Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  Neither Reb, rocking back and forth on his buttocks, nor I could make answer. There would have been a place made for this man among the Thugees. Noticing the condition of my linen, sweaty and mudstained from our flight, Bannon drug fresh jeans and a white osnaburg shirt a size too large from his wagon for me. As I took off my breeches, I said, “No one could help you?”

  “Ah looked fo he’p, Ah swear Ah did. Hit was right after my forty-fourth murdah. Ah was twenty. All that killin’ was beginnin’, you know, to weigh a li’l on mah heart by then.” Slowly, the Soulcatcher wiped the corners of his eyes with his scarf. “Whenever Ah shut mah eyes, Ah heard all them voices…dead people…and a good night’s sleep and me got to be strangers. Ah went to this li’l Methodist church my folks belonged to, and Ah told the pastor what Ah’d done. His name was Reverend Tyler—Ah remembah—and he was a good man. He tole me to stay there with him, but Ah asked him, ain’t there somethin’ Ah kin do to wash away all this evil? Ah mean, couldn’t Ah balance hit with good works or somethin’? Well, suh, this heah pastor, he tole me that mebbe if Ah went to every church in the state of South Carolina and made an offerin’, maybe then Ah’d be clean again….

  “So Ah did that, Master Harris. There wasn’t no church, or shrine, or temple Ah didn’t visit, but the urge to strangle somethin’—or break hit hup—still come ovah me, like a flash of epilepsy. There was no hope, far as Ah could see, nothin’ fo me to do but git back to Reverend Tyler’s li’l church and hide mahself forevah. Ah made mah way back home, slower this time. Ah slept in the woods one night, woods like these, and the world of Gawd and good people ain’t never seemed so beautiful to me—the only blemish in all Creation, the only spot that stank, was me.” He said to Reb, “And d’you know what happened then?”

  Reb gulped, “What?”

  “Well, Ah heard somethin’ funny, like a woman’s voice nearby. Since Ah’d sworn off carryin’ weapons, Ah followed hit emptyhanded, clawin’ mah way through the bushes and, sho as Ah’m sittin’ heah, there she was—a pretty, li’l cullud gal, and three big, cornfed cowboys pawin’ her. Somethin’ in me just went balooey! Ah couldn’t stand by and watch no rape, could Ah? But there be three of them and only one of me. Mebbe Ah could take out one of ’em. Mebbe two. But the third…. Then Ah thoughta somethin’ worse: What about mah soul? Wasn’t hit stained enough? Could hit stand forty-five clear acts of premeditated murdah?

  “But by then there weren’t no time to think. Forty-four or forty-five, what did hit mattah? Ah was damned, no doubt ’bout hit. Ah could nevah save mahself. But at least Ah could save that li’l girl from them—them animals.”

  “Then you routed them?” I asked. “All three?”

  “Killed one,” said Bannon. “Ah smashed his haid with a stone. Like the cowards they was, them other two took off like they done seen the Devil.”

  “Maybe they had,” muttered Reb.

  Bannon said, “What?”

  “Nothing…” Reb was holding his breath, and I guessed we both had the same question:

  “What about the girl?”

  “Oh….” The Soulcatcher looked away. “Ah smothered her with mah saddlebag after they done left. The urge come ovah me again—killin’ that first guy got me all worked hup. Believe me, she was better off after what they done to her….”

  “And the pastor?” asked Reb.

  “Broke his neck after Ah got back.” As if in apology, he added, “Just before he died, there was this look of forgiveness in his eyes. He seemed to understand….”

  Something in me lifted my left hand to my shoulder to strike Bannon. With my other hand I lowered it, as one might press down a mechanical thing gone haywire, and said, to keep this wild man calm, “We all have our work, I guess.”

  “Indeedy.” He sucked his teeth. “And it wasn’t afore long that Ah come to see that the world would always have need for mah specialty. There ain’t many men what kin catch, or kill, a Negro the right way.”

  “There is,” I ventured, “a right and wrong way to this?”

  The Soulcatcher reached for his jug and poured three fingers of warm whiskey into his cup. Leaning back against the log, he rubbed his legs to start blood circulating again. A last rush of chandoo locked in my system, inactive until now, chose that moment to come to life, doubling my vision for an instant, twinning Bannon and the trees behind him. Time dissolved into a deeper silence, the universe breathing outward—a god’s exhalation in sleep—then in, pointlessly. It was as though we were the last men in the world, survivers of a holocaust at Hegel’s end of history, trying to figure out what went wrong. And then the Soulcatcher laughed:

  “You don’t just walk hup to a Negro, especially one what’s passin’, and say, ‘Ain’t you master so-and-so’s boy?’ No, it’s a more delicate, difficult hunt.” Here he stared into his cup. “When you really after a man with a price on his head, you forgit for the hunt that you the hunter. You get hup at the cracka dawn and creep ovah to where that Negro is hidin’. It ain’t so much in overpowerin’ him physically, when you huntin’ a Negro, as it is mentally. Yo mind has to soak hup his mind. His heart.” Here he shogged down a mouthful of corn and cringed. “The Negro-hunt depends on how you use destiny. You let destiny outrace and nail down the Negro you after. From the get-go, hours afore Ah spot him, there’s this thing Ah do, like throwin’ mah voice. Ah calls his name. The name his master used. Andrew, Ah says, if his name be Andrew; Andrew.” I stiffened inwardly, but gave no sign. “Mah feelin’s, and my voice, fly out to fasten onto that Negro. He senses me afore he sees me. You become a Negro by lettin’ yoself see what he sees, feel what he feels, want what he wants. What does he want?” The Soulcatcher winked at Reb, who was brutally silent, chipped from stone. “Respectability. In his bones he wants to be able to walk down the street and be unnoticed—not ignored, which means you seen him and looked away, but unnoticed like people who have a right to be somewheres. He wants what them poets hate: mediocrity. A tame, teacup-passin’, uneventful life. Not to go against the law but hug it. A comfortable, hardworkin’ life among the Many. Don’t seem like much to ask, do it?” This he put to Reb; my friend did not answer. But this, too, was an answer. “It wears him down, ya know? Investin’ so much to get so little. It starts showin’. You look for the man who’s policin’ hisself, tryin’ his level best to be average. That’s yo Negro.” Here he held his cup in both hands. “You nail his soul so he can’t slip away. Even ’fore he knows you been watchin’ him, he’s already in leg irons. When you really onto him, the only person who knows he’s a runaway—almost somebody he kin trust—you tap him gently on his shoulder, and he knows; it’s the Call he’s waited for his whole life. His capture happens like a wish, somethin’ he wants, a destiny that come from inside him, not outside. And me, Ah’m just Gawd’s instrument for this, Master Harris, his humble tool, and Ah never finish the kill ’til the prey desires hit.”

  I said nothing. He did not find me ripe for plucking; he would wait—if his tale could be trusted—until I turned my neck toward the knife. It was a bizarre story, the strangest yet in this odyssey, but it explained (for me) Bannon’s Negroid speech, his black idiosyncrasies, tics absorbed from the countless bondsmen he’d assassinated.

  “The hunt,” said Bannon, suddenly, “is also sweetah when you give the prey a li’l room to run. If Ah ever meet a Negro Ah can’t catch, Ah’ll quit!”

  “Horace,” I said, nodding to Reb, “my man and I will travel tonight after all. We’ve put you out, and I think we can make Spartanburg by daybreak.”

  “Then Ah’ll break camp and take you.” Bannon stood quickly, dusting off the seat of his trousers. “Wouldn’t do to travel on foot, sick as you look. Besides, Ah know a doctor there—no butchering veterinarian—who kin see to yo bruises.” He whipped out a pearlhandled, single-shot derringer, the sort of pistol a brothel keeper might conceal in his boot, from his pocket, played with it, pointed it at me, but remained as polite and unthreatening as a colored preacher talking to the De
vil. “Do you know how Ah bagged my fust Negro passin’ fo’ white?”

  I gazed diagonally across the fire at him. The Soulcatcher made another stage wait. Then:

  “He lit out from a farm in Wareshoals and reestablished hisself in Due West. Got pretty good at passin’, too. They give him this job at a factory. You know what happened?” Bannon grinned; he had four—maybe five—gumline cavities. “His foreman asked him to work on a holiday. This Negro thought on it a spell. He said, ‘If’n the Lord’s willin’, and if Ah sees next sweet potato pickin’ time.’ Might’s well as hung a sign round his neck, sayin’ somethin’ as bootblack as that.” The Soulcatcher, slapping his knee, howled.

  My polite laughter rang false, even to me—a timed laugh I’d perfected at Leviathan, which I let linger for a few breaths.

  The Soulcatcher only smiled. They lifted me, cloak and all, into the back of the buckboard, and, as Bannon threw dirt on his campfire, Reb pulled the thick tarpaulin over me slowly in order to whisper, “Andrew”—the Coffinmaker only called me Andrew when scared or feeling sappy—“you ain’t goin’ off with this lunatic, are you?”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  In the clan-state of the Allmuseri, the griots, Reb told me, advised a man to devote no more than five seconds to untangling any problem. At the end of four, Reb admitted, “No, but you heard him! He’s crazy—he’ll kill you if you slip.”

  “Then I won’t slip.”

  “That ain’t what you said six hours ago.”

  Reb, poor Reb, I thought; I fumbled round the tarpaulin for his hand, then squeezed his thick, work-ruined fingers. “Maybe rabbits enjoy the hunt, too.”

  If the Coffinmaker had not been convinced before that I suffered brain damage, now he was sure, and for aught I know, that may be the truth of it, for I found the Soulcatcher’s modus operandi reassuring; because I knew his techniques, the strategies that poisoned my father, I could stare them down, second-guess Bannon and escape destruction. This struck me as a more certain course, a greater triumph than following the north star. The man did not, on principle, act until a runaway lost hope—this was the origin of all error—and haplessly lay his head on the block; Bannon could not, given his code, the aesthetic laws he lived by, interfere. And, sir, if he was fool enough not to interfere, for whatever reasons, what in this world could I not accomplish?

  These were my thoughts—feverish, I admit, the source of my new-found confidence during the twelve hours I rode in the rear of the rocking wagon, beneath a length of tarpaulin that admitted only tiny spicules of milky light like a stretch of stars above me, Reb up front beside Bannon, who cracked a whip over his horses across sumps, loblollies, and thank-you-ma’ams between Belton and Spartanburg. By mid-morning we arrived, powdered with cerise road dust, at the west end of the little town. It wasn’t much to write home about. Spartanburg’s muddy streets were lined with clapboard structures at the far end. Down that row were houses of public entertainment, two banks, a hotel, brothels, eight saloons, a Big Store, tonsorial parlors, livery stable and saddleshop (combined), a two-story courthouse crested by a cupola, and a small whitewashed church (Anabaptist).

  A rather commonplace, pre-Civil War town, but I ask the reader to ride in with me, and see how the case goes.

  VIII

  ON THE NATURE OF SLAVE NARRATIVES

  Before unpacking our suitcases in Spartanburg, it is necessary to speak briefly, and apologetically, about the form of this Narrative, which, as you have seen, often “worries,” as Mattie Hawkins might say, the formal conventions—as we define them—of the Negro Slave Narrative. To glimpse fully the wheels as they whir beneath the stage, we must first sort and shift awhile in the archival tomb of literary history.

  Of the Slave Narratives that come down to us, there are, if I have done my homework, three kinds: (1) the twentieth-century interviews, conducted during the Great Depression by the Federal Writer’s Work Project, with black citizens born before 1863; (2) the fraudulent “narratives” of runaway slaves commissioned by the Abolitionist Movement as propaganda for Negro manumission; and, finally, (3) authentic narratives written by bondsmen who decided one afternoon to haul hips for the Mason-Dixon line. These last narratives have, as I will demonstrate, a long pedigree that makes philosophical play with the form less outrageous than you might think.

  As a form, the third kind of Slave Narrative is related, as distant cousins are related, to the Puritan Narrative, a document written specifically by a member of a religious American community to show—as testimony—that he has accepted Christ. Here the narrative movement is from sin to salvation; it is with only slight variation that this narrative oomph becomes, in the work of a Douglass, a progress from slavery to freedom. In point of fact, the movements in the Slave Narrative from slavery (sin) to freedom (salvation) are identical to those of the Puritan Narrative, and both these genuinely American forms are the offspring of that hoary confession by the first philosophical black writer: Saint Augustine. In The Confessions we notice (and perceive also in the Slave and Puritan Narratives) a nearly Platonic movement from ignorance to wisdom, nonbeing to being. No form, I should note, loses its ancestry; rather, these meanings accumulate in layers of tissue as the form evolves.

  It is perhaps safe to conjecture that the Slave Narrative proper whistles and hums with this history, to say nothing of the nineteenth-century picaresque novel and story of manners, and all a modern writer need do is dig, dig, dig—call it spadework—until the form surrenders its diverse secrets. However, this hole is very deep, the archaeological work slow, and already you are frowning impatiently, and with good reason, about this essayist interlude. (Only one more intermission follows; I promise.) We will, therefore, rejoin the action in Spartanburg, where Horace Bannon is unloading the human cargo from his wagon.

  IX

  THE UNDERCLIFFS.

  WRITING AND TEACHING.

  THE COFFINMAKER’S DECISION

  The physician is talking:

  “You, my young friend, I mean you, William Harris, you, sir, are suffering from a few minor physical complaints, not one of which is fatal, but taken all together, and if not watched closely, their federation will lead to the medical equivalent of the Panic of 1837; you have, for a lad of two and twenty, the constitutional makeup of a matador, a very old matador, or perhaps his bull, an adrenal output suited for the Cro-Magnon Era, and, if I had not examined you myself—had I, for example, only seen these readings—I would conclude that my daughter, Peggy, who is much given to pranks, had dropped the neurological chart of an antediluvian shark on my desk. I do not recommend rest; I demand it. I also demand payment for this examination within the week because, after seeing your associates, I doubt that you will have two.”

  The physician—his name is Gerald Undercliff—was, as his attitude shows, a crypto-Schopenhauerean. Not for a minute do I mean to say that Dr. Undercliff had read The World as Will and Representation, though he had heard it mentioned at his club, but rather that the good doctor inclined to the opinion of society expressed in the Danzig philosopher’s “Parable of the Porcupines”: namely, that people, like porcupines, congregated for warmth against winter’s chill, but pricked each other severely, and this forced them to disperse into the snow. However, the cold drives them together again, and once more they leap away. At last, after many hopeful turns of huddling and dispersing, they discover that the only tolerable condition for social intercourse is keeping your distance. They were, of course, never entirely warm, but neither were they pricked. Undercliff, a tender-eyed old southern gentleman, was blind enough to bump into doors without his bifocal glasses; when annoyed, he removed them, or perched them high on the great granite dome of his forehead, thereby reducing others, including Peggy Undercliff, to a pleasant blur. Retired, except for a few patients he numbered as old friends, with a fertility god’s belly, Undercliff, who regarded any man who claimed to be religious as a rascal, divided Americans, regardless of race, into two classes: the Annoying and the Very Ann
oying (I figured in the second group), and if he had a single good feature, it was his daughter. It was as if the last leather-winged pterodactyl had sired a dove, and it was Peggy Undercliff who let us in after the doctor latched his door.

  He did more than latch his door, he drew his curtains when Bannon’s buckboard appeared, made his daughter stop playing the piano, and stood, holding his breath, as we rapped the knocker on what was easily the most beautiful house in Spartanburg. A splendid house for the time. A triple-chimneyed Andrew Jackson Downing house with cornices and arched windows, priceless furniture inside (John Henry Porter), paintings (Hudson River School), and curtained bookcases. His laboratory, where we sat, I barechested on a stool, his daughter behind me, was visually noisy: a riot of papers, fruitcores everywhere except in his wastebasket, tools I did not understand, and phrenological heads; it so resembled Ezekiel’s study, and so differed from the Vet’s barn, that I immediately felt comfortable.