By Jim Kates

Authors Anthony E. Kaye and Gregory P. Downs claim that Nat Turner would have seen himself as a Christian prophet.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History by Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory P. Downs. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $30.

From the 1830s on, Nat Turner has been a name to conjure with.

For white Virginians of the time, it stood for the threat of an uprising in the enslaved population and a racial bloodbath. For Black people, the insurrectionist increasingly came to represent the resilience of resistance, a rebuke to the myth of the happily enslaved Negro. Although there were hundreds of slave revolts throughout the South, the one led by Turner most clearly shook up the repressive politics and policies of enslavement in Virginia and beyond, leading eventually to secession and war.

For a long time, the template for Turner’s story was the Confession, taken down by a lawyer named Thomas Gray on the eve of the rebel’s execution. It is a coherent enough abbreviated narrative, and its main points were corroborated by outside testimony. Still, it was filtered through the consciousness of one man, a white man, with his own agenda (and we have learned, since the extensive WPA interviews of the ’30s, how selective these filters can be). For a 1968 best-selling novel by another white writer, William Styron, the received mythology of Nat Turner was contentiously reimagined to fit the era. Since then, there has been little in popular literature, aside from 2016’s film The Birth of a Nation, a graphic historical drama written and directed by Nate Parker.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History lifts the central figure out of received history, amplifying his individuality by casting light on how Nat would have been viewed in the context of his time’s religious climate. Authors Anthony E. Kaye and Gregory P. Downs claim that he would have classified himself as a Christian prophet.

The facts are stark and simple on the surface. On August 21, 1831, Nat (as the authors call him throughout their narrative, leaving the slavemaster’s surname aside) and more than two dozen other men rode through Southampton County, Virginia, killing white families and trying to reach the town of Jerusalem (now Courtland). Members of the group were turned aside in various places, most of them killed or captured. Nat himself hid out for six weeks before finally being found. He surrendered, and was tried and hanged in November.

At the beginning and the end of the book the dual authorship credit is explained. Kaye died before he could finish the manuscript; he passed all his research, theories, and the mantle of authorship to Downs. Between them, the men present Nat not as a savage, but as a devout Christian who was brought up in an explicitly Methodist tradition of preaching and prophecy (and perhaps even reaching beyond the Christian, if we consider Tecumseh and the Shawnee). This belief derived its energy from what is known in religious history as the Second Great Awakening

Nat saw spirits in battle, a darkened sky, blood flowing in streams…. [He] understood the call to war because he was enslaved and because he was a Methodist. Methodists in the early nineteenth century saw belief as a form of warfare, and they did not interpret that warfare as solely metaphorical…. [He] became distinct from his times not when he had his vision but when he acted on it by leading a rebellion.

Again and again, where actual documentation fails them, the authors turn back to the Bible to speculate on what Nat might have done and thought, coloring between the lines with stories of Joshua, Gideon, Elijah, David, and Jesus. “The vision was something that he would have to bear. A call was indeed a burden, as prophets knew. As Jesus bore his cross, a prophet bore the weight of his vision.”

If the book bears a burden of its own, it is its reliance on the subjunctive in the absence of declarative fact: “would have,” “might,” “perhaps,” “seems.” But these serve to spotlight the more general conditions in which Nat lived. “It is also possible…,” though, underlines wider possibilities that aren’t always developed.

They could have been. The narrative is so focused on Nat and his immediate religious environment that it neglects the broad setting, the politics and economics of Nat’s society. We are told of his probable wife and child on a neighboring plantation, but are not given much information about how the plantation system operated. It was certainly freer after his revolt, but the details are not clear. We need more documentation of the kind of context noted by W.E.B. Dubois: “The Turner insurrection is so connected with the economic revolution which enthroned cotton that it marks an epoch in the history of the slave. A wave of legislation passed over the South prohibiting the slaves from learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering with Negro religious meetings. Virginia declared, in 1831, that neither slaves or free Negroes might preach, nor could they attend religious service at night without permission.”

In addition, I am curious about a secondary character who lurks on the fringes of the story: the white man, Thomas Gray, who recorded Nat’s Confession after he rode with the posse that chased down the rebellion and took part in the trials that followed. This isn’t his story. Nevertheless, that Nat’s story has almost exclusively been in the possession of white writers raises its own provocative questions.

Meanwhile, Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History is a significant and readable addition to our understanding of antebellum Black history.

J. Kates is a poet, feature journalist and reviewer, literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a nonprofit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. His latest book of poetry is Places of Permanent Shade (Accents Publishing) and his newest translation is Sixty Years Selected Poems: 1957-2017, the works of the Russian poet Mikhail Yeryomin.