Race in Faulkner

Race in Faulkner's Novels
By Thadious Davis
One of the most debated questions about Faulkner, particularly since the last third of the 20th
century, has been his attitude towards blacks. In the best-case scenario, we can say that Faulkner,
born in 1897, was a product of his time and place, the Mississippi of his birth and heritage. He
did not believe in the equality of black people, and during the school desegregation battles, he
sided with those who would prevent blacks from gaining access to "White Only" schools. He
knew black people as servers and laborers, but not as equals. And yet, being a product of his
times also meant that he shared intimate space with black people, including his childhood nanny,
whom he called "Mammy" until her death in 1940.
Caroline Barr, "Mammy Callie," took care of Faulkner and his brothers in their youth and, in
turn, also Faulkner's own daughter, Jill. While he clearly recognized Caroline Barr's humanity
and her capacity for "devotion and love" (as he stated in dedicating Go Down, Moses to her), his
affection for her remained primarily within the accepted paternalistic racial mode. As a maternal
presence from his childhood into his maturity, Caroline Barr inspired Faulkner to create several
fictional characters modeled on her: Mammie Cal'line Nelson in his first novel Soldiers' Pay;
Dilsey Gibson in The Sound and the Fury; and Molly (also Mollie) Beauchamp in Go Down,
Moses. Both Dilsey and Molly are among his most memorable, principled and moral characters.
They seem to stem from Faulkner's sense of Caroline Barr as a second mother and as a teacher;
he wrote in her funeral sermon that Barr was "a font not only of authority and information, but of
affection, respect and security." The representations of Caroline Barr in Faulkner's fiction suggest
the difference between his literal or everyday rationalized ideology of race as a white
Mississippian living in the Deep South and his determined deployment of race as a category of
understanding human behavior, values and beliefs within his fiction. Almost in spite of his
socialization and acculturation, Faulkner struggles both to represent and to explain the existence
and persistence of racism within not merely Southern society, but American society in the 20th
century. His more conscious awareness of blacks as an inevitable, complex and intricate aspect
of American life separates him from a number of United States authors in the 20th century who
ignored and erased blacks from any visibility whatsoever in their depiction of American society.
A fascinating aspect of Faulkner's career is that he remarks in his essay on the composition of
Sartoris that he learned to tell stories of people from the black stable boys and men (and in other
places he includes Caroline Barr in his list of storytellers he learned from). He states that his
writing was not coming together until he remembered the black voices he has listened to as a
youth, and with that memory he could concentrate on writing his novel with the sounds of those
voices and stories in the background.
____
What is one to make of Faulkner's attitudes about race? Dear Professor Weinstein,
In my opinion, Faulkner's description of African-Americans was very derogatory and belittling.
Please discuss Faulkner's beliefs on race relations and/or racial equity.
winretired
Dear winretired,
You are not alone in thinking that Faulkner's depiction of African-Americans is derogatory and
belittling. As someone who has taught Faulkner to college students for many decades, I know
this reaction will be widespread. Further, I will sometimes be asked: Well, then, why do you
teach these books? As you can imagine, Faulkner scholars have been wrestling with these
matters for decades, and today's readers have a laudable interest in matters of race, and deserve
some answers.
It may well be that my answer won't satisfy you. But here goes: Faulkner was born in 1897 and
wrote the spate of books being read in Oprah's Book Club between 1928 and 1932, at a time
when racism in the South was extraordinarily virulent. It was, in some dreadful sense, a fact of
life if you lived in the South whether you were black or whiteI say this as someone who grew
up in the South in the 1940s and '50s. And because it was a "fact of life," it was, oddly enough,
horribly enough, somehow "natural." Hence, Faulkner's characters refer to African-Americans as
"niggers," since any other term he might have used would have been utterly false to the reality of
his time.
But what is fascinating and moving, at least to me, is the way Faulkner's understanding and
views on race changes over time. If you think of the representation of Dilsey and her family in
The Sound and the Fury, you see people who are grounded in their identity, sure of who and
what they are: They are the moral pillars of the story in some sense. As for their "inner life," we
know nothing of it. Faulkner doesn't seem to have discovered that there could be a story there to
tell. But a quick glimpse at the capsizing white Compsons tells us that "consciousness" is not
such a great gift; still, Faulkner doesn't yet even try to represent black subjectivity.
That is what changes over the course of his great novels. Joe Christmas is the first real effort for
Faulkner to try to think what it could feel like, to beor to suspect that one might beblack. To
be sure, Joe Christmas' skin is not dark and, moreover, he himself is crammed with racist ideas
and feelings. I cannot pretend to offer you a "belief system" based on the figure of Christmas. On
the contrary, the man is a walking cyclone and his racial malaise seems to be at the bottom of it
all. This is not a happy notion and I cannot take its measure or explain it (away). But Faulkner
has recognized that race is a great fault-line in his culture. In his remarkable novel of 1936,
Absalom, Absalom! he takes this recognition much further still, and seeks to probe the origins
and conflicts that led to the Civil War. And in his last great book (in my view), Go Down, Moses,
he tries, at long last, to create a fully African-American character, Lucas Beauchamp, and then to
feel his way as writer into what kinds of thoughts and sensations such a figure would have. I
don't think Lucas is going to be seen as much of a hero today, by the lights of critics or readers
interested in race, yet that novel does try to take the measure of racism's "curse" in the South.
Bottom line: As a white novelist living in the South in the early decades of the 20th century,
William Faulkner is not going to have the kind of "enlightened" attitudes that readers todayin
the 21st centuryare comfortable with. He, like every one of us, is/was a creature of his own
society and did not have a vantage point beyond it. Did he see the evil of racism? Yes. Did he
present African-American characters in such a way that appeals to us today? No. But I think he
deserves both credit and respect for at least seeing in racism the true inhumanity of his time and
place. And, in book after book, he increasingly registered the damage it causes.
Professor Weinstein

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