Carolina QuotesIt could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work.
William Styron Connected to the Carolinas
Source
"A Conversation with William Styron", Humanities (May/June 1997)
- year
- 1997
Cite this record
“It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible…” William Styron. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-3CD7ECC928. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/3cd7ecc928
More from William Styron
RIDING DOWN TO Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly brown clapboard houses which stretch down the hilly streets for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting the pale light of dawn; past the suburban roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which separates the last two hills where in the valley below you can see the James River winding beneath its acid-green crust of scum out beside the chemical plants and more rows of clapboard houses and into the woods beyond.
’Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star. This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
The Shabaka [Sundiata Waglini] story illuminates the most sordid defects of capital punishment. His blackness and poverty helped doom him. He was ruthlessly cheated; it was never his privilege to be granted - even for a phantom crime - the incarceration [i.e. instead of death row] that it meted out to others and that carries the possibility of redemption.