ONCE WHEN I WAS A BOY OF TWELVE OR thereabouts, and living with my mother in the big house at Turner’s Mill, I remember a fat white man who stopped one night and had supper with my owner of that time, Samuel Turner. This traveling man was a bluff, hearty soul with a round red face, cruelly pockmarked, and a booming laugh. A dealer in farm implements—ploughs and harrows, shares and cultivators and the like—he traveled up and down the country with several huge wagons and a team of dray horses and a couple of boys to help him, stopping for the night at this or that farm or plantation, wherever he happened to be peddling his wares. I no longer recall the man’s name (if I ever knew it) but I do remember the season, which was the beginning of spring. Indeed, it was only what this man said about the weather and the season that caused me to remember him at all. For that evening in April, I was serving at the supper table (I had just recently begun this chore; there were two older Negroes in attendance, but it was my apprentice duty alone to replenish the glasses with cider or buttermilk, to pick up whatever fell to the floor, and to shoo away the cat and the dogs) and I recollect his voice, very loud but genial, as he orated to Marse Samuel and the family in the alien accent of the North: “No, sir, Mr. Turner,” he was saying, “they is no spring like it in this great land of ours. They is nothing what approaches the full springtide when it hits Virginia. And, sir, they is good reason for this. I have traveled all up and down the seaboard, from the furtherest upper ranges of New England to the hottest part of Georgia, and I know whereof I speak. What makes the Virginia spring surpassing fine? Sir, it is simply this. It is simply that, whereas in more southern climes the temperature is always so humid that spring comes as no surprise, and whereas in more northerly climes the winter becomes so prolonged that they is no spring at all hardly, but runs smack into summer—why, in Virginia, sir, it is unique! It is ideal! Nature has conspired so that spring comes in a sudden warm rush! Alone in the Virginia latitude, sir, is spring like the embrace of a mother’s arms!”
I remember this moment with the clarity of a great event which has taken place only seconds ago—the breath of spring still in my nostrils, the dusty evening light still vivid and golden, the air filled with voices and the gentle clash of china and silverware. As the traveling man ceases speaking, the clock in the far hallway lets fall six thudding cast-iron notes, which I hear through the soft yet precisely enunciated cadences of Samuel Turner’s own voice: “You are perhaps too complimentary, sir, for spring will soon also bring us a plague of bugs. But the sentiment is well taken, for indeed so far Nature has been kind to us this year. Certainly, I have but rarely seen such ideal conditions for planting.”
There is a pause as the sixth and final chime lingers for an instant with a somnolent hum, then dwindles away dully into infinity, while at this same instant I catch sight of myself in the ceiling-high mirror beyond the far sideboard: a skinny undersized pickaninny in a starched white jumper, the toes of one bare foot hooked behind the other leg as I stand wobbling and waiting, eyes rolling white with nervous vigilance. And my eyes return quickly to the table as my owner, for the traveling man’s benefit, gestures with his fork in a fond, circular, spacious motion at the family surrounding him: his wife and his widowed sister-in-law, his two young daughters around nineteen or twenty, and his two nephews—grown men of twenty-five or more with rectangular, jut-jawed faces and identical thick necks looming above me, their skin creased and reddened with sun and weather. Samuel Turner’s gesture embraces them all; swallowing a bite, he clears his throat elaborately, then continues with warm humor: “Of course, sir, my family here can hardly be expected to welcome such an active time of the year, after a winter of luxurious idleness.” There is a sound of laughter, and cries of “Oh, Papa!” and I hear one of the young men call above the sudden clamor: “You slander your industrious nephews, Uncle Sam!” My eyes wander to the traveling man; his red, evilly cratered face is crinkled in jollity, and a trickle of gravy threads its way down the side of his chin. Miss Louisa, the elder of the daughters, smiles in a vague and pretty way, and blushes, and she lets drop her napkin, which I instantly scurry to retrieve, replacing it upon her lap.
Now in the twilight the merriment slowly subsides, and the conversation proceeds in easy ruminative rhythms, the women silent, the men alone chatting garrulous and fullmouthed as I circle the table with the china pitcher of foaming cider, then return to my station between the two thick-necked nephews, resume my one-legged heron’s stance and slowly turn my gaze out into the evening. Beyond the veranda the pasture slopes away green and undulating toward the pinewoods. On the coarse weedy grass a score of sheep munch placidly in the yellow light, trailed by a collie dog and a small, bowlegged Negro shepherdess. Past them, far down the slope where a log road separates the lawn and the looming forest, I can see an empty cart drawn by two flop-eared mules, making its last trip of the day from the storehouse to the mill. On the seat of the cart sits a Negro man, a yellow straw hat raked down upon his head. As I watch, I see that the man is trying to scratch his back, first his left arm snaking up from his waist, then his right arm arching down over his shoulder as the black fingers grope in vain for the source of some intolerable itch. Finally, as the mules plod steadily down the slope and the cart ponderously rocks and veers, the man stands up with a lurching motion and scrapes his back cowlike up and down against the sidepost of the cart.
For some reason, I find this wonderfully amusing and I suddenly am aware that I am giggling to myself, though not so loudly that the white people may notice. Long moments pass as I watch the cart drift rocking across the margin of the woods, the man seated again as cart and mules pass with a distant drumming of hooves and creaking axles over the little bridge then around the murky lower rim of the millpond, where two white swans glide stately and soundless, finally vanishing behind the forest-shadowed white shape of the sawmill with its dull and sluggish rasp of metal-tortured timber drifting up faintly through the dusk: hrrush, hrrush. Closer now, the yap of the collie dog starts me out of my daydream, and I turn back to the table and the bright tinkling collision of china and silver, the traveling man’s voice broadly ingratiating as he speaks to Marse Samuel: “… a new line of sundries this year. Now for instance, I have some pure sea salt from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, for preserving and table use only, sir … They is nothing better in the market … And so you say they is ten people here, including the overseer and his family? And sixty-eight grown Negroes? Presuming it goes mostly for salt pork then, sir, I should say five sacks will do you nicely, a splendid bargain at thirty-one dollars twenty-five cents …”
Now again my mind begins to wander. My thoughts stray outdoors once more where the brilliant fuss of chattering birds intrudes in the fading day—blackbirds and robins, finches and squawking jays, and somewhere far off above the bottomlands the noise of some mean assembly of crows, their calls echoing venturesome and conniving and harsh. Again the scene outside captures my attention, so now slowly and with irresistible pleasure I turn to gaze at the coarse green slope with its slant of golden light and its nimble bustle of many wings, the flower bed only feet away ferny and damp with the odor of new-turned earth. The little black bowlegged shepherdess has vanished from the pasture, sheep and collie too, leaving behind a haze of dust to tremble in the evening light. Rising on fat whirlpools of air, this haze fills the sky like the finest sawdust. In the distance the mill still rasps with a steady husking noise above the monotonous roar of water from the sluiceway. Two huge dragonflies dart across the evening, wild and iridescent, a swift flash of transparency. Springtime. Worried that my excitement will show, I feel my limbs stretch and quiver with a lazy thrill. A sense of something quickening, a voluptuous stirring courses gently through my flesh. I hear the blood pulsing within me like some imagined wash of warm oceanic tides. In my mind I echo the traveling man’s words—Full springtide, spring, spring, I find myself whispering to myself—and this awakening brings to my lips the shadow of a grin. I feel half stunned, my eyes roll like marbles. I am filled with inexplicable happiness and a sense of tantalizing promise.
As the traveling man’s voice drifts back into hearing, I turn again and feel the gaze of my mistress, Miss Nell, upon me, and I look up then and see her mouth forming the whispered word “cider.” I grasp the heavy pitcher with two hands and again make my circuit of the table, filling the glasses of the women first, taking pains that not a drop is spilled. My care is meticulous. I hold my breath until the edge of the table swims dizzily before my eyes. Now finally I am at the elbow of the traveling man, who, as I serve him, ceases his talk of commerce long enough to look down at me and good-naturedly exclaim: “Well, I’ll be durned if that crock ain’t bigger than you are!” I am only half aware that he is addressing these words to me, and I am unconcerned as I pour the cider, replace the glass, and continue my tour around the table. “Cute little nipper too,” the traveling man adds in an offhand tone, but again I make no connection between myself and what is said until now, drawing near to Miss Nell, I hear her voice, gentle and indulgent as it descends from the rare white prodigous atmosphere above me: “And smart, you wouldn’t believe I Spell something, Nat.” And then to the traveling man: “Ask him something to spell.”
Suddenly I am fastened to my tracks and I feel my heart beat wildly as I realize that I am the focus of all eyes. The pitcher in my hands is as heavy as a boulder. He beams down at me; the radish-red broad cheeks are all benevolence as the man pauses, reflects, then says: “Can you spell ‘lady’?” But abruptly, before I can reply, I hear Samuel Turner interrupt, amused: “Oh no, something difficult!” And the traveling man scratches the side of his pitted face, still beaming: “Oh well,” he says, “let’s see, some kind of flower … ‘Columbine.’ Spell ’columbine.’ “ And I spell it, without effort and instantly but in a pounding fury of embarrassment, the pulse roaring in my ears as the letters tumble forth in a galloping rush: “… i-n-e, spells columbine!” And the laughter at the table that follows this, and a shrill echo from the walls, makes me realize in dismay that I am yelling at the top of my lungs.
“It is I am sure a kind of unorthodoxy, and considered thus by some,” I hear my master say (I resume my station, still flustered and with a madly working heart), “but it is my conviction that the more religiously and intellectually enlightened a Negro is made, the better for himself, his master, and the commonweal. But one must begin at a tender age, and thus, sir, you see in Nat the promising beginnings of an experiment. Of course, it is late for this child, compared with white children, yet …” As I listen to him speak, not completely comprehending the words, my panic and embarrassment (which had been made up in equal parts of childish self-consciousness and terror at the thought that I might publicly fail) diminish, fade away, and in their place I feel stealing over me a serene flow of pride and accomplishment: after all, I may have been a loudmouth, but I did know the word, and I sensed in the sunny laughter a laurel, a tribute. All of a sudden the secret pleasure I take in my exploit is like a delectable itch within, and though my expression in the mirror is glum, abashed, and my pink lips are persimmon-sour, I can hear my insides stirring. I feel wildly alive. I shiver feverishly in the glory of self.
But I seem to be quickly forgotten, for now the traveling man is again talking of his wares: “It is the Carey plough, sir, of stout cast iron, and I calculate it will supplant all ploughs presently in the market. They has been a big demand for it in the Northern states …” Yet even as he talks and my thoughts wander astray again, the proud glow of achievement hangs on, and I am washed by a mood of contentment and snug belonging so precious that I could cry out for the joy of it. Nor does it go away. It is a joy that remains even as the pinewoods begin to crowd ragged trembling shadows into the deserted pasture, and a horn blows far off, long and lonesomesounding, summoning the Negroes from the mill and the distant fields. As abruptly as some interrupted human grumble, the sawmill ceases its harsh rasp and husk, and for a moment the silence is like a loud noise in my ears. Now twilight deepens over the meadow, where bats no bigger than sparrows are flickering and darting in the dusk, and I can see through the evening shadows in the distance a line of Negro men trooping up from the mill toward the cabins, their faces black and barely visible but their voices rising and falling, wearily playful with intermittent cries of laughter as they move homeward with the languid, shuffling, shoulder-bent gait of a long day’s toil. Snatches of their talk rise up indistinctly across the field, sounds of gentle, tired skylarking in the twilight: “Hoo-dar, Simon! … Shee-it, nigger! … Cotch you, fo’ sho!” Quickly I turn away (could there have been a whiff of something desperate and ugly in that long file of sweating, weary men which upsets my glowing childish housebound spirit, disturbs the beatitude of that April dusk?) and circle the table with my pitcher one last time while the two other Negro house servants, Little Morning and Prissy, clear away the dishes and light thick candles on pewter candelabra that fill the darkening room with a pumpkin-hued glow.
My master is talking now, his chair pushed back, the thumbs of both hands hooked in the pockets of his vest. He is in his early forties (to be precise, he will be forty-three at five-thirty in the morning on the twelfth day of the coming June, according to one or another of the old house servants, who know more about the events in white people’s lives than white people do themselves) but he looks older—perhaps only to me, however, since I hold him in such awe that I am forced to regard him, physically as well as spiritually, in terms of the same patriarchal and venerable grandeur that glows forth from those Bible pictures of Moses on the mount, or an ancient Elijah exploding in bearded triumph at the transfiguration of Christ. Even so, the wrinkles around his mouth are early; he has worked hard, and this accounts for those lines and for the cheek whiskers which end in small tufts whiter than a cottontail’s butt. “Ugly as a mushrat,” my mother has said of him, and perhaps this is true: the angular face is too long and horselike, the nose too prominent and beaked, and, as my mother also has observed, “Lawd didn’t leave Marse Sam a whole lot of jawbone.” So much for my master’s chin. But his eyes are kindly, shrewd, luminous; there is still strength in his face, tempered by a curious, abiding sweetness that causes him ever to seem on the verge of a rueful smile. At this time, my regard for him is very close to the feeling one should bear only toward the Divinity.
“Let us adjourn to the veranda,” he says to the traveling man, pushing back his chair. “We usually retire more or less promptly at eight, but tonight you and I will share a bottle of port while we make out a requisition for my needs.” His hand falls lightly on the shoulder of the traveling man, who is rising now. “I hope you will forgive me if it sounds presumptuous,” he continues, “and it is a most unusual thing for me to say, but for a peddler who has the difficulties of so much travel, you sell an extremely reliable line of wares. And this, sir, as you must be aware, is of the greatest importance in a region like ours, removed so far from the centers of commerce. Since last year I have taken the opportunity of commending you to my friends.” The traveling man shines with pleasure, wheezing a little as he bows to the women and the young men, then moves on toward the door. “Well, thank you, sir …” he begins, but my owner’s voice interrupts, not rude, not even abrupt, but in continuation of his praise: “So that they shall be as satisfied as I have been in the past. And what did you say was your tomorrow’s destination? Greensville County? Then you must stop by Robert Munson’s place on the Meherrin River …”
The voices fade, and while I busy myself around the table, helping the old man Little Morning and the young woman Prissy clear the dishes, the rest of the family rises, slowly scattering in the last brief hours before bedtime: the two nephews to attend to a mare ready to foal, Miss Nell to take a poultice to a sick Negro child in the cabins, the three other women—all astir with gay anticipation as they bustle toward the parlor—to read aloud from something they call Marmion. Then these voices too fade away, and I am back in the kitchen again amid the clumping of crudely shod Negro feet and the sharp stench of a ham hock steaming on the stove, back with my tall, beautiful mother banging and grumbling in a swirl of greasy smoke—“ ’Thaniel, you better get dat butter down in de cellar lak I told you!” she calls to me—back in my black Negro world …
But that evening in the early darkness while I lie awake on my straw bed, the word columbine is like a lullaby on my tongue. I caress the word, whispering it over and over again, letting each letter form its own shape, as if suspended magically above me in the night. I lie at the drowsy edge of sleep, listening to the sounds of evening, to the feathery fuss and clumsy stir of chickens in their shed, a far-off howling dog, and from the millpond a steady passionate shrilling of frogs numberless as stars. All around me the smell of manure is rank and strong like the earth itself. Presently I hear my mother’s footsteps as she moves with a tired slat-slat of bare calloused feet from the kitchen, enters our tiny room, and lies down beside me in the dark. Almost at once she is fast asleep, breathing in a gentle rhythm, and I reach out and lightly touch the rough cotton shift above her ribs, to make certain that she is there. Then at last the spring night enfolds me as if with swamp and cedar and with drowsy remembrance, and dimly I hear a whippoorwill call through the dark, the word columbine still on my lips as I sink away into some strange dream filled with inchoate promise and a voiceless, hovering joy.
It was memories like this which stayed with me all through the few days left until my death. During the night just after the trial I came down with some kind of fever, and when I awoke the next morning my arms and legs were trembling with the cold, even though I was soaked in sweat and my head was afire and swollen with pain. The wind had risen and in the sunless morning light, pale as water, a blast of cold air howled through the open window, bringing with it a storm of gritty dust and pine needles and flying leaves. I started to call out to Kitchen, to ask him to fetch a blanket to stop up the window, but then I thought better of it, remained quiet: the white boy was still too scared of me even to answer. So again I lay back against the plank, shivering, and fell into a feverish doze when once more I was lying in the little boat, my spirit filled with a familiar yet mysterious peace as I drifted through the afternoon quiet of some wide and sunlit river toward the sea. In the distance I heard the ocean booming with the sound of mighty unseen breakers crashing on the shore. Far above me on its promontory stood the white temple, as ever serene and solitary and majestic, the sunlight bathing it as if with the glow of some great mystery as I moved on downriver past it, without fear, to the sandy cape and the tumultuous groaning sea … Then this vision glimmered out and I awoke, raging with fever, and I fell asleep again, only to awake sometime later in the day with the fever diminishing and my brow cold and dry and the remnant of something frail and unutterably sweet, like a bird call, lingering in my memory. Then not very long after this the fever commenced again and my mind was a wash and flow of nightmares, nightmares filled with unending moments of suffocation …
And so in this way, between waking and oblivion, with these reveries, voices, recollections, I passed the days and nights before the day of my execution …
My mother’s mother was a girl of the Coromantee tribe from the Gold Coast, thirteen years old when she was brought in chains to Yorktown aboard a schooner sailing out of Newport, Rhode Island, and only a few months older when she was sold at auction beneath a huge live oak tree in the harborside town of Hampton, to Alpheus Turner, who was Samuel Turner’s father. I never laid eyes on my grandmother—nor for that matter a Coromantee girl—but over the years I heard about her and her kind, and in my mind’s eye it is easy to see her as she squats beneath the live oak tree so many years ago, swelled up with child, panting in a slow fright, lifting her face slightly at Alpheus Turner’s approach to reveal a mouth full of filed teeth and raised tattoos like whorls of scattered birdshot on her cheeks, patterns blacker even than her tar-black skin. Who knows what she is thinking at the moment Turner draws near? Although his face is illumined by a beneficent smile, to her it is a fiendish smirk, and besides he is white, white as bone or skulls or deadwood, whiter than those malevolent ancestral ghosts that prowl the African night. And his voice is the voice of a ghoul. “Gnah!” he roars as he touches her, feeling the soundness of her limbs. “Fwagh!” He is saying only “Good!” and “Fine!” to the trader, but in her terror she believes she is about to be eaten. The poor thing nearly takes leave of her senses. She falls from her perch on the block and her mind reels back in space and time toward some childhood jungle memory of warm, enveloping peace. As she lies asprawl, the dealer’s line of talk is to her a witch doctor’s jabber of disconnected croaking sounds, having to do with ritual chops and stews. “They all take such fright, Mr. Turner, never mind! A fine little heifer! Aye, look at them fat tits! Look how they spring! I’ll wager she pops a ten-pound boy!”
But that same summer it was my mother who was born (publicly begat upon the same slave ship by some unknown black father) and it became well known around Turner’s Mill that when my young grandmother—who by this time had been driven crazy by her baffling captivity—gave birth to my mother, she was sent into a frenzy, and when presented with the babe, tried to tear it to pieces.
I expect that if my grandmother had not died soon after this, I would have later become a field or timber hand at the Turner place, or maybe a mill hand, which was only a small cut better. But on account of my grandmother I was lucky and became a house nigger. My grandmother died within days of my mother’s birth, refusing to eat, falling into a stupor until the moment of her last breath, when it was said that the black skin turned to the gray of ashes, collapsing in upon the inhabiting bones until the body of the child (for that is what she was) seemed so fragile as to be almost weightless, like a whitened, burnt-out stick of lightwood ready to crumble at the softest touch. For years there was a cedar headboard in the Negro graveyard, not far from the mill, with carved letters which read:
“TIG”
AET. 13
BORN AN
HEATHEN
DIED BAPTISED
IN CHRIST
A.D. 1782
R.I.P.
That graveyard is in an abandoned corner of a meadow, hard by a scrubby grove of juniper trees and loblolly pine. A plain pole fence, dilapidated to begin with but long since fallen into splintery ruin, sets off the place from the rest of the field; many of the headboards have toppled over to rot and mingle with the loamy earth, while in the spring those that remain become half hidden in a jungle of wild coarse greenery—skunk cabbage and cinnamon fern and a prickly tangle of jimson weed. In the summer the underbrush grows so thickly that you can no longer see the mounds where the Negroes are laid to rest. Grasshoppers sail through the weeds with small scaly whickerings, and ever so often a blacksnake slithers among the green, and on August days the odor is ripe and rank and very close, like a hot handful of grass. “How come you all de time studyin’ dat grabeyard, ’Thaniel?” my mother says. “Ain’t no place fo’ chillun to go studyin’ ’bout.” And it is true: most of the Negroes avoid the place, filled with superstitious dread, and this in some measure (the rest being lack of time; attention to the dead requires leisure) is the reason for the unsightly disrepair. But there is a leftover savage part of me that feels very close to my grandmother, and for a couple of years I am drawn irresistibly back to the graveyard, and often I steal away from the big house during the hot break after midday dinner, as if seeking among all those toppled and crumbling wood markers with their roll call of sweetly docile and abbreviated names like so many perished spaniels—“Peak” and “Lulu” and “Yellow Jake”—some early lesson in mortality. How strange it is, after all, at age thirteen to ponder the last resting place of your own grandmother, dead at thirteen herself …
But the next spring it is all gone. A new graveyard will be laid out at the edge of the woods, but before that—because it is drained and level and easy to get at—even this tiny remnant of crop land is needed, to raise sweet potatoes. I am filled with wonderment at how quickly the graveyard vanishes. It takes less than half a morning—burnt off by a gang of black field hands with casks of turpentine and blazing pine fagots, the weatherworn cedar headboards consumed by flame, the dry underbrush crackling and hissing as the bugs spring up in a swarm and the field mice scuttle away, the cooling black char leveled down by mule team and harrow, so that nothing remains of “Tig,” not the faintest trace nor any vestige of the rest—of the muscle, sleep, laughter, footsteps, grimy toil and singing and madness of all those black unremembered servitors whose shaken bones and dust, joining my grandmother’s in the general clutter underground, are now made to complete the richness of the earth. Only when I hear a voice—the voice of a Negro man, an old field hand standing by amid the swirling smoke, slope-shouldered, loose-lipped, grinning with a mouthful of blue gums, gabbling in that thick gluey cornfield accent I have learned to despise: “Dem old dead peoples is sho gwine grow a nice passel of yams!”—only when I hear this voice do I begin to realize, for nearly the very first time, what the true value of black folk is, not just for white men but for niggers.
So because my mother was motherless, Alpheus Turner brought her up out of the cabins and into his own home, where she was reared by a succession of black aunts and grannies who taught her nigger-English and some respectable graces and where, when she grew old enough, she became a scullery maid and then a cook, and a good cook to boot. Her name was Lou-Ann, and she died when I was fifteen, of some kind of tumor. But I am ahead of myself. What matters here is that the same happenstance that caused my mother to be brought up in Alpheus Turner’s house caused me in the course of events to become a house nigger, too. And that may or may not have been a fortunate circumstance, depending upon how you view what came to pass in Jerusalem so many years later.
“Quit pesterin’ ‘bout yo’ daddy,” says my mother. “What make you think I knows where he done run off to? What his name? I done tol’ you dat twenty times. He name Nathaniel jes’ like you! I done tol’ you dat, now quit pesterin’ ’bout yo’ daddy! When he run off? When de las’ time I seen him? Law me, chile, dat so long ago I ain’t got no rec’lection. Les’ see. Well, Marse Alpheus he died ’leven years ago, bless his name. And seem lak ’twarn’t but a year after dat when me an’ yo’ daddy was cou’tin’. Now dere was some fine-lookin’ man! Marse Alpheus done bought him in Petersburg fo’ to work strippin’ logs in de mill. But yo’ daddy he too smart fo’ dat kind of low nigger work. And he too good-lookin’, too, wid dem flashin’ bright eyes, and a smile—why, chile, yo’ daddy had a smile dat would light up a barn! No, he too good fo’ dat low kind of work, so Marse Alpheus he brung up yo’ daddy to de big house and commenced him into buttlin’. Yes, he was de number-two butteler helpin’ out Little Mornin’ when first I knowed yo’ daddy. Dat was de year before Marse Alpheus died. And me an’ yo’ daddy lived right here together dat time—a whole year it was—right in dis room …
“But quit pesterin’ ’bout dat, I tells you, boy! How I know where he done run off to? I don’ know nothin’ ’tall ’bout dat mess. Why sho he was angered! Ain’t no black man goin’ run off less’n he’s angered! Why? How I know? I don’ know nothin’ ’bout dat mess. Well, awright, den, if you really wants to know, ’twas on account of Marse Benjamin. Like I tol’ you, when Marse Alpheus die ’twas Marse Benjamin come to own ev’ything on account of he was de oldest son. He five years older dan Marse Samuel so he gits to own ev’ything, I mean de house an’ de mill an’ de land an’ de niggers an’ ev’ything. Well, Marse Benjamin he a good massah jes’ like Marse Alpheus, only he kind of young an’ he don’ know how to talk to de niggers like his daddy. I don’ mean he nasty or wicked or nothin’ like dat; no, he jes’ don’ know how to ack easy with nobody—I means white folks an’ niggers. Anyways, one evenin’ yo’ daddy he buttlin’ at de table an’ he do somethin’ dat Marse Benjamin think ain’t quite right an’ he hollers at yo’ daddy. Well, yo’ daddy he ain’t used to havin’ no one holler at him like dat, an’ he turns aroun’ still smilin’, see—he always smilin’, dat man—an’ he mock Marse Benjamin right back. Marse Benjamin he done said somethin’ like, ‘Nathaniel, dis yere silver is filthy!’ An’ yo’ daddy, he say: ‘Yes, dis yere silver is filthy!’ Only he hollerin’ at Marse Benjamin back, smilin’ jes’ as pretty as you please. Well, Marse Benjamin he jes’ fit to be tied, an’ he gits up right dere in front of Miss Elizabeth an’ Miss Nell an’ Marse Samuel and all de chilluns—dey jes’ young things den, ’bout yo’ age—and what he does, he whops yo’ daddy across de mouf with his hand. Dat’s all he does. One time—he jus’ whop him one time across de mouf an’ den he sit down. I’se lookin’ in at de door by dat time an’ all de family’s in an awful commotion at de table, Marse Samuel stewin’ an’ fussin’ an’ sayin’ to Marse Benjamin, ’Lawd knows he was uppity but you didn’ have to whop him like that!’ an’ all, an’ de chilluns all a-cryin’, leastwise de girls. ’Cause you see, Marse Alpheus he didn’ like to smite no niggers anyways an’ he never done it much, but whenever he done it he always took keer to do it way off in de woods out of sight of de white folks an’ de black folks, too. So de fambly dey ain’t never seen a black man hit. But dat ain’t no nem’mine fo’ yo’ daddy. He jes’ come on out of dere and he march straight through de kitchen with dis yere smile still on his face an’ a little bitty strick of blood rollin’ down his lip, an’ he jes’ keep marchin’ on back to de room where we stays at—dis yere room right yere, chile!—an’ he packs up some food in a sack, an’ dat night he done light out fo’ good …
“Where he done went to? How I know ’bout dat? You says on account of you’d like to find him! Lawd, chile, ain’t nobody goin’ find dat black man after all dese many years. What you say? Didn’ he say nothin’, nothin’ at all? Why sho he did, chile. An’ ev’ytime I thinks of it my heart is near ’bout broke in two. Said he couldn’ stand to be hit in de face by nobody. Not nobody! Oh yes, dat black man had pride, awright, warn’t many black mens aroun’ like him! And lucky too, why, he must had him a whole bag full of rabbit foots! Ain’t many niggers run off dat dey don’ soon cotch someways. But I don’ know. Said he was goin’ run off to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and make him lots of money an’ den come back an’ buy me an’ you into freedom. But Lawd, chile! Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, dey say dat’s a misery long ways off from here an’ I don’ know where yo’ daddy ever went.”
Two hundred yards or so behind the room where my mother and I stay, at the end of a path through the back meadow, is the ten-hole privy shared by the house servants and the mill hands living in the compound of cabins near the big house. Sturdily built of oak and set above the steeply sloping bank of a wooded ravine, the privy is divided by a board partition; five holes are for women and small children, the other five are for the men. Because the big house is isolated from mill and field, and because the affairs of house servants transpire as if in a world apart, this privy is one of the few places where my daily life intersects with the lives of those Negroes who already I have come to think of as a lower order of people—a ragtag mob, coarse, raucous, clownish, uncouth. For even now as a child I am contemptuous and aloof, filled with disdain for the black riffraff which dwells beyond the close perimeter of the big house—the faceless and nameless toilers who at daybreak vanish into the depths of the mill or into the fields beyond the woods, returning like shadows at sundown to occupy their cabins like so many chickens gone to weary roost. Most of my way of thinking is due to my mother. It is the plague of her life that amidst so many other comparative comforts she must still make that regular trek to the edge of the ravine and there mingle with the noisy rabble so beneath her. “Hit’s a shame in dis world,” she fusses to Prissy. “Us folks in de house is quality! And we ain’t got no outhouse for our own selfs, hit’s a cryin’ shame! I’ll vow dem cornfield niggers is de akshul limit. Ev’y one dem chillun dey lets pee on de seat, and don’ none of ’em close down dem lids, so’s it stinks like misery. Druther go to de privy settin’ ’longside some ole sow dan one dem cornfield nigger womans! Us house folks is quality!”
Equally disdainful, I avoid the morning rush, training my bowels to obey a later call when I can enjoy some privacy. The earth around the entrance to the men’s side (which I have used since I was five) is bare of vegetation, black hard clay worn glossy smooth by the trample of numberless bare or broganed feet, imprinted daily with a shifting pattern of booted heels and naked toes. Designed to prevent either malingering or seclusion—like the doors to all places frequented by Negroes—the privy door too is lockless, latchless, swinging outward easily on leather hinges to reveal the closet within drowned in shadows, almost completely dark save for slivers of light stealing in through the cracks between the timbers. I am used to the odor, which is ripe, pungent, immediate, smothering my nose and mouth like a warm green hand, the excremental stench partly stifled by quicklime, so that the smell is not so much repellent to me as endurable, faintly sweetish like stagnant swampwater. I raise one oval lid and seat myself on the pine plank above the hole. Between my thighs light floods up from the slope of the ravine and I look downward at the vast brown stain splashed with the white of quicklime. I sit here for long minutes, in the cool beatitude and calm of morning. Outside, somewhere in the woods, a mockingbird begins a chant which ripples and flows like rushing water, ceases, commences again, falls ineffable and pure through the tangle of grapevine and the honeysuckle and the tree-shadowed thickets of ivy and fern. Here within, amid the sun-splashed gloom, I relieve myself in pleasant unhurried spasms, contemplating a blackberry-sized spider weaving in one corner of the ceiling a thick web which shakes, stretches, trembles in milky agitation. Now through the walls of the privy, from the distant back porch of the big house, I hear my mother calling. “ ’Thaniel!” she cries. “You, Nathaniel! Nathan-yel! You, boy! Better come on here!” I have dallied too long, she wants me near the kitchen to fetch water. “Nathaniel Turner! You, boy!” she cries. The mood of contentment dwindles away, the morning ritual nears its end. I reach out toward a tattered sack on the floor—a croker sack filled with corncobs …
All of a sudden a searing heat seizes me from underneath; my bare bottom and balls feel set on fire and I leap up from the seat with a howl, clutching at my scorched nether parts while smoke floats up through the hole in a greasy white billow. “Ow! Ow! Daggone!” I shout, but it is mainly from surprise—surprise and mortification. For even as I cry out, the pain diminishes and I gaze back down through the hole, beholding the grinning light-brown face of a boy my age. He stands off at the edge of the mire below, grasping in one hand a blazing stick. With his other hand he is clutching his stomach in an agony of delight, and his laughter is high, loud, irrepressible. “Daggone you, Wash!” I yell. “Jest daggone yo’ no-good black soul!” But my rage is in vain, and Wash keeps laughing, doubled up amid the honeysuckle. It is the third time in as many months that he has tricked me thus, and I have no one but myself to blame for my humiliation.
THE LIFE AND DEATH
OF
MR. BADMAN
PRESENTED TO THE WORLD IN
A FAMILIAR DIALOGUE BETWEEN
MR. WISEMAN
&
MR. ATTENTIVE
• WISEMAN. Good morrow, my good neighbour, Mr. Attentive; whither are you walking so early this morning? Methinks you look as if you were concerned about something more than ordinary. Have you lost any of your cattle, or what is the matter?
• ATTENTIVE. Good sir, good morrow to you. I have not as yet lost aught, but yet you give a right guess of me, for I am, as you say, concerned in my heart, but it is because of the badness of the times. And, Sir, you, as all our neighbours know, are a very observing man, pray, therefore, what do you think of them?
• WISE. Why, I think, as you say, to wit, that they are bad times, and bad they will be, until men are better; for they are bad men that make bad times; if men, therefore, would mend, so would the times. It is a folly to look for good days so long as sin is so high, and those that study its nourishment so many …
The life of a little nigger child is dull beyond recounting. But during one summer month when I am nine or ten a couple of curious events happen to me, one causing me the bitterest anguish, the other premonitions of joy.
It is midmorning in August, hot and stifling, so airless that the dust-stained trees along the edge of the distant woods hang limp and still, and the grinding of the mill seems blurred, indistinct, as if borne sluggishly through heat waves trembling like water above the steaming earth. High in the blue heavens, buzzards by the score wheel and tilt and swoop in effortless flight over the bottomlands, and I lift my eyes from time to time to follow their somber course across the sky. I squat in the shadow of the little room projecting from the kitchen, where my mother and I live. From the kitchen comes the odor of collard greens cooking, the smell faintly bitter and pungent; midday dinner is far off, I feel my insides churning with hunger. Although I am not underfed (to be the child of the cook is to be, as my mother constantly points out, the “luckiest little nigger ’live”) I seem nonetheless to exist at the edge of famine. On the sill of the kitchen window above me, a row of muskmelons, half a dozen pale globes, stand ripening in the shade, unattainable as gold. I consider them gravely and with a yearning that brings water to my eyes, knowing that even to touch one of them would fetch upon me calamity like the crack of doom. Once I stole a pot of clabber cheese, and the walloping my mother gave me left me sore as a carbuncle.
It is my duty to wait here near the door, to carry water and bring up things from the cellar, to run errands for my mother whenever she commands. My chores today are light, for it is a slack moment in the year when the corn crop has been laid by awaiting harvest and the mill works at half-time. During such a lull it has always been the custom of the brothers Turner, together with their wives and children, to make their annual trip to Richmond, leaving the place for a week or so in the hands of the overseer. Since with the family away my mother has only to cook for ourselves and the house servants—Prissy and Little Morning and Weaver and Pleasant—time hangs heavy for me, and the boredom is like a knife-edge at the back of my skull. It is not an unusual situation, because for a Negro child, denied the pleasures of schooling, there is generally nothing to do, nothing at all; reading no books, taught no real games, until twelve or so too small to work, black children exist in a monotony like that of yearling mules at pasture, absorbing the sun, feeding, putting on flesh, all unaware that soon they will be borne down for life with harness, chain, and traces.
My own condition is more than unusually solitary, since the Turner children with whom I might ordinarily be expected to play are a good deal older than I, and either help run the plantation or are off at school; at the same time, I feel myself set apart from the other Negro children, the children of the field hands and mill hands who are so scorned by my mother. Even Wash (who is the son of one of the two Negro drivers, Abraham—almost the only Turner slave with any responsibility at all) I have drawn away from as I have grown older, in spite of the fact that his circumstances put him a notch above the common cornfield type. At six or seven we played crude games together—climbed trees, hunted for caves in the dark ravine, swung on grapevines at the edge of the woods. Leaning over the brink of the ravine, we tried to see who could pee the farthest. Once we stood in a shadowed clearing near the swamp, and with skinny black arms outstretched, in self-inflicted torture, marveled as a swarm of fat mosquitoes engorged themselves on our blood, finally dropping to earth like tiny red grapes. We built a fort of mud and then smeared our naked bodies with the liquid clay; drying, it became encrusted, a dull calcimine, ghostly, and we howled in mad delight at our resemblance to white boys. Once we dared to steal ripe persimmons from the tree growing behind Wash’s cabin, and were caught in the act by his mother—a light West Indian woman, part Creole, with black ringlets around her head like writhing wet serpents—and were thrashed with a sassafras switch until the welts stood up on our legs. Wash’s sister had a doll that Abraham had made for her; fashioned of jute sacking, its head was an old split maple doorknob. Whether it was meant to be a white baby or a nigger child I could never tell, but I regarded it with wonder; aside from a cast-off cracked wooden top I had gotten at Christmas from one of the young Turners, it was the first toy I can remember. On gray winter days when rain streamed from the heavens, Wash and I crouched in the poultry shed, with pointed sticks tracing patterns upon the white damp crust of chickenshit. For a while it became my favorite kind of play. I drew rectangles, circles, squares, and I marveled at the way two triangles placed together in a certain way formed that mysterious star I had seen so often when (curiosity getting the better of me as I trailed my mother through Samuel Turner’s library) I risked a glimpse of the pictures in a gigantic Bible:
I scratched this design over and over again on the lime-cool, bittersweet-smelling white floor of the chicken shed, a hundred interlocking stars engraved in the dust, quite heedless of Wash, who stirred and fidgeted and mumbled to himself, bored quickly, unable to draw anything but aimless lines.
But these were dumb little games, the brainless play of kittens. As I grow older now there steals over me the understanding that Wash has almost no words to speak at all. So near to the white people, I absorb their language daily. I am a tireless eavesdropper, and their talk and comment, even their style of laughter, vibrates endlessly in my imagination. Already my mother teases me for the way I parrot white folks’ talk—teases me with pride. Wash is molded by different sounds—even now I am aware of this—nigger voices striving clumsily to grapple with a language never taught, never really learned, still alien and unknown. With such a poor crippled tongue, Wash’s way of speaking comes to seem to me a hopeless garble, his mind a tangle of baby-thoughts; so gradually that I barely know it, this playmate floats away out of my consciousness, dwarfish and forgotten, as I settle deep into my own silent, ceaselessly vigilant, racking solitude.
I cannot as yet read The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, not even the title; my possession of it terrifies me, because I have stolen it, yet at the same instant the very idea of the book fevers me with such insupportable excitement that I can feel a loosening in my bowels. (Although I have come late to the joys of reading and still cannot properly “read,” I have known the crude shapes of simple words ever since I was six, when Samuel Turner, a methodical, tidy, and organized master, and long impatient with baking alum turning into white flour and cinnamon being confused with nutmeg, and vice versa, set about labeling every chest and jar and canister and keg and bag in the huge cellar beneath the kitchen where my mother dispatched me hourly every day. It seemed not to matter to him that upon the Negroes—none of whom could read—these hieroglyphs in red paint would have no effect at all: still Little Morning would be forced to dip a probing brown finger in the keg plainly marked MOLASSES, and even so there would be lapses, with salt served to sweeten the breakfast tea. Nonetheless, the system satisfied Samuel Turner’s sense of order, and although at that time he was unaware of my existence, the neat plain letters outlined by the glow of an oil lamp in the chill vault served as my first and only primer. It was a great leap from MINT and CITRON and SALTPETRE and BACON to The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, but there exists both a frustration and a surfeit when one’s entire literature is the hundred labels in a dim cellar, and my desire to possess the book overwhelmed my fear. Even so, it had been a dismal moment. In Samuel Turner’s library, where my mother had gone to fetch a new silver ladle for the kitchen, the books had been locked up behind wire, row after row of lustrous leather-swaddled volumes imprisoned as in a cage. On the morning I accompanied her there, I lingered long enough to be captured by the sight of two volumes, almost exactly alike in size and shape, lying together on a table. Opening one of them, seeing that it was aswarm with words, I was seized with the old queasy excitement in my guts, and fright clashed with greedy desire. My yearning won out, however, so that later that day I crept back to the library and took the book, covering it with a flour sack and leaving behind its companion—something which I later learned was called Grace Abounding. Just as I had expected, and to my wild anxiety, the fact that the book was missing was gossiped throughout the house. Yet I was not alarmed as I might have been, since I think I must have instinctively reasoned that although white people will rightly suspect a nigger of taking almost anything that is not nailed down, they would certainly not suspect him of taking a book.)
This morning, squatting in the shadow of the kitchen, I think longingly of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, wondering if I can summon the courage to remove it from its hiding place and try to read it without being found out. Finally I get up and sidle toward the place where it is hidden. I have stored the book underneath the house—part of which is elevated above the ground—in a dark shelflike recess formed by one of the great oak sills. There spiders stir in the gloom and in the dim light hundreds of flying ants swarm in a pale flutter of brownish transparent wings. Protected by its flour sack, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman reposes in the dark. I creep forward on my knees a yard or so, reach up and remove the sack, then inch back toward the edge of the house where a splash of sunshine falls on the damp bare earth. Here I turn about and sit down with my legs crossed. I open the book and sunlight floods the white page, hurting my eyes. It is cool here, with a ferny smell of dampness, and mosquitoes moon about my ears as I begin my laborious journey through a wild strange country where words of enraging size, black and incomprehensible, blossom like poisonous flowers. My lips move silently, I trace sentences with a quivering finger. Thick words with mysterious syllables, lugubrious and fathomless, obstruct my way like great logs and boulders; small words are no better, obdurate as hickory nuts. I press on in despair, searching for the key, hunting for the soft and sweetly familiar, SUGAR, GINGER, CAPSICUM, CLOVES.
Suddenly I hear footsteps stamping up the dirt path from the cabins and I draw back underneath the house, hidden again, watching. It is the black driver, Abraham. A stout, muscular Negro, very dark, he is dressed in the green denim shirt which is the badge of his authority; he hurries along up the path, sweating in the fierce morning heat, a set, stern, indignant look frozen on his face as his broganed feet tramp the ground inches from where I lay in hiding and then clatter up the back steps into the kitchen. Moments pass and I am aware of nothing. Soon I steal out toward the patch of sunlight again, preparing myself to read, when now I hear voices from up above, in the alcove between the kitchen and the pantry. Abraham is talking to my mother and his tone is agitated, tense, severe.
“You better had,” he is saying, “you better jes’ had, Lou-Ann. Dat man he mean as pizen! I knows. You better light on out ob here!”
“Shoot,” I hear my mother say, “dat man ain’t no trouble. He gib me a bad time an’ I smack him one wid dis yere kettle—”
“But you ain’t seed him dis time!” Abraham breaks in. “He worse’n I ever seed! An’ ain’t no fambly folks aroun’ to say ary word! I jes’ tellin’ you, Lou-Ann, dat’s all I got to say!”
“Shoot, he ain’t goin’ gib Lou-Ann no bad time. Leastwise not today …”
I hear them move from the alcove, the footsteps shuffling on the timbers above my head, their voices becoming indistinct. Presently they are silent and then I hear the door slam open and Abraham’s heavy tread as he thunders down the back stoop and past me once more, his feet sending up small puffs of dust, half trotting now in the direction of the mill.
The mystery, and my perplexity, last only a moment. As soon as Abraham has vanished around the corner of the stable, I sidle out on my behind again to the edge of the house, throwing open the book. The morning is still once more. While I bend my head down to study the open page, my mother begins to sweep in the kitchen above. I hear the steady whisk-whisk of the straw broom on the floor, then the sound of her voice, so faint that I can barely make it out, as she commences a lonesome song.
“Bow low, Mary, bow low, Martha,
For Jesus come and lock de do’,
An’ carry de keys away …”
The song lulls and distracts me, draws me away for a moment from the maddening printed lines. I listen to her sing, and my head falls slowly against a cedar post of the house while I gaze away drowsily at the buildings and shops and stables stretching westward to the swamp, the Negro cabins below them somnolent in the morning heat, and high above all the buzzards in patient and unceasing soar and swoop and meditation, a noiseless quivering tilt of black wings over some dying thing fallen in the far-off woods, hapless and struggling. Nearby, two Negroes with a wagonless mule team shamble up from the woods toward the mill. I hear their laughter and the jingle of a harness, and they pass out of sight. Once again I smell the collard greens steaming; hunger swells inside me, then hopelessly dies. “Bow low, Mary, bow low, Martha,” my mother sings, rich now, and far, and I let my eyelids close together, and soon I seem to be in a kitchen—is it this one I know so well?—at Christmas, and I hear the voice of some white mistress (Miss Elizabeth? Miss Nell?) calling out Christmas gift! in a cheery voice, and I drink the sweet eggnog descending to me from above in short greedy gulps, which does nothing to assuage my hunger. Then Christmas fades away and I am in a honeysuckle glade, filled with the bumbling hum of bees. Wash is with me, and together we watch a horde of Negroes laboring with hoes in a steaming field of young corn. Like animals, glistening with sweat, brown backs shining mirror-bright beneath the blazing sun, they ply their hoes in unison, chop-chopping beneath the eyes of a black driver. The sight of their dumb toil fills me with a sickening dread. Huge and brawny, the driver looks like Abraham, even though he is not Abraham, and now he spies Wash and me and, turning about, comes toward us. Gwine git me two little nigger boys, he says, smiling, Gwine git me two little boys to chop de corn. Terror sweeps through me. Voiceless, in mad flight, I plunge through the honeysuckle, treading air as if across empty space back through a sunlit morning toward the refuge of the kitchen looming near, where now a sudden low hubbub of voices interrupts my fright, waking me with a different fright. My eyes fly open and I crouch forward beneath the house, alert, listening, heart pounding.
“Gwan outa here!” my mother cries. “Gwan away! I ain’t havin’ no truck with you!” Her voice is shrill, angry, but edged with fear, and I can no longer understand the words as she moves to another part of the room above. Now I hear another voice, this one a man’s deep grumble, thick and somehow familiar, but speaking words I am unable to make out as I scramble to my feet at the edge of the house and stand there listening. Again my mother says something, insistent, still touched with fear, but her voice is blotted out by the man’s grumble, louder now, almost a roar. Suddenly my mother’s voice is like a moan, a single long plaintive wail across the morning silence, making my scalp tingle. In panic, wishing to rush away but at the same time drawn as if by irresistible power to my mother’s side, I run around the corner of the house and up the back stoop, throwing open the kitchen door. “There, God damn, ye’ll have a taste of me big greasy,” says a voice in the shadows, and though I am blinded by the sudden darkness, seeing only two blurred shapes wrestling together near the pantry, I now know who the voice belongs to. It is the white man named McBride—since winter the overseer of the fields—a yeasty-faced, moody Irishman with a shock of oily black hair and a bad limp, also a drunkard who has whipped Negroes despite the Turner brothers’ rules to the contrary. My mother is still moaning, and I can hear McBride’s stringy breathing, loud and labored like that of a hound dog after a run.
Blinking, my eyes take in the scene, and I am aware at once of two things: of the fruity odor of apple brandy from a bottle shattered into splinters on the kitchen floor and of the broken neck of this bottle glinting in a shaft of sunlight, clutched in McBride’s hand and flourished like a dagger at my mother’s neck. She is on her back upon a table in the pantry, supporting the full weight of the overseer, who with his other hand fumbles and fights with her clothes and his own. I stand rooted at the door, unable to move. The jagged neck of the bottle clatters to the floor, shattering in a powder like greenish snow. All at once a kind of shudder passes through my mother’s body, and the moan is a different moan, tinged with urgency, and I do not know whether the sound I hear now is the merest whisper of a giggle (“Uh-huh, aw-right,” she seems to murmur) for McBride’s voice, thick and excited, obliterates her own—”There now, me beauty, ye’ll have earrings,” the words an awful sigh—and he makes a quick convulsive motion, while her brown long legs go up swiftly to embrace his waist, the two of them now joined and moving in that same strange and brutal rhythm I have witnessed with Wash through the cracks of half a dozen cabins and which in the madness of complete innocence I had thought was the pastime, or habit, or obsession, or something, of niggers alone.
I fly from the house, headed for nowhere; my only notion is to keep running. Around the stable I scamper, past the weaver’s shed, past the smokehouse and the blacksmith shop, where two ancient black codgers idling in the shade gaze at me in slow wonder. On around the barn I run, faster and faster, across the edge of the apple orchard and along the other side of the house through a shimmering white spider web that clings to my face in damp feathery strands. A stone punctures my bare toe in a tiny starburst of pain, but nothing hinders my flight; I am bound for the ends of the earth. A hedgerow blocks my way; I plunge through it, alighting upon a stretch of sunblasted brown lawn above which tiny butterflies flutter in a swarm of bleached wings like the petals of daisies, swooping up now to escape me. With pinwheeling legs, flailing arms, I hurdle a new ditch and commence rushing down the ailanthus-shaded lane leading to the country road when now, abruptly, my pace slackens, I begin a slow dogtrot which in turn becomes a walk, feet scuffing along. Finally I stop in my tracks, staring at the forest rising up like an impenetrable green wall beyond the fields. There is no place to go.
For long moments I stand in the shade beneath the ailanthus trees, panting, waiting. It is hot and still. Far off, the mill rumbles in a dull undertone, so faint I can barely hear it. Insects stir and fidget among the weeds, their swift random industry like a constant stitching noise amid the heat. I stand and wait for a long time, unable to go farther, unable to move. Then at last I turn and slowly retrace my steps up the lane and across the lawn in front of the house—taking care that Little Morning, pushing a sluggish rag mop on the veranda, will not see me—and now cautiously I part the brittle sticks and branches of the parched hedge, slipping sideways through it, and then dawdle across the lot to the kitchen.
As I come back to my hiding place beneath the house, the door of the kitchen smacks open with a clatter and McBride appears on the rear stoop, blinking in the sunlight, running a hand through his black disheveled hair. He does not see me as I creep back under the house, watching. He blinks steadily, and with his other hand he adjusts one gallus on his shoulder, then runs his fingers over his mouth—a curious, tentative motion almost of discovery, as if touching his lips for the first time. Then a slow and lazy smile steals over his face and he lurches down the steps, missing the last one or not fully connecting with it, so that the heel of his boot makes a sudden popping noise against the timber while at the same instant he sprawls forward, regains his balance and stands erect, wobbling slightly, muttering “God blast!” Yet he is still smiling, and now I can see that he has caught sight of Abraham, who just at this moment is rounding the corner of the stable.
“Abe!” he shouts. “You, Abe!”
“Yassuh!” I hear the voice call back.
“They’s ten hands pickin’ worms down in the bottom cornfield!”
“Yas, Mistah Mac!”
“Well, you fetch they black asses out of there, hear me!”
“Yas, Mistah Mac! Ah do dat!”
“Hit’s too hot even for niggers!”
“Yassuh!” Abraham turns and hustles down the slope, his green shirt plastered black with sweat against his shoulders. Then he is gone and it is McBride alone who seems to fill the entire space within my sight, prodigious even as he stands weaving, grinning to himself in the blighted, sun-baked yard, prodigious and all-powerful, yet mysterious in his terrible authority, filling me with dread. The appearance of his round, heavy face, uplifted to the sun in dreamy pleasure, sickens me inside, and I feel a sense of my weakness, my smallness, my defenselessness, my niggerness invading me like a wind to the marrow of my bones.
“God blast!” he says finally, with baffling glee, and lets out a soft happy cry, totters a bit, and fetches his booted foot up against the remains of a decayed bucket, which flies off in splinters across the yard. In dismay, a great old hen squawks, flees toward the shed, and a cloud of snuff-brown barnyard manure floats aloft like the finest powder, amid tiny pinfeathers bursting everywhere. “God blast!” McBride says again, in a kind of low shout, and he is off and away, limping, in the direction of his own house down the slope. God blast!
Like something shriveled, I draw up within myself underneath the kitchen, the book shut now as I clutch it to my chest. The smell of cooking greens is still warm and pungent on the air. Presently I hear my mother’s feet on the floor above, the broom whisking against the boards, her voice again, gentle, lonesome, unperturbed and serene as before.
“For Jesus come and lock de do’
An’ carry de keys away …”
On another morning later that same month, the rain comes down in great whistling cataracts, whipped into spray by a westerly wind and accompanied by cracklings of lightning and thunder. Fearful for the book’s safety, I rescue it from its precarious shelf beneath the house and steal up the kitchen steps, taking refuge in the pantry behind a barrel of cider. Outside the storm rages but there is enough light to see by, and I crouch in the apple-sweet damp with the book thrown open upon my knees. The minutes pass, my legs grow numb beneath me. The book with its ant-swarm of words is like an enemy, malevolent, wearisome, incomprehensible. I draw taut, crucified on a rack of boredom, yet I know I am in the presence of a treasure; lacking the key to unlock it, I possess that treasure nonetheless, and so with grubby fingers and gritty eyes I persevere …
All at once, very close to me, there is a noise like a thunderclap and I give a jump, fearful that the house has been hit by lightning. But now as I look up I see that it is only the great cedar door to the pantry which has been thrown violently open, flooding the room with a yellowish chill light; at the entry stands the tall, stoop-shouldered, threatening shape of Little Morning, his bloodshot eyes in a leathery old mean wrinkled face gazing down at me with fierce indignation and rebuke. “Dar, boy!” he says in a hoarse whisper. “Dar! I done foun’ you out at last! You de one dat stole dat book, lak I figured all de time!” (How could I have known then what I realized much later: that with suspicion founded upon the simplest envy, he had been spying on me for days? That this creaking old man, simple-headed and unlettered and in the true state of nigger ignorance for a lifetime, had been sent into a fit of intolerable jealousy upon his realization that a ten-year-old black boy was going through the motions of learning to read. For that was the uncomplicated fact of the matter, doubtless dating from the time when, correcting him, watching him haul up from the cellar a keg of MOLASSES instead of the keg of OIL he had been ordered to fetch, I had answered his haughty How you know? with a superior Be-cause it say so, leaving him flabbergasted, spiteful, and hurt.)
Before I can reply or even move, Little Morning has my ear pinched between his thumb and forefinger, and in this way hoists me to my feet, propelling me out of the pantry and into the kitchen, pulling me forward and with an insistent pinch and tug stretching the skin of my skull as he stalks down the hallway. In helpless tow, I flounder after him, the book clutched against my chest. The tail of Little Morning’s frock coat flaps in my face; the old man utters hoarse indignant breaths, huffanapuff huffanapuff, mingled with threats chilling, dire: “Marse Samuel gwine fix you, boy! Marse Samuel gwine send yo’ thievin’ black soul to Georgia!” Fiercely he yanks at my ear, but the pain seems nothing, obliterated by terror so vast that the blood rushes down in red sheets before my eyes. I half swallow my tongue and I hear my voice, strangled, going aaaagh, aaaagh, aaaagh. On we press down the dark hallway, past ceiling-high windows streaming with rain, lit by lightning flashes; I regard the heavens with twisted neck and eyes upside down. “I knowed you was de rascally little debbil dat stole it!” Little Morning whispers. “I knowed it all de time!”
We burst into the great hall of the house, a part of the mansion I have never seen before. I glimpse a chandelier blazing with candles, walls paneled in glossy pine, a stairway winding dizzily upward. Yet my impression of these things is brief, fleeting; filled with horror, I realize that the lofty room is crowded with white people, almost the entire family—Marse Samuel and Miss Nell and two daughters, Miss Elizabeth, one of Marse Benjamin’s sons, and now Marse Benjamin himself, clad in a glistening wet rain cape as he plunges through the front door in a spray of water and a gust of cold wind. Lightning crackles outside and I hear his voice above the drumming of the rain. “Weather for the ducks!” he shouts. “But, Lord, it smells like money! The pond’s spilling over!” There is a moment’s silence and the door slams shut, then I hear another voice: “What have we got, Little Morning?” The old man lets go of my ear.
“Dat book,” he says. “Dat book dat was stole! Dis yere de robbah dat done it!”
Nearly swooning with fright, I clutch the book to my chest, unable to control my voice and the sobs welling up aaaagh aaaagh from deep inside. I would weep, but my anguish is in a realm beyond tears. I yearn for the floor to open and swallow me. Never have I been this close to white people, and their nearness is so oppressive and fearful that I think I am going to vomit.
“Well, bless my boots,” I hear a voice say.
“I just don’t believe it,” says another, a woman’s.
“Whose little darky is that?” asks still another voice.
“Dis yere Nathaniel,” says Little Morning. His tone is still heavy with anger and indignation. “He belong to Lou-Ann in de kitchen. He de culprick. He de one dat snitch de volume.” He wrests the book from my grasp, regarding it with scholarly lifted eyebrows. “Dis de volume dat was took. Hit says so right here. De Life and de Death of Mr. Badman by John Bunyam. Hit de selfsame volume, Marse Sam, sho as my name’s Little Mornin’.” Even in the midst of my fright I am aware that Little Morning—the old humbug—has memorized the title by ear and is fooling no one with this display of literacy. “I knowed it war de same book when I cotched him readin’ it in de pantry.”
“Reading?” The voice is that of Marse Samuel, wondering, quite incredulous. I look up now, slowly. The white faces, viewed for the first time so closely—especially those of the females, only lightly touched by sun and weather—have the sheen and consistency of sour dough or the soft underbellies of mushrooms; their blue eyes glint boldly, startling as ice, and I regard each yawning pore, each freckle, with the awe of total discovery. “Reading?” Marse Samuel says now, with amusement in his voice. “Come now, Little Morning!”
“Well, natchel he warn’t exackly readin’,” the old man adds contemptuously. “He jes’ lookin’ at de pitchers, dat’s all. Hit was on account of de pitchers dat he took de book anyways—”
“But there are no pictures, are there, Nell? It was your volume, after all—”
Could it have been, as I sometimes thought years later, that at that moment I sensed a fatal juncture, realized with some child’s wise instinct that unless instantly I asserted my small nigger self I would be forever cast back into anonymity and oblivion? And so could it have been that right then—desperate, lying, risking all—I mastered my terror and suddenly turned on Little Morning, howling: “ ’Tain’t so! ’Tain’t so! I can so read the book!”?
Whatever the case, I remember a voice, Samuel Turner’s, his wonder and amazement fled, saying in sudden quiet, judicious, tolerant tones, silencing the family’s laughter: “No, no, just wait, maybe he can, let us see!” And as the storm grumbles far off to the east, diminishing, the only sound now rain dripping from the eaves and a distant angry chattering of wet bluejays in the ailanthus trees, I find myself seated by the window. I have begun to cry, aware of white hovering faces like ghostly giant blobs above me, and whispering voices. I struggle briefly, pawing through the pages, but it is beyond all hope: I cannot manage a single word. I feel that I am going to suffocate on the sobs mounting upward in my chest. My distress is so great that Marse Samuel’s words are miles beyond comprehension—a muffled echo I can only dredge up from memory years later—when I hear him cry out: “You see, Ben, it is true, as I’ve told you! They will try! They will try! And we shall teach him then! Hurrah!”
The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction. Nonetheless, it is a failing which, when ill luck befalls us, most of us succumb to; and during the dark years of my twenties, after I had passed out of Samuel Turner’s life and he and I were shut of each other forever, I spent a great deal of idle and useless time wondering what may have be-fallen my lot had I not been so unfortunate as to have become the beneficiary (or perhaps the victim) of my owner’s zeal to tamper with a nigger’s destiny. Suppose in the first place I had lived out my life at Turner’s Mill. Suppose then I had been considerably less avid in my thirst for knowledge, so that it would not have occurred to me to steal that book. Or suppose, even more simply, that Samuel Turner—however decent and just an owner he might have remained anyway—had been less affected with that feverish and idealistic conviction that slaves were capable of intellectual enlightenment and enrichment of the spirit and had not, in his passion to prove this to himself and to all who would bear witness, fastened upon me as an “experiment.” (No, I understand that I am not being quite fair, for surely when I recollect the man with all the honesty I can muster I know that we were joined by strong ties of emotion; yet still the unhappy fact remains: despite warmth and friendship, despite a kind of love, I began as surely an experiment as a lesson in pig-breeding or the broadcasting of a new type of manure.)
Well, under these circumstances I would doubtless have become an ordinary run-of-the-mill house nigger, mildly efficient at some stupid task like wringing chickens’ necks or smoking hams or polishing silver, a malingerer wherever possible yet withal too jealous of my security to risk real censure or trouble and thus cautious in my tiny thefts, circumspect in the secrecy of my afternoon naps, furtive in my anxious lecheries with the plump yellow-skinned cleaning maids upstairs in the dark attic, growing ever more servile and unctuous as I became older, always the crafty flatterer on the lookout for some bonus of flannel or stew beef or tobacco, yet behind my stately paunch and fancy bib and waistcoat developing, as I advanced into old age, a kind of purse-lipped dignity, known as Uncle Nat, well loved and adoring in return, a palsied stroker of the silken pates of little white grandchildren, rheumatic, illiterate, and filled with sleepiness, half yearning for that lonely death which at long last would lead me to rest in some tumbledown graveyard tangled with chokeberry and jimson weed. It would not have been, to be sure, much of an existence, but how can I honestly say that I might not have been happier?
For the Preacher was right: He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. And Samuel Turner (whom I shall call Marse Samuel from now on, for that is how he was known to me) could not have realized, in his innocence and decency, in his awesome goodness and softness of heart, what sorrow he was guilty of creating by feeding me that half-loaf of learning: far more bearable no loaf at all.
Well, no matter now. Suffice it to say that I was taken into the family’s bosom, so to speak, falling under the protective wing not only of Marse Samuel but of Miss Nell, who together with her older daughter Louisa had spent the quiet winter mornings of several years—“riding their hobby,” I remember they called it—drilling me in the alphabet and teaching me to add and subtract and, not the least fascinating, exposing me to the serpentine mysteries of the Episcopal catechism. How they drilled me! How Miss Nell kept after me! I never forgot these glossy-haired seraphs with their soft tutorial murmurs, and do not blame me too much when I say—I shall try not to allude to it again—that there was at least one moment during the earthquake twenty years later when I lingered on the memory of those sweet faces with a very special and savage intensity.
“No, no, Nat, not sucklings and babes—babes and sucklings!”
“Yessum. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.”
“Yes, that’s just right, Nat. Now then, verses three and four. Slowly, slow-ly! And careful now!”
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained. And— And—I forgets.”
“Forget, Nat, not forgets. No darky talk! Now— What is man—
“Yessum. What is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visiteth him? Well, uh— And, For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honor!”
“Wonderful, Nat! Oh, wonderful, wonderful! Oh, Sam, there you are! You should just hear Nat coming along! Come here, Sam, sit beside us for a moment and listen, sit here by the fire! Listen to our little darky recite out from the Bible! He can speak it from memory as well as the Reverend Eppes! Isn’t that so, Nat, you smart little tar baby, you?”
“Yessum.”
But suppose again that it had been Marse Samuel who had died, instead of Brother Benjamin. What then would have happened to that smart little tar baby?
Maybe you will be able to form your own judgment from some things I overheard on the veranda one sultry, airless summer evening after supper, when the two brothers were entertaining a pair of traveling Episcopal clergymen—”the Bishop’s visitants,” they called themselves—one of them named Dr. Ballard, a big-nosed, long-jawed bespectacled man of middle years garbed entirely in black from the tip of his wide-brimmed parson’s hat to his flowing cloak and gaiters buttoned up along his skinny shanks, blinking through square crystal glasses and emitting delicate coughs behind long white fingers as thin and pale as flower stalks; the other minister dressed like him in funereal black but many years younger, in his twenties and bespectacled also, with a round, smooth, plump, prissy face which at first glimpse had caused me to think of him as Dr. Ballard’s daughter or maybe his wife. Not as yet advanced to the dining room, I labored in the kitchen as Little Morning’s vassal, and it was my duty at the moment to fetch water from the cistern and to keep the smudge pot going: positioned upwind in the sluggish air, it sent out small black-oily clouds of smoke, a screen against mosquitoes. Across the meadow, fireflies flickered in the dusk, and I recall from within the house the sound of a piano, the voice of Miss Elizabeth, Benjamin’s wife, breathless, sweet, in quavering, plaintive song:
“Would you gain the tender creature,
Softly, gently, kindly treat her …”
Though usually the sedulous snoop, I had paid no attention to the conversation, fascinated instead by Benjamin, wondering if this would be one of those evenings when he fell out of his chair. As Marse Samuel and the ministers chatted, I watched Benjamin stir in the chair, heard the wickerwork crackling beneath his weight as he let out a sigh despairing and long, raising his brandy glass on high. While Little Morning came forward to serve him he sighed again and the sound was aimless, distracted, dwindling off into a little uh-uh-uh like the tail end of a yawn. I think I recall Dr. Ballard glancing at him uneasily, then turning back to Marse Samuel. And the uh-uh-uh sound again, not loud, still pitched between yawn and sigh, glass half filled with sirupy apple brandy extended negligently in midair, the other hand clutching the decanter. I watched his cheeks begin to flush, blooming tomato-pink in the twilight, and I said to myself: Yes, I think again tonight he might fall right on out of that chair.
But even as I watched him I heard him suddenly exclaim: “Ha!” Then he paused and said: “Ha! Ha! Jesus bloody Christ! Come out and say it!” And then I realized that despite his yawns and rude noises, he was listening to Dr. Ballard and so then I too turned and gazed at the minister, who was explaining: “—and so the Bishop is marking time, as he says. We are at the crossroads—that is the Bishop’s own expression—we are at the crossroads, marking time, awaiting some providential wind to guide us in the right direction. The Bishop is so gifted in his choice of expressions. At any rate, he is aware that the Church all too soon must make some decision. Meanwhile, as his visitants, we are able to send him reassuring news as to the condition of the slaves on at least one plantation.” He paused, with the bleak and wintry suggestion of a smile.
“It will be so reassuring for the Bishop,” said the younger minister. “He will be interested, too, in knowing your general views.”
“General views?” Marse Samuel inquired.
“General views on the institution itself,” Dr. Ballard explained. “He is greatly concerned to know the general views held by—how shall we say it?—the more prosperous landowners of the diocese.”
For a long moment Marse Samuel was silent, his face drawn and reflective as he sucked at a long clay pipe. It was becoming dark. A mild gust of wind, feather-light upon my own brow, sent an oily curl of smoke across the veranda. In the distant swamp, frogs sang and throbbed in a wild, passionate monotone. Little Morning approached Dr. Ballard with a silver tray balanced on the tips of black fingers. “Is you gwine have some mo’ port wine, mastah?” I heard him ask.
Still Marse Samuel remained silent, then finally he said in a slow and measured voice: “Doctor, I will be as direct with you as I can. I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the source of all our misery, individual, political, and economic. It is the greatest curse a supposedly free and enlightened society has been saddled with in modern times, or any other time. I am not, as you may have perceived, the most religious of men, yet I am not without faith and I pray nightly for the miracle, for the divine guidance which will somehow show us the way out of this terrible condition. It is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed. They must be educated! To free these people without education and with the prejudice that presently exists against them would be a ghastly crime.”
Dr. Ballard did not immediately answer, but when he did his voice was detached and indistinct. “How interesting,” he murmured.
“Fascinating,” said the other minister, sounding even more far away.
Suddenly Benjamin lurched erect from his chair and walked to the far edge of the veranda. There in the shadows, unfastening himself, he commenced to piss into a rosebush. I could hear the noise of a lordly stream of water, urgent, uninterrupted, a plashing cascade upon leaf and thorn and vine, and now Benjamin’s voice above the spatter: “Oh, my beloved brother! Oh, my brother’s bleeding heart! What a trial, what a tribulation to dwell with such a saint, who would try to alter the mechanism of history! A saint he is, reverend visitants! You are in the presence of a living, breathing saint! Yas!”
Dr. Ballard blushed, murmuring something I could not understand. Watching from behind the smudge pot, I was suddenly tickled and I had to smother my amusement behind my hand. For the minister, in a desperate fidget, was obviously unaccustomed to conversing with anyone who was in the process of taking a piss, which Benjamin did without a flicker of a thought and in the most public way whenever he drank in the company of men. Yet now Dr. Ballard, though agitated, had to pay even more deference to Benjamin than he did to Marse Samuel, for distant and apart as Benjamin may have been this evening he was still the older brother and the plantation’s titled owner. I watched joyfully as the minister’s lips became puckered and bloodless, bespectacled eyes gazing in wild discomfort at Benjamin’s back. Suddenly the torrent ceased and Benjamin wheeled about, languidly lacing up his fly. Weaving a little, he crossed the porch, drawing near Marse Samuel and letting his hand fall upon the back of his brother’s neck; as he did so, Marse Samuel glanced up at him with a sour-sweet look, rueful, glum, yet touched with quiet affection. Although they were so dissimilar as to seem born of different families, even the most unobservant house servant was aware of the strong bond between them. They had quarreled many times in the past in their fraternal and peaceable way, seeming oblivious of all eavesdropping (or more likely they did not care) and many a black servant gliding around the dinner table had divined enough of their talk to know where each brother stood, philosophically, at least about his body if not his soul.
“My brother is as sentimental as an old she-hound, Doctor,” Benjamin said in an amiable voice. “He believes the slaves are capable of all kinds of improvement. That you can take a bunch of darkies and turn them into shopowners and sea captains and opera impresarios and army generals and Christ knows what all. I say differently. I do not believe in beating a darky. I do not believe, either, in beating a dog or a horse. If you wish my belief to take back to the Bishop, you can tell him that my belief is that a darky is an animal with the brain of a human child and his only value is the work you can get out of him by intimidation, cajolery, and threat.”
“I see,” Dr. Ballard murmured, “yes, I see what you mean.” The minister was paying Benjamin close attention, with a squint-eyed look yet still very deferential. “Yes, I do see clearly what you mean.”
“Like my sentimental and most gentle-hearted brother,” Benjamin continued, “I am against the institution of slavery too. I wish to Jesus it had never come to these shores. If there was some kind of steam engine you could invent to plant corn or cut timber, another to pull suckers, another fine machine to set out in the field and chop tobacco, still another big grand machine to come chugging through the house, lighting the lamps and setting the rooms in order—”
There was an attentive burst of laughter from the two ministers, the younger one tittering behind his fingers while Dr. Ballard made small chuckles and Benjamin himself continued, appreciatively grinning, with one hand resting friendly and familiar on his brother’s shoulder. Still the sour-sweet expression lingered on Marse Samuel’s face and the faintest outline of a sheepish little smile. “Or a machine, I fancy,” Benjamin went on, “that when the mistress of the household prepared herself for an afternoon’s outing, would harness up the mare and bring Old Dolly and the gig around to the front entrance, and then with its strange mechanism set the lady down on one seat and itself on another and prod Old Dolly into a happy canter through the woods and fields— Invent a machine like that, I vow, invent a machine like that, furthermore, that won’t eat you out of house and home, that won’t lie and cheat and thieve you blind, that is efficient instead of being a paragon of blockheadedness and sheer stupidity, that you can lock away at dark in its shed like a pumping engine or a spinning jenny without fear that this machine is going to get up in the dead of night and make off with a prize goose or your fattest Guinea shoat and that when this machine is worn out and beyond its usefulness, you can discard it and buy another instead of being cursed with a no-account old body that conscience dictates you’ve still got to supply with shoes and molasses and a peck of corn a week until the age of ninety-five— Hey! Invent a machine like any of these, gentlemen, and I will say a happy adieu to slavery the moment I can lay my hands on the likes of such a mechanism!” He paused for a moment, taking a swallow from his tumbler, then he said: “Needless to say, I do not see in the near future the possibility of such a machine eventuating.”
There was a brief spell of silence among the company. Dr. Ballard continued to chuckle faintly. Miss Elizabeth had ceased singing, and now in the deep shadows of evening I could hear only the whine of mosquitoes at bay beyond the cloud of dark smoke, and nearby the soft insistent cooing of a mourning dove, a dull fretful sigh—weehoo-hoo-hoo—like a sleepy child in pain. Dr. Ballard crossed his legs abruptly, then said: “Well, from the general tenor of your remarks, Mr. Turner, I presume—well, how shall I say it?—I presume that you feel that the institution of slavery is—well, something we must accept. Would that be a proper interpretation of your remarks?” When Benjamin failed to reply immediately, still gazing down with a crooked bemused smile at Marse Samuel, the minister went on: “And would it also be accurate to discern in what you have just said a conviction that perhaps the Negro lags so far behind the rest of us—I mean, the white race—in moral development that, well, for his own welfare it might be best that he—well, be kept in a kind of benevolent subjection? I mean, is it not possible that slavery is perhaps—how shall we say?—the most satisfactory form of existence for such a people?” He paused, then said: “Cursed be Canaan. A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. Genesis, ninth chapter, twenty-fifth verse. Certainly the Bishop is not completely disinclined to take this viewpoint. I myself—”
But he hesitated, falling silent then, and the whole veranda was quiet, disturbed only by the creaking of chairs. As if his mind for a moment had wandered far away, Benjamin stood there and made no reply, gazing gently down at Marse Samuel, who sat very still in the gathering dark, calmly chewing on his pipe but with a woebegone expression, strained and pinched. He made a movement with his lips, thought better of it, said nothing.
Then Benjamin looked up and said: “You take a little slave like that one there—” And it was an instant before I realized he was speaking of me. He made a gesture toward me with his hand, turning about, and as he did so the others turned too and suddenly I could feel their eyes upon me in the fading light. Nigger, Negro, darky, yes—but I had never heard myself called a slave before. I remember moving uneasily beneath their silent, contemplative gaze and I felt awkward and naked, stripped down to bare black flesh, and a wicked chill like cold water filled the hollow of my gut as the thought crashed in upon me: Yes, I am a slave.
“You take a little slave like that one there,” Benjamin went on, “my brother here thinks he can take a little slave like that and educate him, teach him writing and arithmetic and drawing and so on, expose him to the masterpieces of Walter Scott, pour on the Bible study, and in general raise him up with all the amenities of learning. Gentlemen, I ask you, in all seriousness, ain’t that a whangdoodle of a notion?”
“Yaanh-s,” said Dr. Ballard. The “yes” was a thin whickering sound high in the nose, vaguely distant and amused, yaanh-s.
“Although, gentlemen, I do not doubt that given my brother’s belief in colonization and emancipation and his faith in education and God knows what all, given his passion to prove that a darky has the native gifts granted to the average college professor, he could take a little slave like that one there and teach him the alphabet and his sums and the outlines of geography and right before your eyes you’d think his case was proved. But, gentlemen, let me tell you, my brother does not know darkies like I do. Either that or his saintly belief in reform prevents him from seeing the truth. For, gentlemen, I know better, I know darkies better. I’ll swear to you that if you show me a little darky whom you’ve taught to read the complete works of Julius Caesar forward and backward in the original Latin tongue, I will show you a darky who is still an animal with the brain of a human child that will never get wise nor learn honesty nor acquire any human ethics though that darky live to a ripe old age. A darky, gentlemen, is basically as unteachable as a chicken, and that is the simple fact of the matter.” He halted, then slowly yawned: “Ah, time for bed!”
The ministers and Marse Samuel rose, murmurously chatting, but now as night fell and the bright globe of a full moon rose radiant above the distant woods, I felt Little Morning squeeze me hard on the flesh of my arm, a signal, and I ceased listening to anyone talk, turning to help the old man carry bottles and glasses from the veranda, dousing the smudge pot with sprinkled water, busying myself with a mop against the planks of the pine floor. The chill in my bones would not leave nor was I able for a long time to banish from my mind the thought which hung there as if written on a banner: I am a slave. After some minutes, returning from the pantry, I saw that Benjamin had disappeared, and then I spied Marse Samuel lingering alone at the edge of the veranda. He leaned with one hand propped against the railing and his eyes seemed to follow the two ministers as they made their slow way, black against a blacker black, into the shadows of the night. “God watch over your dreams, Mr. Turner!” the younger one called in a tone girlish and clear.
“And your dreams too,” Marse Samuel replied, but his voice was the thinnest murmur and they could not have heard it. Then he was gone from the veranda and I stood suddenly afraid, listening to Little Morning all agrumble, in gloomy discussion with himself as he limped stiffly among the chairs. A fragrance of tobacco smoke still hung sweetly on the hot still air. For a moment the two ministers, groping their way across the lawn toward the wing of the house, were illumined in a shaft of moonlight, then they vanished for good among the shadows, while the moon itself, rising behind a black frieze of sycamore trees thick with summer leaves, was suddenly obscured, pitching house and lawn into smothering darkness. Well, I am a slave, I thought, and I shivered in the windless, sultry night which seemed—just for an instant—to surround me cold and treacherous and, more somberly, beyond the hope of ending, as if its long ticking course through the hours might lead only to a deeper darkness, without waking, without green glimmerings of dawn or the sound of cockcrow.
Only a few months after this Benjamin died, way out in the swamp, crushed beneath a gigantic bald cypress just as he was engaged in brandy-befuddled remonstrance with two black timber hands. The Negroes later claimed that they had tried to warn of the great tree toppling at their master’s back, but their gesticulations and whispers had been ignored, and they themselves had skipped lightly away as the monster crashed down upon poor drunken Benjamin. Certainly from the rate at which Benjamin had begun to stow away liquor, the story seemed true enough. Among the Negroes for years after there were dark hints, barely spoken, of foul play—but for myself I doubted it. Slaves have put up with far meaner owners than Benjamin.
Anyway, whatever final constraints Marse Samuel may have felt about continuing my education were removed by his brother’s passing. Beyond doubt Benjamin would never have been a cruel master, a nigger-breaker. But if Benjamin’s death brought no rejoicing among the Negroes, it would not be accurate either to say that any were plunged into mourning. Even the dumbest slave shelling corn down in the most rundown and ramshackle cabin had gotten wind of at least the general drift of Marse Samuel’s charitable notions, and they all knew they had passed into more promising hands; so on the day of Benjamin’s funeral, as the scores of humble darkies gathered with sorrowing downcast looks behind the big house and the more musically inclined lifted their voices in tender lament—
“O my massah’s gone! massah’s gone!
My massah’s gone to heaven, my Lord!
I can’t stay behind!”
—the insincerity of their simple words was as plain as the difference between gold and brass …
And so during all those boyhood years when the horn blew at the first crack of dawn, when Abraham stood at the edge of the stable in the still-starlit dark trumpeting in sad hoarse notes the awakening call which brought firelight flickering at the doors of the cabins down the slope—that horn did not blow for me. I alone could stir and turn and sleep another hour, until the full light of sunup roused me to my kitchen chores long after the other Negroes had vanished to mill and woods and fields. Not for my soft pink palms—accustomed to the touch of silver and crystal, of pewter and glossy oiled oak—was the grimy feel of the hoe handle and the sickle and the ax. Not for me was the summer heat of the blacksmith shop or the steaming, gnat-mad fields of corn or the bone-cracking labor of the woods, rump deep in decaying slime, or the racket and toil of the mill where the weight of grain and timber ruptured the gut and twisted shoulders and spine into a stooped attitude of toil as immutable as statues carved in black marble. And although Marse Samuel—certainly a bountiful master by any standard—could never be accused of starving his Negroes, it was nonetheless not the field-hand diet of hog and hominy to which my palate became accustomed, but finer fare, lean ham and game and pastry—leftovers to be sure, but I rarely knew what it was like not to partake of the same food that the Turners themselves enjoyed.
As for work itself, it would be a stretch of the truth to say that my days were idle; indeed, the memory of my youth at Turner’s Mill is one of a constant hustling about the house from dawn until dusk. But honestly recollected, my tasks were light, far from the sweat and stink of the field. I cleaned, I washed, I scrubbed; I polished doorknobs and built fires and learned to set a meticulous table. The hand-me-down clothes I received were baggy, but they didn’t scratch. Off and on for another year or two I continued with my lessons under the tutelage of Miss Nell, a patient, wispy creature who because of some private inner crisis had intensified her already fervid religious bent, now abandoning not only Walter Scott but even John Bunyan and all such secular work in favor of the Bible, especially the Prophets and the Psalms and the Book of Job, which we continued to read together beneath a great tulip poplar, my young black woolly head brushing her silken bonnet. Do not consider me impertinent when I say that years later, immersed in the project which is the reason for this account, I breathed a silent word of gratitude to this gentle and motherly lady, from whose lips I first heard those great lines from Isaiah: Therefore will I number you to the sword, and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter, because when I called ye did not answer . . .
It seems to me now, as a matter of fact, that it was Miss Nell who inadvertently conveyed to me the knowledge of my own very special standing within the family, during a spell of illness a year or so before my mother died and which I reckon to have been in the autumn when I had just turned fourteen. I did not know then nor was I ever told the name of my affliction, but it could not have been anything but grave, for I passed dark streams of blood from my bladder and for days and nights I was racked by an aching fever which sent my mind off into crazed visions and nightmares through which daylight and dark, waking and sleeping were hopelessly jumbled together and my surroundings became as unreal to me as if I had been transported into another land. Dimly I recall being moved from the corn-shuck bed I had shared for so long with my mother to some other room in the house, where I lay upon an enormous bedstead with linen sheets amid the hushed sound of whispers and tiptoeing footsteps. There in my delirium I was attended to every moment; my head was gently lifted, I drank water from a tumbler held to my lips by soft white hands. These same pale hands reappeared constantly, hovering over my eyes as in a dream to cool my burning brow with strips of flannel dipped in cool water. After a week I slowly began to recover, and the week following this I returned to my mother’s room, quite infirm at first but after a while ready to resume my daily chores. Yet I was never able to forget how in the midst of my sickness—during a single moment of clarity which came over me before I fell back into a fevered nightmare—I heard Miss Nell’s tearful voice, her whispered words beyond the strange door of the strange room: “Oh Lord, Sam, our little Nat! Poor little Nat! We must pray, Sam, pray, pray! He mustn’t be allowed to die!”
I became in short a pet, the darling, the little black jewel of Turner’s Mill. Pampered, fondled, nudged, pinched, I was the household’s spoiled child, a grinning elf in a starched jumper who gazed at himself in mirrors, witlessly preoccupied with his own ability to charm. That a white child would not have been so sweetly indulged—that my very blackness was central to the privileges I was given and the familiarity I was allowed—never occurred to me, and doubtless I would not have understood even if I had been told. Small wonder then that from the snug, secure dominion of my ignorance and self-satisfaction I began more and more to regard the Negroes of the mill and field as creatures beneath contempt, so devoid of the attributes I had come to connect with the sheltered and respectable life that they were worth not even my derision. Let some wretched cornfield hand, sweating and stinking, his bare foot gashed by a mishandled hoe, make the blunder of appearing at the edge of the veranda, with a piteous wail asking that I get old massah to please fetch him some kind of “portice” for his wound, and I would direct him to the proper rear door in a voice edged with icy scorn. Or should any black children from the cabins invade, no matter how guilelessly, the precincts of the big house and its rolling lawn, I would be at them with a flourished broomstick and shrill cries of abuse—safe however behind the kitchen door. Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.
It must have been during the spring of my sixteenth year that Marse Samuel took me aside on the lawn after one midday dinner and announced a rather surprising change in the routine of my life. Despite the sense I had of belonging and of a closeness to the family, I was not of course really of the family and there were intimacies I was denied; days and weeks might go by without Marse Samuel paying any note of me, especially during the long busy seasons of planting and harvest, and thus those special moments when I was the object of his attention I can recall with the greatest clearness and intensity. On this particular afternoon he spoke of my work in the house, commending me on my alertness and industry and on the good reports brought to him by Miss Nell and the young mistresses regarding the nimble way I applied myself not only to my lessons but to my daily chores.
Now, all this was laudable, he said, and the duteous way I attended to my work was something in which I myself should take pride. The fact remained, however, that I owned too much ability and intelligence to labor for long as a house servant—a career which could not help but stunt and diminish the capacities he felt I had for development and lead me early into a barren dead end. Did I not honestly think that such a way of life was suitable only for rickety old codgers like Little Morning or ancient mammies with bandannas and rheumy eyes and with a bulge of snuff in their wrinkled cheeks? Certainly a boy who had learned as much as I had could not contemplate such a fruitless lifetime with anything but despondency and dread.
For a moment I was unable to answer. I do not believe that I had ever thought of the future; it is not in the mood of a Negro, once aware of the irrecoverable fact of his bondage, to dwell on the future at all, and even I in my state of relative good fortune must have simply assumed without thought that the days and years which stretched out before me would present only the familiar repetitious and interminable clutter of dirty dishes, chimney ashes, muddy boots, tarnished doorknobs, chamber pots, mops and brooms. That something different might befall my lot had never occurred to me. I do not know what I was about to reply when he slapped me gently on the shoulder, exclaiming in an eager, hearty voice: “I have grander plans for this young darky.”
Grand plans indeed. The beginning of an apprenticeship in carpentry, which, as it turned out for long years, was of as little use to me or anyone as so much rotting sawdust clogging a millwheel. But I could not have known that then. I flung myself into this new fresh field of learning with all the delight and anticipation and hungry high spirits of a white boy setting off for the College of William & Mary and an education in the mysteries of law. Marse Samuel had, for one thing, just recently acquired the services of a master carpenter, a German from Washington called Goat (it occurred to me long afterward that this could not have been the proper spelling, that it must have been something like Godt, but no one ever told me otherwise and in my recollection the man remains forever Goat), and it was these hands into which my owner delivered me for further instruction. For two years under the guidance of Goat I learned the carpenter’s trade in the dusty shop down the slope between the big house and the cabins. I had become fairly good-sized for my age, and was strongly muscled and capable with my hands; all this combined with the fact that I had more than the rudiments of an education, and could measure and calculate nearly as well as any grown white man, made me an able student of the craft and I quickly learned to handle the saw and the adze and the plane and could set a row of joists parallel and straight beneath the laths of a new corncrib roof almost as skillfully as Goat himself. Goat was a large beefy man slow of movement and of words. Outside of carpentering, he seemed content to live by himself and to raise chickens. He had a crown of wispy hair and a shaggy beard the color of cinnamon and he supplied emphasis to his slow, cluttered, growling speech with choppy motions of knobbed and beefy hands. We were able to say little enough to each other, yet somehow he taught me carpentry well and I always felt grateful to him.
One thing about the carpenter’s shop has always lingered in my mind and I should tell it, even though it concerns a matter I would hesitate to dwell on had I not resolved to make this account as truthful as possible. Like most boys of sixteen or thereabouts I had begun to feel severely the pressures of my new manhood, yet I was in an unusual position compared to the other Negro boys, who found an easy outlet for their hunger with the available and willing little black girls whom they took during some quick stolen instant at the edge of a cornfield or amid the cool concealing grass of a stand of sorghum down at the edge of the woods. Isolated as I was from the cabins and such activity, I grew up in almost total ignorance of these fleshly pleasures, and whatever further knowledge I might have gained was confounded by the fear (and this was a fear I must confess I was unable to shake totally free of even in later life) that adventures in this sphere were unholy and obnoxious in the sight of the Lord. Nonetheless, I was a vigorous and healthy boy, and try as I might to fight down temptation I could not resist accepting the opportunity to excite myself whenever the force of my desire became overwhelming. For some reason at that time it seemed plausible to believe that the Lord would not chastise me too harshly so long as I was moderate in taking my pleasure, and thus I limited these solitary moments to once a week—usually Saturdays, close enough to the Sabbath so as to make my penitent prayers on that day all the more forceful and devout.
I would go to a small, low-ceilinged storage shed that was connected to the carpenter’s shop by a door which I could lock with a peg and thong. It was always a nameless white girl between whose legs I envisioned myself—a young girl with golden curls. The shed smelled strongly of freshly hewn timber and there was a resinous odor of loblolly pine, pungent and sharp enough to sear the nostrils; and often in later times, walking through noontime heat past a stand of pine trees, that same spicy and redolent odor of cut timber would arouse my senses and I would feel a sudden surge and stiffening at my groin as I thought of the carpenter’s shop and as the memory began achingly to return, mingling tenderness and desire, of my vision of the golden-haired girl with her lips half open and whispering, and my young self so many years before crouched panting in the pine-smelling sweetness.
I suspect that it was a kind of loneliness, together with the fact that I had an amount of leisure not granted to many other slaves, which helped cause me at this time so zealously to precipitate myself into a study of the Bible, where I acquired—even at that early age—such a reverence and a sense of majesty in the presence of the Psalms and in the teachings of the great Prophets that I resolved that no matter where my destiny took me, no matter what humdrum tasks befell my lot in later years, I would become first and foremost a preacher of the Word. At Christmas time one year Miss Nell made me a gift of a Bible—one of several left at Turner’s Mill by an itinerant messenger of the Bible Society in Richmond. “Heed this good book, Nathaniel,” she said in her soft and distant voice, “and happiness shall attend you wherever you go.” I will never forget my excitement as she pressed the brown leather-covered Bible into my hands. Surely at that moment I must have been (though all unaware) the only black boy in Virginia who possessed a book.
My joy was so great that I became dizzy, and I began to tremble and sweat, though windy drafts swept through the house and the day was bitterly cold. I was overtaken by such a bewildering emotion that I could not even thank the good lady, but merely turned and went to my little room, where I sat on the corn-shuck tick in the slanting icicle light of Christmas afternoon, quite unable to lift the cover and look at the pages. I recall the scent of cedar logs burning in the kitchen beyond the wall behind me, and the kitchen warmth stealing through the cracks of the timbers at my back. I recall too the echo of the spinet piano dimly tinkling far off in the great hall of the house and the sound of white people’s voices lifted in song—Joy to the world! the Lord is come—while with the Bible still clutched unopened in my hands I gazed through a warped and crinkled isinglass windowpane to the sere wind-swept slope outside: there a mob of Negroes from the cabins was trooping toward the house. Muffled up against the cold in the coarse and shapeless yet decent winter garments Marse Samuel provided for them, they straggled along in a single line, men, women, pickaninnies, prepared to receive their gifts—a beanbag or a hunk of rock candy for the children, a yard of calico for the women, a plug of tobacco or a cheap jackknife for the men. They were a disheveled, ragged lot, and as they clumped past on the frozen ground near the window I could hear the babble of their voices, filled with Christmas anticipation, laughter high and heedless, and loutish nigger cheer. The sight of them suddenly touched me with a loathing so intense that it was akin to disgust, belly-sickness, and I turned my eyes away, throwing open the Bible at last to a passage whose meaning was lost on me then entirely but which I never forgot and now in the light of all that has since come to pass shimmers in my memory like a transfiguration: I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction …
Except for Marse Samuel and Miss Nell (and that single fleeting recollection of Brother Benjamin), there is little enough I seem to be able to remember about the Turner family. Miss Elizabeth—Benjamin’s widow—remains but a shadow in my mind; a bony, weepy-looking, raw-elbowed woman, she sang hopefully in a quavering voice and whenever I try to conjure her up in memory it is mainly the voice that lingers—disembodied, pining, frail as a reed, a fluty desiccated Anglo-Saxon whine. She was tuberculous, and since her ailment required her to be often on the coast near Norfolk, where it was thought by the doctors that the damp salt air was curative, I saw her infrequently and then only from afar.
Benjamin’s two sons had both studied something called Progressive Agronomy at the College of William & Mary, and soon after his father’s death the older son, Willoughby, removed himself and his bride to a smaller dwelling at the lower, thickly wooded edge of the plantation; from this house, called the New Retreat, he supervised as his father had before him the logging and timber-cutting operations of the Turner enterprise, and so him too I rarely encountered or had any dealings with.
The other agronomist, Lewis, who was a bachelor—ruddy-faced and stocky and about thirty—shared with his uncle in the management of the plantation and in effect had become the general overseer upon the abrupt departure of the inebriate McBride, whom Marse Samuel eventually fired for his lecherous ways. (I have no idea whether Marse Samuel ever learned of the Irishman’s encounter with my mother although I’m fairly certain that the man, perhaps daunted by her basic unwillingness, never dared to approach her again. Whatever, it is testimony I believe to Marse Samuel’s tolerance and patience—and is perhaps too a measure of something touchingly ingenuous in his nature—that he not only put up with McBride’s drunkenness long beyond the point when another gentleman planter would have sent him packing, but became aware of his proclivity to Negro women a full two years after everyone else on the place had noted the marvel of at least three little slaves born with a palish cast, light curly hair, and a long fat Irish lip.) Lewis was an easygoing master (though I do not believe overly bright; he made errors in his speech which I in my young black wisdom secretly sneered at), and he tended to follow his uncle’s guidance in most practical matters including the handling of Negroes, and in his treatment of those who came within his purview was more or less fair and good-humored, which is all that any slave could ask. When he was not at work he seemed to be most of the time out in the woods on horseback or shooting birds in the meadows, and thus stayed pretty much apart from the Negroes and such private affairs as they might be said (with a stretch of the imagination) to have.
Of the Turners, then, there remains only to speak of Marse Samuel’s two daughters, Miss Louisa and Miss Emmeline. The older girl, Miss Louisa, aided her mother in my earliest instruction, as I have already recounted; and the swift, assured way in which I learned to read and spell and do my sums gives me reason to believe that she was an excellent teacher. But our relationship in the end was so shortlived that it is hard for me to summon up an image of her. When I was around fourteen she got married to a young land speculator from Kentucky and moved away with him forever, leaving my tutelage completely in the hands of my protectress, her Scripture-beset mother.
Miss Emmeline was the last, the youngest. At the time I am speaking of she was twenty-five, perhaps a little more, and I worshiped her—from a great distance, of course—with the chaste, evangelical passion that could only be nurtured in the innocent heart of a boy like myself, reared in surroundings where women (at least white ladies) seemed to float like bubbles in an immaculate effulgence of purity and perfection. With her lustrous rich auburn hair parted at the center and her dark intelligent eyes and the sweet gravity of her mouth which lent to her face such an air of noble calm, she would have been a great beauty even in a society far removed from this backwater, where work and isolation and the weather tended quickly to harshen a white mistress’s charms. Perhaps city life had had something to do with this, since after attending the female seminary nearby in Lawrenceville she had gone north to Baltimore, and there she had spent several years in the home of a maternal aunt. During that time she had fallen victim (or so it was rumored—and so it was bruited about the kitchen by Prissy or Little Morning or one of the house servants, all of them by training chronic snoops) of an unhappy love affair—so grievous that it had threatened a physical decline—and thus Marse Samuel had summoned her home, where she now helped Miss Nell in the management of the household. Eventually it seemed that her spirits were restored, and she fell without strain into the routine of a young plantation mistress, attending to the ill and the feeble in the cabins, laying up preserves and making fruit cakes, and in the spring and summer taking care of the cultivation of a large vegetable garden not far from the carpenter’s shop.
The vegetable garden was her particular devotion; she planted by herself all the seeds and seedlings, and for hours on end, her head sheltered by an enormous straw hat, she would labor side by side with the two small Negro girls who were her assistants, plucking weeds beneath the hot summer sun. Working in the carpenter’s shop, I would often raise my eyes and watch her secretly, bewitched, suddenly short of breath, yearning with a kind of raw hunger for that moment which I knew was about to arrive, and did—that moment when, pausing to look upward at the sky, she let her fair and slender fingers pass lightly over her damp brow, all the while remaining motionless upon her knees, the eyes gently reflective, her teeth glinting through lightly parted lips, a vein throbbing at her temple while she offered me quite unawares the rare glimpse, face to face, of her pure, proud, astonishing smooth-skinned beauty.
Yet my passion for her was virginal, miserably and obscurely connected with my own religious strivings. I believed in purity and goodness, and there was something about her total beauty—a sadness, but a restless and lonely independence of manner, a proud serenity about the way in which she moved—which was pure and good in itself, like the disembodied, transparent beauty of an imagined angel. In later life, of course, I learned that such an infatuation for a beautiful white mistress on the part of a black boy was not at all uncommon, despite the possibility of danger, but at the time my adoration of her seemed to me eerie, unique, and almost insupportable, as if I had been afflicted at the roots of my soul by some divine sickness. I do not believe that during this year-long period of my worship she spoke ten words to me and I dared say nothing to her except to breathe once or twice a queasy “Yessum” or “No’m” to some casual question. Since I no longer worked in the house our paths crossed seldom, and I only asked the Lord that I be allowed sight of her once or twice a day. Naturally she had been aware for a number of years of my unusual standing as a privileged young servant, but her mind was on anything but a nigger boy and although her manner toward me was not unkindly she seemed only faintly conscious of the fact that I lived and breathed. Once from the veranda she called me to help her hang a flower pot; in my jangled fumbling and confusion I nearly allowed the pot to fall, and when, standing at my side, she caught my bare arm amid a shower of earth and cried in a sharp voice, “Nat! Silly goose!” the sound of my name on her lips was as cooling as a benediction and the contact with her white fingers was like the touch of fire.
Then one night in late summer about a year after Miss Emmeline’s return to the plantation from Baltimore, there was a party at Turner’s Mill—and this in itself was an event worthy of note. Social affairs at the plantation were rare (at least within the memory of my time at the big house), not only because of the remoteness of the place but because of the perilous conditions of transportation—deep fords, fallen trees, and washed-out roads making intercourse between the various Tidewater estates in each case a major venture, not to be considered lightly or to be undertaken in an impetuous mood. Once in a great while, however—every two years or so, usually in the late summer when the crops were laid by—Marse Samuel would decide to have what he called, humorously, an “assemblage,” and a score of people would come from miles around, planters and their families from the James and Chickahominy rivers and from down in North Carolina, people with names like Carter and Harrison and Byrd and Clark and Bonner arriving in elegant coaches and accompanied by a hustling, noisy entourage of black nursemaids and body servants. They would stay for four or five days, sometimes as long as a week, and daily there would be fox hunts with the hounds of Major Vaughan, whose plantation was not far away, and turkey shoots and contests in horsemanship, pistol matches and picnics and a great deal of contented, somnolent, easy palaver among the ladies on the veranda, and at least two fancy balls in the great hall, bedecked for each evening’s merriment in yards of pink and blue bunting.
It became my duty on these occasions (after I had reached the age of sixteen or thereabouts) to act in the capacity of “chief usher,” a title which Marse Samuel bestowed upon me and which involved my supervision of all the Negro help outside of the kitchen. (It is possibly a measure of Marse Samuel’s confidence in me that he entrusted me with this position, as young as I happened to be; doubtless on the other hand I simply was quicker and smarter than all the rest.) Caparisoned for a week in purple velvet knee-length pantaloons, a red silk jacket with buckles of shiny brass, and a white goat’s-hair wig which culminated behind in a saucy queue, I must have presented an exotic sight to the Carters and the Byrds, but I reveled in my role and took great pleasure in bustling about and lording it over the other black boys—most of them enlisted from the fields, dumb callow kids all thumbs and knobby knees and popping eyes—even though each day I was kept feverishly busy from dawn to dusk. It was I who greeted the carriages and coaches and helped the ladies dismount, I too who rode herd on Lucas and Todd and Pete and Tim, making certain that they polished each night each gentleman’s boots, that they cleaned up the litter on the lawn, that they hurried about ceaselessly, fetching ice from the ice cellar, retrieving a lady’s lost fan, tethering horses, untethering them, doing this, undoing that. I was the first to arise long before dawn (to help Little Morning prepare daily a stirrup cup of whiskey for the fox hunt was one of my most important chores) and nearly always the last to retire, and the fact that I was up and about at a truly unearthly hour was the only reason that caused me one morning, between ball and hunt, to nearly stumble over Miss Emmeline and someone else in the moonless and murky dark.
It was not the loud whisper of her voice that shocked me so much—though I instantly distinguished it—but the Lord’s name in her mouth, uttered in a frenzy, the first time in my life I had heard blasphemy on a woman’s tongue. And so astonished was I by the words that as I stood there rooted in the dark it did not just then occur to me to consider the event which occasioned them, and I thought she was in some great and nameless peril: “Oh mercy … oh God … oh Jesus … wait! … oh Jesus … now wait! … quick … put it back … now then … slowly … oh Jesus Christ … slowly! … wait!”
A man’s soft groan from the lawn behind the hedge now made me aware of the other presence, and I remained half paralyzed, fascinated yet suddenly sick nearly unto death at the sound of the Saviour’s name spoken thus, as if He had been stripped shamelessly naked by the hot urgency of her lips. “Wait, wait!” she again implored, and a gentle sigh came from the man’s throat, and once more she continued her rhythmic whispering: “Oh mercy … mercy … wait now, slowly! … oh Jesus … oh Christ … oh Christ … oh yes, now! … Oh mercy … mercy … mercy …”
Abruptly then, in a prolonged and dwindling little sob, the voice died and all was silent, and I could hear nothing but the piping of frogs in the millpond and a dull thumping of horses against the stable stalls and the sound of my own heart racing madly, so loud that I thought surely it must be heard above the soughing of a night wind in the sycamore trees. I stood there unable to move, my spirit a shambles from chagrin and shock and fear. And I recall thinking wretchedly: This is what comes of being a nigger. It ain’t fair. If I wasn’t a nigger I wouldn’t find out about things I don’t want to find out about. It ain’t fair.
Then after a long silence I heard the man’s voice, impassioned, tremulous: “Oh my love Em, my love, my love, Em my love!”
But there was no reply from Miss Emmeline and time crept by slowly and painfully like something crippled and old, causing my mouth to go dry and a numbness, premonitory with the clammy touch of death, to spread a tingling chill through my legs and thighs. At last I heard her voice again, placid now, composed, but edged with contempt and bitterness. “Finally you’ve accomplished what you’ve been after for ages. I hope you’re satisfied.”
“Oh Em, my love, my love,” he whispered. “Let me—”
“Stay away from me!” she said, her voice rising now in the darkness. “Stay away from me, do you hear! If you touch me, if you say another word to me I’ll tell Papa! I’ll tell Papa and he’ll shoot you for ravishing your own cousin.”
“But oh my darling Em!” he protested. “You consented to—Oh Em, my love, my dear—”
“Just stay away from me!” she repeated, and again she fell silent and there was no sound for a long while until suddenly I heard her burst out in words touched with raw and abandoned despair: “Oh God, how I hate you. Oh God, how I hate this place. Oh God, how I hate life. Oh God, how I hate God!”
“Oh don’t, Em!” he whispered in a frantic voice. “My love, my love, my love!”
“This God damned horrible place. I would even go back to Maryland and become a whore again, and allow the only man I ever loved to sell my body on the streets of Baltimore. Get your God damned hands off me and don’t speak another word to me again! If you do I’ll tell Papa! Now leave me, leave me, leave me, leave me alone!”
I have spoken elsewhere in this narrative, and more than once, of a Negro’s ubiquity and the learning he acquires, so often unbeknownst to white people, of the innermost secrets of their hearts. That evening was one such time, but it seemed to me, too, as I watched Miss Emmeline rise from the grass and in a rustle of taffeta disappear into the blue shadows of the house and then saw her cousin Lewis rise also and slouch off miserably through the night, that no matter how much covert knowledge a Negro possessed there were questions always left unanswered and a mystery, and that therefore he should not feel himself too wise or all-knowing. Certainly this was true in regard to Miss Emmeline, who, all the while I pondered her after that evening, became ever more wrapped in a dark and secret cloak. She did not speak another word to Lewis nor, so far as I was able to observe, did he dare speak to her; her threat, her admonition triumphed, and some months later the poor man left Turner’s Mill entirely, going down to Louisiana to try to set himself up in sugar or cotton.
As for what I heard and saw that night, please do not consider my account simply—well, mischievous—for in truth such an episode had the effect of altering my entire vision of white women. For now the glow of saintliness which had surrounded Miss Emmeline in my mind dimmed, flickered out, disappeared; it was as if she suddenly stood disrobed and the fascination she held for me was of a different order, just as my hopeless and unending frustration was of a different kind though no less severe. For a while I was still maddened by her. I still worshiped her beauty from a distance but I could not help but be shaken to my guts by the words of blasphemy I had heard her utter, which now inflamed my thoughts, and like pinpoints of fire, pricked and agitated my very dreams. In my fantasies she began to replace the innocent, imaginary girl with the golden curls as the object of my craving, and on those Saturdays when I stole into my private place in the carpenter’s shop to release my pent-up desires, it was Miss Emmeline whose bare white full round hips and belly responded wildly to all my lust and who, sobbing “mercy, mercy, mercy” against my ear, allowed me to partake of the wicked and godless yet unutterable joys of defilement.
One day in October just after I became eighteen—a day recollected with that mysterious clarity of all days upon which transpire the greatest of events—I discovered the actual outlines of that future which Marse Samuel had envisioned for me all these weeks and months and years.