AS RICHARD WRIGHT toured Scandinavia demanding that white men listen, William Faulkner checked into the Algonquin Hotel in New York. It was October 1956, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower had tapped the Mississippi writer to lead a new program aimed at easing Cold War tensions by bringing “People to People” together, literally. The appointment bore some irony; Faulkner was not known to have been particularly personable. According to Allen Tate, a member of the Nashville Fugitives, Faulkner was “arrogant and ill-mannered,” a curmudgeon who “usually failed to reply when spoken to” and refused to socialize with other southern writers, preferring instead to hold himself out as a simple, down-to-earth “farmer.” Tate found this “pretentious,” partly because Faulkner’s reputation hinged on his literary genius, not farming, but also because Faulkner refused to associate with “serious” writers like Tate, preferring to surround himself with “sycophants.”1
It was a harsh assessment, colored perhaps by envy as much as truth. Faulkner was known for being aloof—a loner compared to the cliquish Fugitives—but he was also a major figure, popular not simply among writers but New York socialites, Virginia fox hunters, French intellectuals, even Hollywood. To cast Faulkner’s fans as sycophants oozed of sour grapes. Certainly, nonliterary types liked him, but he also mingled with America’s literary elite, including figures better known than Tate. After checking into the Algonquin, for example, Faulkner cabbed up to East 64th Street to have drinks with John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow, both acclaimed novelists, and William Carlos Williams, a respected poet. Armed with a “gigantic Old Fashioned glass” full of bourbon, Faulkner engaged his peers on how they might best serve People to People, prompting Williams to suggest that the group strive to free Ezra Pound, an American poet who had been confined to a mental institution in Virginia after supporting fascism during World War II. Bellow balked, citing Pound’s anti-Semitic views, while Steinbeck wondered whether the group might support airlifting Hungarians from the clutches of the Soviets, who had recently seized Budapest. Faulkner listened skeptically, sipped bourbon, and waited quietly to hear from another writer who he had contacted about People to People, a Fugitive and old friend of Allen Tate’s, Robert Penn Warren.2
Warren had long held Faulkner in high regard. In 1941, he publicly defended the Mississippi author against charges that one of his novels, The Hamlet, miscast the South as a heap of “gothic ruins” populated by grotesque characters preternaturally obsessed with “the horrible and disgusting.” The attack came from a reviewer who had focused on a scene in The Hamlet depicting a sexual relationship between a man and a cow. Warren recognized the grotesquery of the liaison but read it symbolically, concluding that the character embodied a southern archetype of Faulkner’s invention, a “Snopes,” someone who traded tradition, morality, and “humanism” for self-interest, immorality, and “animalism.” The counterpoint to such venality was another Faulkner invention, the “Sartoris,” a member of a fictional clan that embodied the moral sensibility and honor of the Old South, not just its plantation elite but also its independent yeoman-farmer class.3
Faulkner conjured the struggle between “the Sartoris world” and “the Snopes world” repeatedly in his fiction, locating their battles in an imaginary landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, based on his home in Mississippi, a place where the honorable Sartoris clan was joined by equally honorable families like “the de Spains” and “the Compsons,” who boasted noble pasts but struggled, usually in vain, against modernity, industrialism, and the Snopes. The Snopes rejected paternalism and possessed a “bitter hatred and fear and economic rivalry of the Negroes,” siding with vicious populists like Theodore Bilbo, a two-term governor of Mississippi who exploited racial fears of miscegenation to garner votes in the 1920s. The Snopes also joined the Ku Klux Klan—not its first Reconstruction-era iteration, which Faulkner found to have been “honest and serious” in its struggle against Yankee occupation, but the second Klan, a group who emerged in the 1920s endorsing Prohibition, opposing immigration, and targeting Catholics and Jews as well as blacks.4
It was a complicated mythology. Faulkner’s views of southern declension seemed to suggest a romantic—if deluded—portrait of the Old South, a sense that the region had been governed by codes of honor and noble principles, not violence and exploitation. This was certainly how the Fugitives—also blind to the harsh realities of slavery—read him. Allen Tate declared that arrogance aside, Faulkner’s greatest achievement was his ability to convey the manner in which “the destruction of the Old South released native forces of disorder and corruption,” namely free blacks and violent, Snopish whites, “accelerated by the brutal exploitation of the Carpetbaggers and an army of occupation,” essentially Reconstruction, a tragic episode not because it failed to uphold the rights of former slaves but because it replaced the antebellum South’s “old order of dignity and principle” with “upstarts and cynical materialists” like the Snopes. Cleanth Brooks, an old Fugitive friend of Tate and Warren, found a similar thread in Faulkner’s work, noting that Faulkner tended to focus on “the breakup of the traditional society of antebellum times and the abandonment of its code,” a slow ruin that left “children bereft of proper fathers or mothers, reared as orphans, thrown too much upon their own resources, or deprived of the healthy resources of a big family.”5
However, Faulkner’s portrait of the Old South was not all moonlight and magnolias. In a 1936 novel entitled Absalom Absalom! Faulkner told the story of a poor white character named Thomas Sutpen who emerges from obscurity to build a vast plantation, Sutpen’s Hundred, in northwestern Yoknapatawpha County. The story echoed the lives of many plantation owners in early Mississippi, a frontier state that joined the Union relatively late and lacked the settled rhythms of older dominions like Virginia. Faulkner underscored the Mississippi/Virginia dichotomy by having Sutpen visit an established plantation in Virginia as a teenager only to be denied entrance through the front door by a black slave because he lacks the appropriate social standing. Outraged, Sutpen travels to Haiti where he becomes an overseer, then to Mississippi, where he claims one hundred square miles of Indian land and creates his massive plantation, replete with an ostentatious mansion. Once ascendant, Sutpen appears to have attained the planter ideal, only to then lose most of his property during the Civil War, finally suffering death at the hands of a poor white farmer, the very class of southerner that he had tried to escape.
At first blush, Absalom Absalom! was an allegory of the Old South—a rise-and-fall drama that mapped onto Faulkner’s own mythology of an ascendant plantation elite wiped out by war and poverty. However, Faulkner’s story plumbs darker depths, casting Sutpen’s tale not simply as a romance about the Old South but a discordant set of memories recovered by Quentin Compson, a crumbling Sartorian who pieces together Sutpen’s tale while a student at Harvard in 1909, almost half a century after the Civil War. Like a generation of southerners born after 1865, Quentin struggles with Sutpen’s legacy, in part because the plantation owner had fought valiantly for the Confederacy and lost, in part because he lacked “honor” and defied many of the norms later associated with the planter elite, including many of the ideals that Faulkner and the Fugitives themselves admired. For example, Sutpen is rough, unrefined, and ruthless in his business dealings. He also competes with his slaves, a hallmark of Snopesism, demanding that they physically wrestle with him in his off-time. Such odd behavior leads Sutpen to suffer rejection at the hands of his plantation-owning peers, suggesting that he is not an archetypical hero after all, not a Sartoris but a Snopes.6
For those who read Absalom as an allegory of the Old South, Sutpen’s rise proved a paradox. If Sutpen was more like a Snopes than a Sartoris, then what sense did it make for Faulkner to argue that the Snopes’s had not risen to ascendance until after the Civil War? What was there, if anything, to the idea that the Old South had adhered to a code of honor and principles? According to Cleanth Brooks, the answer to the riddle was that Sutpen was an outlier, and his story not necessarily an allegory of the Old South at all. “Sutpen resembles the modern American,” noted Brooks, not the southern planter. He was “a ‘planner’ who works by blueprint and on a schedule,” someone who is “rationalistic and scientific, not traditional,” and who ultimately resembles a “Yankee, not a southerner at all.”7
Sutpen’s outsider status, suggested Brooks, was linked to his downfall. Unlike the mythic gentleman planter, he pursues modern ideals: individual achievement, naked ambition, and immediate self-gratification. He flouts conventional norms and suffers for it. Perhaps the most important norm that he tramples, the “dark secret” that prompts the “Sutpen tragedy,” as Brooks put it, is his violation of the South’s longstanding prohibition against interracial sex. Careless in his pursuit of sexual partners, Sutpen fathers two interracial children, first in Haiti by accident, then intentionally in Mississippi with a former slave, yielding a daughter who burns down his mansion.8
Although many critics read Absalom, Absalom! as a story about “the curse of slavery,” this was, in Cleanth Brooks’s view, “an oversimplification.” “Slavery was an evil,” he conceded, “but other slaveholders avoided Sutpen’s kind of defeat and were exempt from his special kind of moral blindness.” That blindness proves central to the novel, not a critique of slavery per se but rather a problem with slavery that had long bothered white southerners: interracial progeny. While an embarrassment to polite society, interracial children proved a recurring byproduct of the South’s peculiar institution, particularly in Mississippi, a frontier region that was also a “sexual playground” for rapacious slave-owners. While the children born in this playground were initially identified as black and rendered slaves, subsequent generations of interracial children blurred the “invisible line” of race, not only fooling hapless owners like Thomas Sutpen but undermining the moral basis of slavery itself.9
This was a dilemma. If slavery hinged on a clear delineation between white and black but also incentivized liaisons between white and black, how could the South’s racial order survive? According to Thomas Jefferson, who was himself involved in an interracial relationship with a slave, the answer was “manners and morals.” Sutpen had neither. He fails to vet his partners appropriately, exhibiting an “innocence” about racial pedigree that would lead him to carelessly father an interracial child in Haiti, Charles Bon, who would follow him to Mississippi and ultimately destroy the lives of Sutpen’s legitimate progeny, first by courting his white daughter, Judith, and then by suffering death at the hands of his white son, Henry—all because he is black. “So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can’t bear,” exclaims Bon towards the end of the novel, referring to his love for his half-sister—just before his half-brother kills him.10
The juxtaposition is stark. As Faulkner told it, Henry had been alerted to the fact that Charles is his half-brother prior to the Civil War, agonized over it, but finally concluded that Charles should marry Judith regardless, even though she is kin. However, once Henry learns that Charles is black, Henry moves to stop the marriage, leading Charles to raise the specter of “miscegenation” as an offense even worse than incest. This underscores the centrality of interracial sex to Sutpen’s demise, even as it provides a clue into Faulkner’s own attitudes about race at the time he wrote the novel in the 1930s. Interracial sex had been a persistent problem in the antebellum South. “Miscegenation,” however, was a postbellum word. Slave owners used the term “amalgamation” to describe interracial liaisons, not “miscegenation.” The term only became popular in the region after the Civil War, first coined by two New York “politicos” in 1864 and then publicized by southern proponents of Jim Crow, a system that, unlike slavery, made prohibitions against interracial sex the very “foundation of post–Civil War white supremacy,” a sharp turn away from slavery’s tacit encouragement of interracial progeny and a move toward a new society that encouraged separate racial “development.” This was the world that Faulkner grew up in, and the world that Quentin Compson grew up in as well. By having Compson narrate the story of Charles Bon and Thomas Sutpen, Faulkner quietly invited readers to reconsider the antebellum South through the lens of Jim Crow, a story where Sutpen’s crime is not exploitation but integration: integration in the fields, integration in the wrestling arena, integration in the bedroom.11
That Faulkner would locate miscegenation at the center of slavery’s “curse,” transforming Sutpen’s grand plantation into what Faulkner called a “burning house,” foreshadowed Robert Penn Warren’s gothic romance Band of Angels, which also focuses on the dilemma of interracial progeny, with Amantha Starr as a female counterpoint to Charles Bon. Both writers seemed intrigued by characters who could cross the color line, suffering “tragic alienation” as a result. More normal and well-adjusted were black figures who remained firmly in their racial sphere—whether or not they possessed interracial heritage—a point that Warren made in his book Segregation: The Inner Conflict, and that Faulkner made in two novels, The Sound and the Fury and Intruder in the Dust. In the first, Faulkner told the story of the Compson family’s harrowing decline from antebellum grandeur to postbellum squalor, a saga in which the only unbroken character is the family’s black maid, Dilsey, who labors selflessly for the Compson family while drawing strength and hope from the black church. By contrast, the once-dignified Compsons emerge as a ship of fools suffering various forms of moral degeneration and mental illness. They include Benjy, Quentin’s mentally impaired brother; Quentin himself, who suffers a nervous breakdown and commits suicide at Harvard; and finally Jason, Quentin’s amoral brother who ends up stealing money from his sister, Caddy, after blackmailing her. Compared to such human wreckage, Dilsey appears heroic and composed—itself a type of stereotype—though one that was more positive than negative. Faulkner’s heroic, if one-dimensional portrait of Dilsey hinted that, in his mind, segregation served as a shield protecting blacks from white pathology, a point Dilsey herself makes when she warns her daughter Frony to “tend to yo business en let de white folks tend to deir’n,” a policy she violates only once, when she brings Benjy to her segregated black church, a display of black compassion directed at the South’s white ruins.12
Perhaps Faulkner’s most powerful black character is Lucas Beauchamp, an “intractable and composed” figure who boasts mixed heritage but stands up defiantly to whites, refusing their handouts, resisting their advances, and waiting patiently in jail while he is gradually exonerated from a false murder charge—the main theme of Faulkner’s 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust. Even more than Dilsey, Beauchamp emerges as an exemplar, not just of the black South but of the South itself, one of the few descendants of southern aristocracy in Faulkner’s fiction who had not succumbed to moral decline. That Beauchamp happens to be black was important, for it underscored Faulkner’s larger sense that racial discrimination in the South had forged black character—tempering it like steel—itself a stereotype rationalizing segregation as a type of social defense mechanism, or what Warren termed a briar patch. Beauchamp’s white attorney Gavin Stevens hints at this, reasoning that southerners were a “homogenous people,” and black southerners possessed even “better homogeneity” than whites, for they had exhibited “patience even when [they] didn’t have hope” and possessed not “just the will but the desire to endure.” Black endurance was exemplified by Beauchamp, a character who remains resolute despite the looming threat of his own death for a crime that he did not commit. He also exemplifies southern “homogeneity,” an intriguing allusion to the idea that African Americans comprised a “coherent social group” embodying the best of the South: a committed resistance to the vagaries of modern life and a stoic integrity unshaken even by the threat of imminent death. Stevens indicates as much, arguing that African Americans were the most southern of southerners for they appreciated “the old few simple things,” including “music,” religion, and “a little earth for his own sweat to fall on among his own green shoots and plants.”13
Stevens’s point is oddly reminiscent of the argument that Donald Davidson had made in the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, essentially that African Americans exemplified southern traits, a commitment to community, a tie to the land, and a will to endure, even against insurmountable odds. Like Warren, Faulkner recognized injustice in Jim Crow but also saw something inspirational about the black struggle. “We,” argues Gavin Stevens, “should confederate: swap him [African Americans] the rest of the economic and political and cultural privileges which are his right, for the reversion of his capacity to wait, and endure and survive.” The idea of a racial “swap” seemed to merge the Agrarians’ vision of extolling black virtues with Ralph Ellison’s and Richard Wright’s interest in black moral superiority, a type of gentlemanly arrangement that recognized black virtues and avoided the destruction of black culture called for by Gunnar Myrdal. For Stevens, and possibly Faulkner as well, this was the way out of the burning house. Blacks should gain white privileges, and whites should acquire black virtues. “Then we would prevail,” declares Stevens, “together we would dominate the United States; we would present a front not only impregnable but not even to be threatened by a mass of people who no longer have anything in common save a frantic greed for money and a basic fear of a failure of national character which they hide from one another behind a loud lipservice to a flag.”14
Speaking through Gavin Stevens, Faulkner provided a redemptive vision of America with the black South as a beacon, extolling perseverance, endurance, and a resistance to the cowardice, self-interest, and superficiality of the modern era. This was a resounding rejection of Myrdal’s American Dilemma, a call not to subsume black culture into the white mainstream but to extol it.
Whether Faulkner had been angered by Myrdal was not clear, though he did engage one of Myrdal’s supporters as he mulled over the plot for Intruder in the Dust: black author and Mississippi native Richard Wright. Wright had drawn inspiration from Myrdal’s study in the composition of his own autobiography, Black Boy, which was published in 1945. Faulkner read the memoir and felt moved enough to contact Wright directly, commending his work. “I have just read Black Boy,” exclaimed Faulkner in a personal letter to Wright. “It needed to be said, and you said it well.” What was said, of course, was that the American South harbored virulent racism, far more than the injustices portrayed in Faulkner’s own fiction. “I hope you will keep on saying it,” encouraged Faulkner, a comment suggesting that he at least partially understood Wright’s perspective, a trait that separated him from many other prominent white Mississippians at the time, including Mississippi congressmen Theodore Bilbo and John Rankin, who issued a joint statement declaring Black Boy “the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing” that they had ever seen.15
Faulkner adopted a more positive view but expressed doubts about Wright’s larger project. “I am afraid,” he lamented, that Black Boy “will accomplish little of what it should accomplish, since only they will be moved and grieved by it who already know and grieve over this situation.” The sentence was telling. Faulkner seemed to suggest that he understood Wright’s critique of the South, and maybe even sympathized with it. He also seemed to indicate, however, that those who most needed correction, the Bilbos and Rankins of the world, would reject the book—which, of course, they did. Instead, Faulkner counseled Wright to return to the novel and abandon the memoir. “I hope you will keep on saying it,” encouraged Faulkner, “but I hope you will say it as an artist, as in Native Son. I think you will agree that the good lasting stuff comes out of one individual’s imagination and sensitivity to and comprehension of the suffering of Everyman, Anyman, not out of the memory of his own grief.”16
Why Faulkner found Native Son more compelling than Black Boy was not completely clear. He seemed to indicate that it was a matter of genre, not content, and that the novel lent itself to more creativity, perhaps more general appeal. Then again, perhaps Faulkner liked Native Son because it was set in Chicago, not his own backyard. Only a year earlier, a Georgia writer named Lillian Smith had published a controversial novel about an interracial romance rent apart by violence and racism. The protagonists included a young man—white—who is ultimately murdered by his paramour’s brother—black—and an innocent African American lynched for his death. The book, entitled Strange Fruit, caused a stir in cities like Boston and Detroit, where it was banned, and drove home the theme that Jim Crow distorted human relationships, incited violence, and incentivized pathological behavior. Wright’s memoir followed soon after, a double punch that may have left Faulkner, the South’s preeminent man of letters, feeling some pressure to respond. Smith’s book proved a major literary event, as did the publication of Black Boy, the latter soaring to the top of the bestseller list in April 1945 and remaining there through the summer. Prominent critics like Lionel Trilling and Sinclair Lewis embraced Wright’s book, Wright himself embarked on a high-profile speaking tour, and Life magazine sent a crew to Mississippi to report on the places where Wright grew up. Many read the memoir as a complement to the “Double V” campaign, an effort by African Americans to link America’s fight for democracy abroad during World War II with a similar fight for racial justice at home, spearheaded by the federal government.17
Talk of federal intervention in the South spiked in December 1947, when a committee assembled by President Harry Truman issued a report calling for federal laws against lynching, police brutality, poll taxes, school segregation, racial covenants, and discrimination in employment. Faulkner sat down in the wake of the report and composed Intruder in the Dust, relying on Gavin Stevens to speak out against federal meddling in southern affairs. “That’s why we must resist the North,” declares Stevens in the book, for the North had already tried to reform the South, “and have been admitting for seventy-five years now that they failed.” Abraham Lincoln had humiliated the region, argued Faulkner, a problem that still haunted Dixie. “Lucas Beauchamp’s freedom was made an article in our constitutions,” argues Stevens, referring to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, “and Lucas Beauchamp’s master was not merely beaten to his knees but trampled for ten years on his face in the dust to make him swallow it, yet only three short generations later they are faced once more with the necessity of passing legislation to set Lucas Beauchamp free.” It seemed a direct allusion to the president’s civil rights report, which called for a battery of new laws, all enforced by an expanded Department of Justice with regional offices in every southern state.18
Faulkner found such measures counterproductive, more likely to stoke southern hatred than calm it. Instead, he envisioned a more organic process by which southerners would themselves come to accept blacks gradually. “What we are really defending,” declares Stevens in Intruder in the Dust, is “the privilege of setting [African Americans] free ourselves: which we will have to do for the reason that nobody else can.” Not the North but the South had to address racial injustice, argued Faulkner, because prejudice was ultimately a matter of personal distaste, not something to be legislated away. Of course, this omitted the elaborate network of rules that comprised Jim Crow, even as it presupposed that white southerners would spontaneously stand up to fight discrimination, not something that seemed particularly likely at the time. Faulkner, though, seemed to hold out hope that if white southerners could only be led to appreciate that which was most valuable about the black South, its ability to “endure” for example, then some kind of alliance between the races could be forged, just as Gavin Stevens predicts.19
Faulkner extolled black virtues in a series of public appearances in the 1950s, beginning with an august address before the Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm on December 10, 1950. Standing before a room full of Gunnar Myrdal’s countrymen, Faulkner took the opportunity to strum an Agrarian chord, explaining that modernity had pushed humankind to the brink of nuclear destruction. “There are no longer problems of the spirit,” lamented Faulkner in Stockholm, “there is only the question: When will we be blown up?” Sounding like a Fugitive, Faulkner invoked southern virtues to counter impending global apocalypse, the very same virtues that his African American characters had long exemplified. “I believe that man will not merely endure,” he announced, relying on the same wording that he frequently invoked when speaking about blacks, but “he will prevail,” an optimistic prediction that Faulkner attributed to “soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance,” all qualities that he had associated with the African American experience in The Sound and the Fury and Intruder in the Dust. Although he did not mention race explicitly, Faulkner’s words conjured images not of Quentin Compson or Thomas Sutpen—both flawed white men—but his most powerful black characters, Lucas Beauchamp and Dilsey, the maid who brings her poor, suffering, mentally impaired charge Benjy to church.20
From 1950 to 1954, Faulkner wove together black virtues and Agrarian themes in a string of public addresses that would ultimately foreshadow his reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. On May 28, 1951, for example, he told a class of graduating high school students in Oxford, Mississippi, that the “danger” facing America was not racial discrimination or even nuclear annihilation but big government, a problem threatening “individuality” by reducing individuals to an “unthinking mass,” whether by “giving” them “free food” or “valueless money” which they had not worked for. In another talk a year later, Faulkner sounded a similar note, lamenting the increased reliance of Americans on government programs, “relief roll[s],” and “gravy trough[s],” compromising the virtue of “responsibility,” a trait exemplified by Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, and Booker T. Washington, the same black leader who had endorsed segregation in Atlanta in 1895, and that Robert Penn Warren had praised in his “Briar Patch” essay. Faulkner’s nod to Washington coincided with his larger campaign to write positive black characters into narratives that whites themselves would find sympathetic while extolling black independence and isolation from white corruption.21
Then came Brown. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court cited Gunnar Myrdal directly to support the argument that southern states needed to desegregate their public schools, a decision that sparked a prompt backlash. Mere weeks after the ruling, a prominent state judge in Mississippi named Thomas Pickens Brady delivered a charged address in Greenwood—only eighty miles from Faulkner’s home—warning that school integration would lead to miscegenation, the very same problem that Faulkner had broached in Absalom, Absalom! An alarmed audience member became so incensed by Brady’s words that he summoned a group of community leaders in Indianola to form the first Citizens’ Council, the same group that Warren had targeted in his book Segregation: The Inner Conflict.22
The backlash was roughly what Gavin Stevens predicts in Intruder in the Dust. Rather than boost support for integration, Brown antagonized white people. Faulkner found himself picking up the pieces at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where he delivered an address before a roomful of historians on November 10, 1955. The Nobel Prize winner began by noting that Cold War pressures demanded America do more to live up to its ideal of racial equality. “We have no other weapon to fight communism with but this,” he declared, confessing that “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.” Echoing Richard Wright, Faulkner noted that a frightening trend was emerging in the developing world, a place where “in only ten years, we have watched the nonwhite peoples expel, by bloody violence when necessary, the white man from all of the middle east and Asia which he once dominated.” The answer, which echoed Wright again, was for the United States to right its racial wrongs and then “teach all other peoples” in the world about American values, including freedom and equality.23
However, Faulkner did not make an emphatic plea for integration. “I am not convinced that the Negro wants integration in the sense that some of us claim to fear that he does,” he declared, alluding to Brady’s fears that integration would lead to interracial sex. Instead, Faulkner echoed Warren, suggesting that blacks may have been happy with some level of separation provided they were guaranteed equality, not “equality per se” as he put it but equality of opportunity, or at least the possibility to exercise one’s talents and reap some reward, “to make the best one can of one’s life within one’s capacity and capability, without fear of injustice or oppression or threat of violence.” If the South had only lived up to its promise of providing equal accommodations to blacks, he hinted, “there would have been no Supreme Court decision about how we run our schools.”24
Not long after his Memphis address, Faulkner received an invitation from Life magazine to submit a piece in the same series that featured Robert Penn Warren’s travelogue. Faulkner agreed but took a slightly different tack from Warren, not touring the South with a notepad but writing instead a “Letter to the North.” The missive came out in March 1956 and criticized the NAACP, which had taken events like the killing of Emmett Till to stereotype white southerners as violent racists, “a people decadent and even obsolete through inbreeding and illiteracy.” Although Faulkner had written his share of books about white decadence, he felt that black activists were obscuring the existence of moderates like himself who respected black achievements and were open to the idea of doing away with “compulsory segregation,” meaning Jim Crow laws. However, Faulkner also maintained that no one in the South—white or black—longed to spend more time with members of the opposite race. He even mentioned a letter he had received from a black woman who, he asserted, was “writing for and in the name of the pastor and the entire congregation of her church,” worried that he was taking a stand too favorable to civil rights. “Please, Mr. Faulkner,” began the woman’s letter, “stop talking and be quiet . . . you are not helping us. You are doing us harm. You are playing in to the hands of the NAACP so that they are going to use you to make trouble for our race that we don’t want.” The woman then impugned Emmett Till, complaining that “the Till boy got exactly what he asked for, coming down there with his Chicago ideas, and that all his mother wanted was to make money out of the role of her bereavement.” Whether Faulkner actually received such a letter was not clear, but his reveal coincided with his longstanding view that African Americans themselves harbored doubts about integration. Not surprisingly, he opposed the idea that the government should move aggressively toward achieving “compulsory integration,” a goal that Faulkner found unrealistic. “I must go on record as opposing the forces outside the South which would use legal or police compulsion to eradicate that evil overnight,” declared Faulkner in his Life piece, noting that “I don’t believe compulsion will work.” Faulkner cautioned the NAACP to “go slow,” admitting outright that he sided neither with them nor the Citizens’ Councils, but stood in “the middle,” opposed to the “immorality of discrimination by race” but also more prone to work “to help the Negro improve his condition” than to endorse “immediate and unconditional integration,” a bid for the same type of gradualism that Gavin Stevens endorses while mulling over the fate of Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust.25