The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial
Page 4
“The governor was so sympathetic when he first heard of the rebellion, or the insurrection, as he called it. But on the nineteenth Floyd writes, ‘News from the Colonel of the 39th says the whole is false as it relates to the massacre of Mrs. Cousins and family in Dinwiddie. The slaves are quiet and evince no disposition to rebel.’ The next day he writes: ‘The alarm of the country is great in the counties between this and the Blue Ridge Mountains. I am daily sending them a portion of arms though I know there is no danger as the slaves were never more humbled and subdued.’
“On September 23rd, he mentions two trials in particular that troubled him: ‘I received the record of the trial of Lucy and Joe of Southampton. They were of the insurgents.’”
Calvin leaned forward in his chair, his fingers steepled, his elbows on the table.
“Do you remember me telling you of them, Professor? Lucy and Joe belonged to the widow Mary Barrow and to John Clarke Turner, respectively. I remember when I was told of the trials that my heart was filled with doubt. The governor appears to have been doubtful also. He wrote, ‘What can be done, I yet know not, as I am obliged by the Constitution first to require the advice of the council, then to do as I please. This endangers the lives of these negroes, though I am disposed to reprieve for transportation I cannot do it until I first require advice of council and there are no councillors now in Richmond, nor will there be unless Daniel comes to town in time enough.’”
Harriet pushed her toast away. She had no appetite. People died for no reason. She continued, forcing her way through the reading, “Then on September 27th, ‘I have received record of the trial of three slaves for treason in Southampton. Am recommended to mercy, which I would grant… but in this case I cannot do so, because there is not one member of the Council of State in Richmond. Wherefore, the poor wretches must lose their lives by absence of the councillors from their official duties.’”
Harriet refolded the letter and stuffed it back in its envelope. It was appalling how little care men had for their brothers. “All this is making me ill.”
“And indignant, my dear Harriet.”
“But it was so long ago, Professor. What good does it do to dig it all up now? It is twenty-five years hence and as the governor stated, the poor wretches have already lost their lives. I cannot bring them back.”
“Perhaps, my wife. But the truth is still a precious gem that does not lose value with age. Truth might at least ease the suffering of loved ones left behind.”
The two of them discussed the diary entries. “They are too detailed for me to doubt them.” When they were finished it was decided. She could not travel to the South to investigate; there was a bounty on her head. Instead, Harriet would travel to New York to share the letter with Frederick Douglass and her brother Henry.
Nat Turner
Chapter 5
Cross Keys Area, outside Jerusalem, Virginia
Christmas 1830
Inside the stove warmed the small cabin that was packed with twenty to thirty people—survival made all of them heroes.
Nat Turner made his way around the room, greeting them: Sam, Hark, and the freemen. He leaned to kiss his mother on the cheek. In the corner the children played and he walked to join them. On Sundays, after church, he taught them to read. But before he could begin a lesson this day, his wife, Cherry, came to him.
“It is Christmas, husband, let them play.” She led him to a chair. He looked down at his feet. They felt nothing now, but soon he knew he would feel spiky pain as they thawed.
Nat Turner looked around the small, crowded living space at the people gathered there. It had been a hard winter—hard for slave owners, brutal for slaves—no longer people but black-draped skeletons. Few of the captors had enough to eat and were hard-pressed to find heart to share the little that kept them alive with captives.
The warm air in the cabin carried the bittersweet smell of the hardworking people and mixed it with aromas from the kitchen.
God had sent him back for them.
Eyes shifted from the stove to conversations and back again. Nat Turner smelled the warm fragrance of baking sweet potatoes from the hosts’ garden. A brine of vinegar and salt water steamed from a kettle on the iron stove. As people entered the cabin, shivering from the cold, they made their way to Thomas Hathcock’s wife, freewoman and hostess, stationed near the pots. One would come with a few precious potatoes, a single squash, or a cup of dried beans. All of it swirled into the kettle. Each one brought a metal cup or pan, and when the food was finished they would share.
Mrs. Hathcock had a reputation. Though she was known for her preserves, she could make anything delicious. She did wonders with everything she touched.
Next to the kettle was a large pot of mixed greens—mustard and collards that her husband had rescued from the weather—already tender and kept warming. One of the women brought a small but prized piece of salt pork. Mrs. Hathcock added a tiny, precious portion to the greens to season them. She added lard and a bit of the salt pork to a cast-iron skillet and began to steam-fry a head of cabbage and bits more of it to some of the other dishes to season them.
Daniel came through the door with his mother, both of them Peter Edwards’s slaves. It was rare, but their master kept them together as mother and son. In her hands was a bundle tied like treasure in a rag. She beamed.
“My master butchered last week and gave me these.” Two pig ears, a snout, a tail, and four hooves, frozen from the cold. “There’s chitlins, too—I cleaned them real good.” She looked around at the people. “You don’t have to worry.”
The people’s eyes followed the porcine jewels; their mouths salivated. Smiling, Mrs. Hathcock dropped them into the steaming pot of vinegary water.
Daniel helped his mother to a chair. She smiled. “Master Edwards let me have them instead of feeding them to the dogs.” It was a Christmas treat; for most of them it was the only meat they would taste all year. Nat Turner heard the empty stomachs grumbling. He saw anticipation in their eyes and smiles.
Another woman came and set a lidded jar on the table. “This is something, right here!” From the jar she pulled three pig feet and one ear. She had boiled them and pickled them in brine. Nat Turner smiled back at her. He knew what a sacrifice she had made. She had gone to bed hungry many nights, knowing she had the pork, but saved this Christmas portion to share.
She got a knife and cut the treat, passing tiny pieces around. Children’s eyes rounded and glowed as they sucked on the bones—gnawing on the bones, sucking on the marrow.
Smiling and gracious, his mother gave her portion away to Mother Easter, the old woman who sat beside her. Though his mother had been away from Africa more than thirty years, like a good Ethiopian Christian, she still did not eat pork. Cherry gave hers to their son, and Nat Turner gave his to her.
People huddled together, laughing and talking, gathered from the scattered farms they lived on. Communion was the gift they shared. There was no wine or unleavened bread for them. There were no hats, cloaks, mittens, or presents. There was nothing for them except the hardscrabble meal they had scraped together. Captivity had taken its toll—so many without coats and shelter froze to death during the night. So each one celebrated that he had awakened that morning, clothed and in his right mind. Survival was the gift they shared. All of them heroes.
This was not like the Christmases Nat Turner had seen and sometimes shared at his father’s house.
At his father’s house there had been evergreens. Nat Turner remembered the smell of pine. There was holly with red berries to decorate the room. There was glazed ham and a holiday goose then. The spicy, sugary aroma of apple preserves and brandied peaches filled the room. There was hominy baked with cheese. He could not eat with the others in his father’s house, but his father would bring a plate to him and to his mother with bits of succulent things to taste.
He recalled holding in his hands candy and a book—sometimes a coat new to him, a hand-me-down—given as presents.
The people gathered in this cabin had none of what Nat Turner remembered. God had sent him back from the wilderness for them.
Twenty-eight people crowded into the small cabin. The Artis brothers, part Cheroenhaka Nottoway Indian, sat talking to Hark, Sam, Dred, and some of the other men. “They have taken our land, saying we are not Indians because our mothers wed black men. Now we must pay rent to white men for our own land.” Frown lines were worn into his cheeks. “Indians that marry white men keep their land,” Exum Artis said.
“For now,” his brother, Arnold, added. “But they want us to leave. They want all the freemen to leave because we remember. We remember that they were poor and they once worked as slaves—indentured men. They were treated like us. There were no lies that God made them special.” All the freemen—black and Nottoway—and even white Berry Newsom nodded.
“They want us to leave, but we are just farmers. Where would we go?”
“We remember, so they want us gone. Our forefathers rode together, poor men—white, black, and red—beside each other against oppression in Bacon’s Rebellion. We were all God’s men then, before the powerful and wealthy found a way to separate and trick us. We all stood as men on the same even ground then. We remember, so they want us gone.” The recollections smoldered in Thomas Hathcock’s eyes.
“Good and bad, free and slave, was not based on color. A man of color could be a man of wealth and property,” Exum Artis agreed.
“All that changed after Bacon’s Rebellion. Suddenly the white man—good or bad—was given a halo and wings,” Arnold said.
“Freemen? This is not freedom! They tell us where we can live and what we can grow. Nathaniel Francis rents to us, rent we cannot afford, all the while scheming to take what little we still have, or to take us as slaves for debts we owe. At the end of the season, they take most of our crops and tell us we still owe them more.”
“We have had to sell land for medicine, for seed, and soon all we have will be gone.” Thomas Hathcock shook his head.
“The doctors won’t touch us. They look at us. Afraid the color will rub off.”
“But we remember.”
Nat Turner had heard the stories before. He carried the stories, breathed the stories.
“We know they were not kings and princes. We know they were just men, like us. We know, we were here, and we saw them. They struggled to live on the land, like us. We were here then when there were black and white and Nottoway landowners. There was no word from God, from the Great Father, that only white men were men. We know they are flesh like we are. We were here when it all began.”
Nat Turner and the others knew that there was a plan afoot, a law, to send the freemen to other places, to wipe away the memory. The white men didn’t want to remember themselves as slaves or as prisoners who came to America in chains. They didn’t want to remember themselves as poor people with few choices. They didn’t want to remember that, when they were starving and had nothing, they gave themselves permission to steal—land and people—until they had enough. They wanted to forget and so they had bought, stolen, and taken by force, the power to forget what they’d done—the power to rewrite history.
They bought horses and people and pigs, new clothes and new names. They made themselves titles and positions. They bought carriages, hoop skirts, built houses with windows and stairs, and then went about erasing and evicting those who dared remember their past.
When Thomas Hathcock’s wife passed by, he stopped her. “But now our lives have changed. We have seen free people forced into chains. We had the good of God’s land, but it has been stolen from us.
“See my wife’s hands? She scalds them making preserves to earn a little money. Do you think they will let her sell her goods at the market? Years ago we could, but now she cannot sell there to white men. We cannot sell among ourselves; no one has money to buy.” His wife sighed and then returned to the stove.
Thomas gestured around the small room. “But what they will not buy, they come to the house and demand. All the power is in their hands. If they steal it from her, who can we go to? There is no court for black men. There is no sheriff for men with dark skin. No black man can charge a white man with a crime.”
“They tell us where to live, on land that belonged to us long before those we remember walked this earth. Almost every day there is a threat that someone will have us shipped out of this state away from the land that holds our fathers’ bones. Shipped overseas to some land we’ve never heard of.” Arnold Artis lowered his voice. “And they say we are free, but they treat our wives as their property. They take them when they want to, and there is nothing we can do… not if we want to live. How can this be called freedom?”
Nat Turner knew their shame. He lived their shame. It was his. The shame knotted his stomach, his fists, and tightened his chest.
Thomas Hathcock pointed toward the window. “Years from now, people who pass will forget who built the houses these white men live in and who cleared this land. Maybe some of us will still have families left alive to carry our names. But who will remember how hard we worked? ‘Why didn’t your parents make something of themselves?’ others will say to them.
“What will our children or their children have to show for all our labor? They will be left poor.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “How much more are we expected to stomach?”
Dred pounded one fist into the other hand. “They treat us like animals!” His voice thundered in the small cabin. The women turned to look.
Arnold Artis’s voice and body trembled with frustration. “It has been too long, decades, and it is all these little ones know.” A hush came over the children. They stared, wide-eyed. One small boy began to cry.
Thomas Hathcock’s voice raised, “I cannot stand it much longer!”
Nat Turner, listening to the men, felt for the gunpowder in his pocket. It would not be long. He looked at the people around him. It could not be long.
Thomas Hathcock’s wife, stirring in the pot before her, called to interrupt her husband, a practiced calm in her voice. “What you say is true, Thomas. It will still be true when this day is past. But let us celebrate and enjoy this day with our friends.”
Trembling, Thomas looked at his wife, staring deeply into her eyes until the trembling ceased. He exhaled. “You are right.” He smiled at her and nodded. He clapped his hands. “Come, let the children sing.”
The children looked at their mothers, waiting for nods of reassurance. Then two smaller children giggled tentatively, and then they began to sing.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room.
Other children joined in.
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.
Nat Turner looked around the room at the people he loved. This Christmas Day the room was full of the living. What each of them had was not enough, but together it was a feast. He smiled, listening to his own son sing with the others. It seemed not long ago that he was as small.
Nat Turner looked at his son, Riddick, singing. God sent him back for him.
Harriet
Chapter 6
Brooklyn, New York
1856
To most of America, her brother Henry was the most famous preacher in the States, perhaps the Western world, but he was still Harriet’s baby brother. Though she had heard him preach many times, she was no less amazed each time to hear him and to see him enthrall the congregation before him—hundreds of people, thousands, crowded into the sanctuary. It was the same across the country and overseas. He was paid handsomely to sp
eak. Men, as well as women, wept when he preached, though in seconds his humor and antics had them laughing again.
When Harriet visited Plymouth Church, she sometimes sat on the back pew hoping to not be noticed. But today she sat in the front row so she would have a clear view of the notables who visited her brother’s church. The poet Walt Whitman visited, as did the author and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau. Newspapermen attended, copying every word of Henry’s sermons and publishing them in their papers. Politicians made their way to Plymouth, like the young Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who had ambitions to be senator. John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, William Wells Brown, and Henry Bibb had all been welcomed in the pews and sometimes in the pulpit at her brother’s Brooklyn church.
Outside was Orange Street and beyond that, New York. Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, with Brooklyn’s population swelling each day since the opening of the Fulton Ferry.
Each time she visited there were fewer trees—there was no room for them or for undeveloped plots. Every inch was needed for more dwellings, more businesses for the people who crowded into the city. Immigrants and refugees, English, Dutch, Chinese, Germans, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Printers, nannies, shopkeepers, seamstresses, clerks, poets, painters, singers, bakers, bankers, factory workers, professors, and chimney sweeps. Hundreds of thousands of them huddled in town houses and tenements, finding hope in the crush and anonymity. Wedged together in flats and apartments, the rich and poor, foreign and domestic. Bustling down avenues to department stores, public schools, police stations, to galleries, to synagogues, churches, town halls, storefronts, and cathedrals wearing forced shields of privacy.
There were tensions between the groups jostling for elbow room. But they needed one another. Mind-your-own-business people who learned the necessity of interdependence. The restaurateur, with no room to grow his own, needed the peddler for produce and needed the shopgirl to buy.