B006JHRY9S EBOK (24 page)

Something like these unthinking racial norms surfaces in a 1921 letter Faulkner wrote from New Haven to his father back home. This was his
second experience out of the South (the first—his attempt to enter World War I—had occurred three years earlier). He may have been deliberately catering to his father’s unapologetic racism, or the letter might signal a racial naïveté genuinely his own: “You cant tell me these niggers are as happy and contented as ours are,” he wrote Murry; “all this freedom does is make them miserable because they are not white” (TH 149). Blacks as childlike, happier with someone to take care of them (as during the peaceful time of slavery): little in Faulkner’s extensive dealing with black people, early and late, would radically undermine this regional frame of racial understanding.
²

By 1930, Mammy Callie and Uncle Ned had entered his household and come under his care. That such care was generous and loving does not keep it from being paternalistic at its core. These people were not-white. He did not typically see himself when he looked into the mirror of their faces. Some fifteen years later, he wrote Bob Haas (his editor at Random House), complaining about the slowness of his writing: “One reason it goes slow,” he wrote, “maybe the main one, is conditions here. Negro servants in this country have all quit…. For two years now I have had no house servants except a doddering old man and a 12 year old boy who must go to school too” (SL 256). How different is this from his brother John’s casual assumption of where blacks figured on the social map and what they were expected to do? In neither case did the white man wonder who those helpers were, what they were like apart from their (meagerly recompensed) relation to him. Faulkner showed no interest in why they might be leaving the South in great numbers (the letter was written in 1947, just after World War II: the time of the great migration north). He could understand their departure only by way of the dismissive verb “quit.”

The scene of racial segregation did not always operate smoothly. From the 1890s through the 1930s, the Mississippi politicians James Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo powerfully exploited white anxieties that liberated blacks would be dangerous blacks. These two men channeled and rode a wave of racial anger often referred to as “the rise of the Rednecks.” Plantation patricians—men who had to be careful in their treatment of blacks, however contemptuous their thoughts about them, since black workers were required to make their cotton profitable—increasingly gave way to populist leaders exploiting the incensed thoughts and fears of poor whites. The latter, as Faulkner recognized in the mid-1950s, stood to lose the most from black emancipation. Soon after Vardaman became governor in 1903, he declared, “Six thousand years ago, the Negro was the same in his native
jungle that he is today” (WFSH 157). A year later, Vardaman expanded on his subject: “You can scarcely pick up a newspaper whose pages are not blackened with the account of an unmentionable crime committed by a negro brute, and this crime, I want to impress upon you, is but the manifestation of the negro’s aspiration for social equality, encouraged largely by the character of free education in vogue” (157). “The rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro”: decades of postbellum Southern racial practice had made such rumors commonplace, their credibility immediately to be granted. When Faulkner tried, many years later, to make the case for a single system of public education—for whites and blacks alike—he was up against an almost impenetrable thicket of long-nurtured apprehension and resistance.

Fanned to its most vicious form of expression, such hostility would flare into the ritual violence of lynchings. Faulkner claimed he had never witnessed one, and there is little reason to doubt him. But Mississippi led the nation in lynchings during this period: “In the twenty years from 1889 to 1909, at least 293 blacks were lynched there, more than in any other state in the nation” (WFSH 157). One of the most notorious lynchings—that of Nelse Patton—occurred in Oxford in 1908. Patton was thought to have murdered a woman named Mattie McMillan with a razor blade. He fled the scene but was soon caught by outraged whites. Historian Joel Williamson has shown how journalists and politicians fed the flames of the ensuing racial fury. First reported as “a white woman,” Mattie was within hours referred to as “a white lady”; at first she was “killed,” but within hours the papers reported her as “assaulted and killed.” Furious Oxford whites caught Patton and stubbornly refused to let the law take its course. Brick by brick, for many hours and with many hands, they tore down the symbolically charged courthouse to get at Patton and extricate him from the protections guaranteed by the law. They riddled his body with bullets and strung him up naked and mutilated on a telephone pole, where his body remained on display all night. Ten-year-old William Faulkner slept only one thousand yards from the courthouse that night. He didn’t have to have seen that ritual dismembering to remember its impact for the rest of his life.

I have stressed so far the pole of disidentification—the ways in which Faulkner, when looking into the mirror posed by blacks, managed not to see himself reflected in their lives. This is the Faulkner who casually
spoke (all his life) about blacks as “niggers,” who saw civil rights agitation as essentially the menace of his beloved South being destroyed yet again (thanks to their impatience), and who envisaged their emancipation only by way of their ceasing to be black. This Faulkner was helped to such views by regional ideas and arrangements of race that long preceded his birth and would remain after his death. This Faulkner had little to say of use to civil rights activists who wanted to address centuries of racial abuse, and soon. But this is not the Faulkner who—within the less fettered space of his speculative imagination—wrote
Light in August
and
Absalom, Absalom!
and
Go Down, Moses
. The writer of those novels managed powerfully to escape the blindness attached to being “a native of our land and a sharer in its errors.” And not only the writer saw beyond racial stereotype. The man himself may have been privy to genealogical vignettes—ancestral shadows—that would deepen, if not reorient, his racial thinking. He may have heard of a family history different from the normative one passed down the generations—involving illicit acts of miscegenation and their consequences. His great-grandfather’s turbulent life was rumored to have been racially reckless as well. It was averred that he had spawned a shadowy black line, blood-joined to yet officially separated from the white line. If this were so, then the fictional dark twins of
Mosquitoes
, products of imaginative invention, might have harbored behind them actual Falkners—mulattos who were not imaginary at all, but the mistresses and offspring of the progenitor’s matings. If Faulkner had such knowledge, it would have prompted him to reconsider not just the meaning of the legendary Colonel’s life. It would have more troublingly implicated him in the racial images he saw in his region’s mirror.

To return once more to the progenitor, following Williamson’s account of him, via courthouse and census records: two years after the death in 1849 of his first wife, Holland Pearce, W. C. Falkner married Lizzie Vance. Though never a large slaveholder, W. C. did alter the “complexion” of his holdings during the following decade: “in 1850 all of the slaves in the yard were black; in 1860 they were all mulatto” (WFSH 23)—findings noted by the census taker. These mulattos consisted of two adults—a twenty-seven-year-old woman and a twenty-one-year-old man—and four children, aged from one to eight. Williamson argues that the father of those offspring was possibly the younger black male but more plausibly W. C. himself.

That situation … was not at all unusual in the slaveholding South at large. In virtually every community there was at least one white man, or sometimes an
entire family of white men, who mixed. Almost invariably, these men chose young women who were mulatto rather than black, and household servants rather than field hands. (24–5)

The pattern of such couplings typically took one of three forms: an unmarried slaveholder would choose as de facto wife a mulatto slave and would beget children upon her; or a widowed slaveholder would—in his deceased wife’s stead—take a household slave (often the wife’s maid, as in the case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings); or a slaveholder would sustain two families: the white one living in the main house and the black one kept in the slave quarters. Williamson considers the other men who might have fathered these mulatto children—W. C.’s younger brother James or other Ripley bachelors or widowers—and concludes that the most likely figure was “the most powerful person in this woman’s life, namely, the master” (WFSH 26). As a strong-willed, impetuous man, W. C. Falkner’s psychological profile also fits the bill. A grieving widower in 1849, responsible for a sickly infant and five slaves inherited from his deceased wife, he might have taken as consolation a mulatto mistress during the two years before he met and fell in love with Lizzie Vance. Might have: this—the end of
chapter 1
of the Colonel’s “shadow family”—can only be speculation.

For
chapter 2
, fast-forward many years later to that isolated Ripley cemetery where the Old Colonel lies interred. Visiting there in the late twentieth century, Williamson came upon—as anticipated—the Colonel’s huge marble monument rising over his plot, signaling to the absent world his significance. Few of his white family lie near him, not even his wife Lizzie (though there is ample room in his plot). But three members of that mulatto family group of 1860 are in the Ripley cemetery: Emeline Falkner (the mother) and two of her daughters, Delia and Hellen. His curiosity piqued, Williamson unearthed a good deal of Emeline’s family circumstances. Born a light-skinned slave to a wealthy family in eastern Virginia, she was sold in her midteens to a carpenter named Benjamin Harris. Within a few years, she gave birth to Delia and Hellen; both girls believed that Harris had sired them, even as he also maintained a white family. A man of few business skills, Harris increasingly used his slaves as collateral for loans. In that way, his unpaid debt to W. C. Falkner led in 1858 to Emeline and her two daughters moving into W.C.’s yard. At some point in the mid-1860s, Emeline gave birth to another child, Fannie Forrest Falkner. Emeline’s descendants, according to Williamson, “have always maintained that Colonel Falkner—not Ben Harris—was Fannie’s father” (WFSH 65).

There is some circumstantial evidence to support the claim. “Fannie” derives from “Frances,” the name of W.C.’s favorite sister, and “Forrest” likely comes from Nathan Bedford Forrest, W.C.’s beloved Confederate leader. Her probable birth date (July 1864) accommodates the calendar of W.C.’s sporadic Civil War activities. There is no record of what W.C. was doing between his resignation from the Confederate army in the fall of 1863 and his purchase of a house in Pontotoc in 1865. Moreover, while Lizzie Vance Falkner did not live in that house during the 1860s, evidence suggests that Emeline did. Emeline’s descendants always maintained that Fannie had been born in Pontotoc. Later census records indicate that by 1870, Emeline and Fanny had both left Pontotoc and were living in Ripley. The same records confirm that the two women were still in Ripley in 1880. By this time, as freed blacks, they were identified as “Servant” and “House Maid” in the home of none other than Richard J. Thurmond. This is the man, we remember, who bitterly quarreled with W. C. during the 1880s, and who would gun him down in 1889. As for W. C., the census for 1880 shows him owning only one servant, a thirteen-year-old mulatto named Lena. Williamson speculates that Lena was possibly Emeline’s daughter as well, and that she might also have been sired by W. C. Whatever the case, we know that in 1886 Lizzie Vance Falkner took her two teenage daughters from W. C.’s home in Ripley, all three of them moving to Memphis. In August 1889—just three months before the Colonel’s murder—an apparently outraged Lizzie announced to her husband that she was leaving his ornate Italian villa and Ripley forever.

Did Lizzie flee the Falkner villa in Ripley because of an intolerable scandal brewing there in the late 1880s? (The old man would not have been living alone during these years of her absence.) Was W. C. Falkner not only lover of Emeline and father of Fannie but, a few years later, father of Lena, too? Is it possible that, beyond those abusive relationships and deepening them exponentially, the old man took up in the late 1880s with his own illicit daughter, Lena, thereby scandalizing his wife Lizzie? Is the notorious murder of the Old Colonel by Richard Thurmond actually a dark-twinned love mystery? Both Emeline and Fannie had lived in Thurmond’s household. W. C.’s abuse of Lena—if abuse there was—might have rankled Thurmond no less than the railroad and political imbroglios we know were at play. Certainty about these matters will not be forthcoming.
³
We are left, accordingly, with two sequels to this speculative narrative of miscegenation—each compelling in its own right.

First is the fact that in that Ripley cemetery where so few of W. C. Falkner’s white family chose to be interred, Emeline lies buried, in the northeast corner reserved for blacks. Though there is no record of her ever having married, her tombstone speaks eloquently of her insistence on the marital state. “Mrs. Emeline Lacy Falkner,” she had engraved on it. As Williamson notes, she could hardly have called herself the Colonel’s wife, yet “she did establish firmly the fact—indeed had it written in stone—that she was ‘Mrs. Falkner.’ She is, in truth, the only Mrs. Falkner in the cemetery where
his
marble self rises above all” (WFSH 70, emphasis in the original). Second, did Faulkner know of this putative history? If he did, what difference might it have made to his understanding of race relations in the South? That last query trumps the earlier one. Faulkner’s writerly grasp of racial abuse arrives at its greatest insights—in
Absalom, Absalom!
and
Go Down, Moses
—precisely as though the Old Colonel had risen from the grave and whispered into his great-grandson’s ear. Whispered all of it, from miscegenation to miscegenation to miscegenation. Alone among white novelists of his time, Faulkner would grasp the genealogical dimension of racial abuse, the ways in which acts of miscegenation produced intractable reverberations, generations later. Put otherwise, Faulkner’s profoundest understanding of cascading human trouble over time owes everything to what he was able to discern about racial abuse in the South—perhaps in his own family.