|
The Rebellious Slave
Nat Turner in American Memory
By Scot French
A Conversation with Scot French
Q:
In our popular culture and the history books, Nat Turner is
viewed as something of an archetype: a contradictory mix of
courageousness and depravity. What do these opposite views
reveal about the people who hold them?
Scot French: Like other
"great men" of history who are associated with
slavery, rebellion, and civil war (John Brown, Abraham Lincoln,
Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis), Turner is a polarizing
figure. What we think of these men and their place in the
American pantheon reveals a great deal about who we are as a
people. I'm interested in what these images can tell us about
the culture, society, or — more broadly — the spirit of the
age that produced them.
Q: In
The Confessions of Nat Turner the rebel is depicted as a prophet
and bloodthirsty murderer. In either case, he is a man apart.
What did your research reveal about the true nature of Nat
Turner?
Scot
French: Unfortunately the "real" Nat Turner of
history is lost to us. All we have to work with are sketches,
more or less true to life, drawn by people with varying degrees
of proximity to the man and the event that bears his name.
Personally, I was far more intrigued by the minor characters,
the bit players, in the great historical drama known as Nat
Turner's Rebellion. In fact, my book reveals far more about them
— or, rather, us — than it does about the enigmatic figure
of Turner himself.
Q: What
did the "master narrative" provide to the slaveholders
that proved so powerful to their sense of themselves and their
place in society?
Scot
French: The "master narrative," which placed Nat
Turner at the center of a local conspiracy and suppressed rumors
of wider slave unrest, served the interests of white and black
Southerners alike. For the slaveholders, it deflected attention
away from the oppressive conditions that produced slave revolt
and placed the blame for the 1831 uprising on a single deranged
religious fanatic. For the slaves and free persons of color, who
suffered gross persecution in the aftermath of the rebellion,
the narrative exonerated all but Turner and a few "deluded
wretches" of crimes against the white ruling class.
Q: What
sources did you use to flesh out the true Nat Turner? What did
your visits to Southampton County, Virginia, reveal? What of the
mysterious "trunk" and skull? What do these rumors
reveal about the enduring mystery of the man?
Scot
French: Rather than search for the "true" Nat
Turner, I set out to trace the changing image and reputation of
the most famous rebellious slave in American culture and
society. I wanted to know what people living in very different
places and times made of Turner and the event that bears his
name. I quickly discovered, for example, that Turner's Rebellion
looked very different to a slave girl named Beck than it did to
Thomas R. Gray, the white Southampton county lawyer who recorded
Turner's "Confessions" for posterity. It took a great
deal of painstaking research in court and church records to
reconstruct Beck's testimony and reestablish her central role in
the drama — all but neglected in standard histories of this
event.
My visits to
Southampton County introduced me to descendants of slaves and
slaveholders who served as guardians of Turner's memory and
gatekeepers of the historical record. The late Gilbert Francis,
a local lawyer whose great-grandparents narrowly escaped death
at the hands of Turner and his men, regaled me with stories of
his dealings with white Klansmen, black radicals, and Hollywood
filmmakers alike. Another Southampton County native led me on a
wild but fruitless search for a trunk said to contain
Turner-related papers dating back to 1831.
I devote a few
pages in the epilogue of my book to the enduring mystery of Nat
Turner's skull, which somehow made its way from Southampton
County, Virginia (where it was kept by local residents as a
relic), to Wooster, Ohio (where it was displayed in a college
library and natural history museum), to Gary, Indiana (where it
supposedly resides today, a prized artifact of a newly
established civil rights museum). To me, the story of Nat
Turner's skull illustrates the changing fortunes of the
rebellious slave, once the property of Southampton County
slaveholders, today the revered icon of the Civil Rights and
Black Power generations.
Q: How
has the image of Turner been adapted to the times: slavery and
Civil War; Reconstruction and Jim Crow; Civil Rights and Black
Power?
Scot
French: Well now, you'll just have to read the book to find
out, won't you?
Q: What
made William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner so
controversial? What did that work bring to your research, and
what contact have you had with the novelist?
Scot
French: Styron chose to make Turner a figure with whom
he — and many liberal white Americans of his day — could
identify: a plantation slave with a twentieth-century
intellectual's grasp of history and an ironic sensibility.
Invoking artistic license, Styron built his story around what he
imagined to be Turner's sexually charged relationship with a
beautiful white girl named Margaret Whitehead. This was hardly
the pious black Christian martyr celebrated in Negro History
Week pageants or the black revolutionary so widely admired by
Malcolm X and others! Needless to say, Styron caught hell from
black critics. But he also caught hell from the descendants of
slaveholders who felt that Styron defamed their ancestors as
well.
I devote
considerable attention to Styron's motives in writing The
Confessions and the social and political context in which it was
received. Styron made himself and his papers at Duke available
to me without restriction, which was a tremendous boon to my
research. I admire his willingness to revisit what was obviously
a very painful episode in his life.
Q: Does
"historical relativism" mean that the truth of the
past is largely unknowable by those in the present? Will
society's search for a "usable past" put out of reach
an understanding of the motives of those, like Nat Turner and
others who led the rebellion, who made specific choices in a
specific environment that still echo today?
Scot
French: Historical relativists do not believe that the truth
of the past is largely unknowable by those in the present. They
simply believe that the records of the past can yield no single,
timeless, unassailable "truth" about what really
happened. The best one can hope for is a reasonably accurate
recounting of events built on solid evidence. The most
persuasive truth claims are based on evidence, which is always
open to interpretation and reinterpretation. Sometimes
historians find new evidence, throwing old conclusions into
doubt and raising provocative new questions. Sometimes
historians ask new questions, casting old subjects in a new
light. I like to think I've done a little of both.
Q: Ever
since the decades-old rumors about Strom Thurmond's mixed-race
daughter were proven true, I have been wondering what you think
of this present-day white archetype and how his control of his
personal history sheds light on Southern (and white) historical
narrative.
Scot
French: Though Thurmond was able to control his own personal
history for many years, the "truth" of his
relationship with Essie Mae Williams was well known to many
people for many years — one might call it an open secret. The
same might be said of Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally
Hemings, so long affirmed in African-American oral tradition, so
long denied by Jefferson's white descendants and admiring white
biographers. Only now are we, as a society, facing up to the
uncomfortable "truths" about our shared past under
slavery and segregation. But it's still a very painful subject,
and many of us — black and white — would rather forget that
it ever happened.
Q: History
and storytelling are clear passions — not just in your
professional work, but also in your spare time. You collect
antique typewriters, boxes of family letters, diaries, and
photographs dating back to the early eighteenth century. What is
it about the implements of storytelling that so captivates you?
Scot
French: They make me feel connected to people and places
I've never known. There's something incredibly moving in finding
a mark or trace that someone left — perhaps unwittingly —
for posterity. It's up to me, as a historian, to make sense of
that artifact, to give it life by incorporating it into my life
story. / www.scotfrench.com
 |
Scot French (b. May
29, 1959) is a native of Boylston, Massachusetts. He and his
family live in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he teaches
History and African American Studies at the University of
Virginia.
He received his B.A. in
American Literature and Magazine Journalism from Syracuse
University, where he served as editor-in-chief of The Daily
Orangestudent newspaper from 1979-80. After a brief stint as a
freelance writer, he embarked on an eight-year career as a
reporter, editor, and columnist for several New England
newspapers -- the Peterborough, N.H.-based Monadnock Ledger;
the Manchester, Conn.-based Herald and Journal-Inquirer,
and the Concord (N.H.0 Monitor. |
During his years as an
editor and reporter in New Hampshire, he covered three
first-in-the-nation presidential primary campaigns (1980, 1984
and 1988) as well as the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster.
He received several journalism awards, including one for depth
reporting from the Society of professional Journalists/Sigma
Delta Chi (SPJ/SDX) and one for editorial writing from the New
England Press Association (NEPA).
French enrolled in the
graduate history program at the University of Virginia in
September 1988. There he studied under the direction of Waldo E.
Martin Jr. (The Mind of Frederick Douglass) and later, as
a doctoral candidate, with Edward L. Ayers (The Promise of
The New South: Life After Reconstruction). In 1993, French
and Ayers co-authored an article - "The Strange Career of
Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory,
1943-1993" - for a volume of essays (Jeffersonian
Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf) marking the 250th
anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth. A one-year dissertation
fellowship from the Southern History Program and a two-year
predoctoral fellowship from The Carter G. Woodson Institute for
African-American and African Studies at U.Va. provided French
with crucial support during the research and writing of his
doctoral dissertation. He received his Ph.D. from the Corcoran
Department of History in May 2000.
French is an assistant
professor and associate director of
The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and
African Studies, where his teaching portfolio
includes courses in Southern History, African American History,
and African American Studies. He recently traveled to Havana,
Cuba, as part of a Ford Foundation-funded program exploring the
construction of racial identities in Africa and the Atlantic
World.
French is married to
Christine Madrid French, an architectural
historian and preservation activist. Their first child, Gideon,
was born in 2001.
The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory
* * *
* *
* * * * *
|
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 |
 |
*
* * * *
 |
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'."
|
* * * * *
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)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
update 4 December 2011
|
