Separatists, Integrationists, and William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner

MICHAEL LACKEY University of Minnesota, Morris Separatists, Integrationists, and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner AFTER THE BROWN VERSUS BOARD OF EDUCATION RULING IN 1954, THERE was hope that the United States would finally overcome its legacy of anti-black racism. So moved by the court’s decision was Ralph Ellison that on hearing it “Tears sprang to” his “eyes as he thought not simply about himself but also about the millions of other blacks, especially the young, about to enter a world transformed” (Rampersad 298).1 In the concluding section of The Lonesome Road, which brilliantly documents the contributions blacks made to the formation of American culture, politics, and identity, J. Saunders Redding poignantly pictures the response of blacks when the Chief Justice read the ruling: “there was not a Negro among them who did not feel his allegiance to democracy strengthened and his faith in the American dream renewed” (334). Historically speaking, this euphoria was short-lived, for by the early 1960s, it became transparently clear that whites had devised sometimes subtle, sometimes flagrant ways to circumvent the law mandating integration, as James T. Patterson so intelligently documents in his book about the case and its troubled legacy. Younger blacks in particular became increasingly frustrated with the United States because of rampant forms of racism among the general population, in higher education, and within the legal system, and it was these entrenched and systemic forms of racism that led many young blacks to reject integration and to support separatist movements. For instance, in his 1965 autobiography, Malcolm X mocks “integration-hungry Negroes” (28) who fail to realize the degree to which they have been duped by white liberals. In 1967, Harold Cruse offered a blistering critique of the black intellectual of his age, which he describes as “a retarded child whose thinking processes are still geared to piddling intellectual civil writism and racial integrationism” (Crisis 475). H. Rap Brown expresses the matter most clearly in his 1969 book Die Nigger Die!.: “integration is 1 Arnold Rampersad beautifully describes Ellison’s response to the ruling (298-99). 66 Michael Lackey impractical” (55). For Brown, it is “White people [who have] got hung up on integration.” Black people, he asserts, were not opposed to the separate in separate but equal. “It was the unequal nature of segregation that Black people protested against in the South, not segregation itself.” (124). For these black writers, separate-but-truly-equal, and emphatically not integration, is the political ideal. So powerful and compelling were these movements and many of their writers that it would be easy to think that the majority of blacks adopted and supported Brown’s separate-but-truly-equal political agenda. But actually, statistics indicate that the majority of blacks favored integration over segregation. As the black psychologist and activist Kenneth Clark says: During this period of intense and much publicized separatist activity on the campuses, the vast majority of the folk Negro did not themselves become advocates of black separatism. According to surveys of opinion among Negroes, no more than 15 percent of a representative sample of Negroes ever expressed any sustained rejection of the goals of racial integration. Nor did they accept black separatism as an effective approach to racial justice in America. (“Some” xiv) And yet a brief survey of texts from the late sixties and early seventies could easily lead people to think that the majority of blacks supported separatist agendas. To illustrate, consider some influential works of the late sixties and early seventies that criticize integration and support separatism: Malcolm X’s 1965 autobiography (though it is worth noting that Malcolm reversed his position about integration by the end of his life and work); Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967); Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) and Rebellion or Revolution? (1968); LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal’s Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968); and Addison Gayle, Jr.’s, The Black Aesthetic (1971), just to mention a notable few. What are the corresponding black works that repudiated separatism and supported integration? Before the recent publication of The Haverford Discussions (written in 1969, published in 2013), an integrationist manifesto from prominent black intellectuals of the 1960s, it would have been difficult to name a multi-authored integrationist text similar to Black Fire or The Black Aesthetic. To clarify why this is the case, a brief look at the publication history of The Haverford Discussions will prove instructive. Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 67 Given the rise of black separatism among many college-age blacks, Clark, who played an important role as a testifying psychologist in the Brown v. Board case, organized a meeting of prominent black integrationists in order to expose and oppose separatism as politically dangerous and to promote integration as the best way to effect racial justice. An extremely smart, well-connected, and powerful man, Clark was able to persuade some of the country’s most prominent black intellectuals to participate: Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man made him one of the most influential writers from the 1950s through the 1990s; Redding, who authored many groundbreaking books and was considered the dean of African American studies from the 1940s through the 1980s; John Hope Franklin, University of Chicago history professor and author of From Slavery to Freedom (among many other books); Adelaide M. Cromwell, director of the African Studies Program at Boston University and author of An African Victorian Feminist: The Life and Times of Adelaide Smith Casely Hayford, 1868-1960 (among other books); St. Clair Drake, Stanford University professor and coauthor of the very influential book Black Metropolis (and other books); William Hastie, chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; and Robert C. Weaver, the first African American to hold a cabinet-level position (Secretary of Housing and Urban Development). The group met in May 1969 in order to formulate their objections to black separatism and to produce a counter-manifesto. They taped their meeting; had it transcribed and edited; produced concluding anti-separatist, pro- integrationist statements; and readied the manuscript for publication. Given the nature of their achievements at this high point in many of their careers and the sheer force of their intellectual powers, it would seem that they would have had an easy time getting the work published. But that did not happen. Being disconnected from the younger generation, the media’s excessive focus on black separatist activities, and the loss of funding for the project are just a few reasons why the Haverford Group failed to publish their integrationist manifesto. But the consequences of this failure were staggering. Black separatists controlled the narrative of the period, which gave and continues to give the misleading impression that most blacks of the late 1960s and the early 1970s supported black separatism. This context is hugely important for understanding the controversy surrounding the publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. While Styron’s novel initially received Michael Lackey 68 considerable praise, ten black writers authored a book in 1968 viciously criticizing both the novel and Styron. The main criticism was that Styron deliberately distorted “the true character of Nat Turner” (Clarke, “Introduction” viii). Since then, the “Styron controversy [has] led to a bitter and divisive racial conversation that generated deep anger—anger that has not yet dissipated” (Greenberg xvii). In the following pages, I argue that the publication of William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond gives us a faulty perspective not just on Styron’s novel but also on the black community and the time period. One could wrongly assume that Styron and his novel are deeply racist based on the ten black writers’ responses to The Confessions of Nat Turner. But if one understands that the writers in the volume were not just black but black separatists, then this would significantly impact our understanding of their critique. Moreover, when one understands that black separatists were an extremely vocal minority rather than a majority in the black community, one must reconsider the importance of the volume. This is not to say that the book lacks relevance or meaning. It is just to say that the book, when placed in its context, represents the views of a small percentage of blacks whose views about race, sexuality, aesthetics, and identity have been in large measure debunked. To make my case, I will use the ideas from The Haverford Discussions, which—significantly—were composed not just by blacks but by black integrationists. I. “In the vacuum left by [Martin Luther] King no spokesman has emerged to electrify us with the tough-minded message that segregation and separatism, whether they arise from black or white communities, cripple our potential as social beings.” (Johnson 194) Underwriting the black separatist agenda of the ten black writers is an atomistic conception of human identity. For these writers, black is ontologically separate and distinct from white, so it is mandatory that blacks resist the impulse to integrate and thereby dilute their blackness. Within this framework, what makes Styron’s novel so objectionable is the fact that his Turner is actually white, which is, as Lerone Bennett claims, “not only the antithesis of Nat Turner,” but also “the antithesis of blackness” (5). Human identity can and should be demarcated along rigidly racial lines, and it is for this reason that The Confessions fails so miserably. As Vincent Harding says of Styron’s historical and literary Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 69 crime against Turner: “His life, robbed by Styron of its roots, is somehow neither black nor white, and suffers from the loss of particularity as well as power” (26). In blending black and white or transcending race altogether, Styron does irreparable damage to the historical memory and figure of Turner. For these writers, this ontologically separate approach to racial identity should be the basis for doing history, which is another reason why they are so critical of Styron’s work. We see this most clearly through Harding’s critique of the integrationist James Baldwin, who was invited to attend the first Haverford meeting, was a friend of Styron’s, and saw himself in the character of Styron’s Turner. Baldwin praised The Confessions of Nat Turner, claiming that Styron’s novel “is the beginning of our common history” (Harding 32). But Harding rejects this view because, as he insists, “There can be no common history until we have first fleshed out the lineaments of our own, for no one else can speak out of the bittersweet bowels of our blackness” (32). In this view, not only is it possible to do a separate and distinct black history, but it is also crucial for the uplift of blacks. John Oliver Killens, author of numerous novels and books, also contributed an extremely critical essay to the Ten Black Writers volume, but it was in his article for Gayle’s book The Black Aesthetic where he best articulated his separatist approach to history. In this essay, Killens refers to the “lives of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, [and] Sojourner Truth,” whose stories “are as formidable as George Washington’s, and are based on a much more substantial reality.” Significantly, Killens tells his black readers that “Slavemasters Washington and Jefferson do not belong to our children” (“Black Writer” 368). In the United States, blacks have one history, while whites have another. Members of the Haverford Group rejected the separatist approach to human identity and American history as both intellectually incoherent and politically dangerous. Clark convened the first meeting at Haverford College in order to counter the separatists, who consider “integration a dirty word” (Lackey, Haverford. 5). Consistent among the members of the Haverford Group is their conviction that the separatists have adopted an essentialist conception of black identity, which is based on the same approach that white supremacists adopted and used. To illustrate how this approach functions, Franklin tells a story about a white man who thought that, because Franklin was black, he could “dance a jig.” Michael Lackey 70 Understanding the naïve epistemological assumptions and the tacit racism undergirding this view, Franklin rightly condemns it. But he marvels that then-contemporary blacks have embraced this same kind of essentialist approach to racial identity: “Now Negroes say they can, you know, they can dance a jig better than” whites (51). According to this model, there is something inside blacks (in the blood or in the genes), referred to by Redding and Franklin as either a “genetic endowment” or “superior endowments” (74-75), that makes them uniquely capable of doing something that whites cannot. Black integrationists reject this idea as ridiculous not primarily because of the special trait (dancing a jig) but because of the separatist philosophy underwriting the view. In an essay titled “The Black Revolution in American Studies,” Redding defines the black separatist approach to and view of racial identity most clearly. In the first paragraph, Redding faults thencontemporary black separatists, who presume “no less than the universal social, cultural, and literary history of blacks from pre-Islamic times to the present and the biological and anthropological linkage of all black people.” Redding opposes this view because it is premised on the idea of “a genetic constant, although the theory of a genetic constant has been repudiated by the best scientific minds for a hundred years.” What is really behind Redding’s critique is his rejection of metaphysics, the idea that there exists an immutable essence that transcends cultural context. Black separatists, Redding charges, believe that race is a metaphysical signifier. Consequently, twentieth-century American black separatists believe that they can trace their heritage and identity to the “blacks from pre-Islamic times” (8). Moreover, they believe that their American identities cannot be linked in any substantive way with eighteenth-century white Frenchmen or nineteenth-century white Brits.2 Rather than seeing racial identity in essentialist terms (biological, genetic, or metaphysical), black integrationists see it in cultural, sociological, or anthropological terms. Given this shift in the view of and approach to race from ontological to cultural, the whole basis of separatism collapses. Ellison clarifies why this is the case in a 1970 article 2 For an extensive analysis of Redding’s critique of black separatism and its metaphysical approach to race, see my essay “Redeeming the Post-Metaphysical Promise of J. Saunders Redding’s ‘America.’” Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 71 that was published shortly after the second meeting of the Haverford Group. For Ellison, race is not a genetic, metaphysical, or ontological reality; it is a cultural signifier: It is not skin color which makes a Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the American experience, the social and political predicament; a sharing of that “concord of sensibilities” which the group expresses through historical circumstance and through which it has come to constitute a subdivision of the larger American culture. (“World” 131) In other words, social, political and cultural realities have shaped the identities of American blacks, and while race may have played an important role in the nature of that shaping, it has done so in a sociocultural and not a genetic or ontological sense. The consequence of this approach to race is staggering, especially for whites. As Ellison claims, “Materially, psychologically, and culturally, part of the nation’s heritage is Negro American, and whatever it becomes will be shaped in part by the Negro’s presence” (“What America” 111). Given how much blacks have contributed to the making of the United States, Ellison draws the surprising but inescapable conclusion “that most American whites are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it” (“What America” 108). Based on this culturally integrationist approach to race and identity, Ellison would most likely reject Killens’s claim that blacks must embrace Douglass and Tubman and disown Washington and Jefferson as part of their history. What Ellison would probably say is that Douglass and Tubman are as central to the realization of America’s national identity and democratic ideals as Washington and Jefferson. Therefore, instead of urging blacks to disavow racist white Americans as part of their cultural-national heritage and identity, Ellison would challenge whites to fully acknowledge and own their actual American heritage and identity, which includes Douglass and Tubman, and he would issue this challenge not because it is something that whites should do, but because it is a sociological, political, cultural, and historical fact of being American. In other words, integration is not just one approach among many that we could adopt. It is a cultural, political, and historical fact of our American being, because blacks and whites in the United States “have been integrating since before there was an American nation” (Lackey, Haverford 61). Michael Lackey 72 In essence, black integrationists have profound objections to the philosophy on which ontological separatism is premised, because it, as an ideology that has major political consequences, is the basis for more than just racial discrimination. We see this most clearly in the way the ten black writers treat homosexuality.3 In Styron’s novel, Turner has a homosexual experience with a fellow slave by the name of Willis, and of the ten black writers who critiqued Styron, five fault him for including the scene and some use disgraceful and inexcusable language to do so. Most significant, however, are the assumptions underwriting their critique, which is that homosexuals are subhuman, abnormal, anti-male, repulsive, grotesque, and feminine.4 For instance, Alvin F. Poussaint notes that Styron’s Turner has an ambiguously “homosexual” experience “with another young black slave.” Given this encounter, Poussaint rhetorically asks what this experience tells readers. Here is his answer: “Naturally, it implies that Nat Turner was not a man at all. It suggests that he was unconsciously really feminine.” For Poussaint, it is a given that homosexuality is synonymous with an evil such as the feminine, “an emasculated and ‘abnormal’ character” (“Confessions .” 21), which renders Turner illegitimate and ineffective. According to this framework, homosexuality totally undermines efforts to combat slavery and racism, for Poussaint concludes that the “depiction of the young rebel as a would-be deviant carries the implication that the whole revolt 3 In recent years, scholars have taken note of the scurrilous remarks that many of the ten black writers made about homosexuals and the way Styron’s work functions to support homosexuals. See, for instance, Michael P. Bibler’s “‘As If Set Free into Another Land’” and the “Eating Nat Turner” chapter in Vincent Woodard’s The Delectable Negro. 4 My focus in this section is on the black-separatist demonization of the homosexual. But it is worth noting that many black separatists also made horrible remarks about women. In “The Sexual Mountain,” Calvin Hernton says, during the Black Power/Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, the unequal recognition and treatment of women writers was enunciated more bigotedly than perhaps ever before. “The only position in the revolution for women is the prone position!” “The women’s place is seven feet behind the men!” Pronouncements like these were reflected again and again in the writings, and deeds, of the males of the period. (197) It is worth noting that women were a part of the Haverford Group and that there was not a single negative comment about homosexuals in any of their meetings. Moreover, many members of the group were friends with and strong supporters of the famous civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who worked behind the scenes of the movement so that his homosexuality would not become a distraction. Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 73 against slavery and racism was somehow illegitimate and ‘abnormal’” (22). If this were the only instance of flagrant homophobia in the volume, one could dismiss it as a mere aberration. But these assumptions about homosexuality and this kind of analysis inform much of the work. For instance, after mentioning that “Nat has been engaged in homosexual mutual stimulation with a young black friend,” Harding refers to a joint baptism scene with a white man. For Harding, what makes this scene so despicable, and a logical extension of Turner’s experience with Willis, is that he is baptized with a homosexual. Like Poussaint, Harding assumes that there is a clear and unambiguous meaning in Styron’s fictional representation of homosexuality: “Styron has used this event too, but in such a way as to continue the demeaning of Nat Turner” (27). We can agree, Harding is saying, that homosexuality is a universal symbol used to discredit, delegitimize, and degrade a character. Killens extends this view of homosexuality beyond Styron by referencing Sir Lawrence Olivier’s movie version of Othello, which he considers profoundly flawed, because Olivier “reduced” Othello “to a shuffling stupid-cunning whining idiot, half man and half faggot” (“Confessions” 35). In this register, the faggot signifies that which is neither fully human nor fully male (one gets the sense that to be fully human, one must be a full-fledged heterosexual male for Killens), and Killens, like Poussaint and Harding, takes it as a given that his readers will accept this as a self-evident truth. So it should come as no surprise that Loyle Hairston casually refers to Turner’s homosexual experience as “grotesque” (71). Given that so many writers in this volume are in agreement about the meaning of homosexuality, Hamilton feels free to make a recommendation on behalf of the entire black community: Styron’s literary mind can wander [sic] about homosexuality and the like, and his vast readership can have their stereotypes strengthened by an image of a black preacher who is irrational and weak (unable to kill, excepting some white woman he loves) and uncertain. But black people should reject this; and white people should not delude themselves. (74) In 2003, Kenneth S. Greenberg published a follow-up interview with Poussaint. This interview is extremely valuable, because it sheds considerable light on the assumptions and ideology animating the dominant critique of Styron. Poussaint clarifies how developments in the turbulent sixties led to debates in the black community “about black 74 Michael Lackey consciousness versus integration” (“Interview” 234). As a young man, Poussaint supported the integrationist approach. But as whites became increasingly more aggressive, militant, and violent in their approach to black protests and as he started to better grasp entrenched forms of racism in both the white and black communities, Poussaint began to recognize both the need for and value of separatism. This separatist orientation, in part, explains his objection to Styron, who “seems to have thought the race problem could be solved through integration” (“Interview” 240). Most important for the purpose of this essay are Poussaint’s retrospective comments about the homosexual scene in the novel. One gets the sense that Poussaint now regrets his scurrilous remarks from the 1968 volume, so he seeks to locate them within a cultural context in order to excuse them: You have to remember that this was in 1967. When I read this episode I had the feeling that Styron was depicting something odd and deviant. That is what I felt. He even had Nat Turner refer to the encounter as a sin. In the context of the times, to describe such an encounter was to take away the “manhood” of the person. Even psychiatrists at that time believed that homosexuals lacked “manhood,” that they were feminized, that they were some form of woman, and that they were weak. Styron seemed to be saying Nat Turner couldn’t deal with his manhood, was passive, and really didn’t want to be a killer. That is the way the American public saw it at the time too, certainly. (“Interview” 241) As a symbol with a clearly defined meaning, the homosexual scene signifies a lack of manhood that effectively delegitimizes Turner, his heroism, and the insurrection. This may not be the way we interpret homosexuality today, Poussaint implies, but it is likely that that is what Styron meant to suggest when he authored the scene in 1967 and it is “certainly” how it would have been interpreted in the late sixties. Actually, however, we can say with some certainty that black integrationists would not have interpreted the homosexual scene as the black separatists did. In 1942, Redding published No Day of Triumph, a brilliant work that does short biographical sketches of everyday blacks throughout the South. One of the most moving sections from the work features Rosalie Hatton, whose life is destroyed because she is a lesbian. Rosalie’s brother refuses to acknowledge her as family, because she is “a pervert” and a “woman-lover” (No 236). Given the brutal way that Rosalie is treated, Redding refers to her story as “the hearse of an American dream” (No 215). In 1952, Ellison published Invisible Man, Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 75 which pictures the way systems of oppression function to divest blacks as well as other groups of people of their dignity and rights. As a young black man, the narrator witnesses how a white stripper suffers the same indignities that he experiences (“I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror” [20]). But it is not just white women who are violated with impunity. Ellison pictures a scene about “one of the unspeakables” (188), the figure of Emerson who identifies with the narrator because he, as a homosexual, knows what it is like to be strategically marginalized. In 1956, Baldwin published Giovanni’s Room, a novel that sympathetically portrays a complex form of romantic and sexual love between two men. To put the matter simply, three prominent black integrationists who were invited to join the Haverford Group have sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality in their works well before 1967, and they clarify how structurally similar forms of argument and logic are used to violate blacks and homosexuals with emotional and psychological impunity. The most obvious example of this parallel can be seen in Richard Wright’s The Long Dream, a 1958 novel that presciently articulates a view that has come to dominate in the twenty-first century. The characters Tony, Sam, Zeke, and Fishbelly are going to play baseball, when they notice Aggie West, a young homosexual that all the other boys despise because of his homosexuality. After calling him a “pansy,” “fairy,” “Homo,” and “sissy” (38), Sam smashes a bat against Aggie’s chest and the others beat him. In their subsequent conversation, Zeke, in a self-accusatory moment, uses an analogy to question what they have done to Aggie: “‘We treat ’im like the white folks treat us” (39). This leads the four to a fruitful conversation: “Why you reckon he acts like a girl?” Fishbelly asked. “Beats me,” Tony said. “They say he can’t help it.” “He could if he really tried,” Zeke said. “Mebbe he can’t. . . . Mebbe it’s like being black,” Sam said. “Aw naw! It ain’t the same thing,” Zeke said. “But he ought to stay ’way from us,” Fishbelly said. “That’s just what the white folks say about us,” Sam told him. (39-40) As beings that are ontologically different and inferior, gays, Fishbelly asserts, should be separate (“he ought to stay ’way from us”) from the “normal” people, heterosexuals in this case. But Sam and Tony rightly note that Fishbelly is deploying the same discursive strategies whites use Michael Lackey 76 against blacks (“That’s just what the white folks say about us”). Separatism is a philosophy that justifies the marginalization and violation of not just blacks, but also homosexuals. Black integrationists, who realize that racism and homophobia are merely surface problems, reject separatism, because it promotes a way of thinking that makes multiple forms of political injustice possible. Black separatists focus on a surface issue like race, and consequently, they, like Fishbelly, fail to see that they have adopted a philosophy that contributes to the marginalization and violation of other groups of people, such as homosexuals. Styron, who was friends with the integrationists Redding, Baldwin, and Ellison, is an integrationist, and in his novel, he does not seek to expose surface evils such as racism and homophobia. Rather, he seeks to expose and debunk a separatist ideology and make the case for integration. For Styron, were people to understand and embrace the philosophy underwriting integration, racism and homophobia would ultimately become incoherent nonsense. II. “As a writer who tries to reduce the flux and flow of life to meaningful artistic forms I am stuck with integration, because the very process of the imagination as it goes about bringing together a multiplicity of scenes, images, characters and emotions and reducing them to significance is nothing if not integrative.” (Ellison, Haverford 111) It is through the relationship between Willis and Nat that Styron symbolically represents both the nature and value of integration as well as how integration is thwarted and undermined. Blithely unaware of his own sexual proclivities, Nat is drawn to Willis, for he “found something irresistible about his gaiety and his innocent, open disposition” (Styron, Confessions 201). While Nat says that he and Willis “became fast friends” (201), there are indications that his feelings, unbeknownst to him, go beyond mere friendship. Notice, for instance, how Nat describes Willis’ appearance: “He was a slim, beautiful boy with fine-boned features, very gentle and wistful in repose, and the light glistened like oil on his smooth black skin” (202). This is certainly not how a stereotypical male hero would describe another male. Nat is clearly attracted to Willis, and this attraction creeps up on him before his conscious and judgmental Christian conscience can thwart and/or condemn it. Indeed, Nat’s religious faith initially contributes to his feelings for and bond with Willis. As a Christian, Nat seeks to convert his friend, and he succeeds: “I was able eventually to bring him into an awareness of God’s Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 77 great handiwork and the wonder of His presence abiding in all the firmament” (203). In this instance, faith affirms the majesty and beauty of being as divine presence. Shortly after this conversion, the two men experience a form of religious serenity while fishing, but after Willis pricks his finger, he unthinkingly curses, which leads Nat to hit his friend. Nat regrets doing this, so he tenderly touches Willis to express remorse; this sympathetic response leads to their sexual encounter: I reached up to wipe away the blood from his lips, pulling him near with the feel of his shoulders slippery beneath my hand, and then we somehow fell on each other, very close, soft and comfortable in a sprawl like babies; beneath my exploring fingers his hot skin throbbed and pulsed like the throat of a pigeon, and I heard him sigh in a faraway voice, and then for a long moment as if set free into another land we did with our hands together what, before, I had done alone. Never had I known that human flesh could be so sweet. (204) Significant is the fact that the two accidentally fall into this scene. As a devout nineteenth-century Christian, Nat could not sanction or abide a homosexual experience. But because he is governed primarily by an affirmative version of faith at this moment, one that celebrates and amplifies earthly experience, he does not even attend to Christianity’s prohibition against homosexuality. Indeed, after the experience, he recites a suggestively ambiguous Bible passage from first Samuel in which “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” (204). His affirmative version of faith leads him to seek in scripture something that would support his sexual intimacy with Willis. Still subscribing to an affirmative version of faith, Nat allows himself to take in the beauty and delight of the experience: “My skin still tingled with pleasure, a tired gentle luxurious feeling” (205). Sexual intimacy with Willis is consistent with his religious view that deifies earthly experience. But this changes. In a move reminiscent of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the belated rise of the Christian conscience threatens to sully and perhaps destroy the sacred experience. In forming a bond with Jim, Huck overcomes some (not all) of his absurd prejudices against blacks. Thus, Huck and Jim become friends, and Huck resolves to help Jim escape to freedom. But when Jim is finally on the verge of liberation, Huck’s Christian “conscience went to grinding” him, leading him to believe “that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all 78 Michael Lackey the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm” (199). Living at a time when for the majority being Christian meant being pro-slavery, Huck nearly destroys all that he has experienced with Jim in the name of his faith. Fortunately, Huck chooses Jim and hellfire above Christian teaching. In like manner, it is the belated rise of his Christian faith that nearly destroys Nat’s experience with Willis. Shortly after the encounter, Nat confesses to the Lord: “‘witness these two sinners who have sinned and have been unclean in Thy sight and stand in need to be baptized’” (205). There is some ambiguity here. Was the homosexual experience the unclean act? Or, was it sex outside of marriage? Textual evidence suggests that Nat does not consider his homosexual experience sinful. Just before baptizing Willis, Nat cites the following scripture: “‘For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,’ I said, ‘whether we be Jews and Gentiles, whether we be bond or free, and have been all made to drink into one Spirit…’” (206). This is the core idea underwriting the integrationist philosophy. Separatists have an atomistic conception of identity, which holds that there are clear and rigid distinctions between blacks and whites, males and females, and heterosexuals and homosexuals. By stark contrast, integrationists have a fluid and intermingling approach to identity, so simple binaries become incoherent. Within this framework, is Nat homosexual or heterosexual? This question makes no sense for integrationists, for as Ellison claims, integration is the cultural reality that makes us who we are. So just as there is no such thing as pure black or pure white in the United States, there is no such thing as pure heterosexual or homosexual. A fluid, blending, and intermixing of racial, sexual, and gender identity is who and what we are, so whites are part black and heterosexuals are part homosexual. This integrationist approach has enormous ramifications for the political. The separatist approach holds that, since blacks and whites are ontologically distinct, there must be separate and distinct laws for them. But the integrationists hold that the black/white dichotomy is ultimately untenable and incoherent, so they claim that there should be only one law that applies to all people. To put the integrationist scripture passage that Nat recites into democratic political terms, we have all been made to drink into one spirit, so there should not be separate and distinct laws for blacks and whites, women and men, or heterosexuals and homosexuals. Rather, there should be one law that applies to all people equally. This Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 79 is not just a political proposal. For integrationists, this is the only logical response to the integrationist fact of being. Since Nat supports an integrationist approach, there is no reason to believe that he would condemn homosexuality. Therefore, it makes sense to say that sex outside marriage is the unclean act for which the two must repent. But Nat’s belief in the prohibition against pre-marital sex is one of his theological mistakes. Styron rejected Christianity and was very critical of it because he considered it “a conspiracy to deny its adherents their fulfillment as human beings.” For Styron, religion and God should affirm and magnify “the glories of life.” But Christianity does the exact opposite by criminalizing that which is most sacred and holy, and “High among its prohibitions was sexual pleasure” (Styron, “Transcontinental” 489). Confessing as sinful a sacred moment of sexual intimacy is, for Styron, an act of blasphemy, a violation against life and God. This explains why God refuses to communicate with Nat after he baptizes Willis: I waited for God’s voice. For an instant indeed I thought He spoke but it was only the rushing of the wind high in the treetops. My heart pounded wildly and I recall thinking then: Maybe not now. Maybe He don’t want to speak now, but at another time. (206) In Styron’s world, God would not sanction a baptism based on a renunciation of a life-affirming act of sexual love. Since Nat has rejected God by condemning and renouncing a sacred life experience, God rejects Nat. Given this approach, we could say that Nat is a life-renunciating integrationist. This is seen most clearly through his fantasy future with Willis: “It would be hard to describe how much it pleased me to think of Willis free like myself in the city, the two of us dedicated to spreading God’s word among the black people and to honest work in the employ of the white” (207). Like a married couple, Nat and Willis will work in an imagined future alongside whites in order to spread the integrationist Gospel in which we all can be made to drink into one spirit. But Nat will reject this integrationist approach to life and faith and adopt a separatist one, and what will lead him to do so—ironically—is a white liberal. Samuel Turner is the novel’s white liberal, and while it might at first seem that he is an integrationist, such is not the case. Samuel opposes slavery, and yet he claims that the slaves “cannot be freed” (160), because they lack the requisite education to succeed in Michael Lackey 80 American society. This claim, of course, suggests that all whites are sufficiently educated to merit freedom. But Styron strategically includes scenes in the novel to debunk Samuel’s assertion. For instance, after Nat is sold, he is driven in a wagon by Thomas Moore and his cousin to Southampton. But the two men forget the directions. When they come to a fork in the road, there is a sign that identifies the road to Southampton, but because both white men are illiterate, they do not know which way to go. It is Nat who tells them the right road to take. Based on Samuel’s logic, Moore and his cousin would not qualify for freedom. In essence, Samuel, who seems to be a liberal anti-racist, has adopted a mentality that leads him to treat blacks and whites as ontologically separate and distinct, thus indicating that he is a racist, whether he realizes it or not. It is Samuel’s liberal racist approach that ultimately leads Nat to reject integration and to become an ontological separatist. Nat starts to become aware of Samuel’s subtly racist orientation when Samuel tells him that he has plans for Nat’s formal education. This is the “beginning of an apprenticeship in carpentry” (171). On the surface, Samuel’s gesture is kind and thoughtful. But beneath the surface, ontological separatism informs it. Nat hints that this is the case when he contrasts his experience with the way whites are educated: “I flung myself into this new fresh field of learning with all the delight and anticipation and hungry high spirits of a white boy setting off for the College of William & Mary and an education in the mysteries of law” (171). At this point, Nat can read, and he has become an excellent student of scripture. Given his natural gifts and his personal interests, he would be an ideal seminarian. But instead of suggesting an education that would be suitable to Nat’s talents and desires, Samuel settles on training him in a way that would be suitable for a black man.5 That Samuel’s decision leads Nat to reflect on distinct occupations for blacks and whites is clear when he refers to the parallel form of education for “a white boy.” According to their natures, black boys must be trained to be manual laborers, while white boys can be educated for intellectual 5 In the chapter “Dual-Temporal Truths in the Biographical Novel” in The American Biographical Novel, I demonstrate that Styron patterned Nat’s life on Malcolm X’s, and it is this scene with Samuel that is central to my argument. Nat and Malcolm would like to pursue an intellectual education, but each is encouraged by a white liberal to do manual labor. For both Nat and Malcolm, this experience is crucial in their turn against whites. Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 81 professions—such is the logic of the ontological separatism informing Samuel’s benevolent gesture. It is when Samuel sells Willis that Nat finally registers the horror, magnitude, and significance of his situation as an ontologically separate being. Without any input of their own or their loved ones, slaves can be bought and sold, permanently separated from friends and family. In Nat’s case, when Samuel sells Willis, he has broken up a potential black family, which in part explains why Nat turns so viciously against him. Realizing that even seemingly kind and liberal whites are racists, Nat becomes an ontological separatist who believes that all whites are evil. This leads to the cultivation of “a sense of dull revulsion bordering on an almost unbearable hatred for white people” (286). White people, even if they are babies or individuals who support black liberation and empowerment (as does Styron’s Margaret Whitehead), are guilty according to Nat’s ontologically separatist model. Thus, killing them all is a black liberationist must. In essence, what Styron so brilliantly pictures in his novel is a specific psycho-epistemological structure (ontological separatism) that makes political oppression possible. Ontological separatists hold that there is an essential distinction between blacks and whites, heterosexuals and homosexuals. As such, there must be separate rules and laws for understanding and interacting with each group. Within this framework, Thomas Gray, the lawyer who takes Nat’s confession, knows Nat because “the qualities of irresolution, instability, spiritual backwardness, and plain habits of docility are so deeply embedded in the Negro nature” (88). Consequently, Gray concludes that “the Negro occupies at best but a middling position amongst all the species, possessing a relationship which is not cousin-german to the other human races but one which is far closer to the skulking baboon of the dark continent from which he springs” (93). In like manner, Nat knows the murdered babies and Margaret because all whites are evil, which is why the separatist Nat says to his followers: “to draw the blood of white men is holy in God’s eyes.” (410). Ironically, the ten black writers use this ontological-separatist approach when interpreting Styron’s novel. Five of the ten black separatist writers know Styron’s Nat because all homosexuals are womanish, perverted, cowardly, abnormal, grotesque faggots. To put the matter directly, Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner identifies and exposes ontological separatism as the psycho-epistemological basis for Michael Lackey 82 political oppression, and this separatist philosophy informs the work of the black writers who condemned Styron’s novel. Just as significant, what distorted the black writers’ interpretation of The Confessions is their failure to understand the conventions of the biographical novel. According to Bennett, “Instead of following the traditional technique of the historical novelist, who works within the tension of accepted facts, Styron forces history to move within the narrow grooves of his preconceived ideas” (4-5). Within this framework, novelists are free to fill in the gaps of history by inventing characters or scenes that could logically supplement or illuminate the established facts, but they do not have the freedom to alter the historical record. Based on this approach, John A. Williams says that a writer who focuses on a historical figure “is required to be both a novelist and a historian” (46). But had Bennett and Williams understood some of the conventions of the biographical novel, they would have realized that their critiques were misguided and inapplicable.6 In the historical novel, the protagonist is a fictional figure that represents a historical-social type. As such, this figure symbolically functions to illuminate the social, political, and economic forces that shape and determine the culture’s dominant consciousness.7 The biographical novel is different because the protagonist is based on an actual historical figure. It might seem that the biographical novel is a form of biography that seeks to represent the life of an actual person with as much precision and accuracy as possible, but a brief survey of excellent biographical novels clearly indicates that this is not the case. In the biographical novel Black Thunder (1936), Arna Bontemps makes the protagonist Gabriel Prosser illiterate, even though we know that the actual figure was very literate. In Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Zora Neale Hurston suggests that Moses was not born a Hebrew, as he is in the Old Testament. In Sally Hemings (1979), Barbara Chase-Riboud has the famous painter John Trumbull do a portrait of Sally Hemings, even though there is no record that this happened. And in Cloudsplitter (1998), Russell Banks’s Owen Brown tells his story in 1903, despite the 6 For a more detailed discussion of the conventions of the biographical novel and a clarification of the way these conventions impact our understanding of The Confessions of Nat Turner, see the introduction to my book Truthful Fictions and my book The American Biographical Novel. 7 For an extensive analysis of the historical novel, see Lukács. Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 83 fact that the actual person died in 1889.8 Put simply, prominent biographical novelists both before and after 1967 altered historical and biographical facts, which indicates that these writers were not actually interested in giving readers a literal picture of an actual person’s life. This, of course, begs the question: what kind of truth are biographical novelists trying to give their readers? The answer differs from author to author, but in Styron’s case, central are the structures and conditions of oppression that lead to violent insurrections. As an integrationist who believes that black and white Americans are equally worthy of the promises contained within the Constitution and the Declaration, Styron considers ontological separatism the primary source of our political and cultural woes. Thus, Styron’s aesthetic goal is to depict the dangers emanating from an ontological-separatist ideology, whether white or black, and to imagine an alternative integrationist future. One of the key changes Styron made to the figure of Nat Turner illustrates this point. The black separatist writers were furious with Styron for having his Nat entertain fantasies of sex with a white woman. There were two separate objections: Styron ignored the seeming fact that Turner was married and perpetuated the stereotype that black males have an obsession with white women.9 But what this interpretation overlooks is the transformation in Nat’s character, a transformation that underscores Styron’s critique of ontological separatism and his support for integration. Young, naïve, and idealistic, the white female character Margaret Whitehead rejects the idea that blacks are inferior, opposes slavery, and exposes the hypocrisy of pro-slavery Christians. If any white person in the novel should be seen as supportive of Nat and blacks more generally, it would be Margaret. But Nat fantasizes about violently raping the young woman. Why? Styron uses Margaret to chart a transformation in Nat’s character, which is best expressed through Nat’s sex fantasies. After becoming a black separatist and settling on a violent insurrection, Nat retreats to the woods in order to pray and fast. While there, he is sexually aroused, which leads 8 In “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction,” I clarify the distinction between biography and biofiction. Biographers seek to represent the life of the biographical subject with as much clarity as possible, while biographical novelists use the biographical subject in order to project their vision of life and the world. 9 In his biography of Styron, West presents evidence to indicate that Styron had considered the possibility that Turner was married (338). Michael Lackey 84 him to masturbate. When pleasuring himself, Nat initially fantasizes about a black woman from town. But midway through the experience, he replaces the black woman with a white one. This might seem to support the black separatist view that Styron believes that black men favor white women. But actually, Nat’s masturbatory fantasy shifts from being an act of sexual fulfillment with a black woman to a brutal rape of a white woman. In essence, Nat’s violent hatred of white people taints even his sex fantasies. Notice how his climax with the white woman is described as “a sudden racking spasm or an illness so shattering to the senses that it imposed wonder, and disbelief.” (347). In this moment, Styron is not suggesting that black men desire white women. He is suggesting that militant black separatists detest all whites and see rape as a way to punish the white community. Significantly, Nat’s rape fantasy is not a demented concoction of Styron’s twisted imagination. It is a perverse law of political oppression. Black separatist Eldridge Cleaver characterizes the matter in Soul on Ice by indicting racist America, but he also clarifies how he and other blacks both get revenge on and incite terror within the white community. “Rape,” for Cleaver, is “an insurrectionary act,” because it sends “waves of consternation throughout the white race” (26). Personally, it “delighted” Cleaver to rape white women, because in doing so, he “was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values” (26). To indicate that this is more than just one man’s response to racial and political oppression, Cleaver quotes LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka), who speaks about raping “the white girls” in his poem “Black Dada Nihilismus.” Indeed, Cleaver goes on to say that “there are, of course, many young blacks out there right now who are slitting white throats and raping the white girl” (26). Based on all these examples, Cleaver concludes that there are some “funky facts of life” (27), one of which is that those who are politically oppressed on the basis of race will wreak revenge by raping women from the oppressor class.10 It is Styron’s understanding of this cultural law that explains why he included the scene of Nat fantasizing about raping a white woman and 10 For a more extensive analysis of this psycho-political law regarding rape, see my essay “The Scandal of Jewish Rage in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.” As I demonstrate, Styron was aware of this law, and he uses it in his creation of his character Nathan. It is worth noting that the Yiddish version of Elie Wiesel’s Night contains an example of Jewish males expressing their desire to rape German women after their liberation from a concentration camp. Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 85 a later scene when Nat imagines raping Margaret. But Styron differs from the separatist Cleaver because, as an integrationist, he considers ontological separatism the basis of the problem. Styron’s commitment to integration is seen most clearly through Nat’s sex fantasy on the night before he is hanged. The fantasy is about a white woman, probably Margaret. Significant is the difference between the earlier fantasy, which was described as a sick (“illness”) rape, and the concluding fantasy, which is described as a healthy experience of union and reconciliation. Here’s how the imagined climax is experienced: “With tender stroking motions I pour out my love within her; pulsing flood; she arches against me, cries out, and the twain—black and white—are one” (426). This is not just an individual story about Nat Turner and Margaret Whitehead. It is a much bigger story about “black and white,” thus underscoring the novel’s integrationist theme. Based on Nat’s positive sex fantasy with a white woman, one could wrongly assume that Styron’s Turner ultimately regrets the violent insurrection. But this is not true. In the final section, Turner muses to himself: “I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet I would have spared one. I would have spared her that showed me Him whose presence I had not fathomed or maybe never even known” (428). For Turner and Styron, the white racist slavers got exactly what they deserved, so Nat rightly feels no remorse for their deaths. But not all whites are racist slavers, which is why he would have spared Margaret. In essence, this conclusion debunks the idea of ontological separatism. The separatist lawyer Thomas Gray believes that all blacks are lazy, stupid, and docile beings, while the separatist Nat Turner believes that all whites are racist slavers. But Turner, like Malcolm X, undergoes a transformation, which leads him to reject ontological separatism (Nat would spare Margaret, because she is not like all the other whites that they killed) and to embrace integration (black and white become one). Integration rather than separatism or segregation, Styron suggests, is the only way to combat and overcome racial injustice. We are now in a position to answer a very important question that Clarke raises in his “Introduction” to Ten Black Writers Respond.: “why did William Styron create his Nat Turner and ignore the most important historical facts relating to the real Nat Turner?” (vii). Specifically, Clarke would like to know: “Why did he ignore the fact that Nat Turner had a wife whom he dearly loved?” (vii). The answer has something to do with Styron’s integrationist objectives as a biographical novelist. Literal truths, 86 Michael Lackey like the seeming fact that Turner was married, are subordinate to more important truths, like the psycho-epistemological structure (ontological separatism) that creates the conditions for injustice to flourish. Since Styron considers the psycho-epistemological structure most important for understanding what led to racial injustice and what prompted Turner’s rebellion, he alters lesser significant facts (such as Turner’s marriage) in order to bring into sharp focus the most crucial structure (ontological separatism) at work during the time. This stratification of truth explains why Styron eliminated Turner’s wife and included the scenes with Margaret, but it does not explain Styron’s decision to create Nat’s homosexual encounter with Willis. The reason for this aesthetic choice also presupposes an understanding of the biographical novel. Biographers seek to illuminate the life of a person from the past with as much clarity and precision as possible. Biographical novelists are primarily fiction writers, so they have a very different objective. They identify and appropriate a story that functions to illuminate more than just what happened in the past. They then convert that story into a symbol that could be used to illuminate something from both the past and the present. In Styron’s case, the structures of ontological separatism in the nineteenth century continue to operate within the late twentieth century. However, those structures are used not just to define blacks and whites as ontologically separate and distinct, but also heterosexuals and homosexuals. In order to bring into sharp focus precisely why ontological separatism is such a dangerous political problem, Styron strategically invented the homosexual scene with Willis, thereby suggesting, as did Wright in The Long Dream, that this philosophy is damaging heterosexuals and homosexuals as well as blacks and whites. The solution to the problem is not to wage an ideological war against racism and homophobia, bad as they are, but to expose ontological separatism as their basis and foundation. Within this framework, the way to combat the problem is to be “set free into another land,” a multidimensional integrationist land in which the philosophy of ontological separatism is rendered incoherent and obsolete. Ironically, the critique of ontological separatism at the core of Styron’s novel could be applied to the black separatists who faulted and condemned The Confessions of Nat Turner. Just as white supremacists portray blacks as ontologically separate and distinct in order to justify calling them inferior and therefore subjugating them, black separatists portray homosexuals as ontologically separate and distinct in order to Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 87 justify dubbing them unnatural and therefore marginalizing them. It is important at this point to keep in mind that The Confessions of Nat Turner is not a novel about an actual historical person. It is about the oppressive psycho-epistemological structures and conditions that led to Nat Turner’s subjugation and rebellion, and it just so happens that those same structures and conditions are at work against both blacks and homosexuals in Styron’s day. Based on Styron’s intellectual orientation and aesthetic approach, we could name him a de facto member of the Haverford Group.11 Through Styron’s relationship with Baldwin, who was invited to be a member of the Haverford Group and to attend its first meeting, we can best understand the nature of Styron’s multi-dimensional integrationist aesthetic. In the fall of 1960, Baldwin was struggling financially. To assist him, Styron invited Baldwin to live in the studio of his Connecticut home, which he did until the summer of 1961. At the time, Styron was in the early stages of writing The Confessions, but he had concerns. As he told Baldwin, when he first began the novel, he was “reluctant to try to enter the mind of a slave” (“Jimmy” 98). But Baldwin encouraged the white Southerner to “impersonate a black man” (100). Styron describes this conversation in “Jimmy in the House,” an essay that invites readers to think about separatism in more than just racial terms. Note how Styron describes the two writers during this period: “It was a frightfully cold winter, a good time for the southern writer, who had never known a black man on intimate terms, and the Harlem-born writer, who had known few southerners (black or white), to learn something about each other” (97). Styron emphasizes that race as well as region separate Americans, and he welcomes the opportunity for white and black as well as North and South to come together, which is why he was overjoyed by Baldwin’s response to his novel: “He has begun the common history —ours” (101). There is something wonderfully and richly ambiguous about Baldwin’s reference to “the common history—ours.” If we think of the novel solely in racial terms, then the common history would refer to blacks and whites. But if we also think of the novel in regional terms, then the common history would be as meaningful for white Southerners 11 Redding helped Styron with the research for the novel by giving him historical information (see West 221); Ellison and Styron were friends; Baldwin and Styron were friends and Baldwin encouraged Styron to write from a black perspective; and Styron notes that Franklin had a positive response to the novel (“Jimmy” 101). Michael Lackey 88 as it would be for blacks in Harlem. But it is also possible to include another contentious binary: heterosexuals and homosexuals. And if anyone were to implicitly address this troubled binary in America’s common history, it would be the author of the gay novel Giovanni’s Room. This multidimensional approach to common history assumes greater significance and meaning when we note that Baldwin said that he sees some of himself in Styron’s Nat Turner. In the essay in which common history was mentioned, Baldwin says, “I think there’s some of me in Nat Turner.” As he goes on to say, “If I were an actor, I could play the part” (Sokolov 67). As scholars, it is difficult to say with certainty what prompted Styron to create the gay scene between Nat and Willis, but if we know that Baldwin helped and even enabled Styron to interrogate and subsequently deconstruct the artificial barriers that separate whites and blacks as well as Northerners and Southerners, as he claims in “Jimmy in the House,” then it would only make sense that Baldwin also helped Styron to interrogate and deconstruct the heterosexual/homosexual divide. And that Styron explicitly condones homosexuality is clear from his previously unpublished article that celebrates his unorthodox family, none of whom consider “homosexuality to be either wrong or unnatural” (“Family” 330). In essence, The Confessions of Nat Turner does not just dramatize the virtues of integration. It is an integrationist work, one in which a black Northern homosexual and a white Southern heterosexual collaborated in order to expose and condemn the multi-faceted dangers of ontological separatism and to enable contemporary readers to imagine and be set free in another political land, an integrationist land in which separatism’s arbitrary binaries have no ontological or political appeal or force. The multidimensional integrationists Styron and Baldwin are still beckoning us. Works Cited Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dell, 1988. Banks, Russell. Cloudsplitter. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998. Bennett, Lerone, Jr. “Nat’s Last White Man.” Clarke 3-16. Separatists, Integrationists, and . . .The Confessions of Nat Turner 89 Bibler, Michael P. “‘As If Set Free into Another Land’: Homosexuality, Rebellion, and Community in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Perversion and the Social Relation. Ed. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis Foster, and Slavoj Žižek. 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Williams, John A. “The Manipulation of History and of Fact: An ExSoutherner’s Apologist Tract for Slavery and the Life of Nat Turner; or, William Styron’s Faked Confessions.” Clarke 45-49. Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and. Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. New York: New York UP, 2014. Wright, Richard. The Long Dream. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2000. X, Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993.