His recruits get drunk and waste precious time plundering and raping. From the very beginning, however, Nat's rebellion goes all wrong. This is a time when most wealthy whites are away on vacation, which will make it easier for the slaves to seize weapons and attack the nearby town of Jerusalem. With several loyal slaves behind him, Nat finally launches his rebellion in late August 1831. Gradually the two of them become friends, though Nat is haunted by the fear that if his plans succeed lovely Margaret must die. Though her family owns many slaves, high-spirited Margaret opposes slavery and openly admires Nat's preaching. Gradually he comes to believe these visions mean he is to lead the black race in a holy war to destroy all whites.Ĭomplications arise, however, when Nat meets Margaret Whitehead, the beautiful, vivacious daughter of a wealthy widow who lives nearby. During his religious fasts deep in the deserted woods, Nat begins to have strange visions of black and white angels fighting in the sky. Travis allows Nat to do skilled work as a carpenter and to read his Bible and preach to other slaves. This intensifies his growing hostility towards whites.Īfter bouncing around different masters for a number of years, Nat finally ends up as the property of a decent, hard-working farmer named Travis. Discouraged, Eppes soon sells young Nat to a pair of cruel redneck farmers who brutally whip the frightened, timid slave and treat him like an animal. Though Nat is not especially interested in young women at this point, he finds Eppes physically distasteful and shies away from physical contact. Eppes is a filthy, drooling homosexual who is obsessed with young boys, and he is determined to make Nat "pleasure" him at the earliest opportunity. Samuel Turner has vaguely promised Nat his freedom, but through a series of misunderstandings Nat is sold instead to an impoverished preacher named Reverend Eppes. This traumatic experience gives Nat both a burning hatred of white people and a secret revulsion from women's bodies and the sexual act. Unfortunately, when he was still a child Nat's mother was brutally raped by an Irish overseer while the master was away. Nat learned to read and write, and also became a skilled carpenter. Nat's first master was Samuel Turner, a wealthy Virginia aristocrat who believed in educating his slaves. Nat begins to think back on his past life and tells the novel in a series of flashbacks. Thomas Gray, a smug, oily prosecuting attorney, urges Nat to "confess" his crimes and make peace with God. Nat led a slave rebellion which ended in the deaths of dozens of white people as well as many of his own closest friends. African American slave Nat Turner sits in a Virginia jail awaiting execution for his crimes. Some scholars believe that mental illness may have driven Nat Turner's actions, while others believed Turner to have been moved by religiosity. Some historians consider Gray's account of Turner's "confessions" to be told with prejudice, and recently one writer has alleged that Gray's account is itself a fabrication. Styron's ambitious novel attempts to imagine the character of Nat Turner it does not purport to describe accurately or authoritatively the events as they occurred. He claimed to receive messages, and these messages told him to follow through with his rebellion killing white families with their own weapons. In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired, charged with a mission from God to lead a slave uprising and destroy the white race. The novel is based on an extant document, the "confession" of Turner to the white lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It is based on The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, a first-hand account of Turner's confessions published by a local lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, in 1831. Presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner, the novel concerns Nat Turner's slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, but does not always depict the events accurately. The Confessions of Nat Turner is a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American writer William Styron.
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