The Confessions of Nat Turner (53 page)

So brandy and women is
out
. Now come on.”

In the ravine my followers, together with the new recruit Jack, had finished the last remnants of their barbecue. Pig bones littered the ground around the ashes of a fire, still smoldering.

The five men were reclining amid the cool ferns that rimmed the ravine; they had been talking in soft voices —I heard them as I came down the path with Will—but at my approach they arose and stood silent. Ever since the spring, when I revealed my plans, I had insisted that they pay this deference in my presence, explaining to them patiently that I wished for no obeisance, only absolute obedience; it should not have surprised me, as it did, that they so readilycomplied—endless years of servility had done their abrasive work. Now as they stood waiting among the afternoon shadows I approached them with an upraised hand and said: “The first shall be last.”

“An’ de last shall be first,” they replied, more or less together.

“Report from the First Troop!” I commanded. I used the form of order I had adopted after hearing drills of the mounted militia outside the Jerusalem armory. The First Troop was Henry’s responsibility. Because of Henry’s deafness I had to repeat the command again, whereupon he stepped forward and said: “First Troop dey all ready. Nathan an’ Wilbur bofe is waitin’ at de Blunts’ place. Davy he waitin’ at Mrs. Waters’s. Joe he all ready too down at Peter Edwards’s. Joe he done got him a bad case of de quinsy, but he put him a hot flannel roun’ his th’oat an’ he say he ‘spect he gwine be all right time we gits dere.”

“Report from the Second Troop!” I said.

The Second Troop, a body of six, was Nelson’s. “All my niggers is ready an’ rarin’ to go,” he said. “Austin say he could maybe sneak away from de Bryants’ dis evenin’ an’ jine us at Travis’s roun’ ’bout nightfall. If’n he can, he gwine bring Bryant’s horse.”

“Good,” I said, “more they is at first the better.” Then: “Report from the Third Troop!” Just as I gave this command a tremendous belch broke loose from one of my company, followed by another belch, and I turned quickly to see that it had come from Jack. With a brandy bottle clutched against his black The Confessions of Nat Turner

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chest he was swaying in a delicate circular motion; his thick lips parted in a self-absorbed grin and he regarded me through eyes misted over with a dreamy film—the gaze oddly studious although utterly blank. In a flood of rage I knocked the brandy bottle from his hand.

“No mo’ of
that
, nigger!” I said. “Applejack is
out
, you hear? I catch yo’ black mouth at a bottle again and you goin’ to get clobbered fo’ good. Now
git
on back over there in the trees!”

As Jack sidled away sheepishly, weaving, I called Nelson aside into a small stand of slash pine—a dark place with spongy ground underfoot, swarming with gnats. “Listen!” I said angrily in a low voice. “What’s gone wrong with you, Nelson, anyways?

You supposed to be my right arm, an’ now look what’s done happened already! ‘Twas
you
been sayin’ all along we got to keep the niggers away from the stills and presses! ‘Twas
you
been warnin’ about drinkin’, an’ now here you let this yere big black clown get pissy-eyed drunk right in front of yo’ nose!

What’m I goin’ to
do
? If I can’t depend on you for a simple thing like that, then we done lost the war before it ever gits goin’!”

“I sorry,” he said, licking his lips. His round middle-aged stolid face with its graying stubble and its look of depthless oppression suddenly sagged, became hurt and downcast. “I sorry, Nat,” he repeated, “I guess I jes’ done forgot ‘bout all dat.”

“Man, you can’t ’
low
yo’self to forget,” I insisted, boring in hard,

“you my chief lieutenant, you know that, you an’ Henry. If y’all can’t help me keep these niggers in line, then we might as well run up the white flag right now.”

“I sorry,” he said again, abjectly.

“Awright,” I went on, “forget all that now. Just mind from now on to keep them niggers out’n them stills. Now listen here, one last time. Give me the plan for Travis’s so we git it straight with no trouble. Remember, we uses the broadax an’ the hatchet. Cold steel. No noise. No shootin’ till I give the word. We start shootin’

too soon an’ they be on top of us before daybreak.”

“You right about dat,” he declared. “Anyways—” I listened as he outlined for my satisfaction, one last time, our plan of attack on Travis’s house. “—Den you an’ Henry goes in to getTravis an’

Miss Sarah, dat right?” he was saying. “Sam goes to git Miss Maria Pope—”

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“Only she ain’t there,” I put in.

“How come?” he said.

“She done gone up to Petersburg on a visit, this very day,” I explained with some regret. It was true: the no-account biddy had had supernatural luck.

“Mm-
huh
,” Nelson sighed, “too bad ’bout dat. Sam sho would of fixed dat ol’ bitch’s wagon.”

“Anyway, she gone,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“Well den,” he continued, “I ’spect it best dat Sam stay with you, ain’t dat right? An’ me an’ Hark an’ Jack goes up to de attic an’

gits Putnam an’ dat othah boy. Dis while you takin’ keer of Travis. Meanwhiles, Austin he in de barn saddlin’ up dem horses. What ‘bout Will, Nat? Whar he figgers in?”

“Nem’mine ‘bout Will,” I replied. “We’ll use him as a lookout or somethin’. Nem’mine ‘bout Will.”

“An’ what ‘bout dat little baby?” he said. “You done tole me you was gwine tell us what to do ‘bout dat business. What?”

I had a sinking sensation deep inside. “Nem’mine ‘bout that either,” I answered him, “I goin’ to git all that straightened out when the time comes. Maybe we jest let that baby alone, I don’t know.” I was stung with a sudden, inexplicable annoyance.

“Awright,” I told him, “go on now and git on back with the men. I’ll come down with y’all after dark.”

After Nelson had gone back through the trees, leaving me to chew on a piece of pork they had saved for me from their feast, a mood of anxiety began to steal over me, announcing itself with a faint numbness in my extremities, an urgent heartbeat, pain all around the bottom of my stomach. I started to sweat, and I laid the joint of pork aside, uneaten. I had many times prayed to the Lord to spare me this fear, but now it was plain that, unheeding, He was going to allow me to suffer anyway this griping sickness, this clammy apprehension. The waning summer day was humid and still. I could hear nothing except for the gnats’ feverish insensate humming around my ears and a muffled snatch of talk from the Negroes in the ravine. I wondered suddenly if the Lord had also permitted Saul and Gideon and David to endure this fear before their day of warfare: did they too know this demoralizing terror, this tremor in the bones, this whiff of The Confessions of Nat Turner

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imminent, hovering death? Did they too taste the mouth go dry at thought of the coming slaughter, sense a shiver of despair fly through their restless flesh as they conjured up images of bloodied heads and limbs, gouged-out eyes, the strangled faces of men they had known, enemy and friend, jaws agape in yawns of eternal slumber? Did Saul and Gideon and David, armed and waiting on the eve of the battle, feel their blood change to water in everlasting fright and then long to sheath their swords and turn their backs upon the strife? For an instant panic seized me. I arose as if to flee headlong through the pines, to find some refuge in the distant woods where I would be hid forever beyond the affairs of God and men.
Cease the war, cease the war
, my heart howled.
Run, run
, cried my soul. At that moment my fear was so great that I felt that I was even beyond reach or counsel of the Lord. Then from the ravine I heard Hark’s laugh, and my terror subsided. I was trembling like a willow branch. I sat down on the ground and addressed myself to further prayer and contemplation as the shades of evening drew glimmering in . . .

An hour or so after nightfall—at around ten o’clock—I rejoined my men in the ravine. A full moon had risen to the east, something I had anticipated for months and was in keeping with my plans. Since I was confident that we would be on the offensive throughout all the first night (and with good fortune the second night too), the moon would favor us rather than the enemy. For added illumination I had torches made of lightwood stakes and rags soaked in a gallon cask of camphene—turpentine mixed with grain alcohol—that Hark had stolen from the wheel shop. These torches would be used indoors and with care on the march, whenever the moonlight failed us. Our initial weapons were few and simple: three broadaxes and two hatchets, all carefully honed on Travis’s grindstone. As I made it clear to Nelson, for purposes of stealth and surprise I wished to avoid gunfire at least until the first daylight, when our assault would have gained a safe momentum.

As for the rest of the weapons—guns and swords—the houses along the way would keep us supplied until we reached Mrs.

Whitehead’s and her gun room, a veritable arsenal. Our enemy had supplied us with all the instruments of his own destruction: now in the ravine Sam lit one torch with a lucifer match from a handful he had stolen from Nathaniel Francis. A ruddy light washed across the grave black faces of the men, flickered out at my command as I raised my hand and pronounced a final word of damnation upon the enemy: “
Let the angel of the Lord chase
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them, let them be as chaff before the wind
.” Then in the moonlight their faces receded into shadow and I said: “All right.

Now
. We commence the battle.”

In silence and in single file—Nelson leading, I close at his heels—we came out of the woods and into the cotton patch behind Travis’s wheel shop. One of the men coughed in the darkness behind me and at that instant two of Travis’s cur dogs set up a yapping and howling in the barnyard. I whispered for quiet and we stood stock-still. Then (having foreseen this too) I motioned for Hark to go ahead before us and hush up the dogs: he was on good terms with them and could put them at ease. We waited as Hark stalked across the moonlit field and into the barnyard, waited until the dogs gave a friendly whimper and fell silent. The moon in an opalescent hush came down like dust, like dim daylight, exfoliating from the shop and the barn and sheds elongated shadows—black sharp silhouettes of gable, cornice, roof beam, door.It was hot and still. There was no sound from the woods save for the katydids’ high-pitched
cheercheer-cheercheer
and the peeping of crickets among the weeds. In the flat blazing yellow of the moonlight Travis’s house slumbered, dark within and still as the halls of death. Nelson suddenly laid a hand on my arm and whispered: “
Look dar
.”

Then I saw Hark’s huge outline detach itself from the shadow of the barn, and still another, angular and tall: this would be Austin, the last member to join my striking force. Twenty-five or so, he had nothing against his present owner, Henry Bryant, who had treated him amiably, but felt nothing for him either and had sworn that he would gladly kill him. He had, however, once gotten into a vicious fight with Sam over a yellow girl in Jerusalem and I only hoped that their enmity would not flare up now again.

I signaled for the other men to follow me and we proceeded in Indian file across the cotton patch, clambered quietly over a stile, and met Hark and Austin in the lee of the wheel shop, out of sight of the house. We were now eight. As I gave my keys to Nelson and whispered instructions to him and Sam, I could hear Travis’s hogs grunting sleepily in their pen. Now while Sam and Nelson stole into the shop for a ladder, I told Austin to go to the stable and saddle up Travis’s horses, bidding him to work as silently as he could. He was a tall, lanky field hand with a mean black skull-shaped face, agile and quick despite his height, and very powerful. On the way over through the woods from Bryant’s his horse had flushed a skunk and he stank to heaven. No sooner had he gone off to the stable than Sam and Nelson The Confessions of Nat Turner

305

returned with the ladder. I joined them in walking across the yard to the side of the house while the other four moved noiselessly ahead in front of us to their station in the shrubbery around the front porch. The skunk stench lingered, hot in the nostrils. The two cur dogs ambled along with us beneath the ladder; their bony flanks were outlined in sharp moonlit relief, and one dragged a game leg. A faint breeze sprang up and the skunk odor was obliterated. The air was filled with the rank fragrance of mimosa. I caught my breath for an instant, thinking of the time so long ago when I had played with a boy named Wash in a mimosa-sweet glade at Turner’s Mill. The brief reverie burst like splintered glass. I heard the ladder make a faint
taptapping
as they set it against the side of the house and quickly I tested it for balance, gripping it tight by a chesthigh rung, then without a word began my climb up the side of the house, past the newly whitewashed clapboard timbers that hurt my eyes in a calcimine lunar glare. Even as I reached the open upper hallway window with its fluttering curtains I heard from the main bedroom a stertorous rasping sound, deep-throated, half-strangled, and recognized it as Travis’s snore. (I remembered Miss Sarah’s

“Land sakes alive, Mister Joe does make a racket but you jus’ do learn to live with it after a bit.”) I heaved myself silently over the sill into the dark hallway, into the very bosom of the cavernous snoring noise that muffled the sound of my feet as they struck the creaking floor. I was all aslime with sweat beneath my shirt, my mouth had the dry bitter taste of a walnut shell. It’s not I who’s doing this, I thought abruptly, it is someone else. I tried to spit but my tongue scraped at the roof of my mouth as if against plaster or sand. I found the stairs.

Down on the first floor at the foot of the stairs I lit a candle with a lucifer match, meeting as I did the black wonder-struck face of the servant boy Moses, who had been aroused from his tiny cupboard beneath the stairway by the sound of my feet. His eyes rolled white with alarm. He was stark naked. “What you doin’, Nat?” he whispered.