“First Troop!” I cried. “Secure the woods!” I had just seen the new overseer, a man named Pretlow, and his two young white helpers jump from the steaming still and streak for the woods, the boys running, Pretlow astride a crippled barrelbellied mule.
“Git after them!” I cried to Henry and his men. “They won’t git far!” I wheeled and shouted to the others: “Second and Third Troops, take the gun room! On to the house!”
Ah God! At that moment I was overcome again by such The Confessions of Nat Turner
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dizziness that I pulled in my horse and got down instantly and stood there in the hot field, leaning with my head against the saddle. I shut my eyes; needlepoints of red light floated through the dark, my lungs were filled with dust. When the horse stirred, I rocked as if in a rowboat. Across the field screams of terror came from the house; one stricken female cry, prolonged and wavering, ceased with shocking suddenness. I heard a voice nearby, Austin’s, and looked up to see him riding bareback one of the stallions, with a Bryant Negro seated behind. I gave the other boy my mount and told them both to join the troop chasing Pretlow and his helpers at the edge of the woods. I stumbled, fell to my knees, rose quickly.
“You’s sick, Nat, isn’t you?” said Austin, peering down.
“Go on,” I replied, “go on!” I They galloped off.
On foot now I skirted Richard Whitehead’s corpse lying face down between two rows of cotton. I walked unsteadily, following along the old familiar log fence which I myself had helped build, separating field and barnyard. My men in the house, in the stable, and in the barn, were making a barbaric racket. Still more screams erupted from the house: I remembered that Mrs.
Whitehead’s summer-visiting daughters were home. I clambered over the fence, nearly falling. As I grabbed for the post, I glimpsed the gross old house nigger Hubbard, at gunpoint, being forced into a wagon by Henry and another: captive eunuch, he would not go with us willingly, but tied up in the cart with other pet collected coons, would surely go. “Lawd, sweet Lawd!” he boohooed to the skies as they shoved him up into the wagon, and he sobbed as if his heart would perish. At that moment I rounded the corner of the oxen barn and looked toward the porch of the house. There deserted of all save those two acting out their final tableau—the tar-black man and the woman, bone-white, bone-rigid with fear beyond telling, pressed urgently together against the door in a simulacrum of shattered oneness and heartsick farewell—the porch seemed washed for an instant in light that flowed from the dawn of my own beginning. Then I saw Will draw back as if from a kiss and with a swift sideways motion nearly decapitate Mrs. Whitehead in a single stroke.
And he had seen me. “Dar she is, preacher man, dey’s one left!”
he howled. “An’ she all your’n! Right by de cellah do’! Go git her, preacher man!” he taunted me in his wild rage. “If’n you cain’t make de red juice run you cain’t run de army!”
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Soundless, uttering not a word, Margaret Whitehead rose up and scrambled from her hiding place beyond the sheltering wall of the cellar door and fled me—fled me like the wind. Fleet and light she ran, after the fashion of a child, with bare arms stiffly outstretched, brown hair tied with a bow and tossing this way and that above a blue taffeta dress, pressed to her back in a sweaty oblong of deeper blue. I had not caught sight of her face and realized it was she only when, disappearing around the corner of the house, the silk ribbon which I had seen before fell from her hair and rippled briefly on the air before fluttering to earth.
“Dar! She gone!” Will roared, gesturing with his broadax to the other Negroes, who had begun to straggle across the yard.
“Does you want her, preacher man, or she fo’ me?”
Ah, how I want her, I thought, and unsheathed my sword. She had run into the hayfield, and when I too rounded the corner of the house I thought she had slipped away, for there was no one in sight. But she had merely fallen down in the waist-high grass and as I stood there she rose again—a small and slender figure in the distance—and resumed her flight toward a crooked far-off fence. I ran headlong into the field. The air was alive with grasshoppers: they skimmed and flickered across my path, brushed my skin with brittle momentary sting. I felt the sweat streaming into my eyes. The sword in my right hand hung like the weight of all the earth. Yet I gained on Margaret quickly, for she had tired fast, and I reached her just as she was trying to clamber over the rotted pole fence. She made no sound, uttered no word, did not turn to plead or contend or resist or even wonder. Nor did I speak —our last encounter may have been the quietest that ever was. Beneath her foot one of the poles gave way in crunching powdery collapse and she tripped forward, bare arms still outthrust as if to welcome someone beloved and long-unseen. As she stumbled thus, then recovered, I heard for the first time her hurtful, ragged breathing, and it was with this sound in my ears that I plunged the sword into her side, just below and behind her breast. She screamed then at last.
Litheness, grace, the body’s nimble felicity—all fled her like ghosts. She crumpled to earth, limp, a rag, and as she fell I stabbed her again in the same place, or near it, where pulsing blood already encrimsoned the taffeta’s blue. There was no scream this time although the echo of the first sang in my ears like a far angelic cry; when I turned aside from her fallen body I The Confessions of Nat Turner
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was troubled by a steady soughing noise like the rise and fall of a summer tempest in a grove of pines and realized that it was the clamor of my own breathing as it welled up in sobs from my chest.
I lurched away from her through the field, calling out to myself like one bereft of mind. Yet hardly had I taken a dozen steps when I heard her voice, weak, frail, almost without breath, not so much voice as memory—faint as if from some distant and half-forgotten lawn of childhood: Oh Nat I hurt so. Please kill me Nat I hurt so.
I stopped and looked back. “Die, God damn your white soul,” I wept. “Die!”
Oh Nat please kill me I hurt so.
“Die! Die! Die! Die!”
The sword fell from my hand. I returned to her side and looked down. Her head was cradled against the inside of her arm, as if she had composed herself for sleep, and all the chestnut streaming luxuriance of her hair had fallen in a tangle amid the hayfield’s parched and fading green. Grasshoppers stitched and stirred in restless fidget among the weeds, darting about her face.
“I hurt so,” I heard her whisper.
“Shut your eyes,” I said. I reached down to search with my fingers for a firm length of fence rail and I could sense once more her close girl-smell and the fragrance of lavender, bitter in my nostrils, and sweet. “Shut your eyes,” I told her quickly. Then when I raised the rail above her head she gazed at me,as if past the imponderable vista of her anguish, with a grave and drowsy tenderness such as I had never known, spoke some words too soft to hear and, saying no more, closed her eyes upon all madness, illusion, error, dream, and strife. So I brought the timber down and she was swiftly gone, and I hurled the hateful, shattered club far up into the weeds.
For how long I aimlessly circled her body—prowled around the corners of the field in haphazard quest for nothing, like some roaming dog—how long this went on I do not recollect. The sun rose higher, boiling; my own flesh was incandescent, and when at the farm I heard the men call for me their voices were untold distances away. By the edge of the woods I found myself seated The Confessions of Nat Turner
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on a log, head in my hands, unaccountably thinking of ancient moments of childhood—warm rain, leaves, a whippoorwill, rushing mill wheels, jew’sharp strumming—centuries before.
Then I arose again and resumed my meaningless and ordained circuit of her body, not near it yet ever within sight as if that crumpled blue were the center of an orbit around whose path I must make a ceaseless pilgrimage. And once in my strange journey I thought I heard again her whispery voice, thought I saw
her rise from the blazing field with arms outstretched as if to a legion of invisible onlookers, her brown hair and innocent school gown teased by the wind as she cried: “Oh, I would fain swoon into an eternity of love!” But then she vanished before my eyes—melted instantly like an image carved of air and light—and I turned away at last and went back to join my men.
All day after that we swept north through the countryside.
Despite certain unforeseen halts and delays, our advance was everywhere successful. The Porter place, Nathaniel Francis’s, Barrow’s, Edwards’s, Harris’s, Doyle’s—each was overrun, and each was the scene of ruthless extermination.We missed laying hold of Nathaniel Francis himself (much later I learned from Hark that he had been away at the time in Sussex County), and so it was one of the lesser ironies of our mission—and a source of bitter disappointment to both Sam and Will—that almost the only white man in the county who owned a truly illustrious reputation for cruelty to Negroes escaped the blade of our retribution. His ending would have had a quality all its own. Such are the fortunes of war. By early afternoon I had regained my stability and composure; my strength came back, I felt immeasurably better and took heart and vigor from our rapid gains. Under the influence of Nelson—but also because of my actions at the Whitehead place—Will had become somewhat more subdued, and I felt that finally he was under a semblance of control. By late afternoon there was no one who was white left alive along the twenty miles we had traveled.
Even so, our work of death was not absolutely exhaustive, not complete, and I am far from sure that this was not the ruination of my mission, since it took but a single soul to raise the alarm.
And I must admit to a failing on my own part which may have caused more than anything else the fact of the resistance we began to encounter the following day and which slowed us to a fatal pace. For as I told Gray, late that afternoon just before twilight at the Harris farm we had seen a young white girl of fourteen or so flee to the woods, screaming her terror as she The Confessions of Nat Turner
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rushed into the haven of a grove of juniper trees. And Gray himself had established that it was this girl who had managed to reach the Williams place near dark, allowing that fortunate man to hide his family and his slaves and to ride off north, spreading the alarm. In turn it had been that alarm which may or may not (I cannot be certain) have given the enemy their ultimate advantage and tipped the balance against us. What I failed to confide to Gray is that it had not been “us” who had seen her but I alone, rocking weary in the saddle as dusk descended and my men killed and ransacked and looted the Harris house. I heard her faint frantic cry, saw a flicker of color as she vanished into the darkening thicket of trees.
I might have reached her in a twinkling—the work of half a minute—but I suddenly felt dispirited and overcome by fatigue, and was pursued by an obscure, unshakable grief. I shivered in the knowledge of the futility of all ambition. My mouth was sour with the yellow recollection of death and blood-smeared fields and walls. I watched the girl slip away, vanish without a hand laid upon her. Who knows but whether we were not doomed to lose. I know nothing any longer. Nothing. Did I really wish to vouchsafe a life for the one that I had taken?
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Part IV
“It Is Done …”
Surely I Come Quickly …
Cloudless sunlight suggesting neither hour nor season glows down upon me, wraps me with a cradle’s warmth as I drift toward the river’s estuary; the little boat rocks gently in our benign descent together toward the sea. On the unpeopled banks the woods are silent, silent as snowfall. No birds call; in windless attitudes of meditation the crowd of green trees along the river shore stands drooping and still. This low country seems untouched by humanity, by past or future time. Beneath me where I recline I feel the boat’s sluggish windward drift, glimpse rushing past eddies of foam, branches, leaves, clumps of grass all borne on the serene unhurried flood to the place where the river meets the sea. Faintly now I hear the oceanic roar, mark the sweep of sunlit water far-near, glinting with whitecaps, the ragged shoulder of a beach where sea and river join in a tumultuous embrace of swirling waters. But nothing disturbs me, I drowse in the arms of a steadfast and illimitable peace. Salt stings my nostrils. The breakers roll to shore, the lordly tide swells back beneath a cobalt sky arching eastward toward Africa. An unhurried booming fills me not with fear but only with repose and slumbrous anticipation—serenity as ageless as those rocks, in garlands of weeping seaweed, thrown up by the groaning waves.
Now as I approach the edge of land I look up for one last time to study the white building standing on its promontory high above the shore. Again I cannot tell what it is or what it means. Stark white, glittering, pure as alabaster, it rests on the precipice unravaged by weather or wind, neither temple nor monument nor sarcophagus but relic of the ages—of all past and all futurity—white inscrutable paradigm of a mystery beyond The Confessions of Nat Turner
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utterance or even wonder. The sun bathes its tranquil marble sides, its doorless façade, the arches that sweep around it, revealing no entry anywhere, no window; inside, it would be as dark as the darkest tomb. Yet I cannot dwell on that place too long, for again as always I know that to try to explore the mystery would be only to throw open portals on even deeper mysteries, on and on everlastingly, into the remotest corridors of thought and time. So I turn away. I cast my eyes toward the ocean once more, watch the blue waves and glitter of spume-borne light approaching, listen to the breaking surf move near as I pass, slowly, in contemplation of a great mystery, out toward the sea . .
.
I come awake with a start, feeling the cedar plank cold beneath my back, the leg irons colder still—like encircling bands of ice. It is full dark, I can see nothing. I rise up on my elbows, letting the dream dwindle away from my mind, fade out—this one last time, and forever—from recollection. The chains at my feet chink in the morning’s black silence. It is bitterly cold but the wind has died and I no longer shiver so; I draw the remnant of my ragged shirt close around my chest. Then I tap with my knuckles against the wall separating me from Hark. He sleeps deeply, his breath a jagged sigh as it rattles through his wound. Tap-tap. Silence.
Tap-tap again, louder. Hark awakes. “Dat you, Nat?”
“It’s me,” I reply, “we go soon.”
He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, yawning: “I knows it.
Lawd, I wish dey would git on wid it. What time it is you reckon, Nat?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “they must be a couple hours more.”
I hear the heavy thump of his feet and the sound of his chain-links clinking together, then the noise of a bucket scraping across the floor. Hark chuckles faintly. “Lawd me, Nat,” he says.
“Wisht I could move about. Hit hard enough to pee lyin’ down in de daytime, at night I cain’t hit dat bucket in no way.” I hear a noisy spatter and splash and Hark’s laughter again, low in his throat, rich, amused at himself. “Ain’t nothin’ mo’ useless dan a twofifty-pound nigger dat cain’t hardly move. Did you know, Nat, dey gwine hang me all roped up in a chair? Leastwise, dat’s what dat man Gray done said. Dat sho’ is some way to go.”
I make no reply, the sound of flowing water ceases, and Hark’s voice too falls still. Somewhere far off in the town a dog howls on The Confessions of Nat Turner
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and on without lull or respite, a continuous harsh lonely cry from the bowels of the dark morning, touching me with dread. Lord, I whisper to myself in anguish, Lord? And I clench my eyelids together in a sudden spasm, hoping to find some vision, some word or sign in the profounder darkness of my own mind, but there is still no answer. I will go without Him, I think, I will go without Him because He has abandoned me without any last sign at all. Was what I done wrong in His sight? And if what I done was wrong is there no redemption?
“Dat God durned dog,” I hear Hark say. “Lis
sen at him, Nat. Dat sho de sign of somepn, awright. Lawd, dat dog done barked right on th’ough my dreams jes’ now. Dreamed I was back home at Barnett’s long long time ago when I was jes’ a little ole thing
‘bout knee-high to a duck. An’ me an’ my sister Jamie was gwine fishin’ together down in de swamp. And we was walkin’ along underneath dem wild cherry trees, jes’ as happy as we could be, talkin’ about all dem fish we was gwine catch. On’y dey dis yere dog a-barkin’ at us an followin’ us th’ough the woods. An’ Jamie she done kep’ sayin’, ‘Hark, how come dat dog make all dat holler?’ An’ I say back to Jamie, ’Don’ bothah ’bout no dog, don’
pay dat ole dog no nem’mine.’ Den you done knock on de wall, Nat, and now here dat same dog a-barkin’ way off in de road, and here I is, an’ dis mornin’ dey gwine hang me.”
Then behold I come quickly …
I drowse off dreamless for a time, then I wake abruptly to see that morning approaches with the faintest tinge of pale frosty light, stealing through the barred window and touching the cedar walls with a glow barely visible, like ashes strewn upon a dying fire. Way off in the lowlands across the river, somewhere among the fields and frosty meadows, I hear the sad old blast of a horn as it rouses up the Negroes for work. Nearer there is a tinkle and a rustle, barely heard; the town stirs. A single horse passes cloppetyclop over the wooden bridge, and far away in the distance a cock crows, then another, and they cease suddenly; for a moment all is still and sleeping. Hark again slumbers, the air whistles from his wounded chest. I rise and make my way to the end of the chain, shuffling in a sideways motion toward the window. Then I lean forward against the freezing sill, and stand motionless in the still-encompassing dark. Against the rim of the heavens, high above the river and the towering wall of cypress and pine, dawn begins to rise in light of the softest blue. I raise my eyes upward. There alone amidst the blue, steadfast, The Confessions of Nat Turner
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