Sophie's Choice - William Styron [276]
“I’m with you, old pal,” I heard Nathan say from his chair behind me. “You know, it’s time I saw the South. Something you said early this summer—it seems so long ago—something you said about the South has stuck with me. Or I guess I should say it has more to do with the North and the South. We were having one of the arguments we used to have, and I remember you said something to the effect that at least Southerners have ventured North, have come to see what the North is like, while very few Northerners have really ever troubled themselves to travel to the South, to look at the lay of the land down there. I remember your saying how smug Northerners appeared to be in their willful and self-righteous ignorance. You said it was intellectual arrogance. Those were the words you used—they seemed awfully strong at the time—but I later began to think about it, began to see that you may be right.” He paused for a moment, then with real passion said, “I’ll confess to that ignorance. How can I really have hated a place I have never seen or known? I’m with you. We’ll take that trip!”
“Bless you, Nathan,” I replied, glowing with affection and Rheingold.
Beer in hand, I had edged into the bathroom to take a leak. I was a little drunker than I had realized. I peed all over the seat. Over the plashing stream I heard Nathan’s voice: “I’m due a vacation from the lab in mid-October and by that time the way you’re going you should have a big hunk of your book done. You’ll probably need a little breathing spell. Why don’t we plan for then? Sophie hasn’t had a vacation from that quack during the entire time she’s worked for him, so she’s due a couple of weeks too. I can borrow my brother’s car, the convertible. He won’t need it, he’s bought a new Oldsmobile. We’ll drive down to Washington...” Even as he spoke my gaze rested upon the medicine chest—that depository which had seemed so secure until my recent robbery. Who had been the perpetrator, I wondered, now that Morris Fink was absolved of the crime? Some Flatbush prowler, thieves were always around. It no longer really mattered and I sensed that my earlier rage and chagrin were now supplanted by an odd, complex unrest about the purloined cash, which, after all, had been the proceeds of the sale of a human being. Artiste! My grandmother’s chattel, source of my own salvation. It was the slave boy Artiste who had provided me with the wherewithal for much of this summer’s sojourn in Brooklyn; by the posthumous sacrifice of his flesh and hide he had done a great deal to keep me afloat during the early stages of my book, so perhaps it was divine justice that Artiste would support me no longer. My survival would no more be assured through funds tainted with guilt across the span of a century. I was glad in a way to get shut of such blood money, to get rid of slavery.
Yet how could I ever get rid of slavery? A lump rose in my gorge, I whispered the word aloud, “Slavery!” There was dwelling somewhere in the inward part of my mind a compulsion to write about slavery, to make slavery give up its most deeply buried and tormented secrets, which was every bit as necessary as the compulsion that drove me to write, as I had been writing today, about the inheritors of that institution who now in the 1940s floundered amid the insane apartheid of Tidewater Virginia—my beloved and bedeviled bourgeois New South family whose every move and gesture, I had begun to realize, were played out in the presence of a vast, brooding company of black witnesses, all sprung from the loins of bondage. And were not all of us, white and Negro, still enslaved? I knew that in the fever of my mind and in the most unquiet regions of my heart I would be shackled by slavery as long as I remained a writer. Then suddenly, through a pleasant, lazy, slightly intoxicated mental ramble which led from Artiste to