Up Jumps the Devil (22 page)

The Devil thought Nat Turner was the man to do the pushing. And they would listen to him, blacks and whites alike,
because
he had always talked peace.

THE NEXT DAY
, mending a pair of iron shears in the garden shed, the preacher thought about his awful dreams, and about the peaceful wind inside him. He was confused and frustrated, and asked God for help.

He closed his eyes until he felt the Jesus-wind rise inside him, and said, “God, if You want me to go and work vengeance, You will have to give me a sign. In Your own good time, Lord, give me a sign.”

But the Devil was listening in from behind the sugaring shed, and damned if the sun didn't turn lime green right then and there.

ON SUNDAYS
, slaves and free black people from miles around came to the woods near the farm where Nat lived, to hear him preach, and eat supper with him.

Nat would read the Bible to them, and say wise and peaceful things. He would say how they must never hate, no matter how they were tested. Because hate destroyed a man. Hate and destruction were indivisible.

He told them common wisdom, too. He told the men that when they sparked a woman, they should wrap their pecker in a rhubarb leaf until they were sure it was love they sparked, not just an animal passion.

He told the women they must keep their hair tied up and their clothing modest, not to tempt the childish white masters.

He told the children among them that they must guard their hearts so that hate would not take root.

The Sunday after the sun turned green, he read all the things he always read and taught the wisdom he always taught, but when it came time to tell them about peace, his mouth slammed closed and the words wouldn't come. For the first time he went straight home and didn't stay for the supper.

THERE WERE MORE SIGNS
, one atop another, until one day in the woods, a bird called out, “Kill the white people!” as clear as could be, and Nat couldn't take it anymore.

He packed up a napkin with bread and cheese and dried meat, and sneaked away after the North Star.

But it wasn't that easy.

The first night, he saw a rabbit with two heads. The next night he crossed a river, and when he was halfway across, the river stopped flowing and then went to flowing the opposite way. (This was like a reprimand from God to him, but also a sign he was near the sea.)

It was like God was chasing him. The signs were clear.

He thought of Jonah, in the Bible, and how he ran from God and what God wanted him to do.

So, on the third morning, when he woke up and saw the angel with the devil sign sitting over him, saying, “Where do you think you're going, Nat Turner?” he answered, in a voice so tired, that he guessed he was going back home, and the angel said, “That's good.”

WHEN NAT RETURNED
, his master made him work field labor for a week, plus sleep outside chained to the water pump.

But Nat was too smart, in the master's estimation, to be used that way for long. So when the week was over, he was given a barn to build. It was the kind of thing that lifted Nat's mind and soul! Something to draw and imagine and make whole from the ground up, with God's help. He prayed a wind prayer, for Jesus, and a wood prayer, too, because the barn would be made of wood.

HIS WORK WOULD
have been happier if the angel hadn't sat around bothering him every second.

“You have to
take
freedom,” said the angel. “You have to—”

“Leave me alone, Devil,” said the preacher, shaving boards in the woodshop. “I got work to do.”

“How'd you know I was the Devil?”

“Sign on your forehead. It puzzled me, till I thought how there's one angel who
would
have a sign like that.”

“Devil. Angel. There's not really a difference, you know.”

“I suppose you're going to tell me war and peace are two parts of the same thing, too.”

“You choose Peace,” said the Devil.

“I do,” answered Nat, still shaving boards.

“You, a slave?”

Nat lowered his head, squinting one eye to see where the wood was smooth.

“I am a man, sir. Slavery is a circumstance I find myself in. A man can be stronger than his circumstances.”

The Devil was taken aback. Was this a new idea? He had met others, across the years, who would have liked the idea very much.

“What are you thinking of, Devil?” asked Nat.

The Devil almost said he was thinking of Pocahontas, but instead he said, “You put me in mind of someone, Nat Turner, with how much you love Peace and how much you're not going to get it. The only people who can really choose Peace are those who can also make War. Otherwise it's not a choice. It's like saying a rabbit chooses Peace because it doesn't fight the wolf. The wolf loves it when the rabbit chooses Peace.”

“Thou Shalt Not Kill,” said Nat.

“Death is just a door,” said the Devil. “What does it matter if someone goes through the door because of you or because of old age?”

Nat flung a vise handle into the rafters.

The Devil vanished in a puff of smoke.

THE LAST SIGN
was a total eclipse of the sun.

Nat was preaching a sermon when it happened. But by then he knew the signs had the Devil's hand on them, so it wasn't the eclipse that changed his mind.

It was thinking about what he, himself, had said. About man and circumstance. And for the first time, he wasn't sure what God wanted. He just knew what he felt was right, and sometimes what was right was also wrong. Sometimes doing wrong was a burden you had to shoulder, to make room for something right.

In the woods on Sunday, the sun turned black and terrible overhead and the forest darkened around Nat and his congregation. The preacher saw how the light surrendered to the dark, as if trusting it for a time. And when the sun began to come back, he saw how the sun's trust was rewarded. How it seemed to shine brighter than before.

He felt ashamed, then, for second-guessing God and His signs, even though what needed doing was so bad that God had sent the Devil to get it done.

When he opened his mouth to preach, Nat Turner had a dark light in his eye.

He told them their mission. He said he knew what an awful thing it was, but they had to do it. To everything there was a season, even a season to kill.

They listened, and they believed him. They had always believed him.

It scared him, the way they believed, almost as if they were half asleep, or some part of them were missing. Truth be told, he, too, felt as if he were half asleep or half real.

And they agreed when to meet, and spread the word, and when they went home after sundown, they sharpened axes and made horses ready.

WHEN IT CAME TIME
to ride out and do the killing, it was mostly others who did it. Raiding parties rode here and there, hacking and burning, and Nat rode behind them, grim and stone-faced. Sometimes he found himself in the middle of things, though, and when that happened, he did his duty. He closed his heart and cut. He ignored screams. He closed whole rooms inside himself, and burned and killed until he was sore with it.

The sign on his brow was an ax, now.

He looked at himself in a dead farmer's bedroom mirror, and saw his sign fading to yellow, like a bruise.

When he stepped outside again, a new horseman had joined his raiders. Someone in a new linen shirt, never worked in yet, his skin as black as the bottom of the sea.

Nat mounted his own horse and rode quietly up to the stranger.

“Devil,” he said.

The Devil nodded. His horse snorted.

“I hear they've got the army up after us,” said Nat.

The Devil shrugged.

“That doesn't sound,” said Nat, “like an enemy who's scared. It doesn't sound like an enemy ready to set his slaves free.”

“After this,” said the Devil, in a soft, even voice, “they'll have to sleep with one eye open.”

“What they'll do,” said Nat, “I think, is get just scared enough to kill any black man that looks at them twice. Free or not, won't make any difference. That's what I think.”

“You regret this?” asked the Devil.

Nat shrugged. “Sometimes a man does right; sometimes he does what he has to. I hope good comes of it.”

Night noises. Woodsy sounds. Down the road, new screams choked off.

“Come on, then!” grunted Nat, spurring his horse onto the road. “You brought us hate, now be a man and hate with us!”

“You
need
Hate,” said the Devil. “You know what this world does to the gentle.”

Nat tossed the Devil an ax.

“All right,” said the Devil.

He walked into the farmhouse behind the barn, where a white family knelt in a circle, bawling and begging in their nightclothes. A tall, tan, bullish-looking man, a fat woman with black hair, and four boys, the youngest maybe three years old.

One of the boys had a bad-boy look to him, and he spat at the Devil.

So the Devil took him first.

It was only death.

HE FLUNG THE AX
from halfway across the yard, and Nat had to duck to keep from being twins. Flecks of blood sprayed his shirt. Nat's stony eyes faltered, then, and for a second or two, his face was a mask of horror.

“Death is a door,” said the Devil. “That's all.”

“What have we brought ourselves to?”

“Do you doubt this?” said the Devil. “Nothing wrong with doubt. Jesus doubted. But what you've done is behaved as if you
mattered
. You've lifted your hand and said you refuse to be worthless, refuse to be what someone else thinks you are. You've behaved like a man.”

Nat gave the Devil a blank look, and then he surprised both the Devil and himself by spurring his horse close, eyes blazing in the moonlight. His voice was raw, almost choking. A knife flashed in his hand, pressed against the Devil's throat.

“What do you know,” he hissed, “about being a man?”

The Devil was inexplicably calm. He returned Nat's stare with eyes that were full of yearning for this world that could be so much except that it understood so little, and it was all that he had left. They were eyes that wanted to be trusted, but they were angry eyes, and spiteful, too.

“You're a child, is all you are!”
bellowed the preacher. “What have you ever done that wasn't for yourself?”

They froze that way, glaring fire, and it was the Devil who broke away first, launching his horse with a dreadful cry, and thundering into the woods.

NOT LONG AFTER
, the Virginia militia came after them with muskets and hunting dogs. And some of the black men who had followed Nat Turner had signs on their foreheads too faint to see, and these died with the THUMP of a ball hitting flesh and bone, like someone getting hit with a gravy spoon. And they all ran, different ways.

Nat hid himself in a pile of sticks, and prayed. He felt around inside himself for the peace and the winds and the knowing that had always been there—and it was all there, but with its eyes closed like something that has done what it was made for.

Footsteps approached. “Who's there?” called a soldier.

“Me and the Devil,” called Nat.

Then he looked around, twigs in his hair, and laughed.

“No,” he called again. “It's just me.”

THE DEVIL APPEARED
while Nat waited in jail to be hanged.

He sat in the straw with the preacher and began to preach himself.

“You do not fit in your own time, Nat Turner, the way a dream doesn't fit daylight. But this had to be fought for. Even if it was only going to end like this. Because people will talk about this fight, and the reasons for this fight, and it will become a story.”

Nat grabbed the Devil's wrists with impossible speed.

“Look at me, Devil. What do you see?”

The Devil looked the preacher in the eye, and didn't see a thing.

Nat was a hollow man.

He meant to go down into the grave that way, Nat did. Silent. Hollow. Nothing happening to nothing.

But at the last minute, with the noose around him, bare feet splintering on the scaffold, someone called out to him “What color is God, you reckon, Turner?”

In the years to follow, he knew. And people would expect the story to say certain things and behave a certain way. So he scraped up what little simple joy remained inside him, and answered in a cracking voice, “I don't know any better than you do, you white turkey. Want to come with me and see?”

Chicago, 1974

“I DON'T
FEEL
RICH
,” Fish complained to the Devil.

The Devil shrugged. A fistful of high-end cocaine was skinny-dipping in his bloodstream, and an unholy peace reigned over him.