the confessions of nat turner by william styron

The mystery of Nat Turner has done little to dislodge him from the popular imagination. It is hardly a credible document, believed to have been written mostly to calm white fears that a greater insurrection might be at hand. Turner’s confession was published by Thomas Gray, a white attorney who interviewed him not long after his capture and just days before his hanging. Accounts from the time estimate about 60 whites were killed in the insurrection, and in the weeks that followed, many more blacks were killed in retribution. What little is known about Nat Turner - the preacher and slave who in 1831 led a bloody two-day revolt in southern Virginia - is suspect. Yet the Nat Turner story has never failed to inspire a passionate response. The film’s reception at Sundance - “instant rapture,” by one account - has been explained in part as a reaction to the allegations of exclusion and discrimination that have fueled the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. No one can really know who Nat Turner was, but these divergent portraits are reminders of the role slavery continues to play in shaping race relations in this country, leaving black and white Americans struggling to find a common language for this largely unspoken tragedy. He describes the rebel slave as “a measured, self-determined man of faith, whose courage and sacrifice left him a martyr.” He calls his movie “the black ‘Braveheart.’” Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations-and hopes-which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage.Parker’s vision of Turner is distinctly different. The Confessions of Nat Turneris not only a masterpiece of storytelling is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.

The Confessions of Nat Turneris narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region. In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery.

The confessions of nat turner by william styron