Black Resistance from Nat Turner to Sam Greenlee

Hello!

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot of Black resistance to oppression, which often turns out violent. This is for two reasons: First, earlier this week I happened upon The HistoryMakers’s interview with author Sam Greenlee, who wrote the acclaimed novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969). I’d only heard vaguely of this book before, and it was fascinating to see the author himself talk about it and how he wrote it. If you don’t know, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is basically about a Black man who becomes the first African-American officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He then defects from the CIA and then uses the training he received as an agent to lead a group of freedom fighters in guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government.

The novel by Sam Greenlee.

While I’ve yet to read the book, it certainly sounds interesting. It’s also been made into a movie, the trailer of which you can see here:

In his HistoryMakers interview, Sam Greenlee discusses the public reaction to his novel among Black people. He offers a scathing critique of the idea of assimilation and bemoans that his book didn’t spark a tradition of revolutionary Black novels in which the characters violently overthrow anti-Black oppression. In fact, he says that The Spook Who Sat by the Door was (at the time of the interview in 2001) the sole Black revolutionary novel to be written:

“It's the only black revolutionary novel ever published. The rest are protest novels. And I was hoping I would establish a tradition, but it's the only one out there. [Pause] That's incredible. The assimilationists are in control. The honor- honorary whites are in control.”

All this was fascinating to juxtapose with Greenlee’s own time as a U.S. Army soldier and foreign service officer—a career which came to an end when Greenlee abruptly decided to quit. No doubt his experiences working for the federal government became the jumping-off point on which he based The Spook Who Sat by the Door.

So, the second thing that prompted my research into the Digital Archive this week was my coursework, which required me to read about Nat Turner—the leader of the most successful rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history. His rebellion took place in 1831 in Southampton County. You might remember me discussing my great-grandfather, Richard Turner, a little while ago. Well, his family of Turners were from the same county, and can be traced to a fellow named Britton Turner who was about ten years Nat’s junior. He was probably considered the property of white landowner Samuel Turner (or one of his relatives), just as Nat was. Whether Britton was blood-related to Nat, knew him personally, or just happened to share the same surname as a result of the condition of enslavement, I don’t know. But it is certainly fascinating to share a connection to this part of American history.

Artist’s depiction of Nat Turner with comrades explaining his plan for revolt.

Specifically, I had to read The Confessions of Nat Turner—Turner’s account of the rebellion as dictated to a white lawyer. (Not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Will Styron.) I also had to read the new academic monograph Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community by Vanessa Holden, which is about the Black community—enslaved and free—from which Nat Turner’s revolt sprang. As someone with a keen interest in this period of history and a personal, ancestral connection to this county, it was a very fascinating book to read.

So, I decided to see if I could find anything interesting in the archive about Nat Turner. One of the HistoryMakers, Patricia Turner, shares some of this history. Like my family, Patricia Turner’s ancestors were from Southampton County and later moved to Norfolk, where Patricia would later become one of the famous 17 Black students to integrate the public schools. Unlike my family, however, she boasts an actual, blood relationship to Nat Turner. Whether it’s true or not is nearly impossible to prove—but it’s definitely interesting to think about, no?

Like Patricia Turner, HistoryMaker Steven Roberts, Sr., states that he has some relation to Nat Turner. “[Nat Turner] is really a distant relative of ours,” he says in the clip in which he describes his paternal grandmother’s ancestry.

Other than that, many HistoryMakers describe being inspired by learning about the history of Nat Turner. Blah, for example, says:

“I don't, can't remember favorite books, I mean, I think, little, as girls we probably read things like 'Little Women' [Louisa May Alcott] and whatever, and, you know, my parents and particularly my mother tried to expose us a lot to black history, so as I got older, I really enjoyed reading books like Nat Turner, about Nat Turner and, you know, some of the history that was I think in our lives lacking because we were in this very white environments are really, and you know at a certain age, got very interested in reading books about black history, but I can't think of a particular favorite book.”

So, yeah. That was my little foray into the archive this week. Hope you found it interesting to read.