A Slave’s-Eye View Of His Life

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31772, 31 August 1968, Page 4

A Slave’s-Eye View Of His Life

The Confessions of Nat Turner. By William Styron. Jonathan Cape. 429 pp. Nat Turner was a slave; a religious man who saw himself as Jie instrument of divine vengeance. In the summer of 1831 he led a revolt of about 70 slaves in Southampton County in south-eastern Virginia. In little more than 24 hours, some 57 white men, women and children had been killed. In the march to the county seat, most appropriately named Jerusalem, the rebels were defeated by a volunteer corps of whites and a company of militia. The rebels’ guns were not fit for use. Later they were hunted down by the militia and regular troops. Negroes were massacred indiscriminately. Eventually Nat Turner himself was tried and hanged. The decade before the revolt was marked by economic depression, the growth of anti-slavery feeling, unrest amongst the slaves and the more rapid increase of the Negro than of the white population in the South. News of the slave revolt created panic in Virginia and further afield. The uprising was infectious and had repercussions throughout the South. The wave of outbreaks and conspiracies was followed by the strengthening of the machinery of repression and the re-establishment of a surface calm.

William Styron has attempted to recreate the life and revolt of Nat Turner. It is a fine novel. It won him the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and has been featured on the best-seller lists for a considerable length of time. It deserves the recognition given it

When this has been said, it must be conceded that the claims made for the novel on the dust jacket seem somewhat extreme. There is no reason to suppose that it reveals the “agonising essence of slavery" or the “total experience of being a Negro in that era" although it helps in this direction. The author cannc* be held responsible for what is said on the dust jacket It is worth mentioning only because it emphasises some of the difficulties faced by the writer who sets out to give a slave’seye view of his life a century ago. Relatively little is known about Nat Turner or about the life of a slave as he experienced it in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Slaves did not keep diaries and were in no position to “speak truth to power." This makes the imaginative task of the novelist a difficult one. Styron’s Nat Turner is in two respects unconvincing. First, Nat Turner’s sexual behaviour and fantasies suggest a public school rather than a plantation background. Slaves were chattels. They had no legitimate family life. They had no rights. Initia-

tion into sex was likely to begin young. Whether or not Turner was in fact married matters less than the fact that he has been burdened with inhibitions which have a distinctly middle-class flavour. Second, when the insurrection begins, Nat Turner is unable to kill and does so eventually only with the utmost reluctance and incompetence in o*der to preserve his right to leadership. The life of the slave was brutalising. His mission of vengeance was. he believed, divinely inspired and carefully planned. Why then should he be so divided in his own mind as to be unable to shed blood?

Instead of getting on with his mission, Styron has his Nat Turner meditating on the futility of all ambition and whether he was not doomed to fail. He lets a girl escape to give warning of the rebel approach. So half-hearted a leader of an insurrection was certainly doomed to failure. But Turner was not driven by ambition but by divine command. Not even at the time of his trial and execution did he doubt the authenticity of his call. Nat Turner is made to develop from an acceptance of his slave and servile status through religion into a militant insurrectionist leader. It is almost as if Styron was trying to bring his Turner to the point of appreciating the uselessness of violence as a

means of overthrowing tyranny, struggling to bring to birth what might with time have become a non-violent leadership. It would be reassuring to think that there is a Martin Luther King in the unconscious of every leader of violent rebellion, but it seems unlikely. It is not surprising to find that this novel has been criticised by black Americans. The very first sentence in the author’s note is a challenge. Anyone who is willing to claim that Turner’s was the “only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery” is going to have a fight on his hands.

American historians have tended to minimise or deny discontent amongst the Negro slaves of the United States. It was assumed that racial characteristics, an inherent ineptitude and stupidity, accounted for their submissiveness. Only relatively recently in Aptheker’s study of some 250 slave revolts and conspiracies has the legend of Negro docility under slavery been challenged.

It is for tills reason that Styron’s suggestion that the rebellion was put down with the aid of loyal slaves is felt to be offensive. Whether or not Styron is correct, his suggestion is plausible, not because Negroes were involved, but because human beings are on such occasions typically caught between divided loyalties.

Looked at from one angle,

Nat Turner was a brutal murderer and a terrorist. The fact that the initial date chosen for the rebellion was July 4 was seen by Southerners as a kind of blasphemy. From another angle Nat Turner was a patriot and a martyr for the cause of liberty. This is a familiar problem. Are terrorists terrorists or freedom fighters? Should they be treated as murderers, soldiers or patriots? Styron bridges the gaps to show how it is possible to be all of these at one and the same time. The record of Nat Turner as narrated by William Styron gives no comfort to those who pin their faith either in white power or black militance. The determination to maintain white privilege and injustice leads inevitably to an uprising of black anger and exasperation. This will be a disaster for all.

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders recently stated that the United States is moving steadily towards two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal. The world is moving in much the same direction. “The Confessions of Nat Turner” is not only a fine novel but also a timely one. It should at least give us pause. It may even strengthen the hands of those who work for justice, non-violence and inter-racial co-operation—and they need all the support they can muster.