The Confessions of Nat Turner (24 page)

“Yaanh-s,” said Dr. Ballard. The “yes” was a thin whickering sound high in the nose, vaguely distant and amused,
yaanh-s
.

“Although, gentlemen, I do not doubt that given my brother’s belief in colonization and emancipation and his faith in education and God knows what all, given his passion to prove that a darky has the native gifts granted to the average college professor, he could take a little slave like that one there and teach him the alphabet and his sums and the outlines of geography and right before your eyes you’d think his case was proved. But, gentlemen, let me tell you, my brother does not know darkies like I do. Either that or his saintly belief in reform prevents him from The Confessions of Nat Turner

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seeing the truth. For, gentlemen, I know better, I know darkies better. I’ll swear to you that if you show me a little darky whom you’ve taught to read the complete works of Julius Caesar forward and backward in the original Latin tongue, I will show you a darky who is
still
an animal with the brain of a human child that will never get wise nor learn honesty nor acquire any human ethics though that darky live to a ripe old age. A darky, gentlemen, is basically as unteachable as a chicken, and that is the simple fact of the matter.” He halted, then slowly yawned:

“Ah, time for bed!”

The ministers and Marse Samuel rose, murmurously chatting, but now as night fell and the bright globe of a full moon rose radiant above the distant woods, I felt Little Morning squeeze me hard on the flesh of my arm, a signal, and I ceased listening to anyone talk, turning to help the old man carry bottles and glasses from the veranda, dousing the smudge pot with sprinkled water, busying myself with a mop against the planks of the pine floor. The chill in my bones would not leave nor was I able for a long time to banish from my mind the thought which hung there as if written on a banner:
I am a slave
. After some minutes, returning from the pantry, I saw that Benjamin had disappeared, and then I spied Marse Samuel lingering alone at the edge of the veranda. He leaned with one hand propped against the railing and his eyes seemed to follow the two ministers as they made their slow way, black against a blacker black, into the shadows of the night. “God watch over your dreams, Mr. Turner!” the younger one called in a tone girlish and clear.

“And your dreams too,” Marse Samuel replied, but his voice was the thinnest murmur and they could not have heard it. Then he was gone from the veranda and I stood suddenly afraid, listening to Little Morning all agrumble, in gloomy discussion with himself as he limped stiffly among the chairs. A fragrance of tobacco smoke still hung sweetly on the hot still air. For a moment the two ministers, groping their way across the lawn toward the wing of the house, were illumined in a shaft of moonlight, then they vanished for good among the shadows, while the moon itself, rising behind a black frieze of sycamore trees thick with summer leaves, was suddenly obscured, pitching house and lawn into smothering darkness.
Well, I am a slave
, I thought, and I shivered in the windless, sultry night which seemed—just for an instant—to surround me cold and treacherous and, more somberly, beyond the hope of ending, as if its long ticking course The Confessions of Nat Turner

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through the hours might lead only to a deeper darkness, without waking, without green glimmerings of dawn or the sound of cockcrow.

Only a few months after this Benjamin died, way out in the swamp, crushed beneath a gigantic bald cypress just as he was engaged in brandy-befuddled remonstrance with two black timber hands. The Negroes later claimed that they had tried to warn of the great tree toppling at their master’s back, but their gesticulations and whispers had been ignored, and they themselves had skipped lightly away as the monster crashed down upon poor drunken Benjamin. Certainly from the rate at which Benjamin had begun to stow away liquor, the story seemed true enough. Among the Negroes for years after there were dark hints, barely spoken, of foul play—but for myself I doubted it. Slaves have put up with far meaner owners than Benjamin.

Anyway, whatever final constraints Marse Samuel may have felt about continuing my education were removed by his brother’s passing. Beyond doubt Benjamin would never have been a cruel master, a nigger-breaker. But if Benjamin’s death brought no rejoicing among the Negroes, it would not be accurate either to say that any were plunged into mourning. Even the dumbest slave shelling corn down in the most rundown and ramshackle cabin had gotten wind of at least the general drift of Marse Samuel’s charitable notions, and they all knew they had passed into more promising hands: so on the day of Benjamin’s funeral, as the scores of humble darkies gathered with sorrowing downcast looks behind the big house and the more musically inclined lifted their voices in tender lament—

“O my massah’s gone! massah’s gone!

My massah’s gone to heaven, my Lord!

I can’t stay behind!”

—the insincerity of their simple words was as plain as the difference between gold and brass . . .

And so during all those boyhood years when the horn blew at the first crack of dawn, when Abraham stood at the edge of the stable in the still-starlit dark trumpeting in sad hoarse notes the awakening call which brought firelight flickering at the doors of the cabins down the slope—that horn did not blow for me. I alone could stir and turn and sleep another hour, until the full light of The Confessions of Nat Turner

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sunup roused me to my kitchen chores long after the other Negroes had vanished to mill and woods and fields. Not for my soft pink palms—accustomed to the touch of silver and crystal, of pewter and glossy oiled oak—was the grimy feel of the hoe handle and the sickle and the ax. Not for me was the summer heat of the blacksmith shop or the steaming, gnat-mad fields of corn or the bone-cracking labor of the woods, rump deep in decaying slime, or the racket and toil of the mill where the weight of grain and timber ruptured the gut and twisted shoulders and spine into a stooped attitude of toil as immutable as statues carved in black marble. And although Marse Samuel—certainly a bountiful master by any standard—could never be accused of starving his Negroes, it was nonetheless not the field-hand diet of hog and hominy to which my palate became accustomed, but finer fare, lean ham and game and pastry—leftovers to be sure, but I rarely knew what it was like not to partake of the same food that the Turners themselves enjoyed.

As for work itself, it would be a stretch of the truth to say that my days were idle; indeed, the memory of my youth at Turner’s Mill is one of a constant hustling about the house from dawn until dusk. But honestly recollected, my tasks were light, far from the sweat and stink of the field. I cleaned, I washed, I scrubbed; I polished doorknobs and built fires and learned to set a meticulous table. The hand-me-down clothes I received were baggy, but they didn’t scratch. Off and on for another year or two I continued with my lessons under the tutelage of Miss Nell, a patient, wispy creature who because of some private inner crisis had intensified her already fervid religious bent, now abandoning not only Walter Scott but even John Bunyan and all such secular work in favor of the Bible, especially the Prophets and the Psalms and the Book of Job, which we continued to read together beneath a great tulip poplar, my young black woolly head brushing her silken bonnet. Do not consider me impertinent when I say that years later, immersed in the project which is the reason for this account, I breathed a silent word of gratitude to this gentle and motherly lady, from whose lips I first heard those great lines from Isaiah:
Therefore will I number you to the sword,
and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter, because when I
called ye did not answer
. . .

It seems to me now, as a matter of fact, that it was Miss Nell who inadvertently conveyed to me the knowledge of my own very special standing within the family, during a spell of illness a year or so before my mother died and which I reckon to have been in The Confessions of Nat Turner

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the autumn when I had just turned fourteen. I did not know then nor was I ever told the name of my affliction, but it could not have been anything but grave, for I passed dark streams of blood from my bladder and for days and nights I was racked by an aching fever which sent my mind off into crazed visions and nightmares through which daylight and dark, waking and sleeping were hopelessly jumbled together and my surroundings became as unreal to me as if I had been transported into another land. Dimly I recall being moved from the corn-shuck bed I had shared for so long with my mother to some other room in the house, where I lay upon an enormous bedstead with linen sheets amid the hushed sound of whispers and tiptoeing footsteps. There in my delirium I was attended to every moment; my head was gently lifted, I drank water from a tumbler held to my lips by soft white hands. These same pale hands reappeared constantly, hovering over my eyes as in a dream to cool my burning brow with strips of flannel dipped in cool water. After a week I slowly began to recover, and the week following this I returned to my mother’s room, quite infirm at first but after a while ready to resume my daily chores. Yet I was never able to forget how in the midst of my sickness—during a single moment of clarity which came over me before I fell back into a fevered nightmare—I heard Miss Nell’s tearful voice, her whispered words beyond the strange door of the strange room: “Oh Lord, Sam, our little Nat! Poor little Natl We must pray, Sam, pray, pray! He mustn’t be allowed to die!”

I became in short a pet, the darling, the little black jewel of Turner’s Mill. Pampered, fondled, nudged, pinched, I was the household’s spoiled child, a grinning elf in a starched jumper who gazed at himself in mirrors, witlessly preoccupied with his own ability to charm. That a white child would not have been so sweetly indulged—that my very direct him to the proper rear door in a voice edged with icy scorn. Or should any black children from the cabins invade, no matter how guilelessly, the precincts of the big house and its rolling lawn, I would be at them with a flourished broomstick and shrill cries of abuse—safe however behind the kitchen door. Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.

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It must have been during the spring of my sixteenth year that Marse Samuel took me aside on the lawn after one midday dinner and announced a rather surprising change in the routine of my life. Despite the sense I had of belonging and of a closeness to the family, I was not of course really of the family and there were intimacies I was denied; days and weeks might go by without Marse Samuel paying any note of me, especially during the long busy seasons of planting and harvest, and thus those special moments when I was the object of his attention I can recall with the greatest clearness and intensity. On this particular afternoon he spoke of my work in the house, commending me on my alertness and industry and on the good reports brought to him by Miss Nell and the young mistresses regarding the nimble way I applied myself not only to my lessons but to my daily chores.

Now, all this was laudable, he said, and the duteous way I attended to my work was something in which I myself should take pride. The fact remained, however, that I owned too much ability and intelligence to labor for long as a house servant—a career which could not help but stunt and diminish the capacities he felt I had for development and lead me early into a barren dead end. Did I not honestly think that such a way of life was suitable only for rickety old codgers like Little Morning or ancient mammies with bandannas and rheumy eyes and with a bulge of snuff in their wrinkled cheeks? Certainly a boy who had learned as much as I had could not contemplate such a fruitless lifetime with anything but despondency and dread.

For a moment I was unable to answer. I do not believe that I had ever thought of the future; it is not in the mood of a Negro, once aware of the irrecoverable fact of his bondage, to dwell on the future at all, and even I in my state of relative good fortune must have simply assumed without thought that the days and years which stretched out before me would present only the familiar repetitious and interminable clutter of dirty dishes, chimney ashes, muddy boots, tarnished doorknobs, chamber pots, mops and brooms. That something
different
might befall my lot had never occurred to me. I do not know what I was about to reply when he slapped me gently on the shoulder, exlaiming in an eager, hearty voice: “I have grander plans for this young darky.”

Grand plans indeed. The beginning of an apprenticeship in carpentry, which, as it turned out for long years, was of as little use to me or anyone as so much rotting sawdust clogging a millwheel. But I could not have known that then. I flung myself The Confessions of Nat Turner

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into this new fresh field of learning with all the delight and anticipation and hungry high spirits of a white boy setting off for the College of William & Mary and an education in the mysteries of law. Marse Samuel had, for one thing, just recently acquired the services of a master carpenter, a German from Washington called Goat (it occurred to me long afterward that this could not have been the proper spelling, that it must have been something like Godt, but no one ever told me otherwise and in my recollection the man remains forever Goat), and it was these hands into which my owner delivered me for further instruction.

For two years under the guidance of Goat I learned the carpenter’s trade in the dusty shop down the slope between the big house and the cabins. I had become fairly good-sized for my age, and was strongly muscled and capable with my hands; all this combined with the fact that I had more than the rudiments of an education, and could measure and calculate nearly as well as any grown white man, made me an able student of the craft and I quickly learned to handle the saw and the adze and the plane and could set a row of joists parallel and straight beneath the laths of a new corncrib roof almost as skillfully as Goat himself.