Go Down, Moses

  He entered the gate in the paling fence which he had built himself when old Cass gave them the house, as he had hauled and laid the field stone path across the grassless yard which his wife used to sweep every morning with a broom of bound willow twigs, sweeping the clean dust into curving intricate patterns among the flower-beds outlined with broken brick and bottles and shards of china and colored glass. She had returned from time to time during the spring to work the flower-beds so that they bloomed as usual—the hardy, blatant blooms loved of her and his race: prince’s feather and sunflower, canna and hollyhock—but until today the paths among them had not been swept since last year. Yes, he thought. I got to kill him or I got to leave here.

  He entered the hall, then the room where he had lit the fire two years ago which was to have outlasted both of them. He could not always remember afterward what he had said but he never forgot the amazed and incredulous rage with which he thought, Why she aint even knowed unto right now that I ever even suspected. She was sitting before the hearth where the supper was cooking, holding the child, shielding its face from the light and heat with her hand—a small woman even then, years before her flesh, her very bones apparently, had begun to wither and shrink inward upon themselves, and he standing over her, looking down not at his own child but at the face of the white one nuzzling into the dark swell of her breast—not Edmonds’ wife but his own who had been lost; not his son but the white man’s who had been restored to him, his voice loud, his clawed hand darting toward the child as her hand sprang and caught his wrist.

  “What’s ourn?” he cried. “What’s mine?”

  “Right yonder on the bed, sleeping!” she said. “Go and look at him!” He didn’t move, standing over her, locked hand and wrist with her. “I couldn’t leave him! You know I couldn’t! I had to bring him!”

  “Dont lie to me!” he said. “Dont tell me Zack Edmonds know where he is.”

  “He does know! I told him!” He broke his wrist free, flinging her hand and arm back; he heard the faint click of her teeth when the back of her hand struck her chin and he watched her start to raise her hand to her mouth, then let it fall again.

  “That’s right,” he said. “It aint none of your blood that’s trying to break out and run!”

  “You fool!” she cried. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God. All right. I’ll take him back. I aimed to anyway. Aunt Thisbe can fix him a sugar-tit——”

  “Not you,” he said. “And not me even. Do you think Zack Edmonds is going to stay in that house yonder when he gets back and finds out he is gone? No!” he said. “I went to Zack Edmonds’ house and asked him for my wife. Let him come to my house and ask me for his son!”

  He waited on the gallery. He could see, across the valley, the gleam of light in the other house. He just aint got home yet, he thought. He breathed slow and steady. It aint no hurry. He will do something and then I will do something and it will be all over. It will be all right. Then the light disappeared. He began to say quietly, aloud: “Now. Now. He will have to have time to walk over here.” He continued to say it long after he knew the other had had time to walk back and forth between the two houses ten times over. It seemed to him then that he had known all the time the other was not coming, as if he were in the house where the white man waited, watching his, Lucas’, house in his turn. Then he knew that the other was not even waiting, and it was as if he stood already in the bedroom itself, above the slow respirations of sleep, the undefended and oblivious throat, the naked razor already in his hand.

  He re-entered the house, the room where his wife and the two children were asleep on the bed. The supper which had been cooking on the hearth when he entered at dusk had not even been taken up, what was left of it long since charred and simmered away and probably almost cool now among the fading embers. He set the skillet and coffee pot aside and with a stick of wood he raked the ashes from one corner of the fireplace, exposing the bricks, and touched one of them with his wet finger. It was hot, not scorching, searing, but possessing a slow, deep solidity of heat, a condensation of the two years during which the fire had burned constantly above it, a condensation not of fire but of time, as though not the fire’s dying and not even water would cool it but only time would. He prised the brick up with his knife blade and scraped away the warm dirt under it and lifted out a small metal dispatch box which his white grandfather, Carothers McCaslin himself, had owned almost a hundred years ago, and took from it the knotted rag tight and solid with the coins, some of which dated back almost to Carothers McCaslin’s time, which he had begun to save before he was ten years old. His wife had removed only her shoes (he recognised them too. They had belonged to the white woman who had not died, who had not even ever existed.) before lying down. He put the knotted rag into one of them and went to the walnut bureau which Isaac McCaslin had given him for a wedding present and took his razor from the drawer.

  He was waiting for daylight. He could not have said why. He squatted against a tree halfway between the carriage gate and the white man’s house, motionless as the windless obscurity itself while the constellations wheeled and the whippoorwills choired faster and faster and ceased and the first cocks crowed and the false dawn came and faded and the birds began and the night was over. In the first of light he mounted the white man’s front steps and entered the unlocked front door and traversed the silent hall and entered the bedroom which it seemed to him he had already entered and that only an instant before, standing with the open razor above the breathing, the undefended and defenseless throat, facing again the act which it seemed to him he had already performed. Then he found the eyes of the face on the pillow looking quietly up at him and he knew then why he had had to wait until daylight. “Because you are a McCaslin too,” he said. “Even if you was woman-made to it. Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe that’s why you done it: because what you and your pa got from old Carothers had to come to you through a woman—a critter not responsible like men are responsible, not to be held like men are held. So maybe I have even already forgive you, except I cant forgive you because you can forgive only them that injure you; even the Book itself dont ask a man to forgive them he is fixing to harm because even Jesus found out at last that was too much to ask a man.”

  “Put the razor down and I will talk to you,” Edmonds said.

  “You knowed I wasn’t afraid, because you knowed I was a McCaslin too and a man-made one. And you never thought that, because I am a McCaslin too, I wouldn’t. You never even thought that, because I am a nigger too, I wouldn’t dare. No. You thought that because I am a nigger I wouldn’t even mind. I never figured on the razor neither. But I gave you your chance. Maybe I didn’t know what I might have done when you walked in my door, but I knowed what I wanted to do, what I believed I was going to do, what Carothers McCaslin would have wanted me to do. But you didn’t come. You never even gave me the chance to do what old Carothers would have told me to do. You tried to beat me. And you wont never, not even when I am hanging dead from the limb this time tomorrow with the coal oil still burning, you wont never.”

  “Put down the razor, Lucas,” Edmonds said.

  “What razor?” Lucas said. He raised his hand and looked at the razor as if he did not know he had it, had never seen it before, and in the same motion flung it toward the open window, the naked blade whirling almost blood-colored into the first copper ray of the sun before it vanished. “I dont need no razor. My nekkid hands will do. Now get the pistol under your pillow.”

  Still the other didn’t move, not even to draw his hands from under the sheet. “It’s not under the pillow. It’s in that drawer yonder where it always is and you know it. Go and look. I’m not going to run. I couldn’t.”

  “I know you aint,” Lucas said. “And you know you aint. Because you know that’s all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol.”

  “No,” the othe
r said. “Go home. Get out of here. Tonight I will come to your house——”

  “After this?” Lucas said. “Me and you, in the same country, breathing the same air even? No matter what you could say, what you could even prove so I would have to believe it, after this? Get the pistol.”

  The other drew his hands out from under the sheet and placed them on top of it. “All right,” he said. “Stand over there against the wall until I get it.”

  “Hah,” Lucas said. “Hah.”

  The other put his hands back under the sheet. “Then go and get your razor,” he said.

  Lucas began to pant, to indraw short breaths without expiration between. The white man could see his foreshortened chest, the worn faded shirt straining across it. “When you just watched me throw it away?” Lucas said. “When you know that if I left this room now, I wouldn’t come back?” He went to the wall and stood with his back against it, still facing the bed. “Because I done already beat you,” he said. “It’s old Carothers. Get your pistol, white man.” He stood panting in the rapid inhalations until it seemed that his lungs could not possibly hold more of it. He watched the other rise from the bed and grasp the foot of it and swing it out from the wall until it could be approached from either side; he watched the white man cross to the bureau and take the pistol from the drawer. Still Lucas didn’t move. He stood pressed against the wall and watched the white man cross to the door and close it and turn the key and return to the bed and toss the pistol onto it and only then look toward him. Lucas began to tremble. “No,” he said.

  “You on one side, me on the other,” the white man said. “We’ll kneel down and grip hands. We wont need to count.”

  “No!” Lucas said in a strangling voice. “For the last time. Take your pistol. I’m coming.”

  “Come on then. Do you think I’m any less a McCaslin just because I was what you call woman-made to it? Or maybe you aint even a woman-made McCaslin but just a nigger that’s got out of hand?”

  Then Lucas was beside the bed. He didn’t remember moving at all. He was kneeling, their hands gripped, facing across the bed and the pistol the man whom he had known from infancy, with whom he had lived until they were both grown almost as brothers lived. They had fished and hunted together, they had learned to swim in the same water, they had eaten at the same table in the white boy’s kitchen and in the cabin of the negro’s mother; they had slept under the same blanket before a fire in the woods.

  “For the last time,” Lucas said. “I tell you——” Then he cried, and not to the white man and the white man knew it; he saw the whites of the negro’s eyes rush suddenly with red like the eyes of a bayed animal—a bear, a fox: “I tell you! Dont ask too much of me!” I was wrong, the white man thought. I have gone too far. But it was too late. Even as he tried to snatch his hand free Lucas’ hand closed on it. He darted his left hand toward the pistol but Lucas caught that wrist too. Then they did not move save their forearms, their gripped hands turning gradually until the white man’s hand was pressed back-downward on the pistol. Motionless, locked, incapable of moving, the white man stared at the spent and frantic face opposite his. “I give you your chance,” Lucas said. “Then you laid here asleep with your door unlocked and give me mine. Then I throwed the razor away and give it back. And then you throwed it back at me. That’s right, aint it?”

  “Yes,” the white man said.

  “Hah!” Lucas said. He flung the white man’s left hand and arm away, striking the other backward from the bed as his own right hand wrenched free; he had the pistol in the same motion, springing up and back as the white man rose too, the bed between them. He broke the pistol’s breech and glanced quickly at the cylinder and turned it until the empty chamber under the hammer was at the bottom, so that a live cartridge would come beneath the hammer regardless of which direction the cylinder rotated. “Because I’ll need two of them,” he said. He snapped the breech shut and faced the white man. Again the white man saw his eyes rush until there was neither cornea nor iris. This is it, the white man thought, with that rapid and even unamazed clarity, gathering himself as much as he dared. Lucas didn’t seem to notice. He cant even see me right now, the white man thought. But that was too late too. Lucas was looking at him now. “You thought I wouldn’t, didn’t you?” Lucas said. “You knowed I could beat you, so you thought to beat me with old Carothers, like Cass Edmonds done Isaac: used old Carothers to make Isaac give up the land that was his because Cass Edmonds was the woman-made McCaslin, the woman-branch, the sister, and old Carothers would have told Isaac to give in to the woman-kin that couldn’t fend for herself. And you thought I’d do that too, didn’t you? You thought I’d do it quick, quicker than Isaac since it aint any land I would give up. I aint got any fine big McCaslin farm to give up. All I got to give up is McCaslin blood that rightfully aint even mine or at least aint worth much since old Carothers never seemed to miss much what he give to Tomey that night that made my father. And if this is what that McCaslin blood has brought me, I dont want it neither. And if the running of it into my black blood never hurt him any more than the running of it out is going to hurt me, it wont even be old Carothers that had the most pleasure.—Or no,” he cried. He cant see me again, the white man thought. Now. “No!” Lucas cried; “say I dont even use this first bullet at all, say I just uses the last one and beat you and old Carothers both, leave you something to think about now and then when you aint too busy to try to think up what to tell old Carothers when you get where he’s done already gone, tomorrow and the one after that and the one after that as long as tomorrow—” The white man sprang, hurling himself across the bed, grasping at the pistol and the hand which held it. Lucas sprang too; they met over the center of the bed where Lucas clasped the other with his left arm almost like an embrace and jammed the pistol against the white man’s side and pulled the trigger and flung the white man from him all in one motion, hearing as he did so the light, dry, incredibly loud click of the miss-fire.

  That had been a good year, though late in beginning after the rains and flood: the year of the long summer. He would make more this year than he had made in a long time, even though and in August some of his corn had not had its last plowing. He was doing that now, following the single mule between the rows of strong, waist-high stalks and the rich, dark, flashing blades, pausing at the end of each row to back the plow out and swing it and the yawing mule around into the next one, until at last the dinner smoke stood weightless in the bright air above his chimney and then at the old time she came along the fence with the covered pan and the pail. He did not look at her. He plowed on until the plantation bell rang for noon. He watered and fed the mule and himself ate—the milk, the still-warm biscuit—and rested in the shade until the bell rang again. Then, not rising yet, he took the cartridge from his pocket and looked at it again, musing—the live cartridge, not even stained, not corroded, the mark of the firing-pin dented sharp and deep into the unexploded cap—the dull little brass cylinder less long than a match, not much larger than a pencil, not much heavier, yet large enough to contain two lives. Have contained, that is. Because I wouldn’t have used the second one, he thought. I would have paid. I would have waited for the rope, even the coal oil. I would have paid. So I reckon I aint got old Carothers’ blood for nothing, after all. Old Carothers, he thought. I needed him and he come and spoke for me. He plowed again. Presently she came back along the fence and got the pan and pail herself instead of letting him bring them home when he came. But she would be busy today; and it seemed to him still early in the afternoon when he saw the supper smoke—the supper which she would leave on the hearth for him when she went back to the big house with the children. When he reached home in the dusk, she was just departing. But she didn’t wear the white woman’s shoes now and her dress was the same shapeless faded calico she had worn in the morning. “Your supper’s ready,” she said. “I aint had time to milk yet. You’ll have to.”

  “If I can wait on that milk, I reckon the cow can too,”
he said. “Can you tote them both all right?”

  “I reckon I can. I been taking care of both of them a good while now without no man-help.” She didn’t look back. “I’ll come back out when I gets them to sleep.”

  “I reckon you better put your time on them,” he said gruffly. “Since that’s what you started out to do.” She went on, neither answering nor looking back, impervious, tranquil, somehow serene. Nor was he any longer watching her. He breathed slow and quiet. Women, he thought. Women. I wont never know. I dont want to. I ruther never to know than to find out later I have been fooled. He turned toward the room where the fire was, where his supper waited. This time he spoke aloud: “How to God,” he said, “can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he wont?”

  3

  “George Wilkins?” Edmonds said. He came to the edge of the gallery—a young man still, yet possessing already something of that almost choleric shortness of temper which Lucas remembered in old Cass Edmonds but which had skipped Zack. In age he could have been Lucas’ son, but actually was the lesser man for more reason than that, since it was not Lucas who paid taxes insurance and interest or owned anything which had to be kept ditched drained fenced and fertilised or gambled anything save his sweat, and that only as he saw fit, against God for his yearly sustenance. “What in hell has George Wilkins——”

  Without changing the inflection of his voice and apparently without effort or even design Lucas became not Negro but nigger, not secret so much as impenetrable, not servile and not effacing, but enveloping himself in an aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell. “He’s running a kettle in that gully behind the Old West field. If you want the whisky too, look under his kitchen floor.”