B006JHRY9S EBOK (25 page)

I have considered at some length the limitations of Faulkner’s racial positions. Engaged black leaders were not impressed by his passionate exhortation to “go slow now.” In the 1950s, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin exchanged letters criticizing Faulkner’s all-too-white anguish. Incarcerated in a Birmingham jail in 1963, an unillusioned Martin Luther King would say, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant never.”
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“Never” is what Faulkner meant, though it is not what he said. Nor is it all that he meant. He meant “never” only while he remained in the pole of disidentification, only so long as he could avoid seeing, in the mirror of race, his dark twin staring back at him. Riddling him with responsibility, that twin kept silently asking the same unanswerable question: when would Moses go down to Egypt and make Pharaoh let his people go? Recurrently in the life, and magnificently in the work, Faulkner would become penetrated by the all-troubling burden of that question. It is time to turn to the empathic pole of his imagination.

I have cast Faulkner’s immersion in American race relations in the binary terms of blindness and insight, disidentification and identification. But this opposition is too stark. Rather, Faulkner’s views and feelings oscillated stumblingly between the two poles. His twinship with blacks remained inalterably occluded, troubled. But it also became, at times, radiant. More, his troubled relation to racial turmoil is revealing in ways that simply “being right” could never be. There was for white Southerners no way of simply being right on this issue. Such men and women were incapable of seeing race with innocent eyes, but what they saw
was
race—inevitably affected by the ways their heritage conditioned them to experience race. One sees—at least in part—through the lenses that one’s cultural training both proposes and imposes. But this is not all that one can see, and no act of seeing is predictable—condemned in advance to stereotype. Faulkner did not access racial turmoil as a nonwhite or non-Southerner might—how could he?—but he brought to his particular access all that his racial and regional experience, along with his global travels during the 1950s and his capacious imagination, permitted him to grasp. If his stance suffered from blindness, and was recurrently inconsistent, it did not reduce to those limitations.

It began with Mammy Callie. She wielded almost as formative an influence on Faulkner and his brothers as their mother did, and she was apparently more affectionate and more lovable than Maud. Like black maids throughout the early twentieth-century South, she would have cared for his bodily needs. She would have touched him, soothed him, protected him, scolded him: all acts of bodily acknowledgment—regular, assuring, enabling. One thinks of the possible screen memory behind his earlier reference to his great-aunt’s daughters Vannye and Natalie: “Vannye was impersonal; quite aloof: she was holding the lamp. Natalie was quick and dark. She was touching me. She must have carried me.” Are the remembered sisters stand-ins for memories—even further back—of Maud and Callie? The memoirs of both Johncy and Jack testify repeatedly to the strength of their bond with Callie. She regaled the boys with stories of the Civil War and her childhood in slavery prior to it. She introduced them lovingly to the nomenclature of natural phenomena: the variety of plants and animals, their specific names and habits and requirements, the folktales that go with them and provide bonding narratives between human and natural worlds. Callie entered Faulkner’s parents’ household in 1902, in Oxford. She was a crucial figure in the maturation of this five-year-old boy, and she would
remain an emotional fixture in his life until her death almost forty years later. “Mammy Callie was probably the most important person in his life,” Faulkner’s daughter Jill would later say to Judith Sensibar (OFA 19). Even if we discount the distortions that retrospective memory can impose, Callie figured centrally in the formation of Faulkner’s emotions and beliefs.

Tellingly, Faulkner’s brothers’ memoirs dilate on Callie in ways that never fail to convey foreignness even as they proclaim intimacy. Both memoirs stress the delightful difference of her speech—its lack of book-taught grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Jack lingers on the image of Mammy Callie sitting in her own rocking chair beside the family fireplace, placidly taking snuff. He recalls offering to take her for a flight in his new Aeronca (he flew commercially for a time). He was concerned that his proposal would frighten her: why would a black mammy want to set foot in an airplane? When he saw the anxiety on her face prior to takeoff, he suggested that she could still change her mind. Resolutely she refused to back away: “Whereat de fambly goes—Ah goes, too!” she declared (FOM 148). Pushing herself deeper into the passenger’s seat, she enjoyed her experience in the air, so far as Jack could tell. Did Callie actually speak as Jack recorded her in this vignette, or did he unthinkingly exaggerate the otherness of her speech?

Faulkner has been much praised—and, by a smaller number, called into question—for pronouncing the eulogy at Callie’s funeral in 1940. Since I am among that smaller number who have wondered in print what was at stake in his taking over that role, it seems appropriate to cite my reasons: “Presiding over her funeral,” I wrote thirteen years ago,

Faulkner emphasized Callie’s “half century of fidelity and devotion,” and he went on to identify her as one of his “earliest recollections, not only as a person, but as a fount of authority over my conduct and of security for my physical welfare, and of active and constant affection and love.” On her tombstone he had these words written: “Her white children bless her.” It detracts nothing from the sincerity of this engraving to note, at the same time, that the white Faulkner has taken over the roles of both wounded subject and grateful offspring, organizer of her funeral and spokesman of the grief her death caused others. In none of this do we register the reality of her own black culture, the friends and relatives who likewise (and surely with equal intensity) suffered her loss.
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So I wrote then, and I do not recant now. Yet I wonder if this is straining the ethics of racial behavior a touch excessively. Perhaps the question is unanswerable, or at any rate (as I proposed earlier in a different context) it
has no right answer. Why must we refuse to credit Faulkner’s love of Callie, just as why must we deny the sincerity of his brothers’ love of her? Yet how can we ignore that they acknowledge her humanity only in its unceasing difference from their own—kindred, yes, but looking, smelling, talking, and acting differently from them. And to be treated differently from how they treat each other. Perhaps no love is innocent, and one that crosses the membrane of race is least so. But it is still love. Writing about Faulkner and Callie thirteen years later, I would close with two final considerations. First, according to Faulkner’s authorized biographer, Callie had asked him to deliver the eulogy when the time came (F 413). He hadn’t arrived at the idea on his own. Is it so strange to imagine that she would want this world-famous writer who loved her to cobble together some appropriate words after her departure? Not innocent, but not strange. Second, Jack’s memoir mentions, as it draws toward its melancholy ending, that at the time of his mother’s death (1960), Callie’s rocking chair was to be found next to Maud’s bed. It had remained there these twenty years between the maid’s death and that of the mistress. The same object comes up different the second time. The snuff-smoking black woman’s quaintly special rocking chair, on the one hand, and, on the other, the empty rocking chair where an intimate member of the family used to sit—and which her ageing and solitary friend liked to regard with the eye of memory and love.

Let us return to the Faulkner who stumbled throughout the 1950s in the mined fields of race. The blindness of his positions is clear enough. But stumbling is not only error—though it always
is
error—and there are dimensions of midcentury racial turmoil that you would have to have been there and stumbled through to grasp at all. In his “Letter to a Northern Editor,” Faulkner identified one of those dimensions. Aligned with neither the Citizens’ Council nor the NAACP, he described himself as “being in the middle” (ESPL 87), seeking to ward off disasters rising from either of the two extremes. Grace Hale and Robert Jackson have persuasively argued that the “middle” position Faulkner clung to—and which would not survive
Brown v. Board of Education
—was Southern white liberalism.
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After
Brown
, the die was cast: either for integration or against it. Most Southern white liberals reluctantly retreated to a white moderate position. They wanted to avoid violence, but when the chips were down, they would not turn against the prerogatives of a society founded on segregation. Faulkner found himself even more isolated as he refused to endorse either side of the stark binary before him. He thus had no platform to stand on—no socially shared position to argue from—and that stance reveals both the strength and the limit of his racial understanding.

Although “in the middle” came increasingly to mean “on his own,” Faulkner continued to speak out. The man who had refused as a boy to graduate from high school vigorously supported a single system of public education in Mississippi. It was absurd, he wrote the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
in 1955, “to raise taxes to establish another system at best only equal to that one which is already not good enough.”
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Attacked for this stance, he responded in another letter to the same paper as follows. “To Mr. Womack’s last question: I have no degrees nor diplomas from any school. I am an old veteran sixth-grader. Maybe that’s why I have so much respect for education that I seem unable to sit quiet and watch it held subordinate in importance to an emotional state concerning the color of human skin” (ESPL 219). More, he grasped the economic basis underlying Southern whites’ hatred of blacks: “That’s what the white man in the South is afraid of,” he said in his most widely circulated essay about civil rights, “that the Negro, who has done so much with no chance, might do so much more with an equal one that he might take the white man’s economy away from him” (96).

Faulkner’s post-Nobel Prize travels for the State Department in the 1950s opened his eyes to how the rest of the world was watching America struggle with its race problem. A patriot before the Cold War, he was more emphatically one during it. He could not bear the possibility of the Soviet Union exploiting the United States’ failure to grant equality to one-tenth of its people. “To live anywhere in the world of A.D. 1955,” he announced to the Southern Historical Association, “and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow” (ESPL 146). Perhaps it took his travels to make him realize that after the costly war to defeat Hitler, it was outrageous to oppose human equality. But his Oxford friends and family opposed it—his brother John pointedly wrote to the
Oxford Eagle
attacking one of Faulkner’s arguments—and they would never understand his apparent apostasy. They knew he didn’t want to live on an equal basis with blacks any more than they did, and they hated his pretending that he did. He was not pretending that he did. But he could not affirm any other position than equality in a mid-twentieth-century world.

His fellow white Southerners hated not only what they took to be his posturing: many of them hated him as well. When he publicly asserted that the evidence supporting the death penalty for Willie McGee (a black man convicted of raping a white woman) was insufficient to justify that decision, he was attacked as either a deluded writer or someone seditiously aligned “with the Communists” (F 539). A year earlier (1950), he had courageously criticized (in public) a Mississippi court’s decision to spare white Leon
Turner the death penalty. No one doubted that Turner had murdered three black children, but the jury couldn’t bring themselves to execute a white man for this crime. Faulkner knew how swiftly the jurors would have decided otherwise had the race of the killer and the victims been reversed. He wrote the
Commercial Appeal
that Turner, when eventually released, would at some point murder another child, “who it is to be hoped—and with grief and despair one says it—will this time at least be of his own color” (516).

Later, in September 1955, news of the savage murder and mutilation of young Emmett Till reached Faulkner in Italy. Having just completed an enlightening three weeks’ visit (sponsored by the State Department) in Japan, Faulkner had come to Rome. Hearing this news from home was unbearable. For the next few days, he wrote and rewrote a statement he would release to the American press: “Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not,” he said.

Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi … is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t. (ESPL 223)

During this turbulent period, he seems at times to have feared for his own life. To his Danish friend Else Jonsson he wrote in June 1955: “I can see the possible time when I will have to leave my native state, something as the Jew had to flee from Germany during Hitler” (SL 382).

Man in the middle. Historians are probably correct to see that, politically, this was a disappearing position once
Brown
became American law. White liberal guilt would hardly light the way to a post-civil rights future. That would take wide-scale agitation, co-ordinated marches, tactical confrontations, multiple strategies. It would take mass media coverage, and above all courageous black leadership. Ultimately, in ways Faulkner was never positioned to understand, it would be blacks themselves—by the thousands and thousands—who masterminded the strenuous, nationwide campaign to emancipate blacks. Campaign: the work is still going on. Faulkner would never have been its architect, but that is only to say that he was not a significant political player in matters of race. Yet he sometimes managed to see—precisely from his unavailing stance in the middle—racial realities that went beyond, or beneath, political programs.