For what could freedom mean to Arnold? Unschooled, unskilled, clumsy by nature, childlike and credulous, his spirit numbed by the forty years or more he had spent as a chattel, he had doubtless found life affliction enough while dwelling in a state of bondage. Now having been set free through the grace and piety of his late mistress (who had left him a hundred dollars—which he had squandered in brandy during his first free year—but who had not thought to teach him a trade), the oafish old fellow dwelt upon life’s furthest rim, more insignificant and wretched than he had ever been in slavery, a squatter in an unspeakably filthy lean-to shack on the outskirts of town, hiring himself out as a part-time field hand but existing mainly as a ragpicker or an emptier of privies or in the worst of times as a simple beggar, the bleached palm of his black hand extended for a penny or a worn British farthing and his lips working in a witless “Thank-ee, massah” to those townsmen no longer his masters in fact but in spirit masters more tyrannical than ever before. Of course, a few of the townspeople took pity on Arnold and his brethren but most of them resented his freedom, not because he himself was any threat but because he was in truth a symbol—a symbol of something gone asunder in the institution yet even more importantly a walking reminder of freedom itself and of menacing words, rarely spoken aloud, like emancipation and manumission, and therefore they despised him in a way they could never despise a Negro held in subjection. As for the slaves, among their company he was hardly better off, for if they had no reason actually to despise him he was still the incarnation of freedom, The Confessions of Nat Turner
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and such freedom was, as any fool could see, a stinking apparition of hopelessness and degradation. Thus their impulse was to rag Arnold mercilessly and play cruel tricks on him and to treat him with humorous contempt.
Surely even the poor lepers of Galilee, and all the outcasts to whom Jesus ministered in those awful times, lived no worse than such a free Negro in Virginia during the years of which I think and speak.
The woman stepped close to Arnold, who immediately bent forward in a groveling fashion, plucking from his head as he did so an absurd black wool hat several sizes too large for him and half devoured by moths. And then she spoke, the voice clear, resonant, quite gracious and polite, in rapid yet pleasantly warm Northern tones: “I seem to have lost my bearings”—the accent now touched with vague anxiety—“Major Ridley told me that the courthouse was next to the market. But all I see is a stable on one side and a dram shop on the other. Could you direct me to the courthouse?”
“Yam,” Arnold replied. His face was all nervous obsequiousness, eager, his mouth agape in a ridiculous grin. “Majah Riblees he lib dar, ap yonnah road ap yonnah.” He made an elaborate gesture with his arm, pointing away from the courthouse, down the road leading out of Jerusalem to the west. “Yam, me tek’ee dar, missy, me tek’ee dar.” I listened closely. It was blue-gum country-nigger talk at its thickest, nearly impenetrable, a stunted speech unbearably halting and cumbersome with a wet gulping sound of Africa in it. There were occasions when it was hard enough for some town Negroes to grasp everything in such speech; no wonder that the lady from the North stood dumbstruck, gazing at Arnold with the panicky eyes of one in sudden confrontation with a lunatic. She had understood absolutely nothing, while the Godforsaken Arnold, understanding only a fraction more, had battened upon the name Ridley and had conceived the notion that she wished to be directed to the Major’s home. He kept on gabbling away, groveling, now lowering to the ground his wreck of a hat in a servile, swooping motion. “Yam, missy, me tek’ee Majah Riblees!”
“But—but—” the woman began to stammer, “I don’t seem to know what—” And she halted, her expression now full of chagrin, sorrow, something even more disturbing—perhaps it was horror, but it seemed even more to be akin to pity. At any rate, it was The Confessions of Nat Turner
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what then took place—and it had to do not alone with Arnold and the Northern lady but with the sudden upheaval in myself—that caused this encounter to be graven upon my brain as long as I was possessed of memory. For the woman said nothing more, simply stood there while her arm went limp and the parasol clattered to the road, then raised her clenched fists to her face as if she were striking herself—an angry, tormented gesture—and burst into tears. Her whole frame—backbone, shoulders, rib cage—all the bones which moments before had supported her so proudly seemed to collapse inward with a rush, and she became helpless and shrunken as she stood there in the road, fists pressed to her eyes, shaken by loud racking sobs. It was as if something long pent up within her had been loosed in a torrent.
On the gallery of the market and in the street I could both see and sense a score of Negroes watching her, all of them silent now, puzzled, mouths agape as they regarded her with round wondering eyes.
I had risen in the meantime with my Bible clasped between my hands, and as I drew nearer to the edge of the gallery I was seized by a hot convulsive emotion that I had never known so powerfully before—it was like a roaring in my ears. For what I had seen on this white woman’s face was pity—pity wrenched from the very depths of her soul—and the sight of that pity, the vision of that tender self so reduced by compassion to this helpless state of sobs and bloodless clenched knuckles and scalding tears, caused me an irresistible, flooding moment of desire. And it was, you see, pity alone that did this, not the woman herself apart from pity. For there is peril enough in the first hint of a black man’s lust for a white woman, and since anyway I had striven for years to stifle all fleshly desire—feeling that it was the Lord’s command—there had been little temptation for me to covet such a wild and hazardous prize: to fornicate with a white woman in the ordinary course of events is for most Negroes so remote a possibility, and so mortally dangerous, as to remain hardly even the stirring of a shadowy idea upon the margin of consciousness. But this was something I had never seen. It was as if, divesting herself of all composure and breaking down in this fashion—exposing a naked feeling in a way I had never seen a white woman do before—she had invited me to glimpse herself naked in the flesh, and I felt myself burning for her. Burning!
And even as I stood there trying to dominate and still this The Confessions of Nat Turner
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passion, which I knew to be abominable to the Lord, I sensed that my thoughts had already run galloping beyond control, and in a swift fantasy I saw myself down on the road beginning to possess her without tenderness, without gratitude for her pity but with abrupt, brutal, and rampaging fury, watching the compassion melt from her tear-stained face as I bore her to the earth, my black hands already tearing at the lustrous billowing silk as I drew the dress up around her waist, and forcing apart those soft white thighs, exposed the zone of fleecy brown hair into which I drove my black self with stiff merciless thrusts. The vision would not be mastered nor leave me alone. I stood at the edge of the gallery, looking down while the sweat began to stream from my brow and my heart beat with an urgent and oppressive drumming in my throat. Far off in the back of the market I could hear a banjo plinking and the clatter and jingling of a tambourine, and a surge of nigger laughter. Still the woman kept weeping into her hands, the smooth back of her neck exposed now, white as a water lily, and as silken-tender and vulnerable; yet still in my mind’s eye I was mounted upon her in the dust of the road, hot as a coupling fox, my excitement gathering as I conceived not of any pleasure I might cause her or myself, but only the swift and violent immediacy of a pain of which I was complete overseer, repaying her pity by crushing my teeth against her mouth until the blood ran in rivulets upon her cheeks, displaying my gratitude for that feathery compassion not by murmured endearments but by clasping my hands from underneath ever more fiercely upon the firm flesh of squirming buttocks until drawn up full against my black groin she cried out in the wildest anguish while I shot off within her in warm outrageous spurts of defilement.
“I don’t understand!” I heard the woman cry. “Oh God, I don’
t understand!” And then she raised her head from her hands, and at that instant it was as if my hot vision and her sudden seizure had simultaneously dissolved, vanished. She shook her head in a quick furious motion, paying no attention to Arnold, her pale and beautiful face tear-streaked yet no longer haggard with pity but quite proud, with a kind of buried exultancy, and angry; and as she said it again now—“Oh, no, I just don’t understand! ”—her voice was calm with a flat emphatic outrage and she reached down and retrieved her parasol from the road then turned and strode very briskly but with stately and composed steps up the street, the resplendent silk of her dress making a slippery swishing as she disappeared, erect and proud, past the corner of The Confessions of Nat Turner
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the market. I later learned that soon she left town and never came back. But now I watched her go, my body still hot and swollen and agitated, even though the power of the emotion and my raging heartbeat had begun to slacken as the woman had gained control of herself. Suddenly she was gone. I was left depleted, beaten, and with a choked sensation in my throat as if, trying to utter a single word at that moment, I would find myself bereft of speech.
Below me I saw Arnold shuffle away, mumbling to himself, nodding his head in woolly bewilderment. There was a buzz and yammer among the Negroes around the gallery, cackles of nervous uncomprehending laughter, and then the rhythms of the old Saturday morning market commotion started up again, and all was as it had been before. I stood there for an instant, watching the place in the road where I had taken the woman. It seemed so real in my imagination that I felt there should be some scuffed, trampled place in the dust, marking our struggle.
Though the fever of my excitement had passed, I heard a Negro youth snicker nearby and I saw that he was eying me; then I realized that I was still in the virile state and that this showed through my trousers, and so in embarrassment I sidled away to the rear of the gallery, where I squatted down again in a patch of sunlight. For a long while I was unable to shake the memory of what had just happened and I felt a deep shame, closing my eyes and breathing a prayer to the Lord, supplicating His pardon for this terrible moment of lasciviousness. Thine eyes shall behold strange women and thine heart shall utter perverse things
. . . He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.
I prayed for a bit with passionate contrition; it was a prayer from the soul and I felt that the Lord had understood and had granted me forgiveness for this lapse. Even so, the intensity of my passion troubled me greatly, and all the rest of the morning I searched my Bible, trying to discover some key to this powerful emotion and the reason for my thinking these savage thoughts when the woman broke down so pathetically, drowned in her sympathy. But the Bible offered me no answer, and I remember that later this day, when Moore fetched me from the market and we drove back to the farm in the wagon through waning summer fields growing yellowish and parched, I was filled with somber feelings that I was unable to banish, deeply troubled that it was not a white person’s abuse or scorn or even indifference which could ignite in me this murderous hatred but his pity, maybe even his tenderest moment of charity.
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My years with Mr. Thomas Moore lasted nearly a decade and seemed to me twice as long, filled as they were with sweaty and monotonous toil. Yet I must say that those same years were in certain ways the most fruitful I ever spent, since they offered many occasions for reflection and spiritual contemplation and presented opportunities in the field of evangelism such as I had never known even within the lenient world where I had spent my early life. I suppose the truth is simply that it was possible for benefits like these to accrue only to a Negro lucky enough to remain in the poor but relatively benign atmosphere of Virginia.
For here in this wornout country with its decrepit little farms there was still an ebb and flow of human sympathy—no matter how strained and imperfect—between slave and master, even an understanding (if sometimes prickly) intimacy; and in this climate a black man had not yet become the cipher he would become in the steaming fastnesses of the far South but could get off in the woods by himself or with a friend, scratch his balls and relax and roast a stolen chicken over an open fire and brood upon women and the joys of the belly or the possibility of getting hold of a jug of brandy, or pleasure himself with thoughts of any of the countless tolerable features of human existence.
To be sure, it was a way of life far from, let us say, Elysian but it was also not Alabama. Even the most childlike, ignorant, and benighted Negroes in Virginia had heard that name, and its lovely liquid syllables could arouse only a sickening chill; likewise they had all heard of Mississippi and Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas, and by way of scary tales shuddering up through the vast black grapevine which spread throughout the South, had learned to fear those names like death. Indeed, I must confess that I myself never was totally free of this dread even when my ownership by Moore seemed the most secure or when later, owned by Travis, I was safer still. Often during those years I reflected upon the mysterious providence of God which on that icy cold day of a February past had seen to it that I not be swallowed up into the ant-swarm and the faceless extinction of a nigger-crawling 10,000-acre plantation in the deepest South but that I be delivered instead into the dilapidated but homey surroundings which were the result of my sale to this pinched, puckerfaced little Southampton farmer named Moore.
As for Moore, never again did he lift a hand against me after that day when he struck me with his bullwhip. Not that he didn’t still thoroughly detest me with a profound detestation that lasted, I’m certain, until the moment of his premature and unlamented The Confessions of Nat Turner
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death. He hated all Negroes with a blind, obsessive hatred which verged upon a kind of minor daily ecstasy, and I was certainly not exempt, especially in the light of my book-learning. Even so, he possessed a countrified shrewdness, the vestige of a native intuition which must have warned him that it could only work to his own disadvantage to mistreat or vent his generalized hatred upon the compliant, exemplary, honey-tempered piece of property I determined early to become. And such property I became—a paragon of rectitude, of alacrity, of lively industriousness, of sweet equanimity and uncomplaining obedience. Nor do I exaggerate all this, even though never a day went by when I was not conscious of the weird unnaturalness of this adopted role. For now as all the promise and hope I had ever known flickered out and died and as I sank into the smothering night of bondage, it seemed plain that I must patiently suffer the evil things in store for me, gaining time to meditate upon such possibilities as the remote future might offer and to consult the Scriptures for guidance as to an endurable way of life. Above all I realized that I must not take panic, lashing out in futile retaliation at this analphabetic, squinty-eyed new owner of mine, but instead, like one caught in swamp quicksand who stays each muscle to avoid sinking deeper in the mire, must steel myself to accept without blinking all indignities, all befoulment, all mean hurts forthcoming—at least for the present time. There are occasions, as I have pointed out, when in order to buy some advantage from a white man it is better not even to say “please” but to silently wrap oneself up in one’s niggerness like the blackest of shrouds.
Certain Negroes, in exploiting their own particular niggerness, tell dumb jokes on themselves, learn to shuffle and scrape for their owners, wallowing in the dust at the slightest provocation, midriffs clutched in idiot laughter, or they master the rudiments of the banjo and the jew’s-harp or endear themselves to all, white and black, through droll interminable tales about ha’nts and witches and conjurs and the cunning little creatures of the swamp and woods. Others, by virtue of some indwelling grittiness and strength, reverse this procedure entirely and in their niggerness are able to outdo many white people at presenting to the world a grotesque swagger, becoming a black driver who would rather flog a fellow Negro than eat Smithfield ham, or at the most tolerable limit becoming a tyrannical, fussy, d
isdainful old kitchen mammy or butler whose very security depends upon maintaining without stint—safely this side of The Confessions of Nat Turner
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insolence—an aspect of nasty and arrogant dominion. As for myself, I was a very special case and I decided upon humility, a soft voice, and houndlike obedience. Without these qualities, the fact that I could read and that I was also a student of the Bible might have become for Moore (he being both illiterate and a primitive atheist) an insufferable burden to his peace of mind. But since I was neither sullen nor impudent but comported myself with studied meekness, even a man so shaken with niggerhatred as Moore could only treat me with passable decency and at the very worst advertise me to his neighbors as a kind of ludicrous freak.
“I done bought me a black gospeler,” he would announce in those early days, “a nigger that done learnt the Bible near ’bout by heart. Recite us about Moses, boy.” And I, confronting a circle of brandy-fragrant sun-scorched snaggle-mouthed anus-scratching farmers, would intone in a soft and placid voice a chapter or so from Numbers, which I did indeed know from memory, all the while returning with unfaltering pious glance their looks of mingled wonder, malevolence, suspicion, and shifty-eyed respect, all the while counseling myself to patience, patience, patience to the end. At such moments, though Moore’s hatred for me glittered like a cold bead amid the drowned blue center of his better eye, I knew that somehow this patience would get me through. Indeed, after a while it tended to neutralize his hatred, so that he was eventually forced to treat me with a sort of grudging, grim, resigned good will.
So all through the long years of my twenties I was, in my outward aspects at least, the most pliant, unremarkable young slave anyone could ever imagine. My chores were toilsome and obnoxious and boring. But with forbearance on my part and through daily prayer they never became really intolerable, and I resolved to follow Moore’s commands with all the amiability I could muster.
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