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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. According to Nat's statements, the insurrection was ______.
(a) Confined to five farms.
(b) Confined to two counties.
(c) Spread across twelve miles.
(d) Local.

2. What does Nat have a dream about while In the courtroom?
(a) Boys trapped in quicksand.
(b) Winning his case in court and being freed.
(c) Being lost.
(d) Escaping.

3. What is an insurrection?
(a) A fight.
(b) An uprising.
(c) A peace march.
(d) An agreement.

4. Nat's mind "finally" became what, according to Gray?
(a) Twisted.
(b) Corrupted.
(c) Oercome with emotion.
(d) Confused.

5. How does Gray say the "band" resisted when the white people finally caught up to them?
(a) Desperately.
(b) Feebly.
(c) Feverishly.
(d) With great force.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is Nat's execution date?

2. Who is the last slave captured who participated in the rebellion?

3. Turner says he submits Nat's "own account of the conspiracy" to the public ____________.

4. How does Gray say Nat will be punished?

5. Who is Jeremiah Cobb?

Short Essay Questions

1. Describe the world that Nat lived in from a slave's perspective. Now describe it from a white person's perspective.

2. In Part 1, Nat says "a white man's discomfiture, observed on the sly, has always been a Negro's richest delight." Is this true? If so, why? If not, why would Nat think such a thing? Either way, what does that quote suggest about Nat?

3. When Judge Cobb first appears in the book, Nat describes his face as "blighted, ravaged by sorrow." When considering his eventual killing spree, Nat decides to spare Cobb. Why might he have done that?

4. Gray says that all the other insurgents who were examined tried to exculpate themselves. What does that mean? And why Nat didn't do it?

5. In the "Author's Note", Styron says he has "rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt of which he was the leader." But the written text of the Confession is only around twenty pages. This book is over 400 pages long. Surely this can't be all fact; Styron himself says he allowed himself the "utmost freedom" in reconstructing the events. So which is true? Do you think this book will be mostly fact or fiction?

6. By the middle of Part 1, readers have met four white people: Gray, Kitchen, Miss Maria Pope, and Jeremiah Cobb. None of them are described positively. Why might that be? Since the book is supposedly written from Nat's point of view, why might he only describe white people (to this point in the book) in negative terms?

7. In the introduction, Gray refers to the insurrection as a "conspiracy." Do you agree with that term? Why or why not?

8. When Gray addresses the court, he blames "pure Negro cowardice" as a partial reason for the rebellion's failure, but then later in that same paragraph, Gray describes devoted slaves fighting "as bravely as any man" against Nat and his band. Why is he saying these things? Is he trying to confuse the justices?

9. In Part 1, Gray reads back Nat's account of the killings, and Nat yells at him to stop. Why did Nat say that? Did he feel remorse? Nat says, "We done what had to be done!" Was he was talking about his "visions" and what they told him, or what Nat, personally, felt needed to be done?

10. Styron published this book in 1967, 136 years after Nat Turner's rebellion and during a time of unrest in the United States over equal rights and race relations. In the Author's Note he says "the year 1831 was, simultaneously, a long time ago and only yesterday." What might he mean by that?

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