White Lotus

by John Hersey

  This time Peace’s eyes darted here and there, his hands, raised again in protest, moved in sudden defensive thrusts, and the deep, shaking voice began again to speak out what he saw.

  Foxes. So many! A hundred, two hundred, three hundred. In all the field and the cart lot on the near side of the tobacco house, running around. CATCH THEM! CATCH THEM!

  Peace began to rush here and there in astonishingly agile dashes, and he would reach out with his hands and clutch and grasp, now lifting one of the invisible creatures by the brush, now seeming to have a weight in both hands. He put them all in one area—some kind of enclosure in his mind. Once in a while it seemed that a ghostly fox must have snarled and snapped at Peace, for he snatched back his fingers and grimaced.

  Again I felt the rising wind of emotion in all the slaves. Women who had just been giggling over their drams were weeping; a look of alarm was on every face.

  Peace’s charges to catch the foxes of his mind’s eyes were all near Top Man, and the coop into which he put them also held the slaveherd, who stood stiff and terrified.

  Pine knot! Give me a burning pine knot!

  Peace’s shouts were hoarse and exultant. He ran to the bonfire and took up one end of a branch that was protruding from the coals and ran with it to his imaginary enclosure. He dipped the flaming torch again and again.

  Go! Go on, fox! Go, you! The tobacco house! Ha! Hayah! The millet! The threshing shed! The walnut trees! Go on, fox! Go! Go!

  This time we did not sing or pray. Top Man’s terror tipped over into rage, and he came running toward us with arms flailing, shouting to us to get back to work.

  The dram in my vitals had burnt itself out, and I felt cold in every part of my body.

  A Prizing

  In the second month of the new year the weather grew mild again, to my relief, and on a rainy day, when the air was moist and the tobacco plants of the previous autumn’s crop hanging in the drying house were pliable, the overseer ordered a session of striking, sorting, and prizing.

  Along the center line of the tobacco house stood three great hogsheads, each with a man standing in it. Peace was in the hogshead into which the dark leaves were being prized, and as I and others ran with “hands” of this grade to his huge tun, Auntie and Harlot passed them in turn to Peace, who laid the bundles in courses within the hogshead, and then stamped them down with his bare feet. These three were joined in a kind of dance: Peace’s acceptance of the tobacco from Auntie and Harlot was beautiful, his bending, rising, and rapid trampling, as his shoulders weaved, his arms flew and plunged, while his handmaidens, as he called them, pounded with heels and palms on the staves of the tun as they swung and turned.

  In this work I forgot the stark, wrathful figure of the Peace of visions. Here he was playful, flirtatious, and graceful in his power. He rallied his gang to work faster than the others, and more than once he winked at me as I ran up with a bundle of “hands.” His glances seemed to run all through me in a burning way, like drams. Nothing more had been said of the teaching Auntie and Harlot had whispered about, but I felt that Peace was aware of me, and that I was on the lip of some new phase of my life. I could only wait. I dared not speak to him.

  I felt the next best mood to happiness—altogether lost in the headlong work.

  “Handmaidens!” the spindly slave Tree, a sorter, commented once when I was nearby. “Look at Harlot’s eyes. I call them bed-maidens. What?”

  The other sorters laughed.

  “What?” Tree said again, wanting to prolong the effect of his joke.

  There was a sudden hush in the house; I could hear the rain on the roof. I looked around to see what could have caused the lull, and there at the bright-leaf hogshead I saw for the first time—my knees felt weak—my master, in a rain-wet yellow oilskin cape, Yen the son.

  He was not much more than a boy!

  It seemed he was showing a visitor around his holding. I saw in my first glance the whole of what I had heard: the tale of the father, just dead, a strong plain man; the yellow Matriarch, tenacious, domineering; the son’s ambitions; the drive of a family of clerks at the provincial yamen, tavern-keepers, petty commissioners for the collection of the Emperor’s rents, who wanted to be gentry. Jug, the young master’s body servant, had whispered to Harlot, and she to me, of the young master’s attempts to hobnob with the aristocrats of the estates along Favorable Wind Brook, the Hus, the Mas, the T’angs, the Shihs, in their rounds of quail fights, gambling on sending trained birds after seeds thrown in the air, foot-shuttlecock, and lifting of beams weighted at the ends with heavy stones—pastimes of yellow idleness. But young Yen had been snubbed. I could see that he was unsure of himself. Alongside his perfectly garnished companion he appeared somehow not quite right, in his too new scarlet pantaloons bound in white puttee tapes, his tunic with exaggeratedly long sleeves, and his peasant’s oilskin cape. When the young yellow landlords went fishing, hunting, or trapping, Jug had said, young Yen did his part with great skill, for his rugged father had taught him from the age of eight all the lore of rabbits, wild quail, opossum, doves, snipe, geese, deer, bear, and fish of the brooks—but his very proficiency in these chases set him apart from the landlords of real quality, who were great parlor hunters, trainers of hawks, hard drinkers, but not, as was young Yen, truly at home in the wilds: Jug had seen all this himself in the forests. Yes, our young master had been snubbed, and he was pathetic trying to please this visitor.

  The atmosphere in the tobacco house had suddenly changed. Work started up at an even more feverish pace than before. Harlot sang a hymn with a mad, incongruous speed. On one of the ladders Solemn, who was striking down stalks from the bamboo laths, began to wave each pair of stalks as he descended to the leaf-strippers and to fling his bare feet in semicircles as he scaled the rungs again. The sorters cut capers as they tossed the hands of leaves to the runners. Peace whirled in the great barrel, and heels and palms drummed on all three hogsheads.

  I was caught up in the growing excitement. Would the young master notice me? I heard, repeatedly, loud high cackles of laughter that reminded me of the guffaws, so long ago, of Shaw the linguist on the East Garden and of Gull at the slave auction, at the question: Will they eat us? We ran for fresh burdens as if hard work only lightened our limbs.

  Yet underneath my frantic gaiety, trying to keep up with the others’, lay a chasm of bitterness. Yen the son wanted to show us off to his friend—as his docile, tractable, happy slaves. And we were doing as he wished. We wanted in spite of ourselves to please him. My shoulders weaved as I ran, I was more graceful than ever before, my arms and legs were liquid strength, and I wondered if the young master saw me. Horrible!

  Then Top Man was thumping on Peace’s hogshead with a heavy staff, and he held up a hand as a signal to us to stop our work. We stood panting: bursts of laughter kept spilling out, till Top Man thumped more, and we fell silent—rain and heavy breathing.

  It appeared that Yen wanted to explain our work to his guest—a youth from Twin Hills, the provincial capital, a city dandy who had never seen a prizing before—and our owner had been unable to make himself heard over our exhibition.

  The two young yellow men—how slender and delicate the Yen boy was!—walked along the center of the house, and they paused at Peace’s tun.

  “How is this for a specimen?” Yen said to his friend, tipping his head toward Peace as if the slave were a splendid oak.

  I was standing near enough to hear our young owner’s voice, which was reedy, low, and—betraying his eagerness to please—deferential. Was this the unseen power that had frightened me so many weeks?

  “What is your name, small boy?” the fragile young owner asked huge Peace.

  Peace seemed to hang back; he stood with his hands on the rim of the tun.

  “He is Peace, Big Master,” Top Man hastily said. “You remember Peace.”

  “Ayah, of course,” Ye
n said. It seemed to me that he had known Peace’s name all along, and that his offhandedness was a show for his friend. “The strongest man in the province. Yes or no, Small Peace?” A thin yellow hand patted Peace’s upper arm.

  Peace’s face broke into an agreeable smile, split by the black gap of his missing teeth.

  “Tell me, small son,” the master said, “tell this gentleman here what you do when you have filled the hogshead.”

  The smile on Peace’s face gave way to an absent look. His chin sagged, and now the blank of the lost teeth reinforced the vacuity of his expression.

  Top Man began an answer for Peace: “We hoist another hogshead on this one…”

  “No, Small Top Man, I would like to hear what Small Peace has to say.”

  “Yes, Big Master,” Top Man said, and stepped back a pace.

  Yen stood waiting for Peace to speak.

  Peace appeared to be undergoing torture: forgetfulness and embarrassment. It was clear enough to us slaves that his sudden stupidity was a pretense. At last, with a great effort, he grunted out the words “The way the slaveherd said” in a wretched accent, and he poked a flat hand through the air at Top Man.

  “He may be—I believe he is—the strongest man in the South-of-the-River Province,” young Yen said to his friend, “but he is not the wittiest, would you say?” The master’s friend laughed, and Yen said, “Ai, Liang, you Twin Hills men with your Peach Mountain ideas!”

  Every nerve in my body was strained to receive impressions, and at the words “Peach Mountain”—the name of an island off the mid-coast where slaveowners, taking The Nine Flowers of Virtue at face value, had treated their slaves with unprecedented liberality, only to be rewarded by a bloody uprising led by a white fanatic who called himself The Saint—I noticed that Peace shifted his stance in the hogshead; Auntie’s head turned and her eyes met Solemn’s: no more than that.

  “Can’t you see,” our young yellow master was going on to say, “that these creatures are just children? Look at this big beggar! He will never grow up—likes to jump around and clap his hands. Hai! It’s a marvelous naive gaiety, isn’t it? Delightful! But it vanishes unless you take care of them, Liang. You know?” He had formed a fist at the phrase “take care of them.”

  Top Man said, “Prick the Ditcher, Big Master T’ang’s ditchman, he’s another strong one here in South-of-the-River.” We knew that this slave, whom we called simply Ditcher, had been hired by our master to come and repair his drainage ditches in the third month.

  “I’ve heard of him, Small Top Man,” the master said.

  “Quite a nest,” Yen’s city friend said of Peace’s hair.

  “Fill the second barrel,” Peace suddenly blurted out, as if the procedure he knew so well had just come to him, “mash it all down in the under barrel.”

  “I see, Small Peace,” the master indulgently said.

  “Tackles and levers,” Peace said in something like cleft-palate grunts, and he pointed at the pressing equipment lying at one side of the floor.

  Then Top Man said, as if to cut Peace off, “Big Master, I told you about those rails. I have found out the one who started it. He is right here, Big Master.” The slaveherd had a hand on Mink’s shoulder.

  The master slowly examined Mink. “Where did that accident come from?”

  “He is one of the new ones,” Top man said. “Uncle Ch’en, the slave dealer, shipped him out to us.”

  “Give him—”

  But before the name of the punishment could come out of the lemon lips Peace’s hands had begun to thump on the edge of his hogshead, Harlot’s thin trill of a hymn promptly began, and the work was whirling around us again.

  The master and his friend left us soon.

  At once the work slacked off to a much slower tempo, and Harlot began a new hymn, in the old language of the whites:

  “When I fall upon my knees

  Within the Camp of Dan…”

  The cadence was slow, but now the excitement in the room was greater than it had been as our feet had flown in the yellow man’s presence, and I shared fully in it, for I understood that this song was a call to a secret meeting in the woods in the night.

  Lines in Cinders

  Three weeks more passed, and I had begun to be resentful of Auntie and Harlot, for making promises that were not kept, when, one evening, as I turned away from the dying cook-fire in silence to drop onto my bed, Harlot came to me and whispered, “Tonight, baby!”

  I knew, of course, what she meant. I lay down on my k’ang and covered myself, without, however, undressing, and I waited, staring at the flickering reflections of the fire on the crude ribs of the roof.

  Anticipation danced with just such shimmering lights in my mind. How impatient I was to go!

  At last Auntie came to my bed and touched my arm, and we three left the hut.

  I could just make out the two forms walking ahead of me, and underfoot I could feel the cold, sandy hardness of a cart track. I had no idea where we were going. I was aware that woods loomed on either side of us. I shivered at the thought of spirits of the ill-buried dead that might be out walking their weary paths, but I was reassured by the soft, steady steps of my escorts.

  I heard a click. A crack of light. We were entering a mud-walled building; a lamp was hung high on a joist.

  “Welcome, handmaidens,” Peace’s deep voice said, and then, as my eyes adjusted to the dim light in the room, I saw him: enormous, his hair wildly fanned.

  He saw me, too, and coming forward he said, “Welcome, daughter, to the Camp of Dan. Smart, Smart, the new daughter is here.”

  It was a blacksmith shop. I saw under the lantern an anvil glistening aloof and solemn, like an altar, and beside it a fire pit, and a leather-chested bellows like a huge bullfrog, and gradually, as I stood waiting for Smart, who was huddled in conversation with Solemn and a slave I did not know, I made out a heap of iron hoops for hogsheads; new spades and hoes, their raw handles like shocked sheaves of maize; mule shoes hanging on pegs, and smaller donkey shoes; a shining plow point—in a soot-blackened room, an atmosphere of dimness and grime, cinder-darkened, reminding me of thunderstorms and spiders’ traps. I was still shivering.

  I made out three or four of our field slaves, and two or three strangers, all men; they were murmuring in pairs and trios.

  Then it began. Smart, gentle and soft-voiced, tall as Peace but thin and fragile-looking, took me to a bench. My fears drained away, and I was so excited that everything seemed to whirl around me: dim light, hints, snatches, undertones, men coming and going, great Peace’s deep oracular voice, and the quiet, steady urgency of Smart’s words….

  My heart is beating so hard, my eyes are turning here and there so fast, that everything seems confused. At one point Smart reaches down behind the bench and lifts a book for me to see—black covers—soot, soot—Smart’s book! I see Peace under the lantern; a man leaves the shop. Smart is speaking to me in a low voice. Peace comes to our bench.

  “Beginning at the beginning? ‘…without form, and void; and darkness upon the face of the deep…’?”

  “No,” Smart says, “I was telling her about the slave poet of Ningpo. Wang’s White Peony. To show this child what she could do.”

  Peace spreads his big arms and starts to recite. “ ‘Some view’ ”—his voice is sonorous—“ ‘our pallid race with scornful eye…’ ” He turns away.

  Smart takes a rod of iron from a heap of scraps and traces in the cinders on the floor two lines:

  “Man,” he said. “That’s where we begin. Man.”

  I understand, and I repeat the word “Man,” and I make the two lines of the forked animal and tears come into my eyes.

  Chao-er’s tavern: the wild relief of seeing white slaves let themselves go—but here, in this somber room, the delight is of a wholly different order, and runs far deeper. Perhap
s those two lines are all I can bear to take in. They seem so fateful; two simple lines for “man.” A kind of picture, torso and legs. Will I be able to remember everything?

  Smart has all too gloomily impressed me with the appalling task I am undertaking. I must learn a different character for each word. I cannot call myself even rudely literate until I have mastered three thousand characters. There are, he tells me, forty thousand characters in the Great Dictionary of K’ang Hsi. What a wild thicket I am stumbling into!

  We will start, Smart says, with the Trimetrical Classic, which every yellow schoolboy learns to shout at the top of his lungs by heart. He draws the characters of the first pair of tripodies:

  Man at birth is good;

  Men seem alike but differ.

  He makes the sounds, and the shapes he traces in the black soot burn into my mind as if they were lines of live embers.

  Tracings in ashes. Smoke-darkened beams. This room stirs a strange uneasiness in me. “…our pallid race.” Am I a slave for no other reason than that I am white?

  I hear Peace’s voice rising as he talks to men near the anvil: “Remember this.” He speaks slowly, as if pressing words one by one into ears, about a recent provincial edict entitled “Pulling Weeds,” having to do with the disciplining of slaves. His voice canters now. “Ayah! They shouted this order down three months ago. Magistrate Chiang, Magistrate Ma, the South-of-the-River liberals, most of all. But here’s Magistrate Kuo Lin-tu in jail: they use the order when they want it, these yellow liberals. Smart, Smart, read this to our friends.”

  Peace comes to the bench waving a document. Smart stands and reads the yellow characters aloud. It is a copy of a letter written from the Twin Hills jail by Magistrate Kuo, and it raises a question which gives me a queer feeling in my stomach: Is the institution of slavery consistent with The Nine Flowers?

  Later Smart sketches more wisdom in the cinders, and gives me the names of the characters he draws. Can I fasten my attention to them?