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dim-brained, remorseless, pure; I felt myself shudder, not from the day’s cold but as if from chill fever coursing through the marrow of my bones.
“An overall reluctance. Videlicet . . . And I quote from back near the beginning, which has to do with the murder of none other than your late owner—the aforesaid and, I might add, the benevolent Mr. Joseph Travis. ‘It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. On which, armed with a hatchet and accompanied by Will, I entered my master’s chamber, it being dark I could not give a deathblow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife; it was his last word, Will laid him dead with a blow of his ax,’ and so on.” He paused again, regarding me gloomily out of his flushed face with blotches and spidery veins. “Why?” he said. “’Twarn’t any less dark in there for Will than for you, less’n he was a cat. All I mean is this, Reverend. You haven’t come out and so much as stated it, but the implication here, as I have said, is that you personally killed only one person. Furthermore, the implication if I read it rightly is that the act of killing or trying to kill got you so rattled that Will had to come in and do all the dirty work. Now, it is curious indeed, but Will was one of the few niggers actually slain during the course of this ruction. So it is your word alone I’ve got to take. And that you killed only one and were reluctant to kill more is a line of goods mighty hard to buy. Come on, Reverend, after all, you were the leader . . .”
I thrust my head into my hands, thinking: Then I would know the truth of this beast, which was diverse from all the others, exceeding dreadful, whose teeth were of iron and his nails of brass; which devoured, brake in pieces . . . And barely listening now to Gray, who was saying: “Or this, Reverend, later on that night after the Travises and the Reeses and old Salathiel Francis. You’ve gone on across the fields and now: ‘As we approached, the family discovered us and shut the door. Vain hope! Will, with one stroke of his ax, opened it, and we entered and found Mrs. Turner and Mrs. Newsome in the middle of a room, almost frightened to death. Will immediately killed Mrs.
Turner with one blow of his ax. I took Mrs. Newsome by the hand, and with the sword I had when I was apprehended, I struck her several blows over the head’ —now listen careful—
‘but not being able to kill her. Will, turning around and discovering it, dispatched her also . . ’”
Suddenly I was on my feet in front of Gray, stretched to the limit of the chain. “Stop!” I yelled. “Stop! We done it! Yes, yes, we The Confessions of Nat Turner
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done it! We done what had to be done! But stop recitin’ about me and Will! Leave off studyin’ about all this! We done what had to be done! So stop it!”
Gray had drawn back in alarm, but now as I relaxed and grew limp, my knees rattling in the cold, and as I looked at him as if to regret this sudden fury, he too composed himself, settling himself on the plank and saying finally: “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it. It’s your funeral. Figger I can’t get blood from a turnip noways. But I got to read it and you got to sign it. That’s the edict of the court.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gray,” I said. “I truly didn’t mean to get impudent.
It’s just that I don’t think you understand about this business, and I don’t know but whether it’s too late to make it all plain.”
I moved slowly over to the window again and gazed out into the morning. After a silence Gray commenced to read once more in a subdued, monotonous voice; he shuffled pages inmild confusion. “Hem.‘. . . Viewed the mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction’. My emphasis. Well, that last item—gildin’ the lily, maybe?” I made no reply. Off in the other cell I could hear Hark chuckling, muttering jokes to himself. The fragile dustlike snow was still falling; it had begun to cling to the earth, the thinnest film of white like hoarfrost, no more substantial than breath blown frosty against a pane of glass.
“Encore, as the Frenchies put it,” Gray was saying, “meaning, that is, re-peat: ‘. . . and immediately started in quest of other victims.’ But let’s skip ahead now . . .” The voice droned on.
I raised my eyes toward the river. Across the stream, beneath the trees on the far bank, I saw the procession I had seen each morning, though this time it was late for them—the children usually came at dawn. As always there were four of them, four black children; the oldest could not have been older than eight, the smallest was younger than three. Dressed in shapeless clothing which some troubled mammy had fashioned for them out of cotton sacking or the poorest odds and ends, they picked their way along beneath the trees on the far bank, gathering twigs and fallen branches for some cabin fireplace. Pausing, stooping down, suddenly scampering forward, they moved with quick and sprightly motions beneath the clumsy flapping of their formless little sacks, piling twigs and sticks and fagots high in their arms against their bodies. I heard them call out to each other. I couldn’t make out their words, but on the cold air their The Confessions of Nat Turner
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voices were shrill and bright. Black hands and feet and faces, bobbing, swooping, dancing shapes silhouetted like lively birds against the white purity of the forest and the morning. I watched them for a long time as they moved, all unknowing doomed and hopeless, across the clean space of snow and finally vanished with their burdens, still sweetly chattering and shrill, upriver past the limit of my sight.
Suddenly I thrust my face into my hands, thinking of Daniel’s beast again in the burning visions of the night, thinking of Daniel’s cry: O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?
But the answer was not the Lord’s. It was Gray’s. And in the imprisoned space of my mind it seemed to come back amid a tumult and murmuration of flowing waters, wild waves, rushing winds. Justice. Justice! That’s how come nigger slavery’s going to last a thousand years!
Hark always declared that he could distinguish between good white people and bad white people—and even white people who lay between good and bad—by their smell alone. He was very solemn about all this; over the years he had worked out many subtleties and refinements upon his original philosophy, and he could talk endlessly as we worked alongside each other—
advising me at the top of his voice, assigning exact, marvelous odors to white people like Moses handing down the law. About much of this he was deadly serious, and as he jabbered away his broad, bold face would become furrowed in the most worrisome thought; but Hark’s nature was basically humorous, outward-going, beneficent, serene, and he could not long sustain a somber mood, even though many horrible things had happened to him.
Finally something connected with a white person and a certain smell would tickle some interior nerve: against all restraint the giggles would begin to well up from his belly and in an instant he would have broken down, clutching himself in helpless, wheezing, rich, delirious laughter. “Now, Nat, maybe it jes’ me,”
he would begin seriously, “but dis yere nose of mine she jes’ get better ev’y day. Like I was comin’ roun’ de side of de barn yestiddy evenin’ and dere’s ole Miss Maria a-feedin’ the chickens. She seed me afore I could take off. ‘Hark!” say she.
‘Hark! Come right yere!” So I come, an’ awready my nose begin twitchin’ like a mushrat pokin’ up out’n de swamp. ‘Hark!’ say she. ‘Whar de corn?’ Why, what corn, Miss Maria?’ say I, de ole smell gittin’ strong now. ‘De corn in de shed for de chickens!’ de The Confessions of Nat Turner
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ole bitch say. ‘You suppose’ to have a couple bushels shelled fo’
my chickens and dere ain’t a cupful lef’! Dis de fo’th time in a month! You a shiftless black nigger scoundrel and I pray to see de day my brother sells you off to Mississippi! Git dat corn shelled right now, you shiftless nigger!’ Jesus jumpin’ Judas, de smell, Nat, comin’ out dat woman, if it water ‘twould have drown’
me in my shoes. What it like? ‘Twas like an ole catfish somebody lef’ three days up on a stump in July.” And he would begin to giggle
softly, already clutching at his midriff. “Stink! Even de buzzards fly away from ole pussy like dat!” And glorious laughter.
But not all of them had smells like this, according to Hark. Mr.
Joseph Travis, our master, had “a right honest stench about him,” said Hark, “like a good horse what worked him up a sweat.”
Joel Westbrook, the boy whom Travis employed as an apprentice, was an uncertain, gawky lad, given to temper fits but amiable, even generous when in the mood; hence to Hark his smell had a changing, fitful quality: “Sometime dat boy smell right pretty, like hay or somethin’, other time he smell up a storm.”
This offensive Miss Maria Pope was to Hark, however, in every way consistent in her smell. She was Travis’s half sister, who had come down from Petersburg to live with Travis and his family after her mother’s death. A bony, angular woman, she suffered from blocked sinuses which caused her to breathe through her mouth; as a result her lips were always peeling to the quick and sometimes bled, which necessitated a poultice of lard, and this gave her ever-parted mouth a blanched appearance altogether ghostly and strange. Her eyes wandered distantly, and she was given to stroking her wrists. She hated us Negroes, who were at her beck and call, with a kind of profound and pointless hatred which was all the more burdensome to us because she was not really of the family, and therefore her attitude had a harsh, remote, despotic quality. On summer nights, from the windows of the upstairs room where she slept, I could hear her sobbing hysterically and crying out for her departed mother. She was about forty, I suspect a virgin, and she read aloud from the Bible incessantly with a kind of hollow-eyed, mesmeric urgency, her favorite passages being John 13,
which deals with humility and charity, and the sixth chapter of I Timothy, beginning: Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. Indeed, according to Hark, she once flattened him up against the porch wall and made The Confessions of Nat Turner
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him repeat this homily until he had committed it to memory. I have no doubt that she was more than a little cracked, but this did not diminish my intense dislike of Miss Maria Pope, though occasionally I felt myself feeling sorry for her against my better judgment.
But Miss Maria is, in a manner of speaking, only incidental to a man I am trying to get at in a roundabout fashion—namely, Mr.
Jeremiah Cobb, the judge who was about to sentence me to death, and into whose earlier acquaintance I was led by a complicated series of transactions which I must here try briefly to describe.
As I told Mr. Gray, I was born the property of Benjamin Turner, about whom I remember only a little. Upon his abrupt death when I was around eight or nine (a miller and dealer in timber, he was killed while felling a cypress tree, having turned his back on the monster at an improvident moment), I passed by bequest into the possession of his brother, Samuel Turner, whose property I remained for ten or eleven years. These years, and those preceding them, I shall return to in due course. Eventually Samuel Turner’s fortunes declined, and there were other problems; at any rate, he was unable to continue to operate the sawmill he inherited, along with me, from his brother, and so for the first time I was sold, to Mr. Thomas Moore—a sale which a weakness for irony impels me to remark was effected at the moment I reached my manhood, during my twenty-first year. I was the property of Mr. Moore, who was a small farmer, for nine years until his death (another bizarre misadventure: Moore broke his skull while presiding at the birth of a calf. It had been a balky delivery, and he had wrapped a cord around the calf’s protruding hooves in order to yank it out; as he sweated and tugged and as the calf mused at him soulfully from the damp membranes of its afterbirth, the cord snapped, catapulting him backward and fatally against a gatepost. I had very little use for Moore, and my grief was meager, yet at the time I could not but help begin to wonder if ownership of me did not presage a diminution of fortune, as does the possession, I am told, of a certain kind of elephant in India), and upon Mr. Moore’s demise I became the property of his son, Putnam, who was then fifteen. The following year (that is to say, last year) Mr. Moore’s widow, Miss Sarah, married Joseph Travis, a childless widower of fifty-five desirous of offspring, who lived in this same country region of Cross Keys, an expert wheelwright by trade and the last person so luckless as to enjoy me in the pride of ownership. For although under law The Confessions of Nat Turner
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I was Putnam’s by title, I belonged also to Travis, who had the right to exercise full control over me until Putnam reached his majority. Thus when Miss Sarah wed Joseph Travis and became domiciled beneath his roof, I turned into a kind of twofold property—not an unheard-of arrangement but additionally unsatisfying to property already half deranged at being owned even once.
Travis was moderately prosperous, which is to say that like a few of the other inhabitants of this backwater, he managed to eke out slightly more than a living. Unlike the hapless Moore, he was adept at that which the Lord had him cut out to do, and it was a great relief for me to be able to help him at his trade after the long years at Moore’s and the monotony of toting his water and sopping his feverish, languishing pigs and alternately baking and freezing in his cornfield and his cotton patch. In fact, because of the circumstances of my new employment—which was to act as a general handyman around the wheel shop—I had a sense of well-being, physical at least, such as I had not felt since leaving Samuel Turner’s nearly ten years before. Like most of the other property owners of the region, Travis was also a small farmer, with fifteen acres or so in corn, cotton, and hay, plus an apple grove whose principal function it was to produce cider and brandy. Since the relative success of the wheel shop, however, Travis had cut back on his farm holdings, leasing out his acreage to others, and retaining just the apple orchard, and a small produce garden and patch of cotton for his own use. Besides myself, Travis owned only two Negroes—a number, however, not unusual in its smallness, inasmuch as few white people in the region could any longer afford to support more than five or six slaves, and it was rare indeed to find a citizen prosperous enough to own as many as a dozen. Travis himself had recently owned seven or eight, not counting several unserviceable children, but as his acreage diminished and his solitary craft flourished, he had no need for this obstreperous pack, indeed found so many fat mouths to feed a burden on his capital, and thus, three years before, with great moral misgivings (or so I heard) sold off the whole lot—all but one—to a trader specializing in labor for the Mississippi delta. The one left was Hark, who was my age lacking a year. Born on a vast tobacco plantation in Sussex County, he had been sold to Travis at the age of fifteen after the tobacco sucked the soil dry and the land went to rack and ruin. I had known him for years and had come to love him like a brother. The other Negro, acquired subsequent to the Mississippi sale, was Moses, a husky, tar-black, wild-eyed The Confessions of Nat Turner
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boy of twelve or there-abouts whom Travis, finding himself belatedly short-handed, had bought at the Richmond market several months before my arrival. He was strong and strapping for his age, and bright enough, I think; but he never quite got over the separation from his mammy; it left him bereft, stuporous, and he cried a lot and peed in his pants, sometimes even when he was at work, and all in all was a nuisance, becoming a great trial to Hark especially, who had a mother’s soul in the body of a bull, and felt compelled to soothe and nurse the foundling.
This then was the population of our household at the time when I first encountered Jeremiah Cobb, almost one year to the day before he sentenced me to death: three Negroes—Hark, Moses, myself—and six white people—Mr. and Mrs. Travis and Putnam, Miss Maria Pope, and two more besides. The last were the previously mentioned Joel Westbrook, fifteen years old, a budding wheelwright whom Travis had apprenticed to himself; and Travis’s child by Miss Sarah, an infant boy of two months born with a purple blemish spreading across the center of his tiny face like
the single shriveling petal of a blighted gentian. The white people, of course, lived in the main house, a modest, plain but comfortable two-storied structure of six rooms which Travis had built twenty years before. He had hewn the beams himself, planed the timbers, made it all weather-tight with pine gum and mortar, and had been wise enough to leave standing round it several enormous beech trees which offered shade from any angle against the summer sun. Adjacent to the house, separated from it only by the pigpen and a short path through the vegetable garden, was the wheel shop, converted from a one-time barn: here was the center of activity on the farm, here were the stores of oak and ashwood and iron, the forge and anvils, the bending frames, the modeling hammers and tongs and vises and the rows of chisels and punches and all the other equipment which Travis employed in his demanding craft. Doubtless at least in part because of my repute (decent albeit somewhat ambiguous and suspect in a way that I will soon explain) as a kind of harmless, runabout, comic nigger minister of the gospel, I was later made custodian of the shop; in fact, prompted by Miss Sarah’s avowal of my integrity, Travis gave into my keeping one of two sets of keys. I had plenty enough to do, but I cannot honestly say that my work here was toilsome; unlike Moore, Travis was no task-master, being by nature unable, I think, to drive his servants unreasonably and already having been well The Confessions of Nat Turner
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provided with willing help in the person of his stepson and the Westbrook boy, who was an eager apprentice if there ever was one.
Thus my duties, compared to what I had been used to, were light and fairly free of strain: I kept the place clean and added my shoulder to a job when extra strength was needed, such as bending a wheel rim, and frequently I spelled Hark as he pumped at the bellows of the forge, but generally speaking (and for the first time in years), the tasks I encountered were those calculated to tax not my muscles but my ingenuity. (For instance, the loft of the shop since its conversion from the status of a barn had still been infested by bats, tolerable enough when the place was the abode of cattle but an insufferable plague of drizzling bat shit to humans laboring daily below. Travis had tried half a dozen futile measures to rid himself of the pests, including fire and smoke, which nearly burned the place down; whereupon at this point I went out into the woods to a certain nest I knew of and plucked a blacksnake out of hibernation, wrenching it from the tail-end of its winter’s sleep and installing it in the eaves. When spring came a week later the bats quickly vanished, and the blacksnake continued in friendly, satisfied residence, slithering benevolently around the circumference of the shop as it gobbled up rats and field mice, its presence earning me, I know, quiet admiration in Travis’s regard.) So, all things being equal, from the beginning of my stay with Travis, I was in as palmy and benign a state as I could remember in many years. Miss Maria’s demands were annoying, but she was a small thorn. Instead of the nigger food I was accustomed to at Moore’s, fat pork and corn pone, I got house food like the white people—a lot of lean bacon and red meat, occasionally even the leavings from a roast of beef, and often white bread made of wheat—and the lean-to shed adjoining the wheel shop where Hark and I shared housekeeping was roomy enough, with the first bed elevated above the ground that I had slept on since the old days with Samuel Turner; and I constructed, with my owner’s blessing, an ingenious wooden vent leading through the wall from the forge, which was always banked with charcoal: the vent could be shut off in the summer, but in the winter its constant warmth made Hark and me (the poor boy Moses slept in the house, in a damp kitchen closet, where he could be available for errands night and day) as snug as two grubs beneath a log. Above all, I had quite a bit of time on my hands. I could fish and trap and do considerable Scriptural reading. I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white The Confessions of Nat Turner