Pampered in his role as the pet of the Turner plantation, Nat tells how it was the pious Miss Nell who innocently reads to him the bloodthirsty Old Testament passages that will inspire his future plans for revolt.
[The whites in "The Confessions of Nat Turner" read the bible and quote from it, but seem to have no sense at all of what it is saying].
Nat describes his early sexual fantasies, which are of a faceless white girl with curly blond hair.
He has a more worshipful regard for the youngest daughter of the Turner family, Emmeline. But then, one night, he spies her and a cousin fornicating. In the midst of their coupling, Emmeline blasphemes fervently. Nat's sense of Emmeline's purity, her untouchability is permanently destroyed and soon her image replaces the faceless blond as the subject of Nat's solitary, guilt- ridden pleasures.
On a trip into town, Marse Joseph tells Nat of his plans to emancipate him upon his reaching his majority. But the spell of that eventual gift is clouded when they pass a gang of slaves in chains, enroute to a plantation in Georgia to which they have been sold.
Nat develops a friendship with another slave boy, Willis, and begins to school him in letters and numbers. One day when the two are fishing, and after Willis casually takes the Lord's name in vain (see Emmeline above) for which Nat slaps him, the two boys fall into a carnal embrace -- which Willis enjoys (Man, I sho liked dat. Want to do it agin?) and which Nat justifies to himself via the biblical story of David and Jonathan. Gulity nevertheless, Nat takes it upon himself to baptize Willis and then himself in the stream. Willis becomes his first disciple as a self-proclaimed "minister."
As the economic status of the Turner plantation erodes through the environmental degredation wracking the Tidewater, Marse Joseph secretly sells four slave boys for ready cash. Willis is one of them, which angers Nat, though the master explains that soon all the slaves -- the only true capital available to him -- will need to be sold to pay debts.
Nat is loaned out by Marse Turner to a minister, the Reverend Epps, who tries to molest him and, failing, makes the boy the servant of the entire congregation. The previously pampered Nat discovers for the first time what it is to be a Negro: "It seemed to me that I had been plunged into a hallucination in which I had parted from all familiar existence and was suddenly transformed into a different living creature alltogether -- half man, half mule, exhausted and without speech, given over to dumb and reasonless toil from the hours before dawn until the dead of night." Nat endures it thinking of the freedom he has been promised when he turns 21.
Marse Turner apparently having forgotten, or repudiated, his promise to free Nat, he is sold by the Reverend Epps at a slave auction, the former favorite locked "in a crowded, noisy pen with fifty strange negroes" experiencing "a kind of disbelief which verged close upon madness, then a sense of betrayal, then fury such as I had never known before, then finally, to my dismay, hatred so bitter that I grew dizzy and thought I might get sick on the floor."
Nat's new master, an illiterate, is stunned that his new possession can read. Brooding, the owner Thomas Moore tells his equally uneducated cousin Wallace about a "free nigger" he'd heard about in Smithfield who could read: "when he died they cut open his head and looked at his brain and it had wrinkles just like a white man's. And you know, they was a story 'bout how some of the niggers got holt of a part of the brain and actual et some of it, hopin' they'd git smart too."
Fearing the new slave will inevitably get "uppity," Moore is not pleased at having bought a "nigger" who can read. When Nat asks for food, he is whipped -- physically punished for the first time. It is then, as he feels the wet blood on his neck, Nat first hears God's voice booming through the trees, saying the words: "I abide."
In the future when God speaks to Nat, urging him to "bloodshed of baptism or preaching or charity" it will always be with those same two words: "I abide."
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