Nat Turner: a Slave Rebellion in History and Memory.

Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. Edited by Kenneth S. Greenberg. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. [xx], 289. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-513404-4.)

We know less about Nat Turner, who led one of the most ferocious slave revolts in the nation's history, than perhaps any other pivotal American historical figure. After a century and a half of sustained interest, most of the scattered details known about Turner's failed 1831 uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, are drawn from brief accounts written and published by whites soon thereafter. Yet the magnitude of Turner's rebellion and the incompleteness of its historical record have given rise to multiple, often profoundly different perspectives about the events of 1831. These essays, woven together by Kenneth S. Greenberg, succeed marvelously at revealing the enduring cultural significance of the debates over the meaning of Nat Turner's violent dissent.

Nat Turner pulls together a variety of materials: previously published excerpts, freshly minted essays, and interviews with William Styron and Alvin F. Poussaint. Despite the inevitable repetition of accounts of Turner's rebellion, the collection works well; indeed, the differing emphases placed on the same small set of historical "facts" are fascinating. Greenberg deftly organizes the essays so that the reader is first introduced to Turner, then to the foundational text for all accounts of Turner's rebellion, Thomas R. Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner, and only then to the events of the revolt. Subsequent essays place Turner's revolt in the largest possible context. The concluding section is devoted to the explosive controversy sparked by William Styron's 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Central to the collection and Greenberg's three contributions is the contested historical memory surrounding Turner. With the enviable perspicacity that he has displayed in his previous work, Greenberg poses three simple queries about Nat Turner that raise larger questions about how we have come to "know" what we know about the slave rebel. Greenberg asks, "What was Nat Turner's name? What did he look like? Where is his body?" (p. 3). None of these questions has a simple answer. For example, the only contemporary description of Turner was a brief reward notice published after the uprising. Yet the absence of extended descriptions or visual likenesses of Turner has not inhibited subsequent authors from offering creative portraits of him. Whereas the reward notice described Turner's "rather bright complexion," a 1920 article in the Journal of Negro History pictured him as "of unmixed African lineage with the true Negro face" (pp. 14, 16). In Stephen Oates's hands Turner becomes a "coal-black Prophet" (p. 16). For Greenberg, the curious darkening of Turner reveals evolving cultural attitudes toward Turner, slavery, and race. Rendering Turner dark and primitive helped turn-of-the-century whites explain (away) his violence. For later black nationalists and their sympathizers, a "coal-black" Turner made him a fitting and representative race rebel. Curiously, it has been left to contemporary Southampton blacks to speculate about Turner's "bright complexion" and the possibility that he might have been the son of his white master. In a mere five pages devoted to this topic, Greenberg deftly lays bare many of the presumptions that have shaped the contentious historical memory of American slavery.

David F. Allmendinger's detailed assessment of the "construction" of the earliest accounts of Turner's revolt and Thomas C. Parramore's concise narrative of the revolt also are gems. Because we only know Turner through the voices of others, mostly whites, careful textual analysis of extant accounts is essential if we are to have any confidence in our ability to reconstruct Turner's motivations, beliefs, and life, at least as Turner understood them. Allmendinger systematically assesses Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner and concludes that the white lawyer probably did not greatly distort Turner's jailhouse confessions. We do not need to agree with Parramore's conclusions about Turner's ineptitude as a leader to appreciate the narrative clarity or contextual detail of his account of the swirling events of Turner's rampage. Equally important, Parramore makes vivid the violence wrought by Turner and his followers, who killed perhaps sixty whites, and by vengeful whites, who were responsible for the deaths of perhaps two hundred blacks. The magnitude of violence explains its lingering power on white and black imaginations.

The remaining essays offer differing opinions on Turner's possible inspiration, his standing in the black community, and the possible role of black women in the revolt. Necessarily speculative and often based on broad historical context at least as much as the sparse historical record, essays by Vincent Harding, James Sidbury, Douglas R. Egerton, and Louis P. Masur will not surprise most readers. In broadest terms, they place Turner within the larger black protest tradition that included Toussaint L'Ouverture, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and David Walker. Patrick H. Breen's essay revises ideas about Turner's prophetic charisma among his black community, and Mary Kemp Davis speculates that enslaved women had a larger role in the revolt than the extant historical record reveals.

Greenberg predictably devotes space to the controversy surrounding Styron's fictional rendering of Turner's life. Charles Joyner's essay is an eloquent and fair-minded meditation on the novel's origins and the responses it elicited from black intellectuals. Likewise, the interviews with two of the combatants, Styron and Poussaint, capture some of the polemical excesses that characterized the debate. But if the collection falls short in any area, it is by effectively treating Styron's novel as the most significant manifestation of the uprising's contested memory. What of the black memory of Turner across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? References to him are scattered throughout the era's black orations and historical writings. Although most whites only encountered this counter-memory during the controversy over Styron's novel, its roots ran back a century. A fuller treatment of the black memory of Turner would have been a welcome addition to this otherwise excellent collection.

W. FITZHUGH BRUNDAGE

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill