Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 201

still the white men too, the same ones who on that hot July morning two

and now three years ago had gathered in a kind of outraged unbelief to

Ring, hurl up in raging sweating impotent fury the little three-walled

lean-to--the same men (with affairs of their own they might have been

attending to or work of their own or for which they were being hired,

paid, that they should have been doing) standing or lounging about the

scaffolding and the stacks of bricks and puddles of clay mortar for an

hour or two hours or half a day, then putting aside one of the Negroes and

taking his place with trowel or saw or adze, unbidden or unreproved either

since there was none present with the right to order or deny; a stranger

might have said probably for that reason, simply because now they didn't

have to, except that it was more than that, working peacefully now that

there was no outrage and fury, and twice as fast because there was no

urgency since this was no more to be hurried by man or men than the

burgeoning of a crop, working (this paradox too to anyone except men like

Grenier and Compson and Peabody who had grown from infancy among slaves,

breathed the same air and even suckled the same breast with the sons of

Ham: black and white, free and unfree, shoulder to shoulder in the same

tireless lift and rhythm as if they had the same aim and hope, which they

did have as far as the Negro was capable, as even Ratcliffe, son of a long

pure line of Anglo-Saxon mountain people and-destinedfather of an equally

long and pure line of white trash tenant farmers who never owned a slave

and never would since each had and would imbibe with his mother's milk a

personal violent antipathy not at all to slavery but to black skins, could

have explained: the slave's simple child's mind had fired at once with the

thought that he was helping to build not only the biggest edifice in the

country, but probably the biggest he had ever seen; this was all but this

was enough) as one because it was theirs, bigger than any because it was

the sum of all and, being the sum of all, it must raise all of their hopes

and aspirations level with its own aspirant and soaring cupola, so that,

sweating and tireless and unflagging, they would look about at one another

a little shyly, a little amazed, with something like humility too, as if

they were realizing, or were for a moment at least capable of believing,

that men, all men, including themselves, were a little better, purer maybe

even, than they had thought, expected, or even needed to be. Though they

were still having a little trouble -with Ratcliffe: the money, the Holston

lock-Chickasaw axle grease fifteen dollars; not trouble really because it

had never been an obstruction even three years ago when it was new, and

now after three years even the light impedeless chip was worn by

familiarity and