The Confessions of Nat Turner (22 page)

“God blast!” he says finally, with baffling glee, and lets out a soft happy cry, totters a bit, and fetches his booted foot up against the remains of a decayed bucket, which flies off in splinters across the yard. In dismay, a great old hen squawks, flees toward the shed, and a cloud of snuff-brown barnyard manure floats aloft like the finest powder, amid tiny pinfeathers bursting everywhere. “God blast!” McBride says again, in a kind of low shout, and he is off and away, limping, in the direction of his own house down the slope.
God blast!

Like something shriveled, I draw up within myself underneath the kitchen, the book shut now as I clutch it to my chest. The smell of cooking greens is still warm and pungent on the air. Presently I hear my mother’s feet on the floor above, the broom whisking against the boards, her voice again, gentle, lonesome, unperturbed and serene as before.

“For Jesus come and lock de do’

An’ carry de keys away . . .”

On another morning later that same month, the rain comes down in great whistling cataracts, whipped into spray by a westerly wind and accompanied by cracklings of lightning and thunder.

Fearful for the book’s safety, I rescue it from its precarious shelf beneath the house and steal up the kitchen steps, taking refuge in the pantry behind a barrel of cider. Outside the storm rages but there is enough light to see by, and I crouch in the The Confessions of Nat Turner

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apple-sweet damp with the book thrown open upon my knees.

The minutes pass, my legs grow numb beneath me. The book with its ant-swarm of words is like an enemy, malevolent, wearisome, incomprehensible. I draw taut, crucified on a rack of boredom, yet I know I am in the presence of a treasure; lacking the key to unlock it, I possess that treasure nonetheless, and so with grubby fingers and gritty eyes I persevere . . .

All at once, very close to me, there is a noise like a thunderclap and I give a jump, fearful that the house has been hit by lightning. But now as I look up I see that it is only the great cedar door to the pantry which has been thrown violently open, flooding the room with a yellowish chill light; at the entry stands the tall, stoop-shouldered, threatening shape of Little Morning, his bloodshot eyes in a leathery old mean wrinkled face gazing down at me with fierce indignation and rebuke. “Dar, boy!” he says in a hoarse whisper. “Dar! I done foun’ you out at last!
You
de one dat
stole
dat book, lak I figured all de time!” (How could I have known then what I realized much later: that with suspicion founded upon the simplest envy, he had been spying on me for days? That this creaking old man, simple-headed and unlettered and in the true state of nigger ignorance for a lifetime, had been sent into a fit of intolerable jealousy upon his realization that a ten-year-old black boy was going through the motions of learning to read. For that was the uncomplicated fact of the matter, doubtless dating from the time when, correcting him, watching him haul up from the cellar a keg of MOLASSES instead of the keg of OIL he had been ordered to fetch, I had answered his haughty
How you know
? with a superior
Be-cause it say so
, leaving him flabbergasted, spiteful, and hurt.) Before I can reply or even move, Little Morning has my ear pinched between his thumb and forefinger, and in this way hoists me to my feet, propelling me out of the pantry and into the kitchen, pulling me forward and with an insistent pinch and tug stretching the skin of my skull as he stalks down the hallway. In helpless tow, I flounder after him, the book clutched against my chest. The tail of Little Morning’s frock coat flaps in my face: the old man utters hoarse indignant breaths,
huffanapuff huffanapuff,
mingled with threats chilling, dire: “Marse Samuel gwine fix
you,
boy! Marse Samuel gwine send yo’ thievin’ black soul to Georgia

!” Fiercely he yanks at my ear, but the pain seems nothing obliterated by terror so vast that the blood rushes down in red sheets before my eyes. I half swallow my tongue and I hear my voice, strangled, going
aaaagh, aaaagh, aaaagh
. On we press The Confessions of Nat Turner

122

down the dark hallway, past ceiling-high windows streaming with rain, lit by lightning flashes; I regard the heavens with twisted neck and eyes upside down. “I
knowed
you was de rascally little debbil dat stole it !” Little Morning whispers. “I knowed it all de time!”

We burst into the great hall of the house, a part of the mansion I have never seen before. I glimpse a chandelier blazing with candles, walls paneled in glossy pine, a stairway winding dizzily upward. Yet my impression of these things is brief, fleeting; filled with horror, I realize that the lofty room is crowded with white people, almost the entire family—Marse Samuel and Miss Nell and two daughters, Miss Elizabeth, one of Marse Benjamin’s sons, and now Marse Benjamin himself, clad in a glistening wet rain cape as he plunges through the front door in a spray of water and a gust of cold wind. Lightning crackles outside and I hear his voice above the drumming of the rain. “Weather for the ducks!” he shouts. “But, Lord, it smells like money! The pond’s spilling over!” There is a moment’s silence and the door slams shut, then I hear another voice: “What have we got, Little Morning?” The old man lets go of my ear.

“Dat book,” he says. “Dat book dat was stole! Dis yere de robbah dat done it!”

Nearly swooning with fright, I clutch the book to my chest, unable to control my voice and the sobs welling up
aaaagh aaaagh
from deep inside. I would weep, but my anguish is in a realm beyond tears. I yearn for the floor to open and swallow me. Never have I been this
close
to white people, and their nearness is so oppressive and fearful that I think I am going to vomit.

“Well, bless my boots,” I hear a voice say.

“I just don’t believe it,” says another, a woman’s.

“Whose little darky is that?” asks still another voice.

“Dis yere Nathaniel,” says Little Morning. His tone is still heavy with anger and indignation. “He belong to Lou-Ann in de kitchen.

He de culprick. He de one dat snitch de volume.” He wrests the book from my grasp, regarding it with scholarly lifted eyebrows.

“Dis de volume dat was took. Hit says so right here.
De Life and
de Death of Mr. Badman
by John Bunyam. Hit de selfsame volume, Marse Sam, sho as my name’s Little Mornin’.” Even in the midst of my fright I am aware that Little Morning—the old The Confessions of Nat Turner

123

humbug—has memorized the title by ear and is fooling no one with this display of literacy. “I knowed it war de same book when I cotched him readin’ it in de pantry.”

“
Reading
?” The voice is that of Marse Samuel, wondering, quite incredulous. I look up now, slowly. The white faces, viewed for the first time so closely—especially those of the females, only lightly touched by sun and weather—have the sheen and consistency of sour dough or the soft underbellies of mushrooms; their blue eyes glint boldly, startling as ice, and I regard each yawning pore, each freckle, with the awe of total discovery. “Reading?” Marse Samuel says now, with amusement in his voice. “
Come
now, Little Morning!”

“Well, natchel he warn’t exackly readin’,” the old man adds contemptuously. “He jes’ lookin’ at de pitchers, dat’s all. Hit was on account of de pitchers dat he took de book anyways—”

“But there are no pictures, are there, Nell? It was your volume, after all—”

Could it have been, as I sometimes thought years later, that at that moment I sensed a fatal juncture, realized with some child’s wise instinct that unless instantly I asserted my small nigger self I would be forever cast back into anonymity and oblivion? And so could it have been that right then—desperate, lying, risking all—I mastered my terror and suddenly turned on Little Morning, howling: “’Tain’t so! ’Tain’t so! I can
so
read the book!”?

Whatever the case, I remember a voice, Samuel Turner’s, his wonder and amazement fled, saying in sudden quiet, judicious, tolerant tones, silencing the family’s laughter: “
No, no
, just wait, maybe he
can
, let us see!” And as the storm grumbles far off to the east, diminishing, the only sound now rain dripping from the eaves and a distant angry chattering of wet bluejays in the ailanthus trees, I find myself seated by the window. I have begun to cry, aware of white hovering faces like ghostly giant blobs above me, and whispering voices. I struggle briefly, pawing through the pages, but it is beyond all hope: I cannot manage a single word. I feel that I am going to suffocate on the sobs mounting upward in my chest. My distress is so great that Marse Samuel’s words are miles beyond comprehension—a muffled echo I can only dredge up from memory years later—when I hear him cry out: “You see, Ben, it is true, as I’ve told you! They will try! They
will
try! And we shall teach him then! Hurrah!”

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The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.

Nonetheless, it is a failing which, when ill luck befalls us, most of us succumb to; and during the dark years of my twenties, after I had passed out of Samuel Turner’s life and he and I were shut of each other forever, I spent a great deal of idle and useless time wondering what may have befallen my lot had I not been so unfortunate as to have become the beneficiary (or perhaps the victim) of my owner’s zeal to tamper with a nigger’s destiny.

Suppose in the first place I had lived out my life at Turner’s Mill.

Suppose then I had been considerably less avid in my thirst for knowledge, so that it would not have occurred to me to steal that book. Or suppose, even more simply, that Samuel Turner—

however decent and just an owner he might have remained anyway—had been less affected with that feverish and idealistic conviction that slaves were capable of intellectual enlightenment and enrichment of the spirit and had not, in his passion to prove this to himself and to all who would bear witness, fastened upon
me
as an “experiment.” (No, I understand that I am not being quite fair, for surely when I recollect the man with all the honesty I can muster I know that we were joined by strong ties of emotion; yet still the unhappy fact remains: despite warmth and friendship, despite a kind of
love
, I began as surely an experiment as a lesson in pig-breeding or the broadcasting of a new type of manure.)

Well, under these circumstances I would doubtless have become an ordinary run-of-the-mill house nigger, mildly efficient at some stupid task like wringing chickens’ necks or smoking hams or polishing silver, a malingerer wherever possible yet withal too jealous of my security to risk real censure or trouble and thus cautious in my tiny thefts, circumspect in the secrecy of my afternoon naps, furtive in my anxious lecheries with the plump yellow-skinned cleaning maids upstairs in the dark attic, growing ever more servile and unctuous as I became older, always the crafty flatterer on the lookout for some bonus of flannel or stew beef or tobacco, yet behind my stately paunch and fancy bib and waistcoat developing, as I advanced into old age, a kind of purse-lipped dignity, known as Uncle Nat, well loved and adoring in return, a palsied stroker of the silken pates of little white grandchildren, rheumatic, illiterate, and filled with sleepiness, half yearning for that lonely death which at long last would lead me to rest in some tumbledown graveyard tangled with chokeberry and The Confessions of Nat Turner

125

jimson weed. It would not have been, to be sure, much of an existence, but how can I honestly say that I might not have been happier?

For the Preacher was right: He
that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow
. And Samuel Turner (whom I shall call Marse Samuel from now on, for that is how he was known to me) could not have realized, in his innocence and decency, in his awesome goodness and softness of heart, what sorrow he was guilty of creating by feeding me that half-loaf of learning: far more bearable no loaf at all.

Well, no matter now. Suffice it to say that I was taken into the family’s bosom, so to speak, falling under the protective wing not only of Marse Samuel but of Miss Nell, who together with her older daughter Louisa had spent the quiet winter mornings of several years— “riding their hobby,” I remember they called it—

drilling me in the alphabet and teaching me to add and subtract and, not the least fascinating, exposing me to the serpentine mysteries of the Episcopal catechism. How they drilled me! How Miss Nell kept after me! I never forgot these glossy-haired seraphs with their soft tutorial murmurs, and do not blame me too much when I say—I shall try not to allude to it again—that there was at least one moment during the earthquake twenty years later when I lingered on the memory of those sweet faces with a very special and savage intensity.

“No, no, Nat, not
sucklings and babes—babes and sucklings!
”

“
Yessum
. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou
ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest
still the enemy and the avenger
.”

“Yes, that’s just right, Nat. Now then, verses three and four.

Slowly, slow-
ly
! And careful now!”

“
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon
and the stars, which thou hast ordained.
And—And—I forgets.”

“Forget
, Nat, not forgets. No darky talk! Now—
What is man—

“
Yessum
. What is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son
of man, that thou visiteth him?
Well, uh— And
, For thou hast
made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him
with glory and honor!
”