William Faulkner on Hardship, Conflict, and Change, 1930-1954

1. William Faulkner on Hardship, Conflict, and Change, 1930-1954 Jay Watson, University of Mississippi jwatson@olemiss.edu

2. The cow nuzzles at me, moaning. “You’ll just have to wait. What you got in you aint nothing to what I got in me, even if you are a woman too.” She follows me, moaning. Then the dead, hot, pale air breathes on my face again. He could fix it all right, if he just would. And he dont even know it. He could do everything for me if he just knowed it. The cow breathes upon my hips and back, her breath warm, sweet, stertorous, moaning. The sky lies flat down the slope, upon the secret clumps. Beyond the hill sheet-lightning stains upward and fades. The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked through my clothes. I said You dont know what worry is. I dont know what it is. I dont know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I dont know whether I can cry or not. I dont know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth. (As I Lay Dying, 63-64, Dewey Dell)

3. In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I dont know what I am. I dont if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet their that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the ran shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. . . . How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. (As I Lay Dying, 80-81, Darl)

4. 2 It was one Friday morning three years ago. And the group of men at work in the planer shed looked up, and saw the stranger standing there, watching them. They did not know how long he had been there. He looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either. His shoes were dusty and his trousers were soiled. But they were of decent serge, sharply creased, and his shirt was soiled but it was a white shirt, and he wore a tie and a stiffbrim straw hat that was quite new, cocked at an angle arrogant and baleful above his still face. He did not look like a professional hobo in his professional rags, but there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his own. And that he carried this knowledge with him always as though it were a banner, with a quality ruthless, lonely and almost proud. (Light in August, 31-32)

5. She carried a palm leaf fan and a small bundle tied neatly in a bandanna handkerchief. It contained among other things thirtyfive cents in nickels and dimes. Her shoes were a pair of his own which her brother had given her. They were but slightly worn, since in the summer neither of them wore shoes at all. When she felt the dust of the road beneath her feet she removed the shoes and carried them in her hand. She has been doing that now for almost four weeks. Behind her the four weeks, the evocation of far is a peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices: Lucas Burch? I dont know. I dont know of anybody by that name around here. This road? It goes to Pocahontas. He might be there. It’s possible. Here’s a wagon that’s going a piece of the way. It will take you that far. (Light in August, 6-7)

6. These people who lie about and conceal the ownership of land and property in order to hold relief jobs which they have no intention of performing, standing on their constitutional rights against having to work, who jeopardize the very job itself through petty and transparent subterfuge to acquire a free mattress which they intend to attempt to sell; who would relinquish even the job, if by so doing they could receive free food and a place, any rathole, in town to sleep in; who, as farmers, make false statements to get seed loans which they will later misuse, and then react in loud vituperative outrage and astonishment when caught at it. (“The Tall Men,” 46)

7. . . . with the rest of the world all full of pretty neon lights burning night and day both, and easy, quick money scattering itself around everywhere for any man to grab a little, and every man with a shiny new automobile already wore out and throwed away and the new one delivered before the first one was even paid for, and everywhere a fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA and a dozen other three-letter reasons for a man not to work. (“The Tall Men,” 58)

8. “That first year, when county agents was trying to explain the new system to farmers, the agent come out here and tried to explain it to [the McCallums], explaining how they would cut down the crop, but that the Government would pay farmers the difference, and so they would actually be better off than trying to farm by themselves. “‘Why, we’re much obliged,” Buddy says. ‘But we don’t need no help. We’ll just make the cotton like we always done; if we can’t make a crop of it, that will just be our lookout and our loss, and we’ll try again.’ . . . [They] hauled it all the way into Jefferson before they found out they couldn’t sell it because, in the first place, they had made too much of it and, in the second place, they never had no card to sell what they would have been allowed. So they hauled it back.” (“The Tall Men,” 55-56)

9. “Only even when they didn't raise cotton, every year the county agent’s young fellow would come out to measure the pasture crops they planted so he could pay them for that, even if they never had no not-cotton to be paid for. Except that he never measured no crop on this place. ‘You’re welcome to look at what we are doing,’ Buddy says. ‘But don’t draw it down on your map.’ “‘But you can get money for this,’ the young fellow says. ‘The Government wants to pay you for planting all this.’ “‘We are aiming to get money for it,’ Buddy says. ‘When we can’t, we will try something else. But not from the Government. Give that to them that want to take it. We can make out.’” (“The Tall Men,” 57)

10. “That’s our trouble. We done invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules and recipes that we can’t see anything else; if what we see can’t be fitted to an alphabet or a rule, we are lost. . . . Life’s a pretty durn valuable thing. I don’t mean just getting along from one WPA relief check to the next one, but honor and pride and discipline that make a man worth preserving, make him of any value. That’s what we got to learn again. Maybe it takes trouble, bad trouble, to teach it back to us.” (“The Tall Men,” 60; emphasis added)

11. Aaron Schneider, dir., Two Soldiers (Shoe Clerk Picture Co., 2003) S

12. Faulkner to Malcolm Franklin, July 4, 1943 There is a squadron of negro pilots. They finally got congress to allow them to learn how to risk their lives in the air. They are in Africa now, under their own negro lt. colonel, did well at Pantelleria, on the same day a mob of white men and white policemen killed 20 negroes in Detroit. Supposed you and me and a few others of us lived in the Congo, freed seventy-seven years ago by ukase; of course we cant live in the same apartment hut with the black folks, nor always ride in the same car nor eat in the same restaurant, but we are free because the Great Black Father says so. Then the Congo is engaged in War with the Cameroon. At last we persuade the Great Black Father to let us fight too. You and Jim say are flyers. You have just spent the day trying to live long enough to learn how to do your part in saving the Congo. Then you come back down and are told that 20 of your people have just been killed by a mixed mob of civilians and cops at Little Poo Poo. What would you think? A change will come out of this war. If it doesn’t, if the politicians and the people who run this country are not forced to make good the shibboleth they glibly talk about freedom, liberty, human rights, then you young men who live through it will have wasted your precious time, and those who dont live through it will have died in vain. (Selected Letters of William Faulkner,175-176)

13. How . . . 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. . . . Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t. (Press Dispatch on the Emmett Till case, September 9, 1955) To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow. (“On Fear: The South in Labor,”Harper’s, June 1956)

14. So I would say to the NAACP and all the organizations who would compel immediate and unconditional 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; don't give him the advantage of a chance to cloud the issue by that purely automatic . . . sympathy for the underdog simply because he is under.” (“A Letter to the North,”Life, March 5, 1956)  FAULKNER: . . . I don’t like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation. 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. As long as there’s a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it. But if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians. • You mean white Mississippians. (Interview with Russell Howe, The Reporter, March 22, 1956)