Partial funding for the production of Our Place Our Time is made possible by a grant from the Allison Jay and LOW Parsons Foundation.

Next on Our Place Our Time, we'll take a slow trip to the North Carolina Outer Banks down Route 158 where the scenery is varied and everybody you meet is a character.

We'll talk to prize-winning artist Bonnie Whitworth and trace the history of a bloody slave revolt.

Welcome to Our Place Our Time, the cultural magazine for Hampton Roads.

I'm Vian Webb, and thanks for joining us.

Southampton County lies to the west of Hampton Roads.

It's an agricultural county.

Peanuts and cotton are among its major products.

If you drive through the county, you won't see much evidence of an historical event that occurred there in 1831 that made the Civil War inevitable.

Only a few highway markers remain.

But on November the 11th, 160 years ago this week, the slave Nat Turner was hanged from a tree near the county courthouse ending the bloodiest slave revolt in American history.

The tree and the courthouse are gone now, but if you know where to look, there are still places and houses that help to tell the Nat Turner story.

Producer Tim Morton, with the help of two historians, takes us on a trip through Nat Turner country.

We were mapping our course through Nat Turner country.

My guides were cousins, Frank and Bill Bryant, both with family roots in Southampton County and both with lifelong interests in the Southampton slave revolt.

Which is where our family lived or as, as, as grandchildren we visited our grandparents along this road.

Frank teaches American history at Craddock High School in Portsmouth.

Bill, a writer and newspaper editor, has studied and written about the revolt for more than a decade.

Bill recently completed a film script about the revolt, which he is trying to sell to Hollywood.

Where is the barrel road?

Up the barrel road to what would've been the road into Jerusalem where they encountered the local militia.

We visited Southampton in mid-August, the same time as the slave revolt.

Then as now, Southampton was an agricultural county, corn, cotton, and soybeans among the major crops.

It was and still is a place of smaller farms.

We were driving the same roads, several with the same names.

Turner and his fellow conspirators traveled over during their little more than two-day melee.

Frank and Bill were keeping up a steady beat of information.

Reminders of Nat Turner were easy to find.

Less than two miles from where Nat lived as a slave stands a store owned by direct descendants.

We had decided to start our tour at Persons Church.

In a jailhouse confession Turner made, he described a heavenly vision he had at a mill pond behind the church.

It was six years before the revolt.

Turner was 25 years old.

Watch out for fun.

Who was Nat Turner?

What kind of person was he?

Seeking answers, I had earlier talked with historian Dr.

Tom Bosier of Norfolk State University.

Describe for me your idea of Nat Turner.

Let, let's say you were had to tell a story about Nat Turner to children.

What, how would you describe Nat Turner?

He was always regarded as being different.

He saw himself as being a very, very special person.

And evidently people in his community regarded, Blacks and whites regarded him as being different.

Somehow he managed to learn to read and write at an early stage.

He almost never gave his master any trouble.

And because of he could read and write, he became a religious leader.

The question is did he become a religious leader because he can read and write?

Was he naturally inclined to religion?

Something like that.

But he was well respected by blacks and whites counted as evidence that he a proof as like that he at least baptize at least one white person as such.

But he was a proud person.

Most of the early history books has missed out on that.

He was a very, very proud, dignified man.

He evidently knew what he was doing.

Who was it?

Two stories about Brantley that I've heard.

It was at Persons Mill Pond that Turner baptized himself and a white man named Ethelred Brantley, whom Turner described as wicked.

The white church had denied Turner baptism.

Yeah, here's the pond over here.

Yeah.

Watch this.

Now this was a working hill pond in there.

There was a dam up here at this end of it that was broken.

Turner saw here a vision of white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle under a darkened sun.

A thunder rolling in the heavens and blood flowing in streams.

Come this far into it because the water still left.

Oh yeah.

Uh-huh.

So they came down in here into the the mill pond, which would've been higher there.

And baptized each other.

Gives a full, a pretty good account of this in his confessions.

Yeah, he says he's beginning to have his communication from God.

Frank read from the confession Turner's description of the baptism.

About this time I told these things to a white man, Ethel T - Ethel Red T. Brantley, on whom it had a wondrous effect.

And he ceased from his wickedness and was attacked immediately with contankious eruptions and blood oozed from the pores of his skin.

He was healed and the spirit appeared to me again and said, As the Savior had been baptized, so should we be also.

And when the white people would not let us be baptized by the church, we went down into the water together in the sight of many who reviled us and were baptized by the spirit.

Goes on to say, after this, I rejoiced greatly and gave thanks to God.

It's been said that the Nat Turner Revolt was an isolated event, was it?

It was isolated in the sense that it was the largest and most significant, slave revolt in British North America as such.

In that sense, it was isolated, but Herbert Abdecker has documented at least 250 slave revolts in the continental United States and the Southern United States.

It's even debated about whether it was an isolated revolt in Virginia because you had the Gabriel Prausel conspiracy in Virginia, which they were not able to pull off.

But the Nat Turner revolt was very, very significant.

It had, it was a major turning point for the South.

I guess the most frightened thing was that the most whites realized that if it could have them in Southampton County, it could very well have them anywhere else in the South.

In Southampton County, you had a population of about 16,000 around 1831.

And the majority of that population in the county was black, slave and free black.

And so you had a higher percentage about free blacks in Southampton County than perhaps anywhere else in Virginia in the south.

Matt Turner should spill the first blood as he raises it.

It was at Cabin Pond on August 21st, 1831 that Turner and four others met to plan the revolt.

This is where the con- conspiracy was put together or, or hatched.

I'm sure Turner had it put together in his mind, but you got his four confidants here.

They had a a dinner, a last dinner of sorts before the before the revolt was to begin.

Long after the revolt, a 19th century engraver imagined the early morning scene.

At about 2: AM on August 22nd, Turner and his cohorts started out on their holy and bloody course.

Artist Vonnie Whitworth has won so many prizes in local shows she's soon going to run out of shows to compete in.

Last month alone, her watercolors took five awards.

This past summer, she took a top award at the Virginia Beach Boardwalk Art Show.

And currently, a painting by Vonnie Whitworth is on the cover of a catalog that lists major mid-Atlantic artists.

Mike Sinclair tells us about this artist who paints the familiar people and objects of her world.

For as long as she can remember, Vonnie Whitworth has been painting the world around her.

Her distinctive watercolor style captures the everyday scenes that fill her life.

People she knows, places she's been, all become the subject of her art.

Well, I remember there were days in my life that I would wake up and think, "Well, what can I paint?"

And there was a struggle.

But I don't have that problem now.

It seems that everything I see and everything that is around me affects me in some way.

And sometimes it's not particularly the subject matter.

It's maybe just the way the light happens to hit on a given object or I can be in a public place and see a person and I just, I know that he's the painting just standing there waiting to happen.

Whitworth's formal training is in fashion illustration and she worked full-time as a commercial artist until 1986 when she made the transition to painting full-time for herself.

There are deadlines to meet every day.

And usually I had ads that I had to get out overnight.

So there was always a lot of pressure.

And you're always trying to work to satisfy other people.

And I think that was one of the hardest things.

Always working for someone else and, and trying to be creative and satisfy the buyers or the customer who, who would see the ads in the newspaper.

It's kind of hard to make that transition because the security of knowing that money is coming in from some direction to give that up and to take a chance on a painting might sell this year.

It might sell five years from now, you don't know.

So that was a hard decision to make, but I, I really feel like it, it has worked out really well.

The transition to pursuing her art full-time wasn't easy and would not have been possible without the support of her family and her husband, Tom.

He has taken over many of the business responsibilities of being an artist and many of the tasks that took Vonnie away from her art.

I felt like that in the course of a hundred hours of labor for art, she may only paint 35 hours or so.

The rest of it was running around, cutting mats, you know, doing paperwork for shows.

Just the general things that drive most artists crazy.

Vonnie's style is not opaque and ethereal, typical to most watercolorists.

Her use of paint is heavy and her paintings take on a photorealistic style.

I try to use a combination of, of techniques with watercolor.

Most watercolorists use it in a much more transparent way.

I, I prefer to use either a combination or I do use transparent watercolor, but I, I like to use opaque watercolor in some areas also.

I think it's the combination of the two that makes for a really powerful piece.

George Tusing is an art reviewer for the Virginian pilot Ledger Star.

The mastery of, of technique that she has is something that most artists would give their skin to have, right?

Okay.

So there's that.

But that's very obvious.

She has good sense of color, good sense of design.

I was looking at a little drawing in her studio where the accents of light and dark are placed very sensitively in terms of design.

Some of Whitworth's paintings spring from a file of photographs that she keeps near her easel.

Her most striking paintings are not from photographs, but from life.

They are her figure drawings and grow out of her Friday morning painting sessions with fellow dart center artists, Robin Malbin, Jenny Windsor, and their model, Elaine Salaqua.

I Find that the human figure is probably one of the most complex things that I could possibly think to paint.

When you, when you understand the skeleton structure and the muscle structure in the human body, it's so intricate and so very, very complex that to be able to paint that, it's almost like you think about all of the bones and the muscles and then you think of this sheer layer of skin lying over it and to be able to paint that and convince the viewer that that structure is correct.

Vonnie has recently enjoyed much success.

Her watercolors are gaining national recognition.

She currently has paintings in the National Watercolor Society Show in Los Angeles and the American Watercolor Society Show in New York.

One of the things that I see as a strength in her approach to her art is that she's a thinking artist.

A lot of artists who develop very, very skillful techniques are not thinking artists.

They're simply cranking out pictures like so many commodities.

But she is a thinking artist and in talking with her she knows exactly what she's about.

I tend to not really have ultimate goals.

I have short-term goals that I try to reach in my life and as I reach those small goals, then I, I move on to the next one.

I, I think if I really reach the ultimate goal, then it would be sort of a let down.

Vonnie has taken from her commercial background a tremendous work ethic.

She paints eight to 10 hours a day devoting a huge amount of time to her art and her craft.

This work is starting to pay off as people are beginning to notice the watercolors of Vonnie Whitworth.

Paintings by Vonnie Whitworth will be on display at the Dart Center in downtown Norfolk.

You can see them from November the 15th through the 19th.

Did you get to drive to the North Carolina Outer Banks this summer?

It's always been one of my favorite trips.

You get to come off the anonymous interstate highway and you drive through towns with names like Maple, Poplar Branch, Curatock and Grandy.

You get to see front yards and backyards in gorgeous farmland.

And there's highway art everywhere.

Our crew took a leisurely trip down Route 158.

We hadn't gotten out of Virginia when we realized that our trip was going to be richer than we thought.

Off the side of a bridge, the Northwest River was waiting to beguil us.

A picture for a tourist brochure.

Had we been in the museum, this was the gallery of the Dutch and Flemish old masters.

Gordon at a creek near Sligo was thinking about an impressionist painting or a wet watercolor.

I like this shot.

This is at Sligo.

Good catch, Gordon.

Who said there are no skyscrapers in Moyak?

This Moyok gem dates from 1905.

It was originally a grocery store.

We are a little farther south.

We've never left 158.

Whoa.

Whoa.

This is Flower.

She's a spotted skunk.

She's been descented.

She sleeps most of the time all day and stays up all night.

So when people come through, we have to, you know, bring her out so people can see her and hold her.

She doesn't bite.

She scratches a little bit, but besides that, she's pretty docile.

That's Derek Humphreys who mines Noah's ark.

And that's his cousin and helper, Holly Keen.

Next door to Noah's Ark, there was well, another fantasy in law and art.

We stopped by the carriage shed to talk with a craftsman of law and art, Al Lazarski, a retired mason originally from Connecticut.

Lazarski takes special pride in his cows.

He's got his own pattern, uses plastic eyes, a rope tail and a rod to stick in the ground.

He's got a cow next to a swan in front of his house and a pig.

How'd he get started?

Well, I though about retiring someday and I said, "I have to have something to do.

I can't sit around in the rocking chair."

And so I started doing one thing and it led to this.

I started decapaging poems on a nice plaque.

My mother wrote poems and it didn't turn out as good as I liked.

So I kept going into a different, making different things for people.

And finally I got into all this items that I make now and it's woodworking.

There's art along 158 that to a stranger is just inexplicable.

It's the oldest building in the county.

You go to the jail now to meet politicians.

The post office in Barco is the second smallest in North Carolina.

The one it waves on the outer banks is the smallest.

We learned a story about this building.

It was a schoolhouse built by blacks when the public school the children were supposed to go to was too far away.

This isn't its original location.

The building has had many uses.

Recently, it was a church.

You can't take a leisurely trip down 158 without visiting an antique shop.

We decided on Don Austin's because it seemed like a fair amount of the world's hand-me-downs had washed up here.

Austin's specialty is driftwood.

He gets it out of swamps and dare and hide counties.

How do you price the driftwood, Don?

Just as much as I can get for him.

That's about all I can say.

But you got all kinds of diferent little - Well, it's Diferent, different prices like Volkswagens and Cadillacs.

You bigger it is the, you know, the more somebody will pay for it.

And the harder it is to get, it's a lot of work.

Every piece has to be brought out.

A piece like that, just that piece there will probably weigh 150 pounds.

So you can imagine what a piece like that would weigh when it comes out the water.

Then it has to be hand scrubbed to get all the mud and it's a lot of work in it.

We did make it to the Outer Banks.

Gordon rode across the Curatuck Sound Bridge on top of the truck.

The camera supported on his knees.

We had taken a leisurely drive down and found more than we expected to keep us working.

But Highway 158 and therefore our road story had come to an end.

And since the end was at the Atlantic Ocean under a blue sky with drinks in the cooler, beach chairs, and the possibility of catching a spot or two, we decided we'd start on another story for Our Place Our Time after a while.

Our crew did come back from the Outer Banks eventually, but we'll spury the fish storms.

Next week on Our Place Our Time, we're going to continue our story of the Southampton County Slave Revolt by taking you to some of the places and houses where events of that revolt occurred.

We'll then profile the artist Jose and Vesna Dovis and visit a woman who is living her dream of bringing the theater to children.

I'm Vian Webb.

Thanks for joining us and hope you'll be with us on the next edition of Our Place: Our Time.

Partial funding for Our Place Our Time has been made possible by the Arts Commission of the City of Chesapeake with additional support from the Arts Commissions of the cities of Virginia Beach, Newport News, Norfolk, Hampton and Williamsburg.

Partial funding for the production of Our Place Our Time is made possible by a grant from the Allison J and LW Parsons Foundation.