The Confessions of Nat Turner

Tonight I finished reading William Styron's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).   This was a deeply controversial book upon its publication, because the white author Styron chose to dramatize the life of the leader of the only successful slave revolt in American history. Nat Turner was hung to death in 1831 for his actions, and dictated a confession that Styron uses as his jumping off point.   Styron was accused of indulging in racist stereotypes in his depiction of Turner, and (more generally) of not having the moral authority to tell the story of a black man.  This was the 1960's, when the identity politics that still Balkanize us today were  in their infancy.

I'd known about the controversy surrounding this novel for years, but only picked it up a few months ago.  Then it sat on my desk for a while.  Finally,on President's Day (a day off from work for me), I cracked open the covers.  By the time I went to bed that night, I had read 175 pages and easily could have read many more.  Few novels make me pause sentence by sentence, but passages of Nat Turner made me do just that.  Within the space of a paragraph, I would move from reclining on the couch to  sitting upright with rapt attention.

So I recommend this book. 

Styron's house guest at the  time he wrote Nat Turner was the African-American novelist James Baldwin, who caused controversy of his own by using white protagonists in his novel Another Country (1962). Baldwin and Styron are two of the greatest writers of the last century, who forged a legitimate friendship that surmounted the predictable politics of elite pontificators.  Long live art.

Comments

[Sallie]

I read that the Virginia General Assembly recently approved a resolution to issue a formal apology for the state's past role in slavery.

It's interesting to think that up until the early 1960's, my husband and I could not have been legally married in the state of Virginia.

But that's only because, given human nature's tendency distort perception as necessary to view a preferred reality, the Society for the Descendants of Pocahantas (among whom my family proudly counted themselves), actually asked for, and received, an official exemption to the segregation-era color laws which -- according to the "one drop" rule -- would have made them non-white.