“The Birth of a Nation” arrives amid a resurgence in movies about slavery. Illustration by Keith Negley

In the summer of 1831, Nat Turner’s slave insurrection ripped through Southampton County, Virginia, leaving scores of white men, women, and children dead. The rebels were captured and tried in Jerusalem, a few miles from where the rebellion was put down. Eighteen were publicly executed for their crimes; more than a hundred other slaves were killed in reprisal. Nat Turner, the last to feel the rope, was hanged on November 11th. His corpse was likely dismembered or sold for dissection. But the county’s slaveholding citizens were still afraid. How many of their own slaves were hatching similar plans? Why had Turner carried out so awful an operation? And what could the community do to forestall a reoccurrence?

Amid this atmosphere of panic, a Virginia attorney named Thomas R. Gray published the story of an encounter he had with Turner in the jail in Jerusalem. “I determined for the gratification of public curiosity to commit his statements to writing, and publish them, with little or no variation, from his own words,” he wrote. One wonders what was altered or abridged, but Turner’s voice—straightforward and calm, stoic and unrepentant—is too strange to have been wholly invented. He starts by relating how one day, at the age of three or four, while playing with other slave children, he had begun to tell a story. Turner’s mother, overhearing him, was astonished: the story was true, and it told of a time before Nat’s birth. This precocious act of divination, along with his obvious intelligence and “certain marks” on his head and chest, set Turner apart in the eyes of his fellow-slaves, in the service of “some great purpose.” He tells Gray, “Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.”

That “great purpose” began to reveal itself, Turner says, in whisperings from “the spirit” as he worked at his plow. Gray interjects, “What do you mean by the Spirit?” Turner replies, “The Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days.” Other portents followed: a vision of warring “white spirits and black spirits,” then lights written softly across the sky, then drops of blood appearing like dew on the corn in the fields. After receiving a sign in the form of a solar eclipse, Turner assembled a group of trusted disciples and embarked on his fateful tour of the county.

Turner’s deadpan account of the killings is alternately thrilling and terrifying. He never discloses the precise nature of his communication with the “Spirit,” and betrays no sign of moral struggle or mortal fear. Instead, he casually catalogues routes taken, strategies deployed, weapons used, persons slain. At one home, there was “a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we . . . returned and killed it.” At another, after Turner’s men had stabbed a woman in her sleep, her son awoke, “but it was only to sleep the sleep of death.” As the band marched on, slaying household after household, they added new slaves to their ranks and weapons to their cargo. Turner organized the mayhem with a touch of sinister stagecraft: he placed his best-armed men on horses at the head of the company, and sent them galloping raucously toward each house that they encountered. “ ’Twas my object,” Turner says, “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”

Gray—surely amazed and afraid—asks another question: “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?” Turner answers, “Was not Christ crucified?”

Nate Parker’s film “The Birth of a Nation” is the latest retelling of Turner’s rebellion. The movie premièred to hosannas at the Sundance Film Festival, in January. Shortly after the closing credits rolled, Fox Searchlight Pictures bought the film for seventeen and a half million dollars, a festival record. Reports were ecstatic: there were tears and pealing ovations, and a sense that cinematic history was being made. A week before Sundance began, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had released an all-white list of acting nominees for the Oscars. This sparked an online campaign, hashtagged #OscarsSoWhite: a fast-growing protest against racial exclusion, both in Hollywood’s casting processes and in its award systems. A host of articles and op-eds followed, decrying the state of affairs.

Against this backdrop, Parker’s new “Birth” seemed like a tonic. First, there was Parker himself, who, after spending years raising money for the film, produced, wrote, directed, and starred in it. Parker, now thirty-six, had previously been known for roles in high-minded movies such as “The Great Debaters” (2007), about the debate team at Wiley College, a historically black school in Marshall, Texas, and “Red Tails” (2012), about the Tuskegee Airmen. Now he fulfilled the industry’s long-standing vision of the single-minded male hero-auteur, and answered the growing demand that black artists be empowered to tell the often neglected stories of their people. “This is a blow against white supremacy and racism in this country and abroad,” Parker said of his movie, on a panel at Sundance.

In interviews with entertainment reporters, Parker spoke about the risk of his undertaking. If he sometimes seemed to conflate Turner’s solemn destiny with his own, no one was in the mood to judge him too harshly. After the festival, he embarked on a publicity tour, which included a stop at Wiley College, where he endowed a school of film and drama, to be named after him. Parker had been planning “The Birth of a Nation” for years, but in 2016 Nat Turner’s story took on a dark, premonitory relevance to the Black Lives Matter movement, and to the rolling, hate-tinged farce of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. This last dimension was deepened by the grand gesture of the film’s title, identical to that of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 adaptation of the novel “The Clansman,” a paean to the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. By linking Turner’s tale to that story, “Birth” promised a rewriting of America’s relationship to violence and its beginnings in blood.

It took a deeper knowledge of Parker to halt the movie’s rapturous reception. In 1999, a female classmate at Penn State had accused him and a close friend, Jean Celestin—who co-wrote “The Birth of a Nation”—of sexual assault. The young woman further reported that Parker and Celestin had initiated a campaign of harassment against her. Parker was acquitted at trial; Celestin was convicted, but successfully appealed the verdict on the grounds of ineffective counsel, and the district attorney declined to retry the case. Parker had addressed these issues during promotional interviews for his earlier, lower-profile projects, but the allegations resurfaced in the press as the wide release of “Birth” approached, months after his coronation at Sundance. And there was a fact not previously reported: the woman who accused Parker had, years later, after several attempts, taken her own life.

But none of this—neither the early raves nor the condemnation that followed these revelations—told us much about the movie itself.

“The Birth of a Nation” begins with a campfire in the middle of the woods at night. Light slides across the face of a wise-eyed figure—a shaman, possibly, or a voodoo priest—with paint slathered in curious signs across his body. There are others around the fire, painted in chalky blues and purples, chanting and moaning as a young Nat Turner is prodded into the light. The shaman observes Turner’s “marks”—three keloid dots in a line on his sternum—and proclaims, “This boy holds the holy marks of our ancestors. . . . We should listen to him.”