The Confessions of Nat Turner

Nat begins Part 3 by explaining that, at least through his eyes, “real hatred” of white people “is not common to all Negroes” (251). Rather, “without knowing the white man at close hand,” working in a field “knowing no white man other than that overseer,” a black man “can only pretend hatred” (251). Finding men “in whom hatred was already ablaze” (252) and cultivating it in others becomes Nat’s primary mission leading up to the rebellion.

This passionate hatred rises in Nat at Moore’s farm. He describes a specific instance in which he feels that hatred. Left alone while Moore shops, Nat encounters Thomas Ridley’s fiancée, a beautiful white woman newly arrived from the North. She notices Arnold, a freed man who was an “insoluble difficulty” (254). Nat looks down on Arnold, who he calls “more insignificant and wretched than he had ever been in slavery” (255). Ridley’s fiancée asks Arnold directions to the courthouse.

Arnold speaks in impenetrable “blue-gum country-nigger talk” (256). The woman cannot understand Arnold’s offer to take her there, or his grasping at her arm, and she is overtaken by “chagrin, sorrow” (256), or maybe horror or pity. Suddenly, the woman starts to sob, “as if something long pent up within her had been loosed” (257).