The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial

by Sharon Ewell Foster

  I also resisted Easter because I had personal issues with the thought of slave women who loved the master’s children, as in The Help, who would take an oppressor’s child to her breast when she could not nurse or keep her own. But Nat Turner’s character whispered to me, like a melody to a composer, that they were all heroes. All the slaves were heroes, like prisoners of war, even Easter.

  Easter taught me about the power and complexity of love, love that even transcends chains.

  The easiest characters for me to write were Harriet and Nat Turner’s mother. They were both mothers of sons, as I am.

  Many of Harriet’s struggles to understand in the book are my own. As I wrote, I felt her. In the same way, I felt Nat’s mother calling to me to find the truth, to clear her son’s name.

  6. Nat and Thomas clearly have an intimate, yet complex, relationship. Both care for the other, yet can’t seem to keep their lines of communication open. How do you think this informs the debates that were raging between the North and the South at the time?

  These are such deep questions. You’ve got me working here. I am grateful for your analysis.

  I think that their relationship was like many present-day relationships: We make compromises so that we can remain friends. We are afraid to test the strength of our relationships. So it was with the North and South. There was a bond forged by common struggle and ideals, but as a new nation they were afraid to test the strength of their union.

  Slavery was the issue. Right made a deal with wrong—many of those who knew that slavery was morally and legally wrong compromised because they doubted that there was another way to hold the Union together. Those who knew better excused their friends’ wrongdoing. They sacrificed millions of lives—because the North and the South were afraid to test the union, or to trust that they could survive disunion.

  Those compromises—which were inscribed into our laws, words that remain to testify against us—were made out of fear, not faith or love. We made compromises with evil because we were afraid to test the depth of our relationship or trust God to resolve what seemed impossible. We are still living with the legacy of those compromises.

  7. Nat can almost taste Ethiopia as he stands in the Chesapeake Bay, and yet the shrieks of the beaten woman resound loud enough around him to make him stay. What do you think Nat gave up when he decided to return? What did he gain?

  He gave up what might have been. He gave up personal gain, his family, and peace, temporary peace, for a more lasting peace.

  8. Harriet finds the murder of the Waller family the hardest to stomach, and the sentiment cannot help but echo in the reader. Yet you still manage to keep Nat a sympathetic character. What was the hardest part about writing this scene?

  The most difficult part, as the writer, was being Nat Turner. When I write, I sit in the characters. I felt everything. I experienced everything. I’m serious when I tell you my hair is grayer. (I think I’m going to invest in some dye.) I felt his agony. I smelled the blood.

  It has made me very grateful to those who paid the price for my liberty. Most of my working career I have spent among military people, so I thought I was grateful before. But now I realize that we don’t fully appreciate what we do to them and what they sacrifice having to make life or death decisions in order to secure and protect our freedom.

  9. On page 188, there is an apple tree that has been overtaken by a beautiful, flowering vine. Nat “would prefer to allow both to live—the apples were sweet, fragrant, and might fill his stomach; the wisteria flowers were beautiful to behold.” Do you think Nat would consider the vine in the same way as he carries out his mission in Cross Keys?

  Exactly. You got it!

  He loved both the captives and the captors. God loves both the oppressed and the oppressor. But there was no choice: Unchecked, the wisteria choked everything in its path.

  10. Nat’s relationship to God becomes most pronounced in his ongoing conversation with Trezvant in the jailhouse. How do you think religion both divided and united the white and black population of the early nineteenth century?

  The conversation actually takes place in Peter Edwards’s home before Nat Turner is taken into custody. Nat Turner was a preacher and I think the conversation about race and slavery would also have been about religion.

  I think Christianity, in particular, was dealt body blows by slavery and race. Ruthless people, liars, used religion to justify superiority, slavery, greed, etc. They painted God as the white God of white people. There were many who professed religion even as they did ungodly things.

  It’s hard to trust people who say they are God’s people when there has been a history of religion being used to manipulate, control, and oppress others. Mistrust was planted then and I believe it remains today.

  That lie still causes many to turn away from Christianity. The lie still causes some to feel superior and others inferior. There are some who still preach, teach, and believe this foolishness—they’re also slavery’s victims.

  Yet, at the same time, throughout history and even today, we find diverse people who are bonded together by faith. The abolitionist movement was undergirded by faith. For example, many of the leading abolitionists were courageous people of faith, both white and black—like Henry Ward Beecher, his sister Harriet, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Bishop Richard Allen of Philadelphia—who worked together. In a previous novel, Abraham’s Well, I wrote about Native American, African American, and white preachers who risked their lives to preach together to the Cherokee and the people of African descent who walked the Trail of Tears.

  There are people today who find the courage to reach across color lines—despite all the barriers that would prevent it. If we are willing to do the difficult work of looking at ourselves, faith can help us. It can help us begin to judge people and choose friends and leaders not by skin color or by who they say they are but by the content of their character.

  I guess if race and slavery dealt Christianity body blows, then I guess you could say that faith won’t surrender. Faith, hope, and love keep fighting back.

  11. Thomas Gray’s decision to write a false confession for Nat is one of the strongest betrayals. Where does testimony figure in the novel? How does it inform your role as an author?

  This second book really is Nat Turner’s testimony. I never intended to write from Turner’s perspective. I tried to avoid it.

  But he whispered to me, insisting that he must speak. He told me that they, all the slaves, were heroes: When we teach schoolchildren about slaves we should tell the children that they were American heroes.

  He talked to me about the Great Dismal Swamp, about his love for his wife, Cherry, and his son. He told me about the heartbreak and frustration, and about the witnesses. I suppose you could say he gave me his testimony, and it was my job, as author, to deliver it.

  12. At the end of the novel, Nancie declares herself free when she can finally reassume her Ethiopian name, Nikahywot. Do you find a similar power in names?

  Names open and shut doors. Names confer privilege and take away power. When you take someone’s name, when you take their heroes, their God, whatever makes up their identity, you diminish them. You begin to destroy them and re-create them in your own image.

  My mother was a schoolteacher. The first year of my life was spent on a Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona.

  As a child, I remember my mother talking about our time there. She spoke with wonder. But then her voice would become a whisper and I thought I heard fear in the voice of a woman who showed no fear. “They take the children away from their families,” she said. “They cut their hair.” She shook her head with sorrow. “The children cry and the families cry, but they don’t care.”

  I could imagine the faceless, nameless “they” who did these things. It was a reservation and these things were done by federal mandate.

  My mother showed pictures of the Navajo children clinging to her as though she was their mother. “They wo
n’t let them speak their language,” she said of the children. “They make them change their names.”

  I knew what she was telling me. It was a violation so great that it could not be spoken out loud. But Nancie reclaimed her name.

  I needed to free my readers. I needed to give them hope; it is who I am. It is what I believe.

  I needed to lift the lamp, to tell the tired, discouraged, and poor not to give up. We should not be deceived: No matter the circumstances we can wrestle back our power.

  Nikahywot’s name was like a light, a beacon to all of us, and she reclaimed it. Thirty years later, centuries later, it is never too late. It was restoration and, I suppose, I also did it for the Navajo children and for my mother.

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