The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial

by Sharon Ewell Foster

  Negroes were banned completely from Turner’s Meeting Place. And Nat Turner? It was best for the community, and even best for Nat Turner, to correct things now.

  It was against God’s laws, wasn’t it, for a slave to manage a church’s money and land? What did a slave know about such things?

  Twelve years old. There was no point in setting him to a task at which he could never succeed. How could a black man lead white men? If they left him to it, he would probably destroy himself as well as the church. Better to correct matters now so that by the time he reached twenty-one, he would be acclimated.

  They decided that afternoon: Nat Turner would be neither free nor trustee. Better to set him, then and there, to his rightful place—a place where he would be happy and content with his life. Samuel Turner agreed. Nat Turner would be turned out into the fields.

  “What must we do to correct the deed? I suppose we must take the matter to the county clerk.”

  Turner Newsom had shaken his head. “Nothing needs be done. No court would hear his claim.”

  Samuel Turner assured them Nat would never protest. That afternoon Samuel began to call Nat Turner “slave.” “The slave’s only defense would be to call reputations into question. He would not do that to my departed father. He would not do that to my sisters or my brothers.”

  Samuel Turner was right in how he judged his younger brother. That afternoon and forward, Nat Turner participated in the lie. He participated with his silence. It shamed him—every day it shamed him more. But they were his sisters and they were his brothers. It was his duty to protect them, to protect the image of his father, even if he caused injury to himself.

  They were his father’s white sons and daughters, all claimed, but not he. He could not help but wonder what other things his father had not shared with him. What could his father not tell him because he could not face who Nathan Turner was?

  It did not matter to his father how he felt; it was Nat Turner’s duty to bear it. He was slave even to his father. He was a thing. He did not need to be included.

  In short order, his brother sent him, at twelve years old, to the fields as his slave.

  Still, Nat Turner prayed and hoped his older brother would keep his promise and free him. Years passed and every day he worked, every day he planned to leave.

  Then Cherry happened. He settled in and they married. They had a son, Riddick. Nat Turner gave up thoughts of leaving; it would be enough to be a freeman.

  On his twenty-first birthday, Nat Turner confronted his brother.

  Chapter 19

  It was impudent, Samuel Turner said, for a slave to demand to be free, to demand inheritance.

  “I am a free man, Samuel! Give me my papers and my copy of the deed! You promised our father when he died!”

  His older brother Samuel struck him. “Liar!”

  Nat Turner was never supposed to speak the words. He was supposed to keep up pretenses, to keep his father’s secret. No one was to know—except poor Samuel, who was to bear the eldest son’s burden. Except for Elizabeth and John Clarke… all of them pretending not to know.

  Nat was to deny who he was before his father’s wife, before his sisters Nancy and Susanna, his brother John Clarke, and his baby brother, Benjamin. “I beg you to repent and give me my freedom, my trusteeship. Please… brother.” Samuel struck him again.

  Two more years passed. When his eldest brother lay dying, Nat Turner was certain that Samuel would repent and free him. Called to his sickbed, Samuel whispered in Nat Turner’s ear, “Your mother, your family is free. You were never my property. You were always a free man.”

  Samuel’s will bore no mention of Nathan, Cherry, or his mother, Nancie, as property. His family was free! He was a free man!

  Chapter 20

  But Samuel’s wife, the second Elizabeth, had other plans.

  Still in widow’s weeds, Elizabeth Turner stopped Nat Turner on his way to the fields. “They treated you too kindly, like a family member and not as the slave you are,” she snarled. “But now your fate is in my hands.” She motioned to the man beside her. “I have sold you this day to this fine gentleman, Thomas Moore.” She pointed and sneered behind her veil.

  Nat Turner opened his mouth to protest. But disbelief left him stunned, mute.

  He was a freeman. How could this be happening? His brother’s widow had no right to sell him. She had not been bequeathed Cherry, his mother, Nancie, or him and his son.

  She snarled at him. “Not one word! Not one, Nat!”

  “Nat Turner,” he insisted.

  “I said, ‘Nat’! And if you make things difficult, if you run, I will sell your mother away.” She waved the handkerchief in her hand. Elizabeth had sold him to a man without scruples. “And you needn’t worry about your wife, Cherry. I’ve made arrangements for her also. She and your son will become the property of Giles Reese.

  “It was hardly worth the bother. Less than one hundred dollars for both of them.”

  Nat Turner pleaded with Thomas Moore to purchase his wife also. He would live as a slave. Nat Turner and Cherry would both be his slaves, if they could be together.

  Thomas Moore shrugged. “The arrangements have already been made.”

  One hundred dollars. Even old people and children brought more than one hundred dollars. Elizabeth Turner could have given Cherry to Moore for nothing or sold her to him as a breeder.

  But Elizabeth Turner was making a point about who was master and who was property. She despised Nat Turner—who he was, who God had made him. She hated him because Old Benjamin had dared to list him first—Nathan Turner before Samuel Turner, before her husband—on the church-house deed.

  The order lessened her, along with her husband, and their standing in the community. Through the sale Elizabeth Turner was simply correcting things. “Stay in your place,” she told him.

  She was sending the white men of Southampton a message: There were rules that even white men had to obey. There was a certain divine order. Slavery and life favored white men and there were certain indignities white women had to bear. But no white woman would stand for such public shame and humiliation. There was an order and everyone had to play his or her part. No white man, no matter how bewitched he was, had better put a black bastard before any of his lawful white children. Elizabeth Turner simply set things to right.

  She was sending Nat Turner’s mother a message. Old Benjamin was gone now and Nancie had no voodoo magic, no womanly magic, that could control Elizabeth Turner. The entire Turner family had been shamed long enough—all because of Nancie’s darkie bastard.

  Elizabeth Turner would sell Nat Turner away—out of sight, out of mind, almost as though he never existed. But not too far—she wanted to enjoy his pain. She would sell him to a man who held him in no special esteem—who was not enthralled with his reading, his writing, or his gift for language. Then, to seal it, she would sell his wife to a man who wanted to breed her.

  Nat Turner was strong-willed and he would find a way to make peace with being sold. But losing Cherry would bring him to his knees. Alone, each day he slaved he would be reminded of his place in civilized society.

  Elizabeth wanted him to obey the rules. She wanted him to be who she thought him to be. She needed to affirm that she was naturally better and more powerful.

  Nat Turner was not a man; he was property. He was not a trustee. He had no right to a church—he was forbidden to even enter. He had no right to a wife or to a marriage. She needed him to know—he would never be anything but a slave. Cherry’s sale would teach him.

  Elizabeth Turner was right. It was not the plow or the rod that broke him. It was losing Cherry and his son.

  Chapter 21

  Nat Turner pleaded with the people he knew. There was no other choice; there was no refuge in the courts for him—no court would hear a black man’s case against a white woman or man. No court would listen to his protests that he and his family were free people forced into slavery.

  He would have
been able to endure if Elizabeth Turner had only enslaved him, but she had also stolen Cherry. How could she sell free people, people she couldn’t even pretend to own? He pled his case to each of the Turner’s Meeting Place trustees individually—the Whiteheads, the Newsoms, the Francises.

  He pleaded when he saw them on the roads. He walked to their farms. He called to them as they rushed into church. He was free, and they and their families all knew it. They knew his father’s plans. But they turned their heads the other way.

  Losing his wife was the worst of it.

  Nat Turner had hoped that no one would notice Cherry, would not notice their love and take her away.

  But Elizabeth Turner had told Giles Reese about her. She had planted Cherry in his head. Giles Reese saw all he needed to see; he saw that Cherry could bear children and that Elizabeth Turner was almost giving her away.

  When he came to fetch her and saw Nat Turner, Giles Reese saw more. He saw what only Nat Turner before then had seen. He saw that Cherry was a river; life was on her shores. He saw that Cherry was Nat Turner’s wings and spirit, and that by taking her, Reese and the others could break Nat’s heart and bring Nat Turner back to earth.

  Giles Reese bought her—though he knew she was free and not for sale—and Nat Turner’s son was thrown into the bargain. Giles Reese didn’t need her. She was a nice-to-have. Then Giles Reese, when he was closer to her, recognized that she was beautiful and he wanted her. There was life in Cherry and Giles Reese wanted to live.

  Nat Turner watched them being taken away. He had no gun. He had no law and no sheriff to call. There was no army. He balled his hands into fists. His nails lanced his palms, causing them to bleed.

  He had promised his son things would be different. But he had lied. He was one man against an army, a government. How could he make things different?

  Giles Reese loaded them on the wagon. There were tears in Cherry’s eyes. She looked away. Nat Turner’s son reached back for him. He struggled on his mother’s lap. Riddick kept reaching for him—small hands, pleading brown eyes.

  “Daddy?” First a question. Then as they pulled farther down the road, the word became a shriek. “Daddy! Daddy!”

  He had made Riddick a promise to protect him, to give him a better life. How could he hold his head up in front of his son? How could any captive man hold up his head?

  Chapter 22

  Cross Keys, Virginia

  February 1831

  Nat Turner stroked the horse’s mane before placing the bit in its mouth. When the horse was bridled and hitched and the wagon was readied, Nat Turner helped Sallie Francis Moore Travis aboard. She was on her way to a Valentine’s Day party at the Whiteheads’.

  They traveled down the road with no name and past Giles Reese’s farm, where Cherry lived now. Anxiously, she prattled behind him, speaking more to herself than to him.

  At night sometimes he dreamed of rescuing his wife and son. He dreamed of his hands wrapped around Giles Reese’s throat.

  If any man had touched his wife, Reese would have gone insane. Other white men would have thought Reese justified for shooting someone who tried to steal his wife. They would have joined Reese in gutting the thief, hanging him, castrating him, and worse. So sometimes at night Nat Turner dreamed the same dreams and woke with broken straw gripped tight in his fists.

  He looked toward the Giles Reese farm and would not allow himself to turn away. He made himself feel it—the shame, the rage, the anger, the betrayal—so he would be one with every other man who suffered, every black man who for generations had had his wife, his family stolen away. He would not allow himself to hide from the suffering. In the past, he had been carving peace for himself by not feeling, but now he opened his heart and mind to it. He forced himself to feel it now and to remember.

  Chapter 23

  Cross Keys

  1821

  Every ominous thought, everything he could imagine crowded in on Nat Turner. Losing his family hurt as badly as he imagined it would in the days when he vowed to stay alone. It tormented him to think of his family held captive, of his wife lawfully raped by another man.

  After Cherry was gone, Nat Turner was obsessed with her.

  In the darkness, he crept to Giles Reese’s farm, where he watched outside Cherry’s window. Sometimes he stole nearer and gazed at her lying on her bed. He told himself he must stay away.

  He was sad, he was angry, and then he felt betrayed—betrayed by Cherry because she stayed with Giles Reese. Nat Turner knew there was nothing she could do, no place she could go. He knew she did not love the man but had no choice. He knew Giles Reese did not love her, and that compounded the damage done.

  How could it be that a man who did not love her could tell him, her husband, when he could see Cherry or if he could see her at all? It tore at his insides that men who would kill a man for looking at their wives or daughters were now laughing about Giles Reese’s association with Cherry. Now Nat Turner had to ask their permission.

  Nat Turner was tormented thinking of it. Reese had discussions with Moore over whether the two of them would be generous enough to allow Nat Turner to visit his wife and son. The two of them—Reese and Moore—would laugh about what Reese now knew about her—“she has a spider on her back”—and then give permission.

  Reese would not even lower himself to speak to Nat Turner man-to-man. Instead, Moore would pass the word to Nat Turner second- or thirdhand. “On Sundays you may see her, if Reese doesn’t have her otherwise busy.” Because he was not a man, in their eyes, they took his wife and son so he would know it, too.

  It was not Cherry’s fault, but he could not help but feel betrayed. She was the weapon they used against him. Betrayed by her. Betrayed by God.

  God had put Cherry before him, had made him love her, only to allow Giles Reese to steal her away. He had not asked God for her. He had wanted to be alone. He had not wanted a wife or a child. He had not wanted to be in love. He had taken a vow. He had resisted it. But he had heard God whispering to him to open, to love her.

  Nat Turner ran into the woods deep enough that only the trees could hear him. Even there he would not allow himself to cry or scream. He plowed his fist into a large cypress to dull the pain.

  He did not ask for this life for himself, but he had not complained. He had managed the life and the burden, the debt that he’d been given. But now the pain was unbearable.

  Now the grief of who he was and where he was, of his condition, pushed him to rage. He rolled in the dirt, in the marshy, decayed leaves of old winters that lay on the ground. His anguish was wild and heavy in his bosom, a feral beast that rent his guts.

  How could he look at her, his eyes saying to hers that he could not save her? He could not visit his son in shame. He could not settle for this. He could not visit them pretending to be contented. He was useless to them, dead to them. He could not bear for his wife and his son to see his humiliation, to see that this was the kind of man—one in form but not in spirit—that white men had made him.

  Where was God?

  Nat Turner ran until he came to the pond and he dived in, still wearing his clothes. He didn’t want to feel anymore. He didn’t want to live.

  His head parted the water.

  Before his feet submerged, Nat Turner had a plan.

  Chapter 24

  He would leave. There was no way he could see his wife sold and made to be another man’s concubine and call himself a man. Nat Turner didn’t want to be the kind of man who gave up his manhood just to survive. He didn’t want Cherry to become the kind of wife who smiled when he was looking but frowned when he turned away. He would leave Southampton County; he had no choice.

  The captors said there was no such thing as black love—husbands did not love wives, fathers did not love children, and brothers did not love sisters. Blacks were no more than dogs, or rooting pigs.

  He had no choice but to leave. He had gone along with the charade long enough—too long. He had given up freedom to stay
with his family. But no longer—he would simply walk away. No one could come after him. No one could produce ownership papers that said he or she owned him.

  Before he left Cross Keys, Nat Turner wrote himself a pass so if anyone stopped him as a slave, he would have written permission to travel. Though whoever stopped him would most likely not be literate, a written pass looked official enough that he would not be challenged as a runaway.

  Nat Turner dressed in a pair of worn pants, a shirt, a pair of his father’s shoes that he had hidden away. He never wore them in public, fearing they would be taken from him. But now he wore them and dressed in a coat and hat that had been his father’s and made his way on foot south and east forty miles to the Great Dismal Swamp.

  Nat Turner did not say good-bye. He pulled his collar up around his ears and lowered his head, slinging his small bundle over his shoulder, his axe stuck through it.

  Presidents had already visited the swampland—Washington and Monroe—but the Great Dismal had defied them. President George Washington had thought to earn money from the area by controlling the planned waterway, harvesting trees, and exploiting other resources there. They had used slaves to do the dirty work. But his efforts brought little success.

  The Great Dismal was a mysterious place and everyone around had heard the rumors. The swamp was filled with escaped slaves who could not be tracked or found in the tropical forest.

  Animals and insects were there that civilized men had never seen before. It was said that the trees talked and at night the water whispered. White men died of diseases there—all nature seemed to conspire against them.

  People told stories of whole families of black people who had escaped and found a way to be free in the Great Dismal Swamp. The slaves who holed up there, it was said, were desperate, angry, ready to die—ruthless avengers who would kill a white man sooner than look him in the eye. Some lived there permanently, but for others it was a temporary refuge. Nat Turner knew that if he made it there, no white man from Southampton County would enter the swamp to search for him.