White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Thus in one sentence he took cognizance of the strict laws against teaching slaves, of the basic gentleness of my mistress’s nature, of Hua’s rigidity, of the illiteracy of both master and mistress, of his own mendicant caution, of his passionate desire for a revenge on society, and of a sow’s best chance for safety in cheating the yellows.

  And so we worked up yet another “plan.”

  Hua’s Wife

  It took us three weeks to win Hua’s wife. We proceeded against her by what the old uncle called the “patient rice” method. “He has the longest meal who eats one grain at a time.” Act by rice-grain act, I gained her trust. Obeisance by minute obeisance, the old uncle reinforced her pity of him.

  Hua’s wife was a sturdy woman who, had she not lived in a slave economy, might have been a kind soul. Like her husband, she worked long hours, striving to rise above both self-pity and an ugly marginal life. I learned that her being more than a decade older than Hua was not remarkable; generally in Shantung wives were older than husbands. (Perhaps the Great Plague had taken more men than women from the province.) This difference in age put a strain on her vanity and on her husband’s temptations—I had seen that look of interest in his eyes. Hua’s wife was outwardly subservient, compliant, obedient, yet she steered him as surely as if he were a plow. She smoked a brass-bowled pipe. Her feet had been well bound (i.e., ferociously)—and she bore her ambulant pain and their great “beauty” with an excess of pride. This, from the beginning, was her triumph over me—my enormous feet like dirty river sampans. Stray wisps of her stringy hair, which was supposed to be fastened in a bun behind, fell across her face, and a thousand times a day she shoved the tickling strands aside with the back of her hand.

  I was careful. Moth was my friend in the fields, but I shunned her in the house. I flattered Jasmine, Hua’s wife’s favorite, who was fond of herself. I put a strict end to the exultant swinging of my hips before men, before Hua himself, that thoughts of Old Sun’s Dolphin had induced.

  At last I found out something surprising: that Hua’s wife, too, wanted her revenge on life. When the old uncle asked permission to teach me some characters, on the grounds of giving him one last reason for being alive and giving me the capacity to keep Hua’s planting and harvesting records (he having heard from the pigs, he told her, that I had already some rudimentary reading and writing), she responded by joining the conspiracy—we would trick her husband; he should not know of the lessons until the girl was ready to be useful. I wondered, all of a sudden, how much she despised him.

  So we began a regime of carefully scheduled meetings. Every trip Hua took to the district town was an occasion for a visit from the old uncle and for my being assigned to some “miserable work” on the loom or the wheel, while the other slaves were in the fields, for Hua’s wife thought it best to keep my lessons from the other pigs, for fear they might be envious of me (and perhaps betray her to her deceived husband).

  For me, the thrills of a minor subversion!—to say nothing of the pure joy of preparing myself for a larger one. Among the yellows, learning meant power. I would never have power, but only by means of this wealth could I diminish, at least, my utter weakness.

  And my sips of the wonderful texts: The Four-Hundred-Names Classic! The Thousand-Character Classic, in which not a single word was repeated! The Analects, Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Happy Mean!

  The old uncle possessed the books, he brought them strapped to his thin chest under his gown. His method at first was to tease me with a glimpse at each masterpiece, then he started me on the more solid work of memorization. It was astonishing how much he himself could remember, and although I was convinced that most human beings cheated their way through an unfair world, I could not explicitly tell whether Old Uncle had used “plans” to get through his examinations.

  He was in a way a fine teacher—he was enthusiastic. The promises he made for my future! The Classic of Filial Piety! Songs! The Book of Changes! Springs and Autumns!

  But I was too excited and almost spoiled it all. With Hua’s wife’s knowledge I practiced writing in secret, whenever there was a chance, and one day I left my inkblock lying on the dirt floor beside the loom. Hua found it. Deeply stung perhaps because of his own illiteracy, he rooted around among us like an enraged wounded wolf; he asked each slave many questions. I denied everything, but I felt that my uncontrollable trembling gave me somewhat away.

  “If I ever catch you with a book, you filthy sow, or with an ink block and a brush, I’ll give you five hundred strokes of the heavier bamboo. I’ll cut you in two with it. I’ll have no pigs learning characters on my place! If you give a hog the span of your hand he’ll steal the whole distance to the horizon. Don’t try to learn in my house, you turtle-spawning.”

  Hua’s wife moved calmly about while the farmer screamed at me. Her poise was terrifying. What treachery! Wearily she swept the ends of hair from her face and said, “That baby sow hasn’t the brains to learn. I’m sick of her. Get her out of here.”

  At once Hua puffed up his cheeks and then blew out the air—and with it, one felt, his rage.

  “It is probably Old Uncle’s inkblock,” I heard Hua’s wife placidly say as I was leaving. “He is losing his mind, the poor old ‘magistrate.’ ” This, in honor of his famous failure, is what people called the old uncle behind his back.

  “I’ll give that louse-bitten beggar the toe of my foot where he won’t lose it,” Hua said, suddenly recovering his bad temper.

  At Limestone Hill Generous Temple

  The eighth day of the twelfth month was set aside by the yellows for worship, and Hua gave leeway to his slaves to go to Limestone Hill Generous Temple.

  In the slave hut Daddy Chick praised our master for his liberality. “He is an old-pious,” he said. “I know slaves here and there who have to put their heads in jars in order to pray.”

  “Ayah,” said Lank in a cautious low voice, “you forever suck the master’s tit, Daddy Chick. When will you learn that it’s dry?”

  I walked with Moth. The temple was on a hill six or seven li from Hua’s farm. The sunny day was chilly but not as cold as some we had already had. Hua’s wife had supplied me with a quilted cotton tunic and trousers and a set of ankle bands. Along the road Moth and I were noisy. Daddy Chick said from his rearguard position that our cackling was objectionable—it was the kind of behavior that would give the whites a bad name.

  “Pigs,” Grin said, meaning we already had one.

  I enjoyed Moth. In the fields we were fast friends, and she accepted as a matter of course my being cold to her in the presence of Hua’s wife. She took delight in talking about Dolphin, sometimes teasing me and sometimes gravely coaching me in his seduction. With a fickle, undependable, arrogant man like him, Moth said, the best strategy was to alternate throwing oneself at him and scorning him. Stir up a cloud of dust!

  We had finished picking and ginning, and Hua had twenty-eight bales; a good year, he counted it. The last few days we had been picking in the early mornings with frost on the bolls. My fingers had cracked open and bled. The men had kept a small fire of trash going in the fields, and when Moth and I had been unable to stand our tender fingers any longer we would run and warm our hands awhile. Some days on the way out we had stolen turnips and when no one was looking had slipped them in the coals and on trips to the fire we had stirred them out and taken hasty bites of the hot black-encrusted turnip flesh.

  We could see the temple ahead on a hill scarred on one side by a quarry from which farmers took limestone for their fields; two or three commonplace buildings within a wall. The exalted feature of the temple compound, as seen from the roadway, was an enormous weeping beech tree, which must have been hundreds of years old. It seemed to brood with animate sorrow over the follies of the temple—over the false promises given by idols and the credence given them by men and women with only a moment’s trot to death.

  L
ooking at the tree, I was suddenly frightened by the flimsiness of the high spirits I had been enjoying—reading and writing would only earn me whip wales on my skin, and if for an unlikely moment I should catch selfish Dolphin he would slip from my grasp to that of another woman or to the mountain from which no slave returned.

  Yet when we climbed the hill and I saw, as we approached more closely, knots of slaves idling outside the temple walls—chatting, gambling, boxing, for all the world like the carefree groups at Yang’s tea-water well in the Northern Capital long before the oaths were sworn over the chalk circle—and when I noticed several men in the uniforms of Old Sun’s force, my cheerfulness returned with an actual physical surge, like a pang of acute hunger; I rejected the weeping beech, as it were. I saw Dolphin! He was waving his arms at some summit of narration, and he was wearing bright red trousers. Of the tactics Moth had urged on me, I quickly chose, for this day, the far easier: throwing myself at his feet.

  We of Hua’s went inside to worship. This temple, crowded now with both yellows and slaves, was shabby. Gilt and paint were peeling from some of the divine images. We were herded into the special enclosure for slaves, behind a wooden partition taller than men, so that worshipping yellows would not have to look at us. The priests and monks considered us slaves a nuisance; we had no coppers to spend on incense or paper money to be burned to the idols. A sweet smell of burning punk hovered in our slaves’ box.

  I was floating in a strange many-leveled mood: impatient to be finished with our worship so I could go out to Dolphin; stung by the disdainful droning of the yellow-robed yellow monk with his wheel of supplications praying for us pigs from a platform in our enclosure; frightened and awed by the grotesque figures of all sizes looming before us in an array of divinities banked up to the very roof beams of the dirty building; inclined to skepticism but prudently hedging my doubts with kowtows and murmured requests to certain gods that I thought I could trust; filled with vivid feelings of youth, eagerness, receptivity, fervor; aware, as if of a weight on my back, of the huge mournful tree resting its arms on the tiles over my head.

  How transparent the monk’s warnings! We must remember that Yü Huang, the Jade Emperor, was the author of slavery and the protector of the obedient. That Confucius (a tuft of the philosopher-idol’s horsehair beard had fallen away, leaving a sore of pitted clay in the compassionate face) taught the duty, above all others, of respect. That running away was an offense concretely against the San Kuan, the three causes, rulers of heaven, earth, and water; that the T’u Ti, the local constable god, would punish runaway slaves; that the hog’s hard hands and white skin were marks of the displeasure of the three mythical emperors, Fu Hsi, Shen Nung, Huang Ti.

  And I? I struck my forehead on the brick floor in honor of many-armed Tou Mu, the goddess of the North Star, who was said to have a kind heart for the sufferings of humanity and could lead a slave to the mountain, and to certain of the Niang-Niang, the woman goddesses, who granted babies and protected a woman’s eyes and gave her regular periods, and to Ch’ung Wang, god of insects, praying that he would send blights and worms to Hua’s crops.

  While Moth and I were in the very act of kowtowing, close beside each other, she nudged me with her elbow and whispered, “That’s enough. Let’s go.”

  We slipped out together, knowing that Daddy Chick would stay in the enclosure bowing and murmuring for nearly an hour.

  We walked straight toward Dolphin’s circle. Moth had her eye on a Sun hog named Quart. “When a man has a big nose,” Moth had said to me one day, talking of Quart, “you can be sure he has other big things, too.”

  When we had gone about half the distance to the group a slave woman stepped in our path whose appearance made me grasp Moth’s upper arm. Her hair was matted, her face was long unwashed, her quilted jacket and trousers were torn and the filthy padding within was leaking out, so she seemed a frightful old stuffed doll that was losing its insides. But worst of all were her eyes, which had a piercing stare so like the prophetic one that Yen’s Peace had used to have that I immediately began to tremble. She was, I knew, a witch woman, a follower, in the face of strict prohibitions by the yellows in our province, of our old white-faced Jehovah. One or two of these fanatical witch women were forever lurking around temples rebuking the rest of us for accepting yellow gods, abusing us, laying down spells on us; stirring in us, for all their absurdity, disquieting echoes of past beliefs and fears.

  The woman, her eyes glittering, said, “ ‘And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet…’ ”

  “Seven, eleven, go to heaven,” Moth said in the old language of the whites, to drive the witch out of our path.

  “Erh-lang will bite your arse,” I said, using one of the yellows’ exorcising curses, in the name of the Jade Emperor-god’s nephew, who was in charge of ghosts and spirits.

  Moth and I both sounded lighthearted, and we crowded past the awful woman. All the same, she had, like a whirling wind, lifted up a flying funnel of fallen leaves inside me. Slavery had long since seemed a triumph of the yellows’ many idols over the whites’ one God, and in the temple, shut away behind a wooden wall, even as I kowtowed, I had felt, through a deep unease and dissatisfaction, the essential hostility of the yellow-faced figures towering over me. On the one side of the wooden fence the yellows were thanking these figures for keeping things as they were; on the other the whites were pathetically begging for change. For a moment I yearned for the deity of my dim, distant, tranquil Arizona pillow:

  Jesus, friend to little children,

  Be a friend to me!

  But I saw Dolphin ahead, and all that distress promptly went under the surface.

  There were now about twenty slaves in Dolphin’s group, both men and women. They were standing a few paces from the lip of the limestone quarry. A thicket of juniper bushes and scrub pine straggled off down the hill behind the temple. There were other clumps of slaves all around the compound—so many!

  Moth and I pushed our way into the group, until she was beside Quart and I was next to Dolphin; my shoulder jarred against his arm, and he looked down at me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  “Ayah, it’s little Fall-Down!” he said, and he put an arm around my waist and pulled me to his flank, tucking me under his armpit. I could feel the hardness of his chest through his quilts and mine. “Have you learned how to walk yet?”

  “Have you learned how to hold on to an oil brush?” I put on as impertinent a face as I could manage.

  Dolphin laughed, but then he turned his attention away from me and back to the exchanges of the group. Dolphin, Quart, and three or four other men were arguing about something or other. Dolphin kept his arm around me but seemed to have forgotten that I was there.

  Shortly a hog of the Sun force pushed his way into the group, which was growing all the time as the quarreling voices rose to a louder and louder pitch, and he tapped Dolphin on the far arm and whispered in his ear. Dolphin grunted, removed his arm from my waist, and started to turn away. Then, apparently as an afterthought, he turned back, swung his arm over my head, and pulled me with him in an embrace. “Come on, baby,” he gruffly said. “Something a little sow ought to see to help her grow up.”

  So, tightly held, I was swept along across a hump of the hill into a smaller band of slaves, perhaps six men and three women, who were standing at the edge of the low-lying thicket of evergreens. When Dolphin came up some of the others exchanged with him several rapid whispers. I heard Dolphin ask, “Where?” A woman made a motion with her head and eyes, indicating that whatever they were discussing lay hidden within the thicket. “Let’s go,” Dolphin said.

  One, two, or three at a time, the slaves in the little party broke off, with looks up the hill toward the back of the temple to make sure no one was watching, and ducke
d into the cover of the pines. Dolphin released me, but when he started in, he flapped his hand, commanding me to follow him.

  Fifty paces within the thicket we came on the others. They were standing in a circle next to a large juniper bush, and when I took my place beside Dolphin in the ring I saw the object of the quest.

  On his hands and knees, taking cover under the bush, was a beast of a white man—bearded, long-haired, tattered, foul, thin, and hollow-eyed. Yet at his lip curled a smile and in his eyes lurked a jewel-light so serene, so contemptuous of all of us, that I suddenly felt a catch at my throat and found that I was weeping—for what? For this miserable fortunate man? For all of us? For slaves? For myself—noticed by Dolphin but not really seen by him? For worshippers, idolaters, God’s witch women, anyone who hoped for anything?

  Dolphin reached under his quilted jacket and pulled out three cakes of millet bread and tossed them on the ground between the boar’s hands. Another slave reached down with a flitch of bacon. A third placed a small earthen jar, presumably of salt, on the ground. A fourth undid his waistband and, reaching down into his trousers as if to scratch his private parts, instead pulled out with a guttural laugh a cloth bag of flour that had been hanging within from his cinch; holding up his pants with one clutching hand, he put down the small sack with the other.

  The boar’s dirty claws scooped up the pieces of bread that Dolphin had tossed on the ground, and settling back on his hams the wild free man began to gnaw at one of the hard cakes. His hunger was like a dog’s. He trembled as he ate. We waited until he had finished one of the cakes. Then three of the men, including Dolphin, knelt and murmured confidentially with him. He nodded. Under the ferocious, wild, unkempt outer face of the boar there was a look, which tortured me to the edge of tears again, of intelligence, tranquillity, and compassion for us who were slaves.