The Confessions of Nat Turner (48 page)

“jumped over the broomstick,” since their “marriage” had no sanction under the law, he was bound by no rule of ethics when it came to selling “wife” and offspring—by this grim reasoning a The Confessions of Nat Turner

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little black bastard. It was a rationalization used without shame countless times before. At any rate, out of whatever cause—thoughtlessness, stupidity, ignorance, God only knew—Travis had done it and that was that.

Yet as I’ve said, the man had changed now in the most remarkable way. Prosperity had restored him to the craft he had learned as a boy. In the fullness of middle age he blossomed—or let us say he became unshriveled. He was genial, even generous in his behavior with me, insisting that Hark and I have comfortable accommodations in our bachelor quarters next to the shop, making certain that we ate well from the leavings of the house, permitting no abuse (at least physical) from the rest of the household, and in general comporting himself like every slave’s ideal master. Although at first I was puzzled, I did not have to ponder long the mystery of this man’s renascence. After years as a childless widower and a scrabbling dirt farmer he was now—at fifty-five and in the prime of life—anointed with good fortune: well married to a fat lady who laughed a lot and jollied his days, vigorously prospering at a skilled trade, father of a newborn son and heir, and owner of the smartest nigger in Southampton County.

I have described at length my encounter with Jeremiah Cobb in the late autumn of the year preceding the commencement of this account. This was the day that Hark was run up a tree by Putnam and Miss Maria Pope. It was several months after that strange afternoon, in the waning winter of the fateful year 1831, that I received the final mandate I had so long been hoping for, and began to elaborate upon and implement the plans I had drawn up during those cloistered moments at Mrs. Whitehead’s.

It all came about in the following manner . . .

The winter had been unseasonably mild, with an almost complete absence of snow and ice, and as a result Travis’s shop had been exceptionally busy. The balmy climate allowed the shop to expand out of doors. Day after day not only the shop but the entire plot of bare earth surrounding it had been abustle with activity as Travis together with Hark and myself and the two apprentices, Putnam and the Westbrook boy, scampered about through the smoke and the steam, heating the great metal tires over the forge and firing the hoops until they turned a dull red and sledging the hoops onto the wheels with twenty-pound hammers. It was a noisy, boisterous scene, what with the hissing of the steam as we doused the hot wheels, and the clang of the The Confessions of Nat Turner

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hammers, and Hark’s shouts, and the racket of tortured wood as it snapped and creaked beneath the suddenly cooled, contracting castiron tires. Decent, healthy, amiable work it was too—a far piece from the grime and sweat of the field—and if it had not been for Putnam’s peevish yammerings and the constant taunts he threw Hark’s way I might have actually celebrated such labor, since there was something deeply satisfying about this craft and the way in which straight lengths of nondescript rough wood and strips of crude black iron were transformed into symmetrically spoked, perfectly circular, sumptuously shellacked and polished wheels. The days were long but I relished the half-hour breaks we took morning and afternoon, when Miss Sarah would bring us from the house a plate of biscuits and mugs of sweet cider with a stick of cinnamon; such a pause in labor made the work itself more rewarding, and caused Travis to seem even more acceptable in my eyes.

With a residue of orders from all over the county (and from as far away as Suffolk and the lowland region of Carolina), Travis found it hard to keep up with the demand. Just before he acquired me he had bought a newly patented machine, hand-cranked, which could bend iron in a cold state and eliminated the old process of hammering out hot metal. This machine had merely created the need for another—a sawing contraption which might quickly reduce the growing stockpile of oak and black-gum timbers to manageable lengths—and so late in December, just after Christmas, Travis gave me some rough plans and set me to work on my most ambitious piece of carpentry to date: an enormous “apprentice mill,” complete with ripsaw and treadmill designed to utilize either large Negro or middle-sized mule. It was a challenging assignment and I set to upon it with zeal, isolating myself in a high-roofed shed next to the shop, where (with the sometime help of Hark and the boy Moses) I painstakingly worked out the architecture of the complicated mechanism, carving one by one the gears and the gear-boxes, adding such clever wrinkles as a counterweight system to minimize jamming of the saw, and in all respects carrying through the project with a smooth professionalism that gratified me more than anything I could remember. Since I anticipated that I would be finished with the machine toward the end of February, I asked Travis if I might not please have several The Confessions of Nat Turner

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days off when I was done. I did not linger on it in so many words, but I wanted to go out into the woods to my sanctuary, there to fast and pray for a while—during these last days at work on the mill I had felt the spirit of the Lord hovering very close.

Anyway, I went. I told my owner that I wished to set up a new trapline; the old route had worn out its lure, the rabbits were getting wary. Travis agreed; my rabbits helped augment his income, and he could scarcely refuse. Besides, as I say, there lurked in his heart a basic albeit leaden decency and he knew I had earned the leave. One afternoon late in February, after spreading on a final coat of varnish, I finished the last work on the machine. I knelt and gave thanks to God for the skill of my hands, as I always did when I completed such difficult work, and then without further ado retreated into the woods, carrying with me only my Bible, my wellworn map, and some lucifer matches with which to start a fire.

The full eclipse of the sun began in the midafternoon of the following Saturday, three days after I set out for the woods. I had been fasting ever since the first day, seated next to the fire in my tabernacle, where I immersed myself in the Bible and prayed, taking no sustenance at all except for a little water from the stream and chewing on sassafras roots only to still the cramps that racked my stomach. Usually fasting was a method by which I helped quench all fleshly longings. Whether this time it was the pressure of the work I had just completed, I do not know, but during those first days I seemed beset by devils and monsters. I walked out and sat down amid the pines, trying vainly to rid myself of coarse hot desires. Visions of the flesh of women tempted me, inflaming my passions in a way I had rarely known before. Lust stormed my senses like a sick fever. I thought of a Negro girl I had seen often in the streets of Jerusalem—a plump doxy, every nigger boy’s Saturday piece, a light-skinned kitchen maid with a rhythmic bottom and round saucy eyes.

Heavybreasted, full-bellied, she stood naked before me in my mind’s eye, thrusting at me her glossy brown midriff with its softly rounding belly-bulge and its nest of black hair. Try as I might I could not banish her, keep her away; my Bible availed me nothing.
Does you want a l’il bit ob honeycomb, sweet pussy
bee
? she crooned to me with those words she had wheedled others, and as she ground her hips in my face, with delicate brown fingers stroking the pink lips of her sex, my own stiffened.

In hot fancy my arms went out to encircle her slick haunch and The Confessions of Nat Turner

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ripe behind, my mouth was buried in her wet crotch, and godless mad words struggled on my tongue:
Lap. Lick. Suck
. “Oh, my Lord!” I said aloud, and rose to my feet, but even so the desire would not vanish, would not fade. Sweating, I kissed and embraced the cold scaly trunk of a pine tree. “What can it be
like
?” I called again, as if to the heavens. The rage I had at that moment to penetrate a woman’s flesh—a young white woman now, some slipperytongued brown-headed missy with a sugar-sweet incandescent belly who as I entered her cried out with pain and joy and enveloped me convulsively with milky-white legs and arms—was like a sudden racking spasm or an illness so shattering to the senses that it imposed wonder, and disbelief. I thirsted to plunge myself into the earth, into a tree, a deer, a bear, a bird, a boy, a stump, a stone, to shoot milky warm spurts of myself into the cold and lonely blue heart of the sky. “Lord help me,” I said aloud once more, “what can it be
like
?” The seed left me then, squirting in warm drops along my fingers; my eyelids slammed shut against the face of the day. I slumped shivering against the pine tree’s unloving scaly breast.

At last I opened my eyes, and the thought that lingered in mind was only half a prayer: Lord, after this mission is done I will have to get me a wife.

I slept the rest of the afternoon and through the night. The next day, which was Saturday, I awoke feeling groggy and weak. I drank some water and chewed on a sassafras root, and later dragged myself outside, where I sat reading, propped against a tree. It was while I was studying a few chapters from Jeremiah (for some reason, during a fast, I always savored Jeremiah, whose sour and mirthless temper was an appropriate companion for hunger) that I sensed a change in the atmosphere. The light paled, the stark shadows of the barren wintry trees grew hazy and dull, lost definition;far off in the woods a flock of ragamuffin sparrows, late winter visitors, ceased their cheeping, became still in the false dusk. Around me the leafless gray trees, bleak as skeletons, were plunged into evening shade. I looked up then to see the sun wink slowly out as it devoured the black shape of the moon. There was no surprise in my heart, no fear, only revelation, a sense of final surrender, and I rose to my knees and shut my eyes in prayer, wood smoke sweet in my nostrils, half drowned in the cavelike sudden silence of the woods. For long minutes I knelt there in the somber unearthly hush; sightless, I The Confessions of Nat Turner

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felt the dark like a vapor around me, cold like the edge of zinc and touched with the graveyard’s mossy damp. “
O Lord God to
whom vengeance belongeth
,” I whispered, “
O God to whom
vengeance belongeth, show thyself
.”

Lift up thyself, thou judge of the earth: render a reward to the
proud
. . .

In the distance, like a signal, I heard the noise of a gun, a single faint booming that echoed back and forth amid the hollows of the bare and wintry forest, dwindled, died, then fell quiet. Some solitary hunter: had he too seen the sun darken, fired in terror at the haloed black sphere floating in the heavens? Now when I opened my eyes the sun appeared to be disgorging the moon at the same grave and stately pace with which it had swallowed it up. Light moved softly back across the floor of the woods, daubing the carpet of fallen leaves with yellow bursts of sunshine. Warmth flooded over me, the sparrows in the trees resumed their clamor; the sun rode across the blue sky triumphant and serene. I was suddenly touched by a wild anticipation and excitement.

“Now, Lord,” I said aloud, “the seal is removed from my lips.”

That evening just before sunset Hark came up through the woods and paid me a visit, bringing me a pan of grits and bacon which I was still too agitated to eat. I could only insist that he go back and get in touch with Henry and Nelson and Sam, that he tell them that at noon the next day—a Sunday—they must all assemble here at my sanctuary. With some reluctance because of his concern for my stomach (“Nat, you jes’ gwine shribble up an’ blow clean away,” he said) he obeyed me. The following day Hark and the others came as I had ordered. I bade them sit around the fire next to me. Then after a session of prayer I turned to the subject at hand. I told them the seal had been removed from my lips and that I had received the last sign. I said that the Spirit had appeared to me in the form of the eclipse of the sun, which they themselves had witnessed. The Spirit had informed me that the Serpent was loosened and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men. I went on patiently to explain that the Spirit had commanded that I should take on the yoke and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

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Then as we sat there in the chill afternoon I unfolded to them my great plans. I made it clear that it was neither wise nor sufficient that our group of five (plus the score or so of Negroes I felt confident would join us) simply run off and get lost in the Dismal Swamp. In the first place, I pointed out, there was no possibility at all of a mob of twenty and more Negroes banding together and passing, even by night, thirty-five miles through two counties and part of another without being apprehended. Furthermore, even a smaller group would likely be doomed to failure. “Us five,”

I said, “we run off to the swamp together, those white men’ll catch our asses before we get ten miles past Jerusalem. One or two niggers run off an’ they send out the dogs. Three niggers run off an’ they sent out the army.” Also, how could even Negroes survive long in the swamp without weapons and supplies? In addition, there was a seller’s market in Negroes at the moment, I explained; half a dozen traders were snooping around all over the county, and although I myself was doubtless safe I could not say that I felt the same about the other slaves I knew—including those present—and feared that only a clock-tick and some owner’s necessity or greed might separate any of them from Mississippi or Arkansas.

“Faithful followers, dear brothers,” I said finally, “I believe they ain’t none of you can live like this any longer. Therefore, they is only one thing to do . . .”

Here I stopped speaking altogether for a while, allowing these last words to enter their consciousness. Minutes passed and they said nothing, then Henry’s voice broke the silence, his deaf man’s bleat hoarse and cracked, a shock in the stillness: “Us gotta
kill
all dem white sonsabitches. Ain’t dat what de Lawd done told you? Ain’t dat right, Nat?”