| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Nat Turner before the Bar of Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection. By Mary Kemp Davis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. xvi, 298 pp. $30.00, isbn 0-8071-2249-1.)

Of the many real and imagined characters that populate Mary Kemp Davis's Nat Turner before the Bar of Judgment, none fares so well as David Walker. Davis canonizes Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829–1830) by revealing its more implicit effects. Part 1, "Seizing the Word," is a neatly historicized analysis of the "dialogized word" between Walker, Nat Turner's revolt, Gov. John Floyd of Virginia, and Thomas Ruffin Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831). Davis successfully links Floyd, Walker, and Turner in a discourse on the "politics of repression" in which Walker comes out a clear victor. In part 2, "Rendering a Verdict," Davis offers useful and interesting interpretations of four much neglected nineteenth-century novels. Beginning with G. P. R. James's The Old Dominion (1856) and proceeding chronologically with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred (1856), Mary Spear Tiernan's Homoselle (1881), and Pauline Carrington Rust Bouvé's Their Shadows Before (1899), she augments the reader's sense of the literary and cultural impact of Turner and Walker's legacy. Part 3, titled "Restless Peace: Two Twentieth-Century Novels," offers readings of Daniel Panger's Ol' Prophet Nat (1967) and William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Davis concludes with a brief treatment of Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), in which "the 'name' of the generic female slave rebel who had . . . been erased from historiographical texts" is "restor[ed]." . . .

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