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Sec. 3, Ch. 20 --Christian Salvation in Cross Keys
Make Way for the Lord—1828-1831
In 1828, three significant events moved Turner closer to his
ultimate destiny, his ultimate test. First, Turner confronted his third master,
Thomas Moore. Nathaniel was honest and open. He told Moore what was in his heart.
Turner explained to Moore that he was to have been freed when he came of age.
That was seven years before in 1821. Turner asked for his freedom, or an
arrangement for his freedom. According to a Jerusalem resident, in a letter to
the Richmond Whig (September 26, 1831), Moore whipped Turner "for
saying that the blacks ought to be free, and that they would be free one day or
other" (Foner, p. 27).
This was, at least, Turner’s second flogging. The
previous one was while he was slave to Sam Turner, his half brother. Apparently,
Moore believed Africans were slaves by nature and could rise no higher than that
status. Clearly, Moore decided not to participate in their elevation. After this
flogging Turner did not run away. He made no attempt to escape. If one were
religious, one would be inclined to suggest that God stepped in.
Thomas Moore died in 1828, shortly after Nathaniel’s flogging
(Johnson, pp. 51-53). The oral record is silent on the cause of Moore’s death.
Seemingly, in Southampton, among both blacks and whites, life-expectancy was in
the low-50s, with men dying often in their mid-forties or before. Tidewater
Virginia was indeed the longest settled region of the Old Dominion.
Yet the
western sections of the Tidewater were not fully settled until the middle of the
18th century. In the early 1800s, Southampton was still not that far
from wilderness, from the frontier. The lifestyle for many was elemental and
rugged. It might have been something that he ate that was disagreeable. Or maybe
it was conscience and guilt that killed him. or maybe it was indeed the hand of
the Lord, making a way for the fulfillment of Turner's promise.
Many slaveowners feared that without slavery Virginia would
collapse into a barbarous life, the wilderness overwhelming civilized life. Such
dangers from the forest as snakes, bears, and other wild animals were still the
norm during the 1820s and 1830s. In addition, there were problems of diet,
sanitation, healthcare, and medicinal treatments. Then there were the slaves
themselves, an alien element in their midst, and their uses of superstitions and
poisons to eliminate their enemies (Johnson, p. 56). The causes of non-violent
deaths always left some doubt in the minds of a people who still lived
experientially in a religious and mythic world.
Moore, like Samuel Turner, made no provisions for Nathaniel Turner’s
freedom. Moore’s wife, Sally Francis, was "named administratix of his
estate. Nat and five other slaves—Moses, Lucy, Olive, Somia, and Inarchy—were
left to their young son Putnam Moore," a child about six years old
(Johnson, p. 63). Johnson’s account do not provide the ages of the "five
other slaves." Assuredly, some of them were children or teenagers and would
again be sold. A year after his death, Sally Francis, Putnam’s mother, married
Joseph Travis, a carriage maker. In some fashion, Travis gained ownership of
Moses, a slave youth inherited by Putnam. After Travis’ murder, Moses was
convicted as an "insurgent", sold on the auction block, and then
transported.
Slaveholding was a short career for Putnam Moore. His
stepfather Travis and his mother were the first two to be killed in the
Rebellion. At nine years old, Putnam, living in the Travis household, was also
hacked to death. These three slaveholders were the first to be sacrificed in
Turner’s holy war. Though a slaveholder, Travis was not legally Nathaniel’s
master; he, however, seemed to have been known more as an artisan than a
plantation owner. Travis, however, was in the legal line of ownership for Turner
as well as a number of Turner’s Christian soldiers.
So Nathaniel was gracious toward
him and failed to kill him when he gave the first blow of the Rebellion. In
practice, Sally Francis, the mother of Putnam, managed Nat and, according to
Gilbert Francis, Sally was one of Nat Turner’s childhood playmates and one of
his teachers (Interview with Director of Southampton County Historical Society,
August 2000).
There were sufficient conditions in Cross Keys to drive any
man mad. The immoralities and perversities committed within Cross Keys were
indeed sufficient enough to drive persons mad and worst to reduce them to
beasts. From the perspective of an oppressed people longing ever so much to
establish moral order and respectability in their private lives, the wildest
images of Sodom and Gomorrah were not so far from their everyday imagination.
Turner himself had had three slavemasters within a period of five years; his
last master, six years old. As a Christian apostle, of course, he was morally
indignant, especially in that the agents of this evil called themselves
"Methodists."
By this time, Turner, however, had spiritually developed
beyond mere petty revenge. He had become a man who took full responsibility for
his life in the world. He had worked out his world view. In his mind and soul,
he was already free, greater than any American-made freedom. Since 1825,
at the beginning of his ministry, Turner was, existentially, a member of Christ’s
"kingdom of heaven." For Turner, his treatment as property to be
inherited and sold from one slaveholder to another, without regard for his
rights as a human being, was yet another sign, symbolic of Satan’s expanding
realm.
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 28
November 2011
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