1821
As he sailed back down the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, Nat Turner committed to memory the ebb and flow of the canal’s curative brown waters. He stared at the trees so he would not forget them and the way the treetops seemed to join hands above the canal. He would remember the exotic birds he saw in the swamp—birds of orange and blue, large birds of prey with pink and purple among their feathers. Together, his recollections would be his memorial painting of the Great Dismal Swamp, of Hebron, his refuge. He was leaving the swamp. He was leaving Virginia. He was setting sail.
He would work aboard the ship and that vessel would carry him to Baltimore and then on to Philadelphia, where he would search for Bishop Richard Allen. He would work, save money, and buy his mother’s freedom and passage, and then the two of them would sail away, back to Ethiopia.
Nat Turner looked toward the canal shore, where he saw several white men. He looked away from them and back at the brown water. In three days’ time he would be free of the slavers. In three days’ time his new life would begin. In three days’ time he would no longer have to worry about hiding out or being discovered. In three days’ time he would sail away.
He looked back at the white men onshore. Two of them held the arms of a naked black woman. Her stomach was swollen with child. In awkward jerks she pulled against the hands that held her, trying to free herself. The two men forced her to the ground.
He knew what it meant, what they were going to do. But in three days’ time he would be free. In three days’ time he would have what he had dreamed of all his life; he would have what his mother had prayed for him. He could not save the world.
Nat Turner continued to pole the flatboat down the canal. It skimmed, as though it were floating above the water. His jaw muscles tightened. This was his Hebron, his refuge. He had not seen anyone beaten since leaving Southampton County. He had pretended to himself that what happened there happened nowhere else. He had convinced himself that things were better here. It only happened in Cross Keys. Cruelty did not exist in the swamp or beyond.
The woman screamed now for help. Nat Turner looked back over his shoulder at the woman and her tormentors, his pole still pushing him downstream, away from them. The men tied the woman’s ankles and wrists to stakes in the ground. Then, laughing, their voices drifting over the water, out in the open, they began to beat her. Her screams followed their laughter, echoing across the canal.
Long after he turned his head, long after Nat Turner had passed the spot where the men beat her, he still heard the woman’s shrieks.