408
MICHAEL THElWELl
Despite Drewry's impulse to disparage the abilities of Turner's
lieutenants, he does describe Hark as "a black Apollo" and as "the
most intelligent and enthusiastic conspirator." He claims that this slave
had taken the name of "a famous Negro general named Hark who
served under Saood II ... and who about 1810 carried his arms across
the Euphrates and threatened Damascus." In a similar vein Wil–
liam Wells Brown mentions a slave Will who joins the rebellion as
being "a lifelong rebel who scorned to take his master's name" and
whose last words after committing great carnage with his axe were
"bury my axe with me." "For he religiously believed," Brown explains,
"that in the next world, the blacks would have a contest with the whites
and he would need his axe."
Aside from the origins of Nat Turner in the self-image and world–
view of slave culture, the search for a credible Nat Turner and an ob–
jective reconstruction of his rebellion must certainly include the effects
on his young mind of his "militant" family. What passed between the
young Nat and his "wild and intelligent" African mother? What was
the legacy of his "high-spirited" father who successfully escaped? Or did
he have nothing to say to his son before leaving? To what extent was
the slave "society" that Nat refers to sustained and structured by
memories and legends of Africa? Is no glimmering of the slaves' under–
standing of their situation to be found in their quick acceptance and
adaptation of the Book of Exodus as both a metaphor of their condi–
tion and a promise of deliverance? By what devices did news circulate
"rapidly and mysteriously" among the "surprisingly well-informed" but
"passive and inert" Sambos? Was that haunting, dirgelike melody with
its not quite "civilized" melodic patterns and antiphonal scheme the
words to which were "Steal 'way, Steal 'way, Lord,
ah
ain't got long
to stay heah," just more evidence of the darkies' simple faith?
We find no answers in Mr. Styron's meditations. Indeed, these
questions, which must surely have comprised a large part of the his–
torical Turner's consciousness, are not raised, and Styron's black people,
having lost the African heritage, are by the implications of this void
in the novel in danger of being deprived of the tragic, grim, yet in–
finitely moving and inspiring heritage created for us by those "many
thousands gone" who found ways to endure and myths and ideas by
which to comfort and sustain themselves.
What does it mean, for example, that the Nat Turner of the novel
speaks in a highly literary, convoluted, latinate prose reminiscent of one
of Charles Dickens' Victorian pedagogues? Mr. Styron has said that
the language was in part determined by his desire "to make him every
bit as intelligent as I possibly could."
