Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  That was Clarence’s opponent for Congress. That is, even if the army hadn’t anyone else at all for the experts to assume he understood Negroes, Devries (this is Charles talking) couldn’t have talked himself back up front with one leg missing. So all he had now to try to persuade to send him somewhere were civilians, and apparently the only place he could think of was Congress. So (this is still Charles) maybe it would take somebody with no more sense than to volunteer twice for the same war, to have the temerity to challenge a long-vested interest like Clarence Snopes. Because even if they had arranged things better, more practical: either for 1944 to have happened in 1943 or have the election year itself moved forward one, or in fact if the Japs quit in 1945 too and all the ruptured ducks in the congressional district were back home in time, there still would not be enough of them and in the last analysis all Devries would have would be the heirs of the same uncoordinated political illusionees innocent enough to believe still that demagoguery and bigotry tolerance must not and cannot and will not endure simply because they are bigotry and demagoguery and intolerance, that Clarence himself had already used up and thrown away twenty-odd years ago; Charles’s uncle said to Ratliff:

  “They’ll always be wrong. They think they are fighting Clarence Snopes. They’re not. They’re not faced with an individual nor even a situation: they are beating their brains out against one of the foundation rocks of our national character itself. Which is the premise that politics and political office are not and never have been the method and means by which we can govern ourselves in peace and dignity and honor and security, but instead are our national refuge for our incompetents who have failed at every other occupation by means of which they might make a living for themselves and their families; and whom as a result we would have to feed and clothe and shelter out of our own private purses and means. The surest way to be elected to office in America is to have fathered seven or eight children and then lost your arm or leg in a sawmill accident: both of which—the reckless optimism which begot seven or eight children with nothing to feed them by but a sawmill, and the incredible ineptitude which would put an arm or a leg in range of a moving saw—should already have damned you from any form of public trust. They cant beat him. He will be elected to Congress for the simple reason that if he fails to be elected, there is nothing else he can do that anybody on earth would pay him for on Saturday night; and old Will Varner and the rest of the interlocked Snopes kin and connections have no intention whatever of boarding and feeding Clarence for the rest of his life. You’ll see.”

  It looked like he was going to be right. It was May now, almost time for the political season to open; a good one again after four years, now that the Germans had collapsed too. And still Clarence hadn’t announced his candidacy in actual words. Everybody knew why of course. What they couldn’t figure out yet was just how Clarence planned to use Devries’s military record for his, Clarence’s, platform; exactly how Clarence intended to use Devries’s military glory to beat him for Congress with it. And when the pattern did begin to appear at last, Yoknapatawpha County—some of it anyway—found out something else about the Clarence they had lived in innocence with for twenty and more years. Which was just how dangerous Clarence really was in his capacity to unify normal—you might even say otherwise harmless—human baseness and get it to the polls. Because this time he compelled them whose champion he was going to be, to come to him and actually beg him to be their champion; not just beg him to be their knight, but themselves to invent or anyway establish the cause for which they would need him.

  Charles’s Uncle Gavin told him how suddenly one day in that May or early June, the whole county learned that Clarence was not only not going to run for Congress, he was going to retire from public life altogether; this not made as a formal public announcement but rather breathed quietly from sheep to sheep of old Will Varner’s voting flock which had been following Clarence to the polls for twenty-five years now; gently, his Uncle Gavin said, even a little sadly, with a sort of mild astonishment that it was not self-evident:

  “Why, I’m an old man now,” Clarence (he was past forty) said. “It’s time I stepped aside. Especially since we got a brave young man like this Captain Devries—”

  “olonel Devries,” they told him.

  “Colonel Devries.—to represent you, carry on the work which I tried to do to better our folks and our county—”

  “You mean, you’re going to endorse him? You going to support him?”

  “Of course,” Clarence said. “Us old fellows have done the best we could for you, but now the time has come for us to step down. What we need in Congress now is the young men, especially the ones that were brave in the war. Of course General Devries—”

  “Colonel Devries,” they told him.

  “Colonel Devries.—is a little younger maybe than I would have picked out myself. But time will cure that. Of course he’s got some ideas that I myself could never agree with and that lots of other old fogies like me in Missippi and the South wont never agree with either. But maybe we are all too old now, out of date, and the things we believed in and stood up for and suffered when necessary, aint true any more, aint what folks want any more, and his new ideas are the right ones for Yoknapatawpha County and Missippi and the South—”

  And then of course they asked it: “What new ideas?”

  And that was all. He told them: this man, Colonel Devries (no trouble any more about the exactness of his rank), who had become so attached to Negroes by commanding them in battle that he had volunteered twice, possibly even having to pull a few strings (since everyone would admit that he had more than done his share of fighting for his country and democracy and was entitled to—more: had earned the right to—be further excused) to get back into the front lines in order to consort with Negroes; who had there risked his life to save one Negro and then had his own life saved by another Negro. A brave man (had not his government and country recorded and affirmed that by the medals it gave him, including that highest one in its gift?) and an honorable one (that medal meant honor too; did not its very designation include the word?), what course would—could—dared he take, once he was a member of that Congress already passing legislation to break down forever the normal and natural (natural? God Himself had ordained and decreed them) barriers between the white man and the black one. And so on. And that was all; as his uncle said, Clarence was already elected, the county and the district would not even need to spend the money to have the ballots cast and counted; that Medal of Honor which the government had awarded Devries for risking death to defend the principles on which that government was founded and by which it existed, had destroyed forever his chance to serve in the Congress which had accoladed him.

  “You see?” Charles’s uncle said to Ratliff. “You cant beat him.”

  “You mean, even you cant think of nothing to do about it?” Ratliff said.

  “Certainly,” his uncle said. “Join him.”

  “Join him?” Ratliff said.

  “The most efficacious, the oldest—oh yes, without doubt the first, the very first, back to the very dim moment when two cave en confederated against the third one—of all political maxims.”

  “Join—him?” Ratliff said.

  “All right,” his uncle said. “You tell me then. I’ll join you.”

  His uncle told how Ratliff blinked at him awhile. “There must be some simpler way than that. It’s a pure and simple proposition; there must be a pure and simple answer to it. Clarence jest purely and simply wants to get elected to Congress, he dont keer how; there must be some pure and simple way for the folks that purely and simply dont want him in Congress to say No to him, they don’t keer how neither.”

  His uncle said again, “All right. Find it. I’ll join you.” But evidently it wasn’t that pure and simple to Ratliff either: only to Clarence. His uncle said that after that Clarence didn’t even need to make a campaign, a race; that all he would need to do would be to get up on the speakers’ platform at
the Varner’s Mill picnic long enough to be sure that the people who had turned twenty-one since old Will Varner had last told them who to vote for, would know how to recognise the word Snopes on the ballot. In fact, Devries could have quit now, and his uncle said there were some who thought he ought to. Except how could he, with that medal—all five or six of them—for guts and valor in the trunk in the attic or wherever he kept them. Devries even came to Jefferson, into Clarence’s own bailiwick, and made his speech as if nothing were happening. But there you were. There were not enough soldiers back yet who would know what the medal meant. And even though the election itself would not happen until next year, nobody could know now that the Japs would cave this year too. To the others, the parents and Four-F cousins and such to whom they had sent their voting proxies, Devries was a nigger lover who had actually been decorated by the Yankee government for it. In fact, the story now was that Devries had got his Congressional Medal by choosing between a Negro and a white boy to save, and had chosen the Negro and left the white boy to die. Though Charles’s uncle said that Clarence himself did not start this one: they must do him that justice at least. Not that Clarence would have flinched from starting it: he simply didn’t need that additional ammunition now, having been, not so much in politics but simply a Snopes long enough now to know that only a fool would pay two dollars for a vote when fifty cents would buy it.

  It must have been even a little sad: the man who had already been beaten in advance by the very medal which wouldn’t let him quit. It was more than just sad. Because his Uncle Gavin told him how presently even the ones who had never owned a mechanical leg and, if the odds held up, never would, began to realise what owning, having to live with one, let alone stand up and walk on it, must have meant. Devries didn’t sit in the car on the Square or even halted on the road, letting the constituency, the votes, do the standing and walking out to the car to shake his hand and listen to him as was Clarence’s immemorial and successful campaigning method. Instead, he walked himself, swinging that dead mechanical excrescence or bracing it to stand for an hour on a platform to speak, rationalising for the votes which he already knew he had lost, while trying to keep all rumor of the chafed and outraged stump out of his face while he did it. Until at last Charles’s uncle said how the very ones who would still vote for him would dread having to look at him and keep the rumor of that stump out of theaces too; until they themselves began to wish the whole thing was over, the debacle accomplished, wondering (his uncle said) how they themselves might end it and set him free to go home and throw the tin leg away, chop it up, destroy it, and be just peacefully maimed.

  Then the day approached for Uncle Billy Varner’s election-year picnic, where by tradition all county aspirants for office, county state or national, delivered themselves and so Clarence too would have to announce formally his candidacy, his Uncle Gavin saying how they clutched even at that straw: that once Clarence had announced for Congress, Devries might feel he could withdraw his name and save his face.

  Only he didn’t have to. After the dinner was eaten and the speakers gathered on the platform, Clarence wasn’t even among them; shortly afterward the word spread that he had even left the grounds and by the next morning the whole county knew that he had not only withdrawn from the race for Congress, he had announced his retirement from public life altogether. And that this time he meant it because it was not Clarence but old man Will Varner himself who had sent the word out that Clarence was through. That was July, 1945; a year after that, when the election for Congress finally came around, the Japanese had quit too and Charles and most of the rest of them who knew what Devries’s medal meant, were home in person with their votes. But they merely increased Devries’s majority; he didn’t really need the medal because Ratliff had already beat Clarence Snopes. Then it was September, Charles was home again and the next day his uncle ran Ratliff to earth on the Square and brought him up to the office and said,

  “All right. Tell us just exactly what did happen out there that day.”

  “Out where what day?” Ratliff said.

  “You know what I mean. At Uncle Billy Varner’s picnic when Clarence Snopes withdrew from the race for Congress.”

  “Oh, that,” Ratliff said. “Why, that was what you might call a kind of a hand of God, holp a little of course by them two twin boys of Colonel Devries’s sister.”

  “Yes,” his uncle said. “That too: why Devries brought his sister and her family all the way over here from Cumberland County just to hear him announce for a race everybody knew he had already lost.”

  “That’s that hand of God I jest mentioned,” Ratliff said. “Because naturally otherwise Colonel Devries couldn’t a possibly heard away over there in Cumberland County about one little old lonesome gum thicket behind Uncle Billy Varner’s water mill now, could he?”

  “All right, all right,” his uncle said. “Thicket. Twin boys. Stop now and just tell us.”

  “The twin boys was twin boys and the thicket was a dog thicket,” Ratliff said. “You and Chick both naturally know what twin boys is and I was about to say you and Chick both of course know what a dog thicket is too. Except that on second thought I reckon you dont because I never heard of a dog thicket neither until I seen this clump of gum and ash and hickory and pin-oak switches on the bank jest above Varner’s millpond where it will be convenient for the customerske them city hotels that keeps a reservoy of fountain-pen ink open to anybody that needs it right next to the writing room—”

  “Hold it,” his uncle said. “Dog thicket. Come on now. I’m supposed to be busy this morning even if you’re not.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Ratliff said. “It was a dog way-station. A kind of a dog post office you might say. Every dog in Beat Two uses it at least once a day, and every dog in the congressional district, let alone jest Yoknapatawpha County, has lifted his leg there at least once in his life and left his visiting card. You know: two dogs comes trotting up and takes a snuff and Number One says, ‘I be dawg if here aint that old bobtail Bluetick from up at Wyott’s Crossing. What you reckon he’s doing away down here?’ ‘No it aint,’ Number Two says. ‘This here is that-ere fyce that Res Grier swapped Solon Quick for that half a day’s work shingling the church that time, dont you remember?’ and Number One says, ‘No, that fyce come afterward. This here is that old Wyott’s Crossing Bluetick. I thought he’d a been skeered to come back here after what that Littlejohn half-Airedale done to him that day.’ You know: that sort of thing.”

  “All right,” his uncle said. “Go on.”

  “That’s all,” Ratliff said. “Jest that-ere what you might call select dee-butant Uncle Billy Varner politics coming-out picnic and every voter and candidate in forty miles that owned a pickup or could bum a ride in one or even a span of mules either if wasn’t nothing else handy, the sovereign votes theirselves milling around the grove where Senator Clarence Egglestone Snopes could circulate among them until the time come when he would stand up on the platform and actively tell them where to mark the X. You know: ever thing quiet and peaceful and ordinary and law-abiding as usual until this-here anonymous underhanded son-of-a-gun—I wont say scoundrel because evidently it must a been Colonel Devries his-self since couldn’t nobody else a knowed who them two twin boys was, let alone what they was doing that far from Cumberland County; leastways not them particular two twin boys and that-ere local dog thicket in the same breath you might say—until whoever this anonymous underhanded feller was, suh-jested to them two boys what might happen say if two folks about that size would shoo them dogs outen that thicket long enough to cut off a handful of them switches well down below the dog target level and kind of walk up behind where Senator C. Egglestone Snopes was getting out the vote, and draw them damp switches light and easy, not to disturb him, across the back of his britches legs. Light and easy, not to disturb nobody, because apparently Clarence nor nobody else even noticed the first six or eight dogs until maybe Clarence felt his britches legs getting damp
or maybe jest cool, and looked over his shoulder to see the waiting line-up of his political fate with one eye while already breaking for the nearest automobile or pickup you could roll the windows up in with the other, with them augmenting standing-room-only customers strung out behind him like the knots in a kite’s tail until he got inside the car with the door slammed and the glass rolled up, them frustrated dogs circling round and round the automobile like the spotted horses and swan boats on a flying jenny, except the dogs was travelling on three legs, being already loaded and cocked and aimed you might say. Until somebody finally located the owner of the car and got the key and druv Clarence home,inally outdistancing the last dog in about two miles, stopping at last in the ex-Senator’s yard where he was safe, the Snopes dogs evidently having went to the picnic too, while somebody went into the house and fetched out a pair of dry britches for the ex-Senator to change into in the automobile. That’s right. Ex-Senator. Because even with dry britches he never went back to the picnic; likely he figgered that even then it would be too much risk and strain. I mean, the strain of trying to keep your mind on withdrawing from a political race and all the time having to watch over your shoulder in case some dog recollected your face even if your britches did smell fresh and uninteresting.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” his uncle said. “It’s too simple. I dont believe it.”

  “I reckon he figgered that to convince folks how to vote for him and all the time standing on one foot trying to kick dogs away from his other leg, was a little too much to expect of even Missippi voters,” Ratliff said.

  “I dont believe you, I tell you,” his uncle said. “That wouldn’t be enough to make him withdraw even if everybody at the picnic had known about it, seen it. Didn’t you just tell me they got him into a car and away almost at once?” Then his uncle stopped. He looked at Ratliff, who stood blinking peacefully back at him. His uncle said: “Or at least—”