What would be your reaction, if, after spending years writing a novel, after publishing it to critical success, after receiving the pulitzer prize for it, to have it denounced and attacked as racist? It would devastate me. This version of the novel contains an afterword by the author that is as important to read as the novel.
Not long after publication, politically correct Black writers started to attack this novel as racist. I don't see it. It's fiction, and portrays an entirely feasible account of the little-known Turner that rings true. At least it does to me. I haven't read the criticism of the novel. Are there alternate tellings of the story that would make sense? Surely. It's FICTION. Is this novel racist? Not by any means. To call it racist is probably to misunderstand the definition of the word.
Reading about the controversy over this novel doesn't make me eager to write a historical novel about Tsali, or a novel about my experiences during desegregation in 1970.
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