The Curse & The Hope

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Tell about the South. What's it like

there. What do they do there. Why do

they live there. Why do they live at all?

You can't understand it. You would

have to be born there.

--Absalom, Absalom!

The myths, mysteries, and hard realities of the South are the preoccupation of Presidents, the puzzlement of foreigners, the daily grist of newsmen, and the astonishment of the entire nation. Is the South a war camp of church bombings and station-wagon burnings, or is it a region earnestly attempting peaceful compliance with a hated civil rights law? Does it ask for "understanding" merely to delay the inevitable? Or is there a wound so deep that it will not heal for generations to come? Is poverty too prevalent? Is sex too obsessive?

What sets Southerners apart --what lies at the root of their beliefs and behavior?

One man who knew was William Faulkner. He was born there, in Mississippi, heir to and prisoner of the crinoline-and-lace tradition; he died there in 1962. In writing 19 novels and 80 short stories, almost all about the South, he won through to an understanding that in its richness, scope and completeness, tragic vision and comic invention, will not soon be equaled. At his best he penetrated the magnolia curtain of Southern illusions to the secret springs of motive and action. He said, in effect, "This is the way it feels to be Southern"--something the North needs to know and the South may even need to be reminded of.

Faulkner's vision has little to do with sit-ins and registration drives. His is a vision of history and the heart. It begins with the land in its original wildness and its taming and spoliation by the first settlers and their slaves. For him the crime of the South was chattel slavery, and the white man's denial of the Negro's equal humanity was an ineradicable curse on the land and its people. Ever since, Faulkner argues, the white Southerner has been burdened by a crippling, unacknowledged guilt, as intimate and inescapable as if taken in with the milk of his mother--or of his Negro wet nurse.

Slavery brought the disaster of the Civil War, which united the South, gave it legends, but impoverished it. Reconstruction, by attempting to impose revolutionary change, created the South's implacable resistance to change, and thus put off for a century any real hope of racial equality and the working-out of the Southerners' guilt on their own initiative--which is the only way guilt can be worked out.

The defeated whites clung to the past when Mississippi had been one of the richest states in the Union and Jefferson Davis the rebel President. They were scared because they felt that they were few and the Negroes myriad; they were stubborn because only by convincing themselves that the Negro was somehow inferior, like a pet or a horse, could they justify their long crime of refusing to recognize him as an equal human being; they were violent, partly from the strain of sustaining this myth, partly from fear that if the myth was once cracked, at any point or in any context, the whole perilously maintained social structure would collapse.

Gropings & Costs. Thus Faulkner's stories know the moment when a Southern child first hates, and what happens to men who use other men as tools.

Faulkner brings alive the Southern preoccupation with the past and the sickness of living in memories. He teaches again and again the fear and the reality of miscegenation, and he makes comprehensive the sexual hysteria behind the myth of Southern white womanhood. He can extort reluctant under standing for a code of grim and instant violence.

Faulkner also knew the gropings and costs of conciliation, and the difficulty and urgency of arousing men of good will to action. He spoke of the future not as a social scientist with a blueprint and a program, but as a novelist of "the human heart in conflict with itself"--as he said when he received the No bel Prize. Thus his hopes are implicit in the psychology of the characters he created and in the moral judgments he requires the reader to make. And what he seemed to hope was that out of the heart in conflict, out of the crisis of conscience, could come a new reverence for the land and all its people, and a voluntary recognition by the individual white Southerner of the humanity of the individual Negro. He put his faith in the generation now coming to maturity to go much farther than its fathers.

For those who had ears to hear, Faulkner was offering these things more than a quarter-century ago, back when the public that was embracing Gone With the Wind could dismiss the South's sporadic violence (119 lynchings in the '30s) and constant racial repression as merely a peculiar regional problem. Faulkner himself was often treated as a strictly regional writer.

In 1945, just five years before he won the Nobel Prize, nearly all his novels were out of print. Many white Southerners still turn away from him as difficult, gothic and horror-ridden, loaded down with a guilt they claim they do not feel. Yet today William Faulkner is the one writer--sociologist, historian or novelist, Southerner or Northerner, white or Negro--who is inescapably relevant to a compassionate understanding of the Southern crisis.

Born & Bred. Halfway through the writing of his third novel, Sartor is, he had a vision: "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. I created a cosmos of my own." He called it Yoknapatawpha County and set it down in the rolling pine hills and cotton-rich valley bottoms of northeastern Mississippi, 80 miles from Memphis, Tenn., named its county seat Jefferson, and peopled its 2,400 sq. mi. with 15,611 residents--"Whites, 6,298; Negroes, 9,313. William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor."

Faulkner set 15 of his 19 novels in Yoknapatawpha County. He drew its map, crisscrossed its landscape in his stories, plotted the intricate genealogies of some of its families for four and five generations, told and retold its legends, and searched out its history back to its original Indian inhabitants.

So real was the world of Yoknapatawpha to Faulkner that he sometimes gave the impression of living the life of his county almost day by day. During a bibulous all-afternoon lunch in New York with his last Random House editor, Albert Erskine, Faulkner might ask: "By the way, did you hear what happened to Sarty Snopes?" and then launch into anecdotes (some of them never published) just as if Erskine had lived in the same town but had not been back for a spell. Faulkner once remarked to a friend that Yoknapatawpha Lawyer Gavin Stevens " was a good man, but he didn't succeed in living up to his ideal. But his nephew, the boy [Chick Mallison, the young hero of Intruder in the Dust), I think he may grow up to be a better man than his uncle; I think he may succeed as a human being."

Looking Glass. Yoknapatawpha County and the town of Jefferson resemble closely the Oxford, Miss., area where Faulkner was born in 1897.

(Yoknapatawpha was the original Indian name of the river that runs past Oxford.) Many of its inhabitants, including most of the principal characters of his novels, are closely drawn from his family, his acquaintances, his ancestors. His great-grandfather William Cuthbert Falkner (the novelist added the 'u') was a Confederate colonel and a fiery leader of irregular cavalry; he later turned railroad builder and politician, killed two men in gun fights, was himself finally shot dead in the street by a former business partner. In each larger-than-life detail he has long been recognized as the model for Faulkner's Colonel John Sartoris, progenitor of the Sartoris family, whose family legends, falling fortunes and declining vigor the novelist traced through four generations in eleven novels (principally Sartoris and The Unvanquished). Oxford friends of Faulkner can tentatively identify the real-life sources of several dozen other characters and incidents, including some of the most decadent and grotesque.

But Yoknapatawpha County is far more than antiquarianism and an exercise in skirting the law of libel: it is a looking glass of magical power to enable the patient viewer to see the South whole.

Faulkner was first of all a social historian of matchless accuracy and sweep in capturing the detail of the way life in the Deep South was, and often still is, for whites and Negroes, rednecks and aristocrats, farmers and townspeople. He was also a raconteur of hallucinatory splendor and sudden mirth. But primarily, Faulkner chronicled and explicated the mind and conscience--and something deeper than conscience or even consciousness--of the white Southerner. In effect, his exploration was an exploration of himself. This is one of the most difficult things to do honestly, and one of the most significant if done well.

Black Shadow. For no man could have been more wholly in the South and of the South. William Faulkner was deeply, almost mystically, attached to the land. He was the great-grandson of a man who had owned slaves; his father ran only a livery stable. But Faulkner's concern was spiritual, not economic. His obsession was the region's deepest secret, what he called the curse on the land.

He put it most passionately in Light in August, as the tormented Joanna

Burden remembers the time when her abolitionist father took her to the family graves and told her: "Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of. A race doomed and cursed to be for ever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins. Remember that. His doom and his curse. Forever and ever. Mine. Your mother's. Yours, even though you are a child. The curse of every white child that ever was born and that ever will be born. None can escape it."

And Joanna remembers: "I had seen and known Negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep. But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath."

On the Floor. Faulkner has explored this thesis in myriad ways, but none is more touching, or echoes the experiences of more Southerners, than the story of seven-year-old Roth Edmonds in Go Down, Moses. In all Roth's young life, his constant companion has been a Negro boy named Henry, son of a nearby Negro farmer. They have played and fished together, eaten the same meals and often slept in the same bed. "Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him." Roth decrees that Henry must sleep on a pallet on the floor. This primal wrong and first denial of equality leaves Roth in "a rigid fury of the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit." Just how far Mississippi's troubles extend back into history is examined in Absalom, Absalom! That history is inexorably racial. The novel mercilessly strips away the romantic Southern mythology to reveal the brutal repression of slavery, the arrogance of plantation owners who could summon Negro girls to their beds as if they were ordering the carriage brought around to the door, the guilt behind the Southern obsession with "purity of blood," and the consequences down through the generations of the white man's refusal ever to recognize his Negro offspring, his inability ever to say "my son, my son," to his dark-born child.

In a panting, difficult prose, the several 20th century narrators of Absalom, Absalom! pursue the story of Thomas Sutpen, who came to Mississippi with wagonloads of savage blacks in 1832 determined to change a lOO-sq.-mi. piece of virgin forest into a plantation. Sutpen is a creature of high-flown words and naked will--and perhaps the closest to a tragic hero in the classical Greek sense that U.S. literature has produced.

His fierce dream of Sutpen's Hundred at first succeeds. But disaster overtakes him and his dream of a dynasty. His grown son Henry brings home a friend, Charles Bon, who courts Sutpen's grown daughter Judith--but who turns out to be Sutpen's never-acknowledged child by his first wife, whom he put aside when he discovered that the aristocratic Creole girl had a trace of Negro blood. The Civil War interrupts, and the men go off to fight. But when the weary combatants return and meet at the gate of the ruined plantation, young Henry Sutpen shoots down his half-brother Charles Bon. Why? Was it because of a fear that Judith would commit incest? Or miscegenation?

Thus the plot of Absalom, Absalom! sums up the fundamental Southern anxiety: to the racist's question, "would you want your sister to marry one," Faulkner adds "when he may be your brother?" This, Faulkner seems to say, lies at the heart of the almost paranoiac fear of the "mixing of bloods," which would call in question the belief in a difference between the races on which white dominance was founded, and which, as the owner of one of Mississippi's largest plantations said last week, is still "very real for many whites today."

Crisis of Identity. In Light in August, Faulkner demonstrated how the preoccupation with race can make it tragically impossible for a man to know who he really is, and dramatized the mindless virulence of white reaction to miscegenation. Joe Christmas, the book's hell-ridden hero, is a remarkably modern figure: in the psychological cant phrase of 1964, he suffers an "identity crisis" because he thinks he is part Negro successfully passing for white. Compounding his agonizing psychological fracture, Joe Christmas takes for his mistress a woman who embodies the Southerner's hated notion of the "outside agitator." Joanna Burden is a spinster, a Northerner, dedicated to helping Negroes. Her failure is that she is not able to know Negroes as individuals, but only as an abstract mass or a brooding presence. One day Joanna is found brutally murdered in her bedroom. Obviously Joe has killed her. But this would not have excited the town until an acquaintance of Joe Christmas says that he has always thought Joe was a nigger. That sets off the mob. In his description of Joe's lynching, Faulkner makes clear that vengeance does not expunge guilt, and expiation is nigh to impossible.

"When they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. 'Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell,' he said. But the man on the floor had not moved . . . From out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath . . . upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes."

Renunciation. In the series of novel las and short stories brought together in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner expressed most explicitly his hope that some day reconciliation may be found in an end to exploitation of one race by another. More than any other Faulkner character, Ike McCaslin grapples with and points the way to the moral and emotional resolution of the white man's guilt. Faulkner begins again at the beginning, where Ike McCaslin's ancestors with their slaves took the land from the Indians and tamed it to cotton. He then tells how Ike himself as a boy grows up in the town of Jefferson, learns to hunt deer and bear, and is initiated into a manly love for the wilderness and all the creatures in it.

Ostensibly, Ike McCaslin's life is a series of hunting stories. As that, they are fine entertainment, often anthologized. But beyond that the stories make up a mystical, and for Faulkner truly religious, statement of man's holy relation to the wild land. What Ike McCaslin learns is that he can have peace only at the price of renouncing his claim to his father's slave-won, sharecropper-run plantation, "founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity and carried on even yet with at times downright savagery not only to the human beings but the valuable animals too." But after this his wife rejects him, and Ike thereby loses the right to found a family of his own. The price of reconciliation is terribly high, Faulkner says--and even then it may not be enough.

Told by an Idiot. In The Sound and the Fury, which many critics call his greatest book, Faulkner examined the aimlessness, moral impotence and sense of doom that he saw afflicting many of the old established Southern families in the first third of this century. The events are simple enough, though the stream-of-consciousness telling makes them often difficult to follow. Of the four children in the aristocratic Compson family, the boy Benjy is an idiot, the girl Caddy gets pregnant, marries the wrong man, and goes away, the boy Quentin commits suicide in an inflexible rejection of his sister's dishonor, and the boy Jason grows into a man constantly lashing himself with hate, frustration and repressed violence.

Only the old Negro servant of the family, Dilsey Gibson, can be seen as whole and fully human. Some have found Dilsey heroically simple to the point of sentimental caricature of the "black mammy." Faulkner clearly intended her as a celebration of the quality of Negro endurance that survives with dignity in the Deep South. She is also the book's moral norm, against which the reader measures the decline of the Compsons into drunkenness, hypochondria, idiocy, promiscuity and suicide. Through the three decades spanned by the novel, Dilsey Gibson, with her strength, patience and honesty, is the only one who keeps the family together at all.

Crisis in the Flesh. Faulkner's developing alarm over the grim daily realities of race in the present-day South was best demonstrated in three notable character portraits (one Negro, two white) he painted in Intruder in the Dust, which was his first novel in seven years when it was published in 1948. Lucas Beauchamp (rhymes with reach 'em) is what the local whites violently resent as a "damned high-nosed impudent Negro." As the book opens, he is about to be lynched for murdering a white man. He proves himself a model of imperturbable courage that any civil rights leader should envy.

Lawyer Gavin Stevens, whom Beauchamp calls on to defend him, is the very picture of the well-meaning but ineffectual white moderate who is reluctant to act on his convictions. Faulkner's belief that the coming generation carries the burden and opportunity of reconciliation is personified in Chick Mallison, the white lad who digs up the evidence that clears Beauchamp. Chick is torn between the tradition that expects him to hate Beauchamp for his prideful independence, and his own grudging, slowly growing respect for Lucas as a man. More explicitly than any other of Faulkner's books, Intruder in the Dust is the South's racial crisis given flesh.

Walked Off the Page. But Faulkner is finally relevant not narrowly to the Negro problem in the South but to the white problem--the ills of the entire society and way of life he writes about. In his Snopes trilogy, starting with The Hamlet, he turned to another aspect of that society, telling of the grimly independent small white farmers and the rise of that perfectly unprincipled man Flem Snopes.

Flem Snopes and his rootless clan are a Faulkner creation that rose up and walked off the page. Throughout the South today, "Snopes" is a derisive epithet for men ranging from leading demagogic politicians down to the Klansman next door. Snopeses pop up early in Yoknapatawpha County, but unlike most other Faulkner characters they seem to have no ancestors--at least not from Mississippi. Flem's father, the vicious Ab Snopes, wore neither blue uniform nor grey, but was a carrion crow on Civil War battlefields.

Flem rises because he has no humanity to blur the cold, hyper-rational clarity with which he uses other people's weaknesses. When he outgrows the back country and moves to Jefferson (in The Town and The Mansion), his tribe begins to infiltrate and increase. There is Montgomery Ward Snopes the pornographer, Wat Snopes the carpenter, Virgil Snopes the barber and brothel athlete, and a score of others. When Flem takes over the Sartoris Bank, his success is proof of the loosened grip of the older, principled families.

Agonized Search. All of these novels have a jolting brilliance and precision of characterization. Jason Compson, bitter, narrow and enraged by personal failings, is a merciless rendering of the type of Southerner who constantly vents his frustration with lines such as "What this country needs is white labor. Let these damn trifling niggers starve for a couple of years, then they'd see what a soft thing they have." Negro Novelist Ralph Ellison says that the enduring Dilsey Gibson reminds him of the real-life Rosa Parks, who touched off the Birmingham, Ala., bus boycott one day in 1955 when she refused to stand up for a white passenger because her feet hurt. Lucas Beauchamp catches to perfection the abrasive, unbending independence of a man like James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi three months after Faulkner's death.

The novels also share another trait that seizes and deeply involves the reader: each is an extended and agonized search for truth. Faulkner at his best thus belongs with novelists like Proust or Dostoevsky. This trait in part explains Faulkner's enormous popularity abroad, particularly in such places as Japan and France, where the state of the soul is considered far more absorbing than sociology--least of all the sociology of a remote region such as the U.S. South. There they have viewed Faulkner's work as a series of morality tales, and long before the U.S. did, they understood his novels as dramatizations of a U.S. crisis of conscience that most Americans irritably denied existed.

Visible Conflict. Faulkner's overt, publicly voiced views on the Southern crisis are relatively rare and ambiguous. He was a writer above all, and perhaps he did not know what he thought until he had written it. His novels are a kind of diary of his own tormented inner struggle, an inadvertent self-portrait of a man making visible his own conflict of loyalties and good will.

Faulkner also kept himself one of the least public of writers. He rarely gave interviews, and when he did he was frequently gruff and uncooperative. He secluded himself in a classical Southern house that was an almost defiant backward clutch toward a lost way of life. He often refused to answer the phone. When the movie made from Intruder in the Dust was given its world premiere in Oxford, he announced, to the producers' horror, that he would not attend. He finally did appear at the theater only because someone had reached an aunt of his in Memphis, who thereupon told Faulkner that she was going to the premiere and expected him to escort her. With the negligent indifference of an aristocrat, he did not bother to wear a tie or shave off a three-day stubble.

Shooting in the Streets. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner reluctantly began to develop a sense of responsibility to his audience, and also as a spokesman for the South, though he could still be unpredictable and self-contradictory. His most notorious statement on the racial crisis came in the course of a rambling, angry Oxford interview in February 1956 with British Newsman Russell Warren Howe, who reported Faulkner as saying: "If it came to fighting I'd fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes."

In that same interview, Faulkner insisted repeatedly that "the Negroes are right--make sure you've got that--they're right," and that Southern white racists "are wrong and their position untenable." But ripped from context, shooting in the streets made headlines. Negro Author James Baldwin condemned Faulkner, in large part for that statement, as "guilty of great emotional and intellectual dishonesty."

Faulkner himself followed up the headlines with letters to many newspapers insisting that he had been misquoted by Howe. What the letters naturally did not mention was the fact that at the time of the interview Faulk ner had spent several days working his way through a demijohn of bourbon, a bout set off by a running quarrel about the racial question with his brother John Faulkner, who was a diehard segregationist.

Stop a While. Not a call to arms for the South, but a plea to the North to "stop for a moment," to hold off forcible desegregation until the South had "a little time" to come to its senses and voluntarily grant the Negro's inevitable equality--this was Faulkner's concern in articles he wrote for LIFE and Ebony that same year. As early as 1948, Faulkner had put a similar plea in the mouth of Lawyer Stevens in Intruder in the Dust. And in a letter to a white student at the University of Alabama at the time of the riots over Autherine Lucy's admission, he wrote: "I vote that we ourselves choose to abolish [segregation], if for no other reason than, by voluntarily giving the Negro the chance for whatever equality he is capable of, we will stay on top; he will owe us gratitude; where, if his equality is forced on us by law, compulsion from the outside, he will be on top from being the victor, the winner against opposition. And no tyrant is more ruthless than he who was only yesterday the oppressed, the slave."

Such views hardly make a man a radical from the Northern point of view. But in Mississippi, Hodding Carter recalls, people who had always vaguely thought that "Bill Faulkner is one of us" by the mid-'50s were calling him "small-minded Willie, the nigger lover." He was the target of abusive mail and crank phone calls. Around Oxford there were stores and filling stations that refused to serve him.

They were wrong. No man was more fiercely loyal to his land and his people. But he wanted and demanded that the South cure itself. In the words of the rebellious Chick Mallison, looking at his relatives with sudden pride: "That was part of it too, that fierce desire that they should be perfect because they were his and he was theirs, that furious intolerance of any one single jot or tittle less than absolute perfection --that furious almost instinctive leap and spring to defend them from anyone anywhere so that he might excoriate them himself without mercy since they were his own and he wanted no more save to stand with them unalterable and impregnable: one shame if shame must be, one expiation must surely be but above all one unalterable durable impregnable one: one people one heart one land."

For Every American. Faulkner did not know everything about the South--at least about the new South. He knew few Negroes well, and no civil rights leaders at all, except in briefest acquaintance. He never understood (or anyway portrayed) the urban and educated Negroes that have been the spearhead of the civil rights fight. He saw federal action on civil rights through a haze of fact and legend about the Reconstruction imposed from the North. He never appreciated the imperative need for legal sanction of a Negro's right to sit at a bar, get a haircut, swim in a pool. He only vaguely realized that civil rights legislation provides many a Southerner of good will the excuse to accept--quietly, if not graciously--what cannot be avoided.

Faulkner understood not the legal but the human facts. He understood that the crisis between white and black is not only a crisis for the South but for every American, however many miles may separate him from Mississippi. He understood that legal sanction was one thing, but emotional acceptance was another.

And in the long range of two races' memories or one nation's vision, Faulker's difficult proposal is the only one that works. He desperately urged on his fellow Southerners--and himself--a change of heart. He never, on the evidence, quite managed that change himself. But if he left a message and a legacy, it was to urge upon his fellow Southerners and the nation the imperative necessity for that change.

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