*As always,
there are spoilers ahead*
The
Heartland Film Festival plays for two weeks every fall here in
Indianapolis. In spite of the fact that
we have lived here for ten years, this is the first year that Ann and I have been
able to attend any of the screenings. Our
son was in California for his fall break, so we took a Friday off and saw three
films in a row. The last film for the
night was We Are the Giant, a documentary by Greg Barker about three
pairs of individuals involved in separate Arab Spring rebellions. It was a fantastic film, and I highly
recommend that you see it when it is released in theaters. One of the striking features of the film is
that all the people at the center of the narratives are still in the midst of
the revolutions. Nothing is settled, and
these people are fighting against an institutional power with no assurances
that they will be victorious or that their cause will not be undermined even if
victory is attained. This uncertainty of
rebellion has been bouncing around in my head since the viewing. The other aspect of the stories that
resonated with me was the violence of any political uprising. Some revolutions begin with bullets, but
others are begun with a determination to employ only peaceful means. At some point, however, those peaceful
protestors are set upon by tanks and machine guns run by the national powers
that are equally determined not to be overthrown.
Do the protestors avoid violence and offer themselves as sacrificial
lambs and martyrs, or do they pick up arms and fight not only for freedom but
for self preservation?
It was not
until I was half way into the novel that I realized the issues fresh
in my head from We Are the Giant are also at play in William Styron’s The
Confessions of Nat Turner. From the
start, I knew that I was reading a fictionalized account of the 1831 slave
rebellion led by Nat Turner, the largest slave uprising in history. I knew that there is a real 20-page document
of Turner’s confessions and that Styron, as he says in his Author’s Note that
opens the novel, “rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the
revolt of which he was the leader,” but that “in those areas where there is
little knowledge in regard to Nat, his early life, and the motivations for the
revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself
the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events.” Yet knowing those things, I had no idea how
Turner would be created or how his rebellion would be imagined. The details of those imaginings are the very
things that make this novel incredible.
How many
reasons could a slave possibly need for rising up and killing his oppressors? I never expected anything impressive because
no labor would need to be done to even imagine the motives. But Styron does a beautiful job of making his
world as messy and as complicated and as real as life itself. His characters are complex jumbles of
competing motivations and desires and the book stinks of their sweat and worry,
their aspirations and longings. The
slave owners and white lawyers are as human as Nat and his inner circle of
friends who help him execute his plan.
Styron, in short, takes no short cuts.
He does not let any of his or your assumptions about slaves, slave
owners, whites, blacks, early 19th-century Virginians dictate his
story. As a result, the reader is always
on a voyage of discovery in this tragic world brought magically to life.
The novel
begins in a jail cell where Nat and his friend Hark are imprisoned waiting for
their trials and eventual executions. In
the first part of the novel, Nat meets with Thomas Gray, an attorney who takes down
his confession and writes it up for Nat to sign. In this section we learn the general facts of the matter, as
Styron uses actual passages from the original text published as The
Confessions of Nat Turner. We learn
that Nat is well versed in the Bible, that he is something of a reverend, that
he is well educated and feeling separated from his God. I assumed that his rebellion started as an
impulsive act against a cruel overseer that gained unintentional speed, so it was with some shock that I
read this offhand statement that Nat makes in the middle of a reverie:
I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me, and there was thus available to me more time than I had ever had before to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me.
The calm with which
Turner referred to the mass slaughter of “all the white people” took me by surprise
and made me uncomfortable. Moreover his
religious fervor and sense that the Bible was “exhort[ing]” him on a “mission”
made me think to myself that Turner must be a little nuts and a dangerous
religious zealot. And as I said earlier,
it was not until the middle of the novel that I began to understand how Nat
could so casually insist of killing every white person, men, women, and
children without being the least bit crazy.
Nat may feel
his religion strongly, but his thinking is always ordered and rational—there is
no trace of insanity in his plans. Nat’s
goal is to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom
in the depths of a nearby swamp from where they can defend themselves
from whites seeking to re-enslave them.
It is a three day march through the countryside and along the way, he
and his crew will need to amass an army, supplies, weapons, and horses to
ensure their reaching the swamp and surviving once there. As Nat tells his four disciples when first
revealing his plan to them, “One or two niggers run off an’ they send out the
dogs. Three niggers run off an’ they sent
out the army.” In short, the white men
react strongly to the smallest rebellion, so the reaction to something large
will be astronomical. If Nat and his
followers are to survive three days, they will need to go undiscovered for at
least two. To go
undiscovered, no one can be left alive to run and warn the other. No one.
The reality of this necessity is brought to the reader slowly and
subtly, and it becomes clear that Nat is correct—any betrayal can undo them,
and to spare one white life is to create the argument that another should be spared,
and mercy will result in their ultimate defeat.
In fact, it is one tiny act of mercy by Nat himself that does undo the
rebellion leading to an alarm going up among the whites, which puts an eventual
end to the rebellion. As a reader you are in a no win situation, wanted Nat to succeed and wanting no one to have to die.
This
necessity of death is the tragedy at the heart of the book. The very institution of slavery and the
violence (and continual threat of violence) by the whites needed to keep
slavery alive is the very thing that necessitates the murder of so many
innocents. Just like those involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, in Virginia, 1831, there can
be no peaceful rebellion if the rebellion has any hopes of ending in freedom. Styron weaves this fact together through the
slow building of the novel and the revealing of the characters and the
character of the world they live in.
Styron does what I admire most of any writer, creating characters who
are understandable, admirable in their own way, though flawed in equally
understandable ways. I don’t need to
like a character, but I need to love something about them, to love that
complicated knot at their heart that makes them incontrovertibly human.
The
Confessions of Nat Turner is a heartbreaking and powerful novel, beautifully
constructed and beautifully written.
