Perversion the Social Relation

"As If Set Free into Another Land" 175where to join us in rebellion, the fact that it had all arisen on theFourth of July would be an inspiration not alone to the more knowledgeableslaves of the region but to men in bondage in even more remoteparts of the South who might take flame from my great causeand eventually rally to my side or promulgate their own wild outbreaks.(353-54)By staging his rebellion on the national holiday, Nat hopes to expand thepractice of life and liberty that the Declaration of Independence promisedin word. He still espouses violence, but he also hopes that his actionswill convey an ideological imperative that emphasizes freedom andequality—and not the punishment of whites—as the basis for a new,cohesive community of blacks that spans the different regions of thecountry.Although he is first inspired by the experience of sameness in his encounteèwith Willis, Nat's initial vision of an egalitarian Christian communityfails to offer a solution to the real political problems associatedwith egalitarian citizenship because it leaves the institutions of cultureunchanged. Inspired by a second vision that also dictates the radicaltransformation of society—only this time through violence instead oferotic attachment—Nat ultimately revises his version of Christianity toreconcile that tension between the religious and the political. Nat decidesthat the best way to destroy that rigid hierarchy of social differencesis to destroy the fact of difference by killing whites. The sheerdestructiveness of his plan for insurrection thus indicates the extensionof his desire to be "set free into another land" because he intends notonly to win the emancipation of enslaved Africans, but also to destroycompletely every vestige of the hierarchical society built by white slaveholders.Legal equality, framed in the liberal discourses of fraternity andthe American Revolution, will be easy because the economic, cultural,and ideological institutions that support difference will be gone, as willthe phenomenon of racial difference itself. Everyone in his new landwill satisfy his requirements for both a Christian sameness and a legalequality after slavery because the only people left will already be definedas the same as each other. Of course, these appropriations and revisionsof the other forms of egalitarianism do not spring directly from Nat'sexperience of homo-ness, as if they were always the natural product ofany experience of homo-ness. But this strange, new vision of community