Dear Mr. Peyton: I have been informed by some of our neighbors that you are fortunate enough to have produced turnips for sale and turnips to spare. If this is true, I would like to purchase 10 or 15 bushels. Let me know the price. This year we have sowed only our freshest land in turnips since we presumed that wearied lands would not bring them. They were used as food for Whites and Negroes and also for cattle and sheep. Mr. Young told me he planted turnips to be fed on only by sheep and as the basis of the improvement of poor lands. We will try that experiment here this year, only with buckwheat . . .
For two hours I had written letters concerning the improvement of land, the rotating of crops, and what fertilizer was best. By the time we were finished I knew that turnips as well as hemp and pumpkins were best planted on new clearings of land. And that eight acres of pumpkins, well grown, will feed all the stock we have for two to three months. Those letters taught me more than I learned from Pleasant about my geography and numbers together.
It was to be a warm June evening, turning into the kind of night when you didn’t want to go to sleep but stay up all night talking.
I asked Mother Whitehead if I could sleep upstairs with Violet. “I see nothing amiss with it,” she said.
I made her an eggnog with rum in it, her favorite bedtime drink, and left her there in the parlor. She would have her “talk” with Richard before she retired. They talked every evening, and mostly it was about the running of the plantation.
We sat on Violet’s bed, inside the mosquito netting, and I felt like a girl in a fairy tale. “Tell me about Nat Turner,” I said.
“Did Mother Whitehead get his master to lend him out yet?” she asked.
“She wrote him another letter,” I told her. “But I don’t know whether we’ll be getting him. Violet, do you know where Owen is?”
She giggled. “Well, he isn’t here, so stop looking around. But I do know where he is, yes. He’s with Nat Turner.”
I’d known, as a matter of course, that she was a follower of Nat Turner. All negroes who considered themselves of any eminence around the Southampton area of Virginia were. But I’d never asked her about it. I’d never intruded on her privacy.
The sound of a night bird drifted in the open window. A single tallow candle gave a flickering light. “Why is he with Nat Turner?” I asked. “And where are they?”
“Nat heard he’d run off and went to Nelson’s Pond, where he’d been told he was hiding. It fits right in with Turner’s plans. He’s going to do a baptism there tomorrow.”
The pond was at the abandoned Nelson plantation. The property must have been beautiful when once lived in, with that spacious pond in front. Now it seemed haunted. The owners had fled when people were fleeing these parts and going south because the soil could no longer support their tobacco growing.
“Have you ever seen him do a baptism before?”
“A few times.”
“What’s it like?”
“Have you ever seen your brother do one?”
“Yes, but it can’t be like that, because Turner has no church.”
“Tomorrow, he’s baptizing old Ezra Bentley. Well,” she elaborated, “he takes the person right into the water, then dunks them under and holds them there for a minute while he says the words.”
“Ohhh,” I breathed, “how dramatic.”
“Yes.” She nodded with self-importance. Then she leaned close and whispered in my ear. “Ezra was chased out of your brother’s church for being a drunk and a gambler. He wanted baptism, but your brother said no.”
I nodded solemnly.
“I always thought people who were sinners were supposed to go to church,” she reasoned. “And not be thrown out. But it seems that Richard wants only the ones who aren’t sinners.”
I nodded, agreeing.
“There’s more.” She smiled triumphantly. “Owen’s going to be at the baptism. Yes”—she nodded her head vigorously—“he is. He wants to come home, you see. But he’s afeared of what Richard will do to him. So he’s gone to Nat Turner and hopes Nat will speak with Richard as one minister to another and talk Richard into not whipping him for running away.”
“Ohhh,” I breathed.
“So if you want to come, we go tomorrow.”
“Are we going to bring Owen some food?” I asked.
“Yes. I’ve got it all arranged with Connie in the kitchen. She’s going to make some egg salad sandwiches and wrap them in cabbage leaves. For Owen and Nat.”
I felt envious that she could call Nat Turner by his first name. But she seemed perfectly at ease with it.
“We’d better get to sleep now,” she told me, “or we’ll both get in trouble before we even do anything.”
I was just about bursting to tell someone I was going to one of Nat Turner’s baptisms. Of course, to me, Nat Turner was part real and part fancy. Isn’t that the way he was to everyone in Southampton County? I’d heard rumors and I’d heard fact. He was a nigra minister who’d had visions. He was a slave who’d invented a privy flusher, flushed by water. He was a preacher who held Bible class for his own kind, and he could repair an oak table better than a trained furniture maker.
You could die to meet him and at the same time you were frightened beyond belief at meeting him. He was a slave, sold and resold, hired out at premium prices. Mother Whitehead wanted him but couldn’t get him. Oh, I wanted to tell someone I was going to see him do a baptism. So I wrote inside my head:
Dear Uncle Andrew: Tomorrow is Sunday and I am going with Violet to watch Nat Turner do a baptism. I am so excited. You know who Violet is. And I’ve written to you before about Nat Turner. He is a real renegade in these parts, like your Robin Hood. Don’t worry for me. Violet and I are going to bring Owen home! I hope all is well with you.
Your loving niece, Harriet Whitehead