There are
those who say that history is indifferent, though enough
has been written to distort African American history to
suggest that someone is playing a game with us. This is
quite clear in the case of Nat Turner, born 200 years
ago. It is as if he could be sheathed in an
interpretative garment with so many layers that you
could never really know him. Yet there are some
interesting developments around Turner’s bicentennial.
Symposia and seminars are planned and even a conference
at Temple University on “The Meaning of Nat Turner” is
scheduled for the Spring, 2000. There is even talk of
Spike Lee making a movie of Nat Turner based on the
discredited William Styron’s novel, The Confessions
of Nat Turner. Although this novel won a Pulitzer
Prize it was roundly attacked and severely criticized by
some of the major African American writers and
historians of the day. Thus, it is clear that the
African American people have both a historical and
emotional investment in Nat Turner and this interest in
Nat Turner is not a new discovery, it is a permanent
condition. Nat Turner’s image in our consciousness does
not come and go; it is a historical presence.
A
recent article “Untrue Confessions” by Tony Horwitz
reminded me that it is as true today as it was
thirty years ago that “every body talking bout Nat
Turner don’t know Nat Turner.” Horwitz asks “Is
most of what we know about Nat Turner wrong?”
Because he asked the wrong question, he was never
able to find the answer. The real question is, was
Nat Turner right?
Speculative history written with hindsight often
seeks to prove a point that could not be proved at
the time of an event. Unfortunately this is not
Horwitz’ aim, rather he seeks to render the work of
white southern novelist William Styron (The
Confessions of Nat Turner) useful in
understanding Nat Turner. To do this, Horwitz relies
on Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West, two Harvard
professors, and Spike Lee to help resurrect a dead
vision of Nat Turner. The fact that Styron was born
in 1925 only a few miles away from the scene of
Turner’s revolt may have given him historical
interest in Nat Turner, but Styron’s novel robbed
the meaning of a man’s life. In fact, Styron’s
version of Nat Turner stole a people’s collective
response to oppression by trying to portray a
maniacal Nat Turner.
Not
along ago after lecturing at the Elizabeth City
State University in North Carolina I drove a few
miles north just over the state line to Southampton
County Virginia where in 1800 Nat Turner was born as
a precocious child. I have made a habit of visiting
sacred sites of African deeds. I have meditated on
the farm where Harriet Tubman was born, walked among
the oaks at night on Tuskegee’s campus, and slept in
Amy Garvey’s house in Kingston, and so forth. In
some ways, religion is the deification of ancestors
and my religion is African. It was not different
when I walked along the roads of history in
Virginia.
On
this land, I thought as I walked near the historical
marker indicating the revolt of Nat Turner, we, the
people of a million births, were born once more
during that slave revolt in August 1831.
Since
Nat Turner’s proactive strike against slavery, white
authors beginning with Thomas Gray, who took his
“confessions” have tried to mold a Nat Turner that
they could put on an American stamp or stamp with
the white American imagination. They are baffled by
the fact that a black man rose up so provocatively
against his oppression. What’s wrong with Nat
Turner, they seemed to ask? What is a slave revolt
about if it is not about despising slavery?
Enriched by the memories of Africans, because we
were not citizens until after the Civil War, whose
vivid and conscientious impressions of Nat Turner
were painted in a historical gallery of greatness,
the children of Nat Turner knew as the late John
Henrik Clarke knew that “Nat Turner alone was
sufficient to prove “that black people were worthy
of being free people.” Like the ankh, the scarab
beetle, the crucifix, Shango’s axe, and prayer
beads, the iconic Nat Turner stirs in our hearts the
desire for the sacred.
Soon
after the publication of The Confessions of Nat
Turner, Lerone Bennett, Vincent Harding, John O.
Killens, John A. Williams, Alvin Pouissant, Mike
Thelwell, and others wrote a thunderous response to
what they saw as the betrayal of Nat Turner’s
history in Styron’s work. Black Classic Press has
recently re-issued the volume as The Second
Crucifixion of Nat Turner. It was the last work
edited by John Henrik Clarke.
Can
the real Nat Turner stand up? Vincent Harding,
author of There is A River, says William
Styron “speaks and writes without comprehension of
either the meaning of the drama, or the profound and
bitter depths through which America continually
moves towards the creation of a thousand Nat Turners
more real than (Styron’s) can ever be. When Thomas
Gray gave his peroration on Nat Turner’s
“Confessions” he wrote “I looked on him and my blood
curdled in my veins.” I do not know whether Thomas
Gray was being melodramatic or not, but I do know
that African men and women took heart in the fact
that a black man could bring fear to whites.
However, when Styron finished with Nat Turner you
wanted to have pity on a poor misdirected,
distorted, twisted, fanatic, who did not know what
he was doing. So we are still asking, can the real
Nat Turner stand up? The novelist John O. Killens
was perceptive when he said “there are thousands of
Nat Turners in the city streets today.” In effect,
Turner is standing up everyday in the lives of black
people dealing with the vicissitudes of racism.
The
real Nat Turner was a revolutionary who believed in
liberty. “Give me liberty or give me death” had
reverberated from the Virginia Assembly nearly
twenty-five years before Turner was born. Patrick
Henry would be considered a saint for his commitment
to liberty and Nat Turner would be reinvented as a
fanatic for his determination for liberation. Such
is the alchemy of racism. What could create such
different orientations to men striking for freedom?
Simply put, Nat Turner saw the white slaveholder as
the enemy of justice, peace, and humanity and his
struggle was for integrity.
What
drives the illusions of Turner periodically sent our
way by white authors? I believe that they are
trying to find an acceptable, non-heroic, and
less-threatening Turner. But this cannot be done
without re-writing large parts of the history of our
enslavement, omitting the fundamental deprivation of
liberty and constructing an alternative explanation
for the attempt to dehumanize us. I see in these
whiten versions of Nat Turner an attempt to silence
the voice of protest, militancy, anger, and
righteous indignation. This is why Tony Horwitz must
drag out a chorus of black post-modern
problematizers so that when you see Nat Turner you
will not know him. The idea is to dissect his mind
and motives like the white surgeons dissected his
body after execution.
In the
the Second Crucifixion of Nat Turner, Lerone
Bennett, the eminent historian of African American
culture, wrote that in William Styron’s
Confessions of Nat Turner, we do not get the
voice of Nat Turner. He says, “the voice in this
confession is the voice of William Styron. The
images are the images of William Styron. The
confession is the confession of William Styron.”
Tony
Horwitz, with the collaboration of African Americans
who wish to problematize Nat Turner and any other
black heroic figure has tried to make Styron’s voice
the voice of Nat Turner. William Styron was wrong in
1967 when he wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner
and his Nat Turner remains silent today. It is the
voice of the white southerner that we hear in
Styron’s novel. No amount of revivalism by
vindicationists can rehabilitate Styron’s assault on
the character of Nat Turner. I call the Africans who
are called upon by whites to confirm their opinions
of African actions, vindicationists of white fears.
If Cornel West could be quoted by Horwitz as saying
“that “Styron had struggled to understand the common
history of whites and blacks” Cornel West was wrong.
Nat Turner did not come out of any common history of
whites and blacks and William Styron knew that fact
in l967 and we all know that now.
Turner’s vision meant death to the racist. His
interpretation of his situation was more Fanonian
than Freudian in the sense that he understood that
violence against the slaveholders would show his
humanity because it was human to have rage at evil
and seek to overcome it. No, there was no
commonality between what Turner wanted and what his
slave-owners wanted. These two views were polar
opposites. They were as different as valleys and
mountains. No amount of gainsaying can make Nat
Turner and the slave-owners brothers in a common
quest. Their heavens were as different as their
hells. Henry Louis Gates told Horwitz that the
assault on Styron by “black intellectuals came at
the height of Black Power, of the super-macho,
super-stud Black Panthers, with their guns, leather,
and berets. Styron’s version of Nat Turner was
simply unreadable to these people, and they didn’t
want a white to write about it, particularly in that
way.” Once again Henry Gates has misunderstood the
essence of the African American community’s massive
response to Styron’s The Confessions of Nat
Turner. If Styron had written his twisted
interpretation of Nat Turner today it would have
generated the same heat and same criticism. Styron
raped the image of Nat Turner and presented a
disemboweled version of an African hero.
How
could a white Virginia writer choose to place
himself in the mind of the most iconic of African
heroes and expect to go unchallenged? Styron puts
himself in the first person as Nat Turner. Wasn’t
this the same presumption that whites had taken
during the enslavement and afterwards? To take one
of the greatest African American icons and reduce
his revolt against the racist institution to
religious and sexual fanaticism remains, even now,
sacrilegious. What would a Native American say if a
white person chose to write of Geronimo or Cochise
in the first person and make their campaign against
white settlers turn on some imagined idea of sex
with a white woman? Is there no other reality to the
life of a person enslaved, dehumanized, and
brutalized? Are the daily visitations of abuse
against one’s fellows not enough to create in a
person a strong desire for freedom? Nat Turner’s
victory over enslavement can be found in his
challenge of the system and his strike against our
debasement.
Clearly, his image as an African American
revolutionary retains its potency because we are
confronted by racial subtleties fossilized in
American institutions. If the times do not demand a
messianic force, a heroic persona, then truly the
times always require a thousand Harriets and Nats
who can discern the numerous ways we are victimized
and show the way to victory. In the pursuit of
freedom one is either a collaborator with the enemy
or an aggressive proponent of justice.
One
wonders why Horwitz writing in the New Yorker
could even try to resurrect Styron’s portrayal of
Nat Turner as a tortured, tormented fanatic lusting
after a white woman? Nat Turner’s deliberate revolt
against the white slaveholders had more to do with
his hatred of slavery than with anything else. There
is nothing in Turner’s history that demonstrates
this idea of revolution based on sexual fantasy. His
was not some projection of whiteness as purity or
saintliness; what he saw was what David Walker had
seen, a corrupt, rotten, brutal system of
degradation. He became in his own mind the Lion of
Virginia conquering evil in the name of God. He was
the first breeze of the whirlwind that was to be in
Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.
I
believe that Styron’s Nat Turner came from the
imagination of a writer bent on showing that Nat
Turner had more love for white people than the
radicals of the l960s. When in fact Nat Turner and
the revolutionary activists of the Sixties were
interested in the defeat of racism, oppression, and
white supremacy. Both recognized that white
supremacy was an abnormal, anti-god, unholy, and
unfair system. They both tapped the abundant spring
of American hypocrisy. They knew the white racial
ideology of dominance, having felt its sting. But
the idolatry of whiteness lost its power in the
confrontation with black visions of freedom.
The
American society has always feared rebellion from black
folk. It is quite metaphysical, like the national
conscience recognizes that something is wrong with the
way we have been treated. Consequently, if whites could
find someone to throw white paint on our black faces, to
disfigure us, to distort our reality, to main our
history, then they would feel more comfortable with us.
Therefore, if a white writer, with black assistants,
could blunt the edge of our rage, if he could
problematize our heroes or add layers of complexity
to our heroes’ motives, he could thwart our anger,
eradicate our demands for justice, and eliminate the
need for reparations. Why is it that Alexander Crummell,
Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner, and Malcolm X have drawn such
drastic postmodern attempts at redefinition? Is it not
possible for an African person to be clear about
anything, but particularly clear about racism in
America? David Walker will be the next individual to be
problematized, afterall, he thought “white
Christian Americans” were the most hypocritical and
degenerate people on the face of the earth. Shall we now
await a white author and black assistants to tell us
that David Walker was crazy?
Of course
I am perhaps over-stretching the case in order to
demonstrate that when our history is not in our own
hands we are in danger of transmitting a jaundiced view
of ourselves to posterity.
The
governor of Virginia, John Floyd, knew the power of Nat
Turner’s rebellion. Floyd spoke to the Virginia Assembly
on December 6, 1831, and he said “”I am fully persuaded
the spirit of insubordination which has and still
manifests itself in Virginia, had its origin among the
Yankee population, upon their first arrival amongst us,
but most especially the Yankee pedlars and traders. The
course has been by no means a direct one. They began
first by making them religious in their conversations
which were of the character of telling the blacks, God
was no respecter of persons, the black man was as good
as the white, that all men were born free and equal,
that they cannot serve two masters.”
John Floyd
believed that the slaves who learned to read also read
David Walker. The appearance of David Walker’s “Appeal
to the Colored Citizens of the World” provoked much
discussion and concern among whites. Furthermore, it was
the most passionately logical African treatise in
support of revolt against slavery of its time and
perhaps of all time. Even if it is true as some claim
that we do not know if Walker inspired Nat Turner, it is
true that the conditions both responded to were
universal in North America.
I asked
myself why Nat Turner has inspired generations of
Africans and created great fear in the white population,
a fear that comes out even in statements as contemporary
as Horwitz notion of Nat Turner as someone on a
“rampage” with the idea of “massacring” white people.
Why couldn’t Nat Turner be at war with the enemies
of justice and fair-play, the bearers of evil, and the
sustainers of degradation? In fact, if anything, whites
had systematically massacred black and Native Americans
and “rampaged” across the continent killing and looting.
We had been looted from Africa.
Didn’t
white people have the freedom and the “right” to kill
any Africans, to wantonly shoot down an enslaved person,
to rape any black woman at will, to sell parents’
children to another plantation against their will, to
act like God on earth? Had not thousands of blacks been
murdered for trivial reasons? Wouldn’t the havoc and
macabre killing of black women and children after the
revolt be enough to suggest that the revolt had been
justified? Hadn’t whites killed the innocent without
remorse? Wasn’t Nat Turner responding to centuries of
indignities and malicious actions?
Nat
Turner’s emergence as a revolutionary in 1831 came on
the heels of the 1825 emigration to Haiti of thousands
of Africans from the United States, and David Walker’s
Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in
l829. Fired up with indignation, David Walker had
written like this: “the whites have always been an
unjust, jealous, unmerciful and blood-thirsty set of
beings, always seeking after power and authority.”
Walker was convinced that no people had ever suffered
such “barbarous cruelties” as Africans at the hands of
white Christian Americans. The events of Southampton
County occurred during the same period as the United
States was removing Native Americans to Oklahoma in the
Trail of Death.
Turner
grew organically out of the soil of the African people.
He felt what the masses felt and experienced what they
experienced. He lived in one of the most repressive
regimes in the history of the world during its most
oppressive time. To speak of the enslavement as if it
were a genteel world is to debase the memory of the
ancestor who struggled against the vilest form of
degradation.
What were
the facts of the rebellion as they have come to us
through history?
October 2,
1800 Nat Turner born
1822 Nat
Turner was sold to Thomas Moore after Samuel Turner, his
owner died.
1825 Nat
Turner had his first vision about freedom
August 13,
1831 Signs in the sky appeared that suggested to Nat
Turner that he should prepare for the rebellion
August 20,
1831 Nat Turner asks Henry Porter and Hark Travis to
help plan the revolt
August 21,
1831 Hark Travis, Henry Porter, Samuel Francis, Will
Francis, Nelson Williams meet at a pond and cook a pig.
They are joined by Nat Turner at 3 PM. They are prepared
for war by Nat Turner. He assumes the title of General
Cargill. Henry Porter becomes paymaster.
August 22,
1831 They leave around 2 AM to begin their attacks. They
ride their horses at breakneck speed to create terror
and to prevent escape from the slaveowners’ homes.
August 22,
1831 By noon, Nat Turner had sixty mounted men, ready to
march on the village of Jerusalem. They killed 61
whites. They met first resistance from armed whites.
August 23,
1831 7AM Turner’s forces met armed slaveholders, more
than 100 white men.
August 23,
1831 By 9 AM men are leaving Nat to return to the
plantations. Many of them would later be killed.
October
30, 1831 Nat Turner was captured
November
5, 1831 Nat Turner was tried and found guilty.
November
11, 1831 He was executed and his body mutilated. More
than 200 people were killed by whites in the aftermath.
Nat Turner
was not a freak. He was a self-determining African who
could not live as a slave. We know enough about him to
know that he loved African people and saw his history as
intimately connected with that of his fellows. Scot
French of the University of Virginia is quoted as
saying, “About all we know for sure is that fifty-seven
whites died. We have the bodies.” However, we also know
that more than two hundred men, women, children, were
killed by whites. They must not remain uncommented upon
nor silent in history.
In the
end, Styron’s novel cannot be the basis of a depiction
of Nat Turner. Listen to Styron’s Nat Turner as he is
about to go to the gallows:
“…I feel
the warmth flow into my loins and my legs tingle with
desire, I tremble and I search for her face in my mind,
seek the young body, yearning for her suddenly, with a
craving beyond pain; with tender stroking motions I our
out my love within her; pulsing flood; she arches
against me, cries out, and the twain—black and white—are
one.”
If you
accept this you believe that Nat Turner did not want to
kill the slave-owner he wanted to sleep with the
slaveowner’s wife. John O. Killens writes that “there
is nothing that suggests that Nat had no love whatever
for black women, which is how Styron depicts him. As a
matter of fact, he was married to one, but you wouldn’t
know this from the novel.” Was the lust after a
white woman the only reason Styron’s Nat Turner had a
voice against enslavement? Can only black men married
to or lusting after white women have voice because it
will be a voice of confusion, a freak show of Hollywood
proportions? Is this the Turner of Spike Lee’s interest?
Vincent Harding is right, they done “took my Nat and
gone.”
Was Turner
crazy? Was Patrick Henry? Is the real Nat Turner dead?
Is God dead? By all accounts Nat Turner was not insane,
despite the drawing accompanying Tony Horwitz’ piece in
the New Yorker, depicting a brooding madman.
Furthermore, Turner remains close to the surface of
every African American who thinks about the historical
conditions that are derived from the enslavement. He is
neither dead nor dying in our imagination and history.
The plan carried out by Nat Turner and his cohorts shows
him as a rather reflective and mature thinker and his
activities were consistent with the best examples of
leadership. He demonstrated both gravitas and
charisma. There is no question that he was
passionate, energetic, committed, and dedicated to the
eradication of slavery and this is the generator for our
continuing struggle. He has earned his place in the
panoply of revolutionary icons such as Boukman,
Dessalines, Zumbi, Touissaint L’Ouverture, Delgres,
Yanga, Harriet Tubman, Nanny, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel
Prosser, and John Cavallo. Therefore, at the dawn of a
new century, the second since his birth, Nat Turner
remains elegantly and elaborately wrapped in the fabric
of resistance to domination and it is this Turner, above
all, that African Americans know and hold dear.