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.
Ike McCaslin—Old Carothers’s white grandson—functions as the central bearer of memories. But Lucas (the other grandson, Ike’s “dark twin”) is likewise bathed in the flow of time past—territory that had heretofore been reserved for Faulkner’s privileged white figures. Like their author, these figures (and these alone) are granted the searing consciousness of their missteps and blunderings over time. Lucas’s appeal for Faulkner lodges essentially in the temporal shadow he casts. Seen over decades of past time, he luminously harbors dignity, endurance, survival. Seen in the present alone, he appears at best as a wily black tenant farmer. At worst, he appears—so the chancellor’s clerk angrily addresses him—as an “uppity nigger.”
The next story, “Pantaloon in Black” speaks black distress more starkly—more starkly than Faulkner ever managed again. This story attends to the agony of one of Roth Edmonds’s black tenants, Rider, whose wife has suddenly died. All but inarticulate, he says little; Faulkner writes his distress in bodily fashion. A powerful man, bristling with life-energies, Rider’s very strength keeps him from bridging the distance between his pulsating anguish and his wife’s unbreathing state. Dead and buried, she nevertheless suffuses the space of the cabin she tended during their two years of married life. Entering the cabin, he sees her there and tries to approach:
“Mannie,” he said. “Hit’s awright. Ah aint afraid.” Then he took another step. But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But … she was fading, going. “Wait,” he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: “Den lemme go wid you, honey.” But she was going. (GDM 106)
Faulkner focuses hypnotically on Rider’s foredoomed moves: his attempt to drink himself into not-feeling, his running all night through the woods (as though he could bodily exorcise his grief), and finally his suicidal provocation of a white night watchman in a late-night poker game. Rider has long known of this man’s cheating, but now he calls him on it. When the watchman goes for his gun, Rider swoops from behind his back the razor he always carries there. With the rhythmic power that has characterized all his bodily moves during the past twenty-four hours of distress, he slits the man’s throat a second before the gun goes off. We next see him lynched on a black schoolhouse bell rope, murdered by the watchman’s family and strung up for view.
The story then shifts focus to a bewildered white deputy talking to his wife, trying to explain what his work has been like for the last two days. Responsible for keeping Rider in jail, he has misread every sign of his prisoner’s grief—perceiving only the unfeeling animal barbarity of niggers. The reader knows otherwise. “Lemme go wid you, honey,” Rider had pleaded with the spirit of his dead wife. Finally he has succeeded in provoking whites to “help” him find his way there. “Hit look lack Ah just cant quit thinking,” the deputy quotes Rider saying at the end—unable to get his breath in prison, unable to bear his widowed life. The deputy’s inattentive wife hardly hears these words, and the deputy doesn’t understand them as he recites them. But few words ever uttered in a Faulkner novel carry deeper resonance. In heavy black vernacular, they voice the distress the writer himself endured throughout his life, and was no more able than Rider to put to sleep with booze or other strategies. That distress—the anguish caused by is’s incapacity to restore, or forget, was—gave Faulkner his most compelling material; out of it he made his greatest art. The same distress he bestows on Rider.
Perhaps no single work of Faulkner is more widely reprinted than “The Bear,” the centerpiece of Go Down, Moses. It is the finest hunting story Faulkner ever wrote—perhaps the finest in American literature. Centered on Ike McCaslin’s quest for the legendary bear Old Ben, this story shows why—thanks to his experience of the wilderness—Ike chooses to relinquish his race-tarnished inheritance. Part 4 of “The Bear” goes inside Ike’s memories so as to show what is at stake in his choice. It rehearses a debate in the plantation commissary between Ike and his older cousin Cass. Ike has turned twenty-one and is trying to explain to Cass why he must refuse his inheritance. Even more resonant, part 4 rehearses—through Ike and Cass—Faulkner’s largest meditation on slavery and the Civil War that followed it. Finally, part 4 narrates Ike’s attempt to repair some of the earlier wrong committed by his grandfather. As grandson, Ike comes to recognize himself in the mirror of race posed by the spectral history of his own family, and he cannot live with what he sees there.
“That damn white half-McCaslin,” the strange but insouciant phrase in “Was,” takes on in “The Bear” its delayed resonance. Hubert saying it so casually indicated that everyone knew that the runaway slave (Tomey’s Turl) carried the blood of the white master, Carothers McCaslin. Faulkner does not provide specifics, but one assumes the following: Carothers McCaslin took as mistress the mulatto slave Eunice whom he had bought in 1807 in New Orleans. In 1810, Eunice bore a daughter, Tomasina—fathered by Carothers, though married off to another slave, Thucydus (a common enough practice in antebellum times). Thus Tomasina’s offspring Turl was widely recognized as the grandson of Carothers McCaslin—however “slave-like” the treatment that came his way. So Ike assumes as well, as he presses further (at age sixteen) upon ledgers kept for decades in the plantation commissary. Eventually, those yellowed pages begin to reveal their secret.
Ike’s Uncle Buddy had noted there, some fifty years earlier, that Eunice “Drownd in Crick Cristmas Day 1832.” A little later appeared Uncle Buddy’s ledger entry: “Drownd herself.” Incredulous, Buck responded two days later with another entry, “Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding him self.” Undaunted, Buddy repeated his claim in a later entry: “Drowned herself.” Reading and rereading the ledger, Ike keeps thinking, “But why? But why?” Then a page later
he comes upon this: “Tomasina called Tomy Daughter of Thucydus @ Eunice Born 1810 dide in Child bed June 1833 and Burd.” And following that ledger entry, this one: “Turl Son of Thucydus @ Eunice Tomy born June 1833 … Fathers will” (GDM 198, emphasis in the original).
Illiterate, cryptic, unexplaining, yet—on reflection—these ledger fragments intimate a devastating story. Eunice did indeed drown herself in the creek, six months before her daughter Tomasina died while birthing her baby Terrel (Turl). Piecing the shards together and taking into account the portent of “fathers will,” Ike imagines his way into their unspoken meaning. In 1810 Old Carothers impregnated Eunice, begetting a daughter named Tomasina; twenty-two years later, he impregnated Tomasina, begetting a son named Terrel. When Eunice grasped that her daughter was three months pregnant, and this by the man who was both her own lover and her daughter’s father, she found her life no longer worth living: “he [Ike] seemed to see her actually walking into the icy creek on that Christmas day six months before her daughter’s and her lover’s (Her first lover’s he thought. Her first) child was born, solitary, inflexible, griefless, ceremonial, in formal and succinct repudiation of grief and despair who had already had to repudiate belief and hope” (GDM 200, emphasis in the original).
Ancestral echoes, dark twins: Carothers McCaslin eerily echoes Colonel W. C. Falkner. Both men—imperious masters in the time of slavery—seemed likely to have taken mulatto mistresses, produced offspring, and then impregnated their own offspring. Tomey’s Turl suddenly rises for Ike into uncontainable significance, becoming the marker of generations of white sexual abuse. “Fathers will”: the phrase reverberates—a legal document, but more darkly a despotic power. Rather than acknowledge Turl openly, Carothers bequeathed him money in his will, leaving his sons Buck and Buddy to regulate the bequest. “So I reckon that was cheaper than saying My son to a nigger he [Ike] thought. Even if My son wasn’t but just two words. But there must have been love he thought” (GDM 199, emphasis in the original). There must have been love, Ike has to believe, in the face of ledgers bleakly suggesting otherwise.
Turl never collected during his lifetime the $1,000 bequeathed to him in his father/grandfather’s will. Apparently feeling implicated by Old Carothers’s behavior, Buck and Buddy increased the legacy to $3,000 so that they could assign $1,000 apiece to the three children of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie. One of those children, James, disappeared from view in 1885. Another, Fonsiba, left her white planterly family when a black man from the North came to claim her as his bride. Ike has by then recognized his own blood-complicity in his grandfather’s acts of miscegenation and incest, and he is desperate to bestow the guilt money. But he can neither locate James nor accept Fonsiba’s leaving her white family. A sense of white Southern entitlement—an urge to protect one’s own blacks (one’s “own” as intimacy and possession both)—fuels Ike’s frustration. He remembers with bitterness the black Northerner casually walking into the commissary and demanding Fonsiba as his bride. “You dont say Sir, do you,” an affronted Cass had replied. “To my elders, yes,” the man had responded. He had come to notify Cass as the head of the family, not to beg for favors. Furious, Cass ordered him to “Be off this place by dark” (GDM 264)—the standard white Southern male’s warning to uppity blacks. Thus Fonsiba departed with husband-to-be. Ike soon afterward sets out to find her, determined to bestow the $1,000: “I will have to find her. I will have to. We have already lost one of them. I will have to find her this time” (205, emphasis in the original).
He does find her. She and her husband are living on a bedraggled farm in Arkansas, in squalid conditions that epitomize the novel’s criticism of Reconstruction practices. Fonsiba’s Northern black husband knows nothing about farming—despite the government pension he clutched in his hand when he claimed her—and the glasses he wears lack lenses. Faulkner ungenerously allows those missing lenses to signal the hollowness of the man’s pretense to culture. Ike lectures him sternly. The entire scene of desolation weighs on Ike as something “permeant, clinging to the man’s very clothing and exuding from his skin itself, that rank stink of baseless and imbecile delusion” (GDM 206). “Rank stink”—this revealingly familiar phrase connotes centuries of racial prejudice about black uncleanliness. Just when we think that Faulkner is engaging in the most knee-jerk of Southern stereotypes, he turns the scene upside down. Ike pleads, “Fonsiba, Fonsiba. Are you all right?” In words that conclude the scene by making further argument irrelevant, she answers, “I’m free” (207).
An aftermath to “The Bear” remains: “Delta Autumn,” a brooding narrative that somberly reconfigures the comic tone on which the novel opened. Faulkner revised an earlier version of “Delta Autumn” so that it would center on the old and fragile Ike McCaslin, attending perhaps his last hunt. The time is now the 1940s, the wilderness has receded another two hundred miles from Jefferson, a way of life is coming to an end. Yet Ike tries to remain ensconced in his innocent memories, lying on his cot unsleeping, thinking “there was just exactly enough of it [the wilderness]” (GDM 261) to last him out. And then the surprise: a woman the younger men have pointedly alluded to as the “doe” enters their campsite, approaching Ike’s tent. A sullen Roth Edmonds has the night before given Ike an envelope for her, no explanations offered. He had no intention of being present himself. Uncle Ike was to hand her the envelope if she made an appearance. The woman enters his tent, carrying an infant in her arms. She has been Roth’s mistress, and she is to be repudiated and paid off rather than acknowledged. As she talks to Ike, she reveals that she knows the entire history of his family. Speaking of her own family, she tells Ike that, to support themselves, they used to take in washing:
“Took in what?” he said. “Took in washing?” He sprang, still seated even, flinging himself backward onto one arm, awry-haired, glaring. Now he understood what it was she had brought into the tent with her…. the pale lips, the skin pallid and dead-looking yet not ill, the dark and tragic and foreknowing eyes. Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America, he thought. But not now! Not now! He cried, not loud, in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage: “You’re a nigger!” “Yes,” she said. “James Beauchamp—you called him Tennie’s Jim though he had a name—was my grandfather.” (GDM 266, emphasis in the original)
Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years, but not now! Go slow now! The act of miscegenation—initiated by Old Carothers 130 years earlier and once again enacted within the same family, embodied seven generations later in the form of that sleeping infant—stares out at him. Ike cannot at first acknowledge the dark twin he sees in the mirror she provides. He urges her to go North and find a black man, anyone other than his great-nephew Roth. Her difference from his white line is too great. “Took in washing”: from antebellum days through the Memphis garbage strike that cost Martin Luther King his life in 1968, black people have been cleaning up white people’s dirt, and they have been treated like dirt while doing it. Except that at the same time that she cannot be him, she is undeniably his. Tennie’s Jim—the offspring of the long-ago mating of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp that was set up in “Was”—did not disappear into oblivion in 1885. Over the subsequent decades, beyond narration, he sustained a name of his own, James Beauchamp, and a life of his own, too. In 1940, he reemerged in Go Down, Moses—at once the grandfather of the “doe” and Ike’s long-lost kin. Even as Ike backs away in recoil, his hand reaches out to touch hers: “the gnarled, bloodless, bonelight bone-dry old man’s fingers touching for a second the smooth young flesh where the strong old blood ran after its long lost journey back to home. ‘Tennie’s Jim,’ he said. ‘Tennie’s Jim’” (GDM 267). The story of repudiation is also—inextricably—a story of family and love.
In all of Faulkner’s portrayals of relations between blacks and whites, there are few moments more moving than this one. Centering on a frail old white man reconnecting—in his mind and through his fingers—with his long-absent black kin, the scene is unashamedly paternal, but
it is not condescending. This startling connection transforms the woman before him and her infant into beings at once beyond acknowledgment yet his own. He ends by giving her not just the envelope of money Roth has left but also General Compson’s ancient hunting horn. Henceforth the wilderness hunt—so hierarchical in its arrangements of race and gender—will take on in Ike’s memories blackness as well. The recognitions he has been forced to undergo in this scene are—like most genuine recognitions—unwanted and beyond accommodation. He has lived too long, his innocence painfully ending before his life does.
Something similar is true for his creator as well. In his most compelling fictions of race, Faulkner recognized himself—uncomfortably, guiltily, responsibly—in the mirror of black distress at which he gazed. Paternal, not paternalistic. He knew he was complicit—that his entire life in the South entailed ineffaceable complicities. The solution to the race dilemma in America, should one ever be put into practice, would not be proposed by him. Rather than solutions, his work—at its best—would act as an unnerving dark twin intimating to its white reader: “yes, you, too, are in this mirror, you will need to find a way to live with yourself insofar as you see yourself here.” Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses constitute the most capacious mirror Faulkner was able to construct. It is not a magic mirror, and nothing we see reflected in it is likely to give much cause for satisfaction. But none of his white peers in the twentieth century even attempted to see—and say—what he saw when he gazed into it.
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