The Hagiography of Nat Turner in The Birth of a Nation (review)

Hagiography seldom results in great—or even good—literature, and history is its enemy. The hagiographer simplifies, purifies, elevates, idealizes; he erases, burkes, attenuates, equivocates, so that his subject emerges as an object of pristine ideological veneration, assuring and inspiring the faithful. As the word indicates (“hagios” is Greek for “sacred”), hagiography is a religious act, often repudiating historical fact rather than testing itself against it. In The Birth of a Nation (2016), Nate Parker, the film’s writer-director-actor, sets out to beatify Nat Turner, the leader of a short-lived slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831, in which 55 people, mostly women and children, were killed. So evil was the chattel slavery system of the antebellum South and so much is historical interest focused on that institution today that any armed resistance to it will be reflexively celebrated as laudable. Parker depicts a heroic freedom-fighter Nat, sanctified by his martyrdom, literally: an angel awaits him at the other end of the rope by which he is hanged.

Considerable hype greeted the film at its initial showing at the Sundance Film Festival, and some viewed it as “a fix for the Academy Awards diversity problem.” Subsequently, allegations having nothing to do with the film itself, but with Parker’s sexual misconduct, dampened enthusiasm for the film and led to anemic box-office results. But that distraction concealed not just some treacle in the writing and some mediocre acting (although Parker’s performance has garnered praise in some quarters) but the film’s relation to the historical record found in The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831).

The Confessions consists of an interview of the imprisoned Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray, in which the condemned man confesses candidly and in remarkable detail events in his life that led to the revolt and describes the revolt itself, and to the veracity of which he then “agreeably” attested in court, the confession thus being entered into the record (an electronic version is available at digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=etas). A comparison of The Confessions with The Birth of a Nation reveals that the film is about as inaccurate a parallel of Nat’s own account as it was possible to be. Consider one event in Nat’s account, minor in itself, that looms large, and wholly misrepresented, in the film. One Etheldred T. Brantley, a white man, had led a life so awful that, even though he claimed to be reformed and desirous of baptism, no white minister would baptize him. Nat, a kind of lay preacher among his fellow slaves, agrees to and does baptize Brantley. “After this I rejoiced greatly”: end of story. In the film, however, the whites are outraged that a negro would presume to baptize a white man and inflict on Nat a ferocious beating, one of the chief horror points in the story. He endures it with superhuman courage. In fact, Nat records no such beating. To the contrary, in 1830, he “was living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who to me was a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me; I had no cause to complain of his treatment of me.” Mr. Travis is the first person killed in the revolt, as he sleeps in his bed. In fact, the only mention at all of whipping in The Confession comes as Nat quotes the Bible, speaking in the voice of Jesus Christ: “For he who knoweth his Master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”

Such contradictory fabrication dominates in Birth. In the film Nat lives from boyhood with a Turner family, whereupon their son, Samuel, his boyhood playmate, becomes his conflicted and ultimately menacing adult owner. A Turner family does appear once in The Confessions when the mother is killed; otherwise, however, it has no other connection to Nat. Here is the list of victims, as reported in court:

Joseph Travers and wife and three children...