SOURCE: Gwin, Minrose. “Her Shape, His Hand: The Spaces of African American Women in Go Down, Moses.” In New Essays on “Go Down, Moses,” edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, pp. 73-100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Gwin examines the physical and metaphorical spaces of African American women in Go Down, Moses.]

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison has argued that Africanism is essential to the definition of Americanness and American modernity, as well as to the major themes and presumptions of the white North American literary imagination. In particular, she believes that the white literary imagination has been the ideological site of “the manipulation of the Africanist narrative (that is, the story of a black person, the experience of being bound and/or rejected) as a means of meditation—both safe and risky—on one's own humanity” (Morrison, Playing 53). Morrison calls for literary and cultural inquiries into “[h]ow the representation and appropriation of that narrative provides opportunities to contemplate limitation, suffering, rebellion, and to speculate on fate and destiny” in white North American literature. Criticism of this kind, she believes, “will show how that narrative is used in the construction of a history and a context for whites by positing history-lessness and context-lessness for blacks” (Morrison, Playing 53).

In part, at least, such literary criticism is no stranger to Faulkner studies in general, and to Go Down, Moses in particular. Thadious M. Davis, in Faulkner's “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context, has explored the workings and reflections of racial stereotype in Faulkner and the symbolic valence of “Negro” for the southern writer who wishes to convey concepts such as “slavery, sexuality, primitivism, fraternity, endurance, hope,” and historical contexts such as the antebellum South, metaphors for change, or social issues and problems (T. M. Davis 26-27). Lee Jenkins, whose Faulkner and Black-White Relations takes a psychoanalytic approach to race in Faulkner's fiction, bases his analysis on the premise that, in the minds of whites (Jenkins seems to mean white men), “the black” (he seems to mean black men) has become the mythic personification of repressed impulses and desires of whites, “the embodiment of the very idea of contamination and of the idea that the mind is divided against itself” (Jenkins 58-60). Eric Sundquist, on the other hand, explores Faulkner's “turbulent search for fictional forms in which to contain and express the ambivalent feelings and projected passions that were his as an author and as an American in the South” (Sundquist x).¹

Morrison's suggested areas of inquiry, however, are more focused on narrative than symbol.² Like Henry Louis Gates, she problematizes “race” as an unceasing and dynamic cultural narrative whose telling and retelling have historically served Eurocentric interests.³ She asks how the Africanist story in literature by white Americans becomes “the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism” that makes freedom seem free (Morrison, Playing 56) and how Africanist character in such literature “is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness” (Morrison, Playing 52). In my reading of Go Down, Moses, certainly a novel with what Morrison would call an “Africanist presence at its center,” I should like to complicate these questions to ask how Africanist female narrative and character function in a text written by a white southern male in large part about their exploitation as Africans and as women.⁴ I am hoping to excavate what Chandra Mohanty has called a complex “relationality” (her emphasis)—relations of power “not reducible to binary oppositions or oppressor/oppressed relations.” Mohanty believes that feminist analysis must focus on the interactions between “the idea of multiple, fluid structures of domination which intersect to locate women differently at particular historical conjunctures” and at the same time “the dynamic oppositional agency of individuals and collectives and their engagement in ‘daily life’” (Mohanty 13). Although Mohanty is discussing relations of power in social and political life for Third-World women, her focus on these intersections of the cultural spaces of domination and the cultural spaces of resistance resonates with certain questions I want to pose about Go Down, Moses and its ideological productions and reflections.

I am primarily interested in the relations between material, cultural, and narrative space as they are occupied by African American women in the novel. This is not to imply that I see these three kinds of spaces as distinct or noncontiguous. By material space I mean representations of actual physical structures, landscapes, geographies, to which cultural space with its permutations of the dynamic and incessant workings of ideology is intimately linked; as is narrative space, constructed through the productions of language and what Faulkner might call not-language, or silence. In terms of Go Down, Moses, I am wondering how the cultural space of African women in North America—circumscribed by race and sexual vulnerability and described by African American women in their own critical and literary productions—may (or may not) translate to narrative space in a literary text written by a white southern man at least in part about their predicament. And what do the material spaces—the actual physical sites—that black female characters occupy in these texts indicate about where their Africanist narratives are located, both in terms of their agency as African women and the valence their stories and presence carry? In short, where are their stories located in Go Down, Moses? And what do they mean?⁵

I am wondering also whether Faulkner is participating in what Morrison has called the objectification of “bound blackness” even as he describes the white patriarchal usage of black women, or whether their narrative space—their boundedness within the stories of old Carothers McCaslin's abuse of Eunice and his own daughter Tomasina and their resulting deaths, Zack Edmonds' appropriation of Molly Worsham (later spelled “Mollie”), Roth Edmonds' abandonment of his unnamed lover, cousin, and mother of his son—take up more space than we might at first think. Do their stories push at the boundaries created by the white male characters whose narrative spaces exceed theirs and whose stories may appear to confine theirs to the space of objectification? In exceeding the narrative spaces created for them as objects of oppression, do their stories radicalize Faulkner's text in ways we have not yet recognized? Or, do they (their Africanist stories, their bounded yet somehow excessive spaces) serve a master narrative which has historically unfolded, as Morrison has maintained, “in the rhetoric of dread and desire” and whose manipulation of Africanness has offered “historical, political, and literary discourse a safe route into meditations on morality and ethics; a way of examining the mind-body dichotomy; a way of thinking about justice; a way of contemplating the modern world” (Morrison, Playing 64)? Or … are these questions whose answers are not mutually exclusive?

TEXTUAL AND CULTURAL SPACES

To situate these questions, we may turn to anthropological studies of the relations of space and ideology. Feminist studies in architecture and planning, as well as anthropology, have shown how space and its allocations in the material world “reflect and reinforce the nature of gender, race, and class relations in society” (Weisman 1). In a study of the gendering of space among the Marakwet of Kenya, anthropologist Henrietta Moore argues that material space—for example, a village—can be read as a text. To understand space as a text, Moore says, is “to conceive of the spatial order as something more than merely the physical manifestation, or product, of activities conducted in space. Spatial texts may, therefore, be said to have both a history and a future” (Moore 81). My project here is to try to read a white male literary text as both producing and reflecting African American female space. The kind of reading I am undertaking relies on a corporeal imagination, on a sense of how physical bodies inhabit physical space and how the lived experience of the female body, in this case the black female body, converges with representational practice, in this case the representational practices displayed and enacted in Go Down, Moses.

Following Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, Moore suggests that a text, be it a book or a living space, is not representative of ideology but is a product and producer of ideology, “of the ‘lived’ conditions of social reality. … For ideology is not expressed, reflected or reproduced in the text; rather, it produces and is produced by the text, transforming it into a particular and irreducible representation” (Moore 87-88). In short, spatial texts (of Marakwet's gendered living arrangements)—and, I would argue, textual spaces (for example, of Go Down, Moses)—reveal the dynamic and incessant productions of ideology, as do our readings of them.⁶ The relation between ideology and the text is therefore one of continually “produced representation” (87). Because spatial representations “express in their own logic the power relations between different groups, they are therefore active instruments in the production and reproduction of the social order” (Moore 89). An analysis of spatial representations in a narrative about such power relations may lead to a more grounded notion of how those relations are produced, and how literary and cultural productions are inevitably entwined and synergetic.

Go Down, Moses lends itself to a spatial analysis. Obviously, there are distinct narrative divisions into various but interconnected stories. Moreover, one of Faulkner's primary concerns in the novel is space: the receding space of the wilderness, the effects of the (mis)appropriation of space. One of the more haunting images of the novel is that of the young bear that becomes entrapped in a tiny tree after he climbs up to escape the sound of the logging train. He has run out of space; there is no place for him to go. There is a sense throughout the novel of encroaching claustrophobia, of too much being crowded into spaces not meant to hold so much. The town and logging interests encroach on the wilderness, squirrels crowd hysterically in the big gum tree awaiting Boon Hogganbeck's shots, the old ledgers in the old store are too small a space to contain, in all their cultural and historical implications, the outrageousness of old Carothers McCaslin's crimes and the tragic stories of Eunice and Tomasina, whose lives are squeezed into cryptic phrases in the ledger book, a book whose original purpose was to record profit and loss.

In a very literal way, the constriction of these women's lives into the spaces of the ledger produced by white men is contiguous with the cultural spaces that African American women have historically occupied in a white dominated culture. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins discusses how “white male power is largely predicated on Black female subordination” (Collins 189) and how that subordination has been figured in placing the black female body in the space of the object of display. The treatment of black women's bodies in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, Collins argues, may well have been “the foundation upon which contemporary pornography as the representation of women's objectification, domination, and control is based” (Collins, 168). The exhibition in Europe of African women such as Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, reveals “the importance of gender in maintaining notions of racial purity” and demonstrates “that notions of gender, race, and sexuality were linked in overarching structures of political domination and economic exploitation” (Collins 169). As Sander L. Gilman points out, there were other African women displayed throughout early nineteenth-century Europe. In an 1850 erotic engraving, for example, a white man sitting in an easy chair with his dog at his feet is gazing through an uptilted telescope at the buttocks of an African woman who is standing on top of a large rock bent over with her skirts hoisted. (The man's dog is also gazing upward.)⁷ In a cultural analysis, these kinds of displays may be seen as physical manifestations of the historical paradox of African American women's material space, especially within southern slavery. Though women were often not so confined physically as men, their material spaces were nevertheless extremely confining and hazardous. The “open” space of the slave ship decks or the master's house made African women highly visible targets for what Angela Davis has called “an institutionalized pattern of rape” (A. Davis 23). For them, “open” space within white culture was not open but highly claustrophobic and dangerous.

Harriet Jacobs, for example, writes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, that she preferred the nine-by-seven-by-three-foot (at its highest point) garret in which she lived for seven years to the more constricted and treacherous “open” space she occupied as a female slave in the house of a master intent on raping her:

To this hole I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house. The air was stifling: the darkness total. A bed had been spred [sic] on the floor. I could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on the other without hitting the roof. The rats and mice ran over my bed. … This continued darkness was oppressive. It seemed horrible to sit or lie in a cramped position day after day, without one gleam of light. Yet I would have chosen this, rather than my lot as a slave.

(Jacobs, 114)

The solitary confinement and severe hardship of closed physical space may have been preferable to the terrors of “open” space in which, as Collins says, the black woman was “viewed as an object to be manipulated and controlled” (Collins 69).

It is not surprising to find that space is an issue of great importance in African American women's fiction. In Morrison's Beloved, when Paul D is protesting Sethe's hospitality to Beloved, a young black woman who appears out of nowhere, Sethe replies heatedly, “feel how it feels to be a coloredwoman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that” (Morrison, Beloved 68). In the end, Beloved herself, who has had feelings of breaking into pieces, is dispersed into open space. She is everywhere and nowhere: “Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there” (Morrison, Beloved 275). In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Dana, a black woman living in a Los Angeles suburb in the 1970s, finds herself moving across time to enter the space of nineteenth-century slavery on a Maryland plantation. In what becomes a more and more difficult and injurious journey, Dana extends herself across the spaces of geography, history, and race to save her white male forebear, an oppressive slave master, and keep him alive so that he can coerce another black woman, Dana's great-great-grandmother, to have sexual relations with him, thereby beginning the family into which Dana would eventually be born. Dana finds herself caught up in the confinement of her great-great-grandmother's impossible position. The seeming openness of the space of time travel becomes increasingly restricting and dangerous as Dana gets caught, literally, in the vise between past and present and, in the end, escapes only by losing part of her body.

The fact that open spaces historically have been closed (objectifying, confining, dangerous) for African American women in a society dominated by white men situates any spatial analysis of the narrative configurations of Go Down, Moses on slippery footing. If “open” is “closed,” culturally and often materially, then how are we to measure black women's narrative space—the space of the Africanist/womanist story (if it exists)—in a white man's text where, if literary and cultural representations are correlative, the opening up of narrative space for black female characters may actually be their closing down? If we believe with Moore, however, that spatial texts/textual spaces are both products and producers of ideology, as are their readings, it may be important to explore just how ideology is translated spatially in narrative, not just in terms of Go Down, Moses and Faulkner but within a more general inquiry into the relations between cultural and literary productions.

For example, Go Down, Moses begins with the inscription:

                              TO MAMMY
                    CAROLINE BARR
                                        Mississippi
                                        [1840-1940]
          Who was born in slavery and who
gave to my family a fidelity without
          stint or calculation of recompense
and to my childhood an immeasur-
                    able devotion and love

The space of this epigraph may be seen as open. It pays homage to Caroline Barr and becomes the foyer leading into the novel. On the other hand, it summons the closed equation: black mammy equals love (devotion, fidelity), the figure of “mammy” and the ideological construction of mammy equals love being based materially, as Trudier Harris has pointed out, on the black mammy's separation from her own home space and family “in order to rear generation after generation of whites who would, ironically, grow up to oppress Blacks still further” (Harris 36).⁸ Centered on the page, the inscription to Caroline Barr is circumscribed by white space up, down, and on either side. It has the look of an epitaph on a gravestone.

Just as the epigraph page may be pictured spatially as the foyer which opens into the larger narrative space of Go Down, Moses, the novel's ending, or closure, is Gavin Stevens' commentary on Mollie (earlier spelled “Molly”) Beauchamp's desire to bring her criminal grandson home for a decent burial and her instructions to the newspaper editor that he print all there is to know about “Butch” Beauchamp's death (which, as she may or may not know, was by execution). Although Mollie cannot read, she wants to “look at hit” in the newspaper. Stevens' thoughts about her request close the story and the book:

Yes, he thought. It doesn't matter to her now. Since it had to be and she couldn't stop it, and now that it's all over and done and finished, she doesn't care how he died. She just wanted him home, but she wanted him to come home right. She wanted that casket and those flowers and the hearse and she wanted to ride through town behind it in a car. “Come on,” he said. “Let's get back to town. I haven't seen my desk in two days.”

(365)

These thoughts by the white man whose paternalism has prevented him from understanding or participating in Mollie Beauchamp's grief encloses her and her articulations of what she sees as her grandson's betrayal by Roth Edmonds and, by implication, her people's betrayal at the hands of whites. Stevens misreads Mollie's text and closes down the space of her Africanist narrative articulated in her chants: “Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin. … Sold him to Pharaoh and now he dead” (62). Although Faulkner uses the device of a white man's misunderstanding the stories of black characters (for example, the sheriff's deputy telling the story of Rider's grief, which he mistakes for its lack, in “Pantaloon in Black”), Stevens' statements, if meant ironically or not, may seem an odd way of ending this particular story and this particular novel. Stevens mutes Mollie's narrative of accusation and mourning by trivializing her grief. The final enclosure of Mollie within the space of his paternalism is similar to the enclosure of Caroline Barr's life in the equation of mammy equals love that begins the novel. There is no reopening of black women's spaces, or recognition of the problematics of the position of white manhood vis-à-vis southern history such as that which informs Quentin Compson's last agonizing exclamation about the South in Absalom, Absalom!: “I don't hate it! I don't hate it!” (AA 303) The cultural implications of Mollie Beauchamp's accusations, and of the novel as a whole, seem to become muffled rather than intensified by Gavin Stevens' final pronouncements, which, in the end, distance us from her voice.

Between these two perimeters, the mammy bounded in a whitespace of “love,” “fidelity,” “devotion,” and the mammy's grief and reproach enclosed by white paternalism (Mollie is described as the only mother Roth Edmonds ever knew who nurtured both his body and spirit [113]), Go Down, Moses fluctuates throughout, both opening up and closing down black women's narrative space. And those spaces that contain the stories of black women are not always what they seem. Sometimes these women leave us wondering—as we do in “Pantaloon in Black” when Rider sees the ghost of his dead wife Mannie appear and then dissolve—whether they were ever there at all.

THE SPACE OF THE WATCHING WOMAN

“The Fire and the Hearth” opens with Lucas Beauchamp moving his still because George Wilkins, his daughter Nat's lover, has set up another still on Roth Edmonds' land. Lucas has reported George's activities to Roth and is afraid that his own still, which has been operating for twenty years without Roth's knowledge, will be found in a search for George's. In the process of moving and burying his still in the middle of the night, he finds a coin which he believes is part of a buried treasure. As day breaks and he rises to his feet to go home, he hears a crash and then the sounds of “the quarry fleeing like a deer across the field and into the still night-bound woods beyond” (40). He finds the prints of his daughter's feet where she had squatted in the mud and spied on him. At first this space of the watcher gives Nat a certain amount of power in dealing with her father, her lover, and the law. Although Nat is clever and defiant in her dealings with both Lucas and George, in the end she does not get what she wants: a back porch and a well to make George's house more livable for her. In the last conversation of the story, Lucas and George are making plans to set up the new still George has bought with the money Lucas gave him for the porch and well. Patriarchal power closes around Nat when she is not watching, and the space she has demanded for herself is withdrawn by father and husband.

I want to trace Nat's footsteps, as Lucas does when he sees “the print of his daughter's naked feet where she had squatted in the mud, knowing that print as he would have known those of his mare or his dog, standing over it for a while and looking down at it but no longer seeing it at all” (41), yet this is impossible. Nat makes her prints in this story, but dissolves in the end in man talk carried on by African American men. She watches, but her watching and her clever manipulations dissolve like footprints being washed away. At the end of the story, Lucas, who had earlier been intent on teaching George a lesson “about whose daughter to fool with next time” (61) transfers possession of Nat to George, thereby transforming Nat's enclosure from “daughter” to “wife.” When George asks how they are going to tell Nat she won't be getting a back porch or a well, Lucas replies: “I don't give no man advice about his wife” (75). Like Gavin Stevens' dismissal of Mollie's grief in “Go Down, Moses,” “The Fire and the Hearth” ends with an enclosure of black female space. Nat the watcher, the clever daughter, is made into a wife. It is interesting that Faulkner, in a humorous way, propels two black men, Lucas and George, into the space of patriarchal power, ironically giving them ideological kinship to Old Carothers McCaslin.

Another woman described as watching is Tennie Beauchamp. In “The Bear,” Ike recalls from his childhood, his mother Sophonsiba surprised her brother Hubert Beauchamp with his mulatta mistress, who is wearing Sophonsiba's dress, and ran her out of the house screaming, “My mother's house! Defiled! Defiled!” (289). In the midst of the uproar, Ike remembers

(… Tennie's inscrutable face at the broken shutterless window of the bare room which had once been the parlor when they watched, hurrying down the lane at a stumbling trot, the routed compounded of his uncle's uxory: the back, the nameless face which he had seen only for a moment, the once-hooped dress ballooning and flapping below a man's overcoat, the worn heavy carpetbag jouncing and banging against her knee, routed and in retreat true enough and in the empty lane solitary young-looking and forlorn yet withal still exciting and evocative and wearing still the silken banner captured inside the very citadel of respectability, and unforgettable.)

(289-290)

From the margins, Tennie watches the white family eject the unnamed mulatta mistress from the crumbling house and send her scrambling down the road. Here black women occupy both the spaces of the watcher and the one being watched, subject and object, inside and outside. The space of this recollection within “The Bear” carries a peculiar tension and resonance, for, like Clytie Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! whose tragic face gazing from the window of Sutpen's Hundred becomes the avatar of the inevitable consequences of white greed and rapacity, Tennie's “inscrutable face” both frames the historical moment and becomes the space on which that moment is written. An impersonal syntax (“the routed compounded of his uncle's uxory”) records an image of the rapidly retreating back of one African American woman and the unreadable text of another's face.

What is the space between these two women, one still and unreadable—like Clytie, framed by the window of a crumbling big house—the other whose face we cannot see hurrying down the lane and off the page? What lost stories were here? What “safe spaces,” black women's locations “for resisting objectification as the Other,” as Collins would call them (Collins 95), have been lost? Tennie's “inscrutable face” remains inscrutable. And the mulatta mistress remains a blank spot in the novel, a rapidly receding figure whose story remains untold.

THE SPACE OF THE LEDGER

It is this untold story that haunts Patricia Williams. Specifically, the erasure of her great-great-grandmother's life and narrative provides the original vehicle for Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights, a brilliant study of the relations of race to individual and social contractual rights in this country. A lawyer and professor of law, Williams describes the bill of sale for her great-great-grandmother as “a very simple document but lawyerly document, describing her as ‘one female’ and revealing her age as eleven.” In a county census record of two years later, “on a list of one Austin Miller's personal assets she appears again, as ‘slave, female’—thirteen years now with an eight-month infant” (Williams 17). Since coming into possession of these documents which testify to her great-great-grandmother's existence and its circumstances, Williams writes that she has tried “to piece together what it must have been like to be my great-great-grandmother,” a girl purchased by a thirty-five-year-old Tennessee lawyer known to be temperamental and wealthy, after a fight with his mother about prolonged bachelorhood:

I imagine trying to please, with the yearning of adolescence, a man who truly did not know I was human, whose entire belief system resolutely defined me as animal, chattel, talking cow. I wonder what it would have been like to have his child, pale-faced but also animal, before I turned thirteen. I try to envision being casually threatened with sale from time to time, teeth and buttocks bared to interested visitors.

(Williams 18)

Like Ike McCaslin and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds, Williams searches historical texts (letters and legal opinions written by her great-great-grandfather) for clues to the past. She yearns to find “the shape described by her [great-great-grandmother's] absence in all this” (Williams 19). She sees “her shape and his hand”—“the habit of his power and the absence of her choice”—in the ideologies of power and dominance that continue to shape legal codes and cultural practice in the United States (Williams 19).

In “The Bear,” the space of the ledger is the repository of the overlapping spaces of southern white male rapacity and the need of white men for contemplation and exorcism. For Ike the ledger is inhabited by ghosts of southern history:⁹

a lightless and gutted and empty land where women crouched with the huddled children behind locked doors and men armed in sheets and masks rode the silent roads and the bodies of white and black both, victims not so much of hate as of desperation and despair, swung from lonely limbs.

(278)

The space of the commissary—the place of commerce for the white men who owned it and the land—encloses the shelf of ledgers, the desk and “the corner where it sat beside the scuffed patch on the floor where two decades of heavy shoes had stood while the white man at the desk added and multiplied and subtracted” (279). Within these concentric material spaces—the store, the desk, the ledgers—the female slave is enclosed as the signifier of “bound blackness.” For Ike and his cousin McCaslin, who, like Quentin and Shreve in Absalom, Absalom!, are constructing their own narratives of family and history, the small yet large, closed yet open, narrative spaces occupied by Eunice and Tomasina reveal what Morrison has called “the not-free,” that is, the “conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies” which perform “duties of exorcism and reification and mirroring” for the white imagination (38-39). That the ledger is the space for performing those duties for Ike is abundantly clear:

To Him it was as though the ledgers in their scarred cracked leather bindings were being lifted down one by one in their fading sequence and spread open on the desk or perhaps upon some apocryphal Bench or even Altar or perhaps before the Throne itself for a last perusal and contemplation and refreshment of the Allknowledgeable before the yellowed pages and the brown thin ink in which was recorded the injustice and a little at least of its amelioration and restitution faded back forever into the anonymous communal original dust.

(250)

As in Williams' documents, the text that can be read is written in white men's hands. The sections on Eunice and Tomasina are written by Ike's father Theophilus (“Uncle Buck”) and his uncle Amodeus (“Uncle Buddy”), who both read and recorded the text of sexual violence perpetrated by their father; Buck and Buddy's text is read and its exorcistic function reproduced by Ike and McCaslin; their stories, of course, are of Faulkner's doing. In all these white men's “hands,” the black woman is a shape that is both revealed and obscured.

In a sense, then, the bodies of Eunice the mother and Tomasina the daughter occupy a double space of exchange: Their bodies are used sexually (and for their reproductive value as well) in the material spaces of their lives as slaves; those bodies, as objects of contemplation (Morrison might say, “on demand and on display”) within the space of the ledger, are manipulated again by Ike and McCaslin in performing their “duties of exorcism and reification and mirroring.” Because those duties are grounded in the same principles of exchange that rely on the objectification of bound blackness, they lack the recuperative power to generate new ideologies of empowerment. They are as meaningless as Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy's move into the slave quarters. Ike can only condemn “that whole edifice intricate and complex and founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity and carried on even yet with at times downright savagery” (285); he is unable to construct new ideological foundations in place of the edifice he decries because he is unable to read black women's texts outside the space of the ledger, the space of bound blackness.

Throughout his life, Ike's inability to envision the Africanist female narrative apart from the space of the white man's ledger sets the tenor of his relations with black women within the material and cultural spaces of the postbellum South they and he inhabit. His two important encounters with African American women reveal his inability to see them as subjects outside the space of bound blackness. Both encounters involve the trespass of material space. In “The Bear” we are told how Ike tracks down Fonsiba, who is Tennie and Terrel (Tomey's Turl) Beauchamp's daughter, to give her one thousand dollars from her grandfather Carothers McCaslin's estate. Having failed in a similar mission to find Tennie's Jim the previous year, he is driven by guilt through “slow interminable empty muddy December miles crawled and crawled,” telling himself, “I will have to find her. I will have to. We have already lost one of them. I will have to find her this time” (265). When he does find her, in a log cabin in the midst of a “roadless and even pathless waste of unfenced fallow and wilderness jungle,” he sees not a woman in her kitchen but

crouched into the wall's angle behind a crude table, the coffee-colored face which he had known all his life but knew no more, the body which had been born within a hundred yards of the room that he was born in and in which some of his own blood ran but which was now completely inheritor of generation after generation to whom an unannounced white man on a horse was a white man's hired Patroller wearing a pistol sometimes and a blacksnake whip always.

(265-266)

What Ike sees is not Fonsiba but bound blackness, and his relationship as a white southern man (the Patroller?) to bound blackness. When he later asks her if she is all right, she answers, “I'm free” (268), to which he does not respond but simply goes to the bank and arranges for the money to be paid to her at three dollars a month for the next twenty-eight years. In this scene, which is introduced as he and McCaslin read the ledger within the store, Ike trespasses on Fonsiba's space but does not recognize that he does so. He sees only that she and her husband are living in poverty, and he mistakes that physical poverty for spiritual poverty. For him, Fonsiba is only a body, “only the tremendous fathomless ink-colored eyes in the narrow, thin, too thin coffee-colored face watching him without alarm, without recognition, without hope” (268).

Reflections of Ike's blindness within his bounded whitespace, Fonsiba's watching eyes, like Nat's and Tennie's, give a fleeting glimpse of an opening into African woman's narrative space. There is another story here, another space opening with Fonsiba's assertion, “I'm free” (268). Ike, and Faulkner, rapidly retreat from that story. After Fonsiba utters those two words, which would seem to be but the beginning of her Africanist narrative, the next sentence in the text is a description of the town near Fonsiba and her husband's cabin; the bank; the bank's president, who is given more of a story than Fonsiba herself (“a translated Mississippian who had been one of Forrest's men too” [268]); and Ike's financial arrangements for Fonsiba. Upon hearing those words, “I'm free,” Ike rapidly retreats from Fonsiba's material space which he has trespassed upon. He re-enters the space of the ledger, the world of commerce in which debts of all kinds can be paid in money, the space owned by white men (“one of Forrest's men too”) whose hands inscribe the valuations of the ledger. That space is what Ike cannot retreat from, though he tries, for he himself has become its ideological producer and production.

And so in “Delta Autumn,” when Ike's mulatto kinswoman who is Roth Edmonds' mistress trespasses on the white male space of the hunting tent in the woods, with a baby in her arms, Ike, an old man, can only fumble with the envelope of money and thrust it at her, again aware of her watching eyes, “or not the eyes so much as the look, the regard fixed now on his face with that immersed contemplation, that bottomless and intent candor, of a child” (341). Like Clytie, calling out Rosa Coldfield's name on the stairs of Sutpen's Hundred, the woman says, “‘You're Uncle Isaac,’” to which he replies, “‘Yes … But never mind that. Here. Take it. He said to tell you No’” (341).

It is interesting that Ike's first response to the woman indicates disapproval of her sexual behavior outside marriage (as a white woman). He says:

You sound like you have been to college even. You sound almost like a Northerner even, not like the draggle-tail women of these Delta peckerwoods. Yet you meet a man on the street one afternoon just because a box of groceries happened to fall out of a boat. And a month later you go off with him and live with him until he got a child on you; and then, by your own statement, you sat there while he took his hat and said goodbye and walked out.

(343)

The cultural spaces of enclosure—her legal blackness, her and Roth's incest and miscegenation—begin to encircle their exchange as the young woman tells Ike that James (Tennie's Jim) Beauchamp, old Carother's and Tomasina's grandson, is her grandfather. She is Carother's and Tomasina's great-great-granddaughter. The “dark and tragic and foreknowing eyes” (of Tennie, of Fonsiba, of this woman)—the body of bound blackness—materialize suddenly for Ike, and he cries out, “in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage: ‘You're a nigger!’” (344). His response is to cast her out of his space, male space:

“Then go,” he said. Then he cried again in that thin not loud and grieving voice: “Get out of here! I can do nothing for you! Cant nobody do nothing for you!”

(344)

In a moment that recalls Clytie and Rosa's electrifying “flesh on flesh” connection on the stairs, he touches her hand—“The gnarled, bloodless, bonelight bone-dry old man's fingers touching for a second the smooth young flesh where the strong old blood ran after its long lost journey back to home”—and then draws his hand back beneath the blanket (345). Ironically, then, Ike's space becomes the bounded text. He creates and maintains its boundedness, despite the woman's trespass into male territory marked by man talk and male activity, in which he has been an active participant. There is an interesting hint here of the limitations, exclusions, and potential for the misuse of power within such a space, in contrast to its valorization in the hunting segments of “The Bear,” even for morally conscientious men such as Ike.

Moving from “his hand” to “her shape,” though, I want to think about the “Delta Autumn” woman's narrative space. As Diane Roberts points out, the woman “imperils both the essential binaries of race and gender” by “passing” as white and as a man (85). Roberts believes that, although she colludes with “the Tragic Mulatta narrative,” she is “one of the most articulate female characters in all of Faulkner's fiction” (Roberts, Faulkner 86, 88). Despite her brave trespass into white man's space, it seems to me that the woman (I grow weary of calling her this) speaks from within a closed system of exchange, not so much because she is legally black (Roth does not seem to know this), but because, as a devalued woman (Ike's tone makes that much clear), she is entrapped by a masculinist social order. As Luce Irigaray argues, this is “an economy of desire—of exchange—[that is] man's business” (Irigaray 188). The circulation of women among men establishes the operations of patriarchal society; as Irigaray points out, such a social order results in the “trans-formation of women's bodies into use values and exchange values [that] inaugurates the symbolic order” (Irigaray 184, 189). Irigaray suggests that these valuations of women can be categorized into three areas: virgin (pure exchange value), mother (reproductive value), prostitute (use value). The woman's value for Roth obviously falls in the last category; although she loves him and is the mother of his child, he views her as a prostitute.

For the feminist reader, the “Delta Autumn” woman may reflect and reproduce in troubling ways the ideological components of her own victimization. The woman's profession of love for Roth Edmonds, her willingness to accept the “no” that Ike delivers as Roth's message, her acceptance of Roth's “code” (whatever that is), even her fondness for taking care of his clothes—all speak to a willingness to accept the terms, the bounded spaces, of her own commodification. If, then, she speaks for Eunice and Tomasina, she evokes only their victimization, not their courage, not Eunice's resistance. Ike, in the end, sees her and her baby as the embodiment of his family's crimes and the crimes of southern history. She remains within that bounded space: the story of being “a doe,” of being willing to be “a doe.” Thus, although Faulkner empowers her to enter male space, he also confines her within a narrative of heterosexual desire within a patriarchal economy that commodifies women and manipulates that desire. She trespasses in order to make her desire known, but, like the hunting horn Ike gives her in lieu of any real help or understanding, it has a hollow sound.

THE SPACE(S) OF MOLLY/MOLLIE

In “The Fire and the Hearth,” when Roth Edmonds looks up from the ledger one day, he sees an old woman walking up the road. He does not recognize her. Not until she comes into the store does he realize she is “the only mother he ever knew,” the woman who suckled him and took care of him until he went off to school at age twelve. He fails to recognize Molly Beauchamp because, for the past few years, he has never seen her outside of her own material space. In her own house and yard, where Roth visits her monthly with tobacco and “soft cheap candy which she loved,” she is described as moving slowly and painfully with her washing, or sitting on the porch, “her shrunken face collapsed about the reed stem of a clay pipe” (96). She is even more “placed” by several descriptions of her devotion to Roth, her “care for his physical body and for his spirit too … who had given him, the motherless, without stint or expectation of reward that constant and abiding devotion and love which existed nowhere else in this world for him” (114). In terms of her space within the novel, Molly(ie), perhaps more than any other character, travels the borders of race and gender. I want to suggest that she is a liminal figure whose identity(ies) as the “Molly” of “The Fire and the Hearth” and the “Mollie” in “Go Down, Moses” together transgress certain expectations of blackness and femaleness that Faulkner simultaneously reflects and deflects. I see Molly's transgression of the spaces of the novel as hinging not so much on her stereotypical role as “mammy,” with all its paradoxical implications for both the collapsing of racial barriers and the sustenance of white patriarchal power, but rather on her impact as a character whose liminal narrative can and does move across space and time. As a result of her own movement within and outside of the male narrative of Go Down, Moses, Molly/Mollie has the effect of creating an alternative narrative space, a space which contains both female and Africanist stories.

At the same time, as I've indicated earlier, the openness of such a space may be illusory. Certainly, Molly is not entirely outside of the mammy paradigm, and, in some ways, her character may well be conflated into the closed equation of mammy equals love. As Roberts notes, “Go Down, Moses contains places where the Mammy is refigured, only to slip back, in other places, into the inexorable racial and historical context that circumscribes her” (Roberts, Faulkner 53). In “The Fire and the Hearth,” even when Molly's place within her husband's or Zack Edmonds' house is being contended by the two men, she brings the white baby (Roth) back home with her upon returning to Lucas (“I couldn't leave him! You know I couldn't! I had to bring him!” [49]). This devotion to the white child is questionable for a black woman who has been forced into her situation with Zack, whatever that situation may have been. Yet Molly's energy here, as later in the final story, seems directed toward taking her, and us, out of the male-dominated spaces of the story.

What I find compelling about Molly/Mollie Beauchamp is the motion of her character, its/her movement across the landscape of Go Down, Moses. When Lucas will not give up the divining machine, Molly takes to the road to get a divorce. And when Roth Edmonds at first refuses to help her get a divorce and orders Lucas to return the machine and Lucas refuses to do so, Molly takes to the road again: This time she heads for the woods with the divining machine and is found face down in the mud by the creek. She makes her point. When Edmonds takes her and Lucas into Jefferson to the county courthouse to get the divorce and Lucas agrees, under threat of divorce, to give up the machine, she has won the battle. She has contested Lucas's insistence that he be “the man in the house” (117) and has asserted a different, female-centered narrative in its place. Her determined movement within both material and narrative space, despite her infantilization in certain scenes (at the end of the courthouse scene, Lucas gives her a bag of nickel candy and tells her to “gum it” [125]), lend to her actions and person a dignity and resonance that are unmistakably powerful and that make it difficult to dismiss her as a stereotypical mammy.

The Mollie Beauchamp of “Go Down, Moses” leaves home again, this time to come into town and demand that Gavin Stevens find her grandson, who, she is certain, is in trouble. Although she is again described as very small and old, with a shrunken face “beneath a white headcloth and a black straw hat which would have fitted a child,” Mollie will not be deterred from her mission. Nor will she be shut up. She tells Gavin her mission, and then begins her chant, which resonates throughout the story: “Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharaoh got him—” (353). After Gavin interrupts her to ask some obvious questions, she begins again:

“It was Roth Edmonds sold him,” she said. “Sold him in Egypt. I dont know whar he is. I just knows Pharaoh got him. And you the Law. I wants to find my boy.”

(353-354)

When Stevens enters the black and white space of the Worshams' household, he finds Mollie and her brother sitting by the hearth and chanting.

“Sold my Benjamin,” she said. “Sold him in Egypt.”

“Sold him in Egypt,” Worsham said.

“Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin.”

“Sold him to Pharaoh.”

“Sold him to Pharaoh and now he dead.”

(362)

The Africanist narrative told from within the space of the call and refrain, as well as the historical and cultural accusations with which the Africanist narrative is laden, sets up a claustrophobic space for Gavin Stevens. He almost runs out of the room and down the hall, thinking, “Soon I will be outside … Then there will be air, space, breath” (362).

Mollie's Africanist narrative is a counterpoint to and interrogator of the white paternalism that propels Stevens' thoughts and actions. When Stevens collects money to bring home the “dead nigger,” he tells “merchant and clerk, proprietor and employee, doctor dentist lawyer and barber”—clearly all white men—that it is for Miss Worsham (not Mollie) that the money is needed. When Beauchamp's body is brought into Jefferson, the hearse circles “the Confederate monument and the courthouse while the merchants and clerks and barbers and professional men” watch from various points around the square. The corpse of a black man is thus encircled by white paternalism and its ideological structures, which, as Mollie believes, probably caused his trouble in the first place. Her insistence that the editor put the story, all of it, in the newspaper is part of her insistence on the Africanist narrative. Though Butch Beauchamp's story is, in many ways, like the story of Beloved, “not a story to pass on” (Morrison, Beloved, 275), it is also a story that must be told over and over, as Mollie Beauchamp insists on doing.

Despite Gavin Stevens' perhaps deliberate misreading of that story at the end of the novel, the presence of Molly/Mollie Beauchamp still travels the spaces of Go Down, Moses. Her Africanist/womanist narrative seeps out onto the pages, from cover to cover, like a visible watermark across an open book. Whatever else this book is about must be traced through its presence, her shape.

HIS HAND, HER SHAPE

And yet. Is it possible that Mollie's utterance of the terrible story of bound blackness actually creates, for the white reader, a space for exorcism—“a safe route into meditations on morality and ethics”—and with it, an attendant sense of the same relief that Gavin Stevens feels in returning to the open/free space of his whiteness as he and the editor watch the hearse carrying Butch Beauchamp's body gather speed and move out of town, “the light and unrained summer dust spurting from beneath the fleeing wheels” (364). After Stevens muses to himself about what I believe he misconstrues as Mollie's desire for a nice funeral for her grandson, he says to the editor, “Come on. … Let's get back to town. I haven't seen my desk in two days” (365). Just so do I, the white reader, put down this novel. My question here must be: Do I escape into a freedom made more free by my entry into the “safe” spaces of a novel about African American bondage? Or do I emerge from those spaces with a less safely settled white imagination? Does that novel show the fraudulence of Stevens' return to his desk? Does Go Down, Moses place white paternalism into the position of the object on display, and make black women the watchers, the ones whose gaze is accusatory?

I leave these questions unanswered not so much because I do not know the answers (which I admit I do not) but because I believe, with Morrison and in the spirit of her criticism, that these are questions we should be continually negotiating as North American readers of North American literature. I hope that this spatial reading has shown where black women's stories are located and how they are set into motion in Go Down, Moses. More problematic is the question of what those stories mean, or I should say what those stories can mean. If the relation between ideology and text is one of produced representation, then that production is also enormously complicated by the reader's relation to it. That relation, of reader to Faulknerian text, is in turn compounded in Faulkner studies specifically and American literature generally by having been mediated historically by white men. What I do know and what I have said before is that Faulkner's texts always move beyond what we can say about them.¹⁰ They always embody incommensurability and uncertainty. That embodiment of what we do not know is, in the case of Go Down, Moses, at least partially situated in the narrative spaces of the African American woman. “Her” shape is not only configured by “his” hand, as was the case with Patricia Williams' great-great-grandmother, but it is also created by his hand, the hand of a white southern man whose racist statements, like his sexism, are a matter of record.¹¹ What are we to make of this?

Morrison believes that (white) Americans have chosen “to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence” (my emphasis) (Morrison, Playing 17). In Go Down, Moses, however, Faulkner seems to open and close the spaces of literary utterance for black women, and sometimes to do so simultaneously. The text's engagement with race and gender within the narrative space of African American women both performs and transgresses the material and cultural spaces of region and country, and their attendant ideological permutations. But I do not want to leave this essay on the usual laudatory note of Faulkner's stunning (and it is stunning) ability to keep this kind of textual engagement alive.

Instead I am thinking about how black women in Go Down, Moses slip in and out of the spaces of this text, and in such fleeting ways. I am still wondering what Tennie Beauchamp was thinking when she watched Hubert Beauchamp's unnamed mistress get sent packing down the road. I would like to learn what young Molly Beauchamp held in her mind when she was nursing those two babies, and whether Tomasina ever knew why her mother drowned herself. I want to know whether Nat ever got her porch and well. I want to know the “Delta Autumn” woman's name.¹²

Notes

1. For a more complete list of criticism through 1984 about Faulkner's fictional treatment of racial issues and black characters, see my Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature, 190-191, n. 5. All three studies point to Go Down, Moses as a paradigmatic text in Faulkner's treatment of race, Jenkins viewing the novel as a culmination of Faulkner's thematic concerns (Jenkins 244); Davis, as “a denouement” bringing together a lifetime of thoughts and observations (T. M. Davis 244); Sundquist, as a suffocating “crossing and recrossing of plots and symbolic action” (Sundquist 132). In addition, James A. Snead's Figures of Division shows how writing and telling in Go Down, Moses re-create and reinforce certain “oppressive social rhetorics”—“the linguistic supports of an immoral social system” that Faulkner “self-consciously analyze[s]” in most of his major novels (Snead x).

2. It is interesting that Morrison in Playing in the Dark offers analyses of the fiction of Cather, Poe, and Hemingway, but not of Faulkner, though her 1955 M.A. thesis was written on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Introducing a 1985 reading of Beloved, then a work in progress, at the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford, Morrison commented on Faulkner in ways that pointed ahead to some of her concerns in Playing in the Dark. Her reasons, she said, for “being interested and deeply moved by all his subjects had something to do with [her] desire to find out something about this country and that artistic articulation of its past that was not available in history, which is what art and fiction can do but sometimes history refuses to do” (Morrison, “Faulkner and Women,” 296).

3. In his introduction to “Race,” Writing and Difference, Gates argues:

   The sense of difference defined in popular usages of the term “race” has both described and inscribed differences of language, belief system, artistic tradition, and gene pool, as well as all sorts of supposedly natural attributes such as rhythm, athletic ability, cerebration, usury, fidelity, and so forth. The relation of “racial character” and these sorts of characteristics has been inscribed through tropes of race, lending the sanction of God, biology, or the natural order to even presumably unbiased descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences.

   (Gates, 5)

4. In a 1990 essay on the women of Go Down, Moses, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld writes that she can find no single article on any of the women in the book (Muhlenfeld 211). Muhlenfeld herself argues that the women of the novel “carry great artistic weight” (Muhlenfeld 199), although she seems to agree with Philip Weinstein's assessment that the female characters “have no instigating power” and are tragically passive objects of white male desire (Weinstein 183). In her 1994 study Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, Diane Roberts' discussion of Faulkner's representations of women in Go Down, Moses in terms of the cultural stereotypes of the tragic mulatta and mammy raises provocative questions of the text such as, “Where does desire intersect with subjugation? When does ‘black’ become ‘white,’ or, using the preferred image of the purity-obsessed South, when does the “drop of ink” pollute the clean white page?” (Roberts 79)

5. Mine is a different approach from that of Susan Stanford Friedman who in her essay “Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative” visualizes two axes in narrative: the horizontal, which has to do with what happens in the story (plot, character, action, closure, etc.), and the vertical, which she relates to multiple resonances of a text, whether they be cultural, intertextual, psychodynamic, and so forth.

6. In The Spatiality of the Novel, Joseph A. Kestner argues, in fact, that the interpretive act is itself spatial, “for the text creates a ‘genidentic’ field, incorporating the reader in a dynamic relation with it” (Kestner 22).

7. The engraving is reproduced in Gilman, 239.

8. In Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, which focuses on Faulkner's use of female stereotypes, Roberts employs the Bakhtinian concept of the “grotesque body” to explore representations of black women in general and the mammy figure in particular “as white southern culture understood them” and as Faulkner created them (Roberts xv). She elaborates on the relation between body, race, and gender in literary representations of the mammy in The Myth of Aunt Jemima.

9. Sundquist believes that “the ledgers, like Benjy's section in The Sound and the Fury, are a concentrated representation, a mysterious and seemingly sacred account, of acts and passions whose symbolic value draws into itself and envelops the interpretations it necessitates” (Sundquist 137). John T. Matthews finds in Ike's reading and writing in the ledgers an effort “to confront and to contradict his grandfather” (Matthews 264). I see the ledgers in terms of Morrison's theory of Africanist narrative and American literature, as the highly claustrophobic space of “bound blackness” written by white men and functioning as a site of contemplation and exorcism for white men.

10. In The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference, I associate this excessiveness of Faulkner's texts with the dismantling of oppositional ways of conceptualizing gender.

11. For a discussion of Faulkner's statements about racial issues, see Charles Peavy's Go Slow Now: Faulkner and the Race Question. Donald Petesch discusses the relationship of the fiction to the statements in “Faulkner on Negroes: The Conflict between the Public Man and the Private Art.”

12. The “Delta Autumn” woman is nameless throughout the various versions of the story—in manuscript and in its published form as a short story in Story (published after Go Down, Moses but written first). See Joanne V. Creighton, William Faulkner's Craft of Revision, for a complete description of Faulkner's revisions in Go Down, Moses.

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