578
WILLIAM STYRON
meal ran out quickly but of all his problems food was the least press–
ing. A runaway was forced to live off the land, and Hark, like most
plantation Negroes, was a resourceful thief. Only rarely was he out of
sight of some habitation or other and these places yielded up an
abundance of fruit and vegetables, ducks, geese, chickens- once even
a pig. Two or three times, skirting a farm or plantation, he imposed
upon the hospitality of friendly Negroes, whom he would hail at
twilight from the trees and who would spirit him a piece of bacon or
some boiled collard greens or a pan full of grits. But his great hulking
prowling form made him conspicuous. He was rightly fearful of mak–
ing his presence known to anyone, black or white, and so he soon
began keeping strictly to himself. He even gave up requests for simple
directions of the Negroes: they seemed to grow more ignorant as he
progressed north and filled his ears with such an incoherent rigama–
role of disaways and dataways that he turned from them in perplexity
and disgust.
Hark's spirit took wing when at sunrise, a week or so after leav–
ing Travis's, he found himself in the wooded outskirts of what, accord–
ing to Hannibal's schedule, would be Petersburg. Having never seen
a town of
any
size or description, he was flabbergasted by the number
of stores and houses and the commotion and colorful stir of people,
wagons, and carriages in the streets. To pass around the town without
being seen was something of a problem but he managed it that night,
after sleeping most of the day in a nearby pine grove. He had to swim
a small river in the early darkness, paddling with one hand and hold–
ing up his clothes and
his
sack in the other. But he moved without
detection
in
a half-circle about the town and pushed on north some–
what regretfully, since he had been able to pluck from some back
porch a gallon of buttermilk in a wooden cask and several excellent
peach pies. That night in a wild rainstorm he got hopelessly lost and
to his dismay discovered when dawn came that he had been walking
due east, to God knows where.
It
was bleak, barren pine country,
almost unpopulated, filled with lonely prospects of eroded red earth.
The log road, fallen into sawdust, petered out and led nowhere. The
next night Hark retraced his steps and soon had negotiated the short
leg of his journey to Richmond-like Petersburg a lively community
with a cedarwood bridge leading to it over a river and abustle
with
