William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  “As for the rest, I had come back. And that for a while would do, that would suffice.”

  Charleston, S.C.

  November 3, 195-

  Dear Peter,

  Enjoyed your letter. Please excuse this card but am harried & overloaded. Charleston will never become the Florence of the New World Im afraid but the Sunday amateurs are keeping me busy & Im up to my ears in work. Also, another trauma. Overpopulation. Race-suicide. Poppy is having another baby next June & Ive been walking around Charleston like a wounded elephant, staggering with the usual pride & despair. Kinsey was distinctly wrong. A man doesnt even get started until he moves in toward il mezzo del cammin. Anyway will write more later but wanted to tell you how glad I am that N.Y. goes O.K. for you now. You didnt tell me her name but hope you will bring her down here some day. Who was it in Lear who said ripeness is all. I forget, but he was right.

  Buona fortuna,

  Cass

  THE INTERNATIONAL HOSPITAL OF THE

  BLESSED REDEEMER

  Order of the Daughters of Wisdom

  Via Alessandro Manzoni, 38

  NAPLES

  16 December 195-

  Mr. P. C. Leverett

  30 West Eleventh Street

  New York 11, N.Y., U.S.A.

  Dear Mr. Leverett:

  Returning from a visit to my home in France, I found on my desk your nice letter with its customary cheque. I am sending this cheque back to you. We are, as usual, grateful for your kindness, but this time I must inform you that we are declining your gift, and for the most extraordinary and wonderful reason! God has been most merciful to Luciano di Lieto! In my absence, I was told, Luciano made an amazing recovery from the state of coma in which he has been languishing these many, many months. Sister Veronique, who was attending him at the time, tells me that at one moment Luciano was in the profoundest slumber when, like the Phoenix risen from the ashes of his own affliction, he sprang up in bed complaining loudly of a violent hunger. Upon examination it was discovered that the pressure upon his brain had alleviated itself. Luciano was pronounced well by Dr. Cipolla the examining physician. After two weeks of convalescence (during which he ate like a pig and cheerfully berated our Sisters for their inattention) he was sent home to Pompei fully recovered. I knew that this would be joyous news to you, and am hastening to send this message off to you so that you may share in the knowledge of such a wondrous miracle! God’s mercy is great!

  Thanking you again for all your help, I beg to remain, as ever,

  Sincerely Yours in Mary’s Immaculate Heart,

  Sister Marie-Joseph, D.W.

  Director of Nursing Care

  P.S. Since writing the above, I was informed by Sister Veronique that Luciano was readmitted to the hospital this very morning, suffering from a broken collar bone. He incurred the injury by falling down a flight of stairs in his home in Pompei. The durability of this young man is truly remarkable! I have just now come from seeing him, where he is sitting up in bed, cheerfully smiling and eating like a pig. He sends his felicitations to you, and tells me that he has become affianced. I do somewhat pity the girl but I do not doubt that, if she is at all like Luciano, it will be a match of long duration. He will live to bury us all.

  The Confessions of Nat Turner

  William Styron

  To

  JAMES TERRY

  to

  LILLIAN HELLMAN

  and to

  MY WIFE * and * CHILDREN

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  I Judgment Day

  II Old Times Past

  Voices, Dreams, Recollections

  III Study War

  IV “It Is Done …”

  AFTERWORD:

  Nat Turner Revisited

  * AUTHOR’S NOTE *

  In August, 1831, in a remote region of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery. The initial passage of this book, entitled “To the Public,” is the preface to the single significant contemporary document concerning this insurrection—a brief pamphlet of some twenty pages called “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” published in Richmond early in the next year, parts of which have been incorporated in this book. During the narrative that follows I have rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt of which he was the leader. However, in those areas where there is little knowledge in regard to Nat, his early life, and the motivations for the revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events—yet I trust remaining within the bounds of what meager enlightenment history has left us about the institution of slavery. The relativity of time allows us elastic definitions: the year 1831 was, simultaneously, a long time ago and only yesterday. Perhaps the reader will wish to draw a moral from this narrative, but it has been my own intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an “historical novel" in conventional terms than a meditation on history.

  WILLIAM STYRON

  Roxbury, Connecticut

  New Year’s Day, 1967

  Part

  I

  JUDGMENT

  DAY

  ABOVE THE BARREN, SANDY CAPE WHERE the river joins the sea, there is a promontory or cliff rising straight up hundreds of feet to form the last outpost of land. One must try to visualize a river estuary below this cliff, wide and muddy and shallow, and a confusion of choppy waves where the river merges with the sea and the current meets the ocean tide. It is afternoon. The day is clear, sparkling, and the sun seems to cast no shadow anywhere. It may be the commencement of spring or perhaps the end of summer; it matters less what the season is than that the air is almost seasonless—benign and neutral, windless, devoid of heat or cold. As always, I seem to be approaching this place alone in some sort of boat (it is a small boat, a skiff or maybe a canoe, and I am reclining in it comfortably; at least I have no sense of discomfort nor even of exertion, for I do not row—the boat is moving obediently to the river’s sluggish seaward wallow), floating calmly toward the cape past which, beyond and far, deep blue, stretches the boundless sea. The shores of the river are unpeopled, silent; no deer run through the forests, nor do any gulls rise up from the deserted, sandy beaches. There is an effect of great silence and of an even greater solitude, as if life here had not so much perished as simply disappeared, leaving all—river shore and estuary and rolling sea—to exist forever unchanged like this beneath the light of a motionless afternoon sun.

  Now as I drift near the cape I raise my eyes to the promontory facing out upon the sea. There again I see what I know I will see, as always. In the sunlight the building stands white—stark white and serene against a blue and cloudless sky. It is square and formed of marble, like a temple, and is simply designed, possessing no columns or windows but rather, in place of them, recesses whose purpose I cannot imagine, flowing in a series of arches around its two visible sides. The building has no door, at least there is no door that I can see. Likewise, just as this building possesses neither doors nor windows, it seems to have no purpose, resembling, as I say, a temple—yet a temple in which no one worships, or a sarcophagus in which no one lies buried, or a monument to something mysterious, ineffable, and without name. But as is my custom whenever I have this dream or vision, I don’t dwell upon the meaning of the strange building standing so lonely and remote upon its ocean promontory, for it seems by its very purposelessness to be endowed with a profound mystery which to explore would yield only a profusion of darker and perhaps more troubling mysteries, as in a maze.

  And so again it comes to me, this vision, in the same haunting and recurrent way it has for many years. Again I am in the little boat, floating in the estuary of a silent river toward the sea. And again beyond and ahead of me, faintly booming and imminent yet without menace, is the sweep of sunlit ocean. Then the cape, then the lofty promontory, and finally the stark white temple high and s
erene above all, inspiring in me neither fear nor peace nor awe, but only the contemplation of a great mystery, as I move out toward the sea …

  Never, from the time I was a child until the present—and I am just past thirty—was I able to discover the meaning behind this dream (or vision; for though it occurred mainly as I awoke from sleep, there would be random waking moments when, working in the fields or out trapping rabbits in the woods, or while I was at some odd task or other, the whole scene would flash against my mind with the silence and clearness and fixity of absolute reality, like a picture in the Bible, and in an instant’s dumb daydream all would be re-created before my eyes, river and temple and promontory and sea, to dissolve almost as swiftly as it had come), nor was I ever able to understand the emotion it caused me—this emotion of a tranquil and abiding mystery. I have no doubt, however, that it was all connected with my childhood, when I would hear white people talk of Norfolk and of “going to the seaside.” For Norfolk was only forty miles eastward from Southampton and the ocean only a few miles past Norfolk, where some of the white people would go to trade. Indeed, I had even known a few Negroes from Southampton who had gone to Norfolk with their masters and then seen the ocean, and the picture they recalled—that of an infinite vastness of blue water stretching out to the limit of the eye, and past that, as if to the uttermost boundaries of the earth—inflamed my imagination in such a way that my desire to see this sight became a kind of fierce, inward, almost physical hunger, and there were days when my mind seemed filled with nothing but fantasies of the waves and the distant horizon and the groaning seas, the free blue air like an empire above arching eastward to Africa—as if by one single glimpse of this scene I might comprehend all the earth’s ancient, oceanic, preposterous splendor. But since luck was against me in this regard, and I was never allowed the opportunity of a trip to Norfolk and the ocean, I had to content myself with the vision which existed in my imagination; hence the recurring phantasm I have already described, even though the temple on the promontory still remained a mystery—and more mysterious this morning than ever before in all the years I could reckon. It lingered for a while, half dream, half waking vision as my eyes came open in the gray dawn, and I shut them again, watching the white temple dwindle in the serene and secret light, fade out, removed from recollection.

  I rose up from the cedar plank I’d been sleeping on and sat halfway erect, in the same somnolent motion duplicating the instinctive mistake I’d made four times in as many mornings: swinging my legs sideways off the plank as if to plant them on the floor, only to feel metal bite into my ankles as the chain of the leg irons reached the limit of its slack, holding my feet suspended slantwise in midair. I drew my feet back and let them fall on the plank, then I sat upright and reached down and rubbed my ankles underneath the irons, aware of the flow of blood returning warm beneath my fingers. There was for the first time this year a wintry touch about the morning, damp and cold, and I could see a line of pale frost where the hard clay of the floor met the bottom plank of the jail wall. I sat there for several minutes, rubbing my ankles and shivering some. Suddenly I was very hungry, and I felt my stomach churn and heave. For a while all was still. They had put Hark in the cell next to me the evening before, and now through the planks I could hear his heavy breathing—a choked, clotted sound as if air were escaping through his very wounds. For an instant I was on the verge of waking him with a whisper, for we had had no chance to speak, but the sound of his breathing was slow and heavy with exhaustion. I thought, Let him sleep, and the words I had already formed on my lips went unspoken. I sat still on the board, watching the dawn light grow and fill the cell like a cup, stealthily, blossoming with the color of pearl. Far off in the distance now I heard a rooster crow, a faint call like a remote hurrah, echoing, fading into silence. Then another rooster crowed, nearer now. For a long while I sat there, listening and waiting. Save for Hark’s breathing there was no sound at all for many minutes, until at last I heard a distant horn blow, mournful and familiar-sounding, a hollow soft diminishing cry in the fields beyond Jerusalem, rousing up the Negroes on some farm or other.

  After a bit I manipulated the chain so that I could slide my legs off the board and stand up. The chain allowed my feet a yard or so of movement, and by shuffling to the length of the chain and then stretching myself forward I could see out the open barred window into the dawn. Jerusalem was waking. From where I was standing I could see two houses nearby, perched at the edge of the riverbank where the cypress bridge began. Through one house someone moved with a candle, a flickering light which passed from bedroom to living room to hallway to kitchen, where it finally came to rest on some table and stood still, yellow and wavering. Behind the other house, closer to the bridge, an old woman covered with a greatcoat came out with a chamber pot; holding the steaming pot before her like a crucible, she hobbled across the frozen yard toward a whitewashed wooden privy, the breath coming from her mouth in puffs of smoke. She opened the door of the privy, went in, and the sound of the hinges grated with a small shriek on the frosty air until abruptly and with a crack like that of a gun the door slammed shut behind her. Suddenly, more from hunger than anything else, I felt dizzy and closed my eyes. Tiny freckles of light danced across my vision and I thought for an instant I was going to fall but I caught myself against the sill of the window; when I opened my eyes again, I saw that the candle in the first house had gone out, and gray smoke was pluming upward from the chimney.

  Just then from afar I heard a distant drumming noise, a plunging of hoofbeats in erratic muffled tattoo which grew louder and louder as it approached from the west across the river. I raised my eyes to the far riverbank fifty yards away, where the tangled forest wall of cypress and gum trees loomed high over waters flowing muddy and cold and sluggish in the dawn. A rent in the wall marked the passage of the county road, and now through this rent a horse at an easy gallop appeared, carrying a cavalryman, followed closely by another, then still another, three soldiers in all: like a collision of barrels they struck the cypress bridge in a thunderous uproar of hooves and squealing timber, passed swiftly across the river into Jerusalem, guns glinting in the pale light. I watched until they had galloped out of sight and until the noise of hoofbeats faded into a soft dim drumming behind me in the town. Then it was still again. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the window sill. The darkness was comforting to my eyes. It had for many years been my custom to pray at this hour of the day, or to read from the Bible; but during the five days that I had been made prisoner I had been refused the Bible, and as for prayer—well, it was no surprise to me any longer that I was totally unable to force a prayer from my lips. I still had this craving to perform a daily act which for the years of my grown-up life had become as simple and as natural as a bodily function, but which now seemed so incapable of accomplishment as to resemble a problem in geometry or some other mysterious science beyond my understanding. I now could not even recall when the ability to pray had left me—one month, two months, perhaps even more. It might have been some consolation, at least, had I known the reason why this power had deserted me; but I was denied even this knowledge and there seemed no way at all to bridge the gulf between myself and God. So for a moment, as I stood with my eyes closed and with my head pressed against the cold wood sill, I felt a terrible emptiness. Again I tried to pray but my mind was a void, and all that filled my consciousness was the still fading echo of plunging hoofbeats and roosters crowing far off in the fields beyond Jerusalem.

  Suddenly I heard a rattling at the bars behind me and I opened my eyes, turning to see Kitchen’s face in the lantern light. It was a young face, eighteen perhaps nineteen, pimpled and pockmarked and slack-jawed, quite stupid and so pitifully scared as to make me feel that I had perhaps wreaked upon him some irreversible mental change. For what had begun five days ago as apprehension had changed to constant fright, and this finally, it was plain to see, to a hopeless and demoralizing terror as each day passed and I slept and ate and br
eathed, still unclaimed by death. I heard his voice behind the bars, aquiver with dread. “Nat,” he said. Then, “Hey, old Nat,” in a skittish hesitant voice. “Nat, wake up!”

  For a moment I wanted to shout out, yell “Scat!” and watch him fly out of his britches, but I said only: “I’m awake now.”

  He was obviously confounded to find me at the window. “Nat,” he said quickly. “The lawyer’s coming. Remember? He wants to see you. You awake?” He stammered a bit as he spoke, and by the lantern’s glow I could see his white drawn young face with bulging eyes and a bloodless area of fright around the mouth. Just then I again felt a great empty aching in my stomach.

  “Marse Kitchen,” I said, “I’m hungry. Please. I wonder if you could fetch me a little bite to eat. Kindly please, young mastah.”

  “Breakfast ain’t until eight,” he replied in a croak.

  I said nothing for a moment, watching him. Maybe it was hunger alone which stirred up a last breath, the ultimate gasp of a fury I thought I had safely laid to rest six weeks before. I looked back into the infantine slack-jawed face, thinking: Mooncalf, you are just a lucky child. You are the kind of sweet meat Will was after … And for no reason at all a vision of mad Will came back, and I thought in spite of myself, the moment’s rage persisting: Will, Will. How that mad black man would have relished this simpleton’s flesh … The rage shriveled, died within me, leaving me with a momentary sense of waste and shame and exhaustion. “Maybe you could fetch me just a little piece of pone,” I said, pleading, thinking: Big talk will fetch you nothing but nigger talk might work. Certainly I had nothing to lose, least of all my pride. “Just a little bitty piece of pone,” I coaxed, coarse and wheedling. “Please, young mastah. I’m most dreadful hungry.”