Nat Turner: A Troublesome
Property (2003)
HERE ARE SOME OF THE few things we know about Nat Turner. He was born a slave in Southampton County, Virginia, on October 2, 1800, the property of Benjamin Turner and later of Benjamin’s brother Samuel. Intelligent and articulate, he learned to read at a young age, chiefly from the Bible, and was subject to visionary religious experiences. He preached to other slaves at Baptist ceremonies, influenced a local white man to become an abolitionist, and was regarded by some as a prophet. At the age of twenty-two he escaped, but he voluntarily returned to his owner because of a spiritual revelation. Then, on August 21, 1831, he led a rebellion of roughly fifty neighborhood slaves and free blacks, initially armed with nothing but farm implements, who killed about sixty white men, women, and children of the plantation-owner class, but none of the poor whites. Nat himself later confessed to killing only one person, a young woman named Margaret Whitehead.
This was by no means the only slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere—the most successful was the 1791–1804 Haitian revolution led by Toussaint Louverture, which was fought by slaves and led to the establishment of a free state—but it was without question the most historically significant in the United States, sending shock waves throughout the South. It was soon quashed by an army of three thousand white vigilantes and Northampton militia, who went on a terror rampage and arbitrarily killed almost two hundred blacks. Black bodies were mutilated, and their heads were set atop poles for everyone to see. The names of the murdered blacks are unknown.
Over fifty blacks accused of taking part in the revolt were arrested, but Nat remained at large. He was described in a wanted poster as follows:
5 feet 6 or 8 inches high, weighs between 150 and 160 pounds, rather light complexion, but not a mulatto, broad shoulders, large flat nose, large eyes, broad flat feet, rather knockkneed, walks brisk and active, hair on the top of the head very thin, no beard, except on the upper lip and the top of the chin, a scar on one of his temples, also one on the back of his neck, a large knot on one of the bones of his right arm, near the wrist, produced by a blow.
The crude drawing accompanying the poster is the only image of Nat we have from the period when he lived. On October 30, 1831, he was found hiding in a hole by farmer Benjamin Phipps, who was hunting in the Southampton woods. Nat was armed with a sword, but Phipps had a rifle and a hunting dog. After he was arrested, manacled, chained, and placed in a cell, Nat was interviewed by Thomas Ruffin Gray, who had been doing research on the rebellion and hoped to profit by publishing a book. Gray became the author/editor of The Confessions of Nat Turner, which, whether or not it is a truthful account, has become the most often cited historical document pertaining to Nat’s life.
Forty-five slaves and five free blacks were put on trial; nineteen were hanged, twelve were sold to out-of-state owners (they were too valuable as property to be killed), and the others were acquitted. Nat was hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia, a town that has since had its name changed to Courtland, probably because the locals wanted to obscure identification with Nat and his religious propensities. As revenge, and in order to create terror among blacks, his body was flayed, decapitated, and quartered. His heart was removed, and all the body parts were buried in unmarked land without a funeral.
There have been several films about Nat Turner, but Charles Burnett’s absorbing television version occupies a special place, not only because of its quality but also because, like many important films, it doesn’t fit neatly into a generic category. A fusion of dramatic reenactment (played by five different actors in the role of Nat), informative narration (spoken by Alfre Woodard), talking-head interviews, archival footage, and scenes of the making of the film, it’s the most thoughtful and in my view the best picture on the subject. Interestingly, however, Burnett’s original plan was somewhat different. When he and his cowriters Frank Christopher and Kenneth S. Greenburg first traveled to Northampton to start production, their aim was to make what Burnett called “a Truth and Reconciliation” documentary. He told interviewers: “We had hoped to get [black and white] descendants of families in a room together and have a discussion about where the community is now.” But a newspaper reporter interviewed several of the people who would be talking to Burnett, promised them confidentiality, and then published what they said. “That caused a lot of hostility between neighbors,” Burnett has explained. “At that point they didn’t trust any outsider and especially one with a camera and recorder. So we had to make a different film” (quoted in Miguez and Paz 2016, 71).
The “different” film became an impressive, self-reflexive investigation into conflicting views of Nat and their social meanings. Burnett told me that “the idea of how to approach the subject was developed in a retreat. We worked on the new idea there. Frank [Christopher] should get credit for breaking the fourth wall. Ken [Greenburg] kept us focused on historical facts.” There was plenty of material to consider. For most whites, especially in the nineteenth century, Nat’s “confession” proved that he was an insanely evil religious fanatic (unlike all those nice darkies who worked under the supposedly benign arrangements of southern slavery), but for most blacks, he was a great and inspiring hero. Since his death he has been depicted in a variety of ways, not only by his quasi-amanuensis Thomas Ruffin Gray, but also by artists of fiction, theater, painting, and film and by historians, who have written many books and articles in an attempt to interpret his actions. The narrator of Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property sums up the situation in a kind of thesis statement that also serves as an epitaph for Nat: “His words became the property of others, as his body was during his life.”
The film is interspersed with short interviews with blacks and whites from different backgrounds: historians Herbert Aptheker, Eric Foner, Eugene Genovese, Vincent Hardy, Thomas Parramore, and Peter Wood; cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr.; African American studies professor Ekewewume Michael Thelwell; English professor Mary Kemp Davis; novelist William Styron; Southampton County Historical Society director Kitty Futrell; Rick Francis (a descendant of the white victims); Bruce Turner (a descendent of Nat); law professor Martha Minon; actor/director/activist Ossie Davis; writer Louise Merriweather; Southampton painter James McGee; Race Relations Institute director Ray Winbush; and Pan-African Film Festival director Ayuko Babu (who acted in two of Burnett’s short films). Burnett interweaves the remarks of these figures with dramatized, chronologically ordered scenes of the rebellion and its aftermath, as well as scenes based on several writers who tried to depict Nat in works of documentary and fiction. We see the beginning of the rebellion as a group of Nat’s men invade a plantation house and use a hatchet to kill a husband and wife in their bed; white vigilantes rounding up and getting ready to butcher blacks; Thomas Ruffin Gray’s interview with Nat in his jail cell; Nat’s execution (he’s viewed in silhouette and appears to be the rather small man described in the wanted poster); a scene from abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1856 novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp; a scene from black novelist/orator William Wells Brown’s Civil War–era, fictional rendition of Nat’s speech to his men before battle; a Works Progress Administration (WPA) researcher interviewing an elderly ex-slave in the 1930s; a scene from Randolph Edmonds’s 1935 play The Nat Turner Story; and scenes from William Styron’s controversial 1966 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner.
In the dramatic scenes involving Nat, the use of different actors for the role serves to emphasize the fact that he has been imagined in different ways. When the film reaches the point of Nat’s image in the 1960s and 1970s, we’re shown newsreel and television footage of violence against civil rights protesters; an excerpt from James Baldwin’s Oxford University debate with William Buckley; and clips from speeches by Stokley Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Malcom X, all of whom identified with Nat. Finally, Burnett and his collaborators and crew are shown working on the film we have been watching. His producer and co-screenwriter Kenneth S. Greenberg tells us that Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property is “a film about interpretation.” He then asks rhetorically, “Isn’t that film another interpretation?”
Indeed it is. The risk, as law professor Martha Minon remarks at one point in her interview, is that discussion of Nat might deteriorate into a mere catalog of varying opinions and hence a meaningless relativism. I believe, however, that the film’s straightforward laying out of evidence and opinion with little overt judgment by the narrator serves not only to educate the audience but also to respect them. Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property isn’t like Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950); it’s about different opinions, not about relativism, and some opinions are more persuasive than others. When Burnett came to Southampton, he was disturbed by the fact that whites there were still fighting the Civil War; they were quick to condemn Nat for murdering whites in their beds, but unable to see or admit that black slaves were victims of even worse treatment. His film makes quite clear that nonacademic whites have responded to Nat’s history differently than blacks, and that Nat’s image has undergone changes in different historical circumstances. Some views of him have never completely changed, but that has less to do with relativism than with American racism.
In 2003 Scott Foundas reported to Variety that an earlier “work in progress” version of Burnett’s film had been shown at a documentary festival in 2002; still in rough form, it was twenty-six minutes longer and, in Foundas’s opinion, more overtly partisan. Courtesy of Johnathan Rosenbaum, I’ve seen a version that is twenty-nine minutes longer. I wouldn’t describe it as more partisan, but I prefer it and wish it were widely available. It has a different narrator, more historical background, more dramatic episodes (including a scene adapted from William Styron in which we see Nat as a boy, thus making a total of seven actors who play the character), more interview material, more scenes of bloody white reprisals against rebellious blacks, and more scenes of Burnett and his collaborators at work on the film. It shows that before the Turner rebellion, legislators in Virginia had debated the possible abolition of slavery; it also has a brief scene dramatizing a speech by a prosperous, white, late nineteenth-century Baptist minister, who assures a group of genteel ladies that the rebellion was caused not by a desire for freedom but by a group of stupid heathen under the influence of liquor. In what follows, I concentrate on the film as it appeared on television, but I also describe several additional details from the longer version.
Time constraints imposed by PBS’s Independent Lens program, which initially aired the film, may have been responsible for the final edit. The first dramatic scenes are reenactments of Thomas Ruffin Gray’s interviews with the prisoner in his jail cell and are performed by two veterans of Burnett’s Nightjohn: Carl Lumbly as Nat and Tom Nowicki as Gray. The speeches come straight from Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner. When the two men talk with one another, Burnett covers the action in shot/reverse shots, but when Gray/Nowicki interposes his opinions as editor of the confessions—for example, when he comments on Nat’s education, intelligence, and apparently limitless potential—he turns and directly addresses the camera in the past tense. At one point he remarks on the “calm, deliberate” quality of Nat’s confession and adds that he was disturbed by the expression on Nat’s “fiend-like” face: “I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins!” But nothing in these scenes looks fiendish or histrionically melodramatic. Nowicki avoids any overt suggestion that Gray was a smarmy opportunist (which he probably was), and Lumbly, a muscular, handsome man, plays Nat articulately, as if the character were in quiet awe of the religious vision that motivated his rebellion. Huddled on the floor in rags and chains, he recalls hearing a voice that told him, “Time is fast approaching when the first should be last and the last first.” “While laboring in the field,” he says to Gray, “I discovered drops of blood on the corn as if dew from the heavens, and communicated it to many, both white and black in the neighborhood.” It was a sign from God, Nat says, and God determined his fate by telling him that “Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for men and that I should take it on.” When Gray asks Nat if he expected retribution, Nat responds with a rhetorical question: “Was not Christ crucified?”
Burnett cuts from these dramatized interview scenes to real-life interviews, in which talking heads express their opinions. We never hear the voice of an interviewer, but two questions naturally arise from what we’ve just seen: How accurate and reliable is Gray’s report, and to what degree can historians ever achieve a full, true picture of Nat? Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers what I consider the best response. Without denying that Nat existed or that his rebellion was important, Gates remarks, “There is no Nat Turner back there whole, to be retrieved.” Others more or less concur, especially in regard to the accuracy of the Confessions. English Professor Mary Kemp Davis says, “I do not believe for a moment that Nat Turner talked that way.” For religious historian Vincent Hardy, “It is very clear by now that we cannot take Nat Turner’s confession at face value. . . . But it is also clear that we cannot cast it aside. . . . Nat Turner must have eaten up the Christian and Hebrew testaments and begun to see himself as the embodiment of these.” Still others have somewhat more faith in the record and/or the possibility of arriving at truth. Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker smiles in wonder and approval of Nat’s comparison of his fate with Christ’s crucifixion: “That’s an astonishing statement!” (There is in fact something Christlike in the way Burnett and Carl Lumbly portray the imprisoned Nat’s description of his mission and anticipation of his execution.) William Styron declares that “any intelligent reader [of the Confessions] would have to say this guy is a crazy lunatic.” Historian Peter Wood doesn’t make a judgment but has a rather optimistic view of historical scholarship, which has usually been written by the winners and always involves a decision about what events are historically significant. Nat Turner, he argues, has been shrouded in conflicting myths of saintliness and insanity, but “the historian has to find that real historical person.”
Where judgments about Nat’s rebellion are concerned, opinions are more at odds. Kitty Futrell of the Southampton County Historical Society, a rather sour southern white lady who looks as if she dislikes being interviewed, thinks the Turner rebellion shouldn’t be dignified with the term “war.” “That’s declared!” she says, discounting not only the conditions of slavery but also the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and many other examples of surprise attacks: “You give people the choice that I’m going to fight you!” Almost reluctantly she adds, “Slavery was wrong, but murder is wrong, too.”
Regarding the Futrell interview, it’s worth noting that while making the film Burnett visited the small Courtland museum devoted to Nat, which had been established because at one point filmmakers from Hollywood were going to visit Southampton County and make a picture based on Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner: “I suspect that I’m the only black person up until then who was invited to hold Nat’s sword and hold the rope that hung him,” Burnett has said. “The white ladies that run the museum were nervous about me holding Nat’s sword. I suspected they thought Nat’s spirit was going to take over my body and use the sword on them. The [museum has] made a documentary about Nat . . . sold and shown in the local schools. The video characterizes Nat as a crazy murderer [who] killed innocent people, babies included” (Miguez and Paz 2016, 70).
Commenting on the murder of babies, another eminent Marxist historian, Eugene Genovese, argues, “Revolutions have to kill everybody. A revolution is either thorough or it’s doomed.” But Rick Francis, a descendant of the white victims, says “The murder of women and children sticks in my craw. . . . [Turner] would certainly be remembered better by history if he had limited the killing to . . . white adults.” (Perhaps inadvertently, Francis’s remark suggests that only men are adults.) Bruce Turner, a descendant of Nat, says, “The only way to do the rebellion was to make the price of resistance [from whites] too high.” Law professor Martha Minon, one of the wisest interviewees, offers a plausible psychological explanation for the responses of southern whites: “I think that many white people identify with the innocents, the children. It’s a position that’s much more comfortable. People know they can’t defend slavery morally, so they have to say there was something morally wrong in the uprising.”
Having established a variety of present-day opinions, the film turns to a historical overview of Nat’s changing image, showing how, as the narrator says, he has been “recreated by others to fit their needs.” From the God-obsessed, crazy Nat portrayed by Gray in some parts of the Confessions, we move to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1856 Dred, whose title character is based on Nat. Drawing on the sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century melodrama from which she had achieved great success with Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Stowe depicts Dred as an innately gentle, kindly figure rather than a wild-eyed revolutionary or religious zealot; uneducated, he nevertheless has a poetic sensibility that “softens the heart toward children and the inferior animals,” and a “flame” burning in his heart. In Burnett’s dramatized scene from the novel, Dred is played by Patrick Waller, a sweet-faced, ursine actor who is seen wearing a red African turban, sitting in a forest, and cuddling a tiger cub; hearing a menacing sound, he grasps his sword and runs off along a forest stream.
Burnett cuts to William Styron, who remarks that Nat is a “boon” to writers because so little is known about him that he can be used as a metaphor or symbol for every sort of imaginative literature about slavery and black rebellion. This, however, could be said of any emblematic but politically controversial figure in history, no matter how well or little known. Where Nat is concerned, portrayals of him are always inescapably determined by a social and racial context. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Frederick Douglass often praised Nat as a powerful hero of black emancipation; as historian Eric Foner points out during his interview for the film, Douglass saw Nat as a worthy descendant of the original American revolutionaries, a man who was more true to the ideals of the nation than slaveholders who celebrated the Fourth of July. During the Civil War William Wells Brown (often described as the first African American novelist) delivered a speech in which he imagined what Nat must have said to his small army at Cabin Pond on the night of the rebellion. Burnett dramatizes the scene, casting the slender, intense Michael LeMelle in the role of Nat. “Friends and brothers,” Nat almost whispers to his comrades in the silent woodland, “we are about to commence a great work tonight. Our race is to be delivered from slavery. And God has appointed us as the men to do his bidding.”
In his interview, Ossie Davis recalls how black boys of his generation gloried in Nat and imagined scenarios in which he would triumph. This was especially true during the Great Depression, a period of intense political consciousness and a growing protest literature. Burnett shows a film clip from Orson Welles’s celebrated 1936 “Voodoo” Macbeth, a WPA production with an all-black cast, which was set in the Haitian revolution and featured a rebel leader brandishing a Nat-like sword. He also dramatizes a WPA interview from the early 1930s in which Alan Crawford, an aged former slave, gives a sort of folkloric account of Nat regretfully killing a white baby. Then he dramatizes a closing scene from the most important representation of Nat during those years, Randolph Edmonds’s The Nat Turner Story, a 1935 play intended to be performed mainly in schools. We see a small theater in which the play is being performed, with Tommy Hicks (who played Reverend Banks in The Glass Shield and would work again with Burnett) in the role of Nat. In a closing soliloquy, Nat becomes a tragic figure. Other slaves have called him a “beast,” fearing white reaction. “But if I’m a beast,” he asks, “who made me one?” Looking about at the death and blood on the stage, he cries, “My hands is bloody, too! Was I wrong, Lord?”
During the Civil Rights era and its violent aftermath, when Burnett was growing up, there was a resurgence of interest in Nat. In this period he was seen by blacks not as a tragic hero but as an emblem of angry, armed resistance to the brutality of white racism. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., black leaders Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Malcom X all identified with Nat, as did the Afro-Caribbean intellectual Frantz Fanon. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, winning black athletes raised their fists in the Black Power salute while the US national anthem was played. But these were also the years of white author William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966–1967), a controversial publication that remains to this day the single most ambitious attempt to portray Nat in fiction. Styron was a much-awarded southern white writer who was born less than a hundred miles from the site of Nat’s rebellion. His best-selling novel, narrated in the first person by Nat and bearing the same title as Thomas Ruffin Gray’s 1831 Confessions, won the Pulitzer Prize, landed him on the cover of Newsweek, and brought the Southampton slave insurrection to the attention of a white suburban culture that had barely if ever heard of it. Of course blacks also read the book. In Burnett’s film, Henry Louis Gates Jr. says that as a young man he came home from school one day, saw that the novel had been delivered by the Book of the Month, and stayed up all night reading it. Just when it was on the verge of becoming a Hollywood movie starring James Earl Jones, however, a group of black scholars and writers reacted passionately against it and published a book of their own.
The longer version of Burnett’s film goes into detail about 20th Century Fox’s plans to adapt Styron’s novel, and the reaction that ensued. The picture was to be produced by David Wolper (who is interviewed), directed by Norman Jewison, and written by black author Lou Peterson. Styron received $600,000 for the rights. When this was announced in the trade press, author Louise Meriweather organized a protest and purchased a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter containing many signatures of black professionals opposed to the picture. Wolper initially agreed to the demands of this group, who wanted the picture to be called simply Nat Turner and to be limited to historical records. But as soon as plans were announced to film in Virginia, white locals also protested, resenting the idea of Hollywood “outsiders” meddling with local history. All the old conflicting views of Nat had reemerged in highly public form. William Styron was content to keep his money and wash his hands of Hollywood’s convoluted attempts to satisfy everyone. It soon became clear that the film was too controversial, and production was abandoned.
William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), edited by John Henrik Clarke, was a vitriolic attack on the novel, and for understandable reasons. Leaving aside the aesthetic merits of Styron’s book and granting that he was a talented writer, any fiction about historical figures has a responsibility to be true to the historical evidence. In Nat’s case, Styron overlooked parts of the history and filled the many historical lacunae with imagined motives and implied judgments that the ten black writers found racist. According to Styron (or perhaps one should say according to Styron’s Nat, who, like any first-person narrator, might be, at least theoretically, somewhat unreliable), Nat was a reluctant, bumbling rebel who had been driven mad by the terrible impact of slavery on his native intelligence, religious conviction, and sexuality. His slaveholding owners were in many ways kindly, but the poor whites around him in Southampton were ignorant, deviant, and cruel. Essentially celibate, Nat had experienced only one sexual act, a homoerotic encounter with a young black male. When he became a house slave for the “saintly” Turner, his emotions churned with a mixture of gratitude, admiration, and cold hostility. And when he was befriended by Margaret Whitewood, the idealistic daughter of a slave owner, he boiled with a barely repressed conflict between love and hatred.
There is no historical evidence to support Styron’s psychological speculations. John Henrik Clarke’s introduction to Ten Black Writers Respond points out that according to some sources Nat had a wife on another plantation and was forbidden to visit her, a common situation for slaves, much like the fictional Outlaw and Egypt in Nightjohn, which could have provided one of several clear motives for his revolt. The proposed 1968 Hollywood movie based on Styron would in fact have eliminated most of the sex business with Margaret and given Nat a wife. Styron had seized upon a short passage in Gray’s Confessions in which Nat straightforwardly describes killing Margaret and spun it into a lurid sexual drama. (He also dreamed up Nat’s homosexual episode and a scene in which a female black slave enjoys being raped by an Irishman.) No matter how well-meaning Styron may have thought he was, he had indulged in the sexual fantasy of black lust for lovely, fair-haired, white womanhood that inspired Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the Klu Klux Klan, and a wave of lynching in the South. A few notable black intellectuals—among them Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin—came to his defense, but most others were furious and adamantly opposed to what he had written.
In the longer version of his film, Burnett dramatizes Styron’s imagined sexual encounter between Nat and the young black boy. It’s a tender scene in which Nat and the boy embrace and softly touch one another; when interviewed about it, Styron says that he didn’t intend to suggest homosexuality, he wanted only to describe a “homoerotic” incident of a kind that many young men have experienced. In the shorter, TV version of the film, Burnett retains a couple of other scenes from Styron, using only Styron’s language and doing cinematic justice to his novel. Nat is played by the tall, handsome, imposing Virginia stage actor James Opher and Margaret by the blond, blue-eyed, teenage Megan Gallacher. As they walk together down a wooded path, Margaret chatters excitedly, her head reaching only to the middle of Nat’s shoulder. Nat remains silent. Burnett’s camera looks down at her and up at Nat. She’s a delightful young woman, enjoying what she seems to regard as an innocent friendship and a meeting of minds with a slave she admires, unselfconsciously talking with him about her love of books and her conviction that slavery is wrong. Over her talk, we hear Nat’s inner, retrospective voice calmly confessing the riot of desire and hostility he felt when her arm inadvertently brushed against his and his barely contained temptation to take her sexually then and there. The next scene, in part from Styron and in part from Gray, shows the moment during the insurrection when Nat kills Margaret: he chases her across a field, catches her near a fence, and stabs her several times with his phallic sword. As she lies dying, she begs him to finish her. He asks her to close her eyes, seizes a fence post, and crushes her head.
It must be said in partial defense of Styron that this is not exactly the pure animal lust for white women that Griffith and other whites had depicted. Styron’s Nat is a Freudian creation, an intelligent, sensitive man whose condition as a slave, obsession with religion, and repressed sexuality inflame him with a psychological need to exact vengeance upon the owners who have put temptation in his way. In his interview with Burnett, Styron says he wanted to “humanize” Nat and points out that his friend James Baldwin, who was living in Styron’s house when he began the novel, encouraged him to use his imagination and plunge without reservation into the mind of a black character. (Baldwin had already made a similar but more successful experiment of his own in Giovanni’s Room [1956], a novel told from the point of view of a privileged white American who becomes an expatriate in Paris and has a doomed homosexual love affair with a working-class Italian.) That, however, is an inadequate defense, as Ossie Davis observes in his interview when he asks exactly for whom Styron was trying to “humanize” the character. Davis had a black daughter and wanted her to know that she was beautiful; Styron was promulgating, in apparently more sophisticated form, the old idea that blacks adored and desired white womanhood.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. remarks that if not for its sexual themes Styron’s novel would probably have passed muster with blacks. African American novelist Louise Meriweather, in her interview, says that that she was so angry with Styron that she flushed the pages of The Confession of Nat Turner down the toilet. Burnett himself was typically kind when Styron visited the set and watched the filming of the scenes from his novel. But Burnett confessed to interviewers that he had no admiration for the novelist: “[H]e was out of touch with the black community. . . . Styron said that he hoped his book would bring the races together, as we hoped we would in our film, strangely enough” (Miguez and Paz 2016, 71). Interviewed on the Nat Turner set by Village Voice reporter Gerald Peary in 2001, Styron remained unapologetic about his book: “I find almost all the complaints invalid, irrational, and hysterical, based on bigotry and prejudice. I don’t want to seem self-assured, but I wouldn’t change much” (Kapsis 2011, 127).
In the final moments of Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, Burnett films James McGee, a black painter in Southampton, as he completes work on a large, heroic canvas representing Nat and his insurrectionary army. McGee says that he is trying to “illustrate what is said to me through my ancestors.” In a very indirect way Burnett could be said to do the same thing, but he also places himself overtly and self-reflexively within the long history of art about Nat. The scene with McGee is followed by a montage in which we see Burnett at work on the film; directing the scene in which the rebellious slaves murder the Turner family; and conferring with his actors, cowriters, and crew. Interviewed while at work (by a crew member?), he emphasizes that “it is not that we are trying to reclaim Nat. We are just trying to present other artists’ interpretations of Nat Turner . . . very faithfully, without interpreting their work.” But as Jaqueline Najuma Stewart has pointed out, “the shots of Burnett in production cannot help but implicate him in the debates about what has motivated different artists in their approaches to Turner, particularly, as Burnett notes, how artists have ‘interpreted [Turner’s uprising] a certain way on racial lines’” (2015, 275).
At one point the film’s narrator, Alfre Woodard, asks, “Can any work of art bring Americans closer to an understanding of Nat?” If by “understanding” one means a relatively unmediated knowledge of Nat’s consciousness and personality, the answer to the question is no; we have too little historically reliable information about Nat. But if the question has to do with an understanding Nat’s rebellion, the answer is yes. The problem has less to do with historical information than with who has the power of representation, what interests the representation serves, and whether or not the audience is willing to be persuaded. The racial divide in America continues to vex understanding of the 1831 rebellion in Southampton. Commenting on the ten black writers who attacked William Styron’s interpretation, Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives black artists good advice: “If you don’t like it, write your own.” In 2016 a black filmmaker was at last able to mount a full-scale fictional representation of Nat that stands in vivid contrast to Styron’s. Nate Parker’s wonderfully titled Birth of a Nation portrays Nat as an intelligent and brave man of faith who became a martyr.
Burnett’s film is no less important than Parker’s and is arguably more important—this despite the fact that it shows different opinions of the Turner rebellion and has a relatively understated mode of representation. Burnett had no problem at all understanding Nat’s actions, and he expected his film would help us understand. On YouTube, we can see him stating his purpose in response to an audience question after a screening of Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property: “As an African-American born in Mississippi, I can understand Nat Turner. I can understand anyone in those conditions who would want to be free. . . . It’s very simple to me. If you’ve got your foot on someone’s throat, I can’t understand if you don’t understand that someone’s going to react to it.”