While awaiting execution, Nat recalls his earliest days. He is a "house nigger," brought up hearing (and imitating) the voices of the white owner. His best friend Wash, was "moulded by different sounds . . . nigger voices striving clumsily to grapple with a language never taught, never really learned, still alien and unknown.
In the library of the boy Nat's master, Samuel Turner, the books "had been locked up behind wire, row after row of lustrous leather-swaddled volumes imprisoned in a cage."
Nat steels himself to take one of two tracts by John Bunyan he sees left out on the library table: "The Life and Death of Mr. Badman" (the other is "Grace Abounding").
Nat witnesses the rape of his mother, the cook Lou-Ann by the Irish overseer McBride ("There, God damn, you'll have a taste of me big greasy"); rape turning to seduction as he sees them couple in a rhythym he thought, from earlier spyings, amid the slave cabins, was peculiar to negroes and as the overseer exclaims to Lou-Ann that she shall have earrings from him.
Discovered in his theft of the book, Nat's desire to learn how to read fascinates his master. Musing over this event in his cell, Nat reflects that "the most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction." He nevertheless wonders what would have been his fate had he not become "the beneficiary (or perhaps the victim) of my owner's zeal to tamper with a nigger's destiny."
From the day his desire to learn is discovered, Nat's education becomes a family project. Nat reflects that his master, Marse Turner, "could not have realized, in his innocence and decency, in his awesome goodness and softness of heart, what sorrow he was guilty of creating in feeding me that half-loaf of learning."
Wonderful passage where Nat imagines, from youth to dotage, what would have been his life had he not learned to read -- happier, he suspects, for being ignorant.
The boy Nat a kind of agricultural experiment. He overhears Marse Samuel exclaim on the evils of slavery, opining that education is needed before slaves can be freed to live on their own.
Samuel Turner's brother Benjamin disagrees, finding his brother "sentimental as an old hound" in believing "you can take a bunch of darkies and turn them into shopowners and sea captains and opera impressarios and generals." Benjamin sees negroes as "animals with the brains of a human child." His desire is to replace Negro slaves with machines both for fieldwork and then, sardonically, in the form of "another grand machine to come chugging through the house, lighting the lamps and setting the rooms in order." He drunkenly expands upon the conceit to say that such a machine would not steal or be given to laziness and that, upon such a wondrous machine being invented "I will say a happy adieu to slavery."
Singling out Nat's accomplishments in reading, numbers, and Bible-study, Benjamin opines that whatever learning can be achieved by a darky, he will still be "an animal with the brain of a human child" incapable of wisdom, honesty, or an understanding of human ethics and thus needful of the "benevolent subjection" that enlightened slave owners can provide. A darky, he concludes, "is basically as unteachable as a chicken."
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