Originally uploaded by absentmindedlady
Fires of Jubilee , about the American slave insurgent Nat Turner is our first real reading assignment. All I vaguely recalled about him is that he lead a slave rebellion sometime in the early 1800’s.
Nat Turner was sold several times before his infamous rebellion, but he lived all of his relatively short life in Virginia around the Chesapeake Bay. In recent years I’ve travelled around there a bit visiting my sister and brother-in-law, so I was curious to get a picture of that area as it was when some of the beautiful buildings I’ve admired were first built.
The portrait I get of Turner’s Rebellion is an organized, sustained, premeditated effort of a group of slaves led by Turner to take down slavery in their corner of the South. Because of the brutality involved, I had been picturing a Kirk Douglas as Spartacus style situation, where one day some injustice was one too much and unleashed an impassioned fury, but that was not the case. (Come to think of it, I haven’t seen that movie in years, so I may be misremembering that as well).
The picture painted by the book, and by the more interesting Confessions is of a man aware from his earliest childhood that he was destined for something different. He cultivated an image as something of a mystic, and was profoundly religious. Evidently he had a deep intellectual curiousity, and always hoped that somehow he was meant for something better. I wonder if the drudgery was worse than the actual slavery. I don’t mean to say that slavery alone isn’t enough to drive anyone to madness or violence, but the book returns again and again to the fact that despite the fact that Turner was a literate and demonstrably intelligent man, his masters never put him in housework- always in fieldwork. It just makes me wonder if maybe having a job that at least gave marginal exposure to the things he seems to have craved- books, for one, his explosion would not have been quite so bloody.
And it was bloody. I was pretty shocked at the list of murders. Turner only killed one person, but it was a teenage girl he beat to death. His lieutenants and followers executed the rest of the killings- over forty deaths, mainly decapitations, including a schoolroom of children and some babies. Grisly stuff. Turner made sure that there were no rapes, but one can only imagine at the pent up rage required to axe someone to death. I’m repelled by the fact that it was women and children in addition to overseers and male plantation owners- that is to say, I’m repelled by all the deaths, but especially shocked by the deaths of women and children- but I supposed it’s got a sort of twisted logic. If you’re a slave, you’re not just owned by the master who holds your papers or the overseer, but even the youngest member of the white household is, in the most literal sense, the boss of you.
Sadly but predictably, the uprising didn’t last long, and the retribution of whites on slaves in the area was immediate and awful. Over two hundred black people, guilty and innocent, were killed, and some victims had their heads put up on pikes for display. That’s to say nothing of the longer-lasting legislation in the aftermath enacted as security measures.
It’s a sad story.
Your reaction to this reading reminds me of my reaction to the Luther movie that came out a few years ago… I had some vague knowledge of the protestant reformation, but I had always thought it was more a political and theological struggle — I hadn’t realized quite how many people had died in the revolution, how violent it had been.