The Confessions of Nat Turner (55 page)

“Item.
Them two boys you all killed at Mr. William Williams’s in the fodder field, afternoon of the first day. Them two little boys, both of ‘em not yet ten years old. You mean to tell me you can feel no remorse over that?”

“No sir,” I replied calmly, “no, I feel no remorse.”

“Then goddammit—
item!
Them ten innocent schoolchildren slaughtered at the Wallerses’ place, later in the day.
Ten
little children! You mean to tell me that now, after all these here months, your heart ain’t touched by the agony of an event like that? That you don’t feel guilt over butchering a helpless and defenseless little group like that?”

“No sir,” I said, “I don’t feel anything. I’d like to add, though, if I may, sir, that those people at the Wallerses’ wasn’t entirely defenseless. They wasn’t all just children. Those white men there put up quite a fight against us. They done a lot of shootin’

back. That’s where a couple of my men got their first wounds.” I paused, then added: “But even aside from that I don’t feel any guilt.”

As I spoke I saw that Gray was glaring at me, and I wondered just how much of the truth I was telling him might find its way into those confessions of mine that he would eventually publish. I assumed not much, but it no longer mattered to me. My weariness was as bitter and as aching as that November wind that swept through the cracks of the cedar wall and froze my bones, chilled the chains that shackled my feet. I pointed out that we had seen one young girl of fourteen or so escape screaming into the woods at the Harris plantation late during the first afternoon, and reminded him that he himself had told me that The Confessions of Nat Turner

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this plucky lass, all breathless and hysterical, had come running to warn the people at the Jacob Williams place, two miles to the north. Not only did her flight result in Williams’s eluding our retribution (notably that of Nelson, whose slave he was and who longed to settle accounts) but caused Williams himself to ride off early and alert people up-country in big estates like the Blunts’

and Major Ridley’s. It was at those places that we met our most fierce resistance. And not long after this there appeared on the scene mounted troops from three counties, cutting off our entry into Jerusalem and our capture of the armory, when we were but a short mile or so from the bridge and the county seat.

Gray said nothing for a while. Then at last he drew a deep breath and the air whistled from his throat in a sigh. “Well, Reverend, I’ll have to hand it to you,” he said in a gloomy voice, “for what you set out to do, if you wanted slaughter, you done a pretty complete and satisfactory job. Up to a point, that is. I reckon even you didn’t know the actual statistics, hiding out until now like you done. But in the three days and nights that your campaign lasted you managed to hasten fifty-five white people into early graves, not counting a score or so more fearfully wounded or disabled—
hors de combat,
as the Frenchies say, for the rest of their natural lives. And only God knows how many poor souls will be scarred in their minds by grief and by terrible memories until the day they part this life. No,” he went on, breaking off a black wad from a plug of chewing tobacco, “no, I’ll have to hand it to you, in many respects you was pretty thorough. By sword and ax and gun you run a swath through this county that will be long remembered. You did, as you say, come damn near to taking your army into this town. And in addition, as I think I told you before, you scared the entire South into a condition that may be described as well-nigh
shitless.
No niggers ever
done
anything like this.”

There was nothing to say.

“Well, you was a success, all right. Up to a point. Mind you”—he jabbed a brown-stained finger at me—
“up to a point.
Because, Reverend, basically speaking and in the profoundest sense of the word you was a flat-assed
failure
—a total fiasco from beginning to end insofar as any real accomplishment is concerned. Right? Because, like you told me yesterday, all the big things that you expected to happen out of this just didn’t happen. Right? Only the little things happened, and them little things when they was all added up didn’t amount to a warm bottle of piss. Right?”

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I felt myself shivering as I gazed downward between my legs at the plank floor and at the links of cold cast iron sagging like a huge rusting timber chain in the chill dim light. Suddenly I felt the approach of my own death, and with a prickling at my scalp, considered that death with mingled dread and longing. My hands trembled, my bones ached, and I heard Gray’s voice as if from a broad and wintry distance.

“Item,”
he persisted. “By the U. S. census of last year there were eight thousand niggers in this county, all chattel, not counting around fifteen hundred niggers that were free. Of this grand total of ten thousand plus or minus whatever, you fully expected a good percentage of the male population, at least, to rise up and join you. Anyway, that’s what you have said, and that’s what the nigger Hark and that other nigger, Nelson, before we hung him,
said
you said. Let’s figure that, oh, maybe a little less than half of the nigger population of the county lives along the route you traversed toward Jerusalem. Lives within earshot of your clarion call, so to speak. Counting on the bucks alone, that’s one thousand black people who might be expected to follow your banner and live and die for Niggerdom, and this is only if we figure that a pathetic fifty per cent of the eligible males joined you. Not including pickaninnies and old uncles. One thousand niggers you should have collected, according to your plans. One thousand! And how many actually did join you? Seventy-five at the most!
Seventy-five!
Reverend, I ask you, what kind of a miser’ble-assed percentage is that?”

I made no reply.

“Item,”
he said again. “The item of drunkenness and general unmilitary conduct among your so-called troops. This you can’t deny in spite of the picture I’m sure you’d love to present to the world of a majestic military force in full, ordered, disciplined panoply—elegant soldier boys in bully ranks and files. But we’ve got too much testimony
au contraire.
What you had pure and simple was not an army but a draggledy mob of drunken black ruffians who couldn’t keep out of them stills and cider presses and thus in true nigger fashion contributed further to your downfall. Why, Major Claiborne, who ran the Isle of Wight militia, told me that when he broke you up there at Parker’s field fully a third of your troops was staggerin’ aroun’ drunker’n hoot owls, some of ‘em so pissy-eyed grogged up that they didn’t know the butt-end of a gun from the barrel. I ask you, Reverend, is that any way to run a proper revolution?”

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“No,” I said, “that was bad, I admit. That was one of the worst things that went wrong. I gave orders about that, but when my troops grew in size—when there was a lot of us instead of just a few—why, I somehow lost control over them. I just couldn’t keep an eye on them all at once and I—”But then I fell silent. Why try to explain anything now? Gray was right. Despite a measure of triumph, despite the single short mile that finally separated us from our goal—a nearness to Jerusalem so tantalizing that I could still feel in my flesh the remembered thrill of almost-victory—despite everything we had nearly achieved, in the end we failed beyond all hope or salvage. As he said, I had not been able to govern the boisterous black riffraff, so many of them only half grown, that had rallied behind me; neither I nor Nelson nor Henry nor anyone had been able to prevent those callow harebrained recruits from plundering the liquor cellars, just as we had been hard put to keep them from raiding attics for fancy clothes or ransacking smokehouses for hams or plunging away on horseback in the wrong direction or, more than once, with black fingers unacquainted with guns, almost shooting off their own feet or hands.
But, Mr. Gray,
I found myself wanting to say,
what else could you expect from mostly young men deaf,
dumb, blind, crippled, shackled, and hamstrung from the moment
of their first baby-squall on a bare clay floor? It was prodigious
that we come as far as we did, that we nearly took Jerusalem . . .

But I said nothing, recalling only that moment in the forenoon of the second day when at some pillaged ruin of a manor house far up-county I watched a young Negro I had never seen before, outlandishly garbed in feathers and the uniform of an army colonel, so drunk that he could barely stand, laughing wildly, pissing into the hollow mouth of a dead, glassy-eyed white-haired old grandmother still clutching a child as they lay sprawled amid a bed of zinnias, and I said not a word to him, merely turned my horse about and thought: It was because of you, old woman, that we did not learn to fight nobly . . .

“Last but not least,” Gray said,
“item.
And a durned important item it is, too, Reverend, also attested to by witnesses both black and white and by widespread evidence so unimpeachable as to make this here matter almost a foregone conclusion. And that is that you not only had a fantastic amount of niggers who did
not
join up with you but there was a whole countless number of other niggers who was your active
enemies.
What I mean in simple terms, Reverend, is that once the alarm went out, there was niggers
everywhere
—who were as determined to protect and save their masters as you were to murder them. They was The Confessions of Nat Turner

315

simply livin’
too well!
All the time that you were carryin’ around in that fanatical head of your’n the notion that the niggers were going to latch on to your great mission, as you put it, an’ go off to some stinkin’ swamp, the actual reality was that nine out of ten of your fellow burrheads just wasn’t buyin’ any such durn fool ideas.

Reverend, I have no doubt that it was your own race that contributed more to your fiasco than anything else. It just ain’t a race made for revolution, that’s all. That’s another reason that nigger slavery’s goin’ to last for a thousand years.”

He rose from his seat across from me. “Well, I got to go, Reverend. I’ll see you tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’ll put down in my deposition to the court which precedes your confession that the defendant shows no remorse for his acts, and since he
feels
no guilt his plea will be that of ‘not guilty.’Now, one last time, are you
sure
you feel no remorse at all? I mean, would you do it again if you had the chance? There’s still time to change your mind. It ain’t goin’ to save your neck but it’ll surer’n hell look better for you in court. Speak up, Reverend.”

When I made no reply to him he left without further word. I heard the cell door slam shut and the bolt thud home in the slot with its slippery chunking sound. It was almost night again. I listened to the scrape and rustle of fallen leaves as the cold air swept them across the ground. I reached down to rub my numb and swollen ankles and I shivered in the wind, thinking: Remorse? Is it true that I really have no remorse or contrition or guilt for anything I’ve done? Is it maybe because I have no remorse that I can’t pray and that I know myself to be so removed from the sight of God?

As I sat there, recollecting August, I felt remorse impossible to know or touch or find. All I could feel was an entombed, frustrate rage—rage at the white people we had killed and those we had failed to kill, rage at the quick and the dead, rage above all at those Negroes who refused us or fled us or who had become the enemy—those spiritless and spineless wretches who had turned against us. Rage even at our own minuscule force, which was so much smaller than the expected multitude! For although it ravaged my heart to accept it, I knew that Gray was not wrong: the black men had caused my defeat just as surely as the white.

And so it had been on that last day, that Wednesday afternoon, when after having finally laid waste to twoscore dwellings and our force of fifty had rallied in the woods to storm Major Ridley’s place, I had caught sight for the first time of Negroes in great numbers with rifles and muskets at the barricaded veranda, firing back at us with as much passion and fury and even skill as their The Confessions of Nat Turner

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white owners and overseers who had gathered there to block our passage into Jerusalem. (The alarm had gone out at least by the morning of the day before, our schedule was disastrously upset, and we had met resistance everywhere for many hours. The Ridley place, which straddled the road into town, was now an ominous fortress yet it had to be taken—and quickly: it was our last chance—if we were to break through and dash the last mile on horseback, seizing Jerusalem before it became an armed camp.) Far up on the veranda of the old stately brick house now barricaded by wagons and crates and hogsheads I could see twenty-five or thirty Negroes owned by the white gentry near town—coachmen, cooks, some field hands maybe but I could tell from what they wore mostly gardeners and house nigger flunkies, even a clutch of bandannaed yellow kitchen girls passing ammunition. I heard the voice of Major Ridley above the steady fusillade of gunfire —“That’s the spirit, boys!” he cried to the defenders, black and white alike. “That’s the spirit! Fire away, lads! Lay on the lead! We’ll turn the rascals back!—and the volleys swelled tempestuously down upon us with a noise like the continual crackle of lightning, ripping twigs and leaves from the green summer trees.

Then I recall Hark saying to me as we crouched behind the great stump of a felled oak, shouting above our own rifle fire:
Look at
dem black fuckahs shootin’ at us!
And I thought, lying to myself: Yes, they’re black but they’ve been forced, dragooned by white men who have threatened them with their very lives. Negroes would not fire back like that of their own free will, at least not in those numbers. And all this I kept thinking desperately even as I signaled and we charged the house (but far within I knew better: had not pitifully less than a hundred joined us? When I had expected hundreds? Had not I with my own eyes seen fifty more Negroes flee at our approach all along the way, scattering to the woods?)—our men now moving on foot and crouched in a ragged skirmish line behind hedged and sun-dappled boxwood and maple trees. Each of us was mercilessly exposed, the force not outnumbered but outpositioned and outgunned in a lopsided uphill assault, and intimidated nightmarishly less by white men now than by the sight of a horde of housebound and privileged town and up-county Negroes sending coolly aimed gunfire into our black ranks. At last we had to fall back and disperse into the woods. I saw my men streaming off in panic everywhere.