ANCESTRAL SHADOWS
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.
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.”4 “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.
“BECAUSE THEIR SKINS WERE BLACK”
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.5
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 t
o 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.6 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.
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