An odd day...
For reasons I am not at liberty to divulge, I was at a junior high school today with a group of my students. It's a highly innovative school in what I understand to be a socioeconomically depressed area. Black kids. Entirely, I think. 85 of them.
Throughout the school there are pictures of African-Americans who have made their mark on society. Inspirational. Seriously, I was impressed. These faces were plastered on t-shirts worn by the teachers. But there was one guy who was wearing a Nat Turner t-shirt. Turner is looking, uh, better than he does in contemporary depictions of him (but those were clearly drawn to exaggerate the "African" features of the 1830s Osama bin Laden--he was that hated and detested--broad nose, large lips, etc). Because there is no reliable image of him, the image on this shirt was necessarily an idealization, and he was drawn as a freaking superhero. A strapping guy who was ripped enough to make even the most butch hetero male feel all giggly. And Turner has an axe.
I'm sorry, but we know that I'm a complete prick.
"So, Nat Turner?" I said to the guy.
"Yep!"
"I taught about him last semester."
"Oh, yeah?"
"You know how that turned out, right?"
"With them hanging him. Yeah."
"But you know, before, during the insurrection."
"Yeah."
What I wanted to say was that he had, to my eye, all the markings of a cult leader exploiting a vulnerable population. (The only qualification that I would have is that he was not, to my knowledge, brutalizing the slaves, even if he did lead them on to their deaths.) But I did not want to get into that. I had this in mind:
On which, armed with a hatchet, and accompanied by Will, I entered my master's chamber, it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife, it was his last word, Will laid him dead, with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed. The murder of this family, five in number, was the work of a moment , not one of them awoke; there was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it [...].
Killed the slave owners. I think that there is a self-defense argument that could be made there. Went back to kill an infant in bed. How can you justify that? In my mind a line was crossed, and not an ambiguous one. You don't kill people because they might do something bad to you one day. Also, he massacred all but one of the children in a school, the only difference between the victims and the kids playing around us today was that the kids in Virginia were born of slave holding parents.
He was well aware of this, he led me to understand. "But a role model?" I explained that I taught about Turner as a person who occupies an ambiguous place in history.
What followed was a short discussion with a man who put Turner in the same category as Martin Luther King, Jr., who is traditionally depicted wielding a machete and a pistol. Oh wait, hang on...
Anyway, he was a genuinely nice guy, and when he started mentioning people displayed on the murals in the building, I shifted my conversation to the important stuff that they were doing. I did like the guy. I heaped genuine praise on the school and their program.
So what do you think? Nat Turner a hero? Ambiguous? Villain who had a shitty life?
HJ
Seed Newsvine
5 comments:
Villain in a shitty time, definitely. Like you said, there are some moral lines that are pretty unambiguous. Killing school children and infants, especially because of who they were born to, is a huge one.
Maybe "desperate times call for desperate measures," but that doesn't absolve one of responsibility. He went too far, did too much, allowed the hatred to overpower the right.
It was a desperate time. Labels such as Hero and Villain are too crisp, too black-and-white (no pun intended) to apply to this situation. Ambiguous is more accurate.
Nat Turner, good question, while I don't remember all the details, I think to call him a hero still might be the way to go, in HIS place the genocide of his people was every day, we know the drill, families torn apart, literacy and marriage not allowed, torture daily for some, rape and abuse for others...I just bet he and his fellow slaves had seen more than one Black child beaten or killed (I stil don't believe the fairy tale that slaves were not killed cause they were too valuable)
So IF he killed the family of his genocidal oppressor, well that probably qualifies as street justice...
hero, perhaps desperate captive surely
TomDem55
I agree to the above comments. Perhaps his long-term impact was a net positive, and perhaps the ends were so necessary that they justified the means. I dunno. I sure as shit wouldn't display that much moral complexity on a tshirt.
You know, I have thought about that, John, but there was _no_ negative on the shirt. This is a dangerous type of selective history, what people call "heritage," and leads to things like nationalism and assorted weirdness. (I thought that I came up with that definition, but apparently Hannah Arendt, who I am reading now, said that exactly in The Rise of Totalitarianism. Damn it.) The net positive I believe is largely illusory. For instance, after the revolt, not only did most of his followers swing (others were "transported" farther south--cutting any local family ties), but throughout the community, free blacks and innocent slaves were lynched. There was briefly talk in VA, where it happened, of perhaps repealing slavery (but only for, like, a few minutes). Instead, slavery laws across the south were ratcheted up and the condition of the blacks deteriorated because of the revolt--it was the perfect enactment of all white Southern fears, and rumors of revolts bubbled up all over, leading to more death and nastiness. Used rhetorically in the shaping of a historical narrative, I think that the Turner Rebellion is a highly powerful challenge to the notion that slaves were well treated, as well as to the notions that blacks were naturally a passive, servile race, and that everything was Zippedy-Doo-Dah under slavery. The idea of the noble defeat of an idealized south is insulting at best and potentially dangerous. At the same time, I suspect that Turner would almost certainly have been institutionalized for something like schizophrenia these days. I think that you only are a genuine hero if you have your shit together and are acting deliberately, no? I could be wrong (I've never heard that qualification for hero before.) I do agree, however, with the assertion above that titles hero and villain are too strong and misleading in this case.
HJ
Post a Comment