Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind

2. From Tara to Turner: Slavery and Slave Psychologies in American Fiction and History, 1945–1968

63 2 From Tara to Turner slavery and slave psychologies in american fiction and history, 1945–1968 n 1968—a full thirty-two years after its first appearance—Beacon Press republished Black Thunder. Arna Bontemps begins his introduction to this new edition of the novel with the words, “Time is not a river. Time is a pendulum.” History, Bontemps suggests, is not linear and progressive, but repetitive and cyclical. More than 150 years after the Richmond conspiracy , resistance to slavery had transformed into opposition to Jim Crow, and the assassination of Martin Luther King evoked the execution of Gabriel during another, far distant election year (vii, viii). Just as the militancy of nineteenth-century slaves resounded with American Marxists during the Depression years, so, Bontemps hoped, might his long-neglected novel find an audience in the age of Black Nationalism. Ironically, the 1968 reappearance of Black Thunder coincided with the resurrection of another 1930s text concerning slavery: the much-ballyhooed rerelease of the film adaptation of Gone with the Wind. Furthermore, just as Margaret Mitchell’s dubious fictionalization of slavery had won the Pulitzer Prize a generation before, so, in 1968, did another questionable white-authored novel about the peculiar institution garner the very same accolade. William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner is a fictional account of the insurrection that took place in Southampton,Virginia, in 1831, told from the perspective of its famous leader. Despite its focus upon the black experience in slavery and its portrayal of militant rebellion against the institution, Styron’s novel has generated considerable antagonism. Many have been inclined to see The Confessions of Nat Turner not as a thoughtful dramatizaI recto calls and responses 64 tion of resistance to slavery, but as a racist appropriation and diminution of an African American hero. At the time of its publication, a number of readers objected strenuously to the glowing tributes that the novel received from some quarters. One journalist even published a column entitled“I Spit on the Pulitzer Prize.” African American critics referred to the novel as“an outright fake” and“a typical Southern white man’s cliché” (Stone 105; Meyer quoted in Stone 121; Walker quoted in Stone 125). Contemporary scholars characterize the novel in similar terms—as “yet another example of white America’s determination to misrepresent the Afro-American past,” and as one more instance of “the reductive images and ridiculing representations of African Americans in American literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (Van Deburg 140; A. Mitchell 67). The fundamental problem for many is that Styron’s ideas about slavery derive primarily from Stanley Elkins’s landmark—but controversial— historical study Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). Elkins argues that there is extensive documentary evidence in support of the antebellum southern white opinion that the average African American slave was a“perpetual child incapable of maturity” (84). Rejecting the bigoted explanations of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority that pervade the work of earlier historians such as Ulrich B. Phillips, Elkins suggests that slavery itself produced the“Sambo” persona: that an oppressive institution and the psychological influence of the master created a docile and retarded personality. Elkins acknowledges that a few exceptional individuals were able“to escape the full impact of the system and its coercions upon personality ” (85, 137). In Styron’s novel, Nat Turner is just such an individual, and he sees his fellow slaves as precisely the perpetual children that Elkins describes :“a lower order of people—a ragtag mob, coarse, raucous, clownish, uncouth . . . faceless and nameless toilers,” for whom Nat holds a “lifelong contempt” (135–36, 201). Such a view of enslaved African Americans has not endeared The Confessions of Nat Turner to some readers, who criticize its use of the “fraudulent and untenable” ideas of Elkins, and who deplore Styron’s“vile racist imagination” (Kaiser 54, 57). To many critics, both past and present, Elkins’s study and Styron’s novel epitomize a white-authored “hegemonic discourse on slavery” that dominated American culture before the 1970s (Rushdy, Neo-slave 54). In this view, Styron’s Confessions and Elkins’s Slavery are simply the heirs of Gone 65 with the Wind and Phillips’s American Negro Slavery—and are largely indistinguishable from them as far as their ideological assumptions about slavery and enslaved Americans are concerned. One critic thus accuses Styron of “trying to prove that U...