The introduction to “The Confessions of Nat Turner: Text and Context” is a wonderful read not only in and of itself (how it serves to inform and, for us, contextualize Baker’s Nat Turner) but as a formulae for any historical treatment of a text.  I found the historicity of Kenneth Greenberg’s article to be this perfect balance between a well-grounded and yet truly expansive effort.  By ‘historicity’ I mean a discussion about how authentic a historical document can be and in what ways that historical text can be authenticated and/or contextualized with other historical documents.  I studied history at university, and I wish I had read this sooner.  The line, “The act of recounting, whether personal or historical, often involves transforming the people or events of the past into objects we can use in the present” (26), is a great summation of the study of history (as opposed to “the learning of history”).

With this text in mind—and some of those great, sepia-tinted photographs wandering around in my mind—I approached Nat Turner for a third time without very many expectations.  I tried to stop forcing myself to pay closer attention to some pages than I was inclined to give them (which was part of my project for the second reading), but on the other hand I wanted to donate extra attention to those pages which I felt were the most powerful.  Most of these were the ones that stood out to me in the beginning or the ones that our classmates traced and discussed last class (I trust the intuition of a first read and the collective wisdom of the class).  One of the things I discovered early on was that graphic novels function more like poems than tradition novels, at least in regards to how we traditionally read poems and novels.  This isn’t a necessarily esoteric insight—graphic novels have a select number of images as poems do words, as opposed to the horde of words, images, characters and changes that typify novels—but I enjoyed making the realization.  The picture of the noose around the woman’s foot in the beginning was especially moving to me this time around.  Unlike most, I didn’t find the violence of the rebellion especially distasteful, and each time I’ve read this book I’ve found myself rooting for Nat Turner pretty freely.  But the depiction of rage on pages 174-178 altered that view; I was reminded that this was a historical retelling of some kind, that this was a product of rage—violence begetting violence, suffering over suffering.  In the end, redemption is found (or consummated) by Turner’s death.  Maybe that is the only kind of redemption possible for this kind of story—a movement away from the Old Testament to the New.  On the other hand, I wonder if it was not so much the result itself—which, as Greenberg points out, was relatively minimal on the scale of world history—as it is the story which has endured (if not prominently) for such a long time.  It doesn’t seem strange to me that Nat Turner, who must have had a great love and reverence for the written word, would have passed on his story even into the hands of a miserly white lawyer.  Greenberg’s text also made me think about what historical context I tried, both the first, second, and third times I read it, to put Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner in.  This, in turn, made me think about how that immediate contextualization speaks to my education and my history.

Finally, the big insight I took away from this third, contextualized reading was that I finally felt comfortable enough with the text to criticize it.  I began to think: I needed words here.  And: This is unnecessary and messes up the linguistic flow of the visual text.  And I began to want more of the story and different elements in it here and there.  A few times I felt that the whole story should have just been visually represented.  I believe what Greenberg says, about how retelling a story transforms it, in some way, into the now (just like traditions renew the history out of which they were born), and a lot of times I felt that Baker’s retelling was not fictionalized enough; he did not fill in the Nat Turner’s narrative gaps in the creative ways that I wanted them filled in.  Why didn’t he tell the dynamic story of Nat Turner and his wife?  Did Nat Turner have friends?  What about his suffering?  Why was the intimacy of the slave-master connection not touched on at all?  (In fact, the text presented a very defined and distant establishment.)  Now, I don’t think I’d be able to defend many of my critiques because I know nothing about art or graphic novels.  When it came to thinking that a certain representation was misleading or too underdeveloped, I became a little frustrated by not having the vocabulary to voice what I felt.

The best moment in the book, I think, has to be the mural on pages 102-103.  There’s this descent of the wrathful holy spirit through a lightning bolt—the spirit of Jehovah, God of the Old Testament, the one of fire and brimstone who took away the first born sons of Egypt so that the Jews could be freed from their bondage—and Turner’s arms raised like they would be in prayer but with balled fists, and the tempest behind him, and his scream.  The page got me thinking about that sermon, “I am a sinner in the hands of an angry God,” and some of the stories in Genesis that I don’t but should know by heart.  Then, because Greenburg mentioned that he promised invulnerability to rebels that “held crab claws in their mouths” (p.17), I spent over an hour researching the failed slave rebellion leader Gullah Jack.  Afterward, I wondered if all or any of this is really admissible.  I mentioned this in my first post on Nat Turner, but I still don’t know what sort of textual history this story wants to be placed in or read with.  Perhaps, though, the neat thing about graphic novels is that you are free to bring your own textual history into them in a way that is usually not possible in traditional text-mediums.  At least I was free to do this because I didn’t have any other comic references.  And I’d be willing to defend this point on the grounds that it made the work that much more enjoyable.