Henry pleads with Bon—“You are my brother”—to forego his quest, not force the issue. Bon replies: “No I’m not. I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister” (AA 294). Bon is unpacifiably both. No other novelist approaches Faulkner when it comes to loving what you hate, hating what you love. This unmanageable heart-truth underwrites Absalom and makes it live and breathe. “The human heart in conflict with itself”: so Faulkner characterized his core concern when receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950. What is this but to center his great work on the plight of human beings who find themselves intolerably self-entrapped? Doomed by what their culture has taught them they must be—yet can no longer bear to be? Faulkner’s most compelling protagonists seethe with convictions at odds with their feelings. Over time, agonizingly, they lose their inner coherence. The territory Faulkner opens to anguished reilluming is not—as in his own life—the confusions of love, or the war that was missed at first and mendaciously claimed later. In Absalom it is the reality—at once his own and his region’s—of interracial intimacy cohabiting with repudiation. They are us and not-us, cherished and abandoned—dark twins inseparably bonded by blood, beyond joining because of that shared blood.
By the end, Absalom has revealed in Charles Bon all that he is and cannot be. Bon a nigger? Given what we have seen of the suave and sophisticated white-skinned Bon, the inappropriateness of “nigger” virtually explodes on the page. In mid-nineteenth-century Mississippi, if Bon “were” black, he would have been a slave, and none of Absalom’s love-investments would have been possible. Since he “is” black—as we learn after many hours of reading him as white—we recognize with renewed power the absurd brutality of racial stereotype. Absurd because Bon so transcends the stereotype, brutal because its daily imposition prevented Mississippi slaves from remotely becoming Bon. Faulkner has created, in the guise of this socially impossible figure, so much that the South had experienced but could not allow itself to conceptualize.
Nor does it stop here. Bon has a child, though not by Judith, and this child’s story comes to figure as the mixed-blood nightmare that replaces Sutpen’s lily-white dream of dynastic descent. Unlike his father’s, Charles Etienne’s racial awakening is brutally swift. He was born in a New Orleans in which he “could neither have heard nor yet recognised the term ‘nigger,’ who even had no word for it in the tongue he knew who had been born and grown up in a padded silken vacuum … where pigmentation had no more moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colored candle shades” (AA 165). Suddenly, this child is seized by Clytie and transported—without explanation or shared language—to a northern Mississippi where the space he inhabits has altered beyond recognition:
the few garments (the rags of the silk and broadcloth in which he had arrived, the harsh jeans and homespun which the two women bought and made for him, he accepting them with no thanks, no comment, accepting his garret room with no thanks, no comment, asking for and making no alteration in its spartan arrangements that they knew of until that second year when he was fourteen and one of them, Clytie or Judith, found hidden beneath his mattress the shard of broken mirror: and who to know what hours of amazed and tearless grief he might have spent before it, examining himself in the delicate and outgrown tatters in which he perhaps could not even remember himself, with quiet and incredulous incomprehension) hanging behind a curtain contrived of a piece of old carpet nailed across a corner. (165)
The courtly twinned image at which ragged Charles Etienne stares in this shard of broken mirror reveals the chasm between what he was and what he is. Each present item of clothing reads as the despoliation of a former item of clothing. His New Orleans-furnished body has been displaced by his Mississippi-furnished body, none of this his own choosing. Like his father, Charles Etienne materializes as culturally impossible, torn between here and there, now and then. Puritan northern Mississippi and Catholic New Orleans, the jagged racist present and the harmonious race-neutral past share him incoherently. His solution to these incompatible cultural markings is to combine them as crucifixion. One needs (as one needed with his father) an infrared light to read the black man in this white man. But Charles Etienne makes it easier by guaranteeing, through premeditated acts of violence, that he be recognized as both at once. He chooses for wife exactly the kind of black woman that white and black alike will read as scandalous. Abreast of the nuances of every stereotype that entraps him, he projects nothing except trouble upon black and white alike.
And it is not over yet. The book ends on the note of his brain-damaged, dark-skinned son, Jim Bond. The last of the Sutpen line, this orphaned figure remains howling somewhere in the woods. No one is left who could claim him—unless it be Quentin Compson. Paralyzed by his own race-tormented inheritance, how could Quentin either recognize or fail to recognize—in the mirror of this unassuageably howling idiot—his own dark twin?
Cognition can take forever to become more than cognition. Quentin pores over this story, seeking the detail, the clue, that will unravel its mystery. I have already quoted the innocent detail that later ignites into illumination: “I [Rosa] was not there to see the two Sutpen faces this time—once on Judith and once on the negro girl beside her—looking down through the square entrance to the loft.” So casually said by Rosa: Sutpen’s face on the negro girl Clytie as well as his own daughter. Quentin’s climactic trip to Sutpen’s Hundred (occurring in narrative time at the beginning of the novel, but opened up and passed on to the reader only at the novel’s end) lets him figure out the portent of that white-engendered dark face. “And she didn’t tell you in the actual words,” Shreve says about Quentin’s seeing Clytie there, “nevertheless she told you, or at least you knew” (AA 289). At least you knew: if Sutpen could beget one black child, he could beget others. He could and did beget Charles Bon.
The murder finally takes on its meaning. The morganatic marriage only goes so far, not very far at all. The incest motive goes further, tormenting Henry for the four years of the war. Finally, though, there is miscegenation, and this barrier is nonnegotiable—Henry “thinking not what he would do but what he would have to do. Because he knew what he would do” (AA 292). Perhaps the book’s brilliance is most at work here. Absalom must manage to think through something that its actors—once they know that the obstacle to marriage is miscegenation—are incapable of thinking about at all. Absalom’s strenuous withholding of information—the reasons for its circuitous movement through time—reveals its purpose. We are all but finished with the book when we learn that Bon is not just brother but black brother. Faulkner has suspended that discovery over the entire narrative, releasing it only in the penultimate pages. All previous interpretations of Bon’s murder remain intact. But the racial motive is both the most decisive (the one that can command life-altering behavior) and the last Faulkner can supply. He must withhold it from Bon himself, from most of the other characters, and from the reader as well.
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 t
hat 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.
“BUT THERE MUST HAVE BEEN LOVE”: GO DOWN, MOSES
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.
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