Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory

In August 1831, Nat Turner, a 31-year-old slave claiming divine inspiration, led a band of rebels in the murder of some 60 white men, women and children in Southampton County, Virginia. In a careful investigation of the man and the myth, Greenberg, chair of the history department at Suffolk University and co-writer of a forthcoming documentary on Turner, includes recent and classic essays from 12 scholars, plus transcripts of interviews with novelist William Styron and Alvin Poussaint (Lay My Burden Down). Discussions, sometimes heated, range from the role of women in the insurrection to Turner's relationship to the local black community; from his name to his wife, or lack of one; and from the fate of his body to the question of slavery in Virginia and the country. Writes literary scholar Mary Kemp Davis: ""The rebellion event invites and resists interpretations at every turn."" Historian Herbert Aptheker's 1937 essay asserts that it was only at the moment of Turner's November 11, 1831 execution that Turner began to live. And indeed, he was quickly and posthumously notorious. The Confessions of Nat Turner, by Thomas R. Gray, a local attorney who interviewed Turner after he was caught, was immediately scrutinized; critics questioned the work's authenticity, doubting that a slave could speak so elegantly. During the Civil Rights movement, interpretations of Nat Turner continued; William Styron used Gray's work as a source for his novel of the same name, which in turn spawned the critical volume William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. A film of Styron's book lost steam due to lack of financing and the coordinated opposition activist Louise Meriwether. Greenberg writes that ""these events illustrate the deep and bitter divisions that made it virtually impossible for the nation to remember collectively its most important slave rebel during the 1960s, even in fictional Hollywood form."" Throughout the years, Turner scholarship has been""messy and confusing,"" Greenberg says, but he has done a fine job of collecting and introducing it here.