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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. Shortly after the trial, what happens to Nate?
(a) He gets a warning.
(b) He gets a fever.
(c) He gets a premonition.
(d) He gets a Bible.

2. While driving Miss Margaret to the Vaughans' farm, what dying animal do she and Nat see?
(a) A buzzard.
(b) A turtle.
(c) A cow.
(d) A raccoon.

3. What was the first stop for the initial band of men on the insurrection?
(a) The Barnett plantation.
(b) Jeremiah Cobb's plantation.
(c) Joseph Travis's farm.
(d) Benjamin Turner's homestead.

4. Nat remembers a visitor to the Turner household when he was about twelve. What does Nat remember the visitor describing?
(a) Fall.
(b) Spring.
(c) Summer.
(d) Winter.

5. Why can't Nat carry out the rebellion on the date he originally chose?
(a) His master will be out of town on his birthday.
(b) The Memorial Day picnic will be at the armory lawn.
(c) The 4th of July celebrations will be held in town, not outside it.
(d) He'll be working at Mrs. Whitehead's on his birthday.

Short Answer Questions

1. After Nat says his final prayer before beginning the insurrection, what does he do?

2. Nat's father "ran off" from the Turner household. Why?

3. What does Nat remember seeing after getting to Major Ridley's place?

4. How did Benjamin die?

5. What does Nat compare his life as a slave child to?

Short Essay Questions

1. Early in Part 2, the traveling salesman asks Nat to spell a word. This is the second time in the book that a spelling request has frightened Nat. What are some of the reasons Nat gives for his terror?

2. The scene with Major Ridley's fiancee is very strong. A northern white woman, newly arrived in town, can't find her way around and can't understand the Negroes speech. According to Nat, she left, never to return. Why might Styron have had her interact with Arnold, an elderly slave who had been freed, but with no education and worse elocution?

3. After Nat's fast in Part 3, he said there were two events that helped him interpret his vision of the fighting angels as a mandate to kill whites. What were those two events?

4. When Nat imagines his grandmother's thoughts as a captured Coromantee slave girl, he describes Marse Samuel's smile as looking to her like "fiendish smirk." Why would he would describe the kindest master he had in this way?

5. After Nat spells the word columbine, he lies awake that night thinking about it. He says it's a dream filled with 'inchoate promise'. What does he mean by that? How can one word be a promise?

6. Why might Part 3 be titled "Study War"? Is it appropriate?

7. After Nathaniel Francis forces Will and Sam to fight, Nat feels called to preach for the first time. Why do you think that was the event that brought Nat out in public as a preacher? Quote at least one reason from the book.

8. In Part 2, Nat talks about Samuel Turner's tampering with a slave's destiny by educating him. Immediately afterward, he talks about what his life might have been like if he had not been the subject of Marse Samuel's "experiment." What do you think of this description of his might-have-been life? Is it something that appeals to him?

9. In Part 3, when Nat is owned by Thomas Moore, he says that he fell into the kind of save work that he had believed before could "not ever become my lot, not in a thousand lifetimes." Yet now it had become his lot. How did Nat react to that? How does this turning point relate to his earlier childhood and education, as well as his eventual killing spree?

10. One of the slaves chained by the drover tells Nat that he's "just like him." Do you think this is true? Why or why not?

(see the answer keys)

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