The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Novel

by William Styron

Genres: African American; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Book Prizes & Literary Awards; Biographical; General Fiction

Synopsis

The “magnificent” Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times–bestselling novel about the preacher who led America’s bloodiest slave revolt (The New York Times).

The Confessions of Nat Turner is William Styron’s complex and richly drawn imagining of Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia that led to the deaths of almost sixty men, women, and children. Published at the height of the civil rights movement, the novel draws upon the historical Nat Turner’s confession to his attorney, made as he awaited execution in a Virginia jail. This powerful narrative, steeped in the brutal and tragic history of American slavery, reveals a Turner who is neither a hero nor a demon, but rather a man driven to exact vengeance for the centuries of injustice inflicted upon his people.

Nat Turner is a galvanizing portrayal of the crushing institution of slavery, and Styron’s deeply layered characterization is a stunning rendering of one man’s violent struggle against oppression. This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

 

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Release date: May 4, 2010

Publisher: Open Road Media

Print pages: 434

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 AUTHOR’S NOTE  *

In August, 1831, in a remote region of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery. The initial passage of this book, entitled “To the Public,” is the preface to the single significant contemporary document concerning this insurrection—a brief pamphlet of some twenty pages called “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” published in Richmond early in the next year, parts of which have been incorporated in this book. During the narrative that follows I have rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt of which he was the leader. However, in those areas where there is little knowledge in regard to Nat, his early life, and the motivations for the revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events—yet I trust remaining within the bounds of what meager enlightenment history has left us about the institution of slavery. The relativity of time allows us elastic definitions: the year 1831 was, simultaneously, a long time ago and only yesterday. Perhaps the reader will wish to draw a moral from this narrative, but it has been my own intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an “historical novel" in conventional terms than a meditation on history.

WILLIAM STYRON

Roxbury, Connecticut
New Year’s Day, 1967

 

PART

I

JUDGMENT

DAY

 

ABOVE THE BARREN, SANDY CAPE WHERE the river joins the sea, there is a promontory or cliff rising straight up hundreds of feet to form the last outpost of land. One must try to visualize a river estuary below this cliff, wide and muddy and shallow, and a confusion of choppy waves where the river merges with the sea and the current meets the ocean tide. It is afternoon. The day is clear, sparkling, and the sun seems to cast no shadow anywhere. It may be the commencement of spring or perhaps the end of summer; it matters less what the season is than that the air is almost seasonless—benign and neutral, windless, devoid of heat or cold. As always, I seem to be approaching this place alone in some sort of boat (it is a small boat, a skiff or maybe a canoe, and I am reclining in it comfortably; at least I have no sense of discomfort nor even of exertion, for I do not row—the boat is moving obediently to the river’s sluggish seaward wallow), floating calmly toward the cape past which, beyond and far, deep blue, stretches the boundless sea. The shores of the river are unpeopled, silent; no deer run through the forests, nor do any gulls rise up from the deserted, sandy beaches. There is an effect of great silence and of an even greater solitude, as if life here had not so much perished as simply disappeared, leaving all—river shore and estuary and rolling sea—to exist forever unchanged like this beneath the light of a motionless afternoon sun.

Now as I drift near the cape I raise my eyes to the promontory facing out upon the sea. There again I see what I know I will see, as always. In the sunlight the building stands white—stark white and serene against a blue and cloudless sky. It is square and formed of marble, like a temple, and is simply designed, possessing no columns or windows but rather, in place of them, recesses whose purpose I cannot imagine, flowing in a series of arches around its two visible sides. The building has no door, at least there is no door that I can see. Likewise, just as this building possesses neither doors nor windows, it seems to have no purpose, resembling, as I say, a temple—yet a temple in which no one worships, or a sarcophagus in which no one lies buried, or a monument to something mysterious, ineffable, and without name. But as is my custom whenever I have this dream or vision, I don’t dwell upon the meaning of the strange building standing so lonely and remote upon its ocean promontory, for it seems by its very purposelessness to be endowed with a profound mystery which to explore would yield only a profusion of darker and perhaps more troubling mysteries, as in a maze.

And so again it comes to me, this vision, in the same haunting and recurrent way it has for many years. Again I am in the little boat, floating in the estuary of a silent river toward the sea. And again beyond and ahead of me, faintly booming and imminent yet without menace, is the sweep of sunlit ocean. Then the cape, then the lofty promontory, and finally the stark white temple high and serene above all, inspiring in me neither fear nor peace nor awe, but only the contemplation of a great mystery, as I move out toward the sea …

Never, from the time I was a child until the present—and I am just past thirty—was I able to discover the meaning behind this dream (or vision; for though it occurred mainly as I awoke from sleep, there would be random waking moments when, working in the fields or out trapping rabbits in the woods, or while I was at some odd task or other, the whole scene would flash against my mind with the silence and clearness and fixity of absolute reality, like a picture in the Bible, and in an instant’s dumb daydream all would be re-created before my eyes, river and temple and promontory and sea, to dissolve almost as swiftly as it had come), nor was I ever able to understand the emotion it caused me—this emotion of a tranquil and abiding mystery. I have no doubt, however, that it was all connected with my childhood, when I would hear white people talk of Norfolk and of “going to the seaside.” For Norfolk was only forty miles eastward from Southampton and the ocean only a few miles past Norfolk, where some of the white people would go to trade. Indeed, I had even known a few Negroes from Southampton who had gone to Norfolk with their masters and then seen the ocean, and the picture they recalled—that of an infinite vastness of blue water stretching out to the limit of the eye, and past that, as if to the uttermost boundaries of the earth—inflamed my imagination in such a way that my desire to see this sight became a kind of fierce, inward, almost physical hunger, and there were days when my mind seemed filled with nothing but fantasies of the waves and the distant horizon and the groaning seas, the free blue air like an empire above arching eastward to Africa—as if by one single glimpse of this scene I might comprehend all the earth’s ancient, oceanic, preposterous splendor. But since luck was against me in this regard, and I was never allowed the opportunity of a trip to Norfolk and the ocean, I had to content myself with the vision which existed in my imagination; hence the recurring phantasm I have already described, even though the temple on the promontory still remained a mystery—and more mysterious this morning than ever before in all the years I could reckon. It lingered for a while, half dream, half waking vision as my eyes came open in the gray dawn, and I shut them again, watching the white temple dwindle in the serene and secret light, fade out, removed from recollection.

I rose up from the cedar plank I’d been sleeping on and sat halfway erect, in the same somnolent motion duplicating the instinctive mistake I’d made four times in as many mornings: swinging my legs sideways off the plank as if to plant them on the floor, only to feel metal bite into my ankles as the chain of the leg irons reached the limit of its slack, holding my feet suspended slantwise in midair. I drew my feet back and let them fall on the plank, then I sat upright and reached down and rubbed my ankles underneath the irons, aware of the flow of blood returning warm beneath my fingers. There was for the first time this year a wintry touch about the morning, damp and cold, and I could see a line of pale frost where the hard clay of the floor met the bottom plank of the jail wall. I sat there for several minutes, rubbing my ankles and shivering some. Suddenly I was very hungry, and I felt my stomach churn and heave. For a while all was still. They had put Hark in the cell next to me the evening before, and now through the planks I could hear his heavy breathing—a choked, clotted sound as if air were escaping through his very wounds. For an instant I was on the verge of waking him with a whisper, for we had had no chance to speak, but the sound of his breathing was slow and heavy with exhaustion. I thought, Let him sleep, and the words I had already formed on my lips went unspoken. I sat still on the board, watching the dawn light grow and fill the cell like a cup, stealthily, blossoming with the color of pearl. Far off in the distance now I heard a rooster crow, a faint call like a remote hurrah, echoing, fading into silence. Then another rooster crowed, nearer now. For a long while I sat there, listening and waiting. Save for Hark’s breathing there was no sound at all for many minutes, until at last I heard a distant horn blow, mournful and familiar-sounding, a hollow soft diminishing cry in the fields beyond Jerusalem, rousing up the Negroes on some farm or other.

After a bit I manipulated the chain so that I could slide my legs off the board and stand up. The chain allowed my feet a yard or so of movement, and by shuffling to the length of the chain and then stretching myself forward I could see out the open barred window into the dawn. Jerusalem was waking. From where I was standing I could see two houses nearby, perched at the edge of the riverbank where the cypress bridge

began. Through one house someone moved with a candle, a flickering light which passed from bedroom to living room to hallway to kitchen, where it finally came to rest on some table and stood still, yellow and wavering. Behind the other house, closer to the bridge, an old woman covered with a greatcoat came out with a chamber pot; holding the steaming pot before her like a crucible, she hobbled across the frozen yard toward a whitewashed wooden privy, the breath coming from her mouth in puffs of smoke. She opened the door of the privy, went in, and the sound of the hinges grated with a small shriek on the frosty air until abruptly and with a crack like that of a gun the door slammed shut behind her. Suddenly, more from hunger than anything else, I felt dizzy and closed my eyes. Tiny freckles of light danced across my vision and I thought for an instant I was going to fall but I caught myself against the sill of the window; when I opened my eyes again, I saw that the candle in the first house had gone out, and gray smoke was pluming upward from the chimney.

Just then from afar I heard a distant drumming noise, a plunging of hoofbeats in erratic muffled tattoo which grew louder and louder as it approached from the west across the river. I raised my eyes to the far riverbank fifty yards away, where the tangled forest wall of cypress and gum trees loomed high over waters flowing muddy and cold and sluggish in the dawn. A rent in the wall marked the passage of the county road, and now through this rent a horse at an easy gallop appeared, carrying a cavalryman, followed closely by another, then still another, three soldiers in all: like a collision of barrels they struck the cypress bridge in a thunderous uproar of hooves and squealing timber, passed swiftly across the river into Jerusalem, guns glinting in the pale light. I watched until they had galloped out of sight and until the noise of hoofbeats faded into a soft dim drumming behind me in the town. Then it was still again. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the window sill. The darkness was comforting to my eyes. It had for many years been my custom to pray at this hour of the day, or to read from the Bible; but during the five days that I had been made prisoner I had been refused the Bible, and as for prayer—well, it was no surprise to me any longer that I was totally unable to force a prayer from my lips. I still had this craving to perform a daily act which for the years of my grown-up life had

become as simple and as natural as a bodily function, but which now seemed so incapable of accomplishment as to resemble a problem in geometry or some other mysterious science beyond my understanding. I now could not even recall when the ability to pray had left me—one month, two months, perhaps even more. It might have been some consolation, at least, had I known the reason why this power had deserted me; but I was denied even this knowledge and there seemed no way at all to bridge the gulf between myself and God. So for a moment, as I stood with my eyes closed and with my head pressed against the cold wood sill, I felt a terrible emptiness. Again I tried to pray but my mind was a void, and all that filled my consciousness was the still fading echo of plunging hoofbeats and roosters crowing far off in the fields beyond Jerusalem.

Suddenly I heard a rattling at the bars behind me and I opened my eyes, turning to see Kitchen’s face in the lantern light. It was a young face, eighteen perhaps nineteen, pimpled and pockmarked and slack-jawed, quite stupid and so pitifully scared as to make me feel that I had perhaps wreaked upon him some irreversible mental change. For what had begun five days ago as apprehension had changed to constant fright, and this finally, it was plain to see, to a hopeless and demoralizing terror as each day passed and I slept and ate and breathed, still unclaimed by death. I heard his voice behind the bars, aquiver with dread. “Nat,” he said. Then, “Hey, old Nat,” in a skittish hesitant voice. “Nat, wake up!”

For a moment I wanted to shout out, yell “Scat!” and watch him fly out of his britches, but I said only: “I’m awake now.”

He was obviously confounded to find me at the window. “Nat,” he said quickly. “The lawyer’s coming. Remember? He wants to see you. You awake?” He stammered a bit as he spoke, and by the lantern’s glow I could see his white drawn young face with bulging eyes and a bloodless area of fright around the mouth. Just then I again felt a great empty aching in my stomach.

“Marse Kitchen,” I said, “I’m hungry. Please. I wonder if you could fetch me a little bite to eat. Kindly please, young mastah.”

“Breakfast ain’t until eight,” he replied in a croak.

I said nothing for a moment, watching him. Maybe it was hunger alone which stirred up a

last breath, the ultimate gasp of a fury I thought I had safely laid to rest six weeks before. I looked back into the infantine slack-jawed face, thinking: Mooncalf, you are just a lucky child. You are the kind of sweet meat Will was after … And for no reason at all a vision of mad Will came back, and I thought in spite of myself, the moment’s rage persisting: Will, Will. How that mad black man would have relished this simpleton’s flesh … The rage shriveled, died within me, leaving me with a momentary sense of waste and shame and exhaustion. “Maybe you could fetch me just a little piece of pone,” I said, pleading, thinking: Big talk will fetch you nothing but nigger talk might work. Certainly I had nothing to lose, least of all my pride. “Just a little bitty piece of pone,” I coaxed, coarse and wheedling. “Please, young mastah. I’m most dreadful hungry.”

“Breakfast ain’t until eight!” he blurted in a voice too loud, a shout, his breath making the lantern flame tremble and flicker. Then he darted off and I was standing in the dawn, shivering, listening to the growling in my guts. After a moment I shuffled back over to the plank and sat down and thrust my head into my hands and closed my eyes. Prayer again hovered at the margin of my consciousness, prowling there restlessly like some great gray cat yearning for entry into my mind. Yet once again prayer remained outside and apart from me, banned, excluded, unattainable, shut out as decisively as if walls as high as the sun had been interposed between myself and God. So instead of prayer I began to whisper aloud: “It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto thy name, O most High. 

To show forth thy lovingkindness in the morning …” But even these harmless words came out wrong, and as quickly as I had begun I ceased, the familiar diurnal Psalm foul and sour in my mouth and as meaningless and empty as all my blighted attempts at prayer. Beyond my maddest imaginings I had never known it possible to feel so removed from God—a separation which had nothing to do with faith or desire, for both of these I still possessed, but with a forsaken solitary apartness so beyond hope that I could not have felt more sundered from the divine spirit had I been cast alive like some wriggling insect beneath the largest rock on earth, there to live in hideous, perpetual dark. The chill and damp of the morning began to spread out like ooze through my bones. Hark’s breathing came through the wall like the sound of an old dog dying, all gurgles and shudders and unholy vibrations, stitched together by a sickly thread of air.

A person who has lived as I have for many years—close to the ground, so to speak, in the woods and the swamp, where no animal sense is superior to another—eventually comes to own a supremely good nose; thus I smelled Gray almost before I saw him. Not that the odor that Gray put out demanded great sensibility: suddenly the cold dawn was a May morning, rank with the odor of apple blossoms, his sweet fragrance preceding him as he approached the cell. Kitchen was carrying two lanterns this time. He put one down on the floor and unlocked the door. Then he came in, holding both lanterns high, followed by Gray. The slop bucket was inside by the door and Kitchen jarred it with one of his uncertain, nervous feet, setting the whole bucket to gulping and sloshing. Gray caught a hint of Kitchen’s terror, because at that instant I heard him say: “Calm yourself, boy, for pity’s sake! What on earth do you think he can do to you?” It was a round, hearty voice, jovial even, booming with voracious good will. At this hour I was unable to tell which I resented more, that doughty voice or the honeyed, overpowering perfume. “Lawd amercy, you’d think he was going to eat you alive!” Kitchen made no reply, set a lamp down on the other plank which stuck out, like the one I was sitting on, at right angles from the opposite wall, then picked up the slop bucket and fled, banging the door behind him and throwing the bolt home with a slippery chunking noise. For a moment, after Kitchen was gone, Gray said nothing, standing near the door and blinking slow, tentative blinks past me—I had already noticed he was a bit near-sighted—then he eased himself down on the board beside the lantern. We would not need the lantern long: even as he seated himself morning was pouring with a cool white glow through the window, and I had begun to hear outside beyond the jail a slow-moving fuss and clatter of creaking pumps and banging windows and yapping dogs as the town came awake. Gray was a fleshy, redfaced man—he must have been fifty or a little more—and his eyes were hollow and bloodshot as if he needed sleep. He stirred about to find a comfortable resting place on the plank, then threw open his greatcoat abruptly, revealing beneath a fancy brocaded

waistcoat, now more grease-stained than ever and with the lower button unloosened to accommodate his paunch. Again he gazed toward me, blinking past me as if still unable to see or find his focus; then he yawned and removed, finger by delicate pudgy finger, his gloves, which must once have been pink but now were seedy and begrimed.

“Mornin’, Reverend,” he said finally. When I made no reply, he reached inside his waistcoat and took out a sheaf of papers, unfolding and flattening them against his lap. He said nothing more for a bit as he held the papers close to the lantern, shuffling them in and out, humming to himself, pausing from time to time to stroke his mustache, which was gray and indecisive, a faint shadow. His jaw was in need of a shave. With such an empty feeling in my stomach the over-sweet smell of him almost made me puke as I sat there watching him, saying nothing. I was worn out from talking to him and seeing him, and for the first time—perhaps it was my hunger or the cold or a combination of both, or my general frustration about prayer—I felt my dislike of him begin to dominate my better nature, my equanimity. For although I had disliked him at the very beginning five full days before, disliked the mode and method of the trickery behind his very presence, despised his person and the mellifluous sugarplum stench of him, I quickly understood how foolish it would be not to yield, not to be acquiescent and blab everything now that it all was over—fully aside from his bribery and threat, what else had I to lose? Thus even at the outset I figured that hostility would avail me nothing and I managed if not completely to stifle my dislike (and dislike it was, not hatred, which I have only once felt for any single man) then to mask it, to submerge it beneath the general polite compliance which the situation demanded.

For I had said nothing when first I laid eyes on him, and he had slouched there in the yellow autumnal light (an afternoon, hazy with smoke; I recall the curled and brittle sycamore leaves drifting through the window bars), sluggish and sleepy-eyed, the words coming wearily deliberate while with pink-gloved fingers he scraped at his crotch: “Well now, looky-here, Reverend, ain’t nothin’ good goin’ to come of you shuttin’ up like a old walnut.” He paused, but again I said nothing. “Except maybe—” And he hesitated. “Except maybe

 a pack of misery. For you and the other nigger.” I remained silent. The day before, when they had brought me up by foot from Cross Keys, there had been two women—banshees in sunbonnets, egged on by the men—who had pricked my back deep with hatpins a dozen times, perhaps more; the tiny wounds along my shoulders had begun fiercely to itch and I yearned to scratch them, with a hopeless craving which brought tears to my eyes, but I was prevented from doing so by the manacles. I thought if I could get off those manacles and scratch I’d be able to think clearly, I’d be relieved of a great affliction, and for an instant I was on the verge of capitulating to Gray if he’d allow me this concession—nonetheless, I kept my mouth shut, saying nothing. This immediately proved wise. “Know what I mean by a pack of misery?” he persisted, deliberately, patiently, not unkindly, as if I were the most responsive of company, instead of a worn-out and beaten sack. Outside I could hear the thudding and clash of cavalry and a dull babble of hundreds of distant voices: it was the first day, the presence of my body in custody had been verified, and hysteria hung over Jerusalem like thunder. “What I mean about a pack of misery is this, Nat. Is two items. Now listen. Item in the first part: the con-tin-u-ation of the misery you already got. For example, all that unnecessary junk the sheriff got wound around you there, those chains there around your neck and them quadruple leg irons, and that big ball of iron they hung onto your ankle there. Lord God Almighty, you’d think they’d figured you was old Samson himself, fixing to break down the place with one big mighty jerk. Plain foolishness, I call it. That kind of rig, a man’d die settin’ in his own, uh, ordure long before they got around to stretching his neck.” He leaned forward toward me, sweat like minute pale blisters against his brow; in spite of his easy manner I could not help but feel that he exhaled eagerness and ambition. “Such things as that, what I might call, as I have already stated, the con-tin-u-ation of the misery you already got. Now then … Of two items, the item in the second part. Namely, the promulgation of more misery over and above and in addition to the misery you already got—”

“Excuse me.” For the first time I spoke, and his voice abruptly ceased. He was of course working up to the idea that if I did not tell him everything, he would find a way of getting at me through some sort of villainous monkey

business with Hark. But he had misjudged everything. He had at once misinterpreted my silence and unwittingly anticipated my most nagging, imminent need: to scratch my back. If I was to be hung come what may, what purpose could be served by withholding a “confession,” especially when it might augment in some small way my final physical relief? Thus I felt I had gained a small, private initial victory. Had I opened up at the outset it would have been I who had to ask for indulgences, and I might not have gotten them. But by remaining quiet I had allowed him to feel that only by small favors could he get me to talk; now already he had expressed the nature of those favors, and we had each taken the first step toward getting me unwound from my cocoon of iron and brass. There is no doubt about it. White people often undo themselves by such running off at the mouth, and only God knows how many nigger triumphs have been won in total silence. “Excuse me,” I said again. I told him there was no reason to go any further. And I watched his face flush and his eyes grow round and wide with sudden surprise, also with a glint of disappointment, as if my quick surrender had scattered all the beautiful possibilities of threat and cajolery and intimidation he was spoiling for in his tiresome harangue. Then I told him quite simply that I was most willing to make a confession.

“You are?” he said. “You mean—”

“Hark’s the last one left, except for myself. They tell me he is mighty bad hurt. Hark and I growed up together. I wouldn’t want anybody to hurt a hair on his head. No sir, not old Hark. But that ain’t all—”

“Well sir,” Gray broke in, “that’s a right intelligent decision, Nat. I thought you’d come round to that decision.”

“Also, there’s something else, Mr. Gray,” I said, speaking very slowly. “Last night, after they carried me up here from Cross Keys and I sat here in the dark in these chains, I tried to sleep. And as I tried to sleep, the Lord seemed to appear to me in a vision. For a while I didn’t feel it was the Lord, because long ago I thought the Lord had failed me, had deserted me. But as I sat here in these chains, with this neck iron and these leg irons and these here manacles eating at my wrists, as I sat here in the hopeless agony of the knowledge of what

was going to befall me, why, Mr. Gray, I’ll swear that the Lord came to me in a vision. And the Lord said this to me. The Lord said: Confess, that all the nations may know. Confess, that thy acts may be known to all men.” I paused, gazing at Gray in the swarming, dusty fall light. For a brief instant I thought the falsity of these words would reveal itself, but Gray was lapping it up, intent now, even as I spoke scrabbling at his waistcoat for paper, groping for the walnut writing box at his knee, all fussy anxiety now, as if he risked being left in the lurch. “When the Lord said that to me,” I continued, “Mr. Gray, I knowed there was no other course. Now sir, I’m a tired man, but I’m ready to confess, because the Lord has given this nigger a sign.”

And already the quill pen was out, the paper laid flat on the lid of the writing box, and the sound of scratching as Gray hastened to get down to business. “What’d the Lord say to you again, Nat? ‘Confess your sins, that’—what?”

“Not confess your sins, sir,” I replied. “He said confess. Just that. Confess. That is important to relate. There was no your sins at all. Confess, that all nations may know …”

“Confess, that all nations may know,” he repeated beneath his breath, the pen scratching away. “And what else?” he said, looking up.

“Then the Lord told me: Confess, that thy acts may be known to all men.”

Gray paused, the quill in midair; still sweating, his face wore a look of such pleasure that it verged on exaltation, and for an instant I almost expected to see his eyes water. He let the pen fall slowly to the writing box. “I can’t tell you, Nat,” he said in a voice full of emotion, “I honestly can’t tell you what a splendid—what a really splendid decision you’ve made. It’s what I call an honorable choice.”

“What you mean by honorable?” I said.

“To make a confession, that is.”

“The Lord commanded me,” I replied. “Besides, I ain’t got anything to conceal any more. What have I got to lose by telling all I know?” I hesitated for

a moment; the desire to scratch my back had driven me to the edge of a kind of tiny, separate madness. “I’d feel like I could say a whole lot more to you though, Mr. Gray, if you’d get them to take off these here manacles. I itch up along my neck somethin’ powerful.”

“I think that can be arranged without too much trouble,” he said in an amicable voice. “As I have already intimated at some length, I have been authorized by the court to, within reason, ameliorate any such continuation of present misery that might obtain, providin’ you cooperate to a degree as would make such amelioration, uh, mutually advantageous. And I am happy—indeed, I might say I am overpowered with delight—to see that you feel that cooperation is desirable.” He leaned forward toward me, surrounding the two of us with the smell of spring and blossoms. “So the Lord told you: Confess, that all nations may know? Reverend, I don’t think you realize what divine justice lies in that phrase. For near about onto ten weeks now there’s been a mighty clamor to know, not only in the Virginia region but all over America. For ten weeks, while you were a-hidin’ out and a-scamperin’ around Southampton like a fox, the American people have been in a sweat to know how come you started a calamity like you done. All over America, the North as well as the South, the people have asked theirselves: How could the darkies get organized like that, how could they ever evolve and promulgate not to say coordinate and carry out such a plan? But the people didn’t know, the truth was not available to them. They were in the profoundest dark. Them other niggers didn’t know. Either that or they were too dumb. Dumb-assed! Dumb! Dumb! They couldn’t talk, even that other one we ain’t hung yet. The one they call Hark.” He paused. “Say, I’ve been meanin’ to ask. How’d he ever get a name like that?”

“I believe he was born Hercules,” I said. “I think Hark is short for that. But I ain’t sure. Nobody’s sure. He’s always been called Hark.”

“Well, even him. Brighter than most of the others, I reckon. But stubborn. Craziest nigger I ever saw in my life.” Gray bent closer to me. “Even he wouldn’t say anything. Had a load of buckshot in his shoulder that would of felled an ox. We nursed him along—I’ll be frank with you, Nat, frank and level. We thought he’d tell where you were hidin’ out at. Anyway, we nursed him along. He was tougher’n rawhide, I’ll have to hand him that. But ask him a question and he’d set there right here in this

jail, he’d set there crackin’ chicken bones with his teeth and just rare back and laugh like a hoot owl. And them other niggers, they didn’t know nothin’.” Gray drew back for an instant, silent, wiping his brow, while I sat there listening to the humming and murmuration of people outside the jail—a boy’s call, a whistle, a sudden thudding of hooves, and beneath it all a rise and fall of many voices like the distant rushing of water. “No sir,” he resumed, slower, softer now, “Nat and Nat alone had the key to all this ruction.” He paused again, then said in a voice almost a whisper: “Don’t you see how you’re the key, Reverend?”

Through the window I watched the curled and golden sifting of sycamore leaves. The immobility in which I had sat for so many hours had caused oblong shadowy images to flutter across the margin of my consciousness like the dim beginning of hallucinations. I began to get these mixed up with the leaves. I didn’t reply to his question, finally saying only: “Did you say there was a trial for the others?”

“Trial?” he said. “Trials, you mean. Hell, we had a million trials. Had a trial pretty near every day. September and this past month, we had trials runnin’ out our ears.”

“But trials? Then you mean—” An image came to mind like an explosion of light: myself, the day before, hurried toward Jerusalem along the road from Cross Keys, the booted feet thudding into my back and behind and spine and the fierce sting of the hatpins in my shoulders, the blurred infuriated faces and the dust in my eyes and the gobs of their spit stringing from my nose and cheek and neck (even now I could feel it on my face like an enormous scab, dried and encrusted), and, above all, one anonymous wild voice high and hysterical over the furious uproar: “Burn him! Burn him! Burn the black devil right here!” And through the six-hour stumbling march my own listless hope and wonder, curiously commingled: I wish they would get it over with, but whatever it is they’re going to do, burn me, hang me, put out my eyes, why don’t they get it over with right now? But they had done nothing. Their spit seemed everlasting, its sourness a part of me. But save for this and the kicks and the hatpins, I had come out unharmed, wondrously so, thinking even as they chained me up and hurled me into this cell: The Lord is preparing for me a special

salvation. Either that, or they are working up to some exquisite retribution quite beyond my power of comprehension. But no. I was the key to the riddle, and was to be tried. As for the rest—the other Negroes, as for their trials—suddenly as I gazed back at Gray it became more or less clear. “Then it was to separate the wheat from the chaff,” I said.

“Bien sure, as the Frenchies put it. You couldn’t be more correct. Also you might say it was to protect the rights of property.”

“Rights of property?” I said.

“Bien sure again,” he replied. “You might say it was a combination of both.” He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and drew out a fresh plug of dark brown tobacco, examined it between the tips of his fingers, then gnawed off a cheekful. “Offer you a chaw,” he said after a moment, “except I imagine a man of the cloth like you don’t indulge in Lady Nicotine. Very good idea too, rot the tongue right out of your head. No, I’ll tell you somethin’, Nat, and that somethin’ is this. Speakin’ as a lawyer—indeed, speakin’ as your lawyer, which to some degree I am—it’s my duty to point out a few jurisprudential details which it might be a good idea to tuck under your bonnet. Now, of two items, item in the first part is this. Namely: rights of property.”

I stared at him, saying nothing.

“Allow me to put it crudely. Take a dog, which is a kind of a chattel. No, first take a wagon—I want to evolve this analogy by logical degrees. Now let’s take some farmer who’s got a wagon—a common, ordinary dray wagon—and he’s got it out in the fields somewhere. Now, this farmer has loaded up this wagon with corn shucks or hay or firewood or somethin’ and he’s got it restin’ on a kind of slope. Well, this here is a rickety old wagon and all of a sudden without him knowin’ it the brake gives way. Pretty soon that old wagon is careerin’ off down the road and across hill and dale and before you can say John Henry—kerblam!—it fetches up against the porch of a house, and there’s a little girl peaceably settin’ on the porch—and kerblam! the wagon plows right on across the porch and the poor little girl is mashed to death beneath the wagon wheels right before her stricken mother’s eyes. Matter of fact, I heard of this very thing happenin’ not long ago, somewhere up in Dinwiddie. Well, there's

a lot of boo-hooin’ around, and a funeral, and so on, but pretty soon thoughts inevitably turn back to that old wagon. How come it happened? How come little Clarinda got mashed to death by that old wagon? Who’s responsible for such a horrible dereliction? Well, who do you think’s responsible?”

This last question was addressed to me, but I didn’t choose to answer. Perhaps it was boredom or exasperation or exhaustion, or all three. At any rate, I didn’t reply, watching him shift the quid in his jaws, then send a coppery jet of tobacco juice to the floor between our feet.

“I’ll tell you what,” he went on. “I’ll tell you where responsibility lies. Responsibility lies clean and square with the farmer. Because a wagon is an in-an-i-mate chattel. A wagon can’t be held culpable for its acts. You can’t punish that old wagon, you can’t take it and rip it apart and throw it on a fire and say: ‘There, that’ll teach you, you miserable misbegotten wagon!’ No, responsibility lies with the unfortunate owner of the wagon. It’s him that’s got to pay the piper, it’s him that’s got to stand for whatever damages the court adjudicates against him—for the demolished porch and the deceased little girl’s funeral expenses, plus possibly whatever punitive compensation the court sees fit to award. Then, poor bugger, if he’s got any money left, he fixes the brake on the wagon and goes back and minds his land—a sadder but a wiser man. Do you follow me?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s clear.”

“Well then, now we come to the heart of the matter—which is to say, an-i-mate chattel. Now, animate chattel poses a particularly tricky and subtle jurisprudential problem when it comes to adjudicating damages for loss of life and destruction of property. I need not say that the problem becomes surpassin’ tricky and subtle in a case like that of you and your cohorts, whose crimes are unprecedented in the annals of this nation—and tried in an atmosphere, I might add, where the public passions are somewhat, uh, inflamed to say the

least. What’re you fidgetin’ for?”

“It’s my shoulders,” I said. “I’d be mighty grateful if you could get them to ease off these chains. My shoulders pain something fierce.”

“I told you I’d have them take care of that.” His voice was impatient. “I’m a man of my word, Reverend. But to get back to chattel, there are both similarities and differences between animate chattel and a wagon. The major and manifest similarity is, of course, that animate chattel is property like a wagon and is regarded as such in the eyes of the law. By the same token—am I speakin’ too complex for you?”

“No sir,” I said.

“By the same token, the major and manifest difference is that animate chattel, unlike inanimate chattel such as a wagon, can commit and may be tried for a felony, the owner being absolved of responsibility in the eyes of the law. I don’t know if this seems a contradiction to you. Does it?”

“A what?” I said.

“Contradiction.” He paused. “I guess you don’t comprehend.”

“Oh yes.” Actually, I simply hadn’t heard the word.

“Contradiction. That means two things that mean one and the same thing at the same time. I reckon I shouldn’t be quite so complex.”

I didn’t reply again. There was something about the tone of his voice alone—the wad of tobacco had thickened it, making it sound moist and blubbery—that had begun to grate on my nerves.

“Well, nem’mine that,” he went on, “I ain’t even goin’ to explain it. You’ll hear all about it in court. The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth. You ain’t a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that’s how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that’s how come you’re goin’ to be tried next Sattidy.”

He paused, then said softly without emotion : “And hung by the neck until dead.”

For a moment, as if temporarily spent, Gray took a deep breath and eased himself back away from me against the wall. I could hear his heavy breathing and the juicy sound his chewing made as he regarded me through amiable, heavylidded eyes. For the first time I was aware of the discolored

blotches on his flushed face—faint reddish-brown patches the same as I had seen once on a brandy-drinking white man in Cross Keys who had rapidly fallen dead with his liver swollen to the size of a middling watermelon. I wondered if this strange lawyer of mine suffered from the same affliction. Sluggish autumnal flies filled the cell, stitching the air with soft erratic buzzings as they zigzagged across the golden light, mooned sedulously over the slop bucket, crept in nervous pairs across Gray’s stained pink gloves, his waistcoat, and his pudgy hands now motionless on his knees. I watched the leaves merging with the shadow shapes swooping and fluttering at the edge of my mind. The desire to scratch, to move my shoulders had become a kind of hopeless, carnal obsession, like a species of lust, and the last of Gray’s words seemed now to have made only the most dim, grotesque impression on my brain, the quintessence of white folks’ talk I had heard incessantly all my life and which I could only compare to talk in one of my nightmares, totally implausible yet somehow wholly and fearfully real, where owls in the woods are quoting price lists like a storekeeper, or a wild hog comes prancing on its hind legs out of a summer cornfield, intoning verses from Deuteronomy. I looked steadily at Gray, thinking that he was no better, no worse—like most white men he had a lively runaway mouth—and Scripture leaped to my mind like a banner: He multiplieth words without knowledge, whoso keepeth his tongue keepeth his soul. But finally I said again only: “It was to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

“Or, to switch around the parable,” he replied, “to separate the chaff from the wheat. But in principle you’re dead right, Nat. Point is this: some of the niggers, like yourself, were up to their eyes in this mess, guilty as sin itself with nothin’ to mitigate their guilt whatsoever. Pack of the other niggers, however—and I guess I don’t have to drive home this melancholic fact to you—was either youngly and innocently dragooned or mere tagalongs or they out-and-out balked at this crazy scheme of your’n. It was the owners of them niggers these assizes were designed to protect …”

He was still talking now, and as he talked he removed a sheet of paper from his pocket, but I was no longer listening, attending rather to a sudden miserable, corrosive bitterness in my heart which had nothing at all to do

with this jail or the chains or my aching discomfort or that mystifying, lonesome apartness from God which was still a bitterness almost impossible to bear. Right now I had this other bitterness to contend with, the knowledge which for ten weeks I had so sedulously shunned, buried in the innermost recesses of my mind, and which Gray had casually fetched up ugly and wriggling right before my eyes: them other niggers, dragooned, balked. I think I must have made a quick choked noise of distress in the back of my throat, or perhaps he only sensed this new anguish, for he looked up at me, his eyes narrowing again, and said: “It was them other niggers that cooked your goose, Reverend. That’s where you made your fatal error. Them others. You could not dream of what went on in their philosophy—” And for a moment I thought he was going to continue, to elaborate and embellish this idea, but instead now he had flattened the paper against the plank and was bending down above it, flattening and smoothing the document as he went on in his bland, offhand garrulous way: “So like I say, you can get a good idea from this list how little chaff there was amongst all that wheat. Now listen—Jack, property of Nathaniel Simmons. Acquitted.” He slanted an eye up at me—a questioning eye—but I didn’t respond.

“Stephen,” he went

on, “property of James Bell, acquitted. Shadrach, property of Nathaniel Simmons, acquitted. Jim, property of William Vaughan, acquitted. Daniel, property of Solomon D. Parker, discharged without trial. Ferry and Archer, property of J. W. Parker, ditto. Arnold and Artist, free niggers, ditto. Matt, property of Thomas Ridley, acquitted. Jim, property of Richard Porter, ditto. Nelson, property of Benjamin Blunt’s estate, ditto. Sam, property of J. W. Parker, ditto. Hubbard, property of Catherine Whitehead, discharged without trial … Hell, I could go on and on, but I won’t.” He peered up at me again, with a knowing, significant glance. “If that don’t prove that these trials were fair and square right down the line, I’d like to know what does.”

I hesitated, then spoke. “All it proves to me is that—a certain observance. The rights of property, like you done already pointed out.”

“Now wait a minute, Reverend,” he retorted. “Wait a minute! I want to advise you not to get impudent with me. I still say it proves we run a fair series of trials, and I don’t need none of your lip to show me the contrary. You set here givin’ me a line of your black lip like that and you’ll wind up draggin’ more iron ruther than less.” The idea of even more restraint being unsettling to me, I immediately regretted my words. It was the first time Gray had shown any hostility, and it didn’t rest too well on his face, causing his lower lip to sag and a trickle of brown juice to leak from one corner of his jaws. Almost instantly, though, he had composed himself, wiped his mouth, and his manner again became conversational, casual, even friendly. Somewhere outside the cell, somewhere distant beneath the sparse November trees, I could hear a prolonged shrill woman’s cry, uttering jubilant words of which only one I could understand: my own name, N-a-a-t, the single syllable stretched out endlessly like the braying of a mule across the tumult and the hubbub and the liquid rushing of many voices. “Sixty-odd culprits in all,” Gray was saying. “Out of sixty, a couple dozen acquitted or discharged, another fifteen or so convicted but transported. Only fifteen hung—plus you and that other nigger, Hark, to be hung—seventeen hung in all. In other words, out of this whole catastrophic ruction only round one-fourth gets the rope. Dad-burned mealy-mouthed abolitionists say we don’t show justice. Well, we do. Justice! That’s how come nigger slavery’s going to last a thousand years.”

Gray fussed with his lists and his papers. Then I said: “Mr. Gray, sir, I know I ain’t in much of a position to ask favors. But I fears I’m goin’ to need a little time to collect my thoughts afore I make that confession. I wonder if you’d be so kind as to let me alone here for a short time. I needs that time, sir, to collect my thoughts. To reconcile some things with the Lord.”

“Why sure, Nat,” he replied, “we got all the time in the world. Matter of fact, I could use that time too. Tell you what, I’ll take this opportunity to go see Mr. Trezevant, he’s the Commonwealth’s attorney, about all those shackles and irons they got on you. Then I’ll be back and we’ll get down to work. Half an hour, three-quarters do?”

“I’m most grateful to you. Also, I hope I don’t pressure too much, but, Mr. Gray, I’ve done got powerful hungry since last night. I wonder if you could

get them to fetch me a little bite to eat. I’ll be in a better fix for that confession if I had a little somethin’ on my stomach.”

Rising, he rattled the bars, calling for the jailor, then turned back to me and said: “Reverend, you just say the word and it’s your’n. Sure, we’ll get you somethin’ to eat. Man can’t make a proper confessional ’thout some pone and bacon in his guts.”

When he had gone and the door had closed me in again, I sat there motionless in my web of chain. The midafternoon sun was sinking past the window, flooding the cell with light. Flies lit on my brow, my cheeks and lips, and buzzed in haphazard elastic loopings from wall to wall. Through this light, motes of dust rose and fell in a swarmy myriad crowd and I began to wonder if these specks, so large and visible to my eye, offered any hindrance to a fly in its flight. Perhaps, I thought, these grains of dust were the autumn leaves of flies, no more bothersome than an episode of leaves is to a man when he is walking through the October woods, and a sudden gust of wind shakes down around him from a poplar or a sycamore a whole harmless, dazzling, pelting flurry of brown and golden flakes. For a long moment I pondered the condition of a fly, only half listening to the uproar outside the jail which rose and fell like summer thunder, hovering near yet remote. In many ways, I thought, a fly must be one of the most fortunate of God’s creatures. Brainless born, brainlessly seeking its sustenance from anything wet and warm, it found its brainless mate, reproduced, and died brainless, unacquainted with misery or grief. But then I asked myself: How could I be sure? Who could say that flies were not instead God’s supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching, forced by instinct to dine off sweat and slime and offal, their very brainlessness an everlasting torment? So that even if someone, well-meaning but mistaken, wished himself out of human misery and into a fly’s estate, he would only find himself in a more monstrous hell than he had even

 imagined—an existence in which there was no act of will, no choice, but a blind and automatic obedience to instinct which caused him to feast endlessly and gluttonously and revoltingly upon the guts of a rotting fox or a bucket of prisoner’s slops. Surely then, that would be the ultimate damnation: to exist in the world of a fly, eating thus, without will or choice and against all desire.

I recall one of my former owners, Mr. Thomas Moore, once saying that Negroes never committed suicide. I recollect the exact situation—hog-killing time one freezing autumn (maybe it was this juxtaposition of death against death’s cold season that made such an impression), and Moore’s puckered, pockmarked face purple with cold as he labored at the bloody carcass, and the exact words spoken to two neighbors while I stood by listening: “Every hear of a nigger killin’ hisself? No, I figger a darky he might want to kill hisself, but he gets to thinkin’ about it, and he keeps thinkin’ about it, thinkin’ and thinkin’, and pretty soon he’s gone off to sleep. Right, Nat?” The neighbors’ laughter, and my own, anticipated, expected, and the question repeated—“Right, Nat?”—more insistent now, and my reply, with customary chuckling: “Yes sir, Marse Tom, that’s right, sure enough.” And indeed I had to admit to myself, as I thought more deeply about it, that I had never known of a Negro who had killed himself; and in trying to explain this fact I tended to believe (especially the more I examined the Bible and the teachings of the great Prophets) that in the face of such adversity it must be a Negro’s Christian faith, his understanding of a kind of righteousness at the heart of suffering, and the will toward patience and forbearance in the knowledge of life everlasting, which swerved him away from the idea of self-destruction. And the afflicted people thou wilt save, for thou art my lamp, O Lord; and the Lord will lighten my darkness. But now as I sat there amid the sunlight and the flickering shadows of falling leaves and the incessant murmur and buzz of the flies, I could no longer say that I felt this to be true. It seemed rather that my black shit-eating people were surely like flies, God’s mindless outcasts, lacking even that will to destroy by their own hand their unending anguish …

For a long while I sat motionless in the light, waiting for Gray to return. I wondered if he would get them to bring me some food, after they took off the manacles and chains. I also wondered if I could persuade him to bring me a Bible, which I had begun to hunger for far down inside me with a hunger that made me ache. I shut out the clamor of the crowd from my mind, and in the stillness the flies buzzed round

me with an industrious, solemn noise, like the noise of eternity. Soon I tried to pray, but again as always it was no use. All I could feel was despair, despair so sickening that I thought it might drive me mad, except that it somehow lay deeper than madness.

When dawn broke on that first morning, and cool white light began to fill the cell, Gray blew the lantern out. “Mercy, it’s gotten cold,” he said, shivering, buttoning his greatcoat. “Anyway—” And he paused, gazing at me. “You know, first thing today after the trial’s over I’m going to try to requisition you some winter clothes. ’Tain’t right for a body to set in a cell like this and freeze half to death. I didn’t pay it any nem’mine before, them clothes of your’n, it being so warm until now. But what you’ve got on there—what’s left of it—that’s plain old summer issue, ain’t it? Cotton? Osnaburg cloth? Pity, rags like that in this kind of weather. Now, about the confession, Nat, I got everything down that’s important; worked durn near all night on it too. Well, like I already hinted, this confession will, I’m afraid, comprise the evidence for the prosecution and there won’t be any other issue or issues at stake. I expect that I or Mr. W. C. Parker—that’s your defense attorney—will get up and make some kind of formal statement, but under the circumstances it can’t be much more than a plea that the judges carefully consider the evidence placed before them—in this case your full, free, and voluntary confession. Now, as I’ve already told you, before you sign it this mornin’ I wanted to read it out to you—”

“You mean, this Mr. Parker—” I put in. “You mean you’re not my lawyer?”

“Why sure. He’s my what you might call associate.”

“And I ain’t even seen him? And you tell me today?” I paused. “And you’re taking this all down for the prosecution?”

Impatience flashed across his face, curtailing a yawn. “Eyaw! The prosecutor’s my associate too. What difference does it make, Reverend? Prosecution, defense—it don’t make a hair’s difference one way or the other. I thought I made that perfectly clear to you—that I am a, uh, delegate of the court, empowered to take down the confession. Which I’ve gone and done. But your goose is cooked already.” He looked

at me intently, then spoke in a cajoling, hearty voice: “Come on now, Reverend. Let’s be realistic about this matter! I mean—well, to call a spade a spade—” He halted. “I mean—Hell, you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know I’m going to be hung.”

“Well, since this is a priori and foregone there’s not too much use standing on the legal niceties of the matter, is there?”

“No sir,” I said, “I reckon not.” And there wasn’t. I even felt a kind of relief that logic, at last, had flown completely out of the window.

“Well then, let’s get down to business, because I want to have this written out as sensible as I can before ten o’clock. Now, as I said, I’m going to read the whole thing out to you here. You’ll sign it, and then it’ll be read out again in court as evidence for the prosecution. But while I recite the entire thing out, there are a few items that I haven’t gotten entirely straight in my own mind and I want you to clarify them for me if you can. So while I read I’ll probably have to stop every now and then and make one or two minor amendments. Ready?”

I nodded, convulsed with a shivering cold.

“‘Sir—you have asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection, as you call it. To do so I must go back to the days of my infancy, and even before I was born …’” Gray had begun to read slowly and with deliberation, as if relishing the sound of each word, and already he interrupted himself, glancing up at me to say: “Of course, Nat, this ain’t supposed to represent your exact words as you said them to me. Naturally, in a court confession there’s got to be a kind of, uh, dignity of style, so this here’s more or less a reconstitution and recomposition of the relative crudity of manner in which all of our various discourses since last Tuesday went. The essence—that is, all the quiddities of detail are the same—or at least I hope they are the same.” He turned back

to the document and resumed: “‘To do so,’ et cetera, ’before I was born.’ Hem. ‘I was thirty-one years of age the second of October last, and born the property of Benjamin Turner of this county. In my childhood a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind, and laid the groundwork of that enthusiasm which has terminated so fatally to many, both white and black, and for which I am about to atone at the gallows. It is here necessary to relate—’” And he broke off again, saying: “Do you follow me so far?”

I was cold, and my body felt drained of all energy. I could only look back at him and murmur: “Yes.”

“Well then, to go on: It is here necessary to relate this circumstance; trifling as it may seem, it was the commencement of that belief which has grown with time and even now, sir, in this dungeon, helpless and forsaken as I am, I cannot divest myself of. Being at play with other children, when three or four years old, I was telling them something, which my mother, overhearing, said had happened before I was born. I stuck to my story, however, and related some things which went, in her opinion, to confirm it. Others, being called on, were greatly astonished, knowing that these things had happened, and caused them to say in my hearing: I surely would be a prophet, as the Lord had shown me things that had happened before my birth. And my mother strengthened me in this my first impression, saying in my presence that I was intended for some great purpose …’” He halted again. “Fair enough so far?”

“Yes,” I said. And this was true; at least the essence, as he put it, of what I had told him seemed to be no wrench of the truth. “Yes,” I repeated. “That’s fair.”

“All right, to continue—I’m glad you feel I’ve done justice to your own narrative, Nat: ‘My mother, to whom I was much attached, my master—who belonged to the church, and other religious persons who visited the house, and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my manners, I suppose, and my uncommon intelligence for a child—remarked that I had too much sense to be raised, and if I was, I would never be of any service to anyone, as a slave …’” As he continued to read, I heard a muffled clatter of rattling chains and shackles on the other side of the wall, and then a voice, also muffled, bubbling with phlegm—Hark’s: “Cold in here! Watch-man! I’se cold! Cold! He’p a poor nigger, watchman! He’p a poor freezin’ nigger! Watch-man, fetch a poor freezin’ nigger somep’n to kivver up his bones!” Gray, unperturbed by the racket, continued

to read. Hark kept up his hollering, and at that moment I slowly rose from the plank, stamping my feet to keep warm. “I’m listenin’,” I said to Gray, “don’ mind me, I’m listenin’.” I moved my shackled feet toward the window, paying less attention to Gray now than to Hark’s howls and moans beyond the wall; I knew he had been hurt, and it was cold, but I also knew Hark: this was bogus suffering, Hark at his rarest. The voice of the only Negro in Virginia whose wise flattery could gull a white man out of his very britches. I stood at the window, not listening to Gray but to Hark. The voice grew faint, weak, aquiver with the most wretched suffering: he seemed ready to expire, his voice would have melted a heart of brass. “Oh, somebody come he’p this pore sick freezin’ nigger! Oh, massah watchman, jes’ one little rag to kivver up his bones!” Presently, behind me, I heard Gray get up and go to the door, calling out to Kitchen. “Get some kind of a blanket for that other nigger,” he ordered. Then I heard him sit down again, resume reading, while beyond the wall I was certain I heard Hark’s voice trail off in something like a stifled laugh, a gurgle of satisfaction.

“‘I was not addicted to stealing in my youth, nor have ever been. Yet such was the confidence of the Negroes in the neighborhood, even at this early period of my life, in my superior judgment, that they would often carry me with them when they were going on any roguery, to plan for them. Growing up among them, with this confidence in my superior judgment, and when this, in their opinions, was perfected by divine inspiration, from the circumstances already alluded to in my infancy, and which belief was ever afterward inculcated by the austerity of my life and manners, which became the subject of remark by white and black. Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer …’”

The voice droned on. For a long while I ceased listening. It had begun to snow. The tiniest, most fragile flakes flew past like springtime seed, dissolving instantaneously as they struck the earth. A cold wind was blowing up. Above the river and the swamp beyond, a white rack of cloud hovered, covering the heavens, impermeable, its surface crawling with blackish streaks of mist like tattered shawls. Jerusalem had burst awake. Four more cavalrymen came at a canter over

the cypress bridge, filling the air with a noisy cobbling of hooves. Singly, in pairs, in clusters, men and women bundled against the cold had commenced to hurry up the road toward the courthouse. The road was rutted, brittle with frost, and as they picked their way along they murmured together and their feet made a crunched and crusty sound. It seemed early for such a procession, but then I realized what it was, thinking: They are going to make sure of getting seats, they don’t want to miss anything this day. I gazed across the narrow sluggish river to the forest wall: a long mile of swamp, then the flat fields and woods of the county. It would be the time of year now to lay up firewood: my thoughts moved, as in a daydream, out across cold space to some coarse thicket of beech or chestnut where already in the chill morning light a pair of slaves would be out with ax and wedge; and I could hear the chuck, chuck of the ax and the musical chink of the wedge and see the Negroes’ breaths steaming on the frosty air, and hear their voices ahowl as they labored against the timber, blabbery voices forever innocently pitched to be heard by someone a mile away: “Ole mistis, she say she kain’t find a sartin’ fat turkey pullet!” And the other: “Don’ look at me, brother!” And the first: “Who I goin’ look at, den? Ole mistis, she fine out, she break ev’y bone in yo’ black head!” And then their big-mouthed laughter, childishly loud and heedless in the morning, echoing from the dark woods, from bog and marsh and hollow, and a final silence save for the chuck, chuck of the ax and the chink of the wedge and, far off, a squalling of crows in wheeling descent over cornfields blurred with specks of flying snow. For a moment, despite myself, something wrenched painfully at my heart, and I had a brief blinding flash of recollection and longing. But only for an instant, for now I heard Gray say: “That’s the first item I’m curious about, right there, Reverend. I wonder if you might not clarify that a bit.”

“Which one is that?” I said, turning back to him.

“It’s that part right there in the passage I just read. See, now we’re windin’ up out of the groundwork material and into the insurrection proper and I want to get this part straight especially. I’ll repeat: ‘It was intended by us to

 have begun the work of death on the fourth of July last. Many were the plans formed by us,’ et cetera, et cetera. Les’see: ‘And the time passed without our coming to any determination how to commence. Still forming new schemes and rejecting them, when the sign appeared again, which determined me not to wait longer,’ et cetera, et cetera. Now then: ‘Since the commencement of 1830, I had been living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who was to me a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment to me …’” I saw Gray stir uncomfortably, then raise one haunch up off a fart, trying to slide it out gracefully, but it emerged in multiple soft reports like the popping of remote firecrackers. Suddenly he seemed flustered, discomfited, and this amused me: Why should he feel embarrassed before a nigger preacher, whose death warrant he was reading? He began to speak in a kind of roar, compounding his fluster and stew: “‘I had been living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who was to me a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment to me!’ That’s the item! That’s the item, Reverend!” I found him staring at me. “How do you explain that? That’s what I want to know, and so does everyone else. A man who you admit is kind and gentle to you and you butcher in cold blood!”

For a moment I was so surprised that I couldn’t speak. I sat down slowly. Then the surprise became perplexity, and I was silent for a long time, saying finally even then: “That—That I can’t give no reply to, Mr. Gray.” And I couldn’t—not because there was no reply to the question, but because there were matters which had to be withheld even from a confession, and certainly from Gray.

“For see here, Reverend, that’s another item the people can’t understand. If this was out and out tyranny, yes. If you was maltreated, beaten, ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed—yes. If any of these things prevailed, yes. Even if you existed under the conditions presently extant in the British Isles or Ireland, where the average agricultural peasantry is on an economic level with a dog, or less—even if you existed under these conditions, the people could understand. Yes. But this ain’t even Mississippi or Arkansas. This is Virginia in the year anno

 Domini 1831 and you have labored under civilized and virtuous masters. And Joseph Travis, among others, you butcher in cold blood! That—” He passed his hand across his brow, a gesture of real lament. “That the people can’t understand.”

Again I had the impression, dim and fleeting, of hallucination, of talk buried deep in dreams. I stared long and hard at Gray. Little different from any of the others, nonetheless it was a matter of wonder to me where this my last white man (save one with the rope) had come from. Now, as many times before, I had the feeling I had made him up. It was impossible to talk to an invention, therefore I remained all the more determinedly silent.

Gray looked at me narrowly. “All right, if you won’t open up about that, I’ll skip ahead to this other item. Then I’ll come back and read the whole thing.” He thumbed through the papers. Watching him, I again felt dizzy from hunger. Off in the town, the courthouse clock dropped eight jangling chimes on the morning and the stir and bustle, the sound of hoofbeats and voices, became louder and louder. Somewhere I heard a Negro’s voice, a woman’s, shrill with mock fury: “I gwine knock you to yo’ knees directly!” And then a little black girl’s young laughter, ashiver with equally mock panic and fright. Then a second’s stillness, then the hoofbeats and voices again. I began to nurse and coddle the pain of my hunger, folding my arms over my belly, standing guard over its emptiness like a sentinel. “Here we are,” said Gray. “Now listen to this, Reverend. It’s right after you’ve left the Bryants’ place—remember, you yourself haven’t killed anybody yet—and gone to Mrs. Whitehead’s. I quote: ‘I returned to commence the work of death, but they whom I left had not been idle: all the family were already murdered but Mrs. Whitehead and her daughter Margaret. As I came round to the door I saw Will pulling Mrs. Whitehead out of the house, and at the step he nearly severed her head from her body with his broadax. Miss Margaret, when I discovered her, had concealed herself in the corner formed by the projection of the cellar cap from the house; on my approach she fled but was soon overtaken, and after repeated blows with a sword I killed her by a blow on the head with a fence rail.’ Unquote. Right so far?”

I said nothing.

I felt a prickling at my scalp.

“Very well, we now skip down, oh, maybe ten, fifteen sentences, and what I have written here is this. Now listen careful, because this is more or less the sequence you told me it. I quote: ‘I took my station in the rear, and as it was my object to carry terror and devastation wherever we went, I placed fifteen or twenty of the best armed and most to be relied on, in front, who generally approach the houses as fast as their horses could run; this was for two purposes, to prevent their escape and strike terror to the inhabitants.’ Now listen careful: ‘On this account I never got to the houses, after leaving Mrs. Whitehead’s, until the murders were committed. I sometimes got in sight in time to see the work of death completed, viewed the mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction, and immediately started in quest of other victims. Having murdered Mrs. Waller and ten children, we started for Mr. William Williams’s; having killed him and two little boys that were there,’ et cetera, et cetera. Now of course, Nat, this here like all the rest is a rough paraphrase of your actual words, and subject to your own correction. But the main point is this, which you didn’t tell me in so many words, but which I’m going to bring out now by deductive reasoning, as it were. The main point is that in this whole hellish ruction involving dozens upon dozens of the slain, you, Nat Turner, were personally responsible for only one death. Am I right? Right? Because if I’m right it seems passin’ strange indeed.” He halted, then said: “How come you only slew one? How come, of all them people, this here particular young girl? Reverend, you’ve cooperated with me right down the line, but this here line of goods is hard to buy. I just can’t believe you only killed one …”

Foot-thuds and a rattling at the bars and Kitchen entered, carrying cold cornmeal mush on a plate, along with a tin cup of water. With jittery hands he put plate and cup down on the plank beside me, but for some reason now I was no longer very hungry. My heart had begun to pound, and I felt sweat in rivulets beneath my arms.

“Because it ain’t as if you had been disinvolved in these proceedings—a field general runnin’ the whole show from way behind the lines, like the Little Corporal standin’ aloof and pompous on the heights above Austerlitz.” Gray halted, slanting an eye at Kitchen. “Ain’t you got any bacon for the Reverend?” he said.

“The niggers over to Mrs. Blunt’s place fix it,” the boy replied. “The one that fetched

 it over here said they done run out of bacon.”

“Pretty pissy kewzine for a distinguished prisoner, I’ll vow, cold mush like that.” The boy hurried from the cell, and Gray turned back to me. “But you wasn’t disinvolved from the very beginning. Yes—You have to look at—this reluctance. Videlicet … Les’see …”

There was a shuffling of pages. I sat motionless, sweating, aware of the pounding of my heart. His words (mine? ours?) came back in my brain like a somber and doleful verse from Scripture itself: … came round to the door I saw Will pulling Mrs. Whitehead out of the house, and at the step he nearly severed her head from her body with his broadax. So easy in the telling, why now, uttered by Gray, did it cause me such panic and discomfort? Suddenly, savage lines crashed against my memory: After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces. I beheld then because of the voice of the great words: I beheld even till the beast was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame. For an instant I saw Will’s skinny self, Will’s hatchet face black as night with bulging eyes, mashed-in nose, loose pink minutely creviced lips, and white teeth flashing a smile murderously fixed, dim-brained, remorseless, pure; I felt myself shudder, not from the day’s cold but as if from chill fever coursing through the marrow of my bones.

“An overall reluctance. Videlicet … And I quote from back near the beginning, which has to do with the murder of none other than your late owner—the aforesaid and, I might add, the benevolent Mr. Joseph Travis. ‘It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. On which, armed with a hatchet and accompanied by Will, I entered my master’s chamber, it being dark I could not give a deathblow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife; it was his last word, Will laid him dead with a blow of his ax,’ and so on.” He paused again, regarding me gloomily out of his flushed face with blotches and spidery veins. “Why?” he said. “’Twarn’t any less dark in there for Will than for you, less’n he was a cat. All I mean is this, Reverend. You haven’t come out and so much as stated it, but the implication here, as I have said, is that you personally killed only one person. Furthermore, the implication if I read it rightly is that the act of killing or trying to kill got you so rattled that Will had to come in and do all the dirty work. Now, it is curious indeed, but

Will was one of the few niggers actually slain during the course of this ruction. So it is your word alone I’ve got to take. And that you killed only one and were reluctant to kill more is a line of goods mighty hard to buy. Come on, Reverend, after all, you were the leader …”

I thrust my head into my hands, thinking: Then I would know the truth of this beast, which was diverse from all the others, exceeding dreadful, whose teeth were of iron and his nails of brass; which devoured, brake in pieces … And barely listening now to Gray, who was saying: “Or this, Reverend, later on that night after the Travises and the Reeses and old Salathiel Francis. You’ve gone on across the fields and now: ‘As we approached, the family discovered us and shut the door. Vain hope! Will, with one stroke of his ax, opened it, and we entered and found Mrs. Turner and Mrs. Newsome in the middle of a room, almost frightened to death. Will immediately killed Mrs. Turner with one blow of his ax. I took Mrs. Newsome by the hand, and with the sword I had when I was apprehended, I struck her several blows over the head’—now listen careful—‘but not being able to kill her. Will, turning around and discovering it, dispatched her also …’”

Suddenly I was on my feet in front of Gray, stretched to the limit of the chain. “Stop!” I yelled. “Stop! We done it! Yes, yes, we done it! We done what had to be done! But stop recitin’ about me and Will! Leave off studyin’ about all this! We done what had to be done! So stop it!”

Gray had drawn back in alarm, but now as I relaxed and grew limp, my knees rattling in the cold, and as I looked at him as if to regret this sudden fury, he too composed himself, settling himself on the plank and saying finally: “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it. It’s your funeral. Figger I can’t get blood from a turnip noways. But I got to read it and you got to sign it. That’s the edict of the court.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gray,” I said. “I truly didn’t mean to get impudent. It’s just that I don’t think you understand about this business, and I don’t know but whether it’s too late to make it all plain.”

I moved slowly over to the window again and gazed out into the morning. After a silence Gray commenced to read once more in a subdued, monotonous voice; he shuffled pages in mild confusion. “Hem. ‘… Viewed the mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction.’ My emphasis. Well, that last item—gildin’ the lily, maybe?” I made no reply. Off in the other cell I could hear Hark chuckling, muttering jokes to himself. The fragile dustlike snow was still falling; it had begun to cling to the earth, the thinnest film of white like hoarfrost, no more substantial than breath blown frosty against a pane of glass.

“Encore, as the Frenchies put it,” Gray was saying, “meaning, that is, re-peat: ‘… and immediately started in quest of other victims.’ But let’s skip ahead now …” The voice droned on.

I raised my eyes toward the river. Across the stream, beneath the trees on the far bank, I saw the procession I had seen each morning, though this time it was late for them—the children usually came at dawn. As always there were four of them, four black children; the oldest could not have been older than eight, the smallest was younger than three. Dressed in shapeless clothing which some troubled mammy had fashioned for them out of cotton sacking or the poorest odds and ends, they picked their way along beneath the trees on the far bank, gathering twigs and fallen branches for some cabin fireplace. Pausing, stooping down, suddenly scampering forward, they moved with quick and sprightly motions beneath the clumsy flapping of their formless little sacks, piling twigs and sticks and fagots high in their arms against their bodies. I heard them call out to each other. I couldn’t make out their words, but on the cold air their voices were shrill and bright. Black hands and feet and faces, bobbing, swooping, dancing shapes silhouetted like lively birds against the white purity of the forest and the morning. I watched them for a long time as they moved, all unknowing doomed and hopeless, across the clean space of snow and finally vanished with their burdens, still sweetly chattering and shrill, upriver past the limit of my sight.

Suddenly I thrust my face into my hands, thinking of Daniel’s beast again in the burning visions of the night, thinking of Daniel’s cry: O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?

But the answer was not the Lord’s. It was Gray’s. And in the imprisoned space of

my mind it seemed to come back amid a tumult and murmuration of flowing waters, wild waves, rushing winds. Justice. Justice! That’s how come nigger slavery’s going to last a thousand years!

Hark always declared that he could distinguish between good white people and bad white people—and even white people who lay between good and bad—by their smell alone. He was very solemn about all this; over the years he had worked out many subtleties and refinements upon his original philosophy, and he could talk endlessly as we worked alongside each other—advising me at the top of his voice, assigning exact, marvelous odors to white people like Moses handing down the law. About much of this he was deadly serious, and as he jabbered away his broad, bold face would become furrowed in the most worrisome thought; but Hark’s nature was basically humorous, outward-going, beneficent, serene, and he could not long sustain a somber mood, even though many horrible things had happened to him.

Finally something connected with a white person and a certain smell would tickle some interior nerve: against all restraint the giggles would begin to well up from his belly and in an instant he would have broken down, clutching himself in helpless, wheezing, rich, delirious laughter. “Now, Nat, maybe it jes’ me,” he would begin seriously, “but dis yere nose of mine she jes’ get better ev’y day. Like I was comin’ roun’ de side of de barn yestiddy evenin’ and dere’s ole Miss Maria a-feedin’ the chickens. She seed me afore I could take off. ‘Hark!’ say she. ‘Hark! Come right yere!’ So I come, an’ awready my nose begin twitchin’ like a mushrat pokin’ up out’n de swamp. ‘Hark!’ say she. ‘Whar de corn?’ ‘Why, what corn, Miss Maria?’ say I, de ole smell gittin’ strong now. ‘De corn in de shed for de chickens!’ de ole bitch say. ‘You suppose’ to have a couple bushels shelled fo’ my chickens and dere ain’t a cupful lef’! Dis de fo’th time in a month! You a shiftless black nigger scoundrel and I pray to see de day my brother sells you off to Mississippi! Git dat corn shelled right now, you shiftless nigger!’ Jesus jumpin’ Judas, de smell, Nat, comin’ out dat woman, if it water ’twould have drown’ me in my shoes. What it like? ’Twas like an ole catfish somebody lef’ three days up on a stump in July.” And he would begin to giggle softly, already clutching at his midriff. “Stink! Even de buzzards fly away from ole pussy

like dat!” And glorious laughter.

But not all of them had smells like this, according to Hark. Mr. Joseph Travis, our master, had “a right honest stench about him,” said Hark, “like a good horse what worked him up a sweat.” Joel Westbrook, the boy whom Travis employed as an apprentice, was an uncertain, gawky lad, given to temper fits but amiable, even generous when in the mood; hence to Hark his smell had a changing, fitful quality: “Sometime dat boy smell right pretty, like hay or somethin’, other time he smell up a storm.” This offensive Miss Maria Pope was to Hark, however, in every way consistent in her smell. She was Travis’s half sister, who had come down from Petersburg to live with Travis and his family after her mother’s death. A bony, angular woman, she suffered from blocked sinuses which caused her to breathe through her mouth; as a result her lips were always peeling to the quick and sometimes bled, which necessitated a poultice of lard, and this gave her ever-parted mouth a blanched appearance altogether ghostly and strange. Her eyes wandered distantly, and she was given to stroking her wrists. She hated us Negroes, who were at her beck and call, with a kind of profound and pointless hatred which was all the more burdensome to us because she was not really of the family, and therefore her attitude had a harsh, remote, despotic quality. On summer nights, from the windows of the upstairs room where she slept, I could hear her sobbing hysterically and crying out for her departed mother. She was about forty, I suspect a virgin, and she read aloud from the Bible incessantly with a kind of hollow-eyed, mesmeric urgency, her favorite passages being John 13, which deals with humility and charity, and the sixth chapter of I Timothy, beginning: Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. Indeed, according to Hark, she once flattened him up against the porch wall and made him repeat this homily until he had committed it to memory. I have no doubt that she was more than a little cracked, but this did not diminish my intense dislike of Miss Maria Pope, though occasionally I felt myself feeling sorry for her against my better judgment.

But Miss Maria is, in a manner of speaking, only incidental to a man I am trying to

get at in a roundabout fashion—namely, Mr. Jeremiah Cobb, the judge who was about to sentence me to death, and into whose earlier acquaintance I was led by a complicated series of transactions which I must here try briefly to describe.

As I told Mr. Gray, I was born the property of Benjamin Turner, about whom I remember only a little. Upon his abrupt death when I was around eight or nine (a miller and dealer in timber, he was killed while felling a cypress tree, having turned his back on the monster at an improvident moment), I passed by bequest into the possession of his brother, Samuel Turner, whose property I remained for ten or eleven years. These years, and those preceding them, I shall return to in due course. Eventually Samuel Turner’s fortunes declined, and there were other problems; at any rate, he was unable to continue to operate the sawmill he inherited, along with me, from his brother, and so for the first time I was sold, to Mr. Thomas Moore—a sale which a weakness for irony impels me to remark was effected at the moment I reached my manhood, during my twenty-first year. I was the property of Mr. Moore, who was a small farmer, for nine years until his death (another bizarre misadventure: Moore broke his skull while presiding at the birth of a calf. It had been a balky delivery, and he had wrapped a cord around the calf’s protruding hooves in order to yank it out; as he sweated and tugged and as the calf mused at him soulfully from the damp membranes of its afterbirth, the cord snapped, catapulting him backward and fatally against a gatepost. I had very little use for Moore, and my grief was meager, yet at the time I could not but help begin to wonder if ownership of me did not presage a diminution of fortune, as does the possession, I am told, of a certain kind of elephant in India), and upon Mr. Moore’s demise I became the property of his son, Putnam, who was then fifteen. The following year (that is to say, last year) Mr. Moore’s widow, Miss Sarah, married Joseph Travis, a childless widower of fifty-five desirous of offspring, who lived in this same country region of Cross Keys, an expert wheelwright by trade and the last person so luckless as to enjoy me in the pride of ownership. For although under law I was Putnam’s by title, I belonged also to Travis, who had the right to exercise full control over me until Putnam reached his majority. Thus when Miss Sarah wed Joseph Travis and became domiciled beneath

his roof, I turned into a kind of twofold property—not an unheard-of arrangement but additionally unsatisfying to property already half deranged at being owned even once.

Travis was moderately prosperous, which is to say that like a few of the other inhabitants of this backwater, he managed to eke out slightly more than a living. Unlike the hapless Moore, he was adept at that which the Lord had him cut out to do, and it was a great relief for me to be able to help him at his trade after the long years at Moore’s and the monotony of toting his water and sopping his feverish, languishing pigs and alternately baking and freezing in his cornfield and his cotton patch. In fact, because of the circumstances of my new employment—which was to act as a general handyman around the wheel shop—I had a sense of well-being, physical at least, such as I had not felt since leaving Samuel Turner’s nearly ten years before. Like most of the other property owners of the region, Travis was also a small farmer, with fifteen acres or so in corn, cotton, and hay, plus an apple grove whose principal function it was to produce cider and brandy. Since the relative success of the wheel shop, however, Travis had cut back on his farm holdings, leasing out his acreage to others, and retaining just the apple orchard, and a small produce garden and patch of cotton for his own use. Besides myself, Travis owned only two Negroes—a number, however, not unusual in its smallness, inasmuch as few white people in the region could any longer afford to support more than five or six slaves, and it was rare indeed to find a citizen prosperous enough to own as many as a dozen. Travis himself had recently owned seven or eight, not counting several unserviceable children, but as his acreage diminished and his solitary craft flourished, he had no need for this obstreperous pack, indeed found so many fat mouths to feed a burden on his capital, and thus, three years before, with great moral misgivings (or so I heard) sold off the whole lot—all but one—to a trader specializing in labor for the Mississippi delta. The one left was Hark, who was my age lacking a year. Born on a vast tobacco plantation in Sussex County, he had been sold to Travis at the age of fifteen after the tobacco sucked the soil dry and the land went to rack and ruin. I had known him for years and had come to love him like a brother. The other Negro, acquired subsequent to the Mississippi sale, was Moses, a husky, tar-black, wild-eyed boy of twelve or thereabouts

whom Travis, finding himself belatedly short-handed, had bought at the Richmond market several months before my arrival. He was strong and strapping for his age, and bright enough, I think; but he never quite got over the separation from his mammy; it left him bereft, stuporous, and he cried a lot and peed in his pants, sometimes even when he was at work, and all in all was a nuisance, becoming a great trial to Hark especially, who had a mother’s soul in the body of a bull, and felt compelled to soothe and nurse the foundling.

This then was the population of our household at the time when I first encountered Jeremiah Cobb, almost one year to the day before he sentenced me to death: three Negroes—Hark, Moses, myself—and six white people—Mr. and Mrs. Travis and Putnam, Miss Maria Pope, and two more besides. The last were the previously mentioned Joel Westbrook, fifteen years old, a budding wheelwright whom Travis had apprenticed to himself; and Travis’s child by Miss Sarah, an infant boy of two months born with a purple blemish spreading across the center of his tiny face like the single shriveling petal of a blighted gentian. The white people, of course, lived in the main house, a modest, plain but comfortable two-storied structure of six rooms which Travis had built twenty years before. He had hewn the beams himself, planed the timbers, made it all weather-tight with pine gum and mortar, and had been wise enough to leave standing round it several enormous beech trees which offered shade from any angle against the summer sun. Adjacent to the house, separated from it only by the pigpen and a short path through the vegetable garden, was the wheel shop, converted from a onetime barn: here was the center of activity on the farm, here were the stores of oak and ashwood and iron, the forge and anvils, the bending frames, the modeling hammers and tongs and vises and the rows of chisels and punches and all the other equipment which Travis employed in his demanding craft. Doubtless at least in part because of my repute (decent albeit somewhat ambiguous and suspect in a way that I will soon explain) as a kind of harmless, runabout, comic nigger minister of the gospel, I was later made custodian of the shop; in fact, prompted by Miss Sarah’s avowal of my integrity, Travis gave into my keeping one of two sets of keys. I had plenty enough to do, but I cannot honestly say that my work here was toilsome; unlike Moore, Travis was no taskmaster,

 being by nature unable, I think, to drive his servants unreasonably and already having been well provided with willing help in the person of his stepson and the Westbrook boy, who was an eager apprentice if there ever was one.

Thus my duties, compared to what I had been used to, were light and fairly free of strain: I kept the place clean and added my shoulder to a job when extra strength was needed, such as bending a wheel rim, and frequently I spelled Hark as he pumped at the bellows of the forge, but generally speaking (and for the first time in years), the tasks I encountered were those calculated to tax not my muscles but my ingenuity. (For instance, the loft of the shop since its conversion from the status of a barn had still been infested by bats, tolerable enough when the place was the abode of cattle but an insufferable plague of drizzling bat shit to humans laboring daily below. Travis had tried half a dozen futile measures to rid himself of the pests, including fire and smoke, which nearly burned the place down; whereupon at this point I went out into the woods to a certain nest I knew of and plucked a blacksnake out of hibernation, wrenching it from the tail-end of its winter’s sleep and installing it in the eaves. When spring came a week later the bats quickly vanished, and the blacksnake continued in friendly, satisfied residence, slithering benevolently around the circumference of the shop as it gobbled up rats and field mice, its presence earning me, I know, quiet admiration in Travis’s regard.) So, all things being equal, from the beginning of my stay with Travis, I was in as palmy and benign a state as I could remember in many years. Miss Maria’s demands were annoying, but she was a small thorn. Instead of the nigger food I was accustomed to at Moore’s, fat pork and corn pone, I got house food like the white people—a lot of lean bacon and red meat, occasionally even the leavings from a roast of beef, and often white bread made of wheat—and the lean-to shed adjoining the wheel shop where Hark and I shared housekeeping was roomy enough, with the first bed elevated above the ground that I had slept on since the old days with Samuel Turner; and I constructed, with my owner’s blessing, an ingenious wooden vent leading through the wall from the forge, which was always banked with charcoal: the vent could be shut off in the summer, but in the winter its constant warmth made Hark and me (the poor boy Moses slept in the house, in a damp kitchen

closet, where he could be available for errands night and day) as snug as two grubs beneath a log. Above all, I had quite a bit of time on my hands. I could fish and trap and do considerable Scriptural reading. I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me, and there was thus available to me more time than I had ever had before to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me.

The particular November day I met Jeremiah Cobb is clear in my memory: an afternoon of low gray clouds scudding eastward on a gusty wind, cornfields brown and sere stretching toward the distant woods, and the kind of stillness which comes with that time of autumn, the buzz and hum of insects having flickered out, the songbirds flown south, leaving the fields and woods to dwell in a vast gray globe of silence; nothing stirs, minutes pass in utter quiet, then through the smoky light comes the sound of crows cawing over some far-off cornfield, a faint raucous hullabaloo which swiftly dwindles off in the distance, and silence again, broken only by the scratching and scrabble of dead windblown leaves. That afternoon I heard dogs yapping in the north, as if they were coming down the road. It was a Saturday, Travis and Joel Westbrook had driven that morning to Jerusalem on an errand, and only Putnam was at work in the shop. I was outside at the corner of my shed cleaning some rabbits from my trapline, when in the midst of this deep and brooding silence I heard the dogs yapping up the road. They were foxhounds, but not enough of them for a hunt, and I recall being puzzled, my puzzlement vanishing just as I rose and looked up the road and saw a whirlwind of dust: out of the whirlwind came a tall white man in a pale beaver hat and gray cloak, perched on the seat of a dogcart drawn by a frisky jet-black mare. Behind and below the seat were the dogs, three flop-eared hounds yapping at one of Travis’s yellow cur dogs who was trying to get at them through the spokes of the wheels. It was, I think, the first time I ever saw a dogcart with dogs. From where I stood I saw the dogcart draw up to a halt in front of the house, then saw the man dismount; I thought he came down clumsily, seeming for an instant to falter or to stumble as if weak in the knees, but then, instantly regaining control of himself, he muttered

something half aloud and at the same time aimed a kick at the yellow dog, missed wildly, his booted foot fetching up against the side of the carriage with a clatter.

It was comical to watch—a white man’s discomfiture, observed on the sly, has always been a Negro’s richest delight—but even as I felt the laughter gurgling up inside me the man turned and my laughter ceased. I was now able to observe him for the first time straight on: the face I beheld was one of the most unhappy faces I had ever seen. It was blighted, ravaged by sorrow, as if grief had laid actual hands on the face, wrenching and twisting it into an attitude of ineradicable pain. Now too I could see that the man was a little drunk. He stared somberly at the dog howling at him from the dust of the road, then raised his hollow eyes briefly to the gray clouds scudding across the heavens. I thought I heard a groan pass his lips; a spasm of coughing seized him. Then with an abrupt, clumsy gesture he drew the cloak about his gaunt and bony frame and proceeded with fumbling gloved hands to fasten the mare to the tethering post. Just then I heard Miss Sarah call from the porch. “Judge Cobb!” I heard her cry. “Sakes alive! What are you doin’ down this way?” He shouted something back to her, the cadence of his words obscure, muffled against the gusty wind. The leaves whirled around him, all the dogs kept yapping and howling, the pretty little mare chafed and tossed her mane and stamped. I managed to make out the words: a hunt in Drewrysville, he was taking his dogs there, a grinding noise in the spindle box of his wheel. He thought the axle broke, split, something; being nearby he had come here for repairs. Was Mr. Joe to home? Downwind came Miss Sarah’s voice from the porch, loud, buxom, cheerful: “Mr. Joe’s done gone to Jerusalem! My boy Putnam’s here, though! He’ll fix that wheel for you, Judge Cobb, straightaway! Won’t you come in and set a spell!” Thank you no ma’am, Cobb hollered back; he was in a rush, he’d get that axle fixed and be on his way. “Well, I ’spect you know where the cider press is,” Miss Sarah called. “Right next to the shop. They’s some brandy too! Just help yourself and drink your fill!”

I went back to the corner of the shed, attending to my rabbits, and paid no more mind to Cobb for the moment. Travis had allowed me to have the trapline, and in fact encouraged me in the enterprise since by arrangement

he was to get two out of every three rabbits I caught. Such an agreement was satisfactory to me, inasmuch as this game was plentiful in the countryside and the two or three rabbits a week left for Hark and me were as much as we cared to eat, and more; nor did it matter to me that Travis sold most of the rabbits in Jerusalem and retained the money, which was clear profit, since if he was to earn interest on the capital which, body and brain, I represented anyway, I was glad to be capitalized upon in one small way which I myself took pleasure in. For after all of the dull drudgery at Moore’s, it was the greatest delight to me to be able to make use of some actual indwelling talent, to fashion the traps myself—box traps which I made out of scrap pine from the shop, sawing and planing the wood with my own hands, carving the pegs and the notched pins which tripped the doors, and uniting one after another of the neat miniature coffins into a single smoothly operating, silent, lethal assembly. But this was not all. As much as manufacturing the traps I enjoyed walking the trapline at daybreak in the silence of the countryside, when frost crackled on the ground and the hollows overflowed as if with milk in the morning mists. It was a three-mile hike through the woods along a familiar pineneedled path, and I devised a sort of cloth pouch to take along with me, in which I carried my Bible and my breakfast—two apples and a piece of streak-of-lean pork already cooked the night before. On my return, the Bible shared the pouch with a couple of rabbits, which I brained bloodlessly with a hickory club. A multitude of squirrels preceded me on these walks, in rippling stop-and-go motion; with some of them I became quite familiar and I bestowed names upon them, prophetic Hebrew names like Ezra and Amos, and I numbered them among God’s blest since unlike rabbits they could not by nature be easily trapped and could not by law be shot (at least by me, Negroes being denied the use of guns). It was a silent, gentle, pristine time of day, and as the sun shone pale through the dews and the mists and the woods hovered round me gray and still in the autumnal birdless quiet, it was like the morn of Genesis with the breath of creation fresh upon it.

Near the end of my trapline there was a little knoll, surrounded on three sides by a thicket of scrub oak trees, and here I would make my breakfast. From

this knoll (though hardly taller than a small tree, it was the highest point of land for miles) I could obtain a clear and secret view of the countryside, including several of the farmhouses which it had already become my purpose eventually to invade and pillage. Thus these morning trapping expeditions also served to allow me to reconnoiter and to lay plans for the great event which I knew was in the offing. For at such times it seemed that the spirit of God hovered very close to me, advising me in this fashion: Son of man, prophesy, and say, Thus saith the Lord; Say, a sword, a sword is sharpened, and also furbished: it is sharpened to make a sore slaughter … Of all the Prophets it was Ezekiel with his divine fury to whom I felt closest by kinship, and as I sat there these mornings, the pork and apples devoured, the bag of brained cottontails at my side, I would for a long time ponder Ezekiel’s words because it was through his words that the wishes of the Lord concerning my destiny (even more so than through the words of the other Prophets) seemed most clearly to be revealed: Go through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof … Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark … Often as I brooded over these lines, I wondered why God should wish to spare the well-meaning and slay the helpless; nonetheless, it was His word. Great mornings, filled with hints, auguries, portents! I find it hard to describe the exaltation which seized me at such times when, crouched upon my secret knoll in gray momentous dawns, I saw in the unfolding future—fixed there as immutably as Saul or Gideon—myself, black as the blackest vengeance, the illimitable, devastating instrument of God’s wrath. For on these mornings as I looked down upon the gray and somber and shriveling landscape it seemed as if His will and my mission could not be more plain and intelligible: to free my people I must one day only commence with the slumbering, mist-shrouded dwellings below, destroying all therein, then set forth eastward across the swamps and fields, where lay Jerusalem.

But to get back to Cobb, rather meanderingly I’m afraid, and again by way of Hark. Hark had a flair for the odd, the off-center: had he been able to read and write, been white, free, living in some Elysian time when he was anything but negotiable property worth six hundred dollars

 in a depressed market, he might have been a lawyer; to my disappointment, Christian teachings (my own mainly) had made only the shallowest imprint upon his spirit, so that being free of spiritual rules and restraints he responded to the mad side of life and could laugh with abandon, thrilling to each day’s new absurdity. In short, he had a feeling for the crazy, the unexpected; all in all, this caused me mild envy. There was for instance the time when our shed behind the wheel shop was still uncompleted, and our master paid us a visit during a roaring thunderstorm, gazing skyward at the water cascading through the roof. “It’s leaking in here,” he said, to which Hark replied: “Nawsuh, Marse Joe, hit leakin’ outside. Hit rainin’ in here.” Likewise, it was Hark who gave expression to that certain inward sense—an essence of being which is almost impossible to put into words—that every Negro possesses when, dating from the age of twelve or ten or even earlier, he becomes aware that he is only merchandise, goods, in the eyes of all white people devoid of character or moral sense or soul. This feeling Hark called “black-assed,” and it comes as close to summing up the numbness and dread which dwells in every Negro’s heart as any word I have ever known. “Don’ matter who dey is, Nat, good or bad, even ol’ Marse Joe, dey white folks dey gwine make you feel black-assed. Never seed a white man smile at me yet ‘thout I didn’ feel just about twice as black-assed as I was befo’. How come dat ’plies, Nat? Figger a white man treat you right you gwine feel white-assed. Naw suh! Young massah, old massah sweet-talk me, I jes’ feel black-assed th’ough an’ th’ough. Figger when I gets to heaven like you says I is, de good Lord hisself even He gwine make old Hark feel black-assed, standin’ befo’ de golden throne. Dere He is, white as snow, givin’ me a lot of sweet talk and me feelin’ like a black-assed angel. ’Cause pretty soon I know His line, yas suh! Yas suh, pretty soon I can hear Him holler out: ’Hark! You dere, boy! Need some spick and span roun’ de throne room. Hop to, you black-assed scoundrel! Hop to wid de mop and de broom!’ ”

It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which white people dominate the conversation of Negroes, and it is with certainty I can record that these

were the words that Hark (who had come out of the shed to help me dress and clean the rabbits) had been speaking on this gray November day when, like the most vaguely discernible shadow, we felt simultaneously a presence at our crouched backs and again, half startled, looked upward to see the distressed and ravaged face of Jeremiah Cobb. I don’t know whether he overheard Hark’s words, it would hardly have mattered if he had. Both Hark and I were taken unawares by the man’s magisterial, sudden, lofty figure looming above us, swaying slightly against the smoky sky; so abruptly and silently had he come upon us that it was a long instant before the face of him actually registered, and before we were able to let slip from our hands the bloody rabbits and begin to move erect into that posture of respect or deference it is wise for any Negro to assume whenever a strange white man—always a bundle of obscure motives—enters upon the scene. But now, even before we had gotten up, he spoke. “Go on,” he said, “go on, go on,” in a curiously rough and raspy voice—and with a motion of his hands he bade us to continue at our work, which we did, easing back slowly on our haunches yet still gazing up into the unsmiling, bleak, tormented face. Suddenly a hiccup escaped his lips, a sound incongruous and unseemly and even faintly comical emanating from that stern face, and there was a long moment of silence all around; he hiccuped again, and this time I was sure I sensed Hark’s huge body beginning to shudder with—with what? Laughter? Embarrassment? Fear? But then Cobb said: “Boys, where’s the press?”

“Yondah, massah,” Hark said. He pointed to the shed several yards away, directly at the side of the shop, where the cider barrels lay in a moist and dusty rank in the shadows past the open door. “Red bar’l, massah. Dat’s de bar’l fo’ a gennleman, massah.” When the desire to play the obsequious coon came over him, Hark’s voice became so plump and sweet that it was downright unctuous. “Marse Joe, he save dat red bar’l for de fines’ gennlemens.”

“Bother the cider,” Cobb said, “where’s the brandy?”

“Brandy in de bottles on de shelf,” said Hark. He began to scramble to his feet. “I fix de brandy fo’ you, massah.” But again Cobb motioned him back with a brisk wave of his hand. “Go on, go on,” he said. The voice was not pleasant, neither was it unkindly; it had rather a distant, abstracted quality, yet somehow it remained tinged with pain as if the mind which controlled it struggled with a preoccupying disquiet. He was abrupt, aloof, but there was nothing one might call arrogant

about him. Nonetheless, something about the man offended me, filled me with the sharpest displeasure, and it wasn’t until he limped unsteadily past us through the crackling brown patch of weeds toward the cider press, saying not another word, that I realized that it wasn’t the man himself who annoyed me so much as it was Hark’s manner in his presence—the unspeakable bootlicking Sambo, all giggles and smirks and oily, sniveling servility. Hark had slit open a rabbit. The body was still warm (on Saturdays I often collected my game in the afternoon), and Hark was holding it aloft by the ears to catch the blood, which we saved to bind stews. I can recall my sudden fury as we crouched there, as I looked up at Hark, at the bland, serene glistening black face with its wide brow and the grave, beautiful prominences of its cheekbones. With dumb absorption he was gazing at the stream of crimson blood flowing into the pan he held below. He had the face one might imagine to be the face of an African chieftain—soldierly, fearless, scary, and resplendent in its bold symmetry—yet there was something wrong with the eyes, and the eyes, or at least the expression they often took on, as now, reduced the face to a kind of harmless, dull, malleable docility. They were the eyes of a child, trustful and dependent, soft doe’s eyes mossed over with a kind of furtive, fearful glaze, and as I looked at them now—the womanish eyes in the massive, sovereign face mooning dumbly at the rabbit’s blood—I was seized by rage. I heard Cobb fumbling around in the cider press, clinking and clattering. We were out of earshot. “Black toadeater,” I said. “Snivelin’ black toadeatin’ white man’s bootlickin’ scum! You, Hark! Black scum!”

Hark’s soft eyes rolled toward me, trusting yet fearful. “How come—” he began in an abrupt startled voice.

“Hush your face, man!” I said. I was furious. I wanted to let him have the back of my hand flush in the mouth. “Just hush, man!” I began to mimic him, hoarsely, beneath my breath. “‘Red bar’l, massah! Dat’s de bar’l wid de gennle-men’s cidah! I fix de brandy fo’ you, massah!’ How come you make with that kind of talk, bootlickin’ nigger suckup? It was enough to make me plain ordinary sick!”

Hark’s expression grew hurt, downcast; he moped disconsolately at the ground, 

saying nothing but moving his lips in a moist, muttering, abstracted way as if filled with hopeless self-recrimination. “Can’t you see, miserable nigger?” I persisted, boring in hard. “Can’t you see the difference? The difference betwixt plain politeness and bootlickin’? He didn’t even say, ‘Get me a drink.’ He said just, ‘Where the press?’ A question, that’s all. And there you is, already: scramblin’ and scroungin’ like a bitch pup, massah this and massah that! You enough to make a man chuck up his dinner!” Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools. Ashamed suddenly, I calmed myself. Hark was a vision of dejection. More gently I said: “You just got to learn, man. You got to learn the difference. I don’t mean you got to risk a beatin’. I don’t mean you got to be uppity and smart. But they is some kind of limit. And you ain’t a man when you act like that. You ain’t a man, you is a fool! And you do this all the time, over and over again, with Travis and Miss Maria and Lord help you even with them two kids. You don’t learn nothin’. You a fool! As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. You a fool, Hark. How’m I goin’ to teach you?”

Hark made no reply, only crouched there muttering in his hurt and dejection. I was seldom angry at Hark, but my anger when it came had the power to grieve him. Loving him as I did, I often reproved myself for my outbursts and for the misery they caused him, but in certain ways he was like a splendid dog, a young, beautiful, heedless, spirited dog who had, nonetheless, to be trained to behave with dignity. Although I had not yet told him of my great plans, it was my purpose that when the day came to obliterate the white people, Hark would be my right arm, my sword and shield; for this he was well endowed, being quick-witted and resourceful and as strong as a bear. Yet the very sight of white skin cowed him, humbled him, diminished him to the most fawning and servile abasement; and I knew that before placing my ultimate trust in him I must somehow eliminate from his character this weakling trait which I had seen before in Negroes who, like Hark, had spent most of their early lives on big plantations. Certainly it would not do to have a chief lieutenant who was at heart only an abject nigger, full of cheap grins and comic shufflings, unable to gut a white man and gut him without

a blink or qualm. In short, Hark was for me a necessary and crucial experiment. Though it is a painful fact that most Negroes are hopelessly docile, many of them are filled with fury, and the unctuous coating of flattery which surrounds and encases that fury is but a form of self-preservation. With Hark, I knew I must strip away and destroy that repulsive outer guise, meanwhile encouraging him to nurture the murderous fury which lay beneath. Yet somehow I did not think it would take too much time.

“I don’ know, Nat,” Hark said finally. “I tries and tries. But hit seem I cain’t git over dat black-assed feelin’. I tries, though.” He paused, ruminating, nodding his head ever so slightly over the bloody carcass in his hands. “ ’Sides, dat man he look so sad an’ mou’nful. Never seed such a sad an’ mou’nful man. Kind of felt sorry fo’ de man. What you reckon made him so sad-lookin’ anyways?”

I heard Cobb returning from the press through the weeds, unsteadily, stumbling slightly, with a brittle crackling sound of underbrush being trampled underfoot. “Feel sorry for a white man and you wastin’ your sorrow,” I said in a low voice. Then even as I spoke I made a sudden connection in my mind, remembering how a few months before I had overheard Travis speaking to Miss Sarah about this man Cobb, and the terrors which had beset him grisly and Job-like within the space of a single year: a merchant and banker of property and means, chief magistrate of the county, master of the Southampton Hounds, he lost his wife and two grown daughters to typhoid fever on the coast of Carolina, whither, ironically, he had sent his ladies to recuperate from winter attacks of the bronchial ailments to which all three were prone. Shortly afterward his stable, a brand-new structure on the outskirts of Jerusalem, burned to the ground in one horrid and almost instantaneous holocaust, incinerating all therein including two or three prize Morgan hunters and many valuable English saddles and harnesses, not to mention a young Negro groom. Subsequently, the unfortunate man, having taken heavily to the bottle to ease his affliction, fell down some stairs and broke his leg; the limb failed to mend properly, and although ambulatory, he was plagued by a hectic, mild, irresistible fever and by unceasing pain. When I first heard of all this adversity I could not help

but feel a spasm of satisfaction (do not consider me altogether heartless—I am not, as you shall surely see; but the contentment a Negro takes in a white man’s misery, existing like a delicious tidbit among bleak and scanty rations, can hardly be overestimated), and I must confess that now as I heard Cobb behind me toiling back through the noisy weeds I experienced anew the same sense of gratification. (For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came …) A small thrill of pleasure coursed through my flesh.

I thought he was going to walk past us to the shop or perhaps the house. Certainly I was taken by surprise when, instead, Cobb halted next to us with his boots practically atop one of the skinned rabbits. Again Hark and I started to rise, again he motioned for us to continue work. “Go on, go on,” he repeated, taking a huge gulp from the bottle. I heard the brandy vanish with a froglike croak in the back of his gullet, then the long aspirated gasp of breath, the final wet smacking of lips. “Ambrosia,” he said. Above us the voice was self-confident, sturdy, stentorian; it had an unmistakable vigor and force, even though the tired undertone of sorrow remained, and I felt the residue of an emotion, ever so faint, which I must confess was only the fear I was born and brought up with. “Am-ba-ro-sia,” he said. My fear receded. The yellow cur dog came snuffling up and I hurled into his face a slippery blue handful of rabbits’ guts, which he made off with into the cotton patch, groaning with pleasure. “A Greek word,” Cobb went on. “From ambrotos, that is to say, immortal. For surely the gods were conferring upon us poor humans a kind of immortality, no matter how brief and illusory, when they tendered us this voluptuous gift, made of the humble and omnipresent apple. Comforter to the lonely and outcast, an anodyne for pain, a shelter against the chill wind of remorseless, oncoming death—surely such an elixir must be touched by the hand of something or someone divine !” Another hiccup—it was like a species of shriek, really prodigious—racked his frame, and again I heard him take a swig from the bottle. Intent upon my rabbits, I had not as yet looked up, but I had caught a glimpse of Hark: transfixed, with bloody glistening hands outstretched, he was gazing open-mouthed at Cobb with a look of absolute attention, a kind of ignorant and paralyzed

awe affecting to behold; straining to understand, he moved his lips silently in unison with Cobb’s, chewing upon the gorgeous syllables as if upon air; droplets of sweat had burst forth from his black brow like a spray of quicksilver, and for an instant I could almost have sworn that he had ceased breathing. “Aaa-h,” Cobb sighed, smacking his lips. “Pure delight. And is it not remarkable that to his already estimable endowments—the finest wheelwright in the Southside of Virginia—your master Mr. Joseph Travis should add another supreme talent, that of being the most skillful distiller of this ineffable potion within the span of a hundred miles? Do you not find that truly remarkable? Do you not now.” He was silent. Then he said again, ambiguously, in a voice which seemed—to me at least—touched with threat: “Do you not now?”

I had begun to feel uncomfortable, disturbed. Perhaps I was oversensitive (as always) to the peculiar shading of a white man’s tone; nonetheless, there seemed to be something pointed, oppressive, sardonic about this question, alarming me. It has been my usual experience that when a strange white man adopts this florid, familiar manner, and when his listener is black, the white man is out to have a little fun at the black man’s expense. And such had been my developing mood of tension during the recent months that I felt I must avoid at all costs (and no matter how harmless the by-play) even the faintest premonition of a situation. Now the man’s wretched question had deposited me squarely upon a dilemma. The trouble is: a Negro, in much the same way as a dog, has constantly to interpret the tone of what is being said. If, as was certainly possible, the question was merely drunken-rhetorical, then I could remain humbly and decently mute and scrape away at my rabbit. This (my mind all the while spinning and whirling away like a water mill) was the eventuality I preferred—dumb nigger silence, perhaps a little scratching of the old woolly skull, and an illiterate pink-lipped grin, reflecting total incomprehension of so many beautiful Latinisms. If on the other hand, as seemed more likely from the man’s expectant silence, the question was drunken-surly-sarcastic and demanding of an answer, I would be forced to mutter the customary Yassuh—Nawsuh being impermissible in view of the simple-minded nature of the question. What was so disturbing about this moment was

my fear (and these fears, one may be assured, are neither vagrant nor inconsequential) that the Yassuh might very well be followed by something like this: “Ah, you do now. You do find it remarkable? Am I to understand then that you consider your master a dummox? That because he can make wheels he can’t make brandy? You darkies don’t have much regard for your owners these days, do you? Well, I want to tell you something, Pompey, or whatever your ludicrous name is, that …” et cetera. The changes on this situation are endless, and do not think me overly cautious: motiveless nigger-needling is a common sport. But at this point it was not the possibility of humiliation I wanted to avoid so much as the possibility that having recently vowed that humiliation would never again be a constraint upon me, or a repression, I would be forced to surmount it by beating the man’s brains out, thus completely wrecking all my great designs for the future.

I had begun to shake, and I felt a stirring, a kind of watery weakness in my bowels; just then, however, came a fortunate distraction: nearby in the woods there arose the sound of a crashing in the undergrowth, and we all three turned to see a tawny mud-streaked wild sow lumber out of a thicket, snorting and grunting, trailed by her squealing brood; now as quickly as they appeared pig and piglets seemed to dissolve back into the sere and withered forest, the space of sky above silent and gray and desolate with low-hanging, tattered, wind-driven clouds like smudged cotton through which faint sunlight seeped yellowish and wan. Distracted, our eyes lingered on the scene for a moment, and then came a slamming noise, very close, as the door of the shop opened suddenly, and caught by the wind, hurled itself on screaming hinges backward against the wall. “Hark!” a voice called. It was my boy owner, Putnam. “Where you, Hark?” The child was in a foul mood; I could tell this from the blotches on his pale white face: they grew prominent and rosy whenever he became exercised or harassed. I should add that Putnam had more or less had it in for Hark ever since the preceding year when, out hunting hickory nuts on a balmy afternoon. Hark had innocently but clumsily ambushed Putnam and Joel Westbrook in some tangled carnal union by the swimming pond, both of the boys naked as catfish on the muddy bank, writhing about and skylarking with each other in the most oblivious way. “Never seed such

 foolishness,” Hark had said to me, “But ’twarn’t like I was gwine pay it no never mind. Nigger don’ care ’bout no white boys’ foolishness. Now dat daggone Putnam he so mad, you’d think it was me dat dey caught jackin’ off de ole bird.” I sympathized with Hark but in the end I couldn’t take it too seriously, as it simply typified an uncorrectable condition: white people really see nothing of a Negro in his private activity, while a Negro, who must walk miles out of his path to avoid seeing everything white people do, has often to suffer for even the most guileless part of his ubiquitous presence by being called a spy and a snooping black scoundrel.

“Hark!” the boy called again. “Get in here straight away! What do you think you’re doin’ out there, you no-account nigger! Fire’s gone plumb out! Get in here, God durn you lazy wretch!” The boy wore a leather apron; he had a coarse-featured, sullen, pouty-mouthed face with flowing dark hair and long side whiskers: as he shouted at Hark, I felt a brief, fleeting spasm of rage and I longed for the day to arrive when I might get my hands on him. Hark scrambled to his feet and made off for the shop as Putnam called out again, this time to Cobb: “I think you have someways broke a axle, Judge, sir! My stepdad will fix it! He should be here afore too long!”

“Very well,” Cobb called back. Then so abruptly that for an instant I thought he was still talking to the boy, he said: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. That of course is most familiar, but for the life of me I am unable to place it within the Scriptures. I suspect however that it is one of the Proverbs of King Solomon, whose delight it was to rail at fools, and to castigate human folly …” As he went on talking, a queasy sensation crept over me: the customary positions were reversed, the white man this time had caught the nigger at his gossip. How did I know that my own black blabbermouth would betray me, and that he would overhear every word I had said? Humiliated, ashamed of my humiliation, I let the sticky wet rabbit corpse fall from my fingers and braced my spirit, preparing for the worst. “Was it not Solomon who said the fool shall be the servant to the wise? Was it not he too who said a fool despiseth his father’s instruction? And is not the instruction of the father, through Paul the Jew of Tarsus, manifest even to the

fools of this great dominion, to wit: Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!” As he continued to speak I slowly stood erect, but even at my full height he towered over me, sickly, pale, and sweating, his nose, leaking slightly in the cold, like a great scimitar protruding from the stormy and anguished face, the brandy bottle clutched in one huge mottled hand against his breast as he stood there in a limping posture, swaying and perspiring, speaking not so much to me as through and past me toward the scudding clouds. “Yes, and to this comes the reply, to this mighty and manifest truth we hear the response”—he paused for an instant, hiccuping, and then his voice rose in tones of mockery—“to this irresistible and binding edict we hear the Pharisee cry out of that great institution the College of William & Mary, out of Richmond, from the learned mountebanks abroad like locusts in the Commonwealth: ’Theology must answer theology. Speak you of liberty? Speak you of the yoke of bondage? How then, country magistrate, do you answer this? Ephesians Six, Five: Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ. Or this, my hayseed colleague, how answer you to this? One Peter, Two, Eighteen: Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. There, friend—there—is not that divine sanction for the bondage of which you rave and prattle?’ Merciful God in heaven, will such casuistry never end ! Is not the handwriting on the wall?” For the first time he seemed to look at me, fixing me for a moment with his feverish eyes before upending the bottle, thrusting its neck deep into his throat, where the brandy gulped and gurgled. “Howl ye,” he resumed, “Howl ye: for the day of the Lord is at hand: it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty. You’re the preacher they call Nat, are you not? Tell me then, preacher, am I not right? Is not Isaiah only a witness to the truth when he says howl ye? When he says the day of the Lord is at hand, and it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty? Tell me in the honesty of truth, preacher: is not the handwriting on the wall for this beloved and foolish and tragic Old Dominion?”

“Praise God, mastah,” I said, “that sure is true.” My words were evasively meek

and humble, with a touch of ministerial sanctimony, but I uttered them mainly to cover up my sudden alarm. For now I was truly afraid that he had identified me; the fact that this strange and drunken white man knew who I was smote me like a blow between the eyes. A Negro’s most cherished possession is the drab, neutral cloak of anonymity he can manage to gather around himself, allowing him to merge faceless and nameless with the common swarm: impudence and misbehavior are, for obvious reasons, unwise, but equally so is the display of an uncommon distinction, for if the former attributes can get you starved, whipped, chained, the latter may subject you to such curiosity and hostile suspicion as to ruinously impair the minute amount of freedom you possess. As for the rest, his words had spilled from his lips so rapidly and wildly that I was as yet unable to get the exact drift of his thought, which seemed nonetheless mighty precarious for a white man; and I still could not get over the sensation that he was trying to bait me, or lead me into some kind of trap. To conceal my dismay and confusion, again I mumbled, “That sure is true,” and I chuckled idiotically, gazing toward the ground while I slowly wagged my head—as if to indicate that this poor darky understood precious little if indeed he understood anything.

But now, bending down slightly, his face drifted nearer to me, the skin close up not flushed and whiskey-pink as I had imagined but pale as lard, utterly bloodless and seeming to grow even whiter as I forced myself to return his gaze. “Don’t play dumb with me,” he said. There was no hostility in his voice, its sound was more request than command. “Your mistress pointed you out to me just now. Even so, I would have known, I could have distinguished between you two. The other Negro, what’s his name?”

“Hark,” I said. “That’s Hark, mastah.”

“Yes, I would have known you. I would have known even had I not overheard you. ‘Feel sorry for a white man and the sorrow is wasted.’ Is that not what you said?” 

A shiver of fear, old and habitual and humiliating, passed through me, and despite myself I averted my eyes and blurted: “I’m sorry I said that, mastah. I’m dreadful sorry. I didn’t mean it, mastah.”

“Poppycock!” he exclaimed. “Sorry that you said you’re not sorry for a white man? Come, come, preacher, you don’t mean that. You don’t mean that, do you?” He paused, waiting for an answer, but by now my distress and embarrassment had so unsettled me that I couldn’t even force a reply. Worse, I had begun to despise and curse myself for my own slow-witted inability to deal with the situation. I stood there licking my lips as I gazed out toward the woods, feeling suddenly like the most squalid type of cornfield coon.

“Now don’t play dumb with me,” he repeated, the voice edged with a tone almost gentle, curiously ingratiating. “Your reputation precedes you, as it were. For several years now there has come to my attention wondrous bruit of a remarkable slave, owned at different times by various masters here in the vicinity of Cross Keys, who had so surpassed the paltry condition into which he had been cast by destiny that—mirabile dictu—he could swiftly read, if called upon to demonstrate, from a difficult and abstract work in natural philosophy, and in a fair hand inscribe page after page of random dictation, and had mastered his numbers as far as a comprehension of simple algebra, and had so attained an understanding of Holy Scripture that such of those few adepts in the science of divinity as had examined his knowledge of the Bible came away shaking their heads in wonder at the splendor of his erudition.” He paused and belched. My eyes moved back again toward his, and I saw him wipe his mouth with his sleeve. “Rumor!” he resumed quickly. Now his voice had risen to a kind of impassioned runaway singsong, his eyes were wild and obsessed. “Astounding rumor to emerge from the backwoods of Old Virginny! Astounding as those rumors which in olden times came back from the depths of Asia—that at the source of the River Indus, I believe it was, dwelt a species of mammoth rat, six feet long, which could dance a lively jig while accompanying itself on a tambourine, and when approached would sprout heretofore invisible wings and fly to the topmost branch of the nearest palm tree. Rumor almost impossible to entertain! For to believe that from this downtrodden race, the very laws governing which bind it to an ignorance more benighted and final than death, there could arise one single specimen capable of spelling cat is asking rational intelligence to believe that balmy King George the Third was not a dastardly tyrant or that the moon is made of clabber cheese!” He had begun to jab his finger at me as he spoke, a long bony finger with hairy joints, sending it forth into my face in quick thrusts like a snake’s darting neck. “But beyond this, mind you, beyond this—to imagine this … this prodigy, this paragon, a Negro slave—oh, perish the vile word!—who had acquired the lineaments not just of literacy but of knowledge, who it was rumored could almost speak in the accents of a white man of breeding and cultivation; who, in short, while still one of this doomed empire’s most wretched minions, had transcended his sorry state and had become not a thing but a person—all this is beyond the realm of one’s wildest imagination. No. No! The mind boggles, refuses to accept such a grotesque image! Tell me, preacher, how do you spell cat? Come now, prove to me the reality of this hoax, this canard!” He kept jabbing his finger at me, the voice cajoling, amiable,

the eyes still wintry-wild and obsessed. The smell of applejack was around him like a sweet vapor. “Cat!” he said. “Spell cat. Cat!”

I had begun to feel surely that he was not being sarcastic, that he was somehow trying to express mad, hulking, terrifying feelings beyond anyone’s surmise. I felt blood pounding at my temples and the cold sweat of fear and anxiety clammy beneath my arms. “Don’t mock me, mastah, I pray you,” I breathed in a whisper. “Kindly please, mastah. Don’t mock me.” Time crept past and we were both silent, gazing at each other, and the November wind boomed behind us in the forest, crashing like giant, diminishing footfalls across the graying waste of cedar and cypress and pine; for a moment my compliant lips trembled on a broken wisp of air, faltering—”Ca-, Ca-“—and a grief-haunted sense of futility, childish, lifelong, nigger-black, welled up in me like a sigh of pain. I stood there sweating in the blustery wind, thinking: So this is the way it is. Even when they care, even when they are somehow on your side they cannot help but taunt and torment you. The palms of my hands slimy, and my mind roaring, thinking: I do not want to, but now, now if he forces me to spell the word I will have to try to kill him. I lowered my eyes again, saying more distinctly: “Don’t mock me, mastah, please.”

Yet now Cobb, adrift in his brandy haze, seemed to have forgotten what he had said to me and turned away, staring madly toward the forest where the wind still thrashed and flayed the distant treetops. He clutched the bottle as if with desperation at a lopsided angle against his chest, and a trickle of brandy oozed out against his cloak. With his other hand he began to massage his thigh, holding the leg so tightly that above the knuckles the flesh grew bone-white. ...