Basically, this book is simply the author's personal opinions, prejudices, and fantasies about black people. The hero is the ubiquitous white anti-hero of the present-day novel with the predictable gamut of problems--e.g., homosexual tendencies, a childhood of unhappiness, and adult life dominated by self-doubts and self-hatred, etc.
This is a very basic insult. The skeleton of the true Turner, a black man, can be clearly discerned in the original confessions. That Styron made no attempt to include a portion of Turner's own viewpoint in the novel's hero is nothing less than a denial of Turner's basic worth and separate personality. It is to say that he is not fit to appear, even marginally, in the novel that bears his name.
If Styron wishes to maintain such a web of fabrications and fantasy, it is no more than his own personal problem and more susceptible to pity than censure.
However, this conglomeration of fantasy and distortion has been labeled as literature and accepted as history; this has not been allowed to go unchallenged.
For the purpose of destroying the novel's pretensions to literary or social merit, ten black writers have written criticisms in William Styron's Nat Turner, Ten Black Writers Respond (Beacon Press, $1.95). All of the criticisms are worth reading closely, the most incisive being those by Lerone Bennett, Vincent Harding and Mike Thelwell. The writers are thorough going and competent; among them they do a far more definitive delineation of the book's absurdities and fabrications than I have done here. I recommend them to your attention.
Though the ten writers form the vanguard of Styron's critics, he has some rather imposing figures among his supporters, including, for example, Michael Harrington, Eugene Genovese and Norman Podhoretz. In the debate that has developed, several indicative themes occur constantly: What was Turner really like, and who shaped him more, white people or black? What were his motives? Just how bad was slavery, really, and just how much of a people were black people?
As mentioned above, Nat Turner is a figure of great symbolic significance in the present struggle for black freedom. To write about him and his revolt now, in present-day America, is to write propaganda and allegory. It is to make a de facto attempt to influence the thinking of contempory blacks and whites on a vital segment of black history and thus influence the final outcome of the present struggle.
Defining History
Black people of today and, increasingly, whites as well, are aware that blacks have a separate, distinct, continually evolving history and culture. The problem before the black man today is not whether he has a separate place in the spectrum of humanity, that question was settled long before Leif Erikson was born. Rather it is the precise size, shape and depth of that place that concerns us now. We fully recognize that the validity, character, and depth of the black experience is utterly independent of white reactions, definitions or interpretations.
To a majority of whites, this fact is unpalatable. They must define for us that niche, or rather, the non-existence of that niche. By "they" I now mean primarily the white intellectuals mentioned above, and others of similar persuasion, as well as those who are their predecessors, and those who will undoubtedly follow them. Rather than be independent, dynamic and creative people, we are to be shackled by the history they create for us. We are to be black Anglo-Saxons, clumsily and eternally attempting to emulate white ideals and society. This is a slavery every bit as foul and intolerable as that extant in Turner's day.
The basic issue centering around The Confessions of Nat Turner is who shall define the black identity--blacks or whites? Today we are still involved in an Abolitionist movement; however, now we must abolish intellectual and cultural slavery, rather than chattel slavery, and we today meet this challenge with the same knowledge and determination our forefathers expressed in the following quote from an editorial of the Colored American, October 5, 1839:
"As long as we let them think and act for us, as long as we will bow to their opinions, and acknowledge that their word is counsel and their will is law; so long they will outwardly treat us as men while in their hearts they still hold us as slaves."