CUSHING STROUT
437
different Turners in the black writings about him, for the actual
Turner never spoke firsthand to us. What black oral tradition
has kept alive is on
I
y the image of a messianic and visionary
preacher, who brought down the wrath of a just God and of op–
pressed blacks upon slave-owners. And this figure also lives in
the novel.
The political dispute over the novel has obscured the extent
to which the story is actually cast as a sustained meditation by
Turner on his estrangement from God, an alienation healed at
last before his execution by his memory that the girl he has killed
has indirectly taught him the meaning of a biblical passage:
"God is love." Though he feels remorse for her death, he never
regrets the deeds of the rebels themselves. Unfortunately, Styron
undermined his ground in an interview by arguing that the Ham–
let-like traits he gave to Turner "must have been true in history"
and
mu~t
"historically" have "helped undermine the rebellion."
Styron later replied to his critics in different terms by asserting
that no single fact could be sacred for him because the novelist
provides "an imaginative truth which transcends, in this case,
what the historian can give you." Ironically, the weakness of
Styron's portrait of slavery is that he relied too much on histori–
ans, who had not yet learned the lesson taught by the black novel–
ist Ralph Ellison: that American slaves were more than crea–
tures of white men, and had "helped create themselves out of
what they found around them" and "made a life upon the horns
of the white man's dilemma." Styron need not have created a
Turner black radicals would recognize, but his own Turner
sometimes suggested the expatriated, bisexual James Baldwin, a
writer whom Styron knew personally, better than he did a nine–
teenth-century slave.
While Styron was savaged by those who had a political in–
vestment in Turner, Gore Vidal's
Burr
was a very popular book
in America, even though it ridiculed George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson, the revered leaders of the American Revolu–
tion, and celebrated Aaron Burr, who was tried for treason. Some
of its appeal probably had to do with its gossipy suppositions
that the fictional narrator was Aaron Burr's unacknowledged
natural son and that Alexander Hamilton's offense in provoking
Burr to a duel was the accusation that Burr had been the lover of
his own daughter. Burr's cynical tone about those in power was
