The Confessions of Nat Turner Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.”
    The Confessions of Nat Turner
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    “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