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various things in time past that God had spoken to me. And although I was trying to be truthful I had been unable to answer him exactly, for it was the most difficult kind of question and had to do with a mysterious communion which was almost impossible to explain clearly. I told him that God had spoken to me many times and had surely guided my destiny but that He had never
really
given me any complicated messages or lengthy commands; rather He had spoken to me two words, and always these words alone, beginning on that day in the back of Moore’s wagon, and that it was through these words that I was strengthened and that I made my judgments, absorbing from them a secret wisdom which allowed me to set forth purposefully to do what I conceived as His will, in whatever mission, whether that of bloodshed or baptism or preaching or charity. Yet just as they were words of resolution they were words also of solace.

And as I told Gray, God had a way of concealing Himself from men in strange forms—in His pillar of cloud and His pillar of fire, and sometimes even hiding Himself from our sight altogether so that long periods on earth would pass during which men might feel that He had abandoned them for good. Yet all through the later years of my life I knew that despite His hiding Himself for a while from me, He was never far off and that more often than not whenever I called He would answer—as He did for the first time on that cold day: “I abide.”

I wiped the blood from my neck and crouched down shivering into my overcoat. I listened to the wheels crunching and bumping along the rutted road, uneven here and littered with fallen icy branches, so that the wagon yawed and heaved and pitched me back and forth in a soft rhythm against the boards. Moore and his cousin were silent. A cold winter wind breathed suddenly across the roof of the woods.

“Lord,” I whispered, raising my eyes. “Lord?”

Then high at the top of the icy forest I heard a tremendous cracking and breaking sound, and that voice booming in the trees:

I
abide
.

I clutched my Bible against my heart and leaned against the boards as the wagon, heaving and rocking like a rudderless ship amid a sea of frozen glass, bore me southward again into the dead of winter.

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Part III

Study War

An exquisitely sharpened hatred for the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro’s soul; it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriantly everywhere. Real hatred of the sort of which I speak—hatred so pure and obdurate that no sympathy, no human warmth, no flicker of compassion can make the faintest nick or scratch upon the stony surface of its being—is not common to all Negroes. Like a flower of granite with cruel leaves it grows, when it grows at all, as if from fragile seed cast upon uncertain ground. Many conditions are required for the full fruition of this hatred, for its ripe and malevolent growth, yet none of these is as important as that at one time or another the Negro live to some degree of intimacy with the white man. That he know the object of his hatred, and that he become knowledgeable about the white man’s wiles, his duplicity, his greediness, and his ultimate depravity.

For without knowing the white man at close hand, without having submitted to his wanton and arrogant kindnesses, without having smelled the smell of his bedsheets and his dirty underdrawers and the inside of his privy, and felt the casual yet insolent touch of his women’s fingers upon his own black arm, without seeing him at sport and at ease and at hishypocrite’s worship and at his drunken vileness and at his lustful and adulterous couplings in the hayfield—without having known all these cozy and familial truths, I say, a Negro can only
pretend
hatred. Such hatred is an abstraction and a delusion. For example. A poor field Negro may once in a while be struck by the whip of an overseer riding on a tall white horse, that same Negro may be forced onto short rations for a month and feel his stomach rumble daily in the tight cramps of near-starvation, again this Negro might someday be The Confessions of Nat Turner

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thrown into a cart and sold like a mule at auction in pouring rain; yet if this selfsame Negro—surrounded from childhood by a sea of black folk, hoeing and scraping in the fields from dawn to dusk year in and year out and knowing no white man other than that overseer whose presence is a mean distant voice and a lash and whose face is a nameless and changing white blob against the sky—finds himself trying to hate white men, he will come to understand that he is hating imperfectly, without that calm and intelligent and unrepenting purity of hatred which I have already described and which is so necessary in order to murder. Such a Negro, unacquainted with white men and their smell and their blanched and bloodless actuality and their evil, will perhaps hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain.

During the four or five years approaching 1831, when it had become first my obsession and then my acceptance of a divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, and as far beyond as destiny might take me, it was this matter of hatred—of discovering those Negroes in whom hatred was already ablaze, of cultivating hatred in the few remaining and vulnerable, of testing and probing, warily discarding those in whom pure hatred could not be nurtured and whom therefore I could not trust—that became one of my primary concerns. Meanwhile, before telling of my years at Moore’s and of the circumstances leading up to the great events of 1831, I should like to dwell on this mysterious quality of hatred which it is possible for a Negro to cherish for white people, and to describe one of the moments in my own experience when I felt this hatred at its most deranging and passionate.

This must have been in the summer of 1825, when I had been Moore’s property for a little over three years—a time of great inner confusion and turmoil for me since I was “on the fence,” so to speak, toying with the notion of slaughter and already touched with the premonition of a great mission, yet still fearful and laden with anxiety and unwilling to formulate any definite plans or to ready myself for a firm course of action.

On this day of which I am speaking, Moore and I had driven a double wagonload of firewood into Jerusalem from the farm, and after we had unloaded our deliveries (a considerable portion of Moore’s income derived from supplying wood for private homes, The Confessions of Nat Turner

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also the courthouse and the jail) my owner had gone off to buy some things elsewhere, as was his custom on Saturdays, leaving me to while away several hours by myself. I had become at that time deeply involved in reading the Prophets—mainly Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, whose relevance to my own self and future I had only commenced to divine. It was my habit therefore not to waste time with the other Negroes who stood about chattering idly or wrestling in the dust of the field behind the market or quarreling over some black girl of the town one of them might manage to lure behind a shed. (Often this would lead to group fornication, but through the Lord’s grace I was never tempted.) Instead I would take my Bible to a sunny corner of the wooden gallery at the front of the market and there, some feet apart from the hubbub and the confusion, I would squat for hours with my back against the wall, immersed in the great prophetic teachings.

It was on this pleasant morning that I found myself distracted by a white woman who emerged from a corner of the gallery and suddenly paused, one hand held up against her forehead as if to shield her eyes from the dazzling sunlight. She was an extremely beautiful woman of about forty, stately and slender, dressed in blue-green silk the color of a brandy bottle, with whorls of faint pink in it which swirled and vanished and reappeared even as she stood there, stirring a little, a look of perplexity on the pale oval of her face. She carried a frilly parasol and a richly brocaded purse, and as she paused at the edge of the gallery, frowning, I suddenly knew that such lustrous finery and such delicate and unusual beauty could only mean that this was the woman whose arrival in town had caused a storm of rumor—gossip of course not unremarked by the Negroes, and in this case gossip of such a nature as to evoke only a kind of awed respect. The recently acquired fiancée of Major Thomas Ridley—one of the wealthiest landowners in Southampton, still rich enough to hold onto fifteen Negroes—the woman was from the North, resident of a place called New Haven, and it was bruited that the fortune to which she was heir was in itself of a size that would dwarf the riches of all the estates in Southampton put together. Her extraordinary beauty, her clothes, her strangeness: all of these were of such rarity that it is not remarkable that on that bright morning her appearance among the grubby mob of Negroes caused a reverential hush, sudden and complete.

I watched her step down from the gallery and onto the dusty The Confessions of Nat Turner

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road, the brass tip of her parasol making an agitated
tattat
while she gazed about again, as if searching for direction. And just at this moment her glance fell upon a Negro who was idling nearby directly below me. I knew this Negro, at least by repute, which was doleful indeed. He was a free Negro named Arnold—one of a handful of the free in Jerusalem—a gaunt grizzle-polled old simpleton black as pitch and with an aimless slew-footed gait, the result of some kind of paralysis.Years before he had been set at liberty through the will of his owner, a rich up-county widow, an Episcopal churchwoman shattered by guilt and pining for eternal bliss. I suppose one might praise this high-minded gesture, yet one must add that it was grimly misguided because Arnold was a troubling case. Rather than becoming an embodiment of the sweet fruits of freedom, he exemplified by his very being an all but insoluble difficulty.

For what could freedom mean to Arnold? Unschooled, unskilled, clumsy by nature, childlike and credulous, his spirit numbed by the forty years or more he had spent as a chattel, he had doubtless found life affliction enough while dwelling in a state of bondage. Now having been set free through the grace and piety of his late mistress (who had left him a hundred dollars—which he had squandered in brandy during his first free year—but who had not thought to teach him a trade), the oafish old fellow dwelt upon life’s furthest rim, more insignificant and wretched than he had ever been in slavery, a squatter in an unspeakably filthy lean-to shack on the outskirts of town, hiring himself out as a part-time field hand but existing mainly as a ragpicker or an emptier of privies or in the worst of times as a simple beggar, the bleached palm of his black hand extended for a penny or a worn British farthing and his lips working in a witless “Thank-ee, massah” to those townsmen no longer his masters in fact but in spirit masters more tyrannical than ever before. Of course, a few of the townspeople took pity on Arnold and his brethren but most of them resented his freedom, not because he himself was any threat but because he was in truth a symbol—a symbol of something gone asunder in the institution yet even more importantly a walking reminder of freedom itself and of menacing words, rarely spoken aloud, like emancipation and manumission, and therefore they despised him in a way they could never despise a Negro held in subjection. As for the slaves, among their company he was hardly better off, for if they had no reason actually to despise him he was still the incarnation of freedom, The Confessions of Nat Turner

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and such freedom was, as any fool could see, a stinking apparition of hopelessness and degradation. Thus their impulse was to rag Arnold mercilessly and play cruel tricks on him and to treat him with humorous contempt.

Surely even the poor lepers of Galilee, and all the outcasts to whom Jesus ministered in those awful times, lived no worse than such a free Negro in Virginia during the years of which I think and speak.

The woman stepped close to Arnold, who immediately bent forward in a groveling fashion, plucking from his head as he did so an absurd black wool hat several sizes too large for him and half devoured by moths. And then she spoke, the voice clear, resonant, quite gracious and polite, in rapid yet pleasantly warm Northern tones: “I seem to have lost my bearings”—the accent now touched with vague anxiety—“Major Ridley told me that the courthouse was next to the market. But all I see is a stable on one side and a dram shop on the other. Could you direct me to the courthouse?”

“Yam,” Arnold replied. His face was all nervous obsequiousness, eager, his mouth agape in a ridiculous grin. “Majah Riblees he lib dar, ap yonnah road ap yonnah.” He made an elaborate gesture with his arm, pointing away from the courthouse, down the road leading out of Jerusalem to the west. “Yam, me tek’ee dar, missy, me tek’ee dar.” I listened closely. It was blue-gum country-nigger talk at its thickest, nearly impenetrable, a stunted speech unbearably halting and cumbersome with a wet gulping sound of Africa in it. There were occasions when it was hard enough for some town Negroes to grasp everything in such speech; no wonder that the lady from the North stood dumbstruck, gazing at Arnold with the panicky eyes of one in sudden confrontation with a lunatic. She had understood absolutely nothing, while the Godforsaken Arnold, understanding only a fraction more, had battened upon the name Ridley and had conceived the notion that she wished to be directed to the Major’s home. He kept on gabbling away, groveling, now lowering to the ground his wreck of a hat in a servile, swooping motion. “Yam, missy, me tek’ee Majah Riblees!”