The Confessions of Nat Turner (44 page)

That was wrong. No, he—He had done something
bad,
yesterday, with a boy. The son of a local magistrate. He had paid the boy a dime. The boy had told. He thought the boy had told.

He wasn’t sure. He was afraid.
“Oh Lord God,”
he exclaimed. He broke wind with a plaintive hiss and for an instant his exhalations filled my nostrils like air from a swamp bottom.

“I has always keered for niggers, tucken good keer of niggers,”

said Brantley. “I has never beat a nigger in my life. You preaches so good. I done heerd you. I’m so afeared. I’m so miser’ble. Oh, how can I be saved?”

“By baptism in the Spirit,” I replied sharply.

“If’n I could read,” he said, “maybe I’d know ’bout religion like you does. But I cain’t read nor write neither, not ary word. Oh, I’m so miser’ble! I jest wants to
die
. But I’m skeered of dyin’. Kin all men have pride? Kin
all
men be redeemed?”

“Yes,” I said, “all men can have pride. And all men can be redeemed—by baptism in the Spirit.” Then in a rush it occurred to me that this might be some kind of white man’s trap, a joke, a ruse. “But when you overheard me preach—” I paused. “When you heard me preach that day I was saying things that wasn’t for The Confessions of Nat Turner

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white men’s ears.” A sudden apprehension overtook me, and I started to turn away from him. “I was preaching for black folk,” I said in a harsh voice.

“Oh no, preacher,” he implored me, plucking at my sleeve, “I needs he’p so bad, please.”

“Why don’t you go to your own church?” I retorted. “Why don’t you go to the white man’s church?”

He hesitated, then finally he said: “I cain’t. I mean, I used to go at Nebo. That’s where my sister worships at. On’y Reverend Entwistle, the preacher there, he—” Halting, he seemed unable to go on.

“He what?” I said.

“Oh, he done throwed me out,” he blurted in a choked voice. “He said I was—” Again he paused, and with a sigh, cast his eyes toward the ground. “He said—”

“He said
what?”
I demanded.

“He said they will be no sotomite of the sons of Isr’el in the house of the Lord. He tole me the Bible said so. That’s what he done said, I ‘members ever’ word of it. He said I was a sotomite. So I cain’t go to Nebo. I cain’t go nowheres.” He looked up at me in anguish, tears swimming in his eyes. “Oh, preacher,
how
can I be redeemed?”

I was suddenly swept by pity and disgust, and I have wondered since why I said to him what I did but have failed to come up with a sure answer. It may be only that Brantley at that moment seemed as wretched and forsaken as the lowest Negro; white though he might be, he was as deserving of the Lord’s grace as were others deserving of His wrath, and to fail Brantley would be to fail my own obligation as minister of His word. Besides, it gave me pleasure to know that by showing Brantley the way to salvation I had fulfilled a duty that a white preacher had shirked.

Anyway—

“Then listen,” I told him. “Fast for eight days until next Sunday.

You must eat nothing except that once every two days you can have as much corn pone as you can fill the palm of one hand.

Then next Sunday I will baptize you in the Spirit and you will be redeemed.”

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“Oh Lord have mercy, preacher!” Brantley cried, all asnuffle.

“You done saved my life! I’m so happy!” He tried to clutch my hand and kiss it but I drew away, squirming.

“Fast, as I say,” I repeated, “and meet me at Mr. Thomas Moore’s next Sunday. We will be baptized together in the Spirit.”

The following day was a Sunday, when it was customary for Negroes to be let off for most of the time between late morning and dusk. Early that afternoon I walked the four miles up the road and presented myself at the front door of Mrs. Catherine Whitehead’s. Set back from the road several hundred yards, the house was a comfortable, rambling place made of smooth-planed clapboard (unlike Moore’s, put together with rough-hewn timbers), freshly whitewashed, shuttered, surrounded by a pleasant lawn of clover humming with bees. A dusty field of budding cotton stretched to the far woods. In the front yard reposed a gilt and cherrywood English brougham; it was drawn by a thoroughbred filly, plump, beautifully currycombed, that now stood feeding placidly in the deep grass and broke the hot afternoon silence with her champing sound.

Zinnias bloomed in neat red boxes on the front porch, I smelled a warm odor of roses from a trellis. Mrs. Whitehead was a gentlewoman, a lady of some wealth. There was nothing fancy about the place but it was far better than Moore’s; I knew that she even owned books. Not since my days at Turner’s Mill had I brushed close to white people of means, and as I stood on the porch, awaiting some response to my knock, I was made hurtfully aware of my descent in life and suddenly suspected that I reeked of mule dung. Idly I wondered how in the midst of this drought a place could retain such green grace, such color and lushness; then I spied in the field a windmill—which brought up water from a well—the only one for miles and a marvel to all who beheld it. Its weathered blades made a faint sad clack and flutter across the afternoon quiet.

My knock at the door was answered by Margaret Whitehead; it was our first encounter, and one that should retain momentous syllables, intonations, recollected cadences, glances, hues, harmonies, curvatures, refractions of late summer light. But I remember only a dim pretty pale girl’s face—she must have been thirteen or so—and a gentle voice that replied, “Why yes, he’s here,” unsurprised as if my skin had been alabaster-white, when I said: “Please, young missy, may I have a word with yo’

brother the preacher?”

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When Richard Whitehead appeared he had the crumbs of midday dessert still on his lips; he lost no time in directing me around to the rear door. There I waited fifteen minutes before he came back again—a slender youngish man, rather frail, with a prim hostile mouth and the same petrified eyeballs I had seen once years before in a Turner library sketch-book, amid the hell-ravaged face of John Calvin. His voice was reedy, thin, touched with all of the Sabbath’s hushed and purple melancholy.

I realized I should not have come. Queasy, I was stricken with the old familiar nigger fear, and could not help but avert my glance.

“What is it that you want?” he demanded.

I hesitated for a moment—Out with it quick, I thought—then I said: “Please, mastah, I’m a minister of the gospel. I wonders if after all the folks is gone next Sunday I couldn’t baptize a white gentleman down in yo’ church.”

A startled look came over his face, then faded. “Who are you?”

he said.

“I’m Nat Turner,” I replied. “My mastah’s Mr. Thomas Moore, down by Flag Marsh.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” he said shortly. “What is it you want again?”

Once more I made my request. He regarded me with unblinking eyes, then he said: “What you are asking is ludicrous. How can a darky claim to be an ordained minister of the gospel? Pray tell me where you acquired your background in divinity. Washington College? William & Mary? Hampden-Sydney? What you are asking—”

“I don’t have to be ordained, mastah,” I put in. “In God’s sight I am a preacher of His Word.”

He pursed his lips and I could tell that his incredulity was being slowly converted into anger. “I’ve never heard of such tomfoolery from a darky in my life,” he exclaimed. “What are you up to, anyway? What sort of white gentleman do you propose to baptize in church?”

“Mr. Ethelred T. Brantley,” I said.

“Brantley!” At the name he seemed to go ashen with outrage. “A The Confessions of Nat Turner

251

gentleman!
I know of that scum! Jailed in Carolina for an abominable, unnatural crime against nature! He has been turned out of one congregation in this county, and now he would pollute the sacred altar of a Methodist temple through seeking baptism by the likes of you! What did he pay you to solicit me for such blasphemy?”

“Brantley is a poor man,” I said. “He hasn’t got ten cents. And he is very sick. And lost. Doesn’t the Bible say that the Son of man is come to save that which was lost?”

“Get out of here!” Richard Whitehead cried, his voice shrill now. I hopped sideways as he aimed a kick at me through the door.

“Get your devilish black self off of this property, and don’t come back! And tell that Brantley I have better things to do than be made a fool of by a degenerate and by an uppity nigger! Your master will hear of this, I promise
you-u-u!”

His reedy voice trailed me as I departed by the way I came, a hysteric wail upon which my imagination played while I walked—the sound changing from that of a young woman to something else, a trapped rabbit, a bird, and finally to the scream a man emits at that last instant before the club descends and obliterates together prim mouth and scream.

That week I decided that Brantley and I would be baptized in Persons’ millpond, which lay on an abandoned plantation a few miles from Moore’s. I sent this word to Brantley by a Negro going into Jerusalem, and late in the afternoon on the following Sunday he met me near the pond, where I was waiting with Hark, Sam, and Nelson. Although obviously weak from his fast, Brantley looked somehow healthier: a pink glow of anticipation suffused his face, and he confided to me that his bowels, for the first time in years, were notably under control. “Oh, I’m so happy!” he whispered as the five of us walked down the wooded lane toward the millpond. Rumor of the baptism had, however, spread throughout the county, and when we arrived a mob of forty or fifty poor white people—including some pie-faced females in sunbonnets—rimmed the far banks, waiting for the show. When we reached the water’s edge they began to hoot and jeer at us but kept their distance. Brantley shivered with excitement. “Oh Lordy,” he whispered over and over again, “I’m goin’ to be saved!” While my followers looked on from the near bank I waded out with Brantley, fully clothed, to a place in the pond where the water was chest-deep. There I recited the passage The Confessions of Nat Turner

252

from Ezekiel about the resurrection of the dry bones:
“I will lay
sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover
you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and ye
shall know that I am the Lord . . .”

I pushed Brantley down. He slid under like a wet sack of beans; after he came up, spluttering and choking, his face took on a look of bliss such as I have rarely seen on any man, of any shade.

“I baptize you,” I said, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“Oh Lord God Almighty!” Brantley cried. “Saved at last!”

Something struck the back of my head. The white people on the bank had begun to pelt us with stones and sticks from fallen trees. A thick chunk of wood bounced off Brantley’s neck but he did not flinch, aware of nothing but the glory.

“Oh Lord God!” he gasped. “I’m truly saved! Hallelujah!”

Another stone hit me. I immersed myself with a prayer, then rose. Beyond the white faces blooming dimly on the far bank, heat lightning whooshed up in faint green sheets. Dusk had come down like the shadow of a great wing. I felt a sharp premonition of my own death.

“Brantley,” I said as we struggled back through the water toward my followers on the bank, “Brantley, I advise you to leave the county soon, because the white people are going to be destroyed.”

But I’m sure that Brantley heard nothing. “Lordy, Lordy!” he shouted. “Saved at last!”

Toward the latter part of the decade, as I approached my thirtieth year, it was apparent that a measure of prosperity had come back to the region. Not wealth, by any means. Not luxury, not abundance, but a respectable atmosphere of security accompanied by the feeling that no longer were people threatened with starvation. For one thing, the long drought wore itself out, and periods of steady rain allowed the land to be restored to a state of modest fertility. For another, the log turnpike leading up to Petersburg and Richmond had been The Confessions of Nat Turner

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recently improved, and so opened up a market for the bonanza which, as if by remarkable oversight, the local gentry had failed to realize was stored up in their own backyards. This was the estimable brandy distilled from apples growing so plentifully throughout the county. For if the soil of Southampton was utterly wrecked for tobacco and could produce cotton in quantities adequate only for subsistence, a cornucopia of apples ripened on every hand—wild and in cultivated orchards, in bramble-choked groves on dead plantations, by the wayside of each land and road. They grew in all sizes and colors and varieties, and what had once lain in wormy, decaying heaps on the ground were now dumped by the wagonload into the stills which had become each farmer’s most valued asset. There converted into high-quality applejack, the metamorphosed fruit was shipped in barrels to Jerusalem, where groaning carts drawn by mules and oxen hauled it off north to Petersburg and Richmond—hustling, optimistic, pleasure-seeking communities filled with citizens possessed of fat pocketbooks and serious thirsts. Considerable revenue was thus returned to the county, so although it was plain that Southampton would never wax as rich as Nineveh, the region had become, as I say, fairly prosperous, and it was in the midst of this prosperity that I gradually laid my plans for annihilation and escape.

One of the results upon me of this burgeoning affluence was that the professional skill I had gained at Turner’s Mill—and which for so long had lain aslumber amid Moore’s dismal enterprises—became quite an attractive matter to some of the neighboring landowners, especially those already a notch or two higher on the economic ladder. Prosperity fosters expansion, expansion breeds construction—barns, stills, stables, fences, sheds. Once I had detected the brisk new activity going on around me, it did not take me long to begin to energetically promote my talents as a carpenter. I suddenly found myself in great demand. Moore for his part could not have been happier—as hired-out property I became his chief source of income—and only I could have been happier than he, since I was now pretty well shut of his woodpile and his slop buckets and his cotton patch. Life for a time was provisionally tolerable.