Kyle Baker, Nat Turner, 2 volumes (Kyle Baker/Image Comics, 2006-07). $10.00, paperback.

by Beth Hewitt

History typically involves daily and subtle changes, incremental fluctuations in populations, in landscape, in political consolidation, in cultural tastes and predilections. But sometimes there are sea changes: events so cataclysmic, they shape and orient time and space around them. Nat Turner’s rebellion was one such moment. Kyle Baker’s two-volume Nat Turner marvelously portrays the magnitude of the seismic event even as it also renders the quotidian details of the man who, born into slavery in Virginia and with the conviction that he was a divinely inspired prophet, organized in 1831 one of the largest slave rebellions on United States soil. Although the rebellion was quickly repressed (after his followers had attacked and killed about 55 people), it was a galvanizing moment in the American South, confirming a fear that had been voiced in apocalyptic tones by Thomas Jefferson almost a half century earlier, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Even abolitionists responded to the uprising in alarmist terms. William Lloyd Garrison famously directs his audience to “read the account of the insurrection in Virginia, and say whether our prophecy be not fulfilled.” Garrison’s invocation of Turner’s “hour of vengeance” was to call for “immediate emancipation,” but in the south, Turner’s Rebellion was used to justify increasingly retributive violence (hundreds of slaves were murdered in the aftermath of the rebellion) and increasingly restrictive access to literacy (since southern commentators often credited Turner’s ability to read and write as instrumental to the success of his rebellion).

Thomas Gray, a white southerner, capitalizing on the fear produced in the wake of Turner’s rebellion, translated Turner’s story into The Confessions of Nat Turner, which became a best seller in the period. Gray’s book labors to render Turner’s rebellion for freedom (in which Turner sees himself as chosen by God to lead his people to emancipation) into an act of penitence. The strain of the narrative is between Gray’s claim that he is merely playing amanuensis and the narrative’s titular frame of confession. In this way, although abolitionist writers would compare Turner to Touissant L’Overture, John Brown or George Washington—that is, as a revolutionary hero—Gray’s narrative depicted him as an insane zealot. Gray’s refusal of heroism was famously echoed in William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which likewise gave voice to Turner as confused and conflicted fanatic. Although Styron maintained his surprise at the angry response to his novel, it seems all but inevitable that this would be the critical reaction to yet another white author’s neutralization of black radicalism.

It is in this historical and literary context that we must read Kyle Baker’s magnificent Nat Turner. Here, for the first time, we have a Turner who is psychologically complex and radical, vengeful and righteous, cruel and just. Baker’s biography of Turner (which significantly does not take the title of Confessions) plunges us into the wordless, yet narratively dense, story of Turner’s family. We see Turner’s mother racing away from African slave traders, attempting to “fly” off a cliff into escape; we see her cast in irons and put on the slave ship; we see a young woman on the slave ship throw her child into the jaws of a shark so as to free the infant from the grip of slavery. The book renders for us these most horrific of images—scenes from the Middle Passage, from the auction block, of lynchings and decapitations—with almost no words, save for the “BOOM” of a gun or a “CLANG” of a bell. Baker demonstrates his incredible artistic versatility using realistic, yet hauntingly expressive, charcoal-line sketches that bring to mind Goya’s Disasters of War at every turn. The evocative silence allows Baker to emphasize the ways in which both the institution of slavery, and Gray’s narrative specifically, effectively silenced Turner’s ability to voice the life that Baker’s pictures tell.

Baker eventually does transcribe Turner’s words as Gray published them—they appear sporadically, offset against the plot the pictures depict. Indeed, the book almost seems to insist on a zero-sum ratio between words and image, as if one necessarily crowds out the other. The more Turner “confesses,” the less we can see of the Turner that Gray does not allow us to hear. In the second volume, for example, in which Turner and his supporters begin their attack, we have a full page of Turner’s description of the massacre punctuated with tiny boxes that offer snapshots of the massacre. But then we pull away back into the large silent drawings that dominate, and these tell us things that Gray does not. So while Turner explains that “there was a little infant sleeping in a cradle that was forgotten, until [his men] . . . returned to kill it,” Baker draws for us Turner’s memory of the young woman who destroyed her own child by throwing it overboard the slave ship.

Baker’s book is nothing short of exquisite—not only an example of superlative historical fiction, but also a gorgeous and moving aesthetic object. Reading the combination of the large panel sketches, the intermittent onomatopoeic text, the text from Gray’s Confessions, and the occasional abstract design elements (which include a schematic rendering of the lunar eclipse that Turner took as a signal to God that time for his attack had come), one sees Turner both as regular man and as the mystical visionary who imagined himself chosen to be the new martyr to his people. The dizzying range of the images can’t help but make you feel off-kilter, as if to experience some of both the power and horror of Turner’s life. In the final pages of the second volume, after Turner has been executed and Gray’s book published, we see a slave woman discover Confessions and the last panels depict her disappearing into the shadows to discover the radicalism and heroism of its pages. This is something of what I feel at picking up Baker’s own Nat Turner. He has written a breathtaking book: finally, an artistic representation adequate to the complexity and challenge of Turner and his historical moment.