The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

...And Gray's answer (part of which is typically interrupted by a courtroom revery of the prisoner) is a mixture of nineteenth-century "anthropology" and proto-psychiatry: that the racially inferior mind of the prisoner was deranged by contact with the superstitions and excitements of an outmoded religious doctrine—" Christianity," as he inaccurately calls the Old Testament doctrines of revivalist Virginia...

...Like a dream, it moves with a slow and mysterious pace and transforms familiar objects as it moves...

...THE BOOK is full of dreams, visions, memories...

...How can Styron's modern post-Hemingway consciousness clothe itself in the McGuffey's Reader prose of Nat's quasi-education (The Life and Death of Mr...

...But this lapse is an isolated one, and I believe an unconscious one...

...The awful consequences of aborted rebellions are well-known...

...The words reinforce the feeling of ultimate order as they depict an empty white temple on a headland above a vast ocean...

...Perhaps innocence is only emptyheadedness after all...

...Like a dream, it seems to be speaking of things that are personally important to us yet remote, detached—above all visual...

...A white novelist, native of the same Tidewater Virginia area, took up this document 130 years later and asked himself why this revolt had occurred at that time and place...

...Only at the end does affirmation take over, and the reader of modern sensibilities, accustomed to irony and distance, may squirm at this conclusion...

...In Part 1—"Judgment Day"—Nat tells of his encounter with Gray in the jailhouse, his motives for offering his confession (for he feels no guilt), and his subjective experience of the brief trial that condemns him to death...

...The result could have been a historical novel, a Gothic tale set in period costume, but here all the action—swift and terrible as it is— seems but an instant in the whole brooding dream, although violence presides over that dream...

...Everything that happens to this man counts, but nothing accounts for his destiny...

...Pondering the fact that the alarm that gave away the existence of the revolt and allowed those in its path to prepare resistance had been raised by a young girl whom he had seen escaping the slaughter and had allowed to go, Nat wonders why he stayed his hand: "I know nothing any longer...

...Frequently the frame is a window...

...THE STYLE does what it must to let the dream come through...

...Styron says, "Perhaps the reader will wish to draw a moral from this narrative...

...Part II—"Old Times Past"—is a long memoir, thoughts of Nat Turner about his early life and the experiences that culminated in his determination to carry out his destined mission...

...What turned this literate, skilled, and on the whole well-treated slave into an implacable conspirator, a "fanatic" who showed and felt no remorse for the destruction of babies and small children...

...This is the framework, but the quality and power of the book reside in scene, dialogue, and contemplation, in notable achievements of eye, ear, and moral concentration...

...THE CONCLUSION does not come easy, and Nat's final affirmation is by no means a simple one, for he asserts that he would do it all again—"except one...

...It could have been a pastiche, and indeed we sift these rich materials for familiar stereotypes...

...And almost every moment of seeing has a frame around it, thus partaking to some degree of that initial visionary scene, because this land, too, dwells in the mind of the slave, a man doomed to die, still seeking to transcend the narrow world he was born into...

...Part III—"Study War" —is Nat's vivid account of the planning and execution of the revolt...

...Again, at the end of the second section Nat, struck by a whip for the first (and only) time in his life, whispers "Lord...

...To the few shards of fact that research has unearthed about the rebellion, he has brought childhood memories of the landscape of the Virginia Tidewater and a novelist's habit of remembering: what Southerners (and Northerners), black people, and white, have said, thought, written, feared, done—literature, folklore, history, subtleties of communication and sentimentalities of talk, melodrama, and banality—he has thrown them all into the pot...

...THE STRUCTURE is very simple—simple and sturdy enough to sustain a great weight and complexity of meaning...

...But first it must be fully dreamed, in all its implications...

...The first: " 'Then what I done was wrong...

...Lord?' I said 'And if what I done was wrong is there no redemption?' I raised my eyes upwards, but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem...

...At the end we know, and still we don't know...

...Then in a brief moment of apotheosis there is a hint of ultimate reconciliation...

...As we view the texture of Nat's whole experience, not only the mystical hallucinations but also the shrewd observations, the hurts, slights and pleasures, emotional torments and uncertainties, we begin to understand how it feels to be a chattel, how self-hatred is nurtured in the oppressed, how men learn guile, learn to conceal their feelings...

...The dream or vision with which the book begins (it is a recurrent dream) is like the face of History itself—of a stillness beyond all this flux, a Poussin landscape...

...And this is what William Styron has set out to do in The Confessions of Nat Turner, which he calls "a meditation on history...

...he reflected on how the institution of slavery shaped the lives of everyone in the slave system...

...The otherness of the "notnow" and the "not-this" and the "not me" still eludes us...

...then he wrote this novel...

...His confession was a brief document compiled by Thomas Gray, Nat's white "defense" counsel, from statements made by the prisoner while awaiting trial...

...His revolt, which accomplished the murder of 57 whites—men, women, and children— was ruthlessly suppressed and was succeeded by bloody reprisals and repressive legislation to secure the institutions of slavery...

...And in that silent place, for the first time in his life really alone, he feels "white" in possession of empty house and deserted grounds...

...And yet we are haunted, and American literature is haunted, by the fact of slavery in this country and its unassimilated meanings and consequences...

...Yet something holds these frag86 BOOKS ments and styles together, whether you call it artistic will power or hard dreaming...

...YET THE STRUCTURE of the book does perhaps seem to be urging us toward some conclusion...

...I rose to my feet with infinite difficulty and lassitude...

...There is a quality here of terror, tenderness and nightmare that reflects, Othello-like, the dream at the heart of the "sexual question...

...But it is all more complicated than that...

...Having been cut off since the failure of his mission from prayer and from the presence of his God, Nat achieves at the end a resolution of sorts...

...When Margaret recapitulates her girlish arguments on vital issues with her dear school chum Charlotte Tyler Saunders at Seminary, or recounts the silly romantic pageant there performed, she seems almost a parody of the Southern Sorority girl...

...But this is a vision, not a tract, and I choose not to draw a moral but to be drawn into the moral world here illuminated...

...He asked himself what it means to be a slave...

...Even when it exists in serene conjunction with passages of dialect where the orthography is reminiscent of Uncle Remus, it works...

...And like a dream it leaves us wondering what it all means and convinced that we have touched some profound truth...

...WHAT OF MISS MARGARET...

...Styron has the usual materials to work with...

...The words here are: "seasonless . . . neutral . . . unpeopled . . . silence . . . motionless . . . unchanged . . . serene stark white . . . temple mysterious . . . ineffable .. . without name . . . strange . . . lonely remote . . . profound mystery . . . haunting recurrence...

...ALTHOUGH NAT SPEAKS Of himself as one who has lived "close to the ground," so that "no animal sense is superior to another," it is the visual quality that is most important in a dream, and it is through scene, first, that Styron projects himself into the mind of the slave...

...These memories well up in him as, in a fevered half-sleep half-waking interval of days, he waits for the gallows...

...Even at moments of the most intense action Nat may quite naturally glance out of a window, or with careful mnemonic distancing, step into a remembered picture...

...And there is, especially, the scene where Nat is left alone in the emptied-out plantation to await the arrival of his new master who will come to fetch him away...

...He has run all the risks and avoided nearly all the falls...

...A man like Gray could not understand Nat's rage, but we cannot be too surprised that the greatest moment of fury ("hatred I have only felt once for one single man") is evoked in Nat by kindly old Marse Samuel (a sort of pocket Jefferson) who, like a good liberal benefactor acting out of the best of motives, betrayed Nat after promising him freedom...

...Of the many vivid scenes, three in particular stay with me and continue to exert an artistic force that can only be called moral: There is the attempt of Hark, Nat's friend, to escape north to the Susquehanna, only to be captured days later a short distance from his starting point—a memorable short fable which even the recollection of that other fugitive, Miss Watson's Jim, cannot dim...

...Is it a sepulcher then, on that promontory above the ocean...

...Can we awake from this nightmare...

...Each section but the last ends with a question...

...And it is easy enough to find historical parallels for the fate of these determined zealots, implacable in their faith, who really had no program but to destroy the town of Jerusalem and then retreat into the Dismal Swamp and await deliverance—a politics of desperation in which the masses, of course, did not join...

...Yet one can't be sure...

...And Part IV—a mere eight pages—records his final thoughts as he is led away to be executed...

...but it works...

...87 BOOKS BECAUSE this book is a meditation, not an argument, complexities are unraveled but never resolved...

...As long as novels like this can be written, the medium isn't the message...

...But there is love, too, even as she turns to receive the blow...

...The third section ends with still another question...

...There are still mysteries...

...Nat's sexual feelings, so sternly repressed, so enmeshed in his prophetic religion, seem to be most sharply aroused when sympathy is expressed, as if they can be directed only at accessible objects, and sympathy opens access...

...Styron implicitly eschews that activity, and I think most readers will eschew such handy "morals" as "he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword...

...There are four sections...

...Did I really wish to vouchsafe a life for the one that I had taken...

...and receives from heaven the answer I abide...

...Even when it descends into solecisms ("essayed an attempt") it works...

...Though somewhat modified, it is basically the slightly formal, conventionally inexact, not quite elegant style of so much premodern fiction: generally avoiding extravagance and (unlike the "modern") also avoiding newness and the arresting metaphor, but yet elevated from the colloquial...

...Whether this ending "comes off" depends upon how successfully Styron has 88 BOOKS dealt with the character of Margaret, the girl Nat killed...

...If we allow ourselves to dream at all of that "peculiar institution," slavery, we find ourselves trying to piece together items labeled "myths," "truths," "conjectures," "historical forces" with what traces of meaning are left to us now—what we know, or think we know, of race, of domination and subservience and freedom, of the human capacity for hatred, love, pride, and revenge, No inside view of slavery is possible...

...Even at the beginning, we know—and we don't know...

...In another sense we are more aware than ever of the nuances of human feeling and motive that continue to baffle analysis...

...This image soon fades and we are in the rural landscape of Virginia—a landscape explicitly seen...

...Here are all the elements of that myth of Southern White Womanhood: innocence, piety, good will, a sunny open disposition—but especially innocence (the American dream...

...There is that blinding instant when, the axe crashing down between Travis and Miss Sarah, Nat's observant eye takes in at a glance all the small details of bedroom domesticity...

...In some sense we understand at the end some things we did not understand at the beginning...

...And there lurks (as spelled out less deftly in the character of Miss Emeline, another mistress) the other suspicion: that the girl is really sexually aware after all, and that her happy chatting and carefree sympathy is but a courting of rape and destruction...

...In August, 1831, a few miles south of where the first slaves were brought into this country 200 years earlier, a literate slave, Nat Turner, acting on Biblical and visionary inspiration, led an uprising of Negroes against their white masters...

...The severance from the source of his strength and rebellion is overcome...

...If it counsels patient waiting for deliverance, it also nourishes apocalyptic hopes and strivings...

...What happens between is vision, not explanation...

...Only the rationalist defense attorney, Gray, thinks he has found the answer to his questions in the "confession" he has elicited from Nat Turner...

...Here we skirt all the Big Easy Resolutions of Melodrama...

...His sole personal victim had been another young girl, one who had befriended him...

...After a quick trial Turner himself was hanged...

...Perhaps the Sunday-school goodness of Miss Margaret is a necessary element in this stern morality...

...Styron's masterful work rises above literary fashions, schools, and trends, as do the other books that we remember in our dreams...

...One cannot believe that people ever quite talked this way: "You will find him a man of simplicity and of modest resources...

...Though this is the faith that will sustain the uprising, it is a cryptic answer...

...Usually we see a relatively desolate countryside with skies often gray and "brooding," farms set at distances in brown cornfields, and far-off things moving—dogs, roosters, crows, buzzards, plodding Negroes...

...Badman is Nat's primer) without making the reader feel any of the condescensions of archaism and quaintness...

...Will such casuistry never end...

...The "perhaps" seems ironic...

...So the killing of Margaret by Nat is more like a rape than any of the decapitations and disembowelments wreaked by his fellows...

...The dream is done, but we are not done with it...

...I would not have bet a plugged nickel on this style...

...For all I know the language of justification and regret is just naturally Faulknerian...

...The problem seems insoluble...

...Oddly enough, the most imitative passage, to my mind is the speech of justification given by Marse Samuel, the "good master,"—where for a time the rhythms become Faulknerian with a succession of "because's and "the fact remains that's" and "had you's" and "even though's...

...This killing, so central to Nat's story, is the necessary proof of his manhood, for he must demonstrate to his followers that he will not flinch...

...I have long and do steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land...

...No such easy answers are available to us...