“I don’ know, Nat,” Hark said finally. “I tries and tries. But hit seem I cain’t git over dat black-assed feelin’. I tries, though.” He paused, ruminating, nodding his head ever so slightly over the bloody carcass in his hands. “ ’Sides, dat man he look so sad an’ mou’nful. Never seed such a sad an’ mou’nful man. Kind of felt sorry fo’ de man. What you reckon made him so sad-lookin’ anyways?”
I heard Cobb returning from the press through the weeds, unsteadily, stumbling slightly, with a brittle crackling sound of underbrush being trampled underfoot. “Feel sorry for a white man and you wastin’ your sorrow,” I said in a low voice. Then even as I spoke I made a sudden connection in my mind, remembering how a few months before I had overheard Travis speaking to Miss Sarah about this man Cobb, and the terrors which had beset him grisly and Job-like within the space of a single year: a merchant and banker of property and means, chief magistrate of the county, master of the Southampton Hounds, he lost his wife and two grown daughters to typhoid fever on the coast of Carolina, whither, ironically, he had sent his ladies to recuperate from winter attacks of the bronchial ailments to which all three were prone. Shortly afterward his stable, a brand-new structure on the outskirts of Jerusalem, burned to the ground in one horrid and almost instantaneous holocaust, incinerating all therein including two or three prize Morgan hunters and many valuable English saddles and harnesses, not to mention a young Negro groom. Subsequently, the unfortunate man, having taken heavily to the bottle to ease his affliction, fell down some stairs and broke his leg; the limb failed to mend properly, and although ambulatory, he was plagued by a hectic, mild, irresistible fever and by unceasing pain. When I first heard of all this adversity I could not help but feel a spasm of satisfaction (do not consider me altogether heartless—I am not, as you shall surely see; but the contentment a Negro takes in a white man’s misery, existing like a delicious tidbit among bleak and scanty rations, can hardly be overestimated), and I must confess that now as I heard Cobb behind me toiling back through the noisy weeds I experienced anew the same sense of gratification. (For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came …) A small thrill of pleasure coursed through my flesh.
I thought he was going to walk past us to the shop or perhaps the house. Certainly I was taken by surprise when, instead, Cobb halted next to us with his boots practically atop one of the skinned rabbits. Again Hark and I started to rise, again he motioned for us to continue work. “Go on, go on,” he repeated, taking a huge gulp from the bottle. I heard the brandy vanish with a froglike croak in the back of his gullet, then the long aspirated gasp of breath, the final wet smacking of lips. “Ambrosia,” he said. Above us the voice was self-confident, sturdy, stentorian; it had an unmistakable vigor and force, even though the tired undertone of sorrow remained, and I felt the residue of an emotion, ever so faint, which I must confess was only the fear I was born and brought up with. “Am-ba-ro-sia,” he said. My fear receded. The yellow cur dog came snuffling up and I hurled into his face a slippery blue handful of rabbits’ guts, which he made off with into the cotton patch, groaning with pleasure. “A Greek word,” Cobb went on. “From ambrotos, that is to say, immortal. For surely the gods were conferring upon us poor humans a kind of immortality, no matter how brief and illusory, when they tendered us this voluptuous gift, made of the humble and omnipresent apple. Comforter to the lonely and outcast, an anodyne for pain, a shelter against the chill wind of remorseless, oncoming death—surely such an elixir must be touched by the hand of something or someone divine !” Another hiccup—it was like a species of shriek, really prodigious—racked his frame, and again I heard him take a swig from the bottle. Intent upon my rabbits, I had not as yet looked up, but I had caught a glimpse of Hark: transfixed, with bloody glistening hands outstretched, he was gazing open-mouthed at Cobb with a look of absolute attention, a kind of ignorant and paralyzed awe affecting to behold; straining to understand, he moved his lips silently in unison with Cobb’s, chewing upon the gorgeous syllables as if upon air; droplets of sweat had burst forth from his black brow like a spray of quicksilver, and for an instant I could almost have sworn that he had ceased breathing. “Aaa-h,” Cobb sighed, smacking his lips. “Pure delight. And is it not remarkable that to his already estimable endowments—the finest wheelwright in the Southside of Virginia—your master Mr. Joseph Travis should add another supreme talent, that of being the most skillful distiller of this ineffable potion within the span of a hundred miles? Do you not find that truly remarkable? Do you not now.” He was silent. Then he said again, ambiguously, in a voice which seemed—to me at least—touched with threat: “Do you not now?”
I had begun to feel uncomfortable, disturbed. Perhaps I was oversensitive (as always) to the peculiar shading of a white man’s tone; nonetheless, there seemed to be something pointed, oppressive, sardonic about this question, alarming me. It has been my usual experience that when a strange white man adopts this florid, familiar manner, and when his listener is black, the white man is out to have a little fun at the black man’s expense. And such had been my developing mood of tension during the recent months that I felt I must avoid at all costs (and no matter how harmless the by-play) even the faintest premonition of a situation. Now the man’s wretched question had deposited me squarely upon a dilemma. The trouble is: a Negro, in much the same way as a dog, has constantly to interpret the tone of what is being said. If, as was certainly possible, the question was merely drunken-rhetorical, then I could remain humbly and decently mute and scrape away at my rabbit. This (my mind all the while spinning and whirling away like a water mill) was the eventuality I preferred—dumb nigger silence, perhaps a little scratching of the old woolly skull, and an illiterate pink-lipped grin, reflecting total incomprehension of so many beautiful Latinisms. If on the other hand, as seemed more likely from the man’s expectant silence, the question was drunken-surly-sarcastic and demanding of an answer, I would be forced to mutter the customary Yassuh—Nawsuh being impermissible in view of the simple-minded nature of the question. What was so disturbing about this moment was my fear (and these fears, one may be assured, are neither vagrant nor inconsequential) that the Yassuh might very well be followed by something like this: “Ah, you do now. You do find it remarkable? Am I to understand then that you consider your master a dummox? That because he can make wheels he can’t make brandy? You darkies don’t have much regard for your owners these days, do you? Well, I want to tell you something, Pompey, or whatever your ludicrous name is, that …” et cetera. The changes on this situation are endless, and do not think me overly cautious: motiveless nigger-needling is a common sport. But at this point it was not the possibility of humiliation I wanted to avoid so much as the possibility that having recently vowed that humiliation would never again be a constraint upon me, or a repression, I would be forced to surmount it by beating the man’s brains out, thus completely wrecking all my great designs for the future.
I had begun to shake, and I felt a stirring, a kind of watery weakness in my bowels; just then, however, came a fortunate distraction: nearby in the woods there arose the sound of a crashing in the undergrowth, and we all three turned to see a tawny mud-streaked wild sow lumber out of a thicket, snorting and grunting, trailed by her squealing brood; now as quickly as they appeared pig and piglets seemed to dissolve back into the sere and withered forest, the space of sky above silent and gray and desolate with low-hanging, tattered, wind-driven clouds like smudged cotton through which faint sunlight seeped yellowish and wan. Distracted, our eyes lingered on the scene for a moment, and then came a slamming noise, very close, as the door of the shop opened suddenly, and caught by the wind, hurled itself on screaming hinges backward against the wall. “Hark!” a voice called. It was my boy owner, Putnam. “Where you, Hark?” The child was in a foul mood; I could tell this from the blotches on his pale white face: they grew prominent and r
osy whenever he became exercised or harassed. I should add that Putnam had more or less had it in for Hark ever since the preceding year when, out hunting hickory nuts on a balmy afternoon. Hark had innocently but clumsily ambushed Putnam and Joel Westbrook in some tangled carnal union by the swimming pond, both of the boys naked as catfish on the muddy bank, writhing about and skylarking with each other in the most oblivious way. “Never seed such foolishness,” Hark had said to me, “But ’twarn’t like I was gwine pay it no never mind. Nigger don’ care ’bout no white boys’ foolishness. Now dat daggone Putnam he so mad, you’d think it was me dat dey caught jackin’ off de ole bird.” I sympathized with Hark but in the end I couldn’t take it too seriously, as it simply typified an uncorrectable condition: white people really see nothing of a Negro in his private activity, while a Negro, who must walk miles out of his path to avoid seeing everything white people do, has often to suffer for even the most guileless part of his ubiquitous presence by being called a spy and a snooping black scoundrel.
“Hark!” the boy called again. “Get in here straight away! What do you think you’re doin’ out there, you no-account nigger! Fire’s gone plumb out! Get in here, God durn you lazy wretch!” The boy wore a leather apron; he had a coarse-featured, sullen, pouty-mouthed face with flowing dark hair and long side whiskers: as he shouted at Hark, I felt a brief, fleeting spasm of rage and I longed for the day to arrive when I might get my hands on him. Hark scrambled to his feet and made off for the shop as Putnam called out again, this time to Cobb: “I think you have someways broke a axle, Judge, sir! My stepdad will fix it! He should be here afore too long!”
“Very well,” Cobb called back. Then so abruptly that for an instant I thought he was still talking to the boy, he said: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. That of course is most familiar, but for the life of me I am unable to place it within the Scriptures. I suspect however that it is one of the Proverbs of King Solomon, whose delight it was to rail at fools, and to castigate human folly …” As he went on talking, a queasy sensation crept over me: the customary positions were reversed, the white man this time had caught the nigger at his gossip. How did I know that my own black blabbermouth would betray me, and that he would overhear every word I had said? Humiliated, ashamed of my humiliation, I let the sticky wet rabbit corpse fall from my fingers and braced my spirit, preparing for the worst. “Was it not Solomon who said the fool shall be the servant to the wise? Was it not he too who said a fool despiseth his father’s instruction? And is not the instruction of the father, through Paul the Jew of Tarsus, manifest even to the fools of this great dominion, to wit: Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!” As he continued to speak I slowly stood erect, but even at my full height he towered over me, sickly, pale, and sweating, his nose, leaking slightly in the cold, like a great scimitar protruding from the stormy and anguished face, the brandy bottle clutched in one huge mottled hand against his breast as he stood there in a limping posture, swaying and perspiring, speaking not so much to me as through and past me toward the scudding clouds. “Yes, and to this comes the reply, to this mighty and manifest truth we hear the response“—he paused for an instant, hiccuping, and then his voice rose in tones of mockery—”to this irresistible and binding edict we hear the Pharisee cry out of that great institution the College of William & Mary, out of Richmond, from the learned mountebanks abroad like locusts in the Commonwealth: ’Theology must answer theology. Speak you of liberty? Speak you of the yoke of bondage? How then, country magistrate, do you answer this? Ephesians Six, Five: Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ. Or this, my hayseed colleague, how answer you to this? One Peter, Two, Eighteen: Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. There, friend—there—is not that divine sanction for the bondage of which you rave and prattle?’ Merciful God in heaven, will such casuistry never end ! Is not the handwriting on the wall?” For the first time he seemed to look at me, fixing me for a moment with his feverish eyes before upending the bottle, thrusting its neck deep into his throat, where the brandy gulped and gurgled. “Howl ye,” he resumed, “Howl ye: for the day of the Lord is at hand: it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty. You’re the preacher they call Nat, are you not? Tell me then, preacher, am I not right? Is not Isaiah only a witness to the truth when he says howl ye? When he says the day of the Lord is at hand, and it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty? Tell me in the honesty of truth, preacher: is not the handwriting on the wall for this beloved and foolish and tragic Old Dominion?”
“Praise God, mastah,” I said, “that sure is true.” My words were evasively meek and humble, with a touch of ministerial sanctimony, but I uttered them mainly to cover up my sudden alarm. For now I was truly afraid that he had identified me; the fact that this strange and drunken white man knew who I was smote me like a blow between the eyes. A Negro’s most cherished possession is the drab, neutral cloak of anonymity he can manage to gather around himself, allowing him to merge faceless and nameless with the common swarm: impudence and misbehavior are, for obvious reasons, unwise, but equally so is the display of an uncommon distinction, for if the former attributes can get you starved, whipped, chained, the latter may subject you to such curiosity and hostile suspicion as to ruinously impair the minute amount of freedom you possess. As for the rest, his words had spilled from his lips so rapidly and wildly that I was as yet unable to get the exact drift of his thought, which seemed nonetheless mighty precarious for a white man; and I still could not get over the sensation that he was trying to bait me, or lead me into some kind of trap. To conceal my dismay and confusion, again I mumbled, “That sure is true,” and I chuckled idiotically, gazing toward the ground while I slowly wagged my head—as if to indicate that this poor darky understood precious little if indeed he understood anything.
But now, bending down slightly, his face drifted nearer to me, the skin close up not flushed and whiskey-pink as I had imagined but pale as lard, utterly bloodless and seeming to grow even whiter as I forced myself to return his gaze. “Don’t play dumb with me,” he said. There was no hostility in his voice, its sound was more request than command. “Your mistress pointed you out to me just now. Even so, I would have known, I could have distinguished between you two. The other Negro, what’s his name?”
“Hark,” I said. “That’s Hark, mastah.”
“Yes, I would have known you. I would have known even had I not overheard you. ’Feel sorry for a white man and the sorrow is wasted.’ Is that not what you said?”
A shiver of fear, old and habitual and humiliating, passed through me, and despite myself I averted my eyes and blurted: “I’m sorry I said that, mastah. I’m dreadful sorry. I didn’t mean it, mastah.”
“Poppycock!” he exclaimed. “Sorry that you said you’re not sorry for a white man? Come, come, preacher, you don’t mean that. You don’t mean that, do you?” He paused, waiting for an answer, but by now my distress and embarrassment had so unsettled me that I couldn’t even force a reply. Worse, I had begun to despise and curse myself for my own slow-witted inability to deal with the situation. I stood there licking my lips as I gazed out toward the woods, feeling suddenly like the most squalid type of cornfield coon.
“Now don’t play dumb with me,” he repeated, the voice edged with a tone almost gentle, curiously ingratiating. “Your reputation precedes you, as it were. For several years now there has come to my attention wondrous bruit of a remarkable slave, owned at different times by various masters here in the vicinity of Cross Keys, who had so surpassed the paltry condition into which he had been cast by destiny that—mirabile dictu—he could swiftly read, if called upon to demonstrate, from a difficult and abstract work in natural philosophy, and in a fair hand inscribe page after page of random dictati
on, and had mastered his numbers as far as a comprehension of simple algebra, and had so attained an understanding of Holy Scripture that such of those few adepts in the science of divinity as had examined his knowledge of the Bible came away shaking their heads in wonder at the splendor of his erudition.” He paused and belched. My eyes moved back again toward his, and I saw him wipe his mouth with his sleeve. “Rumor!” he resumed quickly. Now his voice had risen to a kind of impassioned runaway singsong, his eyes were wild and obsessed. “Astounding rumor to emerge from the backwoods of Old Virginny! Astounding as those rumors which in olden times came back from the depths of Asia—that at the source of the River Indus, I believe it was, dwelt a species of mammoth rat, six feet long, which could dance a lively jig while accompanying itself on a tambourine, and when approached would sprout heretofore invisible wings and fly to the topmost branch of the nearest palm tree. Rumor almost impossible to entertain! For to believe that from this downtrodden race, the very laws governing which bind it to an ignorance more benighted and final than death, there could arise one single specimen capable of spelling cat is asking rational intelligence to believe that balmy King George the Third was not a dastardly tyrant or that the moon is made of clabber cheese!” He had begun to jab his finger at me as he spoke, a long bony finger with hairy joints, sending it forth into my face in quick thrusts like a snake’s darting neck. “But beyond this, mind you, beyond this—to imagine this … this prodigy, this paragon, a Negro slave—oh, perish the vile word!—who had acquired the lineaments not just of literacy but of knowledge, who it was rumored could almost speak in the accents of a white man of breeding and cultivation; who, in short, while still one of this doomed empire’s most wretched minions, had transcended his sorry state and had become not a thing but a person—all this is beyond the realm of one’s wildest imagination. No. No! The mind boggles, refuses to accept such a grotesque image I Tell me, preacher, how do you spell cat? Come now, prove to me the reality of this hoax, this canard!” He kept jabbing his finger at me, the voice cajoling, amiable, the eyes still wintry-wild and obsessed. The smell of applejack was around him like a sweet vapor. “Cat!” he said. “Spell cat. Cat!”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 118
