Troops and militia quickly poured into the region, rounding up, disarming, and arresting hundreds of blacks. Sporadic fighting continued, but soon it was over. The insurrection was snuffed out, long before Nat Turner’s dream of a full-fledged rebellion throughout the South could be realized. The militia captured everyone except the ringleader. But Nat Turner had slipped between their fingers.
Weeks passed. A new master arrived. Master Travis’s brother was determined to beat his slaves into submission if necessary. Whites everywhere vented their fear and anger by retaliating against their slaves. Zeb’s mother, along with the rest, fell into sullen silence, hoping every day to hear word of their Moses rising out of his temporary defeat to complete their liberation from the Egyptians.
At length news reached them of Nat Turner’s capture.
Tension between slaves and masters had never been so high. Zeb felt the pressure of the new master’s eye on him wherever he went and whatever he did. The master forbade his slaves to speak to each other during their work. He promised to shoot any slave found outside his house after dark. The former Master Travis had been kind, thought Zeb. But they all knew their new master meant what he said.
Nat Turner’s dream of freedom had plunged them into a worse nightmare than before.
One October morning Zeb Albright sat silently on the floor in the big house blacking the family shoes like he had done fifty times before.
A rustle across the room drew his attention. He glanced up. There stood an eleven-year-old girl. He had not seen her this close since her arrival. With her green eyes and corn-colored hair, she was in his eyes the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
At sight of him, the girl froze in her tracks, her face as white as her dress. Zeb’s hands halted in the middle of his work. Then he smiled.
Only a moment more the girl stood staring, then suddenly screamed, spun around, and darted back for the stairs the way she had come. Gazing after her in confusion, Zeb heard heavy booted feet descending the stairs. Seconds later the girl’s father appeared and with large strides hurried toward him. New Master Travis wasted no time on words.
“Stand up, boy!” he demanded angrily.
Having no idea what was coming, Zeb did so. The next instant a blow from the master’s fist sent him staggering back against the wall. A second blow knocked him through the open door. He stumbled down the steps and onto his back in the dirt outside.
“If you so much as look at my daughter again, I’ll kill you,” the master growled as he walked out and looked down from the porch. He glanced about the yard. “Tie this nigger whelp to the post!” he shouted to one of his men. “Give him the lash—we’ll teach him to show respect to his betters.”
The man came over, reached down and laid hold of Zeb by the scruff of the neck, yanked him to his feet, then dragged him toward the barn.
Mrs. Travis, who had heard her daughter’s screams and the commotion that followed, now followed her husband outside. “The brutes understand nothing but violence,” she said. “I declare I shan’t sleep sound in my bed with such demons around.”
“The troops hung the murderers weeks ago, Ellen,” said Travis.
“Last week they finally got Turner himself. He’ll hang as sure as the rest.”
“That may be, but how do we know they caught them all? That boy there,” she said, pointing toward their man hauling Zeb across the ground away from them, “—what if he is one of Nat Turner’s protégées?”
They stood a few moments more, then slowly descended the porch and walked toward the barn. Crisp snapping explosions from a leather whip, each followed by a scream of pain, rang in their ears.
“If you are truly concerned, Ellen,” said Mr. Travis, “I’ll order the boy killed.”
They rounded the corner of the barn and stood watching as a few more lashes split the skin of the twelve-year-old back, already lined with blood.
The lady watched as the whip fell two or three more times. She seemed to be mulling over her husband’s offer. “Whatever you think best,” she said after a moment. “I have to admit, he doesn’t look vicious, and has never given me trouble before this. But then I never could tell one of their hideous faces from another, or tell what evil and filth they might be thinking.”
She turned and walked back to the house. In fact, she was unconcerned whether the boy lived or died. Her husband watched until he considered the punishment sufficient, then signaled to his man to cut the boy down.
Zeb slumped senseless to the ground in a heap. He had long since ceased to feel the pain. The bleeding welts on his back had already begun to swell and ooze. He lay in near unconsciousness, hardly aware of being dragged to the slave quarters and left on the ground in front of his house where his mother, returning from the fields, found him several hours later.
Nat Turner’s trial and execution put a stop to further talk of open rebellion. There would be no promised land for America’s black children of Israel. Freedom would not come by Nat Turner’s hand. Their deliverer was dead.
Zeb Albright survived his first whipping. But he bore its scars from that day till the end of his life. The injustice of the penalty bit far deeper into his mind than the lash did into his back.
From that day on, Zeb began to change. It might be said that his road to manhood began with the first sting from Master Travis’s whip. He had crossed those burning sands of pain that generations of slaves before him had trod, initiated into the company of some of the best men and women of his race. His natural compassion, his blindness to the color of one’s skin, the guilelessness of his gentle nature, all slowly gave way to a growing root of hardness in his soul. He had been falsely accused and unfairly punished. He began to think that a comparison between the white masters and the taskmasters of Egypt might be accurate after all. Maybe Ol’ Prophet Nat, as he was being called, had been right all along.
As he pondered the ancient story of the liberated people, however, recalling the words he had heard that night in the woods around the fire, he realized that the Israelites had gone to the land of milk and honey, rather than expecting to find it in Egypt. Maybe in the North he and his mama could find the freedom she yearned for.
Perhaps their best chance lay, not in some new Moses to lead them, but in escape.
Slowly life in the South returned to normal.
Yet what was normal now? Whether there would ever be normal again, a great awakening had begun. Nat Turner had stirred the hope of freedom in the souls of America’s Negroes… and the fear of what that freedom might mean in the souls of the whites who owned them.
The long-slumbering legacy of Tungal and his heirs had begun to stir. The faint scent of freedom was in the air. Nat Turner might be dead, but the memory of his valor was not. As news of his failed rebellion spread from mouth to mouth, eventually every slave village on every plantation from the Texas-Louisiana border to the Mason-Dixon Line knew of that dream and began to hope for a new deliverer to lead them to the promised land of freedom.
The dream lived on, and it would grow. Songs of ancient Egypt and the river Jordan began solemnly to float across the cotton fields of the South in the melancholy tones of rich African harmony. Another day would come. Another deliverer would arise.
But something far different than a dream of freedom began to spread among whites on the plantations of the South—fear of the rising tide of black hope. With fear came anger. With anger came paranoia. With them all came a new determination that no Nat Turner would ever rise again, and that nothing would upset the secure world they had built, or the economic balance of their source of wealth.
The Southern way of life—which meant a life based on a “peculiar institution” increasingly out of step with the march of progress in the world—became as sacred in the South as the church.
Yet whites could not help knowing that a great moving and shaking had begun. They were terrified where it might lead. If “Ol’ Prophet Nat” was a constant topic of conversation in the slave shanties of the South,
memory of his failed rebellion never left the minds of the wealthy plantation owners. Southern leaders came to recognize a new problem that required careful consideration.
Education and spirituality became the new foes that, if allowed to spread through the slave community, could in time destroy the way of life they held sacred. The Turner rebellion had been successful because slaves had been allowed too much education and independence. That would have to stop. They would have to clamp down. They would have to keep the slaves illiterate, and prevent the darkies from getting too many spiritual ideas in their heads.
Too much talk of freedom of soul inevitably led to talk about freedom of other kinds.
If Virginia had almost outlawed slavery in 1800, it now led the South against progress with a series of the harshest prohibitions it could devise—forbidding blacks, whether slave or free, to assemble in large groups, to read or write, to preach, to own weapons, to defend themselves, or to leave their plantations without written consent. If Turner’s conspiracy had drawn nourishment from the soil of education and religion, Virginia now took care to remove the possibility of such desires finding root in those soils again.
The new laws, however, only increased the desire for liberty. Zeb Albright was not the only one to realize that their only hope lay in escape. The more daring among them began to devise secret routes from the heart of the South that led to the free states and even all the way to Canada. A secret underground human railroad to freedom had begun.
Though their masters controlled every part of their lives, they could not quench the whispers of freedom. Nor could the South’s new laws of prohibition slow the mounting cry of liberty.
As he matured into a teenager and began to fill out and grow tall and muscular, a hardness could be seen in Zeb Albright’s eyes and face. As the lashes of the master’s whip crisscrossed his back with more and more frequency, scars forming upon scars, at last he understood the fire of hatred he had seen as a boy in Nat Turner’s eyes.
It was not long before a similar fire began to burn in his.
Three Lives… Three Fates…
Three Futures
1833–1835
Far west of any plantation house or sign of civilization a bride of less than two years cradled the head of her husband in her lap.
The day had begun as all days in this godforsaken wilderness… long miles ahead, nothing to anticipate but endless dust and dry heat, and the knowledge that every step forward took them farther from a life and loved ones she might not know or see again. She had harbored grave doubts about this trek from the outset. But he would have their life together begin with adventure. He had prayed, he said, and the Lord had spoken. They would take God’s Word to the outposts of frontier expansion where it was so badly needed, and eventually start a church among the settlers. Reluctantly she had agreed. She also wanted to serve God and teach others about him. She loved her new helpmeet and trusted that he had heard from God. She would accompany him wherever he went.
Her father, however, who had walked with God far longer than both, shared her concern. He was not so easily persuaded that the journey was right. The West was full of dangers—Indians, heat, deserts, hunger, thirst, loneliness. But the son-in-law insisted that through such hardships were God’s servants made strong. God had led his people into the wilderness before. They would trust the Lord to protect them, he said. And in the end, the young visionary’s arguments carried the day.
But there were other deadly and unforeseen dangers as they set out across the wide young land—drought, scorpions, exhaustion, wolves, madness… and rattlesnakes. Indeed, they had seen no Indians. Though the heat had been unbearable, they somehow found sufficient water to keep their containers full and the two oxen healthy. Their prayers, however, had not kept away the fangs whose wounds now scarred her husband’s swollen calf. Nor had they been able to prevent the venom from spreading. A few knife slashes at the skin and a tightly bound tourniquet at the knee were not enough. By evening he was unconscious and feverish. She could do nothing but sit in the wagon and hold him, wiping his face with a damp cloth, and pray that God would somehow intervene in the midst of her helplessness.
Nightfall brought no miracle. The black silence advanced. The menacing howls of wolves and doleful coyotes drew closer. Her mind began to wander and she drifted into a waking stupor.
Hot tears dripped from her cheeks and fell on the ghastly white face of the man she loved. How long she sat senseless—her hands chilled from the prairie night, the skin beneath them burning to the touch—gently rocking back and forth as she held him, she had no idea… nor when the final flickers of life quietly ebbed away from the head in her hands.
Coming to herself sometime after midnight and beholding that death lay in her arms, her quiet tears gave way to heaving moans of anguish.
“Oh, God!” she wailed as the horrible truth at last broke upon her. “Why! God… oh, God!”
There were no other cries. Words were as useless now as prayers. And none heard the despairing sobs of the young widow save him who stores in his heart every human tear of grief and distress until the day they will be sent back whence they came as tears of joy.
Mercifully she did not have to endure the haunting torments and terrifying sounds of the night. Sleep overtook mental exhaustion. She slumped over in the back of the wagon where she had sat for hours and slumbered dreamlessly.
When she came to herself, the gray light of dawn was spreading over the desolate landscape. A chill of clammy dampness clung to everything. She shivered, trying to bring her brain awake.
Suddenly the reality swept over her that the cold came not from the prairie morning but from the stiff, lifeless form of her dead husband, his head still lying upon her lap. The body that had kept her warm during the long nights until now was solid as ice.
Memory of the previous day overwhelmed her. A momentary glance at his face and her stomach lurched. Sickened and horrified, she struggled from under the ghastly weight of the rigid corpse. She reached the ground, heaved several times, and took a few steps to steady herself. She did not weep. Her tears had been spent the night before. With the light of dawn came the strength given to women to endure.
She stood outside the wagon several minutes and tried to breathe deeply of the morning. She filled her lungs not with the air of courage but of resignation. She would do what she had to do. She would survive, because that’s what women did. There was nothing but that. Men dreamed dreams and chased visions. Women survived. The luxury of vision was not given them. She would do what she had to do.
The man in the wagon would probably have wanted her to continue west and live out his dream. But she could not. It had been his dream, not hers. Ministry was the last thing she could think of now. All at once survival itself was paramount. It would take every ounce of courage and stamina she possessed merely to stay alive. If she could manage that, perhaps one day she might think of God again.
She was too devastated to pray. The idea of asking for God’s help seemed suddenly strange, distant, foreign, unreal. How could she ask for God’s help again? If he had not answered yesterday’s desperate pleas, for what else could she ever ask him? What would be the use?
Who was God anyway? If he existed at all, what kind of God was he?
Drawing in another breath, she turned back to the wagon. She must do what had to be done. She would bury him. She would do it alone, and then turn back. The other three wagons could go on, but she would not. She did not care about being the first white woman to cross the Rockies, nor to establish the first Christian mission in the Oregon territory. She would leave that to others. She only hoped that she could find her way out of this desert of desolation and back to some form, any form, of civilization.
If she did not, and died herself along the way, perhaps it would be a relief after all.
At this moment of her own trial and tragedy, she knew nothing of another home across the Atlantic that death would soon visit. Nor that fate would destine her life to
intertwine with one cruelly accused. She only knew that suddenly she was more alone than ever, and in no little danger herself.
On the following night, a continent away, a blood-chilling scream sounded in the blackness of an early, ungodly hour. Trembling and terrified, a man stole quickly down the darkened upper corridor of a large, three-story English manor. The terrible echoes died away as he hurried forward with careful step.
A door partially open at the end of the hall revealed the faint light of a flickering candle from inside. Hoping to disturb no one else in the house—though who could possibly sleep after those piercing shrieks?—he stepped forward, inched the door open, and crept through.
Another dreadful shriek froze him in his tracks. At the sound his blood turned to ice. The face that met his gaze across the room was ghostly white, drawn and haggard. Wide eyes stared at him in mingled horror and revulsion. The uneven light from the candle beside the bed revealed cheeks sunken and hollow. The expression of the face showed no fear, only hatred.
In the second or two it took him to take in the confusing scene, the previous four years swept through his mind in a flash.
He had gone to England as a young idealist to study law, leaving behind father, mother, and older brother, considering his own prospects for the future in no way connected with the estate of his father’s called Greenwood. He loved England but was understandably lonely. There he met a young woman, beautiful but oddly out of step with the society about her. In her strangeness, he also found a peculiar fascination. Whether he was in love with her was doubtful, but to all appearances she fell in love with him. Her family lavished upon him praises perhaps a little overzealous, indicating clearly enough that they were anxious for the two young people to marry.
American Dreams Trilogy Page 4