Kyle Baker's graphic narrative, Nat Turner, juxtaposes its
images and text in a way strikingly different from the traditional
graphic narrative. Baker's illustrated narrative is almost
"silent" or textless. Interspersed on many pages are quotes
from the most significant original historical source for the story: Nat
Turner's 1831 confession to Thomas Gray. The juxtaposition of image
and text is often complementary, but more often, Baker's images
expand or even contradict Gray's narrative, creating a kind of
antagonistic relationship between word and picture. This essay also
traces a similar antagonistic or revisionary relationship between Baker
and William Styron's novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, as well
as the critiques that appeared in William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten
Black Writers Respond, edited by John Clarke. Baker reflects the
controversial history of Nat Turner by suspending multiple versions of
the historical figure within his graphic narrative.
On July 2, 2007, cartoonist Kyle Baker published a single-panel
cartoon titled "Happy Independence Day!" on his website. (1)
This cartoon depicts Thomas Jefferson seated comfortably inside his home
while writing the famous line from the Declaration of Independence,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal. ..." Meanwhile, in the background, a slave boy is pressing
himself against the window and pleading, "Daddy, I'm
cold," while slave masters whip slaves in the fields behind him.
(see Figure 1). The cartoon's satiric commentary on race and
American history is obvious, but I would argue that this panel also
makes a comment about comics as well--specifically, the use of the
graphic narrative form in depicting historical events. This is
especially evident through the way in which the division of panes in the
window visually resembles the panels of a comic page, inviting the
audience to read that section like a comic within the larger panel--a
page that reveals a narrative about the trauma of slavery that Jefferson
ignores.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The irony in this cartoon occurs in the juxtaposition of text and
image. The text, coming from a well-known historical document, is
rendered false by the evidence outside the window, which, other than the
brief dialogue, "Daddy, I'm cold," is depicted through
cartoon images. Therefore, Baker uses the powerful imagery in the
background to undermine the "truth" of the written historical
record.
The point of view in this cartoon also presents certain ethical and
ideological problems for the reader. The audience, regardless of an
individual reader's race, is positioned inside the house with
Jefferson, looking out, thus aligning the reader with the beneficiaries
of the freedoms associated with the Declaration of Independence. In
addition, readers are also aligned with the perspective of the slave
owner in that the real violence happens far off in the distance, away
from our realm of experience, and in a shadowy silhouette. Yet unlike
Jefferson's, our backs are not turned away from the violence;
instead, we face it in a way that highlights a perspective that benefits
from a contemporary understanding of the history of slavery in America
and which allows us to see the irony of the cartoon.
The juxtaposition of the historical text and cartoon image
resembles the postmodern use of intertexuality in historiographic
metafiction--fiction that metatextually comments on and critiques the
written historical record--as described by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics
of Postmodernism. In particular, Hutcheon sees feminist and African
American postmodern writers as particularly adept at using historical
intertexts to parodically challenge traditional power structures:
"[Such authors] have gone far to expose--very self-reflexively--the
myth- or illusion-making tendencies of historiography. They have also
linked racial and/or gender difference to questions of discourse and of
authority and power that are at the heart of the postmodernist
enterprise in general and, in particular, of both black theory and
feminism" (Hutcheon 1988, 16). (2) At its simplest, the cartoon
undercuts the myth of equality established in the Declaration of
Independence by exposing it to the historical truth of slavery, which
was condoned by the same man who wrote those famous words about
equality. This may be the example par excellence of the "ironic
intertextuality" that Hutcheon describes (134).
While Hutcheon's discussion focuses solely on prose fiction,
Hillary Chute directly addresses the unique opportunities that graphic
narratives can have in dealing with history: "In particular,
graphic narrative offers compelling, diverse examples that engage with
different styles, methods, and modes to consider the problem of
historical representation" (Chute 2008, 457). Graphic narratives
seem to be particularly adept at showing traumatic personal and
historical events, Chute argues, because creators of such works
"refuse to show [the traumatic side of history] through the lens of
unspeakability or invisibility, instead registering its difficulty
through inventive (and various) textual practice" (459).
Additionally, "Graphic narrative suggests that historical accuracy
is not the opposite of creative invention; the problematics of what we
consider fact and fiction are made apparent by the role of drawing"
(459). By utilizing this ironic juxtaposition of image and text,
Baker's single panel cartoon, while humorous, demonstrates
comics' ability to represent traumatic history through these
tensions between image and text and history and creativity. This
incident in Jefferson's life likely never happened in this way, but
the image and text speak to a truth about America's failure to live
up to its own basic tenets when it comes to the equality of its
citizens.
This panel also provides a model for reading Kyle Baker's
historical graphic narrative, Nat Turner (2008), about the 1831
Southampton slave insurrection led by the eponymous figure. This is
especially true of the way in which the graphic narrative relates to or
engages with the various texts, both historical and fictional, about
Turner's slave insurrection, in the same way that Baker's
"Independence" image engages with the text of the Declaration
of Independence. These texts, specifically, include Thomas Gray's
1831 document The Confessions of Nat Turner (which serves as a literal
inter-text within Baker's graphic narrative), William Styron's
controversial 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the
responses to Styron's novel recorded in John Hendrik Clarke's
William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. (3)
Baker's Nat Turner juxtaposes its images and text in a way
strikingly different from the traditional graphic narrative, but one
which exploits the graphic narrative's potential to visualize
historical trauma as Chute describes. Baker's illustrated narrative
contains almost no conventional verbal elements, such as word balloons
or caption boxes, with the exception of a few sound effects and a single
phrase--"RUN, DADDY! RUN!"--that repeats in several balloons
over the course of three pages (Baker 2008, 82-84). Running in the white
space of many pages, however, are quotes from the most significant
original historical source for the story: Nat Turner's 1831
confession to Thomas Gray on the eve of his trial for leading a violent
slave revolt that resulted in the murders of fifty-five white people in
Southampton County,Virginia. Baker quotes almost the entirety of
Gray's text, which Gray claimed was a transcription of
Turner's oral confession, but Baker leaves out some information
about the uprising, the legal case, and stories of survivors clearly
added by Gray. (4) Baker also often adds to the illustrated narrative
scenes derived more from general research on slavery than from the
Turner story in particular, but such scenes speak more to the historical
truth of slavery than to the specific, known details of Turner's
life. The juxtaposition of Baker's images and Gray's text is
often complementary, but more often, Baker's visual narrative
expands or even contradicts Gray's verbal narrative, creating a
kind of antagonistic relationship between word and picture similar to
the one deployed in the "Independence" cartoon. (5) The
polyvocality (a term used with some irony, as the dominant
"voice" Baker deploys is a virtually silent visual narrative)
of Baker's approach opens up the Nat Turner story in such a way
that multiple interpretations of the slave leader's controversial
life can be suspended within the single graphic narrative, and in a way
that makes Baker's text more than just an illustrated version of
Gray's narrative, as it may look like on the surface.
The relationship between image and text in visual narratives has
been discussed by W. J. T. Mitchell, and Mitchell's conception of
the "image/text" has in turn informed comics studies, in which
many scholars have dealt with Mitchell's essential question:
"The real question to ask when confronted with these kinds of
image-text relations is not 'What is the difference (or similarity)
between the words and images?' but 'What differences do the
differences (and similarities) make?" (Mitchell 1994, 116). (6)
This question certainly informs this particular study of Kyle
Baker's work. In Nat Turner, the reader is in a constant state of
flux, trying to align the visual and verbal registers of the work. How
do the pictures relate to the words? Are the pictures illustrative,
supplementary, complementary, or contradictory? All of these comparisons
between the visual and the verbal function in Baker's narrative,
but the relationship is neither easy to decode nor organic, as it would
be if Baker's images were merely illustrations of Gray's text,
or as it would be in more traditional graphic narratives, where word
balloons and caption boxes usually occupy the same panel space as the
images. In Alternative Comics, Charles Hatfield identifies "several
kinds of tension, in which various ways of reading--various interpretive
options and potentialities--must be played against each other" in
the medium of comics (Hatfield 2005, 36). One of these, "code vs.
code," explains the tension between word and image in comics:
"comics depend on a dialectic between what is easily understood and
what is less easily understood; pictures are open, easy, and solicitous,
while words are coded, abstract, and remote" (36). Baker pushes
this particular tension to its limit, and, as Hatfield's definition
implies, the reader tends to favor the visual text over the written in
the transmission of meaning. Key moments in Baker's visual
narrative break free from Gray's verbal text to reveal elements of
Turner's life derived from other sources, or aspects of slavery in
general. In particular, Baker adds images that display other modes of
resistance among slaves, including secret attempts to achieve literacy
and the use of coded messages sent through drum beats. Baker also
includes many atrocities associated with the practice of slavery,
including violent whippings and mutilations. These events are not
mentioned in Turner's testimony as documented in Gray's
narrative, but they have credibility because the reader's
contemporary understanding of slave history includes such underground
activities.
Michael Chaney discusses Ho Che Anderson's use of photography
in his graphic biography King in a way that can be useful for
understanding Baker's use of Gray: "In borrowing from this
[photographic] archive, Ho Che Anderson fundamentally asserts the
fungibility of image repertoires, capitalizing on their semantic
manipulability to augment the generic expectations of biography and the
graphic novel form, which seamlessly makes a routine out of the
juxtaposition of images and the multidimensionality of their
meanings" (Chaney 2007, 188). Replacing the photographic archive in
the above quote with the historical archive represented by Gray, we can
see how Gray attempts to fix Turner with a specific meaning--a monstrous
criminal who slaughtered many innocent white people--while Baker's
images open the reader to a more "multidimensional"
understanding of Turner.
Chaney applies Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s conception of
"Signifyin(g)" to the African American graphic narratives
discussed in his essay, and that concept is relevant to Baker's
work as well. For Gates, "Signifyin(g)" constitutes a variety
of "language games, ... figurative substitutions, [and] free
associations" that appear in African American vernacular and
literary discourses (Gates 1988, 58). Gates asserts that "The black
tradition is double-voiced," meaning that texts in this tradition
"talk to other texts" (xxv).This intertextual relationship,
then, involves various kinds of revision from one text to another. One
type of "Signifyin(g),""motivated Signifyin(g)" (for
Gates, something like parody),"functions to redress an imbalance of
power, to clear a space, rhetorically" (124). Gates is primarily
concerned with the way in which the African American literary tradition
builds upon itself through one writer's revising another, and, for
the most part, Gates presents "Signifyin(g)" as a primarily
verbal or textual concept. However, it is helpful to see Baker's
Nat Turner as "double-voiced" in a very literal sense, as the
artist's images "signify on"--comment on, undercut, or
revise--the text that comes from Gray's narrative. Baker's
images also literally "create a space" for his version
ofTurner's story in relation to Gray's text on the very pages
of the graphic narrative, occasionally creating interesting
relationships between image and text. Through this relationship, Baker
"signifies on" the entire historical and literary tradition
that has attempted to fix Nat Turner in a variety of particular roles.
The dialectical imbalance between image and text is exacerbated by
the historical reputation of Gray's narrative, which claims to be
derived from Nat Turner's exact words but clearly contains enough
editorializing, bias, and revision on the part of Gray to raise serious
doubts about its veracity. Gray opens the Confessions with a message
"To the Public," claiming that this is Turner's direct
confession transcribed by the lawyer: "I determined for the
gratification of public curiosity to commit his statements to writing,
and publish them, with little or no variation, from his own words. That
this is a faithful record of his confessions, the annexed certificate of
the County Court of Southampton, will attest. They certainly bear one
stamp of truth and sincerity" (Gray 1831, 40). However, the
language used for Nat's "voice" is almost certainly
Gray's creation, and Gray's own attitude toward the revolt is
clearly expressed:
Gray's agenda is clear: to depict the rebel slaves as
"fiendish," "remorseless murderers" and Turner
himself as a mad "fanatic." (7) Baker lets Gray's
representation of Turner and his revolution stand in relation to the
cartoon images that intersect with and diverge from this document, thus
suspending multiple interpretations of the historical event in a single
work. Chaney's description of other African American graphic
narratives, including Baker's collaboration on Birth of a Nation,
is also relevant here: "each author seeks to confront and revise
history, to discover or invent a usable history by repurposing
inflexible items or images from an archive founded upon black exclusion
and misrepresentation" (Chaney 2007, 199). The various revisions
and reassessments of Turner's story following the publication of
Gray's Confessions seem to confront Gray and attempt to resurrect
Nat Turner's lost voice within his own story.
Baker's attempt to find a "usable history" in Nat
Turner can be read through a historical lens that is not only influenced
by a contemporary understanding of slavery in general, but also through
a more recent controversy about Nat Turner in particular: the late
1960s/early 1970s debates that surrounded William Styron's novel,
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Though Baker does not directly
cite Styron's controversial and problematic prose nove1, (8) the
debate surrounding that earlier work informs Baker's graphic novel,
and the intersections with and digressions from the key disagreements of
that debate highlight a profound ambivalence about whose "Nat
Turner" is most historically accurate. In this sense, Baker also
"signifies on" Styron's novel and the surrounding
controversy in a sense akin to Gates's conception of the term.
William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner was published
in late 1967 to almost universal critical acclaim, followed months later
by a Pulitzer Prize. Upon the awarding of the prize, however, came a
dramatic increase in negative responses to the novel, mostly from black
writers and intellectuals. These responses crystallized in the
publication of William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers
Respond, edited by John Clarke. This collection attacked Styron and his
novel on several points, ranging from historical inaccuracy to overt
racism. (9) Most of the contributors object to the idea of a white
novelist's appropriating a black cultural hero. For some, like
Charles V. Hamilton, Styron is an apologist for slavery whose motivation
is to further an insidious, racist agenda. Others, like Lerone Bennett,
Jr., criticize Styron for reinforcing certain stereotypes of black
masculinity and black history. The more charitable contributors, like
psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint, attribute the problems to Styron's
unwitting and unintentional racism. Bennett lays out a clear statement
of the disjunction between the ten writers' historical
understanding of Nat Turner and Styron's:
In addition to the racial debate inherent here--the white writer
imposing his own white sensibilities on this black historical
figure--the parameters of the historical debate are clear as well:
Styron has substituted a novelist's imagination for historical
fact. This very binary between fiction and fact is what historiographic
metafiction seeks to dismantle, according to Hutcheon, and such binary
challenging is also what Chute sees as the particular purview of the
historical graphic narrative. Therefore, Baker situates his graphic
narrative within a larger historical debate on the Nat Turner story, yet
unlike the prose fiction and historical contributions to that debate,
Baker's Nat Turner, through the formal choices the cartoonist
makes, resists the narrow limitations to which those contributions fall
prey.
For both Baker and Styron, the appeal of Nat Turner's story is
similar: a virtually blank historical canvas, or, at the very least, one
in which the available data are flexible enough to allow some creative
interpretation. As Albert E. Stone writes in The Return of Nat Turner,
"there simply are no texts or historical records of this event
whose authority remains unquestioned" (Stone 1992, 24-25). In his
preface to the Abrams edition, (10) Baker points out that his first
exposure to the Nat Turner story was one paragraph in an American
history textbook, and future investigation yielded far less information
than on other black historical figures like Harriet Tubman and George
Washington Carver. In addition, and perhaps more significant, was the
absence of a "Hollywood Nat Turner film" (Baker 2008, 6) that
would fix the figure in the popular imagination. (11) Styron, in his
afterword to the Vintage edition commemorating his novel's
twenty-fifth anniversary, expresses a similar childhood fascination with
the story of the Southampton slave insurrection and the limited
information available. He also confesses, "I later realized that
one of the benefits for me of Nat Turner's story was not an
abundance of historical material but, if anything, a scantiness"
(Styron 1967, 439).
But for Baker, that historical canvas does, ostensibly, include
Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and, more notably, the
strong critical and cultural reaction against Styron's novel that
followed its publication. Yet none of those sources are represented in
Baker's bibliography, and their absence is conspicuous. (12) Such
an absence could represent a "Signifyin(g)" as well:
commenting on the relative worth of those sources by denying them a
space within the work. Additionally, Baker chooses a silent, visual
style that resists Styron's introspective, existentially paralyzed
version of Nat Turner, (13) nor does he wholly embrace the image of the
mythic rebel hero endorsed by many of Styron's most vociferous
critics. Instead, Baker's Turner is motivated by both religious
fervor and revenge at an unjust, dehumanizing system. Also, Baker
depicts Turner's revolt as complex, brutal, and torn by competing
agendas. In the end, Baker engages with--either by embracing or
rejecting--various interpretations of Nat Turner that have emerged from
Gray's Confessions through Styron's novel and the resulting
controversy to a contemporary understanding of slavery and history.
Baker's Images/Gray's Text
Contrasting sharply with Gray's Confessions and with
Styron's novel, both of which fix Turner with a particular
identity, Baker's graphic narrative depicts Turner in a variety of
ways: as a traditional trickster figure, as a revolutionary leader, as a
religious zealot, and as a cold-blooded murderer, all of which are
versions of Turner featured in representations of the Southampton revolt
since 1831. Through this ambivalence, Baker's graphic narrative
exemplifies Linda Hutcheon's concept of postmodern historiographic
metafiction. Hutcheon explains, "[Many} postmodern novels ...
openly assert that there are only truths in the plural, and never one
Truth; and there is rarely falseness per se, just others' truths.
Fiction and history are narratives distinguished by their frames, ...
frames which historiographic metafiction first establishes and then
crosses, positing both the generic contracts of fiction and
history" (Hutcheon 1988, 109-10). (14) Baker certainly embraces the
plural truths of the Nat Turner story with his multiple and occasionally
contradictory depictions of the character. However, he also parodically
plays with the "generic contract of fiction and history,"
especially in some of the ways in which he marketed the work in its
original publication. The back matter for Baker's previously
published Nat Turner: Encore Edition (2005) claims of the following
volume, "All presented in a historically accurate & educational
presentation which is quite stimulating to the adrenal system through
inventive depictions of such things as beheadings &
evisceration" (Baker 2005b, 96). According to this statement, the
work is both "historically accurate" and
"inventive," which strongly resembles Chute's assertion
that "Graphic narrative suggests that historical accuracy is not
the opposite of creative invention" (Chute 2008, 459).The dichotomy
of history and fiction remains humorously at play in these claims. As
Hutcheon describes, "It is part of the postmodernist stand to
confront the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation, the
particular/the general, and the present/the past. And the confrontation
is itself contradictory, for it refuses to recuperate or dissolve either
side of the dichotomy, yet it is more than willing to exploit both"
(Hutcheon 1988, 106). As with Hutcheon's conception, Nat Turner
resists closure on the varying interpretations available on this
historical event while also calling into question the veracity of the
historical record. In this sense, rather than revealing a singular
historical truth about Nat Turner, Baker imbues the character with many
of the historical interpretations that have preceded this work, no
matter what biases informed those interpretations and no matter how
contradictory one is to the other.
Excluded from Baker's graphic narrative, however, is
Styron's existential, introspective, and morally paralyzed version
of Nat Turner. The visual narrative that Baker utilizes makes the
depiction of interiority difficult. As Baker explains in the preface to
the Abrams edition, "Comic books/graphic novels are a visual
medium, so it's most important for an artist to choose a subject
with opportunities for compelling graphics. The Nat Turner story has
lots of action and suspense, also a hero with superhuman abilities"
(Baker 2008, 6). Baker describes the work as first and foremost an
action comic, and though that may be said with tongue in cheek (as is
clear in the above quoted back matter to the Encore Edition), it's
precisely that action which separates Baker's Turner from
Styron's. Though Baker's Turner is never entirely the
superhero the cartoonist claims him to be, Baker has chosen a medium and
a style that leave Styron's version behind in a way that inherently
critiques Styron's novel.
Baker sets his narrative apart from both Styron's and
Gray's immediately by opening with a forty-five-page sequence that
tells a story of native Africans captured as slaves, their journey on
the Middle Passage, and one woman's desperate attempt to save her
baby from a life of slavery by throwing the infant overboard and into
the mouth of a waiting shark. This sequence is virtually
"silent," save for some sound effects of gunfire and some
brief text from a slaver's memoir on the treatment of Africans
taken as slaves. This separate story does not correspond to anything in
Gray's version of the Confessions or in any other historical
document of Turner's life. Baker reveals, however, that this story
is being told by the young Nat: over the boy's head, a conventional
word balloon floats, filled not with words, but with an image of an
open-mouthed shark that is repeated from an earlier page, highlighting
the way in which image supersedes, or in this case, replaces, text in
the work's hierarchy of meaning (see Figure 2). The opening story
is meant to convey one of the few autobiographical details that
Gray's Confessions provides from Turner's youth:
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
The original text itself provides absolutely no details of
Turner's amazing and possibly supernatural revelation, using vague
language like "something" and "things" to stand in
for the story he told. Baker, instead, creates a story that has
credibility because it conforms to a general historical understanding of
events that occurred in the slave trade. The addition of the
Africa/Middle Passage narrative allows Baker to extend his own narrative
and include a much broader vision of the slave experience beyond the
limits of Turner's life in rural Virginia. The visual register here
dominates the graphic narrative for such an extended period that it
reinforces for the reader very early on the privileged position the
visual has over the verbal. That hierarchy, then, sets the reader up to
be skeptical of Gray's narrative when Baker's images
contradict or otherwise differ from it.
The scene also has a greater impact on the reader's
understanding of Turner. Baker embraces Turner's status as a
prophet amongst his people much more than Gray does, and Baker
privileges the inexplicable, contingent elements of the narrative in
ways that Styron does not. As with other such passages from Gray, Styron
ignores many references to Turner's mysticism and prophet-status.
In another example of the disjunction between image and text, young
Nat Turner is reading the Bible when an approaching slave master causes
Turner to flip the book upside down, scratch his head and cross his eyes
in an ignorant pose, and then perform a lively dance for the
entertainment of the master, thus enacting the playful "Sambo"
stereotype in order to escape abuse and persecution by his master (Baker
2008, 88-90; see Figure 3). Baker does not base this on any
corresponding scene from Gray. In fact, the text Baker quotes on the
same page provides details of Nat's education that are not depicted
in Baker's drawings. Baker portrays the young Nat Turner as a
conventional trickster figure in contrast with the pious and somber
figure that emerges from Turner's testimony and the existential,
introspective figure in Styron's. (15) Any humor is vacated from
this scene, however, by the final image that punctuates it, where the
young Nat is depicted with an angry scowl as the master walks away (90):
the roleplaying Turner must do only fuels both his hatred for his
masters and his rebellious spirit. In this scene, Baker uses the figure
of Nat Turner and the racial stereotype depicted here in combination to
signify a resistance to the dominant culture through the hegemony's
own stereotyping practices: in order to keep his literacy and
intelligence hidden, Nat has to act ignorant in a way that fulfills the
master's expectations of a slave's behavior. Hutcheon explains
how such historical "types" have a limited use in
historiographic metafiction: "'type' has little function
here, except as something to be ironically undercut" (Hutcheon
1988, 114), Baker, therefore, inserts a contemporary interpretation of
the trickster image as a mode of resistance to a historical discourse,
inscribed in the master's playful response, that "typed"
slaves as "Sambos"--a mode that Chaney argues is common in
African American graphic narratives (Chaney 2007, 175-76).
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
William Styron vs. 10 Black Writers: An Overview
Styron uses the "Sambo" image also, and this comes under
fire from the Ten Black Writers. Particularly they object to the
influence on Styron of the controversial views about slavery raised by
Stanley Elkins in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and
Intellectual Life. As Stone summarizes one of Elkins's more
controversial claims: "an unopposed capitalist power gave southern
slaveowners the license to impose upon the great majority of their
working property a basic personality pattern--'Sambo' as
childlike, carefree, self-deprecating victim" (Stone 1992, 265). Of
the Ten Black Writers, Ernest Kaiser most vociferously objects to
Styron's acceptance of Elkins's "Sambo" image,
"[Styron] accepts wholeheartedly the fraudulent and untenable
thesis of ... Stanley M. Elkins ... that American slavery was so
oppressive, despotic and emasculating psychologically that revolt was
impossible and Negroes could only be Sambos" (Kaiser 1968, 54). In
Styron's novel, Nat Turner often refers disparagingly to fellow
slaves who behave in this stereotypical fashion, so it is difficult to
see how Styron "accepts" this image, as Kaiser claims. One
memory that appears early in the novel shows Nat expressing more hatred
of that behavior in his friend Hark than of the whites who inspire it:
Nat becomes enraged and chastises Hark for going too far with his
performance and recommends some kind of balance between obsequious
servitude and open defiance that would allow Hark to maintain his
masculine dignity. As this scene demonstrates, the Sambo image in
Styron's novel is a bit more complex than Kaiser makes out, but
it's also by no means the mode of resistance that Baker depicts it
as.
In addition to claims that Styron supports such stereotypes, each
contributor to Ten Black Writers Respond attacks Styron on the issue of
alleged historical inaccuracies. For example, Styron significantly
alters the family structure of Turner's youth from that which is
described in the available historical resources. According to
Gray's narrative, young Nat was heavily influenced by his
grandmother and knew his father before the senior Turner ran away. In
Styron's novel, the grandmother dies (Styron 1967, 130) and the
father runs away before Nat is born (133), leaving Nat under the sole
care of his mother, a house servant who is frequently raped by her
master. Also, Styron leaves out an escape attempt described in Gray:
"About this time, I was placed under an overseer, from whom I ran
away,--and after remaining in the woods thirty days, I returned, to the
astonishment of the negroes on the plantation, who thought I had made my
escape to some other part of the country, as my father had done
before" (Gray 1831, 46).Turner explains that he returned because he
was encouraged to do so by a "Spirit" who comes to him in a
vision. This was, according to Gray's Confessions, a significant
turning point in his development as a religious leader among his fellow
slaves.
Certain other omissions, additions, and revisions resonate
throughout the ten essays in Ten Black Writers Respond. In particular,
Styron is specifically criticized for his depiction of Turner's
education because Styron's version does not match that of
Gray's confession (thus highlighting one of the specific problems
of the criticism from that essay collection, as acknowledged by Albert
E. Stone in his study of the Styron controversy: a privileging of
Gray's narrative as historically and factually irrefutable, despite
obvious evidence of Gray's own proslavery bias). In Styron, Nat is
taught by the benevolent slave owner, Samuel Turner, and his daughters,
as a kind of social experiment that prepares Nat for survival as a free
man. Nat overhears Samuel Turner explain:
In an afterword published in Vintage's twenty-fifth
anniversary edition of the novel, Styron explains his revision of the
historical details of Nat's education: "Such a strategy, while
disdainful of the facts, enabled me to demonstrate certain critical
philosophical attitudes I couldn't have done otherwise, except
didactically, yet still allowed me to remain, in the larger sense,
historically faithful" (1967, 443). In other words, Styron used
Samuel Turner to illustrate a debate about slave education that did take
place at the time yet could not be fit into the novel any other way by
the author, much in the way that Baker also adds historical information
about slavery to the Turner narrative. These elements gain a sense of
historical veracity because they "happened" in a general
sense, even if the events themselves never happened within the lives of
the historical figures. Thus, each creator tries to access a similar
sense of historical truth while not feeling obligated to the extant and
limited historical record.
Styron's Confessions as Baker's Invisible Intertext
In the historical source material, however, the details of Nat
Turner's education are hardly clear, and it is on this point that
one of the most noteworthy differences between Styron and Baker becomes
evident. In the original Confessions, Turner briefly describes how he
precociously but mysteriously achieved literacy: "The manner in
which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my
own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that
I had no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet--but to the
astonishment of the family, one day, when a book was shewn me to keep me
from crying, I began spelling the names of different objects" (Gray
1831, 45). The mystery here certainly helps maintain Turner's
reputation as a prophet among his fellow slaves, However, later in the
Confessions, Gray contradicts Turner's own story: "As to his
ignorance, he certainly never had the advantages of education, but he
can read and write, (it was taught him by his parents)" (54). Gray
does not explain where he got this contradictory information, and he
does nothing to reconcile it with Turner's own narrative. Styron,
therefore, elides the mystical/heroic image of Turner as an autodidact
in order to present a debate about the education and benevolent
treatment of slaves. Baker, however, offers a third option, in which
young Nat sneaks into the big house and eavesdrops on the white
children's education. In addition, other slaves are shown receiving
severe punishment when they surreptitiously look at books, so Baker
provides another explanation as to why Turner may be cagey about the
origins of his literacy. Just as Styron eschewed available data and used
Turner's education to make a larger historical point about slavery,
Baker uses it to reveal the historically real dangers of self-education
for the average slave. The final image of the graphic narrative
reinforces this by showing a female slave sneaking away with a copy of
Gray's Confessions: Turner's rebellion survives not only in
that narrative, but also in the inspiration Turner provided to other
slaves for educating themselves.
Styron's critics were also angered that the novel depicted
Turner's rebellion as motivated by sexual longing for white women,
occasionally manifesting itself as rape fantasies. These critics not
only saw this as reinforcing a particular stereotype, but also felt it
ignored historical evidence that Nat was indeed married (though these
need not be mutually exclusive). (16) The issues surrounding Nat
Turner's marriage are particularly interesting in the way that the
presence or absence of a wife suits different interpretations of
Turner's story. In the 1992 afterword to the Vintage edition of The
Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron returns to the defense of the novel
that he made publicly in the late 60s and early 70s. In particular, he
continues to defend the depiction of Turner as a celibate bachelor:
Styron's defense problematically depends on the reliability of
source material on the Turner rebellion, when Styron himself, along with
historians who have addressed the event, admit that all the historical
source material is unreliable to a considerable degree. In fact, much
evidence survives that points to the existence of Nat's wife. An
anonymous letter (possibly written by Thomas Gray, according to Tragle)
published in the Richmond Constitutional Whig on 26 September
1831--while Turner was still at large--mentions "some papers given
up by his wife, under the lash" (Greenberg 1996, 81).Thirty years
later, Thomas Wentworth Higginson seems to take for granted that Nat was
married: "Thus, for instance, we know that Nat Turner's young
wife was a slave; we know that she belonged to a different master from
himself; we know little more than this, but this is much"
(Higginson 1861, 54). Stephen B. Oates's The Fires of Jubilee
(1975) and Tragle both provide further evidence of her existence: her
name was Cherry Turner, and she was sold off to Giles Reese during the
same auction in which Nat was sold to Thomas Moore's farm after
Samuel Turner's death (Oates 1975, 29-30). Therefore, Styron's
insistence that "no other reliable source ever spoke of Nat's
being married" in 1992 ignores the fact that sources did exist at
the time of the novel's composition and more had been unearthed
since.
Even more problematic for these critics, however, was Styron's
inability to imagine why, exactly, Nat may have left his wife out of the
confession to Gray. Clarke writes in his introduction to Ten Black
Writers Respond: "Why did he ignore the fact that Nat Turner had a
wife whom he dearly loved?" (Clarke 1968, vii). Clarke goes on to
cite Higginson's reference in order to argue that "the very
separation and helplessness of a man to protect his mate was part of the
explanation for Nat Turner's revolt against slavery and the
plantation system" (viii). In the end, Styron needed Nat to be
single and celibate in order to serve the imaginative project that he
was engaging in with the novel, and he argues that such liberties are
available to the historical novelist regardless of the facts involved.
(17)
Baker, however, chooses an approach to Nat's marital status
that more closely resembles Clarke's connection between family
separation and rebellion. Baker provides a five-page silent sequence
that covers the course of the Turner marriage from romance and courtship
through the wedding and on to the fateful auction, relying largely on
the evidence from The Fires of Jubilee. Nat and Cherry (who is not named
in Baker's narrative) first make doe-eyes at one another while Nat
is pushing a plow and Cherry is bringing in laundry; in the background,
the master approaches with a whip to break up the tender moment. The
wedding ceremony, with the couple jumping over the traditional
broomstick, is followed by two panels of domestic happiness, including
Nat and Cherry in bed with two young children, which indicates that some
time has passed. Next, an auction scene shows children and parents all
being separated, and Nat is dragged away in chains from the rest of his
family. Finally, Nat seethes with anger as he looks up at the window of
the big house, seeing the white couple putting their children to sleep
(one of the children even has a pickaninny doll clutched in her arms).
In a parallel scene, Cherry despondently examines her empty cabin (Baker
2008, 97-101). Following this, Nat appears in a dramatic image, shaking
his fists at the sky during a thunderstorm, and beneath this image
appears the text describing the vision that led Nat toward rebellion:
"And about this time I had a vision--and I saw white spirits and
black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened ..."
(Baker 2008, 102; Gray 1831, 46). Baker's placement of this phrase
below this image, and following the family separation sequence,
demonstrates a "motivated" revision (to use Gates's term,
1988, 124) of the historical text. Gray's passage is quoted
verbatim, but the juxtaposition of image and text alters the meaning of
that text. The phrase "about this time" makes the causal
connection between family separation and the rebellion, indicating that
this was the event that pushed Turner into his revolutionary phase, as
Clarke also argues. Much later, in the heat of the revolt, Baker flashes
back to the traumatic auction when Nat,Will, and another slave named
Henry discuss an infant that was left behind: "There was a little
infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the
house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed
it" (Baker 2008, 121; Gray 1831, 49). Though Baker spares the
reader a graphic depiction of the infant's murder, he does use the
family separation not only as a motivation for the rebellion but also as
a justification for some of the atrocities involving children. Even
later, in one of the more emotionally charged scenes, Will graphically
decapitates a young boy with whom the slave was seen playing earlier in
the narrative.
Both Baker and Styron attempt to address their own explanation for
such atrocities. For Styron, one of the central problems in the Nat
Turner story was the revolutionary leader's inability to kill
anyone but the teenage girl, Margaret Whitehead, as the author explains
in the afterword to the Vintage edition:
Styron frames this unrequited sexual longing as the motivation for
the rebellion, and the murder, then, becomes the climax of the novel. In
Styron's novel, Turner has frequent contact with Margaret when he
is loaned out to the Whitehead farm, and the family places considerable
trust in him when he is given the job of transporting Margaret. During
these excursions, they form a bond, and Margaret claims that he is the
only person, white or black, with whom she can talk. Nat, on the other
hand, develops detailed rape fantasies while they are alone together:
"There's not a soul for miles. I could throw her down and
spread her young white legs and stick myself in her until belly met
belly and shoot inside her in warm milky spurts of desecration"
(367). Sitting in his cell awaiting execution, Turner recalls his
tumultuous feelings for Margaret:
This emotional confusion, where language of violence and eroticism
is interspersed, also highlights the kind of existential paralysis that
Styron depicts, making Turner less of the decisive leader that the Ten
Black Writers claimed was the historically accurate version of the
character.
Alternately, Baker's depiction of the Margaret Whitehead
incident relies heavily on Gray's narrative. Four small pictures
punctuate a page of Gray's text, with a final picture of Nat
swinging a bloody fence rail while Margaret's pleading hand reaches
up from below panel (see Figure 4). This exemplifies another of Charles
Hatfield's "tensions," this one involving the sequence of
individual panels vs. the surface of the page itself as a consciously
designed unit (2005, 48). On this particular page, Baker designs the
layout less with the temporal sequence of panels in mind and more with
an overall design that uses the panels as brief illustrations of the
printed text. In this case, then, Baker momentarily gives up authority
to Gray's narrative, privileging the written text over the images.
This page also challenges Thierry Groensteen's notion of
"iconic solidarity" in the sequence of comic images:
"interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the
double characteristic of being separated ... and which are plastically
and semantically overdetermined by the fact of their coexistence in
praesentia" (2007, 18). When viewed separately from the text, these
images do not function as a clear interdependent sequence, unlike other
sections of this graphic narrative; instead, the reader must rely on the
text for meaning, more like an illustrated book. The lack of hard panel
borders also causes the images to blend visually with the text. Even the
killing itself, despite the graphic blood spray, takes place below the
panel, and the reader does not actually get to "see" Margaret
Whitehead. Baker renders this one death as a minor incident in the
overall slave rebellion, standing in sharp contrast to Styron's
depiction of it as the central, culminating event in Turner's
rebellion. The reversal of emphasis functions as an intertextual
commentary, or "Signifyin(g)," on Styron by Baker: in the
midst of a rebellion where many women and children are killed (and
depicted graphically by Baker), this one does not warrant the attention
it has received in other versions of Turner's story.
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
While Baker seems to reject Styron's version of Nat Turner, he
does not wholly embrace the version proffered by Styron's critics,
either. Toward the end of Baker's graphic narrative, images appear
that stand at odds with the objections of the Ten Black Writers to
Styron's novel. Specifically, they objected to Styron's claim
that the failure of Turner's revolt was due to the betrayal of
fellow slaves. In a jailhouse exchange between Gray and Turner, the
lawyer explains,
Turner feels this betrayal acutely, and it, along with his guilt
over Margaret Whitehead's death, wracks his conscience in his final
days. The Ten Black Writers argue that such betrayal never happened, and
in subsequent debates, historians like Eugene Genovese came to
Styron's defense, pointing out the occurrences of such betrayals
and internecine conflicts in other slave revolts (Genovese 1968,
207-208).
Baker contradicts the Ten Black Writers' objection by
including several scenes in which the revolution is undermined by
slaves. One top-hat-wearing slave warns white slave owners of the
approaching mob, and other slaves rush to inform whites of the
atrocities that have occurred. This leads directly to alarms being
raised and set in motion the events that will ultimately quell the
rebellion. Also, Baker imagines many rebel slaves undone by alcohol
consumption and shows Nat's difficulties holding the rebellion
together due to such internal problems. Rebel slaves are even shown to
be captured at gunpoint by loyal slaves. The depiction of the
self-inflicted downfall of the rebellion creates an impression far from
the mythical, inspirational vision that many of Styron's critics
had for this event, as Baker carves a space for his narrative that
rejects both sides of this debate.
Perhaps Baker's ambivalence toward Turner can best be seen not
in the many versions of Turner himself that Baker employs, but in his
depiction of Benjamin Phipps, the white man responsible for
Turner's capture. Baker draws Phipps not just as the epitome of
white heroism--strong, handsome, romantic--but, in Phipps's first
appearance, Baker has imbued him with traditional Christ-like features:
he has long hair and a beard, and he is first shown being kind to both
animals and children (see Figure 5). In fact, Baker doesn't name
Phipps, so to the casual reader unfamiliar with the Nat Turner story,
this could very well be Christ. And to whites of the time of
Turner's revolt, Phipps was a savior, and by association, Turner
becomes the devil that the whites must defeat in order for their world
to survive. This image presents Baker's most troubling and intense
irony in this work, one that becomes difficult to navigate if a reader
has already invested in a more positive interpretation of Turner.
[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]
Kyle Baker's Nat Turner at once subtly rejects Styron's
image of the doubt-wracked, existentially paralyzed, sexually obsessed
slave while also resisting the call for a mythical rebel hero that the
Ten Black Writers demand. As such, Baker delicately navigates the
cultural and historical pitfalls for which the Nat Turner story is
notorious. For Baker, that story is a complex and contradictory
event--one for which the historical record is extremely incomplete, and
the available data is unreliable due to the competing agendas behind the
recording itself. In Baker's hands, Turner is a trickster, a
religious fanatic, a prophet with quasi-supernatural powers, a father
and husband seeking revenge on a system that separated him from his
family, an insurgent, a devil to be driven out by a white savior, and a
freedom fighter rebelling against oppression. Similarly, the
insurrection itself is righteous, bloody, filled with murderous
atrocities, undermined from within, and ultimately brought down by a
Christ-like white man. Baker's multifaceted interpretation of
Turner and his rebellion embraces the incompleteness and unreliability
of this historical record, and therefore points to the futility of
Styron's fictional enterprise, which attempts to fix the historical
figure in a particular identity. However, Baker is also ambivalent about
the mythical, heroic version of Turner endorsed by Clarke's
contributors. While Baker's Turner can be read as a heroic freedom
fighter during certain points in the graphic narrative, he is also a
terrible fighter and an ineffective leader who ultimately cannot control
his fellow rebels. The polyvocality that Baker utilizes in this work is
entirely in keeping with what Hillary Chute sees as the potential that
historical graphic narratives have to offer over other narratives, and
it is also the method Michael Chaney identifies as a key resistance
technique in many African American graphic narratives, tied directly to
the role Henry Louis Gates, Jr. affixes to "Signifyin(g)" in
the African American literary tradition. Baker uses the freedom afforded
him by comics form and its complex relationship between image and text
to suspend closure on the Nat Turner story and leave in play multiple
Nat Turners in order to reflect the controversial and complicated
history of this story.
Notes
(1) Kyle Baker ranks among the best known African-American comic
creators working today, and his work as both writer and artist appears
in both mainstream superhero (Plastic Man, Deadpool) and independent
comics (The Cowboy Wally Show, Special Forces). His work has garnered
some attention in comics studies, though primarily as an artist in
collaboration with other writers, such as Robert Morales, Aaron
McGruder, and Reginald Hudlin. See especially Rebecca Wanzo's
(2009) and Stanford W. Carpenter's (2005) essays on Truth: Red,
White, and Black--Baker's collaboration with Morales about the
first black Captain America--and Michael A. Chaney's "Drawing
on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels" (2007) which
includes a discussion of Birth of a Nation, a satirical graphic novel by
Baker, McGruder, and Hudlin.
(2) Hutcheon tends to group together postmodern feminist writers
and African American writers as both attempting to use history to
undermine traditional male, white power structures. As she writes,
"it is feminist writers, along with blacks, who have used ...
ironic intertextuality to such powerful ends--both ideologically and
aesthetically. ... Parody for these writers is more than just a key
strategy through which 'duplicity' is revealed, ... it is one
of the major ways in which women and other ex-centrics both use and
abuse, set up and then challenge male traditions in art" (Hutcheon
1988, 134). Such writers include Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed in
particular.
(3) See Davis 1999 for a discussion of other fictional accounts of
the Southampton slave insurrection, including Daniel Panger's 1967
novel Ol' Prophet Nat.
(4) In addition to passages from Gray's Confessions, Baker
also quotes once from Captain Theodore Canoes Adventures of an African
Slaver.
(5) What I describe here as "complementary," Scott
McCloud, in Understanding Comics, describes as "duo-specific,"
"in which both words and pictures send essentially the same
message" (1993, 153). However, in breaking down the various
relationships that words and pictures can have in the medium of comics,
McCloud does not identify one that specifically addresses the kind of
antagonistic relationship between words and pictures that happens in
Baker's work. The closest approximation for McCloud is
"interdependent," "where words and pictures go
hand-in-hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone"
(155). In his examples of interdependence, he includes one in which the
narrative caption reads '"After college, I pursued a career in
high finance," while the image shows masked thieves trying to break
into a safe (155). "Interdependent," therefore, can involve an
ironic relation between image and text.
(6) Key debates exist in comics scholarship over the essential
characteristic that defines comics. One school, following Mitchell and
including scholars like Robert Harvey, argues for the image/text
relationship. As Harvey asserts, "the essential characteristic of
`comics'--the thing that distinguishes it from other kinds of
pictorial narratives--is the incorporation of verbal content"
(Harvey 2001, 75). Most important to this discussion of Baker's
historical graphic narrative, Hillary Chute embraces this definition in
her discussion of historical representation and graphic narratives.
Others, like Groensteen and McCloud, favor sequential images--what
Groensteen refers to as "iconic solidarity" (Groensteen 2007,
18)--as the essential characteristic of comics. I would argue that
Baker's work in Nat Turner presents particular challenges to both
standard notions of the image/text relationship and the iconic
solidarity of sequential images on a page.
(7) For more evidence of the failure of Gray as an historically
accurate, reliable text, see Henry Irving Tragle's The Southampton
Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (1971).
(8) Baker's bibliography is, in fact, fairly limited. In
addition to Gray's narrative, the only works specifically about the
Nat Turner rebellion included in the list are Stephen Oates's The
Fires of Jubilee (1975) and Terry Bisson's Nat Turner: Slave Revolt
Leader (1988), a children's book. Missing are Styron's novel,
John B. Duff and Peter M. Mitchell's The Nat Turner Rebellion: The
Historical Event and the Modern Controversy (1971), Henry I.
Tragle's The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831 (1971), and Herbert
Aptheker's Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion (1966), among others.
Styron and Aptheker especially seem to be willful omissions, as they are
often linked as competing texts in the controversy that followed
Styron's novel. However, as Albert E. Stone points out, most
post-1970 histories of slavery in general or of the Turner rebellion in
particular fail to mention Styron's novel at all. Perhaps, in that
tradition, Baker is linking himself with historians instead of fiction
writers and literary or cultural critics.
(9) As Albert E. Stone discusses in The Return of Nat Turner, the
Nat Turner debates were part of a larger social/historical context in
the late 1960s that went beyond mere disagreements over a
novelist's use or misuse of historical facts. Stone exhaustively
covers the entire cultural context for the Styron controversy from the
late 1960s through the 1980s, including the anticipation built through
publicity for Styron's novel and later re-imaginings of the Nat
Turner story. The focus in this essay, however, is on the specific
historical objections raised in the most well-known criticism of
Styron's novel: the essay collection William Styron's Nat
Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, edited by John Clarke. For a more
thorough discussion of the critical and cultural debate that surrounded
Styron's novel, see Stone 1992. Also, John B. Duff and Peter M.
Mitchell collect a variety of the most important documents from the
debate in The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern
Controversy (1971).
(10) Kyle Baker's Nat Turner graphic novel has been published
in several forms prior to the 2008 Abrams edition. Baker first
self-published the work as a comics miniseries, though he produced only
two issues of a proposed four-issue series. Baker collected those first
two issues in 2005 as Nat Turner: Encore Edition. The second half was
published in 2007 as a single volume by Image Comics, titled Nat Turner:
Revolution. Abrams then collected the two volumes into a single book,
along with a new preface and supplementary material.
(11) In a 2005 interview on the website Pop Image, Baker explained,
"Part of the appeal of NAT TURNER, say, is the fact that there
hasn't been a Denzel Washington movie, so the material will be
fresh to many readers" (Baker 2005a).
(12) In a 2007 interview with Rich Watson, Baker discusses the
research process he used to prepare for Nat Turner and the anxieties he
experienced regarding historical accuracy:
In the process of composing his graphic narrative, then, Baker was
aware of disjunctions between histories of slavery, and he then
foregrounds those disjunctions in his own work.
(13) This is not to say that comics, even silent comics, cannot
depict interiority. Baker, in fact, shows how a young Nat Turner's
imagination is sparked by the Old Testament story of Exodus and the
freeing of the slaves (Baker 2008, 86-87). However, Baker's
artistic style does tend to favor action and violence over such
introspective moments.
(14) As stated earlier, both Chute and Chaney make similar
arguments about the multiplicity of the historical graphic narrative and
the African American graphic novel, respectively.
(15) As with the other representations of Turner that Baker
provides, there is historical precedent for reading Turner as a
trickster figure. In an 1861 Atlantic Monthly article on the Southampton
slave revolt by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the author describes two
particular legends:
For more on Nat as trickster, see Greenberg 1996, 27.
(16) Much to several of the Ten Black Writers' chagrin, Styron
also includes a homoerotic encounter in Nat's youth. The negative
responses from these critics to this scene display a problematic
homophobia, claiming that Styron was attacking Turner's
masculinity. See especially Vincent Harding's and John Oliver
Killens's essays in Clarke 1968.
(17) Styron does, however, deal with the issue of family separation
through the character Hark, who is motivated to join the revolt after
his family is sold off.
(18) Davis points out that, among the novels discussed in her
study, Styron is "the first to explore the mystery of Turner's
murder of Margaret Whitehead" (Davis 1999, 240).
Works Cited
Baker, Kyle. 2005a. Interview with Ed Mathews. Poplmage,
http://www.popimage.com/content/kylebaker2005.html.
--. 2005b. Nat Turner: Encore Edition. New York: Kyle Baker
Publishing.
--. 2007. "Happy Independence Day!" Funny Cartoon of the
Week: Kyle Baker, http://kbcartoonweek.blogspot.com/2007/07/happy-independenceday.html.
--. 2008. Nat Turner. New York: Abrams.
Bennett, Lerone, Jr. 1968. "Nat's Last White Man."
In William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writes Respond, ed. John
Hendrik Clarke. Boston: Beacon Press.
Carpenter, Stanford W. 2005. "Truth Be Told: Authorship and
the Creation of the Black Captain America." In Comics as
Philosophy, ed. Jeff McLaughlin. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Chaney, Michael A. 2007. "Drawing on History in Recent African
American Graphic Novels." Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United
States 32.3: 175-200.
Chute, Hillary. 2008. "Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic
Narrative." PMLA 123.2: 452-65.
Clarke, John Henrik, ed. 1968. William Styron's Nat Turner:
Ten Black Writes Respond. Boston: Beacon Press.
Davis, Mary Kemp. 1999. Nat Turner Before the Bar of judgment:
Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana University Press.
Duff, John B., and Peter M. Mitchell, eds. 1971. The Nat Turner
Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy. New York:
Harper.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of
African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Genovese, Eugene D. 1968. "The Nat Turner Case." The New
York Review of Books 12 September, 34-37. (Republished in The Nat Turner
Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy. Ed. John B.
Duff and Peter M. Mitchell. New York: Harper, 1971).
Gray, Thomas. 1831. The Confessions of Nat Turner. (Republished in
The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents. Ed. Kenneth S.
Greenberg. Boston: Bedford, 1996).
Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. 1996. The Confessions of Nat Turner and
Related Documents. Boston: Bedford.
Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty
and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Harvey, Robert C. 2001. "Comedy at the Juncture of Word and
Image: The Emergence of the Modern Magazine Gag Cartoon Reveals the
Vital Blend." In The Language of Comics: Word and Image, ed. Robin
Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons. Jackson, University Press of
Mississippi.
Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging
Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. 1861. "Nat Turner's
Insurrection." Atlantic Monthly 8 August, 173-86. (Republished in
The Nat Timer Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern
Controversy. Ed. John B. Duff and Peter M. Mitchell. New York: Harper,
1971).
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Kaiser, Ernest. 1968. "The Failure of William Styron." In
William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writes Respond, ed. John
Hendrik Clarke. Boston: Beacon Press.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.
Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. "Beyond Comparison." In Picture
Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Republished in A Comics
Studies Reader. Ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worchester. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi).
Oates, Stephen B. 1975. The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's
Fierce Rebellion. New York: Harper & Row.
Stone, Albert E. 1992. The Return of Nat Turner: History,
Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America. Athens: University
of Georgia Press.
Styron, William. 1967. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York:
Vintage.
Tragle, Henry Irving, ed. 1971. The Southampton Slave Revolt of
1831: A Compilation of Source Material. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press.
Wanzo, Rebecca. 2009. "Wearing Hero-Face: Black Citizens and
Melancholic Patriotism in Truth: Red, White, and Black." journal of
Popular Culture 42.2: 339-62.
Watson, Rich. 2007. "UVC Out-Takes: Kyle Baker (Part 1)."
Interview with Kyle Baker. Glyphs: PopCultureShock,
http://wwwpopcultureshock.com/uvc-outtakes-kyle-baker-part-1/41789/.
Andrew J. Kunka is an associate professor of English at the
University of South Carolina, Sumter. He is co-editor, with Michele K.
Troy, of May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern (2006) and a
contributor to the Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels
(2010).
It will thus appear, that whilst every thing upon the surface
of society wore a calm and peaceful aspect; whilst not one note
of preparation was heard to warn the devoted inhabitants of woe
and death, a gloomy fanatic was revolving in the recesses of
his own dark, bewildered, and overwrought mind, schemes of
indiscriminate massacre to the whites. Schemes too fearfully
executed as far as his fiendish band proceeded in their
desolating march. No cry for mercy penetrated their flinty
bosoms. No acts of remembered kindness made the least
impression upon these remorseless murderers. ... Never did a
band of savages do their work of death more unsparingly. (Gray
1831, 41)
According to the historical data, the real Nat Turner was a
virile, commanding, courageous figure. Styron rejects history
by rejecting this image of Nat Turner. In fact, he wages
literary war on this image, substituting an impotent, cowardly,
irresolute creature of his own imagination for the real black
man who killed or ordered killed real white people for real
historical reasons. The man Styron substitutes for Nat Turner
is not only the antithesis of Nat Turner; he is the antithesis
of blackness. In fact, he is a standard Styron type: a
neurasthenic, Hamlet-like white intellectual in blackface.
(Bennett 1968, 5)
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--I stuck to my story,
however, and related some things which went, in her opinion, to
confirm it--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. (Baker 2008,
57; Gray 1831, 44)
I realized it wasn't the man [Cobb] himself who annoyed me so
much as it was Hark's manner in his presence--the unspeakable
bootlicking Sambo, all giggles and smirks and oily, sniveling
servility. ... He had the face one might imagine to be the face
of an African chieftain--soldierly, fearless, scary, and
resplendent in its bold symmetry--yet there was something wrong
with the eyes, and the eyes, or at least the expression they
often took on, as now, reduced the face to a kind of harmless,
dull, malleable docility. They were the eyes of a child,
trustful and dependent, soft doe's eyes mossed over with a kind
of furtive, fearful glaze. (Styron 1967, 55-56)
"It is I am sure a kind of unorthodoxy, and considered thus by
some, ... but it is my conviction that the more religiously and
intellectually enlightened a Negro is made, the better for
himself, his master, and the commonweal. But one must begin at
a tender age, and thus, sir, you see in Nat the promising
beginnings of an experiment." (Styron 1967, 124)
in the process of using the Confessions as a rough guide, I was
struck by the fact that Nat referred to his relationship with
quite a few people ... but never to a woman in a romantic or
conjugal sense; apparently he had neither a female companion
nor wife. ... A wife or companion would have had important
resonance, and his mention of such a woman would have forced me
to create her counterpart. But since no other reliable source
ever spoke of Nat's being married (a pointless connection in
the formal sense, slaves being legally forbidden to wed) or
even being involved with a woman, it made it all the more
plausible for me to portray a man who was a bachelor, or at
least womanless, a celibate with all the frustrations that
celibacy entails. (Styron 1967, 443-44)
as a novelist I couldn't abandon the relationship of Nat Turner
and Margaret Whitehead to the vacuum into which it had been
cast in the Confessions. It was nearly inconceivable that in
the tiny bucolic cosmos of Southampton the two had not known
each other, or had not been acquainted in some way. ... Since
she was his sole victim, could the entire rebellion have been
conceived as his retribution against her? ... Had they been
lovers? This seemed unlikely, given one's convictions about his
basic asceticism. Perhaps, however, she had tempted him
sexually, goaded him in some unknown way, and out of this
situation had flowed his rage. (Styron 1967, 446) (18)
Suddenly, my ears still pounding uproariously, I am filled with
a bitter, reasonless hatred for this innocent and sweet and
quivering young girl, and the long hot desire to reach out with
one arm and snap that white, slender, throbbing young neck is
almost uncontrollable. Yet--strange, I am aware of it--it is
not hatred; it is something else. But what? What? I cannot
place the emotion. It is closer to jealousy. ... (Styron
1967, 92)
"you not only had a fantastic amount of niggers who did not
join up with you but there was a whole countless number of
other niggers who was your active enemies. What I mean in
simple terms, Reverend, is that once the alarm went out, there
was niggers everywhere--who were as determined to protect and
save their masters as you were to murder them. ... Reverend, I
have no doubt that it was your own race that contributed more
to your fiasco than anything else." (Styron 1967, 397)
Even today, "'cause I'm working on Nat Turner, I was listening
to recordings of interviews with slaves. You ever hear any of
this stuff? That's what I did on most of my research, actually,
'cause I didn't want anyone to call me a liar. I made sure I
wasn't gonna have anything in these books that didn't actually
happen for real. ... You read books about slavery, very few of
them are published by black people [laughs]. ... Most of
these books you read, they say great things like, 'Yeah, they
branded them, but it didn't hurt!" [laughs] I'm reading this
and I can't trust that swill (Watson 2007)
To this day there are traditions among the Virginia slaves of
the keen devices of "Prophet Nat." If he was caught with lime
and lamp-black in hand, conning over a half-finished county-map
on the barn-door, he was always "planning what to do, if he
were blind," or "studying how to get to Mr. Francis's house."
When he had called a meeting of slaves, and some poor whites
came eavesdropping, the poor whites at once became the subjects
for discussion; he incidentally mentioned that the masters had
been heard threatening to drive them away; one slave had been
ordered to shoot Mr. Jones' pigs, another to tear down Mr.
Johnson's fences. The poor whites, Johnson and Jones, ran home
to see to their homesteads, and were better friends than ever
to Prophet Nat. (Higginson 1861, 55)