Books: Will the Real Nat Turner Please Stand Up?

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Indeed, the most telling and effective blows unleashed against Styron's Nat Turner are those leveled in terms of literature, not history. Novelist John Williams (The Man Who Cried I Am) criticizes Styron for offering too many characterizations based on traditional Southern regional cardboard stock. Mike Thelwell, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, reasonably suggests that black slaves developed two languages, "one for themselves and another for white masters," and that Styron has captured neither. Thelwell argues that the more public form is the familiar dialect found in the works of Southern-dialect humorists. The other, "the real language," was the stuff of spirituals that has informed the sermons of preachers from the earliest days down to Martin Luther King; this undoubtedly was the diction used by Turner and his fellow insurrectionists. Thelwell charges that Styron's idiom, at once baroque and Latinate, Old Testament and Victorian, rendered Nat Turner in "a white language and a white consciousness."

Too Familiar. Too often, however, the contributors to this book are simply blinded by their own racism. The fact that Styron is a Virginia-born white seems to discredit him instantly in the eyes of more than one essayist. Rather typically, Political Scientist Charles Hamilton (Black Power) peevishly sees Styron involved in a white man's plot to divest black people of their "historical revolutionary leaders." Novelist John O. Killens ('Sippi) writes: Styron "is like a man who tries to sing the blues when he has not paid his dues." And several essayists, without even the leavening grace of black humor, dryly accuse Styron's Turner of lacking rhythm in his speech. In fact, these black literary jurors are so outraged that a white man should dare to write about a black, they forget that perhaps the best portrait of a Negro woman in American literature was drawn by Gertrude Stein in Melantha.*

Perhaps the most absurd criticism comes from a Boston psychiatry professor, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, who with utter seriousness takes Styron to task for referring to Nat Turner by his first name. "Is this familiarity by the author part of intuitive white condescension and adherence to Southern racial etiquette? Is this reference and the entire book an unconscious attempt to keep Nat Turner 'in his place'? Would the novelist expect Nat Turner to address him as 'Mr. Styron'? Perhaps no one can ever know the answers to these questions."

The important question to ask is: What is Styron's own attitude on ra- cial questions? The Confessions of Nat Turner is a clear enough reply. Styron obviously believes in a darkly militant way that any brutish black uprising is the inevitable result of white persecution. The effect of both, the persecution and the uprising, adds up to tragedy.