Cross Keys Area, outside Jerusalem, Virginia
Christmas 1830
Nat Turner’s feet were thawing and had begun to ache. He looked down at them, at the fissures—the bleeding cracks in his flesh, wide as a small child’s finger. He looked around the room at all the suffering feet. Shoes, even old worn ones, would have been a gift of love.
The children had moved on to another Christmas song.
Jesus, Jesus!
Oh, what a wonderful child!
Jesus, Jesus!
So holy, meek, and mild!
New life, new hope to all He brings.
God had sent him back for them.
Listen to the angels sing,
Glory! Glory! Glory!
To the newborn King!
The aroma from the iron kettle, the sweetness of the corn bread, and the salty, vinegary smell of the pigs’ feet filled the room.
Dred, one of Nathaniel Francis’s slaves, spoke now. “More could be with us, but they are drunk, drinking the whiskey given to them to keep them drunk during the holidays. Christmas whiskey nothing but wet chains.”
Nat Turner answered, “Maybe they drink to save their lives.”
“Funny words from someone whose lips have never touched liquor.” Nat’s friend Hark laughed.
“These are hard times with no good choices. I don’t think drinking is best, but perhaps they do what they have to not to explode—to dull the pain, to stay alive.”
Whiskey for Christmas was what the white people gave them. A turkey and a full stomach would have been a better Christmas gift—a book to read, or even a coat to wear.
Three of the boys went outside for more wood to keep the fire burning. Joshing, coatless, and shoeless, they piled out the door.
Nat Turner, looking through a crack in the boards that covered the window opening, was reminded of himself and Hark. He remembered when the two of them were as young as the boys outside, boys stealing a moment’s rest on Cabin Pond. He remembered. Hark always smiled, but he was truly the practical one, speaking back then about what he knew and what he had seen.
It was the debate they had been engaged in for years.
We are slaves and we are always gonna be slaves. That’s how it has always been and that’s how it is always gonna be.
But that’s not how it always was. We were kings on this earth. There are places where we are still kings.
There you go again, Nat Turner, talking crazy about Africa. Why can’t you leave it alone?
We are more than this. More than this! We are smart. Brave. Why can’t we be colonel? Why always the slave?
Let them be colonel. Let them be president if that will make them happy. I don’t want colonel. Colonel will get me killed.
Do you think God put us here just to be nothing? To tote, lift, and hold up walls?
God sees how things are down here. I don’t see Him coming down here to stop it. He is a white God. He puts white people first. His people, white people, win.
He is our God, too. We are smart as John Clarke, smarter than Salathiel and Whitehead.
Don’t let somebody hear you say that. Your mama will be holding a dead son.
Why should I lie? You see them. Why shouldn’t we be more? Why shouldn’t we dream?
Dream? What I’m trying to do is survive.
I don’t believe God put us here just to do nothing, be nothing. Long ago, there were great kings of Ethiopia with names like Menelik, and a great king of Assyria named Xerxes, and they were black like us and—
And that was long ago, if it ever was. I never saw any of it. What I can see with my eyes is that somebody owns me and if I don’t want to get beat, don’t want to hang, I better not tell him he’s wrong.
He is wrong!
Nat, one of these days you are going to get you and me both killed.
Just think about it… living in a big house, a mansion, commanding armies, and leading the nation!
Hark laughed. Giving speeches with flags waving over your head!
Why shouldn’t we? Why shouldn’t we dream?
I’m telling you, boy. Nat Turner, you gone get us killed.
The children were still singing, the women stirring in the pots. Nat Turner looked out the window again at the boys. They were at a dangerous age; physical signs of adulthood were about to betray them: It was dangerous for a black boy to show that he was a man.
They could be cute little black boy babies, but even at five things changed and mothers were already worried for their black sons, worried that they would not live. At eleven, twelve, thirteen even more danger. There was a change in the way people treated them; threatened by their maturity.
Cold air blew through the crack in the window board, and he looked out again at the boys tussling in the snow. They were growing into the bodies of men. They would need men’s minds if they were to survive.
At twelve or thirteen, white boys began to grow the beginnings of what would be whiskers, then titles, deeds, stars on their shoulders, and dreams that dangled from their chests. White boys grew to be men while black boys grew to be stooped, gray-haired boys fighting to stay alive.
Most of the boys were no longer living with their mothers. Those mothers who still had their sons loved them, but wore worry on their faces. It was the look he had seen on his own mother’s face. They worried if they could hold them, if they could guide them, if they could help the seed inside them to survive. Mothers with unlined faces and prematurely gray hair worried, mothers who were afraid for their sons to dream, feared their sons would not survive. One grabbed her son by the ear. “Little nigger, I will skin you alive.” Thirsty, with no other liquids offered to her, she had drunk in violent words. They were the only words she knew, so she poured them out on her son to protect him, to show him he was loved.
Nat Turner noticed the boy Davy, the one Nathaniel Francis called Two Feet, standing off from the other boys, watching as he leaned on his stick.
Watching them, Nat Turner remembered that it was not long ago that he was the same.
THOMAS GRAY, A boy with peach fuzz around his lips and in his armpits, lay back in the grass. “My father is going to apprentice me to a lawyer so I can be an attorney like him or maybe a judge like my grandfather.” He pulled a dandelion and blew it. “I think sometimes I would rather be a writer instead.”
The boys laughed, most of them twelve years old or so. They were from scattered farms but sometimes got together to play, as they’d done since they were smaller children.
John Clarke Turner shook his head at Thomas Gray’s words. “A writer?”
Richard Whitehead ran his hands over his hair to smooth his cowlick into place. “I’m going to be a preacher.”
Young Salathiel chewed a blade of grass. He laughed. “Ha! You? A preacher?”
“I am going to be a farmer, too. Maybe I’ll try my hand at cotton. But my mother, Caty, says that I would make a fine preacher.”
Salathiel laughed again. “You have what it takes—full of gas and hot air.” Whitehead punched him in the shoulder. Salathiel shook it off. “I’m going to be a landowner. The land as far as I can see is going to be mine.” He turned to John Clarke Turner. “What about you?”
“A tobacco planter or cotton. I’ll own a great plantation. I will be a wealthy man, smoke cigars, and have a beautiful wife and lots of children.”
Salathiel laughed. “And make lots of slaves.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows. “Make lots of money.” The boys laughed, punching one another.
They looked at Benjamin Phipps. He shrugged. There was silence and then Thomas Gray, looking at the other free boys, spoke up. “Maybe our children will marry one another.”
“Maybe.” John Clarke Turner laughed.
Nat Turner and Hark stood off to the side, listening. The other boys weren’t looking at them; the two of them weren’t included in the conversation. He spoke up anyway. “I have been thinking that I would like to be a general, like Washington, and Hark could be my colonel.”
Hark, who was a young slave on the Moore farm, struck a jester’s pose. “That’s me! Colonel!” The other boys laughed. Hark’s eyes pleaded with Nat to stop.
“My mother wants me to be a preacher. She says God has smiled on me and that I am a prophet.” Nat Turner looked at Salathiel and Richard Whitehead. “But maybe I’ll also be a farmer or a plantation owner with a farm next to yours.”
It was a joke to them that he, a slave, might have dreams. The free boys laughed again.
“One day I will be a freeman, like the great Bishop Allen from Philadelphia. I will pay the price for my mother’s freedom. My mother will dress in fine clothes, wear a warm coat, and sit on the pew next to yours.”
Salathiel stood, strode over to Nat Turner, and hit him in the mouth. “You will take care how you speak about my mother.”
Nat Turner tasted salty blood on his lips. He would not let them kick him aside. He would not let them make him less.
THROUGH THE CABIN window, Nat Turner watched the boys tramping back inside from the snow. Davy trailed behind them.
“Kick the snow off your feet,” one of the women warned them. “Act like you got good sense. Act like you got home training or you’ah be sorry.” Better her threats than a hangman’s noose; angry words spoken out of love.
Nat Turner looked at the mothers and the sons, then across the room at his own mother. This would be his last Christmas. The God Who Provides for All had told him to watch for a sign in the heavens.
Hathcock and the Artis brothers had resumed talking. “We are just farmers. We only want peace. They force our hands.”
The dreams that the captors had for the captive farmers were not enough. What they wanted for him was not enough. What they dreamed for the boys and girls was not enough—there were no dreams.
God sent him back to ransom their dreams.
Cherry, his wife, rubbed a warm hand on the side of his face and he turned to her. He kissed her hand. “Dinner soon.” He had been focused on the boys and the men and had not heard her slip up behind him. In her eyes he saw she loved him. In her eyes he saw she worried. It was always worry mixed with love—strawberries and rhubarb, bitter turnips mixed with sweet greens—between black men and women.
She knelt before him and rubbed her warm hands gently over his feet. Nat Turner looked at the people sitting around him. He smelled the Christmas dinner cooking.
“Don’t worry,” she said. Brown eyes framed with black eyelashes, the love between them was unfair to her. Without him, there was less danger for her. He should let her go. Then Cherry would smile and he melted to her. “No worries now, Nathan.” She smiled. “At least for today.” When she was sure no one was watching, she leaned over and shyly kissed his palm.
He had never intended to marry.