The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  kerblam! —it fetches up against the porch of a house, and there’s a little girl peaceably settin’ on the porch—and kerblam! the wagon plows right on across the porch and the poor little girl is mashed to death beneath the wagon wheels right before her stricken mother’s eyes. Matter of fact, I heard of this very thing happenin’ not long ago, somewhere up in Dinwiddie. Well, there’s a lot of boo-hooin’ around, and a funeral, and so on, but pretty soon thoughts inevitably turn back to that old wagon. How come it happened? How come little Clarinda got mashed to death by that old wagon? Who’s responsible for such a horrible dereliction? Well, who do you think’s responsible?”

  This last question was addressed to me, but I didn’t choose to answer. Perhaps it was boredom or exasperation or exhaustion, or all three. At any rate, I didn’t reply, watching him shift the quid in his jaws, then send a coppery jet of tobacco juice to the floor between our feet.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he went on. “I’ll tell you where responsibility lies. Responsibility lies clean and square with the farmer.

  Because a wagon is an in-an-i-mate chattel. A wagon can’t be held culpable for its acts. You can’t punish that old wagon, you can’t take it and rip it apart and throw it on a fire and say: ‘There, that’ll teach you, you miserable misbegotten wagon!’ No, responsibility lies with the unfortunate owner of the wagon. It’s him that’s got to pay the piper, it’s him that’s got to stand for whatever damages the court adjudicates against him—for the demolished porch and the deceased little girl’s funeral expenses, plus possibly whatever punitive compensation the court sees fit to award. Then, poor bugger, if he’s got any money left, he fixes the brake on the wagon and goes back and minds his land—a The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  sadder but a wiser man. Do you follow me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s clear.”

  “Well then, now we come to the heart of the matter—which is to say, an-i-mate chattel. Now, animate chattel poses a particularly tricky and subtle jurisprudential problem when it comes to adjudicating damages for loss of life and destruction of property.

  I need not say that the problem becomes surpassin’ tricky and subtle in a case like that of you and your cohorts, whose crimes are unprecedented in the annals of this nation—and tried in an atmosphere, I might add, where the public passions are somewhat, uh, inflamed to say the least. What’re you fidgetin’

  for?”

  “It’s my shoulders,” I said. “I’d be mighty grateful if you could get them to ease off these chains. My shoulders pain something fierce.”

  “I told you I’d have them take care of that.” His voice was impatient. “I’m a man of my word, Reverend. But to get back to chattel, there are both similarities and differences between animate chattel and a wagon. The major and manifest similarity is, of course, that animate chattel is property like a wagon and is regarded as such in the eyes of the law. By the same token—am I speakin’ too complex for you?”

  “No sir,” I said.

  “By the same token, the major and manifest difference is that animate chattel, unlike inanimate chattel such as a wagon, can commit and may be tried for a felony, the owner being absolved of responsibility in the eyes of the law. I don’t know if this seems a contradiction to you. Does it?”

  “A what?” I said.

  “Contradiction.” He paused. “I guess you don’t comprehend.”

  “Oh yes.” Actually, I simply hadn’t heard the word.

  “Contradiction. That means two things that mean one and the same thing at the same time. I reckon I shouldn’t be quite so complex.”

  I didn’t reply again. There was something about the tone of his The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  voice alone—the wad of tobacco had thickened it, making it sound moist and blubbery—that had begun to grate on my nerves.

  “Well, nem’mine that,” he went on, “I ain’t even goin’ to explain it.

  You’ll hear all about it in court. The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth. You ain’t a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that’s how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that’s how come you’re goin’ to be tried next Sattidy.”

  He paused, then said softly without emotion: “And hung by the neck until dead.”

  For a moment, as if temporarily spent, Gray took a deep breath and eased himself back away from me against the wall. I could hear his heavy breathing and the juicy sound his chewing made as he regarded me through amiable, heavy-lidded eyes. For the first time I was aware of the discolored blotches on his flushed face—faint reddish-brown patches the same as I had seen once on a brandy-drinking white man in Cross Keys who had rapidly fallen dead with his liver swollen to the size of a middling watermelon. I wondered if this strange lawyer of mine suffered from the same affliction. Sluggish autumnal flies filled the cell, stitching the air with soft erratic buzzings as they zigzagged across the golden light, mooned sedulously over the slop bucket, crept in nervous pairs across Gray’s stained pink gloves, his waistcoat, and his pudgy hands now motionless on his knees. I watched the leaves merging with the shadow shapes swooping and fluttering at the edge of my mind. The desire to scratch, to move my shoulders had become a kind of hopeless, carnal obsession, like a species of lust, and the last of Gray’s words seemed now to have made only the most dim, grotesque impression on my brain, the quintessence of white folks’ talk I had heard incessantly all my life and which I could only compare to talk in one of my nightmares, totally implausible yet somehow wholly and fearfully real, where owls in the woods are quoting price lists like a storekeeper, or a wild hog comes prancing on its hind legs out of a summer cornfield, intoning verses from Deuteronomy. I looked steadily at Gray, thinking that he was no better, no worse—like most white men he had a lively runaway mouth—and Scripture leaped to my mind like a banner: He The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  multiplieth words without knowledge, whoso keepeth his tongue keepeth his soul. But finally I said again only: “It was to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

  “Or, to switch around the parable,” he replied, “to separate the chaff from the wheat. But in principle you’re dead right, Nat.

  Point is this: some of the niggers, like yourself, were up to their eyes in this mess, guilty as sin itself with nothin’ to mitigate their guilt whatsoever. Pack of the other niggers, however—and I guess I don’t have to drive home this melancholic fact to you—

  was either youngly and innocently dragooned or mere tagalongs or they out-and-out balked at this crazy scheme of your’n. It was the owners of them niggers these assizes were designed to protect . . .”

  He was still talking now, and as he talked he removed a sheet of paper from his pocket, but I was no longer listening, attending rather to a sudden miserable, corrosive bitterness in my heart which had nothing at all to do with this jail or the chains or my aching discomfort or that mystifying, lonesome apartness from God which was still a bitterness almost impossible to bear. Right now I had this other bitterness to contend with, the knowledge which for ten weeks I had so sedulously shunned, buried in the innermost recesses of my mind, and which Gray had casually fetched up ugly and wriggling right before my eyes: them other niggers, dragooned, balked. I think I must have made a quick choked noise of distress in the back of my throat, or perhaps he only sensed this new anguish, for he looked up at me, his eyes narrowing again, and said: “It was them other niggers that cooked your goose, Reverend. That’s where you made your fatal error. Them others. You could not dream of what went on in their philosophy—” And for a moment I thought he was going to continue, to elaborate and embellish this idea, but instead now he had flattened the paper against the plank and was bending down above it, flattening and smoothing the document as he went on in his bland, offhand gar
rulous way: “So like I say, you can get a good idea from this list how little chaff there was amongst all that wheat. Now listen—Jack, property of Nathaniel Simmons. Acquitted.” He slanted an eye up at me—a questioning eye—but I didn’t respond.

  “Stephen,” he went on, “property of James Bell, acquitted.

  Shadrach, property of Nathaniel Simmons, acquitted. Jim, property of William Vaughan, acquitted. Daniel, property of Solomon D. Parker, discharged without trial. Ferry and Archer, property of J. W. Parker, ditto. Arnold and Artist, free niggers, The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  ditto. Matt, property of Thomas Ridley, acquitted. Jim, property of Richard Porter, ditto. Nelson, property of Benjamin Blunt’s estate, ditto. Sam, property of J. W. Parker, ditto. Hubbard, property of Catherine Whitehead, discharged without trial . . .

  Hell, I could go on and on, but I won’t.” He peered up at me again, with a knowing, significant glance. “If that don’t prove that these trials were fair and square right down the line, I’d like to know what does.”

  I hesitated, then spoke. “All it proves to me is that—a certain observance. The rights of property, like you done already pointed out.”

  “Now wait a minute, Reverend,” he retorted. “Wait a minute! I want to advise you not to get impudent with me. I still say it proves we run a fair series of trials, and I don’t need none of your lip to show me the contrary. You set here givin’ me a line of your black lip like that and you’ll wind up draggin’ more iron ruther than less.” The idea of even more restraint being unsettling to me, I immediately regretted my words. It was the first time Gray had shown any hostility, and it didn’t rest too well on his face, causing his lower lip to sag and a trickle of brown juice to leak from one corner of his jaws. Almost instantly, though, he had composed himself, wiped his mouth, and his manner again became conversational, casual, even friendly. Somewhere outside the cell, somewhere distant beneath the sparse November trees, I could hear a prolonged shrill woman’s cry, uttering jubilant words of which only one I could understand: my own name, N-a-a-t, the single syllable stretched out endlessly like the braying of a mule across the tumult and the hubbub and the liquid rushing of many voices. “Sixty-odd culprits in all,” Gray was saying. “Out of sixty, a couple dozen acquitted or discharged, another fifteen or so convicted but transported. Only fifteen hung—plus you and that other nigger, Hark, to be hung—

  seventeen hung in all. In other words, out of this whole catastrophic ruction only round one-fourth gets the rope.

  Dad-burned mealy-mouthed abolitionists say we don’t show justice. Well, we do. Justice! That’s how come nigger slavery’s going to last a thousand years.”

  Gray fussed with his lists and his papers. Then I said: “Mr. Gray, sir, I know I ain’t in much of a position to ask favors. But I fears I’m goin’ to need a little time to collect my thoughts afore I make that confession. I wonder if you’d be so kind as to let me alone here for a short time. I needs that time, sir, to collect my thoughts. To reconcile some things with the Lord.”

  The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  “Why sure, Nat,” he replied, “we got all the time in the world.

  Matter of fact, I could use that time too. Tell you what, I’ll take this opportunity to go see Mr. Trezevant, he’s the Commonwealth’s attorney, about all those shackles and irons they got on you. Then I’ll be back and we’ll get down to work.

  Half an hour, three-quarters do?”

  “I’m most grateful to you. Also, I hope I don’t pressure too much, but, Mr. Gray, I’ve done got powerful hungry since last night. I wonder if you could get them to fetch me a little bite to eat. I’ll be in a better fix for that confession if I had a little somethin’ on my stomach.”

  Rising, he rattled the bars, calling for the jailor, then turned back to me and said: “Reverend, you just say the word and it’s your’n.

  Sure, we’ll get you somethin’ to eat. Man can’t make a proper confessional ’thout some pone and bacon in his guts.”

  When he had gone and the door had closed me in again, I sat there motionless in my web of chain. The midafternoon sun was sinking past the window, flooding the cell with light. Flies lit on my brow, my cheeks and lips, and buzzed in haphazard elastic loopings from wall to wall. Through this light, motes of dust rose and fell in a swarmy myriad crowd and I began to wonder if these specks, so large and visible to my eye, offered any hindrance to a fly in its flight. Perhaps, I thought, these grains of dust were the autumn leaves of flies, no more bothersome than an episode of leaves is to a man when he is walking through the October woods, and a sudden gust of wind shakes down around him from a poplar or a sycamore a whole harmless, dazzling, pelting flurry of brown and golden flakes. For a long moment I pondered the condition of a fly, only half listening to the uproar outside the jail which rose and fell like summer thunder, hovering near yet remote. In many ways, I thought, a fly must be one of the most fortunate of God’s creatures. Brainless born, brainlessly seeking its sustenance from anything wet and warm, it found its brainless mate, reproduced, and died brainless, unacquainted with misery or grief. But then I asked myself: How could I be sure? Who could say that flies were not instead God’s supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching, forced by instinct to dine off sweat and slime and offal, their very brainlessness an everlasting torment?

  So that even if someone, well-meaning but mistaken, wished himself out of human misery and into a fly’s estate, he would only find himself in a more monstrous hell than he had even imagined—an existence in which there was no act of will, no The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  choice, but a blind and automatic obedience to instinct which caused him to feast endlessly and gluttonously and revoltingly upon the guts of a rotting fox or a bucket of prisoner’s slops.

  Surely then, that would be the ultimate damnation: to exist in the world of a fly, eating thus, without will or choice and against all desire.

  I recall one of my former owners, Mr. Thomas Moore, once saying that Negroes never committed suicide. I recollect the exact situation—hog-killing time one freezing autumn (maybe it was this juxtaposition of death against death’s cold season that made such an impression), and Moore’s puckered, pockmarked face purple with cold as he labored at the bloody carcass, and the exact words spoken to two neighbors while I stood by listening: “Every hear of a nigger killin’ hisself? No, I figger a darky he might want to kill hisself, but he gets to thinkin’ about it, and he keeps thinkin’ about it, thinkin’ and thinkin’, and pretty soon he’s gone off to sleep. Right, Nat?” The neighbors’

  laughter, and my own, anticipated, expected, and the question repeated—“Right, Nat?”—more insistent now, and my reply, with customary chuckling: “Yes sir, Marse Tom, that’s right, sure enough.” And indeed I had to admit to myself, as I thought more deeply about it, that I had never known of a Negro who had killed himself; and in trying to explain this fact I tended to believe (especially the more I examined the Bible and the teachings of the great Prophets) that in the face of such adversity it must be a Negro’s Christian faith, his understanding of a kind of righteousness at the heart of suffering, and the will toward patience and forbearance in the knowledge of life everlasting, which swerved him away from the idea of self-destruction. And the afflicted people thou wilt save, for thou art my lamp, O Lord; and the Lord will lighten my darkness. But now as I sat there amid the sunlight and the flickering shadows of falling leaves and the incessant murmur and buzz of the flies, I could no longer say that I felt this to be true. It seemed rather that my black shit-eating people were surely like flies, God’s mindless outcasts, lacking even that will to destroy by their own hand their unending anguish . . .

  For a long while I sat motionless in the light, waiting for Gray to return. I wondered if he would get them to bring me some food, after they took off the manacles and chains. I also wondered if I could pers
uade him to bring me a Bible, which I had begun to hunger for far down inside me with a hunger that made me ache.

  I shut out the clamor of the crowd from my mind, and in the The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  stillness the flies buzzed round me with an industrious, solemn noise, like the noise of eternity. Soon I tried to pray, but again as always it was no use. All I could feel was despair, despair so sickening that I thought it might drive me mad, except that it somehow lay deeper than madness.

  When dawn broke on that first morning, and cool white light began to fill the cell, Gray blew the lantern out. “Mercy, it’s gotten cold,” he said, shivering, buttoning his greatcoat. “Anyway—”

  And he paused, gazing at me. “You know, first thing today after the trial’s over I’m going to try to requisition you some winter clothes. ’Tain’t right for a body to set in a cell like this and freeze half to death. I didn’t pay it any nem’mine before, them clothes of your’n, it being so warm until now. But what you’ve got on there—what’s left of it—that’s plain old summer issue, ain’t it?

  Cotton? Osnaburg cloth? Pity, rags like that in this kind of weather. Now, about the confession, Nat, I got everything down that’s important; worked durn near all night on it too. Well, like I already hinted, this confession will, I’m afraid, comprise the evidence for the prosecution and there won’t be any other issue or issues at stake. I expect that I or Mr. W. C. Parker—that’s your defense attorney—will get up and make some kind of formal statement, but under the circumstances it can’t be much more than a plea that the judges carefully consider the evidence placed before them—in this case your full, free, and voluntary confession. Now, as I’ve already told you, before you sign it this mornin’ I wanted to read it out to you—”