An icon in African American history, Nat Turner has generated almost every kind of cultural product, including the historical, imaginative, scholarly, folk, polemical, and reflective. In Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, Mary Kemp Davis offers an original, in-depth analysis of six novels in which Turner figures prominently. This Virginia rebel slave, she argues, has been re-arraigned, re-tried, and re-sentenced repeatedly during the last century and a half as writers have grappled with the social and moral issues raised by his (in)famous 1831 revolt. Though usually lacking a literal trial, the novels Davis examines all have the theme of judgment at their center, and she ingeniously unravels the
verdict
each author extracts from his or her plot.
Davis begins by dismantling the historical scaffolding that surrounds her subject. She decodes Virginia governor John Floyd’s
official
assessment of the revolt, which, she says, exemplifies the dialogism between the earliest texts about the rebellion and the incipient novel tradition. She also considers three classes of documents that triangulate the trial trope: court records, selected newspaper accounts, and Thomas Gray’s seminal work, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831). The remainder of her study treats in expansive detail the six novels: The Old Dominion; or, The Southampton Massacre (1856), by the English historical novelist George Payne Rainsford James; Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Homoselle (1881), by Mary Spear Tiernan; Their Shadows Before: A Story of the Southampton Insurrection (1899), by Pauline Carrington Rust Bouve; Ol’ Prophet Nat (1967), by Daniel Panger; and, best known, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron. Discussion of Dessa Rose (1986), Sherley Anne Williams’ response to Styron’s novel, shapes the conclusion.
According to Davis, all of the novelists derive their fundamental understanding about Turner from Gray’s overdetermined text, but they recreate it in their own image. In this fictional tradition that begins with a nineteenth-century romance and ends with postmodern revisions of the form, Davis shows the Turner persona to be multivalent and inherently unstable, each novelist laboring mightily and futilely to arrest it within the confines of art.
