So that is how it all began. My little inner group of followers were excited about such a plan when first I outlined it to them.
Bedeviled, torn apart by hatred, sick unto death of bondage, they would have cast their lot with the most evil ha’nt or phantom of the woods to be shut forever of the white man’s world. They had nothing more to lose. They were passionately eager to set out with me any night, any day. “When?” said their eyes as I told them of my conception. “
When
, man?” Nelson asked bluntly, and I saw Runaway Sam’s eyes glitter with the wildest agitation as he muttered: “Shit! C’mon, le’s
go
.” But I was able to calm them all and—counseling infinite cunning, slowness, and The Confessions of Nat Turner
266
patience—quickly put their excited hopes to rest. “I’ve got to receive the last sign,” I explained to them. “They’s plenty time,” I added.“
Plenty time
.” And this was a phrase I found myself repeating over and over during the following months.
For what they did not know was that behind all my talk of simple flight was a grander design involving the necessity of death, cataclysm, annihilation. They could not know of my vision nor that a true escape into freedom must include not a handful of Negroes but many, and that the blood of white men must flow on the soil of Southampton. They could not know then, because my lips were sealed. But the Lord was about to remove that seal, and they would soon know—of that I was certain.
(Fragment of a memory.) It is the late spring of the next year after that gray winter day when I discovered the map. The library again. Early evening. June. Once more I have been hired out to Mrs. Whitehead, who has set me to installing new pine bookshelves against the remaining bare library wall. This is a job I enjoy—cutting the mortices and tenons and joining them, then boring straight through both pieces of wood with a cross-handled auger in order to pin them together with nails. Rising, shelf succeeds shelf. I work steadily through the twilight, laboring at a casual, rhythmic, unhurried pace. The weather is balmy, the air outside pollen-hazy, filled with the chattering of birds. That pungent smell of wood shavings which I love surrounds me as if in a piney sawdust mist, invisible and sweet. For some reason my plans for the future, which usually occupy my mind during such work, are far from my thoughts. With pleasure I think of the barbecue planned for the following Sunday in the woods. My four close disciples will be there, and in addition to them, three more Negroes whom Nelson and Sam have recruited to my scheme of flight to the Dismal Swamp. Nelson feels that they will make great converts. One of these, an older man named Joe, has told me that he wants to be baptized and I look forward to the rites with satisfaction. (It is rare enough that I encounter a Negro with spiritual aspirations, much less one who might also become, potentially, a murderer.) As I brood congenially on these matters, the auger suddenly slips from my grasp and the sharp point embeds itself in the fleshy under part of my left thumb. I give a gasp of pain. Almost immediately when I remove the point of the drill I see that the damage is slight. The pain too is not severe but I seem to be bleeding copiously. It has happened before.
Unconcerned, I commence to bind up my hand with a cotton rag I carry in my tool box.
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267
Now even as I bandage myself, I hear a voice from the hallway—Mrs. Whitehead’s: “But I shan’t let you go on that hayride, darling, without your cloak!” The tone is gently solicitous. “It’s not full summer yet, dear, and nights can still get cold. Who’s carrying you to the party?”
“Tommy Barrow,” calls Miss Margaret, close by me in the hallway. “Oh, I’ve
got
to find that poem! I’ll prove it to her yet.
Where did you say the book would be, Mother?”
“On the far shelf, darling!” comes the reply. “Right next to the little whatnot near the window.”
Margaret bursts into the library. Most of the time she is away at school, I have seen her only half a dozen times before.
Concerned as I am with swathing my wound I am nonetheless unable to keep from staring at her erect, graceful, seventeen-year-old back. Nor is it the glossy tumbling mass of chestnut-brown hair that captures my attention, nor the freckled young shoulders, nor the slim waist pinched tight by the first corset it has ever been my necessity to see; it is the fact that she wears no skirt at all, only the white frilly anklelength pantalettes that the unworn skirt is destined to conceal and which, had I not been a Negro and therefore presumably unstirred by such a revealing sight, she would never be so immodest to flaunt thus beneath my nose. Garbed to the ankles, she is nowhere near naked, yet the white pants make her seem wantonly unclothed. I am filled with abrupt confusion, hot panic seizes me:Do I keep looking or do I avert my eyes? I avert my eyes—not, however, before trying to avoid, unsuccessfully, a glimpse of the dim shadowed cleft between the round promontories where fabric clings tightly to her firm young bottom.
“I just know the word is
endurance
,” she says aloud, as if to her mother again, or to space. “I’ll prove it to her yet!” She has seized a book from the shelf and now, turning about to face me where I still half squat on the floor, thumbs in a flurry through the pages. She whispers to herself, inaudibly.
“
What
, dear?” Mrs. Whitehead asks from afar.
But now Margaret ignores her mother’s call. A flush of triumph comes to her face and her voice is a little squeal. “
Endurance!
I knew that was the word. Not
forbearance
at all! I told Anne Eliza Vaughan twenty times if I told her once what the right word was, The Confessions of Nat Turner
268
but she wouldn’t
believe
me. Now I shall
prove
it.”
“What, dear?” cries the mother’s voice again. “I can’t hear you!”
“
I told
—” Margaret begins to shout but then breaks off, giving a little shiver of annoyance. “Oh, nothing,” she says to the empty air, and with perfect naturalness and poise continues—in her exuberant conquest—to talk to the only available listener: me.
“Listen!” she says. “Now just listen!
“The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.
“Wordsworth!” she says to me. “
There
, I’ve won a dime from Anne Eliza Vaughan! I told the silly girl it was
endurance
not
forbearance
but she wouldn’t believe me. And I shall win another dime!”
I look up in a quick furtive glance from the ragged bandage I am pressing against my hand, catch sight of the pantalettes again, turn my eyes away. I sweat. A vein pulses at my temple. I feel split upon a sudden and savage rage. How could she with this thoughtlessness and innocence provoke me so? Godless white bitch.
“Oh, Nat, maybe you can tell me the other. And we’ll share the dime! Yes, we’ll share it!” she exclaims. “Mother says you know so much about the Bible, maybe you can answer. I’ve bet Anne Eliza that the line that goes something about ‘our vines have tender grapes’ is from the Bible and she said it was from
Romeo
and Juliet
. Now, tell me, Nat, isn’t it from the Bible? Just
isn’t
it?”
I shrink from looking up and continue to gaze at my right hand clasped tightly upon the other. The rage within me fades away.
Controlling my voice I say finally, after a long hesitation: “You right, young missy. That part’s from Solomon’s Song. It goes:
Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines: for our
vines have tender grapes. My beloved is mine and I am his: he
The Confessions of Nat Turner
269
feedeth among the lilies
. That’s the way it goes. So you win a dime, missy.”
“Oh,
Nat!
” she cries suddenly. “Your
hand!
It’s
bleeding!
”
“It aint anything, missy,” I reply. “It’s just a little bitty cut. Some blood, that don’t mean anything.”
Now I sense (see? feel?) the white pantalettes as she moves close to the place where I am crouched, and reaching down with a swift but gentle motion of her fingers, takes hold of my unwounded right hand. That soothing many-fingered delicacy—it is like scalding water and with a quick jerk I pull my hand away.
“It ain’t anything!” I protest. “It ain’t anything, missy, I
promise
you!”
She withdraws her hand and stands motionless beside me. I listen to her breathing. Then after a pause I hear her murmur softly: “Well, all right, Nat, but you must not fail to take care of it.
And thank you about the Bible. I’ll be sure to give you five pennies as soon as I get them from Anne Eliza Vaughan.”
“Yes, missy,” I say.
“Do take care of that hand, too.
Do
.”
“Yes, missy.”
“Or I won’t give you the five pennies, mind you that!”
“What
are
you up to, little Miss Peg?” I hear the mother call. “It’s seven already. They’ll be here! You’ll be late for the hayride!
Hurry!”
“I’m coming, Mother!” she cries. “Bye-bye, Nat!” Gaily. Then she flits away and I watch the pantalettes receding, the firm young flesh beneath nearly visible in a pink nimbus behind teasing cotton, a translucent concealing infuriating veil. The fragrance of lavender hovers, fades, is gone. I stay crouched there on the floor in the balmy pine-smelling dusk. Outside birds cheep and chirrup, mad with spring. Through my wrists the blood rushes like a millrace. Again the rage returns and I cannot tell why my heart is pounding so nor why my hatred for Margaret is, if anything, deeper than my hatred for her mother.
“
God damn her soul
,” I whisper—not an oath but a supplication.
“
God damn her soul
,” I say again, hating her even more than The Confessions of Nat Turner
270
seconds before, or maybe less—thinking of those ruffled white pantalettes—not knowing which, less or more.
While yanking a borning calf from its mother’s womb Moore suffered a bizarre and fatal accident: the cord parted abruptly, sending my owner in a sprawl backward until his head fetched up against a post and cracked open like a melon. Naturally he was good and drunk when the catastrophe happened. He lingered for half a day before he expired—a mortal leave-taking that plunged me into several seconds’ grief from which I emerged feeling the greatest consternation. Few things are so ominous to a Negro as a death in the family to which he belongs, especially the death of a paterfamilias. Too often simple mad warfare breaks loose among the covetous heirs all pouncing down upon the property, and on will-reading day many a piece of property has found himself chained to a wagon bound for, say, Arkansas, sold off to some rice or cotton demesne by a relative who kept him perhaps as long as a short afternoon before handing him over to a nigger-hustler lurking like a buzzard close by. I myself was overpowered by this dark fear for a while; it went hand in hand with the intolerable notion that being sold would prevent me from fulfilling the great mission the Lord had ordained, and a few weeks passed during which my worry and gloom were almost intolerable. However, it was not long before Joseph Travis came a-courting Miss Sarah and promptly won her hand. Thus such property as I embodied, having been assigned and devised to Moore’s heirs (or heir, in this case the snot-nosed Putnam), was transferred through marriage to Travis.
The unkempt household in which I had lived for nine years now dissolved, decamping to those more pleasant acres nearby, where—joining Hark in the cozy little alcove behind the wheel shop—I dwelt during that crucial and climactic time whose quality I tried to convey early on in this history.
These final two years or so (it may be recalled my telling) were all in all the most free and comfortable I had spent since I left Turner’s Mill. I do not mean to say that I found myself at total leisure. Travis certainly gave me enough to do around the wheel shop and he kept me occupied at chores which, happily, exercised my ingenuity rather than my back. I had of course worked for Travis several times in the past, so I sensed the high value he placed upon my gifts as a craftsman. At risk of gross immodesty, I must say that I was fairly well convinced that my presence in Miss Sarah’s dowry helped cause Travis to woo her in the first place. I rigged up all sorts of artful contrivances for The Confessions of Nat Turner
271
Travis’s shop—a pole saw that could be worked with a wooden foot treadle, a new bellows for his forge, and a cluster of beautiful ashwood tool racks which Travis prized beyond anything in the shop and elicited from his otherwise laconic lips the most dazzling sort of praise. Thus supplied with a resident genius, my new owner, unlike Moore, was in no great sweat to hire out my body, and save for a few occasions that Mrs.
Whitehead prevailed upon him to rent me to her (or, once or twice, when stumps needed pulling, to trade me for a yoke of her phenomenal oxen) I remained calmly in servitude with Travis, counting the days. Yet inside I was burning. Burning! Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of my life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them?
Joseph Travis was at bottom a decent and sympathetic man; this I am compelled to admit despite the reservations I harbored about him during the many periods in the immediate past when he had hired me from Moore. Travis was not a native of Southampton. For reasons unknown, reversing the usual pattern of migration from east to west, he had come to the county from the wild slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A craggy, hollow-cheeked, sandy-haired loner, he had the stormy look and mood of the wilderness about him, and the insanity of solitary months and years often flickered across his face; he appeared to me then a cranky, unpredictable, snarling, intolerant creature, venting his frustration on Negroes with rotten food, hard labor, and somber, savage jibes. Hark’s life with Travis had been, in those early days, anything but pleasant. Then too, during that time, he had committed the unpardonable: he had sold Hark’s wife Tiny and their little boy south, preferring to endure Hark’s reproachful glances and sullen grief than to be faced with two extra mouths which it might have been a strain but hardly a killing sacrifice to feed. Maybe it was his mountain heritage, his lack of experience with Tidewater ways, that caused him to do something that no truly respectable slaveowner would do. It had become plain to me that white men reared outside the tradition of slavery often made the most callous taskmasters—what hordes of corrupt and ruthless overseers hailed from Connecticut and New Jersey! Who knows too but whether Travis’s harsh morality did not tell him that since Hark and his woman had merely