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FREEDOMWAYS   FIRST QUARTER 1968

hatred was already ablaze" or can be cultivated.

Pure hatred, of course, is not only a non-existent quality; but in William Styron's novel it suggests a criminal state of mind which serves to reduce insurrection, in the reader's mind, to the baseness of slavery.

The emotional climax of the slave's story is not a description of the revolt but the orgiastic murder of Nat Turner's master's family, rendered in vivid, blood-curdling detail. One victim's "head, gushing blood from a matrix of pulpy crimson flesh, rolled from his neck and fell to the floor...The headless body...slid down the wall...and collapsed in a pile of skinny shanks, elbows...Blood deluged the room in a foaming sacrament." (my emphasis) A moment later, the "blanched, hacked, bleeding corpses of Putnam and the...boy came clumpety-clumping down the...steps...drenching Moses' [one of Nat Turner's confederates] bare feet in vermillion...." Upstairs, Hark [another executioner-confederate] cries out in a "jubilant sound" that is "oddly like music"!

Momentarily horrified by this ritualistic blood-bath in which he is soaking, Nat Turner winces in pious impotence: "Ah my God! Hast Thou truly called me to this!"

It would be far more appropriate to put the question to his literary creator. For, indeed, William Styron's own "calling" has urged him upon the assignment of describing one of the most spectacular revolts against American slavery as wanton savagery! The brave Nat Turner's "mission" is given no broader interpretation than narrow, bloody revenge. This slanderous portrait is designed to force Nat Turner to join such "villains" as John Brown, Garrison, Lovejoy, Thad Stevens in the rogues' gallery of American history. He would deny Nat Turner the credentials of an authentic hero in man's struggle against tyranny.

Such is the fate of the old "Prophet" in the hands of a writer who still subscribes to the fantasy-history  of an idyllic South- a novelist whose ethos seems committed to the faded myths of a system that was maintained and perpetuated by the ultimate in humane cruelty. William Styron's problem is conceptual- one of reading human history in fundamentalist terms, within the narrow confines of regional loyalty to the so -called southern tradition: a euphemism the institutional white supremacy - from its genesis in the African-slave trade to modern American racism.

The first-person device becomes an effective means of using Nat

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-12 08:37:44