Perversion the Social Relation

"As If Set Free into Another Land" 181ference, this white man will thus pose no threat to the new social orderbecause he will have no desire to return to the horrors of the old. Brantley'sdesire for baptism may be driven by his fear of damnation, but hestill becomes part of Nat's spiritual community by default. As a sexualoutlaw and now as a baptized Christian with an honest resentment forthe sexualized and racialized hierarchies of the slave society, Brantley isthus an honorary member, as it were, in Nat's post-rebellion communityof freedom, sameness, and equality.Within the logic of the novel, the fact that Brantley's sexual identity asa sodomite helps provoke Nat's decision to spare him testifies to the importanceof same-sex desire and homo-ness as a constitutive, rather thana negative, force in the formation of social relations and community.While his model for a larger political community of free blacks invokesthe single-sex metaphor of brotherhood, his decision to spare Brantleyagaiji collapses explicit homosexuality and social isolation onto eachother. As a result, Nat's decision to include Brantley in his new communitynow appears to be a move into a real system of homo-relationalitythat accepts difference as a mere supplement to sameness. This inclusionindicates a gesture toward the finaldissolution of those hierarchicalidentities that enable the concept of sameness in the firstplace. Brantley'ssexual identity, as Nat conveniently misconstrues it, destabilizes thecategories of race, class, and gender, making him simultaneously masculineand "womanish," both white and worse than "the lowest Negro." Byaccepting him as the same in Christian terms and deciding to spare hislife in his political rebellion, Nat thus embraces this destabilization ofidentities in an attempt to prove that he is not simply trying to invert thesocial order by giving blacks ascendancy over whites. His new societystill emphasizes Christian sameness, but only for those Christians whoalso occupy a political opposition to the old order regardless of theirmaterial identities. In this way, Styron would apparently have us believethat by baptizing him, Nat clearly accepts Brantley's identity as a sodomiteand creates a radically new version of Christian relations that istotally unlike either version he has imagined earlier. Nat personally dislikesBrantley, and Brantley himself shows no interest in Nat's politicalambitions because he "hear[s] nothing" of Nat's warning to leave (320).Yet Nat still welcomes him into this new community, proving that thereis now space for personal and political differences within this strange