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.Jordan, after examining all extant issues of theRichmond Enquirer for August and September, 1831, found not even any intimation ofrape on the part of Turner s rebels.Nor were there any hints of rape in such newspapersas the Boston Columbian Sentinel, the Albany Argus, the New York Post, the HarrisburgChronicle, the Milledgeville Federal Union, or the Mobile Register, all of which quoted atlength from Virginia newspapers.See also Robert N.Elliott, The Nat Turner Insurrec-tion as Reported in the North Carolina Press, North Carolina Historical Review 38 (1961),1 18. 284 Notes to Pages 197 20058.Higginson, Nat Turner s Insurrection, 175 77; Jordan, Tumult and Silence, 155.WalterWhite, in his 1929 study of lynching, reported that the issue of interracial sex wasdistorted by what he called a conspiracy of semi-silence into an importance infinitelygreater than the actual facts concerning it would justify. That silence, he said, was theresult of a willful blindness to the historical fact the rape of black women by whitemen during and after slavery, combined with what he called a hallucinatory frenzy about the craving for and rape of white women by black men, which, he said, existsmore in fantasy than in fact. That silence, he said, prevented many Southerners fromany kind of response except one of berserk rage. See Walter White, Rope and Faggot:A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 54 55.59.Drewry, Southampton Insurrection, 117; Jordan, Tumult and Silence, 155 56.60.CONT, 368; Gray, Confessions, in TBWR, 105 106; Woodward and Lewis, Confessionsof William Styron, 89; Genovese, William Styron before the People s Court, 204;Bennett, Nat s Last White Man, TBWR, 15.See also Johnson, Nat Turner Slave Insur-rection, 235 36.Styron said in a 1965 interview that one of the things about this Negro,Nat Turner, is that he took it upon himself to do this incredible thing, to slaughter alot of white people, which for an American Negro was probably the most prodigiousand decisive act of free will ever taken. Nat Turner, he said, couldn t deal with theviolence that he himself had ordained, so to speak, and this is part of my story.I thinkit s very central to the book the idea of what happens when a man boldly proposes acourse of total annihilation and starts to carry it out and finds to his dismay that it snot working for him.I think it s unavoidable in an honest reading of Nat Turner sconfessions that he himself was almost unable to grapple with violence, to carry it outsuccessfully. According to Styron, the Nat Turner I created (and perhaps the NatTurner I believe might have existed), failed for the very reason of his humanity. SeeJack Griffin, Jerry Hornsy, and Gene Stelzig, A Conversation with William Styron, inPennsylvania Review I (Spring, 1965), reprinted in Conversations, 57; Canzoneri and Steg-ner, Interview with William Styron, 69; Ben Forkner and Gilbert Schricke, An Inter-view with William Styron, Conversations, 194.61.Bennett, Nat s Last White Man, TBWR, 12, 15; J.Floyd to J.Hamilton, Jr., November19, 1831, in Duff and Mitchell, eds., Nat Turner Rebellion, 44; Higginson, Nat Turner sInsurrection, 181; unsigned communication [presumably from Governor John Floyd]to Richmond Constitutional Whig, September 17, 1831, in Duff and Mitchell, eds., NatTurner Rebellion, 35; Gray, Confessions, in TBWR, 104, 115, 113.62.Johnson, Nat Turner Insurrection, 235 36; J.Floyd to J.Hamilton, Jr., November 19, 1831,in Duff and Mitchell, eds., Nat Turner Rebellion, 44.63.Bennett, Nat s Last White Man, TBWR, 7; Poussaint, Dilemma of William Styron, TBWR, 17 18; Kaiser, Failure of William Styron, TBWR, 63, 65; Killens, Confessionsof Willie Styron, TBWR, 36 passim.The contributors to TBWR misstate some facts,which it might be best to assume were consequences of zeal rather than malice: Styron sConfessions received neither unqualified praise from white reviewers nor unqualifiedopprobrium from black reviewers.Nor was their charge true that no blacks were invitedto review Styron s Confessions.64.Styron, introduction to This Quiet Dust, 6.65.Vincent Harding, You ve Taken My Nat and Gone, TBWR, 29.Among the most sig-nificant collections and analyses of authentic field-recorded African-American folkloreare Roger D.Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets ofPhiladelphia (Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1964) and his Trickster, the OutrageousHero, in Our Living Traditions, ed.Tristram Potter Coffin (New York: Basic Books,1968); Roger Bastide, African Civilisations in the New World, trans.Peter Green (New York,1971); J.Mason Brewer, Humorous Tales of the South Carolina Negro (Orangeburg: SouthCarolina State College, 1945); and his John Tales, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society21 (1946), 81 104, A[bigail].M.H.Christensen, Afro-American Folk Lore Told RoundCabin Fires in the Sea Islands of South Carolina (Boston: J.P.Cupples, 1892); Daniel J.Crowley, ed., African Folklore in the New World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977);Richard M.Dorson, American Negro Folk Tales (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1967); AlanDundes, African and Afro-American Tales, in African Folklore, ed.Crowley, and his Notes to Pages 200 202 285 African Tales among the North American Indians, Southern Folklore Quarterly 29 (1965),207 19; Ambrose E.Gonzales, The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast (Co-lumbia: The State Publishing Co., 1922); Zora Neale Hurston, High John de Conquer, American Mercury 57 (1943), 450 58; and her Mules and Men (Philadelphia: J.P.Lippin-cott, 1935); Bruce Jackson, ed., The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth Century Periodicals(Austin: University of Texas, 1967); Guy B.Johnson, Folk Culture on St.Helena Island,South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930); Charles ColcockJones, Jr., Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1888);Lawrence W.Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness; Afro-American Folk Thought fromSlavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), esp.pp.81 135; Harry C
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