Mississippi/land/plantation: the Howe interview reveals that in matters of race, Faulkner thought in terms of place. Race released in him a primordial tenderness toward his region—in Faulkner’s imaginary, a white region in need of protection. As racial turmoil intensified, his image of his region under attack transformed predictably, returning magnetically to the crisis of 1860. He imagined a (white) South sanctified once more by menace and separate (once again) from the country to which it belonged. More than a century of regional custom and memory could be heard in particular utterances. Shortly before the Howe interview, Faulkner had made another widely quoted racial statement—this one also soaked in the sanctity of his region’s history. “Go slow now,” he had appealed to black leaders, in an article appearing in Life. “Stop now for a time, a moment,” he urged them. Brown v. Board of Education, decided by the Supreme Court in 1954, had given the black leaders leverage; Autherine Lucy’s admission to the University of Alabama was legally unstoppable. “You have the power now,” he wrote, but it is a power to be restrained. Other race-focused statements made during the mid-1950s intimated that when he said “go slow,” he meant really slow. Questioned in a 1955 interview in Japan, he glossed the change sanctioned by Brown as follows: “That will take a little time … the Negro himself has got to be patient and sensible. But it will come, as I see it, and maybe in three hundred years” (LG 90). Three hundred years; elsewhere he would speak of five hundred years. He was urging blacks to adopt a pace of political change that could only appear to them as glacial.
Abstractly, he wanted black emancipation. He knew, and publicly proclaimed, that Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, followed by Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, meant no less. But on the ground in the South, such emancipation was unimaginable. “Go slow” actually meant: don’t—not yet, not until we are ready. He knew his region’s (white) people too well to believe that they were anywhere near ready. In speech after speech, letter after letter, during the 1950s, he urged patience on blacks and a change of mind on whites. Not a change of heart. He had spent his life paying attention to and making sense of white hearts in the South; he knew the anger and frustration seething there. An outburst of uncontrollable racial violence was what he feared. Forcibly admitting Autherine Lucy into the University of Alabama would release it. The white South, he was sure, was about to explode.
At heart, for him, it was the white South at risk, not its black people. At a Southern Historical Association conference in Memphis in 1955, he said the following: “We will not sit quietly by and see our native land, the South, not just Mississippi but all the South, wreck and ruin itself twice in less than a hundred years, over the Negro question” (ESPL 151). In private correspondence he was more colloquial, his stance more forthright. He wrote a concerned fellow Mississippian of his fear that “for the second time in a hundred years, we Southerners will have destroyed our native land just because of niggers” (SL 391). “Just because of niggers”: the phrase resonates with centuries of inculcated racism. Why won’t they be patient, wait out a change in Southern behavior and politics that is admittedly overdue but that will in time arrive?
White hearts could not be forced to change, but black hearts—again, one hears his regional disidentification with blacks—could be made to alter more swiftly. He soon came to believe that integration would become possible only if Negroes ceased to be—Negro. During his year of teaching at the University of Virginia (1957–58), he pronounced:
Perhaps the Negro is not yet capable of more than second-class citizenship. His tragedy may be that so far he is competent for equality only in the ratio of his white blood… . He must learn to cease forever more thinking like a Negro and acting like a Negro… . His burden will be that, because of his race and color, it will not suffice him to think and act like just any white man: he must think and act like the best among white men. (ESPL 157)
Even granting that Faulkner was speaking to white organizations at a white university, this speech bizarrely distorts the realities it backhandedly recognizes. Faulkner granted a history of miscegenation only to imagine its (unintended) benefits for blacks. He focused not on the scandal of white abuse but on the fantasized potential that the resulting fraction of white blood in black veins would in time enable. More, just as white brutality was erased in this vision of miscegenation, so was it erased in his insistence that black behavior be equal to the best of white behavior.
The same distortions had appeared a year earlier in his “Letter to the Leaders of the Negro Race.” There he urged those leaders to say to their followers: “We must learn to deserve equality so that we can hold and keep it after we get it” (ESPL 111). Deserve equality: Faulkner’s phrasing rejected Jefferson’s insistence on equality as a self-evident truth in need of no prior deserving. Not so for blacks: Faulkner was willing to mortgage their equality to demonstrated proofs of merit. Missing from these utterances was the capacity to enter empathically into black lives, to envisage those lives as already precious and in need of support on their own terms. He had trouble accessing the human reality of blacks as something other than abstracted material potentially reshapable into familiar white forms. For him, in pronouncements such as this one, no equality for blacks until they looked like whites. And smelled like whites too: “But always,” he advised black leaders to tell their people, “let us practices cleanliness … in our contacts with” the white man (111). If such obtuseness about racial turmoil were the last word concerning Faulkner’s dark twinship, it would be mainly a matter of much darkness and little twinning. The pole of disidentification would be triumphant. Most black leaders and white radicals read him thus, and they ended by expecting little from this famous Southerner. A man whose concern led to proposals offering several more centuries of waiting had little to contribute to the solution they were urgently seeking.
How could he have contributed further to their solution? His entire life, saturated in the regional history that had shaped his identity, oriented him toward a good deal of racial blindness. Some twenty-five years before civil rights agitation, at the time of his much celebrated arrival on the New York literary scene (following the publication of Sanctuary), he had been interviewed about race. At that time, he casually allowed that Southern Negroes were childlike and would be better off “under the conditions of slavery … because they’d have someone to look after them” (F 292). Blacks as obedient children when enslaved, potential beasts when emancipated: this binary articulated the South’s abiding racist cliche. The racial imaginary in Faulkner’s greatest novels far transcends this demeaning opposition, yet the racial otherness encoded in the opposition recurs as a sort of default position. Something permanent in his mindset participated in his region’s dominant discourse of race. He would always remain, whatever his anguish, “a native of our land and a sharer in its errors” (ESPL 205).
“THIS THING OF KILLING NEGROES WITHOUT CAUSE”
“Even if it means going out into the street and shooting Negroes,” Faulkner had found himself saying in 1956. It may be hard in the twenty-first century to recall the pervasive race-fueled violence that blanketed the Southern landscape like immovable summer heat during the first half of the twentieth century. One of Faulkner’s finest stories, “Dry September,” opens on a note that bonds implacable weather with inexorable violence: “Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass—the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro” [CS 169]. Faulkner wrote that story in 1931. Twenty-five years earlier, Memphis (some eighty miles northwest of Oxford) was widely recognized as the “Murder Capital” of America. So much of Memphis’s routine violence was racial that the city’s leading paper, the Commercial Appeal, thought fit (in 1906) to exhort its readership as follows: “This thing of killing negroes without cause … [is being] overdone … white men who kill negroes as a pastime … usually end up killing white men” (cited in F2 1:302). The nor
ms running through this editorial—and newspapers live and die by shared norms—testify to the casual entrenchment of Southern racism. The editorial assumes that all readers of the paper are white; that whites killing blacks is being “overdone” as a “pastime” (like irresponsibly killing game beyond the limits of the hunting season); and that the disturbing consequence of such a foolish practice—the reason for the editorial—is that white men could end up getting killed.
What racial arrangements explain the stunning callousness of these norms? To approach this question fully would require consideration of a history beginning four centuries ago with the Middle Passage and New World slavery. A much shortened version can start with the quietly racist organization of social space in the twentieth-century South. Quietly: this ordering system, imposed by whites and more or less tolerated by blacks, often functioned smoothly. I grew up in a quietly segregated Memphis fifty years after it was dubbed the “Murder Capital” of America. In the mid-1950s, Memphis proudly sported a different title (won in nationwide competition): “cleanest city in America.” That appellation would become searingly ironic a decade later, when Martin Luther King—intervening in a protracted garbage collectors’ strike—was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis. Killing Negroes continued unabated, though this time the cause was not in doubt.
Ever since Plessy v. Ferguson (the landmark Supreme Court decision upholding segregation in 1896: the doctrine of “separate but equal”), white and blacks had lived in elaborately stratified worlds. As C. Vann Woodward noted, the proliferation of Jim Crow laws throughout the South (following Plessy) underwrote a racial barrier extending to “virtually all forms of public transportation, to sports and recreations, to hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and asylums, and ultimately to funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries”—from cradle to grave.1 Yet the two races so kept apart also rubbed shoulders constantly. Restaurants, trains, buses, drinking fountains, swimming pools, and public toilets might be quarantined into segregated spaces. But in country stores, at Saturday markets, and in private homes—not to mention other territories devoted to commerce (such as Murry Falkner’s livery stable)—whites and blacks shared social space. Faulkner was born into a world that confidently organized his experience of blacks: how he would engage them, when and where he would see them. A glance at four “innocent” childhood passages from John Faulkner’s My Brother Bill reveals (all unawares) the principles guiding that organization.
“Mother said when she came to the door and saw us [covered in dust], she could not tell us from Jessie’s children” (MBB 23). “Mother came out and told us to leave [the lost kite] alone and when the Negroes came in that night she would have one of them get a ladder and haul the kite down for us” (29). “Dad flung the reins to Mother and jumped to the ground yelling for the Negroes” (42). “You could get most any Negro to take charge of the butchering [of hogs] for the chitterlings” (51). All innocent, all revealing: the comic pseudoconfusion between white Falkner kids and Jesse’s black ones; the secure dependence on hired black help to retrieve a kite from a tree (there is no doubt that “one of them” would do that: they are here for these purposes); the immediate “yelling for the Negroes” to put out a fire caused by a steam engine (they are always nearby, a group without individualizing distinctions, with nothing more important to do and no need to be politely asked); the shared conviction that “most any Negro” would be available to butcher hogs for chitterlings. (The rank odor of chitterlings repelled most white sensibilities, but not black ones.) In these passages, John was focusing on the Falkner boys’ childhood shenanigans. But he also lets us see how extensively a white childhood in the early twentieth-century South assumed the subordinate presence of useful, obedient blacks. A sanctioned racial hierarchy functions so smoothly in these vignettes as apparently to operate by itself, with no one needed at the wheel.
Something like these unthinking racial norms surfaces in a 1921 letter Faulkner wrote from New Haven to his father back home. This was his second experience out of the South (the first—his attempt to enter World War I—had occurred three years earlier). He may have been deliberately catering to his father’s unapologetic racism, or the letter might signal a racial naïveté genuinely his own: “You cant tell me these niggers are as happy and contented as ours are,” he wrote Murry; “all this freedom does is make them miserable because they are not white” (TH 149). Blacks as childlike, happier with someone to take care of them (as during the peaceful time of slavery): little in Faulkner’s extensive dealing with black people, early and late, would radically undermine this regional frame of racial understanding.2
By 1930, Mammy Callie and Uncle Ned had entered his household and come under his care. That such care was generous and loving does not keep it from being paternalistic at its core. These people were not-white. He did not typically see himself when he looked into the mirror of their faces. Some fifteen years later, he wrote Bob Haas (his editor at Random House), complaining about the slowness of his writing: “One reason it goes slow,” he wrote, “maybe the main one, is conditions here. Negro servants in this country have all quit…. For two years now I have had no house servants except a doddering old man and a 12 year old boy who must go to school too” (SL 256). How different is this from his brother John’s casual assumption of where blacks figured on the social map and what they were expected to do? In neither case did the white man wonder who those helpers were, what they were like apart from their (meagerly recompensed) relation to him. Faulkner showed no interest in why they might be leaving the South in great numbers (the letter was written in 1947, just after World War II: the time of the great migration north). He could understand their departure only by way of the dismissive verb “quit.”
The scene of racial segregation did not always operate smoothly. From the 1890s through the 1930s, the Mississippi politicians James Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo powerfully exploited white anxieties that liberated blacks would be dangerous blacks. These two men channeled and rode a wave of racial anger often referred to as “the rise of the Rednecks.” Plantation patricians—men who had to be careful in their treatment of blacks, however contemptuous their thoughts about them, since black workers were required to make their cotton profitable—increasingly gave way to populist leaders exploiting the incensed thoughts and fears of poor whites. The latter, as Faulkner recognized in the mid-1950s, stood to lose the most from black emancipation. Soon after Vardaman became governor in 1903, he declared, “Six thousand years ago, the Negro was the same in his native jungle that he is today” (WFSH 157). A year later, Vardaman expanded on his subject: “You can scarcely pick up a newspaper whose pages are not blackened with the account of an unmentionable crime committed by a negro brute, and this crime, I want to impress upon you, is but the manifestation of the negro’s aspiration for social equality, encouraged largely by the character of free education in vogue” (157). “The rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro”: decades of postbellum Southern racial practice had made such rumors commonplace, their credibility immediately to be granted. When Faulkner tried, many years later, to make the case for a single system of public education—for whites and blacks alike—he was up against an almost impenetrable thicket of long-nurtured apprehension and resistance.
Fanned to its most vicious form of expression, such hostility would flare into the ritual violence of lynchings. Faulkner claimed he had never witnessed one, and there is little reason to doubt him. But Mississippi led the nation in lynchings during this period: “In the twenty years from 1889 to 1909, at least 293 blacks were lynched there, more than in any other state in the nation” (WFSH 157). One of the most notorious lynchings—that of Nelse Patton—occurred in Oxford in 1908. Patton was thought to have murdered a woman named Mattie McMillan with a razor blade. He fled the scene but was soon caught by outraged whites. Historian Joel Williamson has shown how journalists and politicians fed the flames of the ensuing racial fury. First reported as “a wh
ite woman,” Mattie was within hours referred to as “a white lady”; at first she was “killed,” but within hours the papers reported her as “assaulted and killed.” Furious Oxford whites caught Patton and stubbornly refused to let the law take its course. Brick by brick, for many hours and with many hands, they tore down the symbolically charged courthouse to get at Patton and extricate him from the protections guaranteed by the law. They riddled his body with bullets and strung him up naked and mutilated on a telephone pole, where his body remained on display all night. Ten-year-old William Faulkner slept only one thousand yards from the courthouse that night. He didn’t have to have seen that ritual dismembering to remember its impact for the rest of his life.
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