Slaves to resist their masters. He also talks about the consequences of the rebellion or other slaves in the south. This event was part of the university of Mary Washingtons great lives lecture series. [applause] good evening. Im the associate director of great lives and i am pleased to service your host and emcee along with courtney over here helping this evening with q a. Im pleas to bring your attention tonight to our sponsor, the dovetail Cultural Resource group. Theme join me in thanking for their support. Tonights lecture is on net turner, a nat controversial and sometimes very difficult figure to deal with but we are in good hands tonight, i promise it. Kenneth greenberg is a distinguished professor of history at suffolk university. The author of masters and statesman, the political culture of american slavery. And are you ready for this one . Duels,nd slavery, lies, ases, masks, dressing as woman, gives, strangers, humanitarianism, death, slave rebellion, baseball, hunting and gambling in the old south. Howd i do . [laughter] [applause] when it comes to tonight greenberg is the editor of nat turner two notebooks and was part of the team that wrote and produced the pbs film nat turner, a troublesome property. It is my honor to introduce to you kenneth greenberg. [applause] mr. Greenberg well, its a great, great pleasure to be here, when i left boston this morning it was snowing. My plane had to be deiced, but i arrived in paradise. This is a lovely place. I have never been to the campus before, and you have absolutely gorgeous campus. The town is wonderful as well. My hosts have been extremely gracious, and my subject matter is about one of the most difficult subjects in American History. There is controversy every step of the way and battles every step of the way in terms of all the people who have tried to write about nat turner. First, im going to sort of tell you about my own history with writing about nat turner and thinking about nat turner. It covers a fair amount of territory. Then i want to just zero in on a few areas in more detail. Let me begin by describing a couple things. First of all, when i was in graduate school, i first encountered nat turner because we had assigned in class a document called the confessions of nat turner. Im curious, in this group, how many of you have read that, the original confessions, 1831 . How many of you have read the styron novel . Thats interesting. I will be talking about that as well. I will describe the rebellion a little later on in the talk, but basically, after turner was captured he eluded capture for about two months, and after he was captured, he was briefly in jail and tried very, very quickly, and then, during that time of the trial, a few days, a man named thomas gray, a white southerner who was a lawyer not turners lawyer, but had actually been a lawyer or several of the other defendants interviewed him in his jail cell. A couple of weeks after his execution, gray published a document called the confessions of nat turner. Its an amazing document. We have nothing like it in all of American History because people who were rebels against slavery did not get interviewed. They did not write things. Theres no record where you can hear their voices directly. The thing about the 1831 confessions is you cannot hear turners voice directly, either. Its thomas gray who put it together from the interviews, so this makes it one of the great public just puzzling documents for historians. It is the only thing we have like it which has somewhere in it turners voice. On the other hand, it is still through thomas gray, and that is the puzzle. That is why students have thought about this and try to figure out how to sort out the two voices. That really piqued my interest when i was in graduate school, and i said one day i would like to get back to it. As you just heard, i am the editor of that original confessions of nat turner. I put it together with other documents of the period to give people a sense of the time. I try to puzzle out how you can tell what is and is not turners voice. Its very difficult. By the way, if you want to describe a central issue that everybody grapples with, its the question of voice. How can you reconstruct the voice of someone who was so varied, so deeply obliterated by the culture that ended up hanging . In its pretty extraordinary. When i was also in graduate school, i read the William Styron novel. For those of you who do not know, he wrote a novel. He was interested in writing a novel. He is from virginia. When he was in high school, he actually passed a little roadside sign in virginia near where the rebellion took place, and he remembers being on the bus, seeing a roadside sign which made a reference to the rebellion, and ultimately, it stuck in the back of his head. In the 1960s, he decided to come back to the topic and to write a novel. It is a very interesting novel. Its called the confessions of nat turner. What he said what he thought he was going to do was so little is known about turner, what he said was i will follow the historical record in my novel, and then where the record does not speak to an issue, im going to use my imagination to fill in the blanks. In an odd way, again, it replicates the thomas gray situation where you have the voice of a white writer trying to funnel nat turner, and it includes turners voice somewhere in there. He imagines many things which he thought were plausible about slavery. That novel was greeted by the general public and by critics like few american novels ever got needed. Got greeted. The reviews go back and read the reviews if you want. Writer after writer, reviewer after reviewer, famous American Writer write about this as the Great American novel finally written. This was in 1967. Styron won the Pulitzer Prize for writing that novel. Almost from the beginning, there were black critics and some white critics as well who understood the novel as deeply flawed and ultimately racist at its core, and they began to write each other. John henry clarke was the leader of the group of black writers who were in touch with each other, and ultimately, they wrote a collection of essays 10 essays, basically and it was called William Styrons nat turner, 10 black writers respond. They looked at the novel and point of the ways that it got history wrong, but also, its deep racism. What kind of things do they point to . Things like turner making reference to his grandmother, his father, and they are simply left out of this novel. Also, there is a scene where turners mother is raped again, this is styrons invention, but she seems to enjoy the rape by a white overseer. And then, turner is full of hatred of blacks. He sort of adopted some of the ideas he was getting from the White Community and makes references that are nasty references to africanamericans and slaves, but i think the heart of the thing which black critics pointed to was the fact that nat turner lusts after a young and beautiful white teenager, a woman named margaret whitehead. We know that turner personally killed only one person in the rebellion margaret whitehead. That is all we know. What styron did was he imagined was margaret whitehead, what was their relationship, why was she the one person that nat turner killed . He imagined this relationship, but it was full of lust. He had rape fantasies. Ultimately, he killed her with a sword and and a fence rail, which is described in the confessions briefly that way. The black critics asked what that is all about. The idea that black men are always lusting after white women is a white fantasy. Which wasthe reality white men raping black women was always what was going on. The heart of what lynching is all about is the idea that black men are threatening white women. We have these terrible lynchings all over the south of black men accused of raping white women, most of which was simply nonexistent whatsoever, but the terrible public lynchings as you know, we have lots of photographs that get taken. People have postcards made of themselves next to lynch africanamericans, and they would send these postcards to their friends. It was an amazing moment in the culture all centered around lack men lusting after white women. And suddenly you have nat turner, who, by the way, the historical record has no reference to this whatsoever. It is completely coming from William Styrons imagination, and the black critics ask what its all about, taking a black hero and turning him into something we know is a white fantasy yahoo a white fantasy that was an object of a tremendous amount of criticism. And styron made another choice, too. He decided to tell his story in the voice of nat turner. The original confessions has two voices it. Theres Thomas R Gray and then there is also nat turners voice. What happened was this is a really interesting side note to the story, but james baldwin, one of the great African American thinkers of the 1960s became a friend of William Styrons. Starting the new baldwin was a struggling writer at the time. Needed a place to stay. Styron had a place in western massachusetts, the town of rocks rucksbury. Of rural house. Next to it was a converted barn, which was a studio. He invited waldman to live there, and baldwin would do his writing in the studio, and styron would do his writing in the house, and at night, they would come together and get drunk together. Have a grand old time, and styron would invite his neighbors. Many of them were white liberals from the community, and baldwin if you have ever seen baldwin in action, he is an extraordinary man, and his anger was fiery, and he was brilliant and he frightened styrons friends, but nonetheless, he liked styron and styron like him, so as styron was getting under way with writing the confessions of net turner, it was baldwin who said, why dont you be bold . I write in the voice of white people all the time. You should be bold and right in write in the voice of this black man. At one point, styron thought of it as complementary to turner. In the eyes of the black critics, they said he had appropriated turners voice and taken the voice of a great lack black leader and turned it not into his voice but into your voice, and that became a tremendous object of criticism. This became one of the great racial controversies of its time. In some ways among intellectuals but even extending beyond that, this was like the o. J. Simpson case of a later time. Largely broken down in terms of whites and blacks, but not totally. Nonetheless, they looked at this, and styrons novel was under attack. I got to know star related ron, on,ot to know styron later and i can tell you that this controversy he always felt misunderstood, never felt appreciated, and the black critics, who i also got to know when i did my film i interviewed them in the year 2000. They were referring back to events that happened in 1967. When you listen to every one of them, its as if it happened the day before. The anger was as intense as it was in 1967, the clash. By the way, i have to tell you, in my own opinion, styron was a perfectly nice guy. He never understood, however, the race issue he was dealing with. This was the time in the late 1960s when black power was coming into the fourth the fore, and nat turner was one of the black heroes that africanamericans who were the most militant would point to as a great leader. Many of them said he had emasculated a great and. A great man. There was a lot of anger, and the anger persisted. That ever healed that never heal. Styron is now dead a few years, but it never healed for styron for the critics either. Reading that, reading the controversy, getting immersed in it, and later on, would i did well when i did a film about nat turner, which i will come to in a little bit, i got to meet the people involved and got to know them quite well. A lot of great intellectuals involved in this movement. Baldwin himself, by the way, was invited to become one of the 10 black writers. It was going to be 12 black writers at one point, and baldwin said he did not want to do it. Theres only one blurb on the back of the novel, and its from james baldwin. He saw it as a great racial novel. But i know he was friendly with all the black critics, and he understood the nature of their criticism, and he simply did not want to publicly come out to criticize his friend. So that is a complicated story. The next time i came across nat turner was when i wrote the book called honor and slavery, a book with a very long subtitle that you heard, and it was about southern honor. That is a whole other story about southern gentleman thought of themselves as having honor. They thought of africanamericans, enslaved people as not having honor, basically. This a lot of things that go along with what southern honor meant, but just a small piece of that i was interested in the way dead bodies were treated. When someone died who was considered to be a man of honor, the body itself was honored in various ways. As part of a larger argument, i looked at two examples of the way dead bodies were treated. One was john brown. Actually, john brown and nat turner, the two people i picked. Here is something amazing that i discovered at that point. There was a kind of john brown, who attended to lead a slave rebellion and led the raid on harpers ferry, was deeply hated by white southerners. Ive got to tell you, if you read the words of white southerners as they discuss brown, its very common underneath the surface, a grudging kind of admiration. Every once in a while, they say things like lunatic, maniac, and so forth, but here is a guy who was not afraid to die. There were descriptions that he was holding one dying child in an arm and has a gun in the other fighting to the in and. To the end. Or there were descriptions of his execution. A white southerner who wanted to watch the execution he was an elderly gentleman by that time, but he got his friends who were cadets in the military to admit him, and he wore a uniform and got in and could watch the execution. You read his description of john browns death, and he admired the man. He said the guy went bravely to his death, did not twitch as he was dying. Thats the language you would use for someone who was a man of honor. Im not saying they thought brown was a man of honor. They hated him, but they had kind words and imagery mixed in. Now, what happened to nat turners body . If you read the newspaper accounts of the time, and they are very sparse, but one of them says nat turner sold his body in exchange for ginger cakes to the doctors for dissection. He did it for ginger cakes. When i first read that, i said, what . What is that all about . Ideal in a world where you cannot trust anything you read. Heres a guy after all, nat turner did not own his body when he was alive. Why would someone pay him in ginger cakes to have possession of his body which he did not own after he died . This is some white writer the only explanation is some white writer wants to insult nat turner. Its the same writer is at hardly anyone came to the execution, it was not an important event. I can tell you, this was the most important event since the civil war. They had to call the militia out to control the mob. So that cannot possibly be the case, and its also the same guy who says hardly anyone was at his execution. This is all speculation, its true, but thats my world. Welcome. But he was certainly dissected. In 1900, a white southerner who wrote about turner he was a professional historian. You see sort of the beginnings of professional history going on, but he was also from how i from southhampton county. He had a lot of knowledge, but it was a deeply racist description of turner that he gave, but in 1900, here is what he wrote. Nat turners body was delivered to the doctor, who skinned it and made grease of the flesh. His skeleton was for many years in possession of dr. Mastenbrook but has since been misplaced. Thats another thing that should give you pause. Misplacing nat turners skeleton . What is that about . I dont know what thats about. You can take that one. But it does not seem likely to me. There were rumors in the county after 1900, even before, that his skin was turned into a money purse. When i did my film about the rebellion, i spent a lot of time in southampton county, and this is a place where i saw no body parts. Everybody was talking about someone else has these body parts and so forth. There was even one person who said somebody down the street has a lampshade made of nat turners skin. Whenever i tried to find this, it disappeared somehow. Also, this was after world war ii. Lampshades were connected to to jews. To jews and their skin. There were stories like that that came out of world war ii. Theyre talking about nat turner body parts. This is as gruesome as against that is the epicenter of the evil of Race Relations in america. I also met a man there who was a wonderful man, the keeper of i describe him of the keeper of the africanamerican folk memory of the rebellion and a scholar of the rebellion as well even though not fully trained as a historian. His name was james mcgee. When you buy my book about turner, he did the painting on the cover of that book. Its a wonderful painting, you will see. Anyway, he told me that he has a memory from 1949. He was a school kid at that time, but he said that was the 300th anniversary, i think, of the founding of southampton county, and they had a big celebration. This is the height of the era of segregation. He said it was a segregated event so that black kids and other africanamericans watched the celebration from outside the gates of the local high school. They could look in to see what was going on, and he had a memory of this, and i checked this out, and everything was corroborated by written sources. They had a whole pageant of the history of the county with no mention of slavery and no mention of nat turner. Its about other achievements. Indians and so forth, the land growing and people becoming more prosperous, but he said at that pageant, there was a table outside of artifacts, and on one of them, there was an artifact that said it was a money purse made from the skin of nat turner again, its all murky. Was it really . But its a little disturbing to have somebody saying that this is the money purse, but he was sure it was the money purse and given the fact that we hear mention of this from 1900 and then from the time of the rebellion itself, theres body parts going around. We know theres a history of this. Nat turners skull how many of you read about turners skull . There are multiple sightings of his head. Whatever happens to his body is not so clear, the rest of his body, but something purporting to be nat turners skull turns up in places. Sometimes in virginia, in ohio, there is a college where on display at the museum, they have something which is labeled the skull of nat turner. Elkhart, indiana, had one as well as norfolk, virginia