“Don’t Start No Shit, Won’t Be No Shit” – African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community

@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG @CulturedModesty interviewed @drvholden for @NewBooksAfroAm on her book “Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community.”  Check it out!

The struggle to escape Gilead is something we see in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and we see some of the dangers involved when one chooses to fight for freedom and resist totalitarian rule.  What we haven’t seen yet is a full-scale resistance where the captive handmaids rise up to kill the commanders and their wives – the ruling class.

At the end of Season 4, we saw June, the lead character, viciously take apart the man who had been her master – Commander Waterford.  It was brutal, hard to watch, and hard to forget.  It seems to even have left some of us wondering if her actions were justified – like her husband, Luke.

Brutality begets brutality, and I just want to say, “Don’t start no shit, won’t be no shit.”  — LMO

“The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region’s multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time.

“In Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community (U Illinois Press, 2021), Holden recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion’s immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831. A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.”  — New Books in African American Studies

LISTEN TO | Vanessa M. Holden, “Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community” (U Illinois Press, 2021) | New Books in African American Studies | 9/24/2021