Set This House on Fire

Interviews with novelist William Styron and African-American filmmaker, Charles Burnett, on the set of the PBS TV movie, Nat Turner, a Troublesome Property compose this chapter. Burnett’s film offers various conflicting versions of the life of the 19th century Turner. He instigated a Black slave rebellion leading to the deaths of many white Southerners and eventually to his own hanging. One of the versions of Turner comes from Styron’s controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Styron is on the Virginia set to watch scenes translated from his book being filmed. “I like that a lot,” Styron says, endorsing the film’s Rashomon-like aesthetic. Is Turner a villain or a hero? Filmmaker Burnett has his own strong point-of-view, regarding his insurrectionist protagonist as “every man who’d fight for the liberation of others.”