What did Oxford have to offer? The square shut down at six. The county was dry. There were no bars. Restaurants stopped serving after nine. Where could he go?
There was a single oasis on the square, its lights braving the darkness. Gathright-Reed’s Drugstore, on the south side of the square where it had stood for thirty years, stayed open until ten. Here was Pappy’s ray of hope, his light in the window. It wasn’t exactly a watering hole, but this friendly neighborhood drugstore offered something that bars couldn’t: a lending library.
Of course, Pappy had his own magnificent library at Rowan Oak, a beautiful room, understated and elegant. Bookshelves lined two walls. He collected everybody from Shakespeare and Henry Fielding to Henry Miller and Dostoyevsky.
A stuffed owl (shot by Pappy’s stepson, Malcolm, in the 1940s) perched atop the tallest shelf. Pappy had a leather-padded fender built around the brick hearth so we could sit by the fire. His overstuffed reading chair and floor lamp were to the left of the fireplace. A framed black-and-white drawing of Ahab stood on a shelf. There were four paintings by Maud: a small one of Jill and Mammy Callie taken from a photograph; an oil of William Clark Falkner, the Old Colonel, in his CSA uniform; and, in ironic counterpoint, the elegant and dignified face of a black man known as “Preacher.” A twenty-four-by-fifteen-inch oil portrait of Pappy in an antique gilt frame hung over the mantel. In it he is wearing a suit and tie. Nannie painted him in the early ’40s when he was forty-four or forty-five. The canvas she stretched was an inch and a half too short for the frame Pappy selected, so, being economical by nature, she added a narrow strip of board and canvas to fill the gap and painted it to match her son’s suit.
Having read all the books in his library, he went to Gathright-Reed’s Drugstore looking for something new to read but mainly, I think, seeking company.
Pappy had long been friends with the pharmacist Mac Reed, who in the 1930s had functioned as his private mail service, wrapping manuscripts for submission, binding them with string, and mailing them to New York. Reed would not hear of anyone else doing it. After the books were published, he kept copies for sale when they were out of print, stacking them next to the cash register. There was no bookstore in Oxford. Gathright-Reed’s was the only place in town to purchase Faulkner first editions—signed when the author was in a good mood.
In 1955, Reed’s associate Gerre Hopkins manned the drugstore in the evening hours. This was before Hopkins went to medical school and married Jill’s best friend, Mil’Murray Douglas. Reed, perhaps aware of his literary responsibilities, and (rare for a druggist) knowing that books were good medicine, installed a lending library with a rotating stand filled with paperbacks and call cards fitted into the front so that the pharmacy could keep tabs on books that had been checked out.
In Oxford this became the place to be from, say, 9 to 10 p.m. As soon as he heard about the lending library, Pappy was there. The square was a ten-minute walk from Rowan Oak. He could puff his pipe and pretend that he was going somewhere besides Gathright-Reed’s and be grateful that at long last there was somewhere to go in Oxford after nine at night. He could “drop in” at the drugstore and sort through the paperbacks, greet other regular lending-library patrons, and perhaps exchange an opinion on this mystery or that. Hopkins serenely presided over this burst of nocturnal activity. An avid reader and devoted fan of William Faulkner, he welcomed Pappy to the store night after night.
I don’t know if Dr. Hopkins told Pappy about the Case of the Missing Call Cards, but he shared it with me, many years later. One day he noticed that cards were missing in certain paperbacks. He remembered Pappy mentioning that he’d enjoyed this Erle Stanley Gardner or that Dorothy Sayers or Rex Stout. Putting two and two together, Hopkins realized that someone was going through the cards looking for Pappy’s signature. That someone possessed the literary acumen to realize that a Nobel Prize winner’s signature was valuable. Hopkins’s prime suspect was a member of the Ole Miss English Department whose name he would not reveal. (Pharmacist-client privilege may have figured in.) Anyway, to foil the thief, Hopkins forged Pappy’s signature in all the library cards. One wonders if any of those call cards are circulating among collectors as genuine articles.
Then a book went missing. The overdue book was Murder in Pastiche; or, Nine Detectives All at Sea, by Marion Mainwaring (Macmillan, 1954), checked out by William Faulkner. The time limit had expired. After several weeks, Hopkins went to Rowan Oak to pick up the book. I don’t know if he went out of his way to track down every overdue item. Maybe he was caught up in the art of detection, or maybe he just wanted to visit with Pappy. When Aunt Estelle came to the door, Hopkins explained why he had come and she said, “Just a minute, I know right where Bill put that book.” She gave it back to Hopkins and apologized for it being late. Hopkins thanked her and brought it back to the drugstore.
A week later, he noticed that the mystery had been checked out again. He looked at the call card. The book had been signed out by (the real) William Faulkner.
It’s easy to see why Pappy was fascinated with Murder in Pastiche. This sprightly first novel by Mainwaring, a Radcliffe graduate, has nine famous detectives vying to solve a murder committed on a ship during a transatlantic crossing. Each chapter is written in the narrative style of one of nine mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, and Mickey Spillane. No writer could have appreciated Mainwaring’s spoof more than Pappy, who parodied himself in the short story “Afternoon of a Cow,” writing under the pen name of Ernest V. Trueblood.
After several weeks passed, and Pappy still had not returned the book, Hopkins had a dilemma. Should he go back to Rowan Oak again, or should he wait and let the situation resolve itself? Discretion proved the better part of valor. Hopkins relinquished Murder in Pastiche to posterity. (I have a hunch that Pappy loaned the book to Nannie. She would have been beside herself to get her hands on it after he mentioned it. And he would have.)
Dr. Hopkins told my husband, Larry, and me this story at the annual Faulkner Conference at the University of Mississippi. Not long afterward, we purchased a copy of the paperback and presented Murder in Pastiche to him with an apology for having “kept it” so long and, considering that the book was fifty years overdue, with a request for special consideration regarding late fees.
*He was posthumously awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for The Reivers in 1963.
Dean, two, and her cousin Jill, five, dressed for winter in 1938.
Maud; her son Jack Falkner, FBI agent and pilot; and her granddaughter Dean, two, in Oxford in 1938.
Dean with her nurse, Jerry, who taught her to say “Yes, ma’am” and how to say the alphabet backward.
Dean, four, with her mother, Louise; photo taken at the Lafayette County farm of her grandparents Sanford and Pearl Hale.
Dean at age seven in Clarksdale, Mississippi: “a scruffy little girl just home from school.”
Dean, ten, with her mother, Louise, and Boo Ferriss, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and cousin of Dean’s stepfather, Jimmy Meadow, circa 1946.
William Faulkner’s favorite photo of himself was taken by his neighbor Colonel Hugh Evans in 1947.
The homemade houseboat Minmagary, built in 1947 by William Faulkner and his friends Ross Brown, Ashford Little, and Hugh Evans.
William Faulkner relaxing in his library at Rowan Oak. From his weary expression it’s likely that this photo was taken just after he had finished “making one of the books.”
The premiere of Intruder in the Dust was attended by William Faulkner and his family, including Dean Faulkner, thirteen, (not shown). (News photo by Phil Mullen, the Oxford Eagle).
Jill Faulkner, twenty-one, shortly before her marriage in 1954 to Paul Summers.
William and daughter Jill boarding a flight to Stockholm, where he would receive the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded on December 10, 1950. (Commercial Appeal photo)
William Faulkner (center) with son-in-law Bill Fielden and step-granddaughter,
Vicki Fielden in Manila, during Faulkner’s State Department tour in 1955. (Courtesy of Gillian Kay)
Dean, twenty, with longtime friend Sandra Baker, nineteen, while studying abroad in 1957 in Aubigny-sur-Nère, France.
William Faulkner, sixty, with niece Dean Faulkner, twenty-two, at Dean’s wedding reception at Rowan Oak in 1958.
Dean with her children, left to right: Paige, Jon, and Diane; photo taken in Panama on Mother’s Day, 1967.
Larry and Dean Wells, taken through the window of Yoknapatawpha Press, then located over Sneed’s Hardware on the town square of Oxford, Mississippi. (Chip Cooper, courtesy of W. S. Hoole Special Collections, University of Alabama Library)
Faulkner’s portable Underwood typewriter in his “office.”
Rowan Oak seen from the front. (© Buddy Mays/Corbis)
Falkner family plot at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford: William Faulkner’s parents, Murry and Maud; grandparents J.W.T. and Sallie Falkner; brothers, Dean and Jack; sister-in-law Louise; cousin Dorothy Falkner Dodson, daughter of Judge John and Sue Falkner; William’s daughter Alabama Faulkner; and three infant sons of Judge John and Sue Falkner.
I WAS A STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI AT THE time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and several Hungarian refugees enrolled at Ole Miss. The administration had a recruiting drive to sign up campus organizations as sponsors of foreign students. My sorority, Chi Omega, declined, so I threw myself into the campaign with a vengeance. In the process I reinvented myself. The Faulkner tendency to play dress-up was alive and well in me. I grew my hair long and pulled it back into a ponytail. I disdained makeup and wore black sweaters with shapeless tweed jumpers, dirty tennis shoes, and a trench coat in all weather. I was obnoxious. When my dorm roommate archly observed that I looked and smelled like a Hungarian refugee, I could not have been more flattered.
That spring, I fell under the influence of Miss Kate, our next-door neighbor at Rowan Oak, and her daughter, Sandra, my childhood friend, who introduced me to a group of students so radical compared to my usual circle that they might have come from the far side of the moon. Fine arts majors in the classics and theater, they were in school to be students, to use their minds, to learn how to be better citizens. I wanted to be them.
Thanks to Sandra’s introductions, my new friends allowed me to help them publish two or three issues of an underground newspaper, a broadside satirizing a nebulous group of white supremacists, Scotch-Irish descendants that we called “the Scottrish.” We met in secret on the third floor of the university’s YMCA building. Lookouts were posted while we ran off copies of our paper on the mimeograph machine. We had stealthy runners from various dorms, frats, and sororities to distribute the broadside. In the dark of night they would pick up the papers and sneak them into Greek houses and dorms, leaving stacks of them in doorway entrances or on tables to be discovered at breakfast. Afterward the “editorial board members” and contributing writers left the Y one at a time and made our way across campus as casually as our fear would allow.
We thought we were hot stuff, real heroes, riding bicycles around campus, walking to town (in a car-conscious society). We were proud as punch when a carload of students yelled through open windows: “N——r-loving queers!” We sat at an isolated table in the cafeteria with unabashed smugness, certain that no one outside our group of rebels would dare be seen with us. But we were a long way from climbing on a bus with John Siegenthaler or sitting at a lunch counter in North Carolina or walking across a bridge in Selma. Completely safe, we were bush-league liberals.
“Without fear there can be no courage,” Pappy once told me. It’s easy to be brave when you are very young or very old. The young haven’t lived long enough to know any better; and the old have lived too long to care.
We knew that someone was sponsoring our broadside, paying for the mimeograph stencils (which to penniless students were quite expensive) and the paper to run off the broadside, and who, when the mimeograph machine broke, which happened frequently, would pay to have it repaired. We argued cheerfully about the identity of our secret benefactor. It’s amazing that we never considered Pappy, even though he had been widely quoted as saying that being against integration was like living in Alaska and being against snow. Pappy and I had not discussed the pending integration of Ole Miss but only whether I would study French Realism or Old English. My peers and I assumed that our mystery patron was the campus archliberal, history professor James Silver, designated by the White Citizens’ Council as a “threat to the Mississippi way of life,” and our role model and hero. Years later, I was talking to Dr. Silver at a cocktail party and he casually remarked that our anonymous sponsor was none other than Pappy. I was stunned and filled with joy and the hope that Pappy knew that I was a member of the “Third-Floor YMCA Gang.”
Pappy, Wese, and I formed a moderate minority in our family of ardent segregationists and racists. One aunt was fond of saying, “I just don’t understand why anyone would ever want to go anywhere that they weren’t invited, much less wanted. That’s like crashing the party. You just don’t.” In an interview with a local newspaper, another aunt was quoted (accurately, I believe) as saying, “I’m a bigot and proud of it.” The Faulkner men, with the exception of Pappy, heartily endorsed this sentiment, using the “n” word, snickering at racist jokes, and openly advocating violence to defend the “Southern Way of Life.”
Nannie was as full of bigotry as any of them. Early on a fall afternoon when I was staying with her in Oxford, I came home from school bursting with the Bill of Rights, which I had learned by heart. “Do you want to hear what I learned today?” I called to Nannie, and not pausing for a reply, I began to recite: “ ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable …’ ” She interrupted before I could say another word, her voice soft and firm. “Yes, they are, my lamb, with the exceptions of nigrahs, foreigners, Catholics, and Jews.”
Nannie remained steadfast in her prejudice her entire life. Miss Kate, Sandra, Wese, and Pappy saved my soul.
WHEN THE FIRST African American student was about to enter Ole Miss, Wese was social director at the campus YMCA and counselor of foreign students. That Sunday evening, she drove out to the Y to go to work as usual, in spite of the growing probability of campus violence. James Meredith was scheduled to be registered at the University of Mississippi the following Monday.
Traffic in Oxford was heavier than for a home football game. Cars and pickups with license plates from every county—Itawamba, Hinds, Choctaw, Yalobusha, Panola—as well as from Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana were loaded with men, front and back. I could feel the mounting tension. When the first out-of-state buses rolled in, angry, determined faces staring out the windows, I shuddered and feared for James Meredith, our university, our town, our country.
It was a warm September evening. All the windows in Nannie’s house were open, as well as the front door and the French doors. I watched as President Kennedy addressed the nation. He was magnificent, but even as he made his eloquent plea for law and order, we heard the howling of the mob from the campus, a mile away, and the sound of breaking glass. A pall of tear gas hung over the town. The burning smell seeped through the window screens. I closed windows and doors and waited for Wese to come home. She got in around two in the morning, having worked side by side with the Reverend Duncan Gray, our Episcopal priest. The YMCA had been turned into a sanctuary and first-aid station for students and demonstrators overcome by tear gas. Dozens were lying on the floor in the vestibule. Wese brought water to federal marshals and students alike, using the only container she could find, a pencil holder, filling it from a water fountain.
As Wese was tending to the walking wounded, two other relatives of mine were about to confront each other outside the Y. It has been said that the riot at Ole Miss was the last battle in the Civil War, dividing families who fought on both sides. Well, fate brought my uncle John’s sons, Chooky and Jimmy, face to face, armed and dangerous, i
n front of the Lyceum Building. Chooky, a captain in the Mississippi National Guard, was in command of the Oxford company. Jimmy was leading a lynching party (it can’t be called anything else) intent on assassinating James Meredith while the mob ruled the campus.
After the Guard was federalized and under government control, U.S. attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach ordered Chooky to move his unit to the campus and take up positions in front of the besieged Lyceum, where thousands of demonstrators, students and rednecks alike, were throwing bricks at the U.S. Marshals who guarded the building. The rumor was that Meredith was inside. Actually, he was in a men’s dormitory some two hundred yards away, guarded by a handful of FBI agents.
Jimmy Faulkner was one of the men who commandeered a bulldozer at a building site and drove it toward the Lyceum. Klansmen with shotguns and dynamite followed the bulldozer like infantry behind a tank. Their plan was to storm the Lyceum, drag Meredith out, and kill him. Chooky’s arm had been broken when a brick landed in his jeep. He was still in command, his arm in a sling fashioned out of an ammunition belt. Before Jimmy could get to the Lyceum, Chooky stood in the street blocking his path. Jimmy could not bring himself to run over his brother. Instead, he rammed the bulldozer into an oak tree, trying to bring it down so riflemen could use it for cover. The bulldozer’s engine stopped. FBI agents swarmed the machine and Jimmy ran. He was not caught. Later, Chooky was awarded the highest military decorations for service outside a theater of war. Two men were killed during the riot, one of them a civilian bystander, the other a Reuters correspondent, and 160 marshals and guardsmen were wounded, 28 by gunfire.
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