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be undertaken in an impetuous mood. Once in a great while, however—every two years or so, usually in the late summer when the crops were laid by—Marse Samuel would decide to have what he called, humorously, an “assemblage,” and a score of people would come from miles around, planters and their families from the James and Chickahominy rivers and from down in North Carolina, people with names like Carter and Harrison and Byrd and Clark and Bonner arriving in elegant coaches and accompanied by a hustling, noisy entourage of black nurse-maids and body servants. They would stay for four or five days, sometimes as long as a week, and daily there would be fox hunts with the hounds of Major Vaughan, whose plantation was not far away, and turkey shoots and contests in horsemanship, pistol matches and picnics and a great deal of contented, somnolent, easy palaver among the ladies on the veranda, and at least two fancy balls in the great hall, bedecked for each evening’s merriment in yards of pink and blue bunting.
It became my duty on these occasions (after I had reached the age of sixteen or thereabouts) to act in the capacity of “chief usher,” a title which Marse Samuel bestowed upon me and which involved my supervision of all the Negro help outside of the kitchen. (It is possibly a measure of Marse Samuel’s confidence in me that he entrusted me with this position, as young as I happened to be; doubtless on the other hand I simply
was
quicker and smarter than all the rest.) Caparisoned for a week in purple velvet knee-length pantaloons, a red silk jacket with buckles of shiny brass, and a white goat’s-hair wig which culminated behind in a saucy queue, I must have presented an exotic sight to the Carters and the Byrds, but I reveled in my role and took great pleasure in bustling about and lording it over the other black boys—most of them enlisted from the fields, dumb callow kids all thumbs and knobby knees and popping eyes—even though each day I was kept feverishly busy from dawn to dusk. It was I who greeted the carriages and coaches and helped the ladies dismount, I too who rode herd on Lucas and Todd and Pete and Tim, making certain that they polished each night each gentleman’s boots, that they cleaned up the litter on the lawn, that they hurried about ceaselessly, fetching ice from the ice cellar, retrieving a lady’s lost fan, tethering horses, untethering them, doing this, undoing that. I was the first to arise long before dawn (to help Little Morning prepare daily a stirrup cup of whiskey for the fox hunt was one of my most important chores) and nearly always the last to retire, and the fact that I was up and about at a truly unearthly hour was the The Confessions of Nat Turner
144
only reason that caused me one morning, between ball and hunt, to nearly stumble over Miss Emmeline and someone else in the moonless and murky dark.
It was not the loud whisper of her voice that shocked me so much—though I instantly distinguished it—but the Lord’s name in her mouth, uttered in a frenzy, the first time in my life I had heard blasphemy on a woman’s tongue. And so astonished was I by the words that as I stood there rooted in the dark it did not just then occur to me to consider the event which occasioned them, and I thought she was in some great and nameless peril: “Oh mercy . . . oh God . . . oh Jesus . . . wait! . . . oh Jesus . . . now wait! . . . quick . . . put it back . . . now then . . . slowly . . . oh Jesus Christ . . . slowly! . . . wait!”
A man’s soft groan from the lawn behind the hedge now made me aware of the other presence, and I remained half paralyzed, fascinated yet suddenly sick nearly unto death at the sound of the Saviour’s name spoken thus, as if He had been stripped shamelessly naked by the hot urgency of her lips. “Wait, wait!”
she again implored, and a gentle sigh came from the man’s throat, and once more she continued her rhythmic whispering:
“Oh mercy . . . mercy . . . wait now, slowly! . . . oh Jesus . . . oh Christ . . . oh Christ . . . oh yes,
now!
. . . Oh mercy . . . mercy . . .
mercy . . .”
Abruptly then, in a prolonged and dwindling little sob, the voice died and all was silent, and I could hear nothing but the piping of frogs in the millpond and a dull thumping of horses against the stable stalls and the sound of my own heart racing madly, so loud that I thought surely it must be heard above the soughing of a night wind in the sycamore trees. I stood there unable to move, my spirit a shambles from chagrin and shock and fear. And I recall thinking wretchedly: This is what comes of being a nigger.
It ain’t fair. If I wasn’t a nigger I wouldn’t find out about things I don’t want to find out about. It ain’t fair.
Then after a long silence I heard the man’s voice, impassioned, tremulous: “Oh my love Em, my love, my love,
Em
my love!”
But there was no reply from Miss Emmeline and time crept by slowly and painfully like something crippled and old, causing my mouth to go dry and a numbness, premonitory with the clammy touch of death, to spread a tingling chill through my legs and thighs. At last I heard her voice again, placid now, composed, The Confessions of Nat Turner
145
but edged with contempt and bitterness. “Finally you’ve accomplished what you’ve been after for ages. I hope you’re satisfied.”
“Oh Em, my love, my
love
,” he whispered. “Let me—”
“Stay away from me!” she said, her voice rising now in the darkness. “Stay away from me, do you hear! If you touch me, if you say another word to me I’ll tell Papa! I’ll tell Papa and he’ll
shoot
you for
ravishing
your own cousin.”
“But oh my darling Em!” he protested. “You
consented
to—Oh
Em
, my love, my dear—”
“Just stay away from me!” she repeated, and again she fell silent and there was no sound for a long while until suddenly I heard her burst out in words touched with raw and abandoned despair:
“Oh God, how I hate you. Oh God, how I hate this place. Oh God, how I hate life. Oh
God
, how I hate God!”
“Oh don’t, Em!” he whispered in a frantic voice. “My love, my love, my love!”
“This God damned
horrible
place. I would even go back to Maryland and become a whore again, and allow the only man I ever loved to sell my body on the streets of Baltimore. Get your God damned hands
off
me and don’t speak another
word
to me again! If you do I’ll tell Papa! Now leave me, leave me, leave me,
leave me alone!
”
I have spoken elsewhere in this narrative, and more than once, of a Negro’s ubiquity and the learning he acquires, so often unbeknownst to white people, of the innermost secrets of their hearts. That evening was one such time, but it seemed to me, too, as I watched Miss Emmeline rise from the grass and in a rustle of taffeta disappear into the blue shadows of the house and then saw her cousin Lewis rise also and slouch off miserably through the night, that no matter how much covert knowledge a Negro possessed there were questions always left unanswered and a mystery, and that therefore he should not feel himself too wise or all-knowing. Certainly this was true in regard to Miss Emmeline, who, all the while I pondered her after that evening, became ever more wrapped in a dark and secret cloak. She did not speak another word to Lewis nor,so far as I was able to observe, did he dare speak to her; her threat, her admonition The Confessions of Nat Turner
146
triumphed, and some months later the poor man left Turner’s Mill entirely, going down to Louisiana to try to set himself up in sugar or cotton.
As for what I heard and saw that night, please do not consider my account simply—well,
mischievous
—for in truth such an episode had the effect of altering my entire vision of white women. For now the glow of saintliness which had surrounded Miss Emmeline in my mind dimmed, flickered out, disappeared; it was as if she suddenly stood disrobed and the fascination she held for me was of a different order, just as my hopeless and unending frustration was of a different kind though no less severe. For a while I was still maddened by her. I still worshiped her beauty from a distance but I could not help but be shaken to my guts by the words of blasphemy I had heard her utter, which now inflamed my thoughts, and like pinpoints of fire, pricked and agitated my very dreams. In my fantasies she began to replace the innocent, imaginary girl with the golden curls as the object of my craving, and on those Saturdays when I stole into my private place in the carpenter’s shop to release my pent-up desires, it was Miss Emmeline whose bare white full round hips and belly responded wildly to all my lust and who, sobbing “mercy, mercy, mercy” against my ear, allowed me to partake of the wicked and godless yet unutterable joys of defilement.
One day in October just after I became eighteen—a day recollected with that mysterious clarity of all days upon which transpire the greatest of events—I discovered the actual outlines of that future which Marse Samuel had envisioned for me all these weeks and months and years.
It was a Saturday, one of those dusty, ocherous autumnal days whose vivid weather never again seems so sweet and inviting after that youthful time of discovery: wood smoke and maple leaves blazing in the trees, an odor of apples everywhere like a winy haze, squirrels scampering for chinquapins at the edge of the woods, a constant stridor of crickets among the withering grass, and over all a ripe sunny heat edged with feathery gusts of wind smelling of charred oak and winter. That morning I had as usual risen early and gone to the shop, where I busied myself in loading some short two-by-fours on a barrow. Marse Samuel had only a few days before made his seasonal inspection of the field hands’ cabins, finding several of them in a state of sorry dilapidation. This day Goat and I would set up the two-by-fours as underpinning for a couple of new floors; afflicted by the summer’s seepage and rot, many of the old timbers had The Confessions of Nat Turner
147
dissolved into a kind of crumbling splintery sawdust, the cabins themselves then exposed to the raw damp earth and infested by field mice, roaches, ants, beetles, and worms. Although I had grown very fond of my apprenticeship as a carpenter and took pride in my growing mastery of the craft, I despised with a passion that part of my job which required me to work on repairs to the cabins. For one thing alone (and this in spite of all Marse Samuel’s efforts to teach a fundamental cleanliness) there was the odor—the stink of sweat and grease and piss and nigger offal, of rancid pork and crotch and armpit and black toil and straw ticks stained with babies’ vomit—an abyssal odor of human defeat revolting and irredeemable. “
Ai
, yi, yi,” Goat would whisper to the air in his German rattle, “dese people is not animals even,” and lifting a post or beam would make a convulsive face and spit on the floor. At such moments despite myself, the blood-shame, the disgrace I felt at being a nigger also, was as sharp as a sword through my guts.
But that bright morning, appearing at the shop door with a cheery smile, Marse Samuel rescued me before I had even gotten well along on my task. “Throw a saddle on Judy, Nat,” he said, “we’re off to Jerusalem.” Behind the look of humor on his face there was something secretive, conspiratorial,and he lowered his voice to say: “Come November third, Miss Nell and I will have been married for a quarter of a century. I must needs celebrate this anniversary with an appropriate gift.” He plucked me by the sleeve of my shirt, drawing me outside the shop. “Come now, let’s saddle Judy and Tom. I need company to share this splendid day. But you mustn’t breathe a word about the gift, Nat!”
He looked about him right and left, as if fearful of being overheard, then said in a whisper: “Someone sent news from over at the Vaughans’ place that a jeweler from Richmond will be passing today through town.”
I was of course wonderfully pleased—not alone because I was freed of an ugly job but because I liked riding so much and always stole a ride on the rare occasions I was given the opportunity, and also because Jerusalem itself was an exciting place for me; although it was no more than fifteen miles away, I had been there only once several years before and then the little village touched me with wonder despite the solemnity of our mission. That time too I had gone with Marse Samuel, but in a wagon, to help pick out a headstone for my mother’s grave. No cedar headboard for her, no weedfilled corner of some field splashed with tatterdemalion wildflowers. My mother, alone The Confessions of Nat Turner
148
among all the Negroes at Turner’s Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks (scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning in his coffin) with a marble headstone not one inch smaller nor a shade less white than theirs. I am no longer oppressed by the fact (as I was for so many years after I had grown to manhood and was able to reflect long and hard on these matters) that the name on that headstone was not a nigger woman’s forlorn though honest
“Lou-Ann” but the captured, possessed, owned “Lou-Ann Turner.”
We rode out the long front lane over a carpet of fallen leaves. At the entrance to the lane half a dozen field hands supervised by Abraham were clearing a drainage canal which rimmed a part of the land; Marse Samuel greeted them with a loud halloo, and they in turn stood erect and grinned in a servile show of doffed hats and loose-limbed droll shufflings, shouting back: “Mawnin’, massah!” and “Fare ‘ee well, Marse Sam!” I eyed them with aloof, privileged disdain. Their calls echoed behind us even as we set out through the woods by way of a leaf-strewn sunken wagon track leading toward the log road which would take us to Jerusalem. It was a gusty, brilliant morning alive with tossing branches and swirling eddies of leaves beneath us. Marse Samuel’s horse, a glittering black Irish hunter, quickly set the pace and took the lead and for half an hour or so we rode without speaking through the forest until finally, slackening his gait, Marse Samuel let me draw abreast and then I heard him say: “I hear that you are quite a young craftsman.” I found no way to answer these words which were both so pleasing and discomfiting, and I kept quiet, risking only a swift glance at Marse Samuel and catching his eye then shifting my gaze a bit. I saw a pleasant twinkly look on his face, a kind of half-smile as if he were on the verge of divulging a secret. He sat upon a horse with great style and presence; his flowing hair had become a silvery gray in the past few years, and more lines creased and webbed his face, adding to his dignity; for an instant I imagined I was riding in the company of a great Biblical hero—Joshua perhaps, or Gideon before the extermination of the Midianites. I could say nothing as usual; my awe of him was so great that there were moments when I could no more reply to him than if someone had sewn up my lips.