White Lotus

by John Hersey

  “Turn the eggplant,” she said, and my work as a slave began.

  Before long Hua and his little force came in from work. They were covered with lint from the ginning, and the man called Lank could not stop sneezing.

  The master seemed to me cheerful, sturdy, and phlegmatic. “Where is my sun hat? I’ll need it tomorrow.” His wife told him, and he got it down from the rafters with a hooked pole.

  Daddy Chick, Grin, and Lank all had shaved heads, and I soon learned that men slaves in Shantung, or East-of-the-Mountains, were called, besides pigs, hares, because the words for “bald” and “hare” were homophones. Women slaves, if good breeders, were, I learned, sometimes called rabbits. Perhaps the girl Moth, who was in the early stages of pregnancy, and was apparently unmarried, would be such a one.

  The children rushed in, excited, reverberating still with their squeals of the muddy-watered pit, and famished. One warning from the mistress silenced them all. The naked ones, yellow and white alike, were tossed plain shirts that came to their navels.

  We ate all at the same time, the Huas with their children sitting cross-legged on their big k’ang, we slaves in the workroom, squatting on our hams. Jasmine kept slapping her smaller ones, Tale and Tender, who were still brimming with giggles, into silence.

  In the bustling about in the smoky house, and during the meal, when comments on the day’s work were shouted back and forth between spaces, Daddy Chick maintained an uninterrupted flow of affirmation of the yellow man’s thoughts and wishes, “Yes, Master! Hai! Imagine! Number-one certain. Yes, yes. Ayah, I believe it. No doubt. Ai, ai! Ha-ha-ha, yes, that’s good.”

  He who on the cart had spoken curtly of Hua-this and Hua-that now seemed quite lacking in any sense of self at all. The master treated him like a shuttlecock to bounce on his heels, and the old man flew into the air at each kick gaily and even eagerly.

  The eggplant slices that I had carefully tended were reserved for the master alone.

  I had an impression of Hua’s wife’s strong will. Her voice cut like a cleaver, but I must say she was polite to us all.

  “Old Sun’s muskmelons are bad this year,” the master, maliciously happy, shouted from the distance with his mouth full. “Like round stones.”

  “Hayah!” shouted Daddy Chick back again. “They are! Ha-ha-ha. That’s good, Master! That’s wonderful! Like nothing but stones. Did you hear that, Lank?”

  Lank, chewing slowly and moistly like a camel, nodded.

  My New Home

  After supper we slaves retire to our quarter. If Hua’s house seemed poor, ours is dangerous. Upon worm-eaten king and queen posts there hangs over the single room a grid of rotten timbers and rotten purlins holding an enormous weight of sodden earth spread over a matting of kaoliang stalks. When will it crush us? Here there are two k’angs, one for Grin’s family, the other for the rest of us. No windows. A moldy smell. A blackened interior which points to a stove whose chimney is built of timber in the body with a funnel of mud stacks.

  A cloth hangs down to set aside privacy for Grin’s family.

  At the very first glance I see a sign of dissension: a shelf with two gourd water buckets and two gourd dippers.

  And yes, shortly Moth and Jasmine quarrel, at first over the hanging of a washed gown and then over Tender’s urinating on the floor on the wrong side of the cloth drop.

  Daddy Chick says, “Be quiet, or I’ll get Hua to sell you both.”

  This warning does not bring anything like peace.

  Peace! That word—that name! In the coffle on the way to this place we have heard strange reports. The Empire, following its ancient cycle of unification and disintegration, has begun to divide into two great parts: the core provinces around the Northern Capital, loyal to the gentle dynasty; and the periphery, the lands of the coast and south of the rivers, restive under the central rule with its feminine principles yet at the same time groaning under numerous warlords, each of whom, it is said, whirls on his bed at night in mad dreams of usurpation and coronation. In the Northern Capital, Emperor Ch’ang-lo’s early liberalism has been followed by a sudden series of swings from meticulous tyranny to riotous benevolence. We slaves now yearn for the Northern Capital, where, we hear, slaves have been set free! In the most recent flicker of enlightenment, slavery itself has been sentenced to death by a few strokes of a soft brush tracing Ch’ang-lo’s command on the red paper of happiness. And following upon this decree, the white-skinned slaves in the core provinces have been bought from their owners out of the revenue coffers, and they are said to be making their way, though with great difficulty, as a caste of unskilled laborers, servants, and farm hands, beasts of burden but free beasts. Out on the periphery, where I am, we are no less slaves than ever. God with a white face has proved to be of no practical aid to us; prayers to Him fell to the hard ground. I have gathered that the whites in this area are now inclining to yellow idols, yellow kowtowing, yellow incense braziers, yellow rituals, yellow dreams—to yellowness itself, a moiety of which we can, by being raped, achieve. Our life here is the pursuit of a false syllogism: The yellows are free; we will imitate the yellows and liken ourselves to them; we will be free. Ha! And I? I am eighteen. Exhausted after the long march in the coffle, huddling in this rude slave shack, I am eager to conform to the yellowing tendency among all the slaves, yet I am also anxious to take my life more into my own hands, if I can.

  It is not quite dark. I manage, by the most careful maneuvering, to lie down on the k’ang, where we are going to be rather crowded, between Moth and the place against the back wall reserved for Daddy Chick. Moth has tried to get me to sleep next to Lank, but I suspect that her pregnancy has to do with that proximity, and I appeal to Daddy Chick.

  “Sleep next to me, little cat,” he says, with a creasing, something like a smile, around his lips in the half light that makes me wonder if I have chosen wisely.

  Before the cheap lithograph of Tsao Wang, the kitchen god, plastered above our stove, Daddy Chick kowtows on the dirt floor, and in a singsong like that of a paid supplicator he prays for grace and fortitude to help him and all of us to overcome our trials, and for self-denial, humility, patience, obedience, and, good Tsao Wang, the capacity to forgive.

  Lank gives one last sneeze and begins at once to snore. In the doorway Daddy Chick plays, mostly off key, a sad song on his snakeskin-faced Tartar fiddle. When he stops I can hear Grin and Jasmine making the two-backed animal on their earthen bed beyond the cloth drop.

  Moth

  We picked in pairs, and Moth, my partner, working along the opposite side of the row from me, taught me what to do. The plants, which lightly interlaced their outer branches across the middles, were nearly as tall as we, and I could see Moth’s expression—the face of one who was puzzled by life, yet cheerful; rather stupid, yet wily, too. She had a thin high-pitched voice and a lively interest in accidents, bloodshed, danger.

  “Have you ever seen a ‘boar’?”

  “What is that?”

  “Do you not know about the ‘boars’?”

  “No.”

  And she explained in an excited voice, holding down its sound so Hua, who was teamed with Perfection three rows away, could not hear her, and poking her face forward among the beautiful splashes of white lint, that “boars” were runaway slaves who lived in groups, like packs of wonks, in the hills and forests. Running away, Moth said, was called “going to the mountain.”

  “Why mountain?”

  “T’ai Mountain.”

  I had heard, even in South-of-the-River, of T’ai Mountain, the sacred mountain of the eastern provinces, to which pilgrims from all over the Empire made their way in the second month of each year, and where, if he reached it, a runaway slave could not be touched by a yellow hand and could purchase the papers of a freedman and go under safe conduct to the core provinces.

  Suddenly, with a sinking spell, a softening of my kn
ees, I saw a picture from the immeasurably distant past—of a Sunday-evening playtime dash across an Arizona courtyard from a hiding place behind a wheel in the pottery shed to “safe home,” a diamond space marked with a stick in the dust, and squealing (had the sight of Perfection in her glistening sheath at the mudhole stirred up such a memory?), “Free in! Free in! Free in!”

  A sack for the lint I picked from the plants hung by a strap from my neck, its mouth at my breast, its foot bouncing against my feet. I was terrified. My hands were clumsy. Master had assigned me a task, for this first day, of seventy catties—the “standard” for a woman being a picul, or a hundred catties. Moth had whispered with glittering eyes that Hua would beat me with a bamboo rod if I did not complete my task.

  “Daddy Chick said Hua had only used the bamboo once this year,” I whispered through the branches.

  For answer Moth, after glancing on tiptoe over the rows to make sure that Hua was not looking, quickly lifted off the loop of her lint bag and, turning her back to me, suddenly peeled up her louse-bedding gown over her bare back, where I could plainly see many long welts of scar tissue. Swiftly she lowered her dress again and put on her bag, and her fingers flew to the bolls.

  Whom was I to believe? How long ago had this happened to Moth? How could I tell how much I had picked?

  Hua worked hard! He had struck a gong to waken us in the morning, and he had done chores and had burned paper money and set off firecrackers for Shen Nung, the god of farming, and Ch’ung Wang, god of insects, and T’u Ti, the local constable god, and had been getting out the picking bags and baskets before we even reached the house. Now he and Perfection had finished a row; Moth and I were barely a third done with ours.

  I asked, “What is he like?”

  “Hua?”

  I nodded. (I already thought nothing of our calling this man, who could do anything he wanted with us, plain Hua.)

  “One good thing: He never drinks.”

  “Good. Never?”

  “Never even sips it. He works hard. You see how he works.”

  “How can Perfection go so fast?”

  “She keeps both hands flying, the little whore. Hua can last us all out. Endurance! I’ll tell you something else. He’s grateful. If you try hard, he is thankful, very courteous.” Then a kind of pout formed at her mouth, and she said, “But he lies, and he can be very cold, very cruel.” There was a teasing look in Moth’s eyes that confused me. She leaned toward me, parting the branches with her graceful hands. “Masters in East-of-the-Mountains are famous for their cruelty. They cut off noses, use the branding iron, chop off the legs at the knees.” Her voice became so confidential as to seem warmly friendly. “I knew a hog, named Fairhead, his master cut his chestnuts out.” She stood on tiptoe and looked toward Hua, then leaned forward again, and hissed, “This Fairhead could still do it.” Moth giggled, and I lost sight of her as she ducked to pick the lower branches.

  Some of the bolls had been blasted by worms; the top crop was touched with dry rot. How long the row already seemed, and the day had scarce begun! At the ends of the rows were the huge split-bamboo baskets, one for each picker, into which we would have to empty our bags many, many times; my sack was not yet full once. The tips of my fingers were getting raw; my neck and upper arms ached.

  “Wait,” Moth said with a sudden note of tenderness toward me in her voice, “it’s not bad. You and I will have a good time over at Old Sun’s place some night. Lank’s not the only one. There are plenty of nice fat hogs over there. You wait, sweet child. We’ll get them to stand up.” She made an upthrusting sign of a man’s lust with her middle finger, the back of her pretty hand toward me. (But what of the swelling in your belly, Moth?)

  “How big a place is that?”

  Moth opened her arms in a great arc of immensity and joy. “A hundred slaves,” she said, but I could not tell whether she was merely using the round number in the yellows’ manner, to express a plenty, such as, “enough for you and me.” “Old Sun is rich,” she said. “Look!”

  On tiptoes yet again, she pointed off across the fields, and, craning myself, I saw a tall structure, and at its peak two great wooden arms reaching down and out in a vast possessive embrace, as if to grasp at the whole countryside, even at us. These were the turning arms of Old Sun’s cotton press. Moth said the old miser allowed Hua, who could not yet afford a gin and press, to store and process his crop on the big place; the old turtle, posing as Hua’s benefactor, extorted one bale in ten for this “kindness.” We would carry our pickings over to the Sun place at the end of the day and put them in Hua’s lint stall. Then, said Moth, I’d see some of those fat hogs over there. “Ayah!” sighed Moth, as though the service of those delightful pigs at Sun’s were a heavy, heavy burden.

  When the sun stood high, Hua’s wife, with Barley Flower, Cart Tongue, Stone, Little Four, Bargain, Tale, and Tender milling around behind her like puppies, brought food and water out to the field on a slide pulled by the skin-and-bones donkey Daddy Chick had used the day before to cart me out from the district town.

  I noticed this: Hua’s wife treated Jasmine as something like a beloved friend, but toward Moth she was stiff, reserved, and even hostile. If I was to get on the good side of the mistress, I could see that I must not be intimate with Moth—at least, in Hua’s wife’s presence.

  When we went back to picking, I brazenly asked Moth whom she would claim as the father of her baby.

  The only answer I got was tinkling laughter. I could not see Moth’s face; she was low on a plant.

  Shortly afterward she said fiercely, “Be careful! You are breaking some of the branch ends. Old turtle Hua will beat you dead.”

  But she meant no harm. Soon she was joking and giggling again. She was like an autumn day, when a brisk wind blows little rainless clouds rapidly across the face of the sun; the bright intervals are warm but somehow melancholy, for the summer is surely over.

  Each boll had four or five compartments. I had for a few moments after the meal seen Perfection’s deft fingers pluck out the entire contents of a boll at a time with a single snatch of either hummingbird hand, and she kept the lint, as she pulled it out, quite free of the trash of the dried calyxes. I had frequently to pick several times at a boll to empty it, and Moth told me that it took ninety to a hundred good bolls to make a catty. I was often on the edge of tears. What kind of life was this?

  “Tell me more about the boars,” I said.

  “Ai, they’re filthy, like badgers. Sometimes they hide around Limestone Hill Generous Temple, I’ve seen some of them there. They want salt and kaoliang. Some hogs steal fowl or cuts of pork from their masters and slip it to them at the temple. Why, they live in caves, ten, twelve, twenty together.”

  “Are they ever caught?”

  “Ai, those turtles are hard on slave-hunters. You see, they all have knives, and some even have guns they’ve stolen. You know what they do?” Again Moth was leaning forward, her confidential mouth a blossom among the leaves. “They stab the slave-hunters’ wonks and”—her voice fell to a harshly aspirated whisper—“they skin them and eat them. That’s what Lank says.”

  “Do you believe Lank?”

  “Ainh, he’s harmless.”

  “Is he the father of your baby?”

  The face withdrew from the bower of cotton leaves; no giggle this time; no temper, either.

  “Two months ago the boars raided a farm five li from here, Big Cheng’s place—and they stole three sows.” Moth waited. “I mean slave women, sweet child.”

  “Would you like to live like that?”

  “Ayah, don’t even think about it. This is a cleaner life, child.”

  “Moth.”

  “What?”

  “Is Hua the father?”

  This time the silvery laughter ended in an explosive obscenity.

  “You ask questions like a virgin, small bab
y.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Who is?”

  “Why did you call Perfection a whore?”

  “Oh, no, dearest! Don’t take Moth seriously.”

  Storing the Lint

  In the evening we jogged with the baskets of lint on shoulder poles, teaming in pairs to carry pairs of baskets, through fields of cotton, kaoliang, millet, melons and squashes, sweet potatoes, hemp, and sesame, to the big place. I was terrified, because my basket held so much less than anyone else’s.

  What prosperity we came upon! Everything built of bricks. The outer wall of the workshop yard brightly decorated with patterns of brick and painted plaster. Glints of china and glass at the crown of the wall, to keep out robbers for sure. The wonks fat and glossy-coated. Carts with well-greased hubs. Slaves in uniform tunics and pants.

  The storage godown was next to the gin house—a brick structure on stilts, where, underneath, a pair of blindfolded mules went round and round, turning the cogged iron pinion of the gin, while men slaves, above, fed in the raw lint, and others, at the foot of the chutes, bagged the clean cotton, and the seeds, and the trash. I was ashamed of my foul slave-trader’s clothing. We went in the godown. The master weighed the baskets. My yield was less than fifty catties; my heart pounded.

  Hua turned to me, with a mild and even gentle expression, and asked, “Have you picked cotton before, child?”

  “Never.” I could barely hear my own voice.

  “You must do better.”

  So much for my beating! I glanced at Moth, and I was unable to suppress a titter at her mischievous expression. At this Hua gave me a deep look, of interest rather than reproach, which chilled me to the spine.

  Hua, Lank, and Grin emptied their baskets into the bins reserved for my master’s crop, and we left for home. I felt elated at having been let off so easily, and at the light weight of the empty baskets. We trotted. Crossing the courtyard I looked up once more at the gin, and there, on the highest platform, feeding raw lint into the chutes, wearing a clean uniform of the Sun force, stood a man who seemed to me to be Peace.