Word: samuels
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...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...
...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 black-assed feeling, experienced intensely by Nat in the presence of the white people who were most kind to him, that stirred the deepest emotions of rage and confusion in him. Three white people in his life--his one-time master Samuel Turner, Judge Cobb, and Margaret Whitehead -- provoked a moment of warm and mutual sympathy in him. They caused him to feel a dim glimmer of hope, and this short-lived thrill left him more perplexed and enraged than before...
Styron's development of the relationship between Samuel Turner and Nat, if not among the most imaginative parts of the book, is certainly among the most sensitive and interesting. The slave boy viewed his master in awe, as almost divine. The master, in turn, when he saw a young spark of interest, gave Nat the encouragement and opportunity to learn to read...
...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...