Word: styron
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...CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron. 428 pages. Random House...
Black Man's Eyes. Styron's narrative power, lucidity and understanding of the epoch of slavery achieve a new peak in the literature of the South. The customary view, whether of willow-shaded plantation avenues or red clay roads leading to sharecroppers' cabins, has been white. Styron surveys the same landscape, but attempts to see it through the eyes of a black...
...Turner's story is told in the first person, and some readers will feel that it is told almost too well; at times the narrator's lyrical style suggests Styron more than Turner. Most of the time, though, the author's impersonation rings true enough. Nat Turner was not only literate but eloquent: he left a 20-page confession, which was published the year after his death. From this personal account, as well as from a thorough familiarity with the literature of slavery and with Virginia's Tidewater region, Styron re-creates the rebel...
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...
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...