Searching for the real Nat Turner, but finding his ghost in the rubble
Like Thomas Cromwell, the subject of Hilary Mantel’s recently completed Wolf Hall trilogy, Nat Turner is probably more famous as a fictional character than as a real historical individual. In his bestselling 1967 novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” William Styron sought to understand what drove Turner to spearhead a brutally violent 1831 uprising of enslaved and free African Americans in Southampton County, Virginia, in which approximately 60 white people were killed.
Styron’s book won the Pulitzer Prize, but some condemned the novel for infantilizing Nat Turner and offering too-sympathetic portrayals of slaveholders. But even more important, many black intellectuals and readers of the time asked, what gave a white writer the right to create, and in a sense “own,” this paragon of black resistance? This issue about who is allowed to represent people different than themselves resurfaced in last year’s tempest regarding Jeanine Cummins’ novel “American Dirt.”
But unlike Cromwell, how much can we actually know about Turner? He left no writings of his own. His only written traces were the usual legal documents recording events in an enslaved person’s life — birth, sale, rent, and, for the lucky few, manumission — and then an extensive, unreliable pre-execution interview with Turner conducted and published by a Virginia lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray. Styron relied heavily on Gray’s account (which was also called “The Confessions of Nat Turner”) for his own novel.
Turner’s uprising was a cataclysmic event in antebellum Southern history, fulfilling white society’s repressed terror of the millions of humans it had dehumanized. The uprising spurred a wholesale crackdown on the rights of black people in the South, free and enslaved both. Turner was a figure of revilement and nightmares. Even before William Styron created his Turner, he was more a legend than a man.
Given this, Christopher Tomlins asks in his challenging, provocative new book “In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History,” how can one reach back almost 200 years to understand the real Turner? Mr. Tomlins proposes to use the scanty historical record to recover this enigmatic man — not just his actions but his “way of thinking,” what the French call his “mentalité.”
This is particularly challenging, because Turner is “a person unavailed by history, a person whose very archival evanescence renders him … an enigma, a signifier pushed and pulled toward an extraordinary and contradictory array of signifieds.” Mr. Tomlins takes on the thorny problem he has set for himself from a number of angles, and the diversity of the approaches is a virtue of the book.
As the quoted sentence suggests, he’s influenced by French theory and philosophy about language and interpretation, and such sections won’t be palatable to every reader’s taste. Although the research is grounded in diligent archival digging, much of each chapter originally appeared in law-review journal articles and legal-studies anthologies, and the jargon, along with the critical-theory namedropping, can deter the lay reader.
But it’s not all Deleuze and Derrida. Nat Turner, Mr. Tomlins argues, was more David Koresh than Malcolm X. He saw himself not as a political warrior but as a religious figure, an avenging prophet, and Christopher Tomlins contextualizes Turner’s eschatology within American theological thought in the Second Great Awakening period.
Mr. Tomlins teaches law at Berkeley, and unsurprisingly his book offers a sophisticated and granular reconstruction of the legal, social, political and even geographical landscape of slave society in southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina, both before and in response to Turner’s raids. He is especially good on the growing tensions between older, aristocratic, plantation-based Virginia and the pioneer, smallholder uplands of the state (what is now West Virginia).
By the conclusion, Mr. Tomlins seems to have lost sight of his original intent to reconstruct Turner’s “mentalité,” but this isn’t necessarily a drawback. While the book started out as an intellectual biography of Turner, in the end it makes a much broader argument about how the “demonic ambiguities” inherent in the law, capitalism and Christianity fused in the antebellum South to create an evil, aberrant system “both economic and juridical, both moral and psychological, both profane and sacral” — and how Turner and the violence he wielded was an almost inevitable product of that “phantasmagoria.”
“IN THE MATTER OF NAT TURNER: A SPECULATIVE HISTORY” By Christopher Tomlins Princeton ($29.95)