Nat Turner

Chapter 5.

Cross Keys Area, outside Jerusalem, Virginia Christmas 1830 Inside the stove warmed the small cabin that was packed with twenty to thirty people-survival made all of them heroes.

Nat Turner made his way around the room, greeting them: Sam, Hark, and the freemen. He leaned to kiss his mother on the cheek. In the corner the children played and he walked to join them. On Sundays, after church, he taught them to read. But before he could begin a lesson this day, his wife, Cherry, came to him.

"It is Christmas, husband, let them play." She led him to a chair. He looked down at his feet. They felt nothing now, but soon he knew he would feel spiky pain as they thawed.

Nat Turner looked around the small, crowded living s.p.a.ce at the people gathered there. It had been a hard winter-hard for slave owners, brutal for slaves-no longer people but black-draped skeletons. Few of the captors had enough to eat and were hard-pressed to find heart to share the little that kept them alive with captives.

The warm air in the cabin carried the bittersweet smell of the hardworking people and mixed it with aromas from the kitchen.

G.o.d had sent him back for them.

Eyes shifted from the stove to conversations and back again. Nat Turner smelled the warm fragrance of baking sweet potatoes from the hosts' garden. A brine of vinegar and salt water steamed from a kettle on the iron stove. As people entered the cabin, shivering from the cold, they made their way to Thomas Hathc.o.c.k's wife, freewoman and hostess, stationed near the pots. One would come with a few precious potatoes, a single squash, or a cup of dried beans. All of it swirled into the kettle. Each one brought a metal cup or pan, and when the food was finished they would share.

Mrs. Hathc.o.c.k had a reputation. Though she was known for her preserves, she could make anything delicious. She did wonders with everything she touched.

Next to the kettle was a large pot of mixed greens-mustard and collards that her husband had rescued from the weather-already tender and kept warming. One of the women brought a small but prized piece of salt pork. Mrs. Hathc.o.c.k added a tiny, precious portion to the greens to season them. She added lard and a bit of the salt pork to a cast-iron skillet and began to steam-fry a head of cabbage and bits more of it to some of the other dishes to season them.

Daniel came through the door with his mother, both of them Peter Edwards's slaves. It was rare, but their master kept them together as mother and son. In her hands was a bundle tied like treasure in a rag. She beamed.

"My master butchered last week and gave me these." Two pig ears, a snout, a tail, and four hooves, frozen from the cold. "There's chitlins, too-I cleaned them real good." She looked around at the people. "You don't have to worry."

The people's eyes followed the porcine jewels; their mouths salivated. Smiling, Mrs. Hathc.o.c.k dropped them into the steaming pot of vinegary water.

Daniel helped his mother to a chair. She smiled. "Master Edwards let me have them instead of feeding them to the dogs." It was a Christmas treat; for most of them it was the only meat they would taste all year. Nat Turner heard the empty stomachs grumbling. He saw antic.i.p.ation in their eyes and smiles.

Another woman came and set a lidded jar on the table. "This is something, right here!" From the jar she pulled three pig feet and one ear. She had boiled them and pickled them in brine. Nat Turner smiled back at her. He knew what a sacrifice she had made. She had gone to bed hungry many nights, knowing she had the pork, but saved this Christmas portion to share.

She got a knife and cut the treat, pa.s.sing tiny pieces around. Children's eyes rounded and glowed as they sucked on the bones-gnawing on the bones, sucking on the marrow.

Smiling and gracious, his mother gave her portion away to Mother Easter, the old woman who sat beside her. Though his mother had been away from Africa more than thirty years, like a good Ethiopian Christian, she still did not eat pork. Cherry gave hers to their son, and Nat Turner gave his to her.

People huddled together, laughing and talking, gathered from the scattered farms they lived on. Communion was the gift they shared. There was no wine or unleavened bread for them. There were no hats, cloaks, mittens, or presents. There was nothing for them except the hardscrabble meal they had sc.r.a.ped together. Captivity had taken its toll-so many without coats and shelter froze to death during the night. So each one celebrated that he had awakened that morning, clothed and in his right mind. Survival was the gift they shared. All of them heroes.

This was not like the Christmases Nat Turner had seen and sometimes shared at his father's house.

At his father's house there had been evergreens. Nat Turner remembered the smell of pine. There was holly with red berries to decorate the room. There was glazed ham and a holiday goose then. The spicy, sugary aroma of apple preserves and brandied peaches filled the room. There was hominy baked with cheese. He could not eat with the others in his father's house, but his father would bring a plate to him and to his mother with bits of succulent things to taste.

He recalled holding in his hands candy and a book-sometimes a coat new to him, a hand-me-down-given as presents.

He remembered inside his father's church, where he and the other black people were allowed to sit on the back pew when his father was alive. Inside, at Christmas, the church was filled with holly and mistletoe. He recalled the scents of dried lavender, rosemary, and rose petals.

The people gathered in this cabin had none of what Nat Turner remembered. G.o.d had sent him back from the wilderness for them.

Twenty-eight people crowded into the small cabin. The Artis brothers, part Cheroenhaka Nottoway Indian, sat talking to Hark, Sam, Dred, and some of the other men. "They have taken our land, saying we are not Indians because our mothers wed black men. Now we must pay rent to white men for our own land." Frown lines were worn into his cheeks. "Indians that marry white men keep their land," Exum Artis said.

"For now," his brother, Arnold, added. "But they want us to leave. They want all the freemen to leave because we remember. We remember that they were poor and they once worked as slaves-indentured men. They were treated like us. There were no lies that G.o.d made them special." All the freemen-black and Nottoway-and even white Berry Newsom nodded.

"They want us to leave, but we are just farmers. Where would we go?"

"We remember, so they want us gone. Our forefathers rode together, poor men-white, black, and red-beside each other against oppression in Bacon's Rebellion. We were all G.o.d's men then, before the powerful and wealthy found a way to separate and trick us. We all stood as men on the same even ground then. We remember, so they want us gone." The recollections smoldered in Thomas Hathc.o.c.k's eyes.

"Good and bad, free and slave, was not based on color. A man of color could be a man of wealth and property," Exum Artis agreed.

"All that changed after Bacon's Rebellion. Suddenly the white man-good or bad-was given a halo and wings," Arnold said.

"Freemen? This is not freedom! They tell us where we can live and what we can grow. Nathaniel Francis rents to us, rent we cannot afford, all the while scheming to take what little we still have, or to take us as slaves for debts we owe. At the end of the season, they take most of our crops and tell us we still owe them more."

"We have had to sell land for medicine, for seed, and soon all we have will be gone." Thomas Hathc.o.c.k shook his head.

"The doctors won't touch us. They look at us. Afraid the color will rub off."

"But we remember."

Nat Turner had heard the stories before. He carried the stories, breathed the stories.

"We know they were not kings and princes. We know they were just men, like us. We know, we were here, and we saw them. They struggled to live on the land, like us. We were here then when there were black and white and Nottoway landowners. There was no word from G.o.d, from the Great Father, that only white men were men. We know they are flesh like we are. We were here when it all began."

Nat Turner and the others knew that there was a plan afoot, a law, to send the freemen to other places, to wipe away the memory. The white men didn't want to remember themselves as slaves or as prisoners who came to America in chains. They didn't want to remember themselves as poor people with few choices. They didn't want to remember that, when they were starving and had nothing, they gave themselves permission to steal-land and people-until they had enough. They wanted to forget and so they had bought, stolen, and taken by force, the power to forget what they'd done-the power to rewrite history.

They bought horses and people and pigs, new clothes and new names. They made themselves t.i.tles and positions. They bought carriages, hoop skirts, built houses with windows and stairs, and then went about erasing and evicting those who dared remember their past.

When Thomas Hathc.o.c.k's wife pa.s.sed by, he stopped her. "But now our lives have changed. We have seen free people forced into chains. We had the good of G.o.d's land, but it has been stolen from us.

"See my wife's hands? She scalds them making preserves to earn a little money. Do you think they will let her sell her goods at the market? Years ago we could, but now she cannot sell there to white men. We cannot sell among ourselves; no one has money to buy." His wife sighed and then returned to the stove.

Thomas gestured around the small room. "But what they will not buy, they come to the house and demand. All the power is in their hands. If they steal it from her, who can we go to? There is no court for black men. There is no sheriff for men with dark skin. No black man can charge a white man with a crime."

"They tell us where to live, on land that belonged to us long before those we remember walked this earth. Almost every day there is a threat that someone will have us shipped out of this state away from the land that holds our fathers' bones. Shipped overseas to some land we've never heard of." Arnold Artis lowered his voice. "And they say we are free, but they treat our wives as their property. They take them when they want to, and there is nothing we can do... not if we want to live. How can this be called freedom?"

Nat Turner knew their shame. He lived their shame. It was his. The shame knotted his stomach, his fists, and tightened his chest.

Thomas Hathc.o.c.k pointed toward the window. "Years from now, people who pa.s.s will forget who built the houses these white men live in and who cleared this land. Maybe some of us will still have families left alive to carry our names. But who will remember how hard we worked? 'Why didn't your parents make something of themselves?' others will say to them.

"What will our children or their children have to show for all our labor? They will be left poor."

He leaned forward in his chair. "How much more are we expected to stomach?"

Dred pounded one fist into the other hand. "They treat us like animals!" His voice thundered in the small cabin. The women turned to look.

Arnold Artis's voice and body trembled with frustration. "It has been too long, decades, and it is all these little ones know." A hush came over the children. They stared, wide-eyed. One small boy began to cry.

Thomas Hathc.o.c.k's voice raised, "I cannot stand it much longer!"

Nat Turner, listening to the men, felt for the gunpowder in his pocket. It would not be long. He looked at the people around him. It could not be long.

Thomas Hathc.o.c.k's wife, stirring in the pot before her, called to interrupt her husband, a practiced calm in her voice. "What you say is true, Thomas. It will still be true when this day is past. But let us celebrate and enjoy this day with our friends."

Trembling, Thomas looked at his wife, staring deeply into her eyes until the trembling ceased. He exhaled. "You are right." He smiled at her and nodded. He clapped his hands. "Come, let the children sing."

The children looked at their mothers, waiting for nods of rea.s.surance. Then two smaller children giggled tentatively, and then they began to sing.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King; Let every heart prepare Him room.

Other children joined in.

And Heaven and nature sing, And Heaven and nature sing, And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Nat Turner looked around the room at the people he loved. This Christmas Day the room was full of the living. What each of them had was not enough, but together it was a feast. He smiled, listening to his own son sing with the others. It seemed not long ago that he was as small.

Nat Turner looked at his son, Ridd.i.c.k, singing. G.o.d sent him back for him.

Harriet

Chapter 6.

Brooklyn, New York 1856.

To most of America, her brother Henry was the most famous preacher in the States, perhaps the Western world, but he was still Harriet's baby brother. Though she had heard him preach many times, she was no less amazed each time to hear him and to see him enthrall the congregation before him-hundreds of people, thousands, crowded into the sanctuary. It was the same across the country and overseas. He was paid handsomely to speak. Men, as well as women, wept when he preached, though in seconds his humor and antics had them laughing again.

When Harriet visited Plymouth Church, she sometimes sat on the back pew hoping to not be noticed. But today she sat in the front row so she would have a clear view of the notables who visited her brother's church. The poet Walt Whitman visited, as did the author and abolitionist Henry David Th.o.r.eau. Newspapermen attended, copying every word of Henry's sermons and publishing them in their papers. Politicians made their way to Plymouth, like the young Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who had ambitions to be senator. John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, William Wells Brown, and Henry Bibb had all been welcomed in the pews and sometimes in the pulpit at her brother's Brooklyn church.

Outside was Orange Street and beyond that, New York. Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, with Brooklyn's population swelling each day since the opening of the Fulton Ferry.

Each time she visited there were fewer trees-there was no room for them or for undeveloped plots. Every inch was needed for more dwellings, more businesses for the people who crowded into the city. Immigrants and refugees, English, Dutch, Chinese, Germans, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Printers, nannies, shopkeepers, seamstresses, clerks, poets, painters, singers, bakers, bankers, factory workers, professors, and chimney sweeps. Hundreds of thousands of them huddled in town houses and tenements, finding hope in the crush and anonymity. Wedged together in flats and apartments, the rich and poor, foreign and domestic. Bustling down avenues to department stores, public schools, police stations, to galleries, to synagogues, churches, town halls, storefronts, and cathedrals wearing forced shields of privacy.

There were tensions between the groups jostling for elbow room. But they needed one another. Mind-your-own-business people who learned the necessity of interdependence. The restaurateur, with no room to grow his own, needed the peddler for produce and needed the shopgirl to buy.

Carriages, trains, boats, and millions of footsteps. Novelists, newspapermen, butlers, stevedores, waiters, Central Park, and the Erie Ca.n.a.l. Home to the Sons of Liberty, the Battle of Long Island, the place of President Washington's inauguration, the first Congress, the first Supreme Court, Fort Hamilton, and Federal Hall. Home to the hopeful and the suffering.

Irish Catholics swelled the populous, swept across the sea by famine, hunger, joblessness, hopelessness, lynchings, floggings-and laws that forbade their education, voting, possession of arms, and property ownership. Refugee slaves, most swept North by starvation, joblessness-and laws that forbade their education, voting, possession of arms, and property ownership-and the hope of freedom, willing to leave whatever relations they had. Both risked all that was familiar. But disguised by hue and tongue, they did not recognize their brotherhood.

Most runaway slaves, fleeing the South, hitched a ride on the Underground. But some of the Negroes were former New York slaves. Until 1827, New York City had almost as many slaves as Charleston, South Carolina. The city was home to slave ships and investors in slaving-lending money for land, looms, seed, and in Southern cotton. Many of the Northern slaves were purchased in Newport, Rhode Island. Beautiful, beautiful Newport with its Atlantic beaches, lobsters, sailboats, and slaves in chains sold on the wharfs. And beyond Newport were the islands of Cape Verde and islands like Haiti, where captured Africans were broken and transformed into slaves. Beautiful Newport, where schoolmarms and shopkeepers invested their pennies in the trade, hoping to reap shiny dimes.

There were no plantations in New York; the skilled slaves built roads, docks, churches, and Wall Street's wall. After 1827, the New York slaves were freed, but there were still scars and resentful former owners.

Into the slave city, into the darkness, drawn to the void, were the abolitionists, abolitionists more radical than their New England brothers and sisters. New York was home to the Radical Abolitionists Convention, abolitionists who argued that the United States Const.i.tution forbade slavery... nor shall any state deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process.

Gotham was home to the Tappan brothers and the Grimke sisters, to William Wells Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton-abolitionists who argued that slavery was wrong legally and morally. Radical abolitionists argued that slavery was a demon that plagued America, who argued that all good men and women were legally and morally bound to help free the slaves. Slavery was as unlawful as murder, arson, or theft. Some even argued that slaves and their defenders had a duty to take up arms.

Many were not pleased with the abolitionists' growing presence in New York State-there had been antiblack and antiabolitionist attacks that continued to worsen.

Inside Plymouth Church, Harriet leaned forward, and across the room she saw Frederick Dougla.s.s's prematurely graying mane nodding as Henry spoke.

"Without love our faith is meaningless; it has no power. Without love our greatest philanthropy is less than a mere token."

Henry's voice shook the rafters in Plymouth Church-a sanctuary built more like an auditorium than a church-caused the air to vibrate, swelled, and then dropped to a whisper. Words came alive in Henry, or, better still, as Walt Whitman wrote, Henry's words were substantial and delicious. When Henry spoke he became the words, and though he was human and given to human weaknesses, he tried to live the words he spoke. "Without love, intelligence and knowledge have no value."

He not only preached freedom for the captives, he also used his church as a station on the Underground Railroad. He raised money to buy freedom for captive slaves. Henry purchased rifles-rifles that bore the nickname "Beecher's Bibles." At Henry's direction, Sharps rifles were shipped to Kansas along with Bibles to help antislavery men defend themselves against the strangling westward aggression of slavery, slavery discontent to remain within Kentucky's borders.

While some churches struggled to gain and hold any members, most that survived brimmed with women. But Plymouth overflowed with men. Henry offered messages of love to those who had been taught that their very being displeased G.o.d, just as her family had taught Henry and her. They were tainted by original sin and despised by G.o.d.

But Henry preached love, and they flocked to him like parched men to fresh water. His voice thundered, swept through the room, and then eased to a whisper. "Without love-not only for the greatest, but also for the least among us-all that we do is pointless."

From the front of Plymouth, Henry whispered to the congregation, "The only bondage in G.o.d's creation that is tolerable and desirable is the bondage of love."

Again, Frederick Dougla.s.s nodded his head.

Chapter 7.

Mr. Dougla.s.s's hair was more silver than when she last saw him. Harriet lifted a hand to her own hair. Hers was changing, too.