The Confessions of Nat Turner

As Nat approaches his 30s, he notices that a more secure atmosphere returns to the Virginia region. Roads and weather improve. Apples grow robustly and become good brandy. Nat’s carpentry skills are suddenly in demand. Although Reverend Whitehead rejected Nat, his mother, Catherine, values his gifts and hires him out to build a barn as well as to serve as coachman and butler.

Even as he works, Nat feels divided, “straddling two worlds of the mind and spirit” (313). In 1829, though, the questions of how and why to complete his mission are settled in a vision. In the Whitehead library, Nat finds a map of the area and traces it secretly. As he heads out, Mrs. Whitehead apprehends him and asks him about his work, which bothers Nat to an outsize degree. She wishes she could purchase him and speaks about his fine handiwork and his cognitive ability, which she thinks is set far apart from the others who she enslaves. She has, she explains, offered Moore a $1,000 in exchange for him.

From this scene, Nat’s narration cuts into a document that is both an outline of his plan of attack, beginning at the Whitehead home, and a prayer to God. It is clear, from the outline, that Nat is prepared. However, he is waiting for a sign, likely in August, but unsure of “[w]hat yr” (320). After the written interlude ends, he explains that he hoped to engender in his followers “a sense of black militancy” (322) in his preaching years. He develops a closest four followers: Hark, Nelson, Henry, and Sam. While Nelson is old and Henry is deaf, Sam’s “hatred [is] the least complicated of all,” for he wants “simply to eliminate Nathaniel Francis from the domain of his own existence” (324). Nat uses an animal metaphor to picture Sam as a caged animal who, released, would kill ruthlessly.

Nat ranks men based on their rage and their domination, Hark being the most loyal. The group meets regularly in Nat’s woodland sanctuary, and he comes to know “that by the grace of God this escape could be achieved” (325). The men know clearly about the mission of escape, but until the call from God, “they could not know of [Nat’s] vision nor that a true escape into freedom must include not a handful of Negroes but many, and that the blood of white men must flow on the soil of Southampton” (326).

Once he has established the roots of his movement, Nat signals that he will enter a “fragment of a memory” (326). He vividly remembers building more bookshelves for Mrs. Whitehead and rediscovering the map he had once traced. Distracted, Nat drops a tool that cuts his hand, which starts bleeding profusely.

Suddenly, Margaret enters the library looking for a Wordsworth poem, and Nat stares at her youthful beauty. This “Godless white bitch” (329) provokes nervousness and desire in Nat. When she notices his wound, she moves closer and tries to help him. Nat refuses the help, and as Margaret leaves, Nat is confused by his heart’s loud pounding and the fact that his “hatred for Margaret is, if anything, deeper than [his] hatred for her mother” (330).

Nat exists this memory to proceed with his story. The next major event of his life is Moore’s drunken death at the hands of an errant cow, which leaves him fearful of being sold. When Joseph Travis marries Miss Sarah, though, and the family moves “to those more pleasant acres nearby” (331) where he joins Hark’s living quarters for the next two years until the uprising.

Travis values Nat’s skills, which offer much to his wheelmaking business. Though his master is “at bottom a decent and sympathetic man” (332), Nat also recognizes major problems in his treatment of Hark and his odd, outsider’s demeanor. Prosperity brings out better and happier qualities in Travis. In this setting, Nat reminds his reader that Jeremiah Cobb visits, as he recounts in Part 1.

At this time, Nat receives “the final mandate” (334) from God. After weeks of hard work enhancing Travis’s wheelworking workshop, he heads to the woods to pray under the guise of setting up a new rabbit trapline. He planned for fast for days, for fasting “helped quench all fleshly longings” (336). But he feels “beset by devils and monsters,” “visions of the flesh of women” (336), and other evils. Desperately, he asks God for a wife to alleviate his lust after his mission is complete.

Nat lyrically describes a solar eclipse, after which “the seal is removed from [his] lips” (338). Hark arrives to bring him food, but Nat tells him to gather Henry, Nelson, and Sam in his spot at noon the next day. He tells the men what has happened and that he has been commanded to “take on the yoke” of Christ to “fight against the Serpent” (339). Nat explains the need to create a mob to run away, then falls silent; it is Henry who suggests that “[u]s gotta kill all dem white sonsabitches” (340).

Nat finds that the men are unafraid of killing. The more he explains the plan to them, the more he begins to revel in it. That night, as he sleeps in the woods, he dreams peacefully and awakens to what he interprets as a good omen. At the same time, he starts to taste “a sinister taste of death” (341) that is new and pervasive. This feeling persists from that day on, each time he sees a white person. When Travis welcomes Nat back to the farm, Nat hallucinates, envisioning all the white people around him dead in bloody murder. 

Nat selects Independence Day for his attack out of “deliberate irony” (343). But the date is also practical because white people would gather to celebrate. “It was,” Nat explains, his “purpose to slaughter without hesitation each man, woman, and child who [lays] in [his] path” (344). He cancels the plans, though, when the town moves the celebration to the center of town. The shift leads Nat to panic.

Travis hires Nat out to Mrs. Whitehead that summer. While at the Whitehead house, Nat learns from the Reverend that there will be a massive Christian meeting nearby in August. An “unforeseen bounty” would be in Jerusalem, ready “to capture and destroy” (346). Nat considers this his final sign.

Sam and Nelson continue to persuade a “body of men” (346 )to Nat’s band. They usually focused on finding enslaved men who had attempted to run away and drawing out their rage or readiness to kill. Each enlisted in the movement was “sworn to the profoundest secrecy […] on pain of death” (348). Nat considers this vow unnecessary, as he believes that none of the men would “have given away their magnificent secret for all the world” (348).

Nat plans that, rather than meeting all together, his band will go from house to house adding numbers gradually. The band would be the signal for each man “to take up arms against his master as soon as [they] appeared” (350). Nat’s closest four followers repeat this plan to their troops to ensure that each man would be in place on the assigned Monday. As the date draws near, Nat feels confidence in this “majestic black army of the Lord” (350) that he envisions growing gloriously.

Just before the appointed day, Will fights Francis back during a beating and flees the scene. Nat is relieved that Will, who has an extreme desire to rape white women, is gone. But at the same time, the event engenders a new kind of suspicion toward black people. Reverend Whitehead, for one, joins the band that sends out to search for him.

In the wake of his departure, as they drive together, Margaret expresses to Nat that she thinks Will’s actions are justified, given Francis’s cruelty. Enthusiastically, she expresses distaste for her anti-abolitionist friends at school. While she continues, Nat thinks only of his desire for Margaret: she fills him “with boredom and lust” (358). He becomes troubled with doubts about whether he should kill her.

When Margaret stops the cart, spying a crushed turtle on the side of the road, she expresses her sympathy for “suffering things” (359). The two venture toward a river for a drink, and Margaret acts out a play she has performed at school. For a moment, she falls into tempted Nat’s arms. As they head back, Nat looks, for “the last time” (363), into her face.

Just before the appointed date, Nat sets fire to the sanctuary where he’s gone for meditation over the years. Seeing the smoke, Will emerges to meet Nat, who feels “anew the old dread his presence always caused” (365). To Nat, he appears animal, “a wicked little weasel or maddened fox” (366). Unhappily, Nat agrees to let him join the group.

As Nat’s followers join together, he demands reports from each “troop” leader on their charges. A new recruit, Jack, shows up drunk, and Nat grows angry with Nelson for allowing him to disrupt their order. Nat imagines himself among Saul, Gideon, and David—Biblical heroes—and starts to doubt himself; he fears that he is “even beyond the reach or counsel of the Lord” (371). After some time alone, though, he rejoins his men to prepare torches and other materials. The “enemy had supplied [the group] with all the instruments of his own destruction” (371).

Nat describes the band’s gradual arrival to Travis’s place, the first home that they plan to strike. They disturb his “sleep of the innocent,” achieved through acceptance of the “fragile testimony of history” (375). Nat inaugurates the mission by swinging at Travis in his bed, though he misses both his master and Miss Sarah; his strength and ability leaves him as Travis and Sarah cry out in terror. Will emerges into the room and brutally decapitates Travis, shouting: “If’n you cain’t do it, I do it! Das de way us rock dem white fuckahs!” (378). Will kills Sarah as Nat runs, as if trying to escape, out of the room. “Like music, a horn blow,” Hark cries out from upstairs, where he has killed Putnam and the other apprentice, Westbrook. When Nat sees blood coursing around the house, he doubts whether this was truly God’s calling. Moses, a little black boy on the property, bites Nat’s wrist, “driven quite mad by all he had witnessed” (380).

Nat returns, for the first time in Part 3, to his jail cell, where Gray continues to describe his brutality and goads Nat to admit remorse. More than any guilt, Nat explains, he feels “weariness” (381). Gray commends Nat on the “pretty complete and satisfactory job” he did of achieving his goal of “slaughter” (382). “No niggers,” he says, “ever done anything like this” (382).

At the same time, though, Gray reminds him that his mission “was a flat-assed failure” (382). Moreover, a relatively small number of enslaved people joined his movement after hearing his call. Rather than an “army,” Nat’s group is “a draggedly mob of drunken black ruffians” (383). Nat admits that his troop’s drinking was “one of the worst things that went wrong” (384), along with other plundering. Moreover, Gray explains, there were “active enemies” (385) among black people to Nat’s work.

After Gray leaves to submit Nat’s “not guilty” plea, Nat wonders: “Is it true that I really have no remorse or contrition or guilt for anything I’ve done?” (386). What he really feels is “an entombed, frustrated rage” (386) at both black and white people. Nat admits that “the black men had caused [his] defeat just as surely as the white” (386). He remembers the end of the conflict, in which his troops are “intimidated nightmarishly” (387) by both the white men and the black men firing at them to sustain their privilege over enslaved black people. Nat remembers running, hoping to rejoin others but knowing that this will not happen.

Returning home for food and then to the woods to meditate, Nat remembers sadly recognizing that “for the first time in [his] life” (390) he could not think or pray. This silence and absence lead to the fear that Nat still feels in the cell, as he stares out the window. He accepts that he feels remorse for only one death, and then retells the part of the evening when he kills Margaret Whitehead. Fearful that Will would take control of the mission, Nat confronts him, and only Nelson’s intervention prevents the mission from exploding into infighting.

At the Whitehead house, Nat remembers, he feels ill and dizzy. Nevertheless, he chases Margaret, who falls into the field grass. They do not speak; their “last encounter may have been the quietest that ever was” (401). When she trips, Nat plunges his sword into her, then flees from the body “calling out to [himself] like one bereft of mind (401). As he departs, he hears her voice asking him: “Please kill me Nat I hurt so” (402). In an act of mercy, he grabs a fence rail and thrusts it into her, then circles her body “like some roaming dog” (402). He hallucinates that she is alive again. Finally, he returns to the troops.

At the end of Part 3, Nat explains that the troop never actually met Nathaniel Francis, the most hated white man. Although they killed every white person within 20 miles, their “work of death was not absolutely exhaustive, not complete” (403). One white girl, who escaped, ran to raise the alarm. Nat was the only person who had seen her, and “dispirited and overcome by fatigue,” full of “obscure, unshakable grief” (404), he lets her go. At the end of the mission, Nat wonders if he had allowed her to go “to vouchsafe a life for the one that [he] had taken” (404).