Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner" a double confession. The slave revolt leader Nat Turner, chained and in prison awaiting trial and execution, tells his story to the lawyer Gray but it is a surface account -- one that doesn't reveal his motives. But the reader hears Nat's inner thoughts, his private confession.
Nat's dream of an ocean voyage (he has never seen the ocean) at the end of which lies a doorless marble structure on a bluff. A tomb?
Through chained and hungry, the one thing Nat cannot bear is that the Christian God who spoke to him, who daily inspired him to slaughter the enslaving white race has withdrawn from him, no longer speaks in his thoughts.
In prison, Nat meditates on whether the fly that buzzes around his head is the most blessed or cursed of creatures: "In many ways, I thought, a fly must be one of the most fortunate of God's creatures. Brainless born, brainlessly seeking its sustenance from anything wet and warm, it found its brainless mate, reproduced, and died brainless, unacquainted with misery or grief. But then I asked myself: how could I be sure? Who could say that flies were not instead God's supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching, forced by instinct to dine off sweat and slime and offal, their very brainlessness an everlasting torment?"
A g(Nat) = a fly? Nat clearly placed between fellow slaves Hark (who hears) and Will (who acts).
The chained Nat bargains with the garrolous lawyer Gray: "There is no doubt about it. White people often undo themselves by such running off at the mouth, and only God knows how many nigger triumphs have been won in total silence."
In drawing out Nat's confession, Gray complains that the prisoner is not forthcoming about why the insurrectionists killed the kindly (including his "humane" master Joseph Travis) as well as the brutal and were unsparing of innocent children. He also is incredulous that Nat himself slew so few; that he attributes much of the carnage to the slave Will. In these external confessions, dictated to Gray, Nat refuses to address either of these questions of motivation or reluctance.
Gray's legal disquisition on the different kinds of chattel: animate (like Nat) and inanimate (the example he gives is that of a wagon). The court has condemned to death only the intelligent slaves -- a minority of the insurrectionists -- returning the "inanimate" ones to their masters. Gray gives this as evidence of Virginia's superior sense of justice and mercy.
Internally narrating the story of his youth, Nat recalls how his fellow slave Hark (now in an adjacent cell) "always declared he could distinguish between good white people and bad white people -- and even white people who lay between good and bad -- by their smell alone."
We already know that Nat's bloody, biblical vengeance, in accordance with the strictures expressed by the prophet Ezekiel, will make no distinction between good and bad oppressors.
Hark also theorizes the condition of being "black-assed" -- "the numbness and dread which dwells in every Negro's heart" and that comes from contact with every white, whether evil or kind, that inevitably reminds the slave of his blackness. Hark expects a similar result to come from meeting God in heaven.
Hark has gained the enmity of the master's stepson Putnam (who is actually Nat's owner, though as a minor not yet his "master") from having, while out hunting hickory nuts, "innocently but clumsily ambushed Putnam and Joel Westbrook in some tangled carnal union by the swimming pond, both of the boys as naked as catfish on the muddy bank, writhing about and skylarking with each other in the most oblivious way." Putnam's consequent anger at Hark's "spying" is to Nate an "uncorrectable situation: white people really see nothing of a Negro in his private activity, while a Negro . . . must walk miles out of his path to avoid seeing everything white people do."
Styron's evocative description of Nat's pastoral existence (the warm shed he shares with Hark, his daily trapping of rabbits in the surrounding woods) under the kind master Joseph Travis is remarkably intersperced with brief, matter-of-fact, dispassionate references by Nat to the carnage he is planning.
Nat recalls first meeting Judge Cobb, the magistrate who will shortly be presiding over his trial. The judge, visiting the wheelwright shop of Nat's master, identifies Nat as the intelligent, bible-reading slave he has heard rumor of and taunts him with all the contradictory verses which demand of slaves either bloodthirsty revolt or meek obedience.
The drunken Judge Cobb taunts Nat to spell the word cat -- to show his learning -- and Nat rages internally that he will have to murder the man, and thus lose the opportunity for the revolt he is meditating, if he is forced to reveal the secret of his intelligence.
Nat, as Cobb attempts to taunt him into revealing his intelligence: "A Negro's most cherished possession is the drab, neutral cloak of anonymity he can manage to gather around himself, allowing him to merge faceless and nameless with the common swarm: impudence and misbehavior are, for obvious reasons, unwise, but equally so is the display of an uncommon distinction, for if the former attributes can get you starved, whipped, chained, the latter may subject you to such curiosity and hostile suspicion as to ruinously impair the minute amount of freedom you possess."
Cobb repeatedly quotes an aphorism that Nat cannot place in the Bible: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly."
Nat, in more learned fashion, reiterates Hark's notion of black-assed-ness: "even when they care, even when they are somehow on your side, they cannot help but taunt and torment you."
Cobb's drunken rant on the degeneration of Virginia from "plump and virginal principality," fecund with a variety of crops, to "withering, defeated hag," despoiled to provide tobacco for English pipes, and now breeding ground for slaves ("little black infants by the score, the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands") required by the cotton states: "a nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas . . . A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine."
The drunken and grotesque Judge Cobb wails: "Oh Virginia, woe
betide thee! Woe thrice woe, and ever damned be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand."
Nat, who has been plotting his bloody insurrection, feels a momentary "thrill of hope" in hearing Cobb's crazed pronouncements, but it quickly gives way to a sense of danger, suspicion and mistrust.
Cobb further laments loudly when Nat tells him of how the "kind" master Joseph Travis, who doesn't allow beating of his slaves, nevertheless had no choice but to sell Hark's wife and young son to work in the Mississippi cotton fields.
In accordance with the passage from Exekiel that guides Nat's plan and that calls for the protection of those who sigh for justice even as the innocent children are to be slain, he determines that Cobb will be "spared the sword."
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