I cast a quick glance over the crowd and glimpse Hark and Moses, and I exchange looks with Hark, whom I have not seen for nearly two months. Intent, absorbed, some of the women fanning themselves with thin pine-bark shingles, the Negroes are gazing at the preacher with the hollow-eyed fixity of scarecrows, and as I regard them I can tell whom they belong to by what they wear: the ones from Richard Porter and J. T. Barrow and the Widow Whitehead, owners who are fairly rich, dressed cleanly and neatly, the men in cotton shirts and freshly laundered trousers, the women in printed calico and scarlet bandannas, some with cheap earrings and pins; the ones from poorer masters, Nathaniel Francis and Levi Waller and Benjamin Edwards, in dingy rags and patches, a few of the crouched men and boys without shirts, picking their noses and scratching, sweat streaming off their black backs in shiny torrents, the lot of them stinking to heaven. I sit down on a bench near the window in an empty space between Hark and an obese, gross-jowled, chocolate-colored slave named Hubbard, owned by the Widow Whitehead, who sports a white man’s cast-off frayed multicolored vest over his flabby naked shoulders, and whose thick lips wear even now, as he meditates conscientiously upon the sermon from below, a flatterer’s avid smirk. Beneath us, from a pulpit elevated above the assembled whites, in black suit and black tie, pale and slender. Richard Whitehead raises his eyes toward heaven and remonstrates to those of us squatting beneath the roof: If therefore you would be God’s free men in paradise, you must strive to be good, and serve him here on earth. Your bodies, you know, are not your own; they are at the disposal of those you belong to, but your precious souls are still your own, which nothing can take from you if it is not your own fault. Figure well then that if you lose your souls by leading idle, wicked lives here, you have gained nothing by it in this world and you have lost your all in the next. For your idleness and wickedness are generally found out and your bodies suffer for it here, and what is far worse, if you do not repent and alter your ways, your unhappy souls will suffer for it hereafter …
Black wasps soar and float through the windows, drowsily buzzing as they lurch against the eaves. I but barely listen to the sermon; from these same lips I have heard these same sour and hopeless words half a dozen times in as many years: they do not change or vary, nor do they even belong to the one who speaks them, having been composed rather by the Methodist Bishop of Virginia for annual dispensation by his ministers, to make the Negroes stand in mortal fear. That they have a profound effect on some of us, at least, I cannot doubt: even now as Richard Whitehead warms up to his subject, and his pale face dampens and begins to flush as if from the glow of promised hellfire, I can see around me a score of faces popeyed with black nigger credulity, jaws agape, delicious shudders of fright coursing through their bodies as they murmur soft Amens, nervously cracking their knuckles and making silent vows of eternal obedience. Yes, yes! I hear a high impassioned voice, then the same voice croons Ooooo-h yes, so right! And I shift my glance and see that this is Hubbard: obscenely he sways and wiggles on his thick buttocks, his eyes squeezed tightly shut in a trance of prayerful submission. Ooooh yes! he groans, a fat house nigger, docile as a pet coon. And now I feel Hark’s big hand on mine, firm and friendly and warm, and I hear his voice in a whisper: Nat, dese yere niggers goin’ git to heaven or bust dey britches. How you been, Nat?
Eat high off the hog at ole Widow Whitehead’s, I whisper back. Afraid that Hubbard might overhear, I keep my voice pitched low: There’s a gun room there, Hark, it’s something enormous. She’s got fifteen guns locked up behind glass. And powder and shot enough to fill a shed. We get them guns and Jerusalem belongs to the niggers. Last March, a month before leaving the Travises’ for the Widow Whitehead’s, I told Hark of my plans—Hark and three others. Where’s Henry and Nelson and Sam?
Dey all here, Nat, Hark says. I knowed you’d be here, so I got dem to come too. Funniest daggone thing, Nat, lissen … Already he has begun to chuckle, and I start to shush him up, but he continues: You know dat Nelson, his white folks is Baptists and goes to church down Shiloh way. So Nelson didn’ have no business goin’ to no Meth’dist meetin’, specially when dey was preachin’ to de niggers like now. So his massah—you know dat mean ol’ Marse Jake Williams what has one leg—he say: “Nelson, how come you want to go to a Meth’dist meetin’ where they’s exhortin’ the niggers?” So Nelson he say: “Why, massah, dear massah, I feels right sinful. I feels I done bad things to you, and jes’ needs the fear of God in me so’s I can be your faithful nigger from now on!” For a moment Hark shakes and trembles with silent laughter, I fear that he might give us away. But then he is whispering: Now dat Nelson is a caution, Nat! Ever I seed a black man wanted to stick a knife in some white foks it’s dat ole Nelson. Dere he is, Nat, over yondah …
I have acquired the strongest faith in Hark, during the past six months slowly undermining his soppy childish esteem for white people, his confidence in them and his reliance upon them, digging in hard on the matter of the sale of his wife and little boy, which, I have insisted, was an irredeemable and monstrous act on the part of our master, no matter how helpless Marse Joe has claimed to be in the transaction; I have battered down Hark’s defenses, playing incessantly, almost daily, upon his sorrow and loss, coaxing and wheedling him into a position where he too must grasp, firmly and without qualm, one of the alternatives of freedom or death-in-life, until at last—revealing my plans for a bloody sweep through the countryside, the capture of Jerusalem, and a safe flight into the bosom of the Dismal Swamp where no white man can follow us—I see that my campaign has borne fruit: on a winter day in Travis’s shop, harassed to the breaking point by one of Putnam’s yowling, peevish harangues, he turns on the boy, brandishing in one hand a ten-pound crowbar, and with the glint of murder in his eye, saying nothing but presenting such an aspect of walled-up rage breaking loose that even I am alarmed, faces his quaking tormenter down once and for all. It is done, it is like once when I watched a great glorious hawk burst free from a snare into the purity of a wide blue sky. Hark is exuberant. Dat l’il sonabitch never run me up a tree again. Thus Hark becomes the first to join me in this conspiracy. Hark, then Henry and Nelson and Sam: trustworthy, silent, without fear, all men of God and messengers of His vengeance, these have shared already in the knowledge of my great design.
I see Nelson now across the packed gallery: an older man, fifty-four or fifty-five or fifty-six—as is common among Negroes, he himself is not quite sure—he sits oval-faced and impassive amidst this addled, distraught, intimidated throng, heavy-lidded eyes making him appear half asleep, a presence of unconquerable patience and calm, yet like a placid sea beneath which lie boiling vast convulsions of fury. A slick and shiny, elevated “S” the ragged length and width of a small garter snake, souvenir of old-time branding days, winds its way through the sparse gray hairs of his black chest. He can read a few simple words—where or how he has learned them I do not know. Weary and sick—close to madness—of bondage, he has had more than a half a dozen masters, the last and present one an evil-tempered, crippled woodcutter his same age who dares not whip him after his one adventure in this area (with no more emotion than if he had been slapping a gnat, Nelson struck him back full in the face, and said that if he tried it again he would kill him) but now in frightened retaliation and hatred works him like two, and feeds him on the nastiest kinds of leavings and slops. Nelson had a wife and family once but can hope no longer to see them either together or often, scattered as they are all over three or four counties of the Tidewater. Like Hark he has little religion—and like Hark is often foul of mouth, which generally causes me some distress—but this does not really trouble me; to me he is a man of God: shrewd, slow-moving, imperturbable, his slumbrous eyes conceal a maddened defiance, and he will be a strong right arm. Nigger life ain’t worth pig shit, he once said to me; mought make a nigger worth somethin’ to hisself, tryin’ to git free, even if he don’t. And his counsel about strategy is many times inspired: Rock de places what’s got horses first, horses
’ll git us a-moverin’ fast. Or: Rock on a Sunday night, dat’s a nigger’s night for huntin’. Dem white cocksuckers hears a commotion and figger hit’s some niggers out treein’ a possum. Or: Us jes’ gots to keep de niggers out’n dem cider presses. Let dem black bastids get at dat cider an’ brandy and us done lost de war … I look at Nelson and he looks back at me with sleeping, impassive eyes, betraying no recognition …
Now again I hear Hark’s voice in my ear: After church dey’s some kind of doin’s at de graveyard dat de niggers ain’t suppose to go to …
Yes, I say, I know. I feel a growing excitement, for I sense that on this day I may be able at last to outline and enlarge upon the details of my plans. I know. Where we goin’ to meet?
See, dey’s dem two logs over de creek down behin’ de church. I tol’ Henry and Nelson and Sam to meet us dere while de white foks was at de graveyard …
Yes, good, I say, then sssh-h, squeezing his hand, fearing that we will be overheard, and we both turn then, faking pious attention to the words rising toward us through the swarming wasps, up across the creaking and snapping rafters: Poor creatures! You little consider when you are idle and neglectful of your masters’ business, when you steal and waste and hurt any of their substance, when you are saucy and impudent, when you are telling them lies and deceiving them, or when you are stubborn and sullen and will not do the work you are told to do without chastisement—you do not consider, I say, that what faults you are guilty of towards your masters and mistresses are faults done against God Himself, who has set your masters and mistresses over you in His own stead, and expects that you would do for them just as you would do for Him. Do not your masters, under God, provide for you? And how shall they be able to do this, to feed and to clothe you, unless you take honest care of everything that belongs to them? Remember that God requires this of you. And if you are not afraid of suffering for it here, you cannot escape the vengeance of Almighty God, who will judge between you and your masters, and make you pay severely in the next world for all the injustice you do them here. And though you could manage so cleverly as to escape the eyes and hands of man, yet think what a dreadful thing it is to fall into the hands of the living God, who is able to cast both soul and body into hell …
And now through the soft moaning of the black crowd, through Hubbard’s fat sighs of pleasure and the murmur and fidget and the Amens gently aspirated in gasps of dumb rapture and desire, I hear another voice behind me and very near, almost at my shoulder, a harsh rapid low muttering, almost incoherent, like that of a man in the clutch of fever: … me some of dat white stuff, yas, get me some of dat white stuff, yas … And without turning—suddenly unsettled and afraid to turn; rather, afraid to confront that obsessed and demented face, the mashed-in nose and deformed and jutting jaw and bulging eyes with their gaze murderous, fixed, dimbrained, pure—I know whose voice it is: Will’s. I am seized with a quick displeasure. For although like Nelson he has been driven half crazy by slavery, Will’s madness is not governed by silence and some final secret control, but has the frenzied, mindless quality of a wild boar hog cornered hopelessly in a thicket, snarling and snapping its brutish and unavailing wrath. Age twenty-five or a little more, a chronic runaway, he once got nearly to Maryland, sustained in his flight not so much by intelligence as by the same cunning and endurance of those little animals native to the swamps and woods in which he roamed for six weeks, before being overhauled and delivered to his present master, a nigger-breaker named Nathaniel Francis who has beaten him into some kind of stunned and temporary submission. He crouches behind me now, muttering to whom it is impossible to tell—to himself, to no one, to anyone at all. Ole white cunt, he whispers, and in a sort of demented litany repeats it over and over.
Will’s presence disturbs me, for I want no part of him, either now or in my future plans. And I am afraid that he will discover what’s afoot. Rather than finding any value in his fractiousness, his rage and rebellion, I am filled with distrust, instinctively put off by the foaming and frenzied nature of his madness. Besides, there is one other thing, evident enough now in that obsessive incantation: I know from hearsay that he broods constantly upon rape, the despoliation of white women masters his dreams night and day. And already—and Hark and Nelson and the others have sworn to obey—I have forbidden this kind of violation. It is God’s will, and I know it, that I omit such a vengeance: Do not unto their women what they have done to thine …
I banish Will from my mind and as my eyes rove around the gallery I see the other two in whom I have placed my trust. Owned like Will by Nathaniel Francis, Sam is a mulatto, a wiry muscular young field hand with freckles and ginger-colored hair. He is intractable and high-strung, also many times a runaway, and his yellow skin is knobbed and striped by the lash. I value him for his intelligence but also for his color: he is light of hue and his presence thus commands considerable respect among many of the Negroes, especially the simple-minded, and I feel that when my scheme achieves momentum Sam’s appearance will be useful in gaining new recruits. He is skillful in quiet, furtive intrigue and has already won for the cause Henry, who sits beside him now, eyes shut, rocking slightly, with a look of beatitude and calm. So far as I can tell, he is sound asleep. Short, square in shape, very black, he alone among my group is of a religious nature. He is owned by Richard Porter, a devout and kindly master who has never raised a hand against him. At forty, Henry lives among Biblical fancies, in a shadowland of near-silence, almost completely deaf from boyhood by a blow on the head from a drunken overseer whose name or face he can no longer remember. It is the recollection of that blow that feeds his calm fury …
The sound of organ music fills the air. The sermon is ended. Down below, the white people have risen, joining together in song.
“Can we, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?”
The black people do not sing but stand respectfully in the hot gallery, mouths agape or with sloppy uncomprehending smiles, shuffling their feet. Suddenly they seem to me as meaningless and as stupid as a barn full of mules, and I hate them one and all. My eyes search the white crowd, finally discover Margaret Whitehead, her dimpled chin tilted up as, with one arm entwined in her mother’s, she carols heavenward. a radiance like daybreak on her serene young face. Then slowly and softly, like a gentle outrush of breath, my hatred of the Negroes diminishes, dies, replaced by a kind of wild, desperate love for them, and my eyes are wet with tears.
“Salvation, O Salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learnt Messiah’s name …”
And later that afternoon—after the hurried secret parley by the creek—driving the carriage back home through the parched and windless fields, I hear behind me two voices now, Margaret Whitehead’s and her mother’s, fondly:
I do think Boysie’s sermon was most inspiring, don’t you, little Miss Peg?
There is a short space of silence, then her bright laughter: Oh, Mother, it’s the same old folderol, every year! Just folderol for the darkies!
Margaret! What an expression to use! Folderol indeed! I’m simply appalled! If your sainted father were here, to hear you talk like that about your own brother. Shame!
Then suddenly, to my surprise, I realize that Margaret is close to tears. Oh, Mother, I’m sorry, I just don’t know. And she is quietly sobbing now. I just don’t know. I just don’t know …
And I hear the woman draw Margaret to her with a rustle. There, there, dear. I understand. It must be a bad time of the month. We’ll be home soon and you can just go lie down and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea …
High over the flat land thunderheads loom, their undersides churning, promising a storm. I feel the sweat rolling down my back. After a bit I let my eyes close, and I smell the rich odor of horse droppings as I make a silent prayer: Forsake me not, O Lord: O my God, be not far from me. Make
haste to help me, O Lord my salvation, for the hour of my battle comes near …
“Nat Turner! Stand up!”
I rose to my feet in the courtroom. It was hot and very still, and for a long time as I stood clumsily in my chains leaning against the table there was no interruption to the silence save for the panting and roaring of the stove. I turned to face Jeremiah Cobb. As I did so, regarding him for the first time straight on, I saw that his face was as white as tallow; drawn and almost fleshless, it was the face of a cadaver, and it trembled and nodded as if with palsy. He looked down at me, the eyes sunk deep within their sockets, so that the effect was that of a gaze from some immeasurable distance, profound as all eternity. Then all of a sudden I realized that he too was close to death, very close, almost as close as I myself, and I felt a curious pang of pity and regret.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 122