White Lotus

by John Hersey

  “Ayah!” Hua said. He seemed to be licking his chops. “Old Sun gave me a dressing down! Said I was far too lenient with my pigs. He said his father was the same way—too kindhearted. He said his father was too religious, had too much devoutness in him to keep his hogs down in the wallow where they belonged. He said I had yet to learn the first rule of hog-taming: Overhaul every one from time to time. Give him a good raking. Then he’ll stay where he belongs, in the mud by the trough. Old Sun says that’s what he does. Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  “And what about the trade?”

  Hua looked at his wife, then at me. “He hasn’t decided. He says he must discuss it with One-Eyed Chang.” This Chang, who had two keen eyes but was so stubborn, and therefore so narrow-visioned, as to have earned this nickname, was Hua’s successor as overseer of all the Sun slaves.

  “One-Eye will never do you a favor,” Hua’s wife said.

  A Question of Face

  Two afternoons later Hua received a curt message from Old Sun which made him feel so much loss of face that he shut himself up in his room all one day.

  One-Eye had told Old Sun that the hog Dolphin had refused to be traded; said he would kill himself first.

  Hua, determined to recover face, went to the rich man again. He returned swaggering. He said Old Sun himself had talked with the slave Dolphin, and Dolphin had agreed to the trade on condition that Hua would build a separate hut for Dolphin and his sow. To this, Hua reported, he had said, “Keep your filthy proud pig, Venerable. I cannot afford to build him a private mansion.”

  At this Old Sun had laughed until he got the hiccoughs, clapped his hands for One-Eye, and commanded that the trade (hic) be consummated on the following (hic) day, whether the what’s-his-name hog (hic) liked it or not.

  Snake’s Blood

  Dolphin arrived on the bed of a cart with his hands and feet all tied together with one knot of rope behind his back. Daddy Chick, who had gone with Hua to deliver Lank and collect Dolphin, said it had taken four men to truss Dolphin.

  Just as Hua and Daddy Chick, with the rest of us for audience, were murmuring at the main gate about how to unload Hua’s writhing acquisition, and whether to untie him or let him remain bound to think awhile, a hullabaloo approached along the sunken road from the direction of the district town.

  Though I had never seen such a sight before, I knew at once what it was: A runaway slave had been captured.

  The noisy party consisted of a professional slave-hunter; his squad of three “boar-chasers,” athletic young yellow roughnecks of the poorest class, in ragged clothes, loudly arguing in transit with the hunter about their wages for this capture; a pack of yelping wonks, like emaciated yellowish wolves, in a large bamboo cage on a cart; and, tied to the cart tail, with a heavy wooden cangue locked on his neck and wrists, the quarry of the chase, stumbling along half dead.

  It was not hard to see why the hunter had so far underpaid his “boar-chasers.” These hunters with their packs of vicious trained wonks were customarily paid in full by the owners of runaways only if they brought in the captured slaves unmarked by the dogs. In this respect the hunter had not been successful this time; crimson tags of flesh hung from the staggering white man’s forearms. The hunter might not get much for this botched job.

  Here is the scene at the fruition of my daydreams—the arrival of my beloved husband to share my (somewhat overcrowded) k’ang:

  Dolphin, who yearned for the mountain, lying on his side on Hua’s cart bed, his back painfully arched, his extremities cuffed behind with a raveled length of hemp, his furious eyes suddenly melting into a look of astonished compassion when he sees the lurching bloody captive; the children, both Hua’s and Grin’s, rushing merrily out to the road, as if this were a sideshow at a temple festival; my owner in a state bordering on paralysis, not knowing how to deal with the massive rage on his cart; Moth, impervious to the boiling emotions on every side, nudging me and giggling about how busy a certain little mouse will be from now on; and I, weeping because I think that Dolphin thinks that I planted the idea of the odious trade in my master’s mind, and trying not to be seen weeping…

  The procession passed.

  Hua, confronted by the certainty that he would never master Dolphin if not now, stepped forward with a wan face and untied the bonds.

  Dolphin gave his master a surprise: sprang from the cart, suddenly cheerful. During the rest of that day, Hua laughed loudly at everything Dolphin did, too loudly.

  We went to the fields. During the afternoon Daddy Chick gave Dolphin a trivial command—to start a new row.

  “Are you the overseer?” Dolphin snarled.

  “You must get something straight,” said Daddy Chick. “You’re lucky. You have a good master.”

  “ ‘Good’ and ‘master’ don’t fit. Your face is soiled off his behind.”

  For the most part, however, Dolphin went about his work with energy and an indifferent attitude. By day he ignored me; at night he took me off in the fields, and nothing was either better or worse.

  He started right in working for coppers on his own time, mornings and evenings, making baskets, mats, mule collars, chopsticks, birdcages, and hoe handles.

  One day he told Hua that a certain task on the cotton rows was done in a better way at Old Sun’s, and he offered to show how it was done.

  Hua became quarrelsome—called his new slave insubordinate.

  Another time Hua flew into a rage at Dolphin. Dolphin came in from the fields carrying a black snake by the tail. He said he had broken the snake’s back by tracing a cross mark in its track and spitting in the juncture of the cross.

  Hua shouted, “You idiot of a turtle! Don’t you know that a snake’s track in the road will bring rain?”

  Dolphin remained polite and cheerful; this was what truly angered our drought-parched Hua.

  In our slave hut that evening Dolphin cut open the snake and dripped some of its blood into a little bowl of millet liquor, which he had poured out from a bottle hidden in his bedroll, and he drank it—“to get strong. I’ll do more work than all of you put together.”

  Next day came the first real impasse. We were scraping. Hua came storming along the rows. “Move faster, you white shoat,” he cried at Dolphin.

  But Dolphin did not move faster. He began, with shocking deliberateness, to move much slower.

  A Living Cloud

  For a few weeks, until the calamity happened, I suppose my lot could have been called happy. I remember, at any rate, many moments of heightened perception, when, with a keenness of vision and depth of feeling that I could hardly bear, an isolated instant’s joy would become fixed in my mind like a perfect swift sketch on a scroll.

  An example, somewhat ironic:

  Hua’s wife believed that our swine could be protected from hog cholera by attaching a small piece of red cloth to a stick and placing it at the gate of the sty, and she had commissioned me to make and to fly this antiseptic banner. I did. The moment I remember is that of standing back, seeing the long-tailed triangular pennant I had made whipping its vivid bamboo-copperas red against a sky which, having had several weeks to dry out, was the pale blue exactly of Dolphin’s eyes. He and I had coupled, with extraordinary peace of heart, in the burying ground the night before. Now the brilliant sunny scene—the mud fence of the wallow, the pigs dozing, a willow beyond brushing at the morning in the breeze, the beloved sky-eye blue, the small sanguine banner—filled me with the greatest pleasure a slave could have: for a second forgetting that he, too, was a pig, pig, pig.

  Two full moons had passed with but two brief squalls of rain—quick downpours of huge drops which scarcely dampened the skin of the ground. Of Hua’s ten irrigation wells, nine had gone dry.

  As Hua watched his cotton plants shrivel he became more and more religious, which seemed to mean: somber, depressed, punitive. He took us in a party every day to Limestone Hill
Generous Temple to pray. Other masters were also herding their slaves to the temple, and poor yellows flocked there, too. The crowds milling about the hill above the quarry were larger every day.

  Hua became increasingly precise in his rituals, and more and more harsh toward us.

  I began to see religion as a suit of clothing, covering naked barbarity. At the temple pigs talked to other masters’ pigs, and it was our common understanding that the more religious a slaveholder became, the more malicious, violent, vindictive, and deceitful he became. Piety and cruelty were mask and face.

  In Hua I saw something else. He began to look at me, whenever Dolphin’s back was turned, with an expression I could scarcely misread, of overt lechery. Always behind his surreptitious looks was a creditor’s arrogance; I was not to forget my debts to him.

  Then disaster fell on us out of the arid sky.

  We were all scraping one day in what Hua called Giant Toad Second Field, for weeds grew in the dry dirt even if cotton stood still. Dolphin and I worked shoulder to shoulder, and I was churning with the most complicated feelings. On four separate occasions, recently, Dolphin had disappeared after the evening curfew gong; he had told me, the following mornings, with sour wine on his breath, that he had gone to see his old hog friends at Sun’s—he missed them too much. Was he meeting some sow in the graveyard? We were all physically exhausted; the daily hike to the temple and back came on top of our regular work. I was growing afraid of Hua. My dear friend Moth was doing her best to seduce Dolphin before my very eyes. I hated the idols in the temple; I hoped the cotton leaves would curl and die. I brought my hoe down with bone-jarring conviction.

  Dolphin beside me seemed cold. I had learned to my joy that he was capable of deep feelings, but I also knew that he was able readily to close them off altogether. Far, far away was the haunted, wild, bloodshot-eyed Nose of the Capital, devoted to mere desolate badness as his answer to the masters; far remote too, was the equally haunted visionary Peace of South-of-the-River, trying to organize revenge. My husband seemed dispassionate; took slavery, marriage, hoeing, whiteness of skin, lovemaking by grave mounds—took everything as a matter of course. Was this what his bonds had done to him—flattened him out? Or—a comber of panic surged over me—was he calm because he had made up his mind for the mountain?

  “Dolphin.” Crut. Crut.

  “What?”

  “Dolphin. If you go to the mountain will you take me with you?”

  “Hush, baby. Take it easy. You’re going to kill your luck with that hoe.”

  “Will you?”

  “If the badger hears you, you’ll get beaten and me beaten. He’s getting to be a snake. Watch your words.”

  “Will you?”

  Now his chopping is hard.

  “You don’t go in pairs.”

  “Why not?”

  “Anyone knows that. There never has been a slave reach that place except alone.”

  “You’d leave me?”

  “Who said I was going?”

  There was a dry, rustling whir at my ear, and downward across my field of vision slanted the air-fanning flight of a grasshopper. I saw the green papery insect land on a brownish leaf of cotton, and my eye stayed on it as it began, with a voraciousness that only a slave could understand, to clip at the edges of the leaf with its ravenous little mandibles.

  A few hoe strokes later I saw another come down. Dolphin also saw this one. He put down his hoe, stepped to the row, and with hands making two cups trapped the insect. Carefully taking the sawlike lower joints of both the great jumping legs between a thumb and forefinger, he carried the little creature down the line to Hua.

  I saw the storm come up across Hua’s face. He began to scream, “Kill it! Kill it! Were there any more? Ayah! Ayah! Kill it, you white turtle!”

  It was a locust.

  At this knowledge I felt a surge of triumphant malice, and hastily I searched along the stunted, drooping plants for the first of the insects I had seen. I found it with barely room left to stand on the leaf it was consuming, and, imitating Dolphin, I caught it, pinched its hind legs, and carried it without a word to Hua. I felt the wildest pleasure at the sight of the consternation on his yellow face, and when he looked at me, and I saw a flicker of his eye that responded to my awful delight with a much more awful threatening anticipatory delight of his own, I turned away, with renewed shouts from Hua, this time of desire thinly wrapped in alarm, at my back, and I ran in fear to Dolphin, reaching out the insect for him to kill it and somehow protect me.

  Hua, however, turned his mind from me and forthwith adjourned our scraping and herded us off to the temple, where we found half a dozen excited masters and their slaves already gathered, crowding to worship the plaster idol of Ch’ung Wang, god of insects.

  These farmers, or their slaves, had all seen locusts. One of the yellows told Hua the locusts were coming from the district to the west of ours; it was a punishment, he said, for our magistrate’s not having attended the funeral of a deceased warlord of that district, Ch’i by name. Hua shrugged.

  Hua hurried us back to the farm. We saw no more locusts that day, but the next day they came in squads, like groups of scouting outriders. We spent the entire day spotting them and killing them.

  The third day the insects fell like light snow. Hua divided his inadequate force into noisemakers and beaters. Half of us pounded on gongs, pans, and an old peddler’s drum Hua had once bought for just this purpose, and shrilled and whooped, too; some of the insects, perhaps scared by our clanging and booming and shouting, swooped up and flew on. The rest of us thrashed with spades, boards, brooms, and bundles of willow twigs at insects that had landed. Dolphin nailed an old shoe sole to the end of a stick and wielded this swatter with great effectiveness, leaping here and there, roaring, making a jamboree of this macabre sport.

  I spent the forenoon with a gong, the afternoon with a broom, and the whole crazy battle seemed to me an uproarious joke—though I dared not, of course, show this on my face. Hua was being ruined! His gaunt face, ravaged now by a total loss of sleep, seemed so funny to me that I had several times to turn away to keep from laughing. Yet I was uneasy, too. Would we have enough to eat? What if Hua failed altogether? Where would I be sent? Would Dolphin and I be parted?

  The fifth and sixth days were the worst. The insects came in such masses that we abandoned trying to kill them one by one. We dug trenches across the fields and drove them with noise and brooms into these ditches and buried them wholesale. We stayed up the entire fifth night, setting fires whose light attracted the grasshoppers, thousands of which flew straight into the flames; thousands of others, alighting near the fires, were easy prey for our beating tools.

  Long since, the mad joke had palled; I was horrified. The creaking, rustling creatures crawled in my hair, tickled my arms. I half expected them to turn their insatiable hunger against me. And Hua, looking more and more like a lightly framed locust himself, seemed unable, in the midst of his feverish despair, to take his eyes off me.

  On the sixth afternoon a visible cloud of the insects came from the western horizon like a summer squall. Crossing the sun their transparent wings made at first a terrible, tremulous, vibrating shadow on the ground; then the cloud thickened, until at last we could not see the sun at all. The sky resounded with a great dry whisper of millions of wings.

  Hua simply bolted. He ran off in a panic toward the temple.

  Had it not been for Hua’s wife, who stood beating a gong with a steady forearm, as if convinced that she herself would drive away the living storm, we pigs could simply have walked away into the chaotic countryside. Somehow the stolidity of our mistress, in the ever-darkening shadow of the plague, her sad but by no means resigned face, her look of contempt for gods and insects and husbands alike, roused some measure of feeling in me, whether of pity or admiration I could not have said, and I joined in the noisemaking at the top of
my lungs.

  Whatever the reason, it appeared that the main cloud was flying over and beyond us.

  Dolphin, indifferent now as ever, said the locusts knew that Sun’s crops were tastier than Hua’s.

  At this Hua’s wife unexpectedly broke into strident laughter.

  Hua, returning at a run from the temple, could not credit his eyes when he saw that only stragglers from the great cloud had landed on his farm. I think he believed his praying had done it, and once, after dark, when with the very last of our strength we were trying to annihilate the locusts that had fallen like trailing fringes of rain from the cloud, I felt a religious hand on my buttocks. I swung my broom swiftly around and struck my master hard on the arm and chest. What a surge of joy I felt at that blow I Hua drifted away into the shadows without a word.

  On the seventh day the worst seemed to be over, though we could not be sure that the main cloud of the plague would not double back and attack what was left of green on Hua’s acres.

  That afternoon Hua took us to the temple to thank Ch’ung Wang for having sent the cloud farther along.

  As we approached Limestone Hill we saw a large crowd milling around outside the temple, and coming closer we saw fists plunging and we heard angry shouts. A regular riot was in progress. We broke into a run. At the edge of the crowd, which seemed emotionally spent when we arrived, we learned that two boars had dug a tunnel from the shrubby slope behind the temple into the central hall, and they had made themselves a snug secret sanctuary under the banked-up stages on which the gods reposed; one of them was said to have made his nest right under the form of Ch’ung Wang, who was in charge of insects. The boars’ asylum had been discovered only that morning. This desecration was clearly the cause of the plague. The riot was now already abating, we were told, because the two boars had some time since been beaten and stamped to death by—I almost fainted when I heard it—by a mob of frenzied slaves whose masters had hysterically threatened, in the excitement of the discovery, to kill all of them. The infestation, the masters had shrieked, had been brought on by white men. To save their own lives the hogs had kicked and trampled to death two of their own kind. I wondered if the boar I had seen under the bush had been one of them. Had I thought the plague a monstrous joke?