The Confessions of Nat Turner (45 page)

In my new routine I helped convert Travis’s barn to a wheel shop (this only a year or so before Moore died and I became Travis’s chattel through the matrimonial arrangement mentioned already); lent my hand to the construction of at least three barns and two stills in the vicinity of Cross Keys; designed and built for Major Ridley near Jerusalem an ingenious arrangement for his privy The Confessions of Nat Turner

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consisting of wooden sluiceways that led from a dammed creek, the pent-up water of which, at the yank of a chain, merrily whisked the product of one’s visit into another stream down below—a triumph of plumbing that earned for me inordinate hurrahs from the Major and a serviceable second-hand pair of cordovan boots; participated in the building of a new armory in Jerusalem for the Southampton militia (by the purest chance allowing me knowledge of entry to the place—front, back, and side—and to the general location of each gun rack and ammunition store); and spent more days than I can recollect hired out to Mrs. Catherine Whitehead, who, in spite of her son Richard’s continual resentment of my ministerial pretensions, valued my gifts so highly that she was willing to pay Moore, and later Travis, a premium for my services. She had me design a barn for her prize oxen—which I also helped erect—a stable, and a

privy-flusher fed by water from her windmill and based on the same principles as the celebrated mechanism I had put together for Major Ridley. Often too I filled in there as coachman and butler. Mrs. Whitehead was an austere woman, very cool and withdrawn, and she minced few words in dealing with her pet architect. She was, however, completely fair and honest, and brooked no mistreatment of her Negroes. Several times she patted my arm and risked a wan, faraway smile, connoting praise. At last I felt as neutral toward her as I might feel toward a soon-to-be excavated stump.

Yet all through this time I lived as if straddling two worlds of the mind and spirit—a part of me dwelling in the humdrum sphere of daily events and things, of hammer and saw and plane and adze, responding “Yassuh!” with as much cheer as I could muster to some white master’s jibe or sally or observation, playing always the good nigger a little touched in the head with religion but, you know, by dad, a durned black
wizard
with nails and timber; the other part of me haunted still without ceasing by that forest vision, which as it receded into the past became not less meaningful but swelled in portent from day to day. This part of me fasted and prayed and beseeched the Lord earnestly for revelation, guidance, a further sign. I was in an agony of waiting.

I knew that God had told me
what
I must do, yet I had no means of deciding
how
to accomplish my bloody mission, nor where, nor when.

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Then one morning in the late winter of 1829, not through a vision but by a spell of inspiration so beatifically simple that I knew that the Lord must have ordained it, I determined on the
how
and the
where
—so that only the
when
remained.

That day in Mrs. Whitehead’s library, while ostensibly engaged in repairing a table, I happened upon a surveyor’s map of Southampton County and the region lying eastward. I had plenty of time to study the map and several hours later found the occasion to sit down and begin to make a tracing, using a large sheet of clear parchment and Mrs. Whitehead’s best quill pen—the latter borrowed, the first stolen. The map made plain to me what had previously been in my mind only hopeful speculation: a break for freedom, in terms of geography alone, was perfectly feasible. Given the propitious resolution of all the other factors involved, such a break for freedom should meet with every success. It would not be easy. I knew I must consecrate every shred of my intelligence and passion to the fulfillment of these events I was so manifestly called to by God and by destiny.

This afternoon I locked myself in the library. Although Richard was out riding among his parishioners, Mrs. Whitehead was home. Danger. That I might be surprised behind fastened doors and the fact of the ensuing scene (
“What were you doing locked
in there like that?” “’Deed, Miss Caty, that ole lock he jest snap
shut all by hisself”—her dark suspicion then, doubts, creepy
surmise
) were chances I was forced to take. As the map took shape beneath my fingers, the details of my grand scheme began to come miraculously clear. I could hardly wait to get off by myself and write it all down.

In a fever, I finished the map and replaced the original in the book where I had found it, then folded the tracing so that it fitted flat against my stomach underneath my shirt and belt band. At last I knelt on the carpet by the window for a while, praying, giving thanks to God for this revelation; finally I arose and unlocked the door and left.

I was crossing the yard toward the groom’s quarters in the stable (a tolerably comfortable room, with fireplace and straw tick, that I usually occupied during my stays at the Whiteheads’) when I heard Miss Caty call me from the side porch. It was the lackluster hazy oppressive weather between winter and spring—damp, leafless, with a raw chill in the air. She stood huddled in her shawl, a gaunt once-pretty white, white female, The Confessions of Nat Turner

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middle-aged, shivering a little, regarding me with her widow’s somber dispirited eyes. Her hair was parted at the middle and fell toward her shoulders in graying ringlets. I was still excited by the map and by my plans, and was vexed at the sight of the woman, who I felt had no right to intrude on my thoughts at such a crucial time. “Yessum?” I said.

“Did you fix the table as I told you?” she asked.

“Yessum.”

“It was Captain Whitehead’s favorite table. He used to write on it.

It kept collapsing no matter how many times I’d try to get it fixed.

Are you sure it won’t break again? I should be able to get a fancy price for it.”

“Yessum.”

“How did you fix it?”

“I put three dowels in it made of oak. Whoever fixed it before used plain old bone glue and some thin wire, so no wonder it broke. Nice walnut table like that, you have to use strong dowels.

It won’t break no more, I can promise you that, Miss Caty.”

She was by no manner the worst of white people, yet for some reason—perhaps only this interruption of my thoughts —my hatred for her
now
was like a sharp rock in the pit of my stomach. I could barely return her gaze and wondered if somehow she might not be able to detect my hatred, which had begun to pop out on my brow in little pinpoint blisters of sweat.

“Did you get around to the chair yet?” she said.

“No’m,” I replied, “I spent all my time on that table.”

“Well then, tomorrow instead of working with Jack and Andrew on those stall doors you can put the legs back on that chair. Jack is sick anyway. That darky has been sick half the winter.”

Annoyance passed over her face, her lips drew thin. “Also tomorrow—”

“Miss Caty,” I put in, “tomorrow I’m supposed to go back to Mr.

Moore’s. It’s the end of my hire.”

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“The end of your hire?” she exclaimed. “Why, it
couldn’t
be! I hired you until the eighteenth.”

“Yessum,” I replied, “and today’s that date—the eighteenth.”

“Why, I—” Perplexed, she began to say something, then halted, her voice a sigh. “Oh
yes,
I reckon you’re right. It
is
the eighteenth. And you—” Again she paused and then after several moments said: “I wish you didn’t have to go back. You’re the handiest young darky anywhere around. I suppose there’s someone waiting to get you next, as usual.”

“Yessum,” I said, “Marse Tom told me Major Ridley’s fencing in a lot of grass for his new stock and has got me for a fortnight to build fences. Before full spring comes.” I had begun to find it difficult to keep the hatred from quivering in my voice. Why did she have to trespass on my thoughts like this?

“Well,” she sighed, “I certainly wish I could have you for my very own. I’ve offered Mr. Tom Moore a lot of money to buy you but I expect he knows a gold mine when he sees it. It is hard enough to get darkies to work, and I don’t mind saying that you turn out an honest day’s work like no darky I’ve ever come across.”

“I do my best, Miss Caty,” I replied. “Paul said every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labor, for we are laborers together with God. I do believe that.”

“Pshaw!” she exclaimed. “Don’t blandish me with Scripture.

Though indeed I’m sure you’re right. I wish I hadn’t mistaken the date,” she went on. “I wanted that chair fixed and I had so hoped you would take the carriage tomorrow afternoon and fetch little Miss Peg from Jerusalem. It’s her vacation. She’s coming by stage from the Seminary in Lawrenceville. I so hoped you would be here to fetch her. I cannot trust any of the other darkies with those two horses.”

“Yessum,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“But I shall have you back before long, you may be sure ofthat.’

She essayed one of her distant, pallid smiles. “I expect you eat considerably better here than you do at Mr. Moore’s, don’t you?”

“Yessum,” I said, speaking the truth.

“Or even at Major Ridley’s, I’ll vow.”

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“Yessum,” I said again, “that’s right.”

“Oh, I wish I hadn’t mistaken that date. Are you sure today is the eighteenth?”

“Yessum, on that calendar in your library.”

“You’re the only darky I would ever trust to drive Miss Margaret or Miss Harriet or Miss Gwen or any of the grandchildren anywhere. I shudder to think of Hubbard or Andrew or Jack driving and that carriage going helter-skelter with all my children up and down the countryside.” She paused for an instant, regarding me closely; I shifted my gaze. Then she went on: “Mr.

Tom Moore’s so stubborn in not selling you to me. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I felt I had to compose some kind of answer. “Well, Miss Caty,” I said, “Marse Tom makes a bit more money hiring me out, I reckon. In the long run.”

“Well, I expect that he will eventually have to bow to the inevitable and sell you to a person with money and position, if not me then somebody else. You’re too bright a darky to live down in that quagmire, as respectable as your owner may be.

How old are you, Nat? About twenty-five?”

“I’m twenty-eight, Miss Caty,” I said.

“Then at your age you should think of yourself as lucky. Consider the young darkies who lack your ability and can do almost nothing except push a hoe or a broom, hardly even that. I expect you will go far. I mean, for instance, you are actually able to comprehend all I am saying to you. Even if you aren’t sold to someone like me, you will be hired out to people like me who value you enough to feed you well and clothe you warmly and take care of you. Certainly you have no reason to fear that you will ever be sold south, even now when there is a humming market in darkies for Alabama and Mississippi, and there are so many extra mouths to feed—”

As she spoke I saw two of her Negroes, Andrew and Tom, struggling across the field with a burden of sawhorses between them, the crude oaken timbers piled up on top of each other painfully cumbersome and heavy, all askew now and ready to fall to earth.
Ah!
They fell as I watched, tumbling down with a lumpish clatter. Then slowly the blessed nincompoops rearranged the sawhorses into a stack again, hoisted them up The Confessions of Nat Turner

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and continued their hunched, lead-footed pilgrimage across the field, two raggedy silhouettes against a frieze of pinewoods and wintry sky, bound as if for nowhere on to the uttermost limits of the earth—black faceless paradigms of an absurd and immemorial futility. I gave a quick shiver in the chill and thought: Why do men live at all? Why do men wrassle so with air, with nothing? For the briefest instant I was overcome by a terrible anguish.

Richard Whitehead, mounted on a sluggish fat white gelding, came riding into the distant barnyard and flapped an arm, the high-pitched drawl sacerdotal, sweet: “Evenin’, Muvva!”

“Hay-o, Boysie!” she called in return. Her gaze lingered on him, then she cast her eyes back at me and said: “Do you know, I’ve offered Mr. Tom Moore a thousand dollars for you?
One
thousand dollars
.”

Strange that, after a fashion, the woman’s manner toward me had been ingratiating, even queerly tender, with a faint tongue-lick of unctuousness, benevolent, in a roundabout way downright maternal. Nuzzling around my black ass. In my heart of hearts I bore her no ill will. Yet she had never once removed herself from the realm of ledgers, accounts, tallies, receipts, balance sheets, purse strings, profits, pelf—as if the being to whom she was talking and around whom she had spun such a cocoon of fantasy had not been a creature with lips and fingernails and eyebrows and tonsils but some miraculous wheelbarrow. I gazed at the complacent oblong of her face, white as tallow. Suddenly I thought of the document beneath my shirt and again the hatred swept over me. I was seized with awe, and a realization:
Truly, that white flesh will soon be dead
.

“I hope you are aware of how much money one thousand dollars is,” she was saying. “One does not pay that type of money for something one does not really value, or treasure. You are aware of that, Nat, aren’t you?”

“Yessum,” I said.

“No,” she said after a pause, “I expect you will go far, for a darky.”

No. 1. Early objective Mrs. C. Whitehead’s. A gift from God. This
house taken will mark end Ist phase of campaign. Whitehead
gun room next to library. Trophies of Mrs. W.’s dead husband. I5

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muskets, rifles & fowling pieces, 6 flintlock pistols, also 4 swords,
2 cutlasses, 4 small dirks, plenty powder & lead
.

Once house taken & inhabitants destroyed these weapons sh’d
even up balance. If attack be launched at midnight at Cross Keys
(Moore’s? Travis’s?) then Mrs. W.’s sh’d be reached next day by
noon. Houses in between w’l yield up little in way of guns etc. but
must be taken & inhabitants destroyed. Before alarm can be
sounded. Weapons taken here sh’d allow successful drive gen’ly
N.E. to Jerusalem by noon 2d day. Also of course Mrs. W.’s 8