I recall a morning during the late summer of 1967—just a couple of months before the publication of Nat Turner—when I went on a fishing trip off Martha’s Vineyard with two black doctors. They were acquaintances of Jason Epstein, the editor at Random House who had been one of the first to read the manuscript of the book. Being most enthusiastic about the work, he mentioned to the doctors—one a Harvard graduate and the other, I believe, from Cornell—that the subject of my novel was Nat Turner. I remember the unease I felt, and the consternation that Epstein later described feeling, when these two well-educated, worldly black men drew a total blank, declaring without any apparent embarrassment that neither of them had ever heard of Nat Turner in their lives. This was not, despite my suspicions, a put-on. Months later I finally became numb to the many particularities of the attack on me in the book called William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, and managed to shrug off the charges of racism, distortion of the truth, and other derelictions laid against me by blacks everywhere. The one inference which continued to stick most undislodgeably in my craw was that I had maligned a hero universally known and revered throughout the black world in America. I have never professed to be more than an amateur historian, but it took very little professionalism to discover—as I discovered during my early research on Nat—that the writing done on the subject since that revolt in 1831 was skimpy indeed (and, when not skimpy, unreliable) and that with a single exception there had been no substantial work on Nat Turner which could be said to be the product of a professional historian.

Alas, the fiction still persists that Nat Turner was a vital figure in the black consciousness before 1967, studied and explicated by black scholars. As recently as March 1982, one of the more intelligent of my ten black respondents, the historian Vincent Harding, was quoted as saying that I had “ignored the work of black historians by taking credit for resurrecting a black hero.” (To which one must ask: When were writers of historical novels obligated in any way to acknowledge the work of historians?) Claiming no credit really, even now, I still have to insist that prior to my own work there was no important study by any reputable scholar, black or white, with the sole exception of that of a white man, Herbert Aptheker, the Communist party theoretician, who covered the rebellion at some length in his American Negro Slave Revolts. (As if I didn’t have enough trouble with the blacks, Aptheker became one of my fiercest adversaries and during that period denounced me both publicly and in print. Strange how the passing of time engenders charity. I bear no ill will against Aptheker and keep trying to remember—as it might behoove us all to do—that in the horrible dark night of racism at its worst in America, the 1930s, the Communists were among the few friends black people had.)

It was something of a phenomenon, all right. While, of course, many works of science or history or literature have elicited symposiumlike responses in the form of other books, Nat Turner was the first novel in the long annals of American publishing to evoke such an immediate, entirely hostile attack. There was no pretense at balance here, no observance of the gentlemanly rules of polemics or the usual admixture of pros and cons and the attempts to reconcile the bad and good. Justifying their lopsided animus by way of the dual complaint that my book had received unqualified praise in the white press (which was hardly true; it got some very poor reactions, among them a glibly contemptuous review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review) and that no black person had been invited to review it (again untrue; it was reviewed very favorably on the front page of the Chicago Sunday Tribune book section by John Hope Franklin, one of the country’s most distinguished historians), the ten black writers let go an all-out assault. It contained such pitiless indictments of my artistry, my historical and social responsibility, my ethical stance ("morally senile" was the most memorable quote), and even my probable sexual inclinations, that the savagery was at first truly impossible to comprehend. As a matter of fact, though, it was a certain inability to comprehend on my part that enabled me to absorb the shock with less pain than I might have had the attack been more reasoned or temperate. Gradually it sank in that I was being subjected not even to discussible criticism but to the most intractable kind of hysteria—understandable perhaps, though no less ugly for being part of the chaotic racial politics of 1968.

Of course, I fretted and brooded a bit. No Southerner who had fought as hard as I had to free himself of the last clutches of the racial bugaboo wants to hear himself called “an unreconstructed white racist.” Nonetheless, though many of my friends were horrified, I rather surprised myself by the equanimity with which I took this onslaught. (I had even begun to receive phone calls and mail heavy with threat.) Perhaps I simply knew, beleaguered as I was, that help was on its way. This help, I can now see, was essential, for while in my own mind I was guiltless of the atrocities it was claimed I committed, I knew that the general public could easily be bamboozled into thinking that the black writers had a valid case against me. My suspicions were confirmed in this regard when the New York Times daily book critic, who had given my book very favorable treatment in a two-part review, tendered equal time to the black writers, treating their charges with gravity and respect and leaving the impression that I might be every bit the honky trickster I was accused of being. Soon after this, two historians came to my rescue. Both of these scholars had excellent credentials not only as authorities in the field of American slavery but as men personally committed to the cause of civil rights. (The only flaw in their appearance on my behalf was, of course, that they were white.) Martin Duberman wrote a scathing review of the ten black writers in the New York Times Book Review, answering most of the accusations with great skill and a considerable show of contempt. But it was Eugene D. Genovese’s long counterattack in the New York Review of Books that most effectively demolished my critics. His beautifully crafted essay, which point by point dealt inflexibly with all my alleged crimes, not only disposed of the case once and for all but did it with such lofty outrage that the effect was like that of catharsis. Unfortunately, though perhaps inevitably, his piece created its own pathos, for it seemed to say that if a hysterical assault on a novel like mine was all the American black intellectual community could muster, then the community was in a terrible shambles.

I have never ceased being a little surprised at the bustling cottage industry which The Confessions of Nat Turner spawned during the subsequent years. Shortly after its publication there appeared, aside from the Ten Black Writers and bushels of essays and reviews, two complete books devoted to my novel and the controversy surrounding it. Later, in the 1970s, at least two fat, sturdy volumes were written by historians on Nat Turner and his revolt. Each of these writers had plainly worried about my Nat Turner a lot. In one of the books the white author states explicitly that he did not intend to either refute me or refute or defend my critics, although his single reductive description of my book ("depicts Nat as a celibate bachelor given to masturbating about white women”) I think more or less sums up his attitude toward my work. He then goes on to say that “history is largely an interpretive art, the best we can hope for is a careful approximation of what really happened.” To which, of course, one must add that the historical novel, too, is largely interpretive, and is an approximation of what really happened—although the novelist should not (in fact, must not) be very careful. It is his right and privilege to substitute imagination for facts.

The other book—also by a white scholar—makes no bones about being an attempt, at least in part, to refute my vision of Nat Turner, and faults me constantly for having overlooked numerous significant documents pertaining to the revolt. That I did ignore or even willfully avoid certain information which may have been available to me is true. Also, had I been entirely meticulous, I should not have implied—as I imply in this volume’s first essay, “This Quiet Dust”—that I examined every source of fact and data. There obviously existed material which, had I been something more of a scrounger, I might not have wanted to skip. However, I don’t see much importance in all of this. I am flattered that my Nat Turner seems to have achieved such commanding prestige as to provide historians with a touchstone to measure their own notions of accuracy. But, really, how eager most historians seem to be in their desire to preserve their insights from the contamination of a novelist’s insights! There are few historians who appear capable of understanding that a historical novel is in actual flight from facts and the restrictions of pure data, and that the better the novel is—so long as it does not seriously compromise the historical record—the less likely it will show itself to be cluttered by the detritus of fact. About Nat Turner—of whose departed flesh-and-blood self so little is known, or ever will be known—I cared to discover only so much as my instinct as a novelist told me to care. In any case, I am pleased that Nat Turner has survived so well, and that it is now even being read, occasionally, by some intrepid black person of independent mind. I mean nothing supercilious about this last remark. Since the book invites the reader, black or white, merely to partake in an imagined vision within a vision, and claims for itself the quality of being “a meditation on history”—not the revealed truth—there should be nothing in it to fear or hate.

I must have first read this passage when I was ten or eleven years old. At that time my home was not far from Southampton County, where the rebellion took place, in a section of the Virginia Tidewater which is generally considered part of the Black Belt because of the predominance of Negroes in the population. (When I speak of the South and Southerners here, I speak of this South, where Deep South attitudes prevail; it would include parts of Maryland and East Texas.) My boyhood experience was the typically ambivalent one of most native Southerners, for whom the Negro is simultaneously taken for granted and as an object of unending concern. On the one hand, Negroes are simply a part of the landscape, an unexceptional feature of the local scenery, yet as central to its character as the pinewoods and sawmills and mule teams and sleepy river estuaries that give such color and tone to the Southern geography. Unnoticed by white people, the Negroes blend with the land and somehow melt and fade into it, so that only when one reflects upon their possible absence, some magical disappearance, does one realize how unimaginable this absence would be: it would be easier to visualize a South without trees, without any people, without life at all. Thus, at the same time, ignored by white people, Negroes impinge upon their collective subconscious to such a degree that it may be rightly said that they become the focus of an incessant preoccupation, somewhat like a monstrous, recurring dream populated by identical faces wearing expressions of inquietude and vague reproach. “Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family, or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes.” The words are those of Ralph Ellison, and, of course, he is right.

Yet there are many Souths, and the experience of each Southerner is modified by the subtlest conditions of self and family and environment and God knows what else, and I have wondered if it has ever properly been taken into account how various this response to the presence of the Negroes can be. I cannot tell how typical my own awareness of Negroes was, for instance, as I grew up near my birthplace—a small seaside city about equally divided between black and white. My feelings seem to have been confused and blurred, tinged with sentimentality, colored by a great deal of folklore, and wobbling always between a patronizing affection, fostered by my elders, and downright hostility. Most importantly, my feelings were completely uninformed by that intimate knowledge of black people which Southerners claim as their special patent; indeed, they were based upon an almost total ignorance.

For one thing, from the standpoint of attitudes toward race, my upbringing was hardly unusual: it derived from the simple conviction that Negroes were in every respect inferior to white people and should be made to stay in their proper order in the scheme of things. At the same time, by certain Southern standards my family was enlightened: although my mother taught me firmly that the use of “lady” instead of “woman” in referring to a Negro female was quite improper, she writhed at the sight of the extremes of Negro poverty and would certainly have thrashed me had she ever heard me use the word “nigger.” Yet outside the confines of family, in the lower-middle-class school world I inhabited every day, this was a word I commonly used. School segregation, which was an ordinary fact of life for me, is devastatingly effective in accomplishing something that it was only peripherally designed to do: it prevents the awareness even of the existence of another race. Thus, whatever hostility I bore toward the Negroes was based almost entirely upon hearsay.

And so the word “nigger,” which like all my schoolmates I uttered so freely and so often, had even then an idle and listless ring. How could that dull epithet carry meaning and conviction when it was applied to a people so diligently isolated from us that they barely existed except as shadows which came daily to labor in the kitchen, to haul away garbage, to rake up leaves? An unremarked paradox of Southern life is that its racial animosity is really grounded not upon friction and propinquity, but upon an almost complete lack of contact. Surrounded by a sea of Negroes, I cannot recall more than once—and then briefly, when I was five or sixever having played with a Negro child, or ever having spoken to a Negro, except in trifling talk with the cook, or in some forlorn and crippled conversation with a dotty old grandfather angling for hardshell crabs on a lonesome Sunday afternoon many years ago. Nor was I by any means uniquely sheltered. Whatever knowledge I gained in my youth about Negroes I gained from a distance, as if I had been watching actors in an all-black puppet show.

Such an experience has made me distrust any easy generalizations about the South, whether they are made by white sociologists or Negro playwrights, Southern politicians or Northern editors. I have come to understand at least as much about the Negro after having lived in the North. One of the most egregious of the Southern myths—one in this case propagated solely by Southernersis that of the Southern white’s boast that he “knows” the Negro. Certainly in many rural areas of the South the cultural climate has been such as to allow a mutual understanding, and even a kind of intimacy, to spring up between the races, at least in some individual instances. But my own boyhood surroundings, which were semiurban (I suppose suburban is the best description, though the green little village on the city’s outskirts where I grew up was a far cry from Levittown), and which have become the youthful environment for vast numbers of Southerners, tended almost totally to preclude any contact between black and white, especially when that contact was so sedulously proscribed by law.

Yet if white Southerners cannot “know” the Negro, it is for this very reason that the entire sexual myth needs to be re-examined. Surely a certain amount of sexual tension between the races does continue to exist, and the Southern white man’s fear of sexual aggression on the part of the Negro male is still too evident to be ignored. But the nature of the growth of the urban, modern South has been such as to impose ever more effective walls between the races. While it cannot be denied that slavery times produced an enormous amount of interbreeding (with all of its totalitarianism, this was a free-for-all atmosphere far less self-conscious about carnal mingling than the Jim Crow era which began in the 1890s) and while even now there must logically take place occasional sexual contacts between the races—especially in rural areas where a degree of casual familiarity has always obtained—the monolithic nature of segregation has raised such an effective barrier between whites and Negroes that it is impossible not to believe that theories involving a perpetual sexual “tension” have been badly inflated. Nor is it possible to feel that a desire to taste forbidden fruit has ever really caused this barrier to be breached. From the standpoint of the Negro, there is indifference or uncomplicated fear; from that of the white—segregation, the law and, finally, indifference too. When I was growing up, the older boys might crack wan jokes about visiting the Negro whorehouse street (patronized entirely, I later discovered, by Negroes plus a few Scandinavian sailors), but to my knowledge none of them ever really went there. Like Negroes in general, Negro girls were to white men phantoms, shadows. To assume that anything more than a rare and sporadic intimacy on any level has existed in the modern South between whites and Negroes is simply to deny, with a truly willful contempt for logic, the monstrous effectiveness of that apartheid which has been the Southern way of life for almost three quarters of a century.

I have lingered on this matter only to try to underline a truth about Southern life which has been too often taken for granted, and which has therefore been overlooked or misinterpreted. Most Southern white people cannot know or touch black people...