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The Confessions of Nat Turner
    20
    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 The Confessions of Nat Turner
    21
    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, heavy-lidded 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