Once only in all the years of American Negro slavery did slaves organize a revolt. This was in 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, a half-century after the Declaration of Independence, a third of a century before the Civil War. In the hundred years of false freedom following the Emancipation Proclamation, there was no important uprising by violence against the degradation imposed by America on its Negroes, until the summer of 1967. Then there occurred those bombings, burnings, and (to some uncertain extent) that gunfire directed against white Americans, acts said by some to have had the grand design of spreading so far as to force the recall of troops from Vietnam, and the disruption of American policy; but acts, anyway, upon which the governor of New Jersey conferred the title of “insurrection.”

William Styron's new novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner,¹ is based on that uprising in Virginia in 1831, which also was called in its time an “insurrection.” Through the “confessions” of the leader of that insurrection, the book undertakes “to recreate a man and his era,” and to answer for that episode of violence the questions that alarmed the whole South in 1831, as they now alarm white Americans in 1967. Why did the Negroes revolt? How widespread was the conspiracy? Why did Nat Turner fail? But most of all, it seems, the question still is, as it was for the South and as it must ominously be for us, why was the violence so limited? Why only one revolt? (Why only that fitful and even doubtful sniping in our cities, why only that ghetto looting when everywhere the white suburbs lie crammed with plunder, guarded by screen doors and poodles? Why did not the Negroes really seize Detroit or Newark? What will happen next?) Anyone who held slaves as Southerners held them, anyone who holds Negroes in degradation as white Americans hold them today, must realize that his head rests on a tender neck. Yet who dares justify the chop of the axe? And finally, what is the human condition which seems to nourish out of its essence an eternity of tyranny and murder?

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These questions and many more related to them are argued, brooded over, dreamed of, and acted out in The Confessions of Nat Turner. (Why in Virginia, where slave conditions were relatively good? Why—as of the end of this summer—only in the North? What is a Negro?) One of the questions that will surely be asked about the book itself is whether or not the uncanny timeliness of its appearance, after the author's twenty years of study and five years of writing, is really a service or a disservice. The book aspires to be more than a tract, yet today, a book about a Negro who leads other Negroes to murder men, women, and children solely because they are white cannot avoid becoming the matter of editorials, sermons, panels, and shouting matches. It is hard to imagine, though, how anyone will be able to go beyond the author's determination and courage in facing the almost impossible question, that of the justification of murder. This is the book's central and very considerable intellectual distinction. Yet while it was absolutely necessary that the matter be held to without flinching, if the book was to amount to more than another bloody romance, this intellectual and moral problem could not be the author's major concern. “Perhaps,” he says modestly in his brief foreword, “the reader will wish to draw a moral from this narrative, but it has been my own intention. . . .” It has been his intention, surely, to produce a work of art. And certainly he has succeeded beyond the reasonable hopes of almost any writer. The Confessions of Nat Turner is a superb novel. Later I will try to point out some of its achievements as art—worth doing, perhaps, especially because it has the particular excellence of being such a good story that no reader decently susceptible to stories will be likely to pause, his first time through, over the means of his enthrallment. Certain other questions about “timeliness,” however, do affect the book as a novel quite aside from the kind of public notice timeliness may attract, and these must be considered later.

The novel is based on a pamphlet of twenty pages called “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” published in 1832 following Turner's hanging. Styron says he has rarely departed from the few known facts about Turner and the uprising—and never from his understanding of the history of slavery in America. What he has added to that is an immense understanding of the human spirit and a fine novelist's ability to make us see—to force us to see, to shove our noses into it—to smell, taste, and feel these imaginary events, as if they were real, to live through them, according to the way we have been taught by novels to believe we are living when we accept, as so many of us still do, the language of novels as life. Finally there will remain a caution to be stated about that.

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To relate in their order the chief events of Nat Turner's life is not at all to give an impression of the complex and rewarding structure of this book, which is like a treasure hunt where each clue is itself a treasure, but it may give us some bearings for comment. Turner was born at the very beginning of the 19th century, into good fortune for a slave. His mother was cook in a white kitchen, and as a house slave Nat was spared the total brutality of field labor.

Here it is irresistible to give a brief account of Nat's grandmother, whose misfortune allowed his mother, as an orphan, and thus himself as her son, the luck of the house such as it was. His grandmother had been brought over as a girl in a slave ship from the Guinea Coast, was impregnated by some black man on that ship, and she died, insane in her captivity, shortly after reaching the United States of America and bearing here her gift to its posterity. Her cedar headstone, standing for a time until the Negro graveyard is burned over for a yam patch, is one of the ironies of the book that so enters the soul, like iron, that there is incitement to murder in the pious arrogance of every letter of it.

“TIG”
AET. 13
BORN AN
HEATHEN
DIED BAP-
TISED IN CHRIST
A.D. 1782
RIP.

But Nat's luck, furthermore, was that when he passed to his second owner, Samuel Turner, he became the property of an eccentric gentleman who by chance perceived that Nat might be the subject for an experiment in educating Negroes, not an illegal proceeding in Virginia as it was elsewhere, but universally assumed to be about as impossible and useful as teaching cows to fly. Thus, Nat became the pet “darky” of the household, “the smart little tar baby,” and learned to read. He acquired a passion for the Bible. Later, his owner had him instructed in the trade of carpentry and promised him the opportunity of earning his freedom—a further experiment to show that Negroes could be successful as freedmen, since a free Negro without a viable trade was worse off than a slave, even in Virginia. To Nat, then, Mr. Turner is a figure of biblical grandeur, a Moses or an Elijah: “My regard for him is very close to the feeling one should bear only toward the Divinity.” But the land of Virginia goes barren; Mr. Turner, in despair and with self-loathing, deceitfully sells off his slaves. Nat is sold into Egypt—except again he is lucky; he does not go with so many of the others into the murderous plantations of Georgia or Alabama, but stays in Virginia where, however harsh his bondage, he is not lost beyond all bearings of hope. But he has to hate Mr. Turner. At last, after one thing and another, following one adventure after another with sottish whites, sadistic whites, sympathetic whites, indifferent whites, he begins to form his great plan. He has learned to identify all whites with the enemies of the children of Israel, even though, or indeed because, they sometimes pet him. Fully immersed in his project, he still recalls Miss Nell Turner who taught him as a child, and he remembers to breathe “a silent word of gratitude to this gentle and motherly lady, from whose lips I first heard those great lines from Isaiah: Therefore will I number you to the sword, and ye shall bow down to the slaughter, because when I called ye did not answer.”

In those later years when he has turned thirty, Nat is again in a benevolent household, a skilled and trusted craftsman and a valuable property, “the smartest nigger in Southampton.” He has become also a preacher of the Word to his people, and slowly gathers about him a small secret disciple-ship of slaves. He instructs them with stories of the captivity in Egypt, the triumph of Moses, and the wars of Joshua and David. Meanwhile, in the household of his benevolent master, Joseph Travis, Nat becomes ever more familiar with the other race. “Without knowing the white man at close hand . . . a Negro can only pretend to hate.”

In still another household, where, rented out like a mule by his master, his talents as carpenter are highly prized, he is tantalized almost beyond endurance by the patronizing kindliness of Mrs. Whitehead and by the luscious, tender presence of her seventeen-year-old daughter, Margaret. In the Whitehead library he discovers a map of Virginia; and after a final, fast-induced vision, seeing in the heavens a black angel subdue a white angel, he completes his battle plan, based on that of Joshua. He will attack the farms, gathering recruits as he goes, seize the armory of the nearest town, and then retreat with his black army into the fastness of the Dismal Swamp, where, he believes, they can survive indefinitely, escaping in the end by sea to the North. By this time, his chosen few are prepared. When he tells them the time has come to reveal his purpose, they already know:

Us gotta kill all dem white sonsabitches. Ain't dat what de Lawd done told you? Ain't dat right, Nat?

The revolt begins well but soon fails. Joseph Travis and his family are slain, and the Whiteheads. Nat himself kills young Margaret. Altogether, sixty white people die. But only a fraction of the local Negroes join the rebels, many of the others aid the whites. After only two days the band is all dead or dispersed, and the whites undertake a riot of reprisal in which one-hundred and thirty innocent Negroes are cut down by mobs. Nat is captured, tried, and hanged. The first and last slave uprising in America has come to nothing.

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As the few quotations I have given will have indicated, the story is told as if by Nat Turner himself. When the book opens, he is jailed, in leg irons and chains, awaiting trial and certain execution. After a few introductory pages from the deposition of the Southampton County court, the confessions begin, with a daring and totally assured flight of language into the heart and soul of Nat Turner.

Nat recounts the central dream or vision of his life. He imagines he is floating in some sort of small boat down an estuary toward the sea—which he has never seen—and toward a cape where stands a strange white marble building, a temple, sarcophagus, or monument, “endowed with a profound mystery.” This vision—we may suppose it to be both death and birth, seen in this same symbolic white body—brings him always an “emotion of tranquil and abiding mystery.” The book will close as it begins with this half-dream, half-vision. The passage has an extraordinary effect, no matter how we rationalize it with our modern interpretations of dreams. It creates at once sympathy, respect, and trust for our imaginary narrator. At the center of his soul is a dream of peace, beneath all the violence, hatred, and despair; and he conveys this to us in language of surpassing distinction. The dream itself may be beyond language, but it is language that brings it to us. And that the words are those of a Negro slave is made totally credible. The tone, so unfaltering and impeccable throughout the book, is slightly archaic, formal, and touched everywhere with the majesty of the King James Bible. Yet the author has claimed for himself a further daring, beyond his claims of this eloquence for a Negro slave. Nat Turner speaks not only as some genius of the 1830's might have spoken, but he insinuates himself across the years into our minds by his mastery—and strange as it may seem this too is totally successful—of the more exquisite strategies of 20th-century literary language. He says, and the reader believes Nat Turner is saying, “—as if by one single glimpse of this scene I might comprehend all the earth's ancient, oceanic, preposterous splendor.” Here, preposterous is one of our modern sophistications. Or, he says, someone is “chewing upon the gorgeous syllables as if upon air. . . .” Or, “an ancient Elijah exploding in bearded triumph at the transfiguration of Christ.” Or again, this time with the utter conviction of un-rhetorical simplicity: “my tall, beautiful mother.”

Very rarely does the style slip at all, perhaps it does not ever. I may misunderstand when I wish that Nat had not been made to echo the famous line of Marlowe in describing his first great vision, “. . . the blood ran in streams against the churning firmament.” But all in all, the grand style is an achievement as necessary as the intellectual courage of the book, and the primary act of Styron's faith in his hero is this benediction of his finest language. It is a language somewhat of the kind that Styron—if we are to speak of the author now as we do in reviewing books, as enlisted in some competition for Parnassus—a language that Styron has used before but without quite the occasion for it. In Set This House On Fire he did seem to be chewing upon gorgeous syllables as if upon air. Here he has bitten off more than air, and the great words are authentic for Nat Turner. And those other obsessions of Styron's are necessary here, to speak again of the author, those obsessions with willful human debasement, with murder, depravity, corruption of the beautifully innocent, those things that seemed only obsessions in him once. But here they come true.

The other range of language available to contemporary authors also serves Styron well, and again doubly impresses upon us that people who lived in 1831 were human beings like us, and that we are human beings like them. How instantly and shockingly the scene leaps into focus when we overhear a Negro slave of 1831, in Virginia, saying, “Shee-it, man.”

“After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces. I beheld then because of the voice of the great words: I beheld even until the beast was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame.”

“Dey was a free nigger woman name Laurie, wife to old John Bright live up Cloud School way, you know? Well, dey took dat woman an' leant her up ‘longside a fence and druv a three-foot spike right up her ole pussy like dey was layin’ out a barbecue. Oh me, Nat, de tales I heerd tell dese months and days! Dey was two white mens I heerd about, come up from Carolina, has actual got dem a real bunch of black nigger heads all nailed to a pole and was out to git dem some mo' till de troops grabbed holt ‘em an’ run 'em back to Carolina—” “Hush.”

“Nigger life ain't worth pig shit.” “White fuckah.” So far as I know, nobody else has ever seriously made this simple and frightening exchange of the smallest debased currency of talk to establish a sure transaction between our times and those other days.

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Earlier, I remarked how the author, through Nat's voice, causes us to see, taste, and smell the events of the story. This amounts to more than “description.” To Nat Turner, as to Huckleberry Finn (and to Macbeth) in justified precedent, the world of nature, the weather, the call of beast and bird, are more than background. They are signs charged with anima, they are portents, warnings, omens. “The light paled, the stark shadows of the barren wintry trees grew hazy and dull, lost definition; far off in the woods a flock of ragamuffin sparrows, late winter visitors, ceased their cheeping, became still in the false dusk.” Or, “I sat still on the board, watching the dawn light grow and fill the cell like a cup, stealthily, blossoming with the color of pearl. Far off in the distance now I heard a rooster crow, a faint call like a remote hurrah, echoing, fading into silence. Then another rooster crowed, nearer now. For a long while I sat there, listening and waiting. Save for Hark's breathing there was no sound at all for many minutes, until at last I heard a distant horn blow, mournful and familiar-sounding, a hollow soft diminishing cry in the fields beyond Jerusalem, rousing up the Negroes on some farm or other.”

Along with this pervading sense of atmosphere, and the ever-present power of the language itself, the events as drama are prepared and delivered with all the old art of storytelling and with the instruction of modern psychology. Nat's revelations come to him in pairs, reinforcing one another, thickening and deepening the significance of the movements of his mind and of the persons in the action. His first drive to raise himself comes when as a child he instinctively steals a book he cannot read, and almost simultaneously witnesses the rape of his helplessly compliant mother by a drunken white overseer. He becomes aware, then, for the first time, of what he is. “I feel a sense of my weakness, my smallness, my defenselessness, my niggerness, invading me like a wind to the marrow of my bones.”

When Nat first becomes inflamed almost to the point of madness by the girl Margaret Whitehead, he had just bloodied his own thumb, building shelves in her mother's library, whereupon she enters on a girlish prattling errand—in her pantalettes. His first self-baptism follows a boyish incident of homosexuality; his first vision proceeds from a masturbation fantasy. On the whole, this texture of combined incidents seems to be one more of the necessities of the book. At the end, in the last pages—and the suspense of the foregone conclusion keeps up until those very last pages—maybe it becomes at last schematic, but only finally, only, as I have suggested earlier, in a way that no novel could avoid.

Another kind of schematicism appears here and there, minor and rather embarrassing to notice, like some tiny blemishes of the skin that indicate no serious disorder but rather an overindulgence in something too rich for the digestion. These are the phrases that echo unnecessarily the note of historical irony: Negro slavery will last a thousand years, like the Third Reich; mention is made of people ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, like Roosevelt's one-third of a nation. These could well be spared, as perhaps for the sake of the whole book as a novel the “love story” could not.

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The deep connivance of the sexual instincts in all race relations has of course been remarked a million times. The white man's easy exploitation of Negro women, his paranoid fascination with the Negro penis, his projection of all his own forbidden sexual urges onto the Negro, particularly in the classic Southern occupation with sibling incest—these are all familiar matters today. (There is a tale of how William Faulkner once, at a Hollywood story conference, was asked to solve a crux the old Hays office had imposed. The movie needed to indicate clearly to the audience, without showing anything openly censorable, that a young man and a young woman had been having sexual relations. Faulkner: “Make them brother and sister.”)

But sex today has become only another disappointment, rather like Emancipation or Desegregation or Free Dirty Speech. A Negro today can indeed, should he wish to obtain her consent, legally marry any white man's sister. This is less than the millennium. The general relaxation of sexual inhibitions in our society does not seem to have brought about, as once it was innocently supposed to do, any general relaxation of tyranny and murder, of violence. Human aggression is the problem of our time, not sex, and if the two are inextricably bound together in the roots of human biology and culture, if unkinking one of them will help straighten the other, then all we can say is that we have not yet begun. Dramatically, sex plays a central part in The Confessions of Nat Turner, and it does this in the traditional form of Western art, as love. Nat lusts for, loves most tenderly, and finally murders the beautiful Margaret Whitehead. Their scenes together provide some of the most astonishing evocations I have ever seen of how unspeakably desirable the young human female can be when our hearts have fixed upon some particular incarnation.

That Margaret all but openly, all but knowingly, loves Nat too is one of the things that most maddens him. Her love for him could never imagine crossing the hopeless gulf between them, except in death. “O Nat I hurt so. Please kill me Nat I hurt so.” Well, today she could cross that gulf; if the gulf exists now it is as a recognized attraction. And at the climax of the novel, at its romantic, novelistic, romance climax, Nat crosses the gulf. Margaret, God, and his own sex are all, just before he is hanged, reconciled: “and the twain—black and white—are one. I faint slowly.” God, who has been absent from Nat since the rebellion, leaving him in an emptiness beyond despair, speaks out at last. Come, My son! “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

In plain words, Nat Turner has just masturbated and this is his masturbation fantasy. What irony the author intends by this I do not know, nor how much he wants us to dwell on it. Nat, at least, is left with the fantasy as it is to him, as revelation, as the final moment of truth and reconciliation before death. So what can this be except the author's final kindness to Nat, a benevolent deception to ease the truly unbearable thoughts that had been his as he lay in his cell in chains, defeated and alone? It is those thoughts, though, that the reader must be left with, and not the Liebestod.

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In his cell, as the book begins, Nat has been meditating on the flies that buzz there “in haphazard elastic loopings from wall to wall. . . . In many ways, I thought, a fly must be one of the most fortunate of God's creatures. Brainless born, brainlessly seeking its sustenance from anything wet and warm, it found its brainless mate, reproduced, and died brainless, unacquainted with misery or grief. But then I asked myself: How could I be sure? Who could say that flies were not instead God's supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching, forced by instinct to dine off sweat and slime and offal, their very brainlessness an everlasting torment? So that even if someone, well-meaning but mistaken, wished himself out of human misery and into a fly's estate, he would only find himself in a more monstrous hell than he had ever imagined—an existence in which there was no act of will, no choice, but a blind and automatic obedience to instinct which caused him to feast endlessly and gluttonously and revoltingly upon the guts of a rotting fox or a bucket of prisoner's slops. Surely, then, this would be the ultimate damnation: to exist in the world of a fly, eating thus, without will or choice and against all desire.”

Nat reflects how he had once thought that the Negro's Christian faith, “his understanding of a kind of righteousness at the heart of suffering,” could save him. “And the afflicted people thou wilt save, for thou art my lamp, O Lord; and the Lord will lighten my darkness. But now as I sat there amid the sunlight and the flickering shadows of falling leaves and the incessant murmur and buzz of the flies, I could no longer say that I felt this to be true. It seemed rather that my black shit-eating people were surely like flies, God's mindless outcasts, lacking even that will to destroy by their own hand their unending anguish. . . .”

Nigger life ain't worth pig shit, Nat Turner's friend Nelson once said: mought make a nigger worth somethin’ to hisself, tryin’ to get free, even if he don't.

It will take some utmost devotee of suffering to deny that proposition, as he reads this book, or to claim that there was any other choice for a Negro slave, to whom it had occurred that he might become a man, except slaughter. By the time Nat Turner's project begins to form, we cannot wait for the heads to roll. Then what of Newark and Detroit? What of burning stores and stealing television sets, or shooting a fireman in the back, supposing it was not the police or the National Guardsmen who did the shooting? Is this really required to make Negroes worth something? Easy for us to say it is not, but if what this book tells us is true, we are wrong. And wrong on other testimony too, if we are going to take art as testimony. William Faulkner was never able to imagine a Negro as more than a great sufferer—“they endured”—until he created his first real Negro man, Lucas Beauchamp, to whom precisely it first occurred, of all Faulkner's Negroes, that he might kill a white man.

Why is this so shocking? Why are we terrified by the notion that a Negro may kill a white person, when we are only saddened perhaps or indignant when whites kill Negroes with absolute impunity, assassinating Negro leaders in the most cowardly fashion possible, lying about it, and walking the streets afterward in secure self-congratulation; even, with absolute impunity, doing what no fanatic enemy of America could have imagined in his most inimical dreams, bombing a Sunday School full of children and killing them like dynamited fish?

The plain fact is that subject peoples are not supposed to retaliate against their subjection. Retaliation is shocking not for the real harm it does, but because it breaks a taboo. If we admit this right to retaliate, we have admitted our subjection of these people, and this our consciousness cannot afford. Americans have an absolute right to kill Vietnamese. If a Vietnamese kills an American, it is “terror”: the illegal, immoral violation of a taboo, as dreadful as patricide. But like so many of the other taboos, like those sexual ones, this taboo seems to have lost its mana, at least for those upon whom we used to enforce it so freely. Even, there is an element of this primitive magic in the thrilled reaction to the great Israeli war. Jews are supposed to suffer, not to fight back, and above all they are not supposed to win. Or they were not; the thrill is that now they have won the outrageous right to win. Negroes seem still at some early stage of freedom, believing still that they are not supposed to win; while the whites remain at yet an earlier stage, in which Negroes may dare to sing hymns on white territory if they get permission.

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It is a complicated and probably, as usual, a tragic day in history. We made a community here, agreeing to practice violence only minimally against one another, while reserving the right to practice it totally against others. Negroes, Puerto Ricans, they were not members of the community. Their nonviolence was imposed, not agreed upon. Now, uninstructed in the unconscious taboos that guard the rest of us from one another, they are free to commit random acts of aggression, pure aggression quite without other aim—or with the simple aim only, as in the instant switchblade reaction of the macho to some affront, of claiming a pitiful and disgusting runt's “manhood” by the murder of a stranger in the subway. To all this we are as blind as Nat Turner's confessor, the Court Commissioner who was honestly trying to understand the insurrection:

‘For see here, Reverend, that's another item the people can't understand. If this was out-and-out tyranny, yes. If you was maltreated, beaten, ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed—yes. If any of these things prevailed, yes. Even if you existed under the conditions presently extant in the British Isles or Ireland, where the average agricultural peasantry is on an economic level with a dog, or less—even if you existed under these conditions, the people could understand. Yes. But this ain't even Mississippi or Arkansas. This is Virginia in the year Anno Domini 1831 and you have labored under civilized and virtuous masters. And Joseph Travis, among others, you butcher in cold blood! That—’ He passed his hand across his brow, a gesture of real lament. ‘That the people can't understand.’

Nor can we understand. The final words are probably those of the tormented slave-owner who has sold Nat's friends and betrayed Nat, whom he loved.

“Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in such a mean conjunction with its own flesh, its own kind. How else account for such faltering, clumsy, hateful cruelty? Even the possums and the skunks know better I Even the weasels and the meadow mice have a natural regard for their own blood and kin. . . .”

As for us, we seem doomed to remain oppressor and oppressed. Men of good will, we shall hope and pray that we can somehow alleviate all this through due process, through the natural decency of those of us who are enjoying our deserved prosperity in 1967, through the inspiration and leadership of the various millionaires we choose to guide our political destinies, and again, through the natural decency of those who may find themselves at some momentary if slightly fatal disadvantage in our company. This we may devoutly hope. But all we know for certain, considering now the truths of art rather than the blessings of politics or religion, is that from time to time men will rise and slay, if not the oppressor, then whosoever lies at hand in the oppressor's likeness.

¹ Random House, 428 pp., $6.95.