The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial (15 page)

She was sending Nat Turner's mother a message. Old Benjamin was gone now and Nancie had no voodoo magic, no womanly magic, that could control Elizabeth Turner. The entire Turner family had been shamed long enough—all because of Nancie's darkie bastard.

Elizabeth Turner would sell Nat Turner away—out of sight, out of mind, almost as though he never existed. But not too far—she wanted to enjoy his pain. She would sell him to a man who held him in no special esteem—who was not enthralled with his reading, his writing, or his gift for language. Then, to seal it, she would sell his wife to a man who wanted to breed her.

Nat Turner was strong-willed and he would find a way to make peace with being sold. But losing Cherry would bring him to his knees. Alone, each day he slaved he would be reminded of his place in civilized society.

Elizabeth wanted him to obey the rules. She wanted him to be who she thought him to be. She needed to affirm that she was naturally better and more powerful.

Nat Turner was not a man; he was property. He was not a trustee. He had no right to a church—he was forbidden to even enter. He had no right to a wife or to a marriage. She needed him to know—he would never be anything but a slave. Cherry's sale would teach him.

Elizabeth Turner was right. It was not the plow or the rod that broke him. It was losing Cherry and his son.

N
at Turner pleaded with the people he knew. There was no other choice; there was no refuge in the courts for him—no court would hear a black man's case against a white woman or man. No court would listen to his protests that he and his family were free people forced into slavery.

He would have been able to endure if Elizabeth Turner had only enslaved him, but she had also stolen Cherry. How could she sell free people, people she couldn't even pretend to own? He pled his case to each of the Turner's Meeting Place trustees individually—the Whiteheads, the Newsoms, the Francises.

He pleaded when he saw them on the roads. He walked to their farms. He called to them as they rushed into church. He was free, and they and their families all knew it. They knew his father's plans. But they turned their heads the other way.

Losing his wife was the worst of it.

Nat Turner had hoped that no one would notice Cherry, would not notice their love and take her away.

But Elizabeth Turner had told Giles Reese about her. She had planted Cherry in his head. Giles Reese saw all he needed to see; he saw that Cherry could bear children and that Elizabeth Turner was almost giving her away.

When he came to fetch her and saw Nat Turner, Giles Reese saw more. He saw what only Nat Turner before then had seen. He saw that Cherry was a river; life was on her shores. He saw that Cherry was Nat Turner's wings and spirit, and that by taking her, Reese and the others could break Nat's heart and bring Nat Turner back to earth.

Giles Reese bought her—though he knew she was free and not for sale—and Nat Turner's son was thrown into the bargain. Giles Reese didn't need her. She was a nice-to-have. Then Giles Reese, when he was closer to her, recognized that she was beautiful and he wanted her. There was life in Cherry and Giles Reese wanted to live.

Nat Turner watched them being taken away. He had no gun. He had no law and no sheriff to call. There was no army. He balled his hands into fists. His nails lanced his palms, causing them to bleed.

He had promised his son things would be different. But he had lied. He was one man against an army, a government. How could he make things different?

Giles Reese loaded them on the wagon. There were tears in Cherry's eyes. She looked away. Nat Turner's son reached back for him. He struggled on his mother's lap. Riddick kept reaching for him—small hands, pleading brown eyes.

“Daddy?” First a question. Then as they pulled farther down the road, the word became a shriek. “Daddy! Daddy!”

He had made Riddick a promise to protect him, to give him a better life. How could he hold his head up in front of his son? How could any captive man hold up his head?

Cross Keys, Virginia

February 1831

N
at Turner stroked the horse's mane before placing the bit in its mouth. When the horse was bridled and hitched and the wagon was readied, Nat Turner helped Sallie Francis Moore Travis aboard. She was on her way to a Valentine's Day party at the Whiteheads'.

They traveled down the road with no name and past Giles Reese's farm, where Cherry lived now. Anxiously, she prattled behind him, speaking more to herself than to him.

At night sometimes he dreamed of rescuing his wife and son. He dreamed of his hands wrapped around Giles Reese's throat.

If any man had touched his wife, Reese would have gone insane. Other white men would have thought Reese justified for shooting someone who tried to steal his wife. They would have joined Reese in gutting the thief, hanging him, castrating him, and worse. So sometimes at night Nat Turner dreamed the same dreams and woke with broken straw gripped tight in his fists.

He looked toward the Giles Reese farm and would not allow himself to turn away. He made himself feel it—the shame, the rage, the anger, the betrayal—so he would be one with every other man who suffered, every black man who for generations had had his wife, his family stolen away. He would not allow himself to hide from the suffering. In the past, he had been carving peace for himself by not feeling, but now he opened his heart and mind to it. He forced himself to feel it now and to remember.

Cross Keys

1821

E
very ominous thought, everything he could imagine crowded in on Nat Turner. Losing his family hurt as badly as he imagined it would in the days when he vowed to stay alone. It tormented him to think of his family held captive, of his wife lawfully raped by another man.

After Cherry was gone, Nat Turner was obsessed with her.

In the darkness, he crept to Giles Reese's farm, where he watched outside Cherry's window. Sometimes he stole nearer and gazed at her lying on her bed. He told himself he must stay away.

He was sad, he was angry, and then he felt betrayed—betrayed by Cherry because she stayed with Giles Reese. Nat Turner knew there was nothing she could do, no place she could go. He knew she did not love the man but had no choice. He knew Giles Reese did not love her, and that compounded the damage done.

How could it be that a man who did not love her could tell him, her husband,
when
he could see Cherry or
if
he could see her at all? It tore at his insides that men who would kill a man for looking at their wives or daughters were now laughing about Giles Reese's association with Cherry. Now Nat Turner had to ask their permission.

Nat Turner was tormented thinking of it. Reese had discussions with Moore over whether the two of them would be generous enough to allow Nat Turner to visit his wife and son. The two of them—Reese and Moore—would laugh about what Reese now knew about her—“she has a spider on her back”—and then give permission.

Reese would not even lower himself to speak to Nat Turner man-to-man. Instead, Moore would pass the word to Nat Turner second- or thirdhand. “On Sundays you may see her, if Reese doesn't have her otherwise busy.” Because he was not a man, in their eyes, they took his wife and son so he would know it, too.

It was not Cherry's fault, but he could not help but feel betrayed. She was the weapon they used against him. Betrayed by her. Betrayed by God.

God had put Cherry before him, had made him love her, only to allow Giles Reese to steal her away. He had not asked God for her. He had wanted to be alone. He had not wanted a wife or a child. He had not wanted to be in love. He had taken a vow. He had resisted it. But he had heard God whispering to him to open, to love her.

Nat Turner ran into the woods deep enough that only the trees could hear him. Even there he would not allow himself to cry or scream. He plowed his fist into a large cypress to dull the pain.

He did not ask for this life for himself, but he had not complained. He had managed the life and the burden, the debt that he'd been given. But now the pain was unbearable.

Now the grief of who he was and where he was, of his condition, pushed him to rage. He rolled in the dirt, in the marshy, decayed leaves of old winters that lay on the ground. His anguish was wild and heavy in his bosom, a feral beast that rent his guts.

How could he look at her, his eyes saying to hers that he could not save her? He could not visit his son in shame. He could not settle for this. He could not visit them pretending to be contented. He was useless to them, dead to them. He could not bear for his wife and his son to see his humiliation, to see that this was the kind of man—one in form but not in spirit—that white men had made him.

Where was God?

Nat Turner ran until he came to the pond and he dived in, still wearing his clothes. He didn't want to feel anymore. He didn't want to live.

His head parted the water.

Before his feet submerged, Nat Turner had a plan.

H
e would leave. There was no way he could see his wife sold and made to be another man's concubine and call himself a man. Nat Turner didn't want to be the kind of man who gave up his manhood just to survive. He didn't want Cherry to become the kind of wife who smiled when he was looking but frowned when he turned away. He would leave Southampton County; he had no choice.

The captors said there was no such thing as black love—husbands did not love wives, fathers did not love children, and brothers did not love sisters. Blacks were no more than dogs, or rooting pigs.

He had no choice but to leave. He had gone along with the charade long enough—too long. He had given up freedom to stay with his family. But no longer—he would simply walk away. No one could come after him. No one could produce ownership papers that said he or she owned him.

Before he left Cross Keys, Nat Turner wrote himself a pass so if anyone stopped him as a slave, he would have written permission to travel. Though whoever stopped him would most likely not be literate, a written pass looked official enough that he would not be challenged as a runaway.

Nat Turner dressed in a pair of worn pants, a shirt, a pair of his father's shoes that he had hidden away. He never wore them in public, fearing they would be taken from him. But now he wore them and dressed in a coat and hat that had been his father's and made his way on foot south and east forty miles to the Great Dismal Swamp.

Nat Turner did not say good-bye. He pulled his collar up around his ears and lowered his head, slinging his small bundle over his shoulder, his axe stuck through it.

Presidents had already visited the swampland—Washington and Monroe—but the Great Dismal had defied them. President George Washington had thought to earn money from the area by controlling the planned waterway, harvesting trees, and exploiting other resources there. They had used slaves to do the dirty work. But his efforts brought little success.

The Great Dismal was a mysterious place and everyone around had heard the rumors. The swamp was filled with escaped slaves who could not be tracked or found in the tropical forest.

Animals and insects were there that civilized men had never seen before. It was said that the trees talked and at night the water whispered. White men died of diseases there—all nature seemed to conspire against them.

People told stories of whole families of black people who had escaped and found a way to be free in the Great Dismal Swamp. The slaves who holed up there, it was said, were desperate, angry, ready to die—ruthless avengers who would kill a white man sooner than look him in the eye. Some lived there permanently, but for others it was a temporary refuge. Nat Turner knew that if he made it there, no white man from Southampton County would enter the swamp to search for him.

He wanted to hide where he could be swallowed into darkness, into a place of great sadness.

When he traveled previously—when it was winter, so there was little farmwork, and he was hired out to repair mills—Nat Turner always carried his Bible, the one his father had given him. Who knew when God would give him a word for the people? He had preached all over the area, like a Methodist circuit rider, even as far away as Norfolk. But this time he left the book behind.

He pulled his hat snug on his head so no one would notice
the curls in his hair. Head down, he walked quickly, like a man who had business to attend to. But not so quickly he would attract attention.

He was fair enough that, at a distance, passersby might think he was a white man. He would have even more chance of not being discovered if he traveled by night.

As Nat Turner walked, he heard Sister Easter—a captive on Nathaniel Francis's farm. He heard her voice singing to him.

In the word of God

I got a hiding place.

He needed a hiding place. Nat Turner was desperate for a place where he could hide from his troubles, from his thoughts.

In the word of God

I got a hiding place.

Throw me overboard

I got a hiding place.

The Great Dismal Swamp would be his place of escape—his Hebron, his city of refuge. It would swallow him and he would hide forever.

Cross Keys

February 1831

N
at Turner shook the reins and clicked his tongue at the red mare. As they rode past, he forced himself to look at Giles Reese's farm, at the place where Cherry was held captive.

There was an old oak tree not far from Giles Reese's farm, only noticeable in the winter. In the spring, the leaves from the other trees camouflaged it. But in the winter it stood alone. Its girth was more than six men around and its roots must have reached to the center of the earth.