“Confession” is the second story in the co (.)ġ Charles Johnson’s “Confession” 1 cannot be called a rewriting of a slave narrative as the only known accounts of the 1739 Stono rebellion are fragmentary and personal contemporary white reports.
1 Johnson, Charles, Soulcatcher (New York: Harvest, 2001). Johnson’s fiction signifies on the smoothness of Gray’s text, and there emerges a fine picture of the give and take game between slaves and masters, of the complexity hidden beneath the surface simplicity of white domination and, most of all, of a smart rebel, of a dignified man for all his apparent subservience. His white man’s language and Turner’s mystical resignation to death on the gallows is turned into everyday black words lambasting the powers that were through a mask of submissiveness and naïveté. Gray’s apocryphal account is turned upside down both in terms of contents and form. From the beginning, the insistent shadow of Nat Turner’s so-called confessions is felt as a subtext. “Confession” is set at the time of the 1739 Stono rebellion, of which there exists no known contemporary account from a black (slave or free) source least of all the words spoken by one of the rebels during his “trial”. 
Novelist Charles Johnson wrote a companion collection of short stories, Soulcatcher. The 1998 PBS show “Africans in America” spans slavery days until the Civil War.
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