Monday
I’ve finally read Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, which has been on my “books to read” list for decades, and have emerged with mixed feelings. One thing it does very well, however, is help us understand why cops are so likely to shoot African Americans. Although written in 1949, Intruder in the Dust’s deep dive into racism is only too applicable to today’s spate of police killings.
I’m not sure whether we are witnessing an increase in police-on-Black violence or just getting more visual evidence of it, but so many incidents have been packed into the past few weeks that even evangelical pastor and archconservative Pat Robertson is questioning the cops. He has in mind the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the shooting of 22-year-old Daunte Wright in a Brooklyn Park, Minnesota traffic stop, and the Black U.S. army officer stopped, maced, and threatened with execution after Virginia police failed to see his new-car license tag. (One of them said to him, “What’s going on is you’re fixing to ride the lightning, son.”) A number of law enforcement officials were involved in the invasion of the Capitol, and The Guardian newspaper has just reported that
[a] data breach at a Christian crowdfunding website has revealed that serving police officers and public officials have donated money to fundraisers for accused vigilante murderers, far-right activists, and fellow officers accused of shooting black Americans.
By taking us into the minds of southern racists, Faulkner shows us the degree to which White identity is predicated on Black subjugation. In the novel Black farmer Lucas Beauchamp drives the Whites around him crazy by acting as though he is as good as they are. They are therefore looking for a chance to lynch him—not only hang him but burn him alive—after he is accused of shooting a white man. Only because two boys, one Black and one White, and an 80-year-old White woman do some digging around (literally—they dig up the victim’s body) is Lucas discovered to be innocent and saved from a grisly death.
What the Whites in Faulkner’s novel demand from Blacks is what too many cops demand: that they signal submission. Beauchamp refuses to do so, as 16-year-old Chick Mallison discovers:
[W]ithin the next year he was to learn every white man in that whole section of the country had been thinking about him [Lucas Beauchamp] for years: We got to make him be a n*** first. He’s got to admit he’s a n***. Then maybe we will accept him as he seems to intend to be accepted. Because he began at once to learn a good deal more about Lucas. He didn’t hear it: he learned it, all that anyone who knew that part of the country could tell him about the Negro who said ‘ma’am’ to women just as any white man did and who said ‘sir’ and ‘mister’ to you if you were white but who you knew was thinking neither and he knew you knew it but who was not even waiting, daring you to make the next move…[The asterisks are mine]
And further on:
If he would just be a n*** first, just for one second, one little infinitesimal second…
In reading those lines, I think of a twitter thread that I posted upon recently about an African American man whose mother carefully raised him to (among other things) think that the Hardy boys were black. (When she read the books aloud to her children, she transposed them to inner city Detroit.) Because so much of American culture—including its literature—is defined by Whiteness, the effect of the mother’s program was to go against the grain and make Whiteness appear irrelevant. As a result, her son now finds himself behaving differently around Whites than many African Americans. Here’s the relevant passage for today’s discussion:
I honestly believe that the reason a lot of white people think I’m “the real racist” is because I never learned how to care what white people think. There is a subtle, subconscious deference to whiteness that MOST of us have.
Beauchamp refuses to engage in this deference, which Chick discovers early on after the man saves him from drowning and takes him home to dry him off and feed him. Confused that he is in debt to a Black man—we see the extent to which racial superiority is internalized at an early age—Chick tries to pay Beauchamp, only for the man to slap the coins out of his hands. Shaken to the core, Chick becomes obsessed with the matter. Each time he sends him a gift, however, Beauchamp outmaneuvers him with a return gift. Always, Chick remains indebted.
Hegel famously wrote about how, in the master-slave relationship, the master is no less enslaved by the system than the slave, and one sees this operating in Intruder. Chick’s entire sense of his identity, his supposed White superiority, is challenged. In the presence of Beauchamp, he doesn’t know who he is.
We see the same dynamic playing out when Beauchamp is challenged in a store. The White sawmill worker involved could easily be the Virginia cops who pulled over the military officer or the Texas cop who put Sandra Bland in jail (for refusing to stop smoking when he stopped her for a non-offense) or those Whites who have shot Blacks (or called the cops on them) for jogging through their neighborhoods or generally acting as though they belonged where they were. I quote it at length because it gives us such a clear picture of what enrages certain Whites:
[T]his day there were three youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill, all a little drunk, one of whom had a reputation for brawling and violence, and Lucas came in in the worn black broadcloth suit which he wore to town and on Sundays and the worn fine hat and the heavy watch-chain and the [gold] toothpick, and something happened, the story didn’t say or perhaps didn’t even know what, perhaps the way Lucas walked, entered speaking to no one and went to the counter and made his purchase (it was a five-cent carton of gingersnaps) and turned and tore the end from the carton and removed the toothpick and put it into his breast pocket and shook one of the gingersnaps into his palm and put it into his mouth, or perhaps just nothing was enough, the white man on his feet suddenly saying something to Lucas, saying ‘You goddamn biggity stiff-necked stinking burrheaded Edmonds sonofabitch:’ and Lucas chewed the gingersnap and swallowed and the carton already tilted again over his other hand, turned his head quite slowly and looked at the white man a moment and then said:
‘I aint a Edmonds. I dont belong to these new folks. I belongs to the old lot. I’m a McCaslin.’
‘Keep on walking around here with that look on your face and what you’ll be is crowbait,’ the white man said. For another moment or at least a half one Lucas looked at the white man with a calm speculative detachment; slowly the carton in one of his hands tilted further until another gingersnap dropped into his other palm, then lifting the corner of his lip he sucked an upper tooth, quite loud in the abrupt silence but with no implication whatever of either derision or rebuttal or even disagreement, with no implication of anything at all but almost abstractedly, as a man eating gingersnaps in the middle of a hundred-mile solitude would—if he did—suck a tooth, and said:
‘Yes, I heard that idea before, And I notices that the folks that brings it up aint even Edmondses:’ whereupon the white man even as he sprang up reached blindly back where on the counter behind him lay a half-dozen plow singletrees and snatched one of them up and had already started the downswing when the son of the store’s proprietor, himself a youngish active man, came either around or over the counter and grasped the other so that the singletree merely flew harmlessly across the aisle and crashed against the cold stove; then another man was holding the man too.
‘Get out of here, Lucas!’ the proprietor’s son said over his shoulder. But still Lucas didn’t move, quite calm, not even scornful, not even contemptuous, not even very alert, the gaudy carton still poised in his left hand and the small cake in the right, just watching while the proprietor’s son and his companion held the foaming and cursing white man. ‘Get to hell out of here, you damn fool!’ the proprietor’s son shouted: and only then did Lucas move, without haste, turning without haste and going on toward the door, raising his right hand to his mouth so that as he went out the door they could see the steady thrust of his chewing.
We hear a little about the background of the sawmill workers when Chick’s uncle Gavin tells him that their ancestors chose to settle in Mississipi because it reminded them of Scotland:
Which is why the people who chose by preference to live on them on little patches which wouldn’t make eight bushels of corn or fifty pounds of lint cotton an acre even if they were not too steep for a mule to pull a plow across… are people named Gowrie and McCallum and Fraser and Ingrum that used to be Ingraham and Workitt that used to be Urquhart only the one that brought it to America and then Mississippi couldn’t spell it either, who love brawling and fear God and believe in Hell——
What Gavin doesn’t mention is that, upon immigrating to the United States, these Scots instantly received a very valuable piece of cultural capital that recompensed them for their poverty: there was another group of people that they could feel superior to. In other words, recent immigrants didn’t start at society’s bottom rung since they could at least tell themselves that they were White. Or as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green is putting it with her fascist America First movement, “Anglo-Saxon.” [Update: Green has apparently received such negative feedback from GOP leadership for her plans that she is reportedly “scrapping” them. It’s nice to know there are still some limits to rightwing extremism.]
This sense of entitled superiority is so built into the White psyche that it erupts over and over again. Faulkner, however, sees a flicker of hope in Chick, who despite his upbringing also comes to see what racism is doing to the Whites. It begins when, with his sense of indebtedness to Beauchamp, he responds to his request to dig up the body of the victim, which will prove that the white was not shot with Beauchamp’s gun. But it climaxes when he sees how, in the gathering lynch mob, their obsession with their whiteness has erased all individuality. He sees
not faces but a face, not a mass nor even a mosaic of them but a Face: not even ravening nor uninsatiate but just in motion, insensate, vacant of thought or even passion…
I mentioned having mixed feelings about Intruder and some of them lie in how Chick’s uncle, who at times appears to speak for Faulkner (but not always), complains about northern intervention. The south, as the uncle sees it, needs to work out its race problems by itself. Even though federalism has not entirely ensured equal rights for African Americans, however, it’s naïve to think that the south would have (1) given up its slaves without a war and (b) ended Jim Crow without the Supreme Court and the threat of federal troops. Faulkner himself has shown just how deeply racism is embedded in the American psyche.
And therein lies a key value to Intruder in the Dust: we see vividly the toxicity of Whiteness. Intruder also helps us understand why this disease is not limited to the south so that cops in Minnesota and Illinois are just a likely to be infected with it as cops in Virginia and Texas. Only after we have acknowledged the vast scope of the problem can we begin to address it.