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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. What does Nat do for the first time the Saturday he and Hark are at market?
(a) Makes love to a girl.
(b) Preaches a sermon.
(c) Swear at a white man.
(d) Gain some money toward his freedom.

2. When Gray questions Nat, does Nat say he feels any remorse over the killings?
(a) He'd like to go back in time and stop himself.
(b) None at all.
(c) At little.
(d) A lot.

3. What does the traveling salesman ask Nat to spell?
(a) Rose.
(b) Petunia.
(c) Daffodil.
(d) Columbine.

4. Nat's mother considers the household servants to be what?
(a) Too smart for their own good.
(b) Uppity.
(c) Hopeless.
(d) Quality.

5. How did Benjamin die?
(a) He drowned in the swamp.
(b) He got lost and died in the forest.
(c) A tree crushed him.
(d) He fell off a horse and broke his neck.

Short Answer Questions

1. What book did Nat steal from the Turner library?

2. Which of Nat's followers was deaf?

3. What does Nat find in Mrs. Whitehead's library that furthers his plans for a slave uprising?

4. Moore's farm is next to whose?

5. Nat sees something on the way back from Jerusalem that has a big effect on him. What is it?

Short Essay Questions

1. In Part 1, Marse Samuel speaks to Dr. Ballard about the existence of slavery in the South. He says "it is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed. They must be educated!" Samuel's brother Benjamin does not agree with him and argues the other point. Who makes the better argument?

2. When Nat preaches in town in Part 3, he does not use proper English. Why do you think he does that?

3. 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?

4. The story of Hark's escape and eventual return takes up a large section of Part 3. Why might Styron have devoted so much time to this story? What was he trying to show? What do readers learn from Nat's telling of the story?

5. Nat equates Isham to John the Baptist. Nat speaks of a warning after the incident with Isham. Is this related?

6. 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.

7. As the book progresses, the descriptions of white slave owners grow worse and worse, until we reach Nathaniel Francis, introduced in Part 3. Why did Styron make each owner he described, whether the owner of Nat or other slaves, an uglier, meaner character than the one before?

8. After Nat describes his ideas about his grandmother, he switches to describing what he knows about his father--mainly that he ran away, and, at least in Nat's mind, is free now. How does Nat's description of his grandmother differ from his description of his father?

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. 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?

(see the answer keys)

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