As she spoke I saw two of her Negroes, Andrew and Tom, struggling across the field with a burden of sawhorses between them, the crude oaken timbers piled up on top of each other painfully cumbersome and heavy, all askew now and ready to fall to earth. Ah! They fell as I watched, tumbling down with a lumpish clatter. Then slowly the blessed nincompoops rearranged the sawhorses into a stack again, hoisted them up The Confessions of Nat Turner
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and continued their hunched, lead-footed pilgrimage across the field, two raggedy silhouettes against a frieze of pinewoods and wintry sky, bound as if for nowhere on to the uttermost limits of the earth—black faceless paradigms of an absurd and immemorial futility. I gave a quick shiver in the chill and thought: Why do men live at all? Why do men wrassle so with air, with nothing? For the briefest instant I was overcome by a terrible anguish.
Richard Whitehead, mounted on a sluggish fat white gelding, came riding into the distant barnyard and flapped an arm, the high-pitched drawl sacerdotal, sweet: “Evenin’, Muvva!”
“Hay-o, Boysie!” she called in return. Her gaze lingered on him, then she cast her eyes back at me and said: “Do you know, I’ve offered Mr. Tom Moore a thousand dollars for you? One thousand dollars.”
Strange that, after a fashion, the woman’s manner toward me had been ingratiating, even queerly tender, with a faint tongue-lick of unctuousness, benevolent, in a roundabout way downright maternal. Nuzzling around my black ass. In my heart of hearts I bore her no ill will. Yet she had never once removed herself from the realm of ledgers, accounts, tallies, receipts, balance sheets, purse strings, profits, pelf—as if the being to whom she was talking and around whom she had spun such a cocoon of fantasy had not been a creature with lips and fingernails and eyebrows and tonsils but some miraculous wheelbarrow. I gazed at the complacent oblong of her face, white as tallow. Suddenly I thought of the document beneath my shirt and again the hatred swept over me. I was seized with awe, and a realization: Truly, that white flesh will soon be dead.
“I hope you are aware of how much money one thousand dollars is,” she was saying. “One does not pay that type of money for something one does not really value, or treasure. You are aware of that, Nat, aren’t you?”
“Yessum,” I said.
“No,” she said after a pause, “I expect you will go far, for a darky.”
No. 1. Early objective Mrs. C. Whitehead’s. A gift from God. This house taken will mark end Ist phase of campaign. Whitehead gun room next to library. Trophies of Mrs. W.’s dead husband. I5
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muskets, rifles & fowling pieces, 6 flintlock pistols, also 4 swords, 2 cutlasses, 4 small dirks, plenty powder & lead.
Once house taken & inhabitants destroyed these weapons sh’d even up balance. If attack be launched at midnight at Cross Keys (Moore’s? Travis’s?) then Mrs. W.’s sh’d be reached next day by noon. Houses in between w’l yield up little in way of guns etc. but must be taken & inhabitants destroyed. Before alarm can be sounded. Weapons taken here sh’d allow successful drive gen’ly N.E. to Jerusalem by noon 2d day. Also of course Mrs. W.’s 8
Morgans in stable plus 2 carriage horses. If time destroy oxen & other livestock.
Sh’d fire all houses after inhabitants killed? Expect answer No.
W’ld be useful but fire & smoke w’ld only raise earliest alarm. All must be slain though. All.
No. 2. After Mrs. W. penultimate objective Jerusalem. The armory. Old negro Tim handyman there said 2 mos. ago over 100 muskets & rifles, 800 lb. powder, unknown amt. of ball shot in canvas bags but sufficient. Also 4 small bore cannon to be loaded on wagons. Good maybe for defense later w. ball & scatter shot loads.
Armory has many saws axes hardware etc. Useful later.
Also militia stable has 10 horses incl. 6 black Barbs from Albemarle perfect for sending fast vanguard east from Jeru.
Entry into Armory not hard since side doors padlocked but loose fitting. Once guards killed simple to force entry by crowbars betw. door & uprights inside. Town will be devastated by fire.
Therefore I shalt set my face toward the siege of Jerusalem & mine arm shall be uncovered & I shall prophesy against it.
No. 3. “Dismal swamp” ultimate objective. Joshua much better equip. than I w’ld not set forth on mission of total destruction w.
out place to withdraw. Futile to attack as Joshua did fr. examp.
Lachish & Eglon & 5 combined Kings unless safe place to retreat to as the camp at Gilgal. Therefore—
“Dismal swamp.” It lays but 35 mi. E. by S.E. fr. Jeru. 2 days march & less than that from Jeru. if vanguard supplied w. horses.
Road fr. Jeru. to pt. nearest swamp is good by map & this confirm’d by negroes I’ve talked to whove been that way to Suffolk and Norfolk. One (but only) possible main barrier is ford The Confessions of Nat Turner
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across Blackwater riv. betw. So. Hampton & Isle of Wight counties but in Aug. this sh’d be shallow. Find out if ferry there.
Will Lord give me the sign in Aug.? What yr?
“Dismal swamp” grand retreat for my force. Still trackless. Had no idea so huge. On map 30-35 mi. long N-S & 20 mi. at widest.
In unknown territory defense has all advantage. Remember lecture to Marse Samuel by that Col. Persons or Parsons abt.
1812 war in marshes nr. Washington. Once in swamp my force w. supplies guns ammu., etc. c’ld withstand enemy search & attack indefinitely. Other negroes in Va. & N.C. maybe even S.C.
will join us. ? ?
Negroes in Jeru. whove been there hunting w. masters—Long Jim fr. examp. owned by Dr. Massenberg all say Swamp fantastic. Also Charlie & Edward on bear hunt with Col. Boyce.
Talk to Edward again. Fair amt. of high dry ground tho. mainly low swampy land & savanna. Many fresh water springs & unbelievable profusion of game, deer, bear, boar hogs, turkey, mallards, geese, squirrel, hare, coon etc. Fish by millions. Trout, bass, bream, catfish, eels. Some land c’ld be cultivated for vegtbls. Of course endless supply of timber for shelter, revetments, etc. “Dismal swamp” not many miles from Atlantic.
Maybe at last I’ll see the ocean!
Many snakes, espec. water moccasin. Don’t mention this to Hark!!!
No. 4. Total surprise essential & therefore must not reveal plans to followers until last possible moment. Trust the Lord will give me the sign for Aug.
No. 5. Problem of recruitment. Who will follow? Recall item in So’side Reporter recent telling how blacks in So. Hampton outnumber whites by 6-4 ratio which surprised me thinking it was the other way around. This all to the good.
No. 6. Unending patience & trust in God.
No. 7. Wait patiently for His last sign.
No. 8. Must sternly prevent violation of females. We shall not do to their women what they have done to ours. Also w’ld take up precious time.
No. 9. Slay all. No hostages, no impediments, nothing to The Confessions of Nat Turner
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encumber. All. The only possible way.
No. 10. Let Thy hand be upon the man of Thy right hand, upon the Son of man whom Thou madest strong for Thyself. Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts, cause Thy face to shine, and we shall be saved. Amen.
When O Lord?
The number of my followers—they who came from the original Bible class I held behind the market in Jerusalem—now had grown roughly a score. Many of the Negroes cared little or nothing for learning and paid scant interest to what I had to say: these quickly dropped away and joined the noisy mob on the gallery. But others remained, and when I say “followers” I mean those Negroes (including three or four of the free) who had evidenced their faith in me and their attraction to me whether by devoted attention to the stories I told them—stories drawn from Biblical history or from the knowledge of world events I had gained at Turner’s Mill—or by their popeyed and thirsty eagerness to learn a little simple geography (few of them even knew that they lived in a place cal
led Virginia; most thought the earth was as flat as a shingle), or to apprehend the nature of the heavens (some figured the stars so near that they could be brought down by a load of buckshot), or to listen to me as I told them about Napoleon Bonaparte, whose exploits, bruited endlessly by the elder Turners and their guests, had been part of my daily education as a boy and who now was transformed by me, with the utmost guile, into a seven-foot black prodigy and the scourge of all white creation. Lord, how I strove to drive the idea of a nigger Napoleon into their ignorant minds! Naturally, I wished to implant there too a sense of black militancy and I was gratified to see how through my clever guidance they were able finally to identify with this murderous conqueror. Like Joshua and David (turned also into Negro heroes by my artful tongue) he bestrode the wreckage of the white man’s world like an angel of the apocalypse. I described him as an African risen to sweep up and annihilate the white tribes of the North. However childishly, they came to believe in this dark demigod; their eyes glittered while I told of his conquests, and it seemed to me I saw deep in those same eyes the sparks of a newborn courage—hints, auguries of a passion for blood that needed only my final prick of animation to explode into fury. I forbore, however, trying to teach these more simple and benighted of my followers to read or to count. In their twenties or thirties, most of them, they were too The Confessions of Nat Turner
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old for such frills; besides, what good would it do in the end? Nor of course did I yet intimate by the vaguest sign or word the true nature of my great plans. It was enough now, as the time grew short, that they stand in awe of me and warm to the light I knew I shed of ineluctable wisdom and power.
My “inmost four,” as I called them to myself—those in whom I placed my greatest trust and who when the moment came would be the generals of my force—were Hark, Nelson, Henry, and Sam. Two of them, Nelson and Henry, were the oldest among my followers and I valued not only the experience their years had brought them but the cleverness and ability both would have possessed at any age. I sensed that they profoundly respected my superior intelligence and my powers to lead and to enthrall but they were not cowed by me as were so many of the others.
Thus since neither of them was tongue-tied in my presence, there flourished a free and easy intercourse between us, and I was wise enough occasionally to pause and listen, profiting from their counsel. Now in his fifties, Nelson was impassive, slow-moving, gravespoken, dirty-mouthed, wise, hate-ridden, and as solid as a slab of seasoned oak. I felt I could trust him to carry out without hesitation any command. So too for Henry, who, despite or perhaps because of his deafness, seemed to be craftily alert to his surroundings like no Negro I had ever known.
He was about forty, square, squat, black as a tar pit. Some of the other Negroes swore that Henry could sniff bacon cooking at five miles, was able to track the scent of a possum like a hound, could point with his big toe to a plot of earth and disclose an underground cache of fish-bait earthworms swarming like maggots. Almost alone of all my followers he possessed a religious ardor, infusing light and fantasy through the gravestone silence of his inner world. His lips moved and fluttered in echo to my own, his better ear cocked, bright eyes rapt upon me as I recounted some tale of battle in old Israel:of my entire band of Negroes, save for Hark, I felt that Henry paid me the most constant devotion. Yet there was one consideration even greater than either ability or experience which made me cherish Nelson and Henry and caused me to repose in them my final trust. And this was that both of them (like Sam, the youngest of the inmost four, my desperate little half-berserk yellow runaway—liveliest, pluckiest, certainly the most venturesome and resourceful of all my disciples) were capable, in their own long-nourished hatred and rage, of slicing the liver out of a white man with as little qualm or conscience as if they were gutting a rabbit or a pig.
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Ask the average Negro if he is prepared to kill a white man, and if he says yes, you may be sure that he is indulging in the sheerest brag. This was not the case with my inmost four, each of whom had specific grounds to nurture an unswerving hatred.
Bondage had driven Nelson close to madness. Out of simple bad luck he had been sold a cruel number of times—over a half a dozen; his children were scattered to the winds; now in middle age having ended up the property of a vicious, stupid woodcutter who had once struck him in the face (but whom he had struck back) was an affliction Nelson could no longer suffer, and in the ache of his yawning desperation he waited upon me to ordain any course of action. Henry’s rage was different, resigned, more patient, calmer—if rage can be restrained by a calmness—but no less indomitable; his rage blossomed in the muffled near-dead world of his hearing. Deafened as a little boy by a blow on the skull from a drunken overseer, he had since heard only thumps and rustlings, and the memory of that long-ago event daily stoked his placid fury. Each dimly perceived birdcall or unheard voice or child’s mute laugh or the vacuum of soundlessness at the edge of a roaring brook memorialized that unspeakable and unavenged moment thirty years before: the instant he spilled a white man’s blood, I felt, Henry would leap like a swallow straight up into the realm of hearing.
Sam’s hatred was the least complicated of all: like some imprisoned animal aware only that the hulking shadow which falls from time to time across its cage is a being that brings nothing but senseless torment, Sam wished simply to eliminate Nathaniel Francis from the domain of his own existence.
Uncaged, he would go straight for the throat of his tormentor and kill him, and devour all men that resembled him thereafter. As for Hark and his hatred, there was the fact, of course, that his wife and child had been sold south, and this I used as an instrument to break down his docility and his resistance, to undermine his childish fear of white people and his cowardly awe of their mere presence. It was not easy to make of Hark a potential killer, to generate true hatred in that large-hearted breast. Without causing him, as I did, to brood on the sale of his wife and child, I might have failed. But of all the Negroes, Hark was the most surely and firmly under my domination.
We congregated together often, the five of us, mainly on the free Sunday afternoons we were given throughout most of the year.
Sam, Henry, and Nelson all lived within four or five miles from Moore’s, so it was easy for us to gather at my hidden mossy The Confessions of Nat Turner
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knoll in the woods. Over the years my sanctuary had undergone great changes. What had once been a rough pine-bough shelter had now become, through the addition of scrap lumber and pine-gum caulking that I managed to borrow or extort from my various employers, a cozy tabernacle—a commodious and weatherproof refuge complete with little windows made of glass stolen from Travis by Hark, a smoothly planed plank floor, and even a rust-flaked, disintegrating but workable cast-iron stove that Nelson had carried off from a house one Sunday when its owner was at church. A barbecue pit in the shallow ravine nearby completed the hideaway; with Hark as our provider we gloried in (or at least the others did, since I preferred to remain generally abstemious) a plenitude of illicit pigs. Early on during these long afternoons as we talked among ourselves, I would always manage to steer the conversation with great craft and subtlety to the problem of a mass escape. I had fixed the Dismal Swamp already in my mind; it seemed to me even then, even before I had the map in hand, a perfect stronghold for a small band of resolute, woods-canny Negroes: though large (just how vast it really was I could not then know), trackless, forbidding, as wild as the dawn of creation, it was still profusely supplied with game and fish and springs of sweet water—all in all hospitable enough a place for a group of adventurous, hardy runaways to live there indefinitely, swallowed up in its green luxuriant fastness beyond the pursuit of white men. Biding their time in the wilderness, until at last their escape was forgotten, these fugitives might then abandon the swamp and make their way the short distance up to Norfolk, where it would be possible to hide, singly or together,
on board one of the many great merchant ships bound for the North. A heady scheme, beyond doubt, swarming with problems, perils, uncertainties. But I knew that by the grace of God this escape could be achieved.
So that is how it all began. My little inner group of followers were excited about such a plan when first I outlined it to them.
Bedeviled, torn apart by hatred, sick unto death of bondage, they would have cast their lot with the most evil ha’nt or phantom of the woods to be shut forever of the white man’s world. They had nothing more to lose. They were passionately eager to set out with me any night, any day. “When?” said their eyes as I told them of my conception. “When, man?” Nelson asked bluntly, and I saw Runaway Sam’s eyes glitter with the wildest agitation as he muttered: “Shit! C’mon, le’s go.” But I was able to calm them all and—counseling infinite cunning, slowness, and The Confessions of Nat Turner
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patience—quickly put their excited hopes to rest. “I’ve got to receive the last sign,” I explained to them. “They’s plenty time,” I added.“Plenty time.” And this was a phrase I found myself repeating over and over during the following months.
For what they did not know was that behind all my talk of simple flight was a grander design involving the necessity of death, cataclysm, annihilation. They could not know of my vision nor that a true escape into freedom must include not a handful of Negroes but many, and that the blood of white men must flow on the soil of Southampton. They could not know then, because my lips were sealed. But the Lord was about to remove that seal, and they would soon know—of that I was certain.
(Fragment of a memory.) It is the late spring of the next year after that gray winter day when I discovered the map. The library again. Early evening. June. Once more I have been hired out to Mrs. Whitehead, who has set me to installing new pine bookshelves against the remaining bare library wall. This is a job I enjoy—cutting the mortices and tenons and joining them, then boring straight through both pieces of wood with a cross-handled auger in order to pin them together with nails. Rising, shelf succeeds shelf. I work steadily through the twilight, laboring at a casual, rhythmic, unhurried pace. The weather is balmy, the air outside pollen-hazy, filled with the chattering of birds. That pungent smell of wood shavings which I love surrounds me as if in a piney sawdust mist, invisible and sweet. For some reason my plans for the future, which usually occupy my mind during such work, are far from my thoughts. With pleasure I think of the barbecue planned for the following Sunday in the woods. My four close disciples will be there, and in addition to them, three more Negroes whom Nelson and Sam have recruited to my scheme of flight to the Dismal Swamp. Nelson feels that they will make great converts. One of these, an older man named Joe, has told me that he wants to be baptized and I look forward to the rites with satisfaction. (It is rare enough that I encounter a Negro with spiritual aspirations, much less one who might also become, potentially, a murderer.) As I brood congenially on these matters, the auger suddenly slips from my grasp and the sharp point embeds itself in the fleshy under part of my left thumb. I give a gasp of pain. Almost immediately when I remove the point of the drill I see that the damage is slight. The pain too is not severe but I seem to be bleeding copiously. It has happened before.