The Confessions of Nat Turner

Nat recounts, for his reader, what Mr. Gray has reported: Nat “was born the property of Benjamin Turner,” and was passed to “his brother, Samuel Turner” (44), when Benjamin died. When hard times arrived, when Nat was 21 years old, he was sold to Mr. Thomas Moore. Moore died, nine years later, in an accident while birthing a calf; Nat wonders “if ownership of me did not presage a diminution of fortune” (44). He passes to Moore’s son, Putnam, and then to Mr. Joseph Travis, who marries Thomas Moore’s widow, until Putnam reaches maturity. Nat becomes “twofold property” (45).

Under Travis, Nat has “a sense of well-being, physical at least, such as [he] had not felt since leaving Samuel Turner’s nearly ten years before” (45). A man of moderate success, Travis enslaved only two men, Hark and Moses, but he lived in a community in which most men could only afford to enslave five or six. Nat reflects, at the beginning of this section, upon Hark’s “humorous, outward-going, beneficent, serene” (41) character. Travis and Sarah have a child. Travis’s household also contains Joel Westbrook, an apprentice, and Miss Maria Pope, his half-sister. Maria Pope was hateful and sickly, and Nat could often “hear her sobbing hysterically and crying out for her departed mother” (43).

Travis is a wheelwright, and with Putnam and Westbrook around, Nat’s “duties, compared to what [he] had been used to, were light and fairly free of strain” (47). He ate “house food like the white people—a lot of lean bacon and red meat, occasionally even the leavings from a roast of beef” (48). Well-fed and provided with free time for reading the Bible, Nat turned his attention “to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before [him],” namely, “the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County” (48).

After he describes life at Travis’s farm, Nat recounts judge Jeremiah Cobb’s first visit to the homestead, about one year before his crime and trial. He observes that Cobb’s is “one of the most unhappy faces [he has] ever seen” (49). He also notices that the man is drunk, on his way to a hunt, and in need of a wheel repair. But after observing him, Nat returns to the traps that he makes to catch rabbits for sale. At this point in the text, Nat departs from describing Cobb to describe the peaceful mornings he spends trapping rabbits in the countryside and meditating upon his mission to kill the white people of Jerusalem.

The morning he and Hark meet Cobb, Hark is sharing a theory about the “black-assed” (53) feeling white people give black people when they speak. Cobb’s “magisterial” (54) shadow interrupts the speech. After he asks for the press, Hark and Nat secure some brandy for the mysterious man.

Nat realizes that his immediate dislike for the man was mostly “Hark’s manner in his presence—the unspeakable bootlicking Sambo, all giggles and smirks and oily, sniveling servility” (55). Nat points out Hark’s “scramblin’ and scroungin’ like a bitch pup” (56). He softens his language when he realizes how upset Hark is by his words, but he still encourages him to change, reminding him that “you ain’t a man when you act like that” (57). Part of Nat’s frustration comes from his intention to bring Hark into his plan, and his knowledge that he would need to remove “the unctuous coating of flattery which surrounds and encases” his “fury” (57) in order to connect him to the work.

Although Nat remembers that Cobb has lost both his family and his home in the previous year, taken to alcohol, and broken his leg, he encourages Hark never to pity a white man. While Hark is transfixed by Cobb’s luxuriant praise of Travis’s home distilled brew, Nat feels “uncomfortable, disturbed” (60) by the drunk man.

Putnam interrupts the scene searching for Hark, who has “more or less had it in for Hark since the preceding year” (62). After remembering that Putnam’s bitterness came from Hark witnessing his private indecencies, Nat learns that Cobb has, in a reversal of “customary positions” (63), heard his gossip. He is worried that, beyond recognizing him as a preacher, Cobb has “identified [him]” (64). Nat reflects that “a Negro’s most cherished possession is the drab, neutral cloak of anonymity he can manage to gather around himself, allowing him to merge faceless and nameless with the common swarm” (64). 

Cobb reveals that he heard Nat say: “Feel sorry for a white man and the sorrow is wasted” (64). Although Nat claims he is “dreadful sorry” for saying this, Cobb challenges him: “You don’t mean that, do you?” (65). Cobb explains that Nat’s “reputation precedes [him]” (66). Nat is an exemplary slave, to Cobb, for he has “acquired the lineaments not just of literacy but of knowledge” (66).

Nat begs the drunk man not to mock him, by forcing him to spell “cat,” any longer, but Cobb forgets the content of their conversation and moves on to decry the fading “wrecked and ravaged” (68) Virginia land. He bemoans the arrival of slaves, which now, he claims, mostly serves the cotton industry in the deep south. Nat has a “thrill of hope” around Cobb, which he explains only makes him “want to slice [his] throat” (69).

Into this strange conversation, Hark emerges, chased by Putnam and Miss Maria Pope. Cobb seems to narrate this “ritual diversion indigenous to this Southern clime […] two human beings whipping one another” (70). But Nat mentions that Travis does not whip enslaved people. As they watch preparations for Hark’s punishment, Nat explains why he feels sorry for Hark, whose wife and young son, to whom he was devoted, were sold years before. He also explains that Hark has a great fear of heights, which Putnam and Miss Maria discovered earlier, and that, as a result, their favorite punishment was to “run old Hark up a tree.” (73) Cobb watches Hark in his fear and responds: “Great God! Sometimes I think...sometimes…it is like living in a dream!” (74). Then, he wanders to the house. Nat skins a rabbit while Hark sits in the tree. He decides that Cobb “will be among those few spared the sword” (75) when he embarks on his mission. 

The final pages of Part 1 come from Nat’s internal perspective inside the courtroom. He describes another vivid dream, one that takes him while he is “dozing off for several seconds at the oaken table” (75) in the courtroom. In the dream, he searches for his Bible in the woods and comes upon six black boys sinking into a bog “while the noise of a prodigious guilt” (76) overcomes him. He is interrupted by Jeremiah Cobb, the judge, ordering him to stay awake.

As Trezevant reads his confession, Nat describes for his reader the “jammed courtroom” full of people “in holiday finery” (76). He thinks of remembering a Psalm, but he only finds “the same feeling of apartness from God” (77) that he felt in the morning, the feeling he describes at the beginning of Part 1. He feels not only distance but also “repudiation” (78) from God.

He starts to feel, “for the first time, with the same kind of faint shivery chill at [his] spine and shoulders,” fear of “the coming of [his] own death” (78). This feeling is more painful because of his “inability to pray or make any kind of contact with God” (79).

Trezevant concludes the confession and says immediately that “all this here is self-evident and self-explained,” that Nat is “a hell-born and degenerate mass-murderer the likes of which has been unknown to Christendom” (79). He places Nat in a line of famous men like Attila the Hun, claiming that Nat is an exception, for he, “unlike his bloody predecessors in evil, can lay hold on to no mitigation by reason of charity or mercy” (80). He calls for “the supreme penalty with all due speed” (80).

Gray rises to speak “in tones that he always reserved for court, not for a nigger preacher” (81). He notes that white people’s fear “that this uprising was no mere local even but was part of a larger, organized scheme with ramifications spreading out octopus-like throughout the slave population universally” should be “safely laid to rest” (82). But Gray also points out that the mystery of how or why an enslaved person would rebel against a benevolent master persists and haunts white people in the community.

He turns to Nat, showing that “it was obviously he—not the persecutor Trezevant—who was in charge of things” (83), to ask how such resistance happened and if it will happen again. Drawing from Nat’s confession, Gray insists “that all such rebellions are not only likely to be exceedingly rare in occurrence but are ultimately doomed to failure” because “of the basic weakness and inferiority, the moral deficiency of the Negro character” (83).

Gray is convinced that Nat is only guilty of one murder, because it only makes sense that, already condemned to death, he would admit to any others, too. Gray asks the crowd: “Why only one?” (84). As Gray describes Nat’s cowardice, his feeling of guilt returns. He remembers Margaret Whitehead, too, her “joyous and girlish voice” (86) in his mind. Gray underlines the fact that all other testimonies account for Nat “attempting” (87), but failing, to commit more murders. He uses this assertion of “irresolution, instability, spiritual backwardness, and plain habits of docility” in black people as a way to urge Virginians not to succumb “to the twin demons of terror and panic” (87).

Nat sinks further into his memory of driving to church with Margaret. He remembers a poem she wrote and joyously shared with him. He describes with care her “fine white skin, milky, transparent,” her “virginal beauty,” and her “white Sunday linen” (88) attire. She laments that Nat will be “going back to the Travises,” because he is “the only person [she] can talk to” (90). As she speaks, he is “filled with a bitter, reasonless hatred for this innocent and sweet and quivering young girl” and a “long hot desire to reach out with one arm and snap that white, slender, throbbing young neck” (91) This rage, Nat recognized at the time, comes from his fear that his sympathy for Margaret will interrupt his plans.

The memory drifts back into Gray’s speech, in which he cites studies defining black people as “a biologically inferior species” (92). He connects this idea, from a Professor Mebane, to Leibnitz’s theories. He defines Nat’s plans as crude and degenerate, a reason for hope, not fear.

Nat fades back into his memory, in which he and Margaret drive to the church. He notices the part of the church, upstairs, where black people, including Hark and Moses, sit. He joins Hark. They all watch the Reverend, Richard Whitehead, preach. Nat finds the sermon, directed toward black people to make them “stand in mortal fear,” repetitive, for “from these same lips [he has] heard these same sour and hopeless words half a dozen times in as many years” (96).

In the memory, Nat has not seen Hark in two months. The month before he left for his work trade at Whitehead’s, Nat had shared his plan with Hark and three others. In the six months leading to this point, Nat explains, he has undermined “his soppy childish esteem for white people” (97). While Hark whispers to Nat, Nat notices another of the men in on his plan, Nelson, across the aisle. He also notices Sam and Henry, the other two who know about his plan. Hark shares the plan to meet up during “some kind of doin’s at de graveyard dat de niggers ain’t suppose to go to” (99).

Nat continues to half-listen to Whitehead’s prepared speech, annoyed with the “soft moaning of the black crowd” (100). He is bothered by the strange cries of Will, a young man driven “crazy by slavery” (100). At the end of the sermon, the organ plays, all stand, and the white people sing. After he meets in a “hurried secret parley by the creek” (102) with his friends, Nat drives Margaret and her mother home. A call from the present interrupts the memory: “Nat Turner! Stand up!” (103)

At Cobb’s call, Nat stands. Cobb asks if he has anything to say to prevent his death sentence. Nat explains that he does not; he has “made a full confession” (103). In his sentence, Cobb raises the idea that Nat was “led away by fanaticism” (104), but he explains that he must still sentence him to hanging. Cobb and Nat gaze “at each other from vast distances, yet close, awesomely close, as if sharing for the briefest instant some rare secret” (105).

That evening, he and Hark speak through the wall. Nat is amazed that Hark is still alive, because he was shot through the chest when they were captured. Nat waits for Gray to bring him a Bible and tries to pray. Suddenly, Nat decides to ask Hark about Nelson, to ask if he was killed; Hark explains that he was hung. Sam also died, and the “onliest thing ole Sam was sad about was dat we didn’ cotch dat mean sonabitch Nat Francis dat owned him” (107). Hark continues until Nat stops him, because he “can’t bear such talk no more” (107).

Gray arrives to share that Nat cannot have a Bible because only Jeremiah Cobb, out of the six men allowed to vote on such matters, approved of giving it to him. When Nat expresses some sadness, Gray leans in to explain galaxies to him, ultimately telling him that “Christianity is finished and done with” (109). Gray tries to explain to Nat that the reason for all his trouble was his religion. Nat struggles to understand his meaning and hopes “that he would not find it necessary to go on” (111). But Gray continues, telling Nat: “[Y]ou done more with your Christianity to assure the defeat of abolition than all the meddlin’ and pryin’ Quakers that ever set foot in Virginia put together” (112).

Kitchen brings food, which Nat eats quietly. Hark tries to laugh off Gray’s visit, but Nat does not reply. Instead, he looks out the window to Jerusalem. He hears a woman singing in a “voice rich, strong, soaring,” looks out at the “rime of frost” on the ground and the “two guards with muskets” (113).

He leans against the window, listening to the woman’s voice, and wonders if Gray is right, that “all was for nothing, maybe worse than nothing” (113). This must be the reason God will not answer him. When the voice quiets, he looks to the sky and asks: “Then what I done was wrong, Lord? [...] And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption?” (113). There is no answer.