William Styron, a white writer and novelist, was born in 1925 in Newport News, Virginia, the same tidewater region where the real Nat Turner lived one hundred years earlier. Styron's grandmother grew up on a North Carolina plantation, where she owned two slave girls. The hours spent listening to his grandmother's stories about owning slaves haunted the young Styron for years. It troubled him deeply that by his own time racial inequalities still had not been set right. In 1966, during the midst of the growing black civil rights movement, Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, one of his most controversial novels. The book, which focused on the life and rebellion of a black slave in nineteenth-century Virginia, helped shed light on the racial unrest that persisted into the twentieth century.
Early American slavery. Probably as early as 1619, speculators and slave traders brought Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the newly established colonial regions. Unlike white indentured servants, who worked for about seven years, blacks became subject to colonial laws passed in 1660 dictating that slaves would serve white owners for life.
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