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

the truth, still nagged at William Parker. A few had lied; many had hanged.
    There was no doubt that Levi Waller lied. So had Mary Barrow, John Clarke Turner, Jacob Williams, and Nathaniel Francis—the whole Cross Keys bunch. But they were not forced to take their own medicine—there was no rack for them, no beatings, no burnings, no torture to make them confess.
    Would there ever be a way to make it right?

Nat Turner/Negasi

Chapter 1
    Cross Keys Area, outside Jerusalem, Virginia
    Christmas 1830
    N at Turner felt in his pocket to be certain the gunpowder mixture was still dry. He knew exactly the time and place he would use it. He had been planning for months. He was on his way to meet the others.
    It had been a cruel winter. Snow in Virginia was most often one or two fingers deep or none at all, but this winter it had been heavy and so cold that the top of it was frozen. When he stepped, for an instant he stood above it. Then, shoeless, he was calf-deep again in the icy powder. At first cold pain shot up his knee and through his body with each step he took. Soon his feet were frozen and he numbly made his way past isolated farms and houses where he smelled the aroma of meat roasting outside. But he could not breathe deeply; the frozen air stung his lips, the membranes of his nose, ached his teeth.
    The snow had snapped the brittle backs of withered corn plants. It covered the roads like a thick blanket so he barely recognized the fences and places he knew. The trees were his guide.
    The trees were in the beginning and they had witnessed it all. They had seen husbands and sons dragged from their homes, castrated men dripping from their branches. They had seen women torn from the breast of their families and raped underneath the moon and stars. They had seen them beaten, burned, starved, and mutilated. The trees had witnessed it all. Their arms had borne the weight of the tortured.
    He followed the trees, each one a signpost and a threat. Past sleeping apple trees—their feet and hair covered by the snow blanket—he ducked under leafless boughs and touched aged trunks covered with bark, rough even against his numb, bare hands. The trees were black and crooked against the snow’s stark white. In warmer times, their hands and arms gave fruit and all the while told stories of death, strange fruit dangling from their limbs.
    If the trees held the land’s memories, then his mother held his. “You are a man of two continents,” she had told him. “Your father is a man of America. They are the people of justice. An eye for an eye. At least that is what they say. But I am African. Ethiopians are children of mercy. It does not yet appear which will be strongest in you.”
    Ethiopian memories were rich, ancient, and deep. The images went back, his mother told him, before the ferengi, the foreigners, began to count time.
    His mother told him that her mother’s mother had told her that the Ethiopian highlands were waves, disobedient waves that had come crashing too far inland from the sea. The wayward waves had been abandoned by the others who returned to their watery home. Those left behind dried out and hardened, blanketed by green grass. But if you looked closely, you could see that the mountains were really only waves who’d gone too far and lost their way, his mother said. Heathen strangers.
    Most of what he knew about life his mother had taught him. He had a grandmother who had helped raise him, but she was not really his grandmother. She was the old woman who tended all the slave children too old to nurse but too young to work, while their parents slaved in the fields or kitchens. But it was his mother who had taught him most about life, teaching him to honor his elders.
    â€œThey carry the wisdom and history of a people,” she told him. “In Ethiopia they teach us the elders have learned to live a long time, and if we honor them they will teach us the way.”
    Ethiopia