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The Rebellious Slave
Nat Turner in American Memory
By Scot French Reviews
In this well-written and absorbing book,
French presents comprehensive documentation and analysis of
Turner's influence on American culture, politics, racialism, and
relations between African Americans and whites . . .
Beginning with writers of jeremiads
antedating Turner, French then traces the responses of
politicians, historians, preachers, publishers, editorialists
and novelists from post-Turner to the present....
French describes the details of the ups and
downs of Turner's 'posthumous life' with infectious enthusiasm.
His clear-eyed command of all the stories and reasons for
Turner's ever-present and captivating persona in what he calls
'our social or collective memory' is compelling.
The Rebellious
Slave is a well-researched book that probes the often
ambiguous yet tortured image of the Negro in the American
psyche.
--Seattle Times, Feb. 22,
2004:"'Nat Turner': The Haunting Legacy of a Man who Would
Not Live a Slave" Reviewed by John C. Walter,
Professor of History in the American Ethnic Studies Department
at the University of Washington
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French vividly traces the 'postmortem career'
of Nat Turner as an alternately loved and loathed icon of black
America. From the official "master narrative" of 1831
to William Styron’s highly controversial, Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel, and beyond, Turner’s rebellion inspired
uncompromising resistance for many Americans, and embodied
loathsome anarchy for many more. French first parses the image
of the rebellious slave before Turner. The antislavery jeremiads
of Thomas Jefferson (who was "for black freedom on his
terms, and his terms alone," according to French) and
starker voices like William Lloyd Garrison and David Walker
presaged a bloody uprising among the slaves; others used the
perception of simmering black rage to push pro-slavery
sanctions.
French’s book, like the brilliant work on
John Brown by fellow University of Virginia professor Merrill
Peterson, mainly examines the protagonist’s intensely debated
legacy. Abolitionists, later Communist propagandists and finally
civil rights activists and modern liberals would celebrate
Turner as their archetype and hero. Confederate sympathizers and
white Southern conservatives labeled him a dangerous fanatic and
mass murderer, and would ennoble instead the faceless
"faithful slave" or quiet Negro.
French is an adept
chronicler of Turner’s ghost, although much of the book will
be familiar territory to those who have read Kenneth
Greenberg’s edited volume on the subject. The work expands but
leaves unresolved the debate over whether the rebellion resulted
from a wider conspiracy or simply, as the official account
holds, from the messianic mind of Turner himself. After stating
his intent "to reach an audience beyond the academy,"
French succeeds admirably through concrete prose, though his
ethereal subject matter may nonetheless limit that reach
considerably.
--Publishers' Weekly
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Scholarly but accessible and nicely written
study of the many roles the 19th-century insurrectionist Nat
Turner has played in popular culture and memory.
Nat Turner and a band of slaves-some sources
say no more than 40, others 100 or more-rose against their
masters in Tidewater Virginia in August 1831. According to one
contemporary witness, writes French (Carter G. Woodson Institute
for African-American and African Studies/Univ. of Virginia),
Turner convinced his followers that "there were only 80,000
whites in the country, who, being exterminated, the blacks might
take possession." This witness, a Richmond-based journalist
named John Hampden Pleasants, created an influential view of
Turner as charismatic, dictatorial leader of a sheeplike bunch
of followers; they called him "General Nat," imagining
him to be a martinet of the barnyard, of only local interest and
importance. "In establishing Turner as the
mastermind," writes French, "Pleasants limited the
extent of the conspiracy to the reach of his voice"-though,
in fact, Turner's call to rebellion spread far, and long after
his death.
French examines numerous narratives, among
them the challenging eyewitness account of one "Beck, a
slave girl," who revealed that the insurrection had been
carefully planned by many participants for more than a year; the
reverberations of the Turner uprising in John Brown's abortive
raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, which Abraham Lincoln
characterized as "an attempt by white men to get up a
revolt among the slaves, in which the slaves refused to
participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all
their ignorance, saw plainly enough that it could not
succeed"; and, of course, William Styron's famed,
controversial novel Confessions of Nat Turner and a subsequent
film version that never saw light because, Styron claimed,
"Black Power" protests killed it-later amending his
claim to say that the box-office failures of Hello, Dolly!
and Dr. Dolittle bled the parent studio dry, "and
Nat Turner was the casualty.
An illuminating
exegesis on slavery and American popular culture alike, and a
well-done expansion on Kenneth Greenberg's collection Nat
Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (Feb. 2003).
--Kirkus Reviews, Dec. 15, 2003
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French explores
the treatment of Nat Turner in popular American culture from the
immediate aftermath of the slave revolt he led, when authorities
were primarily concerned with preventing the spread of the
rebellion, to more contemporary views. Focusing on Turner's
official confession, French suggests that the document may have
been manufactured to downplay the fervor and extent of the
rebellion and points to counternarratives that indicate a
broader conspiracy. French traces the impact of the revolt on
the abolitionist movement and free people of color, as well as
slave narratives and other popular literature of the time,
through the Reconstruction era, when Turner was viewed as a race
hero.
More
contemporarily, French explores William Styron's 1967 novel, The
Confessions of Nat Turner, and popular response from black
power advocates. When Styron's work was optioned by Hollywood,
its controversial nature eventually killed the project,
highlighting the black anger and white fear engendered by the
rebellion and its place in the history of resistance to American
slavery and racism.
--Booklist (review journal of the
American Library Association) Reviewed by Vernon Ford
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In the News
Scholars are still digging for answers about Turner. How
widespread was the revolt? How did Turner plan it? How authentic
was the famous jailhouse confession he made to Thomas R. Gray, a
white lawyer and former slaveowner who took it upon himself to
seek an accounting from Turner. Was the rebellion inspired by
religious visions, as claimed by Turner?
One of the newest books about him,
The Rebellious Slave:
Nat Turner in American Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), by
the historian Scot French, marches Turner through the prism of
various eras, from the 18th century to today. Mr. French, a
professor of African-American studies at the University of
Virginia, offers several narratives that dispute Gray's account,
drawing, for example, on oral traditions in Southampton's black
community and on testimony from the trials of the accused
rebels.
He also shows how the very idea of the dangerous, rebellious
slave was prefigured in warnings by men as different as the
black abolitionist David Walker and Thomas Jefferson, so that
when Turner arrived on the scene he already fit certain
ideological templates. And Mr. French shows that while many
black intellectuals now insist that Turner is clearly in the
tradition of American freedom fighters, during more politically
cautious eras black leaders pointedly ignored him. "Your
version of history can give us some insights into how you see
yourself," Mr. French said in an interview. "It's not
simply a black-white divide. It's ideological. How are you
mobilizing history in your own world?" . . .
This approach to history, which
focuses on what is called "social memory" or
"public memory," takes for granted that different
groups construct different versions of the past. The competing
versions are passed down through museums, books, commemorations,
films and oral tradition. Each generation then decides whether
to embrace the accepted truths or to challenge the
orthodoxy.
"A lot of it is about who has
cultural authority at any given moment," Mr. French said.
"To accept Nat Turner and place him within the pantheon of
American revolutionary heroes is to sanction violence as a means
of social change. He has a kind of racial consciousness that to
this day troubles advocates of a racially reconciled society.
The story lives because it's relevant today to questions of how
to organize for change.
—Felicia
R. Lee, "Nat Turner in History's Multiple Mirrors,"
The New York Times Arts & Ideas Section, Feb. 6, 2004, p.
A-17:
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Fifty years ago this coming May, the U.S.
Supreme Court made a ruling that profoundly changed American
life. In the Brown vs. Board of Education case, the court
said that schools must be integrated because the doctrine of
"separate but equal" was not constitutional. The
ruling's consequences, both intended and unintended, are still
affecting school integration and the politics of race.
This spring, several books will be released
that re-examine this monumental decision. They, along with the
many books published to capitalize on the interest generated by
Black History Month, add depth and breadth to our understanding
of what it means to be black in America, from the earliest days
to the present . . . .
A look further
back in time at the man who became synonymous with the bloodiest
slave riot in American history can be found in
The Rebellious Slave:
Nat Turner in American Memory (Houghton Mifflin,
$26). In it, Scot French, a former reporter and now a professor
specializing in African and African American history at the
University of Virginia, uses the 1831 rebellion, which panicked
the slaveholding South, to examine American race relations and
attitudes on violence as a political tool. He writes that the
rebellion was not an isolated incident, as commonly thought, but
a part of a large slave conspiracy.
—Carole
Goldberg, "Insight Into What It Means To Be Black In
America New Titles Explore Brown vs. Board Of Education, Slave
Riots, Prayer And Art Collecting," The Hartford (Conn.)
Courant, Feb. 1, 2004
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Advance Praise
In
this beautifully written narrative, Scot French unfolds the story
of how Americans have imagined Nat Turner over the last 170 years.
With a subtle touch, French evokes the fears and hopes that have
swirled around one of the most enigmatic figures in American
history. No one has looked so deeply into the public memory of
race and violence in this nation.
—Edward
L. Ayers, Professor of History and Dean of the College and
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia, and
author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of
America, 1859-1863 and Promise of the New South: Life After
Reconstruction
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Far more compelling
than a traditional biography, Scot French's innovative probing of
our collective memory opens new avenues of debate even as it
details and evaluates earlier portrayals of the black
insurrectionist as both incubus and icon. The Rebellious Slave
is a most welcome contribution to African-American literary and
cultural studies.
—William
L. Van Deburg, Professor of History, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Black Camelot:
African-American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960-1980; New
Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture,
1965-1975, and Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture
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Nat lives! Scot French brilliantly demonstrates how the
image of Nat Turner could be used and abused, fashioned and
refashioned, but never co-opted or rendered passe.
—Daryl
Michael Scott, Professor of History, Howard University, and author
of Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the
Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996
Source:
The Rebellious Slave:
Nat Turner in American Memory /
www.scotfrench.com |
