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

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, 1993, 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 itself, he then began using hidden spots in the woods as private meeting places, often under the cover of darkness, to plan his attack with his conspirators. It is believed that one of the ways Turner summoned fellow conspirators to the woods was through the use of particular songs (Jones, 1993, pp. 79-80). One such song, the one whose lines begin this essay, was "Go in the Wilderness," which reminded its listeners that If you want to find Jesus, go in de wilderness, Go in de wilderness, go in de wilderness, Mournin' brudder, go in de wilderness, I wait upon de Lord. The provenance of the song is uncertain. It is most likely an adaptation of a Methodist hymn entitled "Ain't I glad I got out of the wilderness!" but who adapted it and when is impossible to verify. Some believe it was Turner himself who inverted the song to instruct coconspirators to "Go in the wilderness" for clandestine meetings (Blake), while others have hypothesized a longer lineage of rebellion for the song, tracing it back to the 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 the end, while we cannot be certain about its actual use in slave revolts, we can be certain about the lore that it has generated; as James Kelley (2008) reminds us about the stories surrounding the spirituals and how they were used, sometimes "the story itself, not the proof of it, is what makes the story true" (p. 275). With this in mind, my goal is not to prove that "Go in the Wilderness" was used in a particular way, but to use the stories surrounding its use as a point of departure for a closer analysis of how the song's call to the wilderness, widely regarded as part of a broader clarion call for resistance found throughout the spirituals, functions within the songs overall. Indeed, it is their capacity for hidden expression and masked rebellion that makes the 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 the lofty goal of defining "the spiritual world" in which African Americans "live and strive" (1993, p.5). His dominant metaphor for the entire work is that of the "veil," the ever-present partition that separates African Americans from the world around them, and in doing so, separates them from themselves as well. …