582
WILLIAM STYRON
"One move and I'll blow your head off," said the white man.
"Tie him up, Samson."
It was not so much that Samson, one of his own kind-the little
Negro with the glasses-had betrayed him which grieved Hark
in
later times, although that was bad enough. It was that he had really
journeyed to the ends of the earth to get nowhere. For within three
days he was back with Travis (who had liberally stickered the coun–
tryside with posters) ; he had walked those
six
weeks in circles, in zig–
zags, in looping spirals, never once traveling more than forty miles
from home. The simple truth of the matter is that Hark, born and
raised in the plantation's abyssal and aching night, had no more com–
prehension of the vastness of the world than a baby in a cradle.
There was no way for him to know about cities, he had never seen
a hamlet; and thus he may be excused for not perceiving that "Rich–
mond" and "Washington" and "Baltimore" were
in
truth any of a
dozen nondescript little villages of the Tidewater-Jerusalem, Drewrys–
ville, Smithfield-and that the noble watercourse upon whose shore
he stood with such trust and hope and joy was not "the Squash–
honna" but that ancient mother-river of slavery, the James.
