The Confessions of Nat Turner (39 page)

Hark had no way of knowing that Travis was at heart a more lenient master than Barnett had been. He understood only that he had been separated from all the family he had ever had and from the only home he had ever known. After a week at Travis’s his misery and homesickness and his general sense of loss became insupportable. And so one summer night he decided to light out, heading for that Quaker church over two hundred miles away in Maryland which Hannibal had told him about months before. At first it was all very much a kind of lark since stealing away from Travis’s was a simple matter: he had only to tiptoe out of the shed in which he was kept after Travis had gone to sleep and—with a flour sack containing some bacon and cornmeal, a jackknife, and flint for starting fires, all stolen, the entire parcel slung over his shoulder on a stick—make his way into the woods. It was easy as it could be. The woods were quiet. There he paused for an hour or so, waiting to see if by any chance Travis might discover his absence and raise an alarm, but no sound came from the house. He crept out along the edge of the trees, took to the road north, and sauntered along in high spirits The Confessions of Nat Turner

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beneath a golden moon. The weather was balmy, he made excellent time, and the only eventful moment of that first night came when a dog ran out from a farmhouse, furiously barking, and snapped at his heels. This proved Hannibal correct in his advice about dogs, and caused Hark to resolve that in the future he would give all dwellings wide berth, even if it meant losing hours by moving to the woods. He met no one on the road, and as the agreeable night passed he began to feel a tingling sense of jubilation: running away seemed to be no great undertaking after all. When dawn came he knew he had made good progress—though how far he had traveled he could not tell, lacking any notion of the size of a mile—and with the sound of roosters crowing in some distant barnyard he fell asleep on the ground in a stand of beech trees, well away from the road.

Just before noon he was aroused by the sound of dogs barking to the south, a quavering chorus of yelps and frantic howls which made him sit up in terror. Surely they were after him! His first impulse was to climb a tree but he quickly lost heart for this endeavor because of his fear of heights. Instead he crept into a blackberry thicket and peeked out at the road. Two slobbering bloodhounds followed by four men on horseback came out of the distance in a cloud of dust, the men’s faces each set in a blue-eyed, grim, avenging look of outrage that made Hark certain that he was the object of their pursuit; he shivered in fright and hid his head amid the black-berries, but to his amazement and relief the baying and yelping diminished up the road, along with the fading clatter of hooves. After a bit all was still. Hark crouched in the blackberry patch until late afternoon. When dusk began to fall he built a fire, cooking over it a little bacon and some hoecake he made with water from a stream, and upon the onset of darkness, resumed his journey north.

His difficulties about finding the way began that night and plagued him all the long hours of his flight into freedom. By notches cut with his knife on a small stick each morning, he calculated (or it was calculated for him by someone who could count) the trip as having lasted six weeks. Hannibal had counseled two guides for the trip: the North Star and the great plank and log turnpike leading up through Petersburg, Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore. The names of these towns Hark too had memorized approximately and in sequence, since Hannibal had pointed out that each place would serve as a milestone of one’s progress; also, in the event that one got lost, The Confessions of Nat Turner

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such names would be useful in asking directions from some trustworthy-looking Negro along the route. By remaining close to the turnpike—although taking care to stay out of sight—one could use the road as a kind of unvarying arrow pointing north and regard each successive town as a marker of one’s forward course on the journey toward the free states. The trouble with this scheme, as Hark quickly discovered, was that it made no provision for the numberless side routes and forks which branched off the turnpike and which could lead a confused stranger into all manner of weird directions, especially on a dark night. The North Star was supposed to compensate for this and Hark found it valuable, but on overcast evenings or in those patches of fog which were so frequent along swampy ground, this celestial beacon was of no more use to him than the crudely painted direction signs he was unable to read. So the darkness enfolded him in its embrace and he lost the road as a guide. That second night, as for so many succeeding nights, he made no progress at all but was forced to stay in the woods until dawn, when he began to cautiously reconnoiter and found the route—a log road in daytime busy with passing farm wagons and carts and humming with danger.

Hark had many adventures along the way. His bacon and cornmeal ran out quickly but of all his problems food was the least pressing. A runaway was forced to live off the land, and Hark like most plantation Negroes was a resourceful thief. Only rarely was he out of sight of some habitation or other and these places yielded up an abundance of fruit and vegetables, ducks, geese, chickens—once even a pig. Two or three times, skirting a farm or plantation, he imposed upon the hospitality of friendly Negroes, whom he would hail at twilight from the trees and who would spirit him a piece of bacon or some boiled collard greens or a pan full of grits. But his great hulking prowling form made him conspicuous. He was rightly fearful of having his presence known to anyone, black or white, and so he soon began keeping strictly to himself. He even gave up requests for simple directions of the Negroes: they seemed to grow more ignorant as he progressed north and filled his ears with such an incoherent rigmarole of disaways and dataways that he turned from them in perplexity and disgust.

Hark’s spirit took wing when at sunrise, a week or so after leaving Travis’s, he found himself in the wooded outskirts of what, according to Hannibal’s schedule, would be Petersburg.

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Having never seen a town of
any
size or description, he was flabbergasted by the number of houses and stores and the commotion and colorful stir of people, wagons, and carriages in the streets. To pass around the town without being seen was something of a problem but he managed it that night, after sleeping most of the day in a nearby pine grove. He had to swim a small river in the early darkness, paddling with one hand and holding his clothes and his sack in the other. But he moved without detection in a half-circle about the town and pushed on north somewhat regretfully, since he had been able to pluck from some back porch a gallon of buttermilk in a wooden cask and several excellent peach pies. That night in a wild rainstorm he got hopelessly lost and to his dismay discovered when morning came that he had been walking east toward the sunrise, to God knows where. It was bleak, barren pine country, almost unpopulated, filled with lonely prospects of eroded red earth. The log road, fallen into sawdust, petered out and led nowhere. But the next night Hark retraced his steps and soon had negotiated the short leg of his journey to Richmond—like Petersburg, a lively community with a cedarwood bridge leading to it over a river and abustle with more black and white people than he had ever imagined existed. Indeed, from his pinewoods view down on the town he saw so many Negroes moving in and out and across the bridge—some of these doubtless free, others on passes from nearby farms—that he was almost emboldened to mingle among them and see the city, taking a chance that he might not be challenged by a suspicious white man. Prudence won out, however, and he slept through the day. He swam across the river after nightfall and stole past the dark shuttered houses as he had at Petersburg, leaving Richmond like that other town poorer by a pie or two.

And so he made his way on north through the dark nights, sometimes losing the road so completely that he was forced to backtrack for several days until he regained the route. His shoes wore out and collapsed and for two nights he walked close to the road on bare feet. Finally one morning he entered the open door of a farmhouse while its people were in the fields and made off with a pair of patent leather boots so tight that he had to cut holes for the toes. Thus shod, he pushed through the gloomy woods toward Washington. It must have been August by now and the chiggers and sweat flies and the mosquitoes were out in full swarm. Some days on Hark’s pineneedle bed were almost impossible for sleep. Thunderstorms rumbling out of the west drenched him and froze him and scared him half out of his wits.

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He lost sight of the North Star more times then he could count.

Forks and turnings confused him. Moonless nights caused him to stray away from the road and lose himself in a bog or thicket where owls hooted and branches crackled and the water moccasins thrashed drowsily in brackish pools. On such nights Hark’s misery and loneliness seemed more than he could bear.

Twice he came close to being caught, the first occasion somewhere just south of Washington when, traversing the edge of a cornfield before nightfall, he nearly stepped on a white man who happened at that moment to be defecating in the bushes.

Hark ran, the man pulled up his pants, yelled and gave chase, but Hark quickly outstripped him. That night, though, he heard dogs baying as if in pursuit and for one time in his life fought down his fear of high places and spent the hours perched on the limb of a big maple tree while the dogs howled and moaned in the distance. His other close call came between what must have been Washington and Baltimore, when he was shocked out of his sleep underneath a hedge to find himself in the midst of a fox hunt. The great bodies of horses hurtled over him as if in some nightmare and their hooves spattered his face with wet stinging little buttons of earth. Crouching on his elbows and knees to protect himself, Hark thought the end had come when a red-jacketed horseman reined in his mount and asked curtly what a strange nigger was doing in such a dumb position—obtaining in reply the statement that the nigger was praying—and believed it a miracle when the man said nothing but merely galloped off in the morning mists.

He had been told that Maryland was a slave state, but one morning when he happened upon a town which could only have been Baltimore he decided to risk exposure by creeping out to the edge of the hayfield in which he had concealed himself and calling in a furtive voice to a Negro man strolling toward the city along the log road. “
Squash-honna
,” Hark said. “Whichaway to de Squash-honna?” But the Negro, a yellow loose-limbed field hand, only gazed back at Hark as if he were crazy and continued up the road with quickening pace. Undaunted, Hark resumed the journey with growing confidence that soon it would all be over.

Perhaps there were five more nights of walking when at last, early one morning, Hark was aware that he was no longer in the woods. Here in the gathering light the trees gave way to a grassy plain which seemed to slope down, ever so gently, toward a stand of cattails and marsh grass rustling in the morning breeze.

The wind tasted of salt, exciting Hark and making him press forward eagerly across the savanna-like plain. He strode boldly The Confessions of Nat Turner

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through the marsh, ankle-deep in water and mud, and finally with pounding heart attained a glistening beach unbelievably pure and clean and thick with sand. Beyond lay the river, so wide here that Hark could barely see across it, a majestic expanse of blue water flecked with whitecaps blown up by a southerly wind. For long minutes he stood there marveling at the sight, watching the waves lapping at the driftwood on the shore. Fishnets hung from stakes in the water, and far out a boat with white sails bellying moved serenely toward the north—the first sailboat Hark had ever seen. In his patent leather boots, now split beyond recognition, he walked up the beach a short distance and presently he spied a skinny little Negro man sitting on the edge of a dilapidated rowboat drawn up against the shore. This close to freedom, Hark decided that he could at last hazard a direct inquiry, and so he approached the Negro confidently.

“Say, man,” said Hark, remembering the question he was supposed to ask. “whar de Quakah meetin’ house?”

The Negro gazed back at him through oval spectacles on wire rims—the only pair of glasses Hark had ever seen on a black man. He had a friendly little monkey’s face with smallpox scars all over it and a crown of grizzled hair shining with pig grease. He said nothing for quite some time, then he declared: “My, you is some big nigger boy. How old is you, sonny?”

“I’se nineteen,” Hark replied.

“You bond or free?”

“I’se bond,” said Hark. “I done run off. Whar de Quakah meetin’

house?”

The Negro’s eyes remained twinkling and amiable behind his spectacles. Then he said again: “You is some
big
nigger boy.

What yo’ name, sonny?”

“I’se called Hark. Was Hark Barnett. Now Hark Travis.”

“Well, Hark,” the man said, rising from his perch on the rowboat,

“you jes’ wait right here and I’ll go see about dat meetin’ house.

You jes’ set right here,” he went on, placing a brotherly hand on Hark’s arm and urging him down to a seat on the edge of the rowboat. “You has had
some
kind of time but now it’s all over with,” he said in a kindly voice. “You jes’ set right there while I go see about dat meetin’ house. You jes’ set right there and rest The Confessions of Nat Turner

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you’self and we’ll take care of dat meetin’ house.” Then he hurried up the beach and disappeared behind a copse of small stunted trees.

Gratified and relieved to be at last so close to the end of his quest, Hark sat there on the rowboat for a long moment, contemplating the blue windy sweep of the river, more grand and awesome than anything he had ever seen in his life. Soon a lazy, pleasant drowsiness overtook him, and his eyelids became heavy, and he stretched out on the sand in the warm sun and went to sleep.