The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Styron

  Moore’s farm was a humble one, lying ten miles or so to the southeast of Jerusalem near the settlement of Cross Keys and abutting in part upon the property of Mr. Joseph Travis, whom, it may be recalled, I have mentioned earlier in this narrative and into whose ownership I ultimately passed after Moore’s death.

  (The contiguity of Moore’s and Travis’s farm land was of course one of the fateful reasons for the marriage to Travis by Moore’s widow, Miss Sarah, and also for my coming to know Hark, as will be seen.) Aside from a ramshackle and unwhitewashed raw-timbered farmhouse, Moore owned twenty acres in corn and The Confessions of Nat Turner

  214

  cotton and truck crops and fifty more in the woodland which supplied such a generous part of his otherwise meager income.

  Since I was the only Negro Moore possessed (though from time to time he had to hire other Negroes to supplement my muscle power) and since it was a dirt farm in the dirtiest sense of the word, my carpenter skills were almost never needed—save for crude jobs like patching the pigpen or boarding up a shattered window—and I fell into that daily grind of nigger work which only short months before I had foolishly believed could not ever become my lot, not in a thousand lifetimes. As an efficient, smoothly operating, all-purpose chattel, then, I was engaged at Moore’s in a score of jobs: plowing the wet fields behind a team of mules in the spring, chopping weeds in the cotton patch throughout half the summer, shelling corn, slopping the pigs, getting up hay for the stock, spreading manure, and when all this was done or during spells of gloomy weather, helping Miss Sarah in various scullery and scrubbing chores or at any number of other housemaidenly tasks around the farm.

  Nor was there any such thing as “nothing to do,” for looming like a bleak wall above and beyond all this work, no matter what the season, was the stand of pine and gum and poplar and oak which I had to help Moore cut down and drag by ox-team half a mile to the farmyard, there to be hacked up into firewood lengths and thrown upon the growing mountain of logs which regularly went to stoke the Jerusalem hearths and forges and stoves.

  Though one might not forever plow or hoe, there was always time to chop. Some days the broadax I used seemed an extension of my hands, a still-moving phantom part of me, and at night I went to sleep with its rhythmic pounding aquiver along the muscles of my back and arms. Never to my recollection was I driven beyond endurance—doubtless because I set a productive, industrious pace for myself the final gain of which my owner could hardly in good sense abuse by demanding more.

  Nonetheless, it was loathsome, unrewarding toil and I do not know how I would have survived those days and months and years without the ability to fall into meditation upon spiritual matters even when enduring the most onerous and gut-wrenching labor. This habit, which I had developed a long time before even as a boy, proved to be my salvation. It would be hard to describe the serenity I was able to attain—the rapt and mysterious quality of peace I knew—when amid the stinging flies and the chiggers and the fierce September heat, there in the depths of the woods, tugging at a log chain while Moore nattered The Confessions of Nat Turner

  215

  and nagged in my ear and his cousin Wallace’s ripe obscenities filled the air like small godless black bugs and I heard from afar, across the withering late summer meadows, the jingle of a cowbell like eternity piercing my heart with a sudden intolerable awareness of the eternity of the imprisoning years stretched out before me: it is hard to describe the serene mood which, even in the midst of this buzzing madness, would steal over me when as if in a benison of cool raindrops or rushing water I would suddenly sink away toward a dream of Isaiah and dwell on his words— Ye shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble, for ye are the seed of the blessed of the Lord—and for a long time, as in a trance, dream of myself safe in the new Jerusalem beyond all toil or heat or misery.

  During most of those years I slept on a corn-shuck tick on the floor of a dark little cupboard off the kitchen, sharing the space with some emaciated mice and several bustling and friendly spiders for whom I trapped flies and lived with on the most genial terms. The food at Moore’s may best be described as middling, depending upon the season, always far removed from the bounteous kitchen at Turner’s Mill but a good cut above the animal rations served up by the Reverend Eppes. For the greater part of the winter I subsisted largely off nigger food—half a peck of cornmeal and five pounds of fat salt bacon a week, and all the molasses I could gag down—and with these raw fixings I was expected to make my repast in the kitchen, morning and evening, after the white people had eaten. So from November to March the fare was pretty bad and my stomach growled without ceasing. That I managed to eat fairly well during other seasons was largely due to Miss Sarah, who, though not so gifted a cook as my mother or any who succeeded her at the Mill, was able to set a moderately decent table—especially during the long warm period when vegetables were abundant—and was liberal with the leftovers and the drippings from the frying pan.

  Miss Sarah was a fat, silly, sweet woman with small intelligence but with an amplitude of good cheer that enabled her to disgorge without effort peals of jolly, senseless laughter. She could read and write with some strain and had a little inherited money (it had been her funds, I later divined, which allowed Moore to purchase me), and there was about her a plump unmean simplicity of nature that caused her, alone among the household, to treat me at times with what might pass, fleetingly, as genuine affection: this took the form of sneaking me an extra piece of lean meat or The Confessions of Nat Turner

  216

  finding me a castoff blanket in the winter and once she actually knitted me a pair of socks, and I do not wish easily to malign her by declaring that the affection she bore toward me resembled the warm impulsive tenderness which might be lavished carelessly upon a dog. I even came to be fond of the woman in a distant way (but largely with attentive, houndlike awareness of her occasional favors) and I intend no sarcasm when I say that much later, when she became almost the very first victim of my retribution, I felt an honest wrench of regret at the sight of the blood gushing like a red sluiceway from her headless neck, and almost wished I had spared her such an ending.

  Of the rest of Moore’s household there is little enough to say.

  There was young Putnam, who has already been on view; he was six years old or so upon my arrival at the house, a whiny and foul-tempered child who inherited his father’s hatred for my race and never within my hearing ever referred to me other than as “the nigger.” Since even his father took eventually to calling me by my proper name, this habit of Putnam’s required either great stupidity or self-conscious persistence, perhaps both, but in any case lasted right up until the time he was grown and had become Joseph Travis’s stepson. Like his mother he was destined to have his head separated from his neck—quite a penalty to pay, it might be thought, for calling me “the nigger” so long a time but one which I did not honestly regret exacting.

  There were two other white people in residence: Moore’s father, whom the family knew as “Pappy,” and cousin Wallace. The old man, who had been born in England, was over a hundred years old, white-bearded, paralyzed, half deaf, blind, and incontinent in both bladder and bowel—a misfortune that became my misfortune too, since in the early days of my stay it fell my lot to clean up the mess he made, which was frequent and systematic.

  To my vast relief, on a quiet spring afternoon a year later, he produced a great and final evacuation in his chair, shuddered, and expired.

  Wallace was practically a replica of Moore in body and spirit—a knobby-limbed benighted illiterate, filthy of tongue, blasphemous, maladroit even at such unskilled tasks as the ploughing and hoeing and wood-chopping which Moore extracted from him as recompense for board and keep. He treated me as Moore did, without any especial rancor but with watchful, guarded, unflagging resentment, and (since he is unimportant to this account) the less said about Wallace the better.

  The Confessions of Nat Turner

  217


  So my years at Moore’s, particularly the early years, were far from happy ones but the opportunities I had for contemplation and prayer allowed them to become at least endurable. Most Saturdays I had several long free hours to myself in Jerusalem.

  In all weathers I found the chance to steal away from my cupboard and out in the woods and commune with the Spirit and read from the great prophetic teachings. Those first few years made up a time of waiting and uncertainty, yet I know that even then I had begun to sense the knowledge that I was to be involved in some grand mission, divinely ordained. The words of the Prophet Ezra were of consolation during that strange period; like him I felt that now for a little space grace hath been shewn from the Lord my God, to give me a little reviving in my bondage.

  And soon I discovered a secluded place in the woods, a mossy knoll encircled by soughing pine trees and cathedral oaks no more than a short walk from the house, hard by a brook that sang and bubbled in the stillness. In this sanctuary I kept a weekly vigil from the very beginning, praying and reading, and after I became a little bit at ease at Moore’s and my trips to the woods were more frequent I built a shelter out of pine boughs and used it as my secret tabernacle. Whenever work was slack and the opportunity arose I began occasionally to forsake eating altogether for as long as four or five days at a stretch, having been especially moved and troubled by those lines from Isaiah which go: Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? During these fasts I often grew dizzy and weak, but in the midst of such spells of deprivation a mood of glory stole over me and I was filled with a strange radiance and a languid, blissful peace. The crashing of deer far off in the woods became an apocalyptic booming in my ears, the bubbling stream was the River Jordan, and the very leaves of the trees seemed to tremble upon some whispering, secret, many-tongued revelation. At these times my heart soared, since I knew that if I continued praying and fasting, biding my days patiently in the Lord’s service, I would sooner or later receive a sign and then the outlines of future events—events perhaps terrible and wrapped in danger—would be made plain.

  Like mine, Hark’s misfortune had been that he was only a small item among a man’s total capital, and so he was instantly and easily disposable when the economy foundered. A Negro as The Confessions of Nat Turner

  218

  fantastic as Hark could always command a lovely price. Like me, he too had been born and reared on a large plantation—his in Sussex County, which borders on Southampton to the north.

  This plantation had been liquidated at about the same year as Turner’s Mill, and Hark had been bought by Joseph Travis, who at that time had not developed his wheel-making craft but was still engaged in farming. Hark’s former owners, people or monsters named Barnett, proposed to develop a new plantation down in a section of Mississippi where field labor was at that moment abundant and female house labor scarce. And so they took Hark’s mother and his two sisters with them and left Hark behind, the money gained from his sale financing the rather difficult and expensive overland trip to the delta. Poor Hark. He was devoted to his mother and his sisters—indeed, he had never spent a day in his life apart from them. Thus began one of a series of bereavements; seven or eight years later he was separated forever by Travis from his wife and his little son.

  Hark was never (at least until I was able to bend him to my will) an obstreperous Negro, and for much of the time I knew him I lamented the fact that as with most young slaves brought up as field hands—ignorant, demoralized, cowed by overseers and black drivers, occasionally whipped—the plantation system had leached out of his great and noble body so much native courage, so much spirit and dignity, that he was left as humble as a spaniel in the face of the white man’s presence and authority.

  Nonetheless, he contained deep within him the smoldering fire of independence; certainly through my exhortations I was later able to fan it into a terrible blaze. Certainly, too, that fire must have been burning when shortly after his sale to Travis—stunned, confused, heartsick, with no God to turn to—he decided to run away.

  Hark once told me how it all happened. At the Barnett plantation, where life for the field Negroes had been harsh, the matter of running away was of continual interest and concern. All of this was talk, however, since even the stupidest and most foolhardy slave was likely to be intimidated by the prospect of stumbling across the hundreds of miles of wilderness which lay to the north, and knew also that even to attain the free states was no guarantee of refuge: many a Negro had been hustled back into slavery by covetous, sharp-eyed Northern white men. It was all rather hopeless but some had tried and a few had almost succeeded. One of the Barnett Negroes, a clever, older man The Confessions of Nat Turner

  219

  named Hannibal, had vowed after a severe beating by the overseer to take no more. He “lit out” one spring night and after a month found himself not far from Washington, in the outskirts of the town of Alexandria, where he was taken prisoner by a suspicious citizen with a fowling piece who eventually returned Hannibal to the plantation and, presumably, collected the hundred-dollar reward. It was Hannibal (now a hero of sorts to many of the slaves, though to others a madman) whose advice Hark remembered when he himself became a runaway. Move in the night, sleep by day, follow the North Star, avoid main-traveled roads, avoid dogs. Hannibal’s destination had been the Susquehanna River in Maryland. A Quaker missionary, a wandering, queer, distraught, wild-eyed white man (soon chased off the plantation) had once managed to impart this much information to Hannibal’s group of berry pickers: after Baltimore follow close by the highway to the north, and at the Susquehanna crossing ask for the Quaker meeting house, where someone was stationed night and day to convey runaways the few miles upriver to Pennsylvania and freedom. This intelligence Hark memorized with care, particularly the all-important name of the river—rather a trick for a field hand’s tongue—repeating it over and over in Hannibal’s presence until he had it properly, just as he had been told: Squash-honna, Squash-honna, Squash-honna.

  Hark had no way of knowing that Travis was at heart a more lenient master than Barnett had been. He understood only that he had been separated from all the family he had ever had and from the only home he had ever known. After a week at Travis’s his misery and homesickness and his general sense of loss became insupportable. And so one summer night he decided to light out, heading for that Quaker church over two hundred miles away in Maryland which Hannibal had told him about months before. At first it was all very much a kind of lark since stealing away from Travis’s was a simple matter: he had only to tiptoe out of the shed in which he was kept after Travis had gone to sleep and—with a flour sack containing some bacon and cornmeal, a jackknife, and flint for starting fires, all stolen, the entire parcel slung over his shoulder on a stick—make his way into the woods. It was easy as it could be. The woods were quiet. There he paused for an hour or so, waiting to see if by any chance Travis might discover his absence and raise an alarm, but no sound came from the house. He crept out along the edge of the trees, took to the road north, and sauntered along in high spirits The Confessions of Nat Turner

  220

  beneath a golden moon. The weather was balmy, he made excellent time, and the only eventful moment of that first night came when a dog ran out from a farmhouse, furiously barking, and snapped at his heels. This proved Hannibal correct in his advice about dogs, and caused Hark to resolve that in the future he would give all dwellings wide berth, even if it meant losing hours by moving to the woods. He met no one on the road, and as the agreeable night passed he began to feel a tingling sense of jubilation: running away seemed to be no great undertaking after all. When dawn came he knew he had made good progress—though how far he had traveled he could not tell, lacking any notion of the size of a mile—and with the sound of roosters crowing in some distant barnyard he fell asleep on the ground in a stand of beech trees, well aw
ay from the road.

  Just before noon he was aroused by the sound of dogs barking to the south, a quavering chorus of yelps and frantic howls which made him sit up in terror. Surely they were after him! His first impulse was to climb a tree but he quickly lost heart for this endeavor because of his fear of heights. Instead he crept into a blackberry thicket and peeked out at the road. Two slobbering bloodhounds followed by four men on horseback came out of the distance in a cloud of dust, the men’s faces each set in a blue-eyed, grim, avenging look of outrage that made Hark certain that he was the object of their pursuit; he shivered in fright and hid his head amid the black-berries, but to his amazement and relief the baying and yelping diminished up the road, along with the fading clatter of hooves. After a bit all was still. Hark crouched in the blackberry patch until late afternoon. When dusk began to fall he built a fire, cooking over it a little bacon and some hoecake he made with water from a stream, and upon the onset of darkness, resumed his journey north.

  His difficulties about finding the way began that night and plagued him all the long hours of his flight into freedom. By notches cut with his knife on a small stick each morning, he calculated (or it was calculated for him by someone who could count) the trip as having lasted six weeks. Hannibal had counseled two guides for the trip: the North Star and the great plank and log turnpike leading up through Petersburg, Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore. The names of these towns Hark too had memorized approximately and in sequence, since Hannibal had pointed out that each place would serve as a milestone of one’s progress; also, in the event that one got lost, The Confessions of Nat Turner