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Abstract:
This essay explores the trope of the wilderness in the slave spirituals, arguing that it functions to recreate symbolically the natural landscape into which slaves regularly took refuge in order to elude white surveillance. Drawing on a variety of sources, it considers the unique surveillance culture in the antebellum South, its effect on the everyday lives of the slaves, and the ways in which the slaves used their natural surroundings to avoid it. It then uses a close analysis of the song "Go in the Wilderness" as a point of departure for a broader discussion of the way the wilderness becomes central, both thematically and structurally, to the spirituals as a whole.
If you want to find Jesus, go in de wilderness,
Go in de wilderness, go in de wilderness
-Unknown author, "Go in the Wilderness"
In the late summer of 1831, for weeks after he staged the most notorious slave rebellion in United States history, Nat Turner became a man of the wilderness. After he and nearly 70 other slaves had spent two days massacring white families across the Southampton, Virginia, countryside, his rebellion was quelled and Turner was forced to take refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp area in order to avoid capture (Aptheker, 1 993, p. 298). In the final days of his life, the wilderness was integral to his survival, providing a natural retreat and place of camouflage, just as it had for the many slaves before him who escaped the bonds of slavery.
As it turns out, the wilderness was integral to more than just Turner's survival; it was the place where he found inspiration for his rebellion and the place he returned to often in order to plan it. In his confession, as published in The Confessions of Nat Turner, Turner (1832) recounts that several years earlier, he escaped his overseer and took refuge in the woods for thirty days, during which time he was inspired to turn his attention to "the things of this world, and not to the kingdom of heaven" (p. 8). From the point of his "wilderness moment" onward, Turner began reading and interpreting his natural surroundings for signs about when and how to conduct his rebellion. When his plan had finally revealed...