Confessions of Nat Turner

by William Styron

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  them, let them be as chaff before the wind.” Then in the moonlight their faces receded into shadow and I said: “All right.

  Now. We commence the battle.”

  In silence and in single file—Nelson leading, I close at his heels—we came out of the woods and into the cotton patch behind Travis’s wheel shop. One of the men coughed in the darkness behind me and at that instant two of Travis’s cur dogs set up a yapping and howling in the barnyard. I whispered for quiet and we stood stock-still. Then (having foreseen this too) I motioned for Hark to go ahead before us and hush up the dogs: he was on good terms with them and could put them at ease. We waited as Hark stalked across the moonlit field and into the barnyard, waited until the dogs gave a friendly whimper and fell silent. The moon in an opalescent hush came down like dust, like dim daylight, exfoliating from the shop and the barn and sheds elongated shadows—black sharp silhouettes of gable, cornice, roof beam, door.It was hot and still. There was no sound from the woods save for the katydids’ high-pitched cheercheer-cheercheer and the peeping of crickets among the weeds. In the flat blazing yellow of the moonlight Travis’s house slumbered, dark within and still as the halls of death. Nelson suddenly laid a hand on my arm and whispered: “Look dar.”

  Then I saw Hark’s huge outline detach itself from the shadow of the barn, and still another, angular and tall: this would be Austin, the last member to join my striking force. Twenty-five or so, he had nothing against his present owner, Henry Bryant, who had treated him amiably, but felt nothing for him either and had sworn that he would gladly kill him. He had, however, once gotten into a vicious fight with Sam over a yellow girl in Jerusalem and I only hoped that their enmity would not flare up now again.

  I signaled for the other men to follow me and we proceeded in Indian file across the cotton patch, clambered quietly over a stile, and met Hark and Austin in the lee of the wheel shop, out of sight of the house. We were now eight. As I gave my keys to Nelson and whispered instructions to him and Sam, I could hear Travis’s hogs grunting sleepily in their pen. Now while Sam and Nelson stole into the shop for a ladder, I told Austin to go to the stable and saddle up Travis’s horses, bidding him to work as silently as he could. He was a tall, lanky field hand with a mean black skull-shaped face, agile and quick despite his height, and very powerful. On the way over through the woods from Bryant’s his horse had flushed a skunk and he stank to heaven. No sooner had he gone off to the stable than Sam and Nelson The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  returned with the ladder. I joined them in walking across the yard to the side of the house while the other four moved noiselessly ahead in front of us to their station in the shrubbery around the front porch. The skunk stench lingered, hot in the nostrils. The two cur dogs ambled along with us beneath the ladder; their bony flanks were outlined in sharp moonlit relief, and one dragged a game leg. A faint breeze sprang up and the skunk odor was obliterated. The air was filled with the rank fragrance of mimosa. I caught my breath for an instant, thinking of the time so long ago when I had played with a boy named Wash in a mimosa-sweet glade at Turner’s Mill. The brief reverie burst like splintered glass. I heard the ladder make a faint taptapping as they set it against the side of the house and quickly I tested it for balance, gripping it tight by a chesthigh rung, then without a word began my climb up the side of the house, past the newly whitewashed clapboard timbers that hurt my eyes in a calcimine lunar glare. Even as I reached the open upper hallway window with its fluttering curtains I heard from the main bedroom a stertorous rasping sound, deep-throated, half-strangled, and recognized it as Travis’s snore. (I remembered Miss Sarah’s

  “Land sakes alive, Mister Joe does make a racket but you jus’ do learn to live with it after a bit.”) I heaved myself silently over the sill into the dark hallway, into the very bosom of the cavernous snoring noise that muffled the sound of my feet as they struck the creaking floor. I was all aslime with sweat beneath my shirt, my mouth had the dry bitter taste of a walnut shell. It’s not I who’s doing this, I thought abruptly, it is someone else. I tried to spit but my tongue scraped at the roof of my mouth as if against plaster or sand. I found the stairs.

  Down on the first floor at the foot of the stairs I lit a candle with a lucifer match, meeting as I did the black wonder-struck face of the servant boy Moses, who had been aroused from his tiny cupboard beneath the stairway by the sound of my feet. His eyes rolled white with alarm. He was stark naked. “What you doin’, Nat?” he whispered.

  “Just never you mind,” I whispered in return. “Go back to sleep.”

  “What time hit?” he whined.

  “Hush up,” I replied. “Go to bed.”

  I removed two rifles and a sword from their rack at my elbow and then crossed to the front door, where I unhooked the inside latch and let the others enter, one by one, from the front porch. Will The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  was last. I put a restraining hand against his chest. “You stay here at the door,” I told him, “Be on the lookout if anybody comes. Or tries to get out this way.” Then I turned to the others and said in a low voice: “Nelson and Hark and Jack up to the attic and at them two boys. Sam and Henry stay with me.” The six of us mounted the stairs.

  In the many weeks since that night I have wondered more than once what passed through Travis’s sleep-drowned senses when with such violence and rude suddenness we flung ourselves into his presence and made clear those designs which even he, a forbearing and lenient master, must have considered a nightmare possibility but long since put away from his thoughts as one puts away all ideas of remote and improbable ruin. For surely in the watches of the night, like all white men, he must from time to time have flopped over with a sick groan, thinking of those docile laughing creatures down at the rim of the woods, wondering in a flash of mad and terrible illumination what might happen if—if like gentle pets turned into rampaging beasts they should take it into their hearts to destroy him, and along with him all his own and dearest and best. If by some legerdemain those comical simpleheads known for their childish devotion—so affecting along with their cunning faults and failings—but never known for their manhood or their will or their nerve, should overnight become transformed into something else, into implacable assassins, let us say, wild dogs, avenging executioners—what then would happen to this poor frail flesh?

  Surely at one time or another Travis, like other white men, had been skewered upon such disquieting fancies, and shuddered in his bed. Just as surely his pathetic faith in history had at last erased these frights and apprehensions from his head, allowing him more often sweet composure and pleasant dreams—for was it not true that such a cataclysm had never happened? Was it not fact, known even to the humblest yeoman farmer and white-trash squatter and vagabond, that there was something stupidly inert about these people, something abject and sluggish and emasculate that would forever prevent them from so dangerous, so bold and intrepid a course, as it had kept them in meek submission for two centuries and more? Surely Travis put his trust in the fragile testimony of history, reckoning with other white men that since these people in the long-recorded annals of the land had never risen up, they never would rise up, and with this faith—rocklike, unswerving as a banker’s faith in dollars—he was able to sleep the sleep of the innocent, all anxieties laid to rest.

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  Thus it may have been disbelief alone that governed his still-drowsing mind, and no recollection of past fears, when he shot upright in his bed next to Miss Sarah, cast his eyes at my broadax in a gaze of dull perplexity, and said: “What you all think you’re doin’ in here?”

  The sharp piney odor of camphene stung in my nose. The air was blurred with greasy smoke. By the light of the torch that Henry held aloft I could see that Miss Sarah too had risen up in bed, but the look on her face was not one of puzzlement, like her husband’s, but of naked terror. Instantly she began to
moan, a castaway whimper low in the lungs, barely audible. But I turned back to Travis now, and in doing so I realized with wonder that this was the first moment in all the years I had been near him that I had ever looked directly into his eyes. I had heard his voice, known his presence like that of close kin; my eyes had a thousand times glanced off his mouth and cheek and chin but not once encountered his own. It was my fault alone, my primal fear but—no matter. Now I saw that beneath the perplexity, the film of sleep, his eyes were brown and rather melancholy, acquainted with hard toil, remote perhaps, somewhat inflexible but not at all unkind, and I felt that I knew him at last—maybe even now not well but far better than one knows another man by a pair of muddy trousers viewed from the level of the ground, or bare arms and hands, or a disembodied voice. It was as if by encountering those eyes I had found the torn and longmissing fragment of a portrait of this far-off abstract being who possessed my body; his face was complete now and I had a final glimpse of who he truly might be. Whatever else he was, he was a man.

  All right, man, I thought.

  With this knowledge I raised the broadax above my head, and felt the weapon shiver there like a reed in a savage wind. “Thus art thou slain!” I cried, and the ax descended with a whisper and missed by half a foot, striking not Travis’s skull but the headboard between him and his wife. And at that moment Miss Sarah’s soft moan bloomed into a shriek.

  In this way I inaugurated my great mission— Ah Lord! —I who was to strike the first blow. It seemed as if all strength had left me, my limbs were like jelly, and for the life of me I could not pry the blade of the broadax from the imprisoning timber. Murmuring a prayer, I struggled with the haft. Travis in the meantime, with a terrified bellow, had escaped from the bed and in the sudden The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  dawning of fright, weaponless and with his exit blocked by three Negroes and the bed itself, had become overmastered by raw panic and was trying to find his way out through the wall. “Sarah!

  Sarah!” I heard him wail. But she could not help him. She shrieked like a demented angel. My God, I thought, as I worked at the ax handle; in a fog of senseless deliberation I commenced to catalog the miscellany of homely bedroom artifacts that by torchlight swarmed at the rim of my sight: gold pocket watch, blue hair ribbon, pitcher, faded slate-gray looking glass, comb, Bible, chamber pot, portrait of a grandmother, quill pen, glass of barley water half full. “Shit!” I heard Sam say behind me. “Shit!

  Kill dat fuckin’ bastid!” With a squeal of sprained timber I yanked the blade from the oak, raised it up, swung again at Travis, still clawing at the wall, and—incredibly, impossibly—missed once more. The outside of the blade glanced lightly from his shoulders and the ax handle itself made a deft little pirouette in my hand, twinkled from my grasp, and slid harmlessly to the floor. Half deafened by Miss Sarah’s screams, I reached to retrieve the ax; as I bent down I saw that Travis, regaining charge of his senses, had wheeled about and now stood with his back against the wall and clutched a pewter vase in hand, prepared to defend himself.

  His gaunt work-worn face was the hue of his white nightshirt—but at last how brave he was! Ready for anything, he had joined the battle. In his strong woodsman’s hands the flimsy vase seemed as lethal as a bludgeon. His head moved from side to side in a wary, dangerous rhythm like that of a bobcat I had once seen cornered by a pack of dogs. “Kill him!” I heard Sam roar behind me. But I was not ready.

  I had laid my fingers on the haft of the ax again—dismayed at my irresolution and clumsiness, trembling in every bone—when there now took place that unforeseen act which would linger in my mind during whatever remaining days I was granted the power of memory. Just as I saw it happen I knew that it would be part of my being wherever I went, or whatever I was or became through my allotted time, even in the serene pastures of ancient age. For now as if from the outer dark, from nowhere, and with a silence that was a species of mystery in itself, Will hurled his body into the narrow space between myself and Travis, and his small black shape seemed to grow immense, somehow amorous, enveloping Travis’s nightshirted figure in a brief embrace, almost as if he had joined him in a lascivious dance.

  There were no words spoken as Will and Travis met thus in the torchlight glare; only Miss Sarah’s scream, rising now to an even higher pitch of delirium, informed me of the true nature of this The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  anxious coupling. So quickly that it took a moment for me to realize that the flash of light I glimpsed was from one of the hatchets, honed to an exquisite edge. I saw Will’s arm go skyward,all black resistless sinew, and come down, go up again, and down, up and down once more, then he jumped backward and away, parted company with this companion he had so intimately clasped, and it was at that instant that Travis’s head, gushing blood from a matrix of pulpy crimson flesh, rolled from his neck and fell to the floor with a single bounce, then lay still.

  The headless body, nightshirted, slid down the wall with a faint hissing sound and collapsed in a pile of skinny shanks, elbows, knobby knees. Blood deluged the room in a foaming sacrament.

  “Dar now, preacher man!” I heard Will howling at me. “If’n you cain’t do it, I do it! Das de way us rock dem white fuckahs! Shut yo’ face, white cun!” he cried to Miss Sarah, then to me: “Does you git her, preacher man, or does I?”

  I had no power of speech—though I tried to move my lips—but it made no difference anyway. Will had just begun, his lust was so voracious as to be past all fathoming. Before I could make a sign he had absolved me from the choice. The initiative had become his alone. “Git on aside, preacher man!” he commanded; despite myself I did so, and in a single leap he was across the bed and astride the screaming, squirming fat woman, friendly soul, who had not been able to go to that camp meeting after all. Once again the act was done with prodigious speed and intensity; again in its absolute devotion and urgency it was as if by his embrace this scarred, tortured little black man was consummating at last ten thousand old swollen moments of frantic and unappeasable desire. Between Miss Sarah’s thrashing, naked thighs he lay in stiff elongate quest like a lover; his downward-seeking head masked her face and mostly hid it—all but for the tangled tresses of her hair and the pupil of one eye, wildly quivering, which cast me a glint of lunatic blankness even as the hatchet went up again, and down, and chopped off her scream. Then unimaginable blood spewed forth and I heard the inhabiting spirit leave her body; it flew past my ear like a moth. I turned away as the hatchet made a final chunk-chunk and became still. I thrust aside Henry and Sam (can it really be that I was trying to escape?) and reached the open door. As I gained the threshold I saw the black boy Moses standing with a candle, mouth agape, rigid and transfigured as if in a sleepwalker’s dream. Oddly like music, a horn blow, the voice of a Negro cried out upstairs—surely it was Hark—a jubilant sound; The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  there was the rough scuffling of something being dragged, a creaking of attic timbers, and the blanched, hacked, bleeding corpses of Putnam and the Westbrook boy came clumpety-clumping down the steep steps together like huge loose-limbed dolls hurled by an angry child, drenching Moses’s bare feet in vermilion. Streams of blood past all comprehension lay across the walls and timbers of the evening, blood like all the billows and deeps of the oceans of the world. “Ah my God!” I thought, half aloud. “Hast Thou truly called me to this?”

  Suddenly Hark plunged with thundering footsteps down the attic stairs, and his eyes glittered in the torchlight, wearing an expression of serene joy. He vaulted the two bodies in a bound.

  A servant of servants was Hark no more; he had tasted blood.

  The lost and grieving father had become a killer of men.

  “Hot damn!” I heard him say.

  “Let’s git out of here!” I called, controlling my voice.

  “Let’s git movin’ on!”

  And even as I spoke I felt my wrist being impaled upon agonizing p
ain. At almost the same instant I looked down and began to force open the jaws of Moses, who, driven quite mad by all he had witnessed, had sunk his teeth into the nearest flesh at hand.

  One afternoon in my cell in jail just before my trial I remember Mr. Thomas Gray saying to me in that half-distraught, half-choked tone his voice achieved when he was at the highest point of his own disbelief: “But the butchery, Reverend, the senseless slaughter! The blood of so many of the innocent! How are you able to justify all that? That’s one of the things the people want to know most of all. That’s what I’d like to know, by God! I!”

  A bitter November wind had swept through the cell. My ankles were cold and numb from the chains. When I failed to answer him right away, he went on, slapping the folded paper notes to my confessions against his thick haunch. “I mean, God Almighty, Reverend, these items defy civilized belief, some of ‘em! Lissen here. Item. Taken from your own sworn testimony. After you’ve left the Travis house, leaving behind four slain, you suddenly recollect the little infant—a less than two-year’s-old babe sleepin’

  in his cradle. You tell me you was goin’ to spare the child but suddenly you have a second thought about it. So you say out loud, ‘Nits breed lice!’—there’s a delicate sentiment, I’ll vow, The Confessions of Nat Turner

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  Reverend, for a man of the cloth—and you send Henry and Will back to the house an’ they take that pore pitiful little babe and dash its brains out agin the wall. That’s an item that truly defies civilized belief! Yet it’s as true as true can be. Right from your own lips. An’ you still persist in sayin’ that you feel no guilt over such a ghastly item. You still can claim that you feel not the slightest pang of remorse.”