26

North and South

September 1955–Spring 1957

Murder

On September 6, William Faulkner released, at the request of the United Press, his response to the murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American, a Chicago native visiting family in Greenwood, Mississippi, about eighty miles from Oxford. It was said he had flirted with—perhaps even whistled at and made an obscene remark to—Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, who much later recanted her accusation that he had done so. Such incidents were common enough. Faulkner had written about one in “Dry September”—even suggesting, as in this case, that the violation of white womanhood was imaginary. Perhaps Till did no more than look directly at Bryant, transgressing a southern code that forbid such spontaneous eye contact. Bryant’s husband and a family accomplice abducted Till, tortured him, and threw his body in the river. In Chicago, thousands attended Till’s open-casket funeral that revealed his bloated and bludgeoned body. Both white men were acquitted by a white jury.

When William Faulkner now reacted to such a crime against humanity he thought in terms of a new sense of history, no longer the man who had written so callously about lynching to a newspaper in 1931. That new sense of history included the whole world, in which, as he wrote, three-quarters of the human race was not white. In Italy, having just arrived from Japan, he asked:

Have we, the white Americans who can commit or condone such acts, forgotten already how only 15 years ago, what only the Japanese—a mere eighty million inhabitants of an island already insolvent and bankrupt—did to us?

How then can we hope to survive the next Pearl Harbor, if there should be one, with not only all peoples who are not white, but all peoples with political ideologies different from ours arrayed against us—after we have taught them (as we are doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours.

A disunited America would perish:

Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive.

Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.1

Faulkner had typed up his statement in a USIS office and had, like a good diplomat, asked for suggestions. As so often, however, he would lapse back into undiplomatic but encrusted and retrograde attitudes, saying a year later in a radio interview: “The Till boy got himself into a fix, and he almost got what he deserved. But even so you don’t murder a child.”2

A New Confederation

On November 10, William Faulkner addressed the twenty-first annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. James Silver, an Ole Miss history professor and friend of Faulkner’s, invited him to address an integrated audience of five hundred or so history teachers. By Faulkner’s side, Benjamin Mays (president of Atlanta’s Morehouse College) became, after much cajoling from Silver, the first black person to address the association, or even to be allowed into the hotel at a white gathering. Mays gave the best speech Silver had ever heard: “great intellect, real fervor, and an old-time evangelical ministerial delivery which were a magnificent combination.”3

Silver and Faulkner had known one another ever since Silver had taught Cho-Cho in a class in 1936. Before the friendship deepened, Silver regarded Faulkner as an “amorphous” and “awesome figure,” appearing in town, sometimes, barefooted in torn and tattered clothing, but at Rowan Oak as the country squire, elegant and meticulously dressed, with Estelle, “an aging belle,” presiding at the table as an “agreeable and remarkable hostess because she liked people.” After dinner, Faulkner retired to the library, smoked his pipe with a brandy, and conversed with Dutch, Silver’s wife, while Jim kept Estelle company at the dinner table. Dutch remembered helping Faulkner prepare for a party and asking him, “Is there anything I can do for you?” Faulkner replied, “What could any tall good-looking brunette do for a man?”4

During one memorable evening at Rowan Oak, Ashford Little and Hugh Evans, Faulkner’s houseboat buddies, brought their wives to dinner. Mrs. Evans, “a short lady,” somehow missed her chair and slid under the table. She wasn’t hurt but considerably embarrassed. “So just about the time we got her over the shock,” Little recalled, “Bill just with a straight face slid right under the table, deliberately pulled his chair back and just slid (laughing) under the table.”5

Silver remembered Faulkner’s “obsession with Ole Miss baseball” and other times when he appeared to socialize after football games. The Silvers drove Cho-Cho to the hospital for the birth of her only child. Silver knew the details of the extended family’s life—for example, about Bill Fielden, a New Yorker who set up cigarette factories in the Third World. The Silvers and Fieldens became close friends when Bill and Cho-Cho returned during the war to stay in Oxford. The two Bills played baseball with Jill’s playmates, pitching on opposite sides. When Malcolm returned from the war, Silver and Faulkner heard the horror stories. The Silvers knew about Faulkner’s attachment to Joan Williams just as the historian began, during the filming of Intruder in the Dust, to engage Faulkner in serious discussions of civil rights. Silver was an activist, and his friendship with Faulkner, along with Faulkner’s trips abroad, had made the novelist keenly aware that Mississippi could not go it alone in opposition not only to the federal government but to the world at large. But the rest of his family, including Estelle, kept pulling him back from Silver’s outspoken brand of public protest, which risked for Faulkner not merely peace of mind but his very safety. Estelle’s attitude toward political activism is apparent in her letter to Silver, thanking him for a copy of his book Mississippi: The Closed Society: “Though we differ in some of our convictions, nevertheless I sincerely admire you for taking a positive stand on what you believe to be right. Personally, I have the nightly problem of keeping myself in tune & and am hardly a fit person to . . . judge the acts of others. . . . All of which may mean that I am a moral coward. I’m certainly no crusader!”6

That Faulkner consented to address a room full of historians on the issue of race seemed an especially fraught experience—one that perhaps only became possible because of his proximity to James Silver, who every day, at considerable risk to himself and his family, proclaimed his liberal views on race. If Jim Silver could do that much, surely William Faulkner could give a speech. Faulkner began his address by saying, “To live anywhere in the world of A.D. 1955 and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” He explained that his trips abroad had shown him that America’s “idea of individual human freedom and liberty and equality” was its most potent weapon against communism, which threatened, he believed, to encircle the United States in Asia and in Europe. The American devotion to freedom for all remained the “strongest force in the world.” He chose a word, “confederate,” that had a certain resonance in the room, and he used it to suggest that “all of us who are still free had better confederate, and confederate fast, with all others who still have a choice to be free—confederate not as black people nor white people nor pink nor blue nor green people, but as people who still are free with all other people who still are free; confederate together and stick together too, if we want a world or even a part of a world in which individual man can be free, to continue to endure.” Responding to a postcolonial world in Africa and Asia, he advocated aligning with nonwhite people so that they did not choose a new slavemaster, one that sought to discredit democracy by pointing to its failure in the West. Americans could win the competition with Communists by ensuring equality at home for a nonwhite population already sold on American values in spite of their treatment as inferiors.

Faulkner’s early education that justified slavery as an improvement over the supposed savagery and backwardness of Africa emerged when he suggested that “only three hundred years ago” black people were “eating rotten elephant and hippo meat in African rain-forests.” They lived “beside one of the biggest bodies of inland water on earth and never thought of a sail.” They moved from year to year to avoid “famine and pestilence and human enemies without once thinking of a wheel, yet in only three hundred years America produced Ralph Bunche and George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington.” “Nonwhites,” to use Faulkner’s term, had yet to produce someone like Klaus Fuchs, a German scientist, and the American couple, the Rosenbergs, who gave secret intelligence on the atomic bomb to the Soviets, or like the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in England, not to mention the blueblood Alger Hiss, a State Department official convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. For “every prominent communist or fellow-traveler like [Paul] Robeson, there are a thousand white ones,” Faulkner contended.

He made a distinction between integration and equality, arguing that the “Negro” was more interested in the latter. He did not use the word, but he had miscegenation in mind when he chastised his fellow southerners for their obsession with the purity of their white blood. The choice, he insisted, was not between colors but between “being slaves and being free.” The time was past for choosing “freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank.” Freedom was homogeneous and could not depend on color. To make it plain, he told these teachers of history: “The question is no longer of white against black. It is no longer whether or not white blood shall remain pure, it is whether or not white people shall remain free.” In their own self-interest, in other words, white people could not expect to maintain their liberty without according the same to nonwhites.

J. Merton England, editor of Journal of Southern History, an organ of the Southern Historical Association, called the program on which Faulkner appeared “the best we have ever had.” And yet his membership complained that it wasn’t history but “propaganda” and “crusading,” and “rubbing salt on some pretty sore hides.”7 Faulkner seemed undeterred, hosting several meetings at Rowan Oak to confer with Silver and others about combatting the efforts of the White Citizens’ Councils, who defended segregation. But Silver saw his friend waver, wanting to remain in the good graces of his family and native region.8

“I get so much threatening fan mail,” Faulkner wrote to Jean Stein two weeks after his Southern Historical Association talk, “so many nut angry telephone calls at 2 and 3 am. . . . I don’t like to not know just how serious they are. I wish I had Ben’s [Wasson] complacent view that only sporadic incidents will happen in Mississippi.”9 Conservative black people, however, seconded his position, opposing complete integration, as one black correspondent told him: “She says my stand does harm to her people, keeps the bad ones in her race stirred up, that what the Negro really wants is to be let alone in segregation as it is, that the Negroes are against NAACP.” At the same time, another influence was at work—a State Department that wanted to accede in a “limited manner” to African American demands for equal rights so as to mollify international opinion without disrupting American society. Thus the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in the State Department’s lexicon, stood not for some radical departure, an overturning of past practice, but an “achievement of the U.S. status quo.”10 To the diplomats, in other words, Faulkner was speaking their language. Rather than regarding him as a renegade southerner, they saw him as advancing the State Department line. The slow progress of racial equality suited the Foreign Service just fine. Better Faulkner’s cautionary words than radical integration and race riots. The experimental, innovative novelist proved to be quite an establishment stalwart, taking a paradoxical position that few of his fellow writers understood or appreciated.

But at home, in his family, Faulkner had to contend with brother John writing in the Memphis Commercial Appeal (December 4, 1955): “Communist gold supports the NAACP. This is of record. Our Supreme Court hands down decisions based not on precedent which is the basis of our system of justice but on the policies of the NAACP, which is communist-supported.” The white man, in John’s view, was now treated as subversive if he joined other white men opposing integration. But integration, he declared, was the “credo” of Communists and was part of the “final step” to destroy religion. “I have noticed this: Of those white men of the South who mount the platform to speak in favor of integration, I know a small few personally. Of those I do know, not a single one is a member or active communicant of any church.” One of those he knew was his brother William Faulkner.

The next day Faulkner drafted three letters in reply. They were not published and probably not sent to the Commercial Appeal. “I see in your correspondence of last Sunday that the threat of communism and of atheism (agnosticism) are being used to defend status quo segregation,” one draft began. He did not mention his brother in any of the drafts. To John’s concern about communism, Faulkner countered: “All that’s lacking of the old Hitler formula is the threat of Semitism.” Having established the link between southern racism and fascism, he noted that no proponent of segregation had addressed the following: Christianity recognized no distinctions “among men since whosoever believeth in Me shall never die”; the Golden Rule; the Constitution that declared, “there shall be no artificial inequality—creed race or money—among citizens of the United States.” If there were an agreement to abide by these principles and beliefs, “maybe all of us would be on one side.” Other drafts provided more historical context to his position and were later incorporated into his essay “On Fear,” which he would publish in June 1956.11 The pressures in the family were mounting and were about to erupt in an interview Faulkner would shortly grant to journalist Russell Howe.

Then, in February 1956, Autherine Lucy attempted to enroll in the University of Alabama.

“Go Slow Now”

On June 29, 1955, the NAACP secured a court order preventing the University of Alabama from denying Lucy’s admissions application. More than two years earlier she had been admitted and then rejected when the school discovered she was black. On February 3, 1956, she enrolled as a graduate student in library science, becoming the first African American to be admitted to a white school in Alabama. Three days later rioting broke out, the university president’s home was stoned, and threats were made against Lucy’s life. William Faulkner thought she would be killed. For her own safety, the school suspended Lucy’s enrollment. By the end of March the university had expelled her, claiming she had defamed the school. The NAACP, which had brought her case to court, decided not to pursue further legal action on her behalf.

The danger had been defused, but everyone understood that other African Americans would soon seek admission to white schools. During this tense period—before Lucy’s case had been resolved—Faulkner wrote his “Letter to a Northern Editor,” published in Life on March 5, hoping, as he later said, to “save the South and the whole United States too from the blot of Miss Autherine Lucy’s death.”12 He still hoped his letter would serve should another similar crisis ensue. It began: “I was against compulsory segregation. I am just as strongly against compulsory integration. Firstly of course from principle. Secondly because I dont believe it will work.” The extremes on both sides (the White Citizens’ Councils and the NAACP) were crowding out the middle, which is where he put himself. A federal government–enforced integration would remove the African American from underdog status and turn Faulkner and other moderates like him back to the “white embattled minority who are our blood and kin,” removing him and others like him as agents of change. He did not want to be forced to choose between his principles and his family. Then Faulkner made his controversial plea to the NAACP and other organizations pressing for integration: “Go slow now. Stop now for a time, a moment. You have the power now; you can afford to withhold for a moment the use of it as a force. You have done a good job, you have jolted your opponent off-balance and he is now vulnerable. But stop there for a moment; dont give him the advantage of a chance to cloud the issue by that purely automatic sentimental appeal to that same universal human instinct for automatic sympathy for the underdog simply because he is under.” In short, don’t allow the reactionary forces of the South to feel like the aggrieved party. To make his argument work, Faulkner had to believe that the pressure to change could come from within, as Gavin Stevens had contended in Intruder in the Dust. The North, in short, was forcing upon Faulkner the same decision that Robert E. Lee had made when he sided with his home state, the choice Faulkner had read about as a schoolboy.

Faulkner’s references to “blood and kin” arose out of an exchange with his brother John, who had declared that he would oppose any effort in Oxford to enroll a black person in a white school, and John would do it with a gun. Over dinner in an Oxford restaurant, one of Maud’s friends told Faulkner that he had upset his mother by stirring people up. He flushed and banged the table, but said nothing. This was a topic the Falkners almost never discussed, and for William Faulkner to have done so publicly had violated a taboo. Yet the restraint he showed with his own family seems to have driven him to say more, on the record, of what he could not say to his blood and kin.

What, then, would William Faulkner do? The question drove him to drink, paralyzing him with a fear for all—black and white—that would line up with him somewhere in the middle. Would he really have to take a side? The problem, he believed, was not only his own. He saw the civil rights struggle in conservative terms, as did some black people, who wrote to him fearing for themselves because of the militancy of civil rights organizations like the NAACP, and many white people, who wrote to vilify him for supporting integration. The northern liberal did not “know the South,” Faulkner insisted. “He cant know it from his distance. He assumes that he is dealing with a simple legal theory and a simple moral idea. He is not. He is dealing with a fact: the fact of an emotional condition of such fierce unanimity as to scorn the fact that it is a minority and which will go to any length and against any odds at this moment to justify and, if necessary, defend that condition and its right to it.”

Faulkner kept some of the responses to his Life article, and they reveal the range of opinion he had to confront. “Your Negroes come to New York, just as the Irish came after the potato blight, and the East-European Jews after the pograms [sic]. Your Negroes come for similar reasons: to find decency and build a better life,” wrote a City College of New York lecturer. “There is a saying in Harlem: ‘better a lamp post on Lenox Avenue, than the governor of Georgia.’ ”13 Another reader thought otherwise: “Last week while waiting in a doctors office I came across your artical [sic] in a magazine about segregation which I most heartily agree with and I know thousand of others up north do likewise. It makes you sick at some of the remarks and talks of the Politicians around New York City where they are only looking for the negro vote.”14

Before Autherine Lucy’s case had been resolved, Russell Howe interviewed William Faulkner for the London Sunday Times on February 21,15 when Lucy decided not to pursue her admission to the university. Faulkner was in New York at the time, continuing to see Jean Stein. In fact, before the Howe interview, she had poured out the liquor he had been drinking, which was like “burning books,” he told her. Perhaps she understood that the drinking would loosen certain inhibitions, providing a release from the unbearable tension of a man caught between his convictions, his family, and his heritage.16 Howe, like a good journalist, went right to the heart of the matter: “Wouldn’t a ‘go slow’ strategy lose some of the ground already gained?” Faulkner said: “I don’t know. I try to think of this in the long term view.” He believed that in three hundred years intermarriage would obliterate the “Negro” race: “It has happened to every racial minority everywhere, and it will happen here.” And yet Faulkner also said the black man did not really want to consort with white people: “He likes his own school, his own church. Segregation doesn’t have to imply inferiority.”

Faulkner thought the NAACP should continue its fight to enroll students in southern white schools until the “people of the South get so sick and tired of being harassed and worried they will have to do something about it.” His reference to the people of the South perhaps reflected his distrust of staunchly segregationist southern governments. But right now he feared an armed insurrection—even another Civil War. He regarded the Brown v. Board of Education decision as an extension of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that did not mean immediate progress. Instead, Faulkner advocated a kind of time-out, to let the white man “see that people laugh at him. Just let him see how silly and foolish he looks. Give him time—don’t force us.”

Faulkner almost seemed to be commenting on Shreve’s prediction in the last paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!—except that Faulkner turned that prediction into a political point: “This whole thing is not a confrontation of ideologies but of white folks against folks not white. It is world-wide. We must win the Indian, the Malayan, the sixteen million Negro Americans and the rest to the white camp, make it worth their while.” The remarks could certainly be interpreted as patronizing. And yet “go slow” was not code for “give up.” He supported the Montgomery bus boycott as a demonstration of how interdependent the races had become: “Today the white women of Montgomery have to go and fetch their Negro cooks by car. It is a good step, to let the white folks see that the world is looking on and laughing at them.”

But then came his most controversial comments: “If I have to choose between the United States government and Mississippi, then I’ll choose Mississippi. What I’m trying to do now is not have to make that decision. But if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it means going out into the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians.” He believed, in fact, that most black Mississippians would also be on the white side even at the cost of their own equality. He did not disavow the NAACP, but he rejected what he considered as militant tactics, which did not allow white southeners to feel generous that they were doing right by reversing nine decades of segregation. Black people had the moral case, Faulkner said, “but there is something stronger in man than a moral condition.” Those in the wrong would still resort to their guns, feeling the majority of the country was against them.

Faulkner’s use of “must have” when referring to his own family heritage suggests how unexamined the issue had remained over several generations: “My [great-]grandfather had slaves and he must have known that it was wrong, but he fought in one of the first regiments raised by the Confederate Army, not in the defense of his ethical position but to protect his native land from being invaded.” He even went so far as to say, “My Negro boys down on the plantation would fight against the North with me.” Perhaps some would, but others, like Loosh in The Unvanquished, probably would not. Perhaps his belief that racist ideology had been grafted onto an economy of “peonage” explained his conviction that his “boys” would fight beside him because their economic survival was at stake. This was the paternalistic mind-set of a farmer with three black tenant families. “He lets them have the profits, if any,” Malcolm Cowley reported, because the “Negroes don’t always get a square deal in Mississippi.”17 But the very word “plantation” was odd, since he had only a farm, and not even his great-grandfather could have been said to have been master of a plantation. This southern fantasy still had a grip: “remnants of antebellum identity remain embedded, shard-like, in this anguished southerner caught up in mid-1950s racial turmoil.”18

At the same time Faulkner paid tribute to black people who were more interested in education than white people. The black man’s tolerance showed a “sort of greatness”: “He’s calmer, wiser, more stable than the white man.” Black people rose above their anger, he said. Did he think of Charles Bon at that moment? Black people had done well with far less than white people. He even attributed black vices to white hegemony.

With all the talk of violence Howe wanted to know if Faulkner carried a gun. Faulkner said his friends had encouraged him to do so. But the author of “An Odor of Verbena,” a story that renounced violence even as Bayard Sartoris took up the cause of his violent father, explained: “I don’t think anyone will shoot me, it would cause too much of a stink. But the other liberals in my part of the country carry guns all the time.”

The Howe interview caused an uproar, which Faulkner acknowledged in a letter to the Reporter. He would have corrected some of the inflammatory remarks if he had seen the piece before it was printed: “They are statements which no sober man would make, nor, it seems to me, any sane man believe.” This seemed to be an admission that he had been drinking at the time of the interview. During the Autherine Lucy period he had been beside himself—the cliché seems unavoidable for a man who seemed to be outside himself looking in, seeing himself as a character in one of his own fateful scenes, cornered with no way out. His sober judgment: “The South is not armed to resist the United States that I know of, because the United States is neither going to force the South nor permit the South to resist or secede either.” He repudiated the foolish and dangerous statement that he or anyone else would side with a state against the Union: “A hundred years ago, yes. But not in 1956.”

In Howe’s reply, he stood by his “verbatim shorthand notes,” adding that if the “more Dixiecrat remarks misconstrue his thoughts, I, as an admirer of Mr. Faulkner’s, am glad to know it. But what I set down is what he said.”19 The Howe interview remained a disturbing departure from Faulkner’s more reasoned public pronouncements, but it was not so much an aberration as, again, a kind of recidivist reaction. To W. C. Neill, who had called Faulkner “Weeping Willie” in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Faulkner wrote: “I doubt if we can afford to waste even on Congress, let alone on one another, that wit which we will sorely need when again, for the second time in a hundred years, we Southerners will have destroyed our native land just because of niggers.”20

On March 1, David Kirk, a white University of Alabama student, troubled by the Autherine Lucy controversy on his campus, wrote to William Faulkner. Kirk had studied Faulkner with O. B. Emerson, an authority on Faulkner’s early reputation, and Kirk had a brother on the Ole Miss campus who had seen the Nobel Prize winner, a moderate on race so far as Kirk was concerned. “I was very alone and secretive about it, because knowing him was a danger for me, even a little more than I realized,” Kirk later said: “At that time the whole campus was racist—professors, students and chaplains.” Kirk had been beaten for setting up a barricade to protect Lucy.21 Faulkner wrote to assure Kirk that segregation could not continue and the South should abolish it, “if for no other reason than, by voluntarily giving the Negro the chance for whatever equality he is capable of, we will stay on top; he will owe us gratitude; where, if his equality is forced on us by law, compulsion from outside, he will be on top from being the victor, the winner against opposition. And no tyrant is more ruthless than he who was only yesterday the oppressed, the slave.” This thinking seems another holdover from the southern view of Reconstruction, in which black people were pictured in Birth of a Nation as shouldering white people aside and terrorizing them. He encouraged Kirk to confederate with the Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina. An “inter-State University organization” would promote “integrity and decency and sanity in this matter.” Perhaps that confederation could be extended across the South. “And remember this too,” Faulkner concluded: “you will be dealing with cowards. Most segregationists are afraid of something, possibly Negroes; I dont know. But they seem to function only as mobs, and mobs are always afraid of something, of something they doubt their ability to cope with single and in daylight.”

In April W. E. B. Du Bois challenged Faulkner to a debate, which he declined by telegram: “I DO NOT BELIEVE THERE IS A DEBATABLE POINT BETWEEN US. WE BOTH AGREE IN ADVANCE THE POSITION YOU WILL TAKE IS RIGHT MORALLY LEGALLY AND ETHICALLY. IF IT IS NOT EVIDENT TO YOU THAT THE POSITION I TAKE IN ASKING FOR MODERATION AND PATIENCE IS RIGHT PRACTICALLY THEN WE WILL BOTH WASTE OUR BREATH IN DEBATE.”22 Faulkner was just then recuperating from the stress of his pronouncements on race. On March 18, hemorrhaging and unconscious, he had been rushed to a Memphis hospital. The doctor told his brother Jack, the one male member of the family who had stopped drinking, that Faulkner’s alcoholism would end in his death. When told of the doctor’s prognosis, Faulkner only smiled. He said to a cousin, “If I can’t lead a normal life I’d just as soon be dead.” To him, it was normal to go on, as both his father and grandfather had done.

Drinking, for all its deleterious consequences, remained a coping mechanism—even if it provided only temporary relief, since it was impossible to go anywhere now without confronting race. In Bailey’s Woods, Faulkner encountered two boys playing. One of them asked what made him so different. Faulkner suggested they ask around and tell him the answer. One of the boys returned to say two people told him Faulkner was a “nigger lover.” Well, it was better than being a fascist, he said.23 He persisted, teaming up with Jim Silver and others in meetings at Rowan Oak for a one-issue satire, the Southern Reposure, taking aim at a segregationist stalwart, Mississippi senator James Eastland.24 Faulkner sent copies to friends in New York.25

In the June Harper’s, he tried again, suggesting in “On Fear: Deep South in Labor: Mississippi” that the South contained “rational, cultured, gentle, generous and kindly” people who would fight for segregation. It was those southerners he did not want to see sidelined because of their fear of change, which he knew was coming. They knew better, knew that segregation created an economy that benefited white people at the expense of black people, and the real threat to white hegemony would be the economic rise of black people.

Faulkner’s views on race derived, in part, from a deep distrust of the New Deal federal government: “We—Mississippi—sold our states’ rights back to the Federal Government when we accepted the first cotton price-support subsidy twenty years ago. . . . Our economy is the Federal Government. We no longer farm in Mississippi cotton-fields. We farm now in Washington corridors and Congressional committee-rooms.” But if he had no faith in the federal government, he seemed to have less in the silent southern churches, who did not speak on behalf of equality, of the Golden Rule, or support equal protection and rights under the U.S. Constitution. In private correspondence he also spoke negatively about the NAACP. To Harold Ober, Faulkner emphasized, “I am not trying to sell a point of view, scratch anybody’s back, NAACP or liberals or anybody else.”26 To Jean Stein, he noted, “You can see . . . the mistakes the NAACP makes in this country, since they don’t understand it either.”27 His “distrust of group action and behavior sabotaged his lifelong attempts to describe group behavior: he was often a clumsy commentator on cultural phenomena because he believed, at base, only in individual reality.”28

Then Faulkner turned toward his fellow Mississippians and excoriated them for their fears:

Why do we have so low an opinion of ourselves that we are afraid of people who by all our standards are our inferiors?—economically: i.e., they have so much less than we have that they must work for us not on their terms but on ours; educationally: i.e., their schools are so much worse than ours that the Federal Government has to threaten to intervene to give them equal conditions; politically: i.e., they have no recourse in law for protection from nor restitution for injustice and violence.

Why do we have so low an opinion of our blood and traditions as to fear that, as soon as the Negro enters our house by the front door, he will propose marriage to our daughter and she will immediately accept him?

What had turned Faulkner into a Jeremiah? His travel had not been only for the purposes of recreation and remuneration. And he seemed surprised: “Suddenly about five years ago and with no warning to myself, I adopted the habit of travel. Since then I have seen (a little of some, a little more of others) the Far and Middle East, North Africa, Europe and Scandinavia.” He had discovered that the American dream lived abroad. People believed in “the idea of individual human freedom and liberty and equality on which our nation was founded, which our founding fathers postulated the word ‘America’ to mean.” In view of this global perspective, Americans at home had better unite and “take in with us as many as we can get of the nonwhite peoples of the earth who are not completely free yet but who want and intend to be, before that other force which is opposed to individual freedom, befools and gets them.” Ultimately, he implied, the victorious desire to enforce racial prejudice would result in the enslavement of all. One of the letters attacking Faulkner had called him “Weeping Willie.”29 In this, his most prophetic piece, he sounded indeed like that other weeping prophet, warning his people to reform their ways before it was too late.

Gandhi’s Way

In September, in Ebony, Faulkner published “A Letter to the Leaders in the Negro Race,” repudiating once again the incendiary remarks in the Howe review and reiterating his “go slow” doctrine. This time he added, “be flexible.” He had been relieved when Autherine Lucy had withdrawn from additional legal action: “I want to believe that the forces supporting Miss Lucy were wise enough themselves not to send her back—not merely wise enough to save her life, but wise enough to foresee that even her martyrdom would in the long run be less effective than the simple, prolonged, endless nuisance-value of her threat.” He wanted to see other Lucys persist in applying to white schools until white people realized that black people would not abandon the cause of equality. In effect, he argued for pursuing civil rights on a case-by-case basis, taking into account local conditions and adopting nonviolence, “Gandhi’s way.” He never mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. but claimed he would join the NAACP if he were a black man. He was not against collective action, but he did not think it should be mandated: “I would say that all the Negroes in Montgomery should support the bus-line boycott, but never that all of them must, since by that must, we will descend to the same methods which those opposing us are using to oppress us, and our victory will be worth nothing until it is willed and not compelled.” Faulkner rarely addressed his own presumptions, but perhaps given his audience, he had to change course: “It is easy enough to say glibly, ‘If I were a Negro, I would do this or that.’ But a white man can only imagine himself for the moment a Negro; he cannot be that man of another race and griefs and problems.” Faulkner urged, nevertheless, that black people handle themselves with grace and dignity. Then he quoted Booker T. Washington: “I will let no man, no matter what his color, ever make me hate him.” Turn patience and dignity against the impetuous and unruly white man. Some of the wording remained patronizing, as in his injunction to accept “the responsibilities of physical cleanliness and of moral rectitude.” Earlier he had said that black people had already exhibited such virtues. His closing words, spoken in the “if I were a Negro” mode, crossed a line he had maintained in his fiction: never speaking directly for black people in any of his characters.

“The Far Side of the Moon”

In the fall of 1956, Dean enrolled at Ole Miss, and by spring she had become politically active through the influence of her next-door neighbor Sandra Baker Moore, whose friends were “so radical compared to my usual circle that they might have come from the far side of the moon.” Soon she became involved in publishing an underground newspaper attacking white supremacists. Meeting in secrecy in the university’s YMCA building, they posted lookouts while mimeographing broadsides, sent runners into dorms, fraternity and sorority houses, and dispersed one by one so as not to attract attention. Even so, they were called “nigger lovers” in the university cafeteria. No Falkner had ever actually engaged in public protests. But who had paid for the press effort, including repair of the mimeograph machine? They speculated it might be that notorious liberal James Silver. She had never considered that her Pappy had funded the paper until years later Silver told her so.

Why had it not occurred to Dean that her own uncle stood by her? Perhaps because no one in the Falkner family ever supported integration—even if William Faulkner had put himself on record as doing so. What could he have said to his own mother, who instructed Dean that all men were created equal “with the exceptions of nigrahs, foreigners, Catholics, and Jews.”30