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Revisiting Slave Narratives I

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Judith Misrahi-Barak

The Americas

“Confession”, by Charles Johnson: Revisiting “The confessions of Nat Turner” and History

Claude Julien

Résumé

The 1998 PBS show “Africans in America” spans slavery days until the Civil War. Novelist Charles Johnson wrote a companion collection of short stories, Soulcatcher. “Confession” is set at the time of the 1739 Stono rebellion, of which there exists no known contemporary account from a black (slave or free) source; least of all the words spoken by one of the rebels during his “trial”. From the beginning, the insistent shadow of Nat Turner’s so-called confessions is felt as a subtext. Gray’s apocryphal account is turned upside down both in terms of contents and form. His white man’s language and Turner’s mystical resignation to death on the gallows is turned into everyday black words lambasting the powers that were through a mask of submissiveness and naïveté. Johnson’s fiction signifies on the smoothness of Gray’s text, and there emerges a fine picture of the give and take game between slaves and masters, of the complexity hidden beneath the surface simplicity of white domination and, most of all, of a smart rebel, of a dignified man for all his apparent subservience.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Johnson, Charles, Soulcatcher (New York: Harvest, 2001). “Confession” is the second story in the co (...)

1Charles Johnson’s “Confession”1 cannot be called a rewriting of a slave narrative as the only known accounts of the 1739 Stono rebellion are fragmentary and personal contemporary white reports. The insurrection was followed either by summary executions or reprieves of black rebels who turned themselves in, which, of course, did not give rise to trials producing thorough court records for historians to draw information from. As a consequence, “Confession” will be approached here as a fictional creation based on historical material; but also possibly nourished by a disposition to overturn Gray’s rendering of his meetings with Nat Turner. The rationale for this lies in the story’s very title, which invites, perhaps compels readers to confront the two texts. But, mostly (as I had the privilege to learn from the author), “Confession” historicizes the modern imagination in the wake of Rodney King’s brutal beating and the rioting it provoked.

  • 2 Ibid., x-xi.

2One should first introduce the collection “Confession” is part of. Charles Johnson was involved with Patricia Smith as co-author of the companion book to the PBS series “Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery”. This project meant seven studious years, prolonged by the ultimately accepted request for twelve original stories to dramatize the companion book. According to the preface, Charles Johnson was at first hesitant to engage in writing that involved scholarship and imagination.2 Anyone familiar with the genesis of Middle Passage knows that the historical background is not just words for a writer of fiction who also presents himself as a teacher of African American history and literature, and who, besides, makes no secret of his phenomenological persuasion. Incidentally, bringing history together with the personal and the collective memory is what makes Dreamer (a novel Charles Johnson set at the time of the Chicago Freedom Movement) both difficult and rewarding at the same time. Because readers must build their own paths not only between “fact” and “fiction”, but also between their own private images of Martin Luther King and his book counterpart.

  • 3 Johnson, Charles, Being & Race. Black Writing since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 198 (...)

3Charles Johnson has defined his stand in Being & Race when stating his main interdependent concerns as a writer: firstly, the form the story has taken; secondly, assessing what a story says about the world and, thirdly, measuring what it fails to say about the events.3 In fact, this passage from Being & Race provides the guidelines we will follow in this essay: where a story like “Confession” is concerned, studying form means hearing a black voice exclusively; considering the world and events leads to assessing the impact of our world upon a story set in the early 18th century.

The limits of history, or historicizing the modern world

  • 4 The thread of memory (but deprived of any literary posturing) runs through the collection. The sema (...)

4Soulcatcher’s two opening stories can be looked upon as the collection’s ideological springboard. “The Transmission” tells of enslavement and, through the mouth of a dying young griot chained to his younger brother on a slave ship, of the need to keep alive the history of the people before the “ghosts” (i.e. the whites) stepped into their own sphere.4 “Confession” tells of a need to rebel that becomes overwhelming for an hitherto quiet house slave who has so far accepted his condition without asking himself many questions.

  • 5 Almost two hundred blacks and whites were arrested and prosecuted. Seventy blacks were banished. El (...)
  • 6 Encarta Africana 2000 (Microsoft CD set, 1999) has one page on Stono, Franklin, op. cit., five line (...)

5Producing twelve stories to encapsulate more than two centuries of iniquitous but diverse situations involves hard choices. Stono is of course part of the PBS series, but Charles Johnson could have chosen any of the (known) two hundred and fifty or so, actual or aborted, rebellions. For instance the 1720 plot to take Charleston over that was uncovered and led to a series of executions meant as so many warnings to potential rebels. Or the totally undocumented 1811 uprising in Louisiana involving from three to five hundred rebels. Or, again, the 1741 New York City fires, for which blacks and lower class white “accomplices” were charged (without a shred of evidence), which led to especially cruel capital punishments, once again scheduled to impress the masses.5 This dark moment of colonial history would have made for a litany of cruelty and injustice, the kind of protest fiction far removed from the existential and satirical contents of “Confession”, a story whose main substance is a plunge into the mind of a good upright man held in bondage only one step up from drudgery in the fields. Perhaps Stono was chosen because, although it is the first rebellion leading to (at twenty-five or so) a significant number of white casualties, it is not so well known as the major uprisings of the beginning of the 19th century and afforded more leeway for creation.6 Although the uprising involved about twenty rebels at the start and ultimately gathered from eighty to one hundred slaves, the events are narrated through the lone voice of Tiberius, a (reluctant?) participant in the original violent action to get hold of weapons and powder from the local general store.

  • 7 Black Majority, op. cit., 319.
  • 8 Ibid., 315.
  • 9 The ordinance was passed in 1733, but desertions on a large scale (estimated at about 120 slaves in (...)
  • 10 The colony’s slave population doubled over 20 years. Africans from the south-west who were sought f (...)
  • 11 Ibid., 317.

6As narrated by Tiberius, “Confession” succeeds in recreating the events of the first day, the most intense of an uprising whose last participants were captured (some of them thanks to the help of Indian scouts) the following spring.7 The story’s plot line presents a rebel, Tiberius, held by three militia men who are standing in judgement over him in a barn. While Tiberius (who uses their questions to tell his side of the uprising) is a fictitious character, the names of his white captors, along with those of white victims, are found in accounts. And so is the story’s location, Colonel Hext’s plantation. The three-men jury makes up a functional microcosm of white power in South Carolina: an overseer, Ethan Whittaker, Mr. Hutchenson, the owner of the general store, and Colonel Bull, the colony’s Lieutenant Governor who played an active part as he stumbled upon the rebel group and raised the alarm himself.8 The generally informative story teaches without any didacticism. It tells of the general circumstances of the upheaval: the Spanish Crown’s document9 inciting blacks to flee to St. Augustine through Georgia [17]; the massive ( “a wag-onload10 of... saltwater negroes”) arrival of blacks from Angola [16] who were eager to move against slavery; as well as the rebels’ tactical mistake when they halted after walking ten miles. The bottle the three judges drink from as well as their red eyes also hint at the white men’s heavy drinking that day - confirmed by a £90 bill for liquor charged to the militia.11

  • 12 Ibid., 315. American Negro Slave Revolts, 187, quotes a contemporary source writing “the country th (...)
  • 13 Black Majority, 86.

7While the text provides sufficient information, it is not a history lesson, but a fiction aptly kept lifelike. Tiberius is never made to tell more than he is likely to know and keeps to himself what he takes for granted. A system is at work that imparts to the narration a welcome generic character: for instance, Stono is mentioned once only as the location for Mr. Hutchenson’s store [14]; Tiberius mentions Sunday as the day of the uprising, but no date is given; and, lastly, there is no detail as to the rebels’ halting place on the left bank of the Stono River. A few odd details are missing: for example, Tiberius makes a mental allusion to his being present during the murder of Hext’s wife, but that is not the whole story as the plantation’s overseer was also killed and the house burned down.12 “Confession” withholds important information Tiberius possibly came across in the newspaper: by 1739, Spain was officially at war with Great Britain and Aptheker adds Spanish agents may have been inciting the slaves to rebel.13 While there exists no proof of direct Spanish involvement in the Stono rebellion, one must point out that the story’s silence helps stress the slaves’ agency because the decision to rebel is their own. Indeed, historical events conjure up a backdrop to the story’s real import, to wit the contradictory impulses and ideas churning in Tiberius’s mind.

  • 14 The story places the reader in the perspective of what is generally thought to have been the world (...)

8Tiberius has been spared while fourteen of his co-conspirators were massacred under his eyes, and the hope he starts with is saving his life by telling his captors what they want to hear. His best chance, so he thinks, is winning over Mr. Hutchenson who was an acquaintance of his master.14 As a consequence, he insists on his being the best of servants, a quiet church-going man, an unwilling follower, under threat to his life if he informed on the revolt [20]. However, right from the start, this survival strategy is undermined by another force -one that has been born to him on that eventful Sunday. Indeed, the “All right now, I’m sitting down, just like you asked, but you don’t have to push. What’s that? You want to know why I joined up with Jemmy?” [13] he utters as his captors order him to sit astride a barrel shows the frame of mind of someone weary with slave etiquette and ready to insist on dignity as a human being.

9From then on, Tiberius veers from his defense strategy to attacking the institution, only to return later to placating words. Attacks against the system (signifying on his master’s luxurious life style based on the exploitation of Africans [15, 19]) are at first covert, but soon grow quite explicit. Especially where fiction remodels history. Back in 1739, when the rebels raided the general store for weapons, the keepers (Bathurst and Gibbs) were beheaded and their heads put out on the porch. In “Confession”, Tiberius’s master is beheaded in his bedroom (while Tiberius finishes preparing an elaborate breakfast downstairs), and his head put out on the porch like a “Halloween pumpkin”:

All of a sudden, I seen Jemmy and another fellah named Hannibal come flying barefoot through the dining room, so fast if I’d blinked I woulda missed ’em. Me, I stopped breathin’. I froze right where I was butterin’ a slice a toast, starin’ at the ceilin’ overhead. I was quiet, quiet, quiet. My head felt light. Didn’t a sound breathe from that house until from hupstairs I heard a thump. Godamercy, they must cut Mastah Boswell’s throat straightaway. Next come his wife screaming. They took their time, playin’ with her, I reckon. And since I didn’t know what else to do - I mean, I was part of this thing now, whether I was ready or not - I sat down at the table, stuck a napkin under my collar, and commenced to eatin’ that nice breakfast I put out before it got cold. I figure there was no sense in it goin’ to waste, right? [21]

10Tiberius’s seemingly factual words underline both his ambiguous frame of mind and his deepening challenging of the system. His silent stare at the ceiling denies his neutrality as it can be interpreted as a clear indication given to the assailants of his master’s whereabouts. Next comes a taunt aimed at white female purity when he hints at what the murderers might have done to his mistress before killing her. Then comes the coldly rational sacrilege: eating the master’s breakfast. With a hearty appetite unperturbed by what has just taken place - in style, in the dining room, with the napkin intended for the dead man stuck in his collar - Tiberius eats, seeing no sense in having fine food turn cold. The truth he has been ordered to speak piles innuendo upon innuendo, insult upon insult yet to be capped by the final thrust:

’Bout time I was finishin’ my second cup of mint tea [his mistress’s favorite morning beverage], Jemmy and Hannibal come downstairs, blood splattered over ’em like they been to a butcherin’. Hannibal was carryin’ Mastah Boswell’s head. He put it on the porch like a Halloween pumpkin... [21]

11The “vegetable” detail which lampoons the system by reifying the socially dominant master is of course nowhere to be found in the contemporary documents. Mentioning Halloween itself introduces various associations (death and carnival) that belong to the modern imagination. When read - reset may be a better term - within the context of imagined colonial racial relationships, it smacks of the ultimate insult; but, ironically, one clothed in the simple childishness whites attributed to black minds. Tiberius wears the mask of the naïve black who does not know the full import of his words. When Colonel Bull hits him on the head with the butt of his hunting gun, he feigns surprise: “‘Why’d you’d do that?’ Tiberius’s head was tucked like a turtle’s. He asked Hutchenson, ‘Why’d he do that? I been tellin’ the truth!’” [22]

  • 15 The barrel Tiberius has been ordered to sit on carries two hermeneutic possibilities. “To have some (...)

12Speaking the truth -not on the rebellion, but on slavery itself-overwhelms Tiberius’s original intention to save his life by acting the part of the good submissive slave. The hurt of slavery, the sense of justice and dignity denied have taken hold of him. Boldly, he rebels with words15 as he brings up Jemmy’s mesmerizing power and leadership:

Thing is, there was somethin’ ’bout Jemmy that was... different. Oh no, I’m not just talkin’ ’bout the way Jemmy looked. They was all big strappin’ boys. Jemmy stood six feet five. You got to figure they had to be strong ’cause workin’ rice broke so many people down. Visit any of the quarters, and you’ll find somebody got malaria. Cholera. Whooping cough. The children keep intestinal worms. So, yessir, Jemmy, he was fit. But more’n that, he had somethin’... inside. You could see it in his eyes. The way he looked right through you. [17]

13Although the form of his language is meant to represent slave speech, Tiberius’s words are not those of a submissive slave; but rather those of a modern protester. From this point on, Tiberius moves to an open challenge of the system, saying Jemmy opened his eyes to an unfair situation. From a slave holder’s point of view, his words are blasphemous, especially as they show the recently imported African as a rational being, a proud man capable of oratory:

He talked a long time. Listenin’ to him, I felt maybe like I was in church or somethin’. He was citin’ all the things -horrible things- white people had done. Like cripplin’ runaways. Castratin’ ’em. Pesterin’ the women. Workin’ the field hands ’til they dropped in the water, and all that evil, says Jemmy, was done just so people like Mastah Boswell could have his fresh coffee and grilled fowl every morning. But it didn’t have to be that way, Jemmy says. Back in Africa, he knew somethin’ different and he never let it go. And we didn’t have to either. I heard him say somethin’ like “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He was talkin’ ’bout the Spanish down in Florida. Jemmy said if we struck out together, we could make it to St. Augustine. [18-19]

14The text both states Tiberius’s uneasy sense of a dichotomy ( “I felt like I was livin’ in two worlds, just ’cause I worked in the house.” [16]) and builds a revealing duality by portraying Tiberius, on the one hand, as a human being eager to live on, and, on the other, as a man who needs to state things as they are. These incompatible instincts are especially visible when, after the devastating anti-slavery statement quoted just above, Tiberius reverts to the role of the meek man who would not kill anyone (especially not on the Sabbath [!]) - then asks for a drink in a not so respectful way: “You think I could wet my throat with some of that?” [20]. Colonel Bull who has been partaking of the bottle pulls the prisoner’s head back and brutally forces the remaining liquor down the prisoner’s throat. A key metaphor surges at this point: “After his last swallow, he clamped shut his eyes as the home brew burned its way down.” [20] The last segment of the quotation has been italicized because the “home brew” Colonel Bull gorges him may double up as the “truth of slavery” searing his existence.

15Tiberius knows he is not going to live. He has heard shots outside and seen dead bodies dragged away from execution. So, he speaks up. Participation in the rebellion has made him see the light, as in church [22], he says, trying the Christian approach (again in a seemingly naïve fashion) to move the men to mercy... before insisting he was the one that spoke up and had the lives of many good white people spared. The story’s ending is a foregone conclusion. Hutchenson and Whittaker go through the motions of fairness to walk Tiberius to the site of his death: “‘That’s enough, ’ said Hutchenson. ‘You don’t have to tell us any more. I understand. I believe in freedom, too.’” [23] The verb understand rings here like an ironical echo to Tiberius’s early hope that Hutchenson would “... understand how his life had been turned upside down... “[14] As his end approaches, Tiberius who has seen Colonel Bull load his shotgun signifies against the big man he first put his hopes in, as he plays the part of the meek deferent slave one last time: “‘Thank you, Mr. Hutchenson, ’ he said. ‘I knew you’d understand. I guess y’all fixin’ to let me go now, huh?’” [23]

The Nat Turner connection

16Although a link with Gray’s rewording of his interviews of Nat Turner comes immediately to mind through the story’s title, the word confession is incorrect in Tiberius’s case. A confession is an admission of guilt. Tiberius never confesses to anything, although he may have been more involved than he admits to his judges: indeed, “... what he and the others had done to the old man’s wife” [13] does suggest active participation.

17While Gray makes Nat Turner bask in his murderous career (a way to reassure fellow Virginians that a dangerous madman had been caught and justice would be done), Tiberius’s confession, that he has been victimized by an insane system, is one no white man wanted to hear in 18th century South Carolina:

  • 16 The italics are as in the text itself. The opposition between the underlined verbs in the preterit, (...)

I never thought about bein’ free ’til then. Never saw how things could be different than they was until I listened to Jemmy. Every-thin’ looked changed after he spoke... What I’m sayin’ is that if you listened to Jemmy - really listened - you come16 to see that slavery was mad. Just mad. We was all like folks in one of the madhouses, black and white, thinkin’ the way we lived and died was the nat’ral ways of things when, from top to bottom, it was crazy as can be. We were crazy. I felt like a sleeper. A man who’d been dreamin’ his whole life. But Jemmy woke me hup. [19]

18Comparing the two men (though the word man does not apply to a Nat Turner that is only a white man’s concept) makes Tiberius come out as an inverted double of Gray’s fabrication. Where Nat is a leader, Tiberius is a follower. Nat is a preacher who sees and interprets signs in the sky, Tiberius is an ordinary rational being who gets his news from reading the paper. Nat was an unruly slave who once ran away for thirty days and returned, Tiberius is a quiet faithful servant, a perfect slave with no history of misconduct. Where Nat is physically strong and proud of his intellectual gifts, Tiberius is club-footed, thin of body and unassuming in spite of his then rare (especially for a slave) ability to read. Nat pleads guilty as charged, Tiberius claims he is guiltless. Nat and the main co-conspirators feasted together before the attack, Tiberius breakfasts on his own. Nat is never made to utter his views on slavery, Tiberius constantly speaks up, in one way or another, against the institution. Perhaps more important than opposing the two men and their doings is the texts’ forms: while Nat’s words are rendered through Gray’s own florid style, “Confession” is nothing but black words. Though white presence is overbearing, none of the judges is heard to say anything as Tiberius is made to interpret their questions, as well as their answers to his questions, for the reader.

  • 17 Black Majority, 315; American Negro Slave Revolts, 188.
  • 18 Greenberg, Kenneth S., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1996): (...)
  • 19 Ibid., 12

19The counterpoint emerging from a systematic comparison is carried into the men’s involvement in murderous action. Tiberius insists on his actively saving white lives, while documents tell us only Wallace the tavern keeper was saved for being a good master.17 In Gray’s text, on the contrary, Nat declares his intention was to spare no one. And the white narrator insists on savagery when he makes Nat mention his returning to murder the Travis infant in his cradle, or speak of viewing “the mangled bodies... in silent satisfaction”.18 Whatever the reasons, either Nat’s silence or Gray’s decision to hide this point, we know that Nat did spare the Reeses, who owned his wife Cherry, in spite of the fact their home (Cabin Pond) was located in the rebels’ murderous swath.19

Crisscrossing: 1739/1830/the modern United States

  • 20 Black Majority, 103.
  • 21 American Negro Slave Revolts, 187.

20How legitimate is the leap we are taking over the years? The two rebellions have little in common. The South Carolina of 1739 was a small struggling colony where the heavy black majority enjoyed some leeway a post-Stono 1740 black code aimed at curtailing.20 In addition to its size and racial imbalance, Stono’s social environment was rife with diffuse social tensions finding vent in the Great Awakening. The colony also was undergoing a plague epidemic that provoked from August to September the deaths of half a dozen or so white residents daily, as well as an unrecorded number of slaves. There were also rumors of a Spanish invasion whose preparations were confirmed, some say, on the very day the rebellion erupted. And, of course, there were rampant racial and religious fears expressed in a not-yet-enacted piece of legislation making it mandatory for whites to bring weapons to church on Sundays. This March 15, 1739, statute was brought into existence by an incident earlier that month involving “several negroes” and two whites supposed to have been a Spaniard and an Irishman (two Catholics, as the Angolan slaves perhaps were after having fallen under Portuguese proselytism). The assailants were rebuffed and succeeded in escaping.21

  • 22 The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, 6.

21While all was not well in a Virginia which suffered economically at the beginning of the 19th century -especially Southampton County where the value of the land fell sharply from 5th rank in 1800 to 46th in 1830;22 the nature of slavery had changed. Slaves were more stringently controlled and the racial ratio (sixty whites to forty blacks) was far removed from early 18th century South Carolina where it reached ten blacks to one white in the most unbalanced areas.

22To find out whether my construct of “Confession” as a counterpoint to Gray’s text was anything more than a reader’s intertextual fantasy, I wrote to Charles Johnson who answered promptly, saying it was almost impossible to write of slave revolts without having Nat Turner’s story (he calls it an “ur-text for this subject”) hovering somewhere in the background. The one-on-one counterpoint described above builds a reasonably strong case suggesting the word “hovering” may be too weak a term; but it can, and indeed must be taken to mean the creation of Tiberius involved no conscious anti-Gray process. As a matter of fact, Charles Johnson’s answer also points out the rebellions differed vastly. As a consequence, one could suggest Tiberius reads like a counter model of Gray’s Nat Turner because he has on him flesh that is missing from Nat: while Tiberius is somebody the modern imagination can relate to, Nat is no more than the unlikely skeleton of a perturbed mind.

  • 23 See Ricoeur, Paul, Du Texte à l’action. (Paris: Points, 1986): 153-178, for a discussion of agency (...)
  • 24 Carroll, Rebecca, Swing Low. Black Men Writing (New York: Crown, 1995): 117.

23The protest agenda of “Confession” leaves no doubt as to authorly commitment, “action” (agency offers itself for a translation), as Paul Ricoeur calls it.23 Charles Johnson makes no mystery of his ideological participation as an author in a recent biographical essay where he recalls the teaching of his mentor, novelist John Gardner: “We both believed that moral issues pertained to literature.”24 As Ricoeur puts it in philosophical terms, “action” crosses over into the story that becomes an answer to time-induced aporias, which is another way to speak, as he did in La Métaphore vive, of the resilience of the past referent, its life line to (or with) the moment of writing and/or reading.

24If story telling and reading allow for “action”, the story both describes and prescribes, coils itself up between the phenomenological and the ethical.

  • 25 The author’s first mention of this genetic aspect is dated Feb. 12, 2003. A second email dated Apri (...)

25In his brief but invaluable answer, Charles Johnson points out that for him Tiberius, as a club-footed house servant (that is to say enjoying some privilege), was the “least likely of slaves to revolt until he is swept up by events and the revolt of a charismatic leader.” And the artist adds he hopes that beyond the Nat Turner overtones, the story also carries an echo of the Los Angeles riots after the beating of Rodney King;25 a remark that places Charles Johnson in the vicinity of Ricoeur’s suggestion in Temps et Récit that the present is a modality of our relationship to the past.

  • 26 op. cit., 4.
  • 27 Ibid., 5-6. As a praxis, art implies a telos. And so does reading. Ricoeur also discusses the “refl (...)

26At the beginning of Being & Race, Charles Johnson quotes from André Malraux’s Les Voix du silence: “artists do not stem from their formless world, but from their struggle with the forms which others have imposed on life.”26 Then, arguing in his own words, Charles Johnson goes on to say that writing does not record an experience (or even imitate or represent it) but actually creates that experience. Art liberates the “calcification of perception”; but, primarily, it builds relations: “Whatever the case, fiction - indeed, all art - points to others with whom the writer argues about what is.”27 This matter is elaborated upon in Swing Low:

  • 28 Swing Low, 121.

The very best-case scenario in terms of the creator’s life appearing in his writing by way of emotional biography is when the evolution of a writer’s thoughts and feelings are present in the text. When this happens, the reader can get a sense of the writer’s perceptions, values, and interpretations. It is like reading an autobiography of the soul.28

27Gray portrayed a man both aloof above the masses and crazed (religious “enthusiasm” was a negative qualification in the early 19th century), a blood-thirsty monster; in short put the rebel into the light he saw fit the better to vilify him and reassure white opinion (if that was ever in doubt among Southerners) that the right thing was done with the elimination of a noxious lunatic.

  • 29 The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, 12.

28Charles Johnson, on the contrary, constructs a likable and companionable person sucked into a just cause he discovers in action; and perhaps - though not intentionally - modeled Tiberius to be everything Gray’s Nat Turner could not be in a vengeful white representation of his murderous career. The only similarity between the two men is slight: their apparent celibacy. But historical sources are uncertain as far as Nat is concerned. Some say he had been estranged from Cherry for many years; others reason he may have kept silent on their relationship to protect her.29

  • 30 “Fiction writing was for Gardner what it very soon became for me - a mode of knowledge; a mode of u (...)

29A lot in “Confession” pertains to our modern world. If the story is “an autobiography of the soul”30, the most personal aspect of this modernity is the self-examination Rodney King’s violent arrest and the subsequent rioting must have provoked. Two of the questions that come to mind in keeping with Tiberius’s social situation as a house slave (or, indeed, anyone with one black foot, or perhaps just part of a toe, set in the white world) certainly must be these: Who is safe from reacting violently against racism? And, more pointedly: How can I vent or express my dismay, or my anger, as a person straddling two worlds?

30The story’s own genetic leap over the years that brings 1992 to bear upon 1739 cultivates humanity, as Martha Nussbaum would have it:

  • 31 Anderson, Amanda, “Realism, Universalism, and the Science of the Human”. (Diacritics, Summer 1999): (...)

For Nussbaum, there are three facets to the project of cultivating humanity: the critical examination of one’s way of life and one’s traditions; the capacity to identify as a human being with other human beings across and beyond local ties of region, group, culture, or nation; the “narrative imagination”, the capacity for empathetic understanding of another’s point of view.31

31“Confession” operates as a way to recover past resistance to slavery. The story does not confine itself into the unattainable task of narrating 1739 events. The alchemy of fiction allows a common timeless state of mind to materialize, calls for an end to inequality and unfairness. Tiberius’s frank words on the madness of slavery are barely possible from black to white in the 18th century colonial world. Tantamount to suicide in his position, these words are a way to agency: taking one’s death into one’s own hands rather than returning to slavery-as-before. A modern reader’s knowledge of the referent makes Tiberius’s confession of what slavery means to him sound utterly unrealistic in the mouth of a prisoner bent on saving his life. But readers cannot bypass other impulses. Impulses the story leaves unsaid for them to construct: the decision to remove oneself from slavery, to accept, to call for freedom through death which conjures up overtones of songs that found their way on the printed page much later. Songs Tiberius held in his spirit, if not in his ears, and that subverted the white man’s religion to speak against oppression...

32Among them:

  • 32 Hughes, Langston and Arna Bontemps, The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1983): 290-29 (...)

I am a poor pilgrim of sorrow
I’m in this wide world alone.
No hope in this world for tomorrow.
I’m tryin’ to make heaven my home.32

33As Tiberius brings up religion in an ironical way in his plea, one should be careful not to read too much religiosity into the text. Whatever the case, intertextual association may be superfluous here: Tiberius’s confession against slavery does not seem discordant to readers coming to the story without the historical referent in mind. Which is hardly surprising, because Tiberius’s views have become our way to look upon an institution whose effects still reverberate in the contemporary United States. Whatever historical content is present in “Confession” is second to writing on slavery from the quick of today’s life and feelings.

  • 33 The original group “... were joyned by other Negroes, seventy-five or eighty of them, called out Li (...)
  • 34 See Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of African-American Literary Criticism(...)

34Tiberius knows right from the start he will not live. He goes through the motions, the routine of servility... up to a point. Playing the respectful good-natured fool-slave can only last so long. A ten-mile long march among a group sharing the elation of freedom with “drums and colors”33 recalling the homeland across the waters has changed him. So, he plays “dumb black” to the white man - with a vengeance when he recalls his scrumptious breakfast during the “butchering” of the head/pumpkin later plunked on the porch. Rather than confess to criminal participation in the rebellion, he attacks the system frontally and subtly insults the masters, signifies against slavery and racism. Speaking up becomes the only agency left open to him after the failed uprising. To paraphrase Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Tiberius the slave speaks himself into humankind when denouncing slavery.34

35However, Tiberius does admit (could we say confess?) to one error at the very end, just before being led to execution: the movement’s strategic - and fatal - mistake to have halted, ten miles away, rather than pushing across the river on the way to hope for a life of dignity.

Notes

1 Johnson, Charles, Soulcatcher (New York: Harvest, 2001). “Confession” is the second story in the collection. All references given in square brackets in the text are to the edition above.

2 Ibid., x-xi.

3 Johnson, Charles, Being & Race. Black Writing since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 1988): 3.

4 The thread of memory (but deprived of any literary posturing) runs through the collection. The semantic field makes it explicit in stories 1-3-6 and 10-11-12. One may also remark that the roughly chronological sequencing of stories 1 through 8 gives way in stories 9 through 12 to a chronological disarray, one can read as a metaphor for the coming conflict.

5 Almost two hundred blacks and whites were arrested and prosecuted. Seventy blacks were banished. Eleven were burned alive at the stake, eighteen more were hanged along with four whites (of whom two women). Public executions went on for several grisly weeks. [See Bergman, Peter M., The Chronological History of the Negro in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1969): 34; Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom. (New York, Knopf, 1988), 60.]

6 Encarta Africana 2000 (Microsoft CD set, 1999) has one page on Stono, Franklin, op. cit., five lines. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts. (New York: International Publishers, 1963) sums up the event pages 187-188. A note cites all available contemporary sources, the main of which are: (1) a letter from Lieutenant Governor Bull to the Duke of Newcastle dated Oct. 5, 1739 (Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, II, 270); (2) “Stephens Journal”, Sep. 13, 1739, entry (Ibid., 412-413); (3) an anonymous “Account of the Negroes Insurrection in South Carolina” (in Candler, Northern, Knights, eds., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, XXII, Part 2, 233-234), a source that brings in the Portuguese colony of Angola, mentions Jemmy as the revolt’s leader and points out the revolted slaves may have been attracted to Spanish Catholic St. Augustine for religious reasons; (4) a letter dated Sep. 28, 1739, published in the Boston Weekly Newsletter for Nov. 1-8, 1739; (5) Ramsay, David, The History of South Carolina, I, p. 112n: Ramsay dates the event 1740 and names the slaves’ leader Cato in an account Aptheker calls “fanciful”. (Incidentally, The South Carolina Gazette so frequently quoted in history books did not report on the Stono events; most likely in order not to spread fear.) Peter H. Wood, Black Majority (New York: Norton, 1975), synthesizes what information is available from the multiple sources. To make consultation easier, all historical references will be to Wood’s and Aptheker ’s studies.

7 Black Majority, op. cit., 319.

8 Ibid., 315.

9 The ordinance was passed in 1733, but desertions on a large scale (estimated at about 120 slaves in two groups) only began in 1738, causing officials to report the colonial concern to authorities in London (Ibid., 311).

10 The colony’s slave population doubled over 20 years. Africans from the south-west who were sought for their ability to grow rice, the colony’s valuable new cash crop. In 1720, St. Paul’s County, through which the Stono River runs, held 1634 slaves (most born locally or brought a long time before). In 1742, the parson reported 3829 “heathens and infidels” probably most of them recently arrived slaves (Ibid., 302).

11 Ibid., 317.

12 Ibid., 315. American Negro Slave Revolts, 187, quotes a contemporary source writing “the country there was full of flames”. This statement speaks to the panic among whites in the area. It is estimated not more than six or seven buildings were torched.

13 Black Majority, 86.

14 The story places the reader in the perspective of what is generally thought to have been the world view of house slaves: Tiberius’s deference to the high class white man shows in his constantly associating “Mr.” to his name while he uses the overseer’s first name when thinking about him. Also, when relating the preceding Sunday events, Tiberius exposes, for the benefit of Whittaker’s betters, the overseer ’s inconsiderate show of authority when he ripped the paper out of his hands, which Jemmy snatched back and, confronting punishment, made the white man ride off, red-faced.

15 The barrel Tiberius has been ordered to sit on carries two hermeneutic possibilities. “To have someone over a barrel” is slang for having someone at one’s mercy. On the other hand, a barrel used to be a country store political tribune: that is precisely where Tiberius delivers his message against slavery from.

16 The italics are as in the text itself. The opposition between the underlined verbs in the preterit, “thought”, etc., and “come” in the present tense is linguistically correct as tense is not an obligatory category in black English (See Dillard, J. L., Black English (New York: Vintage Books 1973): 282. Here, this opposition introduces an interesting clash between the past (Tiberius speaks as if slavery were over) and its continued existence in the present.

17 Black Majority, 315; American Negro Slave Revolts, 188.

18 Greenberg, Kenneth S., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1996): 51.

19 Ibid., 12

20 Black Majority, 103.

21 American Negro Slave Revolts, 187.

22 The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, 6.

23 See Ricoeur, Paul, Du Texte à l’action. (Paris: Points, 1986): 153-178, for a discussion of agency and appropriation.

24 Carroll, Rebecca, Swing Low. Black Men Writing (New York: Crown, 1995): 117.

25 The author’s first mention of this genetic aspect is dated Feb. 12, 2003. A second email dated April 23, 2003, reasserts the link to the events in 1992 when it points out my reading “compares that tale to the Rodney King LA riots, which was my intention.”

26 op. cit., 4.

27 Ibid., 5-6. As a praxis, art implies a telos. And so does reading. Ricoeur also discusses the “reflexivity” of art, thought turned inward through (virtual) relationship in Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990).

28 Swing Low, 121.

29 The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, 12.

30 “Fiction writing was for Gardner what it very soon became for me - a mode of knowledge; a mode of understanding others, and by virtue of that understanding, understanding oneself.” Swing Low, 118-119.

31 Anderson, Amanda, “Realism, Universalism, and the Science of the Human”. (Diacritics, Summer 1999): 12. Anderson’s essay comments upon Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: a Classical Defense of Reform on Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 1997).

32 Hughes, Langston and Arna Bontemps, The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1983): 290-291. Any number of Spirituals built upon the theme of departure and death could have been quoted here.

33 The original group “... were joyned by other Negroes, seventy-five or eighty of them, called out Liberty marched on with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating...” (American Negro Slave Revolts, 187, quoting Colonel Bull’s letter.)

34 See Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988): 172. Gates speaks on slave writing. But Tiberius’s spoken words carry echoes from any number of 19th century slave autobiographies.

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