“Well, bless my boots,” I hear a voice say.
“I just don’t believe it,” says another, a woman’s.
“Whose little darky is that?” asks still another voice.
“Dis yere Nathaniel,” says Little Morning. His tone is still heavy with anger and indignation. “He belong to Lou-Ann in de kitchen.
He de culprick. He de one dat snitch de volume.” He wrests the book from my grasp, regarding it with scholarly lifted eyebrows.
“Dis de volume dat was took. Hit says so right here. De Life and de Death of Mr. Badman by John Bunyam. Hit de selfsame volume, Marse Sam, sho as my name’s Little Mornin’.” Even in the midst of my fright I am aware that Little Morning—the old The Confessions of Nat Turner
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humbug—has memorized the title by ear and is fooling no one with this display of literacy. “I knowed it war de same book when I cotched him readin’ it in de pantry.”
“Reading?” The voice is that of Marse Samuel, wondering, quite incredulous. I look up now, slowly. The white faces, viewed for the first time so closely—especially those of the females, only lightly touched by sun and weather—have the sheen and consistency of sour dough or the soft underbellies of mushrooms; their blue eyes glint boldly, startling as ice, and I regard each yawning pore, each freckle, with the awe of total discovery. “Reading?” Marse Samuel says now, with amusement in his voice. “Come now, Little Morning!”
“Well, natchel he warn’t exackly readin’,” the old man adds contemptuously. “He jes’ lookin’ at de pitchers, dat’s all. Hit was on account of de pitchers dat he took de book anyways—”
“But there are no pictures, are there, Nell? It was your volume, after all—”
Could it have been, as I sometimes thought years later, that at that moment I sensed a fatal juncture, realized with some child’s wise instinct that unless instantly I asserted my small nigger self I would be forever cast back into anonymity and oblivion? And so could it have been that right then—desperate, lying, risking all—I mastered my terror and suddenly turned on Little Morning, howling: “’Tain’t so! ’Tain’t so! I can so read the book!”?
Whatever the case, I remember a voice, Samuel Turner’s, his wonder and amazement fled, saying in sudden quiet, judicious, tolerant tones, silencing the family’s laughter: “No, no, just wait, maybe he can, let us see!” And as the storm grumbles far off to the east, diminishing, the only sound now rain dripping from the eaves and a distant angry chattering of wet bluejays in the ailanthus trees, I find myself seated by the window. I have begun to cry, aware of white hovering faces like ghostly giant blobs above me, and whispering voices. I struggle briefly, pawing through the pages, but it is beyond all hope: I cannot manage a single word. I feel that I am going to suffocate on the sobs mounting upward in my chest. My distress is so great that Marse Samuel’s words are miles beyond comprehension—a muffled echo I can only dredge up from memory years later—when I hear him cry out: “You see, Ben, it is true, as I’ve told you! They will try! They will try! And we shall teach him then! Hurrah!”
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The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.
Nonetheless, it is a failing which, when ill luck befalls us, most of us succumb to; and during the dark years of my twenties, after I had passed out of Samuel Turner’s life and he and I were shut of each other forever, I spent a great deal of idle and useless time wondering what may have befallen my lot had I not been so unfortunate as to have become the beneficiary (or perhaps the victim) of my owner’s zeal to tamper with a nigger’s destiny.
Suppose in the first place I had lived out my life at Turner’s Mill.
Suppose then I had been considerably less avid in my thirst for knowledge, so that it would not have occurred to me to steal that book. Or suppose, even more simply, that Samuel Turner—
however decent and just an owner he might have remained anyway—had been less affected with that feverish and idealistic conviction that slaves were capable of intellectual enlightenment and enrichment of the spirit and had not, in his passion to prove this to himself and to all who would bear witness, fastened upon me as an “experiment.” (No, I understand that I am not being quite fair, for surely when I recollect the man with all the honesty I can muster I know that we were joined by strong ties of emotion; yet still the unhappy fact remains: despite warmth and friendship, despite a kind of love, I began as surely an experiment as a lesson in pig-breeding or the broadcasting of a new type of manure.)
Well, under these circumstances I would doubtless have become an ordinary run-of-the-mill house nigger, mildly efficient at some stupid task like wringing chickens’ necks or smoking hams or polishing silver, a malingerer wherever possible yet withal too jealous of my security to risk real censure or trouble and thus cautious in my tiny thefts, circumspect in the secrecy of my afternoon naps, furtive in my anxious lecheries with the plump yellow-skinned cleaning maids upstairs in the dark attic, growing ever more servile and unctuous as I became older, always the crafty flatterer on the lookout for some bonus of flannel or stew beef or tobacco, yet behind my stately paunch and fancy bib and waistcoat developing, as I advanced into old age, a kind of purse-lipped dignity, known as Uncle Nat, well loved and adoring in return, a palsied stroker of the silken pates of little white grandchildren, rheumatic, illiterate, and filled with sleepiness, half yearning for that lonely death which at long last would lead me to rest in some tumbledown graveyard tangled with chokeberry and The Confessions of Nat Turner
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jimson weed. It would not have been, to be sure, much of an existence, but how can I honestly say that I might not have been happier?
For the Preacher was right: He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. And Samuel Turner (whom I shall call Marse Samuel from now on, for that is how he was known to me) could not have realized, in his innocence and decency, in his awesome goodness and softness of heart, what sorrow he was guilty of creating by feeding me that half-loaf of learning: far more bearable no loaf at all.
Well, no matter now. Suffice it to say that I was taken into the family’s bosom, so to speak, falling under the protective wing not only of Marse Samuel but of Miss Nell, who together with her older daughter Louisa had spent the quiet winter mornings of several years— “riding their hobby,” I remember they called it—
drilling me in the alphabet and teaching me to add and subtract and, not the least fascinating, exposing me to the serpentine mysteries of the Episcopal catechism. How they drilled me! How Miss Nell kept after me! I never forgot these glossy-haired seraphs with their soft tutorial murmurs, and do not blame me too much when I say—I shall try not to allude to it again—that there was at least one moment during the earthquake twenty years later when I lingered on the memory of those sweet faces with a very special and savage intensity.
“No, no, Nat, not sucklings and babes—babes and sucklings! ”
“ Yessum . Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.”
“Yes, that’s just right, Nat. Now then, verses three and four.
Slowly, slow- ly! And careful now!”
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained. And—And—I forgets.”
“Forget, Nat, not forgets. No darky talk! Now— What is man—
“ Yessum . What is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visiteth him? Well, uh— And , For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honor! ”
“Wonderful, Nat! Oh, wonderful, wonderful! Oh, Sam, there you The Confessions of Nat Turner
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are! You should just hear Nat coming along! Come here, Sam, sit beside us
for a moment and listen, sit here by the fire! Listen to our little darky recite out from the Bible! He can speak it from memory as well as the Reverend Eppes! Isn’t that so, Nat, you smart little tar baby, you?”
“Yessum.”
But suppose again that it had been Marse Samuel who had died, instead of Brother Benjamin. What then would have happened to that smart little tar baby?
Maybe you will be able to form your own judgment from some things I overheard on the veranda one sultry, airless summer evening after supper, when the two brothers were entertaining a pair of traveling Episcopal clergymen—“the Bishop’s visitants,”
they called themselves—one of them named Dr. Ballard, a big-nosed, long-jawed bespectacled man of middle years garbed entirely in black from the tip of his wide-brimmed parson’s hat to his flowing cloak and gaiters buttoned up along his skinny shanks, blinking through square crystal glasses and emitting delicate coughs behind long white fingers as thin and pale as flower stalks; the other minister dressed like him in funereal black but many years younger, in his twenties and bespectacled also, with a round, smooth, plump, prissy face which at first glimpse had caused me to think of him as Dr. Ballard’s daughter or maybe his wife. Not as yet advanced to the dining room, I labored in the kitchen as Little Morning’s vassal, and it was my duty at the moment to fetch water from the cistern and to keep the smudge pot going: positioned upwind in the sluggish air, it sent out small black-oily clouds of smoke, a screen against mosquitoes. Across the meadow, fireflies flickered in the dusk, and I recall from within the house the sound of a piano, the voice of Miss Elizabeth, Benjamin’s wife, breathless, sweet, in quavering, plaintive song:
“Would you gain the tender creature, Softly, gently, kindly treat her . . .”
Though usually the sedulous snoop, I had paid no attention to the conversation, fascinated instead by Benjamin, wondering if this would be one of those evenings when he fell out of his chair.
As Marse Samuel and the ministers chatted, I watched Benjamin stir in the chair, heard the wickerwork crackling beneath his weight as he let out a sigh despairing and long, raising his The Confessions of Nat Turner
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brandy glass on high. While Little Morning came forward to serve him he sighed again and the sound was aimless, distracted, dwindling off into a little uh-uh-uh like the tail end of a yawn. I think I recall Dr. Ballard glancing at him uneasily, then turning back to Marse Samuel. And the uh-uh-uh sound again, not loud, still pitched between yawn and sigh, glass half filled with sirupy apple brandy extended negligently in midair, the other hand clutching the decanter. I watched his cheeks begin to flush, blooming tomato-pink in the twilight, and I said to myself: Yes, I think again tonight he might fall right on out of that chair.
But even as I watched him I heard him suddenly exclaim: “Ha!”
Then he paused and said: “Ha! Ha! Jesus bloody Christ! Come out and say it!” And then I realized that despite his yawns and rude noises, he was listening to Dr. Ballard and so then I too turned and gazed at the minister, who was explaining: “—and so the Bishop is marking time, as he says. We are at the crossroads—that is the Bishop’s own expression—we are at the crossroads, marking time, awaiting some providential wind to guide us in the right direction. The Bishop is so gifted in his choice of expressions. At any rate, he is aware that the Church all too soon must make some decision. Meanwhile, as his visitants, we are able to send him reassuring news as to the condition of the slaves on at least one plantation.” He paused, with the bleak and wintry suggestion of a smile.
“It will be so reassuring for the Bishop,” said the younger minister. “He will be interested, too, in knowing your general views.”
“General views?” Marse Samuel inquired.
“General views on the institution itself,” Dr. Ballard explained.
“He is greatly concerned to know the general views held by—
how shall we say it?—the more prosperous landowners of the diocese.”
For a long moment Marse Samuel was silent, his face drawn and reflective as he sucked at a long clay pipe. It was becoming dark.
A mild gust of wind, feather-light upon my own brow, sent an oily curl of smoke across the veranda. In the distant swamp, frogs sang and throbbed in a wild, passionate monotone. Little Morning approached Dr. Ballard with a silver tray balanced on the tips of black fingers. “Is you gwine have some mo’ port wine, mastah?” I heard him ask.
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Still Marse Samuel remained silent, then finally he said in a slow and measured voice: “Doctor, I will be as direct with you as I can.
I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the source of all our misery, individual, political, and economic. It is the greatest course a supposedly free and enlightened society has been saddled with in modern times, or any other time. I am not, as you may have perceived, the most religious of men, yet I am not without faith and I pray nightly for the miracle, for the divine guidance which will somehow show us the way out of this terrible condition. It is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed. They must be educated! To free these people without education and with the prejudice that presently exists against them would be a ghastly crime.”
Dr. Ballard did not immediately answer, but when he did his voice was detached and indistinct. “How interesting,” he murmured.
“Fascinating,” said the other minister, sounding even more far away.
Suddenly Benjamin lurched erect from his chair and walked to the far edge of the veranda. There in the shadows, unfastening himself, he commenced to piss into a rosebush. I could hear the noise of a lordly stream of water, urgent, uninterrupted, a plashing cascade upon leaf and thorn and vine, and now Benjamin’s voice above the spatter: “Oh, my beloved brother!
Oh, my brother’s bleeding heart! What a trial, what a tribulation to dwell with such a saint, who would try to alter the mechanism of history! A saint he is, reverend visitants! You are in the presence of a living, breathing saint! Yas!”
Dr. Ballard blushed, murmuring something I could not understand. Watching from behind the smudge pot, I was suddenly tickled and I had to smother my amusement behind my hand. For the minister, in a desperate fidget, was obviously unaccustomed to conversing with anyone who was in the process of taking a piss, which Benjamin did without a flicker of a thought and in the most public way whenever he drank in the company of men. Yet now Dr. Ballard, though agitated, had to pay even more deference to Benjamin than he did to Marse Samuel, for distant and apart as Benjamin may have been this evening he was still the older brother and the plantation’s titled owner. I watched joyfully as the minister’s lips became puckered The Confessions of Nat Turner
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and bloodless, bespectacled eyes gazing in wild discomfort at Benjamin’s back. Suddenly the torrent ceased and Benjamin wheeled about, languidly lacing up his fly. Weaving a little, he crossed the porch, drawing near Marse Samuel and letting his hand fall upon the back of his brother’s neck; as he did so, Marse Samuel glanced up at him with a sour-sweet look, rueful, glum, yet touched with quiet affection. Although they were so dissimilar as to seem born of different families, even the most unobservant house servant was aware of the strong bond between them. They had quarreled many times in the past in their fraternal and peaceable way, seeming oblivious of all eavesdropping (or more likely they did not care) and many a black servant gliding around the dinner table had divined enough of their talk to know where each brother stood, philosophically, at least about his body if not his soul.
“My brother is as sentimental as an old she-hound, Doctor,”
Benjamin said in an amiable voice. “He believes the slaves are capable of all kinds of improvement. That you can take a bunch of darkies and turn them into shopowners and sea captains and opera impresarios and army generals and Christ knows what all.
br /> I say differently. I do not believe in beating a darky. I do not believe, either, in beating a dog or a horse. If you wish my belief to take back to the Bishop, you can tell him that my belief is that a darky is an animal with the brain of a human child and his only value is the work you can get out of him by intimidation, cajolery, and threat.”
“I see,” Dr. Ballard murmured, “yes, I see what you mean.” The minister was paying Benjamin close attention, with a squint-eyed look yet still very deferential. “Yes, I do see clearly what you mean.”
“Like my sentimental and most gentle-hearted brother,” Benjamin continued, “I am against the institution of slavery too. I wish to Jesus it had never come to these shores. If there was some kind of steam engine you could invent to plant corn or cut timber, another to pull suckers, another fine machine to set out in the field and chop tobacco, still another big grand machine to come chugging through the house, lighting the lamps and setting the rooms in order—”
There was an attentive burst of laughter from the two ministers, the younger one tittering behind his fingers while Dr. Ballard made small chuckles and Benjamin himself continued, appreciatively grinning, with one hand resting friendly and The Confessions of Nat Turner
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familiar on his brother’s shoulder. Still the soursweet expression lingered on Marse Samuel’s face and the faintest outline of a sheepish little smile. “Or a machine, I fancy,” Benjamin went on,
“that when the mistress of the household prepared herself for an afternoon’s outing, would harness up the mare and bring Old Dolly and the gig around to the front entrance, and then with its strange mechanism set the lady down on one seat and itself on another and prod Old Dolly into a happy canter through the woods and fields—Invent a machine like that, I vow, invent a machine like that, furthermore, that won’t eat you out of house and home, that won’t lie and cheat and thieve you blind, that is efficient instead of being a paragon of blockheadedness and sheer stupidity, that you can lock away at dark in its shed like a pumping engine or a spinning jenny without fear that this machine is going to get up in the dead of night and make off with a prize goose or your fattest Guinea shoat and that when this machine is worn out and beyond its usefulness, you can discard it and buy another instead of being cursed with a no-account old body that conscience dictates you’ve still got to supply with shoes and molasses and a peck of corn a week until the age of ninety-five— Hey! Invent a machine like any of these, gentlemen, and I will say a happy adieu to slavery the moment I can lay my hands on the likes of such a mechanism!” He paused for a moment, taking a swallow from his tumbler, then he said: