59
panting
ah-ah-ah
as he sprinted for the woods, moving now with such nimble-footed speed that he seemed whisked forward like a sail on the wind. Far behind, losing ground each second, came the pimpled boy, still howling. “Stop! You, Hark! Black wretch!
Stop!” But Hark’s great legs were churning as if propelled by steam; vaulting the pump trough, he soared through the air in a gigantic leap like something suspended by wire or wings, struck the earth with a thumping sound, and without breaking stride, bounded on toward the distant forest, the inside of his bare soles flashing splendidly pink. Then all of a sudden it was as if he had been felled by a cannon ball: his head snapped back, and the rest of him including his pinwheeling legs sailed out and forward, and he came down flat on his back with a bladdery, sacklike thud, directly beneath the clothesline which, at gullet level, had intercepted his flight. But as Cobb and I stood watching, watched him shake his head and try to rise up on his elbows, we saw now not one but two forces, though equally sinister and somber, converging on Hark from opposite directions: Putnam, still waving his lightwood stick, and Miss Maria Pope, who had appeared as if from nowhere like some augury of frustrate bitchery and vengeance, bearing down upon Hark with a hobbled spinster’s gait amid black snapping yards of funereal gingham.
Blown back on the wind, her voice already was hysteric with shrill malevolence. “It’s up the tree for you, nigger!” she screeched. “Up the tree!”
“Now,” I heard Cobb murmur, “now we are about to witness a ritual diversion indigenous to this Southern clime. We are about to witness two human beings whipping another.”
“No, mastah,” I said. “Marse Joe don’t ’low his niggers to be beaten. But there’s ways around that, as you will surely see. You about to witness something else, mastah.”
“Not a speck of charcoal in the shop!” Putnam was shouting in a kind of wail.
“And not a drap of water in the kitchen pail!” Miss Maria shrilled.
As if vying with each other to be the chiefest victim of Hark’s enormity, they surrounded him, encompassed the prostrate form, squawking like birds. Hark staggered to his feet, shaking his head with the slow, stunned, dizzy bewilderment of an about-to-be-slaughtered ox that has received a faulty glancing blow. “It’s up the tree with him this time, impudent black scoundrel!” Miss Maria cackled. “Putnam, get the ladder!”
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“Hark’s most dreadful feared of heights,” I found myself explaining to Cobb. “This for him is worse than a hundred beatings.”
“A fantastic specimen!” Cobb breathed. “A regular
gladiator
, a veritable black Apollo. And swift as a race horse! Where did your master get him?”
“From up Sussex way,” I said, “about ten, eleven years ago, mastah, when they broke up one of the old plantations.” I paused for a moment, half wondering to myself why I was proffering all this information. “Hark’s all forlorn now,” I went on, “heartsick and forlorn. On the outside he’s very cheery, but inside he’s just all torn up. He can’t keep his mind on anything. That’s how come he forgets his chores, and how come he gets punished. Poor old Hark . . .”
“Why is that, preacher?” said Cobb. Putnam had fetched a ladder now from the barn, and we watched the procession as it made its way across the windswept lot, bleak and gray in the fading autumnal light—Miss Maria in the lead, grim, hands clenched, her back stiff and straight as a poker, Putnam behind with the ladder, and between them Hark in his dusty gray denim, shuffling along with his head bent in total dejection, looming over the two of them like some huge Goliath, a giant towering above a pair of vengeful, hurrying dwarfs. In Indian file, straight as an arrow, they made their way toward an ancient and enormous maple whose lower-most branch, leafless now, stretched across the pale sky like a naked arm twenty feet above the earth. I could hear Hark’s bare feet scuffing across the ground, scuffing like the feet of a reluctant child. “Why is that?” Cobb said again.
“Well, mastah, I’ll tell you,” I said. “Couple years ago, afore I became Marse Joe’s property, Marse Joe had to sell off most all of his niggers. Sell them off down to Mississippi, where you know they are planting considerable cotton. Hark told me Marse Joe was in a misery about this, but he just couldn’t do anything else.
Well, amongst these niggers was Hark’s wife and Hark’s child—
little boy about three or four years old he was then. Hark cared for that little boy almost more than anything.”
“Yah, yah, yah,” I could hear Cobb murmur, making little clucking sounds beneath his breath.
“So when that little boy was gone, Hark near about went mad The Confessions of Nat Turner
61
with grief, couldn’t think about anything else.”
“Yah, yah, yah, yah.”
“He wanted to run away and follow them all the way down to Mississippi, but I talked him out of it. See, he’d already run off once years ago and hadn’t gotten anywhere. Besides, it’s always been my idea that a nigger should follow all the rules and regulations so far as he was able.”
“Yah, yah, yah.”
“Anyway,” I went on. “Hark ain’t been quite right ever since then.
You might say he’s just been distracted. That’s why he does things—or doesn’t do things—that get him punished. And I’ll be quite truthful with you, mastah, he
doesn’t
do his chores, but I tell you he just can’t help it.”
“Yah, yah,” Cobb muttered, “yah, great God, the logical outcome
. . .
the ultimate horror!
” He had begun to hiccup again and the sound came forth in intermittent gasps, almost like sobs. He started to say something else, thought better of it, turned away, whispering over and over again:
“God, God, God, God, God
.”
“Now about this here,” I explained. “Like I say, Hark’s most dreadful feared of high places. Last spring the roof leaked and Marse Joe sent Hark and me up to fix it. But Hark got halfway up and he just froze there. Begun to whimper and mumble to hisself and wouldn’t go an inch further. So I had to fix that roof myself.
Anyway, Marse Putnam and Miss Maria caught ahold of this fear of Hark’s—you might say they found out his weak spot. Like I said, Marse Joe won’t tolerate anyone to mistreat his niggers, to beat them or anything like that. So whenever Marse Joe’s away, and Marse Putnam and Miss Maria figger they can get away with it, why, they run old Hark up a tree.”
Which is what they were doing even as I spoke, their voices muffled, remote, indistinct now on the blustery wind. Putnam propping the long ladder against the tree trunk, then jerking his arm furiously upward as he bade Hark to climb. And Hark began climbing, reluctantly, at the third rung turning his frightened face imploringly back as if to see whether they might not have had a change of heart, but this time Miss Maria’s arms jerked upward—
up, nigger, up
—and again Hark continued his climb, knees quaking beneath his trousers. At last arrived at the lowermost branch, Hark swung himself off the ladder, clutching the tree so tightly that I could see even from this distance the veins standing The Confessions of Nat Turner
62
out against the muscles of his arms, then with a sort of scrounging, sliding motion of his rump, deposited himself in the crotch formed by trunk and branch, and sat there embracing the tree with his eyes squeezed shut—dizzy, windy yards above the earth. Then Putnam removed the ladder and laid it flat on the ground beneath the tree.
“Five, ten minutes will go by, mastah,” I said to Cobb, “and then old Hark will commence crying and moaning. Just wait and see.
Then pretty soon he’ll start swaying. Crying and moaning and swaying there on that branch like he’s about to fall off. Then Marse Putnam and Miss Maria’ll set that ladder up against the tree and Hark’ll climb down. I reckon they get scared Hark will fall off and break his neck, and they wouldn’t want that to happen. No, they just want to give old Hark a poor time for a while.”
“Yah, yah, yah,” Cobb murmured, distantly now.
“And that for Hark is a poor time indeed,” I said.
“Yah, yah, yah,” he replied. I don’t know whether he was listening to me or not. “Great God! Sometimes I think . . .
sometimes . . .
it is like living in a dream!
”
Then suddenly, without another word, Cobb was gone, limping in gaunt strides toward the house, the empty brandy flask still clutched in his hand, cloak flapping, shoulders hunched against the wind. I crouched down again above my rabbits, watching Cobb limp and sway across the lot and up to the front porch, his voice faint and weary as he called out: “Hallo, Miz Travis, think I’ll come in and set a spell after all!” And Miss Sarah’s voice way off within, high and full of cheer, and the sound of the door slamming as Cobb vanished inside the house. I stripped the white translucent inner skin from a rabbit, separating it from the pinkish flesh, and plunged the corpse into the cool water, feeling the guts squirming wet and slimy beneath my fingers. Blood mingled with the water, turning it a muddy crimson. Gusts of wind swept through the cotton patch, whistling; an army of dead withered leaves marched along the edge of the barn, rolled with a husky scrabbling noise across the vacant yard. I gazed down into the bloody water, thinking of Cobb.
Go through the midst of
Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that
sigh and that cry for all the abominations, that be done in the
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63
midst thereof . . . Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little
children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is
the mark
. . .
Suddenly I found myself thinking: It is plain, yes, plain, plain.
When I succeed in my great mission, and Jerusalem is destroyed, this man Cobb will be among those few spared the sword . . .
Across the roof of the woods the wind rushed in hissing, majestic swoop and cadence, echoing in far-off hollows with the thudding sound of footfalls. Gray and streaked, boiling, in ponderous haste, the clouds fled eastward across the lowering heavens, growing darker now in the early dusk. After a bit I heard Hark begin to moan, a soft disconsolate wordless wail, filled with dread. For long minutes he moaned, swaying high in his tree.
Then I heard the
tap-tap-tapping
of the ladder as they set it against the tree trunk and let him down.
It is curious how sometimes our most vivid dreams take place when we are but half asleep, and how they occupy the briefest space of time. In the courtroom this day, dozing off for several seconds at the oaken table to which I had been bound by a length of chain, I had a terrifying dream. I seemed to be walking alone at the edge of a swamp at nightfall, the light around me glimmering, crepuscular, touched with that greenish hue presaging the onslaught of a summer storm. The air was windless, still, but high in the heavens beyond the swamp thunder grumbled and heaved, and heat lightning at somber intervals blossomed against the sky. Filled with panic, I seemed to be searching for my Bible, which strangely, unaccountably I had left there, somewhere in the depths and murk of the swamp; in fear and despair I pressed my search into the oncoming night, pushing now deeper and deeper into the gloomy marshland, haunted by the ominous, stormy light and by a far-off pandemonium of thunder. Try desperately as I might, I could not find my Bible. Suddenly another sound came to my ears, this time the frightened outcry of voices. They were the voices of boys, hoarse and half grown and seized with terror, and now instantly I saw them: half a dozen black boys trapped neck-deep in a bog of quicksand, crying aloud for rescue as their arms waved frantically in the dim light and as they sank deeper and deeper into the mire. I seemed to stand helpless at the edge of the bog, unable to move or to speak, and while I stood there a voice echoed out of the sky, itself partaking of that remote sound of thunder:
Thy sons shall be given unto another people and
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64
thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day
long, so that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes
. . .
Screaming their mortal fright, black arms and faces sinking beneath the slime, the boys began to vanish one by one before my eyes while the noise of a prodigious guilt overwhelmed me like a thunderclap . . . “
The prisoner will
. . .” The sharp rapping of a mallet interrupted the horror, and I snapped awake with a start.
“If the court please . . .” I heard the voice say, “it is a crying outrage. Sech behavior is a
crying outrage!
”
The mallet cracked down again. “The prisoner is cautioned to stay awake,” said another voice. This time the voice was more familiar: it was that of Jeremiah Cobb.
“If the court please,” the first voice continued, “it is a disgrace to these assizes that the prisoner goes to sleep, and in the full view of this honorable court. Even if it is true that a nigger can’t stay awake any longer than—”
“The prisoner has been duly cautioned, Mr. Trezevant,” Cobb said. “You may proceed with the reading of the deposition.”
The man who had been reading my confessions aloud now paused and turned to stare at me, obviously relishing the pause, his own sparkling gaze, the total effect. His face was filled with hatred and disgust. I returned his gaze without faltering, though with no emotion. Smooth-featured, bullnecked, squinty-eyed, he now turned back to the papers, leaning forward aggressively on thick haunches and poking the air with a stubby finger. “ ‘The aforementioned lady fled and got some distance from the house,’” he recited, “ ‘but she was pursued, overtaken, and compelled to get up behind one of the company, who brought her back, and after showing her the mangled body of her husband, she was told to get down and lay by his side, where she was shot dead. I then started for Mr. Jacob Williams’s. . ’ ” I ceased listening.
There must have been two hundred people in the jammed courtroom: in holiday finery, the women in silk bonnets and tasseled shawls, the men in black morning suits and patent leather shoes, stern, aggrieved, blinking and blinking, they crowded together on the straight-backed benches like a congregation of owls, silent now and attentive, breaking the steaming stillness with only a sneeze or a strangled, rattling The Confessions of Nat Turner