Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  So finally the expected happened, anticipated by everyone except her apparently, maybe because of the deafness, the isolation, the solitude of living not enclosed with sound but merely surrounded by gestures. Or maybe she did anticipate it but, having been through a war, she just didn’t give a damn. Anyway, she bulled right ahead with her idea. Which was to establish a kind of competitive weekly test, the winners, who would be the top students for that week in each class, to spend the following week in a kind of academy she would establish, with white teachers, details to be settled later but for temporary they would use her sitting-room in her father’s house for a sort of general precept, the winners of each week to be replaced by next week’s winners; these to embrace the whole school from kindergarden to seniors, her theory being that if you were old enough to be taught at eighteen you were old enough at eight too when learning something new would be even easier. Because she couldn’t hear, you see, not just the words but the tones, over- and under-tones of alarm, fright, terror in which the black voice would have to say Thank you. So it was the principal himself who finally came to see Uncle Gavin at the office — the intelligent dedicated man with his composed and tragic face.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” Uncle Gavin said. “I know what you want to say.”

  “Thank you,” the principal said. “Then you know yourself it won’t work. That you are not ready for it yet and neither are we.”

  “Not many of your race will agree with you,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “None of them will,” the principal said. “Just as none of them agreed when Mr Washington said it.”

  “Mr Washington?”

  “Booker T.,” the principal said. “Mr Carver too.”

  “Oh,” Uncle Gavin said. “Yes?”

  “That we have got to make the white people need us first. In the old days your people did need us, in your economy if not your culture, to make your cotton and tobacco and indigo. But that was the wrong need, bad and evil in itself. So it couldn’t last. It had to go. So now you don’t need us. There is no place for us now in your culture or economy either. We both buy the same instalment-plan automobiles to burn up the same gasoline in, and the same radios to listen to the same music and the same iceboxes to keep the same beer in, but that’s all. So we have got to make a place of our own in your culture and economy too. Not you to make a place for us just to get us out from under your feet, as in the South here, or to get our votes for the aggrandisement of your political perquisites, as in the North, but us to make a place for ourselves by compelling you to need us, you cannot do without us because nobody else but us can fill that place in your economy and culture which only we can fill and so that place will have to be ours. So that you will not just say Please to us, you will need to say Please to us, you will want to say Please to us. Will you tell her that? Say we thank her and we won’t forget this. But to leave us alone. Let us have your friendship all the time, and your help when we need it. But keep your patronage until we ask for it.”

  “This is not patronage,” Uncle Gavin said. “You know that too.”

  “Yes,” the principal said. “I know that too. I’m sorry. I am ashamed that I . . .” Then he said: “Just say we thank her and will remember her, but to let us alone.”

  “How can you say that to someone who will face that much risk, just for justice, just to abolish ignorance?”

  “I know,” the principal said. “It’s difficult. Maybe we can’t get along without your help for a while yet, since I am already asking for it. — Good-day, sir,” he said, and was gone. So how could Uncle Gavin tell her either. Or anybody else tell her, everybody else tell her, white and black both. Since it wasn’t that she couldn’t hear: she wouldn’t listen, not even to the unified solidarity of No in the Negro school itself — that massive, not resistance but immobility, like the instinct of the animal to lie perfectly still, not even breathing, not even thinking. Or maybe she did hear that because she reversed without even stopping, from the school to the board of education itself: if she could not abolish the ignorance by degrees of individual cases, she would attempt it wholesale by putting properly educated white teachers in the Negro school, asking no help, not even from Gavin, hunting down the school board then, they retreating into simple evaporation, the county board of supervisors in their own sacred lair, armed with no petty ivory tablet and gold stylus this time but with a vast pad of yellow foolscap and enough pencils for everybody. Evidently they committed the initial error of letting her in. Then Gavin said it went something like this:

  The president, writing: Assuming for the moment just for argument you understand that we substitute white teachers in the negro school what will become of the negro teachers or perhaps you plan to retire them on pensions yourself

  The duck’s voice: “Not exactly. I will send them North to white schools where they will be accepted and trained as white teachers are.”

  The pencil: Still assuming for the sake of argument we have got the negro teachers out where will you find white teachers to fill vacancies left by negroes in Mississippi and how long do you think they will be permitted to fill negro vacancies in Mississippi

  The duck’s voice: “I will find them if you will protect them.”

  The pencil: Protect them from who Mrs Kohl Only she didn’t need to answer that. Because it had already started: the words Nigger Lover scrawled huge in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the mansion the next morning for her father to walk steadily through them in his black banker’s hat and his little snap-on bow tie, chewing his steady chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air. Sure he saw it. Gavin said nobody could have helped seeing it, that by noon a good deal of the rest of Jefferson had managed to happen to pass by to look at it. But what else — a banker, THE banker — could he do? spit on his handkerchief and get down on his knees and rub it out? And later Linda came out on her way back to the courthouse to badger the rest of the county authorities back behind their locked doors. And maybe, very likely, she really didn’t see it. Anyway, it wasn’t either of them nor the cook nor the yardman either. It was a neighbour, a woman, who came with a broom and at least obscured it, viciously, angrily, neither to defend Linda’s impossible dream nor even in instinctive female confederation with another female, but because she lived on this street. The words could have been the quick short primer-bald words of sex or excrement, as happened now and then even on sidewalks in this part of town, and she would have walked through them too since to pause would have been public admission that a lady knew what they meant. But nobody was going to write Nigger Lover nor -Hater either, delineate in visible taunting chalk that ancient subterrene atavistic ethnic fear on the sidewalk of the street she (and her husband of course) lived and owned property on.

  Until at last the president of the board of supervisors crossed the Square to the bank and on to that back room where old Snopes sat with his feet propped on that mantelpiece between foreclosures, and I would have liked to hear that: the outsider coming in and saying, more or less: Can’t you for God’s sake keep your daughter at home or at least out of the courthouse. In desperation, because what change could he have hoped to get back, she was not only thirty years old and independent and a widow, she was a war veteran too who had actually — Ratliff would say, actively — stood gunfire. Because she didn’t stop; it had got now to where the board of supervisors didn’t dare unlock their door while they were in session even to go home at noon to eat, but instead had sandwiches from the Dixie Café passed in through the back window. Until suddenly you were thinking how suppose she were docile and amenable and would have obeyed him, but it was he, old Snopes, that didn’t dare ask, let alone order, her to quit. You didn’t know why of course. All you could do was speculate: on just what I.O.U. or mortgage bearing his signature she might have represented out of that past which had finally gained for him that back room in the bank where he could sit down and watch himself grow richer by lending and foreclosing other people’s I.O.U.s.

  Because pretty soon he had somet
hing more than just that unsigned Nigger Lover to have to walk through practically any time he came out his front door. One night (this was while I was in Europe) a crude cross soaked in gasoline blazed suddenly on the lawn in front of the mansion until the cops came and put it out, outraged and seething of course, but helpless; who — the cops — would still have been helpless even if they hadn’t been cops. You know: if she had only lived alone, or had been the daughter of a mere doctor or lawyer or even a minister, it would have been one thing, and served them both — her and her old man — right. Instead, she had to be the daughter of not just a banker but THE banker, so that what the cross really illuminated was the fact that the organisation which put it there were dopes and saps: if the sole defence and protection of its purity rested in hands which didn’t — or what was worse, couldn’t — distinguish a banker’s front yard, the white race was in one hell of a fix.

  Then the next month was Munich. Then Hitler’s and Stalin’s pact and now when he came out of his house in the morning in his black banker’s hat and bow tie and his little cud of Ratliff’s Frenchman’s Bend air, what he walked through was no longer anonymous and unspecific, the big scrawled letters, the three words covering the sidewalk before the house in their various mutations and combinations:

  KOHL

  COMMUNIST

  JEW

  JEW

  KOHL

  COMMUNIST

  COMMUNIST

  KOHL

  JEW

  and he, the banker, the conservative, the tory who had done more than any other man in Jefferson or Yoknapatawpha County either to repeal time back to 1900 at least, having to walk through them as if they were not there or were in another language and age which he could not be expected to understand, with all Jefferson watching him at least by proxy, to see if his guard would ever drop. Because what else could he do. Because now you knew you had figured right and it actually was durst not, with that record of success and victory behind him which already had two deaths in it: not only the suicide which left her motherless, but if he had been another man except the one whose wife would finally have to shoot herself, he might have raised the kind of daughter whose Barton Kohl wouldn’t have been a Jewish sculptor with that Spanish war in his horoscope. Then in the very next second you would find you were thinking the exact opposite: that those words on his sidewalk he had to walk through every time he left home were no more portents and threats of wreckage and disaster to him than any other loan he had guessed wrong on would be an irremediable disaster, as long as money itself remained unabolished. That the last thing in the world he was thinking to himself was This is my cross; I will bear it because what he was thinking was All I got to do now is keep folks thinking this is a cross and not a gambit.

  Then Poland. I said, “I’m going now,” and Gavin said, “You’re too old. They wouldn’t possibly take you for flight training yet,” and I said, “Yet?” and he said, “Finish one more year of law. You don’t know what will be happening then, but it won’t be what you’re looking at now.” So I went back to Cambridge and he wrote me how the F.B.I. was investigating her now and he wrote me: I’m frightened. Not about her. Not at what they will find out because she would tell them all that herself if it only occurred to them that the simple thing would be to come and ask her. And told me the rest of it: how she had at last quit beating on the locked door behind which the board of supervisors and the school board crouched holding their breath, and now she was merely meeting a class of small children each Sunday at one of the Negro churches, where she would read aloud in the dry inflectionless quacking, not the orthodox Biblical stories perhaps but at least the Mesopotamian folklore and the Nordic fairy tales which the Christian religion has arrogated into its seasonal observances, safe now since even the white ministers could not go on record against this paradox. So now there was no more Jew Communist Kohl on the sidewalk and no more Nigger Lover either (you would like to think, from shame) to walk through in order to be seen daily on the Square: the bride of quietude and silence striding inviolate in the isolation of unhearing, immune, walking still like she used to walk when she was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen years old: exactly like a young pointer bitch just about to locate and pin down a covey of birds.

  So that when I got home Christmas I said to Gavin: “Tell her to tear up that god-damn party card, if she’s got one. Go on. Tell her. She can’t help people. They are not worth it. They don’t want to be helped any more than they want advice or work. They want cake and excitement, both free. Man stinks. How the hell can she have spent a year in a war that not only killed her husband and blew the bejesus out of the inside of her skull, but even at that price the side she was fighting for still lost, without finding that out? Oh sure, I know, I know, you and Ratliff both have told me often enough; if I’ve heard Ratliff one time I’ve heard him a hundred: ‘Man ain’t really evil, he jest ain’t got any sense.’ But so much the more reason, because that leaves him completely hopeless, completely worthless of anybody’s anguish and effort and trouble.” Then I stopped, because he had put his hand on my head. He had to reach up to do it now, but he did it exactly as he used to when I was half as tall and only a third as old, gentle and tender and stroking it a little, speaking quiet and gentle too:

  “Why don’t you tell her?” he said. Because he is a good man, wise too except for the occasions when he would aberrate, go momentarily haywire and take a wrong turn that even I could see was wrong, and then go hell-for-leather, with absolutely no deviation from logic and rationality from there on, until he wound us up in a mess of trouble or embarrassment that even I would have had sense enough to dodge. But he is a good man. Maybe I was wrong sometimes to trust and follow him, but I never was wrong to love him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be,” he said. “Just remember it. Don’t ever waste time regretting errors. Just don’t forget them.”

  So I ran Ratliff to earth again. No: I just took advantage of him. It was the regular yearly Christmas-season supper that Ratliff cooked himself at his house and invited Uncle Gavin and me to eat it with him. But this time Gavin had to go to Jackson on some drainage-district business so I went alone, to sit in Ratliff’s immaculate little kitchen with a cold toddy of old Mr Calvin Bookwright’s corn whiskey that Ratliff seemed to have no trouble getting from him, though now, in his old age, with anybody else Mr Cal might sell it to you or give it to you or order you off his place, you never knew which; sipping the cold toddy as Ratliff made them — first the sugar dissolved into a little water, then the whiskey added while the spoon still stirred gently, then rain water from the cistern to fill the glass — while Ratliff in a spotless white apron over one of the neat tieless faded blue shirts which he made himself, cooked the meal, cooking it damned well, not just because he loved to eat it but because he loved the cooking, the blending up to perfection’s ultimate moment. Then he removed the apron and we ate it at the kitchen table, with the bottle of claret Uncle Gavin and I always furnished. Then with the coffee and the decanter of whiskey we moved (as always) to the little immaculate room he called his parlour, with the spotlessly waxed melodeon in the corner and the waxed chairs and the fireplace filled with fluted green paper in the summer but with a phony gas log in the winter, now that progress had reached, whelmed us, and the waxed table in the centre of the room on which, on a rack under a glass bell, rested the Allanovna necktie — a rich not-quite-scarlet, not-quite-burgundy ground patterned with tiny yellow sunflowers each with a tiny blue centre of almost the exact faded blue of his shirts, that he had brought home from New York that time three or four years ago when he and Gavin went to see Linda married and off to Spain, that I would have cut my tongue out before I would have told him it probably cost whoever (Gavin I suppose) paid for it around seventy-five dollars; until that day when I inadvertently said something to that effect and Ratliff said, “I know how much. I paid it. It was a hundred and fifty dollars.” “What?” I said. “A hundred and fifty?” “There wa
s two of them,” he said. “I never saw but one,” I said. “I doubt if you will,” he said. “The other one is a private matter.” — and beside it, the piece of sculpture that Barton Kohl had bequeathed him that, if Gavin was still looking for first base, I had already struck out because I didn’t even know what it was, let alone what it was doing.

  “All it needs is that gold cigarette-lighter she gave him,” I said. “The Linda Snopes room.”

  “No,” he said. “The Eula Varner room. It ought to have more in it, but maybe this will do. Leastways it’s something. When a community is lucky enough to be the community that every thousand years or so has a Eula Varner to pick it out to do her breathing in, the least we can do is for somebody to set up something; a . . . monument ain’t quite the word I want.”

  “Shrine,” I said.

  “That’s it,” he said. “A shrine to mark and remember it, for the folks that wasn’t that lucky, that was already doomed to be too young. . . .” He stopped. He stood there quite still. Except that you would think of him as being quizzical, maybe speculative, but not bemused. Then I said it:

  “You were wrong. They aren’t going to.”

  “What?” he said. “What’s that?”

  “She’s not going to marry Gavin.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “It will be worse than that.”

  Now it was me that said, “What? What did you say?” But he was already himself again, bland, serene, inscrutable.

  “But I reckon Lawyer can stand that too,” he said.