Confessions of Nat Turner Page 11
Gray halted, and as if pausing for a moment’s breath, leaned forward with both hands against the table top, resting his weight there as he contemplated the magistrates at the bench. The courtroom was silent. Quiet, blinking in the steamy air, the people seemed to attend Gray’s every word, as if each syllable was atingle with the promise of some revelation which would assuage their fright and their anxiety and even the grief which stitched them together, one and all, like the hysteric thread of that woman’s sobbing anguish still persisting in the back of the The Confessions of Nat Turner
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courtroom, a single noise in the stillness, out of hand now, inconsolable. The manacles had made my hands numb. I flexed my fingers, felt no sensation. Gray cleared his throat, then continued: “Now then, honorable Justices, I beg to be permitted a philosophical leap. I beg to be permitted to connect these unassailable biological theories of Professor Mebane with the concepts of an even greater figure in human thought, namely, the great German philosopher Leibnitz. Now, you are all acquainted with Leibnitz’s concept of the monad. The brains of all of us, according to Leibnitz, are filled with monads. These monads, millions and billions of them, are nothing but tiny, infinitesimal mental units striving for development according to their pre-established nature. Now, whether one takes Leibnitz’s theory at its face value or more or less in a symbolical fashion, as I myself am wont to do, the fact remains—and it seems indisputable—that the spiritual and ethical organization of a single mind may be studied and understood from not alone a qualitative standpoint but from a quantitative standpoint likewise.
That is to say, that this striving for development—and I emphasize and underline that phrase—may in the end be only the product of the number of monads that a single mind is physically capable of accommodating.”
He paused, then said: “And here, your Honors, is the crux of the issue which, I submit, if we now examine it closely, can lead only to the most optimistic of conclusions. For with his unformed, primitive, almost rudimentary cranium, the Negro suffers from a grave insufficiency of monads, so grave indeed that this striving for development—which in other races has given us men like Newton and Plato and Leonardo da Vinci and the sublime inventive genius of James Watt—is unalterably hampered, nay, mutilated, in the severest degree; so that on the one hand we have the glorious musicianship of Mozart and on the other, pleasant but childish and uninspired croonings, on the one hand the magnificent constructions of Sir Christopher Wren and on the other the feeble artifacts and potsherds of the African jungle, on the one hand the splendid military feats of Napoleon Bonaparte and on the other—” He broke off again, with a gesture toward me. “On the other the aimless and pathetic and futile slaughter of Nat Turner—destined from its inception to utter failure because of the biological and spiritual inferiority of the Negro character!”
Gray’s voice began to rise. “Honorable Justices, again I do not wish to minimize the prisoner’s atrocious deeds, nor the need for stricter controls upon this portion of the population. But if this trial The Confessions of Nat Turner
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is to illumine us, it must also give us room for hope and optimism! It must show us—and I submit that the defendant’s confessions have done so already—that we must not run in panic before the Negro! So crudely devised were Nat’s plans, so clumsily and aimlessly put into effect …”
Again his words fade away on my ears, and I briefly shut my eyes, half drowsing, and again I hear her voice, bell-clear on that somnolent dusty Sunday half a year past: Oh me oh my, Nat, too bad for you. It’s Mission Sunday. This is Richard’s day that he preaches to the darkies! Alighting from the buggy, she casts me a sweet, rueful look. Poor Nat … And she is gone ahead of me through the dazzling clear light, the white linen swishing as she runs on tiptoe, disappearing into the vestibule of the church, where I too now enter, cautiously, quietly, stealing up the back ladder to the balcony set off for Negroes, hearing as I climb Richard Whitehead’s voice nasal and high-pitched and effeminate as always even as he exhorts that black sweating assembly among whom I will take my seat: And think within yourselves what a terrible thing it would be, after all your labors and sufferings in this life, to be turned into hell in the next life, and after wearing out your bodies in service here to go into a far worse slavery when this is over, and your poor souls be delivered over into the possession of the devil, to become his slaves forever in hell, without any hope of ever getting free from it … High above the white congregation, beneath the church roof where heat as if from an oven blooms stifling and damp amid a myriad swarming motes of dust, the Negroes, seventy or more from the surrounding countryside, sit on dilapidated backless pine benches or squat helter-skelter on the gallery’s creaking floor.
I cast a quick glance over the crowd and glimpse Hark and Moses, and I exchange looks with Hark, whom I have not seen for nearly two months. Intent, absorbed, some of the women fanning themselves with thin pine-bark shingles, the Negroes are gazing at the preacher with the hollow-eyed fixity of scarecrows, and as I regard them I can tell whom they belong to by what they wear: the ones from Richard Porter and J. T. Barrow and the Widow Whitehead, owners who are fairly rich, dressed cleanly and neatly, the men in cotton shirts and freshly laundered trousers, the women in printed calico and scarlet bandannas, some with cheap earrings and pins; the ones from poorer masters, Nathaniel Francis and Levi Waller and Benjamin Edwards, in dingy rags and patches, a few of the crouched men The Confessions of Nat Turner
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and boys without shirts, picking their noses and scratching, sweat streaming off their black backs in shiny torrents, the lot of them stinking to heaven. I sit down on a bench near the window in an empty space between Hark and an obese, gross-jowled, chocolate-colored slave named Hubbard, owned by the Widow Whitehead, who sports a white man’s cast-off frayed multicolored vest over his flabby naked shoulders, and whose thick lips wear even now, as he meditates conscientiously upon the sermon from below, a flatterer’s avid smirk. Beneath us, from a pulpit elevated above the assembled whites, in black suit and black tie, pale and slender, Richard Whitehead raises his eyes toward heaven and remonstrates to those of us squatting beneath the roof: If therefore you would be God’s free men in paradise, you must strive to be good, and serve him here on earth. Your bodies, you know, are not your own; they are at the disposal of those you belong to, but your precious souls are still your own, which nothing can take from you if it is not your own fault. Figure well then that if you lose your souls by leading idle, wicked lives here, you have gained nothing by it in this world and you have lost your all in the next. For your idleness and wickedness are generally found out and your bodies suffer for it here, and what is far worse, if you do not repent and alter your ways, your unhappy souls will suffer for it hereafter …
Black wasps soar and float through the windows, drowsily buzzing as they lurch against the eaves. I but barely listen to the sermon; from these same lips I have heard these same sour and hopeless words half a dozen times in as many years: they do not change or vary, nor do they even belong to the one who speaks them, having been composed rather by the Methodist Bishop of Virginia for annual dispensation by his ministers, to make the Negroes stand in mortal fear. That they have a profound effect on some of us, at least, I cannot doubt: even now as Richard Whitehead warms up to his subject, and his pale face dampens and begins to flush as if from the glow of promised hellfire, I can see around me a score of faces popeyed with black nigger credulity, jaws agape, delicious shudders of fright coursing through their bodies as they murmur soft Amens, nervously cracking their knuckles and making silent vows of eternal obedience. Yes, yes! I hear a high impassioned voice, then the same voice croons Ooooo-h yes, so right! And I shift my glance and see that this is Hubbard: obscenely he sways and wiggles on his thick buttocks, his eyes squeezed tightly shut in a trance of prayerful submission. Ooooh yes! he groans, a fat house The Confessions of Nat Turner
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nigger, docile as a
pet coon. And now I feel Hark’s big hand on mine, firm and and friendly and warm, and I hear his voice in a whisper: Nat, dese yere niggers goin’ git to heaven or bust dey britches. How you been, Nat?
Eat high off the hog at ole Widow Whitehead’s, I whisper back.
Afraid that Hubbard might overhear, I keep my voice pitched low: There’s a gun room there, Hark, it’s something enormous. She’s got fifteen guns locked up behind glass. And powder and shot enough to fill a shed. We get them guns and Jerusalem belongs to the niggers. Last March, a month before leaving the Travises’
for the Widow Whitehead’s, I told Hark of my plans—Hark and three others. Where’s Henry and Nelson and Sam?
Dey all here, Nat, Hark says. I knowed you’d be here, so I got dem to come too. Funniest daggone thing, Nat, lissen …
Already he has begun to chuckle, and I start to shush him up, but he continues: You know dat Nelson, his white folks is Baptists and goes to church down Shiloh way. So Nelson didn’ have no business goin’ to no Meth’dist meetin’, specially when dey was preachin’ to de niggers like now. So his massah—you know dat mean ol’ Marse Jake Williams what has one leg—he say:
“Nelson, how come you want to go to a Meth’dist meetin’ where they’s exhortin’ the niggers?” So Nelson he say: “Why, massah, dear massah, I feels right sinful. I feels I done bad things to you, and jes’ needs the fear of God in me so’s I can be your faithful nigger from now on!” For a moment Hark shakes and trembles with silent laughter, I fear that he might give us away. But then he is whispering: Now dat Nelson is a caution, Nat! Ever I seed a black man wanted to stick a knife in some white foks it’s dat ole Nelson. Dere he is, Nat, over yondah …
I have acquired the strongest faith in Hark, during the past six months slowly undermining his soppy childish esteem for white people, his confidence in them and his reliance upon them, digging in hard on the matter of the sale of his wife and little boy, which, I have insisted, was an irredeemable and monstrous act on the part of our master, no matter how helpless Marse Joe has claimed to be in the transaction; I have battered down Hark’s defenses, playing incessantly, almost daily, upon his sorrow and loss, coaxing and wheedling him into a position where he too must grasp, firmly and without qualm, one of the alternatives of freedom or death-in-life, until at last—revealing my plans for a bloody sweep through the countryside, the capture of Jerusalem, and a safe flight into the bosom of the Dismal Swamp where no white man can follow us—I see that my campaign has borne The Confessions of Nat Turner
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fruit: on a winter day in Travis’s shop, harassed to the breaking point by one of Putnam’s yowling, peevish harangues, he turns on the boy, brandishing in one hand a ten-pound crowbar, and with the glint of murder in his eye, saying nothing but presenting such an aspect of walled-up rage breaking loose that even I am alarmed, faces his quaking tormenter down once and for all. It is done, it is like once when I watched a great glorious hawk burst free from a snare into the purity of a wide blue sky. Hark is exuberant. Dat l’il sonabitch never run me up a tree again. Thus Hark becomes the first to join me in this conspiracy. Hark, then Henry and Nelson and Sam: trustworthy, silent, without fear, all men of God and messengers of His vengeance, these have shared already in the knowledge of my great design.
I see Nelson now across the packed gallery: an older man, fifty-four or fifty-five or fifty-six—as is common among Negroes, he himself is not quite sure—he sits oval-faced and impassive amidst this addled, distraught, intimidated throng, heavy-lidded eyes making him appear half asleep, a presence of unconquerable patience and calm, yet like a placid sea beneath which lie boiling vast convulsions of fury. A slick and shiny, elevated “S” the ragged length and width of a small garter snake, souvenir of old-time branding days, winds its way through the sparse gray hairs of his black chest. He can read a few simple words—where or how he has learned them I do not know. Weary and sick—close to madness—of bondage, he has had more than a half a dozen masters, the last and present one an evil-tempered, crippled woodcutter his same age who dares not whip him after his one adventure in this area (with no more emotion than if he had been slapping a gnat, Nelson struck him back full in the face, and said that if he tried it again he would kill him) but now in frightened retaliation and hatred works him like two, and feeds him on the nastiest kinds of leavings and slops.
Nelson had a wife and family once but can hope no longer to see them either together or often, scattered as they are all over three or four counties of the Tidewater. Like Hark he has little religion—and like Hark is often foul of mouth, which generally causes me some distress—but this does not really trouble me; to me he is a man of God: shrewd, slowmoving, imperturbable, his slumbrous eyes conceal a maddened defiance, and he will be a strong right arm. Nigger life ain’t worth pig shit, he once said to me; mought make a nigger worth somethin’ to hisself, tryin’ to git free, even if he don’t. And his counsel about strategy is many times inspired: Rock de places what’s got horses first, horses’ll git us amoverin’ fast. Or: Rock on a Sunday night, dat’s a The Confessions of Nat Turner
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nigger’s night for huntin’. Dem white cocksuckers hears a commotion and figger hit’s some niggers out treein’ a possum.
Or: Us jes’ gots to keep de niggers out’n dem cider presses. Let dem black bastids get at dat cider an’ brandy and us done lost de war . . . I look at Nelson and he looks back at me with sleeping, impassive eyes, betraying no recognition …
Now again I hear Hark’s voice in my ear: After church dey’s some kind of doin’s at de graveyard dat de niggers ain’t suppose to go to …
Yes, I say, I know. I feel a growing excitement, for I sense that on this day I may be able at last to outline and enlarge upon the details of my plans. I know. Where we goin’ to meet?
See, dey’s dem two logs over de creek down behin’ de church. I tol’ Henry and Nelson and Sam to meet us dere while de white foks was at de graveyard …
Yes, good, I say, then sssh-h, squeezing his hand, fearing that we will be overheard, and we both turn then, faking pious attention to the words rising toward us through the swarming wasps, up across the creaking and snapping rafters: Poor creatures! You little consider when you are idle and neglectful of your masters’ business, when you steal and waste and hurt any of their substance, when you are saucy and impudent, when you are telling them lies and deceiving them, or when you are stubborn and sullen and will not do the work you are told to do without chastisement—you do not consider, I say, that what faults you are guilty of towards your masters and mistresses are faults done against God Himself, who has set your masters and mistresses over you in His own stead, and expects that you would do for them just as you would do for Him. Do not your masters, under God, provide for you? And how shall they be able to do this, to feed and to clothe you, unless you take honest care of everything that belongs to them? Remember that God requires this of you. And if you are not afraid of suffering for it here, you cannot escape the vengeance of Almighty God, who will judge between you and your masters, and make you pay severely in the next world for all the injustice you do them here.
And though you could manage so cleverly as to escape the eyes and hands of man, yet think what a dreadful thing it is to fall into the hands of the living God, who is able to cast both soul and body into hell …
And now through the soft moaning of the black crowd, through The Confessions of Nat Turner
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Hubbard’s fat sighs of pleasure and the murmur and fidget and the Amens gently aspirated in gasps of dumb rapture and desire, I hear another voice behind me and very near, almost at my shoulder, a harsh rapid low muttering, almost incoherent, like that of a man in the clutch of fever: … me some of dat white stuff, yas, get me some of dat white stuff, yas … And without turning—suddenly unsettled and afraid to turn; rather, afraid to confront that obsessed and demented face, the mashed-in nose and deformed and jutting jaw and bulging eyes with their gaze m
urderous, fixed, dimbrained, pure—I know whose voice it is: Will’s. I am seized with a quick displeasure. For although like Nelson he has been driven half crazy by slavery, Will’s madness is not governed by silence and some final secret control, but has the frenzied, mindless quality of a wild boar hog cornered hopelessly in a thicket, snarling and snapping its brutish and unavailing wrath. Age twenty-five or a little more, a chronic runaway, he once got nearly to Maryland, sustained in his flight not so much by intelligence as by the same cunning and endurance of those little animals native to the swamps and woods in which he roamed for six weeks, before being overhauled and delivered to his present master, a nigger-breaker named Nathaniel Francis who has beaten him into some kind of stunned and temporary submission. He crouches behind me now, muttering to whom it is impossible to tell—to himself, to no one, to anyone at all. Ole white cunt, he whispers, and in a sort of demented litany repeats it over and over.
Will’s presence disturbs me, for I want no part of him, either now or in my future plans. And I am afraid that he will discover what’s afoot. Rather than finding any value in his fractiousness, his rage and rebellion, I am filled with distrust, instinctively put off by the foaming and frenzied nature of his madness. Besides, there is one other thing, evident enough now in that obsessive incantation: I know from hearsay that he broods constantly upon rape, the despoliation of white women masters his dreams night and day. And already—and Hark and Nelson and the others have sworn to obey—I have forbiddenthis kind of violation. It is God’s will, and I know it, that I omit such a vengeance: Do not unto their women what they have done to thine …
I banish Will from my mind and as my eyes rove around the gallery I see the other two in whom I have placed my trust.