The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial by Sharon Ewell Foster Read Free Book Online

go?”
    â€œWe 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 God’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 Hathcock’s eyes.
    â€œGood 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.
    â€œAll that changed after Bacon’s Rebellion. Suddenly the white man—good or bad—was given a halo and wings,” Arnold said.
    â€œFreemen? 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.”
    â€œWe have had to sell land for medicine, for seed, and soon all we have will be gone.” Thomas Hathcock shook his head.
    â€œThe doctors won’t touch us. They look at us. Afraid the color will rub off.”
    â€œBut we remember.”
    Nat Turner had heard the stories before. He carried the stories, breathed the stories.
    â€œWe 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 God, 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 titles 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 Hathcock’s wife passed by, he stopped her. “But now our lives have changed. We have seen free people forced into chains. We had the good of God’s land, but it has been stolen from us.
    â€œSee 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.”
    â€œThey 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