198
Eppes’s gave me a certain protection against the wind. Yet it was not the weather which now concerned me, but an irreparable and still, to me, inconceivable violation of my all too meager property. For less than an hour before, after having bought me, Moore had found and grabbed the ten-dollar gold piece I had so carefully sewn up inside my extra pair of pants.
Like some avid little weevil or roach he had homed as if by the sheerest primitive instinct upon my few possessions and within seconds had extracted the gold piece from the belt band, ripping the seam, his round small pockmarked rustic’s face puckered with sly relentless triumph—“I figgered a nigger once’t lived at Turner’s Mill ud steal him some loot,” he muttered to his cousin—as he bit down on the coin then thrust it into the pocket of his jeans.
All my life I had never owned so much as a tin spoon, and the gold piece had been the only real treasure I had ever possessed; that I had kept it so briefly and had parted with it so quickly was something I could barely comprehend. I had wanted to save it against the time when I might start a church in Richmond, now it was gone. Coming as it did after three days’ and nights’ wait in the nigger pen—my limbs poorly warmed and even more poorly nourished on cold cornmeal mush—and joined with the quick disposal of my body to Mr. Thomas Moore, this final act of piracy left me numb and beyond outrage, and I sat stiff, bolt upright on the tailboard of the wagon, clutching my sack tight against my lap with one hand and with the other holding the Bible pressed against my chest. I felt a dull ache around the edge of my jaw and wondered in a distant way at the reason for it, then recollected that it had been caused by Moore’s begrimed and knobby fingers when he had thrust them into my mouth to ascertain the soundness of my teeth.
I listened vaguely to the conversation between Moore and his cousin Wallace, the words coming as if from yards and yards away, from the treetops or across the margin of a remote and snow-covered field.
“They was this hoor I knowed in Norfolk, on Main Street, name Dora,” the cousin was saying, “she would do it three ways if’n you’d pay a dollar-fifty—fifty cents each way and take all afternoon.” He began to snort and chuckle, his voice thickening.
“Second time you shoot, hit jest like a covey of quail flyin’ straight The Confessions of Nat Turner
199
out yo’ ass—”
“Sho,” Moore put in, chuckling too, “sho, I knowed this other hoor who done it three ways, name of Dolly—”
I put their godless talk out of my mind and stared at the glassy and desolate woods, silent now save for the remote noise, every so often, of a branch cracking beneath the weight of ice or the patterning faint sound of a hare as it scampered through the frozen meadows. I shivered suddenly and felt my teeth clicking together in the fierce cold. We had approached a fork in the road, and as I turned my head slightly I glimpsed a wooden signpost sparkling beneath transparent ice and two crude painted signs, one pointing to the southwest: N. CAROLINA VIA HICK’S FORD
The other to the southeast:
SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY LINE 12 MI.
All of a sudden the wagon stopped and I heard Moore say: “Hit’s the right-handed fork to Southampton, ain’t it, Wallace? I recollect that’s what Pappy said to take when we come back out of Sussex. Ain’t that what he said, Wallace?”
Wallace was silent for a moment, then he murmured in a puzzled voice: “Goddam me, I can’t recollect what he said.” He paused again, finally adding more confidently: “If’n we hadn’t come up here by way of that trace through the marsh, I’d know for sure, but now hit do seem to me he said take the right-handed fork comin’ back. Yah, I could swear he said the right-handed fork.
The left-handed fork’ll end you up in Carolina. Gimme ’nother suck on that jug.”
“Yah,” said Moore, “that’s what he said now, I know for sure, the right-handed fork. That sho is what Pappy said.”
A whip cracked on the cold air, the hooves of the oxen resumed their crunching on the rutted road, and as we took the right fork southwest toward Carolina, I thought: Trouble is, since neither of them ignorant scoundrels can read we’re likely to get into worse problems if I don’t set them straight right away, right now. We’ll sure end up lost twenty miles south of here. Anyway, I might get warm sooner.
I turned around and said: “Stop the wagon.”
The Confessions of Nat Turner
200
Moore’s head swiveled about to face me, the wicked little eyes bloodshot, bulging, incredulous. I could smell an odor of brandy the length of the wagon. “What did you say, boy?” he murmured.
“Stop the wagon,” I repeated, “this way goes to Carolina.”
The wagon stopped, wheels sliding and squealing against the ice. Then the cousin turned about, incredulous too, silent, staring, licking his pink peeling lips amid a scraggle of reddish beard.
“How you know this way goes to Carolina?” Moore said. “Jest how do you know?”
“The sign said so,” I replied quietly. “I can read.”
Moore and his cousin glanced at each other, then back at me.
“You can read?” said Moore.
“Yes,” I said, “I can read.”
Again they exchanged quick suspicious glances, and the cousin turned to me, glaring, and said: “Try him, Tom. Try him with the writin’ on that shovel.”
Moore held up a shovel which had lain clotted with earth below them at the front of the wagon. Along its ashwood shaft ran an inscription burnt large and deep with a branding instrument.
“Read them words there, boy,” said Moore.
“It says, ‘Shelton Tool Works, Petersburg, Virginia,’” I replied.
The shovel clattered back onto the floor of the wagon, and as I once more turned around I saw the white woods roll before my eyes in a slow blurred procession of glittering ice-crowned trees while the wagon itself wheeled about in a clumsy half-circle then moved briefly north to the signpost, pivoted, and resumed its ponderous journey southeast now, toward Southampton. An emptiness clutched my stomach as I realized suddenly how hungry I was, after three days on cornmeal mush. Never had I known such hunger before, never in my life, and I was astonished at the urgency of its pain, the desperation of its clamorous appeal deep within my guts.
Moore and his cousin brooded quietly for a long while, then at The Confessions of Nat Turner
201
last I heard Wallace say: “Onliest nigger I ever knowed about could read was a free nigger up in Isle of Wight. Had him a little shoe-cobblin’ business in Smithfield and wrote out letters and such for some of the white folks. When he died they cut open his head and looked at his brain and it had wrinkles in it just like a white man’s. And you know, they was a story ’bout how some of the niggers got holt of a part of that brain and actual et some of it, hopin’ they’d git smart too.”
“Hit don’t do no good for a nigger to git learning,” Moore said somberly, “hit don’t do no good in any way whichever. Like Pappy says, a nigger with a busy head is idle with the hoe.
That’s what Pappy says.”
“A nigger with learning bound to git uppity,” Wallace agreed.
“Hit don’t do no good in any way whichever.”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
Like the hunger, I had never felt a whip before, and the pain of it when it came, coiling around the side of my neck like a firesnake, blossomed throughout the hollow of my skull in an explosion of light. I gasped and the pain lingered, penetrating to the inside of my throat, and I gasped again, feeling that the pain might throttle me to death. Only at that moment, seconds later, did the noise of the whip impress itself on my mind—oddly quiet, a sedate whickering like a sickle slicing through air—and only then did I raise my hand to touch the place where the rawhide had cut my flesh, sensing on my fingertips a warm sticky flow of blood.
“When I gits ready to feed I’ll tell ye, hear me?” said Moore. “And say master! ”
I was unable to speak, and
now again the whip struck, in the same place, blinding me, sending me afloat outside myself on a reddish cloud of pain.
“Say master! ” Moore roared.
“Mastah!” I cried in terror. “Mastah! Mastah! Mastah! ”
“That’s better,” said Moore. “Now shut up.”
Once in the last days before my trial, when I was pondering my own death and was filled with a sense of the absence of God, I remember Mr. Thomas Gray asking me what had been the The Confessions of Nat Turner
202
various things in time past that God had spoken to me. And although I was trying to be truthful I had been unable to answer him exactly, for it was the most difficult kind of question and had to do with a mysterious communion which was almost impossible to explain clearly. I told him that God had spoken to me many times and had surely guided my destiny but that He had never really given me any complicated messages or lengthy commands; rather He had spoken to me two words, and always these words alone, beginning on that day in the back of Moore’s wagon, and that it was through these words that I was strengthened and that I made my judgments, absorbing from them a secret wisdom which allowed me to set forth purposefully to do what I conceived as His will, in whatever mission, whether that of bloodshed or baptism or preaching or charity. Yet just as they were words of resolution they were words also of solace.
And as I told Gray, God had a way of concealing Himself from men in strange forms—in His pillar of cloud and His pillar of fire, and sometimes even hiding Himself from our sight altogether so that long periods on earth would pass during which men might feel that He had abandoned them for good. Yet all through the later years of my life I knew that despite His hiding Himself for a while from me, He was never far off and that more often than not whenever I called He would answer—as He did for the first time on that cold day: “I abide.”
I wiped the blood from my neck and crouched down shivering into my overcoat. I listened to the wheels crunching and bumping along the rutted road, uneven here and littered with fallen icy branches, so that the wagon yawed and heaved and pitched me back and forth in a soft rhythm against the boards. Moore and his cousin were silent. A cold winter wind breathed suddenly across the roof of the woods.
“Lord,” I whispered, raising my eyes. “Lord?”
Then high at the top of the icy forest I heard a tremendous cracking and breaking sound, and that voice booming in the trees:
I abide.
I clutched my Bible against my heart and leaned against the boards as the wagon, heaving and rocking like a rudderless ship amid a sea of frozen glass, bore me southward again into the dead of winter.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
203
Part III
Study War
An exquisitely sharpened hatred for the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro’s soul; it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriantly everywhere. Real hatred of the sort of which I speak—hatred so pure and obdurate that no sympathy, no human warmth, no flicker of compassion can make the faintest nick or scratch upon the stony surface of its being—is not common to all Negroes. Like a flower of granite with cruel leaves it grows, when it grows at all, as if from fragile seed cast upon uncertain ground. Many conditions are required for the full fruition of this hatred, for its ripe and malevolent growth, yet none of these is as important as that at one time or another the Negro live to some degree of intimacy with the white man. That he know the object of his hatred, and that he become knowledgeable about the white man’s wiles, his duplicity, his greediness, and his ultimate depravity.
For without knowing the white man at close hand, without having submitted to his wanton and arrogant kindnesses, without having smelled the smell of his bedsheets and his dirty underdrawers and the inside of his privy, and felt the casual yet insolent touch of his women’s fingers upon his own black arm, without seeing him at sport and at ease and at hishypocrite’s worship and at his drunken vileness and at his lustful and adulterous couplings in the hayfield—without having known all these cozy and familial truths, I say, a Negro can only pretend hatred. Such hatred is an abstraction and a delusion. For example. A poor field Negro may once in a while be struck by the whip of an overseer riding on a tall white horse, that same Negro may be forced onto short rations for a month and feel his stomach rumble daily in the tight cramps of near-starvation, again this Negro might someday be The Confessions of Nat Turner
204
thrown into a cart and sold like a mule at auction in pouring rain; yet if this selfsame Negro—surrounded from childhood by a sea of black folk, hoeing and scraping in the fields from dawn to dusk year in and year out and knowing no white man other than that overseer whose presence is a mean distant voice and a lash and whose face is a nameless and changing white blob against the sky—finds himself trying to hate white men, he will come to understand that he is hating imperfectly, without that calm and intelligent and unrepenting purity of hatred which I have already described and which is so necessary in order to murder. Such a Negro, unacquainted with white men and their smell and their blanched and bloodless actuality and their evil, will perhaps hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain.
During the four or five years approaching 1831, when it had become first my obsession and then my acceptance of a divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, and as far beyond as destiny might take me, it was this matter of hatred—of discovering those Negroes in whom hatred was already ablaze, of cultivating hatred in the few remaining and vulnerable, of testing and probing, warily discarding those in whom pure hatred could not be nurtured and whom therefore I could not trust—that became one of my primary concerns. Meanwhile, before telling of my years at Moore’s and of the circumstances leading up to the great events of 1831, I should like to dwell on this mysterious quality of hatred which it is possible for a Negro to cherish for white people, and to describe one of the moments in my own experience when I felt this hatred at its most deranging and passionate.
This must have been in the summer of 1825, when I had been Moore’s property for a little over three years—a time of great inner confusion and turmoil for me since I was “on the fence,” so to speak, toying with the notion of slaughter and already touched with the premonition of a great mission, yet still fearful and laden with anxiety and unwilling to formulate any definite plans or to ready myself for a firm course of action.
On this day of which I am speaking, Moore and I had driven a double wagonload of firewood into Jerusalem from the farm, and after we had unloaded our deliveries (a considerable portion of Moore’s income derived from supplying wood for private homes, The Confessions of Nat Turner
205
also the courthouse and the jail) my owner had gone off to buy some things elsewhere, as was his custom on Saturdays, leaving me to while away several hours by myself. I had become at that time deeply involved in reading the Prophets—mainly Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, whose relevance to my own self and future I had only commenced to divine. It was my habit therefore not to waste time with the other Negroes who stood about chattering idly or wrestling in the dust of the field behind the market or quarreling over some black girl of the town one of them might manage to lure behind a shed. (Often this would lead to group fornication, but through the Lord’s grace I was never tempted.) Instead I would take my Bible to a sunny corner of the wooden gallery at the front of the market and there, some feet apart from the hubbub and the confusion, I would squat for hours with my back against the wall, immersed in the great prophetic teachings.
It was on this pleasant morning that I found myself distracted by a white woman who emerged from a corner of the gallery and suddenly paused, one hand held up
against her forehead as if to shield her eyes from the dazzling sunlight. She was an extremely beautiful woman of about forty, stately and slender, dressed in blue-green silk the color of a brandy bottle, with whorls of faint pink in it which swirled and vanished and reappeared even as she stood there, stirring a little, a look of perplexity on the pale oval of her face. She carried a frilly parasol and a richly brocaded purse, and as she paused at the edge of the gallery, frowning, I suddenly knew that such lustrous finery and such delicate and unusual beauty could only mean that this was the woman whose arrival in town had caused a storm of rumor—gossip of course not unremarked by the Negroes, and in this case gossip of such a nature as to evoke only a kind of awed respect. The recently acquired fiancée of Major Thomas Ridley—one of the wealthiest landowners in Southampton, still rich enough to hold onto fifteen Negroes—the woman was from the North, resident of a place called New Haven, and it was bruited that the fortune to which she was heir was in itself of a size that would dwarf the riches of all the estates in Southampton put together. Her extraordinary beauty, her clothes, her strangeness: all of these were of such rarity that it is not remarkable that on that bright morning her appearance among the grubby mob of Negroes caused a reverential hush, sudden and complete.
I watched her step down from the gallery and onto the dusty The Confessions of Nat Turner
206
road, the brass tip of her parasol making an agitated tattat while she gazed about again, as if searching for direction. And just at this moment her glance fell upon a Negro who was idling nearby directly below me. I knew this Negro, at least by repute, which was doleful indeed. He was a free Negro named Arnold—one of a handful of the free in Jerusalem—a gaunt grizzle-polled old simpleton black as pitch and with an aimless slew-footed gait, the result of some kind of paralysis.Years before he had been set at liberty through the will of his owner, a rich up-county widow, an Episcopal churchwoman shattered by guilt and pining for eternal bliss. I suppose one might praise this high-minded gesture, yet one must add that it was grimly misguided because Arnold was a troubling case. Rather than becoming an embodiment of the sweet fruits of freedom, he exemplified by his very being an all but insoluble difficulty.