White Lotus

by John Hersey

  “She is one of those three who messed about with Peace.”

  “Yen!” Addressing her son rather sharply by his patronymic, the Matriarch did not turn her head but seemed to be listening for the young man’s whereabouts, as if she thought he might be tiptoeing out of the room behind her back.

  “Yes, T’ai-t’ai.”

  “I believe Duke is getting senile.”

  “If you say so, T’ai-t’ai.”

  The two, and later the overseer as well, talked for some time about the Number One Houseboy. I was too agitated to take in what they meant, but I sensed that both the son and the overseer were helplessly bored, that the yellow mother was one of those plodding, thorough, domineering women who want to do things in an orderly way but cannot help running off into endless digressions.

  I had, very strongly, the feeling I had so often experienced in the Shen dining room, in the Northern Capital, of not being present.

  Above all, I felt that the three yellow people in the room were carrying on their business, whatever it was, with a wholly inappropriate flatness and dryness of feeling: I was rigid with fear; they had been in mortal danger; they were planning, I sensed, to assert with utter finality their mastery over their rebellious slaves—but it was all bored, congenial, distant, punctuated with sighs.

  She was reading again from the ledger in a dull voice, and before long I was overwhelmed by her words—the most minute observations about my movements and behavior: seen talking with Mink a few days after the rails were badly piled; good work as a runner in the tobacco house (someone had seen me!); first night visit to the smithy; other visits, with hours of departure and return; to Twin Hills with Peace; idle, joking, and snickering during a haying; constantly on Peace’s gown-skirt in market-day pastimes—fish feast on six twenty-four, pig roast on seven twenty-eight…. Mostly from Top Man but much of it from some other informer or informers, because several of the entries were about actions which Top Man could not have known—all neatly noted down.

  “Were you intimate with Peace?”

  “What, Venerable Matriarch?” I asked, startled.

  “Did you know his plans?”

  “No, Venerable Matriarch.”

  “You went everywhere with him, didn’t you?”

  “No, Venerable Matriarch,” I said. “Never.”

  She spoke over her shoulder to her son. “They tell lies like little children.”

  “They don’t know what the truth is, T’ai-t’ai.”

  “Well, what do you think, son? Li, what do you say to this one?”

  The overseer waited, seething with dutiful respect. The son put a hand over his eyes and said, “Come, T’ai-t’ai. You had your mind made up about this girl before we started. Can’t we move along? How many more, Top Man?”

  “I’ll go and count them, Big Master.”

  “Stay where you are,” the woman said. “Li?”

  “Sell, Mistress.”

  “I think so. Get the next one, Top Man.”

  Top Man led me to the house slaves’ gate.

  The Pleasure Garden

  It could not be done all at once, for we were a glut on the market. All the masters were selling slaves whom they did not trust. The Yens wanted to sell eleven slaves, field hands—and with all the little notations in their books to go on, they were right about some and wrong about some. There were nine males and two females on the list, and seven of the men had indeed supported Peace beyond others. But Mink was on the list, and Harlot was not. I suppose Mink’s bent back recommended him for sale; and we all guessed that Top Man, the slaveherd, had for some time fancied having a handmaiden himself and that he may have eased the reports on Harlot, who was, besides, of the sort that the yellow people considered intelligent—yellowish skin and “good eyes” of a mix; had been a house slave; was, maybe, the old master’s back-courtyard whelp. The idea of parting from her made me weep every night.

  On an afternoon early in the eleventh month a large wagon, with a high wooden fence set on its bed and braced with metal bands, came for us. The same green boy that had carried Mink and me out from the city, so long before, was driving, and two other men, armed with pistols, were along as guards. Mink and I recognized the boy at once, but he looked right through us. We set out. We could see tops of trees over the fencing as we lurched along and, much later, the roofs of city houses. When the tail gates of the tall box were opened and we jumped down, we saw that we were in an area enclosed by a high brick wall; in the foreground we saw a small pleasure garden—round stone tables, lanterns, fish pools; beyond were two large buildings with ominous iron bars in their gates. We were led to one of these, men and women together. The following morning the commission merchant who owned this big slave jail, “Uncle” Ch’en, came to inspect us, a fat man, all smiles, carrying a canary on his shoulder, one leg of which was attached by a delicate long silver chain to his little finger. He made a wry face when he saw Mink, and he pinched me under the chin. As he left, he said, “Cheer up, small boys and girls, I’ll get you settled comfortably. I’m going to find you each and every one a sweet master.”

  We waited six days. They fed us meal and salt fish. On the afternoon of the sixth day we were led out of the jail building and were filed past a storehouse, and yellow attendants handed us bright clothes to dress ourselves in: I was given a curious blue capelike smock with yellow figures on it, which fastened around my neck on a kind of drawstring; I was not allowed to wear my dirty shift under it. Some of the men had brilliant pantaloons: crimson, orange, purple! We were taken into a yard surrounded by a fence of bamboo palings. It grew dark; lanterns were hung in our enclosure, and the place seemed cheerful. We heard sounds of laughter and applause from the direction of the pleasure garden. A pair of yellow attendants brought a bucket and some tin cups—and we were given drams! Strong drams! Suddenly a white man dressed as a rooster, short, paunchy, with a cockscomb cap on his head and arching feathers attached to his buttocks, whirled out among us, and he began to juggle burning batons, and he spun china plates high on balance sticks, and his fingers like blowing ribbons made a coin appear, disappear, come from his ear, sprout from a slave’s nose. We laughed! We laughed! Someone put a hand on my shoulder: It was the poor-yellow boy with the fuzz on his chin who had driven the cart out and the wagon in, and he beckoned to me. I followed him out of the enclosure. I was charged with two drams’ heat and the wild images of a suddenly enchanted world; I wanted to whoop. We made a turn around a small building and were suddenly in the pleasure garden. Circles of yellow men—not a single woman—sat around bowls and bottles at the many tables; bright lamps shone down from the trees. “Uncle” Ch’en in an elegant braided gown was standing before the assemblage, and with a silver-headed stick he waved me toward a kind of fence stile, a set of wooden steps leading up to, and down from, a platform. He smiled patronizingly at me, and with the residue of confused joy in my throat I smiled back at him. “Ai,” he cried, “gentlemen and alley thieves!” The crowd laughed. “Look at her. Happy child of nature. Strong, supple, cheery, willing, young…” Hooo! A queer sensation. I felt as I climbed the steps as if I were walking downward into icy water. “Come forward if you are interested. Inspect. Satisfy yourselves fully on any purchase you make of ‘Uncle’ Ch’en, my jolly boys.” Have pity, white God! I was for sale. O God, O God, if you have any power, but I know that you do not, give me a bland master. A pair of hands reached round my neck from behind and loosened the drawstring of my smock, and it was pulled open, like a pair of curtains. The faces began to swim before my eyes—grizzled traders, some of them, to be sure, but also many young men, hardly more than boys, out for a night’s adventure. I saw moisture on lips. My head began to cloud; I thought I would collapse. “All right! All right! Seats, gentlemen! That’s all, that’s all. Down you go, my champions!” The hands were at my throat, the curtains were drawn, the string was bowed. Then at my very ear a sudden chanting bega
n in a twangy voice: an auctioneer, standing beside me and a little behind me, crying me off. I heard bids pounded on the stone tables with stone blocks in a code of stone sounds. The auctioneer’s voice rose in tone to an operatic falsetto—a maniac’s singing. “Riding high, riding slow, time is short, life is short. Bid her now, now, now, now. The sun high, the sun hot, ride my donkey home tonight. Now. Low moon, cold moon. Bid her now.” With each “now” there was a rumble of stone on stone before me. Then suddenly it was over. “Next, next, next,” “Uncle” Ch’en was saying. “Move her off of there. Look sharp!” I was given a shove down the steps, and the boy led me back to the jail.

  But who had bought me?

  Beyond the Bridge

  We were carried out of Twin Hills next day in six open wagons, still in our festival clothes. Bystanders stopped and looked at us, and surely they were thinking: How humane! Not many slaves are treated so well as that!

  We rode over the canal bridge and two miles into the country. The caravan stopped. We were unloaded. Men stood in a ring around us with pistols in their hands at half cock. We were ordered out of the pretty clothes, and we were tossed old field-hand outfits in exchange; mine was much too big. Our forty-odd men were chained by the wrists, alternating left and right, into two coffles, Ayah, now we knew that we must have been bought by a slave merchant from the terrible outer provinces. Auntie and three other Yen slaves were in our caravan. Mink was not. The empty wagons turned back, and when a wagon loaded with provisions and six yellow men on muleback came along the road from the city, we began to march. We covered fifteen li that day and every day that followed, for twenty-three days. The riders carried bamboo rods. Nights we spent in slave jails, paddocks, godowns, and pens. I wept in Auntie’s arms.

  BOOK FIVE

  Going to the Mountain

  The Sunken Road

  I WAS BOUGHT in a small-town slave sale by a man who was out at the elbows. He turned away after inspecting me, and I saw the holes in his sleeves and the horny pads of yellow skin over the sharp bones. He was a young farmer, in his late twenties or early thirties, thin as a grasshopper.

  He told the slave merchant that he was ginning at Sun Lao-yeh’s place, he would have to go back out to his farm for the money; he would send a hog in later with the cash for the girl, and to carry her out, he said.

  My owner in rags! But his face was like the surface of a lake; he had bought me at a bargain.

  I waited in the packed dirt courtyard of the inn where the merchant had staged his sale. Yellow men came and went, laughing and cursing; perhaps there was a gambling room inside.

  In the afternoon an elderly slave came to fetch me. He was wearing a woven reed hat which bore a paper notice, written in inelegant characters:

  DO NOT TOUCH THIS HOG

  OR TIGER WILL EAT YOU

  “Where did you get those filthy bags?” he asked me, looking scornfully at my clothes. “Hua T’ai-t’ai will give you a gown of louse bedding.” This was the cheapest cotton cloth.

  He took me on a two-wheeled cart drawn by a donkey whose ribs showed. My escort sonorously announced his name as Chick Fu-ch’in or Daddy Chick. He boasted about his own trustworthiness. “I don’t even have to carry a chit to leave the farm. See this hat?” He tapped the oiled paper on his hat with its warning. “Hua looks out for me.” Hua was our owner, apparently the tiger of the hat notice. Daddy Chick made himself sound astonishingly familiar with our master. Daddy Chick said he himself was a number-one fiddler; he was fifty-four, a pious man, he told me. “I never complain. I bear everything. I am a good servant and I am affectionate to others. Hua gives me money and sends me after rice up at the town. They bring the rice in oxcarts from Tsingtao, the rice carters blow horns all night when they camp along the road to scare away the rats. Look, we have rats the size of wonks in Shantung. Listen! Hua lets me carry his money off any day of the year. I came up here with a cash belt stuffed like a meat dumpling to buy you. What’s your name?” He affected sharp behavior toward me.

  Daddy Chick said that the old mistress took the hogs and sows and piglets right into the house. You would think that Jasmine’s piglets were her own children!

  Hua—he used to be an overseer, Daddy Chick said, quite offhand. Old Sun, a rich cotton-planter, fathered Hua along and set him up as a farmer. “We,” Daddy Chick said, as if he were one of the proprietors, “we have twelve hundred mu of land—not enough. Right now we are picking. Ginning. Baling. Good year this year. Hua is happy as a canary. He hasn’t used the bamboo but once in the year, when Lank stole a swine. Lank hid the meat in Grin’s k’ang.

  “He got you cheap,” Daddy Chick said, tossing a glance at me, like a gob of spit, as if to confirm my worthlessness. “Hua is building on a slow plan, ha-ha! Buys a young sow, and maybe she’ll have a piglet, one this year, one next year, one, one, one, one….” The old slave’s hand chopped out a whole generation of new Hua slaves. “He’s young. He can wait…. Our Moth is pregnant at the present time.”

  The country road was like a great continuous ditch; myriad wheels had compressed its bed far below the level of the fields. Once when we were mired Daddy Chick said, “We say around here, ‘A daughter-in-law sours at last into a mother-in-law; a road in a thousand years becomes a river.’ ”

  This depressed track was crowded with carts and barrows, and we were forced to stop often. Carters contended in an endless warfare of fake haste; Daddy Chick was insolent to whites and like silk with passing yellows. We pulled out of the ruts at a precarious angle to let a cart pass that was stacked as high as a house with little split-bamboo cages of singing birds. Slaves, their heads shaved shiny, jogged along with heavy loads—of melons, night soil, raw hemp, sesame oil—on shoulder poles, trailing strong smells behind them.

  All around us were cotton fields in full fruit, blowing in the dry wind, glorious green seas with a billion whitecaps, flecks of froth, foam, spindrift.

  We came to a cornerstone with a lion carved on its head, and Daddy Chick jumped down from the cart, climbed out of the road’s gully, and with his hub-oil brush daubed the lion’s face, which was already black with carters’ oil. This was to propitiate the guardian of the road, in order to ward off accidents. “Ai,” my escort said, remounting, “I lost an axle near here last month.”

  Soon: “Here we are.”

  In the flooded pits beside the road, from which earth had been taken for the building of the new master’s houses, there was now a little congress of his ducks, geese, pigs, children, and slaves’ children swimming and playing with an uproar of splashes, giggles, wing flaps, oinks, honks, quacks, and shrieks; a holiday bedlam that jarred on my grief, bewilderment, and weak hope.

  Daddy Chick shook his head like a patron at the sight. With a finger cracked and slashed for many years by the brittle dry calyxes of cotton bolls, he pointed at the yellow and white children playing together like brothers and sisters, and he named them for me: “Hua children: Barley Flower, Cart Tongue, Stone, and Little Four. Grin and Jasmine’s children: Perfection, Bargain, Tale, and Tender.” All were naked, save Perfection, a big girl on whose gently swelling promises a cotton-sack shift glistened, white on white, more immodest than skin.

  A Poor House

  This man Hua was barely scraping along—gourd pots and pails in the house. For a broom, to sweep the uneven dirt floor, someone had taken sage twigs and bound them to a buckthorn stick.

  Hua owned, nevertheless, ten souls: Daddy Chick, Grin and Jasmine and their four children, a man named Lank and a girl named Moth, and, now, me.

  The main house, made of mud from the pits where I had seen such jubilation, was on the north end of a walled courtyard, and it was a dirty box-shaped hutch of only three “spaces,” end to end, a space being so much as could be covered by timbers of a certain length, perhaps twelve feet.

  The entrance door was double-leafed, just two worn wide boards hung on pins. Inside the door, in t
he middle space, was the mud cookstove with its thin metal boiler in the shape of a shallow bowl. Slices of eggplant were sizzling in it, and the house was full of garlicky smoke. Above the range, fat, sooty, and seeming to laugh at man’s endless strivings to fill his belly and ease his loins, was Tsao Wang, the kitchen god, on a cheap print tucked in the mud niche.

  At the left was the Hua’s sleeping area, a huge k’ang spanning the far end, stacked with rolled-up quilts, wooden boxes, baskets of all shapes; upon it, I supposed, the entire family slept.

  The third “space” was a work place, with a spinning wheel, a loom, farm implements, jars of grain, carpentering tools, and a bats’ cave of miserable hoardings hanging from spikes in the rafters: sieves, scythes, old shoes, an abacus, a teeming wealth of poverty.

  Why, this master’s house was no better than the slaves’ quarters at Yen’s!

  Six mangy wonks panted and snapped at flies in the shade of the wall in the courtyard.

  Eating All Together

  Hua’s wife, who was at least fifteen years older than he, took me into the sleeping space and drew out of one of the baskets on the big k’ang a gown of gray louse bedding for me. She said I could use what I was wearing for work in the fields.

  My mistress had a deep vertical crease between her eyes; the axe of worry had nicked her unmercifully there.

  “Are your bowels clean?” she asked me.

  She jogged on her bound feet as if on stubby stilts.