It is not often that I read a scholarly book that radically changes the way I think about a field. Celeste-Marie Bernier's Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination did just that. It is a wonderfully well-researched, thoroughly interdisciplinary argument about black male and female heroism.

Bernier takes her title from a letter written to the Richmond Whig by an unknown black man, Nero, in the aftermath of Nathaniel Turner's 1831 rebellion. Building on the momentum of Turner's slave insurgency, Nero's incendiary letter threatened slaveholders with the circulation of “many letters in cipher” and warned that “you would not be the wiser if you were to see them, for they are past your finding out – till you hear from us in characters in blood” (xx). This letter plays on an article published earlier claiming that Turner left behind papers “filled with hieroglyphic characters, conveying no definite meaning [the oldest of which] appear to have been traced with blood” (xx). Bernier uses this potent image of characters of blood to structure her discussion of the interrelation between acts of resistance to white supremacy, including violence, and artistic resistance, through coded signification.

Her point is simple but powerful. Heroic images have been reserved for whites, whereas dehumanizing and degraded images of blacks have served to reinforce racial subordination. Blacks, like Turner, knew that they could control neither their image nor the stories of their actions of resistance. Yet somehow, despite the odds, they did: Turner's characters in blood persisted, notwithstanding the broader context of racist caricature that has largely defined his image, and both Turner's heroic resistance and his elliptical self-fashioning have continued to inspire generations seeking hope.

Bernier examines six controversial heroic figures through a variety of interdisciplinary sources: Toussaint Louverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh (Cinque of the Amistad), Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. She explores their “acts and arts of resistance” (88): their crafting, through indirection and cipher, of “varied embodiments” (360) of a black male and female heroic tradition of resistance. Thus, as Bernier sees it, Turner's genius lies in how he seizes the opportunity to speak to Thomas Gray, who would pen and publish the Confessions, in order to forge a “mythology as an inspiration for future Black radical activists” (116). Although Gray was an “unlikely source for celebrating black moral superiority” (117) or heroism, Bernier argues that, in the Turner/Gray Confessions, Turner succeeded in painting his own image through his “strategies of experimentation” and “of performative subterfuge,” including “disguised patterns of oral testimony” (116).

Turner's success, the power of his characters in blood, can be witnessed by the ways in which Turner's image and his coded resistance have been taken up by artists and writers seeking to redefine and rework his powerful, problematic figure. All the men and women Bernier explores produced “heroic legacies” (9), a diverse range of visual and written texts, continuing in the tradition they initiated of indirection and resistance. This second archive of texts, culled from the historical moments of the Great Depression, the civil rights era, and the present, forms Bernier's second subject. Moving from the Confessions, then, Bernier turns to poems, including Sterling Brown's “Remembering Nat Turner” and Melvin Tolson's “Dark Sympathy,” and paintings by Johnny Otis, William H. Johnson, and others, to trace how Turner, like the other six figures in her volume, has served as a touchstone of black heroism.

One of Bernier's most compelling points is that all the figures under her gaze are “underresearched” (8) because they exist in the “unmappable terrain” (7) of black heroism. This might seem a counterintuitive claim in relation to Truth, Tubman, and Douglass, all of whom are perceived and regularly trotted out as heroes. Bernier argues, however, that while Louverture, Turner, and Pieh negotiate the “demonization” (6) of their images because of their acts of violence, Truth, Tubman, and Douglass navigate “monolithic and reductive definitions of black heroism” (6). Douglass, for example, an “enduringly canonical icon” (8) and “pioneering symbol of black resistance” (252), recognizes his “identity as a site of paradox and conflict” (253), attempts to reject “iconic fixity” (252), and works to create in his literary and visual archive “a world of contestation and slippage” (252). Of particular note in this section are Bernier's discussions of Douglass's “multifaceted and experimental self-portraits” (271) in photographs and of the models of male heroism explored in his The Heroic Slave.

The most brilliant element of Bernier's work is the vast range and number of texts under examination. Her careful, nuanced readings of the archive of texts spawned by her six figures is marred only by the fact that the volume does not contain nearly enough images. Thankfully, an award from the Leverhulme Trust allowed Bernier to include sixteen full-color plates. Many other images are included in black and white. But still I wanted more. For instance, Bernier discusses (briefly) a bronze memorial to Harriet Tubman but we are given no image within Bernier's text to match the discussion of the sculptor's failing portrayal. Similarly, Bernier's extensive and wonderful discussion of Hale Woodruff's three-part mural series, The Mutiny aboard the Amistad, The Amistad Slaves on Trial at New Haven, Connecticut, and The Return to Africa, 1842, has no visual anchor in the text; instead, a footnote sends us to online reproductions. Alas for the shrinking budgets at academic presses and their impact on scholarly inquiry.

I found some of Bernier's writing a bit jargony and repetitive, in contrast with the graceful afterword written by George Lipsitz. And I wish that Malcolm X, who appears briefly in a discussion of Douglass, had found more of a place in this text; I want to hear what Bernier has to say about this controversial figure of black heroism, his coded negotiations, and his legacy. Meanwhile, Characters of Blood deserves to find many readers as it helps to reshape how we think about and teach black heroism.