The Confessions of Nat Turner

by William Styron

‘Feel sorry for a white man and the sorrow is wasted.’ Is

“Hogwash!” he exclaimed. “Christianity is finished and done with. Don’t you know that, Reverend? And don’t you realize further that it was the message contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the prime mover, of this entire miserable catastrophe? Don’t you see the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?”

right: He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

“And would it also be accurate to discern in what you have just said a conviction that perhaps the Negro lags so far behind the rest of us—I mean, the white race—in moral development that, well, for his own welfare it might be best that he—well, be kept in a kind of benevolent subjection? I mean, is it not possible that slavery is perhaps—how shall we say?—the most satisfactory form of existence for such a people?”

it is not in the mood of a Negro, once aware of the irrecoverable fact of his bondage, to dwell on the future at all,

You are the walking proof of what I have tried so hard and usually so Vainly to persuade white gentlemen, including my late beloved brother, namely, that young darkies like yourself can overcome the natural handicaps of their race and at least acquire such schooling as will allow them to enter into pursuits other than the lowest menial animal labor.

They’s an old nigger sayin’