How can racial identity be a serious question in a novel that has virtually no black characters? (A few young blacks wander the Jefferson streets late one night, a pair of older blacks figure in Hightower’s memories of his nineteenth-century childhood. None of them has much bearing on the book’s events.) Yet racial hysteria—like a bomb threat—can flare up, uncontrollably, with neither blacks nor bombs anywhere to be found. In an essay entitled “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin explains the logic of this hysteria: “At the root of the American Negro problem,” he writes, “is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to live with himself … ‘the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.’”8 Dark twins: it is as though the American white man has been surreptitiously infected with Negro-ness. The insanity such infection foments is white alone. My figure of speech invokes the blood, which is Light in August’s obsessive concern. Joe Christmas is incapable of finding a way of living with the Negro in order to live with himself, and this is because he senses his dark twin living inejectably, blood-coiled, beneath his skin. How does Christmas come to believe this? How does Faulkner let us find it out?
The first scene where we realize that Christmas may be black occurs some seventy pages into the book. Far enough along for readers to feel tricked: which is to say, to resent the author not telling us in advance the racial information we require. Such resentment—deliberately fostered by Faulkner’s procedures—boomerangs on us once we ask what is at stake in our demanding to know, first off, a character’s racial pedigree. Like the next two masterpieces focused on race, Light in August acts—mirror-like—as an uninvited dark twin bent on rousing into consciousness its reader’s racial presuppositions. To read it is to reexperience one’s own assumptions about race. Here is the scene in question. Joe Brown, Christmas’s erstwhile partner and cabin-sharer, is being grilled as he tries to explain to an angry public what he has been doing with Christmas. The latter is suspected of having slit the throat of a white woman (Joanna Burden), set fire to her house, and fled. A thousand-dollar reward has been offered to anyone who can identify the killer, and Brown wants to collect it. The riled town, however, wants to know what Brown was doing at the scene of the fire. Byron Bunch narrates what comes next:
“I reckon he was desperate by then. I reckon he could not only see that thousand dollars getting further away from him, but that he could begin to see somebody else getting it…. Because they said it was just like he had been saving what he told them next for just such a time as this. Like he had knowed that if it come to a pinch, this would save him…. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Go on. Accuse me. Accuse the white man that’s trying to help you with what he knows. Accuse the white man and let the nigger go free. Accuse the white and let the nigger run.’
“‘Nigger?’ the sheriff said. ‘Nigger?’
“It’s like he knew he had them then. Like nothing they could believe he had done would be as bad as what he could tell that somebody else had done. ‘You’re so smart,’ he says. ‘The folks in this town is so smart. Fooled for three years. Calling him a foreigner for three years, when soon as I watched him three days I knew he wasn’t no more a foreigner than I am. I knew before he even told me himself.’ And them watching him now, and looking now and then at one another.
“‘You better be careful what you are saying, if it is a white man you are talking about,’ the marshall says. ‘I don’t care if he is a murderer or not.’…
“‘A nigger,’ the marshall said. ‘I always thought there was something funny about that fellow.’” (LA 470–1)
Five times hurled into that space of contestation, the word “nigger” magically reconfigures the stakes involved. Brown exits from the scene of suspicion, as Christmas comes to fill (overfill) that space by himself. All eyes—previously blurred vision now corrected to twenty-twenty—are turned on this absent figure. “Nigger” is bad enough. What is intolerable, as the wordless vibration in the air suggests, is that none of them spotted him in advance. The marshall warningly trots out to Brown the South’s hierarchy of crimes. To murder someone is less culpable than to call a white man a “nigger.” Subsequent recognitions click into place: “I always thought there was something funny about that fellow,” the marshall says. His access to this recognition is revealing. The lack of clarity he and his fellow white townspeople felt during their actual experience of Christmas has been satisfyingly dispelled. Now they know what that was all about. Retrospective judgment silently reconfigures earlier experience so that it fits later prejudice. Removing the gnats and tacks and broken glass from their confusing experience of Christmas, the town transforms the turmoil of is into the peace of was. Uncertainty gets “corrected” into fixed (and fatal) conviction. It doesn’t stop there. Joanna Burden—while alive, a strange Yankee woman living alone in their vicinity—becomes, once dead, a martyr to Southern honor, the victim of black bestiality: “Among them [were those] who believed aloud that it was an anonymous negro crime committed not by a negro but by Negro and who knew, believed, and hoped that she had been ravished too: at least once before her throat was cut and at least once afterward” (LA 611). “Nigger,” we now see, carries with it an entire subhuman narrative. As for Brown, wielder of this talismanic term, we can infer that he is lying about his own process of recognition. He was no less imperceptive than the others about Christmas’s racial identity, until Christmas informed him otherwise. But he has forgotten that he is lying about it, so soothing is it to rewrite earlier blindness into later enlightenment. Except that it is not enlightenment. No one knows if Christmas is black: not others, not Joe, not the reader. None of this not-knowing will prevent the people of Jefferson from killing and castrating him. Only we and Joe are sure that we do not know, but there is nothing satisfying about such knowledge.
The novel wryly reveals that accurate knowledge doesn’t affect irrational behavior anyway. The racial identity of Joe’s father—the man who impregnated Milly Hines, “a fellow with the circus”—is forever uncertain. As Byron explains to Hightower, “She [Milly] told him [her father, Doc Hines] that the man was Mexican … Maybe that’s what the fellow told the gal. But he … knew somehow that the fellow had nigger blood. Maybe the circus folks told him. I dont know. He aint never said how he found out, like that never made any difference. And I reckon it didn’t, after the next night” (LA 678). Never made any difference because, after the next night, the man was dead anyway, gunned down by an insanely racist Doc Hines. Conviction explodes into lethal action. Reliable information is academic, beside the point. The racial makeup of this illegitimate child remains permanently under a cloud, however murderous its consequences.
Taken by his outraged grandfather to a Memphis orphanage, Joe grows up unmothered. The nearest he can approach a motherly figure is the orphanage’s dietitian, whose hair reminds him of candy. Obscurely seeking nourishment from her, he makes his way secretly into her rooms where, in the privacy of her bathroom, he ritualistically takes and swallows her toothpaste. He seems to believe that ingesting this property of hers will secure her to him as well. One day, however, he comes to her room at the wrong time. Before he can slip away, she enters with a coworker, Charlie, who is intent on bullying her into intercourse. She resists feebly. Hearing their sounds, the little boy thinks “that it was a strange hour to be going to bed” (LA 488). Frightened, motionless, he keeps coiling toothpaste into his mouth, more than he has ever taken before. Soon all grows strange inside him—as the intercourse continues beyond the curtain—and the explosion occurs:
At once the paste which he had already swallowed lifted inside him, trying to get back out, into the air where it was cool. It was no longer sweet. In the rife, pinkwomansmelling obscurity behind the curtain he squatted, pinkfoamed, listening to his insides, waiting with astonished fatalism for what was about to happen to him. Then it happened. He said to himself with complete and passive surrender: “Well, here I am.”
When the
curtain fled back he did not look up. When hands dragged him violently out of his vomit he did not resist. He hung from the hands, limp, looking with slack-jawed and glassy idiocy into a face no longer smooth pink-and-white, surrounded now by wild and dishevelled hair whose smooth bands once make him think of candy. “You little rat!” The thin, furious voice hissed; “you little rat! Spying on me! You little nigger bastard!” (488–9)
The scene is passing strange. Joe’s ingestion of the paste grotesquely imitates the passage of semen on the bed (Charlie’s climax echoed by Joe’s eruption), though in his case he is both receiver and releaser. His bids for a mother never get past this debacle in the dietitian’s room. Nor will his later experience of sexuality—the passing and receiving of liquid—take place without violence. The would-be mother—transformed into a Medusa with disheveled hair—pronounces upon Joe a lifelong curse: “You little nigger bastard!” Identity in this novel involves not who you are but how you become penetrated by the names that others have called you. Under pressure, as Brown was earlier in the book, both characters “nigger” Joe to save themselves from scrutiny.
A few pages later, we learn that Joe has been called “nigger” before, on the playground. Though only five, he tried to figure out why he was singled out, treated as different. He knew it had everything to do with the janitor at the orphanage:
He knew that he was never on the playground for an instant that the man [the janitor] was not watching him from the chair in the furnace room door, and that the man was watching him with a profound and unflagging attention. If the child had been older he would perhaps have thought He hates me and fears me. So much so that he cannot let me out of his sight With more vocabulary but no more age he might have thought That is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time. (500–501, emphasis in the original)
Over 150 pages later, a first-time reader learns that this janitor is Doc Hines, Joe’s furious grandfather. Obsessed with the boy’s satanic black blood, Hines has taken him to a Memphis orphanage and become the janitor there, so as never to let the boy out of his sight. If the children code the new boy’s difference as “nigger”—which is not unlikely on an orphanage playground in the early-twentieth-century South—the one focusing their abuse is the ever-vigilant grandfather-janitor. It is as though in a bizarre twist on the Calvinist God balefully scrutinizing his human subjects, Hines unceasingly looks Joe’s black difference into him—“niggers” him: a penetration from which the boy never recovers.
Years later, Joe grows up as the adoptive son of another brutalizing father figure, Calvin McEachern (the man who seeks with systematic violence to force the catechism on the boy). Joe eludes McEachern’s despotic control, even falling in love with an older waitress in a seedy restaurant downtown. That she is a part-time prostitute is something he will not recognize until—like all genuine experience in Faulkner’s world—he is knocked down and forced to face it. Before this painful awakening, however, they become lovers—she is his first—and he invites her to figure out his single carefully guarded secret. He hints that it has to do with his features, and she guesses maybe he is a foreigner:
“It’s different from that, even. More than just a foreigner. You cant guess.”
“How more different?”
“Guess.”
Their voices were quiet … “I cant. What are you?” … She asked him again.
Then he told her. “I got some nigger blood in me.”
Then she lay perfectly still with a different stillness. But he did not seem to notice it. He lay peacefully too, his hand slow up and down her flank.
“You’re what?” she said.
“I think I got some nigger blood in me.” His eyes were closed, his hand slow and unceasing. “I don’t know. I believe I have.”
She did not move. She said at once: “You’re lying.”
“All right,” he said, not moving, his hand not ceasing. (LA 543)
Only here does he offer his difference as something to be shared, an intimacy that might bond them closer. She cannot believe him. It is inconceivable to her that she could be having intercourse with a “nigger,” though she, too—like the others—will hurl his “nigger identity” at him when she is under duress. For the moment she just denies it, in terms that spell out an entire culture’s racial phobia. He speaks of attribute—“some nigger blood in me”—and she speaks of essence: “You’re what?” Racial identity in the South cannot be partial or mixed. To have a drop of black blood is to be black.
Deformed by Hines, brutalized by McEachern, betrayed by Bobbie the waitress, Joe finds himself, years later, in Joanna Burden’s house and (eventually) in her bed. We have already glanced at the failure of that fraught relationship, and we know—it is one of the first things we learn in this book—that it ended with her throat being slit. We have known this since the early pages, and the town has obscenely dilated on it, embroidering the scenario according to their racist fantasies. Few things are more brilliant in Light in August than Faulkner’s withholding this violent event itself, even as no one doubts that it occurred. Rather than give us the deed, Faulkner twice supplies—as already analyzed—the threshold scene: Joe outside her door, hearing the clock sound midnight, knowing that “something is going to happen to me,” and making his way into her house one last time. Two hundred pages into the book, Faulkner finally unfolds the scene itself: what they say to each other, and what they do. There we learn—we alone, no one else in the novel is privy to this scene—that she is lying in wait for him, an ancient and loaded twin-barreled pistol in her hand. She has in mind a double suicide, since the affair is ruined and he will not become a good “Negro” worker in her behalf. He watches as she pulls the trigger point-blank, and the gun misfires. Rather than let her fire again, he reaches for his knife, slits her throat, and flees. Even in Mississippi in the 1930s, a killing that transpired thus would be legally a case of self-defense. Like our other unshared knowledge about events in this novel, knowing this does us no good. Joe must die the death, receive the castration, because—in all white eyes—he is, in essence, and therefore in behavior, a nigger-rapist-murderer.
Although Christmas outwits his pursuers, he chooses, finally, to turn himself in: “I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs” (LA 648, emphasis in the original). He makes sure that the day he starts trying to do so is a Friday. On Saturday, he succeeds in getting recognized and caught. I mentioned earlier Light in August’s brilliant moves, and this is perhaps the most stunning of all. Faulkner turns over the narrative of Christmas’s capture to an anonymous townsman, who speaks to other anonymous townsmen as follows:
“He don’t look any more like a nigger than I do. But it must have been the nigger blood in him. It looked like he had set out to get himself caught like a man might set out to get married. He had got clean away for a whole week…. Then yesterday morning he come into Mottstown in broad daylight, on a Saturday with the town full of folks. He went into a white barbershop like a white man, and because he looked like a white man they never suspected him…. They shaved him and cut his hair and he payed them and walked out and right into a store and bought a new shirt and a tie and a straw hat … And then he walked the streets in broad daylight, like he owned the town, walking back and forth with people passing him a dozen times and not knowing it, until Halliday saw him and ran up and grabbed him and said, ‘Aint your name Christmas?’ and the nigger said that it was. He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let along a nigger too.” (657–8)
A culture’s racial vernacular speaks here, with energetic conviction. In this vernacular, “niggers” are all too likely—it is their “default”
position—to be rapist-murderers who skulk and hide in the woods. They are typically dirty as well—and recognizable as such. One recalls the speeches Faulkner made twenty-five years later in which he reminded black people that, to deserve equality, they should act, dress, and smell like white people. In Light in August there is no place for such condescension. The novelist imaginatively knew, in 1932, what the letter-writer of the 1950s seems to have forgotten. Joe Christmas does not need to be reminded how to dress. With exquisite irony, he bestrides the town as though he owned it. A white barbershop, a new shirt and tie and hat, an unhurried parading through Mottstown as he waits to be recognized: his moves eloquently counter white racist expectations, point for point. He does not say a word. His performance says it for him: “I look like you, perhaps better than you. I am clean, tall, and self-possessed. I enter and exit your segregated spaces—your barbershop and stores—and you do not see my difference. You do not see it because it does not exist. It takes you forever to catch up to me.” I have invented this silent speech, yet something like it roils inside this mob of enraged whites. Confusedly, they register his insult and grasp that he is mocking the racial conventions that underwrite their sanity. “The Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men,” Baldwin wrote. Light in August is the first of Faulkner’s masterpieces to express the fallout of that insanity.
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