The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial (18 page)

The sky overhead was blue and rose, the sun golden. He spoke to his sister. It was the first time he had spoken her name. “I greet you, my sister, Ribka.”

And then he spoke across the water to all those like him and like his mother, children of the captivity, and he prayed for them.
“Awaken!” He prayed that they would raise their heads, stretch out their arms, and make their way to freedom. He prayed that they would find great ships to carry them home.

Fell's Point, Baltimore, Maryland

FREDERICK BAILEY, A boy of less than ten, stood on the opposite shore of the Chesapeake. He lived in Baltimore as a slave on loan to the Auld family. It was his duty to care for the family's young son, Tommy.

Whenever he could, Frederick looked out at the waters that lapped at the shores of Fell's Point. He was hypnotized by the bobbing rhythm of the water. Before him were ships whose sails caught the sunlight and birds that flew overhead to wherever they pleased.

When he looked out over the water, he spoke to the ships, “You are loosed from your moorings, and free. I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip.”

Each time he looked out over the water, he spoke to the birds, “You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in bonds of iron. O, that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone: She hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free!—Is there any God? Why am I a slave?” Each time he spoke, there was no answer.

On the banks of the Chesapeake, young Frederick stopped this time, as though a voice called to him. He turned from the poor white boys he paid wages of bread to teach him to read. He stared out over the water. He had gazed out at the water many times before. He had prayed the same prayers many times before. But this day something seemed different. Escape was no more probable or
possible than it had been the day before, but this day he felt a quickening. It was as though he heard a voice across the water calling to him.

He watched the ships cut through the water, saw the wind catch their sails, and heard the birds cry above. Frederick pledged to himself and to God that day that he would be free. “I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught or get clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as with fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it: one hundred miles north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom.”

It was as though the hand of God touched Frederick and he knew—if he had to fight, or starve, or risk his life, he would be free. “Let but the first opportunity offer, and come what will, I am off. I am but a boy yet, and all boys are bound out to someone. It may be that my misery in slavery will only increase my happiness when I get free. There is a better day coming.”

Chesapeake

1821

NAT TURNER STOOD on the shores of the Chesapeake staring at the ships. Men of all hues boarded, none of them in chains. They were all men sailing into their futures. He would be one of them.

He walked the wharf marveling at the most insignificant things—wooden planks under his feet, seagulls in flight. He stopped a sailor and asked him how a man might go about finding a job. The man pointed at a line of men and told Nat Turner the ship was still hiring.

He stood in line watching the birds fly overhead. He breathed deeply, intoxicated by free air.

When he reached the hiring man, Nat Turner told the man he
would do anything. He was handy and smart, and he was willing to learn. He knew farming and hard work. He had worked as a millwright.

The man did not ask for his pass. He did not ask where Nat Turner had come from. Nat Turner was hired aboard the ship. They would set sail in three days.

AFTER HIS DELIVERY was made, Nat Turner steered the flatboat back down the Dismal Swamp Canal. It would be his last time. He would sail away on the boat harbored now on the Chesapeake and never see Southampton again.

February 1831

O
utside the Whiteheads' farmhouse, Nat Turner and the other men stomped from foot to foot, moving in an attempt to stay warm. As they passed, they greeted one another, occasionally gathering in brief clusters.

“Brother Nelson.” Dred nodded to the other man.

“Good day to you, brother,” Yellow Nelson, the preacher, responded.

“A cold day,” Sam answered.

Preacher Nelson rubbed his hands over his arms, sometimes clapping hands, to stay warm. “Yes, but we're still alive. One more day in our right minds.”

Nat joined them. “Another chance.” He nodded to Nelson. “Is there a word today, preacher?”

Yellow Nelson laughed softly. “Oh, there's always a word from the Lord, Prophet Nat!”

Smiling, Dred shook his head. “Don't get him started, Prophet Nat. You know how you preachers are. We'll be out here in this cold until Kingdom Come. And it's too cold to be out here.”

“That's the truth,” Sam added.

“Too cold,” Nelson echoed.

“Too cold,” Dred repeated, the tone of the conversation changing rapidly. He nodded toward the slaves working in the Whiteheads' fields. “No kind of way to treat people, out in this cold.” He nodded toward the house. “Just so they can be inside at
a tea party.” He nodded, like the others, so that the whites wouldn't notice them pointing.

Nelson nodded. “Dickie has them out there in the fields keeping them busy. He should be out there bending his back.”

Sam stomped his feet. “He's the one who needs to be kept busy. He's a trifling little preacher.”

Nat Turner and Yellow Nelson answered at once. “He's no preacher.”

“A title and a collar don't make you holy,” Nat Turner added. “A tree is known by its fruit.”

“Out here freezing. But they don't care,” Dred insisted.

Nelson shook his head. “They don't see… unless there are too many of us gathered together at one time.”

Without a signal, the captive men began to separate. Slaves were invisible and unimportant unless they moved too suddenly or too quickly—a running slave was sure to gain the captors' attention, attention that might cost the slave his life. They had learned not to laugh or speak too loudly, not to frown, point, or shout. White men might gather, shout, laugh, or yell. But the captives had learned that such behavior was risky. So the captives dispersed quietly, no sudden movements.

Nat Turner moved away. He rubbed his hands together to keep them warm.

The captors said they believed the captives were content in servitude. But they knew better. Their whips, their dogs, their overseers, the guns on their hips said they knew better. Their fear of three or more black men gathered together said they knew better.

Nat Turner felt the captive men's anger and their humiliation that they were treated as accessories and not as humans. Their anger and humiliation were his own. They burned in his belly.

The men moved about separately, and then when each felt it was safe, they moved slowly back together.

Yellow Nelson nodded toward the Whiteheads' carriage. “Look at that foolishness.” The men looked at the top-heavy box perched
on large, spindly-spoked wheels. He chuckled, but not too loudly. “What good is that thing in the country? Always stuck in a rut, Caty Whitehead flapping around like a hen. The Whiteheads have to keep boys with them all the time to lift or pull that thing out of the mud.”

Sam nodded toward Mary Barrow's coach. “That one is even crazier.” His shoulders shook, but his laugh was almost silent. “Did you see the cape she had on, all those feathers? I'm expecting an angry bird to swoop down here any minute, come to get his feathers back.”

Nat Turner smiled. They joshed to release the steam pent up inside them.

Yellow Nelson grinned, his back to the house. “Did you see old Hubbard when he greeted her at the door?” He widened his eyes, mimicking the Whiteheads' elderly Negro doorman. “I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head.”

Nat Turner chuckled, imagining Hubbard.

Nelson went on with his story. “Hubbard says, ‘Mistress Barrow, that is a coat you got on there, if I do have to say so myself!' Oh, she lit up like the Fourth of July, the vain thing.”

The men chuckled, but not loudly enough to attract attention. Owners of nothing, they had become masters of words. Mary Barrow didn't recognize the subtle insult hidden in Hubbard's words, words that said the coat was not a beautiful one but one that woefully defied description.

The temporary ease provided by the laughter didn't last long and they fell into silence.

“Too cold to be out here.” Dred looked toward the Whiteheads' fields again. “No way to treat people. No way to treat a man.” A grumbling sound echoed from his throat. “As if we don't have any other dream but to wait on them.”

His back toward the house, Yellow Nelson was free to frown. “A day is going to come.”

They all understood. They agonized over those in the fields,
over their wives and children, over their mothers and fathers, and over themselves. Their hope and sanity rested on their faith that one day things would change.

“A day is going to come,” Sam repeated.

“Someday,” Nat Turner added. “Judgment comes and that right soon.”

Each man lost in his thoughts, they separated again. Nat Turner looked up at the sky, blue and cloudless. A day was going to come. God had told him so in the Great Dismal Swamp.

1821

A
s he sailed back down the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, Nat Turner committed to memory the ebb and flow of the canal's curative brown waters. He stared at the trees so he would not forget them and the way the treetops seemed to join hands above the canal. He would remember the exotic birds he saw in the swamp—birds of orange and blue, large birds of prey with pink and purple among their feathers. Together, his recollections would be his memorial painting of the Great Dismal Swamp, of Hebron, his refuge. He was leaving the swamp. He was leaving Virginia. He was setting sail.

He would work aboard the ship and that vessel would carry him to Baltimore and then on to Philadelphia, where he would search for Bishop Richard Allen. He would work, save money, and buy his mother's freedom and passage, and then the two of them would sail away, back to Ethiopia.

Nat Turner looked toward the canal shore, where he saw several white men. He looked away from them and back at the brown water. In three days' time he would be free of the slavers. In three days' time his new life would begin. In three days' time he would no longer have to worry about hiding out or being discovered. In three days' time he would sail away.

He looked back at the white men onshore. Two of them held the arms of a naked black woman. Her stomach was swollen with child. In awkward jerks she pulled against the hands that held her, trying to free herself. The two men forced her to the ground.

He knew what it meant, what they were going to do. But in three days' time he would be free. In three days' time he would have what he had dreamed of all his life; he would have what his mother had prayed for him. He could not save the world.

Nat Turner continued to pole the flatboat down the canal. It skimmed, as though it were floating above the water. His jaw muscles tightened. This was his Hebron, his refuge. He had not seen anyone beaten since leaving Southampton County. He had pretended to himself that what happened there happened nowhere else. He had convinced himself that things were better here. It only happened in Cross Keys. Cruelty did not exist in the swamp or beyond.

The woman screamed now for help. Nat Turner looked back over his shoulder at the woman and her tormentors, his pole still pushing him downstream, away from them. The men tied the woman's ankles and wrists to stakes in the ground. Then, laughing, their voices drifting over the water, out in the open, they began to beat her. Her screams followed their laughter, echoing across the canal.

Long after he turned his head, long after Nat Turner had passed the spot where the men beat her, he still heard the woman's shrieks.

N
at Turner made his way to his clearing, to his stream, but the torment in the woman's voice was still with him. In three days he would be leaving. He would not think of her. He would leave it all behind. He would not be burdened, carrying thoughts of Miss Easter, of Cherry, or even of his mother.

He was only one man and he could not change the world. He was no god. There was no help for the people of Cross Keys, no help for any of the captives. If God ignored the people He created, Nat Turner thought, then why shouldn't he?

There was a new life waiting for him. It would be a life with clear skies, calm seas, and there would be no one to make him bow down. He would have a life of travel and adventure where he was treated like all other men. He would forget about the naked woman on the shore. Who was he to her? Who was she to him?

He would prepare himself to leave. Three days. But first he would eat and get himself a good night's sleep. Soon this would all be over and he would be far away.

He made a fire but Nat Turner saw the woman in the flames. He heard her screams and saw her struggling. His stomach churned so that after preparing food, he could not eat. If he could not eat, then he would sleep.

He settled into his sleeping place. He was young and strong, his whole life open before him like the bay, like the sky. He would sail to Ethiopia, where he would become a priest. Or maybe he would marry an Ethiopian woman, a wife no other man could steal. He would forget about the woman on the shore, about Cherry, and about all the others.