William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (152 page)

Bemused, the grand names tolling in my brain like chimes, I felt a kind of horrible, silent laughter welling up within me as the stupid-looking, bull-necked man propelled me thus into history. He again turned and gazed at me, squinty eyes filled with scorn and hatred. “Yeah, uh-huh, those men, your Honors, abominable as their deeds may have been, was yet capable of a certain magnanimousness. Even
their
vengeful and ruthless code demanded that they spare the lives of the young, the helpless, the old and the frail, the pitifully weak. Even
their
hard rules allowed them a smidgen of human charity; and wanton in their cruelty as they was, some spark of grace, some quality of mercy compelled them oftentimes to withhold the sword when it come to shedding the blood of helpless innocence, babies and so on. Your Honors—and I shall be brief, for this case needs no clamorous protestation—the prisoner here, unlike his bloody predecessors in evil, can lay hold on to no mitigation by reason of charity or mercy. No compassion, no memory of past kindnesses or of gentle and paternal care deviated him from the execution of these bleak deeds. Tender innocence and feeble old age—sech alike fell victim to his inhuman lust. A fiend incarnate, self-confessed, his diabolical actions now stand revealed in all their hideous lineaments. Your Honors! Your Honors! The people cry out for swift retribution! He must pay the supreme penalty with all due speed, that the stink of his depraved and hateful flesh be erased from the nostrils of a shocked humanity! … Commonwealth rests its case.” He was finished. Suddenly I was aware that his eyes were spilling over with tears. He had made a prodigious effort.

Dabbing at his eyes with the back of his hand, Trezevant sat down beside the whispering stove; there was no great sound in the courtroom—only a subdued mumbling and a shuffling of feet, a renewed outburst of hacking and coughing through which that solitary noise of hysterical female weeping rose and rose in a soft despondent wail. Across the room I saw Gray murmuring behind his hand to a cadaverous man in a black frock coat, then he quickly arose and addressed the bench. And immediately, with no shock, I realized he was now speaking in tones that he always reserved for court, not for a nigger preacher.

“Honorable Justices,” Gray said, “Mr. Parker and I, speaking as counsel for the defendant, wish to commend our colleague Mr. Trezevant both for his persuasive and fluent reading of the prisoner’s confession and also for his splendid summation. We heartily concur and submit the defendant’s case to the court without argument.” He paused, turned to glance at me impassively, then continued: “However, one or two items, if it pleases your Honors—and I too shall try to be brief, agreeing with the able prosecutor that this case needs no
clamorous protestation.
Felicitous phrase! I would like to make it clear that Mr. Parker and I submit these items not by way of argument, nor out of the desire for mitigation or extenuation for the prisoner, who to our minds is every bit as black—no play on words intended!—as he has been painted by Mr. Trezevant. Yet if these assizes have been convened to apportion justice to the principals in this conspiracy, they have also been held in the spirit of inquiry. For this terrible event has given rise to grave questions—crucial and significant questions the answers to which involve the safety and the well-being and peace of mind of every white man, woman, and child within the sound of my voice, and far beyond, yes, throughout every inch and ell of this Southern empire where the white race and the black race dwell in such close propinquity. Not a few of these questions, with the capture and confinement of the prisoner here, have been answered to our considerable satisfaction. The widespread fear—nay, conviction—that this uprising was no mere local event but was part of a larger, organized scheme with ramifications spreading out octopus-like throughout the slave population universally—this terror has been safely laid to rest.

“Yet other questions perforce remain to trouble us. The rebellion was put down. Its maniacal participants have received swift and impartial justice, and its leader—the misguided wretch who sits before us in this courtroom—will quickly follow them to the gallows. Nonetheless, in the dark and privy stillness of our minds there are few of us who are not still haunted by worrisome doubts. Honesty, stark reality—naked fact!—compel us to admit that the seemingly impossible did, in truth, eventuate: benevolently treated, recipients of the most tender and solicitous care, a band of fanatical Negroes did, in truth, rise up murderously and in the dead of night strike down those very people under whose stewardship they had enjoyed a contentment and tranquillity unequaled anywhere among the members of their race. It was not a fantasy, not a nightmare! It was an actual happening, and its awful toll in human ruin and heartbreak and bereavement can be measured to this very day by the somber pall of mourning which hangs like a cloud here—here in this courtroom, two months and more after the hideous event. We cannot erase these questions, they refuse to dissolve like a mist, as the Bard put it, leaving not a rack behind. We cannot wish them away. They haunt us like the specter of a threatening black hand above the sweetly pillowed head of a slumbering babe. Like the memory of a stealthy footstep in a murmurous and peaceful summer garden. How did it happen? From what dark wellspring did it flow? Will it ever happen again?”

Gray paused and again turned toward me, the square ruddy face impassive, bland, regarding me as ever without hostility. I had grown only mildly surprised by his voice, filled as it was with eloquence and authority, free of the sloppy patronizing half-literate white-man-to-a-nigger tones he had used in jail. It was obviously he—not the prosecutor Trezevant—who was in charge of things. “How did it hap- pen?” he repeated in a slow, measured voice. “From what dark wellspring did it flow? Will it ever happen again?” And he paused once more, then with a flourish toward the papers on the table, said: “The answer lies here, the answer lies in the confessions of Nat Turner!”

Again he turned to address the bench, his words momentarily drowned out as an ancient toothless Negro woman fumbled with a clattering noise at the stove door, hurled in a cedar log; blue smoke fumed outward, and a popping shower of sparks. The door clanged shut, the woman shuffled away. Gray coughed, then resumed: “Honorable Justices, as briefly as I can I want to demonstrate that the defendant’s confessions, paradoxically, far from having to alarm us, from sending us into consternation and confusion, should instead give us considerable cause for relief. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that the prisoner’s deeds mean that we must not enforce stricter and more stringent laws against this class of the population. Far from it: if anything, this dreadful insurrection shows that stern and repressive measures are clearly indicated, not only in Virginia but throughout the entire South. Yet, your Honors, I will endeavor to make it plain that all such rebellions are not only likely to be exceedingly rare in occurrence but are ultimately doomed to failure, and this as a result of the basic weakness and inferiority, the moral deficiency of the Negro character.”

Gray picked up the confessions from the table, shuffled through the pages briefly, and continued: “Fifty-five white people went to a horrible death in this insurrection, your Honors, yet of this number Nat Turner was personally responsible for only one murder.
One murder
—this being that of Miss Margaret Whitehead, age eighteen, the comely and cultivated daughter of Mrs. Catherine Whitehead—also a victim of the insurrection—and sister to Mr. Richard Whitehead, a respected Methodist minister known to many of those in this courtroom, who likewise met a cruel fate at the hands of this inhuman pack. One murder alone, it seems plain, was all that Nat Turner committed. A particularly foul and dastardly murder it was, to be sure—taking the fragile life of a young girl in all her pure innocence. Yet I am convinced that this was the defendant’s sole and solitary victim. Convinced, your Honors, only after much preliminary skepticism. For indeed—perhaps like your honorable selves—skepticism nagged at, nay, overwhelmed me when I pondered close the evidence I transcribed from the prisoner’s own lips. Would not the admission of a single slaying—a single slaying alone—be tantamount to a sly plea for clemency? Thoroughly in key with the malingering nature of the Negro character, would not such an admission be typical of the evasiveness which the Negro perennially employs to cloak and disguise the base quality of his nature? I thereupon resolved upon a sturdy confrontal of the defendant with my strictures and doubts, only to discover that he was adamant in his refusal to admit a greater involvement in the actual slayings. And at this moment—if the court will permit me the levity—I had begun durn well to doubt my doubts. For why should a person, knowing full well that he must die for his deeds anyway, having already owned to one ghastly murder, and having displayed otherwise a remarkable candor in terms of the extent of his crimes—why should he not own
all?
The man hath penance done,’ quoth the poet Coleridge in his immortal rhyme, ’and penance more will do.’ What availed the defendant any further reticence?” Gray halted, then resumed: “Thus, not without some reluctance, I concluded that in terms of this
beaucoup
important item—the killing of one individual, and one individual alone—the prisoner was speaking the truth …

“But why?” Gray continued.
“Why
only one? This was the next question to which I addressed myself, and which caused me a severe and worrisome perplexity. Cowardice alone may well have served to explain this oddity. Certainly, pure Negro cowardice would find its quintessential expression in this base crime—the slaying not of a virile and stalwart man but of a fragile, weak, and helpless young maiden but a few years out of childhood. Yet once again, your Honors, logic and naked fact compel us to admit that this insurrection has caused us to rearrange, at least provisonally, some of our traditional notions about Negro cowardice. For certainly, whatever the deficiencies of the Negro character—and they are many, varied, and grave—this uprising has proved beyond any captious argument that the ordinary Negro slave, faced with the choice of joining up with a fanatical insurgent leader such as Nat Turner or defending his fond and devoted master, will leap to his master’s defense and fight as bravely as any man, and by so doing give proud evidence of the benevolence of a system so ignorantly decried by the Quakers and other such moralistically dishonest detractors. ’Whatever is unknown is magnified,’ quoth Tacitus in
Agricola!
So
much
for Northern ignorance. To be sure, Nat Turner had his misguided adherents. But the bravery of those black men who at their good masters’ sides fought faithfully and well cannot be gainsaid, and let it be so recorded to the everlasting honor of this genial institution …”

Now as Gray spoke, the same sense of misery and despair I had felt that first day when, in the cell, Gray had tolled off the list of slaves acquitted, transported, but not hung—
them other niggers, dragooned, balked, it was them other niggers that cooked your goose, Reverend
—this same despair suddenly rolled over me in a cold and sickening wave, mingled with the dream I had had, only a few minutes before, of the Negro boys screaming their terror in the swamp, sinking out of sight beneath the mire … Sweating, the sweat rolling in streams down my cheeks, I felt an inward, uncontrollable wrench of guilt and loss, and I must have made a sound in my throat, or moved in my rattling chains, uncontrollably again, for Gray suddenly halted and turned and stared at me, as did the six old men at the bench, and I could feel the eyes of the spectators on me, blinking and blinking, watching. Then I slowly relaxed, with a kind of icy interior shudder, and gazed out through the steaming windows at the ragged grove of pine trees far off beneath the wintry sky—of a sudden then, f
or
no particular reason other than that once more I had heard her name, thinking of Margaret Whitehead in some fragrant, summery context of dappled light and shade, dust blooming up from a baked and rutted summer road, and her voice clear, whispery, and girlish beside me on the carriage seat as I gaze at the mare’s clipclopping hooves beneath the coarse and flourishing tail:
And he came himself—the Governor, Nat! Governor Floyd! All the way down to Lawrenceville he came! Isn’t that just the most glorious thing you ever heard?
And my own voice, polite, respectful:
Yes, missy, that must indeed be something grand.
And again the breathless and whispery girl’s voice:
And we had a big ceremony at the Seminary, Nat. And it was the most splendiferous thing! And I’m the class poet and I wrote an ode and a song that the little students sang. And the little girls presented the Governor with a wreath. Want to hear the words of the song, Nat? Want to hear them?
And again my own voice, solemn and polite:
Why yes, missy. I’d sure love to hear that song.
And then the joyous and girlish voice in my ear above the jogging, squeaking springs, mountainous white drifting clouds of June sending across the parched fields immensities of light and dark, dissolving patterns of shade and sun:

We’ll pull a bunch of buds and flowers,

And tie a ribbon round them;
If you’ll but think, in your lonely hours,

Of the sweet little girls that bound them.
We’ll cull the earliest that put forth,

And those that last the longest,
And the bud that boasts the fairest birth,

Shall cling to the stem the strongest
…

Gray’s voice swam back through the courtroom above the restless shuffle, the hiss and hum and torment of the stove, panting like an old hound: “… was not Negro cowardice in this case, honorable Justices, which was at the root of the defendant’s egregious and total failure. Had it been pure cowardice, Nat would have conducted his operation from a vantage point allowing him but little if any propinquity with the carnage, the bloody proceedings themselves. But we know from the prisoner’s own testimony, and from the testimony of the nigger … Negro Hark and the others—and we have no clear reason to doubt any of it—that he himself was intimately involved in the proceedings, striking the first blow toward their execution, and repeatedly attempting to wreak murderous acts of violence upon the terrified and innocent victims.” Gray paused for an instant, then said with emphasis: “But note well, your Honors, that I say
attempting.
I stress and underline that world. I put that word in
majuscules!
For save in the inexplicably successful murder of Margaret Whitehead—inexplicably motivated, likewise obscurely executed—the defendant, this purported bold, intrepid, and resourceful leader, was unable to carry out a
single feat of arms!
Not only this, but at the end his quality of leadership, such as it was, utterly deserted him!” Gray paused again, then went on in a soft, somber, deliberate voice: “I humbly submit to this court and your Honors the inescapable fact that the qualities of irresolution, instability, spiritual backwardness, and plain habits of docility are so deeply embedded in the Negro nature that any insurgent action on the part of this race is doomed to failure; and for this reason it is my sincere plea that the good people of our Southland yield not, succumb not to the twin demons of terror and panic …”