Confessions of Nat Turner Read online

  “Hark,” I said. “That’s Hark, mastah.”

  “Yes, I would have known you. I would have known even had I not overheard you. ‘Feel sorry for a white man and the sorrow is wasted:’ Is that not what you said?”

  A shiver of fear, old and habitual and humiliating, passed through me, and despite myself I averted my eyes and blurted: “I’m sorry I said that, mastah. I’m dreadful sorry. I didn’t mean it, mastah.”

  “Poppycock!” he exclaimed. “Sorry that you said you’re not sorry for a white man? Come, come, preacher, you don’t mean that.

  You don’t mean that, do you?” He paused, waiting for an answer, but by now my distress and embarrassment had so unsettled me that I couldn’t even force a reply. Worse, I had begun to despise and curse myself for my own slowwitted inability to deal with the situation. I stood there licking my lips as I gazed out toward the woods, feeling suddenly like the most squalid type of cornfield coon.

  “Now don’t play dumb with me,” he repeated, the voice edged with a tone almost gentle, curiously ingratiating. “Your reputation precedes you, as it were. For several years now there has come to my attention wondrous bruit of a remarkable slave, owned at different times by various masters here in the vicinity of Cross Keys, who had so surpassed the paltry condition into which he had been cast by destiny that— mirabile dictu— he could swiftly read, if called upon to demonstrate, from a difficult and abstract work in natural philosophy, and in a fair hand inscribe page after page of random dictation, and had mastered his numbers as far The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  as a comprehension of simple algebra, and had so attained an understanding of Holy Scripture that such of those few adepts in the science of divinity as had examined his knowledge of the Bible came away shaking their heads in wonder at the splendor of his erudition.” He paused and belched. My eyes moved back again toward his, and I saw him wipe his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Rumor!” he resumed quickly. Now his voice had risen to a kind of impassioned runaway singsong, his eyes were wild and obsessed. “Astounding rumor to emerge from the backwoods of Old Virginny! Astounding as those rumors which in olden times came back from the depths of Asia—that at the source of the River Indus, I believe it was, dwelt a species of mammoth rat, six feet long, which could dance a lively jig while accompanying itself on a tambourine, and when approached would sprout heretofore invisible wings and fly to the topmost branch of the nearest palm tree. Rumor almost impossible to entertain! For to believe that from this downtrodden race, the very laws governing which bind it to an ignorance more benighted and final than death, there could arise one single specimen capable of spelling cat is asking rational intelligence to believe that balmy King George the Third was not a dastardly tyrant or that the moon is made of clabber cheese!” He had begun to jab his finger at me as he spoke, a long bony finger with hairy joints, sending it forth into my face in quick thrusts like a snake’s darting neck. “But beyond this, mind you, beyond this—to imagine this … this prodigy, this paragon, a Negro slave—oh, perish the vile word!—

  who had acquired the lineaments not just of literacy but of knowledge, who it was rumored could almost speak in the accents of a white man of breeding and cultivation; who, in short, while still one of this doomed empire’s most wretched minions, had transcended his sorry state and had become not a thing but a person-all this is beyond the realm of one’s wildest imagination. No. No! The mind boggles, refuses to accept such a grotesque image! Tell me, preacher, how do you spell cat?

  Come now, prove to me the reality of this hoax, this canard!” He kept jabbing his finger at me, the voice cajoling, amiable, the eyes still wintry-wild and obsessed. The smell of applejack was around him like a sweet vapor. “Cat!” he said. “Spell cat. Cat!”

  I had begun to feel surely that he was not being sarcastic, that he was somehow trying to express mad, hulking, terrifying feelings beyond anyone’s surmise. I felt blood pounding at my temples and the cold sweat of fear and anxiety clammy beneath my arms. “Don’t mock me, mastah, I pray you,” I breathed in a whisper. “Kindly please, mastah.Don’t mock me.” Time crept The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  past and we were both silent, gazing at each other, and the November wind boomed behind us in the forest, crashing like giant, diminishing footfalls across the graying waste of cedar and cypress and pine; for a moment my compliant lips trembled on a broken wisp of air, faltering— ’Ca-, Ca-”—and a grief-haunted sense of futility, childish, lifelong, nigger-black, welled up in me like a sigh of pain. I stood there sweating in the blustery wind, thinking: So this is the way it is. Even when they care, even when they are somehow on your side they cannot help but taunt and torment you. The palms of my hands slimy, and my mind roaring, thinking: I do not want to, but now, now if he forces me to spell the word I will have to try to kill him. I lowered my eyes again, saying more distinctly: “Don’t mock me, mastah, please.”

  Yet now Cobb, adrift in his brandy haze, seemed to have forgotten what he had said to me and turned away, staring madly toward the forest where the wind still thrashed and flayed the distant treetops. He clutched the bottle as if with desperation at a lopsided angle against his chest, and a trickle of brandy oozed out against his cloak. With his other hand he began to massage his thigh, holding the leg so tightly that above the knuckles the flesh grew bone-white. “Almighty God,” he groaned, “this everlasting mortal ache! If a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. God, God, my poor Virginia, blighted domain!

  The soil wrecked and ravaged on every hand, turned to useless dust by that abominable weed. Tobacco we cannot any longer raise, nor cotton ever, save for a meager crop in these few southern counties, nor oats nor barley nor wheat. A wasteland! A plump and virginal principality, a cornucopia of riches the like of which the world has never seen, transformed within the space of a century to a withering, defeated hag! And all to satisfy the demand of ten million Englishmen for a pipeful of Virginia leaf!

  Now even that is gone, and all we can raise is horses! Horses 1”

  he cried as if to himself now, stroking and kneading his thigh.

  “Horses and what else, what else? Horses and pickaninnies!

  Pichaninnies! Little black infants by the score, the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands! The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain-what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney’s infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard’s name!

  In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand! ”

  Groaning in pain now, fiercely stroking his thigh with one hand while with the other he elevated the bottle to his lips and drained it to the dregs, Cobb seemed, for once, oblivious of me, and I recall thinking that wisdom dictated my stealing out of his presence, if only I could find a decent way to do it. In scattered, disordered riot, all manner of emotions had run through me as he had spoken; not in years having heard a white man talk in this crazy fashion, I would not be honest if I did not admit that what he said (or the drunken gist of it, stealing in upon my consciousness like some unreal ghostly light) caused me to feel a shiver of awe and something else, dim and remote, which might have been a thrill of hope. But for some reason I cannot explain, both awe and hope swiftly retreated in my mind, dwindled, died, and even as I looked at Cobb, I could only smell the musky scent of danger—flagrant, imminent danger—and feel a sense of suspicion and mistrust such as I had rarely ever known. Why? It is perhaps impossible to explain save by God, who knows all things. Yet I will say this, without which you
cannot understand the central madness of nigger existence: beat a nigger, starve him, leave him wallowing in his own shit, and he will be yours for life. Awe him by some unforeseen hint of philanthropy, tickle him with the idea of hope, and he will want to slice your throat.

  Yet now before I could make any kind of move, a cracking noise sounded behind us as once again the shop door opened, swung wide, and drove itself with windy force against the wall. And as we turned then, Hark emerged with shirttail flying, scrambling away from the shop, plunging in panicky headlong flight toward the fields and the woods beyond. Legs churning, his great black body moved at a furious gallop; his eyes rolled white with alarm.

  Scant yards behind him now came Putnam, his leather apron flapping as he brandished a stick of lightwood, bawling at the top of his voice. “You, Hark, come back here! Come back here, you dad-dratted no-good an’mal! I’ll get hold of you at last, black bastard !” Fleet as a deer, Hark scampered across the open lot, bare black feet sowing puffs of dust, the barnyard cat fleeing his approach, goose and gander too, cumbersomely flapping their flightless wings, emitting dismal honking sounds as they waddled from his path. On he came past us, looking neither left nor right, eyes round and white as eggshells, and we could hear the voice The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  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!”

  The Confessions of Nat Turner

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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

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  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

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  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 The Confessions of Nat Turner