Anyway, whatever final constraints Ma.r.s.e Samuel may have felt about continuing my education were removed by his brother"s pa.s.sing. Beyond doubt Benjamin would never have been a cruel master, a n.i.g.g.e.r-breaker. But if Benjamin"s death brought no rejoicing among the Negroes, it would not be accurate either to say that any were plunged into mourning. Even the dumbest slave sh.e.l.ling corn down in the most rundown and ramshackle cabin had gotten wind of at least the general drift of Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s charitable notions, and they all knew they had pa.s.sed into more promising hands: so on the day of Benjamin"s funeral, as the scores of humble darkies gathered with sorrowing downcast looks behind the big house and the more musically inclined lifted their voices in tender lament- "O my ma.s.sah"s gone! ma.s.sah"s gone!
My ma.s.sah"s gone to heaven, my Lord!
I can"t stay behind!"
-the insincerity of their simple words was as plain as the difference between gold and bra.s.s . . .
And so during all those boyhood years when the horn blew at the first crack of dawn, when Abraham stood at the edge of the stable in the still-starlit dark trumpeting in sad hoa.r.s.e notes the awakening call which brought firelight flickering at the doors of the cabins down the slope-that horn did not blow for me. I alone could stir and turn and sleep another hour, until the full light of 134.
sunup roused me to my kitchen ch.o.r.es long after the other Negroes had vanished to mill and woods and fields. Not for my soft pink palms-accustomed to the touch of silver and crystal, of pewter and glossy oiled oak-was the grimy feel of the hoe handle and the sickle and the ax. Not for me was the summer heat of the blacksmith shop or the steaming, gnat-mad fields of corn or the bone-cracking labor of the woods, rump deep in decaying slime, or the racket and toil of the mill where the weight of grain and timber ruptured the gut and twisted shoulders and spine into a stooped att.i.tude of toil as immutable as statues carved in black marble. And although Ma.r.s.e Samuel-certainly a bountiful master by any standard-could never be accused of starving his Negroes, it was nonetheless not the field-hand diet of hog and hominy to which my palate became accustomed, but finer fare, lean ham and game and pastry-leftovers to be sure, but I rarely knew what it was like not to partake of the same food that the Turners themselves enjoyed.
As for work itself, it would be a stretch of the truth to say that my days were idle; indeed, the memory of my youth at Turner"s Mill is one of a constant hustling about the house from dawn until dusk. But honestly recollected, my tasks were light, far from the sweat and stink of the field. I cleaned, I washed, I scrubbed; I polished doork.n.o.bs and built fires and learned to set a meticulous table. The hand-me-down clothes I received were baggy, but they didn"t scratch. Off and on for another year or two I continued with my lessons under the tutelage of Miss Nell, a patient, wispy creature who because of some private inner crisis had intensified her already fervid religious bent, now abandoning not only Walter Scott but even John Bunyan and all such secular work in favor of the Bible, especially the Prophets and the Psalms and the Book of Job, which we continued to read together beneath a great tulip poplar, my young black woolly head brushing her silken bonnet. Do not consider me impertinent when I say that years later, immersed in the project which is the reason for this account, I breathed a silent word of grat.i.tude to this gentle and motherly lady, from whose lips I first heard those great lines from Isaiah: Therefore will I number you to the sword, Therefore will I number you to the sword, and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter, because when I and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter, because when I called ye did not answer called ye did not answer . . . . . .
It seems to me now, as a matter of fact, that it was Miss Nell who inadvertently conveyed to me the knowledge of my own very special standing within the family, during a spell of illness a year or so before my mother died and which I reckon to have been in 135.
the autumn when I had just turned fourteen. I did not know then nor was I ever told the name of my affliction, but it could not have been anything but grave, for I pa.s.sed dark streams of blood from my bladder and for days and nights I was racked by an aching fever which sent my mind off into crazed visions and nightmares through which daylight and dark, waking and sleeping were hopelessly jumbled together and my surroundings became as unreal to me as if I had been transported into another land. Dimly I recall being moved from the corn-shuck bed I had shared for so long with my mother to some other room in the house, where I lay upon an enormous bedstead with linen sheets amid the hushed sound of whispers and tiptoeing footsteps. There in my delirium I was attended to every moment; my head was gently lifted, I drank water from a tumbler held to my lips by soft white hands. These same pale hands reappeared constantly, hovering over my eyes as in a dream to cool my burning brow with strips of flannel dipped in cool water. After a week I slowly began to recover, and the week following this I returned to my mother"s room, quite infirm at first but after a while ready to resume my daily ch.o.r.es. Yet I was never able to forget how in the midst of my sickness-during a single moment of clarity which came over me before I fell back into a fevered nightmare-I heard Miss Nell"s tearful voice, her whispered words beyond the strange door of the strange room: "Oh Lord, Sam, our little Nat! Poor little Natl We must pray, Sam, pray, pray! He mustn"t be allowed to die!"
I became in short a pet, the darling, the little black jewel of Turner"s Mill. Pampered, fondled, nudged, pinched, I was the household"s spoiled child, a grinning elf in a starched jumper who gazed at himself in mirrors, witlessly preoccupied with his own ability to charm. That a white child would not have been so sweetly indulged-that my very direct him to the proper rear door in a voice edged with icy scorn. Or should any black children from the cabins invade, no matter how guilelessly, the precincts of the big house and its rolling lawn, I would be at them with a flourished broomstick and shrill cries of abuse-safe however behind the kitchen door. Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.
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It must have been during the spring of my sixteenth year that Ma.r.s.e Samuel took me aside on the lawn after one midday dinner and announced a rather surprising change in the routine of my life. Despite the sense I had of belonging and of a closeness to the family, I was not of course really of the family and there were intimacies I was denied; days and weeks might go by without Ma.r.s.e Samuel paying any note of me, especially during the long busy seasons of planting and harvest, and thus those special moments when I was the object of his attention I can recall with the greatest clearness and intensity. On this particular afternoon he spoke of my work in the house, commending me on my alertness and industry and on the good reports brought to him by Miss Nell and the young mistresses regarding the nimble way I applied myself not only to my lessons but to my daily ch.o.r.es.
Now, all this was laudable, he said, and the duteous way I attended to my work was something in which I myself should take pride. The fact remained, however, that I owned too much ability and intelligence to labor for long as a house servant-a career which could not help but stunt and diminish the capacities he felt I had for development and lead me early into a barren dead end. Did I not honestly think that such a way of life was suitable only for rickety old codgers like Little Morning or ancient mammies with bandannas and rheumy eyes and with a bulge of snuff in their wrinkled cheeks? Certainly a boy who had learned as much as I had could not contemplate such a fruitless lifetime with anything but despondency and dread.
For a moment I was unable to answer. I do not believe that I had ever thought of the future; it is not in the mood of a Negro, once aware of the irrecoverable fact of his bondage, to dwell on the future at all, and even I in my state of relative good fortune must have simply a.s.sumed without thought that the days and years which stretched out before me would present only the familiar repet.i.tious and interminable clutter of dirty dishes, chimney ashes, muddy boots, tarnished doork.n.o.bs, chamber pots, mops and brooms. That something different different might befall my lot had never occurred to me. I do not know what I was about to reply when he slapped me gently on the shoulder, exlaiming in an eager, hearty voice: "I have grander plans for this young darky." might befall my lot had never occurred to me. I do not know what I was about to reply when he slapped me gently on the shoulder, exlaiming in an eager, hearty voice: "I have grander plans for this young darky."
Grand plans indeed. The beginning of an apprenticeship in carpentry, which, as it turned out for long years, was of as little use to me or anyone as so much rotting sawdust clogging a millwheel. But I could not have known that then. I flung myself 137.
into this new fresh field of learning with all the delight and antic.i.p.ation and hungry high spirits of a white boy setting off for the College of William & Mary and an education in the mysteries of law. Ma.r.s.e Samuel had, for one thing, just recently acquired the services of a master carpenter, a German from Washington called Goat (it occurred to me long afterward that this could not have been the proper spelling, that it must have been something like G.o.dt, but no one ever told me otherwise and in my recollection the man remains forever Goat), and it was these hands into which my owner delivered me for further instruction.
For two years under the guidance of Goat I learned the carpenter"s trade in the dusty shop down the slope between the big house and the cabins. I had become fairly good-sized for my age, and was strongly muscled and capable with my hands; all this combined with the fact that I had more than the rudiments of an education, and could measure and calculate nearly as well as any grown white man, made me an able student of the craft and I quickly learned to handle the saw and the adze and the plane and could set a row of joists parallel and straight beneath the laths of a new corncrib roof almost as skillfully as Goat himself.
Goat was a large beefy man slow of movement and of words.
Outside of carpentering, he seemed content to live by himself and to raise chickens. He had a crown of wispy hair and a s.h.a.ggy beard the color of cinnamon and he supplied emphasis to his slow, cluttered, growling speech with choppy motions of k.n.o.bbed and beefy hands. We were able to say little enough to each other, yet somehow he taught me carpentry well and I always felt grateful to him.
One thing about the carpenter"s shop has always lingered in my mind and I should tell it, even though it concerns a matter I would hesitate to dwell on had I not resolved to make this account as truthful as possible. Like most boys of sixteen or thereabouts I had begun to feel severely the pressures of my new manhood, yet I was in an unusual position compared to the other Negro boys, who found an easy outlet for their hunger with the available and willing little black girls whom they took during some quick stolen instant at the edge of a cornfield or amid the cool concealing gra.s.s of a stand of sorghum down at the edge of the woods. Isolated as I was from the cabins and such activity, I grew up in almost total ignorance of these fleshly pleasures, and whatever further knowledge I might have gained was confounded by the fear (and this was a fear I must confess I was unable to shake totally free of even in later life) that adventures in this sphere were unholy and obnoxious in the sight of the 138.
Lord. Nonetheless, I was a vigorous and healthy boy, and try as I might to fight down temptation I could not resist accepting the opportunity to excite myself whenever the force of my desire became overwhelming. For some reason at that time it seemed plausible to believe that the Lord would not chastise me too harshly so long as I was moderate in taking my pleasure, and thus I limited these solitary moments to once a week-usually Sat.u.r.days, close enough to the Sabbath so as to make my penitent prayers on that day all the more forceful and devout.
I would go to a small, low-ceilinged storage shed that was connected to the carpenter"s shop by a door which I could lock with a peg and thong. It was always a nameless white girl between whose legs I envisioned myself-a young girl with golden curls. The shed smelled strongly of freshly hewn timber and there was a resinous odor of loblolly pine, pungent and sharp enough to sear the nostrils; and often in later times, walking through noontime heat past a stand of pine trees, that same spicy and redolent odor of cut timber would arouse my senses and I would feel a sudden surge and stiffening at my groin as I thought of the carpenter"s shop and as the memory began achingly to return, mingling tenderness and desire, of my vision of the golden-haired girl with her lips half open and whispering, and my young self so many years before crouched panting in the pine-smelling sweetness.
I suspect that it was a kind of loneliness, together with the fact that I had an amount of leisure not granted to many other slaves, which helped cause me at this time so zealously to precipitate myself into a study of the Bible, where I acquired-even at that early age-such a reverence and a sense of majesty in the presence of the Psalms and in the teachings of the great Prophets that I resolved that no matter where my destiny took me, no matter what humdrum tasks befell my lot in later years, I would become first and foremost a preacher of the Word. At Christmas time one year Miss Nell made me a gift of a Bible- one of several left at Turner"s Mill by an itinerant messenger of the Bible Society in Richmond. "Heed this good book, Nathaniel,"
she said in her soft and distant voice, "and happiness shall attend you wherever you go." I will never forget my excitement as she pressed the brown leather-covered Bible into my hands.
Surely at that moment I must have been (though all unaware) the only black boy in Virginia who possessed a book.
My joy was so great that I became dizzy, and I began to tremble and sweat, though windy drafts swept through the house and the 139.
day was bitterly cold. I was overtaken by such a bewildering emotion that I could not even thank the good lady, but merely turned and went to my little room, where I sat on the corn-shuck tick in the slanting icicle light of Christmas afternoon, quite unable to lift the cover and look at the pages. I recall the scent of cedar logs burning in the kitchen beyond the wall behind me, and the kitchen warmth stealing through the cracks of the timbers at my back. I recall too the echo of the spinet piano dimly tinkling far off in the great hall of the house and the sound of white people"s voices lifted in song- Joy to the world! the Lord is Joy to the world! the Lord is come come-while with the Bible still clutched unopened in my hands I gazed through a warped and crinkled isingla.s.s windowpane to the sere wind-swept slope outside: there a mob of Negroes from the cabins was trooping toward the house. m.u.f.fled up against the cold in the coa.r.s.e and shapeless yet decent winter garments Ma.r.s.e Samuel provided for them, they straggled along in a single line, men, women, pickaninnies, prepared to receive their their gifts-a beanbag or a hunk of rock candy for the children, a yard of calico for the women, a plug of tobacco or a cheap jackknife for the men. They were a disheveled, ragged lot, and as they clumped past on the frozen ground near the window I could hear the babble of their voices, filled with Christmas antic.i.p.ation, laughter high and heedless, and loutish n.i.g.g.e.r cheer. The sight of them suddenly touched me with a loathing so intense that it was akin to disgust, bellysickness, and I turned my eyes away, throwing open the Bible at last to a pa.s.sage whose meaning was lost on me then entirely but which I never forgot and now in the light of all that has since come to pa.s.s shimmers in my memory like a transfiguration: gifts-a beanbag or a hunk of rock candy for the children, a yard of calico for the women, a plug of tobacco or a cheap jackknife for the men. They were a disheveled, ragged lot, and as they clumped past on the frozen ground near the window I could hear the babble of their voices, filled with Christmas antic.i.p.ation, laughter high and heedless, and loutish n.i.g.g.e.r cheer. The sight of them suddenly touched me with a loathing so intense that it was akin to disgust, bellysickness, and I turned my eyes away, throwing open the Bible at last to a pa.s.sage whose meaning was lost on me then entirely but which I never forgot and now in the light of all that has since come to pa.s.s shimmers in my memory like a transfiguration: I will ransom them from the power of the I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction . . . . . .
Except for Ma.r.s.e Samuel and Miss Nell (and that single fleeting recollection of Brother Benjamin), there is little enough I seem to be able to remember about the Turner family. Miss Elizabeth- Benjamin"s widow-remains but a shadow in my mind; a bony, weepy-looking, raw-elbowed woman, she sang hopefully in a quavering voice and whenever I try to conjure her up in memory it is mainly the voice that lingers-disembodied, pining, frail as a reed, a fluty desiccated Anglo-Saxon whine. She was tuberculous, and since her ailment required her to be often on the coast near Norfolk, where it was thought by the doctors that the damp salt air was curative, I saw her infrequently and then only from afar.
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Benjamin"s two sons had both studied something called Progressive Agronomy at the College of William & Mary, and soon after his father"s death the older son, Willoughby, removed himself and his bride to a smaller dwelling at the lower, thickly wooded edge of the plantation; from this house, called the New Retreat, he supervised as his father had before him the logging and timber-cutting operations of the Turner enterprise, and so him too I rarely encountered or had any dealings with.
The other agronomist, Lewis, who was a bachelor-ruddyfaced and stocky and about thirty-shared with his uncle in the management of the plantation and in effect had become the general overseer upon the abrupt departure of the inebriate McBride, whom Ma.r.s.e Samuel eventually fired for his lecherous ways. (I have no idea whether Ma.r.s.e Samuel ever learned of the Irishman"s encounter with my mother although I"m fairly certain that the man, perhaps daunted by her basic unwillingness, never dared to approach her again. Whatever, it is testimony I believe to Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s tolerance andpatience-and is perhaps too a measure of something touchingly ingenuous in his nature-that he not only put up with McBride"s drunkenness long beyond the point when another gentleman planter would have sent him packing, but became aware of his proclivity to Negro women a full two years after everyone else on the place had noted the marvel of at least three little slaves born with a palish cast, light curly hair, and a long fat Irish lip.) Lewis was an easygoing master (though I do not believe overly bright; he made errors in his speech which I in my young black wisdom secretly sneered at), and he tended to follow his uncle"s guidance in most practical matters including the handling of Negroes, and in his treatment of those who came within his purview was more or less fair and good-humored, which is all that any slave could ask.
When he was not at work he seemed to be most of the time out in the woods on horseback or shooting birds in the meadows, and thus stayed pretty much apart from the Negroes and such private affairs as they might be said (with a stretch of the imagination) to have.
Of the Turners, then, there remains only to speak of Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s two daughters, Miss Louisa and Miss Emmeline. The older girl, Miss Louisa, aided her mother in my earliest instruction, as I have already recounted; and the swift, a.s.sured way in which I learned to read and spell and do my sums gives me reason to believe that she was an excellent teacher. But our 141.
relationship in the end was so shortlived that it is hard for me to summon up an image of her. When I was around fourteen she got married to a young land speculator from Kentucky and moved away with him forever, leaving my tutelage completely in the hands of my protectress, her Scripture-beset mother.
Miss Emmeline was the last, the youngest. At the time I am speaking of she was twenty-five, perhaps a little more, and I worshiped her-from a great distance, of course-with the chaste, evangelical pa.s.sion that could only be nurtured in the innocent heart of a boy like myself, reared in surroundings where women (at least white ladies) seemed to float like bubbles in an immaculate effulgence of purity and perfection. With her l.u.s.trous rich auburn hair parted at the center and her dark intelligent eyes and the sweet gravity of her mouth which lent to her face such an air of n.o.ble calm, she would have been a great beauty even in a society far removed from this backwater, where work and isolation and the weather tended quickly to harshen a white mistress"s charms. Perhaps city life had had something to do with this, since after attending the female seminary nearby in Lawrenceville she had gone north to Baltimore, and there she had spent several years in the home of a maternal aunt. During that time she had fallen victim (or so it was rumored-and so it was bruited about the kitchen by Prissy or Little Morning or one of the house servants, all of them by training chronic snoops) of an unhappy love affair-so grievous that it had threatened a physical decline-and thus Ma.r.s.e Samuel had summoned her home, where she now helped Miss Nell in the management of the household. Eventually it seemed that her spirits were restored, and she fell without strain into the routine of a young plantation mistress, attending to the ill and the feeble in the cabins, laying up preserves and making fruit cakes, and in the spring and summer taking care of the cultivation of a large vegetable garden not far from the carpenter"s shop.
The vegetable garden was her particular devotion; she planted by herself all the seeds and seedlings, and for hours on end, her head sheltered by an enormous straw hat, she would labor side by side with the two small Negro girls who were her a.s.sistants, plucking weeds beneath the hot summer sun. Working in the carpenter"s shop, I would often raise my eyes and watch her secretly, bewitched, suddenly short of breath, yearning with a kind of raw hunger for that moment which I knew was about to arrive, and did-that moment when, pausing to look upward at the sky, she let her fair and slender fingers pa.s.s lightly over her 142.
damp brow, all the while remaining motionless upon her knees, the eyes gently reflective, her teeth glinting through lightly parted lips, a vein throbbing at her temple while she offered me quite unawares the rare glimpse, face to face, of her pure, proud, astonishing smooth-skinned beauty.
Yet my pa.s.sion for her was virginal, miserably and obscurely connected with my own religious strivings. I believed in purity and goodness, and there was something about her total beauty-a sadness, but a restless and lonely independence of manner, a proud serenity about the way in which she moved- which was pure and good in itself, like the disembodied, transparent beauty of an imagined angel. In later life, of course, I learned that such an infatuation for a beautiful white mistress on the part of a black boy was not at all uncommon, despite the possibility of danger, but at the time my adoration of her seemed to me eerie, unique, and almost insupportable, as if I had been afflicted at the roots of my soul by some divine sickness. I do not believe that during this year-long period of my worship she spoke ten words to me and I dared say nothing to her except to breathe once or twice a queasy "Yessum" or "No"m" to some casual question. Since I no longer worked in the house our paths crossed seldom, and I only asked the Lord that I be allowed sight of her once or twice a day. Naturally she had been aware for a number of years of my unusual standing as a privileged young servant, but her mind was on anything but a n.i.g.g.e.r boy and although her manner toward me was not unkindly she seemed only faintly conscious of the fact that I lived and breathed. Once from the veranda she called me to help her hang a flower pot; in my jangled fumbling and confusion I nearly allowed the pot to fall, and when, standing at my side, she caught my bare arm amid a shower of earth and cried in a sharp voice, "Nat! Silly goose!" the sound of my name on her lips was as cooling as a benediction and the contact with her white fingers was like the touch of fire.
Then one night in late summer about a year after Miss Emmeline"s return to the plantation from Baltimore, there was a party at Turner"s Mill-and this in itself was an event worthy of note. Social affairs at the plantation were rare (at least within the memory of my time at the big house), not only because of the remoteness of the place but because of the perilous conditions of transportation-deep fords, fallen trees, and washed-out roads making intercourse between the various Tidewater estates in each case a major venture, not to be considered lightly or to 143.
be undertaken in an impetuous mood. Once in a great while, however-every two years or so, usually in the late summer when the crops were laid by-Ma.r.s.e Samuel would decide to have what he called, humorously, an "a.s.semblage," and a score of people would come from miles around, planters and their families from the James and Chickahominy rivers and from down in North Carolina, people with names like Carter and Harrison and Byrd and Clark and Bonner arriving in elegant coaches and accompanied by a hustling, noisy entourage of black nurse-maids and body servants. They would stay for four or five days, sometimes as long as a week, and daily there would be fox hunts with the hounds of Major Vaughan, whose plantation was not far away, and turkey shoots and contests in horsemanship, pistol matches and picnics and a great deal of contented, somnolent, easy palaver among the ladies on the veranda, and at least two fancy b.a.l.l.s in the great hall, bedecked for each evening"s merriment in yards of pink and blue bunting.
It became my duty on these occasions (after I had reached the age of sixteen or thereabouts) to act in the capacity of "chief usher," a t.i.tle which Ma.r.s.e Samuel bestowed upon me and which involved my supervision of all the Negro help outside of the kitchen. (It is possibly a measure of Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s confidence in me that he entrusted me with this position, as young as I happened to be; doubtless on the other hand I simply was was quicker and smarter than all the rest.) Caparisoned for a week in purple velvet knee-length pantaloons, a red silk jacket with buckles of shiny bra.s.s, and a white goat"s-hair wig which culminated behind in a saucy queue, I must have presented an exotic sight to the Carters and the Byrds, but I reveled in my role and took great pleasure in bustling about and lording it over the other black boys-most of them enlisted from the fields, dumb callow kids all thumbs and k.n.o.bby knees and popping eyes-even though each day I was kept feverishly busy from dawn to dusk. It was I who greeted the carriages and coaches and helped the ladies dismount, I too who rode herd on Lucas and Todd and Pete and Tim, making certain that they polished each night each gentleman"s boots, that they cleaned up the litter on the lawn, that they hurried about ceaselessly, fetching ice from the ice cellar, retrieving a lady"s lost fan, tethering horses, untethering them, doing this, undoing that. I was the first to arise long before dawn (to help Little Morning prepare daily a stirrup cup of whiskey for the fox hunt was one of my most important ch.o.r.es) and nearly always the last to retire, and the fact that I was up and about at a truly unearthly hour was the The Confessions of Nat Turner quicker and smarter than all the rest.) Caparisoned for a week in purple velvet knee-length pantaloons, a red silk jacket with buckles of shiny bra.s.s, and a white goat"s-hair wig which culminated behind in a saucy queue, I must have presented an exotic sight to the Carters and the Byrds, but I reveled in my role and took great pleasure in bustling about and lording it over the other black boys-most of them enlisted from the fields, dumb callow kids all thumbs and k.n.o.bby knees and popping eyes-even though each day I was kept feverishly busy from dawn to dusk. It was I who greeted the carriages and coaches and helped the ladies dismount, I too who rode herd on Lucas and Todd and Pete and Tim, making certain that they polished each night each gentleman"s boots, that they cleaned up the litter on the lawn, that they hurried about ceaselessly, fetching ice from the ice cellar, retrieving a lady"s lost fan, tethering horses, untethering them, doing this, undoing that. I was the first to arise long before dawn (to help Little Morning prepare daily a stirrup cup of whiskey for the fox hunt was one of my most important ch.o.r.es) and nearly always the last to retire, and the fact that I was up and about at a truly unearthly hour was the 144.
only reason that caused me one morning, between ball and hunt, to nearly stumble over Miss Emmeline and someone else in the moonless and murky dark.
It was not the loud whisper of her voice that shocked me so much-though I instantly distinguished it-but the Lord"s name in her mouth, uttered in a frenzy, the first time in my life I had heard blasphemy on a woman"s tongue. And so astonished was I by the words that as I stood there rooted in the dark it did not just then occur to me to consider the event which occasioned them, and I thought she was in some great and nameless peril: "Oh mercy . . . oh G.o.d . . . oh Jesus . . . wait! . . . oh Jesus . . . now wait! . . . quick . . . put it back . . . now then . . . slowly . . . oh Jesus Christ . . . slowly! . . . wait!"
A man"s soft groan from the lawn behind the hedge now made me aware of the other presence, and I remained half paralyzed, fascinated yet suddenly sick nearly unto death at the sound of the Saviour"s name spoken thus, as if He had been stripped shamelessly naked by the hot urgency of her lips. "Wait, wait!"
she again implored, and a gentle sigh came from the man"s throat, and once more she continued her rhythmic whispering: "Oh mercy . . . mercy . . . wait now, slowly! . . . oh Jesus . . . oh Christ . . . oh Christ . . . oh yes, now! now! . . . Oh mercy . . . mercy . . . . . . Oh mercy . . . mercy . . .
mercy . . ."
Abruptly then, in a prolonged and dwindling little sob, the voice died and all was silent, and I could hear nothing but the piping of frogs in the millpond and a dull thumping of horses against the stable stalls and the sound of my own heart racing madly, so loud that I thought surely it must be heard above the soughing of a night wind in the sycamore trees. I stood there unable to move, my spirit a shambles from chagrin and shock and fear. And I recall thinking wretchedly: This is what comes of being a n.i.g.g.e.r.
It ain"t fair. If I wasn"t a n.i.g.g.e.r I wouldn"t find out about things I don"t want to find out about. It ain"t fair.
Then after a long silence I heard the man"s voice, impa.s.sioned, tremulous: "Oh my love Em, my love, my love, Em Em my love!" my love!"
But there was no reply from Miss Emmeline and time crept by slowly and painfully like something crippled and old, causing my mouth to go dry and a numbness, premonitory with the clammy touch of death, to spread a tingling chill through my legs and thighs. At last I heard her voice again, placid now, composed, 145.
but edged with contempt and bitterness. "Finally you"ve accomplished what you"ve been after for ages. I hope you"re satisfied."
"Oh Em, my love, my love love," he whispered. "Let me-"
"Stay away from me!" she said, her voice rising now in the darkness. "Stay away from me, do you hear! If you touch me, if you say another word to me I"ll tell Papa! I"ll tell Papa and he"ll shoot shoot you for you for ravishing ravishing your own cousin." your own cousin."
"But oh my darling Em!" he protested. "You consented consented to-Oh to-Oh Em Em, my love, my dear-"
"Just stay away from me!" she repeated, and again she fell silent and there was no sound for a long while until suddenly I heard her burst out in words touched with raw and abandoned despair: "Oh G.o.d, how I hate you. Oh G.o.d, how I hate this place. Oh G.o.d, how I hate life. Oh G.o.d G.o.d, how I hate G.o.d!"
"Oh don"t, Em!" he whispered in a frantic voice. "My love, my love, my love!"
"This G.o.d d.a.m.ned horrible horrible place. I would even go back to Maryland and become a wh.o.r.e again, and allow the only man I ever loved to sell my body on the streets of Baltimore. Get your G.o.d d.a.m.ned hands place. I would even go back to Maryland and become a wh.o.r.e again, and allow the only man I ever loved to sell my body on the streets of Baltimore. Get your G.o.d d.a.m.ned hands off off me and don"t speak another me and don"t speak another word word to me again! If you do I"ll tell Papa! Now leave me, leave me, leave me, to me again! If you do I"ll tell Papa! Now leave me, leave me, leave me, leave me alone! leave me alone! " "
I have spoken elsewhere in this narrative, and more than once, of a Negro"s ubiquity and the learning he acquires, so often unbeknownst to white people, of the innermost secrets of their hearts. That evening was one such time, but it seemed to me, too, as I watched Miss Emmeline rise from the gra.s.s and in a rustle of taffeta disappear into the blue shadows of the house and then saw her cousin Lewis rise also and slouch off miserably through the night, that no matter how much covert knowledge a Negro possessed there were questions always left unanswered and a mystery, and that therefore he should not feel himself too wise or all-knowing. Certainly this was true in regard to Miss Emmeline, who, all the while I pondered her after that evening, became ever more wrapped in a dark and secret cloak. She did not speak another word to Lewis nor,so far as I was able to observe, did he dare speak to her; her threat, her admonition 146.
triumphed, and some months later the poor man left Turner"s Mill entirely, going down to Louisiana to try to set himself up in sugar or cotton.
As for what I heard and saw that night, please do not consider my account simply-well, mischievous mischievous-for in truth such an episode had the effect of altering my entire vision of white women. For now the glow of saintliness which had surrounded Miss Emmeline in my mind dimmed, flickered out, disappeared; it was as if she suddenly stood disrobed and the fascination she held for me was of a different order, just as my hopeless and unending frustration was of a different kind though no less severe. For a while I was still maddened by her. I still worshiped her beauty from a distance but I could not help but be shaken to my guts by the words of blasphemy I had heard her utter, which now inflamed my thoughts, and like pinpoints of fire, p.r.i.c.ked and agitated my very dreams. In my fantasies she began to replace the innocent, imaginary girl with the golden curls as the object of my craving, and on those Sat.u.r.days when I stole into my private place in the carpenter"s shop to release my pent-up desires, it was Miss Emmeline whose bare white full round hips and belly responded wildly to all my l.u.s.t and who, sobbing "mercy, mercy, mercy" against my ear, allowed me to partake of the wicked and G.o.dless yet unutterable joys of defilement.
One day in October just after I became eighteen-a day recollected with that mysterious clarity of all days upon which transpire the greatest of events-I discovered the actual outlines of that future which Ma.r.s.e Samuel had envisioned for me all these weeks and months and years.
It was a Sat.u.r.day, one of those dusty, ocherous autumnal days whose vivid weather never again seems so sweet and inviting after that youthful time of discovery: wood smoke and maple leaves blazing in the trees, an odor of apples everywhere like a winy haze, squirrels scampering for chinquapins at the edge of the woods, a constant stridor of crickets among the withering gra.s.s, and over all a ripe sunny heat edged with feathery gusts of wind smelling of charred oak and winter. That morning I had as usual risen early and gone to the shop, where I busied myself in loading some short two-by-fours on a barrow. Ma.r.s.e Samuel had only a few days before made his seasonal inspection of the field hands" cabins, finding several of them in a state of sorry dilapidation. This day Goat and I would set up the two-by-fours as underpinning for a couple of new floors; afflicted by the summer"s seepage and rot, many of the old timbers had 147.
dissolved into a kind of crumbling splintery sawdust, the cabins themselves then exposed to the raw damp earth and infested by field mice, roaches, ants, beetles, and worms. Although I had grown very fond of my apprenticeship as a carpenter and took pride in my growing mastery of the craft, I despised with a pa.s.sion that part of my job which required me to work on repairs to the cabins. For one thing alone (and this in spite of all Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s efforts to teach a fundamental cleanliness) there was the odor-the stink of sweat and grease and p.i.s.s and n.i.g.g.e.r offal, of rancid pork and crotch and armpit and black toil and straw ticks stained with babies" vomit-an abyssal odor of human defeat revolting and irredeemable. "Ai, yi, yi," Goat would whisper to the air in his German rattle, "dese people is not animals even," and lifting a post or beam would make a convulsive face and spit on the floor. At such moments despite myself, the blood-shame, the disgrace I felt at being a n.i.g.g.e.r also, was as sharp as a sword through my guts.
But that bright morning, appearing at the shop door with a cheery smile, Ma.r.s.e Samuel rescued me before I had even gotten well along on my task. "Throw a saddle on Judy, Nat," he said, "we"re off to Jerusalem." Behind the look of humor on his face there was something secretive, conspiratorial,and he lowered his voice to say: "Come November third, Miss Nell and I will have been married for a quarter of a century. I must needs celebrate this anniversary with an appropriate gift." He plucked me by the sleeve of my shirt, drawing me outside the shop. "Come now, let"s saddle Judy and Tom. I need company to share this splendid day. But you mustn"t breathe a word about the gift, Nat!"
He looked about him right and left, as if fearful of being overheard, then said in a whisper: "Someone sent news from over at the Vaughans" place that a jeweler from Richmond will be pa.s.sing today through town."
I was of course wonderfully pleased-not alone because I was freed of an ugly job but because I liked riding so much and always stole a ride on the rare occasions I was given the opportunity, and also because Jerusalem itself was an exciting place for me; although it was no more than fifteen miles away, I had been there only once several years before and then the little village touched me with wonder despite the solemnity of our mission. That time too I had gone with Ma.r.s.e Samuel, but in a wagon, to help pick out a headstone for my mother"s grave. No cedar headboard for her, no weedfilled corner of some field splashed with tatterdemalion wildflowers. My mother, alone 148.
among all the Negroes at Turner"s Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks (scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning in his coffin) with a marble headstone not one inch smaller nor a shade less white than theirs. I am no longer oppressed by the fact (as I was for so many years after I had grown to manhood and was able to reflect long and hard on these matters) that the name on that headstone was not a n.i.g.g.e.r woman"s forlorn though honest "Lou-Ann" but the captured, possessed, owned "Lou-Ann Turner."
We rode out the long front lane over a carpet of fallen leaves. At the entrance to the lane half a dozen field hands supervised by Abraham were clearing a drainage ca.n.a.l which rimmed a part of the land; Ma.r.s.e Samuel greeted them with a loud halloo, and they in turn stood erect and grinned in a servile show of doffed hats and loose-limbed droll shufflings, shouting back: "Mawnin", ma.s.sah!" and "Fare "ee well, Ma.r.s.e Sam!" I eyed them with aloof, privileged disdain. Their calls echoed behind us even as we set out through the woods by way of a leaf-strewn sunken wagon track leading toward the log road which would take us to Jerusalem. It was a gusty, brilliant morning alive with tossing branches and swirling eddies of leaves beneath us. Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s horse, a glittering black Irish hunter, quickly set the pace and took the lead and for half an hour or so we rode without speaking through the forest until finally, slackening his gait, Ma.r.s.e Samuel let me draw abreast and then I heard him say: "I hear that you are quite a young craftsman." I found no way to answer these words which were both so pleasing and discomfiting, and I kept quiet, risking only a swift glance at Ma.r.s.e Samuel and catching his eye then shifting my gaze a bit. I saw a pleasant twinkly look on his face, a kind of half-smile as if he were on the verge of divulging a secret. He sat upon a horse with great style and presence; his flowing hair had become a silvery gray in the past few years, and more lines creased and webbed his face, adding to his dignity; for an instant I imagined I was riding in the company of a great Biblical hero-Joshua perhaps, or Gideon before the extermination of the Midianites. I could say nothing as usual; my awe of him was so great that there were moments when I could no more reply to him than if someone had sewn up my lips.
"Mr. Goat told me that you planed down and finished twenty sills and chimney girts as smooth and as clean as could be, mortice 149.
and tenons and all and not one bad joint nor a single timber to throw away in the lot! Fine work, my excellent young carpenter!
What I expect I shall have to do-"
Was he on the edge then of telling me what he had to say later?
Perhaps. But I do not really know, for at that instant Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s horse suddenly reared in a panic and the mare too heaved up beneath me, neighing with alarm, and across the wagon trace three deer bolted in high bounds from a thicket, a buck and two does dappled in the leafy morning light; they flew past us in floating shapes wild-eyed and silent until one after another they struck the blanket of leaves on the far side of the road and vanished into the woods with a clamorous diminishing storm of thudding hooves and snapping branches. "Hoo, Tom!"
Ma.r.s.e Samuel shouted, reining in his horse, calming him, and I too tightened in the mare, and for a moment we stood there in the checkered flickering light, gazing at the place where the white tails of the deer had melted into the woods, listening as the sound of the plunging feet vanished far off among the trees. But it had given us both a start. "A yard farther and they"d have been on top of us, Nat!" Ma.r.s.e Samuel called with an uneasy laugh, and he swung Tom around and galloped ahead, saying no more until a few minutes later when the wagon trace ended, merging with the log road which led to Jerusalem. "Then shall the lame man leap as a hart man leap as a hart," he said, glancing back at me, "and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness-How does it go, Nat?"
"For in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert desert," I answered. "And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be gra.s.s with reeds and rushes dragons, where each lay, shall be gra.s.s with reeds and rushes."
"Yes, yes," he replied. We had drawn to a stop near the end of the trace, beneath a grove of gnarled and ancient apple trees once part of a large cultivated grove but now turned back to the underbrush and the wildwood. Fallen from the branches apples by the bushel lay in disordered piles and rows in a shallow ditch at the edge of the trace; scattered ranks of the red and yellowish fruit were faintly rotting with a cidery odor. Even as we stood there others fell, plop-plopping plop-plopping on the ground. Gnats swarmed over all, barely visible, and the two horses bent down their necks and began to munch at the apples with succulent crunching sounds. "Yes, yes," Ma.r.s.e Samuel said, "I had forgotten. I had forgotten." He smiled suddenly, adding: "By G.o.d"s grace I can afford to forget the Bible with on the ground. Gnats swarmed over all, barely visible, and the two horses bent down their necks and began to munch at the apples with succulent crunching sounds. "Yes, yes," Ma.r.s.e Samuel said, "I had forgotten. I had forgotten." He smiled suddenly, adding: "By G.o.d"s grace I can afford to forget the Bible with you you to rely on. to rely on. For in the wilderness For in the wilderness The Confessions of Nat Turner 150.
shall waters break out and streams in the desert-Lord Almighty, would that it were really so!" He looked about him for a moment, searching the distances with a hand shielding his eyes from the bright sun. "Lord Almighty!" he said again. "What a desolate prospect hereabouts!"
I looked about me too but could see nothing out of the ordinary: apple trees, road, fields, distant woodland-all seemed to be in place.
He turned and regarded me soberly. "Those deer now, Nat. Take those deer for example. Used to be you never saw any deer on this trace, up in this quarter. Too many people around that kept them down. Fifteen, sixteen years ago when you were but a small tadpole the woods would be resounding with gunfire in November, December when old John Coleman and his boys would be laying up venison. They kept the deer population down to a proper size. Let his darkies hunt, too. Had a big driver named Friday who was one of the best deer shots in all of Southampton. But it"s all gone now. When the deer come back it means poor times. It means the people have gone." He looked around again, the expression on his face still earnest, worried, thoughtful. "This grove here," he murmured, "John Coleman"s too. Taken care of, those trees gave the sweetest Jonathans ever you might ask for. Now look at them, all gone to pieces, fit only for the worms. G.o.d, what a pity! What a waste and a shame!"
He said little else for a while as we rode at a slow canter toward Jerusalem. Something seemed to have taken possession of his thoughts and he remained buried within himself, lost in some troubled reverie which contrasted suddenly and puzzlingly with his happy mood of the early morning but which of course I could not presume to intrude upon. We rode in silence for an hour or a little more, the log road lying straight and level as a roofbeam before us, the woods at either side like a whispery wall, wind-thrashed and afire with leaves. Here, unlike the tamed land around Turner"s Mill, it seemed a true wilderness, for the copper and gold landscape was astir with wilderness life: partridge sprang up beyond the edge of the road, and from the forest"s windswept roof fat grouse exploded, booming as they sought the sky. Squirrels and cottontails crisscrossed the road all along the way. Once a red fox considered us from his perch on the trunk of a fallen oak; seated panting, grinning, his tongue lolled out between rows of small wicked teeth.
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Yet even as we rode along I was made aware-because of what Ma.r.s.e Samuel had said-of the strange bleak tracts of land which at intervals broke up the forest, patches of scrubby bramble-choked earth which had once been tobacco fields but now lay in fallow ruin. Scrub oak and pine saplings poked up through these meadows; the earth was raw and weedy and great stretches of chalky, storm-runneled earth upon which nothing could grow blotched the landscape like open wounds. Here and there a forlorn last growth of stripped tobacco stalks stuck up through the briers in stiff withered spines. As we rode past one of these fields I could see on the far horizon the remnant of a great old farmhouse with its roof caved in; the tumbledown outbuildings surrounding it, rotting and abandoned like the ruined offspring of something itself long dead, made the distant view even more sinister, and I turned away from it, beginning to share Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s pensive mood without knowing exactly why, and rode silently along behind him as the woods closed in again on either side around us.
There was little movement on the road, and such of it as there was seemed to be coming toward us, away from Jerusalem: two peddlers" wagons, several farmers in gigs and buggies-all of whom Ma.r.s.e Samuel hailed, being hailed warmly in return with elaborate, deferential greetings-and a half-blind old free Negro woman named Lucy, a ragpicker well known in the region, quite drunk and crazed and astride a spavined motheaten mule, who when Ma.r.s.e Samuel pressed a few pennies into her bleached palm, cackled in a voice which followed us for half a mile: "Bress yo" soul, Ma.r.s.e Samuel, you Jesus hisself! Yes, you des Jesus hisself . . . Jesus hisself . . . Jesus hisself! Jesus hisself! " "
In the outline of a vast arrowhead, flashing and wavering, a flock of geese raced south high in the pure blue above; a gust of wind caught Ma.r.s.e Samuel"s cloak, blowing it about his head, and as he reached up to recover it he said: "How old are you now, Nat?
Eighteen, am I correct?"
"Yes sir, Ma.r.s.e Samuel, I turned eighteen first day of this month."
"Mr. Goat has splendid things to tell me about you," he went on.
"It"s really most remarkable the progress you"ve made." He turned to look at me with the suggestion of a smile. "You"re quite an unusual darky, I suppose you know."
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"Yes sir, Ma.r.s.e Samuel, I reckon I am." I do not recall replying with immodesty; that I was in many ways both exceptional and fortunate was a fact of which I had long been well aware.
"You have by no means acquired what is known as a liberal education," he said. "That was not my intention nor within my powers, even though I am sure that young people of your race will get that kind of learning someday. But you seem to be equipped now with the best part of an elementary schooling. You can read and write, and you can count. You have the most amazing knowledge of the Good Book of anyone within my ken, and that includes several white ministers I know. You will doubtless take on much more learning as you go forward, so long as books are within your reach. In addition to all this you have gained command of a craft, and are exceedingly skillful at everything which has been taught you. You are the walking proof of what I have tried so hard and usually so vainly to persuade white gentlemen, including my late beloved brother, namely, that young darkies like yourself can can overcome the natural handicaps of their race and at least acquire such schooling as will allow them to enter into pursuits other than the lowest menial animal labor. Do you understand what I am getting at, Nat?" overcome the natural handicaps of their race and at least acquire such schooling as will allow them to enter into pursuits other than the lowest menial animal labor. Do you understand what I am getting at, Nat?"
"Yes sir, Ma.r.s.e Samuel," I said, "I understand fine."
"In three years you will be twenty-one, you will have attained your manhood. Until then I wish to see you function on a new basis at the Mill. Commencing tomorrow, you will work only half a day at the shop under Mr. Goat"s direction. During the rest of the time you will act as a.s.sistant driver on the plantation, working together with Abraham in controlling the affairs of the fields and the mill itself but answerable only to me. During some of that time this fall I will be seeking your a.s.sistance in putting my library in order, it is in sorry need of straightening out. That last shipment from the factor in London contained over one hundred volumes in agronomy and horticulture alone, not to speak of the rest of my books and those of my father"s which stand in need of arrangement. Do you think you can help me in all this?"
"I will certainly try, Ma.r.s.e Samuel, I will most surely do my best."
"There may be some items which will be a bit of a trick for you as yet, but you will learn in the process and I think all in all we shall manage handsomely." He had reined in his horse, and I stopped too; now we stood abreast at the edge of the road and Ma.r.s.e Samuel clutched the pommel of his saddle in a gloved hand, 153.
watching me gravely. The road was empty of travelers here, desolate, traversed by small whirlwinds of brown leaves and gritty dust. Flat fields of briers rolled away to the rim of the horizon, a wasteland of dying thorns; somewhere far off a wildfire in the woods burned unchecked and its fragrance, sharp with cedar, floated around us in a powdery sweet haze.
"Now, I have long debated in my mind and heart," he went on slowly, "whether to tell you of this other decision, for fear that it would hinder you in some way or cause you to occupy your head with fanciful notions when you should be attending to your work."
I could not think what it was he was preparing to tell me but there was something in the tone of his voice that put me on the alert, antic.i.p.ating, and in a wild and sudden fantasy I thought: Maybe he"s going to say that if I do everything right he"ll give me old Judy; he let Abraham have a horse only two yearsago . . .
"When I was up in Richmond this last August, I saw Mr. Bushrod Pemberton, who has taken a great interest in the news I have had to convey to him in regard to you-"
A vision of the mare disappeared, and I was thinking instead: What has Richmond got to do with me? And Mr. Bushrod Pemberton? What does either of them got to do with anything in the world?