. His father sent him to Christchurch boarding school in Virginia in 1940 to finish his last two years of high school, hoping the change would make Styron more focused and disciplined.
As a youth, Styron worked at the Hilton Village Movie Theater in Newport News. It was in this theater that he first saw movies such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Grapes of Wrath, which sparked his lifelong interest in film. Today, the building, above, is home to the Peninsula Community Theatre, which presents musicals, dramas, and children’s plays.
It was while traveling as the manager of his high school football team that William Styron, top left in the photograph above, first saw the historical marker commemorating the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion that would ultimately inspire his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Styron as a young Marine circa 1944. In training at Parris Island, South Carolina, Styron proved to be a subpar marksman because of a congenital cataract in his right eye, a condition he did not report when enlisting in the military. Determined to avoid getting discharged, the right-handed Styron learned to shoot his M1 rifle left-handed so he could use his left eye as his shooting eye.
In a January 24, 1951, letter to his father, Styron says of his recently completed first novel, “now … I can truthfully feel that I’ve not only written a novel, but a good novel, perhaps even a really fine novel … and I hope it gives some people a pleasure in inverse proportion to the pain it’s caused me in the writing.”
The first galleys of Lie Down in Darkness, 1951, signed by the author. Styron based the novel’s matriarch, Helen Loftis, on his stepmother, Elizabeth Buxton, whom he depicted as a self-righteous, angry, intolerant woman. Other characters in the novel were collages of people Styron had known in his youth.
In a letter to his father dated April 8, 1953, Styron says, “I think it will probably interest you further to know that I am going to get myself married to [a] girl named Rose … suffice it to say that she’s the girl from whose pres
ence I get the greatest sense of well-being and fulfillment that I’ve ever had.”
The announcement of Styron’s wedding to Rose Burgunder at the Campidoglio in Rome on May 4, 1953. The couple spent the early days of their marriage in Ravello, above the Amalfi Coast of southern Italy, hiking, playing tennis, swimming in the ocean, reading, writing, and hosting friends.
The Styron and Peyton families at the Styron home in Connecticut in 1960. Styron named the character Peyton Loftis in Lie Down in Darkness after these close family friends. In front are Thomas Styron, William Styron, Susanna Styron, and Paola Styron. Rose Styron stands behind William on the left.
Styron later in life, when he spent much time outdoors on long walks with Rose or his dogs. His health deteriorated gradually until his death in 2006.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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