The Confessions of Nat Turner

“Beyond my maddest imaginings I had never known it possible to feel so removed from God—a separation which had nothing to do with faith or desire, for both of these I still possessed, but with a forsaken solitary apartness so beyond hope that I could not have felt more sundered from the divine spirit had I been cast alive like some wriggling insect beneath the largest rock on earth, there to live in hideous, perpetual dark.” 

Nat’s sensation of removal, or distance, from God is the reason for him searching through his memory before death. Because Nat cannot pray, he turns to his bodily experiences on earth for reflection. Notably, the inability to connect to the divine also makes him like a pitiful animal, casting him further into the dehumanized existence that he fears.

“‘Out of sixty, a couple dozen acquitted or discharged, another fifteen or so convicted but transported. Only fifteen hung—plus you and that other nigger, Hark, to be hung—seventeen hung in all. In other words, out of this whole catastrophic ruction only round one-fourth gets the rope. Dad-burned mealy-mouthed abolitionists say we don’t show justice. Well, we do. Justice! That’s how come nigger slavery’s going to last a thousand years.’”

In this moment, Thomas Gray works to build up Nat’s guilt. Nat fears the inefficacy of his actions; Gray heightens that fear by drilling him with the small scale of his movement. He also conflates kindness, of letting off some victims without hanging, with justice, although Nat never goes along with Gray’s argument that any black person has experienced justice before the judicial system.

“In many ways, I thought, a fly must be one of the most fortunate of God’s creatures. Brainless born, brainlessly seeking its sustenance from anything wet and warm, it found its brainless mate, reproduced, and died brainless, unacquainted with misery or grief. But then I asked myself: How could I be sure? Who could say that flies were not instead God’s supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching, forced by instinct to dine off sweat and slime and offal, their very brainlessness an everlasting torment?” 

As Nat watches the flies gather, he wonders if lack of education or brain development is the same thing as eternal suffering. This question carries over directly to Nat’s own black community, which he also sees as fly-like. He wonders if their position is natural and intended or if it is the product of some action, some evil, that sets them apart into suffering.