Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

The Weight of Slavery

The Weight of Slavery

In a short essay which he wrote about the preliminary meditation and research necessary before he, a white Southerner, could write this book about an American Negro slave rebel, William Styron makes the point that no white Southerner actually knows the American Negro people. They may fear them; they may even give them an uneasy sentimental adulation; but they do not know the Negro way of life from the inside because of the psychological effects of a most rigid apartheid. I think that his novel bears out this contention.

In some ways the Nat Turner whom Styron invents is a figure larger than life, moved by philosophical reflections and intense brooding passions which the original Nat Turner – the man who led an unsuccessful rebellion and killed some white families and was hanged for it – might, if he were alive, be hard put to it to recognise. Perhaps the uneasy Southern country belle, Margaret Whitehead, who is the only person he himself killed – his followers and lieutenants killed the rest – is, in my estimation, a projection page 590 from Styron’s own mind. I doubt if this single-minded rebel, driven on by the belief that God had given him the same commission that He gave to Gideon, would have had time or inclination to fall in love with the daughter of a white slave-owner. It provides the novel with sexually romantic undertones which it would not otherwise have possessed. But it shows at least a trace of the Southerner’s delusion that his Negro slave or servant really in his heart of hearts admires and loves him, saying to himself inwardly in Blake’s words –

White as an angel is the English child
But I am black, as if bereft of light

This is not the message of Black Power. Nor is it the message of Nat Turner. The core of the Negro-White relationship is perhaps exemplified most vividly by the quotation from Drewry’s The Southampton Insurrection which Styron has put as an epigraph to his own book –

The bodies of those executed, with one exception, were buried in a decent and becoming manner. That of Nat Turner was delivered to the doctors, who skinned it and made grease of the flesh. Mr Barham’s father owned a money-purse made of his hide. His skeleton was for many years in the possession of Dr Massenberg, but has since been misplaced . . .

This type of racism does not in fact breed any love in the subject people. It produces instead an understandable inability to distinguish between the guilty and those who are merely impotent or ignorant. But the fact that Styron uses the quotation shows that he knows a good deal of this; he also mentions in his essay, ‘This Quiet Dust’, the sparing of the homes of some of the poor whites by the Negro insurrectionists.

Yet I repent of these qualifications when I remember how I read the book through from cover to cover at a sitting, and how it evoked the cold hopeless weight of slavery, and how the apocalyptic visions of Nat Turner seemed to rise inevitably from that dismal world –

Then swiftly in the very midst of the rent in the clouds I saw a black angel clothed in black armour with black wings outspread from east to west; gigantic, hovering, he spoke in a thunderous voice louder than anything I have ever heard: ‘Fear God and give glory to Him for the hour of His judgment is come, and worship Him that made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters . . .’.

There is an original document, transcribed by a lawyer from Nat Turner’s own lips, in which Turner describes his vision; but Styron has significantly elaborated it. In Styron’s version the black strives with a white angel and triumphs. I do not remember any white angel in Turner’s original; and it is worth remembering that in the Black Muslim cosmology of which Nat Turner’s was the forerunner, God is black and the Devil is white, and the page 591 Devil created the white man to persecute God’s chosen people the Negroes. I am ready to be instructed if my interpretation is incorrect. Though this cosmology is theologically unsound, it seems to me a mythologising of history which does good justice to the relation between the different races. But Styron, naturally enough, is loath to suppose that the white man is the Negro’s Devil.

The great strength of the book lies in three areas – its evocation of the state of slavery from the point of view of the slave, with particular emphasis on the fact that the ‘kind’ master could rouse more hatred than the sadist, on account of his condescension; its superb presentation of Nat Turner’s experience of his physical surroundings (here one suspects that Styron is helped by the white man’s supposition that the Negro represents the worlds of intuition and sensation as opposed to his own putative areas of intellect and feeling); and its deep identification with Turner’s apocalyptic religious attitudes. Whatever its minor faults of emphasis may be, it is the strongest book about slavery that I have ever read; and it is most relevant for an understanding of the forces that lie behind the Black Power movement in America.

1968 (519)