The Confessions of Nat Turner (17 page)

Don’t you know that, Reverend? And don’t you realize further that it was the message contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the
prime mover
, of this entire miserable catastrophe?

Don’t you see the plain ordinary
evil
of your dad-burned Bible?”

He fell silent, and I too said nothing. Though I was no longer either as hot or cold as I had been that morning— indeed, for the first time that day I felt a tolerable comfort— my throat had gotten dry and I found it difficult to swallow. I closed my eyes for a second, opened them again: in the cold, pale, diminishing light Gray seemed to be smiling at me, though perhaps it was only the dimness of the twilight which blurred and made indistinct the configurations of his heavy round face. I felt that I had only faintly understood what Gray had said—grasped the barest beginnings of it; finally I replied in a dry voice, the frog still in my throat:

“What do you mean, Mr. Gray? I fear I don’t quite follow.
Evil
?”

Gray leaned forward, slapping his knee. “Well,
Jehoshaphat
, Reverend, look at the record! Jes’ look at it! Look at your own words! The words you rattled off to me for three days runnin’!

The divine spirit! Seek ye the kingdom of heaven! My wisdom
came from God!
All that hogwash, what I mean. And what’s that line you told me the heavenly spirit said to you when you were about to embark on this bloody course of your’n? For he who knows—What?”

“
For he who knoweth his Master’s will,” I said, “and doeth it not,
shall be beaten with many stripes, and thus have I chastened
you
.”

“Yeah, hogwash like that, what I mean. Divine guidance. Holy will. Messages from up above. Durndest slop ever I heard of.

And what did it get you?
What
, Reverend?”

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I made no reply, even though now I had begun to understand what he was trying to say. I stopped looking at him and thrust my head into my hands, hoping that he would not find it necessary to go on.

“Here’s what it got you, Reverend, if you’ll pardon the crudity. It got you a pissy-assed record of total futility, the likes of which are hard to equal. Threescore white people slain in random butchery, yet the white people still firmly holdin’ the reins. Seventeen niggers hung, including you and old Hark there, nevermore to see the light of day. A dozen or more other nigger boys shipped out of an amiable way of life to Alabama, where you can bet your bottom dollar that in five years the whole pack of ‘em will be dead of work and fever. I’ve seen them cotton plantations. I’ve seen them rice layouts too, Reverend—niggers up to their necks in shit from day clean to first dark, with a big black driver to whip

‘em, and mosquitoes the size of buzzards. This is what you brung on them kids, Reverend, this is what Christianity brung on them boys. I reckon you didn’t figure on that back then, did you?”

I was silent for a moment, considering his question, then I said:

“No.” For indeed, to be most truthful, I had not figured on it then.

“And what else did Christianity accomplish?” he said. “Here’s what Christianity accomplished. Christianity accomplished the mob. The
mob
. It accomplished not only your senseless butchery, the extermination of all those involved in it, black and white, but the horror of lawless retaliation and reprisal—one hundred and thirty-one innocent niggers both slave and free cut down by the mob that roamed Southampton for a solid week, searching vengeance. I reckon you didn’t figure on that neither back then, did you, Reverend?”

“No,” I said quietly, “no, I didn’t.”

“And furthermore, you can bet your sweet ass that when the Legislature convenes in December they’re goin’ to pass laws that make the ones
extant
look like rules for a Sunday School picnic.

They goin’ to lock up the niggers in a black cellar and throw away the key.” He paused, and I could sense him leaning close to me. “
Abolition
,” he said in a voice like a whisper. “Reverend, single-handed you done more with your Christianity to assure the defeat of abolition than all the meddlin’ and pryin’ Quakers that ever set foot in Virginia put together. I reckon you didn’t figure on that either?”

“No,” I said, looking into his eyes, “if that be true. No.”

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His voice had risen to a mocking, insistent monotone.

“
Christianity!
Rapine, plunder, butchery! Death and destruction!

And misery and suffering for untold generations. That was the accomplishment of your Christianity, Reverend. That was the fruits of your mission. And that was the joyous message of your faith. Nineteen hundred years of Christian teaching plus a black preacher is all it takes— Is all it takes to prove that God is a God durned lie!”

He rose to his feet, moving briskly now, his voice softer as he spoke, pulling on his dingy gloves. “Beg pardon, Reverend. I’ve got to go. No offense. All in all you’ve been pretty fair and square with me. In spite of what I said, I reckon a man has to act according to his own lights, even when he’s the victim of a delusion. Good night, Reverend. I’ll look back in on you.”

When he had gone Kitchen brought me a pan of cold pork and hoe cake and a cupful of water, and I sat there in the chill dusk, eating, watching the light fall and fade away against the gray sky to the west. Presently I heard Hark on the other side of the wall, laughing softly. “Dat man sho give you down de country, Nat.

What dat man so sweat up about?”

But I didn’t reply to Hark, rising instead and shuffling the length of the chain to the window.

Over Jerusalem hung a misty nightfall, over the brown and stagnant river and the woods beyond, where the water oak and cypress merged and faded one into the other, partaking like shadows of the somber wintry dusk. In the houses nearby, lamps and lanterns flickered on in yellow flame and far off there was a sound of clattering china and pots and pans and back doors slamming as people went about fixing supper. Way in the distance in some kitchen I could hear a Negro woman singing—a weary sound full of toil and drudgery yet the voice rich, strong, soaring:
I knows moonrise, I knows star-rise, lay dis body down
.

. . Already the dusty fall of snow had disappeared; a rime of frost lay in its place, coating the earth with icy wet pinpricks of dew, crisscrossed by the tracks ofsquirrels. In chilly promenade two guards with muskets paced round the jail in greatcoats, stamping their feet against the brittle ground. A gust of wind swept through the cell, whistling. I shivered in a spasm of cold and I closed my eyes, listening to the lament of the woman far off, leaning up against the window ledge, half dreaming in a half slumber of mad weariness and longing:
As the heart panteth after the water
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brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth
for God, for the living God. Deep calleth unto deep at the noise
of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over
me
. . .

For what seemed a long time I stood leaning near the window, my eyes shut tight against the twilight. Maybe he is right, I thought, maybe all was for nothing, maybe worse than nothing, and all I’ve done was evil in the sight of God. Maybe he is right and God is dead and gone, which is why I can no longer reach him . . . I opened my eyes again, looking out into the gloaming light, above the woods where wild ducks skimmed southward against a sky as gray as smoke. Yes, I thought, maybe all this is true, otherwise why should God not heed me, why should he not answer? Still the woman’s rich sweet voice soared through the gathering dusk:
I walks in de moonlight, walks in de starlight; to
lay dis body down
. . . Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still.
I’ll lay in de
grave and stretch out my arms
. . . Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet.

Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done
was wrong, is there no redemption?

I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem.

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Part II

Old Times Past:

Voices, Dreams, Recollections

Once when I was a boy of twelve or thereabouts, and living with my mother in the big house at Turner’s Mill, I remember a fat white man who stopped one night and had supper with my owner of that time, Samuel Turner. This traveling man was a bluff, hearty soul with a round red face, cruelly pockmarked, and a booming laugh. A dealer in farm implements—ploughs and harrows, shares and cultivators and the like—he traveled up and down the country with several huge wagons and a team of dray horses and a couple of boys to help him, stopping for the night at this or that farm or plantation, wherever he happened to be peddling his wares. I no longer recall the man’s name (if I ever knew it) but I do remember the season, which was the beginning of spring. Indeed, it was only what this man said about the weather and the season that caused me to remember him at all.

For that evening in April, I was serving at the supper table (I had just recently begun this chore; there were two older Negroes in attendance, but it was my apprentice duty alone to replenish the glasses with cider or buttermilk, to pick up whatever fell to the floor, and to shoo away the cat and the dogs) and I recollect his voice, very loud but genial, as he orated to Marse Samuel and the family in the alien accent of the North: “No, sir, Mr. Turner,”

he was saying, “they is no spring like it in this great land of ours.

They is nothing what approaches the full springtide when it hits Virginia. And, sir, they is good reason for this. I have traveled all up and down the seaboard, from the furtherest upper ranges of New England to the hottest part of Georgia, and I know whereof I speak. What makes the Virginia spring surpassing fine? Sir, it is simply this. It is simply that, whereas in more southern climes the temperature is always so humid that spring comes as no surprise, and whereas in more northerly climes the winter becomes so prolonged that they is no spring at all hardly, but runs smack into summer—why, in Virginia, sir, it is unique! It is The Confessions of Nat Turner

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ideal! Nature has conspired so that spring comes in a sudden warm rush! Alone in the Virginia latitude, sir, is spring like the embrace of a mother’s arms!”

I remember this moment with the clarity of a great event which has taken place only seconds ago—the breath of spring still in my nostrils, the dusty evening light still vivid and golden, the air filled with voices and the gentle clash of china and silverware. As the traveling man ceases speaking, the clock in the far hallway lets fall six thudding cast-iron notes, which I hear through the soft yet precisely enunciated cadences of Samuel Turner’s own voice: “You are perhaps too complimentary, sir, for spring will soon also bring us a plague of bugs. But the sentiment is well taken, for indeed so far Nature has been kind to us this year.

Certainly, I have but rarely seen such ideal conditions for planting.”

There is a pause as the sixth and final chime lingers for an instant with a somnolent hum, then dwindles away dully into infinity, while at this same instant I catch sight of myself in the ceiling-high mirror beyond the far sideboard: a skinny undersized pickaninny in a starched white jumper, the toes of one bare foot hooked behind the other leg as I stand wobbling and waiting, eyes rolling white with nervous vigilance. And my eyes return quickly to the table as my owner, for the traveling man’s benefit, gestures with his fork in a fond, circular, spacious motion at the family surrounding him: his wife and his widowed sister-in-law, his two young daughters around nineteen or twenty, and his two nephews—grown men of twenty-five or more with rectangular, jut-jawed faces and identical thick necks looming above me, their skin creased and reddened with sun and weather. Samuel Turner’s gesture embraces them all; swallowing a bite, he clears his throat elaborately, then continues with warm humor: “Of course, sir, my family here can hardly be expected to welcome such an active time of the year, after a winter of luxurious idleness.” There is a sound of laughter, and cries of “Oh, Papa!”

and I hear one of the young men call above the sudden clamor:

“You slander your industrious nephews, Uncle Sam!” My eyes wander to the traveling man; his red, evilly cratered face is crinkled in jollity, and a trickle of gravy threads its way down the side of his chin. Miss Louisa, the elder of the daughters, smiles in a vague and pretty way, and blushes, and she lets drop her napkin, which I instantly scurry to retrieve, replacing it upon her lap.

The Confessions of Nat Turner