The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Eugene Genovese’s defense of the historical accuracy of William Styron’s Nat Turner [NYR Sept. 12] shakes one’s faith in historians. I am currently editing a collection of Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essays on slave rebellions, including Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser as well as Nat Turner, and so have had recent occasion to read the same source materials available to Professor Genovese and Mr. Styron. Higginson had the useful habit, not shared by Genovese, of citing his sources fully and accurately. His work is mentioned several times in the review of Ten Black Writers Respond, but never by name.

On the point of the existence of Turner’s slave wife and children, Genovese says: “The evidence for Turner’s alleged black wife comes from an account written thirty years after his death.” This, of course, is Higginson’s Nat Turner’s Insurrection, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861, when Turner’s widow would have been in her late fifties. Higginson’s sources, as he clearly states, were the Confession and the local and national newspapers contemporary with Nat Turner, as well as word-of-mouth legendary material from living survivors of the insurrection. His brief mention of the wife, whose existence had then never been questioned, included the fact that she was “tortured under the lash” after her husband’s death in an effort to get her to reveal the hiding place of his secret papers. This fact would seem ample explanation of Turner’s failure to mention her in his Confession, which Genovese takes as negative evidence of her non-existence. Nat hoped, no doubt, to spare her further suffering, as many a twentieth-century political prisoner has done, and as vainly.

Mr. Styron has pointed out that no legal marriage could have been contracted between slaves in Virginia in the 1820s, since the institution was specifically outlawed. The best evidence for its existence thus would seem to be the large body of descendants, of whose number and volubility Mr. Styron has publicly complained. Several of them have published reminiscences of their grandparents, which presumably Professor Genovese has not read. He says that we “have yet to be shown evidence that slaves and postslavery blacks kept alive a politically relevant legend of Nat Turner.” If the book he is supposedly reviewing does not present such evidence, I respectfully suggest that he consult the files of the Journal of Negro History; in every single volume I have ever had occasion to use, Nat Turner has had several index listings, long before Mr. Styron’s novel. They may, of course, not be “politically relevant,” whatever that means; Nat Turner was not allowed to vote any more than he was allowed to marry.

As for the link between Turner and the white woman for whom Styron shows him impotently lusting: in a general confession of a large number of murders, Nat Turner offers unpleasant specific details of three. They show him as awkward and badly armed, or perhaps both. In two cases a comrade with a sharper sword and fewer scruples finished off the victim for him; in the third he did it himself. It is, as Professor Genovese says, perfectly possible for a novelist to move from these grisly facts to a fantasy of some special association with the woman Turner killed. But for a historian to argue that such a connection is implied by the facts or by Turner’s way of relating them is another kettle of fish entirely. Such folk-psychiatry notoriously works both ways; why not a special relationship with the woman he couldn’t finish killing? Or, better yet, with the man? Or, best of all, with the infant who was almost forgotten (but Freud knows we never forget anything)?

To fantasize such a connection is readily possible, but the link Mr. Styron has provided flatly contradicts the record at a point where it is perfectly explicit. Neither Margaret Whitehead nor his own parents taught Nat Turner to read; he picked up the art from a picture book, amazing his parents and the neighborhood whites thereby and first establishing, thus early in life, his reputation as a remarkable human being. How and where his parents got him that picture book is a legitimate field for historical research. So far as I can discover, no one has ever tried to find out. He perfected his skill from the discarded textbooks of white children and their occasional, sometimes unwitting help. Nothing about the man terrified his white owners as much as this, and he was used for years by white Southerners as a dreadful example of the perils of teaching a Negro to read long before Mr. Styron so used him.

Professor Genovese’s contention that black Americans should be grateful to Styron for having rescued their hero from oblivion even though he has perverted him in the process seems to me equaled only by the argument of slaveowners that blacks ought to be grateful for slavery because it enabled them to have instruction in the Christian religion. Judged by such standards American Negroes have indeed a great deal to be thankful for.

Anna Mary Wells

Douglass College

New Brunswick, New Jersey

To the Editors:

I represent only one tenth of the authorship of William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, so I have been hesitant up to now to comment on the writings of various critics concerning the volume. For better or worse, Eugene Genovese relieved me of that ambiguously felt reticence when he devoted a significant part of his review of the book (NYR, September 12, 1968) to my essay, “You’ve Taken My Nat and Gone.” Indeed he went so far as to offer several choice paragraphs of rebuke, praise, and correction directly to me, paragraphs which seem to require some response. Nevertheless, the words that follow are more than a personal reply. They comprise a relatively brief attempt to address some of the larger issues raised in Genovese’s review, especially those dealing with the intellectual community and the black experience in America.

The overarching theme of my own comments on Styron, his work, and the reaction of many white critics to it was a reflection on tragedy. In the essay I referred largely to that tragedy created by the non-black authorities on black life who are certain that they have eaten and drunk so fully of our experience that they are qualified to deliver homilies to us (at the least provocation) on how that experience should best be understood, recorded and lived, now and in the future. In essence they seek (perhaps unconsciously, but nonetheless effectively) to become the official keepers of our memories and the shapers of our dreams. I suggested that the society which eagerly accepts such assumptions offers to those of us who are black a slavery at once more subtle and more damaging than any we have known before.

AS I CONSIDERED Gene Genovese’s review it seemed to me that he moved fully, indeed enthusiastically at times, into that very element, trailing behind him all the ironic humor and strange blindness that one associates with the tragic course. Let me offer several examples of this direction:

Mr. Genovese, who has done significant research and writing on the institution of slavery in the New World, now becomes an authority on all of black life, including its contemporary and folkloric aspects. Thus, in his review he can boldly tell me that I am deceiving myself and others when I say that Styron’s Nat Turner bears no resemblance to the fascinating man who exists “in the living traditions of black America.” Indeed, Genovese claims that there were no such traditions until Styron “rescued” Turner “from obscurity.” Here Mr. Genovese’s precise words are important for my response. He writes, “we have yet to be shown evidence that slaves and postslavery blacks kept alive a politically relevant legend of Nat Turner or of any other Southern slave leader.”

This would be laughable were it not so tragic. Obviously it is Genovese and many other non-black authorities on the black experience who comprise that “we” which has “yet to be shown evidence” of a living tradition concerning slave rebellions and the relevance of those events to the continuing struggles of black people in America. Thus Mr. Genovese (and others who have written even less interesting admonitions to us elsewhere) has arrogated to himself the task of deciding what is in “obscurity” and what is alive and well in the continuing traditions of black America.

Such a position usually presumes rather extensive knowledge of the subject under consideration, especially when the opinion is stated in so prestigious a publication as this one. But there is another “we” (the black part of the pronoun, one might say), and we wonder if Mr. Genovese is not familiar with the writings and speeches of former slaves and other black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Samuel Ringold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Tubman, or H. Ford Douglass, to name only a few. For the memory of Turner evidently lived among them and was offered by them to black people as an inspiration to resistance.

That other, black, “we” gathers that Genovese has not read the sermons and the speeches and writings of scores of post-Civil War black editors, preachers, and historians. (George Washington Williams is a good example of the latter.) For if he had, Nat Turner could not possibly have remained obscure. We urge him to peruse the pages of Marcus Garvey’s widely read Negro World or to read the poetry and fiction of Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker if he wishes to find a vital tradition concerning Turner, Vesey, and others. Let him settle down among the pages of the recorded slave recollections in the Federal Writers’ Project papers. Let him listen to the black people from Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia who speak of the Sunday School and Lodge pageants and plays of their childhood which dealt with the life and work of Nat Turner. Finally, let him listen again to the voice of Malcolm X.

Here, in all of these areas of the black world, and more, is where Nat Turner continued to live, long after he was hung, long before William Styron was born, very long before Eugene Genovese became an expert on “the living traditions of black America.” The “obscurity” in which Nat Turner and other black slave rebels languished (until rescued by William Styron and others) was created out of the same material as the “darkness” of pre-sixteenth-century Africa: the blindness of white observer-experts. That the publishing and book-reviewing world should hail such latter-day darkness as light is part of our American tragedy.

Another of Genovese’s concerns in his review was the way in which I—among others—sharply criticized Styron for snatching Turner from among the unique formative influences of the black community and placing him in an ambiguous limbo within the white world. Again Genovese claimed that “we know so little and can say so little” about whether or not there existed “a special kind of subterranean life in the slave quarters which might have proven far more powerful than we now appreciate [Emphasis mine].” It is at this point that he throws a personal challenge to me, saying, “If you say that black folk life can be unearthed and made relevant, then do it….”