"Second time you shoot, hit jest like a covey of quail flyin" straight 199.
out yo" a.s.s-"
"Sho," Moore put in, chuckling too, "sho, I knowed this other hoor who done it three ways, name of Dolly-"
I put their G.o.dless talk out of my mind and stared at the gla.s.sy and desolate woods, silent now save for the remote noise, every so often, of a branch cracking beneath the weight of ice or the patterning faint sound of a hare as it scampered through the frozen meadows. I shivered suddenly and felt my teeth clicking together in the fierce cold. We had approached a fork in the road, and as I turned my head slightly I glimpsed a wooden signpost sparkling beneath transparent ice and two crude painted signs, one pointing to the southwest: N. CAROLINA VIA HICK"S FORD The other to the southeast: SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY LINE 12 MI.
All of a sudden the wagon stopped and I heard Moore say: "Hit"s the right-handed fork to Southampton, ain"t it, Wallace? I recollect that"s what Pappy said to take when we come back out of Suss.e.x. Ain"t that what he said, Wallace?"
Wallace was silent for a moment, then he murmured in a puzzled voice: "G.o.ddam me, I can"t recollect what what he said." He paused again, finally adding more confidently: "If"n we hadn"t come up here by way of that trace through the marsh, I"d know for sure, but now hit he said." He paused again, finally adding more confidently: "If"n we hadn"t come up here by way of that trace through the marsh, I"d know for sure, but now hit do do seem to me he said take the right-handed fork comin" back. Yah, I could swear he said the right-handed fork. seem to me he said take the right-handed fork comin" back. Yah, I could swear he said the right-handed fork.
The left-handed fork"ll end you up in Carolina. Gimme "nother suck on that jug."
"Yah," said Moore, "that"s what he said now, I know for sure, the right-handed fork. That sho is what Pappy said."
A whip cracked on the cold air, the hooves of the oxen resumed their crunching on the rutted road, and as we took the right fork southwest toward Carolina, I thought: Trouble is, since neither of them ignorant scoundrels can read we"re likely to get into worse problems if I don"t set them straight right away, right now. We"ll sure end up lost twenty miles south of here. Anyway, I might get warm sooner.
I turned around and said: "Stop the wagon."
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Moore"s head swiveled about to face me, the wicked little eyes bloodshot, bulging, incredulous. I could smell an odor of brandy the length of the wagon. "What did you say, boy?" he murmured.
"Stop the wagon," I repeated, "this way goes to Carolina."
The wagon stopped, wheels sliding and squealing against the ice. Then the cousin turned about, incredulous too, silent, staring, licking his pink peeling lips amid a scraggle of reddish beard.
"How you know this way goes to Carolina?" Moore said. "Jest how do you you know?" know?"
"The sign said so," I replied quietly. "I can read."
Moore and his cousin glanced at each other, then back at me.
"You can read?" said Moore.
"Yes," I said, "I can read."
Again they exchanged quick suspicious glances, and the cousin turned to me, glaring, and said: "Try him, Tom. Try him with the writin" on that shovel."
Moore held up a shovel which had lain clotted with earth below them at the front of the wagon. Along its ashwood shaft ran an inscription burnt large and deep with a branding instrument.
"Read them words there, boy," said Moore.
"It says, "Shelton Tool Works, Petersburg, Virginia,"" I replied.
The shovel clattered back onto the floor of the wagon, and as I once more turned around I saw the white woods roll before my eyes in a slow blurred procession of glittering ice-crowned trees while the wagon itself wheeled about in a clumsy half-circle then moved briefly north to the signpost, pivoted, and resumed its ponderous journey southeast now, toward Southampton. An emptiness clutched my stomach as I realized suddenly how hungry I was, after three days on cornmeal mush. Never had I known such hunger before, never in my life, and I was astonished at the urgency of its pain, the desperation of its clamorous appeal deep within my guts.
Moore and his cousin brooded quietly for a long while, then at 201.
last I heard Wallace say: "Onliest n.i.g.g.e.r I ever knowed about could read was a free n.i.g.g.e.r up in Isle of Wight. Had him a little shoe-cobblin" business in Smithfield and wrote out letters and such for some of the white folks. When he died they cut open his head and looked at his brain and it had wrinkles in it just like a white man"s. And you know, they was a story "bout how some of the n.i.g.g.e.rs got holt of a part of that brain and actual et et some of it, hopin" they"d git smart too." some of it, hopin" they"d git smart too."
"Hit don"t do no good for a n.i.g.g.e.r to git learning," Moore said somberly, "hit don"t do no good in any way whichever. Like Pappy says, a n.i.g.g.e.r with a busy head is idle with the hoe.
That"s what Pappy says."
"A n.i.g.g.e.r with learning bound to git uppity," Wallace agreed.
"Hit don"t do no good in any way whichever."
"I"m hungry," I said.
Like the hunger, I had never felt a whip before, and the pain of it when it came, coiling around the side of my neck like a firesnake, blossomed throughout the hollow of my skull in an explosion of light. I gasped and the pain lingered, penetrating to the inside of my throat, and I gasped again, feeling that the pain might throttle me to death. Only at that moment, seconds later, did the noise of the whip impress itself on my mind-oddly quiet, a sedate whickering like a sickle slicing through air-and only then did I raise my hand to touch the place where the rawhide had cut my flesh, sensing on my fingertips a warm sticky flow of blood.
"When I gits ready to feed I"ll tell ye, hear me?" said Moore. "And say master! master! " "
I was unable to speak, and now again the whip struck, in the same place, blinding me, sending me afloat outside myself on a reddish cloud of pain.
"Say master! master! " Moore roared. " Moore roared.
"Mastah!" I cried in terror. "Mastah! Mastah! Mastah! Mastah! " "
"That"s better," said Moore. "Now shut up."
Once in the last days before my trial, when I was pondering my own death and was filled with a sense of the absence of G.o.d, I remember Mr. Thomas Gray asking me what had been the 202.
various things in time past that G.o.d had spoken to me. And although I was trying to be truthful I had been unable to answer him exactly, for it was the most difficult kind of question and had to do with a mysterious communion which was almost impossible to explain clearly. I told him that G.o.d had spoken to me many times and had surely guided my destiny but that He had never really really given me any complicated messages or lengthy commands; rather He had spoken to me two words, and always these words alone, beginning on that day in the back of Moore"s wagon, and that it was through these words that I was strengthened and that I made my judgments, absorbing from them a secret wisdom which allowed me to set forth purposefully to do what I conceived as His will, in whatever mission, whether that of bloodshed or baptism or preaching or charity. Yet just as they were words of resolution they were words also of solace. given me any complicated messages or lengthy commands; rather He had spoken to me two words, and always these words alone, beginning on that day in the back of Moore"s wagon, and that it was through these words that I was strengthened and that I made my judgments, absorbing from them a secret wisdom which allowed me to set forth purposefully to do what I conceived as His will, in whatever mission, whether that of bloodshed or baptism or preaching or charity. Yet just as they were words of resolution they were words also of solace.
And as I told Gray, G.o.d had a way of concealing Himself from men in strange forms-in His pillar of cloud and His pillar of fire, and sometimes even hiding Himself from our sight altogether so that long periods on earth would pa.s.s during which men might feel that He had abandoned them for good. Yet all through the later years of my life I knew that despite His hiding Himself for a while from me, He was never far off and that more often than not whenever I called He would answer-as He did for the first time on that cold day: "I abide."
I wiped the blood from my neck and crouched down shivering into my overcoat. I listened to the wheels crunching and b.u.mping along the rutted road, uneven here and littered with fallen icy branches, so that the wagon yawed and heaved and pitched me back and forth in a soft rhythm against the boards. Moore and his cousin were silent. A cold winter wind breathed suddenly across the roof of the woods.
"Lord," I whispered, raising my eyes. "Lord?"
Then high at the top of the icy forest I heard a tremendous cracking and breaking sound, and that voice booming in the trees: I abide abide.
I clutched my Bible against my heart and leaned against the boards as the wagon, heaving and rocking like a rudderless ship amid a sea of frozen gla.s.s, bore me southward again into the dead of winter.
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Part III
Study War
An exquisitely sharpened hatred for the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro"s soul; it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriantly everywhere. Real hatred of the sort of which I speak-hatred so pure and obdurate that no sympathy, no human warmth, no flicker of compa.s.sion can make the faintest nick or scratch upon the stony surface of its being-is not common to all Negroes. Like a flower of granite with cruel leaves it grows, when it grows at all, as if from fragile seed cast upon uncertain ground. Many conditions are required for the full fruition of this hatred, for its ripe and malevolent growth, yet none of these is as important as that at one time or another the Negro live to some degree of intimacy with the white man. That he know the object of his hatred, and that he become knowledgeable about the white man"s wiles, his duplicity, his greediness, and his ultimate depravity.
For without knowing the white man at close hand, without having submitted to his wanton and arrogant kindnesses, without having smelled the smell of his bedsheets and his dirty underdrawers and the inside of his privy, and felt the casual yet insolent touch of his women"s fingers upon his own black arm, without seeing him at sport and at ease and at hishypocrite"s worship and at his drunken vileness and at his l.u.s.tful and adulterous couplings in the hayfield-without having known all these cozy and familial truths, I say, a Negro can only pretend pretend hatred. Such hatred is an abstraction and a delusion. For example. A poor field Negro may once in a while be struck by the whip of an overseer riding on a tall white horse, that same Negro may be forced onto short rations for a month and feel his stomach rumble daily in the tight cramps of near-starvation, again this Negro might someday be The Confessions of Nat Turner hatred. Such hatred is an abstraction and a delusion. For example. A poor field Negro may once in a while be struck by the whip of an overseer riding on a tall white horse, that same Negro may be forced onto short rations for a month and feel his stomach rumble daily in the tight cramps of near-starvation, again this Negro might someday be 204.
thrown into a cart and sold like a mule at auction in pouring rain; yet if this selfsame Negro-surrounded from childhood by a sea of black folk, hoeing and sc.r.a.ping in the fields from dawn to dusk year in and year out and knowing no white man other than that overseer whose presence is a mean distant voice and a lash and whose face is a nameless and changing white blob against the sky-finds himself trying to hate white men, he will come to understand that he is hating imperfectly, without that calm and intelligent and unrepenting purity of hatred which I have already described and which is so necessary in order to murder. Such a Negro, unacquainted with white men and their smell and their blanched and bloodless actuality and their evil, will perhaps hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain.
During the four or five years approaching 1831, when it had become first my obsession and then my acceptance of a divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, and as far beyond as destiny might take me, it was this matter of hatred-of discovering those Negroes in whom hatred was already ablaze, of cultivating hatred in the few remaining and vulnerable, of testing and probing, warily discarding those in whom pure hatred could not be nurtured and whom therefore I could not trust-that became one of my primary concerns. Meanwhile, before telling of my years at Moore"s and of the circ.u.mstances leading up to the great events of 1831, I should like to dwell on this mysterious quality of hatred which it is possible for a Negro to cherish for white people, and to describe one of the moments in my own experience when I felt this hatred at its most deranging and pa.s.sionate.
This must have been in the summer of 1825, when I had been Moore"s property for a little over three years-a time of great inner confusion and turmoil for me since I was "on the fence," so to speak, toying with the notion of slaughter and already touched with the premonition of a great mission, yet still fearful and laden with anxiety and unwilling to formulate any definite plans or to ready myself for a firm course of action.
On this day of which I am speaking, Moore and I had driven a double wagonload of firewood into Jerusalem from the farm, and after we had unloaded our deliveries (a considerable portion of Moore"s income derived from supplying wood for private homes, 205.
also the courthouse and the jail) my owner had gone off to buy some things elsewhere, as was his custom on Sat.u.r.days, leaving me to while away several hours by myself. I had become at that time deeply involved in reading the Prophets-mainly Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, whose relevance to my own self and future I had only commenced to divine. It was my habit therefore not to waste time with the other Negroes who stood about chattering idly or wrestling in the dust of the field behind the market or quarreling over some black girl of the town one of them might manage to lure behind a shed. (Often this would lead to group fornication, but through the Lord"s grace I was never tempted.) Instead I would take my Bible to a sunny corner of the wooden gallery at the front of the market and there, some feet apart from the hubbub and the confusion, I would squat for hours with my back against the wall, immersed in the great prophetic teachings.
It was on this pleasant morning that I found myself distracted by a white woman who emerged from a corner of the gallery and suddenly paused, one hand held up against her forehead as if to shield her eyes from the dazzling sunlight. She was an extremely beautiful woman of about forty, stately and slender, dressed in blue-green silk the color of a brandy bottle, with whorls of faint pink in it which swirled and vanished and reappeared even as she stood there, stirring a little, a look of perplexity on the pale oval of her face. She carried a frilly parasol and a richly brocaded purse, and as she paused at the edge of the gallery, frowning, I suddenly knew that such l.u.s.trous finery and such delicate and unusual beauty could only mean that this was the woman whose arrival in town had caused a storm of rumor-gossip of course not unremarked by the Negroes, and in this case gossip of such a nature as to evoke only a kind of awed respect. The recently acquired fiancee of Major Thomas Ridley-one of the wealthiest landowners in Southampton, still rich enough to hold onto fifteen Negroes-the woman was from the North, resident of a place called New Haven, and it was bruited that the fortune to which she was heir was in itself of a size that would dwarf the riches of all the estates in Southampton put together. Her extraordinary beauty, her clothes, her strangeness: all of these were of such rarity that it is not remarkable that on that bright morning her appearance among the grubby mob of Negroes caused a reverential hush, sudden and complete.
I watched her step down from the gallery and onto the dusty 206.
road, the bra.s.s tip of her parasol making an agitated tattat tattat while she gazed about again, as if searching for direction. And just at this moment her glance fell upon a Negro who was idling nearby directly below me. I knew this Negro, at least by repute, which was doleful indeed. He was a free Negro named Arnold-one of a handful of the free in Jerusalem-a gaunt grizzle-polled old simpleton black as pitch and with an aimless slew-footed gait, the result of some kind of paralysis.Years before he had been set at liberty through the will of his owner, a rich up-county widow, an Episcopal churchwoman shattered by guilt and pining for eternal bliss. I suppose one might praise this high-minded gesture, yet one must add that it was grimly misguided because Arnold was a troubling case. Rather than becoming an embodiment of the sweet fruits of freedom, he exemplified by his very being an all but insoluble difficulty. while she gazed about again, as if searching for direction. And just at this moment her glance fell upon a Negro who was idling nearby directly below me. I knew this Negro, at least by repute, which was doleful indeed. He was a free Negro named Arnold-one of a handful of the free in Jerusalem-a gaunt grizzle-polled old simpleton black as pitch and with an aimless slew-footed gait, the result of some kind of paralysis.Years before he had been set at liberty through the will of his owner, a rich up-county widow, an Episcopal churchwoman shattered by guilt and pining for eternal bliss. I suppose one might praise this high-minded gesture, yet one must add that it was grimly misguided because Arnold was a troubling case. Rather than becoming an embodiment of the sweet fruits of freedom, he exemplified by his very being an all but insoluble difficulty.
For what could freedom mean to Arnold? Unschooled, unskilled, clumsy by nature, childlike and credulous, his spirit numbed by the forty years or more he had spent as a chattel, he had doubtless found life affliction enough while dwelling in a state of bondage. Now having been set free through the grace and piety of his late mistress (who had left him a hundred dollars-which he had squandered in brandy during his first free year-but who had not thought to teach him a trade), the oafish old fellow dwelt upon life"s furthest rim, more insignificant and wretched than he had ever been in slavery, a squatter in an unspeakably filthy lean-to shack on the outskirts of town, hiring himself out as a part-time field hand but existing mainly as a ragpicker or an emptier of privies or in the worst of times as a simple beggar, the bleached palm of his black hand extended for a penny or a worn British farthing and his lips working in a witless "Thank-ee, ma.s.sah" to those townsmen no longer his masters in fact but in spirit masters more tyrannical than ever before. Of course, a few of the townspeople took pity on Arnold and his brethren but most of them resented his freedom, not because he himself was any threat but because he was in truth a symbol-a symbol of something gone asunder in the inst.i.tution yet even more importantly a walking reminder of freedom itself and of menacing words, rarely spoken aloud, like emanc.i.p.ation and manumission, and therefore they despised him in a way they could never despise a Negro held in subjection. As for the slaves, among their company he was hardly better off, for if they had no reason actually to despise him he was still the incarnation of freedom, 207.
and such freedom was, as any fool could see, a stinking apparition of hopelessness and degradation. Thus their impulse was to rag Arnold mercilessly and play cruel tricks on him and to treat him with humorous contempt.
Surely even the poor lepers of Galilee, and all the outcasts to whom Jesus ministered in those awful times, lived no worse than such a free Negro in Virginia during the years of which I think and speak.
The woman stepped close to Arnold, who immediately bent forward in a groveling fashion, plucking from his head as he did so an absurd black wool hat several sizes too large for him and half devoured by moths. And then she spoke, the voice clear, resonant, quite gracious and polite, in rapid yet pleasantly warm Northern tones: "I seem to have lost my bearings"-the accent now touched with vague anxiety-"Major Ridley told me that the courthouse was next to the market. But all I see is a stable on one side and a dram shop on the other. Could you direct me to the courthouse?"
"Yam," Arnold replied. His face was all nervous obsequiousness, eager, his mouth agape in a ridiculous grin. "Majah Riblees he lib dar, ap yonnah road ap yonnah." He made an elaborate gesture with his arm, pointing away from the courthouse, down the road leading out of Jerusalem to the west. "Yam, me tek"ee dar, missy, me tek"ee dar." I listened closely. It was blue-gum country-n.i.g.g.e.r talk at its thickest, nearly impenetrable, a stunted speech unbearably halting and c.u.mbersome with a wet gulping sound of Africa in it. There were occasions when it was hard enough for some town Negroes to grasp everything in such speech; no wonder that the lady from the North stood dumbstruck, gazing at Arnold with the panicky eyes of one in sudden confrontation with a lunatic. She had understood absolutely nothing, while the G.o.dforsaken Arnold, understanding only a fraction more, had battened upon the name Ridley and had conceived the notion that she wished to be directed to the Major"s home. He kept on gabbling away, groveling, now lowering to the ground his wreck of a hat in a servile, swooping motion. "Yam, missy, me tek"ee Majah Riblees!"
"But-but-" the woman began to stammer, "I don"t seem to know what-" And she halted, her expression now full of chagrin, sorrow, something even more disturbing-perhaps it was horror, but it seemed even more to be akin to pity. At any rate, it was 208.
what then took place-and it had to do not alone with Arnold and the Northern lady but with the sudden upheaval in myself-that caused this encounter to be graven upon my brain as long as I was possessed of memory. For the woman said nothing more, simply stood there while her arm went limp and the parasol clattered to the road, then raised her clenched fists to her face as if she were striking herself-an angry, tormented gesture-and burst into tears. Her whole frame-backbone, shoulders, rib cage-all the bones which moments before had supported her so proudly seemed to collapse inward with a rush, and she became helpless and shrunken as she stood there in the road, fists pressed to her eyes, shaken by loud racking sobs. It was as if something long pent up within her had been loosed in a torrent.
On the gallery of the market and in the street I could both see and sense a score of Negroes watching her, all of them silent now, puzzled, mouths agape as they regarded her with round wondering eyes.
I had risen in the meantime with my Bible clasped between my hands, and as I drew nearer to the edge of the gallery I was seized by a hot convulsive emotion that I had never known so powerfully before-it was like a roaring in my ears. For what I had seen on this white woman"s face was pity-pity wrenched from the very depths of her soul-and the sight of that pity, the vision of that tender self so reduced by compa.s.sion to this helpless state of sobs and bloodless clenched knuckles and scalding tears, caused me an irresistible, flooding moment of desire. And it was, you see, pity alone that did this, not the woman herself apart from pity. For there is peril enough in the first hint of a black man"s l.u.s.t for a white woman, and since anyway I had striven for years to stifle all fleshly desire-feeling that it was the Lord"s command-there had been little temptation for me to covet such a wild and hazardous prize: to fornicate with a white woman in the ordinary course of events is for most Negroes so remote a possibility, and so mortally dangerous, as to remain hardly even the stirring of a shadowy idea upon the margin of consciousness. But this was something I had never seen. It was as if, divesting herself of all composure and breaking down in this fashion-exposing a naked feeling in a way I had never seen a white woman do before-she had invited me to glimpse herself naked in the flesh, and I felt myself burning for her. Burning!
And even as I stood there trying to dominate and still this 209.
pa.s.sion, which I knew to be abominable to the Lord, I sensed that my thoughts had already run galloping beyond control, and in a swift fantasy I saw myself down on the road beginning to possess her without tenderness, without grat.i.tude for her pity but with abrupt, brutal, and rampaging fury, watching the compa.s.sion melt from her tear-stained face as I bore her to the earth, my black hands already tearing at the l.u.s.trous billowing silk as I drew the dress up around her waist, and forcing apart those soft white thighs, exposed the zone of fleecy brown hair into which I drove my black self with stiff merciless thrusts. The vision would not be mastered nor leave me alone. I stood at the edge of the gallery, looking down while the sweat began to stream from my brow and my heart beat with an urgent and oppressive drumming in my throat. Far off in the back of the market I could hear a banjo plinking and the clatter and jingling of a tambourine, and a surge of n.i.g.g.e.r laughter. Still the woman kept weeping into her hands, the smooth back of her neck exposed now, white as a water lily, and as silken-tender and vulnerable; yet still in my mind"s eye I was mounted upon her in the dust of the road, hot as a coupling fox, my excitement gathering as I conceived not of any pleasure I might cause her or myself, but only the swift and violent immediacy of a pain of which I was complete overseer, repaying her pity by crushing my teeth against her mouth until the blood ran in rivulets upon her cheeks, displaying my grat.i.tude for that feathery compa.s.sion not by murmured endearments but by clasping my hands from underneath ever more fiercely upon the firm flesh of squirming b.u.t.tocks until drawn up full against my black groin she cried out in the wildest anguish while I shot off within her in warm outrageous spurts of defilement.
"I don"t understand!" I heard the woman cry. "Oh G.o.d, I don"t understand!" And then she raised her head from her hands, and at that instant it was as if my hot vision and her sudden seizure had simultaneously dissolved, vanished. She shook her head in a quick furious motion, paying no attention to Arnold, her pale and beautiful face tear-streaked yet no longer haggard with pity but quite proud, with a kind of buried exultancy, and angry; and as she said it again now-"Oh, no, I just don"t understand! just don"t understand! "-her voice was calm with a flat emphatic outrage and she reached down and retrieved her parasol from the road then turned and strode very briskly but with stately and composed steps up the street, the resplendent silk of her dress making a slippery swishing as she disappeared, erect and proud, past the corner of The Confessions of Nat Turner "-her voice was calm with a flat emphatic outrage and she reached down and retrieved her parasol from the road then turned and strode very briskly but with stately and composed steps up the street, the resplendent silk of her dress making a slippery swishing as she disappeared, erect and proud, past the corner of 210.
the market. I later learned that soon she left town and never came back. But now I watched her go, my body still hot and swollen and agitated, even though the power of the emotion and my raging heartbeat had begun to slacken as the woman had gained control of herself. Suddenly she was gone. I was left depleted, beaten, and with a choked sensation in my throat as if, trying to utter a single word at that moment, I would find myself bereft of speech.
Below me I saw Arnold shuffle away, mumbling to himself, nodding his head in woolly bewilderment. There was a buzz and yammer among the Negroes around the gallery, cackles of nervous uncomprehending laughter, and then the rhythms of the old Sat.u.r.day morning market commotion started up again, and all was as it had been before. I stood there for an instant, watching the place in the road where I had taken the woman. It seemed so real in my imagination that I felt there should be some scuffed, trampled place in the dust, marking our struggle.
Though the fever of my excitement had pa.s.sed, I heard a Negro youth snicker nearby and I saw that he was eying me; then I realized that I was still in the virile state and that this showed through my trousers, and so in embarra.s.sment I sidled away to the rear of the gallery, where I squatted down again in a patch of sunlight. For a long while I was unable to shake the memory of what had just happened and I felt a deep shame, closing my eyes and breathing a prayer to the Lord, supplicating His pardon for this terrible moment of lasciviousness. Thine eyes shall Thine eyes shall behold strange women and thine heart shall utter perverse things behold strange women and thine heart shall utter perverse things . . . He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.
I prayed for a bit with pa.s.sionate contrition; it was a prayer from the soul and I felt that the Lord had understood and had granted me forgiveness for this lapse. Even so, the intensity of my pa.s.sion troubled me greatly, and all the rest of the morning I searched my Bible, trying to discover some key to this powerful emotion and the reason for my thinking these savage thoughts when the woman broke down so pathetically, drowned in her sympathy. But the Bible offered me no answer, and I remember that later this day, when Moore fetched me from the market and we drove back to the farm in the wagon through waning summer fields growing yellowish and parched, I was filled with somber feelings that I was unable to banish, deeply troubled that it was not a white person"s abuse or scorn or even indifference which could ignite in me this murderous hatred but his pity, maybe even his tenderest moment of charity.
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My years with Mr. Thomas Moore lasted nearly a decade and seemed to me twice as long, filled as they were with sweaty and monotonous toil. Yet I must say that those same years were in certain ways the most fruitful I ever spent, since they offered many occasions for reflection and spiritual contemplation and presented opportunities in the field of evangelism such as I had never known even within the lenient world where I had spent my early life. I suppose the truth is simply that it was possible for benefits like these to accrue only to a Negro lucky enough to remain in the poor but relatively benign atmosphere of Virginia.
For here in this wornout country with its decrepit little farms there was still an ebb and flow of human sympathy-no matter how strained and imperfect-between slave and master, even an understanding (if sometimes p.r.i.c.kly) intimacy; and in this climate a black man had not yet become the cipher he would become in the steaming fastnesses of the far South but could get off in the woods by himself or with a friend, scratch his b.a.l.l.s and relax and roast a stolen chicken over an open fire and brood upon women and the joys of the belly or the possibility of getting hold of a jug of brandy, or pleasure himself with thoughts of any of the countless tolerable features of human existence.
To be sure, it was a way of life far from, let us say, Elysian but it was also not Alabama. Even the most childlike, ignorant, and benighted Negroes in Virginia had heard that name, and its lovely liquid syllables could arouse only a sickening chill; likewise they had all heard of Mississippi and Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas, and by way of scary tales shuddering up through the vast black grapevine which spread throughout the South, had learned to fear those names like death. Indeed, I must confess that I myself never was totally free of this dread even when my ownership by Moore seemed the most secure or when later, owned by Travis, I was safer still. Often during those years I reflected upon the mysterious providence of G.o.d which on that icy cold day of a February past had seen to it that I not be swallowed up into the ant-swarm and the faceless extinction of a n.i.g.g.e.r-crawling 10,000-acre plantation in the deepest South but that I be delivered instead into the dilapidated but homey surroundings which were the result of my sale to this pinched, puckerfaced little Southampton farmer named Moore.
As for Moore, never again did he lift a hand against me after that day when he struck me with his bullwhip. Not that he didn"t still thoroughly detest me with a profound detestation that lasted, I"m certain, until the moment of his premature and unlamented 212.
death. He hated all Negroes with a blind, obsessive hatred which verged upon a kind of minor daily ecstasy, and I was certainly not exempt, especially in the light of my book-learning. Even so, he possessed a countrified shrewdness, the vestige of a native intuition which must have warned him that it could only work to his own disadvantage to mistreat or vent his generalized hatred upon the compliant, exemplary, honey-tempered piece of property I determined early to become. And such property I became-a paragon of rect.i.tude, of alacrity, of lively industriousness, of sweet equanimity and uncomplaining obedience. Nor do I exaggerate all this, even though never a day went by when I was not conscious of the weird unnaturalness of this adopted role. For now as all the promise and hope I had ever known flickered out and died and as I sank into the smothering night of bondage, it seemed plain that I must patiently suffer the evil things in store for me, gaining time to meditate upon such possibilities as the remote future might offer and to consult the Scriptures for guidance as to an endurable way of life. Above all I realized that I must not take panic, lashing out in futile retaliation at this a.n.a.lphabetic, squinty-eyed new owner of mine, but instead, like one caught in swamp quicksand who stays each muscle to avoid sinking deeper in the mire, must steel myself to accept without blinking all indignities, all befoulment, all mean hurts forthcoming-at least for the present time. There are occasions, as I have pointed out, when in order to buy some advantage from a white man it is better not even to say "please" but to silently wrap oneself up in one"s n.i.g.g.e.rness like the blackest of shrouds.
Certain Negroes, in exploiting their own particular n.i.g.g.e.rness, tell dumb jokes on themselves, learn to shuffle and sc.r.a.pe for their owners, wallowing in the dust at the slightest provocation, midriffs clutched in idiot laughter, or they master the rudiments of the banjo and the jew"s-harp or endear themselves to all, white and black, through droll interminable tales about ha"nts and witches and conjurs and the cunning little creatures of the swamp and woods. Others, by virtue of some indwelling grittiness and strength, reverse this procedure entirely and in their their n.i.g.g.e.rness are able to outdo many white people at presenting to the world a grotesque swagger, becoming a black driver who would rather flog a fellow Negro than eat Smithfield ham, or at the most tolerable limit becoming a tyrannical, fussy, disdainful old kitchen mammy or butler whose very security depends upon maintaining without stint-safely this side of The Confessions of Nat Turner n.i.g.g.e.rness are able to outdo many white people at presenting to the world a grotesque swagger, becoming a black driver who would rather flog a fellow Negro than eat Smithfield ham, or at the most tolerable limit becoming a tyrannical, fussy, disdainful old kitchen mammy or butler whose very security depends upon maintaining without stint-safely this side of 213.
insolence-an aspect of nasty and arrogant dominion. As for myself, I was a very special case and I decided upon humility, a soft voice, and houndlike obedience. Without these qualities, the fact that I could read and that I was also a student of the Bible might have become for Moore (he being both illiterate and a primitive atheist) an insufferable burden to his peace of mind. But since I was neither sullen nor impudent but comported myself with studied meekness, even a man so shaken with n.i.g.g.e.rhatred as Moore could only treat me with pa.s.sable decency and at the very worst advertise me to his neighbors as a kind of ludicrous freak.
"I done bought me a black gospeler," he would announce in those early days, "a n.i.g.g.e.r that done learnt the Bible near "bout by heart. Recite us about Moses, boy." And I, confronting a circle of brandy-fragrant sun-scorched snaggle-mouthed a.n.u.s-scratching farmers, would intone in a soft and placid voice a chapter or so from Numbers, which I did indeed know from memory, all the while returning with unfaltering pious glance their looks of mingled wonder, malevolence, suspicion, and shifty-eyed respect, all the while counseling myself to patience, patience, patience patience to the end. At such moments, though Moore"s hatred for me glittered like a cold bead amid the drowned blue center of his better eye, I knew that somehow this patience would get me through. Indeed, after a while it tended to neutralize his hatred, so that he was eventually forced to treat me with a sort of grudging, grim, resigned good will. to the end. At such moments, though Moore"s hatred for me glittered like a cold bead amid the drowned blue center of his better eye, I knew that somehow this patience would get me through. Indeed, after a while it tended to neutralize his hatred, so that he was eventually forced to treat me with a sort of grudging, grim, resigned good will.
So all through the long years of my twenties I was, in my outward aspects at least, the most pliant, unremarkable young slave anyone could ever imagine. My ch.o.r.es were toilsome and obnoxious and boring. But with forbearance on my part and through daily prayer they never became really intolerable, and I resolved to follow Moore"s commands with all the amiability I could muster.
Moore"s farm was a humble one, lying ten miles or so to the southeast of Jerusalem near the settlement of Cross Keys and ab.u.t.ting in part upon the property of Mr. Joseph Travis, whom, it may be recalled, I have mentioned earlier in this narrative and into whose ownership I ultimately pa.s.sed after Moore"s death.
(The contiguity of Moore"s and Travis"s farm land was of course one of the fateful reasons for the marriage to Travis by Moore"s widow, Miss Sarah, and also for my coming to know Hark, as will be seen.) Aside from a ramshackle and unwhitewashed raw-timbered farmhouse, Moore owned twenty acres in corn and 214.
cotton and truck crops and fifty more in the woodland which supplied such a generous part of his otherwise meager income.
Since I was the only Negro Moore possessed (though from time to time he had to hire other Negroes to supplement my muscle power) and since it was a dirt farm in the dirtiest sense of the word, my carpenter skills were almost never needed-save for crude jobs like patching the pigpen or boarding up a shattered window-and I fell into that daily grind of n.i.g.g.e.r work which only short months before I had foolishly believed could not ever become my lot, not in a thousand lifetimes. As an efficient, smoothly operating, all-purpose chattel, then, I was engaged at Moore"s in a score of jobs: plowing the wet fields behind a team of mules in the spring, chopping weeds in the cotton patch throughout half the summer, sh.e.l.ling corn, slopping the pigs, getting up hay for the stock, spreading manure, and when all this was done or during spells of gloomy weather, helping Miss Sarah in various scullery and scrubbing ch.o.r.es or at any number of other housemaidenly tasks around the farm.
Nor was there any such thing as "nothing to do," for looming like a bleak wall above and beyond all this work, no matter what the season, was the stand of pine and gum and poplar and oak which I had to help Moore cut down and drag by ox-team half a mile to the farmyard, there to be hacked up into firewood lengths and thrown upon the growing mountain of logs which regularly went to stoke the Jerusalem hearths and forges and stoves.
Though one might not forever plow or hoe, there was always time to chop. Some days the broadax I used seemed an extension of my hands, a still-moving phantom part of me, and at night I went to sleep with its rhythmic pounding aquiver along the muscles of my back and arms. Never to my recollection was I driven beyond endurance-doubtless because I set a productive, industrious pace for myself the final gain of which my owner could hardly in good sense abuse by demanding more.
Nonetheless, it was loathsome, unrewarding toil and I do not know how I would have survived those days and months and years without the ability to fall into meditation upon spiritual matters even when enduring the most onerous and gut-wrenching labor. This habit, which I had developed a long time before even as a boy, proved to be my salvation. It would be hard to describe the serenity I was able to attain-the rapt and mysterious quality of peace I knew-when amid the stinging flies and the chiggers and the fierce September heat, there in the depths of the woods, tugging at a log chain while Moore nattered 215.
and nagged in my ear and his cousin Wallace"s ripe obscenities filled the air like small G.o.dless black bugs and I heard from afar, across the withering late summer meadows, the jingle of a cowbell like eternity piercing my heart with a sudden intolerable awareness of the eternity of the imprisoning years stretched out before me: it is hard to describe the serene mood which, even in the midst of this buzzing madness, would steal over me when as if in a benison of cool raindrops or rushing water I would suddenly sink away toward a dream of Isaiah and dwell on his words- Ye Ye shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble, for shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble, for ye are the seed of the blessed of the Lord ye are the seed of the blessed of the Lord-and for a long time, as in a trance, dream of myself safe in the new Jerusalem beyond all toil or heat or misery.
During most of those years I slept on a corn-shuck tick on the floor of a dark little cupboard off the kitchen, sharing the s.p.a.ce with some emaciated mice and several bustling and friendly spiders for whom I trapped flies and lived with on the most genial terms. The food at Moore"s may best be described as middling, depending upon the season, always far removed from the bounteous kitchen at Turner"s Mill but a good cut above the animal rations served up by the Reverend Eppes. For the greater part of the winter I subsisted largely off n.i.g.g.e.r food-half a peck of cornmeal and five pounds of fat salt bacon a week, and all the mola.s.ses I could gag down-and with these raw fixings I was expected to make my repast in the kitchen, morning and evening, after the white people had eaten. So from November to March the fare was pretty bad and my stomach growled without ceasing. That I managed to eat fairly well during other seasons was largely due to Miss Sarah, who, though not so gifted a cook as my mother or any who succeeded her at the Mill, was able to set a moderately decent table-especially during the long warm period when vegetables were abundant-and was liberal with the leftovers and the drippings from the frying pan.
Miss Sarah was a fat, silly, sweet woman with small intelligence but with an amplitude of good cheer that enabled her to disgorge without effort peals of jolly, senseless laughter. She could read and write with some strain and had a little inherited money (it had been her funds, I later divined, which allowed Moore to purchase me), and there was about her a plump unmean simplicity of nature that caused her, alone among the household, to treat me at times with what might pa.s.s, fleetingly, as genuine affection: this took the form of sneaking me an extra piece of lean meat or 216.
finding me a castoff blanket in the winter and once she actually knitted me a pair of socks, and I do not wish easily to malign her by declaring that the affection she bore toward me resembled the warm impulsive tenderness which might be lavished carelessly upon a dog. I even came to be fond of the woman in a distant way (but largely with attentive, houndlike awareness of her occasional favors) and I intend no sarcasm when I say that much later, when she became almost the very first victim of my retribution, I felt an honest wrench of regret at the sight of the blood gushing like a red sluiceway from her headless neck, and almost wished I had spared her such an ending.
Of the rest of Moore"s household there is little enough to say.
There was young Putnam, who has already been on view; he was six years old or so upon my arrival at the house, a whiny and foul-tempered child who inherited his father"s hatred for my race and never within my hearing ever referred to me other than as "the n.i.g.g.e.r." Since even his father took eventually to calling me by my proper name, this habit of Putnam"s required either great stupidity or self-conscious persistence, perhaps both, but in any case lasted right up until the time he was grown and had become Joseph Travis"s stepson. Like his mother he was destined to have his head separated from his neck-quite a penalty to pay, it might be thought, for calling me "the n.i.g.g.e.r" so long a time but one which I did not honestly regret exacting.