The Confessions of Nat Turner

Samuel’s “zeal to tamper with a nigger’s destiny” (151) shapes Nat’s life thereafter. Rather than becoming “an ordinary run-of-the-mill house nigger, mildly efficient at some stupid task,” he is “taken into the family’s bosom” (152). In retrospect, Nat is not sure that he “might not have been happier” without the Turners’ attention, for “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (152).

Nat explains that Samuel and Miss Nell work with him to learn reading, arithmetic, and the Episcopal catechism. On day, a clergyman named Dr. Ballard, along with other ministers, visits the house. Although Nat remembers the noise and scene of the night, he focuses mostly on Benjamin, who drinks brandy while Samuel talks with the ministers.

The ministers, who have come to report on the status of slavery in the South, asks Samuel for a report on his opinions of the institution. Finally, Samuel replies that he “steadfastly [believes] that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land” (156). Yet, though he believes that “it is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed,” so “they must be educated” (156) to be made fit for any kind of freedom. Meanwhile, Benjamin walks to pee into a rosebush off the veranda. He loudly mocks his brother’s “bleeding heart” (157).

Nat closely remembers the ministers’ visible discomfort. But Samuel looks toward Benjamin “with quiet affection” (157). Benjamin continues to speak, explaining that his brother is “sentimental as an old she-hound” (157). Benjamin believes that a black person “is an animal with the brain of a human child” (158). A machine, he jokes, that could do the work of a black person would be far preferable to slavery.

Benjamin gestures toward Nat as an example, and the whole party looks toward him. He “had never heard [himself] called a slave before”(160)that moment. Dr. Ballard agrees with Benjamin that educating Nat is a crazy idea. Samuel “does not know darkies like [he does]” (161). The idea that he is a slave is what lingers in Nat that evening; it is a notion that “[surrounds him] cold and treacherous and, more somberly, beyond the hope of ending” (162).

Benjamin dies months after this incident. No enslaved people are unhappy about his funeral. They are expected to publicly and loudly mourn his death, a process which is visibly insincere. Under Samuel’s leadership, Nat’s life takes on even more leisure; he “could stir and turn and sleep for another hour, until the full light of sunup”(163), and he does not work hard in the field or the blacksmith shop. He becomes accustomed to good food, and his tasks are light.

When he is 14, Nat grows deeply ill. During that illness, he is taken to “an enormous bedstead with linen sheets” and is “attended to every moment” (165). At this point, he knows clearly that he is “a pet, the darling, the little black jewel of Turner’s Mill” (165). At 16, because he is healthy and has the capacity to work, Samuel places him in an apprenticeship in carpentry.

Nat energetically embraces the new work. He is strong, “an able student of the craft”(168), who learns from his German expert quickly. As he grows in a fairly isolated environment, he struggles with the desire for “fleshly pleasures” (169). He pleasures himself once a week in the storage shed, envisioning, always, “a nameless white girl” (169).

At the same time, he establishes his desire to “become first and foremost a preacher of the Word” (170). Miss Nell gives him a leatherbound Bible of his own for Christmas, and his “joy [is] so great that he [becomes] dizzy” (170). On that day, Nat remembers that the other slaves lined up outside to receive their humble gifts, “a disheveled, ragged lot” (170). At this moment, he begins to see himself as a possible salvation for those others.

Nat explains that Benjamin’s son, Lewis, remains on as overseer after Benjamin finally fires the rapist McBride. He is a bachelor, and he follows Samuel’s orders; Lewis seems to enjoy the outdoors. Although Nat describes all members of the Turner family, the one in whom he is most invested is Miss Emmeline, whom he worships. She is a beautiful woman, once spurned in love, who busies herself with canning vegetables and planting vegetables, a task that allows Nat to observe her often.

The passion is “virginal” (174), and Nat’s interest mostly in Emmeline’s sense of purity. They never really speak. Nat remembers one large party, held at the estate, in which he played a major servile role. Up early in the morning, he stumbles upon Miss Emmeline with another person “in the moonless and murky dark” (176). He hears the noises of lovemaking, though it takes him some time to recognize what is happening. In the conversation that ensues, it becomes clear that Emmeline’s cousin Lewis has “accomplished what [he’s] been after for ages” (177). She leaves quickly, full of scorn for her place and position. Lewis leaves Turner’s Mill months later.

This event changes Nat’s “entire vision of white women” (178). Emmeline’s “glow of saintliness” (178) disappears for him. She becomes a sexual object in his mind. 

Just after his 18th birthday, Nat learns of the future Samuel has planned for him. Nat is on his way to repair cabins where field laborers work. He is prepared for his teacher, called Goat, to call the cabins’ inhabitants “not animals even,” which makes him feel “blood-shame” (180). Instead, on this day, Samuel takes him to Jerusalem, ostensibly to visit a jeweler who would make an anniversary gift for his wife.

Nat has only been to Jerusalem once before. He is excited to ride with Samuel, who also takes time, on the trip, to complement his skills. Just as he prepares to tell Samuel about his future, deer run out and spook his horse. Samuel claims that the return of deer to the area “means poor times” (184). He quiets and becomes “buried within himself” (184), a contrast with the happier mood early in the ride.

As they ride, Nat becomes more aware of the “scrubby bramble-choked earth” that lays “in fallow ruin” (184) around them. Eventually, amid the somber mood, Samuel speaks up, to tell Nat that he is “quite an unusual darky” (186). He has “overcome the natural handicaps” (186) of his race, as Samuel sees it. Samuel assigns Nat to work a half day on carpentry and then half day as a driver on the plantation, answerable only to Samuel and helping him with a library project. Once he turns 21, he will move to Richmond, to work for an accomplished architect named Mr. Pemberton. He will return half of his wages to Samuel, and after four years, if he behaves well, Samuel says that he will “draw up the papers for [Nat’s] emancipation” (189).

Samuel is emotional as he tells Nat of this plan. But Nat’s own mind is filled with a “wild sudden confusion” (189). The idea of freedom can make a person “half crazy,” and so Nat’s “first reaction to this awesome magnanimity [is] one of ingratitude, panic, and self-concern” (189). Thoughts of leaving Turner’s Mill fills him with nostalgia. Nat protests that he wants “to stay right here” (190). Eventually, as soon as that morning, his fears dissipate. On the way back from Jerusalem, his “joy and exultancy [grows]” (190).

On the way home, they come upon a slave caravan. Nat has “never seen Negroes in chains before,” and “their silence [is] oppressive, abject, hurtful, and chilling” (191). Samuel speaks to the driver, who explains that the slaves have been sold to a planter in Georgia by the nearby Ryder plantation, which is not “finished too” (193).

While the white men speak, a leader among the enslaved men and boys named Raymond engages Nat. Fearfully, as Raymond presses him for food, Nat avoids the interaction. When Samuel sweeps him away, they move on past Raymond to take the road again. Raymond reminds Nat: “Yo’ shit stink too, sugah. Yo’ ass black jes’ like mine, honey chile” (196).

As Nat begins this next phase of his life, he becomes friends with another boy named Willis. Willis, a few years younger, is intended to replace Nat in the carpentry shop because he is “skillful and neat” (196). Willis is not a Christian, and Nat quickly wants to convert him. As Willis comes into the new faith, Nat recognizes his “own hidden yet implacable and onrushing power” (199).

One day, Nat and Willis have a sexually charged moment in the woods. Nat feels, after the boys pleasure one another, “the presence of the Lord very close, compassionate, all-redeeming” (200). Trying to decipher where God is or what he would say, Nat attempts to baptize Willis, and himself, in a nearby river as the answer to God’s “test.” From that moment on, Nat decides to devote himself to God, “avoiding at all costs such pleasures of the flesh” (202).

A religious revival passes through town one long weekend, and Samuel allows Nat, Willis, and Little Morning to attend. But at midnight, the night before the group departs, Abraham’s daughter wakes Nat to help attend to her sick father. Nat must take some boys to another plantation for him, Abraham explains, before he travels to the revival. One of the boys, it turns out, is Willis; Nat feels betrayed and becomes “nearly frantic with disappointment” (206).

Two white men from the plantation meet Nat and take the four boys away in their wagon. They are intimidating, and they tell Nat to “go home straight away” (210). As they drive away, though, Nat realizes that they travel west, though the plantation they claim to come from is to the east. Willis, and the three others, are not hired out: they’ve been sold.

Noticing that Nat mopes around his estate in the days following Willis’s sale, Samuel confronts him. Samuel defends himself against the charge of “insensibility” and notes that he “saved [Nat] from a bad disappointment”(211)by not letting him attend the revival, which was poorly attended. Nat’s and Willis’s friendship, he claims, was unknown by him. But as Nat continues to ask him about his decisions, Samuel starts to seem “weary,” his voice “faint and far away” (213).

Unused to selling away enslaved people, Samuel explains, he was nervous about the “trouble and unrest” (214) that would come about if he let others know about the sold boys. Samuel intentionally sold only boys who were orphaned so that he would not split up families. He apologizes profusely. But Nat does not understand the need for the sale. Samuel explains that “all of them […] everything”(214)will be gone soon because of the farm’s mounting debts.

Three years later, just before he is set to travel to Richmond, Samuel’s prediction comes true: Nat is passed to a Baptist preacher, Reverend Eppes, and the other slaves are sold. At these moments, in which they faced an uncertain future, Nat noticed that most people spoke of simple matters like “an aching knee,” and he reflects:“They cared nothing about where they came fromor where they were going” (219). This sense of disconnection, in which “they relinquished the past with as much dumb composure as they accepted the present,” makes them “creatures” that deserve “to be sold” (219), in Nat’s eyes. Even as he detests these enslaved people, though, Nat regrets that he could not “save them through the power of the Word” (219).

As the estate empties, Reverent Eppes seems like a good caretaker for Nat, one who “could be expected to complete the documents in regard to [his] freedom” (220). Samuel and his family prepare to depart for Alabama to establish his family again. Nat is “unable to stifle [his] grief” (222) when he says goodbye. In this moment, he feels “adrift between that which was past and those things yet to come” (223).

After Samuel and the others leave, Nat waits alone for Reverend Eppes. He lingers on a Psalm for comfort in this moment of waiting. He feels “the stillness of the plantation,” which is “at this instant almost complete, so oppressive and strange” (224) that he thinks he is deaf. In the empty space, he suddenly starts to imagine that he is “possessor” of the “still and ruined plantation” (226). In feeling like an owner, he momentarily feels an “ecstasy” of being “white,” before his guilt and his “blackness” (227) return.

Nat slowly eats all of the food he has. The Reverend does not arrive, and night falls. With it comes a storm, and it fills him with fear. In the morning, though Reverent Eppes wakes him up. The preacher seems poor and uneducated. As they drive away, the feelings of nostalgia and hunger battle inside of Nat. The two men speak briefly in a short, odd conversation about sexuality.

Slowly, suddenly, the Reverend begins to speak of and touch Nat’s private parts. He squeezes and insists that Nat “mind” (233) him, and as they continue driving, the Reverend repeats his demand. Eventually, Nat explains, Eppes stops “trying to ravish” (233) him. Instead, he simply worked Nat extremely hard as a laborer on his farm and for the rest of the Reverend’s congregation.

Nat loses his optimism and energy with Reverend Eppes at Shiloh. He starts to yearn “for the days and months to pass and for the winter to end […] to be delivered from this pesthole” (236), but he is never taken to Richmond and does not hear from Samuel for months. For the first time, he thinks of “the extremity of running away” (237). Eventually, in 1822, the Reverend sells Nat “into bondage for $460” (239).

Nat rebels against the sale, yelling out about his skills and knowledge, but the men at the sale quiet him. He feels “a kind of disbelief” (240) at the whole experience. He wills himself to forget about Samuel Turner and his ineffective promises; he is sold to Thomas Moore.

As they drive, Moore and his brother bicker over their road direction. Nat corrects them, after reading the road sign, and admits his skills. The brothers test him by asking him to read more. The two men change course and then, eventually, start to argue over whether black men should be fed. Nat, painfully hungry, interjects to say so. For saying “I’m hungry,” he is whipped: he has “never felt a whip before, and the pain of it when it came […] blossomed throughout the hollow of [his] skull” (245).

In the back of Moore’s wagon, that day, Nat receives, the word from God that guides him from then on: “I abide” (246). It is like a “voice booming in the trees” (250) to guide and comfort him forward.