The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial Read Online Free PDF Page A

insurrection of the slaves in that county had taken place, that several families had been massacred and that it would take a considerable military force to put them down.
    More than a quarter of a century ago, Harriet and Henry were young people living in Boston, the place where she had first heard the name “Nat Turner.”
    She rubbed a finger over the writing and stared at the mysterious letter in her hands. She would share them with Calvin. The professor would help her decide what she must do.

Chapter 3
    H arriet poured tea for Calvin and smiled at him, really at the top of his head, his nose buried in his books. She placed jam and butter on the table, rearranged the purple crocuses in the small centerpiece, and then sat down at the table with him. Calmness and morning sunlight crowned the top of his head. She nodded; she could have been born into a different life.
    Captivity was not as she had imagined. Though she had looked into the face of slavery in Cincinnati—speaking with and befriending fugitive slaves, attending a Kentucky slave auction—and heard many stories, she had still held on to a gentrified notion of slavery. A slavery of large, flourishing, romantic plantations, gallant men sauntering among the fields, and of women dancing the reel in great ballroom gowns. The slavery in her mind, despite what she had seen, was one of well-meaning slave masters, friends to their slaves, a benevolent though misguided aristocratic institution led by elderly well-mannered gentlemen with charming Southern accents. In her mind, though she knew slavery was wrong, she saw Kentucky bluegrass, mint juleps, and grace-filled slaves, faithful despite their occasional mistreatment.
    The stories that the refugee slave William and the poor farmer from Southampton County Benjamin Phipps had shared with her forced her to confront a viler, more brutal kind of slavery. Now what filled her head instead of lace and the mellow aroma of cured tobacco smoke was the foul stink of slave ships, the screams of people chained onboard, the cries of women being raped at sea. Now, instead of kindly, elderly slave masters, she saw cruel men, boys really, given too much power—absolute power and with norespect for life. Now she saw starving people, poor people holding others captive to have status and power.
    It made her ashamed that her people, white people, were the captors. Sometimes she thought it best to cover her people’s shame rather than continue to write about it, to drag it out into the open. Then she reminded herself of history: Whites were not the only slave masters, the only ones tempted to think themselves superior—each race had wallowed in the wickedness. That truth did not excuse what was happening in her own time, in her own country, but it did make it easier to stare it in the face. It made it easier to believe that, like intemperance, it was a weakness that could be overcome. There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.
    No wrong could be righted that was hidden and unacknowledged. Without light, it would grow—a creeping, hidden, moldy thing that dragged its shadow with it.
    Now Harriet saw the United States, the nation she loved, lend the force of law—judicial rulings against Dred Scott, congressional passage of the Fugitive Slave Acts signed into law by Presidents Washington and Fillmore, and wording in the nation’s Constitution—to legitimize one brother’s horror against another. A horror where people were stolen and others murdered all for the sake of profit, where families around the world were decimated. A horror that the purveyors said was justified by God’s law, a horror that flipped His law end over end.
    The Constitution asserted: “No Person held to Service or Labour in one