White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The cemetery wall was at my back. My eyes, adjusted to the night, strained up the hill toward the main gate. I felt gloomy. The night air was damp, and walking alone among the newly weeded graves in the dark had been quite a different matter from our social outing on Ch’ing Ming in dazzling sunlight. Dolphin had by no means agreed to meet me. Slipping away from our k’ang in the slave hut had been a strain. Would Daddy Chick waken and miss me, and if he did, could he be counted upon not to report me to Hua?

  Near me, a grave of some important Sun ancestor was surmounted by a huge marble tortoise bearing on his back an inscribed tablet. Why a turtle—the yellows’ most insulting curse word? I felt all about me forces I could not understand, and over me the ragged willow seemed to have stars clinging like aphids to its leaves.

  I was shivering. I spat, to exorcise evil spirits that might be near me.

  A motion on the hill! I gripped the tree trunk harder, unable to decide whether to run toward or away from the apparition.

  I had said I would wait for him under the tree. I would try to stay where I was.

  The moving thing came closer and closer. It paused, divided into two, and sat on the great marble turtle and laughed in two drunken voices—man’s and woman’s. Then it folded into a tight ball and rolled down the ancestor’s mound and fumbled in a draw between graves, not ten paces from me, and I began to hear grunts, sharply drawn breaths, moans, and suppressed cries.

  In the midst of this I saw a new figure swiftly approaching. It came down the hill toward the willow and straight through the draw, and I saw it go down, stumbling over the drunken fornicators; then I heard a woman’s horrified gasp and a man cursing, then guffaws—more than one voice. Then Dolphin was with me under the tree. He was shaking with laughter. The other forms were scrambling uphill; I saw them drop down several mounds away.

  I did not know, beyond a flood of relief, what I felt. Anxiety, awe, hope, fear of the dark, a slave’s inchoate longing, a feeling of the rawness of life that came from eavesdropping on the drunken lusts of others.

  “You decided to come,” I said in a voice whose trembling I heard indifferently, as if it were not mine.

  Dolphin did not speak or move for a long time. Then he took my cheeks in his palms and lifted my face.

  Never, until that moment, had Dolphin, by word or act, showed me the slightest sign of outgoing tenderness, but now I felt in his hands, which shook like my voice of a moment ago, the full force of a strength-and-helplessness that must have been a male slave’s lot. I did not know whether this force had anything to do, really, with me. The endless passivity of his days; this blundering, wild, unstoppable assertion by night, its power expressed in its very gentleness. This touch of the cupping hands was far more intense than anything I had been offered in those few minutes long ago in the small dark room in Chao-er’s tavern.

  Now explicit feeling began to pour into me. All my hopes and daydreams of so many days had shaped this flood of—why, there was nothing to call it but desperation. The warm hands on my cheeks filled me with a blind and boundless desperation.

  We lay together in the very draw where the drunken pair had made those unbridled noises. A grave to one side looked to my distracted glance, in a moment of transport of an order that was new in my life, like a—could I bear to think it?—like a distant mountain. Did I make sounds like that drunken woman’s? I do not know. We stayed in the draw until the sky began to lighten. I did not sleep all night, because of my beliefs that moonlight and starlight, no matter how pale, could paralyze a sleeping cheek, and that if a glowworm crawled across a sleeping eye, that eye would never see again.

  A Fatal Greed

  I was in the clutch of a fatal greed—fatal, I mean, for a two-legged sow. I wanted to possess Dolphin. I wanted him for mine alone.

  We slept together often in the graveyard and in the woods and in the open fields, always now at Dolphin’s urging. He enjoyed me; he spoke, at last, some tender, almost abject, words of promise to me. I came second with him: himself came first.

  But I was greedy. I determined that we would be married, knowing perfectly well that slave marriages in the yellow dominion were meaningless. They consisted of owners’ permissions, and they lasted until an owner’s convenience required the moving of one partner to another farm, or until a master sold husband or wife away—or, indeed, until one or another slave tired of the arrangement. All a sow’s owner cared about was that she should breed, increasing his wealth.

  In those days I began to wear a charm to help bring this determination of mine to pass—a pair of mole paws on a cord around my neck. This talisman, which I bought from a peddler with stolen coppers, restored to me a feeling of confidence that I had never felt since the owner of the East Garden had snatched my relic of the Guevavi martyr from my neck when we were first sold.

  How fitting!—the spadelike tools that a blind creature used to make his way through the endless sod of this world.

  Yet how perverse the charm was, too! Moth had whispered to me of something secretly called the Kingdom of the Mole—a place beyond “the mountains,” beyond the borders of the slave provinces, where, though the territory was supposed to be free, Imperial laws still required the return of slaves who had escaped from the slave lands; it was said that there certain yellow “moles” led the runaways through their “runs” to safety far from the borders. And so my charm presaged both getting and losing….

  First, before I even opened the way for Dolphin to ask me to marry him, I had to make sure that Hua and his wife would give their permission. I thought that this would readily be granted: all they could wish was for me to be pregnant, to give them a gift of another piglet on the place.

  Two events now took place, however, which forced me to postpone my plan.

  Before dawn one morning in the fourth month Moth began to suffer birth pains. Jasmine, who was to serve as midwife, prepared for the delivery, and I did whatever Jasmine told me. I had never seen a baby born, and when the labor began in earnest I was afraid, partly for Moth but indirectly for myself, imagining myself in Moth’s place on the straw mats on the mud k’ang in our slave hut—pale hands gripping a plow handle, forehead running with sweat, teeth clamped on a twisted wet cloth to curb the unearthly cries.

  Jasmine anointed her hands with lard. She made poor Moth between pains drink some tea made from the clay of a mud-wasp’s nest, to ease her labor, and for the good influences of iron we placed the head of a hoe in the k’ang oven under her. Jasmine sent me out to collect cobwebs to stem hemorrhages, and to steal some sugar from Hua’s wife’s jar to put on the dressings afterward.

  When, hours later, a strange object, cheese-covered and blotched, emerged at last to my terror from a struggling Moth, Jasmine lifted it upside down in her firm hands and with hard blows knocked breath into it. It squalled! It had tiny fruit in its crotch! A noisy boy! A great value to the Huas!

  Jasmine, overjoyed, cleaned it up. She put a greasy bit of half-cooked pork fat in its mouth “to clean out the insides,” and she made me light a fire outdoors and burn the afterbirth—else, she said, Moth would be a long time recovering; a chore that made me ill. When I returned, the baby was still crying, and Jasmine was murmuring over it. “Look!” she said to me, pointing at his tightly clenched fists, so perfect and delicate, like secret scrolls of fern in earliest spring. “He’s going to be a thief, he’ll turn out a thief—that’s what it means when they grip their hands like that.” This seemed to delight Jasmine.

  Hua’s wife came and inspected the baby. I saw the mistress’s face cloud over, her jaw set up hard. She swept out in a wild fury.

  Then Jasmine showed me the awful trouble that had come into our house: The infant’s skin was yellowish, its hair was black, its still-squinted eyes were “good”—there were the telltale vertical folds of the inner canthi, drawing down the skin to prove who was the father.

  We moved in fear. St
ealthily the second morning we washed the baby in water in which a branch of acacia had been boiled, to make the child immune to the diseases that killed white infants.

  For days Hua’s wife spoke to no one. Hua, who had been increasingly morose since the sale of his crop, lay low; he got out of his wife’s way like a wonk with its tail between its legs. How unlike a master he was! In small ways we slaves were rude to him, but we kept our distance from the seething yellow woman. Moth, recovering, fondling her doll-like infant with all sorts of cooing and murmuring, was oblivious of the storm that was raging in the main house.

  A few days later, the second deterrent: One of Old Sun’s private militia discovered, buried under sacks in the old miser’s seed house, some literature from the so-called Uncage-the-Finches Society in the Northern Capital.

  A large number of Sun hogs, Dolphin among them, were shut up in a bamboo palisade and were questioned for days on end about these documents.

  We were dimly aware of an unaccountable fervor among some of the yellows, mostly Buddhists, in the faraway core provinces, who wanted all slaves throughout the Empire to be set free. But this fervor was remote; the harsh, exhausting routine of our daily lives dulled our minds, and apart from a persistent aching consciousness of “the mountain,” toward which we could struggle one by one if our individual lots drove us to such a mad risk, we gave little thought to the vague rumors.

  Besides, we mistrusted yellows who wanted to help us—what did they really want?

  The discovery of the literature, however, terrified the masters and impressed the slaves of the entire district. It was, indeed, the violent reaction of the slaveowners rather than the broadsheets themselves that stirred us to endless whispered conferences out of the yellows’ earshot.

  Even Daddy Chick made our hearts beat wildly by playing tunes on his Tartar fiddle which, without his singing at all, acted onus like thrilling messages in code, for we knew the unsung words of the songs:

  The finch in the pine tree was sighing,

  The sky was an ear for his voice.

  And another—about “the mountain”:

  Ten thousand stones, the path is a place to stumble.

  From the high crag the path cannot be seen.

  It was certain that Daddy Chick had no thought whatever of running away, yet he played these “away songs” on his soughing fiddle with a melancholy that made us, as we lay on the k’angs, grind our teeth.

  For a week I lost track of Dolphin. We could not get any word back and forth. There opened before my eyes the abyss that life without him would be.

  When Moth’s little mix was nine days old, it was time to name him. On Moth’s first rising at dawn she carried the infant three times around the slave hut and then, at the door, Jasmine loudly pronounced the name Moth had chosen: Apple. We all kissed Moth, who wept with joy.

  Jasmine’s children had all survived, and Moth felt that Jasmine understood the magic that was needed to bring a slave infant through the trials of the beginning of life as a chattel. One night the baby was fretful. We were all up. Jasmine made Grin light his pipe and, drawing on it, she blew smoke on the throbbing fontanel of Apple’s head. “It’ll make him drunk,” she said. The baby was soon asleep.

  Apple had a pale birthmark on its chest. Jasmine directed Moth to lick it for nine successive days to make it go away. She said it would fade in a few months.

  Jasmine had endless, advice. “Feed a child out of the cooking pan, and he’ll go to the mountain when he gets big enough. If he turns out to stutter give him a drink of tea out of a bell. Don’t show him his face in a mirror until he’s a year old, or he’ll be tongue-tied. When you take him out in the fields, Moth, don’t shade him with a hat belonging to Hua, or his teeth will be slow coming in, they might come in snaggled. Wash his limbs in the water we’ve used to cook rice if you want to keep him from being bowlegged. In the fields don’t put him down and then forget and step across him; he won’t thrive if you do that, he’ll be stunted. To dry up when you’re weaning him, hang an old cash that’s been worn smooth around your neck, hang it down between your breasts, then take it off and put it on an anthill, and when the ants go down you’ll dry up. You can rub camphor on your breasts, too.”

  Moth said, “Stop, stop! You make me dizzy.”

  Moth now returned to the fields on a suckler’s status. She left the infant in charge of Hua’s wife, whose face puckered daily, as if she had been chewing hot ginger root, at the sight of the little master-begotten bastard. Moth was excused to the main house at brief intervals during the day to feed the child at the breast, and she was allowed rest periods “to cool her milk.”

  Hua’s wife made no secret of her continuing fury at Hua, and her sarcasm against him, in our presence, made us laugh when we achieved the privacy of the slave hut. Moth seemed not the least bit ashamed of the paternity of her baby; in fact, she spoke of “opportunities” that might open up to a little mix, and I thought she carried herself with an almost insolent pride before Hua’s wife, who, surprisingly, now that the baby was born and the half-suspected truth was out, behaved towards Moth with a forbearance that verged on tenderness.

  Hearing that the grillings in the bamboo stockade had been brought to an inconclusive end, and that Dolphin and the other suspects had been set at large, but still having heard nothing more from him, I decided to set about getting what I wanted.

  One day I helped the mistress clean the floors of the main house. We spread dampened charcoal ashes on the caked dirt and left them there some time “to draw the smells out,” then swept them up and threw them out in the courtyard, where I scattered them with the back of a wooden rake. I went in the house and abruptly told Hua’s wife that I wanted to marry a hog belonging to Old Sun.

  I saw at once that she would accede; I thought she seemed relieved.

  However, she said, “It is bad for slaves on separate farms to marry.”

  “May I ask Old Venerable?” We slaves used honorifics only when we begged for favors.

  Perhaps she saw my appeal as a chance to punish her husband in some vague way. She said, “I’ll take care of it with him.”

  Two days later Hua’s wife took me aside and said, “All right. You may ask his permission now.” Why the half-formed smile? Had she brought it home to Hua that my marriage would place me out of bounds to his itch? What had she put in my lips as she quoted my appeal?

  I asked him, and he—responding to whatever had been behind that smirk of hers—was bad-tempered. “I have no objection,” he said. “But I’ll wager you will never get old Night-Soil Basket’s permission.” How undignified for a yellow man to use hogs’ epithets! “And if you do marry this pig, don’t ask for a chit every night. It is no good to marry a pig on another farm.” Hua walked away from me. Had I not been completely absorbed by my sweet greed, I might have been frightened by Hua’s manner.

  Now Dolphin.

  I thought of using the policy Moth advised—suddenly refuse to go out in the fields and lie with him; drive him to distraction with desire; make a bargain—that in exchange for marriage.

  But I decided to do just the opposite: give myself to him altogether. This was easy. Was I not a slave to begin with?

  Within a fortnight he had, without a word of prompting, asked me to become his wife. I could not refuse him! He said he would ask his master’s permission.

  At work at Hua’s I waited anxiously for three days for some word from Dolphin. Then one of Old Sun’s militiamen came to Hua with a curt message that Sun Lao-yeh intended to buy the slave girl White Lotus from Hua for seventeen taels of silver—a despicable price, an insulting condescension, which only a patron could offer a man who was at his mercy.

  Hua blew up. He saw himself driven to ground—his wife and his patron after him like vicious wild dogs. Hua railed; the militiamen remained calm and over-patient.

  “Sun Lao-yeh is doing this for
the sake of the two pigs,” the militiaman said with infuriating serenity and obvious hypocrisy. “The permanence of the marriage depends on their living together, working side by side, being drawn together by common experiences.”

  “Turtle shit!” Hua screamed. “The old squeeze-purse wants the girl because pig offspring follow the condition of the mother.”

  “Lao-yeh would not be happy to hear that he had been called a squeeze-purse.”

  The upshot was that Hua went himself, in his tunic that was out at the elbows, to plead with Old Sun.

  Hua came back with permission to keep me—and with permission for me to marry Dolphin. Hua exulted before his wife and before us all at having pulled off this result, but there was something unconvincing in his pride. What had he yielded to make this bargain? He made it amply clear to me that I was in his debt. I saw this; it was Moth who pointed out to me that his wife saw it, too.

  We chose the holiday of the Summer Festival, fifth fifth, as our wedding date. Hua’s wife was suddenly like an aunty hen to me. She gave me three louse-bedding gowns, and Moth, who was childishly excited by my prospects, showed me how to dye them in bright colors.

  We boiled hickory bark and bay leaves, and strained the brew, and let it stand a day; then we heated it again, wet one of the gowns in cold water, plunged it in the boiling dye, let it soak awhile, and took it out, dried it, then set it with urine. That was my yellow dress. We dyed another in bamboo and set it in copperas, and that was my red. We dyed the third in pine straw and set it with vinegar, and that was my purple. My old dress that I had been wearing in the fields we dyed in indigo and set it with alum, and that was my blue. The colors were uneven and streaked, but they were at least colors.

  Hua hovered about these activities with a surly expression. “What courtesans!” he sarcastically said.

  We gathered petals of jasmine and leaves of sweet basil, and we stole some cloves from the kitchen, and we folded these things into my colored gowns and let them stand three days, and then my clothes were good-smelling.