SOURCE: "James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones as a Source for Faulkner's Rev'un Shegog," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, September, 1992, pp. 24-30.

[In the following essay, Fleming suggests the influence of Johnson 's God's Trombones on William Faulkner's southern black preacher in The Sound and the Fury.]

Studies of Faulkner's relationship to the black race have usually treated his depiction of black characters, his position on civil rights questions, the place of African Americans in Faulkner's South, or Faulkner's influence—positive and negative—on later black writers from Ralph Ellison to William Melvin Kelley.¹ It has generally been assumed that Faulkner, as a Southerner, needed no sources for his successful black characters. He grew up among black people and had ample opportunity to observe their speech and mannerisms. However, comparing the Easter service at Dilsey's church with James Weldon Johnson's book of African-American sermons in verse, God's Trombones (1927), suggests that Faulkner knew the book and used it in his depiction of Reverend Shegog, the visiting preacher from St. Louis.

God's Trombones was the culmination of nearly a decade of experimentation in which Johnson attempted to capture the idiom of the black Southern preacher without resorting to the usual dialect spellings associated with the comic "darkies" of the white minstrel show. In 1920 he published "The Creation" in The Freeman, and over the next seven years worked sporadically, as his duties with the NAACP permitted, on the remaining six poems that would make up God's Trombones. Faulkner, in touch with Sherwood Anderson's New Orleans literary set, could hardly have been unaware of a book that was reviewed in the Saturday Review, the New York Times Book Review, Bookman, The Nation, and Poetry. Also, Faulkner was corresponding with black poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite in 1927.² Braithwaite, a friend of Johnson's, might easily have called God's Trombones to Faulkner's attention.

Looking for a metaphor for what he termed the "full gamut of [the] wonderful voice" of the Negro preacher, Johnson finally decided that it most resembled not the sound of "an organ or a trumpet, but rather of a trombone, the instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice—and with greater amplitude. He intoned, he moaned, he pleaded—he blared, he crashed, he thundered."³ Johnson, who knew his music, notes that the trombone possesses a complete chromatic scale, "enharmonically true, like the human voice or the violin" (7). While Faulkner does not mention the trombone, he too uses the image of the wind instrument. Rev. Shegog's voice, once he gets warmed up, is "as different as day and dark from his former tone, with a sad, timbrous quality like an alto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it had ceased in fading and cumulate echoes."⁴ Again as Shegog grows more engrossed in his preaching, Faulkner refers to his voice ringing "with the horns" (295) as his scholarly air is stripped away.⁵

The whole presentation of Shegog echoes the tone of Johnson's introduction to God's Trombones, which insists that, although the black preacher may be personally ridiculous, his rhetoric allows him to transcend his personal limitations. Johnson tells the story of how a black preacher read a cryptic biblical passage and then announced: "Brothers and sisters, this morning—I intend to explain the unexplainable—find out the undefinable—ponder over the imponderable—and unscrew the inscrutable." (4-5) Faulkner's Rev. Shegog does not make himself ridiculous by anything that he says, but his appearance is all against him as Frony notes when she says, "En dey brung dat all de way fum Saint Looey" (293). Beside the congregation's regular preacher, who is a large, light-colored man of "magisterial and profound" bearing, the visitor appears disappointing:

The visitor was undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat.… And all the while that the choir sang again and while the six children rose and sang in thin, frightened, tuneless whispers, they watched the insignificant looking man sitting dwarfed and countrified by the minister's imposing bulk, with something like consternation. They were still looking at him with consternation and unbelief when the minister rose and introduced him in rich, rolling tones whose very unction served to increase the visitor's insignificance. (293)

What happens when Rev. Shegog begins to preach is almost exactly what Johnson reports having witnessed in Kansas City while he was a guest at a black church. Johnson recalled that he had arrived at a church where he was to speak for the NAACP following the service. The congregation had been lulled nearly to sleep by an "exhorter" who had concluded a dull sermon just as Johnson arrived. After two more short sermons, the visiting minister rose to speak.

He appeared to be a bit self-conscious, perhaps impressed by the presence of the "distinguished visitor" [Johnson himself] on the platform, and started in to preach a formal sermon from a formal text. The congregation sat apathetic and dozing. He sensed that he was losing his audience and his opportunity. Suddenly he closed the Bible, stepped out from behind the pulpit and began to preach. He started intoning the old folk-sermon that begins with the creation of the world and ends with Judgment Day. He was at once a changed man, free, at ease and masterful. The change in the congregation was instantaneous.…(6)

Faulkner's treatment of the parallel scene in The Sound and the Fury is strikingly similar to Johnson's account of the transformation of the visiting preacher in Kansas City. When Rev'un Shegog begins to speak, his performance seems as disappointing as his appearance, and although his manner is impressive in a scholarly sense, it does not appeal to his audience:

When the visitor rose to speak he sounded like a white man. His voice was level and cold. It sounded too big to have come from him and they listened at first through curiosity, as they would have to a monkey talking.… They even forgot his insignificant appearance in the virtuosity with which he ran and poised and swooped upon the cold inflectionless wire of his voice, so that at last, when with a sort of swooping glide he came to rest again beside the reading desk with one arm resting upon it at shoulder height and his monkey body as reft of all motion as a mummy or an emptied vessel, the congregation sighed as if it waked from a collective dream and moved a little in its seats. (293-94)

The performance seems to be over, and Frony's low expectations seem to be fulfilled. But the visitor is not done. Like Johnson's preacher, he recaptures his audience with his "Brethren and sisteren.… I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb!" (294). He becomes more mobile, walking "back and forth before the desk, his hands clasped behind him.…" The congregation has sat quietly during his scholarly delivery of the formal, prepared sermon, but now, he is answered by "a woman's single soprano: 'Yes, Jesus!'" As the preacher further departs from his Northern persona, his speech becomes more earthy:

"Breddren en sistuhn!" His voice rang again.… "I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!" They did not mark just when his intonation, his pronunciation, became negroid [sic], they just sat swaying a little in their seats as the voice took them into itself. (295)

He goes on to preach a sermon that, while devoid of any continuity or organization, enthralls the congregation and leaves it emotionally drained when he is finished.

The power of the preacher is attested to by several members of the congregation as they leave the church:

"He sho a preacher, mon! He didn't look like much at first, but hush!"

"He seed de power en de glory."

"Yes, suh. He seed hit. Face to face he seed hit." (297)

There are few direct word-by-word parallels between what Johnson's preachers and Faulkner's say, but both share the theme of the coming of Judgment Day: Johnson's first six sermons on such topics as the Prodigal Son, the death of the individual, and the Flood pave the way for a treatment of the last judgment in the seventh; likewise, Faulkner has been building toward the notion of a day of reckoning throughout The Sound and the Fury. Thus, a recurring theme in each work is, "There comes a time, / There comes a time" (God's Trombones 22), or "dey'll come a time" (Sound and Fury 295) when the individual will be judged. Both preachers call for salvation by the faithful washing "their robes in the blood of the Lamb" so that they are "clothed in spotless white" (God's Trombones 55) or urge "de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!" (Sound and Fury 295). And Dilsey's final pronouncement, "I've seed de first en de last" (297) mirrors the structure of God's Trombones, which begins with the Creation and ends with Judgment Day.

What is more striking than verbal echoes is the outline of Rev'un Shegog's sermon. The seven-verse sermons of God's Trombones are:

"The Creation"
"The Prodigal Son"
"Go Down Death—A Funeral Sermon"
"Noah Built the Ark"
"The Crucifixion"
"Let My People Go"
"The Judgment Day."

Faulkner employs allusions to five of the seven within Rev'un Shegog's sermon of less than 500 words. "Go Down Death" is echoed by Shegog's reminder that "dey'll come a time. Po sinner saying Let me lay down wid de Lawd, lemme lay down my load" (295). The Flood is referred to by Shegog when he says, "I sees de whelmin flood roll between; I sees de darkness en de death everlastin upon de generations" (296). The crucifixion is treated in a paragraph which calls up "Calvary wid de sacred trees … de thief en de murderer … [and] de wailin of women en de evening lamentations" (296). Shegog reminds the congregation of those who "passed away in Egypt … de generations passed away" (925) just as Johnson's preacher has done in "Let My People Go." And as previously mentioned, Shegog's sermon begins and ends with reminders of the subject of Johnson's last poem: Judgment Day.

Although one recent critic sees a resemblance between Shegog and Johnson's portrait of the black preacher but sees more contrasts than similarities and pronounces Faulkner's sermon "not completely successful,"⁶ a comparison of the two preachers and their sermons justifies a more positive conclusion. The success of both sermons depends heavily on the dramatic shift in style by each preacher, a shift that elicits a corresponding change in the reaction of the congregation—and of the reader. In spite of the obvious stylistic difference caused by the facts that Johnson elected not to use dialect and Faulkner did use it, the sermons are remarkably similar in both style and substance, and Faulkner's description of the reaction to Rev'un Shegog closely echoes Johnson's account of the reaction of the Kansas City congregation in his preface to God's Trombones.

James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones appears to have exerted a significant influence on Faulkner as he completed one of his most important novels. Admittedly, Rev'un Shegog is a minor character in The Sound and the Fury, and Johnson's influence extends to no more than some five pages. However, that influence is important in that Rev'un Shegog's sermon has been called "an extraordinarily memorable event in American fiction that, with a readily acknowledged power and poignancy, brings to a climax the agony and the ecstasy of The Sound and the Fury.…"⁷

While the success of Shegog's sermon has been questioned by some critics, the fact that Faulkner was influenced by James Weldon Johnson in the creation of a significant black character and a scene characteristic of black life is both noteworthy and suggestive. Faulkner, whose commitment to the black race has sometimes been suspect among black readers and critics, showed a willingness and ability to achieve insights denied to white observers by consulting the work of a respected black author of his day and in doing so strengthened the final section of one of his best works.

Notes

¹ See, for example, Charles H. Nilon, Faulkner and the Negro (New York: Citadel, 1965); Lee Jenkins, Faulkner and Black-White Relations: A Psychoanalytic Approach (New York: Columbia UP, 1981); Thadious M. Davis, Faulkner's "Negro": Art and the Southern Context (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983); and Richard Beards, "Parody as Tribute: William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer and Faulkner," Studies in Black Literature, 5 (Winter 1974), 25-28.

² Joseph Blotner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner (London: Scholar Press, 1977) pp. 35-36.

³ James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Viking, 1927), pp. 6-7. Future references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

⁴ William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, New, Corrected Edition (New York: Random, 1984), p. 294. Future references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

⁵ Shegog's effective use of the black oral tradition and Faulkner's skill at conveying that tradition have been treated by Bruce A. Rosenburg, "The Oral Quality of Reverend Shegog's Sermon in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury," Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 2 (1969), 73-88, and Andre Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure: Fulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976), p. 200.

⁶ Davis, p. 122.

⁷ Arthur F. Kinney, introd., Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Compson Family (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 2. See also Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York: Random, 1962), p. 48; Arthur Geffen, "Profane Time, Sacred Time, and Confederate Time in The Sound and the Fury," Studies in American Fiction. 2 (1974), 175-97; Joseph R. Urgo, "A Note on Reverend Shegog's Sermon in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury," NMAL. 7, No. 1 (1984), item 4; and Bleikasten, p. 197.