At the beginning all that existed was G*d and nothing. G*d sent out into the nothing an emanation of Itself, and from this came a great tumult of emanations, forming a cradle for the emptiness, a quickening grid of light. The ten emanations are called the sephiroth, and their splendid lights, properlyread, yield up the most secret name of G*d. The universe that grew up in this cradle was made out of G*d, and the sephiroth are no less than the ten facets of Its nature. They are the path by which the soul journeys downward to the world at birth, and the points by which it navigates its return to Heaven.
Death, however, is not a necessary precondition to this journey. The spirit can climb the ladder of the sephiroth while yet in the flesh, and likewise can a man descend the ladder a second time and make himself as a god on earth. Whosoever has ears to hear, let him hear, etc.
Virgil Ball has ears.
Endurance
I WAS BORN WHITE, Asa says. Shall I tell it?
Under oath, Asa Trist, genuine land-owner’s son, learned to brake, cut, card, spin flax, all genuine farming work well learned, mashing potatoes for the horses, pigs, well-watering and slopping cows, milking cows, pulling the legs at birthing, pulling calves, milking goats, separating milk from cream, setting milk to stand in a cool, dry place, making white-curd cheese from butter-milk, from bitches’-milk, making cheese, making a good side of smooth, oval cheese, good God, dousing it with cream, turning over, standing straight, lying bent, for hours good God learning words, boiling sugar-beet, then pressing, boiling the juice, preparing for the making of the sweet sugar-beet syrup, giving it out on Sundays to the niggers, letting twenty niggers in to wash, taking twenty cuts, smelling the butter off the skin, early hot milk skimmed, little tear-drops, big pot full of boiled potatoes, watching father hand out the plates, watching mother, one plate sugar-beet syrup, one plate white-curd cheese, one plate bread, planting rice, laying it out in neat white lines on the ground, cutting up the meat, hunks of ham or fat drippings or scrapple, greetings to all honorable childs of niggers
I SEE VIRGIL ALONE, by the orchard fence. Write my biography, Virgil! I call out to him. And I’ll write one for you.
Morning, Asa, Virgil says. Careful, now. Clem is watching us from her cat-seat.
Clementine talks with the Redeemer that way, Virgil.
I know.
Listen to me, Virgil. Please. The Redeemer and I share the same idea.
Virgil smiles. What idea is that, Asa?
To make me sick, I answer. That I might learn endurance.
ONE WHIP LAID LENGTH-WISE IN A LINE, frontsteps of the mansion to the old poplar tree, two whips end-to-end, back porch to the cabins, four whips configured into a diamond, eighteen feet by eighteen feet by eighteen, one thousand diamonds into a net, neighbors and family and children, nets to catch stray birds, strung out across the water, niggers dressed in net-skirts, Heaven a high, cold house with nets strung across the windows, outside the neighbors, the friends, the chattering family, eighteen whips each eighteen feet laid out in a chain, a stable full of horses, hat-box full of bottles, God laughs — Asa!
Then forgives.
THE LIMBS OF THE FRUIT TREES along the fence look like arms and legs. Virgil is offering me a choice—: to tell him the history of my greatest exploits, or to die.
That hat-box you had in Memphis, Asa. He looks me in the face. Asa!
Yes?
That black box. Do you recollect it?
Parson has it, I say, blinking.
Virgil frowns. Parson.
I feel much better now, Virgil. Pray let’s make use of it. There’s very little time.
First tell me about the hat-box.
I lift my shoulders. Samples. Cuts. A project.
He looks at me. Research?
Yes. That.
What would Parson want with it?
Parson is a castrato! I snicker. A singer in the choir.
Virgil looks me in the eye. Were all the cuts from niggers?
No sir. Some were from dirty old white men.
PLACED IN SOLUTION of carbon disulfide sample desiccates, reduces, color of wood-smoke, color of butter, scars, gouges, incision-marks fatten and blister, cat-fish gathered up in nets, family property, Federal state and district, oil, coal and natural gas, stately ladies of New Orleans tilt and squat over cast-iron pails, quadrilles, quarantine, quadroons, Creole bandy-legs, red-bones, over the cast-iron fathers of New Orleans. Say, Virgil—:
THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME, you see. In that solution.
Virgil is quiet. They all look like nigger skins.
I say nothing, but my heart is flying toward him—: Yes.
Virgil rubs his face. You might be onto something there, Asa, he says. Laughing as he says it in his heart.
Yes.
I still don’t see what Parson would want that hat-box for.
Shall I tell him? He has three locks of your hair, Virgil. And of mine.
Virgil stops. Takes hold of the fence-rail with both his hands. Whitens. You don’t mean. You don’t mean to say, those bottles—
I lift a trouser-leg, disclosing a bright rectilinear scar.
He pants. You buggered fool, Asa. Who else did you cut?
Thaddeus Morelle, a lock of hair. Goodman Harvey — generous, obliging — a snippet of hide. Virgil Ball—
Virgil heaves me back against the fence. You never cut into me, you son-of-a-bitch. You never — with your limp white lady-hands. You never did.
Allow me to write a brief chapter, Virgil. Virgil—:
VIRGIL’S WHITE ARM UNCOILS. I fall sweetly to earth. I wanted to reconcile opposites, Virgil. Occult knowledge and science, black hide and white hide, the healthy and the sick—
By God, Asa. You’d better tell me something I want to listen to.
He keeps it up in his attic, I say.
What?
The box. The cuttings. Everything I took. I look up at Virgil. And I’ll tell you something more.
Virgil turns and starts toward the house. If you’re only spinning thread, you moon-faced bastard, on my mother’s grave, I’ll—
Virgil! I moon-face at him. Stop a moment further, Virgil! There’s more to tell.
I’ve heard enough, Asa. You can dribble the rest out later.
Later is an open grave, but Virgil cannot know this.
ASA TRIST, GENTLE-FARMER’S SON, spit on at birth, mother-coddled, good worker, learned well the following—: the Hand of Glory. Cut a hand from a runaway and wrap it in a winding-sheet. Press it thoroughly to drain the fluid from it. The blood, the water, the lymph. Keep it for a week in an earthen jar mixed with pepper and saltpeter under the ground. Dry it in the heat of the sun or if the sun is not ample in a cotton-wood-fed furnace. The fat which runneth from the hand is mixed with wax to make a candle. Said candle is then put into the hand’s own fingers. Light from said candle will cure any spell of whiteness. Light from said candle will bring horrors to a child.
MY FATHER WAS WELL-KNOWN TO THE REDEEMER, Virgil, as you know.
Virgil looks back at the house. I know it.
You walk the grounds each day, with Delamare. The same rounds each day, exactly. Why?
For Christ’s sake, Asa—
EVERY day, I say again. I close my eyes. You’ve never noticed it?
He curses. What, Asa? What should I notice?
I raise my left hand, holding up three fingers. Thaddeus Morelle, at the privy. Goodman Harvey, beside the stables. Now there’s a hole by the tobacco-shed.