11. Philip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 96; James O. Hall, “The Shelton Laurel Massacre: Murder in the North Carolina Mountains,” Blue & Gray (February 1991): 23; and John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: The Civil War in Western North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 194–95. See “Unionists in the Attic,” chap. 13 in this volume, for another perspective on the Shelton Laurel massacre. To learn more about other violence and cruelty committed against women in the region, see Margaret Walker Freel, Unto the Hills (Andrews, N.C.: privately printed, 1976), 129–61, on such incidents in Cherokee County, N.C.; William R. Trotter, Bushwhackers: The Mountains, vol. 2: The Civil War in North Carolina (Greensboro, N.C.: Signal Research, 1988), 188–200; and Keith Bohannon, “ ‘They Had Determined to Root Us Out’: Dual Memoirs by a Unionist Couple in Blue Ridge Georgia,” in Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South, ed. John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 97–120.
12. The best account of these women, drawn largely from their letters to Governor Vance, is Gordon B. McKinney’s “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (January 1992): 37–56. See also Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, chap. 8; and Inscoe, “Mountain Women, Mountain War,” Appalachian Journal 31 (Spring/Summer 2004): 343–48 (part of a roundtable discussion of the historical realities of the film Cold Mountain).
13. Mary to Alfred Bell, February 19, 1864, in Alfred W. Bell Papers, Special Collections, Duke University Library. For a full account of Mary Bell’s wartime experience, see “Coping in Confederate Appalachia,” chap. 7 in this volume.
14. Lizzie Lenoir to Sarah J. [“Sade”] Lenoir, January 22, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC. On other such raids, see Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 197–98; Paul D. Escott, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd in Confederate North Carolina,” Maryland Historian 13 (Summer 1982): 1–17; and Teresa Crisp Williams and David Williams, “ ‘The Women Rising’: Cotton, Class, and Confederate Georgia’s Rioting Women,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 86 (Spring 2002): 49–83.
15. Van Noppen, Stoneman’s Last Raid, 4–5. For briefer accounts of the raid, see Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 243–58; and Trotter, Bushwhackers, part 5. It is curious how little attention is paid to Stoneman’s Raid in broader histories of the war. It rates no mention at all, for instance, in three recent treatments of the war’s end: Grimsley and Simpson, Collapse of the Confederacy; Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month That Saved America (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); or William C. Davis, An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government (New York: Harcourt, 2001).
16. Rankin, “Stoneman’s Raid,” 26–27.
17. Ibid., 29.
18. R. L. Beall to Cornelia Phillips Spencer, August 1866, Cornelia Phillips Spencer Papers, SHC.
19. Mary Taylor Brown to John Evans Brown, June 20, 1865, W. Vance Brown Papers, SHC.
20. Quoted in Thomas Felix Hickerson, ed., Echoes of Happy Valley: Letters and Diaries, Family Life in the South, Civil War History (Durham, N.C.: privately printed, 1962), 105. These class-based responses by Southern women to Union troops are analyzed in Faust, Mothers of Invention, chap. 9; and Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 19–20, 42–44. On the reaction of Union troops to Southern women, see Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 6, “She Devils.”
21. Laura Norwood to Walter Gwyn, April 25, 1865, James Gwyn Papers, SHC.
22. Spencer, Last Ninety Days of the War, 196.
23. Robert L. Beall to Cornelia Spencer, August 1866, Spencer Papers, SHC.
24. Verena Chapman to Cornelia Phillips Spencer, May 8, 1866, ibid.
25. Ibid. Of this letter, Spencer informed Zebulon Vance: “Mrs. Chapman sent me a 16-page letter! She is certainly a smart woman & very womanish (High praise, I know!).” Cornelia Phillips Spencer to Zebulon B. Vance, August 24, 1866, Spencer Papers, SHC.
26. Joseph C. Norwood to Walter W. Lenoir, April 2, 1865, in Hickerson, Echoes of Happy Valley, 104; Ella Harper diary, April 17, 1865, George W. F. Harper Papers, SHC. Final quote from R. L. Beall to Cornelia Phillips Spencer, August 1866, Spencer Papers, SHC.
27. Robert L. Beall, “Notes on Stoneman’s Raid in Burke County and the Town of Morganton” (1866), manuscript in Spencer Papers, SHC.
28. Ibid.
29. Ella Harper diary, April 15, 1865, George W. F. Harper Papers, SHC.
30. Rankin, “Stoneman’s Raid,” 29–31.
31. Mary Taylor Brown to John Evans Brown, June 20, 1865, W. Vance Brown Papers, SHC.
32. Ibid.
33. Gale, “Life in the Southern Confederacy,” 50.
34. Ibid., 52. Historians offer various explanations for this sudden reversal of policy by the Union forces, all of which rest in part on the fact that Gillem gave up command to others and proceeded to Nashville, where the first postwar session of the Tennessee legislature was convening. See Spencer, Last Ninety Days of the War, 232; Van Noppen, Stoneman’s Raid, 89–90; John G. Barrett, The Civil War in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 363–65; and Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 255–57.
35. Spencer, Last Ninety Days of the War, 231–32.
36. Sarah Jane Bailey Cain, “The Last Days of the War in Asheville, N.C.,” typescript, John Lancaster Bailey Papers, SHC, 35–36.
37. Mary Taylor Brown to John Evans Brown, June 20, 1865, W. Vance Brown Papers, SHC.
38. Gale, “Life in the Southern Confederacy,” 57.
Remembrance
10
The Racial “Innocence” of
Appalachia
William Faulkner and the Mountain South
Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, is a long way from Southern Appalachia, and William Faulkner has never been noted as a chronicler of the mountain experience. But in at least two instances he did write of southern mountaineers, and in both he emphasized their isolation from the rest of the South, and in particular, from its black populace. In an early and little-known short story, “Mountain Victory,” and in what is arguably his finest novel—Absalom, Absalom!—Faulkner related the initial encounters of nineteenth-century highlanders with African Americans. In “Mountain Victory” it is a black man who intrudes upon an Appalachian family’s home. In Absalom, Absalom! it is a mountaineer who leaves his native environment and discovers in its lowland setting the peculiarities of the “peculiar institution.” The differences in these situations are considerable, and yet it is the similarities that are more revealing—for both scenarios involve white mountaineers traumatized by their first interracial confrontations and the drastic actions to which they are driven as a result.
Probably no other American novelist has left us with as rich a body of work dealing with the subtleties, complexities, and ambiguities of southern race relations as has William Faulkner. According to Joel Williamson in his 1993 study of Faulkner as a southern historian, “race was central, integral, and vital.” This was particularly true of Faulkner’s fiction of the 1930s, works that “remain probably the ultimate indictment not merely of the injustices of the racial establishment in the South in and after slavery, but in its capacity for the often subtle, always brutal reduction of humanity, both black and white.”1
Faulkner’s two attempts to apply these themes to the mountain South indicate that he was intrigued by what he believed to be probably the only group of white southerners never to have known blacks and whose lives had been untouched by the basic biracial character of the rest of the South. In applying this “brutal reduction of humanity” to mountaineers suddenly exposed to members of a second race, Faulkner prov
ided some not so subtle insights into the anomaly of what he perceived as the racial “innocence” of Southern Appalachia. This chapter explores how Mississippi’s greatest writer dealt with that anomaly in his fiction and of the array of early twentieth-century sources from which he drew his assumptions of the racial dynamics of this southern region, a region so different from his own.
“Mountain Victory” first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in December 1932 and was included two years later in Faulkner’s first short story collection.2 It is the story of a Confederate major, Saucier Weddel, who returns at the Civil War’s end to his Mississippi plantation from service in Virginia. Accompanied by Jubal, his black body servant, he approaches the cabin of a Tennessee mountain family and asks to spend the night. The rest of the story addresses the mixed reactions of the five-member family to the two strangers: the fanatical hatred of the eldest son, Vatch, a Unionist veteran who bitterly resents both “rebels” and “nigras”; his unnamed sister’s strong sexual attraction to this refined uniformed officer; the awe of his young brother Hule; and the wary distance and more muted hostility maintained by both parents. When his sister’s lust hardens Vatch’s resolve to murder both of the unwanted guests, his father warns them to leave immediately. But Weddel, though probably aware that a delay could cost him his life, refuses to leave until his black companion (temporarily immobilized by potent mountain corn whiskey) can go with him. When the two finally attempt a hasty retreat off the mountain the next morning, Vatch and his father ambush and kill them as well as young Hule, who is caught in their range of fire as he makes a last desperate effort to save his new hero.
Despite the story’s intriguing premise and literary merit (Irving Howe called it “Faulkner’s best piece of writing about the Civil War”),3 “Mountain Victory” has been all but overlooked by most critics. The few attempts at analysis have recognized as major themes either the clash between lifestyles of the plantation aristocrat and the poor white mountaineer;4 the contrasting loyalties between family members and between master and servant;5 or the most obvious source of tensions between the Tennesseans and their visitors, their opposing sympathies toward the Union and the Confederacy.6
But a more subtle and perhaps more important catalyst for the ensuing tragedy is the Tennesseans’ racial hostility toward their guests. Faulkner portrayed the highlanders’ unfamiliarity with blacks by describing how Jubal’s appearance makes them think of primates. They see him as “a creature a little larger than a large monkey” and “crouched like an ape in the blue Union army overcoat.” The family’s initial dismay as they watch the two men approach—they stare as if they have seen “an apparition”—takes on new meaning when, well into the narrative, it becomes apparent that they think Major Weddel is a black man, too. When Vatch calls him “you damn nigra,” Weddel recognizes the real source of the Union sympathizer’s hostility. “So it’s my face and not my uniform,” he replies. “And you fought four years to free us, I understand.” The sister broaches the question directly to his servant, whose disdain for what he calls “deseyer igntunt mountain trash” is heightened by such an assumption. “Who? Him? A nigger? Marse Soshay Weddel?” Jubal exclaims. “It’s caze yawl aint never been nowhere. Aint never seed nothing. Living up here on a nekkid hill whar you cant even see smoke. Him a nigger? I wish his maw could hear you say dat.”7
It is only when the father confronts Weddel about his racial makeup that the source of the confusion is revealed. Weddel explains that his father was part French and part Choctaw Indian, which accounts for his own appearance, described by Faulkner as “a half Gallic half Mongol face thin and worn like a bronze casting.”8 Compounding the mountain family’s confusion about Weddel’s race is his kind treatment of his black servant. Because Jubal is ill, the major allows him, his companion and protector since childhood, to ride his horse and to wear his coat.9 This close relationship between master and former slave, along with a certain “uppitiness” on the part of the latter, adds to the family’s suspicions of Weddel’s racial identity and their distaste over not only the presence of both men but the connection between them. Their lingering uncertainty becomes a crucial factor in sealing the pair’s tragic fate because of the daughter’s lust for the Mississippi soldier, who may have black blood. The possibility of a biracial union proves to be as strict a taboo for these mountain men as for most other southerners and thus provides the added impetus for their deadly ambush. Ultimately, though, it is Faulkner’s penetrating and subtle depiction of the variety of responses to these outsiders—from revulsion to attraction, from fascination to contempt, all stemming from their unfamiliarity with either blacks or interracial relationships—that forms the heart of the story and the most basic explanation for its violent denouement.
In Absalom, Absalom! published four years later in 1936, Faulkner perpetuated and expanded these themes of highland racism, but with interesting variations. In this second version of the clash between cultures, it is the mountaineer who becomes the outsider. Only late in the novel does Faulkner reveal the background of his protagonist, Mississippi planter Thomas Sutpen, and the incident that sets the novel’s plot in motion. Sutpen was born in 1808 in the mountains of what would much later become West Virginia. When he was ten, his mother died and his father, for reasons never fully ascertained, took him and his sisters back to resettle in Tidewater Virginia, near the mouth of the James River. “The whole passel of them . . . slid back down out of the mountains, skating in a kind of accelerating and sloven and inert coherence like a useless collection of flotsam on a flooded river.” The narrative at this point is subtly transferred to Sutpen’s young eyes, and his uninitiated impressions of plantation life are among Faulkner’s most perceptive passages. The account begins with the statement that “Sutpen’s trouble was innocence.”10 While much of his naïveté can be ascribed to his youth, Faulkner quickly makes it apparent in his fullest description anywhere of Southern Appalachian society that young Sutpen represents a regional innocence as well:
He was born where what few other people he knew lived in log cabins with children like the one he was born in—men and grown boys who hunted or lay before the fire on the floor while the women and older girls stepped back and forth across them to reach the fire to cook, where the only colored people were Indians and you only looked down at them over your rifle sights. . . . Where he lived the land belonged to anybody and everybody and . . . only a crazy man would go to the trouble to take or even want more than he could eat or swap for powder or whiskey. . . . So he didn’t even know there was a country all divided and fixed and neat because of what color their skins happened to be and what they happened to own, and where a certain few men not only had the power of life and death and barter and sale over others, but they had living men to perform the endless repetitive personal offices . . . that all men have had to do for themselves since time began. . . . So he had hardly heard of such a world until he fell into it.11
While perpetuating the standard stereotypes of a slovenly primitive lifestyle, Faulkner stressed even more the egalitarian, nonmaterialistic, almost utopian communal nature of mountain life. In describing this undeveloped, idyllic society, he imbued it with a moral superiority over the more sophisticated and “civilized” caste system of the plantation South. The image of the family sliding down out of the mountains suggests not only a geographical descent but a social, economic, and moral backsliding as well. Faulkner clearly implied that the critical factor in making the journey that Melvin Backman has called “the unhappy transition from frontier independence to share-cropping subservience” is the black presence in the flatlands and the racism inherent in that new social setting.12 Thus it is the awakening of such feelings in Sutpen on which this episode centers and which makes it, in turn, central to the novel’s meaning.
Faulkner described the first black man seen by these mountain children as “a huge bull of a nigger . . . his mouth loud with laughing and full of teeth like tombstones” as he carries their inebriated
father out of a tavern “over his shoulder like a sack of meal.” Soon afterward, his sister is nearly run over by a carriage driven by a “nigger coachman in a plug hat shouting ‘Hoo dar, gal! Git outen de way dar!’ ” In observing this new and foreign landscape and in finally settling with his family in a cabin on the edge of a plantation “where regiments of niggers with white men watching them planted and raised things that he had never heard of,” young Thomas Sutpen learns the difference “not only between white men and black ones, but . . . between white men and white men” as well. That awareness fully registers in a personal sense only about two years later when Sutpen delivers a message from his father to the plantation owner on whose land they live. Knocking on the mansion’s front door, he is met by a house servant who, without even hearing the purpose of his errand, instructs him to use only the back door. That reprimand by a man he describes as a “monkey nigger” with a “balloon face”—in terminology reminiscent of “Mountain Victory”—sends the boy running from the house in shock and confusion.13
This rebuff becomes a traumatic turning point for Sutpen, as he at once discovers his innocence and loses it. For it is at this instant that he is first made conscious of his own status within this newly discovered racist and class-distinctive world. “He had never thought about his own hair or clothes or anyone else’s hair or clothes until he saw that monkey nigger, who through no doing of his own happened to have had the felicity of being housebred in Richmond maybe, looking . . . at them.” His shame at the slave’s contempt for his patched jeans and lack of shoes leads the boy to the further humiliating realization that the plantation owner, “the rich man (not the nigger) must have been seeing them all the time—as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity.”14
Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South Page 29
