The Real Nat Turner
by Molefi Kete Asante
(First published in Emerge, March, 2000)
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:
