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

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 Hathcock pointed toward the window. “Years from now, people who pass 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.
    â€œWhat 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 uslike 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 Hathcock’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 Hathcock’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 reassurance. 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 ofthem 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, Riddick, singing. God sent him back for him.

Harriet

Chapter 6
    Brooklyn, New York
    1856
    T o 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 Thoreau. 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