Out of his humiliation and his sense of helplessness to retaliate for the insult inflicted on him, Sutpen, only thirteen or fourteen years old, resolves that in order to live with himself and to challenge the superiority of the planter class and those they own, “you have got to have what they have that made them do what the man did. You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with.”15 With that goal firmly implanted in his mind, he leaves the cabin and his family in the middle of the night, never to see them again. He somehow manages to get to the West Indies and eventually to Mississippi, where he begins his rise to wealth and power as a planter, a course that ultimately leads to his own and his children’s tragic downfall, brought on by miscegenation, interracial marriage, and murder.
Thus, in two very different contexts, Faulkner portrayed the innocence of the southern mountaineer confronting the biracial character of the rest of the South along with the bewilderment and hostility toward a heretofore unknown entity—a black man. In both cases that contact leads to traumatic overreactions of significant consequence. For a writer whose work was constantly attuned to the variations and complexities of race relations in the South, it is easy to see why the premise explored in these two works so intrigued Faulkner. And one can readily trace the sources of his interest and information regarding the southern highlands, a region he would not see firsthand for many years to come.
Faulkner’s own family traced its roots back to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century residents of Haywood County, North Carolina, which at that time covered much of the area from Asheville to the Tennessee border. His great-great-grandfather, Joseph Falkner, was born and raised in western North Carolina just after the Revolutionary War, his father having moved there from South Carolina during that conflict.16 Joseph married Caroline Word of Surry County, and in 1825 they began a westward trek to Missouri. They got only as far as Knoxville when she delivered William Clark Falkner, whose first name his literary great-grandson would bear. That migratory pattern from the Carolinas to the frontier wilds of the Old Southwest, of which his own family was a part, provided the basis for the backgrounds of his fictional families, the Sartorises and the Compsons, as well as Calvin Burden, and of course, Thomas Sutpen, despite the latter’s more circuitous route via Tidewater Virginia and Haiti.17
Much more immediate influences on the highland depictions of “Mountain Victory” and Absalom, Absalom! were literary sources. An Irvin S. Cobb story, relating the ambush and murder of a homeward-bound Confederate veteran by Tennessee mountaineers, provided the bare bones for Faulkner’s short story.18 But the theme of both of Faulkner’s works—racism made all the more virulent by mountain innocence—seems to have been shaped as much by three fictional works on Southern Appalachia inscribed by Faulkner and added to his library in September 1932, just a month before he submitted “Mountain Victory” to the Saturday Evening Post. They were Emmett Gowen’s Mountain Born and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread, two recently published novels, and George Washington Harris’s 1867 classic collection of stories and sketches, Sut Lovingood, the tone of which is set by its subtitle, Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool” Warped and Wove for Public Wear.19
Faulkner once listed Sut Lovingood as one of his favorite literary creations, and it remained one of the select volumes that he kept most accessible throughout his life in a bookcase next to his bed.20 Though race relations remained peripheral to Harris’s tales of East Tennessee, blacks were on occasion subjects of the racist derision typical of nineteenth-century regional humorists. There are casual references as well to the contempt mountaineers had for blacks as part of the outside world. Harris wrote of one particularly colorful but stereotypical backwoods moonshiner: “He hates a circuit rider, a nigger, and a shot-gun—loves a woman, old sledge [a card game], and sin in eny shape.”21
More pervasive in Harris’s “yarns” is the sense of that unstructured and carefree society that Faulkner envisioned. Lovingood’s philosophy of life sounds strikingly like Faulkner’s description of Sutpen’s birthplace: “Men were made a-purpus jus’ to eat, drink, an’ fur stay-in’ awake in the early part of the nites: an wimen were made to cook the vittles, mix the spirits, an’ help the men do the stayin’ awake. That’s all, an’ nothin’ more, unless it’s fur the wimen to raise the devil atwix meals, an’ knot socks atwix drams, an’ the men to play short cards, swap hosses with fools, and fite fur exercise, at odd spells.”22 Faulkner seems to have extracted much of that description for his own use, but he dropped the satiric disdain in which Harris wrapped it. In his romanticized twentieth-century interpretation, mountain “innocence” is taken far more seriously and treated with considerably more respect than Harris, a native East Tennessean, could ever muster for it.
More in tune with Faulkner’s tone is Emmett Gowen’s Mountain Born. Despite its focus on feuding Tennessee families, Gowen assigned much the same sense of virtue and purity to mountain society, which he has a New York executive and homesick highland expatriate describe as “beautiful and Arcadian.” Its residents, he wrote, “can’t read, but their hearts are full of poetry and their heads full of fine thought.”23 But of these three works it is Grace Lumpkin’s proletariat novel, To Make Our Bread, that provided Faulkner with the most basic inspiration for the Thomas Sutpen story. Like Faulkner, Lumpkin focused on a mountain family who moves out of the hills and finds its innocence shattered when faced with the hard realities of a racist and class-conscious society in the flatlands. Driven from their home in the South Mountains of North Carolina by encroaching lumber companies around the turn of the century, the McClures are forced to settle in a piedmont industrial community (modeled on Gastonia, North Carolina), where they eventually become involved with the labor unrest in its textile mills in the 1920s.
Their initial interracial contacts are only incidental to Lumpkin’s themes, but she conveyed both the curiosity and surprise of the mother and daughter and the contemptuous avoidance of the former’s elderly father when they first see black children on entering a mill town. “They’re niggers,” he informs the women. “White and black don’t mix.” The McClure women’s reactions bring to mind Faulkner’s description of the Sutpen girls who, along with “the other white women of their kind,” have a “certain flat level silent way . . . of looking at niggers, not with fear or dread but with a kind of speculative antagonism.” Even more incidental, but possibly an influence on Faulkner’s short story, is the elderly McClure’s reference, in relating his experiences in the Civil War, to a “rich man’s son” who serves in the army with a slave to care for him, who stays on even after he knows he is free.24
Although Faulkner once stated that he “never read any history,”25 he wrote these stories in the wake of a number of historical treatments of Southern Appalachia that contributed greatly to the popular image of the region as all white. From the 1890s on, a variety of published works contributed to the dual assumptions upon which Faulkner based these two works—the absence of blacks in the mountains and the strong animosity mountain residents felt toward them. In 1897, a journalist wrote admiringly of the north Georgia mountains, “Nowhere will be found purer Anglo-Saxon blood.” In 1901, an ethnogeographer echoed these sentiments for another part of the region. Kentucky mountaineers have not only kept foreign elements at bay; they have “still more effectively . . . excluded the Negro. This region is as free of them as northern Vermont.”26
As for hostility toward blacks, East Tennessee seems to have generated more commentary than other parts of the mountain South, perhaps because of the lengthier Union occupation it endured during and after the Civil War. In a seminal and widely used document collection on Reconstruction first published in 1906, Walter Fleming included several passages illustrating the irony of the fact that the South’s most ardent Unionists were also among its most intense racists. From northern journalist J. T. Trowbridge’s observations in 1865, Fleming singled out the quote “East Tennesseans, though opposed to slavery and secession, do n
ot like niggers.” He also drew from congressional testimony of Freedman’s Bureau officials in 1866 the statement “It is a melancholy fact that among the bitterest opponents of the Negro in Tennessee are the intensely radical loyalists of the mountain district—the men who have been in our armies.”27 Whether or not Faulkner ever read these specific passages, the same concept—that mountain Unionists could also be rabid racists—comes through so clearly in “Mountain Victory” that it seems hardly coincidental that he set his story in East Tennessee.
By far the most popular treatments of the region, Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders (1913 and 1922) and John C. Campbell’s The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921), were still in wide circulation in the early 1930s. Their pronouncements on the racism and racial demographics of the mountain South represent a culmination of contemporary thought on highlanders’ attitudes, past and present, and were perhaps the most accessible of nonfictional corroborative sources for Faulkner’s interpretation of the antebellum mountaineer at the time he was writing.
Kephart noted that “the mountains proper are free not only of foreigners but from negroes as well.” In many mountain settlements, “negroes are not allowed to tarry,” he wrote, explaining that the mountaineers’ dislike of blacks is simply an instinctive racial antipathy, coupled with a contempt for anyone who submits to servile conditions.28 Campbell echoed these conclusions. While acknowledging variations in racial demographics and attitudes in the region, he stressed that even in his own time there were mountain counties “without a single Negro inhabitant and where it was unpleasant if not unsafe for him to go.” He told of a terrified child who beheld a black man for the first time and called him a “no-tail bear.”29
Such examples are certainly exceptional, but it is in such instances that perception most deviates from reality. Though there were certainly pockets of extreme isolation and alienation throughout the southern highlands, the depictions of racial “innocence” were far too simplistic, romanticized, and exaggerated a notion to apply to the region and its people as a whole. The black presence in many parts of Southern Appalachia was considerable, and slaveholding was by no means as foreign to much of the area as Faulkner and his sources implied.
Only within the past decade and a half have historians and sociologists fully embraced the reality of an African American presence in the southern highlands, particularly for the antebellum period. We know that slavery existed in every county in Southern Appalachia in 1860, and despite considerable shifts in the region’s racial demographics after the Civil War, there was never a point at which an all-white population characterized the region.30 We now have a variety of local and regional studies on the impact of both the presence and the multiple functions of slaves throughout Appalachia. We have also recognized and documented the class distinctions created because of the presence of those slaves, and the considerable economic and political influence wielded by those mountain masters who owned them.31
Countering the idea of racial hostility among mountain residents are indications that many opposed slavery on humanitarian grounds, that those who owned slaves treated them more leniently, that there were several strongholds of abolitionism in East Tennessee and Kentucky, and that the highlands served on occasion as safe havens for slaves escaping oppression and cruelty elsewhere. The rampant Unionism of much of the region during the Civil War and the Republicanism afterward also led more distant observers to equate such sentiments with racial liberalism.32
While those trends too were as much perception as reality, Faulkner never showed any interest in these alternative facets of highland race relations. It was the darker side of the white Appalachian mindset—their latent but volatile racism—that most intrigued him. His application of the term “innocence” to his fictional highlanders did not imply any benign sentiments or lack of prejudice toward blacks simply because they were unknown entities; rather, it suggested only an ignorance of African Americans and of the multitiered society their presence imposed on the rest of the South.
Yet it wasn’t even that innocence or the single-race vacuum in which it was bred that most inspired Faulkner’s treatment of the mountain South. In both “Mountain Victory” and Absalom, Absalom! it was the challenges to that innocence from which problems arose and plots emerged. Once exposed to the reality of that second race, mountaineers experienced what Joel Williamson termed a “brutal reduction of humanity.” For the Tennessee hosts of Major Weddel and for the Sutpen family who “slid back down” out of the Virginia highlands into Tidewater plantation society, first-time interactions with blacks ended in tragedy. Faulkner’s genius is most evident in his ability in these cases to portray his highlanders as both victims and perpetrators of their respective tragedies. Not only did men and boys lose their innocence; they found their humanity brutally reduced as well.
Faulkner owed much to current literary and historical treatments of the Appalachians in his depiction of an exclusively white society unencumbered by the stratification and oppression of the plantation South and yet as racially prejudiced as, if not more than, almost any other segment of the South. The basis for this assumption had been alive and kicking for more than a century by the time it drew Faulkner’s attention, and it was by no means on the wane when he discovered it. Five years after the publication of Absalom, Absalom! W. J. Cash gave it even more widespread credence when, in The Mind of the South, he concluded, like Kephart, Campbell, and Faulkner: “Though there were few slaves in the mountains, [the mountaineer] had acquired a hatred and contempt for the Negro even more virulent than that of the common white of the lowlands, a dislike so rabid that it was worth a black man’s life to venture into many mountain sections.”33
One cannot say whether Faulkner’s work was among those that helped shape Cash’s views. But even if not a direct influence on Cash, Faulkner’s depictions of the racial innocence of the mountain South would ensure the viability of such assumptions for years to come. Because Faulkner reached such a vast readership, he gave the views of his sources—the mountain chroniclers—far greater and longer-lasting exposure than they would probably have otherwise enjoyed. As with many of the myths of southern history, the very adaptation by William Faulkner of this concept of Appalachian racism infused it with new levels of meaning, dramatic force, and even credibility.
Notes
1. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7.
2. William Faulkner, “Mountain Victory,” Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 3, 1932; later reprinted in Faulkner, Doctor Martino and Other Stories (New York: H. Smith and R. Hass, 1934).
3. Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 264.
4. Ibid.
5. Dorothy Tuck, Crowell’s Handbook of Faulkner (New York: Crowell, 1964), 171.
6. Philip Momberger, “A Critical Study of Faulkner’s Early Sketches and Collected Stories” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1970), 244–50. Momberger’s is the most thorough analysis of “Mountain Victory.”
7. William Faulkner, “Mountain Victory,” Collected Stories (1950; rept., New York: Random House, 1977), 746, 753, 747, 751, 763, 756.
8. Ibid., 762. Weddel’s background is established in another Faulkner short story, “Lo!” in Collected Stories, 381–403.
9. Faulkner may well have based the relationship between Weddel and Jubal on that between his own great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner, and his body servant, Nate. For full accounts of Colonel Falkner’s Civil War career, see Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1974), 20–32; Williamson, Faulkner and Southern History, chap. 2; and Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 22–27.
10. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936; reprint, New York: Random House, 1951), 223, 220. Sutpen’s past is reconstructed by Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate, based on Compson’s g
randfather’s version of what Sutpen had told him. For an analysis of Thomas Sutpen as a mountaineer, see Lynn Dickerson, “Thomas Sutpen: Mountain Stereotype in Absalom, Absalom!” Appalachian Heritage 12 (Spring 1984): 73–78.
11. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 221–22.
12. Melvin Backman, Faulkner: The Major Years: A Critical Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 98.
13. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 225, 231, 226–27, 232.
14. Ibid., 232, 235.
15. Ibid., 238.
16. Blotner, Faulkner, vol. 1, 8–9. See also his genealogical chart in vol. 2, 222–23. The family’s name was spelled without a “u” until the author himself added it. For his explanation of the new spelling, see William Faulkner: A Biographical and Reference Guide, ed. Leland H. Cox (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1982), 4.
17. William Faulkner, Sartoris (1929; rept., New York: Random House, 1956), 9; The Sound and the Fury (1929; rept., New York: Random House, 1966), 404; Light in August (1932; rept., New York: Random House, 1967), 228.
18. Howe, William Faulkner, 264.
19. Joseph Blotner, William Faulkner’s Library: A Catalogue (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 34–36, 41. See also Dickerson, “Thomas Sutpen,” 74. Though all three books have inscriptions in Faulkner’s handwriting dated September 1932, this did not necessarily mean that he had only then acquired these volumes. His copy of Sut Lovingood was one his grandfather had owned long before. Milton Rickels, George Washington Harris (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965), 128.
20. Jean Stein, “William Faulkner: An Interview,” in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1951–1960), 79; Rickels, George Washington Harris, 128. Indeed, one wonders if Faulkner derived the name Sutpen from Lovingood’s first name.
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