The jury was out eight minutes. They stood and looked at him and said he was guilty. Motionless, his position unchanged, he looked back at them in a slow silence for several moments. “Well, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
The judge rapped sharply with his gavel; the officer touched his arm.
“I’ll appeal,” the lawyer babbled, plunging along beside him. “I’ll fight them through every court—”
“Sure,” Popeye said, lying on the cot and lighting a cigarette; “but not in here. Beat it, now. Go take a pill.”
The District Attorney was already making his plans for the Did you see how appeal. “It was too easy,” he said. “He took it — he took it? like he might be listening to a song he was too lazy to either like or dislike, and the Court telling him on what day they were going to break his neck. Probably got a Memphis lawyer already there outside the Supreme Court door now, waiting for a wire. I know them. It’s them thugs like that that have made justice a laughing-stock, until even when we get a conviction, everybody knows it wont hold.”
Popeye sent for the turnkey and gave him a hundred dollar bill. He wanted a shaving-kit and cigarettes. “Keep the change and let me know when it’s smoked up,” he said.
“I reckon you wont be smoking with me much longer,” the turnkey said. “You’ll get a good lawyer, this time.”
“Dont forget that lotion,” Popeye said. “Ed Pinaud.” He called it “Py-nawd.”
It had been a gray summer, a little cool. Little daylight ever reached the cell, and a light burned in the corridor all the time, falling into the cell in a broad pale mosaic, reaching the cot where his feet lay. The turnkey gave him a chair. He used it for a table; upon it the dollar watch lay, and a carton of cigarettes and a cracked soup bowl of stubs, and he lay on the cot, smoking and contemplating his feet while day after day passed. The gleam of his shoes grew duller, and his clothes needed pressing, because he lay in them all the time, since it was cool in the stone cell.
One day the turnkey said: “There’s folks here says that deppity invited killing. He done two-three mean things folks knows about.” Popeye smoked, his hat over his face. The turnkey said: “They might not sent your telegram. You want me to send another one for you?” Leaning against the grating he could see Popeye’s feet, his thin, black legs motionless, merging into the delicate bulk of his prone body and the hat slanted across his averted face, the cigarette in one small hand. His feet were in shadow, in the shadow of the turnkey’s body where it blotted out the grating. After a while the turnkey went away quietly.
When he had six days left the turnkey offered to bring him magazines, a deck of cards.
“What for?” Popeye said. For the first time he looked at the turnkey, his head lifted, in his smooth, pallid face his eyes round and soft as those prehensile tips on a child’s toy arrows. Then he lay back again. After that each morning the turnkey thrust a rolled newspaper through the door. They fell to the floor and lay there, accumulating, unrolling and flattening slowly of their own weight in diurnal progression.
When he had three days left a Memphis lawyer arrived. Unbidden, be rushed up to the cell. All that morning the turnkey heard his voice raised in pleading and anger and expostulation; by noon he was hoarse, his voice not much louder than a whisper.
“Are you just going to lie here and let—”
“I’m all right,” Popeye said. “I didn’t send for you. Keep your nose out.”
“Do you want to hang? Is that it? Are you trying to commit suicide? Are you so tired of dragging down jack that . . . You, the smartest—”
“I told you once. I’ve got enough on you.”
“You, to have it hung on you by a small-time j.p.! When I go back to Memphis and tell them, they wont believe it.”
“Dont tell them, then.” He lay for a time while the lawyer looked at him in baffled and raging unbelief. “Them durn hicks,” Popeye said. “Jesus Christ . . . Beat it, now,” he said. “I told you. I’m all right.”
On the night before, a minister came in.
“Will you let me pray with you?” he said.
“Sure,” Popeye said; “go ahead. Dont mind me.”
The minister knelt beside the cot where Popeye lay smoking. After a while the minister heard him rise and cross the floor, then return to the cot. When he rose Popeye was lying on the cot, smoking. The minister looked behind him, where he had heard Popeye moving and saw twelve marks at spaced intervals along the base of the wall, as though marked there with burned matches. Two of the spaces were filled with cigarette stubs laid in neat rows. In the third space were two stubs. Before he departed he watched Popeye rise and go there and crush out two more stubs and lay them carefully beside the others.
Just after five oclock the minister returned. All the spaces were filled save the twelfth one. It was three quarters complete. Popeye was lying on the cot. “Ready to go?” he said.
“Not yet,” the minister said. “Try to pray,” he said. “Try.”
“Sure,” Popeye said; “go ahead.” The minister knelt again. He heard Popeye rise once and cross the floor and then return.
At five-thirty the turnkey came. “I brought—” he said. He held his closed fist dumbly through the grating. “Here’s your change I brought . . . It’s forty-eight from that hundred you never — dollars,” he said. “Wait; I’ll count it again; I dont know exactly, but I can give you a list — them tickets . . .”
“Keep it,” Popeye said, without moving. “Buy yourself a hoop.”
They came for him at six. The minister went with him, his hand under Popeye’s elbow, and he stood beneath the scaffold praying, while they adjusted the rope, dragging it over Popeye’s sleek, oiled head, breaking his hair loose. His hands were tied, so he began to jerk his head, flipping his hair back each time it fell forward again, while the minister prayed, the others motionless at their posts with bowed heads.
Popeye began to jerk his neck forward in little jerks. “Psssst!” he said, the sound cutting sharp into the drone of the minister’s voice; “pssssst!” The sheriff looked at him; he quit jerking his neck and stood rigid, as though he had an egg balanced on his head. “Fix my hair, Jack,” he said.
“Sure,” the sheriff said. “I’ll fix it for you”; springing the trap.
It had been a gray day, a gray summer, a gray year. On the street old men wore overcoats, and in the Luxembourg Gardens as Temple and her father passed the women sat knitting in shawls and even the men playing croquet played in coats and capes, and in the sad gloom of the chestnut trees the dry click of balls, the random shouts of children, had that quality of autumn, gallant and evanescent and forlorn. From beyond the circle with its spurious Greek balustrade, clotted with movement, filled with a gray light of the same color and texture as the water which the fountain played into the pool, came a steady crash of music. They went on, passed the pool where the children and an old man in a shabby brown overcoat sailed toy boats, and entered the trees again and found seats. Immediately an old woman came with decrepit promptitude and collected four sous.
In the pavilion a band in the horizon blue of the army played Massenet and Scriabine, and Berlioz like a thin coating of tortured Tschaikovsky on a slice of stale bread, while the twilight dissolved in wet gleams from the branches, onto the pavilion and the sombre toadstools of umbrellas. Rich and resonant the brasses crashed and died in the thick green twilight, rolling over them in rich sad waves. Temple yawned behind her hand, then she took out a compact and opened it upon a face in miniature sullen and discontented and sad. Beside her her father sat, his hands crossed on the head of his stick, the rigid bar of his moustache beaded with moisture like frosted silver. She closed the compact and from beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves of music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the opposite semicircle of trees where at sombre intervals the dead tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain
and death.
Light in August
Light in August (1932) tells the story of two strangers that arrive at different times in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Initially, the plot focuses on Lena Grove, a young pregnant white woman from Alabama looking for the father of her unborn child. The narrative then shifts to the life of Joe Christmas, who has settled in Jefferson and passes as white, though he secretly believes he has black ancestry. After a series of flashbacks narrating Christmas’ early life, the plot resumes with his time spent living and working with Lucas Burch, the father of Lena’s child, who left Jefferson and changed his name when he found out that Lena was pregnant.
The novel is prominent by its loose, unstructured modernist narrative style, drawing from Christian allegory and oral storytelling. The text explores themes of race, sex, class and religion in the American South. By focusing on characters that are misfits marginalised in their community, Faulkner portrays the clash of alienated individuals against a Puritanical, prejudiced rural society. Due to its naturalistic, violent subject matter and fascination with the ghosts of the past, Light in August is regarded as a Southern gothic novel, a genre also exemplified by the works of Faulkner’s contemporary Carson McCullers, and by later Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote. Its initial reception was mixed, with some reviewers critical of the author’s style and subject matter. However, it has come to be considered one of Faulkner’s most important literary achievements and for some critics is held as one of the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century.
The first edition
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
The first edition’s title page
1
SITTING BESIDE THE road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old
She had never even been to Doane’s Mill until after her father and mother died, though six or eight times a year she went to town on Saturday, in the wagon, in a mailorder dress and her bare feet flat in the wagon bed and her shoes wrapped in a piece of paper beside her on the seat. She would put on the shoes just before the wagon reached town. After she got to be a big girl she would ask her father to stop the wagon at the edge of town and she would get down and walk. She would not tell her father why she wanted to walk in instead of riding. He thought that it was because of the smooth streets, the sidewalks. But it was because she believed that the people who saw her and whom she passed on foot would believe that she lived in the town too.
When she was twelve years old her father and mother died in the same summer, in a log house of three rooms and a hall, without screens, in a room lighted by a bug-swirled kerosene lamp, the naked floor worn smooth as old silver by naked feet. She was the youngest living child. Her mother died first. She said, “Take care of paw.” Lena did so. Then one day her father said, “You go to Doane’s Mill with McKinley. You get ready to go, be ready when he comes.” Then he died. McKinley, the brother, arrived in a wagon. They buried the father in a grove behind a country church one afternoon, with a pine headstone. The next morning she departed forever, though it is possible that she did not know this at the time, in the wagon with McKinley, for Doane’s Mill. The wagon was borrowed and the brother had promised to return it by nightfall.
The brother worked in the mill. All the men in the village worked in the mill or for it. It was cutting pine. It had been there seven years and in seven years more it would destroy all the timber within its reach. Then some of the machinery and most of the men who ran it and existed because of and for it would be loaded onto freight cars and moved away. But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan — gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting slowly into red and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes. Then the hamlet which at its best day had borne no name listed on Postoffice Department annals would not now even be remembered by the hookwormridden heirs-at-large who pulled the buildings down and burned them in cookstoves and winter grates.
There were perhaps five families there when Lena arrived. There was a track and a station, and once a day a mixed train fled shrieking through it. The train could be stopped with a red flag, but by ordinary it appeared out of the devastated hills with apparitionlike suddenness and wailing like a banshee, athwart and past that little less-than-village like a forgotten bead from a broken string. The brother was twenty years her senior. She hardly remembered him at all when she came to live with him. He lived in a four room and unpainted house with his labor- and child-ridden wife. For almost half of every year the sister-in-law was either lying in or recovering. During this time Lena did all the housework and took care of the other children. Later she told herself, ‘I reckon that’s why I got one so quick myself.’
She slept in a leanto room at the back of the house. It had a window which she learned to open and close again in the dark without making a sound, even though there also slept in the leanto room at first her oldest nephew and then the two oldest and then the three. She had lived there eight years before she opened the window for the first time. She had not opened it a dozen times hardly before she discovered that she should not have opened it at all. She said to herself, ‘That’s just my luck.’
The sister-in-law told the brother. Then he remarked her changing shape, which he should have noticed some time before. He was a hard man. Softness and gentleness and youth (he was just forty) and almost everything else except a kind of stubborn and despairing fortitude and the bleak heritage of his bloodpride had been sweated out of him. He called her whore. He accused the right man (young bachelors, or sawdust Casanovas anyway, were even fewer in number than families) but she would not admit it, though the man had departed six months ago. She just repeated stubbornly, “He’s going to send for me. He said he would send for me”; unshakable, sheeplike, having drawn upon that reserve of patient and steadfast fidelity upon which the Lucas Burches depend and trust, even though they do not intend to be present when the need for it arises. Two weeks later she climbed again through the window. It was a little difficult, this time. ‘If it had been this hard to do before, I reckon I would not be doing it now,’ she thought. She could have departed by the door, by daylight. Nobody would have stopped her. Perhaps she knew that. But she chose to go by night, and through the window. She carried a palm leaf fan and a small bundle tied neatly in a bandanna handkerchief. It contained among other things thirtyfive cents in nickels and dimes. Her shoes were a pair of his own which her brother had given to her. They were but slightly worn, since in the summer neither of them wore shoes at all. When she felt the dust of the road beneath her feet she removed the shoes and carried them in her hand.
She had been doing that now for almost four weeks. Behind her the four weeks, the evocation of far, is a peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices: Lucas Burch? I dont know. I dont know of anybody by that name around here. This road? It goes to Pocahontas. He might be there. It’s possible. Here’s a wagon that’s going a piece of
the way. It will take you that far; backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as though through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.
The wagon mounts the hill toward her. She passed it about a mile back down the road. It was standing beside the road, the mules asleep in the traces and their heads pointed in the direction in which she walked. She saw it and she saw the two men squatting beside a barn beyond the fence. She looked at the wagon and the men once: a single glance all-embracing, swift, innocent and profound. She did not stop; very likely the men beyond the fence had not seen her even look at the wagon or at them. Neither did she look back. She went on out of sight, walking slowly, the shoes unlaced about her ankles, until she reached the top of the hill a mile beyond. Then she sat down on the ditchbank, with her feet in the shallow ditch, and removed the shoes. After a while she began to hear the wagon. She heard it for some time. Then it came into sight, mounting the hill.
The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and ungreased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry sluggish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still pinewiney silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much is this so that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost travelling a half mile ahead of its own shape. ‘That far within my hearing before my seeing,’ Lena thinks. She thinks of herself as already moving, riding again, thinking then it will be as if I were riding for a half mile before I even got into the wagon, before the wagon even got to where I was waiting, and that when the wagon is empty of me again it will go on for a half mile with me still in it She waits, not even watching the wagon now, while thinking goes idle and swift and smooth, filled with nameless kind faces and voices: Lucas Burch? You say you tried in Pocahontas? This road? It goes to Springvale. You wait here. There will be a wagon passing soon that will take you as far as it goes Thinking, ‘And if he is going all the way to Jefferson, I will be riding within the hearing of Lucas Burch before his seeing. He will hear the wagon, but he wont know. So there will be one within his hearing before his seeing. And then he will see me and he will be excited. And so there will be two within his seeing before his remembering.’
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 130