ROBERT
COLES
the black community parb.clpates in the myths of its oppressors and
shares the same perceptions of historical experience. I t is in this sense
that the novel is "reactionary."
Robert Coles
I find it very hard to answer Mr. Thelwell. I have admired
his writing since I first came across it in the articles "Fish are Jumping
An' the Cotton is High: Notes from the Mississippi Delta" and "Bright
An' Mownin' Star" in the Spring and Fall issues respectively of the
Massachusetts Review.
I say
his
writing because he wrote as a writer;
not a Negro writer, not an activist who has decided to put something
down on paper, but a very gifted observer who can describe the Mis–
sissippi Delta every bit as eloquently as the white man from Oxfom,
Mississippi, he quotes and admires.
I hope the reader will look up those two pieces. The "uncertainty,
fear, even desperation" that Thelwell mentions are still around - down
in the Delta, in Nat Turner's Virginia and in New York City. The near–
starvation he describes also still exists, and it would seem that the
President of the United States has other things on his mind than such
minor embarrassments to the "free world." Anyway, to recognize ter–
ribly wounded and hungry people one doesn't have to be "a psy–
chologist who has worked with Southern Negroes," or have any "cre–
dentials" or know too much a:bout that absurd categorization "the
Negro mind," which is one of about a million vulgar, dramatic ex–
pressions floating around today. Yet, enormous dignity, courage, re–
sourcefulness and yes, style can exist side-by-side with terror and its
degrading consequences, though I am afraid that people like me, with
all our "credentials," aren't likely to appreciate that fact. Faulkner
and Ralph Ellison, yes; but not the psychiatric label-mongers - who in–
timidate, I suspect, all too many writers, people I would expect to
know better.
Mr. Thelwell essentially says Mr. Styron has
a
view of Nat Turner,
and one not sufficiently redemptive, to use the word I used. Whites
still don't see the "true tenor" of not only Negro language, but the
Negro "world-view." And Styron in particular has not transcended
him–
self, the white Southerner, the man who cannot disengage himself from
the "pervasive accumulation of white mythology about black people"
which emerges through Styron's Nat in an acceptance of "all of the
