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The
Uncertain Identity of Nathaniel Turner:
The
Scholars Debate
By
Rudolph Lewis
According to Gerald Peary in his article “Nat
Turner’s Second Coming: Set This House on Fire” (Village
Voice,
29 August 2001), filmmakers are making another attempt to
portray what Molefi Asante calls “The Real Nat Turner” (Emerge, March 2000). In this new “omnibus movie,” part
documentary and part fictional, director and co-writer Charles
Burnett uses six chosen texts, including Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Dred (1856),
Randolph Edmond’s “agitprop play Nat Turner,” and William Styron’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The
Confessions of Nat Turner (which James Baldwin
“adored”), and will also use six different actors to
dramatize the life and career of the Southampton prophet and
Christian apostle.
William
Styron, who used a Freudian analytical approach, rightly points
out that “Nat Turner has conformed to all those who consider
him, and been rewritten in the image of people writing about
him.” This author-influenced view may be applicable to the
1831 “Confessions” edited and published by Thomas R. Gray.
Nonetheless Turner’s testament is indispensable in determining
his character and his biblical theological perspective, which no
theologian or other commentator has ever attempted to ascribe to
the lawyer Gray. Yet we need to be more critical and systematic
about the folklore and other historical documents if we are to
get at the truth of Nathaniel Turner’s identity, which is
inseparable from his religiosity. To get at the center of
Turner’s theological perspective, such factors as the date of
his mother’s arrival in Virginia, his parentage, his religious
denomination and influences, his marital status, his struggle
for self-identity, and his goals must be clarified. This paper
will present that more systematic view.
Determining
the truth of the mother in the 1831 “Confessions” and her
role in Nathaniel’s life is essential in order to make sense
of Nathaniel’s family and his character. But Turner scholars
have failed to produce a coherent view of the young African
woman, named Nancy by her master Benjamin Turner, that rings
true. In his Trabelin’
On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (1979),
Mechal Sobel concludes that Turner’s mother “had been taken
from Africa some five years before his birth,” and that
Nathaniel’s father “may have also been born in Africa” (p.
162). Sobel’s estimation about the African mother’s arrival
in Virginia and the father’s ethnic origin are mere
imaginative speculations which Sobel cannot sustain by
reasoning or by documentation. Sobel’s primary aim is to use
Nathaniel’s life to sustain a thesis that the Baptist faith of
African Americans is a syncretic religion, part Christian and
part African.
In
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American Experience
(1999), edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates,
writer Robert Fay concludes that Nathaniel’s mother “was
kidnapped from Africa in 1793” and that Nathaniel’s father
“is believed to have spent his life in the Great Dismal Swamp
. . . with other escaped African Americans” (p. 1901). Again
the information provided on Turner’s parents is speculative
and imaginative, rather than factual and definite. Like Sobel,
Fay provides no documentation or reasoning for his conclusions.
As can be noted, a two-year difference exists in these two
accounts of Nancy’s arrival in Virginia. Sobel chose five
years before Turner’s birth (1795) and Fay seven years (1793).
Though neither writer included the rationale for such dates,
these estimations resulted from Turner’s account of his
“mother” in the 1831 “Confessions” in which she is a
woman who has fully absorbed a Christian world view. Thus this
“mother” needed to have been in Virginia for an extended
period of time.
Before
turning to the 1831 “Confessions” and its account of
Turner’s parents, two other factors must be considered,
namely, the physical descriptions of Nathaniel and the attempted
infanticide by his mother, both of which recur in folklore and
historical accounts. In
Before the Mayflower (1962), Lerone Bennett, Jr., then
history editor of Ebony magazine, concluded that Nathaniel Turner was “black in
color" (p. 118). In
Black Odyssey: The Story of the Negro in America (1949). Roi
Ottley described Turner derisively as “short, black, and calm,
with a hairless bullet head set on broad shoulders” (p. 139).
Neither of these reputable scholars accounted for his source of
information. Again, we have
a case of imaginative projection.
Documents
contemporary to the events provide a contrasting description.
According to the Governor of Virginia’s 1831 proclamation and
the letter of Jerusalem resident W. G. Parker, Nathaniel Turner
was of a “rather bright complexion.” Both accounts go on to
explain that Turner could not be confused as a white man; that
is, he did not have the typical appearance of a mulatto, for he
also had strong Negroid features which included a “large flat
nose” (Tragle, p. 421 and Foner, p. 13). In a set of four
video tapes made for the Southampton Historical Society, Gilbert
Francis, descendant of local slave holders and a folk historian,
makes an unsuccessful attempt to account for Turner’s
“bright complexion.” Francis theorizes that Turner’s
mother was from the Nile Valley and was of an “olive color.”
This East African theory of the origin of Turner’s mother
seems highly unlikely and raises the suspicion that this
explanation of Turner’s complexion was manufactured by
Turner’s white family and sustained by their co-religionists
to mask the sexual impropriety of Benjamin Turner, Nancy’s owner and master.
This
documentary tape of the Southampton Historical Society provides
not only a different description of Turner’s skin complexion
but also a different timeline for the arrival of Turner’s
mother in Cross Keys. According to Gilbert Francis, slave
traders imported Turner’s mother from Africa to Jamestown and
sold her on an auction block in Suffolk, Virginia, to Ben
Turner, then in his early 30s “some time between January and
March of 1800” (Nat
Turner Insurrection—1831, Tape 1). Francis’ 1800 date is
at odds with the 1793 date in Gates’ Africana
and the 1795 date in Sobel’s Trabelin’
On. If Francis is correct in his timeline (which seems
reasonable in light of other factors), this fact must alter
entirely how we interpret other events in Turner’s life and
how we interpret events narrated in the 1831 “Confessions.”
In
his video narrative, Gilbert Francis also sustains the tale of
the attempted infanticide. According to Francis’ account,
Nathaniel’s mother tried to kill him at birth, as soon as he
came out of the womb, because she “did not want her baby to
grow up in slavery.” But this kind of conclusion that Nancy
possessed a radical “abolitionist sentiment” seems
unjustified historically and culturally. In his The
Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral
Discourse (1995), Peter J. Parris, Professor of Social
Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, points out rightly
that “African slaves did not arrive on these shores as
full-blown abolitionists” (p. 62).
In their world-view,
Africans coming from a tribal background possessed neither a
“pan-African [nor] racial identity” (p. 61). According to
Parris, “Africans had long practiced domestic slavery where
the captive became attached to the family and gradually was
assimilated into it at the lowest rank.” So, with respect to
the ethical legitimacy of the institution of slavery, Parris
continues, “there was virtually no difference between
slaveholding Christianity and African religions” (p. 62).
Thus, Nancy’s ethnic origin nor her religion seems to account
for this African mother’s odd and bewildering behavior. We
must, therefore, look elsewhere for a more reasonable
explanation.
If
we allow that Nathaniel had a “bright complexion” and that
his mother arrived in the village of Cross Keys, the center of
the Southampton Rebellion, “some time between January and
March of 1800,” we must also allow that the most likely
candidate for Nathaniel’s father is the thirty-four-year-old
Benjamin Turner, her owner and master. That a young terrified
African girl in her teens would make a free sexual alliance with
an American slave immediately on stepping off a slave ship,
especially without Ben Turner’s consent, seems too incredible,
baffling and exceedingly doubtful. Such a determination would
play on the stereotype of the loose morality of African females,
which none openly will try to sustain.
A
more likely scenario would be that the sight of the newborn’s
complexion rekindled the angst
Nancy felt when she was ravished; it marked her shame and
symbolized the violence visited upon her by her new master,
Benjamin Turner. In addition, Ben Turner had by his wife
Elizabeth, according to F. Roy Johnson, “three sons and two
daughters—by age, Samuel, Nancy, John Clark, Susanna, and
Benjamin B,” (The Nat Turner Slave Insurrection, p. 18). In that John Clark and
Nathaniel, playmates during their childhood, were about the same
age, it is likely that Ben Turner’s wife was pregnant with her
third child John Clark when Nancy was bought on the auction
block in Suffolk and brought to Cross Keys (Nat
Turner Insurrection—1831, Tapes 1 and 2). The pregnancy of
the wife Elizabeth thus created a situation and condition for
Ben Turner’s probable sexual impropriety with the young
African teenager, Nathaniel’s mother.
But
there are additional factors suggestive of Ben Turner’s
paternity of Nancy’s baby. It was Ben Turner who named the
child Nathaniel, which in Hebrew means “gift of God.”
(Nathaniel is also the name of one of the disciples of Jesus in
the Gospel of John; it was he who first recognized Jesus as the
Son of God [1:49].) It was also Ben Turner who gave the child to
Harriet and Tom to be raised. (Harriet and Tom were house slaves
who had probably also been owned by Ben Turner’s father.) This
scenario of taking the child from the mother and giving it to
older slaves to raise was not unusual.
According to Frederick
Douglass’ 1845 Narrative, this was a common practice so that the child did not
develop an affection for his mother. In his domestic drama,
Douglass wrote: “I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother
by the light of day. . . . Very little communication ever took
place between us. . . . I was not allowed to be present during
her illness, at her death or at her burial.” The nameless
father in the “Confessions” that ran away was probably Tom,
Nathaniel’s surrogate father rather than his biological
father. We must also conclude that the “mother” and the
“grandmother” referred to in the “Confessions” are one
and the same person, namely, Harriet.
With
this background, we turn now to the 1831 “Confessions” and
the miraculous events of Turner’s childhood which he believed
were critical in determining his career as prophet and his
becoming an apostle of Jesus Christ.
Being
at play with other children, when three or four years old, I was
telling them something, which my mother overhearing said it had
happened before I was born . . .
others being called on were greatly astonished, knowing
that these things had happened, and caused them to say in my
hearing, I surely would be a prophet as the Lord had shewn me
things that had happened before my birth. And my mother and
father strengthened me in this my first impression, saying in my
presence, I was intended for some great purpose, which they had
always thought from certain marks on my head and breast.
According to Mechal Sobel, this interpretation of the
birth marks was an “African tradition . . . his mother Nancy .
. . was not very distant from” (p. 162). Sobel’s cultural
analysis, however, runs counter to that of Anglican priest John
Mbiti, author of the influential book African
Religions and Philosophy (1969). “In the strict biblical
sense of prophets and
the prophetic movement,” according to Mbiti, “there are no
prophets in African traditional societies,” for African
concepts of time “lack the long dimension of the future” (p.
248). Thus Nancy could not have been the “mother” to which
Turner makes reference to in the 1831 “Confessions,”
for she had not been acculturated to the extent that she could
offer such religious training.
When
speaking of his “mother,” Turner, as is common even today
among African-Americans, was speaking of his surrogate mother
and “grandmother,” namely, Harriet, who should be viewed
more precisely as Nathaniel’s “spiritual mother and
guide.” In any event, for a slave child, Nathaniel received
considerable and uncommon attention. Seemingly, it was Harriet
who set up an interview with her fellow religionists of
Turner’s Meeting House, a Methodist congregation founded and
headed by Ben Turner in his own household. Turner told Gray,
“My grand mother, who was very religious . . . my master [Ben
Turner] . . . and other religious persons who visited the house
and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my
manners . . . and my uncommon intelligence for a child, remarked
I had too much sense to be raised and . . . I would never be of
service to any one as a slave.” In this account, Harriet
seemingly extracted a promise from Ben Turner for Nathaniel’s
eventual freedom.
There
were also additional childhood events that further assured
Nathaniel that he had a special destiny. He learned to read and
write without teachers. He knew the contents of books without
having studied. He made paper, gunpowder, and other items
without training. By age seventeen, Nathaniel was able to
conclude definitively that he had indeed been set aside by God
for a divine mission, for it was at the ages of seventeen and
nineteen that he received his first two revelations, in which
the Holy Spirit urged Nathaniel to seek the kingdom of Heaven.
Though
not mentioned directly in the 1831 “Confessions,” the period
from 1810 to 1823 was one of great crisis for Ben Turner’s
family. In 1810 Ben Turner died. According to F. Roy Johnson,
“All thirty of the old master’s slaves were divided between
their mistress [Elizabeth] and her five children. (The Nat Turner Slave Insurrection, p. 27). Sam Turner, however,
received the greater portion of Ben Turner’s estate which
included 360 acres of land (Nat
Turner Insurrection—1831, Tapes 1-2). With fewer slaves
than his father, Sam Turner did not indulge Nathaniel as had his
father and thus sent Ben Turner’s young protégé and son to
the fields to work behind the plow. Nathaniel remained until the
very end a field slave, a radical contrast to his earlier status
as pampered house slave. In 1822, Samuel Turner died. His
slaves, including Nathaniel, were placed on the auction block to
assure his wife and children an income.
At
Ben Turner’s death, there was an economic downturn in
Virginia, which was mirrored in the 1832 legislative speech of
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, nephew of the master of Monticello.
Randolph reported that the exportation of slaves had “averaged
8,500 for the last twenty years,” that is, from 1812 to 1832.
Randolph concluded that it had become an “increasing practice,
in parts of Virginia to rear slaves for the market” (The
Negro in Virginia, p. 179).
From a religious perspective,
Methodists in Virginia mirrored less and less God’s universal
salvific will, which is everywhere and always, by becoming more
exclusionary in their religious practices. The Methodist Discipline
of 1796 which took a strong stand against the buying and selling
of slaves was less observed. By 1820, the Methodist policy of
“delayed manumission schedule agreements,” under which Ben
Turner probably promised Nathaniel his freedom, ceased to be
used as frequently. “Methodism moved from a persecuted,
radical sect to dominant church (The
Garden of Methodism, pp. 161-163; 167-168).
In
Cross Keys, Turner’s Meeting House, founded by Ben Turner,
which included both white and black, slave and free—in the
Pauline manner—reestablished itself as Turner’s Methodist
Church, headed by Nathaniel’s second master and Ben Turner’s
eldest son, Samuel, who was a trustee. This Cross Keys’
religious institution in its ecclesiastical majesty excluded
slaves from worshipping and partaking of the sacraments along
with their masters.
In effect, Christian slave holders stood
treacherously between Christian slaves and God’s “real
presence” and his “true and effectual means of grace.”
Christian slave holders thus forced Christian slaves to develop
other means of reenacting the Lord’s baptism, his Last Supper,
and his sacrifice on the cross. The efforts of Christian slaves
to restore this symbolical loss of God’s living presence can
be seen in Nathaniel’s Eucharistic vision, that is, the blood
of Christ falling from heaven as dew and landing on the leaves
of corn and also sacred writings appearing in the blood of
Christ.
At
age twenty-one, Nathaniel demanded that Samuel fulfill Ben
Turner’s promise of freedom. But Sam Turner, who died suddenly
a year later in 1822, refused the demand and had Nathaniel
whipped for his arrogant self-assertion. These events threw
Nathaniel into a spiritual crisis. He ran away into the
wilderness of Cross Keys, forsaking the Holy Spirit’s urge
that he “seek the kingdom of Heaven,” a phrase that can be
found in both the Gospel of Matthew (6:33) and the Gospel of
Luke (12:31). Nathaniel, however, returned to his master after
thirty days, prompted by yet another encounter with the Holy
Spirit, in which he was told that he must do the will of his
Master, that is, Jesus Christ, or be beaten with many stripes,
an admonition that can be found at Luke 12:47. The entire
chapter of Luke 12 is important for an understanding of
Turner’s theological vision and his rationale for a holy war,
especially verses 49-53 in which Jesus exclaims he came not for
peace but division even within families and for the baptism of
his own death.
Soon
after his wilderness experience, it is believed that Nathaniel
“married,” a tale oft-repeated in folklore and history
books. Most likely, Sam Turner concocted this notion of
marriage, an arrangement which fell well short of the true
meaning of the word. For African-American slaves, marriage with
all of its spiritual and legal rights was an impossibility in
the village of Cross Keys. Local whites and others in retelling
the "Nat Turner Story" paired Nathaniel with Cherry as a means to
conceal Sam Turner’s sexual impropriety with the slave girl
Cherry. This pattern of deception by local religionists is not
new to the slave-holding regime. Douglass wrote about such
deceptions in his 1845 Narrative. In addition, we have already demonstrated above how slave
owners and their heirs fudged Ben Turner’s rape of
Nathaniel’s mother Nancy when she first arrived in Cross Keys
after which she conceived and bore Ben Turner’s son Nathaniel.
As
Styron pointed out
in the Village Voice (29 August 2001), to portray the prophet of
Southampton as the head of a bourgeois family with wife and
child, as John Henrik Clarke argued in Ten
Black Writers Respond (1968), would be to ignore the ascetic
life and calling that Nathaniel Turner etched out clearly in the
1831 “Confessions,” a religious life recommended in chapter
seven of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. In the midst
of slave breeding and slave trading, it is reasonable to think
that Turner believed as Paul, “It is a good thing for a man
not to touch a woman” (7:1), for “An unmarried man is
anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the
Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the
world, how he may please his wife” (7:32-33). Undoubtedly, the
1831 “Confessions” portrays Nathaniel Turner clearly as a
man “anxious
about the things of the Lord.”
Allow
me to conclude by sketching briefly the three stages that can be
seen in the life of Nathaniel Turner. His first stage was an
idyllic one. He lived in the household of his master and father
Ben Turner and received many accolades and considerable
attention by Ben Turner’s Pauline religious community.
Beginning with the death of Ben Turner, Nathaniel Turner entered
his second developmental stage which was one of paternal
abandonment and betrayal. In this progressive level, Nathaniel
moved into his central crisis of growth and self-identity. He
was owned by three separate masters, including his half-brother
Sam Turner; and at his death, Nathaniel was sold on the auction
block and bought by Thomas Moore; and at his death, Nathaniel
was inherited by Thomas Moore’s six-year-old son, Putnam, who
was one of the children slaughtered in the Rebellion.
During
this middle stage of identity creation, Nathaniel was in
psychological bondage: he lacked direction; he was confused,
questioning and trying to find the meaning of love, authority,
rebellion, and fatherhood. In the words of theologian William
Hamilton, Nathaniel Turner was an Oedipal believer, “a man
standing still and alone in a desolate place . . . looking up to
the heavens . . . no eyes of flesh, only eyes of faith . . .
crying out his questions to the heavens” (The
Death of God Movement, p. 67). Nathaniel Turner, however,
did become an “autonomous religious personality.” Like
Christ, he stood beside his neighbor, that is, by those at the
bottom of society, his fellow slaves.
In this final stage of maturation,
Nathaniel Turner can be likened to the Greek character Orestes,
who eschews an inexorable fate. Orestean theology means an end
to a preoccupation with inner conflict, the agony of faith, and
the careful confessions of sin. When emphasizing Turner’s
killing of Margaret Whitehead as “incredibly significant,”
William Styron was exceedingly perceptive. For Nathaniel Turner,
Margaret Whitehead symbolized Turner’s Methodist Church, the
religious institution that sanctified in Cross Keys slave
breeding and slave trading or more specifically the “works of
the flesh” listed by Paul at Galatians 5:19-21.
The leaders of
the Church desecrated marriage vows, violated the sanctity of
family, and dissolved numerous families for monetary greed. By
these moral crimes, untold and de-emphasized, the Christian
slave holders of Cross Keys found security and authority. In his
decisive choice, Nathaniel Turner understood that only when
these acts are abolished can one inherit the kingdom of Heaven.
Taking up his cross, he exacted the wrath of his Lord Jesus
Christ and atoned for his “crimes” with his own life’s
blood. Because of his Christian decisiveness and sacrifice, I
thus offer Nathaniel Turner as a paradigmatic hero for
contemporary man. * * * *
*
update 28 June 2008 |
