White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The Agent—how beautiful and naturally grand he seemed by contrast!—was ceremonious and gentle with the yellows, and obviously not afraid of them; this calmed us all.

  The first of the men with skin the color of curds called forward porters with gifts for the Agent: a curious carved chair, a cane with a golden head, an embroidered lounging robe, a case of razors, flagons of brass, a roll of shimmering satin, and a red silk banner as tall as the Agent with what was said to be a poem praising him in black velvet characters.

  Next this chief yellow man stepped forward, along with the one with lank hair at his chin, and one other yellow, and the Agent, and two interpreters, and they began taking us out into the sunlight, one at a time, alternating men and women, to stand before them, to be examined in total nakedness, and one of the yellows, evidently some sort of physician, inspected each of our people, looking into his eyes, mouth, and ears, inspecting his feet, even rudely handling his private parts, and the bearded one would command each person to turn and raise his arms to show his strength, and flex his legs, and then there would be a discussion, translated by one of the linguists, and finally the chief yellow man would call to his porters, and they would run to the piles of goods and get what he commanded and carry the things to the Agent’s feet—and so of course we knew that we were being sold to be eaten by these monsters, just as Kathy Blaw had said.

  I had not believed Kathy Blaw, but now I believed her.

  Involuntarily, I guess, in a low voice, I began to call for my father. Kathy Blaw, next to me, pinched my arm and told me with vicious severity to be silent.

  The physician turned away some of our people—an older woman from our village, Mrs. Carboot, for one, who, as we all knew, had the milky film of a cataract in her right eye.

  But then Chandler Nott, a weaver from our village, a grandfather of several years, was bought without debate, and I saw why we had been shaved and oiled: Mr. Nott’s hair had been gray as cobwebs and his skin slack-looking and dry, and now he passed for a man in his prime.

  Agatha’s father, Mayor Jencks, gave us a surprise, for he went forward in his turn with a manner that was eager, co-operative, and even obsequious to the yellows, and the monsters were pleased with him and paid the highest price they had yet given for any of us: a peck of Mexican dollars, seven braziers of hammered bronze, three bolts of Shantung, eight pornographic fans, six flutes, thirty-two brass cigar clippers, and an enormous bottle of rice brandy nested in woven rattan—and the curd-face with the scraggly beard, learning through his linguist that this was a village mayor, directed that Mr. Jencks be favored with a pair of underdrawers and ordered him to stand near the party of yellow men to tell them the real value of his villagers, which our mayor thenceforth did—lying, however, in our favor and to the yellow men’s expense in many cases.

  Gabriel acted in quite another way. He stood fast, when called forward, as if not hearing, and the Agent had to snap his fingers to some “police,” who dragged Gabe forward. Gabriel then glared at Mayor Jencks, toady to the yellows, with a look of revulsion, and he would not even glance at the yellow men, and he stood as indifferent as a tree when the physician probed and kneaded his flesh with fulvous hands. Upon being directed by the chief translator to display his strength, Gabe remained as still and relaxed as a basking lizard. The Agent began to shout. Gabe was deaf. The highest-ranking yellow man became enraged, and his face turned from pale curd to wild bloody saffron, and he stepped forward and with his own hands wielding a leather strap he dealt Gabriel several unmerciful slapping blows, which Gabe took without a quiver of his body or so much as a murmur, though tears brimmed out of his staring eyes. As nothing could persuade Gabe to bend or stretch his limbs, the yellow cannibals, as we thought them, purchased him anyway—at a price almost as high as Mayor Jencks’s.

  Waiting to be called, I was torn between these two manners, the mayor’s and Gabe’s, of fetching a handsome price, and I tried to choose one or the other, imagining, in my immature way, that I could be valuable, but when I was beckoned forward by the head linguist I could do nothing but hang my head and try to still my knocking heart. The physician’s clammy yellow fingers made me start, and the shame when he intruded on my privacy was unspeakable. Mayor Jencks, though he knew me well as his daughter Agatha’s best friend, had nothing to say for my value. As I heard my insignificant price translated by the interpreter I could only think that I was worth even less: a brass incense bowl, three lengths of cotton cloth, a bag of pomegranate seeds, and ten dollars Mex. And that was all.

  I thought myself dismissed and was turning away when the man with the stringy beard stepped forward and snatched from between my young breasts my locket of the Guevavi martyr and whipped its chain over my head, opened it, took out the bit of rag, the rusty nail, and the lizard’s tail, and hacking with laughter tossed them to the number-one yellow, who also laughed and dropped them to the ground, motioning me aside with the back of his hand. My terror at losing my luck locket, which had become disproportionately important in my mind, flared into a hope that its spilled contents would somehow bring disaster—smallpox, a bolt of lightning, a Gila monster’s venomous fangs—to the bearded man; my eyes showed him my wish.

  He turned and stepped on my locket where it lay in the dirt.

  When the last of our people had been bargained for, the Agent ordered porters to carry off the goods our sale had earned for the Syndicate—Mort Blain, our captor, a flabby man, had brought but a middling price—and the Agent’s party left.

  Kathy Blaw had evidently been infuriated by the rape of my locket, and as soon as the Agent had left the courtyard, she pronounced out loud, in her queer, shrill storytelling voice, one of our bitter postwar proverbs: “The yellow man who lives in a palace like Sammerfield or Bink—when he dies he lies in the ground like anyone else.”

  The principal yellow directed the interpreters, who were white men, to tell him what the woman had said, but we understood the linguists to indicate that they had not heard. The yellow man grew excited, and the head translator, after commanding Kathy Blaw in English to repeat the proverb, which she did with much spirit, rendered to the yellow man what must have been an innocuous translation, or perhaps a complete invention, at which the yellows laughed uproariously, patting the linguist’s shoulders. So we saw that the linguist, too, could lie for his own kind, even though he was the yellow man’s creature.

  An hour later we were crowded, standing naked against one another, into half a dozen large moving vans, Mack trucks, and we were driven for a long time, hearing incessantly the grinding of the trucks’ chain drives, and when we stopped at last and the tail gates of my van opened, it was dark outside.

  We were all put in a huge, damp, vile-smelling, cockroach-infested chamber under the ground, like a great cistern, already occupied by many naked strangers. There were only four small openings overhead, hatched with iron bars, and through these stingy grates we got an occasional breath of air and saw the stars of the open sky that we had always thought our own.

  Gay Moya’s Night

  To me, a girl of fifteen, who had never been anywhere outside my village except to Flagstaff on the bus six times in my life, torn now from my beloved locket of the Guevavi martyr, that little capsule with all my luck in it, this night in the pit at the yellow men’s fort on the outskirts of Santa Barbara was so full of strangeness and terror that surely, had it not been for Kathy Blaw, who held me tightly, my leaping heart must have burst my fragile ribs to flee. All around us we could hear the sounds of prayers to God, who must have been all ears in His heaven to catch the many denominational shadings. Our plight—all of us naked, in a dark hole, with creeping vermin supping at our bodies which had been sold to the miscreated yellow-skinned men—made us all equal, the once powerful with the once weak, so that the great Mort Blain was nothing more than I. Once when I dozed into a hazy half-dreaming state, I grew terrified that Mort Blain would somehow grow in stature and be
transformed into a shimmering creature seven feet tall with a horned headpiece atop coruscating masses of raffia strands, and that he would threaten to gore me for not having shrieked and screamed and scratched to protest Mr. Slattee’s leaving Agatha on the hillside path to die. But most of the night I was wide awake. Kathy Blaw beside me trembled with the fury that had always been encysted in her, which had often frightened me but now supported me, and I was astonished to hear her rail, with utter disregard for her safety, against the Syndicate and against the yellow men who seemed even more implacable than that dreaded organization. I exerted all my will to think about Gay Moya, not as I had seen her at the wheel of the white Caddy, looking dumb and irritable, but rather in a glow of her perfection in all her films, for I had always thought of her as a gentle goddess of night and coolness who reigned over the pleasures of the dark—over dancing, over kissing, over love-making in bed of a kind I had often tried to imagine but now would never have from Arty Coteen, over the evening whispering of an intimate (I would never hear it from Agatha again), over music, calm thoughts, and sleep. But I could not, even with Gay Moya’s help, keep this horrible night from spinning, buzzing, biting. I could see a handful of feeble embers, stars as weak as I who would never be a star, in the grates above, and I heard groans and sighs around me.

  Fire on Water

  Light seeped like a mist through the grates, and we were all taken out of the pit at last. We were formed in a courtyard into strings of sixes, men chained to men, women bound neck to neck with thongs.

  The yellow man with goat hairs at his chin, together with the physician, a white linguist, and a troop of the Syndicate’s bogus cops, appeared in our courtyard, and Goat-Beard said through the interpreter that he was our Big Number One, and that any slave—this was the first time we had heard ourselves called by that name—who caused the slightest disturbance would have his or her head cut off on the spot. That was all the yellow man said to us.

  Many of us trembled, not knowing when we would be eaten.

  I gave myself a moment’s strength by thinking: I am not a girl, I am a brass bowl, three lungees of cotton, a bag of seeds, and ten bucks Mex. Let the yellow people choke eating that!

  But my terror returned, wheeling back like a hopeful buzzard.

  We were marched out of the yellows’ fortress naked, and we made our way through woodland downhill. Suddenly we debouched into a wide, open glade, and ahead of us, beyond a further slope of the great trees and beyond a sandy stripe, we saw—new frights each day!—two atmospheres, one above the other, one lighter than the other, lying like layers into the unimaginable distance, where you could see their jointure in a perfect straight line. In my desert-village ignorance I thought the sandy stripe was the edge of our world of dirt, and that beyond lay nothing but upper and lower skies. But Kathy Blaw told me the darker sky was the sea.

  I had imagined the sea to be a broad, sluggish, brown-watered river, the color of ours outside the village hedge, with a visible farther shore. I huddled against Kathy Blaw in a fear at this expanse of sumptuous blue. Where was its other bank?

  We walked on until the sun stood hot overhead. As we approached the sea we could hear a steady roar, as of an overwhelming flow of traffic, and when we were close enough I saw what was making this clamor—lines, I imagined, of white fire coming to the strip of sand on the bank of the sea, rolling humps of dazzling white steamy fire roaring as loud as a thousand Mack trucks.

  Along the strip of sand were tents, guarded by many white soldiers, which sheltered, as we could see, great stores of the yellow man’s wealth, apparently recently landed here.

  Out in the water, at a great distance, beyond the many flashing lines of the burning sea, lay a strange structure, black, with a white house on it and a metal chimney; it looked like some sort of factory—a yellow man’s ship, Kathy Blaw said between chattering teeth.

  Now squads of yellow sailors, in smart blue uniforms like lounging pajamas, came from above the tents dragging several metal boats down the sand, and they lay them in the lacy fringe of gleaming ashes that the lines of sea-fire threw on the beach. The bearded Big Number One, alone, leaving his physician and linguist and guards behind, stepped without fear into the first boat and crouched in it, and eight sailors, singing together, their trousers darkening at the touch of the fiery water, heaved the metal shell into the first line of roaring smoke, and leaped in, and began to propel it, fiercely slapping at the fire around them with paddles shaped like the fly swatters our women used at home. The boat rose and plunged like a bronco. I was stunned by the courage of the yellow man with his straight black goat whiskers blowing in the wind.

  Then the “police” began to force our people, sixes of chained men first, into other boats. This was horrible. We were desert people. Our bravest men resisted. I saw Mayor Jencks trying to remonstrate placatingly with a squad of cops, but they menaced him with sheath knives, and I could see his bewilderment, after years of village authority, at these rations of threatening scorn. I myself was too frightened by the hot sea even to wonder how these white “police” felt about doing such work for the yellows, pricking at their fellow whites to drive them to God knew what destination. Gabe stepped into a boat without a flicker of fear. Mort Blain was lifted into one of the vessels as inert as a sack of corn meal.

  The lifeboats went and returned many times. I saw that all of them shuttled safely through the lines of fire, but this did not slake my fear in the least.

  Our turn came. My rabbit panic was increased many times over by the realization that Kathy Blaw—so stern, so positive!—was in terror, too. We hugged each other and crouched with our shaved heads bowed between the metal gunwales of the boat. Through all the pounding and crashing of our outward trip I had only one thought: that I was even more afraid of the yellow crewmen than I was of the horrible spumy fire through which they were rowing us.

  Strong arms carried me up some stairs attached to the side of the ship. I stood on a wide floor of sun-hot steel in a crowd of naked men, women, and children, hemmed in by a five-foot palisade of bamboo stakes erected on the deck.

  We saw a dozen yellow-skinned faces peering down at our nakedness from porches of the houselike white structure that rose at the forward part of the ship.

  A long time passed while the boats returned twice more to the shore. When the last trip was done, there were more people in the enclosure than had lived in all our village; we stood body to body.

  Big Number One mounted a platform near one of the huge masts with its cricket-leg lifting booms, and his white linguist translated his words to us:

  That we were slaves, that we had doubtless heard lies about being eaten, that we would not be eaten, that we were to be carried away to his kinsmen’s farms, that we would live, as we had at home, as tillers of the soil, artisans, laborers, and housekeepers.

  Further, that if any yellow man on this ship abused as, we were to tell the linguist, but if any of us offered to strike a yellow man or made a disturbance of any kind, he would lose his life.

  I, for one, did not believe what Big Number One said about not being eaten. Speaking of lies he lied, to stupefy us, I thought.

  The men’s strings were broken, and they were chained in pairs, and the thongs were taken from the women’s necks, and we were sent down on ladders through two holes in the steel floor, the men into one, women and children into another.

  Big Number One stood near the hole into which the women were being lowered. When Kathy Blaw and I, still clinging to each other, came before his eyes, the white linguist spoke to him, and Big Number One evidently remembered us, I because of my moment of defiance at the loss of my locket, Kathy Blaw because of her chanting of the proverb, which had apparently been given such a benign translation. Big Number One ordered that we two be put aside; the linguist explained to us, in a whisper in our American tongue that sounded so good, that he himself had suggested to Big Number One that we be cho
sen as two of the cooks for the slaves, and that we would therefore go down last. We were fortunate, he said. (So quickly I learned the value to a slave of behavior, even bad behavior, that draws attention.) The white linguist was a sleek animal, dressed in a long gown like the more important yellow men, firm-fleshed and prosperous-looking, like Mort Blain before his tumble, and he grinned at us with the condescending familiarity of a dispenser of favors.

  Kathy Blaw and I, and two other women also chosen to cook, Baptists, were sent below at last. Belowdecks the air was hot, and there was a fetid smell of spoiled fish. The great space of the hold had been decked into several layers, like shelves, and we saw that all the women were laid out supine on these shelves in rows, heads away from the edges. Each shelf was less than three feet above the next lower, giving the women barely room to sit up in place. As in the pit in the fort, we saw the sky through square holes with steel bars across them. Kathy and I and the two Baptists were given places on the top shelf nearest the ladder. A wooden hatch cover was lowered with a clatter onto the opening, and we heard the clink of metal latches battening it down and then cloth-soled footsteps, evidently of a yellow man on guard, roundabout it. The whole ship slowly swayed. There were sounds of thumping, creaking, and clanging all through the vessel. The light in the barred holes dimmed; we were amazed that dusk had come so soon. We had had no food all day.

  I must have slept, because I was next aware of the running of cloth feet on the steel deck just above me, and shouts in the yellows’ undulous language, a rhythmic grinding of apparatus beneath us, a continuous thumping of heavy links of chain on heavy metal, and then a vibration, a stirring of the life of the ship. New light and sips of blessed fresh cool air came through the openings. The rhythmic swaying of the ship began to be mixed with a helical plunging, as of a great galloping slow-motion horse spavined in one hock. A strange sickish dizziness came over me, and when a child near me retched, I, too, became ill at the sight of its fear, and so did many others as panic spread among us. The stench in the compartment became unbearable. We tried our best in the confined space not to lie in our bile.