Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property
Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property assembles an impressive lineup of scholars who offer insights into the power and meaning of Turner’s revolt and its interpretative malleability. It provides teachers with an excellent lesson in the way we re-construct the past in relation to social and political conditions. To that end, the documentary depicts multiple Nat Turners; each Turner performs of one of the many different characterizations of him drawn up over the years.
We first meet the Nat Turner depicted in the lawyer Thomas R. Gray’s jailhouse “confessions” on the day prior to his execution. Scholars question the extent to which these transcribed interviews reflected Turner’s actual words but, given the paucity of other evidence on Turner and his possible motives, we cannot, as the professor of religion Vincent Harding notes, “cast it aside.” This Turner is eloquent, resolute, and confident in his fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. It was in these confessions that Turner defended his actions by asking, “Was Christ not crucified?,” a statement writer William Styron dismisses as the ravings of a “crazy lunatic” and the historian Herbert Aptkeker calls “one of the great moments in human history.”
Each generation remade Turner to fit their ideas of race, the struggle against inequality, and the implications of violent resistance. In the midst of the abolitionist movement, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Dred (1856) depicted a softened, nonviolent Turner comforting to white sensibilities; during the Civil War, escaped slave and abolitionist leader William Wells Brown imagines an heroic, revolutionary leader; and at the dawn of the long civil rights era, educator Randolph Edmunds’s play “The Nat Turner Story” (1937) depicts a tormented, ambivalent soul struggling to reconcile his dreams of freedom for his people with his horrific actions.
In the film, civil rights leaders reflect on Turner’s heroic status within the black community and how his tale has become part of African Americans’ oral historical traditions. One particularly poignant recollection comes from the actor Ossie Davis, who recalled how he and his friends re-enacted their own versions of Turner’s revolt as children. Yet it also shows how, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, white Southerners disparaged Turner as the villain of an “essentially benign institution,” and how some still today view his revolt as an unjust assault on innocents.
We hear from Kitty Futtrell of the Southamption County Historical Society, who castigates Turner’s actions (especially his killing of women and children), since he offered no formal declaration of war. Her words are counterbalanced by the observations of the historian Eugene Genovese, who notes that Turner well understood that “revolutions have to be thorough.”
The film’s final half deals with the reception of William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968), released as Martin Luther King’s “dream” of peaceful race relations and true equality “evaporated” in a haze of riots and recriminations. Hailed by many white critics as an instant classic, many African American readers were disturbed by Styron’s speculation that Turner’s deeds were driven by an unrequited love with Margaret Whitehead, one of Turner’s victims.
The film chronicles the storm of protest that followed the novel’s publication and situates the controversy within the questions of race and sexuality it provoked. Styron’s novel, another creative interpretation of the thin slivers of
extant historical evidence, illustrates how, in historian Peter Wood’s view, contests over the motivations and meanings of Turner are akin to “people throwing punches in the dark.” Because we know so little about Turner and what specifically compelled him to make such a daring assault on slavery, he has become a blank canvas for subsequent generations to fill with their own thoughts on the still smoldering racial divisions that shaped this historical moment and continue to shape American society today. For as the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes, “If you don’t like Bill Styron’s Nat Turner, write your own.” Undoubtedly, many more will.
Andrew W. Kahrl Indiana University Bloomington, Ind. akahrl@indiana.edu
