"Go in de Wilderness": Evading the "Eyes of Others" in the Slave Songs

Abstract

If you want to find Jesus, go in de wilderness, in de wilderness, go in de --Unknown author, Go in Wilderness In late summer of 1831, for weeks after he staged most notorious slave rebellion in United States history, Nat Turner became a man of wilderness. After he and nearly 70 other slaves had spent two days massacring white families across Southampton, Virginia, countryside, his rebellion was quelled and Turner was forced to take refuge in Great Dismal Swamp area in order to avoid capture (Aptheker, 1993, p. 298). In final days of his life, was integral to his survival, providing a natural retreat and place of camouflage, just as it had for many slaves before him who escaped bonds of slavery. As it turns out, was integral to more than just Turner's survival; it was place where he found inspiration for his rebellion and 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 woods for thirty days, during which time he was inspired to turn his attention to the things of this world, and not to kingdom of heaven (p. 8). From point of his 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 itself, he then began using hidden spots in woods as private meeting places, often under cover of darkness, to plan his attack with his conspirators. It is believed that one of ways Turner summoned fellow conspirators to woods was through use of particular songs (Jones, 1993, pp. 79-80). One such song, one whose lines begin this essay, was Go in Wilderness, which reminded its listeners that If you want to find Jesus, go in de wilderness, in de wilderness, go in de wilderness, Mournin' brudder, go in de wilderness, I wait upon de Lord. The provenance of song is uncertain. It is most likely an adaptation of a Methodist hymn entitled Ain't I glad I got out of wilderness! but who adapted it and when is impossible to verify. Some believe it was Turner himself who inverted song to instruct coconspirators to Go in wilderness for clandestine meetings (Blake), while others have hypothesized a longer lineage of rebellion for song, tracing it back to 1823 Vesey Plot in South Carolina, when it may have been used in a similar way to summon rebellious slaves to secret gathering spots. In end, while we cannot be certain about its actual use in slave revolts, we can be certain about lore that it has generated; as James Kelley (2008) reminds us about stories surrounding spirituals and how they were used, sometimes the story itself, not proof of it, is what makes story true (p. 275). With this in mind, my goal is not to prove that Go in Wilderness was used in a particular way, but to use stories surrounding its use as a point of departure for a closer analysis of how song's call to wilderness, widely regarded as part of a broader clarion call for resistance found throughout spirituals, functions within songs overall. Indeed, it is their capacity for hidden expression and masked rebellion that makes spirituals so central to African American cultural expression generally. Nowhere is this clearer than in W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk. In Souls, Du Bois sets out for himself lofty goal of defining the spiritual in which African Americans live and strive (1993, p.5). His dominant metaphor for entire work is that of veil, ever-present partition that separates African Americans from world around them, and in doing so, separates them from themselves as well. …