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 portray Negro character. It remains a significant expression of a widely shared attitude; and yet, obviously, some “sense of how Negroes live” is indispensable for the white artist. For if the Negro is not, as Richard Wright has asserted, “America's metaphor,”² he is obviously one very important metaphor; and our classic writers have generally acknowledged this by attacking the issue.

No white writer of stature has committed himself to this problem more strongly than Faulkner; “The Negro,” Robert Penn Warren concludes, “is the central figure in Faulkner's work.” Warren, like other Southerners of moderate and liberal persuasion, has found much to satisfy him in Faulkner's efforts. Because of his open-eyed rendering of Negroes, Warren contends, Faulkner was able to accomplish “a more difficult thing” than Joyce's Dedalus: “To forge the conscience of his [white Southern] race, he stayed in his native spot and, in his soul, in images of vice and of virtue, reenacted the history of that race.”³ Few writers receive such praise. But Faulkner's formidable efforts have left Negroes far from satisfied. Precisely because he is “the greatest artist the South has produced,” Ralph Ellison asserts, Faulkner's Negro characterizations illustrate the usual difficulties of white writers; “even a glance” at Faulkner's fiction “is more revealing of what lies back of the distortion of the Negro in modern writing than any attempt at a group survey might be.”⁴

Go Down, Moses (1942) contains perhaps Faulkner's most comprehensive vision of the Negro's role in American history: a panorama of the effects of slavery and manumission on five generations of white and Negro descendants of a plantation patriarch, Carothers McCaslin. In Isaac McCaslin, Carothers's grandson who refuses his inheritance because it is “founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity,” Faulkner finds one of his most attractive white heroes; and Faulkner motivates Isaac's gesture by allowing him a virtually rhapsodic theory about the descendants of those slaves. Negroes, Isaac concludes, “are better than we are. Stronger than we are.” Their very “vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them.” They possess formidable virtues: “endurance” and “pity and tolerance and forbearance and fidelity and love of children.” And they are vessels of a singular racial spirituality: they have “learned humility through suffering and learned pride through the endurance which survived the suffering.”⁵ At face value, Isaac's beliefs constitute as glowing a compliment to the Negro race as any in our literature.

Warren feels Faulkner shares Isaac's attitude. Although “I am not saying that we should take the word of Isaac … or any single character in Faulkner,” still “such characters do lie within a circumference of Faulkner's special sympathy and their utterances demand respect.”⁶ Isaac, however, is only one voice in a complex dialogue. McCaslin Edmonds, his cousin, argues an opposing and very familiar, view: Negroes are irresponsible, child-like creatures, ravaged by congenital vices: “Promiscuity. Violence. Instability and lack of control. Inability to distinguish between mine and thine” (p. 294). They must be protected from themselves by responsible whites. In the terms which Faulkner presents, Isaac's gesture of repudiation must stand or fall according to which view of Negroes is more accurate. Edmonds is a formidable representative of conservative thought; and although the balance in their debate is shown to weigh in favor of Isaac, he is never allowed the satisfaction of certainty. Faulkner reveals in “Delta Autumn” that Isaac will take to his grave the suspicion that Edmonds was right, that in rejecting the plantation he has deserted his duty to its Negroes rather than responded to it.

Like Isaac, Faulkner seems never to have resolved these issues on a personal level. His 1955 stand on the integration of Mississippi schools recalls Isaac's idealism. “If we are to have two school systems,” he pleaded, “let the second one be for pupils ineligible not because of color but because they either can't or won't do the work of the first one”⁷; it was an attitude little more calculated to win popularity in Mississippi in 1955 than Isaac's in 1888. But when the question of the nature of Negro character arose, Faulkner's attitude contrasted starkly to his protagonist's. Granting that “the white man is responsible for the Negro's condition,” he nevertheless asserted that it is a “fact that the Negro does act like a Negro and can live among us and be irresponsible.” The Negro's “tragedy,” he suggested, “may be that so far he is competent for equality only in the ratio of his white blood.”⁸

Coming as they did toward the end of his career, these more reactionary statements suggest that Faulkner's feelings toward blacks were never more than ambivalent: that he was incapable at any time of presenting an Isaac McCaslin without a balancing McCaslin Edmonds. If this is true, it follows that such feelings must have affected most—if not all—of his Negro characterizations. Most interesting is the fact that Faulkner's typical Negroes are either females or males who have large portions of white blood. Much has been made of Dilsey of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Nancy Mannigoe of Requiem for a Nun (1951) as successful Negro characterizations. But the most obvious thing about each of these figures is its traditional nature. Dilsey and Nancy are both “mammies” whose chief source of identification is the white family they serve; their very heroism is a kind of subservience. Male figures like Joe Christmas of Light in August (1932), Charles Bon of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Ned McCaslin of The Reivers (1962) present other difficulties. Christmas and Bon are shown by Faulkner to be raised as whites, in a white environment; their experience is a very different thing from that of the average Negro. Although Ned is at home in the Negro community and even comes forward on occasion as its spokesman, a major source of his personal identification is revealed to be his white ancestor, Carothers McCaslin. Is it too much, then, to suggest that the Negro female became tragic for Faulkner only through her role as “mammy” to a white family, or that the Negro male was worthy of serious attention “only in the ratio of his white blood”?⁹

Go Down, Moses swarms with characters of African descent. The novel is dedicated to Caroline Barr, the “mammy” of the Faulkner household, and dark-skinned Molly Beauchamp—of whom Caroline Barr is clearly the prototype—seems indeed the image of most of Isaac's Negro virtues. But the ambivalence suggested in the commissary dialogue is extended—perhaps on an unconscious level—to most of the book's male characters. Lucas Beauchamp, the mulatto grandson of Carothers McCaslin, lives in imperial isolation from other Negroes, lording it over them because of his McCaslin blood; he is, according to the white kinsman who knows him best, “more like old Carothers than all the rest of us put together” (p. 118). And part-Negro, part-Indian Sam Fathers also isolates himself from blacks, finding his identity in his Indian, not his Negro heritage, which he rejects as that of slaves. There are brief portraits such as George Wilkins, Sickymo, and the husband of Isaac's Negro cousin Fonsiba: but these are based, disappointingly, on stereotypes. If Isaac's ideas of Negro character are to apply to males as well as to females, the weight of their dramatization falls on one portrait: Rider, of the story “Pantaloon in Black.”

This story, for several reasons, has never received the attention it deserves. Its plot appears, at first, a mere retelling of such earlier lynching tales as “Dry September” (1931) and Light in August (1932). Moreover, the tale bears no direct relationship to the McCaslin family history; its flimsy connection is that Rider lives on the McCaslin plantation (“Rider was one of the McCaslin Negroes,” Faulkner told Malcolm Cowley¹⁰). In other ways, however, “Pantaloon in Black” is unique. It undertakes several important approaches to Negro characterization Faulkner never attempted elsewhere. In contrast to Light in August, “Pantaloon” dramatizes the lynching of a full-blooded black man with a relatively typical Southern background; unlike “Dry September” it offers an extended portrait of the lynched victim. In contrast to practically all of Faulkner's stories, the important events of the plot of “Pantaloon” are isolated from white influence; only after Rider's death are we presented with a callous white deputy and his racist wife who provide a further perspective. Rider, moreover, represents Faulkner's only attempt at anything approaching a genuine African hero: the dominating male who is the reverse image of the clown of plantation propaganda. And finally, the story contains an ambitious attempt at an image stream from inside the mind of its black protagonist, the only lengthy effort of this kind Faulkner ever undertook.¹¹ The result is a Negro characterization which is, perhaps, his most ambitious.

Rider, on the surface, possesses every quality of an authentic hero. A magnificent laborer of “midnight-colored” skin, “better than six feet” and weighing “better than two hundred pounds,” he works in a lumber crew where he handles “at times out of the vanity of his own strength logs which ordinarily two men would have handled with canthooks.” He is a natural leader, at twenty-four the “head of the timber gang itself because the gang he headed moved a third again as much timber between sunup and sundown as any other moved” (pp. 144, 135, 137). An orphan, raised by an overly devout aunt and uncle, Rider has recently made a good marriage; American life, which promises little to men of his race, seems to offer Rider much. But after six happy months, Rider's bride, Mannie, unexpectedly dies.

Faulkner's plot centers on the strange outburst of emotionalism which follows. Rider cuts all ties with his former life, including—very pointedly—his relationship with God, whom he attacks in a drunken speech. Unable to sleep, he rambles the countryside, drinking prodigiously, growing increasingly hysterical. For no apparent reason, he attacks and kills a white gambler, Birdsong, and shortly after is found innocently asleep on his front porch. In prison, his hysteria begins once more; he becomes violent, and has to be subdued by the other prisoners. Pinned to the floor at last, Faulkner's deputy relates, Rider lies “with tears big as glass marbles running across his face …, laughing and laughing and saying ‘Hit look lack Ah just cant quit thinking. Look lack Ah just cant quit’” (p. 159). Eventually he is taken from the prison and hanged by Birdsong's relatives.

This final martyrdom aside, Rider's seems a familiar tragic pattern: the strong extrovert who cannot reconcile a private loss. But as Faulkner controls it here, the tragedy's significance is peculiarly racial. In a society in which few blacks succeed, Rider has experienced no failure before his loss of Mannie; and pointedly, Faulkner never specifies the cause of that bereavement. To have revealed any reason for Mannie's death would have forced him to connect Rider's grief with the accidents of Negro experience; with the cause unspecified, Rider can be shown consciously able to account for his loss only as an act of God. The treatment effectively emphasizes the roots of Rider's hysteria: in his soul he believes that all Negro tragedies stem from the same source. These feelings are the deep, permanent ones, and they ignore the logic of the situation, denying him rest until they have found a racial expression in the murder of Birdsong.¹²

The root of all this is a familiar experience of Negro life: a point at which an individual feels all whites blending into a common image of his personal frustrations. It is an experience to which black writers have addressed themselves with compulsive repetition. Such a scene controls the efforts of Ralph Ellison's hero in Invisible Man (1952) to explain his “invisibility”: “You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you.” Insulted on a dark street, he is shocked to find himself in a murderous “frenzy.” He beats the stranger to the pavement, and “in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat.” Only his final sense of the man's incomprehension saves the situation.¹³ Eldridge Cleaver has described a series of similar experiences from his own youth; with Cleaver, moreover, violence was a conscious expression of his sense of being dehumanized. “I became a rapist,” he confesses. “I did this … deliberately, willfully, methodically.” The crimes provided the strange thrill of revolutionary commitment. “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law. … I felt I was getting revenge.” Yet a profound desperation, like that of Ellison's man, was just beneath the surface: “looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild, and completely abandoned frame of mind.”¹⁴ Only after arrest and imprisonment was he able to view his actions objectively.

But it is Richard Wright who in Native Son (1940) has given us the Negro prototype of these experiences, as well as their most exhaustively particularized elaboration. Published the same year “Pantaloon” appeared independently in Harper's, Wright's novel features in Bigger Thomas a protagonist who possesses no such articulate self-understanding as Ellison's man, or even the young Cleaver. Bigger, an ignorant, self-centered youth, is twice a murderer: first, by accident, of a wealthy white girl; and then, with deliberation, of his Negro mistress. Wright stresses Bigger's inability to perceive the humanity of whites: “To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead.” Hence rather than shame, Bigger feels an exhilaration similar to Cleaver's. He has discovered, however accidentally, the power to strike back at that nameless “force”; and in doing so he has acted out his most deeply repressed fantasies. Surrounded by unknowing whites on a streetcar he reflects excitedly, “Would any of the white faces all about him think that he had killed a rich white girl? No! They might think he would steal a dime, rape a woman, get drunk, or cut somebody; but to kill a millionaire's daughter and burn her body?” At the thought, Wright relates, Bigger “smiled a little, feeling a tingling sensation enveloping all his body.”¹⁵ For Wright, even the most uncritical black man's status reflects the familiar existential paradox that Rider feels so deeply: to gain his humanity, it appears necessary to assume, however unconsciously, the responsibility for violating conventional morality.

The point is of primary significance for Go Down, Moses. Rider's is the pivotal portrait in the reader's understanding of Isaac's romantic view of the Negro; although the commissary scene takes place before Rider's birth, we must assume that Rider's portrait is inserted to illustrate the kind of experience Isaac has had. “Pantaloon” is one of three episodes which precede “The Old People” and “The Bear”—the core of Isaac's story—and are designed to prepare the reader for the commissary dialogue. “Was” and “The Fire and the Hearth” are centered upon character studies of men of mixed blood. “Was” shows how Tomey's Turl, Carothers McCaslin's son by his own half-cast daughter, is forced into the tragi-comic Black Clown behavior of slaves: in Isaac's terms “vices … that white men and bondage have taught them.” “The Fire and the Hearth” attacks the same problem from another angle, suggesting how Turl's son Lucas Beauchamp, motivated by knowledge of his white ancestry, can in his own words remain “a nigger … [but] a man too” (p. 47). The function of “Pantaloon in Black” is to dramatize the experience of a full-blooded black who like Lucas rejects slavish behavior.

The result should be a story which truly strengthens Isaac's credibility. Forced to take a second look at violent Negro conduct in Rider, the reader is presumably prepared to accept Isaac's radicalism in the commissary. Confronted with Edmonds's list of Negro vices, he presumably connects this kind of thinking with that represented by the deputy and his wife, and Isaac's list of Negro virtues with the qualities of Rider before Mannie's death. Hence he is also presumably ready to understand Isaac's belief that Negroes are “better than we are. Stronger than we are,” and to accept his repudiation of the plantation.

Faulkner's hopes for “Pantaloon in Black,” then, were ambitious. He addressed himself to a Negro problem to which Negroes have assigned a central importance. He attacked it through channels usually out of bounds for the white writer. And he gave the story a pivotal position in a major attempt at rendering the Southern past. But for the reader who looks beneath Faulkner's technical virtuosity for some genuine sampling of the sense of Negro life on which his views are based, “Pantaloon in Black” can only disappoint. In a story which must stand or fall on a convincing portrayal of Negro identity, Faulkner consistently recoils whenever he seems closest to committing himself to that identity. In critical spots, furthermore, Faulkner falls back on matter so obviously from a white, not a Negro, heritage, as thoroughly to undermine his verisimilitude. And perhaps most important, “Pantaloon in Black” does not perform the function in Go Down, Moses for which it was intended.

From the opening pages, Faulkner involves the reader, almost as though it were a reflex, in a tradition very alien indeed to the unliterary black's way of looking at himself. The most obvious fact about “Pantaloon” is that it is stamped from the venerable mold of southern Gothicism; its plot recalls Poe's familiar dictum that “the death … of a beautiful woman is … the most poetical topic,” that it should be told through her “bereaved lover.” The funeral scene, Rider's return to the place of the consummation of his love, his encounter with Mannie's ghost, his attempt to drown his sorrows in alcohol, his longing for a death he finally achieves—all this is as old as Gothic romance itself, and has little enough to do with Negroes.

Granted such dependence on literary tradition, we may anticipate that Faulkner's rendering of Rider's stream of consciousness will be in large measure an artificial effect. And that is precisely the case. It is achieved through the familiar Faulknerian impressionism that suggests rather than specifies. The encounter with Mannie's ghost is typical. As Faulkner tells the story, Rider is first aware of the apparition through the reactions of his dog:

Then the dog left him. The light pressure went off his flank; he heard the click and hiss of its claws on the wooden floor as it surged away and he thought at first that it was fleeing. But it stopped just outside the front door, where he could see it now, and the upfling of its head as the howl began, and then he saw her too. She was standing in the kitchen door, looking at him. He didn't move. He didn't breathe nor speak until he knew his voice would be all right, his face fixed too not to alarm her. “Mannie,” he said. “Hit's awright. Ah aint afraid.”

(p. 140)

This passage is a very successful one technically. Faulkner's imagery (the “click and hiss” of the dog's claws, the “upfling of its head as the howl began”), and his careful specification of Rider's more superficial thoughts (“He didn't breathe nor speak until he knew his voice would be all right”) evoke vivid emotional and visual impressions. But significant insights into Rider's consciousness—the pathos and shock of seeing Mannie, his desire to join her in death—are portrayed indirectly through his only articulated thought: “Hit's awright. I aint afraid.”

The passage is revealing. Faulkner never truly gives shape to the deeper workings of Rider's mind; there is nothing here of the carefully evoked private imagery of a Benjy or a Quentin Compson. His success in suggesting Rider's identity as a Negro is due entirely to a single technique: a rhythmical repetition of imagery, action and dialogue indicating the more superficial aspects of Mississippi Negro experience. Too often, furthermore, Faulkner relies on mere clichés which, plucked from the stream of his rhetoric, grate on the consciousness of any sensitive reader. Rider carries a razor, drinks “moon” whiskey. He and Mannie subsist on a diet of sidemeat, greens, cornbread and buttermilk. He refers to whites, singular and plural, as “white folks,” he punctuates the crap game with cries of “Ah'm snakebit” (pp. 139, 147, 153).

Faulkner's use of idiom of this sort is of special interest. A familiar reaction from critics has been praise for Faulkner's ear for black English. Irving Howe comments that “No other American novelist … has listened with such fidelity to the nuances of … [the Negro's] speech and recorded them with such skill.”¹⁶ This is a doubtful estimate. But even if true, it still fails to reach the heart of the problem, which is that convincing dialect, far more than a splattering of clichés like soul food and “moon” whiskey, can be a successful means of avoiding deeper characterization.

Typical are the passages in which Rider belligerently rejects his God. His uncle counsels, “De Lawd guv, and He tuck away,” that Rider should “Put yo faith and trust in Him.” Rider objects impatiently, “What faith and trust?” and complains, “What Mannie ever done ter Him? What He wanter come messin wid me … ?” Later, alone, jug in hand, he drunkenly addresses this rejected deity. “Dat's right. Try me,” he asserts. “Try me, big boy. Ah gots something hyar now dat kin whup you. … Come on now. You always claim you's a better man den me. Come on now. Prove it” (pp. 145, 147-148). Such passages serve the purpose of reminding us that Faulkner's characters are intended, after all, as Negroes; but if we strip away such surface “realism” we are left with little more than a black Shropshire lad, calling on homebrew to outstrip doctrine in reconciling God's intransigence.

The incident, like others, illustrates a significant irony. Granted that Rider's tragedy offers insights into the Negro identity crisis, that Faulkner is presenting an archetypal plot which many Negro writers have chosen. Still the specificities of its presentation—the warp and woof of Faulkner's tapestry—are of white origin. Throughout “Pantaloon in Black” Faulkner's formidable techniques are not employed in dramatizing Negro life. Rather, they are employed in obscuring it. The story does not offer what it promises. It is no slice of Negro life, but rather another, more skillful, interpretation of Negro life on white terms.

Such considerations are of primary importance for Go Down, Moses. Whether or not one accepts Warren's dictum that “The Negro is the central figure in Faulkner's work,” Faulkner, by motivating Isaac's gesture through his understanding of Negroes, has made the issue a critical one for this novel. But when Faulkner attempts to dramatize that life from the inside, the reader finds the fundamentals of Negro life avoided rather than attacked. If this is the limit of Faulkner's ability to realize Negro experience, the reader must assume, Isaac's exalted views are not, finally, based on a genuine understanding. To accept this is to conclude that Go Down, Moses is in an important sense a failure.

But Faulkner's difficulties with “Pantaloon in Black” do not end with his failure to produce a convincing sample of Negro life. The story is also surprisingly inadequate as an illustration of Isaac's beliefs. Rider may be “better” than Faulkner's whites spiritually, and his emotions, like his physique, may be “stronger.” But he is the dramatic antithesis of a fundamental point of Isaac's romanticism: the “endurance” on which Faulkner himself laid such stress. For Isaac, the race has “learned humility through suffering and learned pride through the endurance which survived the suffering.” But among those qualities the only one which is illustrated by Rider's portrait is that of having suffered. The experience has, furthermore, taught him (justifiably?) no humility, whether toward his white boss or his job or the God he sarcastically addresses; and yet his soaring pride is hardly the Faulknerian kind which develops “through the endurance which survived the suffering.” The most obvious thing about Rider, in fact, is that he does not endure. The white deputy and his nagging wife are through their very insensitivity equipped to survive in Yoknapatawpha society; but Rider, Faulkner's most nearly heroic black male, is not.

Rider's presence in the book, in fact, argues that “endurance” in Go Down, Moses is no heroic African quality, but one reserved rather for mammies and mulatto males. The Negroes who endure in this novel are the superstitious, self-effacing Molly Beauchamp, and her husband Lucas, who patterns himself after his white ancestor. In a novel in which Lucas and Molly survive and Rider succumbs, is not the reader justified in questioning whether the Negro's endurance is not reserved for subservient females, or parcelled out to the male only in the degree Faulkner later acknowledged his readiness for “equality”: “in the ratio of his white blood”? The fact is that Faulkner, in characterizing Rider, has inadvertently undermined Isaac's carefully phrased concepts. His full-blooded Negro male is not “stronger” than whites if “stronger” means the ability to survive.¹⁷

It is a significant failure. For Faulkner to have backed off from dramatizing Negro life at the very point at which he intended to attack it is understandable, if regrettable. But to have been led into a dramatization of Negro character which undermines rather than illustrates the beliefs of his white hero is a problem of a different order. It suggests the significance of Ellison's remark that “even a glance [at Faulkner] is more revealing of what lies back of the distortion of the Negro in modern writing than any attempt at a group survey might be.” Ellison feels that “Faulkner's attitude is mixed.” Granting that Faulkner “has been more willing perhaps than any other artist to start with the stereotype … and then seek out the human truth which it hides,” still, Faulkner takes “his cue from the Southern mentality in which the Negro is often dissociated into a malignant stereotype … on the one hand and a benign stereotype … on the other”; he “most often … presents characters embodying both.”¹⁸ Although this at first may itself appear a stereotyped attitude, it is in fact an understatement of the problem in “Pantaloon.” Faulkner's intention was, clearly, to start out with the “malignant” Black Beast, then to reveal the “truth” of Rider's tragedy: that a man “better than we are” has been flawed by shortcomings “that white men and bondage have taught them.” But the reader who looks beneath the surface realism of Faulkner's techniques and the romantic fervor of Isaac's rhetoric finds a third possibility: an image of black manhood which is too physical, too emotional, too childish, finally, to survive the rigors of American life, an image which suggests inevitable failure without white help. It is plain both from the structure of Go Down, Moses and from Faulkner's emphasis on other occasions on “endurance” that this was not the image he consciously intended. The implication is obvious that his feelings on the subject were so “mixed” that they prevented a coherent approach to the issue. In this context Baldwin's remark that the “sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long endured is hidden” from whites is striking in its suggestiveness.

Ironically, it is this very matter of endurance which Faulkner makes such an issue in Isaac's speculations that marks Rider's portrait off from the similar creations of Negro writers. Ellison's hero, poised knife in hand over his victim, realizes that “the man had not seen me,” that “as far as he knew, [he] was in the midst of a walking nightmare.” Such understanding is the index of his humanity, for from it issues a guilt Rider never feels: he is “both disgusted and ashamed.”¹⁹ The point is a telling one. Ellison's man is capable of a willed choice, and because of this, he achieves a transcendence over the circumstances imposed by society. Similarly, the youthful Cleaver, encountering a more lenient justice than Rider, lived to learn the meaning of his rapes: “I lost my self respect. My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse.” It was the beginning of a new life. “That is why I started to write. To save myself.”²⁰ This is a moral development that, in Rider's Mississippi, he might never have lived to achieve; still, the important difference between Soul on Ice and Go Down, Moses is that he does achieve it. Cleaver's self-portrait demonstrates that even in the worst circumstances, a degraded state may be transcended; Rider's tale suggests that under relatively favorable conditions such transcendence may be illusive. The case of Wright's Bigger Thomas at first seems different; Bigger is no more a survivor than Rider. But the implication for Negro characterizations in the two portraits differs sharply. Bigger is a confused, trapped young man, and there is never any suggestion in Native Son that he represents the best the race can produce. Wright's portrait shows how a white-dominated society can turn an ordinary youth into a dangerous criminal; Faulkner's that the best of full-blooded Negroes cannot escape such a transformation. Apparent similarities notwithstanding, in short, there is an enormous gap between the attitudes of these Negro writers and that of Faulkner toward Negro characterization.

Despite Faulkner's difficulties, Go Down, Moses is, obviously, a contribution of lasting importance to the novel of race. To have understood Rider's tragedy in somewhat the same terms that Wright, Ellison, Cleaver, and others have understood the problem is a considerable achievement. So also is Faulkner's dramatization of the horror of the McCaslins' miscegenous, incestuous history, and his creation of a white protagonist who could not bear the guilt of such a heritage. The significance of all this increases when one considers how far in advance its creation was of the recent Negro literary successes which have so enlarged our national awareness. And if Faulkner fails in damaging ways, it is not enough merely to deplore his difficulties. What Negro critic, truly, could desire the Faulkners, or Warrens or Styrons, to break off all efforts at fictional realization of Negro life? To do so would be to ring down a curtain of literary segregation more absolute than any political one. That Faulkner made the effort, and made it in his characteristically ambitious fashion—that is of basic importance.

Still, Faulkner falls lamentably short in Go Down, Moses of what Warren promises of him: that “To forge the conscience of his [white Southern] race, he stayed in his native spot and, in his soul, in images of vice and of virtue, reenacted the history of that race.” The contradictory feelings with which he approached the subject of Negro character preordained that this formidable book would be in a final sense a failure. What began as an ambitious attempt to assess the total tragedy of slavery becomes, finally, a kind of case study in the accuracy of Baldwin's belief that for whites to accept the qualities of Negro life, “the nature of the [white] American psychology … must undergo a metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable.” Perhaps Faulkner came to realize this. Addressing the readers of Ebony during the integration crisis of 1956 he expressed an attitude striking in its similarity to Baldwin's. “It is easy enough,” he wrote, “to say glibly, ‘If I were a Negro, I would do this or that.’ But a white man can only imagine himself for the moment a Negro; he cannot be that man of another race and griefs and problems.”²¹

Notes

1. James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” Partisan Review, XVIII (Nov.-Dec., 1951), 673, 674.

2. Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), p. 109.

3. Robert Penn Warren, “Faulkner: The South and the Negro,” Southern Review, I (Summer, 1965), 512, 529.

4. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), p. 42.

5. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York, 1955), pp. 298, 294, 295. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

6. Warren, p. 521.

7. Faulkner, “To the Editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal,” in Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, by William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York, 1965), pp. 220-221.

8. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, ed. Faulkner in the University (Charlottesville, Va., 1959), pp. 213, 210.

9. An interesting departure from Faulkner's pattern of dark-skinned mammies and mulatto males is the black youth Ringo of The Unvanquished (1938). Ringo is a rarity in Faulkner: an intelligent, witty, aggressive individual of African blood who seems destined to succeed at anything he undertakes. But Ringo, like Dilsey, values himself as a member of a white family; his source of personal identification is his position as one of the stalwarts in the white order of things on John Sartoris's plantation. Furthermore, Faulkner finds no real place for a mature Ringo in The Unvanquished. He is kept in the background in “An Odor of Verbena” as Bayard Sartoris assumes the hero's role. To provide a mature version of this promising black youth is perhaps no artistic necessity; but in the context of Faulkner's understanding of Negro character, his failure to do so is most suggestive.

10. Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962 (New York, 1966), p. 113.

11. In “The Fire and the Hearth” Faulkner makes a similar effort to enter Lucas Beauchamp's mind. As I have emphasized, Lucas does not truly identify himself as a Negro.

12. That Rider's story had a lasting attraction for Faulkner is evidenced in the fact that he allowed Temple Drake Stevens to retell it in capsule form in Requiem for a Nun as a part of her speculations about race. Temple is specific about Rider's motivation: “… at first he tried just walking the country roads at night for exhaustion and sleep, only that failed and then he tried getting drunk so he could sleep, and that failed, and then he tried fighting and then he cut a white man's throat with a razor in a dice game and so at last he could sleep for a little while.” Requiem for a Nun (New York, 1951), pp. 198-199.

13. Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, 1952), pp. 7-8.

14. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York, 1968), p. 14.

15. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York, 1966), pp. 108-109.

16. Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York, 1962), p. 134.

17. There has been a good deal of confusion about the significance of the term “endurance” for Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Endurance is, obviously, one of Dilsey's virtues. But the Faulkner who philosophizes about such virtues is the Faulkner of the 1940's. The Faulkner of 1929 shunned abstractions of this type; amid the concreteness of imagery and action with which Dilsey is realized, they would have been out of place. It was only in 1945, when he composed the Compson history which was first published as an appendix to Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner (New York, 1946) that Faulkner gave Dilsey a life in Memphis after the disintegration of the Compsons, and summed up her earlier experience with the statement, “They endured” (p. 756). This was sixteen years after the publication of the earlier novel, and Faulkner was now in a more philosophical frame of mind. He had recently worked out the concept of endurance which he articulated through Isaac McCaslin in Part IV of “The Bear,” published for the first time with Go Down, Moses only three years earlier. Now he was speculating with Cowley about how to represent all aspects of Yoknapatawpha County in The Portable. The Compson history was created to help explain the Dilsey section which, wrenched out of its original context, was to be included in the new book. The expression “They endured” suggests that the Dilsey narrative is representative of Negro life in general—as it is not intended to be in the novel. See The Faulkner-Cowley File, pp. 28, 31, 35, 36, 39.

    Dilsey is, in many ways, the most appealing of Faulkner's blacks. But figures like Dilsey and Nancy Mannigoe typify only the relatively small number of black women who once regarded themselves as members of white households. This is in itself a comment upon the nature of Dilsey's endurance. The tragedy she lives through is that of her adopted, not of her natural, family. A less fully developed but more logically consistent figure is the mulatto Clytie Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! As Thomas Sutpen's illegitimate daughter, Clytie is literally a Negro member of his family; hence her tragic loyalty is more fully motivated.

18. Ellison, Shadow and Act, pp. 42-43.

19. Ellison, Invisible Man, p. 8.

20. Cleaver, p. 15.

21. Faulkner, “A Letter to the Leaders of the Negro Race” (originally “If I Were a Negro”), Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, p. 110.