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RECENT BOOKS                              KAISER

viii; 184 pages. $5.95 (cloth)' $2.45 (paper). (Foner is editor of America's Black Past: A Reader in Afro-American History, 1970, and author of Free SOi8l, Free Labor, Free men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, 1970. Another similar recent book on Turner is the Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Even and the Modern Controversy edited by J.B. Duff and P. M. Mitchell. F. Roy Johnson's The Nat Turner Story [Johnson Publishing Co., Murfreesboro, N.C., 240 pages, $7.50, 1970] is an expanded edition of his The Nat Turner Slave Insurrection published in 1966. in Freedomways [2nd quarter, 1970] and in the pamphlet In Defense of the People's Black and White History and Culture [1971], I took up the many attacks on the book William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond '1968] and the repeated attacks on black history as black mythology. See also H. Aptheker's "The Living Nat Turner" [Political Affairs, feb. 1972]. The attacks continue. Historian James M. McPherson, in a preface to new edition of T. W. Higginson's Black Rebellion [Arno Press, 1969], has to admit that the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy in S.C. in 1822 has been established by studies by John Lofton and Willian W. Freehling despite Richard Wade's study denying the conspiracy. But McPherson finds nothing much wrong with Styron's vicious novel and says that the ten black writers misunderstood Styron's meaning about Nat's lusting after a white woman. Higginson's statement about Nat's wide as described in the Virginia newspapers is not enough evidence for him. Why doesn't McPherson look at these newspaper accounts? He also falsely accuses Styron's black critics of assuming that all slaves settles with hated and rebellions against their white oppressors. No one ever said that. Another more vicious attack is Seymour L. Gross and Eileen Bender's "History, Politics, and Literature: The Myth of Nat Turner"(American Quarterly, Oct. 1971). The authors' of this 32-page, leading article try desperately to prove Styron's novel right and the black critics wrong about Nat Turner. Why? Black criticism of Styron's novel is condemned as political as if content in a novel counts for nothing; form is everything. The authors try at great length to show that Gray maneuvered Nat into saying what he said in The Confessions. Nat wasn't that militant. They dig into black history to show that since the Turner story has changed somewhat over the years since 1831, the Turner story and black history are all largely a myth and are not to be taken seriously. Styron's novel is more truthful. Why don't Gross and Bender look at Henry I. Tragle's big book The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material [University of Massachusetts Press, 1971] if they want documentation? Their attitude is similar to the white historians who accept the slaveholders' records as true documents but reject virtually all of the slave narratives as untrue and unreliable, as doctored by Abolitionists. These two writers are really trying to show up and reinforce the now explored southern myth of Black Samba non-hesitance to U.S. Slavery. But these writers and Stanley Elkins, Eugene Genovese and the others just can't make this myth stick today. It is too late for this now. Gross also attacked black protest creative writing in Images of the Negro in American Literature [1966] for, as he says, stripping Blacks of their unique, tragic and heroic history, of their particular humanness. Now along comes Morris Dickstein's "The Black Aesthetic in White America" [Partisan Review, Jan.-Feb. 1972] which says that black writers have a black consciousness that crucially influences the entire nation. It says further

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