The Confessions of Nat Turner

“‘Out of sixty, a couple dozen acquitted or discharged, another fifteen or so convicted but transported. Only fifteen hung—plus you and that other nigger, Hark, to be hung—seventeen hung in all. In other words, out of this whole catastrophic ruction only round one-fourth gets the rope. Dad-burned mealy-mouthed abolitionists say we don’t show justice. Well, we do. Justice! That’s how come nigger slavery’s going to last a thousand years.’”

In this moment, Thomas Gray works to build up Nat’s guilt. Nat fears the inefficacy of his actions; Gray heightens that fear by drilling him with the small scale of his movement. He also conflates kindness, of letting off some victims without hanging, with justice, although Nat never goes along with Gray’s argument that any black person has experienced justice before the judicial system.

“In many ways, I thought, a fly must be one of the most fortunate of God’s creatures. Brainless born, brainlessly seeking its sustenance from anything wet and warm, it found its brainless mate, reproduced, and died brainless, unacquainted with misery or grief. But then I asked myself: How could I be sure? Who could say that flies were not instead God’s supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching, forced by instinct to dine off sweat and slime and offal, their very brainlessness an everlasting torment?” 

As Nat watches the flies gather, he wonders if lack of education or brain development is the same thing as eternal suffering. This question carries over directly to Nat’s own black community, which he also sees as fly-like. He wonders if their position is natural and intended or if it is the product of some action, some evil, that sets them apart into suffering.

“‘The main point is that in this whole hellish ruction involving dozens upon dozens of the slain, you, Nat Turner, were personally responsible for only one death.’”

The fact that Nat only successfully kills one person is interesting to Gray. Gray sees this as a marker of Nat’s guilt, or perhaps his lack of manhood. Nat seems unsure, even as he retells this story, of why this fury or killing is so difficult for him. Gray aptly pulls out this fear and anxiety about manhood from Nat’s story, and it pervades the rest of the text. 

“I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me, and there was thus available to me more time than I had ever had before to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me.” 

Once Nat reaches Joseph Travis’s farm, the idle thoughts about his mission crystallize because he has space to think them through more fully. In this sense, in his relative kindness, Travis creates the conditions for his own death.  

“In short, Hark was for me a necessary and crucial experiment. Though it is a painful fact that most Negroes are hopelessly docile, many of them are filled with fury, and the unctuous coating of flattery which surrounds and encases that fury is but a form of self-preservation. With Hark, I knew I must strip away and destroy that repulsive outer guise, meanwhile encouraging him to nurture the murderous fury which lay beneath.”

Nat generalizes about other black people often, as if distanced from the population as a whole. That he enacts an “experiment” upon his compatriot Hark shows that, just as Samuel Turner did for him, he perceives others as case studies to prove his point about potential and possibility. What he wants to pull away is the protective layer that prevents men from acting out in anger against their owners.

“Suddenly, my heart still pounding uproariously, I am filled with a bitter, reasonless hatred for this innocent and sweet and quivering young girl, and the long hot desire to reach out with one arm and snap that white, slender, throbbing young neck is almost uncontrollable. Yet—strange, I am aware of it—it is not hatred; it is something else. But what? What? I cannot place the emotion. It is closer to jealousy, but it is not even that.” 

This is the first moment in which Nat expresses his complicated attraction to Margaret. His “long hot desire” is both violent and sexual, her “throbbing young neck” both appealing and frustrating. But he “cannot place the emotion” that drives this desire.

“We gazed 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.” 

In the courtroom, Nat and Cobb share this glance, which seems to express their complicated relationship. Nat feels kinship with Cobb, intellectually, probably because both are so lost in their own minds and reveries. 

“I open the book and sunlight floods the white page, hurting my eyes. It is cool here, with a ferny smell of dampness, and mosquitoes moon about my ears as I begin my laborious journey through a wild strange country where words of enraging size, black and incomprehensible, blossom like poisonous flowers. My lips move silently, I trace sentences with a quivering finger.” 

The first time that Nat tries to teach himself to read, he enters a new kind of nature with “poisonous flowers.” The excitement of this new space, and the appeal of mystery, is strong for Nat. As he grows older, he learns that he must not probe the spaces of all mysteries. He doubts whether or not learning to read was a true positive for him.

“‘It is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed. They must be educated! To free these people without education and with the prejudice that presently exists against them would be a ghastly crime.’”

Samuel Turner’s assimilationist beliefs, expressed here, were not uncommon in this time period. As a Christian, he believes that bondage is wrong, but he also believes in gradual emancipation, achieved by teaching black people to fit into and operate within white society.

“‘For, gentlemen, I know better, I know darkies better. I’ll swear to you that if you show me a little darky whom you’ve taught to read the complete works of Julius Caesar forward and backward in the original Latin tongue, I will show you a darky who is still an animal with the brain of a human child that will never get wise nor learn honesty nor acquire any human ethics though that darky live to a ripe old age. A darky, gentlemen, is basically as unteachable as a chicken, and that is the simple fact of the matter.’”

Benjamin Turner’s belief counters that of his brother. He sees race as an essential quality separating groups of people. This passage describes the different evolutionary stages that he attributes to each group. All of this belief comes despite Benjamin’s round rudeness and moral cruelty.

“I am no longer oppressed by the fact (as I was for so many years after I had grown to manhood and was able to reflect long and hard on these matters) that the name on that headstone was not a nigger woman’s forlorn though honest ‘Lou-Ann’ but the captured, possessed, owned ‘Lou-Ann Turner.’” 

Nat reflects upon his mother’s and grandmother’s death by thinking about the role of bodies in the earth. The memorial of ownership bothers him because it erases the perceived reality of his mother’s experience. As he reaches adulthood, he learns to live by not being oppressed, but rather empowered by this frustration.

“If I could be shaken to my very feet by this unsought-for encounter with a boy, think what it might be, I reflected, think what an obstacle would be set in my path toward spiritual perfection if I should ever have any commerce with a woman!” 

Nat is concerned, in his adolescent years, about his sexuality. His single encounter comes with a boy, Willis, but he fears how women will shape or interrupt his spiritual growth. Later, he cries out for a wife, recognizing that his desperate sexual desire has overcome him.

“They cared nothing about where they came from or where they were going, and so snored loudly or, abruptly waking, skylarked about, laughing and slapping each other, and trying to clutch at the passing overhead leaves. Like animals they relinquished the past with as much dumb composure as they accepted the present, and were unaware of any future at all. Such creatures deserved to be sold, I thought bitterly, and I was torn between detestation for them and regret that it was too late for me to save them through the power of the Word.” 

This passage aptly describes Nat’s feeling of superiority over other enslaved people, which he develops while he is a favorite at the Turner home. When he equates other black people to animals, he follows Samuel’s assimilationist logic that, without education, black people are inferior. It is easy to compare this description to that of flies in Part 1.

“[I]t was this matter of hatred—of discovering those Negroes in whom hatred was already ablaze, of cultivating hatred in the few remaining and vulnerable, of testing and probing, warily discarding those in whom pure hatred could not be nurtured and whom therefore I could not trust—that became one of my primary concerns.” 

Nat describes how easy he feels it is to unleash the power he hopes to unleash from men in his community. Hatred is key to his mission; this is one moment in which the possible expansion or shifting of Christian ideals becomes clear in Nat’s talk.

“But this was something I had never seen. It was as if, divesting herself of all composure and breaking down in this fashion—exposing a naked feeling in a way I had never seen a white woman do before—she had invited me to glimpse herself naked in the flesh, and I felt myself burning for her. Burning!” 

When Thomas Ridley’s fiancée breaks down in discomfort over Arnold’s ignorance and her own, Nat sees a new kind of sexual desire for a white woman. This sense of restricted vulnerability and gender expectations, and then the equation of honesty with sexuality, is part of Nat’s tangled and confused sexuality throughout the text. 

“‘Black folk ain’t never goin’ to be no great nation until they studies to love they own black skin an’ the beauty of that skin an’ the beauty of them black hands that toils so hard and black feet that trods so weary on God’s earth. And when white men in they hate an’ wrath an’ meanness fetches blood from that beautiful black skin then, on then, my brothers, it is time not fo’ laughing but fo’ weeping an’ rage an’ lamentation! Pride!’” 

When Nat begins to “preach” to black people in the market, he begins to use their language. He enacts a translation of Christian thought into a different tongue and a different logic to suit his purposes in accomplishing his mission.

“This part of me fasted and prayed and beseeched the Lord earnestly for revelation, guidance, a further sign. I was in an agony of waiting. I knew that God had told me what I must do, yet I had no means of deciding how to accomplish my bloody mission, nor where, nor when.” 

Nat’s mission is set, in his mind, but he envisions himself like a Biblical figure, waiting for a call from God to begin or “accomplish” the feat before him. This “agony of waiting” grows stronger the less time he has to read and write. 

“Later I asked questions, and found that none of my followers shrank from the idea of killing; I made it plain that murder was an essential act for their own freedom and they welcomed this truth with the stolid acceptance of men who, as I have shown, had nothing on earth to lose.” 

This fact that Nat anticipates—that the men around him have “nothing on earth to lose”—shapes his expectations for their behavior. For him, unlike for the white people of Jerusalem, it is easy to see that and why any man would want to join his troupe.

“I had granted only one exception to this rule—Jeremiah Cobb, that stern and tormented man whose encounter with me will be remembered. Now, however, despite my efforts to thwart a fondness for her in my heart, I could not help but feel that Miss Sarah—who had never regarded me with anything but kindness and who during my last illness nursed me with a motherly, sisterly, clucking solicitude—should escape the blade of my wrath.”

Nat considers it a weakness when he weighs dispensations for different white people in his life. He is not coldhearted, his narration reveals: he has tenderness and can clearly see the positive sides of many white people in his life. The “blade of [his] wrath” is a powerful thing that he does not take lightly, and his emotions sway him away from making it a thoroughgoing slaughter.

“‘Reverend, I have no doubt that it was your own race that contributed more to your fiasco than anything else. It just ain’t a race made for revolution, that’s all.’” 

Gray’s belief, and his desire to make sense of Nat’s rebellion, returns throughout the text to solidify Nat’s anxiety about his own failure. Whether or not Gray works intentionally here, his rhetoric is part of Nat’s interior admission of guilt.

“Then I arose again and resumed my meaningless and ordained circuit of her body, not near it yet ever within sight as if that crumpled blue were the center of an orbit around whose path I must make a ceaseless pilgrimage.” 

Nat’s chaotic inward landscape, after he kills Margaret, sets him off on a “ceaseless pilgrimage.” Like his separation from God, Nat separates himself from the “crumpled blue” figure but still orbits around it, as if in penance, on a “pilgrimage” to atone for his failure. 

“Yet I cannot dwell on that place too long, for again as always I know that to try to explore the mystery would be only to throw open portals on even deeper mysteries, on and on everlastingly, into the remotest corridors of thought and time. So I turn away.” 

Nat decides, at the end of his life, to “turn away” from the mysteries. With age, mystery loses its appeal and becomes a scary thing to confront, for it is indecipherable. 

“I will go without Him, I think, I will go without Him because He has abandoned me without any last sign at all. Was what I done wrong in His sight? And if what I done was wrong is there no redemption?” 

Nat’s anxiety builds to a climax as his executioners approach. These questions embody the reasons for Nat to reflect upon his story: “redemption,” at the core of what he wanted to share with others, is now at stake. It is a feature of Christianity that he does not, cannot understand upon death, especially when he feels distant from God.