Faulkner, William - Walter Taylor (essay date 1989)
Walter Taylor (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: Taylor, Walter. “‘Pantaloon’: The Negro Anomaly at the Heart of Go Down, Moses.” In On Faulkner: The Best from American Literature, edited by Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, pp. 58-72. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989.
[In the following essay, Taylor argues that Faulkner's portrayal of the experience of African Americans in the South ultimately fails to provide an accurate picture.]
The “sense of how negroes live and how they have so long endured,” wrote James Baldwin in 1951, was “hidden” from white Americans. The barriers, he felt, were formidable; foremost was “the nature of the [white] American psychology.” For whites to accept the qualities of Negro life, that psychology “must undergo a metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable.”1 The statement summed up years of Negro frustration at the fumbling efforts of white writers to...
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