Will

One thing I found interesting as I read through “Nat Turner” was Kyle Baker’s use of stock types and situations to fill in the gaps left in the sparse narrative which makes up “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” From the beginning, when he posits the origins of Turner’s mother in a narrative conflating many stories of African slave raids (reminding me of a much more violent version of the Newberry award winning children’s novel “Amos Fortune, Free Man”), to the end, where lens flares halo around the martyred Turner’s head as the grotesquely evil crowd (gap toothed girl, apple-chewing woman, and slavering man included at no extra charge) is struck dumb at their own sin, tropes abound in Baker’s construction.

The trope I found most powerful and simultaneously most disturbing, however, was the figure of Will – the most violent and strongest of Turner’s original band. In the original text, he is mentioned as saying “his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him. I asked him if he thought to obtain it? He said he would, or loose his life.” Additionally, Turner (in Gray’s words) attributes the first and largest individual number of deaths to Will. From these clues, Baker builds up the character of the brute, a man of generally sunny disposition who wholeheartedly gives in to the frenzy of killing when roused, and at the last gasp is still the most fearsome of the rebel slaves.

Starting with chapter III: Freedom, Will takes an arresting role. The sunny side of his nature appears as he chops wood and waves to a smiling tiny boy, though Baker utilizes image-juxtaposition with the axe in the forground of the smiling white boy as a stock situation of foreshadowing, creating a kind of sick tension. As Turner begins his rebellion with a failed hatchet swing and his first victims awake, a now-hat-wearing Will is the first to strike, revealing Baker’s conception of Will as Turner’s lieutenant. From there on, Will proves himself the most effective, ruthless, and perseverant of Turner’s men – volunteering to kill the forgotten infant, and then most iconically (because it occurs in a splash page) backhanding the little boy’s head off cleanly as the child runs smiling towards him.

The horror of this image is that which militates most strongly in Baker’s favor for me. I detest the sentimentalized description of Turner as a superhero in the preface, am rather sickened by the caricatures and martyr-images of the final scene, and unconvinced by the “literacy” message of the opening and closing images. But here, Will presents a character of great complexity. What he does is clearly absolutely evil – though the child would no doubt grow up to be as horribly exploitative an owner as his parents, he currently loves the slaves and trusts them, making Will’s action that much more horrible. And yet Will remains somewhat admirable, both because of his sunny initial appearance, and his dramtically fitting exit, rising from his apparent death and facing a circle of rifles with bared teeth. This final scene struck me as very Frank Miller-esque, reminding one of Batman rising from his beating at the hands of the mutant leader.

In the end, I am mostly unmoved and frustrated by Baker’s work in “Nat Turner,” but in his conception of Will I see the strength of his manipulation of familiar figures and circumstances, bringing out both the evil and the good of the rebellion in a nuanced way.