Confessions of Nat Turner

by William Styron

  At along about midnight I was awakened by a soft whisper and, suspended like clinking bells above my face, the tinkling of a lantern in whose sudden yellow glow the eyes of a little Negro girl were as round as eggshells. It was one of Wash’s younger sisters—another of Abraham’s numberless children—and she mumbled that I must come down to the cabin right away, her The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  daddy had sent her, her daddy was miserable sick. I dressed and followed the girl down the slope through the moonlit, frog-filled, balmy night and there in the cabin found Abraham as the girl had said, feverish and in bed, coughing and hacking away, his broad black chest glistening with streams of sweat in the glare of the lamp.

  “’Tain’t nothin’, Nat,” he said weakly. “Hit jes’ de misery I gits ev’ry springtime. I gwine be awright come next week.” After a pause he went on: “But nem’mine dat. Marse Samuel done told me I gots to take dem four boys up to whar de trace begins at two in de mawnin’. What time hit now?”

  “I just heard the clock ring twelve,” I said. “What boys you talking about, Abe?”

  “Marse Samuel done hired out four boys to chop tobacco fo’ two weeks over to de Vaughans’ place. Vaughan’s got a wagon dat’s gwine meet our wagon up whar de trace commences. I uz supposed to carry dem boys up dere but now I got dis misery, so you got to carry ’em, Nat. Dat’s at two o’clock, so git on now an’

  let dis po’ sick man rest his bones. I gwine be awright.”

  “But I’m goin’ to the camp meeting, Abe,” I started to protest, “all this time I figured on the camp meeting—”

  “You kin still go to de camp meetin’, boy.” he insisted, “you jes’

  ain’t gwine git a whole lot of sleepin’, dat’s all. Now git on, Nat, and carry dem boys on up dere in de wagon. Dey waitin’ right now behin’ de stable. Here, you got to take dis yere paper.”

  Of course Abraham was right about the camp meeting: I might still make it to the beginning of the trace and back, pick up Willis and Little Morning and the others and be off to Jerusalem just as I had planned—provided only that I was willing to do without sleep, a minor burden. What I had not counted on, however, was that among those four Negro boys I must take to meet the Vaughans’ wagon, among those sleepy black faces upturned to the moonlight in the hushed luminous space of ground behind the stable’s lowering wall, was that of Willis himself, and my heart gave a sickening heave as I caught sight of him and as there came over me a chill, clammy sense of betrayal.

  “But he said you could go to the camp meeting!” I fumed while I harnessed up the two mules, shortening their traces amid the manure-sweet stable gloom. Willis padded drowsily about barefooted in the darkness, helping me, saying not a word.

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  “Daggone, Willis!” I whispered urgently. “He didn’t mention nothin’ at all about bein’ hired out to Major Vaughan. Nothin’!

  Now daggone it, you goin’ to be over at the Vaughans’ for two weeks choppin’ tobacco and maybe it’ll bea whole ’nother year before you get to go to a camp meetin’.” I was nearly frantic with disappointment, and the radiant globe of pleasure and anticipation in which I had buoyantly dwelt for so long cracked and fell away from me like shattered glass as I yanked the mules out onto the moon-drenched lawn and, wildly impatient, urged the boys up into the wagon. “Daggone it,” I said, “I fixed fried chicken and there’s cider too! C’mon, nigger boys, move yo’

  butts!” The three other boys scampered up over the tailgate; young field hands of fifteen or sixteen, they giggled nervously as they clambered into the wagon; all three of them wore rabbits’

  feet attached to a leather bracelet on the left ankle—that year a plantation fashion; one boy was able to disgorge at will large bullfrog belches and this he began to do without ceasing, bringing forth from the other boys squeals of childish laughter.

  Willis climbed onto the seat beside me. “Git up, mules!” I said angrily. It was the first time I had ever felt even the trace of disillusionment with Marse Samuel and this strange new feeling itself added to my distress. “Daggone Marse Samuel anyway!” I said to Willis as we set forth down the lane. “If he was going to hire you out to the Vaughans for two weeks, how come he didn’t tell me and you first so we wouldn’t get all prepared about goin’

  to the camp meeting?”

  In a little while my chagrin and anger drained away, fading off into that mood of resignation to which most Negroes become accustomed sooner or later, no matter what the occasion. After all, there were worse blows, I figured as we rocked along slowly through the moon-white woods; suppose Willis could not go to this camp meeting, did it really matter? Certainly there would come along other revivals I could take him to, and his failure to attend this one would make but a tiny gap in his spiritual education. I looked at him tenderly as the moon spread a pale light over his features; nodding next to me, he was half asleep, his delicate lips apart and his eyelids fluttering in a fight against slumber. I aroused him with a nudge and a question: “What’s two and three?”

  “Five,” he said after a pause, rubbing his eyes.

  “And three and four?”

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  “Seven.” He began to say something else, hesitated, then went on: “Nat, how come you figures Marse Samuel done hired me out? I’se a ‘prentice carpenter.”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully, “I reckon they need extra hands over there. But that’s all right. Marse Samuel only hires out to good people, I know that, and the Vaughans are quality folk, treat you well. Anyway, listen, it ain’t but for two weeks, no time at all. Then you’ll be back and we’ll have more teaching. What’s three and eight?”

  “Fo’teen,” he said, yawning hugely.

  Behind us in the cart the three boys had gone to sleep, sprawled against each other lifeless and limp in the moonlight. The night was clamorous with frogs and katydids, warm, fragrant with cedar, clear like day, the moon powdering the trees in light as starkly white as the dust of bone. The lop-eared mules, plodding along with a crushed rasping sound against the dewy weeds, found their way ahead as if they knew the road by heart, and I let the reins go slack in my hand, drowsing too, and fitfully slept until the end of the trace, roused only once and then dimly by the high wail of a bobcat miles off in the swamp, its distant scream echoing through some perplexed strange dream like the sound of claws scraped in anguish across the bare face of the heavens.

  Presently I felt Willis stir on the seat and sensed the other boys moving about behind me; then I woke with a start and realized that the mules had stopped. Here in the moonlight at the end of the trace I saw the log road stretching east and west through the weeds and now against the trees the outline of the Vaughans’

  wagon, huge and canvas-covered and motionless, the floppy white roof making it look like the picture of a sailing ship, foundered now upon the edge of the forest. The figures of two white men disengaged themselves from the shadows of the wagon, and one of them—a portly gentleman with a plump aging face beneath a shiny wide-brimmed planter’s hat—approached as we sat there, and said to me in a not-disagreeable voice: “You Abraham?”

  “Nawsuh,” I said. “I’se Nat. I’se de numbah-two driver. Abraham he done took sick, yassuh, ’deed he took real sick.” Nigger gabble.

  He drew closer to the wagon and all of a sudden a tinkling The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  musical sound and a jaunty little tune interrupted the silence, sending a spooky chill up my back, and then I saw that the man had taken from his vest a silver watch and had opened it, and that it was from this watch that the music was coming, in miraculous plinkety notes, as if he held a tiny spinet piano and tiny pianist—I thought of one of the beribboned Turner ladies—imprisoned in his hand. My wonderstruck eyes must have betrayed me, for the man said then: “Quite a little timepiece, no? A triumph of the watchmaker’s art. T
hat, my boy, is Loodwig van Beethoven.” He snapped the watch shut, strangling the music in mid-passage. “And you are no more than ten minutes late and deserve praise for your promptitude. Look alive, boy!” He tossed up at me a plug of chewing tobacco, which I caught in midair. “Now then, Abe—or what’s your name—you have four young hands for the Vaughans here, right? And a paper for me to sign which you will take back to your master.” He turned aside from me for an instant and called in a breezy, amiable voice toward the back of the wagon: “All right, boys! Up now into the other wagon! Hop to, lads! We’ve nearly to Greensville County to go tonight.” Willis and the other boys scrambled down off their perch and moved somnolently toward the Vaughans’ great white wagon across the road.

  “Sleepyheads, I see!” he said with a chuckle. “Well, you’ll find the Major’s wagon a cozy enough place for a snooze. Hop to now, me young bucks! Hurry up and we’ll be on our way!”

  “Good-bye, Nat,” Willis said, starting across the road.

  I made a silent, parting wave to Willis and watched as the man spread the paper which Abraham had given me against the footboard beneath my legs and scratched something across it with a stubby quill, humming to himself in a breathy, hoarse voice the same tune he had just let loose from his watch. “Todd,”

  he whispered, “Jim, Shadrach, Willis … There, boy,” he added finally, “You take that receipt back to your master, and mind that you don’t lose your way. Go home straight away, do you hear me? Good night, laddie.”

  “Good night, massah,” I said. I watched him cross the log road and mount the wagon with slow and corpulent difficulty, seating himself next to the other white man, a shaggy blur in the moonlight, who tapped all four mules into an ambling start, then gave the hindmost mule a sharp and savage stroke with his whip, causing the wagon to sway out of the ditch, groaning as it picked up a ponderous sluggish speed and continued to totter The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  and sway in a precarious lopsided angle above the log road and with a great noise like the collision of countless barrels gained a final momentum, the uproar diminishing as the white shape passed westward through the moon’s relentless glare and out of sight.

  The Vaughans’ ain’t west, I thought. The Vaughans’ place is east.

  I sat there without moving. One of my mules stamped wearily, setting the traces to jingling. Around me in the woods the sound of frogs was deafening, shrilling in a ceaseless insensate choir like wind through a million reeds. Almost imperceptibly the moon sank slowly behind a thicket of cypress trees, and the log road was shadowed in a tangle of bent silhouetted limbs and branches, black as human arms. From the south a gentle breeze sprang up and I heard a whispering and a stirring across the leafy roof of the forest.

  “Lord?” I said aloud.

  Still I listened to the soft and sibilant rustling among the moonlit treetops, and I held my breath as if waiting for the sound of some immanent, hovering voice.

  “Lord?” I called again. But as I sat listening the wind died, and along with it the whispering and rustling, the unspoken voice, and the night once again was enveloped in a shrilling of frogs, the ripe hot chirruping of katydids among the trees.

  I must have waited there for an hour or more. Then slowly I started back—with an emptiness such as I had never felt before—knowing that I did not have to read the paper in my hand to make me sure of what I already knew, thinking miserably, fiercely: Willis. And those boys! Gone, Lord. Plain gone for good!

  Listen, Lord. Not hired out, not Vaughan’s, not anything but that man with the watch who was nothing but a nigger trader. Simple as that, yes, Lord! Not hired out but Jesus Christ Almighty sold . .

  . Sold, Lord, sold!

  And he was saying: “One might think I was a blockhead not to know why you’ve been moping around for so long and regarding me so accusingly. But though I will take the blame for poor management of an already bungled transaction, I will have to still steadfastly defend myself from any charge of insensibility. For is The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  that not what you find me guilty of?”

  “I don’t understand what that word means,” I said. “The charge of—something.”

  “The charge of insensibility. The charge that I somehow blithely allowed you to arrange to take the boy to a camp meeting while fully aware that he was to be sold before you ever got to Jerusalem. Which brings me to another matter that I should mention in passing. And that is the camp meeting itself. I was in Jerusalem that Friday, which as you may remember was the first day of the revival. I believe I counted no more than twenty-four of the faithful, not including several stray cats and dogs, at the meeting grounds.They packed up and left the next day, and had you gone there with your wagonload of wild-eyed apostles you would have been greeted by a deserted field of grass. Which only goes to show that this benighted countryside cannot sustain a religious revival any more than it can feed itself. So I mention in passing that I saved you from a bad disappointment. But as for the lad in question, I must only repeat that I had no more idea that you were taking him to that camp meeting than I had knowledge that the two of you were what you describe as inseparable friends. Lacking eyes in the back of my head, or a seventh sense, I can scarcely be asked to mark the relationship between every human being among the eighty or so of all colors that exist on this property. And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one’s own life are other men, they who are so desperately preoccupied with their own. I knew nothing about you and that boy, nothing at all.”

  I remained silent, wetting my lips with my tongue and feeling desolate and miserable, gazing at the library floor.

  “I have told you more than once now that had you come to me the next day and stated your case—had you made yourself immediately clear instead of for two weeks casting me these looks of canine reproach—I should have taken steps to get the boy back, buy him back even though that might mean money and travel to an extent quite out of the ordinary. But I must try to convince you that surely by now he has passed through the Petersburg market—though even of the place I cannot be really certain, it may be that he was taken to a sale in Carolina—whatever, that he has been passed on into some buyer’s hands and must now be on the way to Georgia or Alabama, though one can hope that a kindly providence has The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  seen fit that he somehow remain in Virginia. This, however, I sincerely doubt. The fact remains that he would now seem to be all but irrecoverable. I am in no way blaming you for lacking the presence of mind to come to me earlier when I may have been able to do something about it. I am only asking you now to try to understand the impossibility of my position. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said after a moment. “Yes, I do but—”

  “Yes, but again,” he interrupted, “you are still eaten up about that one thing that will not let you alone. Even though you say you told him of your own surprise, you are devoured by the terrible idea that the boy for the rest of his life will think that you were a party to, an accomplice in, his disposal. Am I correct in this? Isn’t that what you said you are unable to shake from your mind?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “that’s right.”

  “Then what can I say? Say that I too am sorry? I’ve said that over and over to you before. Perhaps he will think that, perhaps not. Possibly it would be better for your peace of mind if you envisioned him thinking charitably of you—if indeed it occurs to him to think of you as being involved in his disposition at all—envisioned him thinking of you only as an unwitting and ignorant dupe in the whole transaction, which you were. But if he thinks otherwise, I can only repeat again and for the last time that I am sorry. There is nothing else that I can say. Understand again: I had no idea that Abraham would fall ill and that you would become the—the instrument by which those boys were delivered into—into other hands.” He ha
lted then and looked at me, lapsing into silence.

  “But—” I began slowly, “but I—”

  “But what?”

  “All right,” I went on, “I see pretty well, I guess, about Willis, you didn’t know about him and I. How I was teaching him and all. But this other thing I don’t understand. I mean, going out at night like that and thinking they was going to be hired out at the Vaughans’.” I paused. “I mean, everyone was going to know what really happened anyway, by and by. Or not by and by.

  Soon.”

  He looked away from me and when he spoke at last his voice was faint and faraway; suddenly I realized how weary he The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  seemed, how gaunt were his cheeks and how red-rimmed and vacant were his eyes. “I will be truthful with you. I was quite simply troubled—afraid. I got confused, lost my bearings. Only twice do I recall darkies ever being sold away from here—both times by my father, both of the darkies, I’m afraid, crazy people who were a threat to the community. Furthermore and aside from that, there has never until now been any need. So I had never sold off hands before, and as I have readily admitted, it was a bungled transaction. I had not wanted the word to get around, I was afraid of the trouble and unrest that would ensue once the darkies knew that some of the people were being sold. So in my confusion I conceived the idea of disposing of the first four under the cover of night and in the guise of a fortnight’s hire to Major Vaughan. I thought that somehow the shock would be less this way, that it would be easier for the place to become accustomed to their absence. Worst of all, I conspired with a trader. It was folly to expect anything to come of this method. It was devious and cowardly. The duplicity! The masquerade! I should have done it in broad daylight with all the plantation as gaping onlookers to a plain and simple sale, with money changing hands in full view. Of the entire proceedings the only redeeming feature may be that at least I tried to make certain that my first sale would involve no separation of families. It was unfortunate for you, perhaps imponderably unfortunate for your young friend, that my resolve to pick only boys who were old enough to make the break, boys who additionally had already been orphaned and who thus had no family ties to sever—well, it was unfortunate that he was one of four who answered to that description.” He halted again, remaining silent, then said in a faint voice: “I’m sorry. God, how sorry I am, that Willie …”