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was unable to refrain from stealing a glance again at the twin soft ridgelike promontories where her skirt drew tight across her thighs, the wrinkled valley of taffeta between, the stiff round bone twirling ceaselessly in the porcelain hand. I sensed her eyes again, the saucy tilt of a dimpled chin, her face turned, poised, waiting. I struggled for an answer.
“I mean just wouldn’t you, Nat?” she repeated, the girlish voice whispery and near. “I mean, I’m only a female, I know, but if I were a man and a darky and I was abused like that by that horrible old Nathaniel Francis, I’d just hit him right back. Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, missy,” I replied, choosing a tone of humility, “I don’t rightly know as how I would. That way you might just end up dead.” I paused, then added: “But I guess Will he just had about more than he could stand. And by and by when you have more than you can stand you sort of go crazy and hit back before you even know it. And I reckon that’s just what Will done with Mr. Francis.
But I’d be mighty careful about retaliating against a white mastah, I would indeed, missy.”
She said nothing then, and when she spoke finally her voice was grave, pensive, filled with a kind of ample, questing, hurtful sorrow I had never before heard, or overheard, in a white person so young. “Oh me, I don’t know!” she sighed, and the sound rose from deep within her. “I just don’t know, Nat! I just don’t know why darkies stay the way they do—I mean all ignorant and everything, and getting beaten like that Will, and so many of them having people that own them that don’t feed them properly or even clothe them so that they’re warm enough. I mean so many living like animals. Oh, I wish there was some way that darkies could live decently and work for themselves and have—oh, real selfregard. Oh, guess what, Nat, let me tell you something!” Her tone changed abruptly, the quality of lament still there but now edged with indignation.
“I got in the most terrible fight with this girl at the Seminary named Charlotte Tyler Saunders. She was one of my very best friends and still is, but we got into this terrible fight in May just before school was over. Well, the fight was over darkies.
Because you see this girl Charlotte Tyler Saunders’s father owns, oh, just quintillions of darkies on this plantation up in Fluvanna County and he’s in the legislature in Richmond and whenever the thing comes up there about emancipating the slaves he always gives these big long boring speeches about it The Confessions of Nat Turner
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that Charlotte Tyler finds in the Gazette and reads to the other girls. I mean he’s all against emancipation and he says all these things about how darkies are irresponsible and have no morals and are bestial and lazy and how you can’t teach them and all that balderdash. Well, this time I’m talking about she’d just finished reading this speech that her father gave and, I don’t know, Nat, I just sort of finally exploded. And I said, ‘Well listen, Charlotte Tyler Saunders, I don’t intend any disrespect to your father but that is simply folderol because it just isn’t so!’ And oh, she got mad at me, and said, ‘It is so, any person with a grain of sense and eyes to see knows it’s so!’ And I was almost crying then, I was so mad, and I reckon I was almost screaming. And I said, ‘Well, listen to me, Miss Charlotte Tyler Saunders, I happen to know that where I live in Southampton my mother hires a darky slave who is almost as intelligent and refined and clean and religious and profoundly understanding of the Bible as Dr.
Simpson’—Dr. Simpson is principal of the Seminary, Nat—‘and not only that, my erstwhile friend’—I was positively almost screaming—‘if you want my humble opinion, and I’m certain that I’m the only girl in school who thinks so, but my humble opinion is that the darkies in Virginia should be free!’”
After a pause, Margaret said: “Oh, she made me so angry! And the thing is, Nat, she is au fond a very kind, sweet, considerate girl. Au fond means ‘deep down’ in French. It’s just that some people—” She broke off with a sigh, saying: “Oh, I don’t know.
Sometimes life is so complicated, isn’t it? Anyway, Nat,” she concluded slowly, “that darky I was talking about was you. I mean, it really was.”
I made no reply. Her closeness, her presence stifled me, even now as the summer air flowed past my face, wafting toward me her odor—a disturbing smell of young-girl-sweat mingled with the faint sting of lavender. I tried to inch myself away from her but was unable to, found instead that I could not avoid touching her, nor she me, elbow lightly kissing elbow. With a longing that made me wet beneath the arms I ached for the ride to be finished, even as I realized that we had half an hour more to go. I watched the horse’s black tail ripple and flourish, and the brown rump glistening. Along the rutted road the buggy wheels counted off the hillocks and humps in a steady clatter of iron on stone.
We were riding through a deserted part of the county where fields of broom and briar and sedge and yellow mustard became interspersed with patches of dappled woodland. It was country I knew well. There were no dwellings here, no people—only a The Confessions of Nat Turner
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decrepit fence or, far off in an empty meadow, the shattered hulk of an ancient barn. The air was clear, the sun dazzling bright; grand pinnacles and peaks of summer clouds sent across the fields racing shadows shaped like gigantic hands. Again I smelled the warm girl-sweat, sensed her presence, soap, skin, hair, lavender. Suddenly, despite myself, the godless thought came: I could stop now and here, right here by the road in this meadow, do with her anything I wished. There’s not a soul for miles. I could throw her down and spread her young white legs and stick myself in her until belly met belly and shoot inside her in warm milky spurts of desecration. And let her scream until the empty pinewoods echoed to her cries and no one would be the wiser, not even the buzzards or the crows . . . The sweat poured down my sides beneath my shirt. Then I uttered a silent prayer, and furiously thrust the thought out of my mind as one thrusts away the very body and spirit of Satan. How did I dare think such disastrous thoughts with my great mission so near? Even so, I still could not help but feel my member swollen and pulsating underneath my trousers. My heart was pounding. I prodded the horse on with a snap of the reins.
And again the whispery voice in my ear: “I mean Charlotte Tyler really tries to be a very religious person—that’s the thing. That’s why I can’t understand really religious people holding such views. I mean, look at Mama! And Richard, for pity’s sake! And every one of my sisters! And that Charlotte Tyler Saunders— au fond she professes to believe in love when, honestly, I don’t believe she has the faintest inkling of what the Bible teaches about love. I mean all those beautiful teachings of John about love and how you shouldn’t fear it. Fear and torment. Oh, you know, Nat, that verse that speaks about torment. How does it go?”
“Well, missy,” I replied after a moment, “you must mean the verse in the first epistle that says: There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: Because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. That’s how it goes.”
“Oh yes!” she exclaimed. “And he said: Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. Oh, it is the simplest thing in the world, is it not, Nat—the perfect Christian love of God, and of one another, yet how many people shun that blessed grace and live in fear and torment? God is love, John said, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him . . . Could anything be more simple or easy or plain?”
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On she prattled in her whispery voice, love-obsessed, Christ-crazed, babbling away in an echo of all the self-serving platitudes and stale insipid unfelt blather uttered by every pious capon and priestly spinster she had listened to since she was able to sit upright, misty-eyed and rapt and with her little pantalettes damp with devotion, in a pew of her brother’s church.
She filled me with boredom and lust—and now, to still at least the latter emotion, once and for all, I let h
er constant rush of words float uncaptured through my mind, and with my eyes on the horse’s bright undulating rump, concentrated on a minor but thorny problem that was facing me at the very outset of my campaign (This concerned Travis—I should say, rather, Miss Sarah. I had resolved on a mercilessly intransigent course of action when it came to killing the white people, determined that not a single soul—no matter how friendly our relations had been—would be spared the ax or the gun. To contemplate otherwise might be fatal, for if I allowed my heart to soften in the case of one person, it would be all too easy for such clemency to overtake me with another, and another, and still another. I had granted only one exception to this rule—Jeremiah Cobb, that stern and tormented man whose encounter with me will be remembered. Now, however, despite my efforts to thwart a fondness for her in my heart, I could not help but feel that Miss Sarah—who had never regarded me with anything but kindness and who during my last illness nursed me with a motherly, sisterly, clucking solicitude—should escape the blade of my wrath. I had no qualms about the others of the house, including Travis, who although decent enough stirred in me few fraternal reverberations; the others, especially young Putnam, I heartily wished to see removed from their existence. About Miss Sarah’s fate, however, I suffered already painful guilt and misgivings, and I felt that if in some devious fashion or other I could contrive to make sure—perhaps through subtle ministerial urging—that she, a good Baptist, was shouting hallelujahs at that Carolina camp meeting on the night of my attack, out of harm’s way with her infant child—Yet was that any answer? Because then she would only return to a scene of grievous devastation—) I was pondering this difficult matter, greatly troubled and suddenly despondent, when Margaret Whitehead gave a little gasp, clutched my sleeve, and said: “Oh, Nat, stop! Please stop!”
A passing wagon or cart, hours before, had run over and crushed a turtle. Margaret had spied it from her side of the buggy and she insisted—with another tug at my sleeve—that we climb down and help it, for she had seen that it was still alive. “Oh, the The Confessions of Nat Turner
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poor thing,” she whispered as we viewed the little beast. The black and brown mosaic of the turtle’s shell had been split down the center from side to side, a pale bloody paste oozed out of the fissure and from a spiderweb of minute fracture marks that grooved the surface of the shell. Yet, indeed, the turtle still lived; it wiggled feebly and hopelessly with its outstretched legs and craned its long leathery neck and remained immobile, dying, jaws agape and hooded eyes mossed over in some dim reptilian anguish. I touched it lightly with my toe.
“Oh, the poor thing,” Margaret said again.
“Ain’t nothing but a turtle, missy,” I said.
“Oh, but it must suffer so.”
“I’ll put it away,” I replied.
She was silent for a moment, then said softly: “Oh yes, do.”
I found a hickory branch at the side of the road and smote the head of the turtle hard, a single time; its legs and tail quivered briefly, then relaxed with a soft uncurling motion, the tail drooped, and it was dead. When I threw the stick into the field and turned back to Margaret, I saw that her lips were trembling.
“’Twasn’t nothin’ but an old turtle, missy,” I said. “Turtle don’t feel anything. He’s pretty dumb. They’s an old nigger sayin’ about animals that goes, ‘They that doesn’t holler doesn’t hurt.’”
“Oh, I know it’s silly,” she said, composing herself. “It’s just—oh, suffering things.” Suddenly she put her fingers to her forehead.
“I’m kind of dizzy. And it’s hot. Oh, I wish I could have a sip of water. I’m so thirsty.”
I kicked the turtle into the ditch.
“Well, they’s a brook that runs along back in those trees there,” I said. “Same brook that goes by yo’ mama’s place. It’s fit to drink here, I know, missy. I’d fetch you some water but I don’t have a thing to carry it in.”
“Oh come, we’ll walk,” she replied.
Her spirits brightened again as I led the way across a scrubby parched field toward the stream. “I’m really very sorry that I The Confessions of Nat Turner
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spoke of Charlotte Tyler Saunders in that fashion,” she said cheerfully behind me. “She’s really just the sweetest girl. And so talented. Oh, did I ever tell you about this masque that we wrote together, Nat?”
“No, missy,” I replied, “I don’t believe so.”
“Well, a masque is a sort of a play in verse—you spell it with a q-u-e on the end—and it’s quite short and it has to do with elevated themes—oh, I mean things of the spirit and philosophy and poetical matters and such like. Anyway, we did this masque together and it was performed at the Seminary last spring. It was quite some success, I can tell you that. I mean after it was performed, do you know, Dr. Simpson told Charlotte Tyler and me that it was the equal of dramas he had seen performed up North on the stages of Philadelphia and New York. And Mrs.
Simpson—that’s his wife—told us that rarely if ever had she seen a performance that was so affecting and imbued with such lofty ideals. Those were her words. Anyway, this masque that we wrote is called The Melancholy Shepherdess. It’s laid in first-century Rome. In one way it’s very pagan but at the same time it exemplifies the highest aspirations of Christian belief.
Anyway, there are these five characters. At the Seminary they were all played by girls, naturally. The heroine is a young shepherdess who lives on the outskirts of Rome named Celia.
She is a very devout Christian. The hero is the young manor lord whose name is Philemon. He’s very handsome and everything, you see, and au fond he’s very kindly and good but his religion is still quite pagan. Actually, the truth is that his religion is animistic
. . .”
As the dry field gave way to a patch of woods I could hear water splashing in the brook. The sunlight dimmed out as we entered the grove of trees; a ferny coolness enveloped me, there were pine needles underfoot and I smelled the sharpbittersweet odor of rosin. The closeness, the stillness, the seclusion here created once more a voluptuous stirring in my blood. I turned now to guide her by my glance, and for an instant her eyes met mine unflinchingly, not so much coquettish as insistent—inviting, daring, almost expecting my gaze to repose in her own eyes while she prattled blissfully on. Although as brief and fleeting as the space of a blink, it was the longest encounter I could remember ever having with a white person’s eyes.
Unaccountably, my heart swelled in my throat in a quick ball of fear. I turned away, swept with lust again, hating her guts, now driven close to distraction by that chattering monologue pitched The Confessions of Nat Turner
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at a girlish whisper which I no longer bothered to listen to or to understand. Years and decades of pine needles made a buoyant sweet-smelling carpet sibilant beneath our feet. I paused to dislodge a pine branch that lay across our path, then rose, and she gave a little murmur of surprise as the fullness of her breast bumped the flesh of my arm in soft collision. But she paid it no notice, continued talking while we walked down toward the stream. I was oblivious of her words. The place where her breast had met my arm was like an incandescence, tingling; again I was smothered by remorseless desire. Insanely, I found myself measuring the risk. Take her, a voice said. Take her here on this bank by this quiet brook. Spend upon her all afternoon a backed-up lifetime of passion. Without mercy take your pleasure upon her innocent round young body until she is half mad with fright and pain. Forget your great mission. Abandon all for these hours of terror and bliss . . . I felt my virile part stiffen again beneath my trousers, and I was suddenly and absurdly torn between fear that she might see my state and an impulse to expose it to her—oh God, forget it, forget it! Never could I remember having been so unhinged by desire and hatred. Trying to settle my emotions I said in an uncertain voice, too loud:
“There’s the water!”
“Oh, I’m so thirsty!” she exclaimed. Fallen tree
s made a little rapids here, and the water foamed over the logs cool and green.
I watched as she knelt by the brook and brought pale cupfuls of water up to her face in the curved hollow of her hands. Now, the voice said, take her now.
“Oh, that’s better!” she said, drawing back. “Don’t you want some, Nat?” And without waiting for an answer, went on:
“Anyway, Nat, after this wicked Fidessa kills herself in remorse, then Philemon takes his sword and kills Pactolus, the evil old soothsayer. I played Philemon in our performance and that part was such fun, I mean with wooden swords and all. Then Philemon is converted to Christianity by Celia and in the very last scene you see them as they plight their troth. And then there are these last lines, I mean what is known on the stage as curtain speeches. That’s where Philemon holds his sword up in front of Celia like a cross and says: We’ll love one another by the light of heaven above . . .”
Margaret rose from her knees and turned, standing at the edge of the brook with her arms outstretched to the air, transfigured as The Confessions of Nat Turner
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if before a crowd of onlookers, her eyes half closed. “Then Celia says: Oh, I would fain swoon into an eternity of love!
“Curtain! That’s all!” she said brightly, proudly, looking toward me. “Isn’t that a wonderful masque? I mean it has a very poetical, religious quality, even if I do say so myself.”
I made no reply, but now as she moved from the side of the stream she tripped, gave a little cry, and for the briefest instant fell against me, clasping my arms with her still-wet hands. I grabbed her about the shoulders—only as if to prevent her falling—and as quickly let her go, but not so quickly that in the intervening space I did not smell her skin and her closeness and feel the electric passage across my cheek of strands of chestnut-colored hair. During that moment I heard her breathing and our eyes met in a wayward glint of light that seemed to last much longer than any mere glance exchanged between two strangers journeying of a summer afternoon to some drowsy dwelling far off in the country.