Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community by Vanessa M. Holden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community by Vanessa M. Holden Kelly Kennington (bio) Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community. By Vanessa M. Holden. ( Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 184. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $22.95.) In Surviving Southampton, Vanessa M. Holden expands the usual scope of the 1831 Southampton Rebellion to include the larger community of free and enslaved women and children who produced and participated in the uprising. Her reframing of the conflict from Nat Turner's Rebellion to the Southampton Rebellion reinforces her argument that such individuals as Nat Turner did not act alone in their resistance to slavery. Violent uprisings always necessitated the participation of the Black community through a variety of resistance strategies. Enslaved and free women's resistance ranged from violence to sharing information or providing support for the rebellion. Holden's work also considers the Southampton County community as a significant context for what she calls an "intimate" rebellion. She notes how the class concerns of small and midsized farms affected the rebellion by bringing enslavers; enslaved men, women, and children; and free people of African descent into close contact in their work and social lives. Holden is to be commended for the painstaking work involved in extracting this story from a limited archive of legal testimony taken under extreme duress. Holden has organized her book into five thematic chapters that, first, lay the foundation for the rebellion and, then, closely examine the source materials available to study and understand it. She builds on scholarship that emphasizes the significance of space and geography, including such classics as Stephanie Camp's Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004) and Anthony Kaye's Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (2007), as well as more recent works, such as Ryan Quintana's Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina (2018) and Rashauna Johnson's Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (2016). In the first chapter, Holden provides the backdrop for the rebellion by detailing slavery and resistance in Southampton County, which she describes as "geographies of surveillance and control." She argues that we must look both at the enslavers' geographies of control and at geographies of "evasion and resistance" used by enslaved community members to survive their circumstances (11). The next three chapters examine the roles of [End Page 105] women, free people of African descent, and children in resistance before, during, and after the Southampton Rebellion. Historians have minimized these groups in literature on the Southampton Rebellion, and rebellions more generally, but each group practiced resistance strategies that allowed them to contribute to the Southampton Rebellion. Finally, chapter 5 dives into a close reading of witness testimonies in the immediate wake of the rebellion, including the famous record of Nat Turner's Confessions, paying unique attention to the silences. Holden thus heeds the call of Marisa J. Fuentes, in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016), and others to examine silences in the archives, though Holden adds an interesting twist to how the silences are interpreted. When witnesses take responsibility for the rebellion without implicating other community members, Holden astutely reads these omissions as intentional "silences" that "should be trusted and celebrated" (120). In other words, silences can also reveal "intent, agency, and strategy" (84). Holden's main contribution to the historiography is explaining in detail how a whole new cast of characters participated in rebellions of enslaved and free people of African descent. In Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020), Vincent Brown briefly alludes to the role of women in rebellions, and he calls for additional work on women's roles in them. Holden, however, offers a more meticulous analysis of the parts played by enslaved women, free people of African descent, and children in Southampton. She does so by using the rich trial record of the accused rebels, which includes testimony from several enslaved and free women about the men, women, and children involved in the Southampton Rebellion. Holden argues that witnesses sought...