The Outrage of Benevolent Paternalism

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:

Then Cobb said: "Boy's where's the press?"

"Yondah, massah," Hark said. He pointed to the shed several yards away, directly at the side of the shop, where the cider barrels lay in a moist and dusty rank in the shadows past the open door. "Red bar'l, massah. Dat's de bar'l fo' a gentleman, massah." When the desire to play the obsequious coon came over him, Hark's voice became so plump and sweet that it was downright unctuous. "Marse Joe, he save dat bar'l for de fines' gentlemens."

"Bother the cider," Cobb said, "where's the brandy?"

"Brandy is de bottles on de shelf," said Hark. He began to scramble to his feet. "I fix de brandy fo' you, massah." But again Cobb motioned him back with a brisk wave of his hand.... Something about the man offended me, filled me with the sharpest displeasure, and it wasn't until he limped unsteadily past us through the crackling brown patch of weeds toward the cider press, saying not another word, that I realized it wasn't the man himself who annoyed me so much as it was Hark's manner in his presence--the unspeakable bootlicking Sambo, all giggles and smirks and oily, sniveling servility.

It was this same Hark who, according to Nat, "gave expression to that certain inward sense that every Negro possesses when, dating from the age of twelve or ten or earlier, he becomes aware that heis only merchandise, goods, in the eyes of all white people devoid of character or moral sense or soul." Hark called this feeling "black-assed," and it summed up the numbness and dread in every Negro.

As Hark put it,

"Don't matter who dey is, Nat, good or bad, even ol' Marse Joe, dey white folks day gwine make you feel black-assed. Never seed a white man smile at me befo'. How come dat 'plies, Nat? Figger a white man treat you right you gwine feel white-assed. Naw suh! Young Massah, old massah sweet-talk me, I jes' feel black-assed th'ough and th'ough. Figger when I gets to heaven like you say I is, do good Lord hisself even He gwine make old Hark feel black-assed, standin' befo' de golden throne. Dere He is, white as snow, givin' me a lot of sweet talk and me feelin' like a black-assed angel.

It is this black-assed feeling, experienced intensely by Nat in the presence of the white people who were most kind to him, that stirred the deepest emotions of rage and confusion in him. Three white people in his life--his one-time master Samuel Turner, Judge Cobb, and Margaret Whitehead -- provoked a moment of warm and mutual sympathy in him. They caused him to feel a dim glimmer of hope, and this short-lived thrill left him more perplexed and enraged than before.

Other people, including his last master, treated Nat decently; but with them it was always the same kind of benevolent paternalism which a person holds towards a valued pet, or a handy ox. The most infuriating thing Nat could imagine was to be submitted to the "wanton and arrogant kindness" of a white man. This ambivalence of race accounted more for Nat's rebellion than did any rage resulting from being intolerably oppressed; it is a theme which Styron has Nat express over and over.

Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of my life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them?

Nat's revolt occurred in Virginia, not in the brutal Deep South. He himself rarely encountered harshness and was the product of an ideal master--he was educated, promised freedom, more or less, and refined in the white man's house.

Styron's development of the relationship between Samuel Turner and Nat, if not among the most imaginative parts of the book, is certainly among the most sensitive and interesting. The slave boy viewed his master in awe, as almost divine. The master, in turn, when he saw a young spark of interest, gave Nat the encouragement and opportunity to learn to read.

Samuel Turner looked upon Nat as an experiment to destroy the myth of the Negro's inferior intellect. He exhorted Nat and gradually gave him responsibilities. Styron bases Samuel Turner on John Hartwell Cocke, who was a leading spokesman for emancipation in the Virginia legislautre of the early 1880's. (Ironically, Samuel Turner's efforts to educate and "housebreak" Nat ultimately resulted in the revolt that doomed the growing movement for slave emancipation in Virginia.) Styron takes the philosophy of Cocke and puts it directly into Samuel Turner's mouth. Turner's discussion with two ministers are, word-for-word, from Cocke's personal letters:

I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the source of all our misery, individual, political, and economic.

Nat, whose real father ran away when he was an infant, identified with his master and set himself apart from the Sambos--the field Negroes. He felt disgust at having to use their outhouse. But, as one slave infomred him, "Yo' ass black jes' like mine, honey chile." In this way Styron shows how Nat's relationship with Samuel Turner was tormented and complicated; the condition became radically worse when Nat was denied his promised freedom by a Baptist preacher in whose hands Samuel Turner had entrusted him.

Almost to have freedom and then to have it grabbed away would be more than any mortal could stand. Given his early piety which his Bible-reading had sharpened, Nat's leap to religious fanaticism was not a long one. Each new debasing experience led him more and more to the avenging words of the Old Testament:

"Son of Man, prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord; Say, a sword, a sword is sharpened, and also furbished: it is sharpened to make a sore slaughter ... Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women..."

It became Nat's obsession and divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, Virginia. Styron, with historical justification, isolates Nat from his murderous followers and portrays the man's pure hate; it is calm, intelligent, and unrepentant. Others, says Styron, "hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain." Nat, however, had known the white man and had been cultivated by him.

The sharp contrast which Styron draws between Nat and his friend Hark contrasts the puritanical nature of one with the worldly humor of the other. In Styron's view, Nat was largely motivated by sexual frustration, while Hark had no such similar hang-ups. It was Hark, too, who could murder ruthlessly. Nat maintanied a strange distance from the rebels' blood-spilling.

With the framework of an insurrection and trial, it would have been easy for Styron to produce an intense novel that maintained a delirious pitch throughout. What he has done, however, is to create imaginative visions and recollectons within the mind of the doomed slave and yet present the poignancy of the recent massacres and the impending execution. Styron is a great stylist and a perfectionist, but he certainly is not guilty of trying to present a cosmic view of the South or the declining prosperity of Virginia Tidewater. Criticisms of Styron's use of Nat's memory to describe landscapes are unfounded. The author's sensitivity towards the setting adds much richness to the novel. In the end, the reader is only exhausted by the many and deep experiences in Nat Turner's mind. Styron has achieved his goal--a work of art and a significant contribution to black-white understanding