The news came to me one morning during the following month of June, when once again I had been hired out by Travis to Mrs.
Whitehead. Or traded, I should say—traded for two months fair-and-square, as the phrase went, for a yoke of oxen that Travis sorely wanted to yank stumps on burnt-off land he intended to plant in apple trees. Mrs. Whitehead was in a sweat of pleasure as usual to have me back: she needed me both as The Confessions of Nat Turner
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coachman and as carpenter, having contemplated extensive additions to her barn. At any rate, it was while I was back at her homestead that I overheard a passing Baptist preacher inform his colleague, Richard Whitehead, that amammoth camp meeting had been planned for the brethren of his own sect late that summer down in Gates County, across the line in North Carolina. Hundreds if not thousands of Baptists from Southampton had already signified their joy to attend, the preacher—a wholesome-looking, ruddy-faced man—said to Richard, and added with a wink that he did not really mean to poach on Richard’s territory by suggesting that Methodists too were more than welcome to come and shed their sins. We are all brothers in one faith, he asserted; the camping fee this year was only half a dollar a head—no charge for nigger servants and children under ten. Then he made a wan joke about Methodists and temperance. In recollecting Richard’s answer, I seem to remember that he thanked his fellow pastor in tones characteristically bleak, chill, and dry, allowed as how he thought few Methodists would attend—being spiritually so well provided for here in their native parish—but went on to say that he would keep the event in mind and inquired desultorily about the time.
When the other preacher replied, “From Friday the nineteenth of August until Tuesday, guess that’s the twentythird,” I (who was holding the bridle of the preacher’s horse) understood that the date of my great mission, emanating from those ecclesiastical lips, had just then been revealed to me as vividly as the fire of the Lord that showered down at the feet of Elijah. What an unforeseen bounty! Deprived of several hundred Baptist sinners—half of its population—Jerusalem should be child’s play to capture and destroy. Silently I offered up a prayer of thanks. It was my very last sign.
There were left then a bare two months to complete the final preparations, although I was pleased that so much had been done since that day of the sun’s eclipse. Primarily, I was gratified by the progress that had been made in the area of recruitment—a matter which, because of the extreme secrecy and confidence involved, I had thought would be formidably difficult but that had succeeded beyond my hopes.This was largely due to the skill, tact, and force of persuasion that both Sam and Nelson possessed to a high degree. (Henry gained one or two converts but his deafness made him less effective.) It was due also to the scientific manner in which I went about assembling my body of men. First I consulted the map where many months before I had outlined the direction of march toward The Confessions of Nat Turner
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Jerusalem. That route was not a direct assault upon the town by the most obvious approach—the seven-mile road from Cross Keys to the cedar bridge that provided entry into Jerusalem across the Nottoway River. Such a route, while arrow-straight and quite short, would leave us mercilessly exposed on either flank. I set down rather a plan of march in the shape of a slovenly, reclining “S,” an enormous double loop nearly thirty-five miles in its total length which avoided the few main thoroughfares while at the same time took advantage of secluded lanes and cowpaths in its snakeline journey to the northeast across the countryside. Along the way, I calculated, our force would encounter over twenty plantations, farms, and homesteads—twenty-three to be
exact—but all of these with scant exception were lands owned by the more affluent gentry of Southampton and so contained items of utmost importance to the success of our expedition: Negroes, horses, provisions, guns.
Mainly Negroes. Consulting the map and carefully listing the names of the owners of the properties which were due to be attacked, I made a meticulous inventory of the Negroes in each household—not too difficult a chore since on market day in Jerusalem, when from all of those places one or two Negroes at least came to town, it was a simple business for me or any one of my close followers to mingle among them and by asking innocent questions (and some not-so-innocent) to determine the composition of the slave brotherhood at each house. After this, a subtle whisper about runaways proved often to be an effective approach. Negroes who had run away were likely to have fiery spirits. Thus Nelson would sidle along toward a young Negro from Benjamin Blunt’s estate, exchange a few words of pointless palaver, and offering the boy a bit of sorghum sugar or a chaw of tobacco, might ask in a sly voice: “You done got any peoples up at yo’ place dat evah run off?” As often as not this would elicit a little headscratching, followed by galloping eyeballs and the cautious disclosure that uh-huh, well, dey was a nigger boy run off not long ago. Name of Nathan. Was gone three weeks.
Massah done cotched him though. And so the following Saturday, or the next, Nelson would cozy up to Nathan—a strapping brown buck with a glint mean and rebellious in his unhappy eyes—and draw him aside into the patch of weeds behind the market, where he would sound him out about his runaway nights and days, and lazily jaw along with him about freedom and probe softly but firmly for the hot pulsating aching boil that was Nathan’s fury. And at last Nelson would utter those The Confessions of Nat Turner
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three naked uncompromising words he was to repeat so many times: “Kin you kill?” Then Nathan’s own words would pour out in a savage, strangled rush all wet and garbled with hatred: “Shit, man, kin I kill! I mean, man, git me a ax, I kill awright! I chops de dick an’ balls off’n a white man an’ you see how I kin kill!” And at that moment—as with Daniel and Davy and Curtis and Stephen and Joe and Jack and Frank and so many more—a recruit was born into my great cause.
Yet if the enlistment of zealous young Negroes was central to our activity at that time, it was equally important that we guard against treachery. As for our killers, the enthusiasts, the trustworthy converts—of these by midsummer I counted a committed two dozen, all tough, stalwart, desperate young men around whom the other Negroes would rally as we swept the countryside. On pain of death, each of them had been sworn to the profoundest secrecy. I had had the opportunity to speak to them in private, one by one, either behind the market or at my woodland sanctuary, where they were brought on a Sunday by Sam or Nelson. I was impressed by the ardor of these plowboys and pig tenders and woodcutters; the idea of freedom had stirred and inflamed their hearts, the prospect of a long and dangerous journey made them quiver with excitement. For them the threat of death as a penalty for betrayal was a needless flourish, since they were quite beside themselves with joy at the bloody adventure in the offing, and would not (except inadvertently, which became my nagging fear) have given away their magnificent secret for all the world. These young men were safe, captured, within the fold. What kept me at an agonized pitch of tension was not the fear of treachery among the faithful ones, but apprehension that through a careless murmur or slip of tongue my great scheme would come to the attention of some obsequious coon of a house nigger who, wringing his hands and asweat with lubricious intent, would hurry to Old Massah or Ole Mistis with the tidings. For if I was touched to my very roots by this revelation that there were, after all, Negroes proud and furious enough to stake their flesh and souls on this gamble for liberty, my own pride was somehow diminished by the certain knowledge that there existed other Negroes, and many of them, who to gain no more than a plug of tobacco or a couple of fishhooks or half a pound of stew beef would tattle away their own mother’s life. Indeed, that summer I lived cheek by jowl with one of these in the stable quarters at Mrs. Whitehead’s—with Hubbard, an obese and chocolate-colored toady, a lard-haunched mincing flatterer with an artful tongue who at the The Confessions of Nat Turner
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faintest hint or flicker of trouble could be expected to croon his suspicions into Miss
Caty’s ear. It was Hubbard, and others like him living in proximity to any of my men in houses up and down the county, that gave me nightmares and grounds for my most piercing disquiet.
But as the warm days passed with their blue skies and sweet smell of hay and as summer reached its zenith, I becamemore and more confident of success. So far as anyone could tell, the secret was kept; both the white people and the Negroes went about their customary business—building barns, haying, chopping corn and cotton, cutting timber, making wheels and money. Toward the end of my hire at Mrs. Whitehead’s—on that
“Mission Sunday” I have earlier described—I managed to gather my inmost followers around me at a service preached by Richard Whitehead at his church. During the parley we held down by the creek afterward, while the white people were interring one of their number in the graveyard (some pox-stricken infant—among the favored last, it struck me at the time, to be spared the disagreeable events to come), I was able to impart to the group my final plans for the campaign.
I had long pondered the strategy of my assault, and had come up with the conclusion that to assemble my force in one place was not only disadvantageous but virtually impossible—the sudden gathering together of so many Negroes would surely be noticed and would arouse suspicion or alarm. No, my attack had to be one of accretion and rising momentum, a snowball-like accumulation of forces whereby the spearhead group (in this case, myself and my inmost four) must be joined by single individuals prepared and waiting at the various homesteads as we swept through the county on our serpentine way toward Jerusalem. Each of the Negroes, then, of the twoscore or more who had committed themselves to me would be “spotted” in this or that house, along the route—almost always at the place he belonged to anyway—and there would stand ready to take up arms against his master as soon as we appeared—my fine black hellion then participating in the slaughter and continuing on with us to the next objective where still another black killer, or several, would be waiting. Such a scheme required timing and coordination, and to this end I delegated to each of my inmost four the task of riding herd on and closely instructing a “troop” of five or six of the others; he must keep in touch with his little troop as much as possible during the intervening weeks while he drubbed into them incessantly the idea of secrecy and made The Confessions of Nat Turner
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certain that each man—on that fateful August Monday now hovering near—would be at his station. If all went well, I calculated that from our first midnight strike at Travis’s until our capture of the armory in Jerusalem the time elapsed would be thirty-six hours.
And I felt that all would be well.
That Sunday as I dismissed my followers with a prayer, my spirit was filled with a strange exaltation and with a sense of the imminence of glorious victory. I knew that my cause was just and, being just, would in its strength overcome all obstacles, all hardships, all inclement turns of fortune. I knew too that because of the noble purpose of my mission even the most cowed and humbled of Negroes would divine its justice, and I foresaw legions of black men everywhere rising up to join me. Black men all over the South, all over America! A majestic black army of the Lord!
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight:
My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower and my deliverer; my shield . . .
Yet no sooner than I was about to leave Mrs. Whitehead’s and go back to Travis, when a frightening and, indeed, almost unprecedented incident took place—something which, because of the sudden enmity and distrust for Negroes it was bound to stir up among many of the white people, caused me to fear that my entire mission would be thrust into jeopardy, or ruin.
What occurred had to do with Will—Sam’s fellow slave at Nathaniel Francis’s. While submitting to one of his owner’s periodical beatings, Will had finally snapped, perpetrating what for a Negro was the gravest of deeds: he had struck Francis back. Not only that, he had struck Francis savagely enough (with a lightwood fagot wrenched from a barnyard stack) as to have broken Francis’s left arm and shoulder. Then Will lit out for the woods, and had yet to be found. In certain ways the episode—when I first heard of it—caused me a mixture of feelings. On the one hand, I felt a distinct relief that Will was gone. I feared his mania, his unfocused hatred and madness, and I passionately wanted him to have nothing to do with my campaign of destruction, sensing that I could in no way control or govern him. I knew that he was obsessed with the idea of raping The Confessions of Nat Turner
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white women—something I could not abide. His assault upon Francis and his flight to the woods—provided he was gone for good—was thus for me the resolution of a minor but nagging problem. Yet I was appalled. For at the same time, such a violent act, even though well provoked and not entirely unheard of, was rare and shocking enough so as to make it likely that an atmosphere of suspicion would close in upon Negroes in general. The gossip would get started: God durned niggers gittin’
so they hit back. I was deeply afraid that with such feelings prevalent, our Negroes would become unsettled by the overall mistrust and lose heart for the venture or—even worse—would under this new pressure somehow give away our great secret.
As at other houses in the vicinity, tumult reigned at Mrs.
Whitehead’s when the news came of Will’s atrocity. It was noon on a Friday, and I was hitching up the buggy in order to take Miss Margaret to her friend’s house down-county—she was to spend the weekend—when word was brought by two melodramatic-looking white men on horseback, sagging with sidearms and rifles. A posse was being organized to track the black bugger down, one man shouted to Richard from the saddle. “Git a gun, preacher,” he cried, “and come along!” The sweating, stamping horses filled the barnyard with a cloud of dust; one of the men listed sideways, grinning, already inebriate with brandy and the thrill of the chase. “That air nigger,” called the other, “we goin’ have to shoot him down!”
I watched Richard disappear inside the house. There was something incongruous about the idea of this delicate and enervated man of God in his lethal pursuit through the swamps of a demented unarmed black runaway, but soon he emerged from the house with a musket and a pistol, prim lips vengefully set as he adjusted a beaverskin hunting cap at a rather rakish tilt over his brow. One of the other Negroes had saddled the fat gelding. Trailing her son with a look of pale concern, Miss Caty clutched her hands together while entreaty charged her voice:
“You must take care, Boysie! A darky like that is like a mad dog!”
And now Margaret’s three married sisters, just arrived for a summer’s visit, spilled out from the house with gingham skirts ballooning on the wind; they also began to implore their brother to watch out for his safety, and as he climbed aboard his bovine steed they uttered little chirps and squeals of alarm. “Do be careful, Boysie dear!” Miss Caty cried, clinging to his hand. Then the three little grandchildren scampered from the kitchen to wave their uncle on his way, while at the same instant, like some The Confessions of Nat Turner
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grotesque harbinger of all in black folk gone emasculate forever, the egregious house nigger Hubbard wiggled out on sloping ladylike hips to add his blessing to the chorus of Godspeeds.
“You take good care ob yo’sef, massah,” he gabbled unctuously, his hoarse caution a fawning echo of Miss Caty’s own. “Dat Will he some mean nigger, I knows! Will jes’ a mad dog, massah, an’
dat’s de troof!” He resembled nothing so much as some asinine fat mammy, and I could have seen him dead on the spot. Only Margaret remained detached from the scene. I glimpsed her at the doorway of the house, where she lingered among the shadows, a look of solemn annoyance engraved upon her pretty face. Then as Richard, murmuring, “Don’t worry, Muvva,”
pressed a brave kiss upon Miss Caty’s outstretched knuckles and wheeled about to join the other men, Margaret’s annoyance deepened; she made a grimace of disgust and, turning, vanished from sigh
t.
And, “Such stupid folderol!” she was saying soon after, as we rode southward toward the Vaughans’. “I mean all those guns and everything, and chasing down this poor darky Will who’s probably just half crazy with fear and everything, out there in the swamps. And they’ll probably shoot him! Oh, it’s just terrible!”
She paused for an instant; out of the corner of my eye I saw her wipe a fleck of dust from her nose. Descending, my eyes caught a glimpse of the fabric of her skirt, drawn tight across her lap, jiggling to the rhythm of the buggy, while even closer to me was her hand, white as milk glass, blue-veined, twirling the bone handle of her parasol. “I mean of course he shouldn’t have done what he did,” she went on, “striking Mr. Francis back like that.
But honestly, Nat! Every single solitary soul in this county knows about Mr. Francis, and how he treats his darkies. They all think it’s just terrible what he does to them. I know Mama does. And look at her! I should hardly blame Will for striking him back like that. Wouldn’t you have struck Nathaniel Francis back if he’d abused you so much like that? Just wouldn’t you, Nat?”
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968 Pulitzer Prize) Page 38
