Segregation has worked brillantly in the South, and, in fact, in the nation, to this extent: it has allowed white people, with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation, only the Negro they wish to see. As the walls come down they will be forced to take another, harder look at the shiftless and the menial and will be forced into a wonder concerning them which cannot fail to be agonizing. It is not an easy thing to be forced to reexamine a way of life and to speculate, in a personal way, on the general injustice. -- James Baldwin, Harper's Magazine, October 1958.

WILLIAM STYRON shares the belief of his good friend James Baldwin that white men create their own Negroes. Like any Southerner, Styron has heard the same myth a thousand times: how people up North just don't know the Negro like we do down here, how we have had wonderful relationships with the family Negroes for over 20 years, and how we both prefer social distance from each other. Styron also knows that the Southern racial stigma is based more on a lack of contact than on friction or closeness. There still exists a deeply feared law of apartheid in the South, and it precludes intimacy between whites and blacks at any level.

Styron's upbringing on matters of race was normal for a Southern boy. He was taught to call a Negro female a "woman" instead of a "lady." He was forbidden to use the word "nigger." He was pained by the sight of extreme Negro poverty, while he took school segregation as an ordinary fact of life.

Although he feels that he has learned more about the Negro after having lived in the North, Styron recognizes that a profound and distinct characteristic of the South is that the Negro is always there; he is an integral part of the tradition, the atmosphere, the scenery. And the white Southerner cannot help but to respond to this presence of Negroes. In Styron's words several years ago,

No wonder the white man so often grows cranky, fanciful, freakish, loony, violent; how else respond to a paradox which requires, with full majesty of law behind it, that he deny the very reality of a people whose multitude approaches and often exceeds his own; that he disclaim the existence of those whose human presence has marked every acre of the land, every hamlet and crossroad and city and town, and whose humanity, however inflexibly denied, is daily evidenced to him like a heartbeat in loyalty and wickedness, madness and hilarity and mayhem and pride and love?

Styron believes that it is his moral duty and that of every white Southerner to break down the old law of apartheid and to come to know the Negro, however condescending or belated the effort may appear to be. It is partially for this reason that he has made the subject of Negro slavery his obsession for the last 20 years. His fascination grew when he researched the meager documents of the only slave revolt in American history, which occurred about 20 miles from his Virginia home.

This one revolt, led by Nat Turner in 1831, was at that time considered an aberration; it inconveniently disturbed an accepted notion of the slave system: that slavery, although morally wrong, was used with such charity, benevolence, and restraint that an organized, bloodthirsty insurrection was inthinkable. Nat Turner proved otherwise. The psychological and physical oppression of slavery was supposed to make organized revolt impossible, and the system was doubtlessly emasculating upon most slaves. Nat's revolt stood as a momentous threat to the slave society's security.

Styron uses the story of Nat Turner to describe what it was like for a man to live as a slave from day to day. He must relate the story through the eyes of the rebellious slave, thereby intruding on the consciousness of a black man. But the book does not purport to provide a deep analysis of the slave mind, nor does it intend to present a metaphor for Negro rioters in 1967. Styron is simply creating a work of art which portrays the psychological effects of slavery.

It would be almost pointless to draw parallels between Nat Turner's rebels and the black revolutionists of 1967 because, in Styron's words, the slaves existed in "hopelessly oppressed conditions" whereas blacks now have some political power and consciousness.

In another way, however, Nat himself resembles today's Negro. Unlike most slaves, Nat received a sense of identity through education and the promise of freedom; he lived in his master's house and saw the good things he was missing but soon might possess with his freedom. His hopes were taken away, and, like Negroes who anticipated equality after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, he was left with frustrations and bitterness. Violence and furious retribution climaxed the frustrations and allowed the rebels to find a sense of dignity.

Styron had only two significant sources about the insurrection--The Southampton Insurrection by William S. Drewry and Nat's Confessions, which were written by a lawyer named Thomas Gray while Nat Turner awaited his trial. Drewry, who was of pro-slavery leanings, reconstructed what Styron calls an accurate chronology of the insurrection. The 20-page Confessions describes the rebel deeds and a few of Nat's thoughts. Otherwise, there is nothing. Little is known of Nat's background and early years. Therefore Styron, the novelist, has the freedom to speculate on the intermingled miseries, hopes, frustrations, and inner rages which caused Nat to rise up.

Styron's book is spoken by Nat as he lies in jail, beaten, chained, freezing, starving, and waiting to be hanged. The progression of time from the start to the end of the novel is short--it covers a few passing moments with Gray in jail, at the trial, and then in the jail again before the execution. In between these events are Nat's recollections of his own past. Styron's weaving of past and present is complex but in no way confusing. It is a great credit to Styron's art that he can leap about chronologically and yet maintain the drama and clarity of the story. Throughout the novel, Nat maintains a vague distance from the insurrection and the trial. Emotional build-up instead develops from isolated experiences he has under the yoke of different masters. But as the book proceeds, the suppressed rage intensifies, Nat's recitations of Old Testament wrath increase, and the action quickens. Near the end, he recalls the insurrection vividly and hotly. Feelings reach a peak with his murder of Margaret Whitehead, who is Nat's suppressed love and his sole victim. He has been unable to kill at any other point in the insurrection, and after her death there is even a decline in the momentum of the uprising and a sag in the tension. It is almost as if Nat gains a previously unknown compassion for white people because of her death. This seems to be Styron's view as he puts New Testament words of charity in Nat's head thereafter, and portrays him committing an unprecedented act of mercy to a white person.

In the many monologues which weave throughout the novel, Styron has Nat think in an eloquent, clear, 20th-century style. But in conversation, Nat employs a number of dialects which only a Virginia-raised craftsman like Styron could create.

True to the South's Protestant tradition, Nat's fundamentalism is based on the Old Testament. He quotes frequently the verses of Isaiah. With white people, he talks in a subdued nigger-rhetoric fitting for a pious black Baptist minister (which he is). With other houses slaves his tone is slightly more relaxed, and with field Negroes (whom he holds in disdain) it becomes much more Sambo-ish. The juxtaposition of Nat speaking in several of his roles can at times be very amusing, and at other times--as when he speaks in an inferior style before less intelligent white men--very degrading.

Despite his own careful pains to avoid sounding too intelligent, Nat became disgusted and enraged when his fellow Negroes ingratiated on whites. Take this passage, for example, with Nat, Hark (another slave), and old Judge Cobb: