The Confessions of Nat Turner Read Free Page A

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, red-faced 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 The Confessions of Nat Turner
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    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