The Confessions of Nat Turner
THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT
TURNER
WILLIAM STYRON
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Copyright
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Copyright © by William Styron
Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright
© 2000 by RosettaBooks LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information address [email protected] First electronic edition published 2000 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN 0-7953-0312-2
The Confessions of Nat Turner
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Contents
Part II Old Times Past: Voices, Dreams, Recollections
The Confessions of Nat Turner
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eForeword
A novel of shocking power and magnificent rage, William Styron’s
The Confessions of Nat Turner
remains one of the boldest and most moving explorations in American fiction of the horror of slavery. Styron puts himself inside the mind of Nat Turner, a real historical figure who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, to understand the anguish and bitterness that are bred into a people by such inhuman treatment. The author’s premise is so audacious that it drew bitter criticism in the midst of remarkable acclaim -- a sure sign that a literary work has made its point. The African-American novelist James Baldwin said of Styron’s achievement, “He has begun the common history --
ours.”
Virginia-born novelist William Styron (b. 1922) is one of the finest American novelists of his time, a Southern writer who has made surprising and immensely rewarding choices in the subjects about which he has chosen to write. Though Styron has not been prolific -- four novels and various other writings -- his work has had a powerful impact on readers for some 50 years, beginning with the novel
Lie Down in Darkness
, published in 1951. He won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1967 for his novel
The Confessions of Nat Turner
, a powerful historical novel that was so successful and acclaimed that it drew a backlash of criticism. Much the same thing happened when
Sophie’s Choice
was published in 1979. A National Book Award winner in 1980,
Sophie’s Choice
was recently named one of the 100 greatest novels of the century written in English by both the Modern Library and the Radcliffe Publishing Course.
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Sophie’s
Choice
.
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The Confessions of Nat Turner
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Part I
Judgment Day
Above the barren, sandy cape where the river joins the sea, there is a promontory or cliff rising straight up hundreds of feet to form the last outpost of land. One must try to visualize a river estuary below this cliff, wide and muddy and shallow, and a confusion of choppy waves where the river merges with the sea and the current meets the ocean tide. It is afternoon. The day is clear, sparkling, and the sun seems to cast no shadow anywhere. It may be the commencement of spring or perhaps the end of summer; it matters less what the season is than that the air is almost seasonless—benign and neutral, windless, devoid of heat or cold. As always, I seem to be approaching this place alone in some sort of boat (it is a small boat, a skiff or maybe a canoe, and I am reclining in it comfortably; at least I have no sense of discomfort nor even of exertion, for I do not row—the boat is moving obediently to the river’s sluggish seaward wallow), floating calmly toward the cape past which, beyond and far, deep blue, stretches the boundless sea. The shores of the river are unpeopled, silent; no deer run through the forests, nor do any gulls rise up from the deserted, sandy beaches. There is an effect of great silence and of an even greater solitude, as if life here had not so much perished as simply disappeared, leaving all—river shore and estuary and rolling sea—to exist forever unchanged like this beneath the light of a motionless afternoon sun.
Now as I drift near the cape I raise my eyes to the promontory facing out upon the sea. There again I see what I know I will see, as always. In the sunlight the building stands white—stark white and serene against a blue and cloudless sky. It is square and formed of marble, like a temple, and is simply designed, possessing no columns or windows but rather, in place of them, recesses whose purpose I cannot imagine, flowing in a series of arches around its two visible sides. The building has no door, at The Confessions of Nat Turner
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least there is no door that I can see. Likewise, just as this building possesses neither doors nor windows, it seems to have no purpose, resembling, as I say, a temple—yet a temple in which no one worships, or a sarcophagus in which no one lies buried, or a monument to something mysterious, ineffable, and without name. But as is my custom whenever I have this dream or vision, I don’t dwell upon the meaning of the strange building standing so lonely and remote upon its ocean promontory, for it seems by its very purposelessness to be endowed with a profound mystery which to explore would yield only a profusion of darker and perhaps more troubling mysteries, as in a maze.
And so again it comes to me, this vision, in the same haunting and recurrent way it has for many years. Again I am in the little boat, floating in the estuary of a silent river toward the sea. And again beyond and ahead of me, faintly booming and imminent yet without menace, is the sweep of sunlit ocean. Then the cape, then the lofty promontory, and finally the stark white temple high and serene above all, inspiring in me neither fear nor peace nor awe, but only the contemplation of a great mystery, as I move out toward the sea. . . .
Never, from the time I was a child until the present—and I am just past thirty—was I able to discover the meaning behind this dream (or
vision;
for though it occurred mainly as I awoke from sleep, there would be random waking moments when, working in the fields or out trapping rabbits in the woods, or while I was at some odd task or other, the whole scene would flash against my mind with the silence and clearness and fixity of absolute reality, like a picture in the Bible, and in an instant’s dumb daydream all would be re-created before my eyes, river and temple and promontory and sea, to dissolve almost as swiftly as it had come), nor was I ever able to understand the emotion it caused me—this emotion of a tranquil and abiding mystery. I have no doubt, however, that it was all connected with my childhood, when I would hear white people talk of Norfolk and of “going to the seaside.” For Norfolk was only forty miles eastward from Southampton and the ocean only a few miles past Norfolk, where some of the white people would go to trade. Indeed, I had even known a few Negroes from Southampton who had gone to Norfolk with their masters and then seen the ocean, and the picture they recalled—that of an infinite vastness of blue water stretching out to the limit of the eye, and past that, as if to the uttermost boundaries of the earth—inflamed my imagination in such a way that my desire to see this sight became a kind of The Confessions of Nat Turner
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fierce, inward, almost physical hunger, and there were days when my mind seemed filled with nothing but fantasies of the waves and the distant horizon and the groaning seas, the free blue air like an empire above arching eastward to Africa—as if by one single glimpse of this scene I might comprehend all the earth’s ancient, oceanic, preposterous splendor. But since luck was against me in this regard, and I was never allowed the opportunity of a trip to Norfolk and the ocean, I had to content myself with the vision which existed in my imagination; hence the recurring phantasm I have already described, even though the temple on the promontory still remained a mystery—and more mysterious this morning than ever before in all the years I could reckon. It lingered for a while, half dream, half waking vision as my eyes came open in the gray dawn, and I shut them again, watching the white temple dwindle in the serene and secret light, fade out, removed from recollection.
