The Turners acquired this land years ago. He gets out, stands and looks toward the far side of a forest thick with 15- and 20-foot pines. “My father always said, ‘Show this place to your children.’ “Īlvin Turner drives around to the back of the Turners’ land, turns up a rutted, dirt lane and pulls over. They always thought they might do something with it someday, but even if they didn’t, they’d know it was there, she says. I am.”įor the past 80 years, the cave has been the family’s private memorial of Nat Turner. “I’m very proud to say that I’m a descendant of him. She’s never talked to any of her white neighbors about Nat Turner: They’ve never asked her, and she’s never volunteered her opinion. “I guess I was 40 or 50 years old before I owned that he was kin to me,” she says. But it took her decades to rationalize it. She now thinks that Turner’s insurrection was the spark that eventually freed her race. God told Nat Turner to free his people, and Elizabeth figures that’s the only way Turner knew how. She began discovering admirable intentions behind Turner’s murderous spree. She got curious, but she had a tough time finding any books locally.įinally, she got a cousin to check a book out of a Richmond library. When Elizabeth was 17 or 18, a high school teacher mentioned some books about Nat Turner. Her father didn’t mind he talked about Nat Turner until the day he died. “My grandmother, if anybody got talking about it, she got quiet.” “We didn’t want to have no connection to Nat Turner,” Elizabeth says. She had nightmares about that terrible man and what he’d done. He said that wasn’t the right way to do it.” “My father said he wanted to be a free man. The kids wondered why a preacher would do those things? Then her father told them that Nat Turner had been a preacher. He had killed children her age, and even babies. He had killed members of the Francis family and others that lived nearby. He told her that Nat Turner had killed all these people. He made no excuses and spared no details.Įven though the other children were there, it seemed like he was talking mostly to his daughter. That’s where Elizabeth’s father gathered the children and told them what Nat Turner had done. It was a pleasant walk, until they got to the cave. Sidney Turner led the 10 children through holly, dogwood and pines. Hogs and cattle grazed and roamed freely into the woods. The field wasn’t as manicured then, but the woods weren’t as thick, either. She wore a dress, because in those days that’s what girls wore. He always wore a tie, no matter what else he had on. Her father was wearing bib overalls, a button-up shirt, a straw hat and a tie. “We have a very important place on this farm,” she remembers him saying, “and I want you children to know about it.” He wanted to show them the spot before the weather got hot and they had to worry about snakes. Her father, Sidney, gathered a group of children: Elizabeth, her younger brother, a couple of cousins and some youngsters from neighboring farms. Nabors was only 6 then, but she remembers the day vividly. Her father had bought some farm and wooded land two years earlier, and one day he told the kids he wanted to show them something. “It wasn’t that much to see, but it’s just the idea of it being there,” he said.Įlizabeth Nabors, Alvin’s 86-year-old aunt, remembers being at the cave the first time she learned about Nat Turner’s deeds. If the stake is gone, it’s even more important that Alvin find the cave now. Alvin hopes the stake hasn’t been knocked down by the family’s reforesting. He marked the exact spot with a metal stake. Since then, loamy Southampton County earth has crumbled into the cave and made it nearly impossible to recognize.Īlvin’s father, who died a few years ago, sprayed white paint on trees to mark a trail through the woods to the cave, but that’s now faded. E-Pilot Evening Edition Home Page Close Menu
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