The Confessions of Nat Turner (12 page)

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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.

Needless to say, I am not suggesting that the prisoner’s deeds mean that we must not enforce stricter and more stringent laws against this class of the population. Far from it: if anything, this dreadful insurrection shows that stern and repressive measures are clearly indicated, not only in Virginia but throughout the entire South. Yet, your Honors, I will endeavor to make it plain that all such rebellions are not only likely to be exceedingly rare in occurrence but are ultimately doomed to failure, and this as a result of the basic weakness and inferiority, the moral deficiency of the Negro character.”

Gray picked up the confessions from the table, shuffled through the pages briefly, and continued: “Fifty-five white people went to a horrible death in this insurrection, your Honors, yet of this number Nat Turner was personally responsible for only one murder.
One murder
—this being that of Miss Margaret Whitehead, age eighteen, the comely and cultivated daughter of Mrs. Catherine Whitehead—also a victim of the insurrection—