White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The wave of nausea that crossed the capital that afternoon had a strangely curative effect. Yü-li was disposed of, and the tavern girl Cassia Cloud felt her queer inner aptitude stirring again, and she swore before the magistrates that certain respectable men—“some of your Ears of the Court, if you please, I can tell you their names”—had tried to have her poisoned, and indeed these same respectable men had put up the money for the slaves’ and Mohammedans’ plot. But the judges, glad to be breathing fresh air again, stood her down and said they had had the last of all that.

  She pouted and said they owed her fifty taels of silver.

  What for, pray?

  “The reward,” Cassia Cloud said. “Ayah, the Emperor’s proclamation. Your Honors took the pains to read it out to me in the court here. Did you think I was not listening?”

  They paid her the money and sent her away.

  The madness, it seemed, was nearly over. Within a few days the elephant pens had been emptied. The slaves condemned to transportation were carried off on carts, and many others were returned to their masters. The Emperor issued a proclamation that thanks to his own divine mercy the city had been spared. The magistrates petitioned the Emperor for funds to reimburse masters for the loss of slaves that had been beheaded, burned, or transported. This was only fair, said my master to his wife. After all, the masters had paid good money for these chattels that had been removed from their premises by force majeure for the sake of the common welfare.

  Discussing this petition one evening at a meal with his friend P’an, my own master fired a remark almost straight into my ear as he ladled soup from a bowl I was in the act of lowering to the table, and it was not until some days later that I understood that the words had been intended literally. “Do you know, friend P’an, I have come near to concluding that for us city-dwellers indenture is economically viable, and slavery is not. These whites were farmers in their native lands, and they are good for only one thing, P’an: agriculture. Not so?”

  A Parcel Is Sold

  And, accordingly, in about a month, when the master had been able to secure and bond for four years’ servitude six healthy yellows, four men and two girls, Manchurians all and safe Buddhists, I was sold. So were Old Bow and Gull. So, it happened, into the same broker’s hands, was Sun’s Mink. The mistress wanted back for her new girls most of the clothes she had, I thought, given to me, and when we departed my small bundle, wrapped and tied in an undergown, was easy to carry. We four were sent to Tientsin and were placed on an onion-carrying junk in a parcel, as they called us, of twenty-odd slaves—bound, we were told, for a somewhat warmer place than the Northern Capital. We were kept for the most part on deck by day, and we slept nights in the holds on sacking thrown over hills of pungent onions.

  BOOK FOUR

  Peace’s War

  On the Cart

  A WARM DAY in the eleventh month. Haze. The right-hand hub of the crude two-wheeled cart needs grease, and half of each turn is a living screech which sends groundlings ahead of us scurrying away from the rutted earthen road into the forests, where leaves are falling.

  The morose agent, really a courier, a sapling boy in the shapeless black trousers of the local peasant style, who affects a pipe with a stem nearly three feet long, at the end of which is a brass bowl no larger than an acorn’s hull, sits at the lip of the car between the shafts, shod feet dangling behind the donkey’s tail. He is armed. The donkey wears a bell at its neck to keep it awake. Mink and I are the only riders on the flat-bedded cart, and, having been told nothing, we can only assume that we are being delivered: to the compound we now pass whose walls bear dazzling white-plastered panels?—to another?—to an unknown farm cut from the solemn forest, with wide fields of money crops lying all around the landlord’s walls? Mink laughs but is afraid.

  We pass on, and at intervals we see other endless walls, and we have glimpses of a river with barges and sampans, and the ruts deepen, and the roots spreading in the track shake us. Mink laughs again. I am afraid, too, and I laugh. Gull and Bow have been sold away in a separate parcel.

  What am I to make of my life? Whenever I think of the Northern Capital—the oath, the fires, the elephant pens—my flesh still crawls; yet I am a girl of only sixteen, passing through new landscapes with wide eyes. Changes of scenery refresh and excite me, and mislead me, perhaps. I have had my ears open, too, along the way, and I have heard talk of flux. They say Emperor Yung-t’ai is dead; long live Emperor Ch’ang-lo! The great dynast Yung-t’ai had a long rule, during which he subdued the Manchu warlords, so the northern part of the land massif has been more or less unified. In the coalescing North, in the so-called “core provinces,” into one of which we have been transported, the repressive measures of Yung-t’ai had prepared the ground for a rank growth of liberal ideas. His successor, Emperor Ch’ang-lo, a scholar and philosopher, has accordingly promulgated a set of principles by which his prefects and magistrates are to conduct civil life; it is called The Nine Flowers of Virtue. Despite this decree, real life has not changed—everywhere are bloodshed and turnover, greed and graft and injustice, disgusting cruelties in the name of progress; but the words of the Imperial edict are powerful, and hope has leaped up in the hearts of the have-nots.

  Ch’ang-lo’s Nine Flowers of Virtue is a triumph of the enlightenment of sweet sun-soaked Buddhism, which perceives the causes of suffering and the means of salvation from suffering. According to this thrilling document, spiritual fervor and gentle reason are henceforth to go hand in hand in every yamen, and as usual with political reform, all must be turned to a practical end. Everybody is to be in a better case. The only question in my young mind (remembering the white banner of guilt waved over Nose) is: What is meant by everybody? Who is everybody this time? Surely slaves are not included. We slaves are convulsed with a hope of betterment but, quickly seeing through the hypocrisy of The Nine Flowers and comprehending that no one is to help us to a salving of our pain, we know that we must help ourselves or give up hope. But how strange! Hope meant to us, long ago, in our lives that we called free, God in His heaven with a white face and a white beard, and along the way, on the onion-carrying junk and on the carts we have ridden since, I have heard that our old religion has swept like a sweet rainfall across the slave population. God is a secret we keep from the yellows; there are no more sects, only the one white God of hope. And now, as I, a girl of sixteen, ride on the cart with Mink to an unknown destination, my heart turns to the fair-skinned God I thought I knew as a friend in Arizona. On the jolting cart bed I try to pray to Him, but I do not ask for much. “Give me, dear God, a mild master.”

  We travel another hour, and the donkey’s hoofs pound on a wooden bridge over a brook, and beyond, as we pass a tavern where slaves lounge in the seats of their masters’ sedan chairs waiting for their owners to come out tipsy and bad-tempered, there is a sudden high-pitched rasping of laughter from the row of chairs; and I understand that Mink and I are a joke to our own kind. We drive on some distance, partly through woods.

  We arrive at our goal, and, “Thank you, God,” I say out loud, addressing Him again in my relief as the squeaking of vexed wooden parts stops.

  Unpainted Wood

  My first impression within the compound wall, that day, was of the plainness of everything. The “big house,” by no means a villa and not grand at all, was a brick structure of three courtyards, with unpainted jambs and eaves; it had a face of hardheaded shrewdness. A canopy of black walnut and of ill-smelling ailanthus trees, old watchman-trees, stood over the spirit screen at the front of the house.

  Taking in the scene before I dropped from the cart, just inside the main gate of the farm, I had a glimpse of a pale figure, hurrying away as if for cover, under the darkest shade of the trees, a common blue gown, blurred face, white hair; this specter moved behind a tree trunk.

  I had a senseless reaction of disappointment and even anger, as if I had been cheated at a bargain, thinking
with something akin to pride of the elegance of the Shens’ house in the Northern Capital, the perfectionism of my mistress there—a glimpse in memory’s eye of my thickened fingers on a polishing rag bringing out the creamy glow of an ivory figure, set in laurel-green lacquer, of a nobleman’s daughter who is fondling a fawn; in the capital it had all been an inlaid story. But here: rude weathered wood, eroded bricks, straggling weeds, signs of peasant indifference and greed.

  The agent led us to a shedlike building, in a side courtyard of the big house, the office of the place, unpainted and untended, too, within which we found a yellow man about fifty years old, in heavy work clothes, sitting with his back to us at a desk clicking an abacus. His neck at the sides below the ears was crinkled like the treated pelt of a woods animal. He turned and, seeing Mink’s bent back, cursed the young agent, in filthy terms, in the broad Honan, or South-of-the-River, dialect.

  The boy, in a crackling and suddenly cheerful voice, said, “The same to your mother.”

  “This crookback is good for nothing,” the man irritably said. I took him to be our new owner. A cloth fastener had torn away from the shoulder of his tunic, the cuff of his quilted sleeve was frayed, and in his person he was bad-tempered, hoarse, and yellow-toothed, and I could not help comparing this wild wolf with Big Venerable Shen, whose glossy queue was ever fastened with a bow.

  “The order said the cheapest pair, man and wench,” the boy said.

  “Cheapest turtles!” the rough man said. “Old Yen would have skinned you alive.”

  “It’s not my fault,” the boy whined. “ ‘Uncle’ Ch’en made the selection. You can send them back.”

  A white man came into the office, large, benign, grave, and pompous, saying that “the Matriarch” had told him to inspect the new girl—a possibility for seamstress; and as the yellow man turned away with a shrug, the self-assured big white man came to me, lifted my chin, examined my hands, and asked me if I had had any experience sewing. I shook my head. “She will not do,” the big white man said to the yellow man’s back.

  “Look at the prime hand they sent me,” the yellow said. He was leaning over, digging into a wooden chest.

  The big white man looked down at Mink and laughed. “You strong, small boy?” I was astonished at this white man’s arrogance, for he behaved like a yellow master.

  Mink, crouching in his fear, grinned and nodded.

  “You can have the girl in the fields,” the big man said to the yellow. “Let the crooked one sweep out.”

  “Hah!” The man’s bark was like a gunshot. He turned toward us with his arms full. He threw the things he was carrying onto his desk, and he counted out to me: two calico shifts, a drab coolie gown, a shapeless suit of quilted cotton, and a pair of thick-cloth shoes; and he ordered me to get out of my last castoffs from Big Madame Shen and to put on the coolie gown. He issued clothes to Mink and ordered him to change, too. The yellow errand boy stared at me, his mouth sagging, as I began to undress in the open room. The rough yellow man said, “Go, go, go, go,” and drove the boy out, and the big white left. As I sat on the floor pulling on the shoes, I heard the cart’s dry hub recommence its outcries. Kr-r-r-e-e-e-e!

  When we were ready the yellow man told Mink and me to follow him, and he led us through the main courtyard of the big house. I was afraid to look about, for fear of seeing that disquieting form lurking under the trees, and I strode awkwardly, with a feeling that the shadow in the shadows was watching me. We went next through a large rear courtyard, around the sides of which were dingy small rooms and stables and sheds and storerooms. In the shade at one side a number of house slaves, somewhat better dressed than we, squatted on their hams in the peasant fashion and laughed cruelly at the sight of the frightened newcomers.

  We went out at a postern gate along an orchard path by a well-kept vegetable garden, and then across a mowing lot, and at last, in a meager grove of locusts, we came to a shabby wall of mud and straw. Passing through a stout gate we entered a dismal courtyard. On two sides of this rude narrow enclosure ran long rows of mud-walled rooms, making the sides of a kind of street, along which, sitting in clusters, promenading on its pig-wallow pavement, chatting, passing an idle market-day afternoon, were a couple of score of slaves in clothes just like ours—the men in cotton shirts with elbow-length sleeves and rough shin-length trousers; the women in coolie gowns; children in tow shirts, their bellies and legs naked; and all without exception barefooted.

  The yellow man turned me over to a heavy-set woman he addressed as Small Auntie.

  This Auntie, wheezing and sighing, took me to her mud cubicle, which was also to be mine—a nest, she said, of unmarrieds. It had a dirt floor and two mud-and-straw k’angs, on which five women, counting myself, would now be sleeping. Auntie told me to take off my shoes and save them for the fields and cold weather. We sat on the high doorstep. She looked at me and nodded and said, with a wholehearted acceptance of me that made me want to throw myself in her arms and weep, “You’re a well-made little thing, child.” I was sixteen; I did not know what to expect. I began to ask questions and I learned:

  This place, Auntie told me, was a tobacco farm, as big as—suddenly a phrase in our old language—“the Kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar.” At that name from the Bible my heart began to pound; the white-skinned God was our secret. The owner’s name, Yen. These people about us were field hands—plowmen, hoehands, wagoners, ox-drivers, cooks for the slaves; cowherd and hogherd; carpenters, masons, millers, smiths, spinners, weavers. Counting the house hands, Yen’s slaves now numbered fifty-three. It was going to be a good year for the Yens, for the following reason: Many opium-smokers mixed their drug with tobacco, and last year there had been an Imperial edict condemning the use of opium, and this had had the perverse effect of greatly increasing the demand for the drug, and so for tobacco, too…. “Ayah, no, child! That was Li, the overseer. The young master is away today at Thousand Ducks Landing, downriver.” The city from which the agent had brought us? Twin Hills. In the grove? The yellow Matriarch, the old master’s widow.

  Auntie said her own “Bible name” among the whites was “the Woman of Timnath.” “Peace gave me my name.”

  “Who is Peace?”

  “Let’s see where Peace is,” the fat woman said, and she leaned forward and looked up and down the street. “He will be along.”

  Soon Auntie said she must “be at Peace’s side,” and she left me with a thin, white-haired woman, who told me her man had died just a month before. A sour smell rode on this old widow’s breath, and her eyes were full of a sticky fluid—some thick issue of grief?

  There was an air of calm along the compound street, which gave me, agitated as I was by the shabbiness of my new home, a feeling of being caught and held. Slow movements. All being dressed alike, the slaves seemed to have one languid identity. I started up when a girl suddenly screamed, but the scream cascaded off into a squeal and a long tinkling laugh. The haze had burned away, and the afternoon light was sharp.

  Then a moving clump of slaves, a kind of procession, slowly came along the compound street. I saw at its heart an astonishing presence, an enormous man, taller than the door lintels of the mud rooms, and as he came closer I jumped up again and held both sides of the door, to keep from falling, for I saw that the man looked something like Nose. It was Nose transformed, grown larger, coarsened; two upper front teeth were missing, and a scar arched over one eye, as if for that eye this man had two eyebrows, one light, one dark, and his hair grew down to his shoulders and was brushed out like thatch at sides and back, braided (a hint of the Drum Tower Boys!) into two locks over the forehead and in tiny queues at several points at the outer fringes of the stiff mass. And his eyes, yes, yes, were bloodshot. He looked twenty-five and brutal. Auntie walked beside him on one hand, and on the other a “mix,” as the yellows called half-yellow, half-white slaves, a beautiful girl of about twenty; several other slaves strolled with this trio i
n a tight company.

  Opposite the widow and me the big man turned aside toward us, and I heard him ask Auntie in a strong but gentle voice that reminded me, for some reason, of Preacher Honing reading the responses, “Is this the new daughter?” She nodded. He took some steps toward me. I must say that I had never seen Nose look at me in such a penetrating way. The man held his eyes on mine, unwavering, not blinking, and he seemed to be pouring some kind of power out at me through them. My heart was beating hard again.

  “What is your name, daughter?”

  I managed to say, “White Lotus.”

  His overwhelming stare moved to the widow, and he said to her—calling her daughter though she was more than twice his age, “Turn your thoughts out onto the ground, daughter.”

  “Yes, Peace,” she said, but she shook her head sadly.

  His terrible eyes turned back to me. “This”—he moved an open hand toward Auntie’s cheek—“is my handmaiden, the Woman of Timnath. And this”—his hand swung toward the mixie—“my other handmaiden, the Harlot of Gaza.” He spoke the “Bible names” in the old language. And he introduced a “brother,” Solemn, whom he called his “maker of what I need,” and another “brother,” Smart, his reader and writer.

  Auntie told him with a laugh that I had mistaken the overseer for the master.

  Peace said the young master was away. He began to tell me about our owner. The father, the old master, Peace said, had died two years before. “He was a man with hard knuckles, he could stand any weather. He wanted to build—stole from the earth. He wanted to get it all in his own hands. Miser! Miser! You see this place—no plaster or paint, all rough. The boy—different: He sees the big places downriver, he wants kowtowing, he speaks of blood and breeding, silk sleeves, but he knows that his farm is unplastered brick and unpainted wood—do you see, daughter? The father came up here as soon as they built the canal across to the Yellow River and opium began to come in, he saw the chance for tobacco; the son sees no chance—he knows he comes from a line of clerks. The grandfather—a clerk in Twin Hills. You’ll see what soft hands and long fingernails the boy has.”