Could it be, too, that I felt her relax, go the faintest bit limp, as she slumped against me? This I would never know, for swiftly we were apart; a cloud passed over the day, bringing shadows and a breeze which teased the loosened, wanton edges of her hair.
The flicker of an instant then, no more, but she was frozen in an attitude of stiff, still death. As the wind rose there was a clatter in the trees like the noise of cataclysmic strife, and I was suddenly—without reason—inconsolable with an emptiness such as I have never known.
Then she trembled as if with a chill, saying gently, “We’d better hurry back, Nat.” And I, walking beside her now, replied, “Yes, missy,” and this was the last time—but for one—that I ever looked into her face.
We were ready. I knew that the exodus of many of the Baptists of the county to their camp meeting down in Carolina would commence on Thursday the eighteenth of August, and they would not return until the following Wednesday. And so for close on to a week Southampton would be deprived of a large portion of its white population, and the armed enemy would be considerably fewer both in Jerusalem and the outlying countryside. I hit upon Sunday night as the time to begin my assault, largely on the advice of Nelson, who pointed out with his usual shrewdness that Sunday nights were habitually the nights when Negroes went hunting for coon or possum, at least during The Confessions of Nat Turner
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the leisurely month of August; those evenings always resounded until dawn with a great commotion in the woods—hoots and shouts and the yapping of dogs—and so our own disturbance would be less likely to attract notice. Furthermore, it would be simply easier to assemble on Sunday, normally the Negroes’
free day. Seizing an early advantage by slaying all at Travis’s, equipping ourselves with his several guns and two horses, we should then be able to proceed along the lower loop of the great
“S” I had laid out on the map and (after invading the properties in between and slaughtering all therein) arrive sometime the next day at the middle of the “S” and thus at what I had long since termed my “early objective”—Mrs. Whitehead’s home with its rich store of horses, guns, and ammunition. I would have by then a goodly body of troops. Including the Negroes I had “spotted” at the intervening houses (plus two of Miss Caty’s boys, Tom and Andrew; them I had easily recruited during my final stay), I calculated that upon leaving Mrs. Whitehead’s our force should number more than a score, apart from another four or five whom out of instinct I had not trusted enough to take into my earliest confidence but who I expected would join us when we appeared.
Provided that we took the most extreme care to prevent anyone from escaping and raising an alarm, we should be able to sweep the rest of the country and arrive, triumphant, in Jerusalem by noon of the second day, our force swollen into the many hundreds.
Late that Sunday morning my four inmost followers gathered themselves for a final barbecue in the dense woodland ravine beyond my sanctuary. At the last moment, the night before, I had sent Hark up the road to the Reese farm with instructions for him to tell one of the Reese Negroes, Jack, to join the barbecue and so become a member of our initial striking force. I had felt the need for a strong arm to augment our first blow, and Jack fitted the requisite details—weighing well over two hundred pounds and by luck boiling at a high pitch of resentment and wrath: only one week before, Jack’s woman, a butter-skinned, almond-eyed beauty, had been sold to a Tennessee trader scrounging quite openly he allowed to planter Reese (and within Jack’s hearing),
“for likely-looking pussy for gov’mental gentlemen in Nashville.”
Jack would go with me to the far ends of the earth; certainly he would make quick work of Reese.
All morning and most of the afternoon I withdrew from my followers, remaining near my sanctuary, where I read from my Bible and prayed for the Lord’s favor in battle. The weather had The Confessions of Nat Turner
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become sultry and close, and as I prayed a single locust shrilled somewhere amid the trees, playing like an incessant tormented fiddle-string on my eardrums. After my long prayers I set fire to my tabernacle and stood aside from the clearing as the pine logs which had for so many years sheltered me went up in blue smoke and a roaring and crackling of flames. Then when the ashes had cooled I knelt amid the ruin and made a final prayer, beseeching God for his protection in the coming struggle: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
It was just after I had risen from my knees that I heard a rustling in the underbrush behind me and turned to see the demented, murderous, hate-ravaged, mashed-in face of Will. He said nothing, merely looked at me with his bulging eyes and scratched at his naked black scarred belly below which a pair of gray jeans hung in tatters. I was seized by reasonless fear.
“What you doin’ here, boy?” I blurted.
“I seed de smoke. Den I done seed dem niggers down dere in de gully,” Will replied coolly. “Dey done gib me some barbecue. I heered dem talkin’ ‘bout startin’ a ruction an’ killin’ de white folks.
When I ax Sam an’ Nelson if’n I could jine up dey tol’ me to ax you.”
“Where you been all these yere weeks?” I asked. “Nat Francis see you an’ he’ll shoot you dead.”
“Don’ shit me ’bout no Nat Francis,” Will retorted. “I shoot him now!”
“Where you been?” I repeated.
“Aroun’,” he replied. “All aroun’.” He shrugged. His eyes caught the light in disks of malign fire, and I felt anew the old dread his presence always caused me, as if I had been suddenly trapped like a fly in the hatred he bore toward all mankind, all creation.
His woolly head was filled with cockleburs. A scar glistened on his black cheek, shiny as an eel cast up on a mud bank. I felt that if I reached out I could almost touch with my fingertips the madness stirring within him, feel a shaggy brute heaving beneath a carapace of scarred black skin. I turned away.
“You git on out of here,” I said. “We don’ need no more men.”
Abruptly, in a single bound from the underbrush, he was at my The Confessions of Nat Turner
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side. He brandished a knobbed fist beneath my chin. “Don’ shit me, preacher man!” he said. His voice was the hiss of a cornered cat. “You try an’ shit me, preacher man, an’ you in bad trouble. I isn’t run in de woods all dis yere time fo’ nothin’. I’se tired of huckaberries. I gwine git me some meat now— white meat. I gwine git me some dat white cunt too.” For weeks he had hidden in the woods, grubbing for berries and nuts and earthworms—even carrion—stealing an occasional chicken in between times of pursuit by white men and dogs; he had lived like an animal and now, streaked with mud, stinking, fangs bared beneath a nose stepped upon and bent like a flattened spoon, it seemed to me that he was an animal—a wicked little weasel or maddened fox—and the blood ran chill in my veins. I felt that he might at any moment leap for my throat. “You shit me, preacher man,” he said hoarsely, “an’ I fix yo’ preacher ass! I knock you to yo fuckin’ black knees! I isn’t gwine hang out in de swamp no mo’ eatin’ huckaberries. I gwine git me some meat. I gwine git me some blood. So, preacher man, you better figger dat Will done jined de ruction! You maybe is some fancy talker but you isn’t gwine talk Will out’n dat!”
( After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a beast dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; it devoured and brake in pieces . . . )
Even as he spoke I knew that I was on the verge of capitulating to him, backing down. I was, to be sure, fearful of him, afraid that I could not control him or bend him to my will; and it was this instinctive mistrust that had caused me months before to eliminate him from my plans. At the same time, it was clear now that if I could channel his brutal fury and somehow keep him in check he would make a potent addition to our striking force. All the privation in the woods had not weakened him but rather had lent to his sinewy body furious zeal and stren
gth; the muscles along his purplish black arms quivered and jumped with murderous power. I saw the vicious scars implanted upon his flanks by Francis’s lash and suddenly, though without spirit for the move, I relented.
( Then I would know the truth of this beast, which was diverse from all the others . . . )
“Awright,” I said, “you can jine up with us. But let me tell you one thing good, nigger. I is the boss. I runs this show. When I says jump there, you jump right there, not in no still or cider press and The Confessions of Nat Turner
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not in no haystack, neither. You ain’t goin’ to spread no white woman’s legs, not on this trip you ain’t. We got a long way to go and a pile of things to do, and if the niggers start a-humpin’ every white piece in sight we ain’t goin’ to get half a mile up the road.
So brandy and women is out. Now come on.”
In the ravine my followers, together with the new recruit Jack, had finished the last remnants of their barbecue. Pig bones littered the ground around the ashes of a fire, still smoldering.
The five men were reclining amid the cool ferns that rimmed the ravine; they had been talking in soft voices —I heard them as I came down the path with Will—but at my approach they arose and stood silent. Ever since the spring, when I revealed my plans, I had insisted that they pay this deference in my presence, explaining to them patiently that I wished for no obeisance, only absolute obedience; it should not have surprised me, as it did, that they so readilycomplied—endless years of servility had done their abrasive work. Now as they stood waiting among the afternoon shadows I approached them with an upraised hand and said: “The first shall be last.”
“An’ de last shall be first,” they replied, more or less together.
“Report from the First Troop!” I commanded. I used the form of order I had adopted after hearing drills of the mounted militia outside the Jerusalem armory. The First Troop was Henry’s responsibility. Because of Henry’s deafness I had to repeat the command again, whereupon he stepped forward and said: “First Troop dey all ready. Nathan an’ Wilbur bofe is waitin’ at de Blunts’ place. Davy he waitin’ at Mrs. Waters’s. Joe he all ready too down at Peter Edwards’s. Joe he done got him a bad case of de quinsy, but he put him a hot flannel roun’ his th’oat an’ he say he ‘spect he gwine be all right time we gits dere.”
“Report from the Second Troop!” I said.
The Second Troop, a body of six, was Nelson’s. “All my niggers is ready an’ rarin’ to go,” he said. “Austin say he could maybe sneak away from de Bryants’ dis evenin’ an’ jine us at Travis’s roun’ ’bout nightfall. If’n he can, he gwine bring Bryant’s horse.”
“Good,” I said, “more they is at first the better.” Then: “Report from the Third Troop!” Just as I gave this command a tremendous belch broke loose from one of my company, followed by another belch, and I turned quickly to see that it had come from Jack. With a brandy bottle clutched against his black The Confessions of Nat Turner
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chest he was swaying in a delicate circular motion; his thick lips parted in a self-absorbed grin and he regarded me through eyes misted over with a dreamy film—the gaze oddly studious although utterly blank. In a flood of rage I knocked the brandy bottle from his hand.
“No mo’ of that, nigger!” I said. “Applejack is out, you hear? I catch yo’ black mouth at a bottle again and you goin’ to get clobbered fo’ good. Now git on back over there in the trees!”
As Jack sidled away sheepishly, weaving, I called Nelson aside into a small stand of slash pine—a dark place with spongy ground underfoot, swarming with gnats. “Listen!” I said angrily in a low voice. “What’s gone wrong with you, Nelson, anyways?
You supposed to be my right arm, an’ now look what’s done happened already! ‘Twas you been sayin’ all along we got to keep the niggers away from the stills and presses! ‘Twas you been warnin’ about drinkin’, an’ now here you let this yere big black clown get pissy-eyed drunk right in front of yo’ nose!
What’m I goin’ to do? If I can’t depend on you for a simple thing like that, then we done lost the war before it ever gits goin’!”
“I sorry,” he said, licking his lips. His round middle-aged stolid face with its graying stubble and its look of depthless oppression suddenly sagged, became hurt and downcast. “I sorry, Nat,” he repeated, “I guess I jes’ done forgot ‘bout all dat.”
“Man, you can’t ’ low yo’self to forget,” I insisted, boring in hard,
“you my chief lieutenant, you know that, you an’ Henry. If y’all can’t help me keep these niggers in line, then we might as well run up the white flag right now.”
“I sorry,” he said again, abjectly.
“Awright,” I went on, “forget all that now. Just mind from now on to keep them niggers out’n them stills. Now listen here, one last time. Give me the plan for Travis’s so we git it straight with no trouble. Remember, we uses the broadax an’ the hatchet. Cold steel. No noise. No shootin’ till I give the word. We start shootin’
too soon an’ they be on top of us before daybreak.”
“You right about dat,” he declared. “Anyways—” I listened as he outlined for my satisfaction, one last time, our plan of attack on Travis’s house. “—Den you an’ Henry goes in to getTravis an’
Miss Sarah, dat right?” he was saying. “Sam goes to git Miss Maria Pope—”
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“Only she ain’t there,” I put in.
“How come?” he said.
“She done gone up to Petersburg on a visit, this very day,” I explained with some regret. It was true: the no-account biddy had had supernatural luck.
“Mm- huh,” Nelson sighed, “too bad ’bout dat. Sam sho would of fixed dat ol’ bitch’s wagon.”
“Anyway, she gone,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“Well den,” he continued, “I ’spect it best dat Sam stay with you, ain’t dat right? An’ me an’ Hark an’ Jack goes up to de attic an’
gits Putnam an’ dat othah boy. Dis while you takin’ keer of Travis. Meanwhiles, Austin he in de barn saddlin’ up dem horses. What ‘bout Will, Nat? Whar he figgers in?”
“Nem’mine ‘bout Will,” I replied. “We’ll use him as a lookout or somethin’. Nem’mine ‘bout Will.”
“An’ what ‘bout dat little baby?” he said. “You done tole me you was gwine tell us what to do ‘bout dat business. What?”
I had a sinking sensation deep inside. “Nem’mine ‘bout that either,” I answered him, “I goin’ to git all that straightened out when the time comes. Maybe we jest let that baby alone, I don’t know.” I was stung with a sudden, inexplicable annoyance.
“Awright,” I told him, “go on now and git on back with the men. I’ll come down with y’all after dark.”
After Nelson had gone back through the trees, leaving me to chew on a piece of pork they had saved for me from their feast, a mood of anxiety began to steal over me, announcing itself with a faint numbness in my extremities, an urgent heartbeat, pain all around the bottom of my stomach. I started to sweat, and I laid the joint of pork aside, uneaten. I had many times prayed to the Lord to spare me this fear, but now it was plain that, unheeding, He was going to allow me to suffer anyway this griping sickness, this clammy apprehension. The waning summer day was humid and still. I could hear nothing except for the gnats’ feverish insensate humming around my ears and a muffled snatch of talk from the Negroes in the ravine. I wondered suddenly if the Lord had also permitted Saul and Gideon and David to endure this fear before their day of warfare: did they too know this demoralizing terror, this tremor in the bones, this whiff of The Confessions of Nat Turner
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imminent, hovering death? Did they too taste the mouth go dry at thought of the coming slaughter, sense a shiver of despair fly through their restless flesh as they conjured up images of bloodied heads and limbs, gouged-out eyes, the strangled faces of men
they had known, enemy and friend, jaws agape in yawns of eternal slumber? Did Saul and Gideon and David, armed and waiting on the eve of the battle, feel their blood change to water in everlasting fright and then long to sheath their swords and turn their backs upon the strife? For an instant panic seized me. I arose as if to flee headlong through the pines, to find some refuge in the distant woods where I would be hid forever beyond the affairs of God and men. Cease the war, cease the war, my heart howled. Run, run, cried my soul. At that moment my fear was so great that I felt that I was even beyond reach or counsel of the Lord. Then from the ravine I heard Hark’s laugh, and my terror subsided. I was trembling like a willow branch. I sat down on the ground and addressed myself to further prayer and contemplation as the shades of evening drew glimmering in . . .
An hour or so after nightfall—at around ten o’clock—I rejoined my men in the ravine. A full moon had risen to the east, something I had anticipated for months and was in keeping with my plans. Since I was confident that we would be on the offensive throughout all the first night (and with good fortune the second night too), the moon would favor us rather than the enemy. For added illumination I had torches made of lightwood stakes and rags soaked in a gallon cask of camphene—turpentine mixed with grain alcohol—that Hark had stolen from the wheel shop. These torches would be used indoors and with care on the march, whenever the moonlight failed us. Our initial weapons were few and simple: three broadaxes and two hatchets, all carefully honed on Travis’s grindstone. As I made it clear to Nelson, for purposes of stealth and surprise I wished to avoid gunfire at least until the first daylight, when our assault would have gained a safe momentum.