ARGUMENTS
409
The language that the real Nat Turner must have spoken, preached,
exhorted and plotted in still exists in the rural south. The true tenor of
that language - apocalyptic, poetic, richly allusive and moving - can
be
seen in the spirituals and bitter blues poetry - which is a familiar
part of the national culture. It is a language coming out of suffering
and oppression, a language of subterfuge, of sharp metaphor and para–
ble, which implies a world-view. It is a functional, living language, rather
than a formal literary one, depending on vivid similes, effective juxta–
position of images and contrasts rather than large vocabulary for its
range and flexibility. It is capable of communicating incredibly subtle
nuances of meaning through variation of rhythm, cadence and' intona–
tion. A credible characterization of Nat Turner demands some literary
approximation of this language, and not only because many black read–
ers feel that there is an implicit insult in Mr. Styron's giving Turner an
abstract "white" language to make him "intelligent.'"
In the act of giving Turner a white language Styron invests him
with a white consciousness. Styron's Nat is removed from the slave
cabins and installed in the great house from which, isolated from his
peers, he observes blacks from a distance "like actors in an all black
puppet show." He is constantly observing "lines of Negroes etched
against the sky," or in coffles going south. The most striking character–
istic of this figure is. the extent to wliich he operates within the context
of nineteenth-century plantation owner assumptions about blacks. The
voice and consciousness which operates in this novel as Turner's, per–
ceives and defines black existence in terms which black people
have
never accepted.
The underlying racism may
be
no more virulent than
that of Faulkner, but in Faulkner's characters one recognizes a self–
justifying class rhetoric quite unrelated to black consciousness.
Styron's black preacher, teacher and revolutionary sees his "black
shit-eating people" as "flies," ''God's mindless outcasts, lacking that will
to destroy ... their unending anguish." He describes field hands as "a
disheveled ragged lot" whose voices "babble, with loutish nigger cheer"
and fill him with "a loathing so intense it was akin to disgust and belly
sickness." From his position in the great house, he regards "Negroes of
the mill and field as creatures beneath contempt." He describes an old
slave as being "simple headed and in a true state of nigger
ignorance.'~
He is revolted by a group in church who are "picking their noses,
scratching, sweating and stinking to high heaven" with "faces popeyed
with nigger credulity." Nowhere do his descriptions and reflections on
his fellow slaves escape the exaggerated, parodic, pseudo-anthropological
language of the slave-auction announcement. The only slave of ·any
accomplishment, with any psychological integrity and purposefulness that
