Friday
Some of my comments about Flannery O’Connor’s racism in Wednesday’s post apply as well to William Faulkner. While Michael Gorra in a New York Review of Books article notes that the Mississippi author “never stopped believing in the racial hierarchy that shaped his boyhood,” Faulkner also understood in a deep way how racism corrupts white people.
Gorra focuses on a scene in Light in August that gets at the nature of police violence against Blacks. When a sheriff finds a woman with her throat cut, a long list of racial assumptions determine what he does next:
What sticks with me is the first step that the local sheriff takes in running his investigation: “Get me a nigger.” That’s what he tells his deputy, and that last word falls like a blow precisely because the thought is so utterly casual, so inevitable in a world in which its violence comes as a matter of course.
The sheriff doesn’t care which black man his deputy finds. Anyone will do, because he assumes that any black man in the neighborhood will know about the crime, or at least can be made to know. Maybe the murderer was living in that little cabin down back of the house? The man the deputy hauls up claims, at first, to know nothing at all, his voice “a little sullen, quite alert, covertly alert.”
The African American man instantly engages in his own set of calculations as he tries to negotiate the power dynamic. Thanks to phone cameras, White Americans have become more aware how African Americans are routinely forced into such calculations each time they encounter cops:
He watches the sheriff, wary of a blow, and doesn’t pay attention to the white men standing behind and surrounding him. Then he feels the snap and sear of a leather belt across his back. “I reckon you aint tried hard enough to remember,” the sheriff says, and the belt falls again, its buckle rasping across the victim’s flesh, a physical violence as automatic as that racial epithet itself.
Being black makes that man as liable to attack as if he had committed a crime. It’s dangerous, not telling the sheriff what he wants to know, and yet it might also be dangerous to speak. Two white men have been living in that cabin, bootleggers; or at least two men who look to be white. Should that nameless black man give up their names, should he trust his state’s constituted authorities? Will the police protect him if talking gets him in trouble? Anyone who reads Light in August will understand his caution, knowing as the belt falls that this isn’t an isolated bit of brutality. It’s standard police work in that Jim Crow world, and looking it over again helps this white reader understand the long history behind the deep suspicion of law enforcement that so many Americans feel.
Gorra should make his point more forcefully. If Blacks are are suspicious of white police, it’s because police continue to behave this way.
In Absolom, Absolom, Gorra shows how Faulkner captures the South’s continued obsession with its Confederate past, noting that
the Canadian Shreve McCannon describes his Mississippi-born Harvard roommate, Quentin Compson, as having grown up in a world of “defeated grandfathers,” a world that can’t stop reminding him “to never forget.” Faulkner’s characters can’t put anything behind them, and indeed many of them don’t want to, the white ones anyway. They prefer to live in the moment of loss, as though they were their own ancestors’ ghosts, refusing to let the past become past.
Tragically, the South has exported this longing for a white-controlled past to other parts of the United States. It’s not only southerners who wave Confederate flags these days.
Gorra goes on to make a connection between a Confederate statue that still looms over Oxford, Mississippi—one that the Faulkner family helped erect—and a scene of white violence in The Sound and the Fury:
That statue appears throughout Faulkner’s work, but it plays a special part at the end of The Sound and the Fury (1929). On Easter Sunday, 1928, a black teenager called Luster takes the mentally disabled and nonverbal Benjy Compson for his weekly visit to the cemetery. It’s the first time Luster has been put in charge of the Compson’s horse-drawn buggy, and as he approaches the square, the eyes of the statue upon him, Luster makes a mistake. He takes the carriage to the left of that memorial, hoping to show off to any friends in the square. But Benjy needs routine, he needs repetition. With him, the carriage has always gone to the right, and now he begins to wail, to bellow in “astonishment… horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless, just sound.”
Then Luster is thrown from his seat, and a fist crashes down on his head. Benjy’s malignant brother, Jason, has appeared, “jumping across the square and onto the step” of the carriage; he grabs the reins from Luster, threatens to kill him, and then slews the buggy around to the right. Soon enough, Benjy grows quiet, with everything moving once more “in its ordered place” around him. Meanwhile, the marble man stands sentry in the courthouse square over the re-subdued black body. Jason’s fist; the deputy’s belt; the rope that figures in some of Faulkner’s other stories, too. The Sound and the Fury links such Confederate memorials to the legitimized violence of the white society that built them…
Although Mississippi has made some important changes recently, including taking down a second Confederate statue in Oxford (next to the university) and removing the Confederate flag from the state flag, this statue still remains. Whatever his personal views, however, Faulkner in his fiction captures racial violence in all its ugliness.
Sir Philip Sidney would approve since he wrote that the poet’s first responsibility is to truth, regardless of his or her view (“the poet, he nothing affirms”). Toni Morrison admired Faulkner for, as Gorra puts it, his refusal to look away when racial violence presents itself. In the end for such writers, art trumps ideology.
