The Confessions of Nat Turner (49 page)

It was as if by those words we were committed.
Us gotta kill
. . . I talked on, detailing my plans. I showed them the map; although they could not read it, they understood my projected route. Later I asked questions, and found that none of my followers shrank from the idea of killing; I made it plain that murder was an essential act for their own freedom and they welcomed this truth with the stolid acceptance of men who, as I have shown, had nothing on earth to lose. And so I spoke to them throughout the afternoon and into the early evening. In my excitement the weakness I had suffered from my long fast, the drowsiness and vertigo, all seemed to dissolve into the wintry air. I was gripped by a sense of exaltation, of mastery and of perfect assurance, that sent great cries and shouts of gladness throughout my The Confessions of Nat Turner

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being. I wondered if even Joshua or Gideon had felt such an ecstasy, or had heard that knowledge like a voice in the brain:

“The first shall be last.”

“An’ de last shall be first,” they replied. These lines became our password and our greeting, our benediction.

That evening after I dismissed my followers—swearing each to secrecy and silence as I sent them on their way back through the woods—I fell asleep by the fire and dreamed the most placid dreams I had dreamt in a lifetime. And when I awoke the next day and found a king snake, recently aroused from hibernation, sunning himself in my clearing, I blessed its presence in the Lord’s name and saw it as a good omen.

Even so, there had begun to dwell in my mouth a sinister taste of death—a sweetish-sour and corrupt flavor that rose thickly up through the nostrils like tainted pork—which I had never experienced before and which I could not rid myself of; it persevered through all the great events of the following summer, and even to the very end of the upheaval. Moreover, I began to suffer from that strange illusion or dislocation of the mind that from then on I could not shake loose or avoid. In short, not always but often when I encountered a white person after that day—man, woman, or child—there was an instant when his living presence seemed to dissolve before my eyes and I envisioned him in some peculiar attitude of death. On the morning following my revelation to my followers, for example, when I came back out of the woods as I returned to Travis’s, I was smitten by this hallucination to an intense degree. Now overtaken with weakness again from my fast, I headed east to the farm just before noon. As I walked unsteadily along the path which straggled out of the last clump of pine trees I saw that the place was a hive of activity and work. From the distance I could see the two boys, Putnam and young Joel Westbrook, carrying between them a sheaf of strip iron toward the wheel shop.

Farther away, on the front porch of the house, Miss Sarah waddled about with a busy broom, sending up puffs of dust. Still farther off in the barnyard the angular, aproned form of Miss Maria Pope hunched along, strewing handfuls of corn amid a crowd of chickens. The big treadmill saw I had built stood outside the wheel shop; it drove across the field a singsong rasp of metal on wood, and a monotonous clatter. Below the treadmill Travis occupied himself with a hammer and chisel, while above him on the treadmill itself, looming naked to the waist and enormous The Confessions of Nat Turner

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through a cloud of steam, Hark plodded at a slant toward the sky, his great legs moving as if in some ageless pilgrimage toward an ever-receding and unattainable home.

As I approached the farm I saw that Travis, turning about, had caught sight of me; he shouted something to me in words that were lost on the wind, then pointed at the treadmill and threw me a welcoming, amiable wave with his hand. He shouted again, and now I caught the words. “Durned good job!” was what I heard; but I stopped then—stock-still and with the taste of death sweet and yellow beneath my tongue—seized for the first time by that hallucination. For like the moment once in a far corner of childhood when at Turner’s Mill I had happened on a white child’s book in which the woodcut-shapes of small human beings were hidden among the trees, or in a grassy field, and I was teased by the captions to know, “Where is Jacky?” or “Where is Jane?”—now the distant people before me leaped out similarly from their benign and peaceable scene and I discerned them instantly in the postures of death, prefigured in attitudes of bloody immolation: the two boys sent sprawling with heads bashed in, Miss Sarah disemboweled upon the quiet porch, Miss Maria Pope hacked down amid her chickens, and Travis himself impaled upon a pike, the ice of incomprehension freezing his eyes even while he raised his arm, now, in beneficent greeting.

Only Hark endured as he strode ceaselessly upon his treadmill—
Ah, Hark
!—high above the dead, paddling like a glorious black swan toward the plains of heaven.

“Well yes, Nat,” Hark told me once late that spring. “I reckon I kin kill. I
kin
kill a white man, I knows dat now. Like I done tol’ you, I done had some hard times thinkin’ ’bout killin’ white folks when we start de ruction. I ain’t nebber killed nobody in all my bo’n days. Sometimes at night I done woked up all asweat and atremble wid dese yere terrible dreams in my head, thinkin’ ’bout how it gwine be when I got to kill dem white folks.

“But den I gits to thinkin’ ’bout Tiny and Lucas an’ Marse Joe sellin’ dem off like dat, sellin’ dem off widout no nem’mine fo’

how
I
feels ’bout it, den I knows I kin kill. Hit like de Lawd
ax
me to kill, ‘cause it plain long
sinful
to sell off a man’s own fambly, like you say.

“Lawd, Nat, hit sho done cause me a powerful misery, de lonesomeness I done had in my heart after Tiny and Lucas was gone. Like Lucas now—I mean, you know hit kind of funny, de The Confessions of Nat Turner

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way I tried to figger out ways
not
to grieve over dat little boy.

After dey took him away wid Tiny de lonesomeness got so bad I could hardly stan’ it. An’ so I begun to think ’bout all de
mean
things dat Lucas done. I begun to think ’bout all dem times dat he screeched an’ hollered an’ kep’ me fum sleep an’ de time he done got mad an’ whopped me wid a hoe handle or dat time he th’owed a mess of grits right in Tiny’s face. An’ I’d think about all dese times an’ I’d say to myse’f: ‘Well, he was a mean young’un anyway, hit good to git shet of him.’ An’ dat ud make me feel better for mebbe a little bit. Den, Lawd, I’d think of de mean things I done to
him
, an’ dat ud make me feel bad other way aroun’. But hard as I’d try I couldn’t keep feelin’ mad about dat little boy, an’ by an’ by I’d think about him a-chucklin’ an’ ridin’ on my back an’ us playin’ together behin’ the shed, an’ de grief ud come back an’ pretty soon I’d get so lonesome I could almost die

. . .

“No, Nat, you right. Hit sinful to do dat to folks. So when you ax me kin I kill, I figgers I kin, easy ’nough. ‘Thout Tiny an’ Lucas I wouldn’ like to hang roun’ dis yere place any longer noways . . .”

That I chose Independence Day as the moment to strike was of course a piece of deliberate irony. It seemed clear to me that when our eruption was successful—with Jerusalem seized and destroyed and our forces soon impregnably encamped in the Dismal Swamp—and when word of our triumph spread throughout Virginia and the upper southern seaboard, becoming a signal for Negroes everywhere to join us in rebellion, the fact that it had all arisen on the Fourth of July would be an inspiration not alone to the more knowledgeable slaves of the region but to men in bondage in even more remote parts of the South who might take flame from my great cause and eventually rally to my side or promulgate their own wild outbreaks. Yet the choice of that patriotic extravagancy which I made in the spring also involved a very practical consideration. For many years the Fourth of July had been the largest, noisiest, and most popular of all general celebrations in the country. The festivities had always been held at the camp meeting grounds several miles from Jerusalem, and were attended by nearly every white person in the region save for the feeble, the ailing, and those already too drunk to travel. As has been seen, it was my purpose to slaughter without hesitation each man, woman, and child who lay in my path. Needless to say, however, I was sure that the Lord wished me to take Jerusalem by the most expedient means, and hence if I were able eventually to enter the town by stealth and The Confessions of Nat Turner

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seize the armory when most of the people were away at their jubilee, then so much the better—especially if, in addition to the advantageous momentum such a thrust would give me, it might result in naturally fewer casualties among my men. Although Joshua’s initial concept had been a planned ambush—luring the people out—it was through a somewhat similar maneuver of capturing an empty town that he defeated the cities of A! and Bethel—and this led after all to the ultimate downfall of Gibeon and to the Children of Israel’s inheritance of the land of Canaan.

Timing my assault for the Fourth of July likewise seemed to me for a while to be strategy inspired by the Lord.

But early in May my plans along such a line were dashed to pieces. One Saturday while at the market in Jerusalem conferring with my inmost four disciples, I learned from Nelson that for the first time in local history it had been decided that the Independence Day to-do would be held not at the outlying meeting grounds but within the town itself. That of course made the prospect of attacking Jerusalem on July Fourth even more hazardous than it ordinarily might, and so in great consternation I abruptly canceled my plans. Now in a near-panic, unaccountably, I felt that the Lord was playing with me, taunting me, testing me, and shortly after that Saturday, I fell ill with a bloody flux and a racking fever that lasted nearly a week. During this interval I was wrenched with anxiety. In my despair I began to wonder if the Lord had really called me to such a great mission after all. Then I recovered from my seizure almost as quickly as I had been stricken. Pounds lighter but somehow feeling stronger, I rose from bed in my shed adjoining the wheel shop (where I had been nursed and fed, alternately, by Hark and the ever-ebullient Miss Sarah, soon to cease her existence) to learn of a new development that made me feel—in joyous relief mingled with shame at my faithlessness—that the Lord had not misused me; instead in His great wisdom He had caused me to wait for a grander day and the beginnings of an even more propitious design.

The news came to me one morning during the following month of June, when once again I had been hired out by Travis to Mrs.

Whitehead. Or traded, I should say—traded for two months fair-and-square, as the phrase went, for a yoke of oxen that Travis sorely wanted to yank stumps on burnt-off land he intended to plant in apple trees. Mrs. Whitehead was in a sweat of pleasure as usual to have me back: she needed me both as The Confessions of Nat Turner

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coachman and as carpenter, having contemplated extensive additions to her barn. At any rate, it was while I was back at her homestead that I overheard a passing Baptist preacher inform his colleague, Richard Whitehead, that amammoth camp meeting had been planned for the brethren of his own sect late that summer down in Gates County, across the line in North Carolina. Hundreds if not thousands of Baptists from Southampton had already signified their joy to attend, the preacher—a wholesome-looking, ruddy-faced man—said to Richard, and added with a wink that he did not really mean to poach on Richard’s territory by suggesting that Methodists too were more than welcome to come and shed their sins. We are all brothers in one faith, he asserted; the camping fee this year was only half a dollar a head—no charge for nigger servants and children under ten. Then he made a wan joke about Methodists and temperance. In recollecting Richard’s answer, I seem to remember that he thanked his fellow pastor in tones characteristically bleak, chill, and dry, allowed as how he thought few Methodists would attend—being spiritually so well provided for here in their native parish—but went on to say that he would keep the event in mind and inquired desultorily about the time.

When the other preacher replied, “From Friday the nineteenth of August until Tuesday, guess that’s the twentythird,” I (who was holding the bridle of the preacher’s horse) understood that the date of my great mission, emanating from those ecclesiastical lips, had just then been revealed to me as vividly as the fire of the Lord that showered down at the feet of Elijah. What an unforeseen bounty! Deprived of several hundred Baptist sinners—half of its population—Jerusalem should be child’s play to capture and destroy. Silently I offered up a prayer of thanks. It was my very last sign.

There were left then a bare two months to complete the final preparations, although I was pleased that so much had been done since that day of the sun’s eclipse. Primarily, I was gratified by the progress that had been made in the area of recruitment—a matter which, because of the extreme secrecy and confidence involved, I had thought would be formidably difficult but that had succeeded beyond my hopes.This was largely due to the skill, tact, and force of persuasion that both Sam and Nelson possessed to a high degree. (Henry gained one or two converts but his deafness made him less effective.) It was due also to the scientific manner in which I went about assembling my body of men. First I consulted the map where many months before I had outlined the direction of march toward The Confessions of Nat Turner

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Jerusalem. That route was not a direct assault upon the town by the most obvious approach—the seven-mile road from Cross Keys to the cedar bridge that provided entry into Jerusalem across the Nottoway River. Such a route, while arrow-straight and quite short, would leave us mercilessly exposed on either flank. I set down rather a plan of march in the shape of a slovenly, reclining “S,” an enormous double loop nearly thirty-five miles in its total length which avoided the few main thoroughfares while at the same time took advantage of secluded lanes and cowpaths in its snakeline journey to the northeast across the countryside. Along the way, I calculated, our force would encounter over twenty plantations, farms, and homesteads—twenty-three to be