Word: nat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Almost to have freedom and then to have it grabbed away would be more than any mortal could stand. Given his early piety which his Bible-reading had sharpened, Nat's leap to religious fanaticism was not a long one. Each new debasing experience led him more and more to the avenging words of the Old Testament...
Samuel Turner looked upon Nat as an experiment to destroy the myth of the Negro's inferior intellect. He exhorted Nat and gradually gave him responsibilities. Styron bases Samuel Turner on John Hartwell Cocke, who was a leading spokesman for emancipation in the Virginia legislautre of the early 1880's. (Ironically, Samuel Turner's efforts to educate and "housebreak" Nat ultimately resulted in the revolt that doomed the growing movement for slave emancipation in Virginia.) Styron takes the philosophy of Cocke and puts it directly into Samuel Turner's mouth. Turner's discussion with two ministers are, word-for-word...
...Nat, whose real father ran away when he was an infant, identified with his master and set himself apart from the Sambos--the field Negroes. He felt disgust at having to use their outhouse. But, as one slave infomred him, "Yo' ass black jes' like mine, honey chile." In this way Styron shows how Nat's relationship with Samuel Turner was tormented and complicated; the condition became radically worse when Nat was denied his promised freedom by a Baptist preacher in whose hands Samuel Turner had entrusted...
...became Nat's obsession and divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, Virginia. Styron, with historical justification, isolates Nat from his murderous followers and portrays the man's pure hate; it is calm, intelligent, and unrepentant. Others, says Styron, "hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain." Nat, however, had known the white man and had been cultivated...
...sharp contrast which Styron draws between Nat and his friend Hark contrasts the puritanical nature of one with the worldly humor of the other. In Styron's view, Nat was largely motivated by sexual frustration, while Hark had no such similar hang-ups. It was Hark, too, who could murder ruthlessly. Nat maintanied a strange distance from the rebels' blood-spilling...