The Confessions of Nat Turner

Nat’s sexual desires awaken in his teenage years. Like the desire to scratch himself when in shackles, “a kind of hopeless, carnal obsession” (23), Nat finds his teenage years plagued with strong sexual need. Because he is separated from other black people, he believes, he lacks the usual chances to explore those sexual desires. Instead, he takes “the opportunity to excite” himself “whenever the force of [his] desire” (169) overwhelms him.

Nat’s passion for Margaret Whitehead fills him with desire, and with vivid memories of her scent, her tone of voice, and her skin even after he has killed her. In penetrating her with a section of fence to spare her pain upon death, Nat only partially fulfills his desire; he regrets the action, just before he dies, when he admits his own guilt to himself. Margaret’s piety, and her whiteness, appeal to him, just as Emmeline Turner’s did in his teenage years.

Notably, Nat’s desire for women coincides with their whiteness. Emmeline, Margaret, and Thomas Ridley’s wife epitomize the beauty he envisions in his “solitary moments” (169) of pleasure. However, his sexual experiences come to fruition with Willis, a black boy. After their encounter, Nat struggles to naturalize his actions to his religious beliefs, but he is certain that he had never “known that human flesh could be so sweet” (199). Sexually, Nat ends his life largely unfulfilled but still curious and racked by the mystery of what was and could have been for him, physically. 

The “gulf”(10) between Nat and God is the first, most notable feeling of The Confessions of Nat Turner. Its resolution, just between his death, is the novel’s emotional climax, for it resolves the “terrible emptiness” (10) that Nat feels from the moment he decides to enact his rebellion. Nat’s desire to feel connected to God means that his separation from God, “which [has] nothing to do with faith or desire” (12), motivates him to enter back into his memory in search of the stories that might remind him of that connection to God. The feeling of being “some wriggling insect beneath the largest rock on earth,” living “in hideous, perpetual dark” (12), is unbearable.

Nat remembers that his faith was his motivation in pursuing rebellion. It was also the thing that brought his followers, apostle-like, to him. Never thinking of himself as a preacher, Nat only studies the Bible and prays for himself, as part of his education and later part of his technique to persevere through the demands of slavery. But after the black people of Jerusalem witness Will and Sam fight one another, for their owner Nathaniel Francis’s entertainment, he uses the Bible to establish a religious mission for racial rebellion. This attachment of social action to religious faith forms the core of Nat’s movement.

Thus, when Gray casts the efficacy of Nat’s movement into doubt, that only compounds Nat’s religious doubt. His belief in the divinity of his “mission” has profound personal consequences when he must face death without any divine reassurance. When he finally hears a divine message, just before his death, it does not resolve any mystery, for Nat or for his reader: simple assurance of God’s presence is the enduring note of Nat’s life, and that assurance is sufficient, at least for Nat.