AR.GUMENTS
405
knowledge of black people which most southerners claim as their special
patent; indeed they were based on almost total ignorance."
This knowledge, he writes, came from a distance, "as though I had
been watching actors in an all black puppet show." He concludes that
"one of the most egregious of southern myths" is that of the white south–
erner's boast that "he knows the Negro." A major factor in this dis–
tance is the effect of "the sexual myth" which he says "needs to
be
reexamined." "Surely a certain amount of sexual tension between the
races continues to exist," he writes, "and the southern white man's fear of
sexual aggression on the part of the Negro male is still too evident to
be ignored. . . . While it cannot be denied that slavery times produced
a vast amount of inter-breeding . . . it is impossible not to believe that
theories involving a perpetual sexual 'tension' have been badly inflated."
(Later in the essay when he discusses the Turner insurrection, Styron
says he finds it interesting that "the Negroes did not resort to torture,
nor were they ever accused of rape. Nat's attitude toward sex was
Christian and highminded, and he had said: 'we will not do to their
women what they have done to ours.' ")
The Southerners' ignorance of the Negro, Styron notes,
has
its
effect on his literature. "Most southern white people cannot know or
touch Negroes," a gulf reflected even in "the work of a writer supreme–
ly knowledgeable about the south as William Faulkner, who confessed
a hesitancy about attempting to 'think Negro,' and whose Negro charac–
ters, as marvellously portrayed as most of them are, seem nevertheless
to be meticulously
observed
rather than
lived."
(Faulkner, in retrospect,
proves the wiser, .as we shall see, and Styron should have given a great
deal more thought to the reasons behind the canny Mississippian's
"hesitance." )
And, in the essay, Styron summed up the political nature of Nat's
insurrection: "That the insurrection was not purely racial, hut perhaps
obscurely premarxist, may be seen by the fact that a number of dwellings
belonging to poor white people were pointedly passed by."
Significantly, his comments on Turner's place in the slave society
is quite different from that found in the novel: "his gifts for preaching,
for prophecy, and his own magnetism seem to have been so extraordinary
that he grew into a rather celebrated figure among Negroes of the
county, his influence even extending to whites, one of whom - a poor,
half-cracked, but respectable overseer named Brantley - he converted to
the faith and baptised in a mill pond."
Styron assumes the white southerner's ignorance of blacks to
be
a
recent phenomenon. But the evidence is that slave masters and over-
