Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (33 page)

And he does. The most astonishing—and easily overlooked—sequence in the novel takes place in the commissary when Ike—age sixteen, coming of age—discusses with his cousin Cass the old yellowed ledgers that they are reading together. Indented and italicized within Faulkner’s text, words abbreviated and misspelled, these ledgers contain the written history of the McCaslin family, especially the doings of the patriarch Carothers McCaslin, as registered in the exchanges between Buck and Buddy, children of the patriarch, Ike’s father and uncle. I called this sequence “easily overlooked” because it seems so utterly cryptic, just a series of italicized coinages and compressed notations relating to a faraway time and virtually indecipherable to the reader. Let me reproduce the salient parts of this material, and you can see for yourself how impenetrable it looks:

Then, a page later in the text, the two brothers’ queries:

Followed by

And then a final return-entry, incomprehensible as ever:

Ike had read these entries earlier, many times, always thinking they were the harmless, docile, tedious record of his forebears, but at the age of sixteen he reads them again, sensing their terrible import, and he now pursues the story of a drowned slave woman, finding that it is inextricably tied to birth and death:

leading to the notation

This is what history looks like. Via their inscriptions in the yellowed ledgers Buck and Buddy are telling a story, and it has to do with Carothers McCaslin’s treatment of his slaves, focusing especially on the acquisition of Eunice back in 1807 and her mysterious death in 1832, drowned in the creek.
Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding him self
write, incredulously, the brothers. To answer that question—and I’d want to say that all the moral power of Faulkner’s book is invested in answering that question—we need to piece together the horribly coherent story being sketched out. Carothers goes to New Orleans and purchases Eunice. Two years later, Eunice is married to his man-slave Thucydidus and gives birth immediately thereafter to Tomasina. Seventeen years later Eunice drowns herself in the creek. Six months later, Tomasina gives birth to Turl. Yet my account leaves out all the crucial unstated information, information that Ike has understood, namely, that Eunice is impregnated by Carothers (her first lover, Ike reasons) and then married off to Thucydidus; and then Carothers impregnates his own daughter. Upon realizing this, Eunice kills herself. The baby is born six months later.
Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding him self
. This death makes terrible sense, for it is a response to the racial transgressions that were business as usual in the antebellum South. It makes terrible sense, yet the reader of Faulkner’s text is—initially—unable to make sense of it. Why? Because it is in cryptic form, misspelled, enigmatic, unreadable. It is as illegible, as indecipherable as a bear print would be for you and me, even though it stares at us in the text. Bear print.
Print
.

Print resembles animal tracks; print consists of markers on a page, such as an old ledger entry, that are transformed into meaning by the act of reading. Think, for a minute, of alphabets you do not know, such as Chinese or Japanese or Hebrew or Arabic, and then visualize them on a page: they look like bear prints. Think back further still if you can—and you can’t, for it is impossible—back to your unschooled initial apprehension of English, when it has to have looked like scratchings on a page, markers without meaning, again on the order of bear prints. Ike McCaslin is performing one of the oldest coming-of-age rituals we know—call it Confirmation, call it Bar Mitzvah—which consists of reading the Holy Books to an audience of adults as a sign that oneself is now an adult by dint of being able to read just these books. These ledgers with their terrible story are the South’s Scripture. Ike’s task of maturation is to understand what this story of human violation means, to understand that there is a dreadful answer to the question
Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding him self
. He does understand, and he acts accordingly. Innocence, experience, love, abuse, sacrifice: all are there. He renounces his heritage. He abdicates. He says no to the McCaslin legacy, in particular the plantation with all the land. He refuses the ticket.

We are a far cry from Faulkner’s earlier doomed young men who went under. Ike McCaslin’s model is Christ the carpenter, not Jesus the crucified. Ike McCaslin refuses, forfeits all material goods and benefits, rents a cabin from his cousin who thus inherits the land, becomes Uncle Ike to the entire region but father to none. This may look remarkably clear, but it is morally as opaque as ever, since it is by no means self-evident that refusing one’s patrimony is a step toward changing things. Nor is it clear that one can ultimately refuse one’s patrimony, as Ike himself demonstrates in later stories by dint of his residual racial ambivalence, his inability to see black people as entirely human and entitled to the same rights and respect as whites. This is painfully clear in the penultimate story, where Ike hands an envelope filled with money to a black woman who has come looking for her lover, Ike’s own relative; it is a horrible moment, for this man and this woman are McCaslins all, black and white even if distantly related, and their union, if sanctioned, might—might—signal some form of wisdom and generosity, some healing of the wounds of the past. Instead, Ike is horrified, tries to buy time, tells the woman to wait, perhaps another thousand years. Her answer to him is the strongest thing in the novel: “Old man, have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you dont even remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?”

It is as if the novel had the wisdom to pirouette its central people, to oblige us to rethink their moves. As if the novel had the courage to attack its hero, who seems to have learned so much. And one has therefore to wonder what kind of a solution celibacy itself is, not to mention abdication, for responding to the crimes committed against blacks and women. Ike is haunted by his own gesture, knows he is, in the eyes of the community, a figure of ridicule as well as probity, seems to sense the sterility, the escapism, of his choice. Yes, he did choose. But what choice do you make when you realize that your own hereditary culture is cursed, shot through with moral transgressions? Ike said no. But what is there to say yes to? And is saying no actually doable? Growing up: you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Faulkner has not simplified things.

Yet, in the final reckoning, we must say that “reading the books of one’s culture” is a prodigious step in the right direction, given the earlier fates of Benjy, Quentin, and Joe Christmas. Ike McCaslin proves that education is possible, that maturation entails an ever-increasing understanding of one’s own culture, of one’s place in it, even if it leads to opting out as the only option. Ike at least lives; he does not drown in the Charles River, as Quentin did in his exit from culture. And maybe there is a kind of light, hedged but real, in this autumnal text, a light, a hope for
us
. He encounters cryptic markers—bear tracks, ledgers—and he converts them into significance, indeed into ethical significance. What does education mean, if not this? What is it that every culture hopes to instill in its young—if not a capacity for understanding where they are, for reading the land they inhabit. It begins with learning one’s letters, and it ends only at death. Books—perhaps especially books of literature, because they do not parade as facts, but rather demand our interpretation—are the sites of this precious commerce. This may be as good a shot as civilization is likely to have in proffering a paradigm of growing up that gives us some hope.

The conversion of signs into meaning is the school lesson that is never over and never easy. There are no “master readers” who can go on automatic pilot, certain that they will get it right. But most arduous of all is the challenge of belief, of actually feeling that words on a page—or figures in an equation or data on a screen or people on the street—require our active moral intervention if we are to understand them. Here is perhaps school’s greatest failure: its failure to convince the young that what they read has an ethical import beyond the dictionary meanings of the terms involved; not just an ethical import but an imaginative life.

I look back at my own education and want to weep: I absorbed, as all students do, my share of data, of names and dates and formulas, but I was never prodded to take the next step, to ponder what they might really mean (beyond the test that was coming), how they might impact my own life, on the lives of others. Literature gratifies me because it is my second chance at schooling, my later opportunity to plumb the dimensions of words, to gauge their extended reach and bite. None of this is to be found in primers or how-to books. There exists no method for this. And there are no shortcuts, including quick visits to Wikipedia or other websites; if anything, we are awash in data today, filled to the very brim with facts, only a click away from still greater volumes of information. Yet we are short on wisdom, short on interpretation, all too illiterate when it comes to converting signs on a page into the rich—sometimes unbearably rich—human meanings they contain. It is the challenge we face every day: in our texts, in all our relations, in our world. It is not so much a question of taking books seriously as of taking life and oneself seriously. Growing up means learning to read.

Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of 1982,
The Color Purple
, is not much read today, I suspect. It may seem too sentimental, too much of a fairy tale; Steven Spielberg’s film with Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover, despite the fine intentions of all involved, pushes it still further into mawkish territory. Yet Walker’s novel is the right book for capping this study, because it is a much tougher, shrewder, and more ambitious work than has been acknowledged. And because the evolution of Celie, a classic study of growing up in the school of hard knocks and overcoming abuse, is indeed something to behold. So many of my young protagonists are damaged goods—Blake’s chimney sweep, Pablos, Heathcliff, Jane, Benjy, Quentin, Antoinette—but their injuries pale before the brutality of Celie’s childhood.

It would be hard to improve on the opening line: “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.” We soon realize that these are a father’s words to his daughter as he forces her to have sex with him. Celie is still almost a child, and her account of what is done to her has an unbearable eloquence, largely because of her own innocence. Blake brilliantly exploited the lens of innocence, but Walker brings it to bear on the most elemental forms of abuse and injury: “First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy.” That there might be consequences is beyond her understanding: “When I start to hurt and then my stomach start moving and then that little baby come out my pussy chewing on it fist you could have knock me over with a feather.” This is what innocence looks like.

I have my reasons for referencing Blake. The God who sends angels into the dreams of chimney sweeps, to tell them to be good boys, is eventually reconceived by Walker as a white male phantom who sits on black people’s eyeballs; and although Celie writes letters to God, using him essentially as a sewage system (since the dirt done to her has to be evacuated somewhere), Walker is mounting her attack even in the opening paragraphs, as in Celie’s assertion to her mother that the baby is God’s child and that God has taken it. The venerable old construct depicting God as the source of children comes in for some damage here, since we can scarcely avoid the inference that God is also a rapist, a child stealer, a pretty vicious force. The book makes good on this characterization, even though it takes some time for Celie to move consciously into such an indictment. Male privilege, stemming from either God or other males who do his bidding, looms large in this book, and it is against this brutally coercive system that the story of Celie’s maturation takes place. Even Faulkner, who wrote about black women as the ultimate tragic victims of southern hierarchical arrangements, did not—could not—write their story from the inside. They remain silent in his books. Alice Walker can “speak” them, and she tells us what it must have felt like to be on the receiving end of sexually abusive male culture.

We’ve already noted Celie’s sexual initiation (by “Pa”). Let’s now consider her courtship (by Mr. ——). Mr., later called Albert, who wanted to marry her sister Nettie, reluctantly settles for Celie and comes over to get another look. She goes to the door. “He’s still up on his horse. He look me up and down.” Celie is a bit frightened by the horse. The new baby, Lucious, comes out and asks what’s going on. “Pa say, Your sister thinking bout marriage.” Pa goes on to add, for Mr.’s benefit: “She good with children.” Mr.’s only response is “That cow still coming?” Pa seals the deal: “Her cow.” Literary and sociological texts from every era have taught us that marriage is as much an economic event, a market proposition, as it is anything else, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it placed quite this squarely in the barnyard. The horse, the cow, the looking Celie up and down: we are not far from the infamous slave markets of the antebellum South, where one purchased by the pound, as it were, weighing the goods in terms of its potential service along a variety of lines: manual labor, sexual productivity, capacity to take punishment. “Your sister thinking bout marriage,” Pa tells Lucious. What this entire passage tells us is: Celie’s own thinking is off limits, of no interest, since she is simply an item on the block, being traded, ratcheted up in value by having her own cow.