The Confessions of Nat Turner (33 page)

There on a shelf over the great brick hearth was the last meal ever to be served here to a Turner: four pieces of fried chicken, half a loaf of shortening bread, sweet cider in a cracked mug—decent big-house food, proper for a farewell repast, thoughtfully covered by a worn clean flour sack as a screen against flies. That I recall with great clarity such small details may have something to do with the overall sense of ominousness, the spidery disquietude and perplexity which, like the shadows of vines creeping up a stone wall in descending sunlight, began to finger my spine as I sat on the window sill in the empty kitchen eating that chicken and bread. The stillness of the plantation was at this instant almost complete, so oppressive and strange that I suddenly thought, jittery with a vague terror, that I had been stricken by deafness. I ceased eating for a moment, both ears cocked and straining, waiting for some sound outside—a bird call, the plashing of a duck on the millpond, a whisper of wind in the forest—to convince me that I could hear, but I heard nothing, nothing at all, and my panic swelled until just then the startling noise of my own bare callused foot scuffing roughly on the pine floor reassured me: I chided myself for my silliness and continued eating, and was further soothed by a fly’s insensate deafening mutter as it settled on the topmost edge of my ear.

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But the feeling of an ominous hush and solitude would not leave me alone, would not fade away, clung to me like some enveloping garment which, try as I might, I could not ease from my shoulders. I tossed the chicken bones down into the weed-choked flower bed below the kitchen window, and wrapping the remains of the bread carefully in my sack along with the broken mug—I thought it would become of use somehow—ventured out into the great hall of the house.

Dismantled of everything that could be moved—of crystal chandeliers and grandfather’s clock, carpets and piano and sideboard and chairs—the cavernous room echoed with a tomblike roar to my sudden sneeze. The reverberation smashed from wall to wall with the sound of waterfalls, cataracts, then became silent. Only a lofty mirror, webbed with minute cracklings and bluish with age, embedded immovably between two upright columns against the wall, remained as sure proof of past habitation; its blurred and liquid depths reflected the far side of the hall, and there four immaculate rectangles marked the vanished portraits of Turner forebears; two stern gentlemen in white wigs and cocked hats, two serene ladies with modest bosoms bedecked in ribbons and flounces of pink satin, they had been nameless to me yet over the years as familiar as kin: their absence was suddenly shocking, like swift multiple deaths.

I went back out on the veranda, again waiting for the sound of hooves and wheels, and again there was only silence. Even then I had begun to feel that I was alone, abandoned, forgotten, and that no one was going to come and fetch me; the sensation caused me fear and foreboding but part of the emotion was not unpleasant, and way down inside I felt my bowels stirring with a mysterious, queasy, voluptuous thrill. I had never felt this way before and tried to put it out of my mind, laying my sack down on the veranda steps and strolling to the small promontory at the side of the house, where in almost one glance it was possible to survey the entire prospect of abandoned dwellings, decaying shops and sheds and ruined land—an empire devastated by the hordes of Gideon. The heat had become wicked, unrelenting, pouring down from a smudged, greasy sky in which the sun pulsated like a faint pink coal through the haze. As far as my eye could reach, the cabins lay in weatherworn rows to the vast bottom cornfield, now a majestic jungle of weeds, sunflowers, and impenetrable green bramble. The sense of excitement, gut-deep, warm, squirmy, returned irresistibly as I watched the The Confessions of Nat Turner

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scene, as my eyes lingered on the ranks of empty cabins then returned to regard the shops close by, the outhouses and stables and sheds, and the big house looming near, unpeopled and silent in the terrible heat.

Only a dripping of water through the cracked millpond dam disturbed the silence now—only a steady unhurried dripping and nearby the flickering hum of grasshoppers in the weeds. I tried to force back the sharp and growing excitement but even as I did so I felt my pulse pounding and the sweat flowing beneath my arms in streams. There was no wind, the trees in the surrounding woods were quiet; yet because of this very stillness they seemed a solid mass stretching out on all sides of me in perfect circumference to the last boundaries of the world, an all-pervading triumphant mass of greenery. Nothing but this still and ruined plantation existed; it was the very heart of the universe and I was the master not alone of its being at the present instant but of all its past and hence all its memories.

Solitary and sovereign as I gazed down upon this wrecked backwater of time, I suddenly felt myself its possessor; in a twinkling I became white—white as clabber cheese, white, stark white, white as a marble Episcopalian. I turned about and moved to the very crest of the slope, hard by the circular drive where carriages had come and gone and ladies in crinoline and taffeta had lightly and laughingly dismounted upon carpeted footboards, their petticoats spilling on the air like snow as I steadied their outstretched arms. Now, looking down at the shops and barns and cabins and distant fields, I was no longer the grinning black boy in velvet pantaloons; for a fleeting moment instead I owned all, and so exercised the privilege of ownership by unlacing my fly and pissing loudly on the same worn stone where dainty tiptoeing feet had gained the veranda steps a short three years before. What a strange, demented ecstasy! How white I was!

What wicked joy!

But my blackness immediately returned, the fantasy dissolved, and I was again overtaken by wrenching loneliness and a pang of guilt. The Reverend Eppes did not appear, though I strained my ears for the sound of his approach on the road. I went back to my Bible once more, reading and committing to memory one of my favorite passages—the story of Samuel and the ark of the covenant—while afternoon lengthened and light dimmed on the veranda and thunder grumbled and heaved faintly on the smoky horizon.

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As it grew dark I knew that the Reverend Eppes would not arrive that day. I got hungry again and had a twitch of sharp discomfort when I realized that there was no more to eat. Then I remembered the shortening bread in my sack, and when night fell, I ate the rest of the loaf, washing it down with water from the cistern behind the kitchen. Inside the house it was as black as the swamp on a moonless night, clammy and stifling, and I stumbled aimlessly about while clouds of mosquitoes whined about my ears. My little bedroom had been stripped bare like all the rest, and there was no use sleeping there, so I lay down on the floor in the great hall near the front door with my sack as a pillow beneath my head.

Then along about what must have been eleven o’clock a storm descended on the plantation, scaring me out of wits and sleep; titanic lightning bolts illumined the dark, in flashes of eerie green outlined the deserted mill and the millpond, where steely rain swept the surface of the water in windy sheets and torrents.

Cracklings of thunder rent the heavens, and a single shaft of lightning suddenly broke in two a huge old magnolia nearby in the woods, toppling half the behemoth to earth with a squealing and a groaning like a stricken madman. The night filled me with terror, I had never known such a storm, never in my life; it seemed a special storm ordained by God, and I hid my head between my sack and the bare planks of the floor, wishing that I had never been born. At last the storm slackened, dwindled away with a soft dripping noise and I raised my head up, recollecting the flood:
The fountains also of the deep and the
windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was
restrained
. . . I whispered thanks to the Lord in a prayer, and finally went off to sleep, listening to the wet sound of an owl, blown in by the storm, as it stirred and shivered somewhere high on a ledge of the hall above me, fussing
hoot-oo, hoot-oo,
hoot-oo
.

Then I heard a voice—“Git on up, boy”—and I awoke in a dazzle of morning light to see and feel the toe of a black boot prodding me awake—not a gentle prod, either, but an insistent sharp boring-in between my ribs which caused me to gasp and rise instantly onto my elbows, gulping morning air as if I had been half drowned.

“You Nat?” I heard the man say. Even as he spoke I knew it was the Reverend Eppes. He was clad from head to toe in clerical black; motheaten black preacher’s leggings he wore too, level The Confessions of Nat Turner

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with my eyes now, and I saw that several buttons were missing and for some reason the gaiters exuded, or seemed to exude, a sour, worn, unclean smell. My eyes traveled up the length of his long black-clad shanks and his seedy black mohair frock coat and lingered for the barest instant on the face, which had a skinny, big-nosed, pentecostal, Christ-devoured, wintry look of laughterless misery about it; bespectacled with oval wire-framed glasses, belonging to a man of about sixty, redly wattled in the neck like a turkey gobbler’s, bitter of countenance and opaque of eye, it was a face graven with poverty, sanctimony, and despair, and both my heart and my belly suddenly shriveled within me. If nothing else, I knew I had had my last piece of white bread for some time to come.

“You Nat?” he said again, more insistent now. It was a barren and suspicious voice, nasal, full of cold November winds, and something in it warned me that with this clergyman it would not do to display any educated airs. I scrambled to my feet and retrieved my sack from the floor and said: “Yas, massah, das right. I’se Nat.”

“Git on in that buggy down ’ere,” he ordered.

The buggy was at the veranda steps, drawn by the most pathetic sway-backed old spotted mare I had ever seen. I clambered up onto the worn seat and waited there in the sunlight for half an hour or more, watching the sad old nag switch her tail against a hide covered with sores upon which flies supped greedily and listening to the muffled commotion made by the Reverend Eppes as he stamped about in the far recesses of the house. Finally he returned and climbed up on the seat beside me, bearing with him two huge iron pothooks (I had thought it impossible that the house could yield anything else to a scavenger) which he had managed to yank with his great raw-knuckled fists out of the solid oak of a kitchen wall. “
Gee-
yup, Beauty,” he said to the horse, and before I knew it we had gone down the lane beneath the trees shrill with locusts, and Turner’s Mill, abandoned to the beetles and the meadow mice and the owls, was out of my life forever.

We must have traveled several miles up the wagon trace before the Reverend Eppes spoke again. During this part of the journey, the sorrow and the sense of dislocation and loss I had felt—the ache of desperate homesickness which had tormented me ever since I had been left alone the day before—was obscured by the The Confessions of Nat Turner

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pure fact of hunger in my stomach, and I thought longingly of yesterday’s chicken, and felt my insides painfully rumbling, all the while hoping that if the Reverend Eppes opened his lips to utter a thought it would be a thought concerning the question of food. But this was not to be.

“How old you be, boy?” he said.

“I’se twenty, massah,” I replied, “twenty-one come de first day October.” It is good for a Negro, when trying to ingratiate himself with a strange white man, to convey an impression of earnest simplicity and this may often be achieved by adding to such a reply as mine some phrase like “Das de truth,” or “Das right.” I think that I must have tacked on then a sweet and open “Das de truth,” and by so doing made the mistake of arousing in the Reverend Eppes a further consciousness of my youth, my innocence.

“You ever git any of them little nigger girls in the bushes?” he said. A funky stale smell seemed to pour from his threadbare clothes, an odor of grease and soil and deep poverty; I wanted to avert my nose but dared not. There was something about the man that filled me with an uneasiness verging on dread.

Dismayed by his question, I felt myself honestly unable to answer and tried to let myself off the dilemma in typical nigger fashion by a slow soft giggle and a great mouthful of inarticulate syllables. “Aa! Eeh—Haw!”

“Mr. Turner done told me you religious-minded,” he said.

“Yassuh,” I replied, hoping that religion would work to my advantage somehow.

“So you religious-minded,” he went on. He had a dry barren voice, monotonously reedy and harsh, like the crepitation of a cricket in the weeds. It seemed impossible that such a voice could ever exhort people to anything. “And if you religious-minded, then you shorely know, boy, what King Solomon son of David said about women, ’specially whores. He said a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men. That right, boy?”

“Yassuh,” I said.

“He said by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a The Confessions of Nat Turner

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piece of bread, and the adulteress will hunt for the precious life.

That right, boy? He said keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. Lust not after her beauty in thine heart, neither let her take thee with her eyelids.

You
know
that’s right, boy.”

“Das right,” I replied, “yassuh, I ’spect das right.” We had not looked at each other; I sensed rather his wintry and eaten face next to mine, gazing despairingly straight ahead, and I smelled the sour, yeasty odor seeping from his clothes; my mouth went as dry as sand.

“But a young man,” he said, “now that’s a different idea.A young man is beauty and sweetness. He said eat thou
honey
, because it is good, and the honeycomb which is sweet to thy taste. Eat thou
honey
. That right, boy? He said the glory of young men is their strength and the beauty of old men is the gray head. He said when thou liest down thou shalt not be afraid, yea, thou shalt lie down. Yes, boy? Hope deferred maketh the heart sick but when the
desire
cometh, it is a tree of life. The true root and the tree of life, praise God.”