The Vaughans’ ain’t west, I thought. The Vaughans’ place is east.
I sat there without moving. One of my mules stamped wearily, setting the traces to jingling. Around me in the woods the sound of frogs was deafening, shrilling in a ceaseless insensate choir like wind through a million reeds. Almost imperceptibly the moon sank slowly behind a thicket of cypress trees, and the log road was shadowed in a tangle of bent silhouetted limbs and branches, black as human arms. From the south a gentle breeze sprang up and I heard a whispering and a stirring across the leafy roof of the forest.
“Lord?” I said aloud.
Still I listened to the soft and sibilant rustling among the moonlit treetops, and I held my breath as if waiting for the sound of some immanent, hovering voice.
“Lord?” I called again. But as I sat listening the wind died, and along with it the whispering and rustling, the unspoken voice, and the night once again was enveloped in a shrilling of frogs, the ripe hot chirruping of katydids among the trees.
I must have waited there for an hour or more. Then slowly I started back—with an emptiness such as I had never felt before—knowing that I did not have to read the paper in my hand to make me sure of what I already knew, thinking miserably, fiercely: Willis. And those boys! Gone, Lord. Plain gone for good! Listen, Lord. Not hired out, not Vaughan’s, not anything but that man with the watch who was nothing but a nigger trader. Simple as that, yes, Lord! Not hired out but Jesus Christ Almighty sold … Sold, Lord, sold!
And he was saying: “One might think I was a blockhead not to know why you’ve been moping around for so long and regarding me so accusingly. But though I will take the blame for poor management of an already bungled transaction, I will have to still steadfastly defend myself from any charge of insensibility. For is that not what you find me guilty of?”
“I don’t understand what that word means,” I said. “The charge of—something.”
“The charge of insensibility. The charge that I somehow blithely allowed you to arrange to take the boy to a camp meeting while fully aware that he was to be sold before you ever got to Jerusalem. Which brings me to another matter that I should mention in passing. And that is the camp meeting itself. I was in Jerusalem that Friday, which as you may remember was the first day of the revival. I believe I counted no more than twenty-four of the faithful, not including several stray cats and dogs, at the meeting grounds. They packed up and left the next day, and had you gone there with your wagonload of wild-eyed apostles you would have been greeted by a deserted field of grass. Which only goes to show that this benighted countryside cannot sustain a religious revival any more than it can feed itself. So I mention in passing that I saved you from a bad disappointment. But as for the lad in question, I must only repeat that I had no more idea that you were taking him to that camp meeting than I had knowledge that the two of you were what you describe as inseparable friends. Lacking eyes in the back of my head, or a seventh sense, I can scarcely be asked to mark the relationship between every human being among the eighty or so of all colors that exist on this property. And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one’s own life are other men, they who are so desperately preoccupied with their own. I knew nothing about you and that boy, nothing at all.”
I remained silent, wetting my lips with my tongue and feeling desolate and miserable, gazing at the library floor.
“I have told you more than once now that had you come to me the next day and stated your case—had you made yourself immediately clear instead of for two weeks casting me these looks of canine reproach—I should have taken steps to get the boy back, buy him back even though that might mean money and travel to an extent quite out of the ordinary. But I must try to convince you that surely by now he has passed through the Petersburg market—though even of the place I cannot be really certain, it may be that he was taken to a sale in Carolina—whatever, that he has been passed on into some buyer’s hands and must now be on the way to Georgia or Alabama, though one can hope that a kindly providence has seen fit that he somehow remain in Virginia. This, however, I sincerely doubt. The fact remains that he would now seem to be all but irrecoverable. I am in no way blaming you for lacking the presence of mind to come to me earlier when I may have been able to do something about it. I am only asking you now to try to understand the impossibility of my position. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said after a moment. “Yes, I do but—”
“Yes, but again,” he interrupted, “you are still eaten up about that one thing that will not let you alone. Even though you say you told him of your own surprise, you are devoured by the terrible idea that the boy for the rest of his life will think that you were a party to, an accomplice in, his disposal. Am I correct in this? Isn’t that what you said you are unable to shake from your mind?”
“Yes,” I replied, “that’s right.”
“Then what can I say? Say that I too am sorry? I’ve said that over and over to you before. Perhaps he will think that, perhaps not. Possibly it would be better for your peace of mind if you envisioned him thinking charitably of you—if indeed it occurs to him to think of you as being involved in his disposition at all—envisioned him thinking of you only as an unwitting and ignorant dupe in the whole transaction, which you were. But if he thinks otherwise, I can only repeat again and for the last time that I am sorry. There is nothing else that I can say. Understand again: I had no idea that Abraham would fall ill and that you would become the—the instrument by which those boys were delivered into—into other hands.” He halted then and looked at me, lapsing into silence.
“But—” I began slowly, “but I—”
“But what?”
“All right,” I went on, “I see pretty well, I guess, about Willis, you didn’t know about him and I. How I was teaching him and all. But this other thing I don’t understand. I mean, going out at night like that and thinking they was going to be hired out at the Vaughans’.” I paused. “I mean, everyone was going to know what really happened anyway, by and by. Or not by and by. Soon.”
He looked away from me and when he spoke at last his voice was faint and faraway; suddenly I realized how weary he seemed, how gaunt were his cheeks and how red-rimmed and vacant were his eyes. “I will be truthful with you. I was quite simply troubled—afraid. I got confused, lost my bearings. Only twice do I recall darkies ever being sold away from here—both times by my father, both of the darkies, I’m afraid, crazy people who were a threat to the community. Furthermore and aside from that, there has never until now been any need. So I had never sold off hands before, and as I have readily admitted, it was a bungled transaction. I had not wanted the word to get around, I was afraid of the trouble and unrest that would ensue once the darkies knew that some of the people were being sold. So in my confusion I conceived the idea of disposing of the first four under the cover of night and in the guise of a fortnight’s hire to Major Vaughan. I thought that somehow the shock would be less this way, that it would be easier for the place to become accustomed to their absence. Worst of all, I conspired with a trader. It was folly to expect anything to come of this method. It was devious and cowardly. The duplicity I The masquerade! I should have done it in broad daylight with all the plantation as gaping onlookers to a plain and simple sale, with money changing hands in full view. Of the entire proceedings the only redeeming feature may be that at least I tried to make certain that my first sale would involve no separation of families. It was unfortunate for you, perhaps imponderably unfortunate for your young friend, that my resolve to pick only boys who were old enough to make the break, boys who additionally had already been orphaned and who thus had no family ties to sever—well, it was unfortunate that he was one of four who answered to that description.” He halted again, remaining silent, then said in a faint voice: “I’m sorry. God, how sorry I am, that Willie …”
“Willis,” I said. “And so
you just had to sell them. There just wasn’t any other way.”
His back was to me now, he stood facing the great high window open to the spring garden, and his voice, dim enough at the outset, was barely audible and I had to strain to hear it, as if it belonged to someone so infirm and depleted, or so lacking in spirit or hope, that whether the words could be understood was at last a matter of indifference. He went on as if he hadn’t heard me.
“Well, soon all of them will be gone—everything—not just the land now utterly consumed by that terrible weed, not just the wagons and the pigs and the oxen and the mules but the men too, the white men and the women and the black boys—the Willies and the Jims and the Shadrachs and the Todds—all gone south, leaving Virginia to the thorn bushes and the dandelions. And all this we see here will be gone too, and the mill wheel will crumble away and the wind will whistle at night through these deserted halls. Mark my word. It is coming soon.”
He paused, then said: “Yes, I had to sell those boys because I needed the money. Because anything non-human I had to sell was unsellable. Because those boys were worth over a thousand dollars and only through their sale could I begin to make the slightest inroad upon those debts I have accumulated for seven years—seven years during which I have lied to myself night and day in an effort to believe that what I saw around me was an illusion, that this mutilated and broken Tidewater would survive in spite of itself, that no matter how wrecked and eaten up the soil, no matter how many men and chattel began to move south to Georgia and Alabama, Turner’s Mill would forever be here grinding out timber and meal. But now it is timber and meal for ghosts.” He ceased speaking for a moment, then again the weary voice resumed: “What should I have done instead? Set them free? What a ghastly joke! No, they had to be sold, and the rest of them will be sold too, and soon Turner’s Mill will stand a dead hulk like the others on the landscape, and somewhere in the far South people may remember it but it will be remembered as if it were the fragment of a dream.”
For a long time now he fell silent and then finally he said (or I think he spoke my name, I was straining so hard to hear), “Nat …” And when he spoke again, his voice was the barest murmur as if whispering from the far bank of a stream against a rising wind. “I sold them out of the desperation to hang on pointlessly a few years longer.” He made an abrupt gesture with his lifted arm, and it seemed that he passed his hand in a quick angry motion across his eyes. “Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in such a mean conjunction with its own flesh, its own kind. How else account for such faltering, clumsy, hateful cruelty? Even the possums and the skunks know better! Even the weasels and the meadow mice have a natural regard for their own blood and kin. Only the insects are low enough to do the low things that people do—like those ants that swarm on poplars in the summertime, greedily husbanding little green aphids for the honeydew they secrete. Yes, it could be that mankind has yet to be born. Ah, what bitter tears God must weep at the sight of the things that men do to other men!” He broke off then and I saw him shake his head convulsively, his voice a sudden cry: “In the name of money! Money!”
He became silent and I stood waiting for him to continue, but he said nothing, turned with his back toward me in the dusk. Afar and high above I heard Miss Nell call out: “Sam! Samuel! Is there anything wrong?” Yet again for a long while he made no sign, no motion, so at last I moved quietly toward the door and left the room.
Three years after this episode (and a galloping swift three years they seemed to me)—a month before my twenty-first birthday and at just about the time I had originally been destined to start my life anew in Richmond—I was removed from Marse Samuel’s purview and passed into the temporary custody of, or fell under the protection of, or was rented out to, or was borrowed by, a Baptist preacher named the Reverend Alexander Eppes, pastor to an impoverished flock of farmers and small tradesmen living in a district called Shiloh about ten miles to the north of Turner’s Mill. For a long time I was never quite clear as to the relationship between me and the Reverend Eppes. Yet, one thing is certain, and this is that I was not “sold,” in the unadorned, mercenary sense of the word. The other Negroes at Turner’s Mill might be sold—and sold they were, with depressing regularity—but the notion that I could be disposed of in this way was, up to and including the moment when I passed into the hands of the Reverend Eppes, quite inconceivable. Thus for the next three years, aware though I might have been of the uncertainty of the future that lay before me, I never thought once that Marse Samuel would not still ensure my freedom in Richmond as he had so eagerly promised—and I kept up this sunny optimism and complacency even as I watched Turner’s Mill and all of its land and its people and its chattel and its livestock disintegrate before my eyes like one of those river islands at flood time which slowly crumbles away at the edges, toppling all of its drenched and huddled ragtag occupants, coons and rabbits and blacksnakes and foxes, into the merciless brown waters.
The Negroes—because they were by far the most valuable of the property, because at anywhere between four hundred and six hundred dollars apiece they represented the only safe, solid capital which Marse Samuel could liquidate in order to meet his creditors’ incessant demands (the creditors too were packing up and leaving the Tidewater, hence an urgency in their claims)—the Negroes began to be sent off at a steady rate, in twos and threes or singly, a family here, another there, though often months might go by without a sale. All at once would appear a man in a gig, a gentleman with white side whiskers and a thick gold watch chain, stamping the mud from his mirror-bright boots. In the library I would serve biscuits and port from a silver tray, listening to Marse Samuel’s voice wan and weary in the summer dusk: “It is the traders who are an abomination, sir, the traders! That they will generally pay more means nothing to me. They are unscrupulous, sir, and would think nothing of separating a mother from her only child. That is why, helpless as I am in this dreadful situation, I can at least insist upon dealing with a gentleman … Yes, with one bad exception, so far all my sales have been with gentlemen like yourself … You are from the York County Fitzhughs, you say? Then you must be a cousin of Thaddeus Fitzhugh, a classmate of mine at William & Mary … Yes, the last lot of people I sold was to a gentleman heading west to the Boonslick country, I believe, in Missouri; I sold him a family of five … A most humane and learned gentleman from Nottoway he was … You are favored by the gods, sir as you must know, to have a mill situated near a city like Richmond, free of the burden, the curse of land … I do not know, sir, it is clear that time is drawing short for me here. Perhaps I shall go to Kentucky or Missouri too, though I have heard of interesting prospects in Alabama … Come now, I will show you George and Peter, the best mill hands I have left, you may be sure that they are uncommonly likely Negroes … Only a few of my darkies will have been fortunate enough to remain in Virginia …”
So George and Peter would go, or Sam and Andrew, or Lucy and her two young boys, packed off in a wagon which I myself would often drive to deliver them in Jerusalem, and always I was haunted and perplexed by the docile equanimity and good cheer with which these simple black people, irrevocably uprooted, would set out to encounter a strange and unknown destiny. Although they might cast backward what appeared to be the faintest glimmer of a wistful glance, this final parting from a place which had been their entire universe for years caused them no more regret than did the future cast over them worry or foreboding: Missouri or Georgia were as far away as the stars, or as near as the next plantation, it was all the same to them, and with despair I marked how seldom they seemed to bother even bidding farewell to their friends. Only the rupture of some family tie I felt could grieve them, and such calamities did not happen here. Twittering and giggling, they mounted the wagon poised to carry them to an impossible fate at the uttermost ends of the earth, and they could speak only of an aching knee, the potency of a hairball from a mule’s stomach as a charm against witches
, the proper way to train a dog to tree a possum, and mumble incessantly about eating. Slumbrous in broad daylight, they would flop asleep against the side boards of the wagon, pink lips wet and apart, nodding off into oblivion even before they had been taken beyond the gate, even before they were carried past the bounds of that land which had composed the entire smell and substance and geography of their lives and whose fields and meadows and shimmering woodland now dwindled away behind them, unseen and unremarked, forever. They cared nothing about where they came from or where they were going, and so snored loudly or, abruptly waking, skylarked about, laughing and slapping each other, and trying to clutch at the passing overhead leaves. Like animals they relinquished the past with as much dumb composure as they accepted the present, and were unaware of any future at all. Such creatures deserved to be sold, I thought bitterly, and I was torn between detestation for them and regret that it was too late for me to save them through the power of the Word.
And so at last an alien quietude and stillness settled over the plantation, a hush so profound that it was in itself like the echo or reverberation of a faint remembered sound upon the ear. Finally it was not alone the Negroes who were disposed of but all the rest—the mules and the horses and the pigs, the wagons and the farming implements and the tools, saws and spinning wheels and anvils and house furniture, buggies and buggy whips and spades and scythes and hoes and hammers, all and anything movable or unhingeable and detachable and worth more than half a dollar. And the absence of these things left a silence astonishing and complete. The great mill wheel, its last revolution accomplished, lay idle on its oaken shaft bedecked with dried mattings of greenish pond weed and grass, motionless now, the deep-throated steady grumble and roar as much a memory as those other diurnal sounds, far more faint yet persistent, that had echoed in all weathers season after season from dawn till dusk: the chink-chinking of hoes in the distant cornfields, sheep bleating on the lawn and a Negro’s sudden rich laughter, an anvil banging in the blacksmith’s shop, a snatch of song from one of the remotest cabins, the faint crashing in the woods of a felled tree, a stirring within the big house, a fidget and a buzz, a soft musical murmuration. Slowly these sounds diminished, faded, became still altogether, and the fields and rutted roadways lay as starkly deserted as a place ravaged by the plague: weeds and brambles invaded the cornfields and the meadows; sills, frames, and doors fell apart in the empty outbuildings. At night, where once glowing hearths lit each cabin down the slope, now all lay in suffocating dark like the departure of the campfires of some army on the plains of Israel.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 134
