The Hidden Face of History: Styron’s Confessions and Post-1967 Voicings of Nat Turner in Fiction and Drama

LINDA S. WATTS University of Washington Bothell The Hidden Face of History: Styron’s Confessions and Post-1967 Voicings of Nat Turner in Fiction and Drama History has two faces, one turned toward us, the other averted. The face turned toward us is the sum total of event and remembrance. It is history recalled by those involved in it, as shapers or witnesses, doers or sufferers. The hidden face of history is not what we have forgotten, but what we have never remembered, those products of imperceptible change, extended duration, and infinitesimal progression that go unnoticed by living contemporaries and only reveal themselves to the analytic gaze of the historian. –Jan Assmann (The Mind of Egypt. 3) “The Author of Their Misfortune”.?: Thomas Gray and His Successors IN THIS OTHERWISE CYNICAL AGE, READERS STILL TEND TO RELY UNDULY, even uncritically, upon the version of the past rendered within historical documents. In the instance of Nat Turner, the ur-text for virtually all subsequent accounts is the document that purports to be Turner’s jailhouse testimony: Thomas Gray’s 1831 pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner. To hear Gray tell it, when Justice Jeremiah Cobb pronounced his sentence for Nat Turner, he delivered a fiery condemnation concluding with the following lines: You have been arraigned and tried before this court, and convicted of one of the highest crimes in our criminal code. You have been convicted of plotting in cold blood, the indiscriminate destruction of men, of helpless women, and of infant children. The evidence before us leaves not a shadow of doubt, but that your hands were often imbrued in the blood of the innocent; and your own confession tells us that they were stained with the blood of a master; in your own language, “too indulgent.” Could I stop here, your crime would be sufficiently aggravated. But the original contriver of a plan, deep and deadly, one that never can be effected, you managed so far to put it into execution, as to deprive us of many of our most valuable citizens; and this was done when they were asleep, and defenceless [sic]; under circumstances shocking to humanity. And while upon this part of the subject, I cannot but call your attention to the poor misguided wretches who have gone before you. They are not few in number—they were your bosom associates; and the blood of all cries aloud, and calls upon you, as the author of their misfortune. Yes! You 94 Linda S. Watts forced them unprepared, from Time to Eternity. Borne down by this load of guilt, your only justification is, that you were led away by fanaticism. If this be true, from my soul I pity you; and while you have my sympathies, I am, nevertheless called upon to pass the sentence of the court. The time between this and your execution, will necessarily be very short; and your only hope must be in another world. The judgment of the court is, that you be taken hence to the jail from whence you came, thence to the place of execution, and on Friday next, between the hours of 10 A.M. and 2 P.M. be hung by the neck until you are dead! dead! dead and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul. (Greenberg 56-57) The problem with this passage is that it diverges substantially from the court record in both emphasis and tone.1 If one examines the trial documents associated with Nat Turner’s case, the language of sentencing seems restrained, even matter-of-fact, by comparison. Here is how the official record reads, again in the voice of Jeremiah Cobb: Therefore it is considered by the Court that he be taken hence to the Jail from whence he was taken therein to remain until Friday the 11th day of November instant, on which day between the hours of ten o’clock in the forenoon and four o’clock in the afternoon he is to be taken by the Sheriff to the usual place of execution and there be hanged by the neck until he be dead. And the Court values the said slave to the sum of three hundred...