The Confessions of Nat Turner

At first, Hark is, for Nat, “a necessary and crucial experiment” (58). Because the two men work together, under Joseph Travis, they already have a bond, but Nat still feels some superiority over the other man. After all, Hark is a large, 250-pound worker who even speaks differently from Nat. But because his mother and sisters, and then his wife and child, have been sent away from him, Hark holds anger within him that Nat seeks to ignite.

After Nat strips “away and [destroys] that repulsive outer guise” (58), he encourages the anger within Hark to ensure that he will be able to carry out the murders that Nat has planned. But Hark’s temperament is more complex than Nat. In his pragmatic moments, Nat realizes that Hark is funny, an actor, and he is also tough, persisting in jail even after hit with buckshot while the two men attempted to escape a local militia. Hark’s wisdom is different from Nat’s but it stays with Nat across the story, both in the past and the present.

Jonathan Cobb is the one man that Nat notes to his reader “will be among those few spared the sword” (74) when he accomplishes his rebellious mission. Cobb makes an impression on Nat when he visited Joseph Travis’s property about a year before Nat’s rebellion. He catches Nat’s attention when he overhears Nat’s private conversation with Hark and confronts him about it: this act of white listening is, Nat realizes, a reversal of the usual listening and speaking roles of black and white people.

Cobb himself looks “distressed and ravaged” (54) on the day that they meet. He is a drunk, and he waxes poetically at Nat and Hark in ways that Nat hardly understands. Still, the men have such a strong, odd, inexplicable connection that, even after Cobb sentences Nat to death, the two stare “at each other from vast distances, yet close, awesomely close, as if sharing for the briefest instant some rare secret—unknown to other men—of all time, all mortality and sin and grief” (105). Cobb and Nat are connected through the mysterious moments they share at Travis’s farm. 

Gray is a white man who works both with the defense and the prosecution in Nat’s trial. Although he works hard to convince Nat that each participant in his rebellion earned a fair trial, his own confusing role in Nat’s trial testifies that the truth is otherwise. Gray’s most memorable line is one that he repeats: that “nigger slavery’s going to last a thousand years!” (26). Gray works hard to develop Nat’s guilt and contributes to his despair, implanting in Nat’s mind across the text the idea that his rebellion only inspired a few men, and that it ruined their lives. Because of Gray, Nat more desperately hopes for affirmation that his rebellion accomplished something positive for black people.

Margaret Whitehead is the object of Nat’s affection. The daughter of a local preacher, Reverend Whitehead, who largely rejects Nat’s faith or motives, Margaret is young and beautiful as well as piteous and progressive in her thinking about black people. She is the only person who Nat personally kills during his rebellion, and he grants her an extra blow to mercifully kill her when she asks for it. This penetrative death replaces the connection Nat would prefer, the “desire” that still “swells within” (412) him until the moment of his death.

Joseph Travis is the last master who Nat has, who is “a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in [him]” (35). Travis is a wheelmaker who takes advantage of Nat’s carpentry skills. He also often allows Nat time and space to enter the woods, time which he uses to create his sanctuary and establish his plans. Nat’s decision to kill Travis, and to kill him first among all men, baffles white people in Jerusalem, especially Gray, because Travis is a benevolent master. This sense of Nat’s “illogic” displays the kinds of reason that Nat uses by comparison to the white trial that judges his actions.

Samuel is the master who allowed Nat to learn how to read. Unlike his brother Benjamin, Samuel is progressive in his beliefs about the capacities of black people. Samuel believes that “young people of [Nat’s] race will get” (186) a liberal education someday. He prides himself on the small amount of education that he and his wife, Miss Nell, have provided to Nat since they discovered his own efforts to teach himself how to read. Although Samuel establishes a plan to lead Nat to emancipation as an adult, he becomes weak when his farm begins to fail. Ultimately, Samuel loses Nat’s admiration when he sells his companion, Willis, and Nat unknowingly delivers the boy to slave traders.

Emmeline is a Turner cousin, returned from Baltimore where a lover spurned her. Emmeline’s great beauty draws an adolescent Nat in, and he glorifies her. After he witnesses Emmeline’s own cousin, Lewis, rape her, his fascination with her shifts. “The glow of saintliness” around her shifts, and she stands “disrobed” in a sexuality that inspires in Nat “pinpoints of fire” (179) in his dreams.

Benjamin is Samuel’s more cruel, less religious brother. Nat born his property, and he remembers only a little bit about the drunk man. Benjamin is “killed while felling a cypress tree” (44 )in the woods with two of his own slaves, who do not actively try to prevent the accident. Benjamin is irreverent, peeing over the veranda in the company of ministers and rebelling against his brother, who nonetheless loves him. Few, especially few black people, genuinely mourn his death.

Henry is one of Nat’s four closest advisors in his mission to rebel against Jerusalem’s white population. Henry’s religious nature is what draws him to Nat; he has “a devout and kindly master who has never raised a hand against him” (101). That said, he is permanently deaf because of “a blow on the head from a drunken overseer” (101) in his childhood. This deafness fuels the fury in him that Nat draws upon. 

Nelson is one of Nat’s four closest advisors in his mission to rebel against Jerusalem’s white population. His is “a presence of unconquerable patience and calm” (98), but he, too, has fury underneath that guise. Nelson has had many cruel masters. 

Sam is one of Nat’s four closest advisors in his mission to rebel against Jerusalem’s white population. He is muscular and young and has attempted to run away many times. He is owned by Nathaniel Francis, a cruel owner who works him hard and beats him often. Sam is an important part of Nat’s movement because he is persuasive and well-respected in the community of black people.

Will is, like Sam, enslaved by Nathaniel Francis, a cruel and demanding owner. Just before Nat’s planned insurrection, Will, who is frantically angry and lusts to rape white women, hits Francis back during a whipping and runs away. His arrival into Nat’s meditation, just before the beginning of the rebellion, frustrates Nat and worries him. Will’s madness takes over the mission when Nat breaks down, and his angry energy throws some chaos into their planned and measured attack.

Lou-Ann is Nat’s mother. He remains upset, into manhood, “that the name on [her] headstone was not a nigger woman’s forlorn though honest ‘Lou-Ann’ but the captured, possessed, owned ‘Lou-Ann Turner’” (181). Her mother, a 13-year-old Coromantee girl born in Africa, tried to tear her apart when she was born; she died days later, of a hunger strike. Nat’s mother dies when he is young, and only a few memories of her—including that of her rape—linger in his mind.

Willis is an enslaved teenager on Samuel Turner’s property with whom Nat is close. Their relationship is ambiguously sexual and friendly, and they are close enough (without others especially noticing) that Nat is very angry when Samuel sells Willis to prop up his family’s finances.

Reverend Eppes is the Baptist minister in whose hands Nat falls when Samuel Turner’s plans fall apart. He molests Nat on the way to his own property, and though he does not repeat the instance, work at his home is hard and rewards meager. He sells Nat, against Samuel’s original wishes, to Thomas Moore.