(Sorry this is late; I wrote it up yesterday and then completely forgot to actually post it!)

Two things struck me on my second reading of Nat Turner, both of which end up being somewhat problematic in light of the “in context” reading we had about the historical understanding of Nat Turner’s rebellion.  Firstly, there is the issue of Nat Turner’s success (or lack thereof) and the extent to which it rests on his shoulders, on the shoulders of the group as a whole, or on the shoulders of only those who followed him.  This is something I noticed in the first read-through, and which I highlighted in my tracing exercise; Kyle Baker spends a significant amount of time and effort and devotes a significant amount of space to portraying the less than stellar behavior of many of the men who were part of the rebellion, even going so far as to differentiate them from Nat Turner in terms of how they are drawn.  Secondly is the extent to which Baker seems to ignore the confused and unclear voices of the Confessions on which he based his graphic novel.  We know that the Confessions are as much a product of Thomas Gray’s writing and perspective as they are of Nat Turner’s actual spoken retelling as he awaited execution, but Baker seems not to address that whatsoever and takes the Confession more-or-less at face value.

The former observation came about initially when I noticed that Baker was making a deliberate choice to portray some of the black men as complicit with the white men in stopping the rebellion, and that those black men were literally stereotypes, drawn with round, wide eyes, huge lips, big noses, exaggerated proportions, and an overdramatic and confused demeanor.  This is in contrast with Turner who is drawn with sharp angles and straight lines, always seeming to be aware of his surroundings, his goals, etc.  While he is busy planning and carrying out his rebellion with the help of a very small core of dedicated men, everyone else is shown as content to tag along for the looting and drinking.  Beyond the obvious issue with using the stereotypes of the time to seriously portray characters, Baker raises an issue of historical accuracy: the way he has written his book, he shows Turner’s rebellion undone by his own people, by forces outside his own control.  If only all of the men under his command had stayed sober and been truly serious about his vision, they might have succeeded in taking Jerusalem by surprise, but instead, someone went and betrayed them, and then everyone got drunk and failed to keep up their end of the bargain, resulting in the failure of the rebellion and the execution of Turner.  We know that this isn’t exactly accurate.  It only amplifies the question I had before about Baker’s view of the story and his motivation for telling it this way: Does he really think that the slave uprising was entirely undone by “snitching” and laziness?

The latter point is something that I had not thought about until I read the contextual article, but is quite present now in my thoughts about the novel.  Did Baker realize the conflicted and biased nature of the Confession?  And if so, how much?  He only shows Gray writing it down across a couple of pages toward the very end; nowhere else is there any acknowledgement that the story being told is heavily filtered through the perspective of a white man with a vested interest in obtaining a gripping story, whose acquaintances and friends were killed in the uprising.  From my reading, Baker takes the Confession at face value insofar as it portrays Turner as especially conscious, calculating, and motivated about his actions, and then moves beyond it to give a vision of Turner as a sympathetic character surrounded by, as I said above, temerity, overindulgence, and subversion.  There is very little in the novel to show Turner as anything but a great man with a great plan; the vast majority of the brutal murder is carried out by others (in words and in pictures), and the failure of the rebellion is placed squarely at the feet of traitors and layabouts within his group.  Baker seems to just be taking the basic facts of the rebellion as they are presented in the Confession and then arranging them as he has seen them, with Turner as a tragic hero undone by circumstances outside his control.  Is this accurate?  Not really; not as far as we know.  And I think it cheapens the story a bit.