Confessions of Nat Turner Read online

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  midst thereof … Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark …

  Suddenly I found myself thinking: It is plain, yes, plain, plain.

  When I succeed in my great mission, and Jerusalem is destroyed, this man Cobb will be among those few spared the sword …

  Across the roof of the woods the wind rushed in hissing, majestic swoop and cadence, echoing in far-off hollows with the thudding sound of footfalls. Gray and streaked, boiling, in ponderous haste, the clouds fled eastward across the lowering heavens, growing darker now in the early dusk. After a bit I heard Hark begin to moan, a soft disconsolate wordless wail, filled with dread. For long minutes he moaned, swaying high in his tree.

  Then I heard the tap-tap-tapping of the ladder as they set it against the tree trunk and let him down.

  It is curious how sometimes our most vivid dreams take place when we are but half asleep, and how they occupy the briefest space of time. In the courtroom this day, dozing off for several seconds at the oaken table to which I had been bound by a length of chain, I had a terrifying dream. I seemed to be walking alone at the edge of a swamp at nightfall, the light around me glimmering, crepuscular, touched with that greenish hue presaging the onslaught of a summer storm. The air was windless, still, but high in the heavens beyond the swamp thunder grumbled and heaved, and heat lightning at somber intervals blossomed against the sky. Filled with panic, I seemed to be searching for my Bible, which strangely, unaccountably I had left there, somewhere in the depths and murk of the swamp; in fear and despair I pressed my search into the oncoming night, pushing now deeper and deeper into the gloomy marshland, haunted by the ominous, stormy light and by a far-off pandemonium of thunder. Try desperately as I might, I could not find my Bible. Suddenly another sound came to my ears, this time the frightened outcry of voices. They were the voices of boys, hoarse and half grown and seized with terror, and now instantly I saw them: half a dozen black boys trapped neck-deep in a bog of quicksand, crying aloud for rescue as their arms waved frantically in the dim light and as they sank deeper and deeper into the mire. I seemed to stand helpless at the edge of the bog, unable to move or to speak, and while I stood there a voice echoed out of the sky, itself partaking of that remote sound of thunder: Thy sons shall be given unto another people and The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long, so that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes …

  Screaming their mortal fright, black arms and faces sinking beneath the slime, the boys began to vanish one by one before my eyes while the noise of a prodigious guilt overwhelmed me like a thunderclap … “The prisoner will …” The sharp rapping of a mallet interrupted the horror, and I snapped awake with a start.

  “If the court please …” I heard the voice say, “it is a crying outrage. Sech behavior is a crying outrage! ”

  The mallet cracked down again. “The prisoner is cautioned to stay awake,” said another voice. This time the voice was more familiar: it was that of Jeremiah Cobb.

  “If the court please,” the first voice continued, “it is a disgrace to these assizes that the prisoner goes to sleep, and in the full view of this honorable court. Even if it is true that a nigger can’t stay awake any longer than—”

  “The prisoner has been duly cautioned, Mr. Trezevant,” Cobb said. “You may proceed with the reading of the deposition.”

  The man who had been reading my confessions aloud now paused and turned to stare at me, obviously relishing the pause, his own sparkling gaze, the total effect. His face was filled with hatred and disgust. I returned his gaze without faltering, though with no emotion. Smooth-featured, bullnecked, squinty-eyed, he now turned back to the papers, leaning forward aggressively on thick haunches and poking the air with a stubby finger. “ ‘The aforementioned lady fled and got some distance from the house,’” he recited, “ ‘but she was pursued, overtaken, and compelled to get up behind one of the company, who brought her back, and after showing her the mangled body of her husband, she was told to get down and lay by his side, where she was shot dead. I then started for Mr. Jacob Williams’s. . ’ ” I ceased listening.

  There must have been two hundred people in the jammed courtroom: in holiday finery, the women in silk bonnets and tasseled shawls, the men in black morning suits and patent leather shoes, stern, aggrieved, blinking and blinking, they crowded together on the straight-backed benches like a congregation of owls, silent now and attentive, breaking the steaming stillness with only a sneeze or a strangled, rattling The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  cough. The round iron stove sizzled and breathed in the quiet, filling the air with the scent of burning cedar; the room grew stifling warm and vapor clung to the windowpanes, blurring the throng of people still milling outside the courthouse, a row of tethered gigs and buggies, distant pine trees in a scrawny, ragged grove. Somewhere in the back of the courtroom I could hear a woman sobbing softly, but hoarsely and bitterly and with that particular rhythmic scratchy persistence of a female close to hysteria. Someone tried to shush her up, to no avail; the sobs continued, heartbroken, rhythmic, unceasing.

  For many years it had been my habit, when situated in a position where time grew heavy on my hands, to pray— often not so much beseeching God for special favor (for I had long since come to believe that He must surely frown upon too many pesky requests) as simply out of some great need to stay in touch with Him, making sure that I never strayed so far away that He would be beyond hearing my voice. The Psalms of David I knew by heart, almost all of them, and many were the times each day when I would stop in the midst of work and recite a Psalm half aloud, feeling that by so doing I did not bother or harass the Lord yet magnified Him all the same by adding one voice to the choir of ascending praise. Yet again as I sat in the courtroom, listening to the restless stir and fidget of bodies on the benches, the hacking and coughing, the woman’s persistent sobbing like a single thread of hysteria, the same feeling of apartness from God which I had felt early that morning, and for past days in numbers beyond counting, washed over me in a chill, desolating gush of anguish. Beneath my breath I tried to murmur a Psalm, but the words were flat, ugly, without meaning. The sense of His absence was like a profound and awful silence in my brain. Nor was it His absence alone which caused me this renewed feeling of despair, absence itself might have been endurable: instead it was a sense of repudiation I felt, of denial, as if He had turned His back on me once and for all, vanished, leaving me to mouth prayers, supplications, psalms of praise which flew not upward but tumbled hollow, broken, and meaningless into the depths of some foul dark hole. As I sat there I felt again almost overwhelmed by weariness, the weariness of hunger, but I forced my eyes to stay open and my gaze drowsed across the room toward Gray, still scribbling at his writing box, pausing now and then only to splash tobacco juice, with a dull pinging sound, into the brass spittoon at his feet. Nearby in the crowd an old hatchet-faced man sneezed enormously, again and again, the sneezes exploding violently from his nose in a shower of mist.

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  My mind turned inward upon my abandonment. I found myself thinking of some lines from Job: Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me; when his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness …

  Then suddenly, and for the first time, with the same kind of faint shivery chill at my spine and shoulders that announces the commencement of a fever—a prickle at my neck as if from the lighest passing touch of icy fingers—I began to fear the coming of my own death. It was not terror, it was not even panic; it was rather an apprehension and a faint one at that, an airless mounting sense of discomfort and uneasiness as if, knowing that I had eaten a piece of tainted pork, I was awaiting the cramps and the griping flux to come, the sweats and the gut-sickness.
/>   And somehow this sudden fear of death, or rather this tremulous and hesitant emotion which was more like a dull worry than fright, had less to do with death itself, with the fact that I must soon die, than with my inability to pray or make any kind of contact with God. I mean, it was not that I had wanted to beseech God because I was afraid of dying; it was rather that my own failure in praying to Him had caused me now this troublesome fear of death. I felt a trickle of sweat worm its humid way down the side of my forehead.

  Now I could tell that the man they called Trezevant was approaching the end of my confessions, the voice at once slowing its pace and rising in tone on a note of dramatic finality: “

  ‘… I immediately left my hiding place, and was pursued almost incessantly until I was taken a fortnight afterwards by Mr.

  Benjamin Phipps, in a little hole I had dug out with my sword, for the purpose of concealment, under the top of a fallen tree. On Mr. Phipps’s discovering the place of my concealment, he cocked his gun and aimed at me. I requested him not to shoot and I would give up, upon which he demanded my sword. I delivered it to him forthwith. During the time I was pursued, I had many hairbreadth escapes, which your time will not permit me to relate. I am here loaded with chains and willing to suffer the fate that awaits me…:’ ”

  Trezevant let the paper slip from his hand onto the table beside him and wheeled toward the six magistrates at the long bench, speaking quickly, almost without a pause, his next words surprisingly quiet but coming in such a rush that they seemed almost a continuation of my confessions: “If it may please this honorable court, the Commonwealth rests its case. All this here The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  is self-evident and self-explained. It would be very unseemly to indulge in a prolixity of words after the simple fact of sech a document—each bloody and horrifying phrase of which reveals the prisoner setting here as a fiend beyond any parallel, a hell-born and degenerate mass-murderer the likes of which has been unknown to Christendom. Now, this is no elaboration on the truth; this is truth itself, your Honors. Search the annals of all time, uh-huh, pry into the darkest and obscurest chronicles of human bestiality and you will search in vain for the equal of sech villainy. Attila the Hun that they aptly called the Scourge of God—him that ransacked Rome and held the very Pope in thrall—the Chinese Khan, nicknamed Genji, that with his rapacious Mongol hordes laid waste to the great empires of the Orient; the nefarious General Ross, all too well known to most of those older people here still living, the cruel Englishman that in the conflict of 1812 devastated our capital of Washington, D.C.—

  vipers in human clothing all, yet not a man amongst them that does not tower as a pillar of virtue andrectitude alongside the monster setting here this day, right here, in this court of law …”

  Bemused, the grand names tolling in my brain like chimes, I felt a kind of horrible, silent laughter welling up within me as the stupid-looking, bull-necked man propelled me thus into history.

  He again turned and gazed at me, squinty eyes filled with scorn and hatred. “Yeah, uh-huh, those men, your Honors, abominable as their deeds may have been, was yet capable of a certain magnanimousness. Even their vengeful and ruthless code demanded that they spare the lives of the young, the helpless, the old and the frail, the pitifully weak. Even their hard rules allowed them a smidgen of human charity; and wanton in their cruelty as they was, some spark of grace, some quality of mercy compelled them oftentimes to withhold the sword when it come to shedding the blood of helpless innocence, babies and so on.

  Your Honors—and I shall be brief, for this case needs no clamorous protestation—the prisoner here, unlike his bloody predecessors in evil, can lay hold on to no mitigation by reason of charity or mercy. No compassion, no memory of past kindnesses or of gentle and paternal care deviated him from the execution of these bleak deeds. Tender innocence and feeble old age—sech alike fell victim to his inhuman lust. A fiend incarnate, self-confessed, his diabolical actions now stand revealed in all their hideous lineaments. Your Honors! Your Honors! The people cry out for swift retribution! He must pay the supreme penalty with all due speed, that the stink of his depraved and hateful flesh be erased from the nostrils of a The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  shocked humanity! … Commonwealth rests its case.” He was finished. Suddenly I was aware that his eyes were spilling over with tears. He had made a prodigious effort.

  Dabbing at his eyes with the back of his hand, Trezevant sat down beside the whispering stove; there was no great sound in the courtroom—only a subdued mumbling and a shuffing of feet, a renewed outburst of hacking and coughing through which that solitary noise of hysterical female weeping rose and rose in a soft despondent wail. Across the room I saw Gray murmuring behind his hand to a cadaverous man in a black frock coat, then he quickly arose and addressed the bench. And immediately, with no shock, I realized he was now speaking in tones that he always reserved for court, not for a nigger preacher.

  “Honorable Justices,” Gray said, “Mr. Parker and I, speaking as counsel for the defendant, wish to commend our colleague Mr.

  Trezevant both for his persuasive and fluent reading of the prisoner’s confession and also for his splendid summation. We heartily concur and submit the defendant’s case to the court without argument.” He paused, turned to glance at me impassively, then continued: “However, one or two items, if it pleases your Honors—and I too shall try to be brief, agreeing with the able prosecutor that this case needs no clamorous protestation. Felicitous phrase! I would like to make it clear that Mr. Parker and I submit these items not by way of argument, nor out of the desire for mitigation or extenuation for the prisoner, who to our minds is every bit as black—no play on words intended!—as he has been painted by Mr. Trezevant. Yet if these assizes have been convened to apportion justice to the principals in this conspiracy, they have also been held in the spirit of inquiry. For this terrible event has given rise to grave questions—crucial and significant questions the answers to which involve the safety and the well-being and peace of mind of every white man, woman, and child within the sound of my voice, and far beyond, yes, throughout every inch and ell of this Southern empire where the white race and the black race dwell in such close propinquity. Not a few of these questions, with the capture and confinement of the prisoner here, have been answered to our considerable satisfaction. The widespread fear—nay, conviction—that this uprising was no mere local event but was part of a larger, organized scheme with ramifications spreading out octopus-like throughout the slave population universally—this terror has been safely laid to rest.

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  “Yet other questions perforce remain to trouble us. The rebellion was put down. Its maniacal participants have received swift and impartial justice, and its leader—the misguided wretch who sits before us in this courtroom—will quickly follow them to the gallows. Nonetheless, in the dark and privy stillness of our minds there are few of us who are not still haunted by worrisome doubts. Honesty, stark reality—naked fact!—compel us to admit that the seemingly impossible did, in truth, eventuate: benevolently treated, recipients of the most tender and solicitous care, a band of fanatical Negroes did, in truth, rise up murderously and in the dead of night strike down those very people under whose stewardship they had enjoyed a contentment and tranquillity unequaled anywhere among the members of their race. It was not a fantasy, not a nightmare! It was an actual happening, and its awful toll in human ruin and heartbreak and bereavement can be measured to this very day by the somber pall of mourning which hangs like a cloud here—

  here in this courtroom, two months and more after the hideous event. We cannot erase these questions, they refuse to dissolve like a mist, as the Bard put it, leaving not a rack behind. We cannot wish them away. They haunt us like the specter of a threatening black hand above the sweetly pillowed head of a slumbering babe. Like the memory of a stealthy footstep in a murmurous and peaceful
summer garden. How did it happen?

  From what dark wellspring did it flow? Will it ever happen again?”

  Gray paused and again turned toward me, the square ruddy face impassive, bland, regarding me as ever without hostility. I had grown only mildly surprised by his voice, filled as it was with eloquence and authority, free of the sloppy patronizing half-literate white-man-to-a-nigger tones he had used in jail. It was obviously he—not the prosecutor Trezevant—who was in charge of things. “How did it happen?” he repeated in a slow, measured voice. “From what dark wellspring did it flow? Will it ever happen again?” And he paused once more, then with a flourish toward the papers on the table, said: “The answer lies here, the answer lies in the confessions of Nat Turner!”

  Again he turned to address the bench, his words momentarily drowned out as an ancient toothless Negro woman fumbled with a clattering noise at the stove door, hurled in a cedar log; blue smoke fumed outward, and a popping shower of sparks. The door clanged shut, the woman shuffled away. Gray coughed, then resumed: “Honorable Justices, as briefly as I can I want to demonstrate that the defendant’s confessions, paradoxically, far The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  from having to alarm us, from sending us into consternation and confusion, should instead give us considerable cause for relief.