Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  That is, except one afternoon a week, usually Wednesday. Old Snopes neither smoked nor drank nor even chewed tobacco; what his jaws worked steadily on was, as Ratliff put it, the same little chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air he had brought in his mouth when he moved to Jefferson thirty years ago. Yes, lost: it wasn’t even to Uncle Gavin: it was Ratliff she went to that afternoon and said, “I cant find who sells the whiskey now.” No, not lost so much, she had just been away too long, explaining to Ratliff why she hadn’t gone to Uncle Gavin: “He’s the County Attorney; I thought—” and Ratliff patting her on the back right there in the street, saying for anybody to hear it since obviously she couldn’t:

  “You been away from home too long. Come on. We’ll go git him.”

  So the three of them in Gavin’s car drove up to Jakeleg Wattman’s so-called fishing camp at Wyott’s Crossing so she would know where and how herself next time. Which was to drive up to Jakeleg’s little unpainted store (Jakeleg kept it unpainted so that whenever a recurrent new reform-administration sheriff would notify him he had to be raided again, Jakeleg wouldn’t have a lot of paint to scratch up in drawing the nails and dismantling the sections and carrying them another mile deeper into the bottom until the reform reached its ebb and he could move back convenient to the paved road and the automobiles) and get out of the car and step inside where the unpainted shelves were crowded with fishhooks and sinkers and lines and tobacco and flashlight batteries and coffee and canned beans and shotgun shells and the neat row of United States Internal Revenue Department liquor licenses tacked on the wall and Jakeleg in the flopping rubber hip boots he wore winter and summer with a loaded pistol in one of them, behind the chicken-wire-barricaded counter, and you would say, “Howdy, Jake. What you got today?” And he would tell you: the same one brand like he didn’t care whether you liked that brand or not, and the same one price like he didn’t give a damn whether that suited you either. And as soon as you said how many the Negro man (in the flopping hip boots Jakeleg had worn last year) would duck out or down or at least out of sight and reappear with the bottles and stand holding them ntil you had given Jakeleg the money and got your change (if any) back and Jakeleg would open the wicket in the wire and shove the bottles through and you would return to your car and that was all there was to it; taking (Uncle Gavin) Linda right on in with him, saying as likely as not: “Howdy, Jake. Meet Mrs Kohl. She cant hear but there’s nothing wrong with her taste and swallowing.” And maybe Linda said,

  “What does he have?” and likely what Uncle Gavin wrote on the pad for that was Thats fighting talk here This is a place where you take it or leave it Just give him eight dollars or sixteen if you want 2. So next time maybe she came alone. Or maybe Uncle Gavin himself walked into the bank and on to that little room at the back and said, “Look here, you old fish-blooded son of a bitch, are you going to just sit here and let your only female daughter that wont even hear the trump of doom, drive alone up yonder to Jakeleg Wattman’s bootleg joint to buy whiskey?” Or maybe it was simple coincidence: a Wednesday afternoon and he—Mr Snopes—cant say, “Here, hold on; where the hell you going? This aint the right road.” Because she cant hear him and in fact I dont know how he did talk to her since I cant imagine his hand writing anything except adding a percent symbol or an expiration date; maybe they just had a county road map he could point to that worked up until this time. So now he had not one dilemma but three: not just the bank president’s known recognisable car driving up to a bootleg joint, but with him in it; then the dilemma of whether to let every prospective mortgagee in Yoknapatawpha County hear how he would sit there in the car and let his only female child walk into a notorious river-bottom joint to buy whiskey, or go in himself and with his own Baptist deacon’s hand pay out sixteen dollars’ worth of his own life’s blood.

  Lost. Gavin told me how over a year ago the two Finn communists had begun to call on her at night (at her invitation of course) and you can imagine this one. It would be the parlor. Uncle Gavin said she had fixed up a sitting room for herself upstairs, but this would be in the parlor diagonally across the hall from the room where old Snopes was supposed to spend all his life that didn’t take place in the bank. The capitalist parlor and the three of them, the two Finnish immigrant laborers and the banker’s daughter, one that couldn’t speak English and another that couldn’t hear any language, trying to communicate through the third one who hadn’t yet learned to spell, talking of hope, millennium, dream: of the emancipation of man from his tragedy, the liberation at last and forever from pain and hunger and injustice, of the human condition. While two doors away in the room where he did everything but eat and keep the bank’s cash money, with his feet propped on that little unpainted ledge nailed to his Adam fireplace and chewing steadily at what Ratliff called his little chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air—the capitalist himself who owned the parlor and the house, the very circumambience they dreamed in, who had begun life as a nihilist and then softened into a mere anarchist and now was not only a conservative but a tory too: a pillar, rock-fixed, of things as they are.

  Lost. Shortly after that she began what Jefferson called meddling with the Negroes. Apparently she went without invitation or warning, into the different classrooms of the Negro grammar and high school, who couldn’t hear thunder, mind you, and so all she could do was watch—the faces, expressions, gestures of the pupils and teachers both who were already spooked, perhaps alarmed, anyway startled and alerted to cover, by the sudden presence of the unexplained white woman who was presently talking to the teacher in the quacking duck’s voice of the deaf and then holding out a tablet and pencil for the teacher to answer. Until presently, as quick as the alarmed messenger could find him I suppose, the principal was there—a college-bred man, Uncle Gavin said, of intelligence and devotion too—and then she and the principal and the senior woman teacher were in the principal’s office, where it probably was not so much that she, the white woman, was trying to explain, as that they, the two Negroes, had already divined and maybe understood even if they did not agree with her. Because they, Negroes, when the problems are not from the passions of want and ignorance and fear—gambling, drink—but are of simple humanity, are a gentle and tender people, a little more so than white people because they have had to be; a little wiser in their dealings with white people than white people are with them, because they have had to survive in a minority. As if they already knew that the ignorance and superstition she would have to combat—the ignorance and superstition which would counteract, cancel her dream and, if she remained bullheaded enough in perseverance, would destroy her—would not be in the black race she proposed to raise but in the white one she represented.

  So finally the expected happened, anticipated by everyone except her apparently, maybe because of the deafness, the isolation, the solitude of living not enclosed with sound but merely surrounded by gestures. Or maybe she did anticipate it but, having been through a war, she just didn’t give a damn. Anyway, she bulled right ahead with her idea. Which was to establish a kind of competitive weekly test, the winners, who would be the top students for that week in each class, to spend the following week in a kind of academy she would establish, with white teachers, details to be settled later but for temporary they would use her sitting room in her father’s house for a sort of general precept, the winners of each week to be replaced by next week’s winners; these to embrace the whole school from kindergarden to seniors, her theory being that if you were old enough to be taught at eighteen you were old enough at eight too when learning something new would be even easier. Because she couldn’t hear, you see, not just the words but the tones, over- and under-tones of alarm, fright, terror in which the black voice would have to say Thank you. So it was the principal himself who finally came to see Uncle Gavin at the office—the intelligent dedicated man with his composed and tragic face.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” Uncle Gavin said. “I know what you want to say.”

  “Thank you,” the principal sai
d. “Then you know yourself it wont work. That you are not ready for it yet and neither are we.”

  “Not many of your race will agree with you,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “None of them will,” the principal said. “Just as none of them agreed when Mr Washington said it.”

  “Mr Washington?”

  “Booker T.,” the principal said. “Mr Carver too.”

  “Oh,” Uncle Gavin said. “Yes?”

  “That we have got to make the white people need us first. I the old days your people did need us, in your economy if not your culture, to make your cotton and tobacco and indigo. But that was the wrong need, bad and evil in itself. So it couldn’t last. It had to go. So now you dont need us. There is no place for us now in your culture or economy either. We both buy the same installment-plan automobiles to burn up the same gasoline in, and the same radios to listen to the same music and the same iceboxes to keep the same beer in, but that’s all. So we have got to make a place of our own in your culture and economy too. Not you to make a place for us just to get us out from under your feet, as in the South here, or to get our votes for the aggrandisement of your political perquisites, as in the North, but us to make a place for ourselves by compelling you to need us, you cannot do without us because nobody else but us can fill that place in your economy and culture which only we can fill and so that place will have to be ours. So that you will not just say Please to us, you will need to say Please to us, you will want to say Please to us. Wdl you tell her that? Say we thank her and we wont forget this. But to leave us alone. Let us have your friendship all the time, and your help when we need it. But keep your patronage until we ask for it.”

  “This is not patronage,” Uncle Gavin said. “You know that too.”

  “Yes,” the principal said. “I know that too. I’m sorry. I am ashamed that I …” Then he said: “Just say we thank her and will remember her, but to let us alone.”

  “How can you say that to someone who will face that much risk, just for justice, just to abolish ignorance?”

  “I know,” the principal said. “It’s difficult. Maybe we cant get along without your help for a while yet, since I am already asking for it.—Good day, sir,” he said, and was gone. So how could Uncle Gavin tell her either. Or anybody else tell her, everybody else tell her, white and black both. Since it wasn’t that she couldn’t hear: she wouldn’t listen, not even to the unified solidarity of No in the Negro school itself—that massive, not resistance but immobility, like the instinct of the animal to lie perfectly still, not even breathing, not even thinking. Or maybe she did hear that because she reversed without even stopping, from the school to the board of education itself: if she could not abolish the ignorance by degrees of individual cases, she would attempt it wholesale by putting properly educated white teachers in the Negro school, asking no help, not even from Gavin, hunting down the school board then, they retreating into simple evaporation, the county board of supervisors in their own sacred lair, armed with no petty ivory tablet and gold stylus this time but with a vast pad of yellow foolscap and enough pencils for everybody. Evidently they committed the initial error of letting her in. Then Gavin said it went something like this:

  The president, writing: Assuming for the moment just for argument you understand that we substitute white teachers in the negro school what will become of the negro teachers or perhaps you plan to retire them on pensions yourself

  The duck’s voice: “Not exactly. I will send them North to white schools where they will be accepted and trained as white teachers are.”

  The pencil: Still assuming for the sake of argument we have got the negro teachers out were will you find white teachers to fill vacancies left by negroes in Mississippi and how long do you think they will be permitted to fill negro vacancies in Mississippi

  The duck’s voice: “I will find them if you will protect them.”

  The pencil: Protect them from who Mrs Kohl Only she didn’t need to answer that. Because it had already started: the words Nigger Lover scrawled huge in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the mansion the next morning for her father to walk steadily through them in his black banker’s hat and his little snap-on bow tie, chewing his steady chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air. Sure he saw it. Gavin said nobody could have helped seeing it, that by noon a good deal of the rest of Jefferson had managed to happen to pass by to look at it. But what else—a banker, THE banker—could he do? spit on his handkerchief and get down on his knees and rub it out? And later Linda came out on her way back to the courthouse to badger the rest of the county authorities back behind their locked doors. And maybe, very likely, she really didn’t see it. Anyway, it wasn’t either of them nor the cook nor the yardman either. It was a neighbor, a woman, who came with a broom and at least obscured it, viciously, angrily, neither to defend Linda’s impossible dream nor even in instinctive female confederation with another female, but because she lived on this street. The words could have been the quick short primer-bald words of sex or excrement, as happened now and then even on sidewalks in this part of town, and she would have walked through them too since to pause would have been public admission that a lady knew what they meant. But nobody was going to write Nigger Lover nor -Hater either, delineate in visible taunting chalk that ancient subterrene atavistic ethnic fear on the sidewalk of the street she (and her husband of course) lived and owned property on.

  Until at last the president of the board of supervisors crossed the Square to the bank and on to that back room where old Snopes sat with his feet propped on that mantelpiece between foreclosures, and I would have liked to hear that: the outsider coming in and saying, more or less: Cant you for God’s sake keep your daughter at home or at least out of the courthouse. In desperation, because what change could he have hoped to get back, she was not only thirty years old and independent and a widow, she was a war veteran too who had actually—Ratliff would say, actively—stood gunfire. Because she didn’t stop; it had got now to where the board of supervisors didn’t dare unlock their door while they were in session even to go home at noon to eat, but instead had sandwiches from the Dixie Café passed in through the back window. Until suddenly you were thinking how suppose she were docile and amenable and would have obeyed him, but it was he, old Snopes, that didn’t dare ask, let alone order, her to quit. You didn’t know why of course. All you could do was speculate: on just what I.O.U. or mortgage bearing his signature she might have represented out of that past which had finally gained for him that back room in the bank where he could sit down and watch himself grow richer by lending and foreclosing other people’s I.O.U.’s.

  Because pretty soon he had something more than just that unsigned Nigger Lover to have to walk through practically any time he came out his front door. One night (this was while I was in Europe) a crude cross soaked in gasoline blazed suddenly on the lawn in front of the mansion until the cops came and put it out, outraged and seething of course, but helpless; who—the cops—would still have been helpless even if they hadn’t been cops. You know: if she had only lived alone, or had been the daughter of a mere doctor or lawyer or even a minister, it would have been one thing, and served them both—her and her old man—right. Instead, she had to be the daughter of not just a banker but THE banker, so that what the cross really illuminated was the fact that the organisation which put it there were dopes and saps: if the sole defense and protection of its purity rested in hands which didn’t—or what was worse, couldn’t—distinguish a banker’s front yard, the white race was in one hell of a fix.

  Then the next month was Munich. Then Hitler’s and Stalin’s pact and now when he came out of his house in the morning in his black banker’s hat and bow tie and his little cud of Ratliff’s Frenchman’s Bend air, what he walked through was no longer anonymous and unspecific, the big scrawled letters, the three words covering the sidewalk before the house in their various mutations and combinations:

  KOHL

  COMMUNIST

  JEW

  JEW
>
  KOHL

  COMMUNIST

  COMMUNIST

  KOHL

  JEW

  and he, the banker, the conservative, the tory who had done more than any other man in Jefferson or Yoknapatawpha County either to repeal time back to 1900 at least, having to walk through them as if they were not there or were in another language and age which he could not be expected to understand, with all Jefferson watching him at least by proxy, to see if his guard would ever drop. Because what else could he do. Because now you knew you had figured right and it actually was durst not, with that record of success and victory behind him which already had two deaths in it: not only the suicide which left her motherless, but if he had been another man except the one whose wife would finally have to shoot herself, he might have raised the kind of daughter whose Barton Kohl wouldn’t have been a Jewish sculptor with that Spanish war in his horoscope. Then in the very next second you would find you were thinking the exact opposite: that those words on his sidewalk he had to walk through every time he left home were no more portents and threats of wreckage and disaster to him than any other loan he had guessed wrong on would be an irremediable disaster, as long as money itself remained unabolished. That the last thing in the world he was thinking to himself was This is my cross; I will bear it because what he was thinking was All I got to do now is keep folks thinking this is a cross and not a gambit.

  Then Poland. I said, “I’m going now,” and Gavin said, “You’re too old. They wouldn’t possibly take you for flight training yet,” and I said, “Yet?” and he said, “Finish one more year of law. You dont know what will be happening then, but it wont be what you’re looking at now.” So I went back to Cambridge and he wrote me how the F.B.I, was investigating her now and he wrote me: I’m frightened. Not about her. Not at what they will find out because she would tell them all that herself if it only occurred to them that the simple thing would be to come and ask her. And told me the rest of it: how she had at last quit beating on the locked door behind which the board of supervisors and the school board crouched holding their breath, and now she was merely meeting a class of small children each Sunday at one of the Negro churches, where she would read aloud in the dry inflectionless quacking, not the orthodox Biblical stories perhaps but at least the Mesopotamian folklore and the Nordic fairy tales which the Christian religion has arrogated into its seasonal observances, safe now since even the white ministers could not go on record against this paradox. So now there was no more Jew Communist Kohl on the sidewalk and no more Nigger Lover either (you would like to think, from shame) to walk through in order to be seen daily on the Square: the bride of quietude and silence striding inviolate in the isolation of unhearing, immune, walking still like she used to walk when she was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen years old: exactly like a young pointer bitch just about to locate and pin down a covey of birds.