Word: slaving
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Styron's hero is an unwed celibate, his one and only sexual experience being with another black man. He has a Moynihan-style one-parent family. His mother is much contented with her life as a house slave. He leads a life of loneliness and frustration during his childhood, thoroughly cut off from other children his age. He receives all of his education from whites...
...from the lonely, white-dominated childhood of Styron's hero, Nat Turner was asked to plan and particiuate in his elder's theft raids against white slave owners...
...people are interesting. There is no historical evidence whatsoever that Turner or any of his men had sexual interests in white women. However, in the entire book, which spans the length of his life, only three black women are shown. The first is Turner's grandmother, a freshly captured slave who dies at age 14 after giving birth to Turner's mother. The grandmother is portrayed as a noble, if bestial and uncomprehending, savage. Turner's mother is shown as an ignorant, narrow, self-satisfied women. Not only is she proud to be a house slave of the Turner family...
...this man and his family are starving to death in the impoverished countryside. The man's only apparent function in the story is to show the inability of blacks to live without the guidance of white people and to verbally excoriate Nat's excessively cruel master. By contrast, the slaves are somewhat better fed and generate an aura of contentment. I noticed that some of the slaves suffered under cruel masters. I noticed that the author deplored cruelty to slaves and condemned cruel slave masters. I noticed that every single one of the slaves who joined Turner did so because...
...childhood by those by whom I had been taught to pray, both white and black, and in whom I had the greatest confidence, that I had too much sense to be raised, and if I was, I would never be of any use to any one as a slave. Now finding I had arrived to man's estate, and was a slave, and these revelations being made known to me, I began to direct my attention to this great object, to fulfill the purpose for which, by this time, I felt assured I was intended...