The Confessions of Nat Turner (28 page)

A free man
. Never in a nigger boy’s head was there such wild sudden confusion. For as surely as the fact of bondage itself, the prospect of freedom may generate ideas that are immediately obsessed and half crazy, so I think I am being quite exact in saying that my first reaction to this awesome magnanimity was one of ingratitude, panic, and self-concern. And the reasons were as simple and as natural as a heartbeat. Because such was my attachment to Turner’s Mill—the house and the woods and the serene and familiar landscape which had composed my entire memory and the fact of my
becoming
and had fashioned me into what I was—that the idea of leaving it filled me with a homesickness so keen that it was like a bereavement. To part from a man like Marse Samuel, whom I regarded with as much devotion as it was possible to contain, was loss enough; it seemed almost insupportable to say good-bye to a sunny and generous household which, black though I was, had cherished The Confessions of Nat Turner

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me as a child and despite all—despite the unrelenting fact of my niggerness, the eternal subservience of my manner and the leftovers I ate even now and my cramped servant’s room and the occasional low chores I was still compelled to do, and the near-drowned yet lingering and miserable recollection of my mother in a drunken overseer’s arms—had been my benign and peaceable universe for eighteen years. To be shut away from this was more than I thought I could bear.

“But I don’t want to go to any Richmond!” I heard myself howling at Marse Samuel, galloping after him now. “I don’t want to work for any Mr. Pemberton!
Naw
sir!” I cried. “Unh-
unh
, I want to stay right here!” (Thinking now of my mother’s words long ago, and still another fear:
Druther be a low cornfield nigger or dead than
a free nigger. Dey sets a nigger free and only thing dat po’ soul
gits to eat is what’s left over of de garbage after de skunks an’

dogs has et
. . . ) “Naw!” I yelled. “Unh-
unh!
”

But all I could hear was Marse Samuel shouting not to me but to his horse, now plunging ahead through flying and pinwheeling billows of autumn leaves: “Hey, Tom! Old Nat won’t feel that way for . . . long . . . will . . . he . . . boy!”

And of course he was right. For many months afterward I worried off and on about my future in Richmond. But my worst fears began to melt away even that morning as we approached Jerusalem, when like some blessed warmth there slowly crept over me an understanding of this gift of my own salvation, which only one in God knew how many thousands of Negroes could hope ever to receive, and was beyond all prizing. I would have, after all, several years before I’d be leaving Turner’s Mill. As for the rest, to be a free man in a fine city working at a trade he cherished was not a fate to be despised; many a poor outcast white man had inherited far less, and therefore I should give thanks unto the Lord. I did so that day in Jerusalem, while waiting for Marse Samuel in the shadow of a stable wall, taking my Bible from the saddlebag and praying alone on my knees while carts clattered by and the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer rang out like the clang of a cymbal:
O God, thou art my God;
early will I seek thee . . . because thy lovingkindness is better
than life, my lips shall praise thee
. . .

Yet that afternoon on the way back to Turner’s Mill, just as my joy and exultancy grew and I listened to Marse Samuel describe the kind of good work that would be in store for me in Richmond (he too was in radiant spirits, he had bought Miss Nell a The Confessions of Nat Turner

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resplendent gold and enamel French brooch and was glowing with pride), we encountered on the road a sight so troubling that it was like a shape of darkness passing across the bright October sun, and it looms over my memory of this day as persistently as the recollection of some exhausted moment toward the year’s end when one looks out and finds that all is hushed and that night has begun to fall, and there steals over the tongue the first flat dead taste of winter.

The slave coffle had halted at the side of the road, not far below the clearing where the wagon trace began. Had we started out ten minutes later it would have been on its way again, we should not have seen it. I began to count, and I saw that there were about forty Negro men and boys skimpily clad in ragged cotton shirts and trousers; they were linked to each other by chains that girdled their waists and each was manacled with double cuffs of iron which now lay loose in their laps or on the ground. I had never seen Negroes in chains before. None of them spoke as we passed, and their silence was oppressive, abject, hurtful, and chilling. They sat or squatted in a line straggling through the fiery mounds of fallen leaves at the wayside; some were chomping on handfuls of corn pone in a listless fashion, some dozed against each other, one gangling big fellow rose as we approached and wall-eyed and expressionless began to piss into the ditch, a small boy of eight or nine lay weeping desperately and hopelessly against a fat middle-aged shiny liver-colored man gone sound asleep where he sat. Still no one spoke, and as we moved on I heard only a faint chinking sound of their chains and now the single lugubrious plunking of a jew’s-harp, very slow, tuneless, and with a weird leaden monotony, like someone pounding in senseless rhythm on a crowbar. The three drovers were youngish sort of sun-reddened men, fair-haired and mustached, and all wore muddy boots; one of them carried a leather bullwhip and it was he who tipped his wide straw hat to Marse Samuel as we came up to them and stopped. The chains chinked faintly in the ditch, the jew’s-harp went
bunk-bunk-bunk-bunk
.

“Where are you bound?” Marse Samuel said. He had lost all trace of his gaiety now, and his voice sounded disturbed and strained.

“Dublin, in Georgia, sir,” was the reply.

“And where do you hail from?” he asked.

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“Up in Surry County, near Bacon’s Castle, sir. They done broke up the Ryder plantation and these here is Ryder’s niggers. sir.

Georgia bound, we is.”

“When did you leave Surry?” Marse Samuel said.

“Morning of the day afore yesterday,” the drover said. “We’d be a heap further along excepting we took a wrong turning after dark somewheres up in Sussex and got ourselves proper lost for a bit.” He grinned suddenly, exposing teeth so black with tobacco stain that they seemed almost lost in the hollow of his mouth. “It ain’t always easy to find the way down here, sir. In Jerusalem we got many misdirections. Are we headed the right way for Carolina and the routes south, sir?”

But Marse Samuel failed to respond to the question then, exclaiming in a voice touched with disbelief: “The Ryder plantation too! And these are the Ryder Negroes. Lord God, things must be getting bad up there when—” But abruptly he broke off and said in reply: “Yes, you should arrive at Hicks’ Ford after nightfall. Then I believe there is an overland trace which will take you across the line to Gaston, thence down to Raleigh by the regular route. When do you expect to reach your destination in Georgia?”

“Well, sir,” the drover replied, still beaming, “I has taken many a gang of niggers from Virginia down to Georgia though never from Surry before on account of the trading gentleman I works for is Mr. Gordon Davenport, who has bought most of his niggers up on t’other side of the James in counties like King William and New Kent. The niggers from up there is mostly old stock Lower Guinea niggers with short leg shanks and poor constitutionals and seeing as how you can’t walk niggers like that for more’n twenty miles a day you’d be lucky sometimes to make Savannah River inside of six weeks. And has to lash the mortal shit out’n

‘em all the way.” He paused and spat into the leaves. “But see, sir,” he continued patiently to explain, “I happens to know that these Southside niggers from Surry and Isle of Wight and Prince George is most all of them late stock true Upper Guineamen with long shanks and healthy constitutionals, by and large, and you can get twenty-five even thirty miles a day out of ‘em easy, even the bitches and young’uns, and hardly ever have to lay on none of ‘em a stroke of the whip. Which is all fine with me. So I reckon that except for floods and such like we will fetch Dublin the second week in November.”

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“And so the Ryder place is finished too!” Marse Samuel said after a long pause. “I knew it was failing but—so soon! The last grand old place in Surry; it is hard to believe!”

“’Tain’t hard to believe, sir,” the drover said. “Land up there has got so miserable poor you can’t make a gift of it. Ain’t nothing but the acorns to eat in Surry, sir. They says a bluejay flyin’ over has to tote his own food—” One of the other drovers began to chuckle and snort.

As he spoke, my mare who was disposed to sidle at times sidestepped her way a few yards down the line away from the drovers, tossing her mane and drawing to a nervous stop near the place where the jew’s-harp was dully strumming.
Bunk-bunk
.

Suddenly the noise ceased and the mare jerked about and I could hear the chinking of the chains along the ditch and the child’s heartbroken wail as he sobbed without ceasing against the plump liver-colored grayhead who now blinked awake and cast rheum-filled dreamy eyes down at the little boy, murmuring:

“Das awright.” He stroked the child on his kinky brown head and said again: “Das awright.” And then he began to repeat the phrase gently, over and over, as if they were the only words he knew: “Das awright . . . das awright...”

Without warning a gust of wind came up, and a moment’s shadow crossed the face of the day, and the frost-tinged shuddering breeze ran down the line of Negroes, shoveling the leaves up around their decrepit lumpish shoes, flicking the edges of their cotton sleeves and the cuffs of their gray tattered trousers. I felt myself give a shiver, then as quickly as it had come the shadow vanished, the day brightened warmly like a blossom, and at that moment I heard at my elbow a voice soft and slick as satin: “Isn’t you gwine give Raymond a nice sweet potato, honey chile?”

I ignored the voice, still listening to Marse Samuel, who was saying: “I presume they are separating Negro families in Surry then, otherwise you’d have a number of women in this coffle.”

“‘Deed I couldn’t say, sir,” the drover replied. “Mr. Davenport jest hires me to drive ‘em.”

“Pretty please, honey chile,” the voice below persisted, “isn’t you got a nice sweet potato for ole Raymond? Us is jes’ sick of apples. And pone. Sour apples from de road an’ pone. Us is jes’

sick of dat mess. Come on, honey, isn’t you got a nice sweet potato fo’ Raymond? Or a tiny ole piece of bacon?”

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I looked down and saw a freckled ginger-colored Negro, squat and muscular, with thick lips and a sparse reddish head.

Thirty-five or perhaps forty, he had the blood in him somewhere of an Irish overseer or the scion of a James River manor or a traveling Pennsylvania tinker; from the way he sat with a certain shabby yet subtle prestige—maybe it was the manner in which the two boys chained on either side had cozied up against him, or the impudence of the jew’s-harp clutched in one thick clumsy hand—I could tell that deference was paid and due him: there was a Raymond on every plantation. It was surely owing to his white blood that Raymond achieved his eminence but also to some native bankerish wit and sagacity which, however forlornly crippled, made him store up a meager authority and was ever a beacon for all the others. What caused an eclipse of the moon?

Raymond knew.
Hit caused by a gret mystery cloud flyin’ up
out’n de swamp
. Was there a way to cure rheumatism? Ast old Ray.
Make you a portice of turkentine wid red earthworms and
de juice of a red onion, dat’s de onliest way
. Having a little trouble with your old woman at night?
Git you de cotton dat she’s
thowed away when she got her monthlies and wear it sewed up
inside yo’ pants, dat’ll start a woman humpin’
. When would the niggers be free?
In 1842, I seed it in a dream, niggers led by a
wooden-legged white man from up in Paris, France.
And so the talk goes round among the niggers:
Ast ole Ray. Raymond he
know near ’bout ev’ything in de whole wide world.
Won’t it be bad times down in Georgia?
Naw, dat’s rich peopleses’ country,
dat’s why us is goin’ dar. Niggers down in Georgia eats fried
eggs three times a day . . .

“What yo’ name, sweet?” he whispered up at me.

“Nat,” I said. “Nat Turner.”

“Where you live at, honey chile?”

“Live at Turner’s Mill,” I said, “down-county.” So little called for were the words I uttered next that I have wondered since why the Lord did not wrench out my tongue. “My mastah’s goin’ to set me free in Richmond.”

“Well, ain’t dat jes’ de nicest thing,” said Raymond.

“God’s truth,” I replied.

“Come on, sugah,” he importuned in his glossy voice, “don’ a rich The Confessions of Nat Turner

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nigger boy like you got a bite to eat for ole Raymond? My, dat’s a pretty bag on dat saddle. I bets dey’s all kinds of nice things to eat in dat bag. Come on, sugah, give ole Raymond a bite to eat.”

“Dey’s on’y a Bible in dat bag!” I said impatiently, though full-lapsed into a field nigger’s tongue. I gave the mare a slap behind the ears, checking her crabwise gait, and brought her about toward Marse Samuel. Late afternoon had begun to settle down upon us as we stood there, it had grown cold. Light from the descending sun fell amid the October leaves and through wood smoke and haze lay streaming upon a tangled desolation of weeds and brambles, so furiously luminous that it seemed a field ready to explode into fire. Drawing near Marse Samuel I heard the jew’s-harp again,
bunk-bunk-bunk
.

“Come, we must be on our way,” he said to me, wheeling about, and we turned together then; for some reason I hesitated and stopped entirely, gazing back, and he said again: