The Confessions of Nat Turner (40 page)

Then he heard a sudden voice and he awoke in terror to see a white man standing over him with a musket, hammer cocked, ready to shoot.

“One move and I’ll blow your head off,” said the white man. “Tie him up, Samson.”

It was not so much that Samson, one of his own kind—the little Negro with the glasses—had betrayed him which grieved Hark in later times, although that was bad enough. It was that he had really journeyed to the ends of the earth to get nowhere. For within three days he was back with Travis (who had liberally stickered the countryside with posters); he had walked those six weeks in circles, in zigzags, in looping spirals, never once traveling more than forty miles from home. The simple truth of the matter is that Hark, born and raised in the plantation’s abyssal and aching night, had no more comprehension of the vastness of the world than a baby in a cradle. There was no way for him to know about cities, he had never even seen a hamlet; and thus he may be excused for not perceiving that “Richmond”

and “Washington” and “Baltimore” were in truth any of a dozen nondescript little villages of the Tidewater—Jerusalem, Drewrysville, Smithfield—and that the noble watercourse upon whose shore he stood with such trust and hope and joy was not

“the Squash-honna” but that ancient mother-river of slavery, the James.

Since the practice was common in the region to hire out slaves from one farm to another, it was only natural that Hark’s and my paths should cross not long following my sale to Moore and after Hark had been returned to Travis. Negroes were hired out for numerous jobs—plowing, chopping weeds, clearing land, helping to drain swamps or build fences, dozens of other chores—and if The Confessions of Nat Turner

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memory serves me right I first encountered Hark when he moved in to share my cupboard after Moore had borrowed him from Travis for a few weeks of wood-chopping. At any rate, we quickly became fast and even (when the pressures of our strange existence permitted) inseparable friends. At that time I had begun to retreat deeply into myself, into the vivid, swarming world of contemplation; a sense of dull revulsion bordering on an almost unbearable hatred for white people (I can only describe it as a kind of murky cloud which no longer allowed me to look directly at white faces but to perceive them sideways, as distant blurs, a muffling cloud of cotton which also prevented me from hearing any longer their voices save for the moments when I was given a command or was drawn to what they said by some distinct peculiarity of occasion or circumstance) had commenced to dominate my private mood, and since for a long stretch I was Moore’s solitary Negro and had only white faces to consider, I found this situation gloomy and distracting. Hark’s abrupt black presence helped to remedy this: his splendid good nature, his high spirits, his even-tempered and humorous acceptance of the absurd and, one might add, the terrifying—all of these things in Hark cheered me, easing my loneliness and causing me to feel that I had found a brother. Later of course, when I became Travis’s property, Hark and I became as close as two good friends could ever be. But even before then, even when I was not working for Travis or Hark for Moore, the proximity of the two farms allowed us to go fishing together and to set up some traplines for rabbits and muskrat and to take our ease in the deep woods on a Sunday afternoon with a jug of sweet cider and a chicken Hark had stolen, juicily broiled over a sassafras fire.

Now late in 1825 what began as a simple dry spell developed into a searing drought that lasted far into the next year. Winter brought neither rain nor snow, and so little moisture fell during the springtime that the earth crumbled and turned to dust beneath the blade of the plow. Many wells ran dry that summer, forcing people to drink from muddy streams reduced to trickling rivulets. By early August food had become a problem since the vegetables planted in the spring yielded nothing or grew up in leafless stalks; and the cornfields, ordinarily green and luxuriant in rows higher than a man, displayed hardly anything but withered little shoots that were quickly eaten up by the rabbits.

Most of the white people had laid up cellar stores of potatoes and apples from previous seasons, or had small quantities of pickled fruits, so there was no risk of actual famine, at least imminently; besides, supplies of nigger food like salt pork and The Confessions of Nat Turner

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cornmeal still existed in moderate amounts, and as a last resort a white man could always partake of these victuals, allowing his palate to experience what every slave had endured for a lifetime.

But the free Negroes of the region were not so lucky. Food for them was bitterly scarce. They had no money to buy pork and meal from the white people, who in any case, mildly panicked, had hoarded such provisions for their slaves or themselves, and the little gardens of sweet potatoes and kale and cowpeas upon which they depended for sustenance year after year brought forth nothing. By late summer the dark rumor passed among the slaves that a number of the free Negroes in the country were starving.

For some reason I date the events of 1831 from this summer, five years earlier to the very month. I say this because I had my first vision then, the first intimation of my bloody mission, and these were both somehow intricately bound up with the drought and the fires. For on account of the dryness, brushfires had burned unchecked all summer throughout the woods and the swamps and the abandoned fields of the ruined plantations.

They were all distant fires—Moore’s wood lot was not threatened—but the smell of their burning was constantly in the air. In the old days, when dwellings might have been in danger, white men with their slaves would have gone out and fought these fires with shovel and ax, setting backfires and creating long swaths of cleared land as defense against the encroaching flames. But now most of that remote land was in spindly second-growth timber and great tracts of bramble-choked red earth gone fallow and worthless, and thus the fires smoldered night and day, filling the air with a perpetual haze and the scorched bittersweet odor of burnt undergrowth and charred pine. At times, after a spell of feeble rain, this haze would disappear and the sunlight would become briefly clean, radiant; shortly thereafter the drought would set in again, interrupted by vagrant thunderstorms more wind and fury than rain, and the sawdust mist would begin its pungent domination of the air, causing the stars at night to lose their glitter and the sun to move day after day like a dulled round shimmering ember across the smoky sky. During that summer I commenced to be touched by a chill, a feeling of sickness, fright, an apprehension—as if these signs in the heavens might portend some great happening far more searing and deadly than the fires that were their earthly origin. In the woods I prayed often and searched ceaselessly in The Confessions of Nat Turner

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my Bible for some key, brooding long upon the Prophet Joel, who spoke of how
the sun and the moon shall be darkened and
the stars shall withdraw their shining
, and whose spirit—like mine now, stirred, swept as if by hot winds, trembling upon discovery—was so constantly shaken with premonitions and auguries of a terrible war.

Then late that summer I had the opportunity to go on a five-day fast. Hark and I had together chopped several wagonloads of wood, because of the drought there was nothing to be done in the fields; and so Moore gave us five days of absence—a fairly common dispensation during August. Later we would cart the wood into Jerusalem. Having just stolen a plump little shoat from the Francis farm nearby, Hark declared that he would have nothing to do with fasting himself. But he said he was eager to accompany me to the woods and hoped that the odor of barbecued pork would not prove too much of a trial for my spirit or stomach. I assented to his company, adding only that he must let me have time for prayer and meditation, and to this he was cheerfully agreeable: he knew the fishing was good along the little stream I had discovered and he said that while I prayed he’d catch a mess of bass. Thus we passed the long hours—I secluded within my little thicket of trees, fasting and praying and reading from Isaiah while Hark splashed happily in the distance and warbled to himself or went off for hours in search of wild grapes and blackberries. One night as we lay beneath the smoky stars Hark spoke of his disappointment with God. “Hit do seem to me, Nat,” he said in a measured voice, “dat de Lawd sho must be a white man. On’y a God dat was white could figger out how to make niggers so lonesome.” He paused, then said: “On’y maybe he’s a big black driver. An’ if de Lawd is black he sho is de meanest black nigger bastid ever was born.” I was too tired, too drained of strength, to try to answer.

On the morning of the fifth day I awoke feeling sickly and strange, with an aching emptiness at the pit of my belly and a giddiness swirling about in my brain. Never had a fast affected me with such weakness. It had grown wickedly hot. Smoke from the distant wildfires hung sulphurous in the air, so thick that the myriad shifting piney motes of it were nearly visible like dust, all but obliterating the round unwinking eye of a malign and yellow sun. Tree frogs in the oaks and pines joined with great legions of cicadas to set up an ominous shrilling, and my eardrums throbbed at the demented choir. I felt too exhausted to rise from The Confessions of Nat Turner

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my pine-needle bed and so stayed there reading and praying as the hot morning lengthened. When Hark came up from the creek I bade him go back to the house since I wanted to remain alone.

He was reluctant to leave. He tried to force me to eat and said I looked like a black ha’nt and clucked over me and fussed; but he finally did go, looking morose and apprehensive. After he had left I must have dropped off again into a deep slumber, for when I awoke I had lost all sense of time: great oily clouds of smoke coursed across the heavens and the sun had disappeared as if behind a rack of flaxen haze, leaving me with no notion of the hour of day. A languor like the onset of death had begun to invade my bones, an uncontrollable trembling seized my limbs; it was as if my spirit had slithered out of my body, letting the flesh sink away like a crumpled rag on the ground, all but lifeless, ready to be shivered, flayed, blown apart by divine remorseless winds.

“Lord,” I said aloud, “give me a sign. Give me the first sign.”

I rose to my feet with infinite difficulty and lassitude, clutching at a tree trunk, but hoisted myself no more than a foot or so from the ground when the sky began to whirl and spots of fire like minute blossoms danced before my eyes. Suddenly a calamitous roaring sound filled the heavens, touching me with awe and fright, and I slid to the earth again. As I did so, lifting my gaze upward, it was plain that a vast rent appeared in the boiling clouds above the treetops. I had become drenched in sweat and the droplets swarmed in my eyes yet I was unable to turn away from the great fissure yawning in the sky, seeming to throb now in rhythm to the roaring noise overwhelming all, drowning out even the shrilling forest din. Then swiftly in the very midst of the rent in the clouds I saw a black angel clothed in black armor with black wings outspread from east to west; gigantic, hovering, he spoke in a thunderous voice louder than anything I had ever heard: “
Fear God and give glory to Him for the hour of His
judgment is come, and worship Him that made heaven and earth
and the sea and the fountains of waters
.” Then there appeared in the midst of the rent in the clouds another angel, also black, armored like the first, and his wings too compassed the heavens from east to west as he called out: “
If any man worship the beast
and his image and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his
hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and
he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of
the Lamb, and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever
and ever
.”

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I started to cry out in terror, but at this moment the second black angel seemed to pour back into the clouds, faded, vanished, and in his place came still another angel—this angel white yet strangely faceless and resembling no living white being I had ever known. Silent, in glittering silver armor, he smote the remaining black angel with his sword, yet as in a dream I saw the sword noiselessly shatter and break in two; now the black angel raised his shield to face down his white foe, and the two spirits were locked in celestial battle high above the forest. The sun suddenly became dark and the blood ran in streams against the churning firmament. For a long time, or no time—what time?—the two angels struggled on high amid the blood-streaked billows and the noise of their battle mingled with the roaring sound within my senses like a hot wind until, half fainting, I felt as if I were about to be blown heavenward like a twig. Yet so quickly that it seemed but a heartbeat in space, the white angel was vanquished and his body was cast down through the outermost edges of the sky. Still I gazed upward where the black angel rode triumphant among the clouds, saying aloud now, and to me: “
Wherefore didst thou marvel? These
shall make war with the Lamb and the Lamb shall overcome
them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and they that are
with him are called, and chosen, and faithful. Such is your luck,
such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth you
must surely bear it.”

Instantly then the black angel was swallowed up into the empyrean and the great rent in the clouds melted at the edges and became one, leaving the sky murky and sulphurous as it had been before. An odor of burnt pine scorched and seared my nostrils, I felt surrounded by the flames of hell. I pitched forward on my hands and knees and vomited into the pine needles, vomiting without issue, retching in prolonged pained spasms that brought up only spittle and green strings of bile. Sparks as if from some satanic forge blew in endless windrows before my eyes, a million million pinpricks of catastrophic light.