The Confessions of Nat Turner Part 10

It was hot and muggy and a moist haze with a hint of storm about it blurred the greenish sky; by late morning the sun burned down through murky waves of heat, so oppressive that even the locusts became still and the birds retreated, silent, to the leafy blue sanctuary of the woods. For two or three hours I read from my Bible, committing several Psalms to memory. (My Bible was the only possession I had to take away from Turner's Mill save for these things: a single change of denim pants, two cotton s.h.i.+rts, an extra pair of what are elegantly known as n.i.g.g.e.r brogans, some little bone crosses I had carved, a needle and some thread, a pewter cup left to me by my mother, and a ten-dollar gold piece which Ma.r.s.e Samuel had given me the day before. It was a matter of custom that the person into whose hands I was delivered would supply the rest of my needs. The gold piece I had sewn into the belt band of my pants, and I kept everything wrapped in a large blue bandanna.) It seemed 183.

appropriate to the moment, suspended as I was between two existences, troubled by abandonment and loss, heartsick at the void I felt upon the departure of all the dearest and best friends I had ever known, yet at the same time obscurely excited by the promise of a new world, liberty, the fruition of all those dreams I had entertained in the recent past of myself a freedman jauntily striding toward church or job down some Richmond boulevard-it seemed appropriate to this mingled mood, as I say, that I study a Psalm in which sorrow and exaltation were joined, and I recollect that it was Psalm 90 that I put to memory that morning, the one beginning, Lord, thou hast been our Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations, dwelling place in all generations, and which contains the verse that goes: and which contains the verse that goes: A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night . . when it is past, and as a watch in the night . .

Noon came and went, the coppery sun sank toward the afternoon: still no Reverend Eppes, and I was hungry. I remembered then (having in my absorption forgotten) the meal waiting for me, and so with my sack thrown over my shoulder I walked back through the bare, deserted halls to the kitchen.

There on a shelf over the great brick hearth was the last meal ever to be served here to a Turner: four pieces of fried chicken, half a loaf of shortening bread, sweet cider in a cracked mug-decent big-house food, proper for a farewell repast, thoughtfully covered by a worn clean flour sack as a screen against flies. That I recall with great clarity such small details may have something to do with the overall sense of ominousness, the spidery disquietude and perplexity which, like the shadows of vines creeping up a stone wall in descending sunlight, began to finger my spine as I sat on the window sill in the empty kitchen eating that chicken and bread. The stillness of the plantation was at this instant almost complete, so oppressive and strange that I suddenly thought, jittery with a vague terror, that I had been stricken by deafness. I ceased eating for a moment, both ears c.o.c.ked and straining, waiting for some sound outside-a bird call, the plas.h.i.+ng of a duck on the millpond, a whisper of wind in the forest-to convince me that I could hear, but I heard nothing, nothing at all, and my panic swelled until just then the startling noise of my own bare callused foot scuffing roughly on the pine floor rea.s.sured me: I chided myself for my silliness and continued eating, and was further soothed by a fly's insensate deafening mutter as it settled on the topmost edge of my ear.

184.

But the feeling of an ominous hush and solitude would not leave me alone, would not fade away, clung to me like some enveloping garment which, try as I might, I could not ease from my shoulders. I tossed the chicken bones down into the weed-choked flower bed below the kitchen window, and wrapping the remains of the bread carefully in my sack along with the broken mug-I thought it would become of use somehow-ventured out into the great hall of the house.

Dismantled of everything that could be moved-of crystal chandeliers and grandfather's clock, carpets and piano and sideboard and chairs-the cavernous room echoed with a tomblike roar to my sudden sneeze. The reverberation smashed from wall to wall with the sound of waterfalls, cataracts, then became silent. Only a lofty mirror, webbed with minute cracklings and bluish with age, embedded immovably between two upright columns against the wall, remained as sure proof of past habitation; its blurred and liquid depths reflected the far side of the hall, and there four immaculate rectangles marked the vanished portraits of Turner forebears; two stern gentlemen in white wigs and c.o.c.ked hats, two serene ladies with modest bosoms bedecked in ribbons and flounces of pink satin, they had been nameless to me yet over the years as familiar as kin: their absence was suddenly shocking, like swift multiple deaths.

I went back out on the veranda, again waiting for the sound of hooves and wheels, and again there was only silence. Even then I had begun to feel that I was alone, abandoned, forgotten, and that no one was going to come and fetch me; the sensation caused me fear and foreboding but part of the emotion was not unpleasant, and way down inside I felt my bowels stirring with a mysterious, queasy, voluptuous thrill. I had never felt this way before and tried to put it out of my mind, laying my sack down on the veranda steps and strolling to the small promontory at the side of the house, where in almost one glance it was possible to survey the entire prospect of abandoned dwellings, decaying shops and sheds and ruined land-an empire devastated by the hordes of Gideon. The heat had become wicked, unrelenting, pouring down from a smudged, greasy sky in which the sun pulsated like a faint pink coal through the haze. As far as my eye could reach, the cabins lay in weatherworn rows to the vast bottom cornfield, now a majestic jungle of weeds, sunflowers, and impenetrable green bramble. The sense of excitement, gut-deep, warm, squirmy, returned irresistibly as I watched the 185.

scene, as my eyes lingered on the ranks of empty cabins then returned to regard the shops close by, the outhouses and stables and sheds, and the big house looming near, unpeopled and silent in the terrible heat.

Only a dripping of water through the cracked millpond dam disturbed the silence now-only a steady unhurried dripping and nearby the flickering hum of gra.s.shoppers in the weeds. I tried to force back the sharp and growing excitement but even as I did so I felt my pulse pounding and the sweat flowing beneath my arms in streams. There was no wind, the trees in the surrounding woods were quiet; yet because of this very stillness they seemed a solid ma.s.s stretching out on all sides of me in perfect circ.u.mference to the last boundaries of the world, an all-pervading triumphant ma.s.s of greenery. Nothing but this still and ruined plantation existed; it was the very heart of the universe and I was the master not alone of its being at the present instant but of all its past and hence all its memories.

Solitary and sovereign as I gazed down upon this wrecked backwater of time, I suddenly felt myself its possessor; in a twinkling I became white-white as clabber cheese, white, stark white, white as a marble Episcopalian. I turned about and moved to the very crest of the slope, hard by the circular drive where carriages had come and gone and ladies in crinoline and taffeta had lightly and laughingly dismounted upon carpeted footboards, their petticoats spilling on the air like snow as I steadied their outstretched arms. Now, looking down at the shops and barns and cabins and distant fields, I was no longer the grinning black boy in velvet pantaloons; for a fleeting moment instead I owned all, and so exercised the privilege of owners.h.i.+p by unlacing my fly and p.i.s.sing loudly on the same worn stone where dainty tiptoeing feet had gained the veranda steps a short three years before. What a strange, demented ecstasy! How white I was!

What wicked joy!

But my blackness immediately returned, the fantasy dissolved, and I was again overtaken by wrenching loneliness and a pang of guilt. The Reverend Eppes did not appear, though I strained my ears for the sound of his approach on the road. I went back to my Bible once more, reading and committing to memory one of my favorite pa.s.sages-the story of Samuel and the ark of the covenant-while afternoon lengthened and light dimmed on the veranda and thunder grumbled and heaved faintly on the smoky horizon.

186.

As it grew dark I knew that the Reverend Eppes would not arrive that day. I got hungry again and had a twitch of sharp discomfort when I realized that there was no more to eat. Then I remembered the shortening bread in my sack, and when night fell, I ate the rest of the loaf, was.h.i.+ng it down with water from the cistern behind the kitchen. Inside the house it was as black as the swamp on a moonless night, clammy and stifling, and I stumbled aimlessly about while clouds of mosquitoes whined about my ears. My little bedroom had been stripped bare like all the rest, and there was no use sleeping there, so I lay down on the floor in the great hall near the front door with my sack as a pillow beneath my head.

Then along about what must have been eleven o'clock a storm descended on the plantation, scaring me out of wits and sleep; t.i.tanic lightning bolts illumined the dark, in flashes of eerie green outlined the deserted mill and the millpond, where steely rain swept the surface of the water in windy sheets and torrents.

Cracklings of thunder rent the heavens, and a single shaft of lightning suddenly broke in two a huge old magnolia nearby in the woods, toppling half the behemoth to earth with a squealing and a groaning like a stricken madman. The night filled me with terror, I had never known such a storm, never in my life; it seemed a special storm ordained by G.o.d, and I hid my head between my sack and the bare planks of the floor, wis.h.i.+ng that I had never been born. At last the storm slackened, dwindled away with a soft dripping noise and I raised my head up, recollecting the flood: The fountains also of the deep and the The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained restrained . . . I whispered thanks to the Lord in a prayer, and finally went off to sleep, listening to the wet sound of an owl, blown in by the storm, as it stirred and s.h.i.+vered somewhere high on a ledge of the hall above me, fussing . . . I whispered thanks to the Lord in a prayer, and finally went off to sleep, listening to the wet sound of an owl, blown in by the storm, as it stirred and s.h.i.+vered somewhere high on a ledge of the hall above me, fussing hoot-oo, hoot-oo, hoot-oo, hoot-oo, hoot-oo hoot-oo.

Then I heard a voice-"Git on up, boy"-and I awoke in a dazzle of morning light to see and feel the toe of a black boot prodding me awake-not a gentle prod, either, but an insistent sharp boring-in between my ribs which caused me to gasp and rise instantly onto my elbows, gulping morning air as if I had been half drowned.

"You Nat?" I heard the man say. Even as he spoke I knew it was the Reverend Eppes. He was clad from head to toe in clerical black; motheaten black preacher's leggings he wore too, level 187.

with my eyes now, and I saw that several b.u.t.tons were missing and for some reason the gaiters exuded, or seemed to exude, a sour, worn, unclean smell. My eyes traveled up the length of his long black-clad shanks and his seedy black mohair frock coat and lingered for the barest instant on the face, which had a skinny, big-nosed, pentecostal, Christ-devoured, wintry look of laughterless misery about it; bespectacled with oval wire-framed gla.s.ses, belonging to a man of about sixty, redly wattled in the neck like a turkey gobbler's, bitter of countenance and opaque of eye, it was a face graven with poverty, sanctimony, and despair, and both my heart and my belly suddenly shriveled within me. If nothing else, I knew I had had my last piece of white bread for some time to come.

"You Nat?" he said again, more insistent now. It was a barren and suspicious voice, nasal, full of cold November winds, and something in it warned me that with this clergyman it would not do to display any educated airs. I scrambled to my feet and retrieved my sack from the floor and said: "Yas, ma.s.sah, das right. I'se Nat."

"Git on in that buggy down 'ere," he ordered.

The buggy was at the veranda steps, drawn by the most pathetic sway-backed old spotted mare I had ever seen. I clambered up onto the worn seat and waited there in the sunlight for half an hour or more, watching the sad old nag switch her tail against a hide covered with sores upon which flies supped greedily and listening to the m.u.f.fled commotion made by the Reverend Eppes as he stamped about in the far recesses of the house. Finally he returned and climbed up on the seat beside me, bearing with him two huge iron pothooks (I had thought it impossible that the house could yield anything else to a scavenger) which he had managed to yank with his great raw-knuckled fists out of the solid oak of a kitchen wall. "Gee- yup, Beauty," he said to the horse, and before I knew it we had gone down the lane beneath the trees shrill with locusts, and Turner's Mill, abandoned to the beetles and the meadow mice and the owls, was out of my life forever. yup, Beauty," he said to the horse, and before I knew it we had gone down the lane beneath the trees shrill with locusts, and Turner's Mill, abandoned to the beetles and the meadow mice and the owls, was out of my life forever.

We must have traveled several miles up the wagon trace before the Reverend Eppes spoke again. During this part of the journey, the sorrow and the sense of dislocation and loss I had felt-the ache of desperate homesickness which had tormented me ever since I had been left alone the day before-was obscured by the 188.

pure fact of hunger in my stomach, and I thought longingly of yesterday's chicken, and felt my insides painfully rumbling, all the while hoping that if the Reverend Eppes opened his lips to utter a thought it would be a thought concerning the question of food. But this was not to be.

"How old you be, boy?" he said.

"I'se twenty, ma.s.sah," I replied, "twenty-one come de first day October." It is good for a Negro, when trying to ingratiate himself with a strange white man, to convey an impression of earnest simplicity and this may often be achieved by adding to such a reply as mine some phrase like "Das de truth," or "Das right." I think that I must have tacked on then a sweet and open "Das de truth," and by so doing made the mistake of arousing in the Reverend Eppes a further consciousness of my youth, my innocence.

"You ever git any of them little n.i.g.g.e.r girls in the bushes?" he said. A funky stale smell seemed to pour from his threadbare clothes, an odor of grease and soil and deep poverty; I wanted to avert my nose but dared not. There was something about the man that filled me with an uneasiness verging on dread.

Dismayed by his question, I felt myself honestly unable to answer and tried to let myself off the dilemma in typical n.i.g.g.e.r fas.h.i.+on by a slow soft giggle and a great mouthful of inarticulate syllables. "Aa! Eeh-Haw!"

"Mr. Turner done told me you religious-minded," he said.

"Ya.s.suh," I replied, hoping that religion would work to my advantage somehow.

"So you religious-minded," he went on. He had a dry barren voice, monotonously reedy and harsh, like the crepitation of a cricket in the weeds. It seemed impossible that such a voice could ever exhort people to anything. "And if you religious-minded, then you sh.o.r.ely know, boy, what King Solomon son of David said about women, 'specially wh.o.r.es. He said a wh.o.r.e is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men. That right, boy?"

"Ya.s.suh," I said.

"He said by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a 189.

piece of bread, and the adulteress will hunt for the precious life.

That right, boy? He said keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. l.u.s.t not after her beauty in thine heart, neither let her take thee with her eyelids.

You know know that's right, boy." that's right, boy."

"Das right," I replied, "ya.s.suh, I 'spect das right." We had not looked at each other; I sensed rather his wintry and eaten face next to mine, gazing despairingly straight ahead, and I smelled the sour, yeasty odor seeping from his clothes; my mouth went as dry as sand.

"But a young man," he said, "now that's a different idea.A young man is beauty and sweetness. He said eat thou honey honey, because it is good, and the honeycomb which is sweet to thy taste. Eat thou honey honey. That right, boy? He said the glory of young men is their strength and the beauty of old men is the gray head. He said when thou liest down thou shalt not be afraid, yea, thou shalt lie down. Yes, boy? Hope deferred maketh the heart sick but when the desire desire cometh, it is a tree of life. The true root and the tree of life, praise G.o.d." cometh, it is a tree of life. The true root and the tree of life, praise G.o.d."

"Ya.s.suh," I sighed wretchedly.

We rode for a long time in silence. We had taken a side turning off the trace and pa.s.sed now through country I had never seen before. It was poor, eroded land with weed-choked red-clay fields bare of habitation. Scraggly pine groves stretched across the landscape, and high in the blue above us turkey buzzards swooped and wheeled, touching me with gloom and with visions of bleached skeletons, decayed flesh, and slow suffering deaths.

A smoky haze hung over the land, and crows cried dismally from afar. It was as if all the people had suddenly vanished from the earth.

"Tell me something, boy," he said finally, the reedy voice suddenly strained, hesitant yet fraught with some terrible decision. "I hear tell a n.i.g.g.e.r boy's got an unusual big p.e.c.k.e.r on him. That right, boy?"

I became feeble with anxiety and could make no reply. The buggy had stopped and we rested in the shade of a spindly old oak, half dead in a shroud of leaves prematurely, yellowing and withering, the great hulk of its trunk smothered in the green fecund moist embrace of honeysuckle and Virginia creeper.

Dizzy with apprehension, I kept my eyes fixed toward my feet. A 190.

fragrance of honeysuckle mingled with the presence now of the Reverend Eppes; he was sweating in streams, and I could see the sweat as it drained from beneath his black s.h.i.+ny cuff and onto the back of the great ungainly sun-blistered hand which now tensely clutched his knee.

"You know what I hear tell, boy?" he went on, placing the same tight and tormented hand on the fleshy part of my upper leg. His voice trembled, his old ugly red fingers trembled, and I too felt myself trembling inwardly as I made a silent, urgent plea to the heavens: Lord? Are you there, Lord Lord? Are you there, Lord? A cloud pa.s.sed over the day then, and a sudden breath of coolness came, borne as if on the air freshening in the treetops; now with a leafy tremor the coolness fled, light blossomed blindingly, and the stench of the Reverend Eppes once more was sour and close. "I hear tell your average n.i.g.g.e.r boy's got a member on him inch or so longer'n ordinary. That right, boy?"

I remained as silent as the s.p.a.ce within a tomb, feeling the quivering fingers on my thigh. When I made no reply, he fell somberly quiet, then after a long moment he squeezed down remorselessly on my flesh and whispered: "You goin' to mind me, boy?"

But this time when I failed to answer, he removed his hand from my leg and we started off anew, squeaking dustily along northward through the sullen and woebegone countryside.

Perhaps half an hour pa.s.sed before he spoke again, and his dry ageless cricket's voice was filled with despair and hatred and love and misery and retribution as he said: "You better better mind me! mind me!

You jest better better mind me, that's all, you hear!" mind me, that's all, you hear!"

Time grows brief in this chronicle of my early years. My residence with the Reverend Eppes was short-lived. There remains need to tell only of the way in which the Reverend Eppes's stewards.h.i.+p of my fortunes led me not toward that freedom I had for so long antic.i.p.ated as a natural consequence of the transfer of my person into his custody, but toward something entirely and surprisingly different.

It had been Ma.r.s.e Samuel's intention, I believe, that I labor only for a short while in the service of the minister. However, it turned out that I worked there for less time than Ma.r.s.e Samuel must even have imagined. As you have doubtless seen, one of Ma.r.s.e Samuel's characteristics was a fetching ingenuousness and faith in human nature; being a poor judge of people anyway, it was 191.

especially unfortunate that abstaining as he did from formal religious observance, he should still retain a traditional respect for and trust in the goodness of the clergy. This trust was a central mistake. I think that in handing me over to the Reverend Eppes he envisioned a charming, benign, and mutually satisfying relations.h.i.+p between an adorable old bachelor preacher and his black acolyte-already "religious-minded" and learned in the Scripture-the two of us dwelling in perfect Christian concord as I celebrated with honest labor the spiritual harvest that his age and wisdom might shower upon me. What a splendid vision.

What tender dreams of charity one hopes blessed my late master's slumber amid the balmy Alabama night!

Well, old Eppes ceased trying to ravish me (and this is one of the few tolerable aspects of my stay) fairly early on, so that by the time autumn arrived I was free at least of that worry, which for a spell had been a burdensome one. There had been a few days after my arrival at s.h.i.+loh when he had ambushed me in the sagging, pestilential two-hole outhouse which served both his own pitiful dwelling and the church; there, cosseting me loudly again with proverbs and other suasions from Holy Writ, he tried to break me down by the same route he had traveled on the day of our first encounter, his big old beak leaking the dew of frustration onto his upper lip and his voice a paradigm of anguish as he clutched at me amid the swarming flies. But one day he made a great and defeated shudder, and with wormwood in his mouth, abandoned the quest, to my relief and puzzlement. Only much later, when I grew older and considerably more reflective, did it occur to me that his desire for me, intense as it was, must have been at war with and was finally exceeded by his desire for my domination. Had he reached his lesser goal, had I submitted to his malodorous gropings, he would have gained a pet but lost a slave; it is not easy totally to master someone you've b.u.g.g.e.red behind the woodpile, and if I had become the compliant vessel of his cravings he might have found it much harder to run me until my legs felt like stumps.

Which is what he did-eighteen and twenty hours a day, seven days a week, especially especially, I should add, on Sunday-and for the first time in my life I began to sense the world, the true true world, in which a Negro moves and breathes. It was like being plunged into freezing water. Further, I soon realized that my predicament was made even more onerous by the fact that I was the only slave in s.h.i.+loh, a grim and pious little crossroads community of The Confessions of Nat Turner world, in which a Negro moves and breathes. It was like being plunged into freezing water. Further, I soon realized that my predicament was made even more onerous by the fact that I was the only slave in s.h.i.+loh, a grim and pious little crossroads community of 192.

some thirty-five souls. Small farmers for the most part, scratching for life itself in arid patches of corn and sweet potatoes, these were the leftovers and castoffs from the same cataclysmic depression which had sent the more prosperous of their fellow citizens, like Ma.r.s.e Samuel, to the far South: failed overseers, one-armed tinkers, bankrupt country storekeepers, reformed drunks, G.o.d-maddened paralytics, they were a bleak and undone brotherhood of true believers with scarcely a dollar to divide among them and only the hope of the soul's rescue through total immersion to preserve them and their goiterous women and pale, straw-haired, worm-infested children from absolute disintegration.

As the only two-legged chattel in s.h.i.+loh, then, it befell my lot not only to do the ch.o.r.es for the Reverend Eppes-to chop kindling and haul spring water and feed Beauty, the sway-backed mare, and sh.e.l.l corn and slop the three pigs and build the morning fires, acting both as a sort of grotesque valet to the preacher in the shack he called a parsonage and as a s.e.xton at the rickety church-but to be of service to the rest of the congregation as well. As I deviously learned, the good pastor had never been in possession of a Negro before (that I must have become, however briefly, the answer to a lifelong prayer is a fact which often touched me in later years), and in the first flush of enthusiasm over the bonanza that I represented, he obviously had a deep Christian urge to share me equally with the members of his flock. Thus all that fall and winter-one of the most frigid years within living memory-I found how swiftly the body loses its sap and the soul its optimism through having one's energies split three dozen ways. It seemed to me that I had been plunged into a hallucination in which I had parted from all familiar existence and was suddenly transformed into a different living creature altogether-half-man, half-mule, exhausted and without speech, given over to dumb and reasonless toil from the hours before dawn until the dead of night. In the tiny three-room parsonage I slept in what was called the kitchen, on a straw tick covered with rags near the back door. Bitter winds moaned through all the cracks in the house; even stoked to the limit the fireplace gave scant warmth; when banked at night it gave no heat whatever, and as I lay s.h.i.+vering on the floor in the dim light I could see ice congealing on the surface of the preacher's chamber pot. He snored cavernously all night long, throbbing like a mill wheel through my restless dreams. Sometimes he would 193.

give a great strangled noise and wake up chattering disconnected words from the gospel. "I also am am of Christ!" he howled once, and another night I saw his white nights.h.i.+rted shape lurch upright as he wailed: " of Christ!" he howled once, and another night I saw his white nights.h.i.+rted shape lurch upright as he wailed: "Lewdness, O ye Jews!" Even in the unbelievable cold the house was fetid and rank like a chicken pen in summer.

Lord, what a time! How I yearned for the days and months to pa.s.s and for the winter to end; how I waited for the moment to come when I would be delivered from this pesthole, to Richmond and into freedom. But it became an endless and wicked season, with no relief in sight. Thrice monthly the post coach came through from the South, but the mail it dropped off was scanty anyway, and there was never a letter from Ma.r.s.e Samuel-certainly not a word for me nor (at least so far as I was able to tell) any message to the Reverend Eppes. And so I labored through icy months, sustained by the gloomy comfort of Ecclesiastes, whose words I managed to put to memory in the few moments wrested each day from sleep and work. It was good to realize, as I hauled away the contents of the privy in a leaky bucket, that all is vanity; the great Preacher succored me through hours of ceaseless toil.

In the mornings I sweated for the Reverend Eppes, chopping wood, toting water, sweeping, whitewas.h.i.+ng the outer timbers of the house and the church-an unending task not made easier by the fact that the whitewash often froze on the brush. After midday dinner (we bowed our heads together in blessing and then ate in silence in the kitchen, he on the single chair, I crouched on my haunches on the floor, devouring a meal that was unvaryingly terrible-fatback and corn pone drenched in mola.s.ses-but at least abundant: in that fearsome weather my protector could not afford to have his labor source lose power through meager victualing) there would come a rattling of wagon wheels outside on the frozen rutted ground, and a cry: "It's me, George Dunn, Parson! I've got the n.i.g.g.e.r this afternoon!" And off I would go to the Dunn place three miles away at the edge of the pinewoods, there to work for another six hours felling trees, burning brush, emptying privies, sh.e.l.ling corn or performing any of a dozen low and muscle-wrenching ch.o.r.es it might strike a doomed, chilblained red-necked Baptist farmer needed doing.

Other days I often walked to my afternoon's labor, trudging two miles or more along some snow-covered woodland path, to arrive finally with freezing toes at a shack or cabin in a clearing and hear a woman's voice from the front stoop: "Leander! The 194.

n.i.g.g.e.r's here!" I began to feel myself loutishly half existing, my ident.i.ty fading, as a Percheron must feel if it feels, never more so than those times when after hours of frostbite and sweat on the roof of a barn, I was compelled to carry back to the Reverend Eppes the actual rental for my labor-a silver dollar rarely, most often a cramped, brain-tormented: Rev. Eppes I. O. U.

$0.50 U.S.

Use of nigro 5 hours Ashpenaz Groover. 12 Jan.

on a sc.r.a.p of coa.r.s.e brown paper, or a crock of pickled okra, a pound of goat cheese wrapped in a flannel rag, or a jar of candied sweet potatoes-delicacies, moreover, I never got to taste. No one beat me, and I was rarely even scolded. Generally speaking, I was accorded the cheerful respect due any superbly efficient mechanism.

My despair and loneliness grew until the existence I led seemed a nightmare from which I was frantically trying to arouse myself; the burden of my daily wretchedness felt an actual weight, heavy and immovable, bearing down like a yoke upon my shoulders.

For the first time in my life I considered the extremity of running away (following honorably in my father's barefooted path), but I was dissuaded from such a course not alone by the two hundred miles of trackless and freezing wilderness which lay between myself and Pennsylvania, but by the fear, of course, that in so doing I would simply forfeit the very liberty I had been a.s.sured was soon to be mine. Yet all remained the same. With a fingernail purchase on freedom, I found myself laboring like an ox. Every ten days the mail coach came up from the South, and departed, leaving no advice from Ma.r.s.e Samuel. Despair and gloom pressed down upon me like merciless hands. Each morning I awoke praying that on this this day I would be taken to Richmond, there to be delivered into the hands of that civilized and enlightened master whose only concern was eventually to obtain my freedom. The moment never arrived. I squatted silently with the Reverend Eppes in the draughty kitchen, choking down my corn pone and mola.s.ses. Overhead, day after sullen day, the sun was a wafer of light barely visible, wanly tracing the hours across a creepy black sky dreamed by The Confessions of Nat Turner day I would be taken to Richmond, there to be delivered into the hands of that civilized and enlightened master whose only concern was eventually to obtain my freedom. The moment never arrived. I squatted silently with the Reverend Eppes in the draughty kitchen, choking down my corn pone and mola.s.ses. Overhead, day after sullen day, the sun was a wafer of light barely visible, wanly tracing the hours across a creepy black sky dreamed by 195.

Jeremiah.

I cannot calculate what my value was in cheese and okra but I made a mental accounting of the hard cash I brought in, and figured that between October and the middle of February I earned for the Reverend Eppes a total of $35.75.

About the services in the ramshackle church (keeping four stoves fueled all afternoon and evening with hickory logs made Sunday one of my most arduous days) it is best to remain for the most part quiet, drawing over these mysteries-as Sir Walter Scott might say-a prudent veil. For although I myself in later years acquired great power in preaching and exhortation, and found myself deeply stirred by the way in which people took flame from the Word and became exalted by it, sometimes losing possession of all their senses; and although through total abandonment it is often possible to obtain a close communion with the Spirit-nonetheless these white people at s.h.i.+loh were a scandal, whooping and shouting and bubbling at the mouth as the Reverend Eppes raked them through h.e.l.lfire in his dry cracked voice, and amid the sweat and steam, falling into a kind of ultimate frenzy, stripping to their underdrawers, male and female, and riding each other bareback up and down the aisles.

It seemed to me Babylonian, a mockery, and I was always glad when the Sunday night service was over and I could clean up the mess they made and go to bed.

Once at dusk, coming back from a weary afternoon's work at a farm deep in the pinewoods, I paused for a short while in the middle of a clearing. Heavy snow lay over the floor of the woods and in the trees, and there was not a sound anywhere. Darkness was pressing on fast, and I knew that if I did not get back to the parsonage before nightfall I would surely lose the way and just as surely freeze to death in the forest. Yet for some reason I was not frightened by the notion; it seemed a friendly and peaceable idea, to fall asleep amid the snow and the pines and never wake up-delivered into the bosom of eternity, forever safe from mean and dishonorable toil. It was a blasphemous, faithless vision but somehow I thought G.o.d might understand. And for a long moment I loitered there in the cold, silent clearing, watching the gray twilight descend, half yearning for the night to overtake me and enfold me close within its benign, chill, indifferent arms.

But then I recalled the new life which awaited me in Richmond 196.

and the grand future I would have as a free man, and a sudden panic seized me. I began to run through the snow, faster and faster, and reached the parsonage just before the last light faded from the sky.

On February 21, 1822, in the village of Suss.e.x Courthouse, Virginia, the Reverend Eppes sold me into bondage for $460. I'm certain that this sum is true because I watched Evans or Blanding-I do not know which one-of Evans & Blanding, Incorporated, auctioneers, pay that amount in twenty-dollar bills as we stood in the anteroom of the n.i.g.g.e.r pen that the traders had set up in a crumbling brick tobacco warehouse on the outskirts of the village. The date, too, I know to be exact because it was outlined in flagrant red upon a big corporate wall calendar, not ten feet from where we stood, along with the inscription in ragged journeyman printer's type: $ $ $.

PLAY SAFE WITH "E. & B."

SPOT CASH PAID FOR.

LIKELY NEGROES.

The fifteen-mile trip by buggy up across the county line from s.h.i.+loh, the sale itself-everything had taken less than half a day.

It had all happened before I could even think about it. And I stood there in the windy barnlike building, clutching my sack and watching the old preacher convey me into a trader's hands.

I recall crying out: "But you can't do this! You and Ma.r.s.e Samuel had a written agreement. You was to take me to Richmond Richmond! He told told me so!" me so!"

But the Reverend Eppes said not a word, counting bills, each golden second climbing from penury to riches, his spectacles frosting up as with wettened forefinger and eagerly moving lips he verified his booty.

"You can't can't!" I shouted. "I've got a trade trade, too! I'm a carpenter!"

"Somebody hush the n.i.g.g.e.r up!" I heard a voice say nearby.

"That n.i.g.g.e.r boy, gentlemen," the preacher explained, "is a little 197.

tetched in the head about that one item. But he jest bully where it matters. He jest a bully bully worker. Got right smart strength for one so slender, and a good mind on him-can actual spell out some words, and has a G.o.d-fearin' spirit. Reckon he might be a likely stud, too. Mercy, ain't this been a winter?" Then without further comment he turned and on a frosty blast of air was gone. worker. Got right smart strength for one so slender, and a good mind on him-can actual spell out some words, and has a G.o.d-fearin' spirit. Reckon he might be a likely stud, too. Mercy, ain't this been a winter?" Then without further comment he turned and on a frosty blast of air was gone.

I cannot make sense out of most of the rest of that day. I do recollect, however, that in the evening, as I lay slumped in the crowded, noisy pen with fifty strange Negroes, I experienced a kind of disbelief which verged close upon madness, then a sense of betrayal, then fury such as I had never known before, then finally, to my dismay, hatred so bitter that I grew dizzy and thought I might get sick on the floor. Nor was it hatred for the Reverend Eppes-who was really nothing but a simple old fool-but for Ma.r.s.e Samuel, and the rage rose and rose in my breast until I earnestly wished him dead, and in my mind's eye I saw him strangled by my own hands.

Then from that moment on (until the occasion of beginning this account of my life) I banished Ma.r.s.e Samuel from my mind as one banishes the memory of any disgraced and downfallen prince, and I refused to give him ten seconds' thought ever again.

One night soon after this there was a thaw and it started to rain.

Torrents of water came down, lashed by a bitter west wind. Later the temperature began to fall and the rain turned to sleet, so that by the next morning all of the countryside was sheathed in a glistening, crystalline coverlet of ice, as if dipped in molten gla.s.s.

Finally the sleet stopped, but the sky remained leaden and overcast, and the ice-encrusted woods seemed to merge without definition into the gla.s.sy and brittle underbrush of the fields, casting no shadow. That day, after I had been sold at auction to Mr. Thomas Moore, we rode back south out of Suss.e.x Courthouse in a wagon drawn by two oxen, and the wheels squealed and crackled against the white troughs of ice in the rutted road and the iron-shod hooves of the oxen crunched c.u.mbersomely on the hard frozen earth.

Moore and his cousin, another farmer whose first name was Wallace, sat hunched up on the seat behind the oxen, and I leaned up to the rear of them on the wagon's open tailboard with my feet dangling over the edge. It was fearsomely cold and as we creaked along I s.h.i.+vered, although the frayed woollen overcoat which was the single legacy of my stay at the Reverend 198.

Eppes's gave me a certain protection against the wind. Yet it was not the weather which now concerned me, but an irreparable and still, to me, inconceivable violation of my all too meager property. For less than an hour before, after having bought me, Moore had found and grabbed the ten-dollar gold piece I had so carefully sewn up inside my extra pair of pants.

Like some avid little weevil or roach he had homed as if by the sheerest primitive instinct upon my few possessions and within seconds had extracted the gold piece from the belt band, ripping the seam, his round small pockmarked rustic's face puckered with sly relentless triumph-"I figgered a n.i.g.g.e.r once't lived at Turner's Mill ud steal him some loot," he muttered to his cousin-as he bit down on the coin then thrust it into the pocket of his jeans.

All my life I had never owned so much as a tin spoon, and the gold piece had been the only real treasure I had ever possessed; that I had kept it so briefly and had parted with it so quickly was something I could barely comprehend. I had wanted to save it against the time when I might start a church in Richmond, now it was gone. Coming as it did after three days' and nights' wait in the n.i.g.g.e.r pen-my limbs poorly warmed and even more poorly nourished on cold cornmeal mush-and joined with the quick disposal of my body to Mr. Thomas Moore, this final act of piracy left me numb and beyond outrage, and I sat stiff, bolt upright on the tailboard of the wagon, clutching my sack tight against my lap with one hand and with the other holding the Bible pressed against my chest. I felt a dull ache around the edge of my jaw and wondered in a distant way at the reason for it, then recollected that it had been caused by Moore's begrimed and k.n.o.bby fingers when he had thrust them into my mouth to ascertain the soundness of my teeth.

I listened vaguely to the conversation between Moore and his cousin Wallace, the words coming as if from yards and yards away, from the treetops or across the margin of a remote and snow-covered field.

"They was this hoor I knowed in Norfolk, on Main Street, name Dora," the cousin was saying, "she would do it three ways if'n you'd pay a dollar-fifty-fifty cents each way and take all afternoon." He began to snort and chuckle, his voice thickening.