The Confessions of Nat Turner (41 page)

“Lord,” I whispered, “hast Thou truly called me to this?”

There was no answer, no answer at all save the answer in my brain:
This is the fast that I have chosen, to loose the bonds of
wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go
free, and that ye break every yoke
.

I might not have interpreted such a vision as a mandate to destroy all the white people had there not taken place soon after The Confessions of Nat Turner

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this, and in quick order, a couple of ugly events which had the effect of further alienating me from white men and consolidating in me the hatred of which I have already spoken. My memory of these events begins shortly after I left the woods. I did not recover from my fast as readily as I had at other times. I was left feeling vacant and dizzy, with a continuing weakness which even ample portions from the leftovers of Hark’s barbecued pig could not dispel; nor was I strengthened by a jar of preserved plums which he had stolen, and my lassitude hung on along with a feeling of somber melancholy, and I returned to Moore’s the next morning with aches and agues running up and down my limbs and with the recollection of my terrible vision lurking at the back of my brain like some unshakable grief. Early as it was, the heat from the sun, trapped beneath a blanket of haze, had become almost intolerable. Even the cur dogs in Moore’s barnyard sensed something gone wrong in the atmosphere; they snuffled and whimpered in their limitless misery, and the pigs lay snout-deep amid a stinking wallow, while the chickens squatted inert like swollen feather dusters in the steaming pen. Upon mounds of wet manure blowflies in multitudes greenly festered and buzzed. The farm smelled oppressively of slops and offal. A scene such as this, as I approached it, seemed timeless in its air of desolation; I thought of a hateful encampment of lepers in Judea. The lopsided weatherworn farmhouse stood baking in the sun, and when from within I heard a childish voice, Putnam’s, call out, “Dad! The nigger’s back from the woods!” I knew I was truly back.

I could hear Hark in the barn with the mules. The oxen that Moore once owned he had replaced with mules, partially because mules—unlike oxen and certainly horses—would sustain almost any punishment handed out by Negroes, a people not notably sweet-natured around domestic animals. (Once I overheard Marse Samuel lament to a gentleman visitor: “I do not know why my Negroes make such wretched husbandmen of horses and cattle.” But
I
knew why: what else but a poor dumb beast could a Negro mistreat and by mistreating feel superior to?) Even Hark for all his tender spirit was brutal with farm stock, and as I came near the fence I heard his voice in the barn, loud and furious: “God dang yo’ dumb mule asses! I gwine knock de livin’
mule shit
clean on out’n you!” He was harnessing a team of four to the wagons—two huge vehicles known as dray carts, linked together by a tongue—and this I knew meant I had returned just in time, for like Hark, I would be needed to ride into Jerusalem and spend a sweaty two days delivering and The Confessions of Nat Turner

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unloading a small mountain of wood.

As we started out toward town—Moore and Wallace on the seat together in the lead wagon, Hark and I behind sprawled on the great pile of lightwood logs, the timber alive with ants and pine-smelling in the heat—Moore essayed an attempt at some humor involving me. “God durn if hit don’t rain soon, Wallace,” he said, “I’m goin’ to git the preacher back there to bring me to religion and learn me to pray and such all. God durn sweet corn in Sarah’s lot, I done took a look this mornin’ and them ears ain’t no bigger than a puppy dog’s peter. How ‘bout it, preacher,” he called back to me, “how ’bout askin’ the Lord to let loose a whole lot of water? Lemme suck on some of that lightnin’, Wallace.”

The cousin handed him a jug and for a moment Moore fell silent.

“How ‘bout it, preacher,” he said again, with a belch, “how ‘bout rattlin’ off a special prayer and tell the Lord to unplug his asshole and git the crops growin’ down here.”

Wallace guffawed and I replied in tones ingratiating, ministerial—the accommodating comic nigger: “Yassuh, Marse Tom, I sure will do that. I sure will offer up a nice prayer for rain.”

But although my voice was compliant and good-natured it took all the self-restraint I had not to retort with something raw and surly, dangerously more than insolent; a quick flash of rage, blood-red, bloomed behind my eyes, and for an instant my hand tightened on a log and I measured the space between it and the back of Moore’s shaggy dirt-crusted red neck, my arm tensed as if to knock the little white weevil from his perch. Instantly then the rage vanished and I fell back into my thoughts, not speaking to Hark, who presently reached for a banjo he had made out of fence wire and some pine strips and began to plunk out the lonesome strains of one of the three tunes he knew—an old plantation song called “Sweet Woman Gone.” I still felt sick and shaken and a weariness was in my bones. With the memory of my vision lingering in the recesses of my mind, it seemed that the visible world around me had changed, or was changing: the parched fields with their blighted vegetation and the wood lots on either side painted like the fields with dust, now utterly windless and still, drooping near death with yellowing leaves, and over all the cloud of smoke from remote fires burning unbridled beneath no man’s eyes or dominion—all of these combined with my hangdog mood to make me feel that I had been transported to another place and time, and the bitter taste of dust on my lips caused me to wonder if this countryside might not in a strange manner resemble Israel in the days of Elias, and this barren road The Confessions of Nat Turner

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the way to some place like Jerusalem. I shut my eyes and drowsed against the logs while Hank softly sang and the words of “Sweet Woman Gone” invaded my dreaming, unutterably sorrowful and lonesome; then I sharply awoke to a low moaning sound from the side of the road and to the accents of my own troubled voice whispering in my brain:
But you are going to
Jerusalem
.

My eyes opened upon a strange and disturbing sight. Back from the road stood a tumbledown house which in previous trips I had barely noticed: nothing more than a hovel constructed of rough pine logs, windowless, half caved in, it was the home of a destitute free Negro named Isham and his family. I knew very little about this Negro, indeed, had laid eyes on him only once—when Moore had hired him one morning and within short hours had sent him packing, the miserable Isham being possessed of some deep indwelling affliction (doubtless caused by a long-time insufficiency of food) that turned his frail limbs into quivering weak pipestems after no more than five minutes of labor with the broadax. He had a family of eight to support—a wife and children all under twelve—and in easier times he managed barely to survive through his pitiful efforts at work and by tending a little garden, the seeds and seedlings for which he obtained through the good will of nearby white men more charitable than my present owner. Now, however, in this time of perilous drought it was quickly apparent that Isham dwelt close to the brink, for around the shanty in its sunbaked clearing where once had grown corn and peas and collards and sweet potatoes all was withered and shrunken and the rows of vegetables lay blasted as if devoured by wildfire. Three or four children—naked, the ribs and bones showing in whitish knobs beneath their skin—fidgeted spiritlessly around the crumbling doorstep. I heard the soft plaintive moaning sound at the roadside and gazed down and saw squatting there Isham’s wife, bony and haggard, gently rocking in her arms the fleshless black little body of a child who appeared to be close to death.

I had only a glimpse of the child—a limp, shapeless tiny thing like a bundle of twigs. The mother cradled it close, with infinite and patient grief, pressing it next to her fallen breasts as if by that last and despairing gesture she might offer it a sustenance denied in life. She did not raise her eyes as we passed. Hark had ceased his tune and I looked at him as he too caught sight of the child; then I turned and glanced at Moore. He had briefly halted the team. His little puckered face had the sudden aspect of a man The Confessions of Nat Turner

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overcome by revulsion—revulsion and shame—and instantly turned away. In past time he had shown no charity to Isham at all; unlike one or two of the other white men in the vicinity—sorely beset themselves—who had nonetheless helped Isham by a little cornmeal, some preserves, or a pound of fatback, Moore had parted with nothing, turning Isham out after his brief stint of work without paying him the few cents which was his due, and it was plain now that the sight of the dying child had caused even his adamantine heart to be smitten by guilt.

Moore gave the lead mule a stroke with his whip, but just as he did so a gaunt Negro man appeared at the side of the team and yanked at the traces, causing the wagon to stop its lurching forward movement. This Negro I saw was none other than Isham—a sharp-faced, brown, hawk-nosed man in his forties with bald ringworm patches in his hair and with eyes ravaged and lusterless, filmed over with aching hunger. And immediately I sensed madness roving through his soul. “
Ho
, white man!” he said to Moore in a garbled, crazy voice. “You isn’t give Isham ary bit to eat! Not ary bit! Now Isham got a dead chile! You is a white fuckah! Das all you is, white man! You is a sonabitchin’

cuntlappin’ fuckah! What you gwine do ‘bout some dead baby now, white fuckah?”

Both Moore and his cousin gazed down at Isham as if dumbstruck. Never in their lives, I am sure, had they been addressed in such a fashion by a Negro, bond or free, and the words which assailed them like a bullwhip left them with jaws hanging slack, breathless, as if they had found themselves in some sudden limbo between outrage and incredulity. Nor had I ever heard raw hatred like this on a Negro’s lips, and when I glanced at Hark, I saw that his eyes too were bright with amazement.

“White man eat!” Isham said, still clinging to the traces. “White man eat! Nigger baby she stahve! How come dat ‘plies, white fuckah? How come dat ‘plies dat white man eat bacon, eat peas, eat grits? How come dat ‘plies like dat an’ li’l nigger baby ain’t got ary bit? How come dat ‘plies, white cuntlappin’ fuckah?”

Trembling, the Negro sought to spit on Moore but seemed disadvantaged by the intervening height and distance and by the fact that he could bring up no spit; his mouth made a frustrated smacking noise, and again he tried in vain, smacking—a defeated effort awful to watch. “Whar de twenny-fi’ cents you owes me?” he shouted in his bafflement and rage.

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But now Moore did a curious thing. He did not do what a few years of proximity to such an impassioned nigger-hater made me think he would do: he did not strike Isham with his whip nor shout something back nor clout him on the side of the head with his boot. What he did was to turn toadstool-white and in a near-frenzy give the lead mule a vicious, quick lash which started the wagon to rumbling swiftly forward, tearing the mules’ harness from Isham’s hands. And as he did this and as we moved ahead as fast as the wagon’s ponderous bulk would allow, I realized that Isham’s unbelievable words had at first thrust Moore into a strange new world of consciousness which lacked a name—so strange an emotion indeed that a long moment must have passed while voice called to voice across the squalid abysm inside his skull and finally named it: Terror. Furiously he lashed the beasts and the brindle wheel-mule gave a tormented
heehaw
that echoed back from the pines like crackbrained laughter.

I learned later that after the drought had broken within a few months, Isham and his family somehow survived their plight, having been restored from a state of famine to the mere chronic destitution that was their portion in life. But that is another matter.

Now such an event along the road on this ominous morning, seen through the prism of my mind’s already haunted vision, forced me to realize with an intensity I had never known before that, chattel or unchained, slave or free, people whose skins were black would never find true liberty—
never
, never so long as men like Moore dwelt on God’s earth. Yet I had seen Moore’s terror and his startled insect-twitch, a pockmarked white runt flayed into panic by a famished Negro so drained of life’s juices that he lacked even the spittle to spit. This terror was from that instant memorialized in my brain as unshakably as there was engrafted upon my heart the hopeless and proud and unrelenting fury of Isham—he who as the wagon fled him through the haze shouted at Moore in an ever-dimming voice, “
Pig shit!
Some-day nigger eat meat, white man eat pig shit!” and seemed in his receding gaunt contour as majestic as a foul-tongued John the Baptist howling in the wilderness.

O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the
wrath to come
?

I think it may have been seen by now how greatly various were the moral attributes of white men who possessed slaves, how different each owner might be by way of severity or benevolence.

They ranged down from the saintly (Samuel Turner) to the all The Confessions of Nat Turner

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right (Moore) to the barely tolerable (Reverend Eppes) to a few who were unconditionally monstrous. Of these monsters none in his monsterhood was to my knowledge so bloodthirsty as Nathaniel Francis. He was Miss Sarah’s older brother, and although in physical appearance he resembled her slightly, the similarity ended there, for he was as predisposed to cruelty as she was to a genuine, albeit haphazard, kindness. A gross hairless man with a swinish squint to his eyes, his farm lay several miles to the northeast of Moore’s. There on middling land of about seventy acres he eked out a sparse living with the help of six field slaves—Will and Sam (whom I have mentioned earlier in this narrative), a loony lost young wretch, one of God’s mistakes, named Dred, and three even younger boys of about fifteen or sixteen. There were also a couple of forlorn female house servants, Charlotte and Easter, both of them in their late fifties and thus too old to be the source of any romantic tumult among the younger men.