Guilt, for which Gray presses, is Nat’s to admit to himself. These events, brutal and tender, display Nat’s strong and unique perspective on the world around him, which is always set apart from others of any race. He tracks the rise of his literacy, his religious vocation, his sexuality, and his pride. He revisits the families, the plantations, and the fellow enslaved people with whom he lived. Jumping back and forth across years, spaces, and even owners, Nat follows his mind in pursuit of some way to understand whether or not his actions were justifiable. Contrary to Gray’s assertation, which seeks order and reason for Nat’s story that will allow white people to continue to believe that “slavery’s going to last a thousand years” (26), Nat’s confession is unstable. Then Nat begins to retell his own story through small windows into his memory. Thomas Gray, a supposedly neutral lawyer covering Nat’s case, retells and elaborates upon Nat’s confession in the courtroom. From the first pages of the novel, Nat’s strong internal imagination and analysis emerges his visions and his preaching, which he reveals as he tells the story of his life, are the outer fruits of those internal habits. As he watches flies, “God’s supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally” (27) in his cell and in the courthouse, Nat philosophizes about the differences between his own race and those base animals. The overarching sense of doubt and fear, magnified from his sense of being “removed from God” (12) in these last days of his life, pervades those metaphors. Nat, for whom literacy has always been important, sees and creates metaphors in the world around him.
They also demonstrate his vivid, imaginative mind and his natural sense for descriptive language. These scenes establish Nat’s deep connection to nature, but they also show his deep connection to other black people, however limited by walls and differences. He also hears noises, including a woman’s voice singing one dark night after his trial, “grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid” (113). In his prison cell, Nat Turner witnesses the world moving outside: horses coming and going, a few black people going about daily tasks.
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