Nat Turner (graphic novel)

AUTHOR: Baker, Kyle

ARTIST: Kyle Baker (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Harry N. Abrams

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2005-2006

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2008

Publication History

Kyle Baker first encountered Nat Turner in elementary school while reading a single paragraph about Turner’s rebellion in an American history textbook. Over time, Baker would again find brief mentions of Turner in various books, but not until he read Malcolm X’s description of Turner’s revolt in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) did Baker see the potential of retelling Turner’s story in graphic form.

Baker originally intended Nat Turner to be a self-published, four-issue miniseries. The first issue was published in June, 2005, the second in December, 2005. Both issues were published by Kyle Baker Publishing and printed in black and white. The remaining issues were never published in the same single-comic format.

In June, 2006, Nat Turner: Encore Edition, again published by Kyle Baker Publishing, collected the first two issues of the miniseries. In February, 2007, Nat Turner: Revolution was published by Images Comics, collecting the two previously unpublished comics. These editions were both ninety-six pages and were published in black and white.

In June, 2008, the entire series was collected by the publishing house Harry N. Abrams into a single edition. This edition, unlike the previous, was printed in a muted sepia duo tone and includes a two-page preface by Baker.

Plot

Noting the rarity of works about Turner, Baker creates a dramatic retelling of Turner’s life, insurrection, and execution. Baker bases his work on history and legend to fashion a Turner who repudiates the dehumanization of slavery through violence. Baker spares no unpleasantness in depicting the harshness of slavery, racial inequality, and the brutality of Turner’s insurrection.

Baker divides Nat Turner into four chapters. In the first, an idyllic village market is disrupted when African slave raiders attack marketgoers, attempting to kidnap villagers to sell on the slave market. Turner’s mother (though Turner has not been born yet) resists the raiders but is eventually cornered on the edge of a cliff, where she attempts to leap to her death, only to be lassoed by one of the raiders. Later, aboard ship, she is crammed alongside hundreds of other slaves. Sharks follow the ship, devouring dead slaves who are thrown overboard. One woman gives birth during the voyage and once top-side, throws her baby overboard, at which point a shark devours it. Chapter 1 ends with images of Turner’s mother being sold and a young Turner somehow recounting the story of the baby being thrown to the sharks, an event that happened before he was born.

Chapter 2 presents a young Turner growing into a religious revolutionary. As a child, he is excluded from school, but his curiosity and intelligence propel him to learn. He listens at the door of the schoolhouse, teaches himself to read, and reads the Bible ceaselessly, particularly the narratives about Moses freeing the Israelites. Turner experiences visions and realizes he has a divine calling for some great purpose, cryptically prophesying an upcoming cataclysm. Baker also depicts an apocryphal tale of Turner marrying, having two children, and then being separated from them as they are sold to three different owners. Later, Turner, standing in the rain with fists raised to heaven, sees a vision of a battle between white and black spirits. The chapter closes with images of Turner raising a Bible, prophesying to other slaves.

Chapter 3 depicts the insurrection. Turner views an eclipse as a sign to start the slaughter, in which no white person is to be spared. Turner’s men kill the Travis family in their beds. Leaving the house, Turner realizes they have forgotten the Travis’s infant and orders Henry and Will back to the house to kill the baby. The band continues house to house. Upon returning to his owner’s home, Henry, one of Turner’s lieutenants, is cheerfully greeted by his owner’s young son, whom Henry immediately decapitates with a single ax blow. Turner’s group grows to about sixty men, but the group’s organization and discipline begin to deteriorate. As Turner’s forces become more disorganized, the white community coordinates an attack. Turner and his forces are confronted by a large militia; some flee, but others attack. As Turner’s men falter, Turner retreats. Unable to organize a counterattack, Turner hides for six weeks before being captured.

Chapter 4 quickly recounts Turner’s imprisonment, confession, and execution. As Turner faces execution, his lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, asks Turner if he believes the rebellion to have been a mistake. Turner replies by comparing his own fate to that of Christ’s. When Turner is taken to be hanged, a small throng mocks him as he looks heavenward. Turner is hanged from a tree; the faces in the crowd turn from excitement to wide-eyed emptiness. The book ends with a young house servant sneaking away to read her master’s copy of Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1831).

Characters

•Nat Turner, the protagonist, possesses a superior intellect but must endure the barbarity of slavery throughout his life in Southampton, Virginia. Turner is separated from his father, refused an education, and then forcibly separated from his wife and children. Turner seems to possess special gifts, as he recounts events that happened in the past, sees visions, and communes with the spirit of God. Turner interprets various signs and divine messages as God’s endorsement of his leading a revolt against white slave owners.

•Turner’s mother, born in Africa, has a fearless and indomitable spirit. When slave raiders enter her village, she resists their onslaught, protecting a boy by killing two of the raiders and leading other raiders away from him before being captured. Nat Turner reflects his mother’s strength and courage.

•Turner’s father is an imposing figure with a serious demeanor. He is deeply loved and respected by his son. He listens carefully to secret messages passed through the community through drumbeats and passes information to other slaves through coded whistling. He escapes from his owners in the night, leaving his wife and young Turner behind, never to be seen again.

•Turner’s wife resembles Turner’s mother. She is tall and slender and appears happy to be married to Turner. She has two children but is separated from both her husband and her children when she and her children are sold to different slave-owners.

•Henry is a slave who possesses a friendly demeanor, demonstrated by his gentle smile and friendly wave to his owner’s young son. He is a muscular man and a foot taller than most everyone around him. His demeanor changes, though, under Turner’s tutelage, and he becomes one of Turner’s most loyal devotees. He is so devoted, in fact, that during the insurrection, he kills his owner’s son without hesitation.

•Will is another of Turner’s most trusted adherents. Turner refers to him as Will the Executioner for his unflinching ability to kill.

•Joseph Travers is Turner’s owner and the first to be killed during the insurrection.

•Thomas Ruffin Gray, a small, balding, bespectacled lawyer, records Turner’s confession after three days of questioning.

Artistic Style

Baker uses heavily shaded sepia duo tone drawings in Nat Turner. Each chapter begins with a full-page borderless drawing, while the main work uses various panel constructions, mostly clearly defined rectangular and square panels. Occasionally, Baker employs circles, ovals, and inlaid panels. Word balloons are used only in a single scene when young Turner shouts for his father to run. Sound effects are generally used within panels, while narrative text is generally used outside panels. Baker avoids the exaggerated caricatures found in many of his lighter works, favoring sketches of fairly naturally proportioned characters. Baker’s model for Nat Turner appears to be an 1863 steel engraving based on a work by Felix O. C. Darley, which Baker incorporates in the bottom panel on page 111 without disrupting the visual narrative.

The graphic novel relies heavily upon the artwork to present the narrative and includes text only occasionally, primarily from Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner. The images often inform and at times conflict with Gray’s text. While the text suggests Turner’s motivation for the rebellion is of supernatural origin, the images suggest a more earthly motive: revenge. Baker juxtaposes contrasting images to illustrate the inequity and oppression of nineteenth-century slavery in Southampton, Virginia: Images of one slave’s rhythmic drumbeats are juxtaposed with the monotone clanging of the town’s bell; images of slaves waking from the floor are juxtaposed with images of whites waking in their beds; images of Turner’s family being sold are juxtaposed with images of his master, Joseph Travers, tucking his children into bed; images of Turner’s wife and children being dragged away by their new owners are juxtaposed with Turner’s orders for Henry and Will to kill the Travers’s infant. These images create a secondary narrative that makes the text more satisfyingly rich and complex.

Themes

The theme most clearly demonstrated in Nat Turner is that violence begets violence. Baker presents a culture in which brutality toward slaves is an accepted, natural occurrence. Chapter 2 begins with an older slave sending messages to other slaves through drumbeats in the middle of the night. The old man is captured, whipped, and literally has salt rubbed into his wounds. His tormentors then cut off his hands and destroy his drum. Later, a female slave is on her knees scrubbing her master’s floor when she spots a book with a lion on the cover. Curious, she opens the book only to be caught by her master, who has her strung up by her ankles and whipped by another slave until a pool of blood forms on the ground beneath her head. Unbearable psychological violence is also visited upon Turner when he is separated from his wife and two children when they are sold to different owners. The barbarity of these acts is reciprocated as Turner leads his bloody uprising. Other themes that may be readily found in Nat Turner are endurance under oppression, the inextinguishable desire for freedom and justice, the rationalization of violence, the self-destructive nature of violence, the dehumanization of both master and slave in a slave system, religious fanaticism as an instrument for violence, the consequences of racism, and the relationship between education and freedom, among others.

Impact

Since his execution in 1831, Turner has been mythologized as he has been constructed and reconstructed many times over. For some, Baker included, Turner is a hero who resisted slavery’s tyranny, becoming a symbol of hope for those suffering under the intolerable weight of oppression. For others, he is a hellish villain, a prototypical terrorist who slaughtered innocent children in his quest to defy subjugation. A third view is that Turner is neither a hero nor a villain but rather the natural consequence of the institution of slavery.

In his introduction to Nat Turner, Baker wonders why so few books and films have been made about Turner. The answer, most likely, lies in the brutality of Turner’s rebellion, particularly the slaughtering of children and infants. Baker does not shy away from this violence, which allows readers to develop their own opinions as to how Turner should be understood. Filmmakers may also hesitate, remembering the outrage directed toward William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner in the late 1960’s.

Baker has claimed that Nat Turner is a true story, but as with others who have attempted to re-create Turner’s narrative (Harriet Beecher Stowe, George P. R. James, Mary Spear Tiernan, Pauline Carrington Rust, Daniel Panger, and Styron) he has excluded some facts while including a number of historical speculations: Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner mentions Turner being influenced by his grandmother; Turner’s having a wife is still a source of dispute among historians; women and children taking up arms in support of the insurrection also lacks historical support.

Nat Turner has been well received by critics and reviewers alike. Baker has been praised for his unflinching look into the evils of slavery and has again thrust Turner into the spotlight for this generation.

Films

Goodbye Uncle Tom. Directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. Euro International Film, 1971. In this Italian film, a documentary team is sent to the nineteenth century, where it films the harrowing inhumanity faced by slaves brought to America: squalid conditions on ships, dehumanizing living quarters, sexual exploitation, and white justifications for slavery. This film is at once a searing indictment of slavery and a highly exploitative film. Turner appears in the last sequence of the film, as an African American man reads Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner on a beach in contemporary times. As he reads passages from the book, he imagines the white people on the beach taking on the roles of the white victims in the book.

Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. Directed by Charles Burnett. Subpix, 2003. This PBS documentary presents multiple actors in the role of Turner, each depicting different interpretations of Turner-Gray’s, Stowe’s, William Wells Brown’s, Randolph Edmond’s, and Styron’s. Turner is presented as a religious fanatic, a sacrificial victim, a heroic revolutionary, and a sexually repressed rebel. Along with the recreated accounts are interviews with Ossie Davis, Henry Louis Gates, Eugene Genovese, Styron, and others.

Possession. Directed by Kevin R. Hershberger. Richmond 48 Hour Film Project, 2010. This short film stars Tyhm Kennedy as Nat Turner and Shawn T. Singletary as Will. The film presents Turner in a way that is similar to Gray’s depiction, claiming divine authority and calling his men to prepare themselves to kill everyone but insisting that the primary goal of Turner is to gain freedom for his fellow slaves. As the men attack the first house, Will hesitates to kill those he claims never caused harm. Turner sternly reminds Will that slavery has made him property, that it is their divine obligation to free their fellow slaves; he commands Will to pick up his weapon. The short film ends with Will asking what he should do.

Further Reading

Burgan, Michael, et al. Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (2006).

McGruder, Aaron, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker. Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel (2004).

Morales, Robert, and Kyle Baker. Captain America: Truth–Red, White, and Black (2004).

Bibliography

Clarke, John Henrik, ed. William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Davis, Mary Kemp. Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1996.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Gross, Seymour L., and Eileen Bender. “History, Politics, and Literature: The Myth of Nat Turner.” American Quarterly 23, no. 4 (October, 1971): 487-518.

Oates, Stephen B. The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion. New York: Harper, 1975.

Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1968.