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It must come last because he, we, and the others in the novel must experience Bon otherwise until the end. We internalize (as Henry does) the developing emotional value of his becoming a brother. We live inside his subjectivity as a man who does not know he is black. He figures it out,
finally, because the refusal of acknowledgment he receives at the hands of his father tells him eventually, by process of elimination, who he has to be. He must be suffering from the one condition no white Southern patriarch
can
acknowledge: black blood. Finally it clicks into coherence. Sutpen himself long ago suffered the same searing illumination that Faulkner’s tortured narrative technique springs upon Bon. Brutally refused entrance into the plantation’s front door, the young Sutpen

seemed to kind of dissolve and a part of him turn and rush back through two years they had lived there like when you pass through a room fast and look at all the objects in it and you turn and go back through the room again and look at all the objects from the other side and you find out you had never seen them before, rushing back through those two years and seeing a dozen things that had happened and he hadn’t even seen them before. (AA 190)

Still the same, yet wholly different now. Likewise, the reader of
Absalom
stumblingly reads on, believing that the objects and others encountered are themselves—until later revealed as dark inversions when seen from “the other side.” To read
Absalom
is to undergo a racial education that moves—over time—from cognition into tragic recognition.

Blacks had hardly been the catapult for tragic recognition when he began writing fiction. Either absent from his earlier fiction or “unimpatient” decor within them, they had commanded no special attention. In
Light in August
, however, Faulkner had found his way into a realm where race mattered imperiously. It is as though he suddenly sat up in bed after a nightmare and asked himself: what would it feel like—to me—if I suddenly found myself to be one of them? To me: there was no question of what
they
might feel like. The novel didn’t ask who (as a community living in segregated “freed-man’s” districts of every town in the South) they might be. No empathic entry into Southern blackness, virtually no blacks in the novel at all. This absence is ultimately telling, for it reveals what conditions Faulkner required to turn—for the first time seriously—to race relations in the South. Those conditions mandated that the one suffering from such relations be white—a man trapped in a weave of racial rumor about his identity at its core genetic level. The man had to be unable to know what blood ran in his veins. If this narrow optic radically limited Faulkner’s vision of race, it simultaneously brought to focus an extraordinary insight. Beneath the surface confidence
of Southern whites ran a racial insecurity bordering on hysteria. If a drop of black blood was thought to make a white person black, who might not unknowingly carry this toxic drop? No one could see the internal wreckage that drop would have wrought. Invisibly infected carriers might be anywhere, and they might not even know the illness they were bringing into the white community. Such anxiety might be enough to make many a white man in the segregated South have trouble going back to sleep, once he had sat bolt upright at three o’clock in the morning and wondered: what if I were black and didn’t know it?

Racial hysteria, the insanity that overtakes white men in the South confronting their dark twin, served as Faulkner’s entry point in
Light in August
. In
Absalom
, he would go further. Less violent than
Light in August, Absalom
extensively explored the prehistory of that putative drop. Suppose our nineteenth-century “white” brothers and sisters were already, ever since the genesis of the plantation design itself, infected carrriers of that drop of black blood? Suppose the foundation of the South’s abiding dream—its plantation paradigm of wealth, civility, and achievement—were invisibly steeped in impure blood? Such blood would not only be pressing from outside to get inside that plantation’s front door but also simmering inside and threatening to get outside. In a culture founded for over two centuries on racial relations at once intimate and barbaric, how could that drop of black blood
not
be already at work, subverting the meaning of the planterly dream?
Absalom
took Faulkner more time to write than
Light in August
not least because its reverberations went further: a racial malaise that had been gathering for over two hundred years, endemic to the slaveholding South. And not just a malaise. Because that drop was invisible—and, as Faulkner sometimes recognized as well, genetically meaningless—whites might embrace blacks (unidentified as such) as beloved siblings and offspring. They would be loved inside the family so long as they were thought to be white, though passionately repudiated from it once marked as black. The malaise manifested at the same time as a foredoomed love story.
⁹

In 1938, flush (briefly) with money from MGM’s purchase of film rights to
The Unvanquished
($25,000), Faulkner purchased a 320-acre lot in the countryside named Greenfield Farm. He would later, in the post-Nobel years, insistently self-identify as a farmer. This was not just an identity he recurrently drew on to beg out of pressing engagements (as he would try in 1950 to beg out of the Stockholm trip to receive his Nobel Prize). It was also an abiding component of the person he had long imagined himself to be, perhaps ever since his childhood exposure to woods and wilderness.
Greenfield Farm demanded more agricultural expertise and managerial energy than he possessed or could afford to provide, so he put his brother Johncy in charge of running it. Against professional advice, he insisted on raising mules—and lost money doing so. Though Johncy ran the farm, Faulkner footed the bills and spent a good deal of time there as well. He came to know his black workers—including the familiar Uncle Ned—in more sustained and intractable ways. His role toward them was approaching that of the master of the plantation, and they were looking more like tenant farmers. Such would become, in
Go Down Moses
(1942), the fundamental roles played by the forty-three-year-old Roth Edmonds, frustrated landowner, and his wily black tenant farmer Lucas Beauchamp.

A vignette recounted by Faulkner’s authorized biographer conveys something of the tenor of race relations on the farm and in the novel as well. It seems that Faulkner had unwisely bought a scrawny little bull called Black Buster. This bull soon became Uncle Ned’s favorite, but was not much good at impregnating cows. So at considerable further expense, Faulkner bought a large pedigreed bull that answered better to these needs. As the Fourth of July (1938) approached, Faulkner told Ned to slaughter Black Buster so that they could at least (and for once) get something profitable out of him, in the form of tasty ribs. The master had proposed a noon barbecue to his friends and family; Black Buster would be the plat de résistance. Ned agreed to take care of the details. By noon the guests had arrived, the ribs and other dishes had been set out on the table, and the lunch was under way. In the midst of the delectable meal, Faulkner happened to glance toward the field where he saw—Black Buster. Startled, he looked at Ned and asked, “Who’s that?” Ned responded, “that’s Black Buster.” “Then,” looking at the meat roasting on the spit, Faulkner asked, “who’s this? I thought I told you to kill Black Buster and I thought you told me you did.” As Faulkner began to realize that he hadn’t seen his pedigree bull for the past couple of days, Ned rose swiftly, answering in retreat, “Master, I calls them all Black Buster” (F 398). Such a story would have no place in either the brutal
Light in August
or the tragic
Absalom, Absalom!
but would fit perfectly into the wryly comic white master-black tenant shenanigans of
Go Down, Moses
.

A comic undertone runs through much of this novel, and its prehistory explains to some extent why. As often, Faulkner was out of money in 1940. He wrote Bob Haas at Random House that he desperately needed $10,000—$1,000 immediately and the rest in monthly installments. Haas helped as he could, but Faulkner’s financial urgency seemed to outpace Haas’s (or anyone else’s) ability to pacify it for long. In this context,
Faulkner started to conceptualize
Go Down, Moses
. The new book must first of all be profitable. His working model for making it profitable was
The Unvanquished
, also composed (four years earlier) by his revising a cluster of previously published stories. Here he would do the same, trying to place the stories in the same high-paying popular magazine market. Thus he began, so to speak, with defective materials—stories written as potboilers and published (eight of them) in magazines as varied as
Harper’s, Collier’s
, the
Atlantic Monthly
, and the
Saturday Evening Post
. The problem before him—as he was the first to realize—was to make the novel itself greater than the sum of its parts (“stories about niggers,” as he had characterized them to Haas [SL 124]). Almost miraculously, he succeeded in this, though an ineradicable residue of the stories’ prehistory still lives in their racially insouciant tone. That tone—sometimes flawless but recurrently facile when not condescending—penetrates “Was” and “The Fire and the Hearth” (which together account for over a third of the book). Blacks on a working twentieth-century white-owned farm are portrayed as wily, lazy, and cleverer than their white master ever anticipates. Whenever they are not kept under strict supervision, they start to make trouble. As Roth (the frustrated, landowner) puts it to Lucas, “As soon as you niggers are laid by trouble starts” (67). The premise is clear. Black workers get away with murder, and all the burden is on the white landowners trying to keep them in line. Since there was no way Faulkner could remove this premise, he thought of something better. He would make it pay. And he would begin by using the perspective of an uncomprehending nine-year-old boy, Cass, to tell a story that took place years before his younger cousin, Ike, was even born.

Go Down, Moses
opens in 1859 (a racially portentous year) with a merry chase. “Was” begins with two white bachelors—Cass’s uncles Buck and Buddy McCaslin—rushing to recapture their runaway slave, Tomey’s Turl. Turl is hotfooting it toward another plantation where his mate, Tennie, who is owned by Hubert Beauchamp, is forced to live apart from him. Casually operative already are two of slavery’s disturbing features: runaway slaves and slaveholders’ right to divide their slaves’ families as they see fit. The most disturbing feature soon enters the narrative with equal casualness. Hubert, not about to make matters easier for the separated couple, refuses to have “that damn white half-McCaslin on his place even as a free gift” (GDM 7). This slave hunt is about two white McCaslins chasing their white “half-McCaslin” brother. But Buck and Buddy hardly think of either whiteness or fraternity when they regard Turl. When Buck hunts Turl incorrectly (there are rules for this sort of thing) and gets run over by
him, he realizes his error: “Afterwards, Uncle Buck admitted that it was his own mistake, that he had forgotten when even a little child should have known: not to ever stand right in front of or right behind a nigger when you scare him; but always to stand to one side of him” (16). The story ends with the runaway slave recaptured and Tennie now set to join him by way of a tortuously complicated set of gambling wagers. Everyone in the story knows what a “nigger” is and how to hunt him. No reflections, no concession that anything strange is going on.

The next chapter, “The Fire and the Hearth,” focuses on Lucas Beauchamp—of all the black men in Faulkner’ work, the most intricately represented. Almost obsessively, Faulkner returns to Lucas’s independent bearing: his “face which … was a composite of a whole generation of fierce and undefeated young Confederate soldiers” (GDM 91). Usually that face is haughtily inexpressive, and at all times its owner proudly dates himself back to his white grandfather, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. Moreover, Lucas’s most riveting memories—focused on an encounter with Carothers’s white descendant Zack—circulate around the enabling resources bequeathed by his grandfather. When Zack’s wife was dying in childbirth, Lucas’s wife, Molly, went to her bedside, to nurse the newborn baby (Roth). Molly remained at the big house for six months; Lucas would never know what roles she played there. Finally he could take it no longer. In a balletlike ritual of challenge and counter-challenge—suffused with enmity and intimacy—Lucas confronts Zack in the bedroom, coming within an inch of taking Zack’s life. At the ultimate moment, his gun misfires, the crisis ends, and Lucas returns home: “
Old Carothers
, he thought.
I needed him and he come and spoke for me”
(45, emphasis in the original). In calling Zack to account, Lucas drew precisely on what he had inherited from the imperious and unyielding progenitor. Does one hear a precursor of Faulkner’s later claim that the black man “is competent for equality only in the ratio of his white blood”?

In dramatizing Lucas’s remembered struggle—his standing up like a man, let the consequence be what it will—Faulkner compellingly represented a black man in distress. No longer picturesque racial décor, Lucas was granted a significant past. In that recalled scene, his chest heaved, his mind lurched, as he sought to confront the assault on his manhood. It comes as no surprise to learn that Faulkner added this scene when he revised the magazine version of these materials
(Collier’s
would have had little interest in this flashback). More broadly, Faulkner wrote a black capacity for memory itself into
Go Down, Moses
—by way of revisions and with considerable consequences. The
novel exits the brittle cleverness of current-day games, rising into a brooding sense of what has been cumulatively endured over time.