Suffering in Context

I found the descriptions of Will and Nat in both the blog and the comment to be deeply perceptive, particularly Kay’s military leader analogies.  I see Ian’s summary of Will’s exit as Frank Miller-esque as a juducuous incorporation of two dramatically different topics within the graphic novel genre, showing us how nonfiction and fiction collude and collide to make text and illustration the tantalizing connections with which students can readily engage.

While compelling, these portraits are, as is all literature, only a slice of the whole we continually try to make of anecdote and information.  To understand the spark behind the true story of the Rebellion, we need to include those aspects of real life that are alien to us today:  the actual social, political, physical, and economic status of slaves in 19th century America.  The illustration posted here is from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain published in 1883 from the online North Carolina History Project in Chapel Hill (13).  In it, we see what looks like a friendly enough scene.  The fellow in the foreground is comfortably expressing himself with one hand, and, with the other, he lays a proprietary yet amicable hand on the left shoulder of the slave he is about to sell.  The three comfortable-looking while men in the picture have appropriately fitting, probably clean clothing, good boots, and hats to protect them from the hot sun in the south.  The slave is wearing overalls that are too short, a long-johns shirt, no hat, and heavy shoes.  The two men in the background are probably the potential buyers for the slave and want to be convinced of his merits.  The conversation probably includes humiliating details like how many hours he can be worked without food or rest, how he has either never run away, or preferably how he did so once, and after a severe beating, has been compliant ever since, and the most devastating weapon to hold over the slave’s head, his family either lives with him or nearby and the loss of which can be held over him to force him to remain in his position.

After taking the emotional resources into context I think I can agree with the characterization that Nat was more of an organizer than Will, and that Will’s strength became his greatest weapon in participating in the Rebellion.  They were both using their survival skills to take the best advantage of the situation in which they found themselves.

A Fresh Perspective Please – Travis

 

I have to admit, I was not looking forward to reading this novel from the moment I saw it on the syllabus and the completion of the task did not alleviate any expected feelings or thoughts.  I guess I agree with Kacy in my inability to share Kyle’s enthusiasm with the material, most probably because I heard the story (and many many like it) growing up all my childhood and then learned of the events (albeit from a more academic slant) in school.  Much like Maus, having a fair amount of knowledge on the history of Nat Turner, I found myself looking for a fresh perspective to the account, something to provide a different interpretation of the tragic events; in this, Kyle Baker failed me.

Graphic Novel indeed.  Baker’s use of images to depict the story was perhaps the only thing fresh to me, however, I have seen my fair share of slave images.  It makes me wonder as to the intended audience of Nat Turner, and the intended reception/experience of the reader. I am far from numb to the history of slavery, but did Kyle Baker truly use a book laden with images to create a greater response than words?  I am so thankful that I purchased a used book in which someone wrote down the notes of the pages from the back on the pages to describe the action depicted in the images; I found myself spending more time than intended trying to decipher a large number of the images and some of them were simply too confusing in artwork for me to grasp. 

I don’t think anyone can call Nat Turner a superhero (seriously…it makes me laugh), or a hero in my opinion. Of course, that’s just my humble opinion; I merely mentioned the name to my Uncle Sunday evening and he looks up from his work to ask, “The Civil Rights Leader?”  I could only laugh.  I don’t think anyone would read Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner and feel they were engaged with the story of a Civil Rights Leader, but, like all things, you could call it a matter of perspective.  Nat Turner was violent; so were the actions of the rebellion.  Nat Turner attempted to depict the horrors of slavery; I can’t think of a collegiate audience foreign to it’s knowledge.  I just could not find a fresh perspective from Nat Turner, and this created a large abyss in my ability to appreciate the work.

Nat Turner Jumble

I feel like there is a lot to talk about with this book, and many of the previous posts have touched on a lot of those issues, so I don’t necessarily want to rehash, but my thoughts on the piece are kind of all over the place. I’m going to throw them down and maybe I’ll be able to make sense of them.

Messiah or Madman?

I’m not entirely sure where Baker’s work falls on this issues. As has been noted before, he claims Nat Turner as a personal hero, but then shows Turner doing some very troubling things. I will be the first to admit that you don’t have to agree with 100% with the actions or beliefs of a personal hero (for example, I count Theodore Roosevelt as a big hero of mine and think he is an admirable man, but he was responsible for some pretty unpleasant things, like the ripping-off of the Panamanians or his blood-thirsty desire to start war with Spain), but there does seem to be a bit of a disconnect in Baker’s hero worship. Turner is displayed as messianic and is drawn to look very heroic, but he makes some very un-messianic choices, like the decision to go back to kill the baby in the cradle. Baker seems to acknowledge this disparity of character by making the depictions of violence increasingly brutal, and the images of the rebels as increasingly grotesque, yet Turner himself retains his look of nobility. There’s almost a sense that Baker is distancing Turner from the most barbaric acts (which fits with the Confessions themselves).

Blurbs

I found the blurbs on the back of the book (as well as the description on the inside jacket) to be very interesting in hindsight. Several of these items state basically the same thing: “This book chillingly illustrates the horrors of the slave trade.” Now, the book certainly does expose some of the horrors of slavery and the slave trade, and rightfully so, but these are not the atrocities that cling to my mind at the end of the book. When I put down Nat Turner, I still have visions of Will, in monstrous hulking mass, brutally hacking people (including children) to death. By the end of the book, I’m not thinking about the horrors of slavery, but the horrors of the actions of the rebels. Perhaps this is Baker’s way of depicting that violence begets violence, and that oppression begets insurrection, but it seemed incongruous to read these blurbs upon closing the book.

Depictions of Characters

We’ve touched on some of this a bit already. It seems pretty clear that as the violence continues the rebels become more grotesque (particularly Will), but there were some other things I noticed.

To begin with, as I hinted at above, Nat Turner has a very Christ-like countenance, especially in the final chapter. This obviously plays to the messianic role he is cast in, but it seemed to me at odds with the  lithograph portrait of Nat Turner http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/small/collections/southampton/NatTurnerRebellionPhotos/image/item1.jpg. However, I later found this engraving of Turner’s capture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nat_Turner_captured.jpg which seemed more likely the primary source of Baker’s illustration. Of course this later engraving would have been made some time after Turner’s capture, since the artist wasn’t born until nine years after Turner’s death.

Another thing I noticed, which seemed to add commentary to the images (commentary without words obviously) was Baker’s portrayal of many of the other slaves. As the rebellion continues, the rebels continue to drink heavily. These slaves seem to be depicted almost cartoonishly (pp. 143 and 157), and the implication seems to be that the rebellion might have succeeded had it not been for these slaves.

Additionally, the slaves that side with the owners and warn them of the rebellion are drawn as  caricatures of the Uncle Tom/Minstrel-type (pp. 130, 132, 136). By using these types of stereotypical and  cartoonish depictions of those not on the side of the rebellion, Baker is clearly labeling them as the enemy. These cartoonish figures call to mind the worst of the racist depictions of black people in the Stepin Fetchit tradition. These characters seem completely out of place in the otherwise serious depictions of the book.

Conclusion?

I guess I’m not sure where I stand on this book, or even where Baker stands. I think in general the book is masterfully done, but I’m left with a general sense of ambivalence. I found the book compelling and thought provoking and I thought the art was beautifully rendered, but was left somewhat empty by the experience.

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.

Picture’s worth a thousand

Many people have discussed the role of Nat Turner as a hero, the biblical references, and other aspects of character and storytelling. You beat me to it, so now I’m left wondering how to talk about a text that doesn’t even (really) talk itself. A strong lack of words, save for the occasional diary entry, place most of the storytelling work on pictures. That’s not to say pictures aren’t capable of such an endeavor, they do so all the time in children’s books. But this is a different monster entirely, and as a text that drives home important themes on slavery, morality, literacy, and human nature, it must work harder than the average children’s book. I felt compelled in particular by the way Baker uses revelation of information to help keep my attention high, despite the lack of words.

As I read, I found I frequently asked myself, “wait, what just happened?” One way Baker weaves his stories–while also helping keep readers focused on the story, despite its lack of words–is through his revelation of information, which often sends the reader back several pages to understand exactly “what just happened.” This technique shows up early on and continues through much of the book, though I noticed it does taper off a bit as the violence gets extreme, since the violence becomes the story. When the story opens we see a lot of people living somewhere. Their dress and setting don’t resemble that of a plantation, but I’ll admit I didn’t notice this at first (11–13). When we see the images on 14 and 15, of horses with guns charging in, an immediate sense of time and place comes into the pages. We’re most likely in Africa during a slave raid. After realizing this, I immediately flip back to the beginning to see what I missed, and notice that some of the hints of time and place are in the drawings’ intricacies, though they still rely on the future pages to help make sense and add to the narrative thread of the story.

Similarly, on the boat a baby is born and juxtaposed by images of sharks (41). An interesting, pictorial use of foreshadowing when we later see the role of both the baby, mother and sharks. When the new mother begins running on the deck, I first interpreted this as a fight or flight response of a scared new mother, trying to protect her child (50). Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong, as we see definitively when she bits the slaver’s arm (54), allowing her own child to fall into a shark’s jaws where it will forever remain outside the grip of American slave owners.

These images help reveal the power that pictures actually have in graphic novels. Subtle depictions can help confuse the reader before forcing him to return to earlier pages to understand what exactly just transpired in the story. In this way, Baker constantly plays with our expectations and helps reinforce characters’ motivations and actions by forcing us to re-read. In this sense, each picture is worth many thousands of words. And each picture forces us to consider how words shape texts, even graphic novels, and helps show that they may not be as important in storytelling as we previously believed.

Lost in Translation

I’ll admit it. I am not quite sure what Baker’s intentions were while creating this graphic novel. At least, I feel as if he sent some mixed messages.

We know from his preface that the artist felt a certain type of fascination with Nat Turner. And if makes sense to draw/write on a topic that interests one. But I feel as if he went a little far in his preface when he mentions, ” The Nat Turner story has lots of action and suspense, also a hero with superhuman abilities. I often choose to write books on subjects I wish to know more about. I wanted to know how a person nobody wanted to talk about could be arguably one of the most important men in American history” (pg. 6).

A hero with superhuman abilities? Exactly how is murder heroic and superhuman? How is using religion to support one’s own view unusual? Even his megalomania was commonplace.

One of the most important men in American history? Well I assume murdering a bunch of people will grant you a footnote in some history book somewhere.

I guess I just don’t understand the juxtaposition of the preface in relation to the story. It causes a lot of conflict.

Without the preface I would have viewed this story as a “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” story. Basically, treating men as beasts will probably make them so.

To be fair to Baker, he related a rather realistic background for the story and didn’t try to portray Nat Turner in a heroic manner. In fact, using Turner’s own clinical and chilling recounting completely obliterated any thoughts of a knight on a charger. But Baker did give him some manner of nobility. Especially during the depiction of the lynching scene. The crowd completely surrounding him with expectant faces as he stoically views the brilliant sky. The unnerved faces as they watch the stillness of his body as he exhales his last breath.

Maybe I am having such a difficult time with this text because I don’t share the same fascination that Baker does…

“The style of warfare… in the Bible”

Kenneth S. Greenburg’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner: Text and Context” may be one of my favorite supplementary texts we’ve read for this class — extremely well versed in the world in which Nat Turner lived and rebelled, and wonderfully fitting Turner, Gray, the rebellion, and the text into the world we now inhabit. While the piece consistently impressed me, one section particularly struck me: the idea that the “indiscriminate slaughter” (Greenburg 20) that filled the first phase of Nat Turner’s rebellion (the latter phases never came to be) “was consistent with the style of warfare Nat Turner must have read about in the Bible” (20; italics mine).

While much is made of Turner’s faith and belief that he was given a “special purpose” (1) in this world by forces from the next in Greenburg’s piece and both Gray’s and Kyle Baker’s Confessions, only Greenburg seems to attribute not only Turner’s “purpose” to Christianity, but his violent methods. Often the Bible is thought of a book of redemption and salvation by Christians, not as a book where one can find some form of justification for “indiscriminate massacre” (20). Perhaps it is as simple as the distance in years between the Bible’s conception and our world today, but I feel it would be difficult to imagine anyone arguing now that images such as can be found on page 135 of Baker’s text should be discussed in any way as having their justification, footing, or roots in religious scripture, yet Greenburg is quick to point out the prophet Ezekiel telling his followers to “Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women…” (Greenburg 20) if they are non-believers, thus somewhat linking Baker’s horrific image of a child having his head removed by an axe with a religious narrative — Ezekiel told his followers to slay “those who had broken faith” (20); Turner tells his followers to kill all the whites they encounter as the first step in a religiously ordained “holy crusade” (16-7).

I am sure I am far from the only one who is unsettled by the idea of Nat Turner as a hero (Baker calls Turner “my hero” in his introduction (Baker 7), somewhat coloring the text for me) as well as the central figure of an “indiscriminate massacre,” but I am also rather unsettled by Greenburg’s rather keen observation that Turner garnered his violent plan from the pages of the Bible. Baker directly confronts this issue, depicting Gray asking Turner, “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?”, to which Turner replies, “Was not Christ crucified?” (189). Turner believes that his actions are ordained by God, that his “style of warfare” taken from the Bible is just and righteous, and that his hanging will cement his place as a religious prophet and figure, paralleling himself and his actions to Christ’s own.

In many ways I can understand how the horrors of slavery could drive an enslaved person to violence. What I am having a problem with is the fact that not only is Turner presented as a Christ figure by Baker (a reflection of Turner’s own presentation of himself as a Christ figure, though Gray’s misrepresentation of Turner should also enter this debate), but that in order to accept this portrayal, one must also accept Greenburg’s idea that Turner learned his style of violence — an indiscriminate massacre that targets every white person, not only slaver owners — from the Bible, and that this kind of violence has any place, be it in the pages of scripture or in a southern Virginia town near the North Carolina border as a result of “man’s inhumanity to man.” It is here that I have a difficult time accepting Turner as a “hero” or as a Christ figure for I can’t understand any way, not even through paralleling Turner and his actions alongside those of violent episodes depicted in scripture, that Turner’s actions reflect a true hero or Christ figure, not at least as I have come to understand those terms in today’s world.

As a flawed man, I can understand Nat Turner and his actions; as a hero, as Baker claims early on in his text to conceive Turner as, I cannot — I don’t feel Turner’s actions, even if they are understandable, are in any way heroic.

Text, Images, and History in “Nat Turner”

Moving back and forth between the photographs in the UVa archive and the Baker’s illustrations in Nat Turner, I was struck by the similarity between them.  Barker’s drawings evoke the same tone of old photos: his choice of shading and use of shadows mimic, at times, the feeling one gets looking at tintypes.  His selection of “color” – varying shades of off-brown for backgrounds and darker shades of black – in many ways replicate the lithographs, daguerreotypes and engravings of the period.  His use of photographs as page “headers” (129, 130, 133, etc.) and the insertion of a sketch/photo of an axe (152), complete with manufacturing details and trademarks, also give the novel a sense of the straight-forward history and a chronology of events.

It is highly likely that Barker came across pictures of slaves during his research for the book and was influenced visually by what he discovered.  As he states in the introduction, the genesis of the novel comes from his engagement with history texts and his curiosity about Turner’s rebellion and he is true to “history” in his drawings.

What little written text Barker does use works against the graphic text. The excerpts from The Confessions of Nat Turner move back and forth between a matter-of-fact recitation of events and the wonderfully structured sentences describing his spiritual development and final epiphany. The bland and gentle matter-of-factness of the written text clashes head-on with the brutality of the images. Turner mentions the kindness of some of his victims in his confession and then Baker renders an image of absolute brutality and terror as they are destroyed.

In terms of the mating of text and images, Barker’s Nat Turner is far removed from Spiegelman’s attempt to accurately the story of Maus. The “confession” of Nat Turn could be a distortion of what really passed between Turner and Thomas Gray, and Gray’s editorializing certainly calls into question the reliability of the narrator. Barker’s drawings, however, take much of what is said as a departure point from which he feels free to write a “novel” that captures what is not said, but what is implied by Turner.  The retrospective vantage point of history bears out Turner’s words.

The first panel of the book is nothing more than a pair of eyes and the image of a book surrounded by black.  It captures one of the themes highlighted by Turner in his confession; how the power of the written word can set us free.  Barker mentions the power of written text extensively in his preface and then proceeds to create a text with only a minimum of words.

Nat Turner’s Ambiguous Conclusion

In the end, I was impressed by Baker’s Nat Turner because it left me feeling so conflicted – almost disturbingly conflicted.  As I got toward the end, I was growing uncomfortable with how the rebellion was portrayed.  I thought the ironic juxtaposition of brutal imagery with Turner’s own dispassionate, matter-of-fact descriptions was great, but the Christ-like depiction of his hanging (complete with celestial light beaming down from the heavens) was overly congratulatory.  There’s no doubt that Turner was a great man who stood up against the worst sort of human oppression.  However, he did so by equally inhuman means (slaughtering women, children etc).  You could definitely make an argument that those are the only means that could truly wake people up to the evils of slavery, but I thought the super-martyrdomy imagery and the caricature-like drawing of the bloodthirsty mob was making our minds up for us and oversimplifying the insane (and extremely interesting) moral complexity inherent in Turner’s account.

That being said, I thought the last few panels brought a lot of that ambiguity back to the party.  I inferred that the girl who steals away to read Nat Turner’s confession is Harriet Tubman, especially considering how the timing fits and how Baker mentions in his introduction that the rebellion inspired her, among others.   Considering how, historically, Tubman was illiterate, this may be a stretch.  If this is a valid reading, though, it suggests the possibility that more violence isn’t the only way to resist violent oppression.  As we see throughout the story, it’s education that gives Nat Turner his power to organize and inspire his rebellion.  In Tubman’s case, however, stories (including biblical stories and stories like that of Turner’s rebellion) spur her to take a different approach.  You could see it as Nat Turner’s sacrifice paving the way for gradual resistance and improvement, or you could see it as Tubman learning from the episode, consciously rejecting Turner’s methods, and taking another path.  Or maybe it isn’t Tubman.  Maybe it’s meant to be generic, and the emphasis is simply on the potential of stories and education to give us power to shape our worlds.  Maybe it’s a mix.  In any case, it’s an intriguing conclusion to a visceral, ambiguous story.

Nat Turner: Panel Pics and Color Choices

When I heard that Nat Turner wouldn’t have any text, or, rather, would have very limited text, part of me was worried. I must still admit that it was only a small part of me that worried, because I learned from Dark Knight alone that graphic novel pictures can pack a heck of a punch. I found myself thinking how quick of a read Nat Turner would be, but that wasn’t the case. I spent minutes on every panel dissecting it, trying to distinguish the background shading from the skin, the action indicators from the weapons, and sometimes, it took me a while simply to register what I was looking at. There was so much that was grotesque, disturbing, and/or weighted, that at times I didn’t know where to look or what I was supposed to be seeing until I looked again…and again. (For example page 198 top panel. I can see clearly now that it is a headless body on a table and that the actual head is being held by the man on the right, but when I first quickly looked at it, I couldn’t tell for seconds what any of it was.)

I definitely was forced often to slow down and “read” the pictures. I had to stop and stare to digest what was going on before I could move to the next page or the next detail. And then, what I did see, I am haunted by. How naïve was I to find Maus disturbing? (Half joking here…) Maus still has its moments, but there is much more gruesomeness being enacted for you on the pages here that the violence is shown in the forefront, even when we only see bubbles of the aftermath.

The preface of Nat Turner is very appropriately written, as I was glad to have read it once I finished the novel. Baker calls his story the “perfect subject for a comic book,” and I think, to some extent that that is true (6). The sentence long explanations that the history books give on Nat Turner do not drive home what happened. The history we are taught lets us glaze over the gritty details, but also don’t let us forget that something of significance did happen at the same time. By using such a visual medium to show this story, it is harder for the reader to leave with the same understanding of the Nat Turner rebellion. Even when it is hard to understand what you are seeing in the panels, you are still left with a sentiment for what it going on within them.

This is a story that reminded me of a class discussion. I couldn’t handle these same panels in color. It’s a lot to take in with just the shades of brown, black, and gray. If in these muted tones it still overrides the senses, I can’t imagine what it would be like all in color. In fact, I think it would have made it too “cartoony” even if the cartoon would be completely disturbing. As it stands, it almost shows as an old time photo in its sepia tones. To be in color like it is on the cover would lend itself to a strictly over the top horror genre that I think would be too distracting. Shading and blending make this book have depth; line confusion and make the pictures have more weight. To add color would be to get rid of the confusion for where lines stop and would make the picture clearer, which I think would come to the detriment of art itself.

~Kelley