Many of you are probably aware that William Styron wrote a novel titled
“The Confessions of Nat Turner” in 1967 during a period of deep Black
militancy. Styron’s portrayal of Turner had little to do with Nate
Parker’s film. He found Turner to be a “dangerous religious lunatic and
. . . psychopathic monster” based on his reading of Turner’s confession
to a court-appointed lawyer named Thomas Gray. Styron’s version of
Turner was so offensive that a rejoinder titled “William Styron’s Nat
Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond” eventually appeared. In anticipating
his later morphing into a bigoted reactionary, Eugene Genovese wrote a
long defense of Styron in the N.Y. Review of Books.
In reading a/2008 NY Times article/
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/books/review/Row-t.html>about Styron
and the Nat Turner controversy, I found myself wondering what Turner
actually said in the confessions. As it happens, it has beenposted on
the
Internet<http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=etas>and
is well worth reading. Much of it has the rhetoric of a sermon but there
are a couple of sentences that help you to understand why Nat Turner
became a rebel:
And the negroes found fault, and murmurred against me, saying that if
they had my sense they would not serve any master in the world. And
about this time I had a vision–and I saw white spirits and black spirits
engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened–the thunder rolled in the
Heavens, and blood flowed in streams–and I heard a voice saying, “Such
is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or
smooth, you must surely bare it.”
For Styron, Nat Turner’s rebellion was not that much different than the
advance of an unnamed former slave in D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a
Nation” upon a white southern belle who generates so much fear that she
throws herself off a cliff rather than submit to him. The Wikipedia
article on Styron’s novel describes his version of the scene that is the
climax of Parker’s film:
From the very beginning, however, Nat’s rebellion goes all wrong. His
recruits get drunk and waste precious time plundering and raping. A
crazed, axe-wielding, sex-obsessed slave named Will begins ridiculing
Nat’s leadership and attempting to seize control of the tiny slave army.
https://louisproyect.org/2016/10/01/the-13th-the-birth-of-a-nation/
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