The Confessions of Nat Turner (20 page)

Because the

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big house is isolated from mill and field, and because the affairs of house servants transpire as if in a world apart, this privy is one of the few places where my daily life intersects with the lives of those Negroes who already I have come to think of as a lower order of people—a ragtag mob, coarse, raucous, clownish, uncouth. For even now as a child I am contemptuous and aloof, filled with disdain for the black riffraff which dwells beyond the close perimeter of the big house—the faceless and nameless toilers who at daybreak vanish into the depths of the mill or into the fields beyond the woods, returning like shadows at sundown to occupy their cabins like so many chickens gone to weary roost. Most of my way of thinking is due to my mother. It is the plague of her life that amidst so many other comparative comforts she must still make that regular trek to the edge of the ravine and there mingle with the noisy rabble so beneath her.

“Hit’s a shame in dis world,” she fusses to Prissy. “Us folks in de house is
quality!
And we ain’t got no outhouse for our own selfs, hit’s a cryin’ shame! I’ll vow dem cornfield niggers is de akshul
limit.
Ev’y one dem chillun dey lets pee on de seat, and don’

none of ‘em close down dem lids, so’s it stinks like misery.

Druther go to de privy settin’ ‘longside some ole sow dan one dem cornfield nigger womans! Us house folks is
quality!
”

Equally disdainful, I avoid the morning rush, training my bowels to obey a later call when I can enjoy some privacy. The earth around the entrance to the men’s side (which I have used since I was five) is bare of vegetation, black hard clay worn glossy smooth by the trample of numberless bare or broganed feet, imprinted daily with a shifting pattern of booted heels and naked toes. Designed to prevent either malingering or seclusion—like the doors to all places frequented by Negroes—the privy door too is lockless, latchless, swinging outward easily on leather hinges to reveal the closet within drowned in shadows, almost completely dark save for slivers of light stealing in through the cracks between the timbers. I am used to the odor, which is ripe, pungent, immediate, smothering my nose and mouth like a warm green hand, the excremental stench partly stifled by quicklime, so that the smell is not so much repellent to me as endurable, faintly sweetish like stagnant swampwater. I raise one oval lid and seat myself on the pine plank above the hole. Between my thighs light floods up from the slope of the ravine and I look downward at the vast brown stain splashed with the white of quicklime. I sit here for long minutes, in the cool beatitude and calm of morning. Outside, somewhere in the woods, a mockingbird begins a chant which ripples and flows like rushing The Confessions of Nat Turner

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water, ceases, commences again, falls ineffable and pure through the tangle of grapevine and the honeysuckle and the tree-shadowed thickets of ivy and fern. Here within, amid the sun-splashed gloom, I relieve myself in pleasant unhurried spasms, contemplating a blackberry-sized spider weaving in one corner of the ceiling a thick web which shakes, stretches, trembles in milky agitation. Now through the walls of the privy, from the distant back porch of the big house, I hear my mother calling. “ ’Thaniel!” she cries. “You, Nathaniel! Nathan-
yel!
You, boy!
Better come on here!
” I have dallied too long, she wants me near the kitchen to fetch water. “Nathaniel Turner!
You
, boy!” she cries. The mood of contentment dwindles away, the morning ritual nears its end. I reach out toward a tattered sack on the floor—a croker sack filled with corncobs . . .

All of a sudden a searing heat seizes me from underneath; my bare bottom and balls feel set on fire and I leap up from the seat with a howl, clutching at my scorched nether parts while smoke floats up through the hole in a greasy white billow. “
Ow! Ow!

Daggone!
” I shout, but it is mainly from surprise—surprise and mortification. For even as I cry out, the pain diminishes and I gaze back down through the hole, beholding the grinning light-brown face of a boy my age. He stands off at the edge of the mire below, grasping in one hand a blazing stick. With his other hand he is clutching his stomach in an agony of delight, and his laughter is high, loud, irrepressible. “Daggone you, Wash!” I yell. “Jest daggone yo’ no-good black soul!” But my rage is in vain, and Wash keeps laughing, doubled up amid the honeysuckle. It is the third time in as many months that he has tricked me thus, and I have no one but myself to blame for my humiliation.

THE LIFE AND DEATH

OF

MR. BADMAN

PRESENTED TO THE WORLD IN

A FAMILIAR DIALOGUE BETWEEN

MR. WISEMAN

&

MR. ATTENTIVE

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WISEMAN. Good morrow, my good neighbour, Mr. Attentive; whither are you walking so early this morning? Methinks you look as if you were concerned about something more than ordinary.

Have you lost any of your cattle, or what is the matter?

ATTENTIVE. Good sir, good morrow to you. I have not as yet lost aught, but yet you give a right guess of me, for I am, as you say, concerned in my heart, but it is because of the badness of the times. And, Sir, you, as all our neighbours know, are a very observing man, pray, therefore, what do you think of them?

WISE. Why, I think, as you say, to wit, that they are bad times, and bad they will be, until men are better; for they are bad men that make bad times; if men, therefore, would mend, so would the times. It is a folly to look for good days so long as sin is so high, and those that study its nourishment so many . . .

The life of a little nigger child is dull beyond recounting. But during one summer month when I am nine or ten a couple of curious events happen to me, one causing me the bitterest anguish, the other premonitions of joy.

It is midmorning in August, hot and stifling, so airless that the dust-stained trees along the edge of the distant woods hang limp and still, and the grinding of the mill seems blurred, indistinct, as if borne sluggishly through heat waves trembling like water above the steaming earth. High in the blue heavens, buzzards by the score wheel and tilt and swoop in effortless flight over the bottomlands, and I lift my eyes from time to time to follow their somber course across the sky. I squat in the shadow of the little room projecting from the kitchen, where my mother and I live.

From the kitchen comes the odor of collard greens cooking, the smell faintly bitter and pungent; midday dinner is far off, I feel my insides churning with hunger. Although I am not underfed (to be the child of the cook is to be, as my mother constantly points out, the “luckiest little nigger ’live”) I seem nonetheless to exist at the edge of famine. On the sill of the kitchen window above me, a row of muskmelons, half a dozen pale globes, stand ripening in the shade, unattainable as gold. I consider them gravely and with a yearning that brings water to my eyes, knowing that even to touch one of them would fetch upon me calamity like the crack of doom. Once I stole a pot of clabber cheese, and the walloping my mother gave me left me sore as a carbuncle.

It is my duty to wait here near the door, to carry water and bring up things from the cellar, to run errands for my mother whenever The Confessions of Nat Turner

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she commands. My chores today are light, for it is a slack moment in the year when the corn crop has been laid by awaiting harvest and the mill works at half-time. During such a lull it has always been the custom of the brothers Turner, together with their wives and children, to make their annual trip to Richmond, leaving the place for a week or so in the hands of the overseer. Since with the family away my mother has only to cook for ourselves and the house servants—Prissy and Little Morning and Weaver and Pleasant—time hangs heavy for me, and the boredom is like a knife-edge at the back of my skull. It is not an unusual situation, because for a Negro child, denied the pleasures of schooling, there is generally nothing to do, nothing at all; reading no books, taught no real games, until twelve or so too small to work, black children exist in a monotony like that of yearling mules at pasture, absorbing the sun, feeding, putting on flesh, all unaware that soon they will be borne down for life with harness, chain, and traces.

My own condition is more than unusually solitary, since the Turner children with whom I might ordinarily be expected to play are a good deal older than I, and either help run the plantation or are off at school; at the same time, I feel myself set apart from the other Negro children, the children of the field hands and mill hands who are so scorned by my mother. Even Wash (who is the son of one of the two Negro drivers, Abraham—almost the only Turner slave with any responsibility at all) I have drawn away from as I have grown older, in spite of the fact that his circumstances put him a notch above the common cornfield type.

At six or seven we played crude games together—climbed trees, hunted for caves in the dark ravine, swung on grapevines at the edge of the woods. Leaning over the brink of the ravine, we tried to see who could pee the farthest. Once we stood in a shadowed clearing near the swamp, and with skinny black arms outstretched, in self-inflicted torture, marveled as a swarm of fat mosquitoes engorged themselves on our blood, finally dropping to earth like tiny red grapes. We built a fort of mud and then smeared our naked bodies with the liquid clay; drying, it became encrusted, a dull calcimine, ghostly, and we howled in mad delight at our resemblance to white boys. Once we dared to steal ripe persimmons from the tree growing behind Wash’s cabin, and were caught in the act by his mother—a light West Indian woman, part Creole, with black ringlets around her head like writhing wet serpents—and were thrashed with a sassafras switch until the welts stood up on ourlegs. Wash’s sister had a doll that Abraham had made for her; fashioned of jute sacking, The Confessions of Nat Turner

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its head was an old split maple doorknob. Whether it was meant to be a white baby or a nigger child I could never tell, but I regarded it with wonder; aside from a cast-off cracked wooden top I had gotten at Christmas from one of the young Turners, it was the first toy I can remember. On gray winter days when rain streamed from the heavens, Wash and I crouched in the poultry shed, with pointed sticks tracing patterns upon the white damp crust of chickenshit. For a while it became my favorite kind of play. I drew rectangles, circles, squares, and I marveled at the way two triangles placed together in a certain way formed that mysterious star I had seen so often when (curiosity getting the better of me as I trailed my mother through Samuel Turner’s library) I risked a glimpse of the pictures in a gigantic Bible:
Y

blackness was central to the privileges I was given and the familiarity I was allowed—never occurred to me, and doubtless I would not have understood even if I had been told. Small wonder then that from the snug, secure dominion of my ignorance and self-satisfaction I began more and more to regard the Negroes of the mill and field as creatures beneath contempt, so devoid of the attributes I had come to connect with the sheltered and respectable life that they were worth not even my derision. Let some wretched cornfield hand, sweating and stinking, his bare foot gashed by a mishandled hoe, make the blunder of appearing at the edge of the veranda, with a piteous wail asking that I get old massah to please fetch him some kind of “portice”

for his wound, and I would I scratched this design over and over again on the limecool, bittersweet-smelling white floor of the chicken shed, a hundred interlocking stars engraved in the dust, quite heedless of Wash, who stirred and fidgeted and mumbled to himself, bored quickly, unable to draw anything but aimless lines.

But these were dumb little games, the brainless play of kittens.

As I grow older now there steals over me the understanding that Wash has almost no words to speak at all. So near to the white people, I absorb their language daily. I am a tireless eavesdropper, and their talk and comment, even their style of laughter, vibrates endlessly in my imagination. Already my mother teases me for the way I parrot white folks’ talk—teases me with pride. Wash is molded by different sounds—even now I am aware of this—nigger voices striving clumsily to grapple with The Confessions of Nat Turner

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a language never taught, never really learned, still alien and unknown. With such a poor crippled tongue, Wash’s way of speaking comes to seem to me a hopeless garble, his mind a tangle of baby-thoughts; so gradually that I barely know it, this playmate floats away out of my consciousness, dwarfish and forgotten, as I settle deep into my own silent, ceaselessly vigilant, racking solitude.

I cannot as yet read
The Life and Death of Mr. Badman
, not even the title; my possession of it terrifies me, because I have stolen it, yet at the same instant the very idea of the book fevers me with such insupportable excitement that I can feel a loosening in my bowels. (Although I have come late to the joys of reading and still cannot properly “read,” I have known the crude shapes of simple words ever since I was six, when Samuel Turner, a methodical, tidy, and organized master, and long impatient with baking alum turning into white flour and cinnamon being confused with nutmeg, and vice versa, set about labeling every chest and jar and canister and keg and bag in the huge cellar beneath the kitchen where my mother dispatched me hourly every day. It seemed not to matter to him that upon the Negroes—none of whom could read—these hieroglyphs in red paint would have no effect at all: still Little Morning would be forced to dip a probing brown finger in the keg plainly marked MOLASSES, and even so there would be lapses, with salt served to sweeten the breakfast tea. Nonetheless, the system satisfied Samuel Turner’s sense of order, and although at that time he was unaware of my existence, the neat plain letters outlined by the glow of an oil lamp in the chill vault served as my first and only primer. It was a great leap from MINT and CITRON