The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial (6 page)

“For now,” his brother, Arnold, added. “But they want us to leave. They want all the freemen to leave because we remember. We remember that they were poor and they once worked as slaves—indentured men. They were treated like us. There were no lies that God made them special.” All the freemen—black and Nottoway—and even white Berry Newsom nodded.

“They want us to leave, but we are just farmers. Where would we go?”

“We remember, so they want us gone. Our forefathers rode together, poor men—white, black, and red—beside each other against oppression in Bacon's Rebellion. We were all God's men then, before the powerful and wealthy found a way to separate and trick us. We all stood as men on the same even ground then. We remember, so they want us gone.” The recollections smoldered in Thomas Hathcock's eyes.

“Good and bad, free and slave, was not based on color. A man of color could be a man of wealth and property,” Exum Artis agreed.

“All that changed after Bacon's Rebellion. Suddenly the white man—good or bad—was given a halo and wings,” Arnold said.

“Freemen? This is not freedom! They tell us where we can live and what we can grow. Nathaniel Francis rents to us, rent we cannot afford, all the while scheming to take what little we still have, or to take us as slaves for debts we owe. At the end of the season, they take most of our crops and tell us we still owe them more.”

“We have had to sell land for medicine, for seed, and soon all we have will be gone.” Thomas Hathcock shook his head.

“The doctors won't touch us. They look at us. Afraid the color will rub off.”

“But we remember.”

Nat Turner had heard the stories before. He carried the stories, breathed the stories.

“We know they were not kings and princes. We know they were just men, like us. We know, we were here, and we saw them. They struggled to live on the land, like us. We were here then when there were black and white and Nottoway landowners. There was no word from God, from the Great Father, that only white men were men. We know they are flesh like we are. We were here when it all began.”

Nat Turner and the others knew that there was a plan afoot, a law, to send the freemen to other places, to wipe away the memory. The white men didn't want to remember themselves as slaves or as prisoners who came to America in chains. They didn't want to remember themselves as poor people with few choices. They didn't want to remember that, when they were starving and had nothing, they gave themselves permission to steal—land and people—until they had enough. They wanted to forget and so they had bought, stolen, and taken by force, the power to forget what they'd done—the power to rewrite history.

They bought horses and people and pigs, new clothes and new names. They made themselves titles and positions. They bought carriages, hoop skirts, built houses with windows and stairs, and then went about erasing and evicting those who dared remember their past.

When Thomas Hathcock's wife passed by, he stopped her. “But now our lives have changed. We have seen free people forced into chains. We had the good of God's land, but it has been stolen from us.

“See my wife's hands? She scalds them making preserves to earn a little money. Do you think they will let her sell her goods at the market? Years ago we could, but now she cannot sell there to white men. We cannot sell among ourselves; no one has money to buy.” His wife sighed and then returned to the stove.

Thomas gestured around the small room. “But what they will not buy, they come to the house and demand. All the power is in their hands. If they steal it from her, who can we go to? There is no court for black men. There is no sheriff for men with dark skin. No black man can charge a white man with a crime.”

“They tell us where to live, on land that belonged to us long before those we remember walked this earth. Almost every day there is a threat that someone will have us shipped out of this state away from the land that holds our fathers' bones. Shipped overseas to some land we've never heard of.” Arnold Artis lowered his voice. “And they say we are free, but they treat our wives as their property. They take them when they want to, and there is nothing we can do… not if we want to live. How can this be called freedom?”

Nat Turner knew their shame. He lived their shame. It was his. The shame knotted his stomach, his fists, and tightened his chest.

Thomas Hathcock pointed toward the window. “Years from now, people who pass will forget who built the houses these white men live in and who cleared this land. Maybe some of us will still have families left alive to carry our names. But who will remember how hard we worked? ‘Why didn't your parents make something of themselves?' others will say to them.

“What will our children or their children have to show for all our labor? They will be left poor.”

He leaned forward in his chair. “How much more are we expected to stomach?”

Dred pounded one fist into the other hand. “They treat us
like animals!” His voice thundered in the small cabin. The women turned to look.

Arnold Artis's voice and body trembled with frustration. “It has been too long, decades, and it is all these little ones know.” A hush came over the children. They stared, wide-eyed. One small boy began to cry.

Thomas Hathcock's voice raised, “I cannot stand it much longer!”

Nat Turner, listening to the men, felt for the gunpowder in his pocket. It would not be long. He looked at the people around him. It could not be long.

Thomas Hathcock's wife, stirring in the pot before her, called to interrupt her husband, a practiced calm in her voice. “What you say is true, Thomas. It will still be true when this day is past. But let us celebrate and enjoy this day with our friends.”

Trembling, Thomas looked at his wife, staring deeply into her eyes until the trembling ceased. He exhaled. “You are right.” He smiled at her and nodded. He clapped his hands. “Come, let the children sing.”

The children looked at their mothers, waiting for nods of reassurance. Then two smaller children giggled tentatively, and then they began to sing.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King;

Let every heart prepare Him room.

Other children joined in.

And Heaven and nature sing,

And Heaven and nature sing,

And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Nat Turner looked around the room at the people he loved. This Christmas Day the room was full of the living. What each of
them had was not enough, but together it was a feast. He smiled, listening to his own son sing with the others. It seemed not long ago that he was as small.

Nat Turner looked at his son, Riddick, singing. God sent him back for him.

Brooklyn, New York

1856

T
o most of America, her brother Henry was the most famous preacher in the States, perhaps the Western world, but he was still Harriet's baby brother. Though she had heard him preach many times, she was no less amazed each time to hear him and to see him enthrall the congregation before him—hundreds of people, thousands, crowded into the sanctuary. It was the same across the country and overseas. He was paid handsomely to speak. Men, as well as women, wept when he preached, though in seconds his humor and antics had them laughing again.

When Harriet visited Plymouth Church, she sometimes sat on the back pew hoping to not be noticed. But today she sat in the front row so she would have a clear view of the notables who visited her brother's church. The poet Walt Whitman visited, as did the author and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau. Newspapermen attended, copying every word of Henry's sermons and publishing them in their papers. Politicians made their way to Plymouth, like the young Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who had ambitions to be senator. John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, William Wells Brown, and Henry Bibb had all been welcomed in the pews and sometimes in the pulpit at her brother's Brooklyn church.

Outside was Orange Street and beyond that, New York. Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, with Brooklyn's population swelling each day since the opening of the Fulton Ferry.

Each time she visited there were fewer trees—there was no
room for them or for undeveloped plots. Every inch was needed for more dwellings, more businesses for the people who crowded into the city. Immigrants and refugees, English, Dutch, Chinese, Germans, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Printers, nannies, shopkeepers, seamstresses, clerks, poets, painters, singers, bakers, bankers, factory workers, professors, and chimney sweeps. Hundreds of thousands of them huddled in town houses and tenements, finding hope in the crush and anonymity. Wedged together in flats and apartments, the rich and poor, foreign and domestic. Bustling down avenues to department stores, public schools, police stations, to galleries, to synagogues, churches, town halls, storefronts, and cathedrals wearing forced shields of privacy.

There were tensions between the groups jostling for elbow room. But they needed one another. Mind-your-own-business people who learned the necessity of interdependence. The restaurateur, with no room to grow his own, needed the peddler for produce and needed the shopgirl to buy.

Carriages, trains, boats, and millions of footsteps. Novelists, newspapermen, butlers, stevedores, waiters, Central Park, and the Erie Canal. Home to the Sons of Liberty, the Battle of Long Island, the place of President Washington's inauguration, the first Congress, the first Supreme Court, Fort Hamilton, and Federal Hall. Home to the hopeful and the suffering.

Irish Catholics swelled the populous, swept across the sea by famine, hunger, joblessness, hopelessness, lynchings, floggings—and laws that forbade their education, voting, possession of arms, and property ownership. Refugee slaves, most swept North by starvation, joblessness—and laws that forbade their education, voting, possession of arms, and property ownership—and the hope of freedom, willing to leave whatever relations they had. Both risked all that was familiar. But disguised by hue and tongue, they did not recognize their brotherhood.

Most runaway slaves, fleeing the South, hitched a ride on the Underground. But some of the Negroes were former New York slaves.
Until 1827, New York City had almost as many slaves as Charleston, South Carolina. The city was home to slave ships and investors in slaving—lending money for land, looms, seed, and in Southern cotton. Many of the Northern slaves were purchased in Newport, Rhode Island. Beautiful, beautiful Newport with its Atlantic beaches, lobsters, sailboats, and slaves in chains sold on the wharfs. And beyond Newport were the islands of Cape Verde and islands like Haiti, where captured Africans were broken and transformed into slaves. Beautiful Newport, where schoolmarms and shopkeepers invested their pennies in the trade, hoping to reap shiny dimes.

There were no plantations in New York; the skilled slaves built roads, docks, churches, and Wall Street's wall. After 1827, the New York slaves were freed, but there were still scars and resentful former owners.

Into the slave city, into the darkness, drawn to the void, were the abolitionists, abolitionists more radical than their New England brothers and sisters. New York was home to the Radical Abolitionists Convention, abolitionists who argued that the United States Constitution forbade slavery… nor shall any state deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process.

Gotham was home to the Tappan brothers and the Grimke sisters, to William Wells Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—abolitionists who argued that slavery was wrong legally and morally. Radical abolitionists argued that slavery was a demon that plagued America, who argued that all good men and women were legally and morally bound to help free the slaves. Slavery was as unlawful as murder, arson, or theft. Some even argued that slaves and their defenders had a duty to take up arms.

Many were not pleased with the abolitionists' growing presence in New York State—there had been antiblack and antiabolitionist attacks that continued to worsen.

Inside Plymouth Church, Harriet leaned forward, and across the room she saw Frederick Douglass's prematurely graying mane nodding as Henry spoke.

“Without love our faith is meaningless; it has no power. Without love our greatest philanthropy is less than a mere token.”

Henry's voice shook the rafters in Plymouth Church—a sanctuary built more like an auditorium than a church—caused the air to vibrate, swelled, and then dropped to a whisper. Words came alive in Henry, or, better still, as Walt Whitman wrote, Henry's words were substantial and delicious. When Henry spoke he became the words, and though he was human and given to human weaknesses, he tried to live the words he spoke. “Without love, intelligence and knowledge have no value.”

He not only preached freedom for the captives, he also used his church as a station on the Underground Railroad. He raised money to buy freedom for captive slaves. Henry purchased rifles—rifles that bore the nickname “Beecher's Bibles.” At Henry's direction, Sharps rifles were shipped to Kansas along with Bibles to help antislavery men defend themselves against the strangling westward aggression of slavery, slavery discontent to remain within Kentucky's borders.

While some churches struggled to gain and hold any members, most that survived brimmed with women. But Plymouth overflowed with men. Henry offered messages of love to those who had been taught that their very being displeased God, just as her family had taught Henry and her. They were tainted by original sin and despised by God.

But Henry preached love, and they flocked to him like parched men to fresh water. His voice thundered, swept through the room, and then eased to a whisper. “Without love—not only for the greatest, but also for the least among us—all that we do is pointless.”