B006JHRY9S EBOK (23 page)

The default pole in Faulkner’s paradoxical racial stance is disidentification. He is not his dark twin. “Shooting Negroes” is an utterance, however accidental and unintended, whose hostility cannot be explained away. It is hard to imagine his saying “shooting whites,” no matter how much he had been drinking. Somewhere inside his psyche, inculcated there and confirmed by his region’s truisms, he
could
envisage shooting Negroes. His words to Howe further reveal his incapacity to enter black lives. “I have known Negroes all my life,” he proclaimed, “and Negroes work my land for me. I know how they feel.” Warming to his theme, he added that, if it came to violence, “My Negro boys down on the plantation would fight against the North with me. If I say to them, ‘Go get your shotguns, boys,’ they’ll come” (LG 262). The master/slave model is patent. He is the master of the plantation, they its obedient workers; he is the man, they the boys; he owns the guns and gives the orders, they followsuit. He is the active subject, they the docile object. This widely shared fantasy failed the South in the Civil War, when black slaves—given the chance—fled in huge numbers from their astonished Southern masters. The fantasy is all the more outrageous
when sounded in 1956. Even intoxicated, he had to have known that neither his home (Rowan Oak) nor his farm (Greenfield Farm) was a plantation. Or is it that in foundational matters, the passage of time itself seems illusory? That beneath and behind the twentieth-century Southerner’s home and farm there lurks the destroyed yet indestructible antebellum plantation? Untimely: remnants of antebellum identity remain embedded, shard-like, in this anguished Southerner caught up in mid-1950s racial turmoil. In crucial moments, such as this unrehearsed New York interview, these remnants rise troublingly to the surface. Dark twins is also a notion about identity over time. The living Faulkner harbors inside himself the unaltered convictions of his dead fellow white Southerners of 1865.

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).

“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 norms 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.