Word: nat
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Foretaste of Freedom. The idea of hope comes from a kindly farmer, Samuel Turner, whose surname Nat assumes. When the young slave steals a book, his master sees proof that Nat is no less a man than himself. An educational experiment begins, during which the pupil absorbs the rudiments of scholarship along with a bitter truth: "The preacher was right. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow...
Samuel Turner has plans to free his pet slave. The prospect appalls Nat: servitude and this loving master are all that he has known. Yet the foretaste of freedom, as Styron insists throughout the book, can only excite growing hunger. In one morning, in one glimpse of the possibilities of the future, Samuel Turner converts Nat forever into a hu man being burning to be free...
...plans fail. The Tidewater land goes sterile and bankrupts Samuel Turner. He surrenders Nat to the cus tody of a Baptist minister-a caricature of ecclesiastical evil-who even tually sells...
...still nine years before Nat revolts, nine years in which to feed on the vengeful rantings of Old Testament prophets and to mature a "disbelief which verged close upon madness, then a sense of betrayal, then fury such as I had never known before, then, finally, hatred so bitter that I grew dizzy." The hatred is directed against Samuel Turner, the man who invited him to dream...
...This is Nat Turner's message-and Styron's. His story flows relentlessly to its collision with horror. The conspirators hack off heads as if vengeance alone were the insurrection's aim. The de fenders of slavery respond as bloodily; more than 200 Negroes, most of them innocent, die in reprisal. U.S. slavery's only true revolt vanishes into the darkness before the Civil War. "It just ain't a race made for revolution, that's all," says a court officer smugly...