White Lotus

by John Hersey

  There was moss on one side of a beech-tree trunk, and Peace took our direction from it—northward toward the river, rather than eastward as I had expected. We ran across some unfamiliar tobacco fields—“Should be Wang’s,” Peace said—risking the open ground because it was still half light and we thought no one would be awake anywhere yet.

  In woods beyond the fields, we came across two slaves sleeping on the ground, who were wakened by our footsteps.

  One of them jumped up and said, “Where are you going, Peace? Where should we go?” No more “General.”

  Peace said he would go northward for a day or two and then loop around toward East-of-the-Mountains. “Can we go with you?”

  It would be better, Peace said, not to make up into a party.

  We moved along, and when we crossed a swollen drainage ditch I realized why we were not going straight toward the city: there would be no way yet of getting over the flooding brook, and Peace, indeed, soon said he aimed to find a small sampan such as would usually be tied up in fair numbers against the pilings of most of the tobacco growers’ landings along the river. That, in due course, we did, and for an hour we poled ourselves and floated down the swollen river, and then, as it grew full light under dry clouds that were now scudding seaward, we abandoned the sampan on the far bank of the river and went into the forests there.

  Peace, still carrying the lance, was quiet, soft-voiced, noncommittal. Now and then there came into his eyes a flicker, just a flicker, of a dreamy speculative look; he blinked it quickly out, but I thought I would die of pain in my heart at the sight of those momentary, shuttered abstractions. I felt, as we went through the unbroken forests, checking the river from time to time on our right hand, that I, and we, and all of our kind, could never have any hope at all, never. Auntie was somehow cheerful, perhaps for Peace’s sake, but I could not lift my spirits.

  We saw the city once; we had to swing far around some farms, and a settlement on our side of the river.

  The sun came out. The day grew bland. Could there have been such a typhoon?

  Well beyond the city, in a stretch of the river called Tiger’s Fan Narrows, we saw ahead, once as we came out onto the bank, a seagoing junk, a lumbering Ningpo trader, its three great spars slightly canted, so it was evident that the ship had grounded itself on a bar. It was only about fifty feet from our shore, and we worked along the bank toward it. The towering blue transom with red facings was ill reflected in the muddy waters of the river; her brown and yellow sails and their bamboo battens were furled and lashed upright along the masts. Peace dropped his pike in the river. As we drew abreast of her, the junk appeared idle, asleep, though we could hear some sort of bleating aboard. We saw a white crewman fishing with a handline in the shallow water over the near rail.

  “You will never catch a fish there,” Peace called out to the man.

  “Might catch a river pig.”

  “Run onto a bank?”

  “Yes. Blew like the end of the world last night.”

  “Waiting for a tide?”

  “Yes.”

  “When is it due?”

  “When it comes.” The sailor shrugged.

  “Where are you running?”

  “Home. Ningpo.”

  “Can you take a man?”

  “And three women?”

  “Just the man. These women are taking the day off.”

  “You are a sight!” Yes, our clothes were muddy. “All right, son. He is sick.” The sailor pointed with his thumb over his shoulder at the cabin on the high stern, and obviously meant the captain. “We have nine billy goats on here, might as well have you. You hold on there.”

  The man came off in a skiff that was tied alongside and carried Peace out to the junk.

  Peace said nothing in parting, save, as the water widened between us, “You tell Solemn, now.”

  We turned upriver, and I could not bear to look back. Around a bend we took off our clothes and washed the mud out of them in the river, and they dried on us as we went on. This being a market day, we were bold. A white riverman carried us across the river to Twin Hills. “That was a typhoon last night,” he said, as he sculled us over. “Had to haul this cockleshell a half a li up the field so it wouldn’t wash away. Had to do it alone. Our other slave, Sinner, he skipped out, don’t know where he’s gone.”

  The city was quiet. We walked out the Brook Road, and a slave ferried us across the still-swollen stream near Lü’s tavern. We cut around through the fields to the quarter, and neither Li nor Top Man saw us arrive. The men were all in their rooms, sleeping.

  Yellowing Leaves

  Now it was the ninth month, and it all began again—informings, slapdash trials, beheadings, the feeling of nausea every day. The young master came back from West-of-the-Mountains Province on the double, and we saw more of him in a fortnight than we had seen in nearly a year, saw that he was afraid, and that his overseer was angry and frustrated because the work was disrupted, for the crop was beginning to yellow, and it was time to cut the stalks off close to the ground and let the plants wilt and then take them in and hang them on the laths in the tobacco house; but Top Man, the slaveherd, was exceedingly busy at the yamen in Twin Hills, telling the provincial magistrates that he had heard this, and that, and Overseer Li had to go and testify, and provincial guardsmen infested our place. How Top Man swaggered in the quarter! He was a person of importance to them, and he had the same fear that they did, that he would be murdered in bed, so he swaggered to hide his terror. The first prisoners, about twenty of them, including Solemn, and, we heard, Ch’eng’s Candy, Fan the mix, and Wang’s Judge, but not Smart, were locked up in the new prison. A unit of the provincial guard was posted near Lü’s tavern, not far from us on the Brook Road, and it was said that War Lord Sun had asked the Emperor for reinforcements from North-of-the-River. Peace and Ditcher were missing.

  On the twelfth day of the ninth month, on a knoll at the edge of the city, five white men were beheaded.

  Tree proposed to run away, and he began measuring himself for a description to go on a pass he wanted Smart to forge for him.

  Fan, the mix, was tried in the Chengchow yamen, and he was discharged for want of evidence, because he was a free mixie, and the provincial justices, keenly protective of the natural rights of men under The Nine Flowers, had decided that men who were slaves could not give testimony against a freeman, even though he might be partly white. Hearsay was fit enough for slaves, however, and five more were beheaded on the fifteenth, with the entire force of the yellow provincial guard commanded to watch.

  A Firm Stance

  Some days we worked in a more or less orderly way, and one afternoon toward the end of the ninth month, as we were cutting the plants in gangs, Harlot sang a hymn, slow and sad, and to my amazement she improvised a pair of lines that were an unmistakable summons to a secret meeting in the smithy after dark—though she no longer used the phrase “Camp of Dan,” but sang “sword into plowshare.”

  As soon as I could I whispered a question to her about the call, and she said she knew nothing, only that Smart had told her to issue it.

  Rumors ran around the rest of the afternoon—that Peace was coming back to see us for an hour, that he had been killed by a slave for the reward, that we were going to start the whole thing up again without him. I shook my head at the report of his return; I shook my head at any hope at all….

  Nightfall. Had Auntie, Harlot, and I any right to go to the meeting? Woman of Timnath, whore of Gaza, Delilah of Sorek—that fevered imagination! There was no more of all that now. Auntie crept to a whispered conference with Smart; and Smart, sorrowing for his “brother” Solemn who had been beheaded, whispered with tears in his eyes, yes, yes, yes, he wanted us to attend….

  The familiar lamp hung from the smoke-blackened joist. Our group was much smaller than it had used to be, and I was more conscious of the faces
that were missing than of those that were there. On Smart’s bench, where Smart had so long ago traced in cinders for me the first two-lined character, “man,” a stranger sat, whose face was vaguely familiar, and as we three women entered he nodded to us in a jocular way, as if he knew us, a loose-jointed, slow-moving man, and when I saw him shrug his shoulders while answering a question of Smart’s, I knew who he was: the crewman on the Ningpo trader who had rowed ashore for Peace. He was called Bow Steersman; perhaps that was his job on the vessel. When he began his story I sensed that he was carefree, airy, far from our mood—perhaps because he had never been enlisted in the war, perhaps merely because he was a homeless, anchorless crewman.

  “I saw him throw that stick with a knife lashed onto it in the river water; he thought I did not but I did. Captain Ts’ui, he was down in his bunk with an earth fever. Queer man, that one. Moody—no, not moody. You just cannot tell. You look in his face, and he has a grin on it, but his eyes are mourning, or sometimes it is the other way—sour mouth and those eyes lighted up like the Scholars’ Garden in Twin Hills there. He doesn’t pay attention to what’s moving around outside his head—or in it, either one. Has little crinkles all around his eyes—from laughing? I doubt it. Used to be an overseer, won’t talk about it. Before we got off the bar there, Dogface, one of our men, he’d been asleep in the crew’s mat shed forward, he waked up and came on deck, and he says, ‘Ai! Aren’t you Peace?’ But he says, ‘My name is Steady.’ When the tide came in, Captain Ts’ui got up, groaning and aching, and he set us some sail, and we moved off the sandbar. Two days later we all got wind about the reward, when we stopped at Lu P’an’s landing, and Salt and Dogface—Salt is the longest one to have been a slave to the captain there, and Salt claims Captain Ts’ui set him free, but he didn’t give Salt any papers, it was during a time the captain was a Lamaist that he said Salt could go free, but then he gave up being a Lamaist—he’s a man like that, never rests on one spot—and Salt was scared he’d changed his mind, because the captain never said another word about it, sometimes gave Salt some money, other times shouted and cursed at him like a turtle. Anyway Salt and Dogface told him they suspected the big man that came aboard on the bar, that he was the one the reward was for, but Captain Ts’ui says, ‘He came aboard as a free man, I can’t touch him.’ Salt says, ‘Where are his papers?’ Captain Ts’ui says, ‘He left them.’ Captain Ts’ui had been an overseer, he knows you don’t have a white man running around without a chit or some kind of proof. All right, we were eleven days on our down passage, and Captain Ts’ui said nothing. We could have put in at Thousand Ducks Landing, or at Round House Landing, we could have hailed twenty vessels that were up-passaging. One did hail us, Captain Yang boarded us, wanted to know whether it was safe to go up, with the slave revolt and all, but Captain Ts’ui said not a word about this man Peace or Steady that he had aboard there, two teeth missing, long hair, cut on the brow—exactly the man. Sometimes you would swear that Captain Ts’ui was walking around in a dream. We coasted down there to Ningpo and tied up on fenders alongside a big twenty-five-man junk, and Captain Ts’ui still said nothing to secure this man Peace, wrote his forms for the customs and said nothing in them at all about this runaway, sends Dogface ashore for some short-ration provender at the market and no orders to Dogface about trying to secure the man. All right. Dogface sniffs the reward. He goes to a yellow man, Chiang, whom he knows, Chiang goes straight to the constables, and at two o’clock, here they come, Constables Tung and Hsü—I know those bastards, just try to get slavey drunk and they’re on your neck like a pair of dirty ospreys—so they came on board and took him, and they asked Captain Ts’ui how it was he had not reported the man Peace all along the voyage, and he says, ‘Look, teachers, look at my writing tablet and brushes here, I was just this second writing to Captain Tu, at the Emperor’s admiralty, to ask what to do with the man.’ Well, those two dirty bastard ospreys came back later and bound Captain Ts’ui over, to appear at the yamen and answer to the Emperor for doing nothing all that time.”

  “How did Peace seem when last you saw him?” Smart asked.

  “I never saw a man so stiff before the constables, especially those two turtles. I tell you, he smacked all over of stubbornness, he stood there stubborn. They tried to get him to confess it down on paper, and he said, ‘I will speak to no one but Warlord Sun, in the yamen at Twin Hills, or else the Emperor himself.’ He wouldn’t, either; he pressed his lips tight. Those two hungry bastard ospreys were not used to pride in a white man, they shook him up hard, and he just looked as if he pitied them. I don’t know what good it did, though, they just ran him off in chains.”

  The Spirit of the Accused

  On eleventh month, seventh day, Peace was beheaded. We heard that his fortitude and dignity and inflexibility held up to the very end—that he had refused to make a confession that would implicate anyone else, that he had said to them at his trial, “I know you set your minds on killing me long before you laid a hand on me—so why this look-like-a-trial, which isn’t a trial at all?” And that he had gone to the platform silent, calm, but hard to recognize as the terrible Peace, for his one request in jail had been granted: that his long hair be all cut off and his head be altogether shaved.

  Three days later Ditcher gave himself up to the Twin Hills yamen, saying he wanted the reward of three hundred strings of cash, of a half catty each, that had been offered for his capture, to be given to a free white friend of his, Dirty Chi, who had persuaded him to surrender. The authorities decided that, being white, Chi was entitled to but fifty strings. Ditcher was beheaded.

  On information from Top Man, the slaveherd, the guards arrested Smart, and he was tried and beheaded.

  Brass and True, for their loyalty in discovering the plot to their master, were purchased by the Emperor’s treasury and set free.

  Altogether thirty-five slaves were beheaded; four, who had been arrested, escaped and ran away; one killed himself in prison. So we heard. The reinforcements of the Emperor’s guard were returned to North-of-the-River. The cost to the Emperor of the entire disturbance, the treasury announced, was four ingots of gold and five thousand eight hundred twenty-nine catties of copper cash, so at least our war had cost them something.

  One day toward the end of the tenth month, a woman came back to our quarter from a day in the city—young Master Yen would issue no more passes to men—with a sheet of rice paper tucked under her gown that had been passed, hand to hand, from old Ku the Usher in the yamen down through the town, and that was, they said, an exact copy of official minutes, destined for the Emperor’s eyes, of a speech First Minister Hsien was said to have made in the beautiful yamen in whose hallways the light slaps of my own bare feet had echoed one afternoon many hopes ago. I, who had learned to read from dead Smart, went from room to room along the street, reading the paper in whispers: “The accused,” the First Minister had said, “have shown a spirit which, if it becomes general, must swamp the five provinces in blood. They had a sense of their rights, a contempt for danger, and a thirst for revenge which portend the most unhappy consequences.” When I had finished the rounds, I was able to throw myself on my k’ang and sob out my heart, in mourning, at last, for our stiff, obdurate, compassionate seer and general, who had died with the locks of his strength and decency shorn. The paper had spoken of a spirit among the whites that was still dangerous. All my fire, it seemed just then, had been put out with Peace’s life.

  A Conference

  The Yens waited to make their move until the dust had settled—and the crop had been largely laid away.

  One day in mid-tenth the field hands were led in a body to the rear courtyard of the big house, the house slaves’ quarter, and we were formed into a line. One by one our people were admitted to the back door of the main courtyard, and later we saw those who had been taken inside walking singly across the far side of the quarter, returning by way of the gate from the side courtyard, whence they had apparently be
en let out under orders to return to the field hands’ quarter without speaking to those still waiting in line. By and large the women were discharged from the house very soon after having been admitted; men were kept longer. Auntie, however, who was ahead of me in the line, was kept an age, and when she finally left I saw her almost running toward the refuge of our mud huts, in great agitation.

  My turn came. Top Man, the slaveherd, appeared at the gate and beckoned to me. I was so nervous I stumbled and fell over the high gate sill; a crackling laugh ran down the waiting line. Inside, an impression of darkness, heaviness. Top Man walked ahead.

  He led me into the side courtyard and to a room that seemed to be a tailor shop—where slave clothes were made, no doubt. Bolts of cheap cloth lay in a heap along the inner wall. Across the room at the far end ran a trestle table, on which numerous books and papers were spread, and behind this—my heart tripped—the yellow Matriarch was seated. The young master was standing to one side, beyond her; he leaned against the wall picking his teeth with a quill, and he seemed to me even younger and more delicate than I had thought him that day in the tobacco house. Overseer Li was seated at one end of the worktable. Top Man stood beside me.

  “Name?” the Matriarch asked.

  “Small White Lotus, Big Mistress,” Top Man said.

  “Yes,” the woman curtly said, and she leafed through a large ledger. “Ayah, yes, White Lotus. Let us see.” She was far smaller and slighter than I had thought her, and her voice was mild and soft, and I kept thinking, Could her gods be more powerful than Jehovah? Peace had said over and over that he was going to kill her. “Purchased eleven eleven,” she said, running her forefinger down the notations in the big book, “from ‘Uncle’ Ch’en, seventy-two catties of cash. Eleven twenty-six: Reprimanded by Duke for chasing around big house after laundering.” The eyes, dark as the night mists on the ice pond, turned up to me. “Ai, yes, I remember you, I wanted you in the house the day you came, but Duke said you would cause trouble among the domestics, among the men. Has she, Small Top Man, down at the field quarter?”