The Confessions of Nat Turner (14 page)

I am silent, and I feel my heart pounding at a great rate, although I do not know the reason for this.

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And Mama said you were going. Going back to the Travises. And
that makes Margaret so sad, because she won’t have anyone to
talk to all summer. But they’re only a few miles away, Nat. You
will come by sometime, won’t you, on a Sunday? Even though
you won’t be carrying me to church any more? I’ll just feel lost
without your society—I mean reciting to me from the Bible, I
mean really knowing it so deeply and all
. . . On she prattles and chirrups, her voice joyful, lilting, filled with Christian love, Christian virtue, Christ-obsessed young awe and discovery. Did I not think that Matthew was of all the Gospels the most
sublime
?

Was not the doctrine of temperance the most
noble, pure
, and
true
contribution of the Methodist Church? Was not the Sermon on the Mount the most
awe-inspiring
message in the entire world? Suddenly, my heart still pounding uproariously, I am filled with a bitter, reasonless hatred for this innocent and sweet and quivering young girl, and the long hot desire to reach out with one arm and snap that white, slender, throbbing young neck is almost uncontrollable. Yet—strange, I am aware of it—it is not hatred; it is something else. But what? What? I cannot place the emotion. It is closer to jealousy, but it is not even that. And why I should feel such an angry turmoil over this gentle creature baffles me, for save for my one-time master Samuel Turner, and perhaps Jeremiah Cobb, she is the only white person with whom I have experienced even one moment of a warm and mysterious and mutual confluence of sympathy. Then all at once I realize that from just that sympathy, irresistible on my part, and unwanted—a disturbance to the great plans which this spring are gathering together into a fatal shape and architecture—arises my sudden rage and confusion.

Why are you going back to the Travises, Nat, so soon?
she says.

Well, missy, I was just hired out for two months by Marse Joe.

It’s what they call trade-fair-and-square.

What’s that? she says. Trade . . . what?

Well, missy, that’s why I’ve been working for your mama. Marse
Joe he needed a yoke of oxen to pull stumps and Miss Caty she
needed a nigger to work on her new barn. So Marse Joe traded
me for two months for a yoke of oxen. That’s what they call
trade-fair-and-square.

She makes a thoughtful humming noise.
Hm-m. A yoke of oxen.

I mean, and you . . . That seems so very strange
. She is silent The Confessions of Nat Turner

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for a moment. Then:
Nat, why do you call yourself a nigger like
that? I mean it sounds so—well, so sad somehow. I much prefer
the word darky. I mean, after all, you’re a preacher . . . Oh, look
yonder, Nat, the church! Look at how Richard has gotten one
whole side whitewashed already!

Now again, the soft reverie flowing away in my mind like smoke, I heard Gray’s voice as he addressed the court: “. . . are doubtless familiar, perhaps actually conversant, with an even more important work by the late Professor Enoch Mebane of the University of Georgia at Athens, a study of still more commanding stature and exhaustive research than the opus by Professors Sentelle and Richards just quoted. For whereas Professors Sentelle and Richards have demonstrated, from a theological standpoint, the innate and inbred, indeed the
predestined
deficiency of the Negro in the areas of moral choice and Christian ethics, it remained the achievement of Professor Mebane to prove beyond the iota of a doubt that the Negro is a
biologically
inferior species. Certainly this court is aware of Professor Mebane’s treatise, therefore I shall refresh your honorable minds of its contents only in the barest outlines: videlicet, that all the characteristics of the nigger head—the deeply receding jaw, measurable by what Professor Mebane has termed the gnathic index; the sloping, beetle-browed cranium, with its grotesque and brutelike width between ear and ear and its lack of vertical lobal areas that in other species allow for the development of the most upwards-reaching moral and spiritual aspirations; and the extraordinary thickness of the cranium itself, resembling not so much that of any human but of the lowest beasts of the field—that all these characteristics fully and conclusively demonstrate that the Negro occupies at best but a middling position amongst all the species, possessing a relationship which is not cousin-german to the other human races but one which is far closer to the skulking baboon of that dark continent from which he springs . . .”

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.