6

Was

Go Down, Moses, 1940–1942

Way Down in Egypt Land

On January 21, 1940, as Faulkner perused the galleys of The Hamlet, Mammy Callie died. A paralytic stroke had felled her a few days earlier. Estelle and Caroline Barr’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren watched over her. She was near a hundred as far as anyone knew. She had ailed from time to time, and Faulkner had always soothed her suffering with ice cream, her favorite that he obtained on late-night trips to a juke joint. She had a small house behind Rowan Oak where a live-in couple tended to her, making sure she had enough “wood and such,” and help if she took sick. She ate her meals at Rowan Oak and took care of seven-year-old Jill.1

Faulkner arranged the obsequy in the Rowan Oak parlor, delivering a three-hundred-word funeral address to her weeping family, calling her a “fount of authority” who had kept him secure with love and devotion. On February 3, the Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted him: “As oldest of my father’s family, I might be called her master. That situation never existed between ‘Mammy’ and me.”2

Faulkner wrote on February 5 to Robert Haas, sending back the galleys late, explaining: “I have had little of heart or time either for work.” Until the stroke she could still “hear perfectly and thread needles and sew by lamplight, and would walk for several miles. . . . She couldn’t have gone better, more happily.” A few days later he sent Haas his eulogy, remarking, “it turned out to be pretty good prose.”3 He put a marker on her grave:

MAMMY

Her white children

bless her.

He dedicated Go Down, Moses to her:

TO MAMMY

CAROLINE BARR

Mississippi

[1840–1940]

Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity withoutstint or calculation of recompenseand to my childhood an immeasur-able devotion and love

What William Faulkner felt deeply he turned into literature—at some cost to the life out of which his words arose. Barr’s family were grateful that he covered all their expenses, but another view prevailed among Barr’s relatives: “And then he had the funeral in the living room! In his living room! And I think he had the Community Choir of Oxford. I think they call that choir to come down and sing and then he let us brought her to the Baptist Church. He come with it [the body]. Him and Miss Estelle had the funeral and carried her on out there and buried her.” They wondered why Faulkner had not given his eulogy in their church or home—“even at the bitter end, he couldn’t let go of her, couldn’t let her be with her family.” In 1940, it would have been difficult for Barr’s family to speak up, but their resentment several decades later remained palpable.4 In 1940, perhaps it was inconceivable to Faulkner to hold the service in Barr’s home or church. Caroline Barr seemed “an emblem of those traditional relationships unchanged by the Civil War,”5 and in fact still operative in Jill’s upbringing.

To the Falkners, the head of the family had shown Caroline Barr deep respect. Aunt Bama wrote to her nephew Vance Broach, enclosing a clipping from the Memphis Commercial Appeal (February 5, 1940), “Rites Held for Former Slave in Novelist Faulkner’s Home.” The headline alone, for that time, was startling. Bama also enclosed a letter from Mary Bell, one of Barr’s relatives, thanking him for “giving Mammy such a fine funeral.” Bama wrote parenthetically to Broach, “Have you been away from Dixie too long to appreciate that?” Faulkner had answered Bell’s letter, Bama wanted her nephew to know, adding: “For him to take the time to write to this lowly, obscure negro is an index to the real Faulkner & for that reason I wanted you to read it.”6 Bama’s letter evokes the eighteenth-century world of deference, when the word “condescension” meant the nobleman’s gracious acknowledgment of the lower orders.

Faulkner admired Caroline Barr’s independence and realized she did not always coincide with the Falkner line. But he made no mention in his funeral oration of her several efforts to strike out on her own, which always ended in her return to the Falkners. They may even have admired what might be called her race pride. “And if Mammy [Callie Barr] could have seen that Decoration Day parade,” Faulkner wrote to his mother on June 2, 1918: “The colored troops were there, veterans of the civil war, dolled up in blue suits and cigars and medals until they all looked like brigadiers.”7 The condescending (“dolled up”), nevertheless, is part of paying respect to these black men in blue. To Faulkner, perhaps, Caroline Barr’s decision to remain in service to his family was more than they deserved but also a comfort in supposing her very presence redeemed their own complicity in slavery. Exactly what Faulkner shared with his mother at this moment is hard to get at and yet should not be overlooked.

Caroline Barr’s death is a poignant and painful moment in Faulkner biography since, like Go Down, Moses, her death exposes what whites mistook about the black people who worked for and lived among them. Faulkner himself, for all his sensitivity, could fail as his characters failed to acknowledge the full humanity of more than half the population of Lafayette County cum Yoknapatawpha: 6,298 whites and 9,313 “Negroes,” according to the map drawn for Absalom, Absalom!—another searing indictment of the white people who reject the invisibly black Charles Bon.

On May 3, 1940, in a letter to Robert Haas, Faulkner confessed that Barr’s death set off a vehement train of reactions to the deaths of Murry, Alabama, and Dean: frustration, anger, dismay, and wonder at “this quite alarming paradox”: He had shouldered responsibilities that interfered with his ambition and genius, developed as much away from home as within it, as a solitary man and a scion. He had carried it all—the Falkner and Oldham debts, the dependents—“white and black,” without inheriting land or money, and with no expectation of recompense. The unreconstructed Falkner also made an appearance: “What I need is some East Indian process to attain to the nigger attitude about debt. One of them is discussing the five dollars he must pay before sunset to his creditor, canvasses all possibilities, completes the circle back to the point of departure, where there is simply no way under heaven for him to get five dollars, says at last, ‘Well, anyway, he (the creditor) cant eat me.’ ‘How you know he cant?’ the second says. ‘Maybe he won’t want to,’ the first says.”8 “Pantaloon in Black,” published in Harper’s (October 1940), included in Go Down, Moses, portrays a tragic black man with a harrowing dignity. Writing as William Faulkner in a letter he seemed in a different realm, writing about a world in which he played a compromising part.

Unable to write what he called trashy short stories, he began to conceive of works that would eventually become Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers, although committing himself, even for six months, to a novel bothered him because he had so many pressing obligations. His letters to Robert Haas, full of dollar-sign amounts, signified his month-by-month calculations as to how he could manage his debts and continue to write.9 He opted for a short-story collection comprising already published magazine fiction and new material giving that work a greater dimension and integrity, just as he had done for The Unvanquished.

It took more than a year to work out what to do with interrelated short stories. He fretted about “this business in Europe”—the war. “What a hell of a time we are facing,” he wrote Haas. Faulkner could still fit into his World War I uniform: the “wings look as brave as they ever did. I swore then when I took it off in ’19, that I would never wear another, nohow, nowhere, for no one. But now I don’t know. Of course I could do no good, would last about two minutes in combat. But my feeling now is better so; that what will be left after this one will certainly not be worth living for. Maybe the watching of all this coming to a head for the last year is why I cant write, dont seem to want to write, that is. But I can write”—by which he meant he was not written out and still wanted to “scratch the face of the supreme Obliteration and leave a decipherable scar of some sort.” The very technology that could destroy a thousand lives, he proposed, might also “preserve, even by blind mischance and a minute fault in gears or timing, some scrap here and there, provided it was ever worth preserving.”10 This Second World War heightened his historical sensibility just as the first one had, driving him to think more deeply about slavery, bondage, and all forms of oppression. Civilization was at stake. In the heart of Go Down, Moses, in the fourth section, “The Bear,” Ike McCaslin and McCaslin Edmonds debate no less than the nature of their heritage and the values on which their patrimony was founded.

At the same time, the housebound writer had tried and failed to get a Hollywood assignment, reflecting his desperation as he stewed about his insupportable circumstances: income tax, insurance premiums, bank notes, his and his mother’s household expenses, and his unprofitable farm. “I need $4,000.00 more by Jan 1,” he wrote Haas on June 7, 1940, acknowledging the $3,000 advance for a novel not yet delivered. Then he resorted to his only remaining financial resource, saying he did not want to be a Random House burden, especially after “You and Don and Bennett have been my good friends for a long time.” Rather than spoil it all, he had considered contacting a publisher (Harold Guinzberg of Viking Press) who had “intimated” years before Faulkner’s connection with Random House, that “I could almost write my own ticket with him. This may not even hold now. But it is one thing more I can try before I decide to liquidate my property and savings.”11 Guinzberg did make an offer but also agreed that Faulkner should stay with Random House if the Viking Press offer could be matched. Bennett Cerf wrote Faulkner, explaining they had 2,500 copies of The Hamlet to sell and a tremendous stake in his career: “All of us are absolutely sick at heart at the thought of your leaving Random House.”12 After Guinzberg calculated the cost of buying Faulkner out of his Random House contract, he withdrew his offer.13 Then Harold Ober sold some short stories and even held back his commission on one to help his client.

Farming, flying, and doing some work as an advisor with Ole Miss’s flying school seemed to lift Faulkner’s spirits, although he brooded on race in “this destruction-bent world. Saxon fighting Saxon, Latin against Latin, Mongol with a Slav ally fighting a Mongol who is the ally of a Saxon-Latin ally of the first Slav; nigger fighting nigger at the behest of white men; one democracy trying to blow the other democracy’s fleet off the seas. Anyway, it will make nice watching when the axis people start gutting one another.” This conflicted network of disrupted relations would figure into the genealogies of Go Down, Moses as Faulkner began to dilate on the nexus between North and South, white and black, and intrafamilial dramas that would engulf the McCaslin and Edmonds descendants.14

Mired in the here and now, he retreated to the woods: “off there hunting, I dont fret and stew so much about Europe.” But the wilderness was no solution to his worries. He was the same man, sometimes separating from fellow hunters and drinking himself sick. On one trip he had to be evacuated from camp by motorboat. It had been a close call, his doctor told him. And yet, as usual, he recovered in short order. The world elsewhere, especially the war, could not be denied: “I’m only 43, I’m afraid I’m going to the damn thing yet.”15 The woods would form the backdrop of Go Down, Moses, the world Faulkner had grown up in but that was vanishing as dramatically as the war came upon him. But he had not yet worked out a sufficiently complex view of what historical change had wrought and what it portended. But it was all around him: the demolition of an Oxford church to make way for a supermarket, the tearing down of an old hotel that had been a part of the community for a hundred years, and the elimination of train service in and out of Oxford, where he had arrived and departed for forty years.

“The Tall Men,” one of the Saturday Evening Post stories published during this period to pay off back taxes, reflected Faulkner’s siege-like psychology and vision of a world coming after him, as it comes after the McCallum brothers, Anse and Lucius, who have not registered for the draft. This is the family in Flags in the Dust that takes in young Bayard Sartoris after he wrecks his car, in which old Bayard has his fatal heart attack. The pastoral setting is akin to the backwoods environs of Sergeant York (1941), featuring a war hero who begins as a draft resister, a film with sentiments similar to Faulkner’s about the sturdiness of rural America and its core values. In “The Tall Men,” the old deputy, Gombault, accompanying a government agent arresting two draft resisters, extols independent cotton farmers who brook no interference from government programs and the New Deal farm subsidy programs. The McCallums “still believed in the freedom and liberty to make or break according to a man’s fitness and will to work,” and not according to what the government paid them for planting or not planting crops. Anse and Lucius are patriotic but resist the draft so long as the country is not actually at war. Their attitudes jibe with Faulkner’s own anti–New Deal opinions voiced by Gombault. Like Sergeant York, the McCallums do not want to shirk their duty. Ultimately they decide “it was time to go, because the Government had sent them word.”16

In letters, and in the limited range of stories like “The Tall Men,” Faulkner did not have the capacity to confront issues that could not be neatly divided up between antinomies like big government and individual liberty. On May 1, 1941, he finally announced his plan for Go Down, Moses, the “general theme being relationship between white and negro races here.” But the stories still required an encompassing argument that would put them within the panorama of history. Not until November did Faulkner find the core story of the novel, “The Bear,” a reworking of “Lion” (1935) that would unite all the chapters. The fourth section of “The Bear,” taken out in the Saturday Evening Post version, created the dialectical argument that radiated throughout Go Down, Moses, a culmination of the short story–novel structures he had built up cumulatively in The Unvanquished and The Hamlet. Go Down, Moses, completed in December 1941, reflects a heroic effort to coalesce his conflicted life and work on several fronts—at home, in Hollywood, in mass-circulation magazines, bringing together every aspect of his biography, family, regional, national, and world history in a series of concatenating chapters that recover a past that suffuses the present, beginning with “Was.”

Part 1 of “Was” introduces “Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike,’ past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one.” His cousin McCaslin Edmonds, from whom Ike derives the past events that are about to be narrated in part 2, is “descended by the distaff” but inherits the plantation, even though Ike belongs to the male line of McCaslins who originally held the title to the land granted from the Indian patent. Ike finishes his life, however, in a “cheap frame bungalow in Jefferson,” the gift of his wife’s father.

In part 2, Cass Edmonds tells the story of Ike’s father, Uncle Buck, hunting for his part-white McCaslin slave, Tomey’s Turl, even as Miss Sophonsiba Beauchamp hunts Buck for a husband. The fox horn blows, indicating that Buck and Cass are near the Beauchamp plantation, where they will “den” Tomey’s Turl, and Miss Sophonsiba will “den” Uncle Buck. Caught in Sophonsiba’s room, Buck must gamble for his freedom and for the “niggers,” according to a wager by Miss Sophonsiba’s brother, Hubert. Beauchamp would like to pursue a simple, rustic way of life, but he is forced to accommodate himself to his sister’s claims of aristocratic descent and adherence to a chivalric code. The snares of family and heritage, so familiar to Faulkner as head of his clan, are played to comic effect, but in the novel’s historical context, race, family, individuality, and property become inextricably mixed and inescapable, full of the paradoxes that Faulkner put so plaintively in his letters.

After having “won” Sophonsiba through losing the card game, Buck sends for his brother Buddy to help him escape the marriage. In the meantime Buck is reduced to acting like a “nigger,” telling Cass that “if they pushed him too close . . . he would climb down the gutter too and hide in the woods until Uncle Buddy arrived.” Although Buddy successfully extricates his brother from an entangling alliance, the ending of “Was” suggests that eventually Buck will be caught in Miss Sophonsiba’s trap. For when they return home, the old dog “Old Moses” is found with the fox’s crate around his neck—surely a symbolic forecast of foxy Miss Sophonsiba’s yoking that other old dog, “old Buck,” as Tomey’s Turl calls him.

Ironic reversals of power dynamics, the woman commanding the man, the slave eluding the master, the white man acting as “nigger,” and later more than one black man acting with the authority of a white man, turn both past and present, the antebellum and postbellum worlds, upside down as befits a Faulkner who revolted against his responsibilities even as he continued to uphold them. He keenly understood the ironies of his own life, many of them self-made, and others inherited, in a frustrating cycle that runs all the way through his letters to Random House, just as characters like Buck and Tomey’s Turl remain on the run.

The next chapter, “The Fire and the Hearth,” centers on a contemporary figure, Lucas Beauchamp, a proud black descendant of old Carothers McCaslin, nearly as old as Ike, and the oldest McCaslin Negro on the plantation. Lucas is planning to dispose of George Wilkins, his young competitor in the moonshine trade and his daughter Nat’s fiancé, who is a “fool innocent of discretion.” Lucas is worried that George will expose the illicit black business that the white people, Zack Edmonds and his son, Carothers (Roth), have forbidden. Near where Lucas has planned to bury his still, part of a plot against George Wilkins, Lucas discovers a gold coin in an Indian burial mound. As canny and pecuniary as Ratliff, Lucas succumbs to treasure-hunting fever.

But the search for buried treasure is interrupted twice by episodes from Lucas’s past, providing insights into his present attitudes and the state of the McCaslin family and plantation. In the first episode, forty-three years earlier (1898), Lucas had risked his life to save the life of Roth Edmonds’s mother, but she died, and Lucas’s wife, Mollie, took her place in Zack Edmonds’s household. Believing that Zack had taken Mollie as his mistress, Lucas demanded that the white man return her. Mollie had come back, but with Zack’s child (Roth) as well as her own. Roth Edmonds only knows that Lucas achieved an unusual degree of independence stemming from a confrontation with his father about a woman, and Roth is frustrated by that awareness because it inhibits his own authority on the plantation, especially since his mother died in childbirth and Mollie is the only mother he has known. The separation from her as he becomes an adult is painful and confusing and provoking.

The second interruption of treasure-hunting deals with an even earlier time (1895), when Lucas, turned twenty-one, came to Ike to ask for the legacy left him by old Carothers. Although he should have been in the inferior position of a black man, his proud demand for the legacy transformed it into a debt owed to him and a responsibility Ike had shirked. Ike, living in a little bungalow in town, supported by fifty dollars per month from his cousin Cass, realizes that he is powerless to aid Lucas in any other way than by simply dispensing a legacy that had been in his trusteeship. Lucas’s cold and distant response prompts Ike to think: “Fifty dollars a month. He knows that’s all. That I reneged, cried calf-rope, sold my birthright, betrayed my blood, for what he too calls not peace but obliteration, and a little food.”

As Lucas gives up the hunting days of his youth and young manhood, Ike dwells more and more on those very same experiences. Lucas accepts his McCaslin heritage, even though white people treat him as an inferior; Ike relinquishes a position of respect and authority in his family and community that is his by birth. Lucas matures into a position of self-importance, his age a considerable factor in his dealings with the much younger Roth, who is continually reminded of Lucas’s claims as head of the family, but who is much more than that: “I am not only looking at a face older than mine and which has seen and winnowed more, but at a man most of whose blood was pure ten thousand years when my own anonymous beginnings became mixed enough to produce me.”

Faulkner’s own bifurcated biography, his identity as a solitary writer and his obligations as landowner and head of family, his unwillingness to permanently move away from Oxford or repudiate his heritage and his compulsion to claim his status within his family and community are writ deeply into Go Down, Moses—as is his understanding of bondage and deliverance and of the desire to be set free from the past. But renouncing ownership, as Ike does, results in powerlessness. It is, then, the vexed relationship between past and present that Faulkner kept trying to get right as he wrote his new kind of history.

“Pantaloon in Black” completes a trilogy of chapters seeking different ways of connecting past and present, and black people to white. It is, in some ways, the most remarkable chapter in the novel, since it closes in on a black consciousness in ways reminiscent of Richard Wright, Faulkner’s African American and Mississippi-born contemporary.17 Rider and his wife build a “fire on the hearth” on their wedding night “as the tale told how Uncle Lucas Beauchamp, Edmonds’ oldest tenant, had done on his forty-five years ago and which had burned ever since.” Lucas Beauchamp’s heritage survives into the 1940s. Just as losing Mollie to Zack Edmonds provoked a crisis in the life of twenty-four-year-old Lucas, so now, forty-three years later, twenty-four-year-old Rider’s loss of Mannie leaves him bereft of any reason to go on living and convinced that he is “bound to die.” Rider, like Lucas and Ike, is set apart from both black and white people by the special integrity of his personality and his unusual bond with nature. All three are proud, solitary men, but Lucas and Rider curb the vanity of their own strength by cooperating with their wives in the union of marriage. “Pantaloon in Black,” an ironic allusion to the buffoon of commedia dell’arte, repudiates the denigrating stereotype of the foolish black man that lingers in Flags in the Dust and in Faulkner’s later letters. After Mannie dies, Rider no longer cares what happens to him. He no longer conforms to his subordination as a black man. He cuts the throat of a white man cheating black men at dice.

The grief of a solitary and proud man, so familiar to Faulkner, infuses Rider’s despair. However straitened Faulkner’s marriage to Estelle had become, the continuity he craved always brought him back from the temptations to leave her. He could not imagine life without the rituals and traditions of family life and home. Without them, in Hollywood, a despondent Faulkner dreamed about playing cards in the kitchen with his family. Rider’s self-destructive inability to stop drinking, like Faulkner’s binges, reflects a sensibility beyond the help of anyone’s intervention.

In another of the novel’s many ironies, a white deputy puzzles over Rider’s suicidal behavior, which is as unaccountable as Nelse Patton’s when he cut the throat of a white woman well known to him, and with whom he had done business before. The deputy, like the exhausted Rider on his last day, is “spent now from lack of sleep and hurried food at hurried and curious hours and, sitting in a chair beside the stove, a little hysterical too.” The stove, the deputy’s modern fire and hearth, reflects what should be the center of domestic harmony. Unfortunately he cannot imagine that Rider’s acts were those of a man who had lost precisely what the deputy is looking for from his inattentive wife: some comforting response to allay the trauma of the last several hours. The deputy is caught in a system of prejudice he did not create, no matter how much his own actions may perpetuate it. The very force of his concern with Rider’s story suggests that he is genuinely troubled by this black man’s fate and is searching for some way to explain it to himself. Like Rider, the deputy cannot stop thinking, nor can he help looking for the meaning of what he has just witnessed. So he repeats Rider’s last words and then addresses a question of his own to his wife, unconsciously echoing Rider’s own puzzlement: “ ‘Hit look lack Ah just cant quit thinking. Look lack Ah just cant quit.’ And what do you think of that?” She does not think anything of it: “ ‘I think if you eat any supper in this house you’ll do it in the next five minutes,’ his wife said from the dining room. ‘I’m going to clear this table then and I’m going to the picture show.’ ” She wants to be diverted, entertained, as Faulkner well knew from all the picture shows he had written. By failing to understand her husband’s desperate obsession with Rider’s last desperate words, the white deputy’s wife is as “lost” to her husband at this moment as Mannie was to Rider. These are characters and marriages for which the modern screen had no use, which is to say that in Go Down, Moses Faulkner relieved himself of his own bondage to unreal scripts and redeemed his vocation as a writer.

“The Old People” reverses the trajectory of the first three chapters by returning to the terrain of the Indian stories, establishing a genealogy and line of authority that is an alternative to the white Edmonds/McCaslin ascendancy. Faulkner had told Will Bryant he would write a novel about the Indians and now made them central to the historical vision of Go Down, Moses. Sam Fathers, the part-Negro descendant of an Indian chief, is Ike’s spiritual guide. The chapter includes Ike’s experiences from his eighth to his twelfth year that he will still remember at eighty, but the predominant time is 1879, when Sam marks Ike with the blood of the buck he has just slain, initiating the twelve-year-old boy into the order of nature, just as Cass Edmonds was initiated into the life of the plantation at the age of nine in “Was.” Even though Sam Fathers has also initiated Cass in the woods, Cass had become an unwitting accomplice in Uncle Buck’s hunting of Tomey’s Turl. The circular pattern of “Was,” in which Tomey’s Turl eventually returns to Tennie’s cabin and Uncle Buck returns to the Beauchamp plantation and Sophonsiba’s bed chamber, conforms to Sam’s reading of the buck’s path in which “he will circle back in here about sundown to bed.” But “Was” has no equivalent to Ike’s awareness of “the buck moving in it [the wilderness] somewhere, not running yet since he had not been pursued, not frightened yet and never fearsome but just alert also as they were alert, perhaps already circling back, perhaps quite near, perhaps conscious also of the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire.” The timeless quality of the woods fosters the identification of hunter and prey with one another that can never be acknowledged in the slave hunts, or in the distinctions of society and family that Faulkner forsook on his own in the wilderness.

In “The Bear,” Ike first becomes aware of “Old Ben,” not by sighting him or even hearing him but through participating in the sensation of the hounds: “a little different—an eagerness, passive; an abjectness, a sense of his own fragility and impotence against the timeless woods, yet without doubt or dread.” Ike’s primordial feelings occur in a wilderness that “looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam Fathers’ Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready.” Ike relinquishes his gun, compass, and watch in order to get his first look at the bear, and to experience “a condition in which not only the bear’s heretofore inviolable anonymity but all the ancient rules and balances of hunter and hunted had been abrogated.” But once he has done so, Ike is lost. To find his way back to where he has abandoned his watch and compass, he makes, as Sam has “coached and drilled him,” a “cast to cross his backtrack.” When he does not find the point at which he originally began, he makes the next circle in the opposite direction and much larger, so that the pattern of the two of them would bisect his track somewhere. He finds the watch and compass, and then he has his privileged vision of the “dimensionless” bear. Old Ben becomes for Ike all-encompassing. The watch and the compass are time- and space-bound, whereas the bear appears to move in neither time nor space. Where the watch and compass divide and separate time and space into units, the bear and the wilderness coalesce, soundless and solidified. Putting aside the instruments of civilization foreshadows Ike’s renunciation of his white heritage. To him, his family line depends upon a very short chain of cause and effect, whereas the bear seems ancient and ubiquitous. For Ike, the bear does not vanish, is not lost; rather he simply recedes back into his element, always there, always present, in a changeless universe. Yet the first pages of “The Bear” announce that the wilderness is doomed.

In part 2, Ike is caught in the paradox of hunting Old Ben, symbol of the immortal wilderness. Ike’s confusion is apparent in his failure to shoot the bear when the little fyce turns Old Ben toward Ike. Old Ben, the “epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life,” is also just an aging bear. Ike senses the fatality the hunt enacts, but he passively accepts its consequences as though he were just an observer of historical processes that he is, in fact, helping to bring about as both the wilderness and Old Ben are inseparable from his initiation into the meaning of life.

Old Ben’s death also marks a turning point in McCaslin history. Retrospection on the events related in “The Bear” has begun even before the events themselves can properly be said to have ended. Groups of men, very carefully chosen for the representativeness of their experiences in or beside the wilderness, gather around the old bear to remember the past, as though they instinctively understand that Old Ben’s death is a historical event like the closing of the frontier, which can be preserved only through the imagination. Ike is sixteen. In two years he will set out on his attempt to locate the son of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp, Tennie’s Jim, who left home at twenty-one before collecting his thousand-dollar legacy. This is the same ubiquitous Tennie’s Jim of “The Bear.” Ike and Tennie’s Jim run forward to witness the death scene, with their valiant dog Lion gutted by Old Ben. Although the main action concentrates on Boon Hogganbeck’s care for the dying Lion and on Sam Fathers’s sudden collapse, the repeated appearances of Tennie’s Jim help to define the kind of world that dies along with the major figures in the story. No reason is ever given for the disappearance of Tennie’s Jim two years after this scene, but the scene itself argues that the world, and the place Tennie’s Jim occupied in it, has been destroyed. All along Faulkner has carefully associated the whole life of Tennie’s Jim with these wilderness scenes, just as he grounded Lucas’s life in his loyalty to the plantation.

Tennie’s Jim is a part of many memorable scenes in “The Bear.” He holds “the passive and still trembling bitch,” who, in Sam’s words, “would have to be brave once so she could keep on calling herself a dog.” Tennie’s Jim pours the whiskey, which is like a sacrament to the hunters. He holds the hounds on leash, saddles the mules, wakes Ike up on the morning when he and Boon go into town for whiskey. Tennie’s Jim is the black man who pulls the towsack off of the horse that Boon and Ike purchased, and he is the one who is sent to the doctor for Boon, Lion, and Sam. He stays with Sam after the white men leave. Tennie’s Jim’s departure from the scene, from Ike’s life, and from his native land suggest his quest for a new world in which to forge his identity while Ike remains fixed on the past.

Part 4 shows that Ike’s vision of history is seriously damaged, if not wholly discredited, by his inability to accept the change that is dramatized in the first three parts of “The Bear.” Instead of continuing the sixteen-year-old Ike’s development from the killing of Old Ben to his last visit to Major de Spain’s hunting camp when he is nearly eighteen (which is treated in part 5), part 4 begins with Ike’s rejection of his patrimony on his twenty-first birthday, and it then ranges from his sensitive reading of the commissary books at sixteen, to his attempts to “free” Fonsiba (Tennie’s daughter) when he is eighteen, to Lucas’s acceptance of his legacy when Ike is twenty-eight, to Hubert Beauchamp’s bequest to Ike, and finally to Ike’s refusal to share his McCaslin legacy with his wife by rejecting her plea that he assume the ownership of the plantation. Ike is an isolated figure, retreating from family responsibilities and estranging himself from those like Cass and his wife who might have been his closest confidants.

Part 4 includes the powerful debate between Ike and Cass Edmonds. Ike presumptuously speaks of a divine purpose transcending a loyalty to family heritage, while Cass stubbornly interprets history from the point at which his family took possession of the land. Ike invokes higher laws operating in contravention of his cousin’s obsession with regional history, while Cass chides Ike for relinquishing his responsibility as the sole heir to the McCaslin plantation in favor of a faith in God’s purposes that does not seem warranted in light of the very history Ike invokes, and that he then puzzles out in Buck and Buddy’s commissary books.

The twin brothers had originated the family debate by both accepting and then trying to modify the legacy left to them by their father, old Carothers. They move out of the big house, the conspicuous symbol of a slave economy, and move into the one-room log cabin, “refusing to allow any slave to touch any timber of it other than the actual raising into place the logs which two men alone could not handle.” Even so, Buck and Buddy treat their slaves as animals, herding them “without question protest or recourse, into the tremendous abortive edifice scarcely yet out of embryo.”

Because the commissary books are, in a sense, the past itself—“the yellowed pages and the brown thin ink in which was recorded the injustice and a little at least of its amelioration and restitution faded back forever into the anonymous communal original dust”—they give to Ike’s investigation a sense of immediacy found nowhere else in Faulkner’s fiction.18 Buck and Buddy use their ledgers as business accounts, journals, diaries, and chronologies. In the process of accustoming himself to the varied uses of the ledgers, Ike is also accustoming himself to the thought patterns, the sense of history, and indeed the heritage he had debated with Cass. Ike’s obsession with the ledgers, with an accounting of the past, also reflected Faulkner’s own ledger-keeping at Greenfield Farm. Keeping accounts straight mattered deeply for financial and emotional reasons.

The ledgers reveal that Buck and Buddy do their best to put together a complete account of what they know about their family as it had been established by their father and grandfather. After their father’s death, the twin McCaslins conscientiously attempt to free their family’s slaves in the only way they know how—through business transactions recorded in the family ledgers. That the slaves are more than just property, more than just a part of plantation “business” to Buck and Buddy, is clear from the entries in which Buck notes that neither Fibby nor Roskus wants to leave the plantation and that Thucydus wants to earn his freedom.

Buck makes sure that the 27th and 28th of June 1837, the days on which “A.@ T. McCaslin” tried to free their slaves after their father’s death, are fully and precisely recorded. Two entries in the ledger, one by Buck and one by Buddy, seem to have been Ike’s first insight into why it was so important to free Thucydus on the very day after old Carothers died: “Eunice Bought by Father in New Orleans 1807 $650. dolars. Marrid to Thucydus 1809 Drownd in Crick Christmas Day 1832.” Buddy’s entry is easily the most dramatic in all of the ledgers, for it is made without preface or explanation and reaffirmed after Buck’s skeptical reactions two days later:

June 21th 1833 Drownd herself

23 Jun 1833 Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding him self

Aug 13th 1833 Drownd herself

Buck brings out the truly shocking nature of Buddy’s statement by expressing an assumption of his time, that a slave had no life of his own that he could think of ending. Buck is not reflecting on the particular circumstances of Eunice’s death (note his change from “herself” to “him self”) but is betraying his notions about black people in general.

Ike does not share his father’s attitudes toward black people, and so the nature of his questions is different. It is not quite so surprising to him that Eunice should commit suicide, but he is perplexed by Uncle Buddy’s insistence on the point. Additional entries record that Eunice died six months before her daughter Tomasina (Tomey) gave birth to a child (Turl). On June 21, 1833, perhaps after the birth of Tomey’s Turl, Buddy realized she had committed suicide. On June 28, 1837, four years later, and a day after old Carothers died, Thucydus, Eunice’s husband, was offered his freedom. Once Ike looks at his grandfather’s will, he realizes that old Carothers “made no effort either to explain or obfuscate the thousand-dollar legacy to the son [Tomey’s Turl] of an unmarried slave-girl.” If never stated by old Carothers, it is nevertheless clear to Ike, as presumably to Buddy, that old Carothers would have left such a legacy only to his own son, and that he shifted the burden and the consequences of his sin to the next two generations of his family rather than directly acknowledge his responsibility to his black son.

But why would Eunice commit suicide? Ike reads in the ledgers that Eunice’s daughter died in childbirth. Old Carothers, Ike conjectures, impregnated his own daughter, and that is another reason why he could not directly acknowledge his son. Ike strengthens his shocking inference by noting that his grandfather, who “never went anywhere more than his sons in their time ever did and who did not need another slave, had gone all the way to New Orleans and bought” Eunice. Ostensibly seeking a mate for Thucydus, old Carothers had evidently obtained a mistress for himself. Ike then shifts to the only other concrete evidence he has: remembering the light-skinned Tomey’s Turl, his father Buck’s unacknowledged half brother. Buddy’s insistence on Eunice’s suicide finally makes sense. Tomey’s Turl received his white blood from Carothers’s intercourse not only with Tomasina but also with her mother, Eunice. Faulkner himself had no doubt that Ike is right: “The ledger excerpts in Go Down, Moses were a little to set a tone and an atmosphere,” he wrote to historian Bell Wiley, “but they also told a story of how the negros became McCaslins too. Old McCaslin bought a handsome octoroon and got a daughter on her and then got a son on that daughter; that son was his mother’s child and her brother at the same time; he was both McCaslin’s son and his grandson.”19

Buddy’s brief but insistent record of Eunice’s suicide drives Ike to imagine Eunice’s last moments: “He 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.” In an act of empathy, Ike creates a scene akin to Rider’s despair after his wife’s death. Ike invests Eunice with a dignity and integrity that are only hinted at in the historical record and that Buck and Buddy seem to have only partially recognized.20

The “rank dead icy air” in which Ike asks himself why Eunice drowned herself is reminiscent of Quentin in the cold, tomb-like room asking himself why Henry killed Bon. For both young men the past is of immense importance to their sense of identity; they cannot live in the present without reckoning with the past. Neither Quentin nor Ike proves capable of living a full life. Their plight, so familiar to what Faulkner confronted with his own family’s occluded racial history, was his only way of acknowledging a deep affinity with black people like Eunice and Rider. Go Down, Moses implicitly recognizes the crucial importance of his black kin in his life and work.

In part 5 of “The Bear,” Ike retreats from his heritage in the guise of repudiating change. He is disturbed at the new signs of progress represented by the planing mill that will tear down the wall of wilderness as part of the unceasing encroachment on nature and the mania of ownership that estranges Ike from the present. He seeks refuge in the unceasing round of nature, although an immersion in it is the antithesis of history.

In “Delta Autumn,” which is very specifically set a year before America’s entry into World War II (November 1940), Ike, now seventy-three, serenely rejects Roth’s low opinion of mankind and his bitter tirade against the degeneration of the nation unfit to fight Hitler and too susceptible to homegrown fascism and superficial patriotism: “singing God bless America in bars at midnight and wearing dime-store flags in our lapels.” Ike notes that the country has always had its defenders: “My pappy and some other better men than any of them you named [Roosevelt and Willkie] tried once to tear it in two with a war, and they failed.” Although Ike believes that man always has the potential to be just a little better than his circumstances allow him to be, he acknowledges his disappointment in man’s failure to take advantage of his God-given opportunities. But his own refusal to accept responsibility for the plantation makes him an ineffective counter to Roth’s vision of tyranny, both in public and private life, and he is disturbed by his own responsibility to the “does,” the women who, according to Ike, make fighting for one’s country a meaningful act of self-defense. All along Legate, Roth’s hunting buddy, has been referring to Roth’s black lover as a “doe,” and Roth is perhaps more irascible than usual, voicing a somewhat darker view of humanity than he expresses in “The Fire and the Hearth.” In that chapter he shows his other side, his devotion to Mollie Beauchamp, inspired by Callie Barr, who taught Roth to be a gentleman.

Neither Ike nor Roth can quite fulfill their responsibilities. Ike acts as Roth’s agent in paying off Roth’s mistress, who had had a child by him. Ike assumes that her return to the hunting camp is motivated by feelings of revenge, but the woman’s responses show how unfair Ike has been to the couple: “I would have made a man of him. He’s not a man yet. You spoiled him. You, and Uncle Lucas and Aunt Mollie. But mostly you.” Cutting himself off from the present has only meant that Ike repeats the past, failing to recognize his own kin, so the woman has to tell him she is a descendant of Tennie’s Jim. Ike responds in “amazement, pity, and outrage,” “You’re a nigger!”

This is a powerful, paradoxical moment that tests Ike’s capacity to empathize. He sounds surprised and also brutal, especially after his haunting re-creation of Eunice’s suicide. And for Faulkner himself? What did this moment mean? He used the word “nigger” frequently, and “Negro” appears in the novel more than a hundred and “Negress” thirteen times, in both lowercase and uppercase, perhaps signaling “a moment of transition in the development of his political consciousness.”21

To Ike, this “nigger” is as inconceivable a match for Roth as Charles Bon was for Judith: “Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America, he [Ike] thought. But not now! Not now!” And her response might as well be Bon’s: “Old man, have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you dont remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?” He gives her cynical advice to go north and take revenge on “a black man” and surrenders to a bitter condemnation of the present, equating the loss of the wilderness and the degradation of humanity.

Like the ending of Absalom, Absalom!, which projects into the North, into the Western Hemisphere, and into the future, the novel’s coda, “Go Down, Moses,” shifts to a Chicago jail where Butch Beauchamp, a convicted murderer, awaits execution. Beauchamp, born a McCaslin black man, now in the numbers racket, answers the census taker’s questions in a “voice which was anything under the sun but a southern voice or even a Negro voice.” He is imprisoned in a “steel cubicle” and lives in a denatured atmosphere, the antithesis of Ike’s wilderness experience, in which all of the color, other than that of the steel fixtures, comes from the overdressed prisoner himself: “He wore one of those sports costumes called ensembles in the men’s shop advertisements, shirt and trousers matching and cut from the same fawn-colored flannel, and they had cost too much and were draped too much, with too many pleats.”

The scene is a manifold contrast to the world presented in previous chapters—the integrity that Rider’s black voice gives to his experience, the natural beauty of the wilderness, the economy and frugality of Ike and the other hunters. Against Butch’s “sports costume” sit Lucas’s fifty-year-old hat and Lucas’s “small metal dispatch box which his white grandfather, Carothers McCaslin himself, had owned almost a hundred years ago,” and in which Lucas kept the “knotted rag tight and solid with the coins, some of which dated back almost to Carothers McCaslin’s time, which he had begun to save before he was ten years old.” In the second part of “Go Down, Moses” there are references to Gavin Stevens’s “rumpled linen suit” and the newspaper editor’s “old fashioned boiled shirt.” On the other hand, Butch’s “steel cubicle” may stir memories of Ike’s “rented cubicle” in “Delta Autumn.” In part 1 of “Was,” Ike sleeps on an “iron cot”; in part 1 of “Go Down, Moses,” Butch lies on a “steel cot” in striking contrast to Rider, who tears his iron cot “clean out of the floor it was bolted to.” Although on opposite ends of a moral and historical and racial scale, both men are McCaslins who have, each in his own way, repudiated a heritage and tried to seal off the agony of loss that impels Rider’s violence. In a sense Butch has also taken Ike’s advice to Roth’s black lover and gone north.

In “Go Down, Moses,” Gavin Stevens, another outsider, like the deputy in “Pantaloon in Black,” is largely ignorant of the relationships between black people in his own community. Stevens is more sensitive and compassionate than the deputy, but his perceptions of black people are largely abstract and patronizing. He treats very lightly Mollie’s accusation that Roth Edmonds sold her Benjamin into Egypt because he does not understand the significance of Roth’s throwing Butch off the plantation for breaking into the commissary store. Butch offends against the laws of property and against the established order the commissary represents, but Roth is equally wrong in denying responsibility for Butch’s fate, so that both violate the plantation tradition of interdependence and mutual obligation, which Faulkner carried on in his own extended family at Rowan Oak. Roth’s sense of duty and his complaints about his patriarchal role are not that different from Faulkner’s own tirades against his dependents.

Stevens attends Butch’s funeral in the black community in a setting Faulkner obviated in his services for Caroline Barr. Like Stevens, Faulkner remained an observer, building out his story after watching a coffin come into town on a train.22 Stevens cannot share the traditions embedded in the communal mourning of his black neighbors. He panics in a manner reminiscent of the white deputy’s hysterical reaction to Rider and wants to resume the status quo. Stevens’s parting words—“ ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to town. I haven’t seen my desk in two days’ ”—match Buck’s last words to Uncle Buddy in “Was”: “Go on and start breakfast. It seems to me I’ve been away from home a whole damn month.” Stevens, like Buck, is a man of his time, but his attitudes are also continuous with Buck’s.

Faulkner’s concern with change is embodied in the artistic and technical aspects of his work in the sense that he links character development to the processes of time. Here the historical dimension of Faulkner’s imagination is the same as in Absalom, Absalom!, in which what a character’s actions come to signify depends on the time from which they are viewed. Lengthen, shorten, or abolish the historical perspective, and the meaning of human actions and human character changes. How we perceive a character, then, depends very much upon how we adapt to the novel—upon, that is, the imaginative level reached. In both novels there is always another level, more intricate than the previous one, so that character creation becomes a historical exploration of the interaction between our past and present perceptions of specific figures.

The progressive nature of Faulkner’s exploration of the past is especially apparent toward the end of Go Down, Moses, as parts 4 and 5 of “The Bear” and “Delta Autumn” all read like possible conclusions to the book that are superseded, each in its turn, by another attempt at closure. The book’s meaning expands through these conceivable conclusions, but it does not end in any finite sense. Still another conclusion, beyond “Go, Down, Moses,” is possible, although Faulkner thought that with this ending he had achieved a structure for the work that would at the end be sufficiently apparent to return us to “Was” and to a sense of the past as still transforming and perfecting itself in our minds.

Stand apart from the seven individual chapters of Go Down, Moses, and from the ways they are connected to each other, and look at a larger structural dynamic: The first three chapters deal with plantation life in the South and with the history of race relations between the dominant white master class and their repressed black slaves. The wilderness out of which the white man carved this world is a minor theme. In the next three chapters, the major and minor themes are reversed, and the world of white civilization is seen through the perspective of the wilderness as an encroaching set of future conditions. The resolution of this dialectic of wilderness and civilization is accomplished in the last chapter, briefly set in Chicago and then in Jefferson. In the town and the city, however, the same problems of white-black relationships occur, the same consequent question of what constitutes a genuine human community is posed. The white man’s invasions of (in turn) the wilderness, the plantation, the town, and the city are successively the focal turning points that define his increasing distance from his own sources. For Ike, man’s evil increases with the distance in time from man’s initial violation of the wilderness. But Go Down, Moses itself seems to argue that good and evil are the basic, unquantifiable antinomies of all stages of history. Butch Beauchamp, for instance, is not corrupted in the city. He goes to the city because he is already corrupt, and because he has as a result been expelled from his native land. The census taker who inquires after his real name and background is just as shocked as a member of Jefferson would be to hear that Butch does not care about his family and does not concern himself about the disposal of his body. Although the census taker is also in a “numbers racket,” he does not treat Butch merely as a number but responds to Butch’s own inhumanity as might any sensitive human being. Gavin Stevens, with his Heidelberg Ph.D., is not less humane than Ike, who has been schooled in the wilderness. A sense of humanity, in short, is not tied to a particular place, and Ike’s assumption to the contrary (that the wilderness is the special preserve of universal moral values) renders him powerless in a changing world. As in Absalom, Absalom!, past and present are not joined by emphasizing the sameness of any two periods of time, but by dramatizing history as a human process that is going on at all times and all places.

“Our Most Distinguished Unread Talent”

So said the reviewer in the Boston Globe (May 6, 1942), seconded by the Trenton Times (May 9), which deemed Go Down, Moses Faulkner at his best. His difficult style and subject matter that put some people off also relegated him to a niche even among the literati who had yet to absorb the implications of his work. In short, unlike Hemingway, Faulkner was not a digestible appetizer for a literary party let alone for mass consumption. Even a distinguished critic like Lionel Trilling in the Nation (May 30) could not fathom the novel’s purpose or structure, calling “Pantaloon in Black,” for example, an inferior story unrelated to the rest of the volume. But one critic, Malcolm Cowley in the New Republic (June 29), began to come around, admitting that “there is no other American writer who has been consistently misrepresented by critics, including myself.”

A few reviewers, like John Temple Graves in the Saturday Review (May 2), saw that the South per se is not really the point: “Reading the stories with Hitler’s war going on tends to make you give certain names to certain of their motifs. You seem to recognize the stern and bloody surviving which the Nazis preach, the pure democracies Walt Whitman sang, and the fatal heredity and environment which made the late Clarence Darrow pity all men for their crimes.” Graves understood that in order to triumph in the war, Americans had to understand their own criminality, what Americans had done to Americans of different races, which the pure democracy of the woods could not wipe out, as Ike’s own reactionary politics demonstrate. “We who are now called on for our instincts of survival,” Graves argued, “can feel the click of words like these”: “It was of the men, not white nor black nor red but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter;—the best game of all, the best of all breathing.” Ed Werkman in the Pittsburgh Press (April 26) quoted, without comment, a passage from Ike’s speech in “Delta Autumn” that revealed the novel’s reach:

This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares.

Ike’s own pride in his heritage, no matter how much he deplores it, is set against the chaotic, contradictory, and paradoxical nature of modern life. The “deswamped and denuded and derivered” land leads to the ecological disaster of The Wild Palms, and up North he sees an exploitive economy and interracial coupling that is mindless and rootless. Reviewers were not prepared to recognize, let alone deal with, Ike’s diatribe. Most of them praised “The Bear” but failed to see how “Delta Autumn” severely compromised Ike’s moral position, which itself grew out of the interaction of three races: red, white, and black. Ike’s outrage is the voice of panic—almost a prediction of what was in store for the world after the Pearl Harbor attack, when America opposed Hitler’s rendition of purity but remained racist. The global import of Go Down, Moses, published five months after America’s entry into the war, went unheeded and unread.