Of the many comments that The Confessions of Nat Turner has evoked, two have touched me with especial poignancy. One is that of James Baldwin, who is recorded as having said: “He has begun the common history—ours.”1 The other is from President Stokes, who wrote in a letter to me: “The Confessions of Nat Turner initiates all Negroes into our fearsome and wonderful heritage.”*1 I would like to consider the meaning of these two statements as they merge together in my mind—the Negro's fearsome and wonderful heritage and the relevance of that heritage to the common history, ours—and to reflect briefly on the past that binds together all of us.
First, however, let me say that my coming to Wilberforce University represents in a curious way the fulfillment of a journey which I began years ago as a boy in Tidewater Virginia. I was born in a middle-class Southern home, of educated Southern parents who desired what are commonly known as the “best things” in learning and culture. Yet my first memories of cultural advantages are not those arising out of some white background but from the famous Negro college nearby, Hampton Institute, a campus whose trees and lovely seaside setting are more vivid in my memory than those of the segregated white Southern schools I later attended. It was there at Hampton as a boy and—surprisingly enough for the South at that time—in integrated audiences, that I first heard the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Vienna Choir Boys, the Budapest String Quartet, there that I first saw educational films which the surrounding white community had little interest in seeing. I was very young during those years and I recollect with perfect clarity how, leaving Ogden Hall after an evening concert, some concert of Mozart or Beethoven which first stirred me with a passion for music which has never left me, I would be conscious in a vague, inchoate, yet nagging way that a barrier was gradually being breached in me, that the prejudices which were a normal part of the daily life of a Southern boy were being even then eroded away. For this was a Negro college—it was under the auspices of no white school that I was being proffered such beauty—and I could not escape the dim feeling that my life would someday be bound up together with the lives of those black people who had made me this splendid gift of music and had shared it with me. And although it was a number of years before I was able completely to shake free from that racial bias which wounds nearly every person born and bred in the South, it was surely these memorable evenings at Hampton that caused me far back in childhood to begin a long process of identification with the Negro people and the Negro spirit. And, as I say, the privilege I have of speaking here at Wilberforce seems only a continuation of that privilege which was first tendered me years ago, and as a gift, at Hampton.
I no longer know when or where it was that Nat Turner entered into my consciousness. It may have been around the time when my grandmother—then an old lady almost ninety years old—first told me about the two slave girls she owned when she herself was a little girl, just before the Civil War. In any case, I do know that I was still quite young, still in high school, when something strangely brooding and troublesome stung my curiosity, when I first heard of that slave in a nearby county, Southampton, who a hundred years before had risen up and struck down his oppressors, and had been hanged and had sunk back not into history but into oblivion. I remember going to Southampton in those days; there was no trace of Nat Turner then—only a solitary highway marker—just as there is no trace today of that dim and prodigious black man, nothing, no monument, no ruin, no relic of that revolt unique in American history. Even at that time I must somehow have been aware of the startling and devastating fact: that here in a state supreme among all the American states in the obeisance it paid to history—here in the Virginia of Jamestown and Yorktown and Williamsburg, of George Washington and Patrick Henry and John Marshall, the bloody land of Chancellorsville and the Wilderness—here in this same commonwealth another man had been born and had risen up, and wreaked a cataclysm, yet unlike those illustrious others he had not been memorialized and enshrined but had had his very memory spirited away, and was now obliterated, entombed, all traces of him vanished as if he had never dwelt on earth. I could not, of course, have expressed at that early age the underlying truth of this matter; my apprehension of the tragic reality came at a later date.
What simply had happened was this: Two races of people had existed side by side on this continent, in intimacy, in the closest propinquity, for three centuries and more. One race had possessed a history, an intricate and meaningful past made up of a web of antecedents and relatives and often remembered forebears whose works and deeds were chronicled or celebrated, indexed, annotated, or otherwise imperishably recorded for a more or less grateful posterity; their names were Stuart and Calhoun and Peyton, Wyatt and Upchurch, Longstreet and Davidson and Taliaferro and Lee. Their fortunes and their failures were a matter of enduring knowledge, their romances the subject of poems and novels, the edifices they built monuments to dynasty and power. Not all were rich by any means, but even those less favored had a past and an ancestry and could claim a continuity in time which might explain and even give some meaning to their present estate.
The other race had no past at all. Generation succeeded generation without mark or record, like dead leaves, the only memorial of their existence a scrawled first name in a property ledger or a carved monosyllable on the cedar headboard in a tumbledown graveyard choked with weeds and dandelions. No tie, no link bound son to father, father to grandfather; of their earthly coming there was small celebration, of their passing scant mourning, and of the chronicling of either few words. Their names were Tom and Jim and Ella Mae, Phoebe and Lucinda, Easter and Uncle Henry and Jericho and Dred. These people were chattel, property—a terrible though inescapable truth—and even had they been able to create a meaningful history it would have been denied them, obliterated by those who held them in bondage, the worst the world has ever seen. Such common history as the two races shared—shared in passion and heartbreak and hilarity and rage and hatred and love—this common history would not be allowed even after the chains of slavery were broken and black people, at least by law, became free men. If allowed at all, this history would become partisan, factional, biased—the black slave less a subject for the intense exploration of an institution than a pawn in the battle between white men passionate to display either their past benevolence or their present self-righteousness. And no one single figure in Negro history demonstrated how effectively the white man has eradicated that very history than that messianic preacher, Nat Turner. In Southampton County, now as in my boyhood, nothing remains; all is crumbled into dust; dwellings, barns, sheds, anyplace Nat must have visited along his cataclysmic journey has vanished as if into air. Yet perhaps it was just this willful destruction of history, this very absence of anything to see or smell or touch, that for so long challenged me to discover the truth about Nat Turner, to resurrect him from a nearly nonexistent past and in that act of resurrection to try to create a paradigm not only of man in revolt but of the beautiful and tragic reality of the history that all of us, black and white, have shared for so long in common.
It is perhaps a terrible paradox that Nat Turner—certainly one of the first American Negroes to become aware of the nature of our shared history—found the very fact of his inseparable bond with white people so intolerable that he was led to the most hideous sort of slaughter and destruction. I have often been asked if there was not some moral or lesson to be drawn from the story of Nat Turner, whether out of the mythic quality of his career there was not some parallel to be drawn about the revolutionary events of our own era. I have always hesitated to answer such questions, since like most honest writers my true intent was to produce not a tract for the times but a literary work which somehow might transcend matters even of racial conflict. What a slave in his anguish produced in destruction and bloodshed a century and more ago does not necessarily find its echo in the clamor and strife of present-day events. Yet certain connections are unavoidable, and it may be well to essay one or two final reflections. Was Nat Turner mad? No, I do not think so. Obsessed, yes, fixed with a murderous, obdurate purpose but one who was not so much mad as one who, like Martin Luther, could do no other. Nat Turner was oppressed, yet like some few who are oppressed he had tasted the sweet breath of freedom. It requires only a modicum of psychological insight to reason that continued oppression in the face of the promise of freedom may result in a bloody rage on the part of the oppressed and disaster for the oppressor; that whenever oppression persists—especially when liberty and abundance in all their glory lie roundabout for others—the oppressor may expect, as surely as the dawning of the sun, the visitation upon his head of unholy wrath.
Yet still it cannot be escaped that if oppression is bound to breed hatred, rampant hatred in return can only bring on catastrophe. During Nat Turner's insurrection fifty-five white people went to their deaths, and of the slaves involved most were either transported or hanged. The scores of innocent black people slaughtered or tortured in reprisal appall the imagination. That Nat Turner's revolt prevented the state of Virginia, which had been edging toward emancipation, from freeing its slaves now seems plain, just as that same futile insurrection brought down upon the black people of the entire South cruel new repressions and burdens which lasted until the Civil War. One cannot regard the story of Nat Turner with equanimity and blandly counsel revenge. Then what is the answer? For Frantz Fanon, the distinguished Negro psychiatrist, hatred itself is a cathartic for the disinherited, the oppressed, an emotion outside of morality which, however destructive, allows men the ecstasy of a sense of worth and self-regard.*2 The cost in human anguish is consequently of no matter. I myself am in no position to argue against this point of view, since I cannot lay claim to a condition in life which might impel such violence. Nor can I suggest that love is the answer, for love is perhaps now both too difficult and too easy, and in any event doubtless too late. Yet it was the only answer that Margaret Whitehead had—she whom Nat Turner dearly loved and whom in despair he murdered with his sword. “Beloved, let us love one another,” she said to Nat, quoting John, “for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God” (I John 4:7).
Perhaps there is no answer. Love was too late for Margaret Whitehead, as it was for Nat Turner, and indeed as it may be for us; but maybe when all is done it is love that remains still our last, our only hope.
[Speech at Wilberforce University, November 21, 1967. Previously unpublished.]
*1 Rembert E. Stokes, president of Wilberforce University 1956–1976, who was present on the stage when Styron delivered this speech. Reverend Stokes later became Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.—J.W.
*2 Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a Martinique-born French psychiatrist whose best-known book is The Wretched of the Earth, first published in 1961, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre.—J.W.