So the most prominent thing that stands out to me is the violence in the book. I feel kind of silly for not expecting violence in a book about a rebellion. Although as the preface says, we aren’t really given anything except for a sentence of two in history books about Nat’s rebellion; I didn’t know too much about it at all. The entire “Freedom” section was intense (and rightfully so). I felt like I was watching a movie, which was pretty awesome. I guess it evoked a strong emotional response from me; I wasn’t reading, I was watching.
Throughout the first few sections I found myself completely lost and thinking, “What’s going on” and “Wait, who is that? Is that one Nat?” I do believe that there’s an important reason for including the beginning stuff even if I’m not sure what the reason is. My guess is that you have to know where someone came from to know where they are going. And maybe we wouldn’t think the slaves’ actions during the rebellion would be justified if we didn’t know what they experienced to become slaves. Once again, slave hardships sometimes seem to be nonexistent in history books.
There’s one panel that’s just stuck in my head and it’s the one with the baby and the shark. I can guess why the events leading up to it occurred, but who caught the baby? Am I right to assume that the baby is Nat Turner? Am I the only one confused?
I think the baby is an altogether different person, otherwise the narrative would have probably ended in a sharks belly
I agree that this scene with the baby and shark can be confusing. As Nick points out, though, the baby is not Nat Turner. And in fact, the nameless baby fills a number of symbolic roles in the text. It’s a symbol of the much larger number of nameless victims of slavery (and of the Middle Passage, to be more specific). But the baby also echos a longstanding trope: the mother who would rather kill her child than see him or her enslaved. This is the basis of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and of several other fictional texts too. Morrison’s novel, incidentally, was inspired by a real-life occasion of infanticide that happened in Cincinnati in the 19th century.