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William
Styron
on Nat Turner and Dred
In her muscular defense of the novels of
Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York Review, September 3,
1970), Ellen Moers has added an odd footnote to a tiresome
controversy. I certainly can take no serious exception to Miss
Moer's implied assumption that Mrs. Stowe's vision of Nat Turner
may be more appealing or meaningful or aggressively militant
than my own. Like Miss Moers I feel that Dred is a
neglected work, despite all of its ghastly shortcomings as a
work of fiction, and I'm sorry that it has not attracted over
the years more readers since in its primitive way it does indeed
show (tut-tut Miss Moers, not prove, no novel proves
anything) that "slavery is horrible."
But I wish that in her haste to express
enthusiasm for Dred at the expense of my own novel (the
same sin of which, vice versa, she accuses Professor C.
Vann Woodward) she had been less haphazard with certain
historical "facts," the faithfulness to which
presumably makes Mrs. Stowe a better witness to the character of
Nat Turner than myself. Miss Moers first says that Dred "is
guilty of none of the distortions to which objection has been
raised in the controversy over William Styron's novel on the
same subject." She then points out that in Dred the hero is
educated by Negro parents while my Nat Turner is taught by white
people, and it is true that here Mrs. Stowe adheres to the
original Confessions--for whatever they may be
worth--while in this respect my own version is at variance with
them. But let Miss Moers go on. Mrs. Stowe's Dred, she
says,
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. . . lives and dies in the Great
Dismal Swamp. . . . Dred has both wife and children, who
live with him and rely on his love, support, and
protection in the swamp. far from being a rebel in
isolation, he is presented by Mrs. Stowe as a product of
the Denmark Vesey uprising. |
And she says finally:
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These aspects of her hero and her
story Harriet Beecher Stowe lifted whole from the 1831 Confessions
of Nat Turner . . . and also other documents of unrest
in the antebellum South, black and white. |
I assume that Miss Moers means just what she
says by the phrase "lifted hole." But in plain truth
there is not a single word in the 1831 Confessions to
indicate that Nat Turner had anything to do with the Great
Dismal Swamp, and it can be stated flatly even at this late date
that the historical Nat certainly did not live or die there.
Furthermore, if Miss Moers will carefully reread the original Confessions
she will find that Mrs. Stowe could not possibly have
"lifted whole" any reference to Nat Turner's wife and
children, since there is no mention of either, nor is there an
oblique reference to the Denmark Vesey uprising (not an
uprising, by the way, but an aborted revolt) or any other slave
insurrection. I have read the same documents of unrest in the
ante-bellum South as Mrs. Stowe did, and concluded it unlikely
that Nat Turner was motivated by the example of Denmark Vesey.
Mrs. Stowe thought otherwise but in either case it is a matter
of conjecture, a novelist's guesswork. Why should such a choice
absolve Mrs. Stowe of "distortions" while leaving me
on the hook?
I suspect that Mrs. Stowe caused Dred to live
and die in the Dismal swamp because she shrewdly understood both
the responsibilities and the liberties of a novelist, and such
an existence in the swamp seemed an honest possibility for her
hero--not because it actually happened. My own Nat Turner
dreamed of the Dismal Swamp as a possible refuge after his
revolt through fictional logic no more queer or strained or
distorted. I am reasonably certain that Mrs. Stowe had the same
motive of honest possibility in the case of the unmentioned wife
and children and the unmentioned Denmark Vesey. As fictional
hypotheses these are by no means unacceptable, especially given
the romanticism in Mrs. Stowe and her "belief in the
necessity of heroes." Whatever, the principle of honest
possibilities was the only recourse for Mrs. Stowe--as well as
myself--when so little of consequence is really known about the
man whose life one is trying to re-create.
As for my own work, I'm afraid that--despite
the charges laid against me of flagrant inaccuracy--my
old-fashioned, unromantic regard for the crude historical
evidence is so great--greater than Mrs. Stowe's--that I would
have supplied Nat Turner with a Dismal Swamp and all the other
places and persons and appurtenances had he made reference to
them, but in the end, like Mrs. Stowe, I felt free as a novelist
to indulge my fancy.
Miss Moers has every right to feel as she
wishes that my rendition of slavery is deficient compared to
that of Mrs. Stowe--that hers is less full of the
"lassitude and self-pity" she sees me sharing with
such a funny bedfellow as LeRoi Jones; to object to a writer's
vision of his material is every reader's privilege. But she has
hardly shown Mrs. Stowe to be free of "distortions"
which I might add have been not only the right but the frequent
necessity of all historical novelists from Scott and Stendhal
and Tolstoy down to the present day.
Roxbury, Connecticut William Styron, born 1925 in Newport
News, Virginia, spent a brief stint in the Marine Corps during
World War II. Styron graduated from Duke University in 1947. He
worked briefly in New York as an associate editor for
McGraw-Hill, and in 1951 he published his first novel, Lie
Down in Darkness, for which Styron was awarded the Prix de
Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Styron
married Rose Burgunder in 1953 and settled in Roxbury,
Connecticut, his current residence. In 1967, Styron's The
Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictional account of the
Southampton slave uprising of 1831, became front-page news. The
book received the Pulitzer Prize. Styron's introspective and
psychological portrayal of Nat Turner brought him immediate and
bitter criticism, especially from some African-American authors
who believed that Styron had little understanding of the slave
experience and that Styron's Turner was tinged with racism.
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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update 8 December 2011
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