Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Third, as a totally gratuitous addition, Styron has Turner spend two-thirds of his life lusting to rape a white girl, any white girl...
...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...
There is no evidence of any kind that Turner or any of his men lusted for white women. From the visitations he described and the rhetoric he used, even through the white lawyer who took down the confessions, one can recognize Turner as a black Spiritualist minister...
Styron's perceptions of black 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...
...living in the city as custom, common sense, comfort, and economic necessity would dictate, 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...