The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

Author:William Styron
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2008-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

And now I began to look forward to the coming of the Reverend Eppes, but it took an almighty long time for him to fetch me. All morning I sat on the steps of the bare veranda, stripped of its furniture, waiting for the clergyman to arrive, awaiting the sound of hoofbeats, the rattle of some conveyance coming up the lane. It was hot and muggy and a moist haze with a hint of storm about it blurred the greenish sky; by late morning the sun burned down through murky waves of heat, so oppressive that even the locusts became still and the birds retreated, silent, to the leafy blue sanctuary of the woods. For two or three hours I read from my Bible, committing several Psalms to memory. (My Bible was the only possession I had to take away from Turner’s Mill save for these things: a single change of denim pants, two cotton shirts, an extra pair of what are elegantly known as nigger brogans, some little bone crosses I had carved, a needle and some thread, a pewter cup left to me by my mother, and a ten-dollar gold piece which Marse Samuel had given me the day before. It was a matter of custom that the person into whose hands I was delivered would supply the rest of my needs. The gold piece I had sewn into the belt band of my pants, and I kept everything wrapped in a large blue bandanna.) It seemed appropriate to the moment, suspended as I was between two existences, troubled by abandonment and loss, heartsick at the void I felt upon the departure of all the dearest and best friends I had ever known, yet at the same time obscurely excited by the promise of a new world, liberty, the fruition of all those dreams I had entertained in the recent past of myself a freedman jauntily striding toward church or job down some Richmond boulevard—it seemed appropriate to this mingled mood, as I say, that I study a Psalm in which sorrow and exaltation were joined, and I recollect that it was Psalm go that I put to memory that morning, the one beginning, Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations, and which contains the verse that goes: A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night …

Noon came and went, the coppery sun sank toward the afternoon: still no Reverend Eppes, and I was hungry. I remembered then (having in my absorption forgotten) the meal waiting for me, and so with my sack thrown over my shoulder I walked back through the bare, deserted halls to the kitchen. There on a shelf over the great brick hearth was the last meal ever to be served here to a Turner: four pieces of fried chicken, half a loaf of shortening bread, sweet cider in a cracked mug—decent big-house food, proper for a farewell repast, thoughtfully covered by a worn clean flour sack as a screen against flies.

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