White Lotus

by John Hersey

  A familiar chill swept through me, one I had suffered many times in recent days—as if I were sitting in a draft of numbness-wind. What would Dolphin do to me if the baby turned out to be a mix, like Moth’s, by the same father? Dolphin had taken my body a hundred times; Hua once. Could my luck be that bad? Ayah, could a slave’s luck be anything but bad?

  Dolphin was staring at me with a horrifying expression—nothing about it had changed in the least. No surprise; no pleasure; no displeasure. Nothing. The same look of annoyance and indifference as before; wanted his nap.

  “I’m pregnant, at least I think so,” I said; perhaps he had not heard me. Was Dolphin himself numb through and through? Had he taken seriously Hua’s threat to sell him away? Did he not care where he slaved, or for whom, or beside whom? Sometimes in the nights, these past few, when I had missed my period and waited and waited to make sure, and had grown sure, I had wakened swimming in sweat in certainty that Hua had indeed meant his threat to sell Dolphin, and I had been doubly frightened by it because I sensed it had vaguely to do with me. But at other times I had thought it simply a stock shout of meaningless warning, such as owners and overseers often threw at their pigs, as ignorant slave mothers used threats of dragons and witches to silence their children.

  Dolphin stirred slowly. A momentary flicker of some sort of confusion sped across his face. Then he said, “I have to tell you, baby. I won’t be here to see it.”

  “You’re going off. I knew it.”

  “Hua says he wants to sell me. I can’t stand around and wait for that.”

  “Maybe Old Sun would buy you.”

  “What good would that be? He uses the bamboo like any other yellow man.”

  “But you won’t take me with you?”

  “I’m going with Grin.”

  “With Grin! I thought you had to go alone.”

  “Two men, baby. That’s different.”

  Why was I so attracted to a totally selfish man? Why couldn’t I even feel any anger?

  “Does Jasmine know?”

  “She’ll have to know now.”

  That thought made us both look along the shadows of locusts and black haws down the edge of the field, at the human lumps, sound asleep. I suddenly felt drowsy myself, as if drugged, overcome with a fearful yet sweet lethargy such as is supposed to sweep over one who is freezing to death. The terrifying news I had just heard made me, of all things, sleepy. Looking at the sleepers, I envied them. The yellows, citing deep naps like these taken anywhere and anyhow, called us lazy, shiftless, spineless, sluggish of blood; the expression they used for us was huai-le, meaning “bad,” “spoiled,” “broken,” “out of order.” What the yellows had not the capacity or sympathy to know was that sleep was our freedom; we ran away into it as into ownerless country. It was the peaceful mountain available to each of us without danger of slave-hunters, wonks, starvation. Frightened to my very marrow by Dolphin’s words, I yawned.

  Dolphin, however, was apparently thinking of the new situation that was created by my knowing his and Grin’s plan. He got up, went down the line to Grin’s limp form—legs drawn up and hands tucked under the chin like a baby’s—and woke him by shaking his shoulder. Grin sat up. Dolphin beckoned to him and came back to me. Grin arose, fully awake at once, and came to us.

  “You’ll have to tell Jasmine. This one got it out of me.”

  Grin was outraged. “How’s that? I thought you said not to tell them until the day before we went.”

  Dolphin replied in the same bland, unconnected tone as he had used toward me. There was a kind of magnificence about his detachment; he must have been the Emperor of the Not-Carers. “She got it out of me.”

  “How ‘got it out of you’? Did you have to answer her?”

  Still utterly indifferent: “She’s pregnant.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not saying by whom.”

  A rich blush sped up my neck and across my face. “You turtle!” I said, but my voice was not strong.

  “I had to tell her.”

  “Could she keep it from Jasmine for a while?”

  “Why should I?” I said.

  “You have to tell her,” Dolphin said

  “Ayah,” Grin said. “That’s not going to be easy.” But Grin was suddenly sunny. “Listen, Dolphin,” he said. “I had an idea. We ought to take rope bridles with us. Then if any yellows see us while we’re getting away, and ask us, ‘What are you doing here? Why don’t you have chits? Are you boars?’ we can say, ‘No, Master, we belong to Hua next to Sun, we were leading his team of donkeys in this evening, and a hare jumped out from under a bush and the donkeys ran off, and we took out after them. Have you seen two donkeys? One of them has a black streak down his nose.’ We could say something like that.”

  Dolphin was smiling, but the smile was grotesque, because his eyes were dull and humorless. It was as if he had been told to smile. “That’s beautiful, Grin,” he said. “We’ll do that.”

  Then we heard Hua’s shouts. “Tumble up! Tumble up, you pigs, and to work.”

  I supposed that Jasmine was informed of the plan sometime that day, but closely as I watched her I could see no change in her. Perhaps she thought of Grin’s plan as something every hog should try; perhaps she was tired of him anyway. We slaves had had plenty of practice in acceptance of daily horrors, and perhaps Jasmine’s reaction was simply the norm of slave behavior: acquiescence in the inevitable. What could one really do but take things as they were? Grin was the father of Jasmine’s three children; for reasons good or poor, he had stayed on with her for a long time. Yet the news that he was to go apparently struck her as not worth fighting. I felt, watching Jasmine, as if the white-skin numbness was gradually overcoming us all; that soon we whites would be exactly what the yellows wanted—dead souls in living bodies, automatons, walking and working hypnotics.

  Yet in the days that followed we four were, at times, remarkably buoyant. Now that Jasmine and I knew the plan, Grin and Dolphin spent more time with us than they had been spending. Sometimes we softly sang hopeful slave songs with cryptic lines:

  Discarding my sash I put on a coat lined with mountain-goat skin;

  Discarding my ankle bands I wear shoes with magpie wings,

  and we played games of secret words. In the fields, before Hua himself, we used simple everyday words, which we had coded to mean things important to us, but in which our master would hear nothing out of the ordinary. By stealing, buying, and sewing, Jasmine and I helped assemble sets of clothing Grin and Dolphin had never been seen to wear. Daddy Chick remarked to Hua, before us, that it had been long since he had heard so many joyous exclamations around the farm.

  As for me, no matter how heartsick I might be, when Dolphin touched me I felt the numbness drain away. The graveyard was still our favorite place. Under his body, between two memorial mounds, my body responsively moved; his excitement spoke to mine; the throbs of his final gift each time shook my whole body in a long, slow, almost unbearably happy unstringing, and I knew afterward, with tears on my cheeks, that the waves of numbness that flowed over me and through me many times each day meant less than I had feared, because I was surely alive.

  The Kite

  On ninth ninth, the Ch’ung Yang Festival, it was the custom to ascend to the highest lookout in the countryside—in our case Moon Wall Hill, across a valley from Limestone Hill—and there, enjoying wine and special cakes reserved to that day, to gaze at the view. This was supposed to promote longevity. Our master led us all out in the early morning, with two hampers of wine and cakes, one (capacious) for yellows, the other (small) for whites.

  As we set out, Dolphin had under his arm a large and elaborate kite, which over recent days he had made himself, out of materials he had bought from vendors from his own money belt. He carried the kite covered, and therefore hidden, by a wrapping of cheap rice paper. He had allowed no one to see
it as he made it.

  The morning was fine, a north wind blew. Dolphin, more animated than he had been for a long time, said we would see a vision on his kite string.

  The Ch’ung Yang Festival inaugurated the kite-flying season in East-of-the-Mountains Province. Moth had told me all about this soulful sport, and I looked forward with childish delight to the display. From now on for several weeks, she had said, the sky would be tenanted by the most ingenious kites—dragons with great wings, segmented centipedes, butterflies, frogs, flying tigers, bees, eagles, all sorts of vivid and horrid creatures. Most of them would have been made by slaves, who competed with each other in sending up fantastic contrivances, many of which, Moth said, proved, because of the simplicity of the art with which they were made, comical beyond words; while others, made by kite geniuses, white men, were breathtaking in their beauty. Many of the creatures that leaped in this way into the blue would be agitated, Moth said, by the wind—would roll their eyes, flap their wings, ramp with their paws, swing their long tails, or, best of all, growl, moan, mew, whistle, roar.

  So we walked out to Moon Wall Hill in gay spirits.

  The highest part of the hill was of course reserved for the yellows; a stripe of powdered lime, girdling the summit, marked the contour above which slaves were not permitted to climb. And so below the hill’s nipple of yellows we whites gathered, in exceedingly large numbers. It did not take us who were Hua pigs long to drink the wine and eat the cakes from the master’s parsimonious slave basket; nor did we need long to contemplate the landscape—to us, an expanse of dirt furnished and curried by our own hard work which would certainly not give us long life.

  We kept teasing Dolphin to launch his surprise.

  “Wait!” he would say, with a glassy look of the wine bottle already glinting in his eyes. “Gaze at the view! Suck in old age through your eyeballs! Come on, Daddy Chick. Look out there: ten thousand years just lying in wait for you.”

  Daddy Chick was the only one who took seriously the inscription Hua had pasted on the doorpost that morning: SEE FAR, LIVE LONG. The oldest of us all, he was squinting and straining, with his hands outstretched in the wonder he wanted to feel, looking like a man trying to make his way across a dark room.

  Soon, from here and there in the lower circle on the hill, kites began to rise on the steady breeze, and at each one a murmur of admiration, or a ripple of laughter, or (in the cases of flying monsters) a shout of mock apprehension would go up.

  “What’s the matter, Dolphin? Won’t your kite fly?” Grin asked.

  Grin’s latter question had double meanings, because among themselves whites used the expression “flying a kite” for a man’s having the stiffness of desire, and, indeed, some of the squeals of laughter on the hillside that had been saluting the taut going up of the many kite strings had been allusions to a pleasant sport which was not, like this one, seasonal.

  “Don’t worry yourself, Grin,” Dolphin said. “It will go up when I tell it to.”

  “You have it trained?”

  “No. It wants to go up all the time.”

  “What are you waiting for?” I asked with a suitable lift of my voice.

  Dolphin smiled and patted me on the shoulder as a reward for one side of my sally.

  “I think there had best be a crowd of kites up before this one flies,” he said.

  More and more kites were strung out, and they were making all sorts of funny noises in the air. It was a glorious noontime. We were surrounded by whites; the sky was the blue of a respite from moisture, not of drought, a kite sky, a sky for these paper jokes and casual works of art with strings attached. I slipped my hand into the crook of Dolphin’s elbow. I did not yet know what he felt, if anything, about the life that had taken root in me. For this day I was feeling flippant, Moth-like, and sun-warmed, though underneath this light mood lay a pit of uneasiness. Dolphin and Grin had not set a date for their running away; they drifted along, making plans so desultory that it seemed the whole idea might pass. On the other hand, I knew I might wake up any morning to find Dolphin gone.

  With his elbow he squeezed my hand against his rib cage.

  “Wait till you see it,” he said, winking at me.

  Finally, in one sweeping motion, Dolphin uncovered his kite, drew it over his head planing on the wind, and paid out string. In a few moments it stood high above us, yawing back and forth as Dolphin let out more and more scope. He fetched up near the end of the string and there in the sky, blinking its eyes, was a yellow man’s face.

  It was Hua.

  The kite was an unmistakable caricature of our master: sad, dogged, lewd, pretentious, seedy, drought-haggard. Hua’s unkempt queue was the kite’s tail.

  Near us I heard Sun hogs whispering, “It’s Hua. It’s Dirty Hua.”

  Laughter broke out around us. I saw guffawing slaves pointing at this kite among the others. I looked back, half expecting the real Hua to be rushing down the hill at us, and saw that a similar commotion was stirring the yellows on the hill crest—of pointing and laughing.

  I began to be afraid. Dolphin’s face was bland—no particular signs of emotion. Now and then an old friend of Dolphin’s from the Sun force came over to him and jokingly congratulated him for his astonishing recklessness. “He’s going to tickle your backsides,” Quart said. Dolphin unconcernedly nodded. I feared far worse than that.

  I wondered what Hua would do. I realized he could not come down the hill to order Dolphin to strike his kite and take us home, for that would only call attention to this scandalous act of derision; Hua would lose too much face. But what would he do later? He had ordered us to rendezvous with him “before the noon hour”—meaning, whenever the gathering would begin to break up—at the stone-lion marker at the corner of the Cheng farm at the foot of Moon Wall Hill.

  When the general adjournment came, we waited for some time at the marker. Dolphin had the kite under his arm. At last Hua and his wife came along, in company with some other inferior yellow gentry; they were all carrying on a lively conversation, the Huas laughing and chatting with the cheeriest of them. The Huas were in their best holiday clothes, which looked shabby enough. Hua pumped his chin at us as the party passed, signaling us to follow.

  We fell in behind this group. Slaves belonging to other yellows in the gathering joined up with us, and all of them steered significant looks at Dolphin, but he seemed oblivious; cheerful, unexcited, armored in some sort of seashell calm.

  The informal procession reached our farm, and we fell out. The Huas called polite farewells, bowing and dipping their fisted hands to their friends. We slaves started for our hut, but Hua shouted to us to go into his courtyard and wait for him.

  When Hua strode in to us his face was still masked—or perhaps bandaged—in the sociability he had been keeping up with his companions on the return trip. “Now!” he said. “We have all had a pleasant morning. Now let’s go out to Sixth Low Field for a half task of scraping. Get your hoes. Be brisk!” This was all correct and usual: too much so. “Daddy Chick, lead them out and get them started while I get into my work clothes.”

  We went to work. It seemed to me that Hua was a long time coming out. When he came, he had changed into more than his work clothes: he had changed—but it was not any more a laughing matter—into the creature on the end of Dolphin’s kite string.

  He walked straight to Dolphin. His face was drawn and miserable in its hardness. He spat out: “I thought I told you to repair the door of the vegetable pit.”

  “Yes, Master,” Dolphin mildly said, “I fixed it.”

  “How fixed it? It came off its hinges when T’ai-t’ai tried to open it.”

  “I hadn’t finished it. It was all finished but the fastenings.”

  Hua walked back and forth; he was obviously seething. “I gave you the task a week ago.”

  “Yes, Master,” Dolphin said. “You told me you wanted t
o buy some new hinges next market. Or that you wanted to think about buying them.”

  “I said no such thing.”

  Dolphin shrugged, as if to say, “It’s your word against mine, and a slave is always wrong.”

  Hua looked for a moment at the hoe Dolphin was holding. It had been broken at the throat, and had been crudely repaired—the handle chopped off, whittled to a point, reinserted, and hooked in place with a bent spike. Hua walked to Dolphin, kicked the hoe violently, so it flew out of Dolphin’s hand, and in a passion shouted, “Turtle! Turtle! I told you to fix these hoes smartly.”

  Dolphin said, “That one is only temporary, Master. We needed some new handle stock. Daddy Chick said—”

  But Hua broke in with a flood of curses. Then he turned and ran toward the crop-watching shelter beyond the next field, and in a short time he was back with his beating rod—a billy of bamboo as thick as a thumb and long as an arm, its joints, like little knuckles, blackened with the blood of previous punishments—Moth’s blood?

  When I saw Hua striding back towards us, I felt as if he were coming after me; he was like a punitive figure in a bad dream I had often had, beginning in the Northern Capital. I wanted to run. Hua walked up to Dolphin and said, “Take off your tunic.”

  Dolphin’s eyes wavered for a moment, and I could see that the thick impenetrable varnish of indifference that Dolphin had lately been wearing was cracking and scaling off him.

  “Big Master Hua,” he said in a voice that was suddenly trembling. “I will not take it off.”

  “You what?” Hua stepped a pace closer to Dolphin.

  “I will not be bambooed again by any man. I’ve decided that. If you beat me, Master, or if you have me beaten, I’ll never do another day’s work for you or for any other man.”

  Hua was now shaking all over. He could manage nothing with his voice except to repeat what he had said before: “You what?”

  “I’m not going to stay here and be bambooed. You said you were going to sell me. I wish you would. I don’t want to stay here with you.”