White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Uncut stones are worthless;

  Illiterates ignore the proprieties.

  Men come and go. For a moment Auntie is beside the bench, her hand on my head. I stand and hastily whisper, “Is this a meeting, Auntie?”

  “No, no, child,” she says, laughing at me. “They’re teaching tonight.”

  Some time later an enormous man comes in—he is three inches taller and even more massive than Peace, and he is loud and jovial; the others urge him again and again to tone down his voice. I hear someone call him Ditcher. His hair is long, like Peace’s, but the effect is different. Peace’s head seems majestic, prophetic; Ditcher’s hair falls low on his forehead, almost to his eyes, and he looks like a playful bear, a buffoon. He slaps men on the back and constantly laughs.

  Peace is showing him something, and others press close. Then Peace raises the object high in the air in one hand, as if to strike or chop with it, and it is close under the lamp, and I see that it is a slab of bone with teeth set in it—the jawbone of a horse or a mule.

  Smart traces new figures and makes new sounds.

  It seems to me that Peace is speaking, now, for Ditcher’s benefit, and with a great show of authority, of the occult uses and powers of snakes, lizards, frogs, scorpions, snails, worms, and rats. Ditcher’s eyes roll—he is impressed.

  Smart’s foot wipes out a tracing in the cinders. I remember every shape he has made, and its sounds. I have waited so long for this chance that my mind is like a pure glass bottle. I take in every detail: a mattock head, whose tongue has been broken on a rock, hanging on a nail on a beam near the lantern, waiting for its turn to be mended.

  I am amazed at Peace’s memory. He cannot read the yellow characters—Smart is his reader—but it appears that every word that Smart has read aloud to him has lodged itself in his head. He is a mimic; he is transformed. Just now he stands with arms folded, his face modulates from pity to wrath as he gives back, like an ancient cliff throwing back echoes, the very tones of Smart’s careful reading from a clandestine scroll: “…‘There were several white brothers, blood brothers, who were sold in different lots, and it was deeply moving to hear their cries at parting. Ayah, you nominal Buddhists! Might not a white wretch ask you, “Did you learn this from your Buddha, who says to you, ‘Harm no living creature’?”’ ”

  “ ‘Harm no living creature,’ ” Smart repeats, nodding. The sound of Smart’s voice from Smart’s own lips is startling when it has seemed to be coming from Peace’s.

  Peace goes on with the narrative. Ditcher’s eyes are absurd—like those of a boy watching honey being poured.

  Thrilled as I am, I nevertheless feel disquieted by a quality I sense in Peace—a stiffness; he is like one of the straight iron blanks for mule shoes I see lying nearby. Is there any heat that could bend him?

  When Peace is finished Smart tells me in a quiet voice about the recklessness of the tobacco farmers along the canal. They are ruining the soil, he says. The good soil is a mere crust over clay, and it is exhausted in three years, and new fields have to be cleared from the forest, as I have seen; and besides, there is too much tobacco, they can’t seem to sell it all, it gluts Twin Hills warehouses. And he begins to tell me—but it is getting late, I am rattled, I cannot absorb any more—about the Peach Mountain slaves’ uprising.

  “I don’t know what you mean!” I protest.

  “That is enough for one night, child,” Smart says, patting my hand. “Don’t you worry,” he adds with great gentleness. “You are going to be a fine reader.”

  Now I openly cry.

  Peace leads the way home. The Woman of Timnath and the Harlot of Gaza walk arm in arm with him, and I hear a thin, delicate humming from Harlot.

  We are accosted by Top Man, the slaveherd, at the rear gate of the field hands’ quarter. I hear him hissing to Peace, “I told you before, Peace. You have to be here for the counts. I cannot stay up all night for you to take your girls to the woods. I told you. One of these days Overseer Li is going to hear about you.” Peace is standing straight and stiff, and Top Man’s voice begins to trail off into a pleading whine. “I can’t help it. They are going to take my skin if they find out the count is wrong. They are going to skin me alive.”

  Peace walks past him through the gate without a word. Someone makes a spitting sound.

  Peace

  So my life was turned inside out. I felt that I had a purpose, but I did not know exactly what it was. My growing curiosity about the secret work being transacted by night matched my growing sense of the pain of life by day. Auntie swabbed with herbal tea the bamboo welts on Mink’s bent back—earned at the game of rails. Harlot’s songs at work, even when we skipped through our motions with apparently weightless hearts, had a haunting sadness to them, of recollection: Egypt! Auntie brought Egypt to South-of-the-River Province by telling me that the Pharaoh of the songs lived so long ago that none of the great trees had been here, only a waste of sand, and some mean little bushes, one of which burned beside a path when God sat in it, and rushes on the bank of the canal. Sometimes at a teaching Smart opened his black-winged book to let me examine a character I had learned. The translated Bible, yellow ethics, dark superstitions—all spun together in my head. Once in a while I saw Peace under the hood of light from the lamp in the blacksmith shop, surrounded by whispering men, holding up in a grip of anger the animal jawbone: What was his threat?

  Peace was indeed at the heart of the puzzle, and Peace was in my thoughts when I lay on my straw mat unable to sleep.

  He was nothing like Nose. How had I seen Nose in him that first day in the slave quarter? My memories, my grief, my desire. …Perhaps it had been a flash of prevision, an instantaneous grasping that this man would have, as Nose had had, an incalculable importance to me. These days I was obsessed with him. I yearned to be near him all the time, yet what I felt was less love than awe. He was far too austere to figure in daydreams of touching, embracing. I think I felt that my only hope for some vague rescue lay with him, but at the same time I felt a latent danger to me, to all of us, in his unbending iron straightness.

  One day in the third month we were building fences, along the line where we had thrown the stacks of rails askant. The sky was overcast, the air was clammy. There were white patches on the ground, for a sleety snow had fallen the day before, but the ground was unfrozen and muddy. Top Man was pushing us hard—kept saying that the spring rampage would be on us soon. Peace was digging a ditch for the high palings. I was one of those who carried the stakes to the fence line, after Solemn and Tree, working with adzes, sharpened the upper ends.

  Mink was in our gang that morning, and he, too, had been assigned as a carrier. Mink was already well liked by many of the men, for he was a daring gambler, and he had the hand of a master craftsman at pitchpenny; the coin would soar from his fingers, without a spin to steady it such as other men used, and it would hit the ground flat and slide no more than its own diameter and stop within a hairbreadth of the wall. He was sharp-tongued, and since he had been bambooed he had carried on a satirical cringing and sniveling before the slaveherd that made us all laugh behind our hands. During a wait for a rail, Mink picked up one of the wood chips that had fallen from Solemn’s adze and pretended that it was a stale piece of man t’ou, and, stooped and doubled with the effort, he gnawed at the pretended bread with one side of his jaw and then the other, sighing and moaning grotesquely at the deliciousness of the morsel. All of us who were nearby broke into laughter.

  Top Man, seeing the horseplay, walked up behind Mink and struck him a token slapping blow with an open hand on the round of the head, not so much to hurt as to surprise.

  Mink whirled. A malevolent look on his face gave way at once to an obsequious pleading expression.

  Top Man stood over the twisted figure, on the point of letting out a roar of frustration and censure, when, from behind, Peace, towering over Top Man precisely as the sla
veherd dwarfed Mink, slapped the slaveherd’s after-crown with the same force, the same dusting contempt as Top Man had applied to the bent jester.

  Now Top Man spun around. “Peace,” he said. He suddenly began breathing hard, as if from the running of his thoughts. “You are about due.”

  Peace said, looking at Top Man with a piercing Judas eye, “Would you want to be a crookback, Top Man? You don’t have to be born crookbacked. You could get that way—sometime, late, dark night, a lizard could climb down your wall, jump on your bed. Think about it, Top Man. Would you like to shrivel up?”

  Top Man’s lower jaw was trembling. I myself was shaking. I believed in Peace’s mysterious admonition. I did not like Peace’s manner; his warning had been too merciless, his magic too sickening. Yet I felt relieved. Peace had put a hand on Mink’s shoulder, and the hand had run down the bowed spine between the still-cringing Mink’s shoulder blades.

  From down the line Li had seen a cluster gathering where we were, and he strode toward us. Peace said, “Overseer coming. Best way to keep your back straight—keep your tongue straight, Top Man.” He picked up his shovel and turned to his digging.

  When the overseer asked the slaveherd a few moments later what we had been doing, we saw, with a satisfaction that was also heartsore, that Peace was surely Mink’s avenger, not only for today’s slap but also for the wales on his back, for Top Man said, “We were just seeing if there are enough rails along this stretch, Overseer Li. There are. It’s all right.”

  Another day I saw a more compassionate side of this frightening man. We had begun to prepare the tobacco seedbeds—plots of deep forest mold on which the brush from the new clearings had been heaped and burned for a dressing of wood ashes. We were set one day to forking the seedbeds with special care, turning in the ashes and kicking up the leaf mold so it was as mellow as our master’s steamed bread. Our gang was working by tasks; stakes had been driven in the ground to mark each hand’s section, full tasks for the men, two thirds for women.

  I was digging hard—when suddenly the widow who lived in my hut, the sour, sarcastic, defeated hag whom I had come to treat with a young girl’s contempt for a gloomy old chawbacon, threw up her arms, fell to her knees, and began to scream the name of her man, who had now been under the ground five months. It was a frightful sound. Her shrieks semed to express, to the limit of desperation, the question I had daily asked myself: For what am I working?

  Run away! I must run away! I looked at the edge of the forest beyond the seedbeds, and for a few moments the impulse to fly almost took control of my limbs.

  I saw others looking at the woods, turning their heads jerkily this way and that, and I realized that the widow’s terrifying breakdown had laid bare for all of us the utter hopelessness of our slavish life.

  Then Peace was kneeling beside the howling, frail figure, and I heard his prophet’s voice boom out, “Let us pray, daughter.”

  Behind the widow’s back Peace was beckoning to Smart, and Smart ran across the soft seedbed and stood before the pair. I could not hear what Smart said. Peace put a vast arm across the old woman’s cricket shoulders, and the two began to rock back and forth. The widow was catching at her breath, like an infant after bawling. A couple of minutes of this, and the old woman was calm, and, roaring, Peace summoned all the men of the gang, and with forks flying they completed the old woman’s whole task for the day as she stood by shaking her head.

  A few days later T’ang’s Prick the Ditcher was hired on, as contracted at New Year’s, and one afternoon we were hauling stones for his lining of a drainage ditch and a culvert. This slave must have weighed as much as a large donkey, and his strength and endurance were as gross as his joviality and optimism. It was extraordinary how he took the great rocks handed down to him by pairs of men in the supply chain—we women were handling smaller stones for chinks and gaps—and with one thrust drove them into the mud of the ditch so their flat faces were flush; and how he stood hour after hour up to his knees in the chilly water of a third-month day. His game was woman-chasing. His prowess was famous in three provinces, and it was said that his master was thinking of taking him off ditch work and hiring him out as a slave breeder; Auntie had told me with a straight face that fourteen babies had been born at one of the down-canal plantations nine months after he had stayed there on a two-day ditching: he had stopped at the farm, she had said, holding up her hands as if scandalized, only one night. The great satyr did not care about age or looks, it was said, anything female would do. This made for a day of squealing on the part of our entire force of women. Even the old widow got out a snigger when Ditcher chucked her chin. Once in a while Ditcher would leap from the water and run up the bank after a woman who had brought him down a little stone; she would scramble shrieking uphill, her foot slipping now and then in her hope of being caught. Ditcher would clamp his huge, wet, muddy hands on the woman’s buttocks, give them a good shake, and slide back into the ditch roaring with laughter.

  Once Ditcher made a sally after Harlot, and I could not help looking at Peace’s face to see how Peace took this byplay with the girl he called his handmaiden. Peace seemed unperturbed—seemed, indeed, not to have noticed that anything unusual had happened. Peace heaved at the cracked rocks, passing them down to the giant in the ditch.

  Later, during a pause, I glanced at Peace and saw that he was staring at the mud at his feet with a blazing, inturned fervency. I thought he was about to see another of his visions. Then—perhaps roused myself by the rutting high spirits of Ditcher—I had a moment of thinking Peace had gulled us all, for I doubted whether he had seen those awful visions: Had he staged them? My doubt was feeble, however, and it fled in panic as Peace happened to raise his eyes—they might meet my own!

  Drams were given in midafternoon to Ditcher and a half dozen men, Peace among them, who had been working down the bank of the muddy run. When Peace was served he turned and reached his mug out to Ditcher. Ditcher looked suspicious. “Here,” Peace said, “you could use it.”

  Ditcher did not like this. “Who’s chilled? What are you trying to do?”

  “Take it, brother,” Peace said. He spoke softly but looked angry.

  Ditcher glanced around at the other men’s faces, to see if he could read their feelings. He wanted the dram, one could tell, but he did not want it at the cost of a humiliation. “Are you trying to put the phoenix eye on me?”

  Peace held the cup steady at arm’s length.

  At last Ditcher could stand the temptation no longer, and he seized the cup and put its contents down his throat in one gulp. Then he belched grandly.

  Peace, with a look less of triumph than relief in his eyes, said, “ ‘Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.’ ”

  As if with one voice Auntie and Harlot said, in the old language, “Amen.”

  At the women’s tones Ditcher snapped his head this way and that in distress, but no one now was paying any attention to him. Harlot had started a hymn, and all joined in the choral praise of a loving God we could not really picture. Several women were suddenly in tears, for somehow, in a gesture of kindness—undertaken from who knew what motives—and with his deep-voiced words from Smart’s sooty book, Peace had suddenly reached down into our deepest recesses and pulled out the yearning, the deep sense of having been cheated, the helpless anger of all of us who seemed to be the accursed children, not of that white-faced God who never showed mercy, but of a puny yellow man named Yen.

  Rememberer

  A warm day—spring had arrived. The scene: a spring cleaning of the quarter. I was listless, distracted by sensuous thoughts, lazy in the sunlight, and dissatisfied. The catkins were out on the walnut trees; a weeping willow over the pond behind the tobacco house was a cascade of yellowy green. The tobacco beds had been seeded, the millet fields had been planted. A market day in the fourth month. All things topsy-turvy. We had turned every chattel,
rag, and pot outside the mud wall of the compound, and in the groves and plots clothes and quilts and straw screens were spread out to the sun; the men had built at the compound gate a vast rick of rushes from the swamps near the canal, and we wove fresh matting for our mud beds.

  I had cleaned the rude chicken house outside the wall where we unmarrieds raised fowl and eggs, and I had spread the chicken manure on our garden plot. Now I was to sweep our room, walls and floor, and sprinkle lime about, but I was obliged to wait, because an infant, who had been left in Bliss’s care while his mother stripped her room, was asleep inside on some sacking in one corner, and I dared not sweep for fear—according to one of our superstitions that we had perhaps picked up from the yellows—of knocking the broom against his soul, which we supposed was out of his body while he slept, and perhaps sweeping it right away into the aimless breezes outdoors.

  The men lounged in the street of the quarter, harassing the busy women with remarks that suited the voluptuous day.

  Mink was sitting beside me on the door sill, chatting with me. “You can’t just stand there and see a dead lion. One that isn’t there. Hundreds of foxes running around! You can’t just see things if they aren’t there.”

  “Some can,” I said. “Some people can.”

  “Is that really true?” Mink said. His shrewd face was pulled into a skeptical knot; one eye seemed to be higher on his face than the other. “How do you know that?”

  “I saw it in Smart’s book.”

  “Can you read that thing?”

  “Beginning to.” Yes, this was my happiness. Smart said I excelled. The beautiful characters moved like processions of memories in my mind, as vivid as sagebrush, clay pots, Gay Moya on the screen, and my father’s walk. Yet in this setting and in this language, the book did not seem to be Preacher Honing’s mild Bible, this was a book of burning hopes, of wild promises.