The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Styron

  “Willis,” I said. “And so you just had to sell them. There just wasn’t any other way.”

  His back was to me now, he stood facing the great high window open to the spring garden, and his voice, dim enough at the outset, was barely audible and I had to strain to hear it, as if it belonged to someone so infirm and depleted, or so lacking in spirit or hope, that whether the words could be understood was at last a matter of indifference. He went on as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “Well, soon all of them will be gone—everything—not just the land now utterly consumed by that terrible weed, not just the wagons and the pigs and the oxen and the mules but the men The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  too, the white men and the women and the black boys—the Willies and the Jims and the Shadrachs and the Todds—all gone south, leaving Virginia to the thorn bushes and the dandelions.

  And all this we see here will be gone too, and the mill wheel will crumble away and the wind will whistle at night through these deserted halls. Mark my word. It is coming soon.”

  He paused, then said: “Yes, I had to sell those boys because I needed the money. Because anything non-human I had to sell was unsellable. Because those boys were worth over a thousand dollars and only through their sale could I begin to make the slightest inroad upon those debts I have accumulated for seven years—seven years during which I have lied to myself night and day in an effort to believe that what I saw around me was an illusion, that this mutilated and broken Tidewater would survive in spite of itself, that no matter how wrecked and eaten up the soil, no matter how many men and chattel began to move south to Georgia and Alabama, Turner’s Mill would forever be here grinding out timber and meal. But now it is timber and meal for ghosts.” He ceased speaking for a moment, then again the weary voice resumed: “What should I have done instead? Set them free? What a ghastly joke! No, they had to be sold, and the rest of them will be sold too, and soon Turner’s Mill will stand a dead hulk like the others on the landscape, and somewhere in the far South people may remember it but it will be remembered as if it were the fragment of a dream.”

  For a long time now he fell silent and then finally he said (or I think he spoke my name, I was straining so hard to hear), “Nat . .

  .” And when he spoke again, his voice was the barest murmur as if whispering from the far bank of a stream against a rising wind.

  “I sold them out of the desperation to hang on pointlessly a few years longer.” He made an abrupt gesture with his lifted arm, and it seemed that he passed his hand in a quick angry motion across his eyes. “Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in such a mean conjunction with its own flesh, its own kind.

  How else account for such faltering, clumsy, hateful cruelty?

  Even the possums and the skunks know better! Even the weasels and the meadow mice have a natural regard for their own blood and kin. Only the insects are low enough to do the low things that people do—like those ants that swarm on poplars in the summertime, greedily husbanding little green aphids for the honeydew they secrete. Yes, it could be that mankind has yet to The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  be born. Ah, what bitter tears God must weep at the sight of the things that men do to other men!” He broke off then and I saw him shake his head convulsively, his voice a sudden cry: “In the name of money! Money! ”

  He became silent and I stood waiting for him to continue, but he said nothing, turned with his back toward me in the dusk. Afar and high above I heard Miss Nell call out: “Sam! Samuel! Is there anything wrong?” Yet again for a long while he made no sign, no motion, so at last I moved quietly toward the door and left the room.

  Three years after this episode (and a galloping swift three years they seemed to me)—a month before my twenty-first birthday and at just about the time I had originally been destined to start my life anew in Richmond—I was removed from Marse Samuel’s purview and passed into the temporary custody of, or fell under the protection of, or was rented out to, or was borrowed by, a Baptist preacher named the Reverend Alexander Eppes, pastor to an impoverished flock of farmers and small tradesmen living in a district called Shiloh about ten miles to the north of Turner’s Mill. For a long time I was never quite clear as to the relationship between me and the Reverend Eppes. Yet, one thing is certain, and this is that I was not “sold,” in the unadorned, mercenary sense of the word. The other Negroes at Turner’s Mill might be sold—and sold they were, with depressing regularity—but the notion that I could be disposed of in this way was, up to and including the moment when I passed into the hands of the Reverend Eppes, quite inconceivable. Thus for the next three years, aware though I might have been of the uncertainty of the future that lay before me, I never thought once that Marse Samuel would not still ensure my freedom in Richmond as he had so eagerly promised—and I kept up this sunny optimism and complacency even as I watched Turner’s Mill and all of its land and its people and its chattel and its livestock disintegrate before my eyes like one of those river islands at flood time which slowly crumbles away at the edges, toppling all of its drenched and huddled ragtag occupants, coons and rabbits and blacksnakes and foxes, into the merciless brown waters.

  The Negroes—because they were by far the most valuable of the property, because at anywhere between four hundred and six hundred dollars apiece they represented the only safe, solid capital which Marse Samuel could liquidate in order to meet his creditors’ incessant demands (the creditors too were packing up The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  and leaving the Tidewater, hence an urgency in their claims)—the Negroes began to be sent off at a steady rate, in twos and threes or singly, a family here, another there, though often months might go by without a sale. All at once would appear a man in a gig, a gentleman with white side whiskers and a thick gold watch chain, stamping the mud from his mirror-bright boots. In the library I would serve biscuits and port from a silver tray, listening to Marse Samuel’s voice wan and weary in the summer dusk: “It is the traders who are an abomination, sir, the traders! That they will generally pay more means nothing to me.

  They are unscrupulous, sir, and would think nothing of separating a mother from her only child. That is why, helpless as I am in this dreadful situation, I can at least insist upon dealing with a gentleman . . . Yes, with one bad exception, so far all my sales have been with gentlemen like yourself . . . You are from the York County Fitzhughs, you say? Then you must be a cousin of Thaddeus Fitzhugh, a classmate of mine at William & Mary . .

  . Yes, the last lot of people I sold was to a gentleman heading west to the Boonslick country, I believe, in Missouri; I sold him a family of five . . . A most humane and learned gentleman from Nottoway he was . . . You are favored by the gods, sir as you must know, to have a mill situated near a city like Richmond, free of the burden, the curse of land . . . I do not know, sir, it is clear that time is drawing short for me here. Perhaps I shall go to Kentucky or Missouri too, though I have heard of interesting prospects in Alabama . . . Come now, I will show you George and Peter, the best mill hands I have left, you may be sure that they are uncommonly likely Negroes . . . Only a few of my darkies will have been fortunate enough to remain in Virginia . . .”

  So George and Peter would go, or Sam and Andrew, or Lucy and her two young boys, packed off in a wagon which I myself would often drive to deliver them in Jerusalem, and always I was haunted and perplexed by the docile equanimity and good cheer with which these simple black people, irrevocably uprooted, would set out to encounter a strange and unknown destiny.

  Although they might cast backward what appeared to be the faintest glimmer of a wistful glance, this final parting from a place which had been their entire universe for years caused them no more regret than did the future cast over them worry or foreboding: Missouri or Georgia were as far away as the stars, or as near as the next plantation, it was all the same to them, and with d
espair I marked how seldom they seemed to bother even bidding farewell to their friends. Only the rupture of some family tie I felt could grieve them, and such calamities did not happen The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  here. Twittering and giggling, they mounted the wagon poised to carry them to an impossible fate at the uttermost ends of the earth, and they could speak only of an aching knee, the potency of a hairball from a mule’s stomach as a charm against witches, the proper way to train a dog to tree a possum, and mumble incessantly about eating. Slumbrous in broad daylight, they would flop asleep against the side boards of the wagon, pink lips wet and apart, nodding off into oblivion even before they had been taken beyond the gate, even before they were carried past the bounds of that land which had composed the entire smell and substance and geography of their lives and whose fields and meadows and shimmering woodland now dwindled away behind them, unseen and unremarked, forever. They cared nothing about where they came from or where they were going, and so snored loudly or, abruptly waking, skylarked about, laughing and slapping each other, and trying to clutch at the passing overhead leaves. Like animals they relinquished the past with as much dumb composure as they accepted the present, and were unaware of any future at all. Such creatures deserved to be sold, I thought bitterly, and I was torn between detestation for them and regret that it was too late for me to save them through the power of the Word.

  And so at last an alien quietude and stillness settled over the plantation, a hush so profound that it was in itself like the echo or reverberation of a faint remembered sound upon the ear. Finally it was not alone the Negroes who were disposed of but all the rest—the mules and the horses and the pigs, the wagons and the farming implements and the tools, saws and spinning wheels and anvils and house furniture, buggies and buggy whips and spades and scythes and hoes and hammers, all and anything movable or unhingeable and detachable and worth more than half a dollar. And the absence of these things left a silence astonishing and complete. The great mill wheel, its last revolution accomplished, lay idle on its oaken shaft bedecked with dried mattings of greenish pond weed and grass, motionless now, the deep-throated steady grumble and roar as much a memory as those other diurnal sounds, far more faint yet persistent, that had echoed in all weathers season after season from dawn till dusk: the chink-chinking of hoes in the distant cornfields, sheep bleating on the lawn and a Negro’s sudden rich laughter, an anvil banging in the blacksmith’s shop, a snatch of song from one of the remotest cabins, the faint crashing in the woods of a felled tree, a stirring within the big house, a fidget and a buzz, a soft musical murmuration. Slowly these sounds The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  diminished, faded, became still altogether, and the fields and rutted roadways lay as starkly deserted as a place ravaged by the plague: weeds and brambles invaded the cornfields and the meadows; sills, frames, and doors fell apart in the empty outbuildings. At night, where once glowing hearths lit each cabin down the slope, now all lay in suffocating dark like the departure of the campfires of some army on the plains of Israel.

  As I have already said, Marse Samuel soon found that it was not possible for me to be delivered to that Mr. Pemberton in Richmond on my twenty-first birthday as he had hoped. Through the solemn moments of one evening after supper he explained to me how the depression which afflicted the Tidewater had washed over the city too, and how the market for such clever labor as I might provide had severely diminished—indeed was

  “busted,” as the saying goes. Thus my master was faced with a troublesome dilemma. He could not on the one hand simply set me free without a period of “seasoning” in the hands of a responsible person: all too manyyoung Negroes, given their freedom without sponsorship, without some protection, had found themselves one morning beaten senseless, their papers stolen, bumping about in a daze as the wagon wheels rumbling underneath their cracked skulls bore them south to the fields of cotton. At the same time to take me with him to Alabama (that is where, almost at the last moment, he decided to try the remnants of his luck) would altogether defeat his plans for me, since opportunities for the rich life of a free Negro craftsman were almost nonexistent down in those townless river-bottom swamps and stews. So finally Marse Samuel had decided upon a provisional course, entrusting my body to the good Christian shepherd of whom I have spoken, the Reverend Eppes—this devoted and pious gentleman who could be expected to complete the documents in regard to my freedom as soon as the times got better up in Richmond (as they surely would) and who as recompense for his compassion and his overseeing of my destiny would receive the fruits of my labor for a while, gratis.

  And so there came a September morning, hot and throbbing with the sound of locusts, when Marse Samuel bade me farewell for all time.

  “I told him we were leaving this morning,” he said to me, “so the Reverend Eppes should be here to fetch you sometime around noon, maybe before. As I have told you before, Nat, you need have nothing to worry about. Although a Baptist, the Reverend The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  Eppes is a gentleman of great probity and kindliness and will treat you in exactly the manner I would wish. You will find him a man of simplicity, and of modest resources, but he will be good to you. I shall be in touch with him by post from Alabama, and I shall be in touch with my own representatives in Richmond. And thus after a year or so, no more, the Reverend Eppes will arrange for your apprenticeship in Richmond and your eventual emancipation in just the same way I would have done had I been here. It is all written up in the agreement we made in Jerusalem and its legality is unquestioned. More important, though, Nat, is the trust I have in the Reverend Eppes. He will provide for all your needs, physical and spiritual. He is truly a gentleman of humanity and honor.”

  We stood in the shade of a great sycamore tree; the day was sultry, breathless, the air close and damp like a warm mouth-enveloping hand. The four wagons with which Marse Samuel would make the long trip were ready, waiting, the mules stamping and stirring in their traces. The rest of the family—the older nephew and his wife, Miss Emmeline, Benjamin’s widow, Miss Nell—had gone away already; they had stopped down in Raleigh with cousins or (in the case of the older ladies) had begun a sojourn in Petersburg, from whence Marse Samuel would summon them once all was safely established on Alabama soil. Of the Negroes, only Prissy and Little Morning and Abraham and his family were left; house Negroes, they had memories of happy times, and they wept loudly, the mourning lot crammed into one wagon. In tears I had said good-bye to them all, kissing Prissy and clasping Abraham in a warm mute embrace and, at last, taking Little Morning’s cold old-leathery feeble hand and pressing it to my lips; hair white as frost now, palsied and totally gone in the head, he lay propped sightless and uncomprehending at the rear of the wagon, heading south at his life’s withered and weary end from the only home he had ever known. The mules stirred and stamped in their traces. Try as I might, I seemed unable to stifle my grief.

  “You mustn’t take on so, Nat,” Marse Samuel said, “it is not like a death, it is like a new life for all of us. We shall always be in touch by the post. And you—” He paused for an instant, and I knew that he too was moved. “And you— you, Nat—think of the freedom that you will have, after all! Keep that in mind always and the sorrow of this parting will fade in your memory. The future is all that matters in our lives.”

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  Again he ceased speaking and then, as if struggling to choke back his own feelings, began to say all sorts of commonplace things in a forced voice touched with false cheeriness: “Come now, Nat, chin high! . . . The receiver of the land, Judge Bowers in Jerusalem, is sending around a man who will remain here as the custodian and he might even be here today . . . Meanwhile, Prissy has left noontime dinner for you in the kitchen . . . Chin high, Nat, chin high always and good-bye! . . . Good-bye! . . .

  Good-bye!”

  He embraced me awkwardly, swiftly. I fel
t his whiskers against my cheek, and heard Abraham’s bullwhip crack far ahead like a musket. Then he turned about and was gone, and the wagons were gone, and it is the last I ever saw of him.

  I stood in the lane until the final echo of the wheels vanished rattling in the distance. My desolation was complete. As sundered from my root and branch as a falling leaf fluttering on eddies of air, I was adrift between that which was past and those things yet to come. Great boiling clouds hung on the far horizon.