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Book: The Confessions of Nat Turner
Quotes of Book: The Confessions of Nat Turner
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  1. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    -retaining the other half for yourself in savings for the future. Thereupon, at Mr. Pemberton's good report of your labor-and again I have no doubt that this might be anything but exemplary-I shall draw up the papers for your emancipation. You will then at the age of twenty-five be a free man." He paused and gave my shoulder a soft nudge with his gloved fist, adding: "I shall only stipulate that you return to Turner's Mill for a visit every blue moon or two-with whichever young darky girl you have taken for a wife!
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  2. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    It is I am sure a kind of unorthodoxy, and considered thus by some," I hear my master say {I resume my station, still flustered and with a madly working heart}, "but it is my conviction that the more religiously and intellectually enlightened a Negro is made, the better for himself, his master, and the commonweal.
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  3. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    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?
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  4. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    My mother, alone among all the Negroes at Turner's Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks {scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning in his coffin} with a marble headstone not one inch smaller nor a shade less white than theirs. I am no longer oppressed by the fact {as I was for so many years after I had grown to manhood and was able to reflect long and hard on these matters} that the name on that headstone was not a nigger woman's forlorn though honest "Lou-Ann" but the captured, possessed, owned "Lou-Ann Turner.
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  5. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    I reckon even you didn't know the actual statistics, hiding out until now like you done. But in the three days and nights that your campaign lasted you managed to hasten fifty-five white people into early graves, not counting a score or so more fearfully wounded or disabled-hors de combat, as the Frenchies say, for the rest of their natural lives. And only God knows how many poor souls will be scarred in their minds by grief and by terrible memories until the day they part this life. No," he went on, breaking off a black wad from a plug of chewing tobacco, "no, I'll have to hand it to you, in many respects you was pretty thorough. By sword and ax and gun you run a swath through this county that will be long remembered. You did, as you say, come damn near to taking your army into this town. And in addition, as I think I told you before, you scared the entire South into a condition that may be described as well-nigh shitless. No niggers ever done anything like this.
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  6. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.
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  7. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    Therefore, they is only one thing to do …" Here I stopped speaking altogether for a while, allowing these last words to enter their consciousness. Minutes passed and they said nothing, then Henry's voice broke the silence, his deaf man's bleat hoarse and cracked, a shock in the stillness: "Us gotta kill all dem white sonsabitches. Ain't dat what de Lawd done told you? Ain't dat right, Nat?" It was as if by those words we were committed. Us gotta kill … I talked on, detailing my plans.
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  8. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain-what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard's name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand!
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  9. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    I suppose the truth is simply that it was possible for benefits like these to accrue only to a Negro lucky enough to remain in the poor but relatively benign atmosphere of Virginia. For here in this worn-out country with its decrepit little farms there was still an ebb and flow of human sympathy-no matter how strained and imperfect-between slave and master, even an understanding {if sometimes prickly} intimacy; and in this climate a black man had not yet become the cipher he would become in the steaming fastnesses of the far South but could get off in the woods by himself or with a friend, scratch his balls and relax and roast a stolen chicken over an open fire and brood upon women and the joys of the belly or the possibility of getting hold of a jug of brandy, or pleasure himself with thoughts of any of the countless tolerable features of human existence.
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  10. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    Yet I was appalled. For at the same time, such a violent act, even though well provoked and not entirely unheard of, was rare and shocking enough so as to make it likely that an atmosphere of suspicion would close in upon Negroes in general. The gossip would get started: God durned niggers gittin' so they hit back. I was deeply afraid that with such feelings prevalent, our Negroes would become unsettled by the overall mistrust and lose heart for the venture or-even worse-would under this new pressure somehow give away our great secret."
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  11. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    But oh, my brothers, black folk ain't never goin' to be led from bondage without they has pride! Black folk ain't goin' to be free, they ain't goin' to have no spoonbread an' sweet cider less'n they studies to love they own selves. Only then will the first be last, and the last first.
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  12. William Styron _ The Confessions of Nat Turner

    And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one's own life are other men, they who are so desperately preoccupied with their own. I knew nothing about you and that boy, nothing at all.
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