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nigger boy like you got a bite to eat for ole Raymond? My, dat’s a pretty bag on dat saddle. I bets dey’s all kinds of nice things to eat in dat bag. Come on, sugah, give ole Raymond a bite to eat.”
“Dey’s on’y a Bible in dat bag!” I said impatiently, though full-lapsed into a field nigger’s tongue. I gave the mare a slap behind the ears, checking her crabwise gait, and brought her about toward Marse Samuel. Late afternoon had begun to settle down upon us as we stood there, it had grown cold. Light from the descending sun fell amid the October leaves and through wood smoke and haze lay streaming upon a tangled desolation of weeds and brambles, so furiously luminous that it seemed a field ready to explode into fire. Drawing near Marse Samuel I heard the jew’s-harp again, bunk-bunk-bunk.
“Come, we must be on our way,” he said to me, wheeling about, and we turned together then; for some reason I hesitated and stopped entirely, gazing back, and he said again:
“Quickly! Quickly! We must be on our way!”
Now moving again down the long line of Negroes, I was aware that the jew’s-harp had stopped playing; we came by the place where Raymond sat in his chains and I heard him call to me as we trotted past—the voice sweet and slow, highpitched, not unkind, as ever knowing and prophetic and profound: “Yo’ shit stink too, sugah. Yo’ ass black jes’ like mine, honey chile.”
At along about this time in my life—it must have been the following spring—I came to know a Negro boy named Willis.
Save for Wash and my mother and house servants like Little Morning, Willis was the first Negro I was ever close to. Two or three years younger than I, the son of a woman who had done much of the weaving at the Mill and who had died that winter of some lung complaint, he had caught Marse Samuel’s eye as a suitable replacement for me in the carpenter’s shop, now that my duties called for me to work in the shop only half a day. As soon as I saw him at work, learning how to plane and hammer under the tutelage of Goat, I could understand why Marse Samuel had chosen him to be my successor, for unlike most Negro boys—
who become clumsy and ruined for anything but the sloppiest jobs after four or five years of bent-over toil chopping and hoeing in the cornfields, and in whose hands a hammer only turned into a weapon to fracture their own shins—Willis was skillful and neat, a quick learner, and he gained Goat’s favor and approval almost as quickly as I had done. He could not read or write a The Confessions of Nat Turner
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word, of course, but he had a sunny, generous, obliging nature and was full of laughter; despite my early suspicion of him—a hangover from my lifelong contempt of all black people who dwelt down the slope—I found something irresistible about his gaiety and his innocent, open disposition and we became fast friends. Considering my habitual scorn, I do not know why this happened: perhaps it was as if I had found a brother. He loved to sing as he worked, helping me brace a timber, the voice a soft little rhythmical chatter:
“Gonna milk my cow, gonna catch her by de tail, Gonna milk her in de coffee pot, po’ it in de pail.”
He was a slim, beautiful boy with fine-boned features, very gentle and wistful in repose, and the light glistened like oil on his smooth black skin. His only faith, like most of the Negroes’, was in omens and conjurs: with the long hairs from the cock of a bull that had died of the bloat he had tied up three fuzzy patches on his head, to ward off ghosts; the fangs of a water moccasin he wore on a string around his neck, a charm against fever. His talk was childish and guileless and obscene. I was very fond of him; feeling thus, I was troubled for his soul and longed to bring him out of ignorance and superstition and into the truth of Christian belief.
It was not easy at first—leading this simple, unformed, and childlike spirit to an understanding of the way and an acceptance of the light—but I can recall several things working in my favor.
There was his intelligence for one thing, as I have said: unlike so many of the other black boys, half drowned from birth in a kind of murky mindlessness in which there appeared not the faintest reflection of a world beyond the cabin and the field and the encompassing woods, Willis was like some eager, fluttering young bird who might soar away if only one were able to uncage him. Perhaps growing up near the big house had something to do with this, only briefly had he known the drudgery of the fields.
But there was also the mere fact of his nature, which was—different. He had come into life blessed with an unencumbered, happy spirit, bright and open to learning; everything about him was lively, dancing, gay, free of that stupid and brutish inertia of children born to the plow and the hoe.
More than all this, however, was the sway I kept over him by virtue of what I had simply become. I possessed an unusual position and authority, especially for a Negro who was so young, The Confessions of Nat Turner
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and I was certainly fully conscious of the respect and even awe in which I was held by all the black people at the Mill now that it had become known that I was second only to Abraham in control. (Being too young, too dumb, too prideful at the time, I could not have realized—as I sat astride Judy in some noisy timber lot thronged with toiling Negroes, aloof, disdainful, intoning from a requisition in a voice ostentatiously educated and loud—how much sour resentment boiled behind those awed, respectful glances.) Owning such power and advantaging myself of Willis’s innocence and the trust he had in me, I was able eventually to bring him into an awareness of God’s great handiwork and the wonder of His presence abiding in all the firmament. Do not think ill of me when I confess that it was during these hours with Willis in that spring of my eighteenth year, praying with him in the stillness of a noontime meadow, exhorting him to belief as I clutched my Bible with one hand and with the other pressed long and hard on the smooth heft of his shoulder until I could feel him shudder and sigh in response to my whispered supplications—“Oh Lord, receive this poor boy Willis, receive him into Thy almighty care, receive him into belief, yes, Lord, yes, yes, he believes,” and Willis’s voice in a gentle fluting echo, “Das right, Lawd, Willis he believes”—do not think ill of me, I say, when I confess that then for the first time like a yellow burst of sunlight which steals out from behind a cloud and floods the day, there swept over me the mysterious sense of my own hidden yet implacable and onrushing power.
That spring I remember we went fishing together on Saturdays and Sundays. A muddy creek wound through the swamp beyond the millpond. The walnut-brown water was thick with bream and catfish and we sat long morning hours in a swarm of gnats on the slippery clay bank, angling with pine poles we made in the shop, our hooks fashioned from bent nails upon which we skewered crickets and earthworms. Far off the mill groaned, a muffled watery rushing and mumbling. The light here was diaphanous, the air warm and drowsy, astir with darting buggy shapes and the chattering of birds. One day, his finger pricked by a hook or the sharp spine of a fish, Willis cried out—“fuckin’
Jesus!” he yelled—and so swiftly that I hardly knew what I was doing I rapped him sharply across the lips, drawing a tiny runnel of blood. “A filthy mouth is an abomination unto the Lord!” I said.
His face wore a broken, hurt look and he reached up to lightly finger the place where I had struck him. His round eyes were soft and childlike, trusting, and suddenly I felt a pang of guilt and pain at my anger, and a rush of pity swept through me, mingled with a The Confessions of Nat Turner
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hungry tenderness that stirred me in a way I have never known.
Willis said nothing, his eyes were brimming with tears; I saw the moccasin fangs dangling at his neck, bone-white and startling against his shiny bare black chest. I reached up to wipe away the blood from his lips, pulling him near with the feel of his shoulders slippery beneath my hand, and then we somehow fell on each other, very close, soft and comfortable in a sprawl like babies; beneath my exploring fingers his hot skin throbbed and pulsed like the throat of a pigeon, and I heard him sigh in a faraway voice, and then for a long mom
ent as if set free into another land we did with our hands together what, before, I had done alone.
Never had I known that human flesh could be so sweet.
Minutes afterward I heard Willis murmur: “Man, I sho liked dat.
Want to do it agin?”
For a time I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, averting my eyes, keeping my gaze up toward the sun through leaves atremble like a forest of green fluttering moths. Finally I said:
“The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”
Time passed and Willis said nothing, then I heard him fidget on the ground next to me, and he said, chuckling: “You know what jizzom puts me in mind of, Nat? Hit look jes’ lak buttermilk. Look dere.”
My skin still tingled with pleasure, a tired gentle luxurious feeling which at the same time I felt to be a danger and a warning. I recall a catbird high in the water oak above, swinging like a rag amid the branches, jabbering and screeching; gnats whirred madly in the air around my ears, beneath my skull the clay bank was as cold as a sliver of ice. They kissed one another, and wept one with another, I thought, until David exceeded. And he rose and departed. And Jonathan went into the city …
“Come on,” I said, rising. He pulled his pants up and I led him to the edge of the creek.
“Lord,” I said in a loud voice, “witness these two sinners who have sinned and have been unclean in Thy sight and stand in need to be baptized.”
“Das right, Lawd,” I heard Willis say.
In the warmth of the spring air I suddenly felt the presence of the Lord very close, compassionate, all-redeeming, The Confessions of Nat Turner
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all-understanding, as if His great mercy dwelt everywhere around us like the leaves and the brown water and the chattering birds.
Real yet unreal, He seemed about to reveal Himself, as fresh and invisible as a breath of wind upon the cheek. It was almost as if God hovered in the shimmering waves of heat above the trees, His tongue and His almighty voice trembling at the edge of speech, ready to make known His actual presence to me as I stood penitent and prayerful with Willis ankle-deep in the muddy waters. Through and beyond the distant roaring of the mill I thought I heard a murmuration and another roaring far up in the heavens, as if from the throats of archangels. Was the Lord going to speak to me? I waited faint with longing, clutching Willis tightly by the arm, but no words came from above—only the sudden presence of God poised to shower Himself down like summer rain, and the wild and many-voiced, distant, seraphic roaring. “Lord,” I cried, “Thy servant Paul has said: And now why tarriest thou? arise and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord. That’s what he said, Lord, that’s what he said! You know that, Lord!”
“Amen!” Willis said. Beneath my fingers I could feel him begin to stir and shudder and another “Amen!” came from him in a gasp.
“Das right, Lawd!”
Again I waited for God’s voice. For an instant indeed I thought He spoke but it was only the rushing of the wind high in the treetops. My heart pounded wildly and I recall thinking then: Maybe not now. Maybe He don’t want to speak now, but at another time. A thrill of joy coursed through me as I thought: He’s just testing me now. He’s just seeing if I can baptize. He’s going to save His voice for another time. That’s all right, Lord.
I turned to Willis, tugging at his arm, and together we went out into water waist-high where I could feel the mud squirm warm between my toes. Off near the other bank a little water snake scurried along like a whip on the surface of the creek, in frantic S-shaped ripples disappeared upstream; I took it as a good omen.
“For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,” I said,
“whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free, and have been all made to drink into one Spirit …”
“Amen,” said Willis. I grasped the back of his head and shoved him under, pressed him down beneath the foaming murky waters. It was the instant of my first baptism, and the swift brief The Confessions of Nat Turner
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exaltation I felt brought a sudden flood of tears to my eyes. After a second or two I brought him up in a cloud of bubbles, and as he stood there dripping and puffing like a kettle but with a smile as sweet as beatitude itself on his shining face, I addressed myself to the blue firmament.
“Lord, I am a sinner,” I called, “let me be saved by these redeeming waters. Let me henceforth be dedicated to Thy service. Let me be a preacher of Thy holy word. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
And then I baptized myself.
Walking back to the Mill that afternoon we passed down a lane of dogwood, white and pink in wanton lovely splashes, and a mockingbird seemed to follow us through the woods, making a liquid chanting sound among the wild green leaves. Willis kept up a steady excited chatter all the way—we had caught half a dozen bream—but I paid little heed to him, being lost in thought.
For one thing, I knew that I must consecrate myself to the Lord’s service from this point on, as I had promised Him, avoiding at all costs such pleasures of the flesh as I had experienced that morning. If I could be shaken to my very feet by this unsought-for encounter with a boy, think what it might be, I reflected, think what an obstacle would be set in my path toward spiritual perfection if I should ever have any commerce with a woman!
Difficult as it might become, I must bend every effort toward purity of mind and body so as to unloose my thoughts in the direction of theological studies and Christian preaching.
As for Willis—well, I realized now that loving him so much, loving him as a brother, I should do everything within my power to assure his own progress in the way of the Lord. I must first try to teach him to read and write—I figured he was still not too old for learning; that accomplished, maybe it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Marse Samuel might be persuaded that Willis, too, was fit for freedom and could be set loose in the outer world—Richmond perhaps!—with a grand job and a house and family. It would be hard to describe how much it pleased me to think of Willis free like myself in the city, the two of us dedicated to spreading God’s word among the black people and to honest work in the employ of the white.
The thought filled me with such hope and joy that I stopped on The Confessions of Nat Turner
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the path beneath the dogwood trees and there in the clear spring air knelt with Willis in thanksgiving and blessed him in the Lord’s name, replacing before I arose again his moccasin fangs with a tiny white cross I had carved from the shinbone of an ox.
Whenever in later times I recollected that day and thought of my first eighteen years, it seemed to me that all that long while it was as if I had been mounting a winding and pleasant slope toward the distant hills of the Lord, and that that day was a kind of promontory on the way. Not knowing the future, I had expected to pause at this lofty place and then go on, proceeding upward by gentle stages to the remote, free, glorious peaks where lay the satisfaction and fulfillment of my destiny. Yet as I say, whenever I reflected upon that eighteenth year of mine and that day and the events which quickly followed, it was plain to me that this promontory had been not a restful way station but an ending: beyond that place there was no gentle, continuing climb toward the great hills but a sudden astonishing abyss into which I was hurled like a willow leaf by the howling winds.
One long weekend late that spring there was to be a Baptist camp meeting just outside of Jerusalem. A wellknown revivalist named Deacon Jones would be the leader, coming all the way down from Petersburg, and Baptists for miles around were expected to meet there—hundreds and hundreds of planters and farmers and their families from a dozen counties, some traveling from as far away as the coast of North Carolina. Tents would be pitched, for four days and nights there would be singing and praying and feasting from wild turkey and barbecue. There would be a laying-on of hands and organ and banjo music, and general salvation for all lucky enough to attend. Some o
f the slaveowners, I knew, would bring what Negroes they owned and these privileged souls too might partake of the spirit of the revival, and would be welcome just like the white people to approach the holy bench, even though few of them would get a taste of the turkey or the barbecue. When I learned of the camp meeting I became greatly excited, and I asked Marse Samuel if I might be permitted to go for the Saturday gathering, taking several of the servants in one of the wagons. I intended to include Willis and Little Morning, who had gotten religion many years before and who, ailing now and feeble and with a pitiful wandering mind, might be going to his last revival. Although Marse Samuel was an Episcopalian he had long ago put churchgoing out of his head; yet he did not scorn the Bible and often sought ways that his Negroes might be led into religious The Confessions of Nat Turner
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instruction—I myself of course being the chief example. Thus when I asked him if I might go on this Saturday expedition he readily gave his permission and said that he would write out a pass for the group, warning me only that I should return before nightfall and that I must keep an eye on the other Negroes, who might fall into the hands of the wise and knowing darkies from some James or Blackwater River plantation; these were smart darkies who had been exposed to white rivermen and traders and thus to vice, and they would literally swindle our innocent backwoods Negroes out of their trousers or their shoes.
Ever since the day I baptized Willis, I had begun to teach him to count and also to read, using my Bible as a primer and spelling out the words on the back wall of the shed next to the carpenter’s shop, with a cattail dipped in lampblack as a kind of brush to write the letters. It pleased me to see how quickly he responded to my instruction; if I persevered, and took advantage of every opportunity, I was sure that it would not be long before he knew the alphabet and would be able to see the connection between the letters and the words in such a simple line as the third verse of the entire Bible, which of course goes: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. Willis too was excited at the prospect of going to the camp meeting. Although I myself had never been to such a revival, I knew from tales told long ago by my mother and Little Morning just what sort of colorful bustle and activity might be expected, and thus I was able to tell Willis all about it and infect him with my own anticipation. On the afternoon before the day of the camp meeting I borrowed two juicy pullets from Goat’s brood, promising to pay him back in extra work, and I made up a large and festive meal for us Negroes who were going—fried chicken, a rare treat, and a couple of loaves of shortening bread I was able to wheedle out of Abraham’s wife, who had become cook at the big house—and I put the chicken and bread in a small pine box together with a jug of sweet cider, placing all in the carpenter’s shed where it would be safe from pilfering black hands, and then went to bed at a very early hour since we would be leaving for Jerusalem long before dawn the next morning.
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