The Confessions of Nat Turner Part 5

But that evening in the early darkness while I lie awake on my straw bed, the word columbine 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 Confessions of Nat Turner 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 103.

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 pa.s.sionate 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 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 columbine still on my lips as I sink away into some strange dream filled with inchoate promise and a voiceless, hovering joy. 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, s.h.i.+vering, 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 cras.h.i.+ng on the sh.o.r.e. 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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 104.

nightmares, nightmares filled with unending moments of suffocation . . .

And so in this way, between waking and oblivion, with these reveries, voices, recollections, I pa.s.sed 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. " " 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 s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.ts! Look how they spring! " 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 s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.ts! 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 s.h.i.+p 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.

105.

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 n.i.g.g.e.r. 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 coa.r.s.e greenery-skunk cabbage and cinnamon fern and a p.r.i.c.kly 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.

Gra.s.shoppers 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 gra.s.s. "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 superst.i.tious 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 106.

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 f.a.gots, 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 pa.s.sel 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs.

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 n.i.g.g.e.r-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 107.

become a house n.i.g.g.e.r, too. And that may or may not have been a fortunate circ.u.mstance, depending upon how you view what came to pa.s.s in Jerusalem so many years later.

"Quit pesterin' 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, Ma.r.s.e 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! Ma.r.s.e Alpheus done bought him in Petersburg fo' to work strippin' logs in de mill. But yo' '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, Ma.r.s.e 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! Ma.r.s.e 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 n.i.g.g.e.r work. And he too good-lookin', too, wid dem flas.h.i.+n' 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 Ma.r.s.e Alpheus he brung up yo' daddy to de big house and commenced him into b.u.t.tlin'.

Yes, he was de number-two b.u.t.teler helpin' out Little Mornin'

when first I knowed yo' daddy. Dat was de year before Ma.r.s.e 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' pesterin' 'bout dat, I tells you, boy! How I know 'bout dat, I tells you, boy! How I know where 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. 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 Ma.r.s.e Benjamin. Like I tol' you, when Ma.r.s.e Alpheus die 'twas Ma.r.s.e Benjamin come to own ev'ything on account of he was de oldest son. He five years older dan Ma.r.s.e Samuel so he gits to own ev'ything, I mean de house an' de mill an' de land an' de n.i.g.g.e.rs an' ev'ything. Well, Ma.r.s.e Benjamin he a good ma.s.sah jes' like Ma.r.s.e Alpheus, only he kind of young an' he don' know how to talk to de n.i.g.g.e.rs like his daddy. I don' mean he nasty or wicked or nothin' like dat; no, he jes' don' know how to ack easy easy with n.o.body-I means white folks with n.o.body-I means white folks an an' n.i.g.g.e.rs. Anyways, one evenin' yo' daddy he b.u.t.tlin' at de table an' he do somethin' dat Ma.r.s.e Benjamin think ain't quite right an' he hollers hollers at yo' daddy. at yo' daddy.

Well, yo' daddy he ain't used to havin' no one holler holler at him like dat, an' he turns aroun' still smilin', see-he always smilin', dat man-an' he mock Ma.r.s.e Benjamin right back. Ma.r.s.e Benjamin he done said somethin' like, 'Nathaniel, dis yere silver is filthy!' at him like dat, an' he turns aroun' still smilin', see-he always smilin', dat man-an' he mock Ma.r.s.e Benjamin right back. Ma.r.s.e 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 108.

hollerin' at Ma.r.s.e Benjamin back, smilin' jes' as pretty as you please. Well, Ma.r.s.e Benjamin he jes' fit to be tied, an' he gits up right dere in front of Miss Elizabeth an' Miss Nell an' Ma.r.s.e 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, Ma.r.s.e Samuel stewin' an' fussin' an' sayin' to Ma.r.s.e 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, Ma.r.s.e Alpheus he didn' like to smite no n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body. Not n.o.body! n.o.body! 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs run off dat dey don' 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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. St.u.r.dily built of oak and set above the steeply sloping bank of a wooded ravine, the privy is divided by a board part.i.tion; five holes are for women and small children, the other five are for the men.

Because the 109.

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, coa.r.s.e, 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! quality! And we ain't got no outhouse for our own selfs, hit's a cryin' shame! I'll vow dem cornfield n.i.g.g.e.rs is de akshul And we ain't got no outhouse for our own selfs, hit's a cryin' shame! I'll vow dem cornfield n.i.g.g.e.rs is de akshul limit. limit. Ev'y one dem chillun dey lets pee on de seat, and don' 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 n.i.g.g.e.r womans! Us house folks is quality! 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 beat.i.tude and calm of morning. Outside, somewhere in the woods, a mockingbird begins a chant which ripples and flows like rus.h.i.+ng 110.

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! yel! You, boy! You, boy! Better come on here! Better come on here! " I have dallied too long, she wants me near the kitchen to fetch water. "Nathaniel Turner! " I have dallied too long, she wants me near the kitchen to fetch water. "Nathaniel Turner! You 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 b.a.l.l.s 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, Was.h.!.+" 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. " 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, Was.h.!.+" 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.

111.

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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.i.g.g.e.r '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 112.

she commands. My ch.o.r.es 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 circ.u.mstances 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 sa.s.safras switch until the welts stood up on ourlegs. Wash's sister had a doll that Abraham had made for her; fas.h.i.+oned of jute sacking, 113.

its head was an old split maple doork.n.o.b. Whether it was meant to be a white baby or a n.i.g.g.e.r 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 chickens.h.i.+t. 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: Y Y 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 ma.s.sah to please fetch him some kind of "portice"

for his wound, and I would I scratched this design over and over again on the limecool, 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-n.i.g.g.e.r voices striving clumsily to grapple with 114.

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 The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, not even the t.i.tle; 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 MOLa.s.sES, 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 The Life and Death of Mr. 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 l.u.s.trous 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 115.

flour sack and leaving behind its companion-something which I later learned was called Grace Abounding 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 The Life and Death of Mr. Badman 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 The Life and Life and Death of Mr. Badman 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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, CAPSIc.u.m, CLOVES. 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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, CAPSIc.u.m, 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 pa.s.s and I am aware of nothing. Soon I steal out toward the patch of sunlight again, preparing myself to read, 116.

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 had," he is saying, "you better jes' had 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 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. 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', 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 117.

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 pa.s.s 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! 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 a.s.suage my hunger. Then Christmas fades away and I am in a honeysuckle glade, filled with the b.u.mbling 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 s.h.i.+ning mirror-bright beneath the blazing sun, they ply their hoes in unison, in a cheery voice, and I drink the sweet eggnog descending to me from above in short greedy gulps, which does nothing to a.s.suage my hunger. Then Christmas fades away and I am in a honeysuckle glade, filled with the b.u.mbling 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 s.h.i.+ning mirror-bright beneath the blazing sun, they ply their hoes in unison, chop-chopping 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. 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 Gwine git me two little n.i.g.g.e.r boys, me two little n.i.g.g.e.r boys, he says, smiling he says, smiling , Gwine git me two little , Gwine git me two little boys to chop de corn. boys to chop de corn. Terror sweeps through me. Voiceless, in mad flight, I plunge through the honeysuckle, treading air as if across empty s.p.a.ce 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. Terror sweeps through me. Voiceless, in mad flight, I plunge through the honeysuckle, treading air as if across empty s.p.a.ce 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, wis.h.i.+ng 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 118.

door. "There, G.o.d d.a.m.n, 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 pa.s.ses 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 right," she seems to murmur) for McBride's voice, thick and excited, obliterates her own- "There now, me beauty, ye'll have earrings 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 s.h.i.+mmering 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 119.

above which tiny b.u.t.terflies 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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.