Red Leaves, William Faulkner

Red Leaves

I

THE TWO INDIANS crossed the plantation toward the slave quarters. Neat with whitewash, of baked soft brick, the two rows of houses in which lived the slaves belonging to the clan, faced one another across the mild shade of the lane marked and scored with naked feet and with a few homemade toys mute in the dust. There was no sign of life.

“I know what we will find,” the first Indian said.

“What we will not find,” the second said. Although it was noon, the lane was vacant, the doors of the cabins empty and quiet; no cooking smoke rose from any of the chinked and plastered chimneys.

“Yes. It happened like this when the father of him who is now the Man, died.”
“You mean, of him who was the Man.”
“Yao.”

The first Indian’s name was Three Basket. He was perhaps sixty. They were both squat men, a little solid, burgher-like; paunchy, with big heads, big, broad, dust-colored faces of a certain blurred serenity like carved heads on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra, looming out of a mist. The sun had done it, the violent sun, the violent shade. Their hair looked like sedge grass on burnt-over land. Clamped through one ear Three Basket wore an enameled snuffbox.

“I have said all the time that this is not the good way. In the old days there were no quarters, no Negroes. A man’s time was his own then. He had time. Now he must spend most of it finding work for them who prefer sweating to do.”
“They are like horses and dogs.”

“They are like nothing in this sensible world. Nothing contents them save sweat. They are worse than the white people.”
“It is not as though the Man himself had to find work for them to do.”

“You said it. I do not like slavery. It is not the good way. In the old days, there was the good way. But not now.”
“You do not remember the old way either.”

“I have listened to them who do. And I have tried this way. Man was not made to sweat.”
“That’s so. See what it has done to their flesh.”

“Yes. Black. It has a bitter taste, too.”
“You have eaten of it?”

“Once. I was young then, and more hardy in the appetite than now. Now it is different with me.”
“Yes. They are too valuable to eat now.”

“There is a bitter taste to the flesh which I do not like.”
“They are too valuable to eat, anyway, when the white men will give horses for them.”

They entered the lane. The mute, meager toys — the fetish-shaped objects made of wood and rags and feathers — lay in the dust about the patinaed doorsteps, among bones and broken gourd dishes. But there was no sound from any cabin, no face in any door; had not been since yesterday, when Issetibbeha died. But they already knew what they would find.

It was in the central cabin, a house a little larger than the others, where at certain phases of the moon the Negroes would gather to begin their ceremonies before removing after nightfall to the creek bottom, where they kept the drums. In this room they kept the minor accessories, the cryptic ornaments, the ceremonial records which consisted of sticks daubed with red clay in symbols. 

It had a hearth in the center of the floor, beneath a hole in the roof, with a few cold wood ashes and a suspended iron pot. The window shutters were closed; when the two Indians entered, after the abashless sunlight they could distinguish nothing with the eyes save a movement, shadow, out of which eyeballs rolled, so that the place appeared to be full of Negroes. The two Indians stood in the doorway.

“Yao,” Basket said. “I said this is not the good way.”
“I don’t think I want to be here,” the second said.

“That is black man’s fear which you smell. It does not smell as ours does.”
“I don’t think I want to be here.”

“Your fear has an odor too.”
“Maybe it is Issetibbeha which we smell.”

“Yao. He knows. He knows what we will find here. He knew when he died what we should find here today.” Out of the rank twilight of the room the eyes, the smell, of Negroes rolled about them. “I am Three Basket, whom you know,” Basket said into the room. “We are come from the Man. He whom we seek is gone?” The Negroes said nothing. The smell of them, of their bodies, seemed to ebb and flux in the still hot air. 

They seemed to be musing as one upon something remote, inscrutable. They were like a single octopus. They were like the roots of a huge tree uncovered, the earth broken momentarily upon the writhen, thick, fetid tangle of its lightless and outraged life. “Come,” Basket said. “You know our errand. Is he whom we seek gone?”

“They are thinking something,” the second said. “I do not want to be here.”

“They are knowing something,” Basket said.
“They are hiding him, you think?”

“No. He is gone. He has been gone since last night. It happened like this before, when the grandfather of him who is now the Man died. It took us three days to catch him. For three days Doom lay above the ground, saying ‘I see my horse and my dog. But I do not see my slave. What have you done with him that you will not permit me to lie quiet?’”

“They do not like to die.”
“Yao. They cling. It makes trouble for us, always. A people without honor and without decorum. Always a trouble.”
“I do not like it here.”

“Nor do I. But then, they are savages; they cannot be expected to regard usage. That is why I say that this way is a bad way.”
“Yao. They cling. They would even rather work in the sun than to enter the earth with a chief. But he is gone.”

The Negroes had said nothing, made no sound. The white eyeballs rolled, wild, subdued; the smell was rank, violent. “Yes, they fear,” the second said. “What shall we do now?”
“Let us go and talk with the Man.”

“Will Moketubbe listen?”
“What can he do? He will not like to. But he is the Man now.”

“Yao. He is the Man. He can wear the shoes with the red heels all the time now.” They turned and went out. There was no door in the door frame. There were no doors in any of the cabins.
“He did that anyway,” Basket said.

“Behind Issetibbeha’s back. But now they are his shoes, since he is the Man.”
“Yao. Issetibbeha did not like it. I have heard. I know that he said to Moketubbe: ‘When you are the Man, the shoes will be yours. But until then, they are my shoes.’ But now Moketubbe is the Man; he can wear them.”

“Yao,” the second said. “He is the Man now. He used to wear the shoes behind Issetibbeha’s back, and it was not known if Issetibbeha knew this or not. And then Issetibbeha became dead, who was not old, and the shoes are Moketubbe’s, since he is the Man now. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t think about it,” Basket said. “Do you?”
“No,” the second said.
“Good,” Basket said. “You are wise.”

II

The house sat on a knoll, surrounded by oak trees. The front of it was one story in height, composed of the deck house of a steamboat which had gone ashore and which Doom, Issetibbeha’s father, had dismantled with his slaves and hauled on cypress rollers twelve miles home overland. It took them five months. His house consisted at the time of one brick wall. 

He set the steamboat broadside on to the wall, where now the chipped and flaked gilding of the rococo cornices arched in faint splendor above the gilt lettering of the stateroom names above the jalousied doors.

Doom had been born merely a subchief, a Mingo, one of three children on the mother’s side of the family. He made a journey — he was a young man then and New Orleans was a European city — from north Mississippi to New Orleans by keel boat, where he met the Chevalier Sœur Blonde de Vitry, a man whose social position, on its face, was as equivocal as Doom’s own. 

In New Orleans, among the gamblers and cutthroats of the river front, Doom, under the tutelage of his patron, passed as the chief, the Man, the hereditary owner of that land which belonged to the male side of the family; it was the Chevalier de Vitry who called him du homme, and hence Doom.

They were seen everywhere together — the Indian, the squat man with a bold, inscrutable, underbred face, and the Parisian, the expatriate, the friend, it was said, of Carondelet and the intimate of General Wilkinson. 

Then they disappeared, the two of them, vanishing from their old equivocal haunts and leaving behind them the legend of the sums which Doom was believed to have won, and some tale about a young woman, daughter of a fairly well-to-do West Indian family, the son and brother of whom sought Doom with a pistol about his old haunts for some time after his disappearance.

Six months later the young woman herself disappeared, boarding the St. Louis packet, which put in one night at a wood landing on the north Mississippi side, where the woman, accompanied by a Negro maid, got off. Four Indians met her with a horse and wagon, and they traveled for three days, slowly, since she was already big with child, to the plantation, where she found that Doom was now chief. He never told her how he accomplished it, save that his uncle and his cousin had died suddenly. 

At that time the house consisted of a brick wall built by shiftless slaves, against which was propped a thatched lean-to divided into rooms and littered with bones and refuse, set in the center of ten thousand acres of matchless parklike forest where deer grazed like domestic cattle. 

Doom and the woman were married there a short time before Issetibbeha was born, by a combination itinerant minister and slave trader who arrived on a mule, to the saddle of which was lashed a cotton umbrella and a three-gallon demijohn of whisky. After that. Doom began to acquire more slaves and to cultivate some of his land, as the white people did. 

But he never had enough for them to do. In utter idleness the majority of them led lives transplanted whole out of African jungles, save on the occasions when, entertaining guests, Doom coursed them with dogs.

When Doom died, Issetibbeha, his son, was nineteen. He became proprietor of the land and of the quintupled herd of blacks for which he had no use at all. Though the title of Man rested with him, there was a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan and who finally gathered in squatting conclave over the Negro question, squatting profoundly beneath the golden names above the doors of the steamboat.

“We cannot eat them,” one said.
“Why not?”
“There are too many of them.”

“That’s true,” a third said. “Once we started, we should have to eat them all. And that much flesh diet is not good for man.”
“Perhaps they will be like deer flesh. That cannot hurt you.”
“We might kill a few of them and not eat them,” Issetibbeha said.

They looked at him for a while. “What for?” one said.

“That is true,” a second said. “We cannot do that. They are too valuable; remember all the bother they have caused us, finding things for them to do. We must do as the white men do.”
“How is that?” Issetibbeha said.

“Raise more Negroes by clearing more land to make corn to feed them, then sell them. We will clear the land and plant it with food and raise Negroes and sell them to the white men for money.”

“But what will we do with this money?” a third said.
They thought for a while.
“We will see,” the first said. They squatted, profound, grave.

“It means work,” the third said.
“Let the Negroes do it,” the first said.

“Yao. Let them. To sweat is bad. It is damp. It opens the pores.”
“And then the night air enters.”
“Yao. Let the Negroes do it. They appear to like sweating.”

So they cleared the land with the Negroes and planted it in grain. Up to that time the slaves had lived in a huge pen with a lean-to roof over one corner, like a pen for pigs. But now they began to build quarters, cabins, putting the young Negroes in the cabins in pairs to mate; five years later Issetibbeha sold forty head to a Memphis trader, and he took the money and went abroad upon it, his maternal uncle from New Orleans conducting the trip. 

At that time the Chevalier Sœur Blonde de Vitry was an old man in Paris, in a toupee and a corset, with a careful toothless old face fixed in a grimace quizzical and profoundly tragic. He borrowed three hundred dollars from Issetibbeha and in return he introduced him into certain circles; a year later Issetibbeha returned home with a gilt bed, a pair of girandoles by whose light it was said that Pompadour arranged her hair while Louis smirked at his mirrored face across her powdered shoulder, and a pair of slippers with red heels. They were too small for him, since he had not worn shoes at all until he reached New Orleans on his way abroad.

He brought the slippers home in tissue paper and kept them in the remaining pocket of a pair of saddlebags filled with cedar shavings, save when he took them out on occasion for his son, Moketubbe, to play with. At three years of age Moketubbe had a broad, flat, Mongolian face that appeared to exist in a complete and unfathomable lethargy, until confronted by the slippers.

Moketubbe’s mother was a comely girl whom Issetibbeha had seen one day working in her shift in a melon patch. He stopped and watched her for a while — the broad, solid thighs, the sound back, the serene face. He was on his way to the creek to fish that day, but he didn’t go any farther; perhaps while he stood there watching the unaware girl he may have remembered his own mother, the city woman, the fugitive with her fans and laces and her Negro blood, and all the tawdry shabbiness of that sorry affair. 

Within the year Moketubbe was born; even at three he could not get his feet into the slippers. Watching him in the still, hot afternoons as he struggled with the slippers with a certain monstrous repudiation of fact, Issetibbeha laughed quietly to himself. He laughed at Moketubbe and the shoes for several years, because Moketubbe did not give up trying to put them on until he was sixteen. Then he quit. 

Or Issetibbeha thought he had. But he had merely quit trying in Issetibbeha’s presence. Issetibbeha’s newest wife told him that Moketubbe had stolen and hidden the shoes. Issetibbeha quit laughing then, and he sent the woman away, so that he was alone. “Yao,” he said. “I too like being alive, it seems.” He sent for Moketubbe. “I give them to you,” he said.

Moketubbe was twenty-five then, unmarried. Issetibbeha was not tall, but he was taller by six inches than his son and almost a hundred pounds lighter. Moketubbe was already diseased with flesh, with a pale, broad, inert face and dropsical hands and feet. “They are yours now,” Issetibbeha said, watching him. Moketubbe had looked at him once when he entered, a glance brief, discreet, veiled.
“Thanks,” he said.

Issetibbeha looked at him. He could never tell if Moketubbe saw anything, looked at anything. “Why will it not be the same if I give the slippers to you?”

“Thanks,” Moketubbe said. Issetibbeha was using snuff at the time; a white man had shown him how to put the powder into his lip and scour it against his teeth with a twig of gum or of alphea.

“Well,” he said, “a man cannot live forever.” He looked at his son, then his gaze went blank in turn, unseeing, and he mused for an instant. You could not tell what he was thinking, save that he said half aloud: “Yao. But Doom’s uncle had no shoes with red heels.” He looked at his son again, fat, inert. 

“Beneath all that, a man might think of doing anything and it not be known until too late.” He sat in a splint chair hammocked with deer thongs. “He cannot even get them on; he and I are both frustrated by the same gross meat which he wears. He cannot even get them on. But is that my fault?”

He lived for five years longer, then he died. He was sick one night, and though the doctor came in a skunk-skin vest and burned sticks, he died before noon.
That was yesterday; the grave was dug, and for twelve hours now the People had been coming in wagons and carriages and on horseback and afoot, to eat the baked dog and the succotash and the yams cooked in ashes and to attend the funeral.

III

“It will be three days,” Basket said, as he and the other Indian returned to the house. “It will be three days and the food will not be enough; I have seen it before.”
The second Indian’s name was Louis Berry. “He will smell too, in this weather.”

“Yao. They are nothing but a trouble and a care.”
“Maybe it will not take three days.”

“They run far. Yao. We will smell this Man before he enters the earth. You watch and see if I am not right.”
They approached the house.

“He can wear the shoes now,” Berry said. “He can wear them now in man’s sight.”
“He cannot wear them for a while yet,” Basket said. Berry looked at him. “He will lead the hunt.”

“Moketubbe?” Berry said. “Do you think he will? A man to whom even talking is travail?”
“What else can he do? It is his own father who will soon begin to smell.”

“That is true,” Berry said. “There is even yet a price he must pay for the shoes. Yao. He has truly bought them. What do you think?”
“What do you think?”
“What do you think?”

“I think nothing.”
“Nor do I. Issetibbeha will not need the shoes now. Let Moketubbe have them; Issetibbeha will not care.”
“Yao. Man must die.”
“Yao. Let him; there is still the Man.”

The bark roof of the porch was supported by peeled cypress poles, high above the texas of the steamboat, shading an unfloored banquette where on the trodden earth mules and horses were tethered in bad weather. On the forward end of the steamboat’s deck sat an old man and two women. One of the women was dressing a fowl, the other was shelling corn. The old man was talking. He was barefoot, in a long linen frock coat and a beaver hat.

“This world is going to the dogs,” he said. “It is being ruined by white men. We got along fine for years and years, before the white men foisted their Negroes upon us. In the old days the old men sat in the shade and ate stewed deer’s flesh and corn and smoked tobacco and talked of honor and grave affairs; now what do we do? 

Even the old wear themselves into the grave taking care of them that like sweating.” When Basket and Berry crossed the deck he ceased and looked up at them. His eyes were querulous, bleared; his face was myriad with tiny wrinkles. “He is fled also,” he said.

“Yes,” Berry said, “he is gone.”
“I knew it. I told them so. It will take three weeks, like when Doom died. You watch and see.”
“It was three days, not three weeks,” Berry said.

“Were you there?”
“No,” Berry said. “But I have heard.”
“Well, I was there,” the old man said. “For three whole weeks, through the swamps and the briers—” They went on and left him talking.

What had been the saloon of the steamboat was now a shell, rotting slowly; the polished mahogany, the carving glinting momentarily and fading through the mold in figures cabalistic and profound; the gutted windows were like cataracted eyes. 

It contained a few sacks of seed or grain, and the fore part of the running gear of a barouche, to the axle of which two C-springs rusted in graceful curves, supporting nothing. In one corner a fox cub ran steadily and soundlessly up and down a willow cage; three scrawny gamecocks moved in the dust, and the place was pocked and marked with their dried droppings.

They passed through the brick wall and entered a big room of chinked logs. It contained the hinder part of the barouche, and the dismantled body lying on its side, the window slatted over with willow withes, through which protruded the heads, the still, beady, outraged eyes and frayed combs of still more game chickens. 

It was floored with packed clay; in one corner leaned a crude plow and two hand-hewn boat paddles. From the ceiling, suspended by four deer thongs, hung the gilt bed which Issetibbeha had fetched from Paris. It had neither mattress nor springs, the frame crisscrossed now by a neat hammocking of thongs.

Issetibbeha had tried to have his newest wife, the young one, sleep in the bed. He was congenitally short of breath himself, and he passed the nights half reclining in his splint chair. He would see her to bed and, later, wakeful, sleeping as he did but three or four hours a night, he would sit in the darkness and simulate slumber and listen to her sneak infinitesimally from the gilt and ribboned bed, to lie on a quilt pallet on the floor until just before daylight. Then she would enter the bed quietly again and in turn simulate slumber, while in the darkness beside her Issetibbeha quietly laughed and laughed.

The girandoles were lashed by thongs to two sticks propped in a corner where a ten-gallon whisky keg lay also. There was a clay hearth; facing it, in the splint chair, Moketubbe sat. He was maybe an inch better than five feet tall, and he weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. 

He wore a broadcloth coat and no shirt, his round, smooth copper balloon of belly swelling above the bottom piece of a suit of linen underwear. On his feet were the slippers with the red heels. Behind his chair stood a stripling with a punkah-like fan made of fringed paper. Moketubbe sat motionless, with his broad, yellow face with its closed eyes and flat nostrils, his flipperlike arms extended. On his face was an expression profound, tragic, and inert. He did not open his eyes when Basket and Berry came in.

“He has worn them since daylight?” Basket said.
“Since daylight,” the stripling said. The fan did not cease. “You can see.”

“Yao,” Basket said. “We can see.” Moketubbe did not move. He looked like an effigy, like a Malay god in frock coat, drawers, naked chest, the trivial scarlet-heeled shoes.
“I wouldn’t disturb him, if I were you,” the stripling said.

“Not if I were you,” Basket said. He and Berry squatted. The stripling moved the fan steadily. “O Man,” Basket said, “listen.” Moketubbe did not move. “He is gone,” Basket said.
“I told you so,” the stripling said. “I knew he would flee. I told you.”

“Yao,” Basket said. “You are not the first to tell us afterward what we should have known before. Why is it that some of you wise men took no steps yesterday to prevent this?”
“He does not wish to die,” Berry said.
“Why should he not wish it?” Basket said.

“Because he must die some day is no reason,” the stripling said. “That would not convince me either, old man.”
“Hold your tongue,” Berry said.

“For twenty years,” Basket said, “while others of his race sweat in the fields, he served the Man in the shade. Why should he not wish to die, since he did not wish to sweat?”
“And it will be quick,” Berry said. “It will not take long.”

“Catch him and tell him that,” the stripling said.

“Hush,” Berry said. They squatted, watching Moketubbe’s face. He might have been dead himself. It was as though he were cased so in flesh that even breathing took place too deep within him to show.

“Listen, O Man,” Basket said. “Issetibbeha is dead. He waits. His dog and his horse we have. But his slave has fled. The one who held the pot for him, who ate of his food, from his dish, is fled. Issetibbeha waits.”
“Yao,” Berry said.

“This is not the first time,” Basket said. “This happened when Doom, thy grandfather, lay waiting at the door of the earth. He lay waiting three days, saying, ‘Where is my Negro?’ And Issetibbeha, thy father, answered, ‘I will find him. Rest; I will bring him to you so that you may begin the journey.’”

“Yao,” Berry said.
Moketubbe had not moved, had not opened his eyes.

“For three days Issetibbeha hunted in the bottom,” Basket said. “He did not even return home for food, until the Negro was with him; then he said to Doom, his father, ‘Here is thy dog, thy horse, thy Negro; rest.’ Issetibbeha, who is dead since yesterday, said it. And now Issetibbeha’s Negro is fled. His horse and his dog wait with him, but his Negro is fled.”

“Yao,” Berry said.
Moketubbe had not moved. His eyes were closed; upon his supine monstrous shape there was a colossal inertia, something profoundly immobile, beyond and impervious to flesh. They watched his face, squatting.

“When thy father was newly the Man, this happened,” Basket said. “And it was Issetibbeha who brought back the slave to where his father waited to enter the earth.” Moketubbe’s face had not moved, his eyes had not moved. After a while Basket said, “Remove the shoes.”

The stripling removed the shoes. Moketubbe began to pant, his bare chest moving deep, as though he were rising from beyond his unfathomed flesh back into life, like up from the water, the sea. But his eyes had not opened yet.

Berry said, “He will lead the hunt.”
“Yao,” Basket said. “He is the Man. He will lead the hunt.”

IV

All that day the Negro, Issetibbeha’s body servant, hidden in the barn, watched Issetibbeha’s dying. He was forty, a Guinea man. He had a flat nose, a close, small head; the inside corners of his eyes showed red a little, and his prominent gums were a pale bluish red above his square, broad teeth. He had been taken at fourteen by a trader off Kamerun, before his teeth had been filed. He had been Issetibbeha’s body servant for twenty-three years.

On the day before, the day on which Issetibbeha lay sick, he returned to the quarters at dusk. In that unhurried hour the smoke of the cooking fires blew slowly across the street from door to door, carrying into the opposite one the smell of the identical meat and bread. The women tended them; the men were gathered at the head of the lane, watching him as he came down the slope from the house, putting his naked feet down carefully in a strange dusk. To the waiting men his eyeballs were a little luminous.

“Issetibbeha is not dead yet,” the headman said.
“Not dead,” the body servant said. “Who not dead?”

In the dusk they had faces like his, the different ages, the thoughts sealed inscrutable behind faces like the death masks of apes. The smell of the fires, the cooking, blew sharp and slow across the strange dusk, as from another world, above the lane and the pickaninnies naked in the dust.

“If he lives past sundown, he will live until daybreak,” one said.

“Who says?”
“Talk says.”
“Yao. Talk says. We know but one thing.” They looked at the body servant as he stood among them, his eyeballs a little luminous. He was breathing slow and deep. His chest was bare; he was sweating a little. “He knows. He knows it.”

“Let us let the drums talk.”
“Yao. Let the drums tell it.”

The drums began after dark. They kept them hidden in the creek bottom. They were made of hollowed cypress knees, and the Negroes kept them hidden; why, none knew. They were buried in the mud on the bank of a slough; a lad of fourteen guarded them. He was undersized, and a mute; he squatted in the mud there all day, clouded over with mosquitoes, naked save for the mud with which he coated himself against the mosquitoes, and about his neck a fiber bag containing a pig’s rib to which black shreds of flesh still adhered, and two scaly barks on a wire. 

He slobbered onto his clutched knees, drooling; now and then Indians came noiselessly out of the bushes behind him and stood there and contemplated him for a while and went away, and he never knew it.

From the loft of the stable where he lay hidden until dark and after, the Negro could hear the drums. They were three miles away, but he could hear them as though they were in the barn itself below him, thudding and thudding. It was as though he could see the fire too, and the black limbs turning into and out of the flames in copper gleams. 

Only there would be no fire. There would be no more light there than where he lay in the dusty loft, with the whispering arpeggios of rat feet along the warm and immemorial ax-squared rafters. 

The only fire there would be the smudge against mosquitoes where the women with nursing children crouched, their heavy sluggish breasts nippled full and smooth into the mouths of men children; contemplative, oblivious of the drumming, since a fire would signify life.

There was a fire in the steamboat, where Issetibbeha lay dying among his wives, beneath the lashed girandoles and the suspended bed. He could see the smoke, and just before sunset he saw the doctor come out, in a waistcoat made of skunk skins, and set fire to two clay-daubed sticks at the bows of the boat deck. “So he is not dead yet,” the Negro said into the whispering gloom of the loft, answering himself; he could hear the two voices, himself and himself:
“Who not dead?”
“You are dead.”

“Yao, I am dead,” he said quietly. He wished to be where the drums were. He imagined himself springing out of the bushes, leaping among the drums on his bare, lean, greasy, invisible limbs. But he could not do that, because man leaped past life, into where death was; he dashed into death and did not die, because when death took a man, it took him just this side of the end of living. It was when death overran him from behind, still in life. 

The thin whisper of rat feet died in fainting gusts along the rafters. Once he had eaten rat. He was a boy then, but just come to America. They had lived ninety days in a three-foot-high ‘tween-deck in tropic latitudes, hearing from topside the drunken New England captain intoning aloud from a book which he did not recognize for ten years afterward to be the Bible. 

Squatting in the stable so, he had watched the rat, civilized, by association with man reft of its inherent cunning of limb and eye; he had caught it without difficulty, with scarce a movement of his hand, and he ate it slowly, wondering how any of the rats had escaped so long. At that time he was still wearing the single white garment which the trader, a deacon in the Unitarian church, had given him, and he spoke then only his native tongue.

He was naked now, save for a pair of dungaree pants bought by Indians from white men, and an amulet slung on a thong about his hips. The amulet consisted of one half of a mother-of-pearl lorgnon which Issetibbeha had brought back from Paris, and the skull of a cottonmouth moccasin. He had killed the snake himself and eaten it, save the poison head. He lay in the loft, watching the house, the steamboat, listening to the drums, thinking of himself among the drums.

He lay there all night. The next morning he saw the doctor come out, in his skunk vest, and get on his mule and ride away, and he became quite still and watched the final dust from beneath the mule’s delicate feet die away, and then he found that he was still breathing and it seemed strange to him that he still breathed air, still needed air. Then he lay and watched quietly, waiting to move, his eyeballs a little luminous, but with a quiet light, and his breathing light and regular, and saw Louis Berry come out and look at the sky. 

It was good light then, and already five Indians squatted in their Sunday clothes along the steamboat deck; by noon there were twenty-five there. That afternoon they dug the trench in which the meat would be baked, and the yams; by that time there were almost a hundred guests — decorous, quiet, patient in their stiff European finery — and he watched Berry lead Issetibbeha’s mare from the stable and tie her to a tree, and then he watched Berry emerge from the house with the old hound which lay beside Issetibbeha’s chair. 

He tied the hound to the tree too, and it sat there, looking gravely about at the faces. Then it began to howl. It was still howling at sundown, when the Negro climbed down the back wall of the barn and entered the spring branch, where it was already dusk. He began to run then. 

He could hear the hound howling behind him, and near the spring, already running, he passed another Negro. The two men, the one motionless and the other running, looked for an instant at each other as though across an actual boundary between two different worlds. He ran on into full darkness, mouth closed, fists doubled, his broad nostrils bellowing steadily.

He ran on in the darkness. He knew the country well, because he had hunted it often with Issetibbeha, following on his mule the course of the fox or the cat beside Issetibbeha’s mare; he knew it as well as did the men who would pursue him. He saw them for the first time shortly before sunset of the second day. He had run thirty miles then, up the creek bottom, before doubling back; lying in a pawpaw thicket he saw the pursuit for the first time. 

There were two of them, in shirts and straw hats, carrying their neatly rolled trousers under their arms, and they had no weapons. They were middle-aged, paunchy, and they could not have moved very fast anyway; it would be twelve hours before they could return to where he lay watching them. 

“So I will have until midnight to rest,” he said. He was near enough to the plantation to smell the cooking fires, and he thought how he ought to be hungry, since he had not eaten in thirty hours. 

“But it is more important to rest,” he told himself. He continued to tell himself that, lying in the pawpaw thicket, because the effort of resting, the need and the haste to rest, made his heart thud the same as the running had done. It was as though he had forgot how to rest, as though the six hours were not long enough to do it in, to remember again how to do it.

As soon as dark came he moved again. He had thought to keep going steadily and quietly through the night, since there was nowhere for him to go, but as soon as he moved he began to run at top speed, breasting his panting chest, his broad-flaring nostrils through the choked and whipping darkness. 

He ran for an hour, lost by then, without direction, when suddenly he stopped, and after a time his thudding heart unraveled from the sound of the drums. By the sound they were not two miles away; he followed the sound until he could smell the smudge fire and taste the acrid smoke. 

When he stood among them the drums did not cease; only the headman came to him where he stood in the drifting smudge, panting, his nostrils flaring and pulsing, the hushed glare of his ceaseless eyeballs in his mud-daubed face as though they were worked from lungs.

“We have expected thee,” the headman said. “Go, now.”
“Go?”

“Eat, and go. The dead may not consort with the living; thou knowest that.”
“Yao. I know that.” They did not look at one another. The drums had not ceased.

“Wilt thou eat?” the headman said.
“I am not hungry. I caught a rabbit this afternoon, and ate while I lay hidden.”
“Take some cooked meat with thee, then.”

He accepted the cooked meat, wrapped in leaves, and entered the creek bottom again; after a while the sound of the drums ceased. He walked steadily until daybreak. “I have twelve hours,” he said. “Maybe more, since the trail was followed by night.” 

He squatted and ate the meat and wiped his hands on his thighs. Then he rose and removed the dungaree pants and squatted again beside a slough and coated himself with mud — face, arms, body and legs — and squatted again, clasping his knees, his head bowed. 

When it was light enough to see, he moved back into the swamp and squatted again and went to sleep so. He did not dream at all. It was well that he moved, for, waking suddenly in broad daylight and the high sun, he saw the two Indians. They still carried their neatly rolled trousers; they stood opposite the place where he lay hidden, paunchy, thick, soft-looking, a little ludicrous in their straw hats and shirt tails.

“This is wearying work,” one said.

“I’d rather be at home in the shade myself,” the other said. “But there is the Man waiting at the door to the earth.”

“Yao.” They looked quietly about; stooping, one of them removed from his shirt tail a clot of cockleburs. “Damn that Negro,” he said.
“Yao. When have they ever been anything but a trial and a care to us?”

In the early afternoon, from the top of a tree, the Negro looked down into the plantation. He could see Issetibbeha’s body in a hammock between the two trees where the horse and the dog were tethered, and the concourse about the steamboat was filled with wagons and horses and mules, with carts and saddle-horses, while in bright clumps the women and the smaller children and the old men squatted about the long trench where the smoke from the barbecuing meat blew slow and thick. 

The men and the big boys would all be down there in the creek bottom behind him, on the trail, their Sunday clothes rolled carefully up and wedged into tree crotches. There was a clump of men near the door to the house, to the saloon of the steamboat, though, and he watched them, and after a while he saw them bring Moketubbe out in a litter made of buckskin and persimmon poles; high hidden in his leafed nook the Negro, the quarry, looked quietly down upon his irrevocable doom with an expression as profound as Moketubbe’s own. “Yao,” he said quietly. “He will go then. That man whose body has been dead for fifteen years, he will go also.”

In the middle of the afternoon he came face to face with an Indian. They were both on a footlog across a slough — the Negro gaunt, lean, hard, tireless and desperate; the Indian thick, soft-looking, the apparent embodiment of the ultimate and the supreme reluctance and inertia. The Indian made no move, no sound; he stood on the log and watched the Negro plunge into the slough and swim ashore and crash away into the undergrowth.

Just before sunset he lay behind a down log. Up the log in slow procession moved a line of ants. He caught them and ate them slowly, with a kind of detachment, like that of a dinner guest eating salted nuts from a dish. They too had a salt taste, engendering a salivary reaction out of all proportion. He ate them slowly, watching the unbroken line move up the log and into oblivious doom with a steady and terrific undeviation. He had eaten nothing else all day; in his caked mud mask his eyes rolled in reddened rims. 

At sunset, creeping along the creek bank toward where he had spotted a frog, a cottonmouth moccasin slashed him suddenly across the forearm with a thick, sluggish blow. It struck clumsily, leaving two long slashes across his arm like two razor slashes, and half sprawled with its own momentum and rage, it appeared for the moment utterly helpless with its own awkwardness and choleric anger. “Olé, grandfather,” the Negro said. 

He touched its head and watched it slash him again across his arm, and again, with thick, raking, awkward blows. “It’s that I do not wish to die,” he said. Then he said it again— “It’s that I do not wish to die” — in a quiet tone, of slow and low amaze, as though it were something that, until the words had said themselves, he found that he had not known, or had not known the depth and extent of his desire.

V

Moketubbe took the slippers with him. He could not wear them very long while in motion, not even in the litter where he was slung reclining, so they rested upon a square of fawnskin upon his lap — the cracked, frail slippers a little shapeless now, with their scaled patent-leather surfaces and buckleless tongues and scarlet heels, lying upon the supine obese shape just barely alive, carried through swamp and brier by swinging relays of men who bore steadily all day long the crime and its object, on the business of the slain. 

To Moketubbe it must have been as though, himself immortal, he were being carried rapidly through hell by doomed spirits which, alive, had contemplated his disaster, and, dead, were oblivious partners to his damnation.

After resting for a while, the litter propped in the center of the squatting circle and Moketubbe motionless in it, with closed eyes and his face at once peaceful for the instant and filled with inescapable foreknowledge, he could wear the slippers for a while. 

The stripling put them on him, forcing his big, tender, dropsical feet into them; whereupon into his face came again that expression tragic, passive and profoundly attentive, which dyspeptics wear. Then they went on. He made no move, no sound, inert in the rhythmic litter out of some reserve of inertia, or maybe of some kingly virtue such as courage or fortitude. 

After a time they set the litter down and looked at him, at the yellow face like that of an idol, beaded over with sweat. Then Three Basket or Had-Two-Fathers would say: “Take them off. Honor has been served.” They would remove the shoes. Moketubbe’s face would not alter, but only then would his breathing become perceptible, going in and out of his pale lips with a faint ah-ah-ah sound, and they would squat again while the couriers and the runners came up.

“Not yet?”
“Not yet. He is going east. By sunset he will reach Mouth of Tippah. Then he will turn back. We may take him tomorrow.”
“Let us hope so. It will not be too soon.”
“Yao. It has been three days now.”

“When Doom died, it took only three days.”
“But that was an old man. This one is young.”

“Yao. A good race. If he is taken tomorrow, I will win a horse.”
“May you win it.”
“Yao. This work is not pleasant.”

That was the day on which the food gave out at the plantation. The guests returned home and came back the next day with more food, enough for a week longer. On that day Issetibbeha began to smell; they could smell him for a long way up and down the bottom when it got hot toward noon and the wind blew. 

But they didn’t capture the Negro on that day, nor on the next. It was about dusk on the sixth day when the couriers came up to the litter; they had found blood. “He has injured himself.”

“Not bad, I hope,” Basket said. “We cannot send with Issetibbeha one who will be of no service to him.”
“Nor whom Issetibbeha himself will have to nurse and care for,” Berry said.
“We do not know,” the courier said. “He has hidden himself. He has crept back into the swamp. We have left pickets.”

They trotted with the litter now. The place where the Negro had crept into the swamp was an hour away. In the hurry and excitement they had forgotten that Moketubbe still wore the slippers; when they reached the place Moketubbe had fainted. They removed the slippers and brought him to.

With dark, they formed a circle about the swamp. They squatted, clouded over with gnats and mosquitoes; the evening star burned low and close down the west, and the constellations began to wheel overhead. “We will give him time,” they said. “Tomorrow is just another name for today.”

“Yao. Let him have time.” Then they ceased, and gazed as one into the darkness where the swamp lay. After a while the noise ceased, and soon the courier came out of the darkness.
“He tried to break out.”

“But you turned him back?”

“He turned back. We feared for a moment, the three of us. We could smell him creeping in the darkness, and we could smell something else, which we did not know. That was why we feared, until he told us. He said to slay him there, since it would be dark and he would not have to see the face when it came. But it was not that which we smelled; he told us what it was. 

A snake had struck him. That was two days ago. The arm swelled, and it smelled bad. 

But it was not that which we smelled then, because the swelling had gone down and his arm was no larger than that of a child. He showed us. We felt the arm, all of us did; it was no larger than that of a child. He said to give him a hatchet so he could chop the arm off. But tomorrow is today also.”

“Yao. Tomorrow is today.”
“We feared for a while. Then he went back into the swamp.”
“That is good.”
“Yao. We feared. Shall I tell the Man?”

“I will see,” Basket said. He went away. The courier squatted, telling again about the Negro. Basket returned. “The Man says that it is good. Return to your post.”

The courier crept away. They squatted about the litter; now and then they slept. Sometime after midnight the Negro waked them. He began to shout and talk to himself, his voice coming sharp and sudden out of the darkness, then he fell silent. Dawn came; a white crane flapped slowly across the jonquil sky. Basket was awake. “Let us go now,” he said. “It is today.”

Two Indians entered the swamp, their movements noisy. Before they reached the Negro they stopped, because he began to sing. They could see him, naked and mud-caked, sitting on a log, singing. They squatted silently a short distance away, until he finished. He was chanting something in his own language, his face lifted to the rising sun. His voice was clear, full, with a quality wild and sad. 

“Let him have time,” the Indians said, squatting, patient, waiting. He ceased and they approached. He looked back and up at them through the cracked mud mask. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips cracked upon his square short teeth. The mask of mud appeared to be loose on his face, as if he might have lost flesh since he put it there; he held his left arm close to his breast. 

From the elbow down it was caked and shapeless with black mud. They could smell him, a rank smell. He watched them quietly until one touched him on the arm. “Come,” the Indian said. “You ran well. Do not be ashamed.”

VI

As they neared the plantation in the tainted bright morning, the Negro’s eyes began to roll a little, like those of a horse. The smoke from the cooking pit blew low along the earth and upon the squatting and waiting guests about the yard and upon the steamboat deck, in their bright, stiff, harsh finery; the women, the children, the old men. They had sent couriers along the bottom, and another on ahead, and Issetibbeha’s body had already been removed to where the grave waited, along with the horse and the dog, though they could still smell him in death about the house where he had lived in life. The guests were beginning to move toward the grave when the bearers of Moketubbe’s litter mounted the slope.

The Negro was the tallest there, his high, close, mud-caked head looming above them all. He was breathing hard, as though the desperate effort of the six suspended and desperate days had catapulted upon him at once; although they walked slowly, his naked scarred chest rose and fell above the close-clutched left arm. 

He looked this way and that continuously, as if he were not seeing, as though sight never quite caught up with the looking. His mouth was open a little upon his big white teeth; he began to pant. The already moving guests halted, pausing, looking back, some with pieces of meat in their hands, as the Negro looked about at their faces with his wild, restrained, unceasing eyes.

“Will you eat first?” Basket said. He had to say it twice.
“Yes,” the Negro said. “That’s it. I want to eat.”
The throng had begun to press back toward the center; the word passed to the outermost: “He will eat first.”

They reached the steamboat. “Sit down,” Basket said. The Negro sat on the edge of the deck. He was still panting, his chest rising and falling, his head ceaseless with its white eyeballs, turning from side to side. It was as if the inability to see came from within, from hopelessness, not from absence of vision. They brought food and watched quietly as he tried to eat it. 

He put the food into his mouth and chewed it, but chewing, the half-masticated matter began to emerge from the corners of his mouth and to drool down his chin, onto his chest, and after a while he stopped chewing and sat there, naked, covered with dried mud, the plate on his knees, and his mouth filled with a mass of chewed food, open, his eyes wide and unceasing, panting and panting. They watched him, patient, implacable, waiting.

“Come,” Basket said at last.
“It’s water I want,” the Negro said. “I want water.”

The well was a little way down the slope toward the quarters. The slope lay dappled with the shadows of noon, of that peaceful hour when, Issetibbeha napping in his chair and waiting for the noon meal and the long afternoon to sleep in, the Negro, the body servant, would be free. He would sit in the kitchen door then, talking with the women who prepared the food. 

Beyond the kitchen the lane between the quarters would be quiet, peaceful, with the women talking to one another across the lane and the smoke of the dinner fires blowing upon the pickaninnies like ebony toys in the dust.

“Come,” Basket said.
The Negro walked among them, taller than any. The guests were moving on toward where Issetibbeha and the horse and the dog waited. The Negro walked with his high ceaseless head, his panting chest. “Come,” Basket said. “You wanted water.”

“Yes,” the Negro said. “Yes.” He looked back at the house, then down to the quarters, where today no fire burned, no face showed in any door, no pickaninny in the dust, panting. “It struck me here, raking me across this arm; once, twice, three times. I said, ‘Olé, Grandfather.’”

“Come now,” Basket said. The Negro was still going through the motion of walking, his knee action high, his head high, as though he were on a treadmill. His eyeballs had a wild, restrained glare, like those of a horse. “You wanted water,” Basket said. “Here it is.”

There was a gourd in the well. They dipped it full and gave it to the Negro, and they watched him try to drink. His eyes had not ceased as he tilted the gourd slowly against his caked face. They could watch his throat working and the bright water cascading from either side of the gourd, down his chin and breast. Then the water stopped. “Come,” Basket said.

“Wait,” the Negro said. He dipped the gourd again and tilted it against his face, beneath his ceaseless eyes. Again they watched his throat working and the unswallowed water sheathing broken and myriad down his chin, channeling his caked chest. 

They waited, patient, grave, decorous, implacable; clansman and guest and kin. Then the water ceased, though still the empty gourd tilted higher and higher, and still his black throat aped the vain motion of his frustrated swallowing. A piece of water-loosened mud carried away from his chest and broke at his muddy feet, and in the empty gourd they could hear his breath: ah-ah-ah.

“Come,” Basket said, taking the gourd from the Negro and hanging it back in the well.


The End