Faulkner and Racism
The single most indelible fact about William Faulkner's work is his persistent concentration on observing and recording the culture and country in which he was born; what is most striking now, as we look back on his legacy from our own, is the enormous courage and cost of that task. Faulkner's Lafayette County, in northeastern Mississippi, not far from the battle sites of Brice's Cross Roads, Corinth, and Shiloh, is still marked in its town squares with statues of soldiers of the Confederate Army of the United States, in full battle dress and, more often than not, facing South towards the homeland they mean to protect with their lives. But what for Faulkner is most haunting is not the communal psychology of war so much as the agonizing recognition of the exacting expenses of racism, for him the most difficult and most grievous awareness of all. Racism spreads contagiously through his works, unavoidably. Its force is often debilitating, and its consequences often beyond reckoni!ng openly. The plain recognition of racism is hardest to bear and yet most necessary to confront. There is a much keener racial awareness at work ten years later, however, in Faulkner's novel of the war of Northern a
[page 269] Granny's intractable racism is continually the novel's subtext. She befriends a black slave boy Ringo because he refuses to leave the Sartoris family--something Bayard works free enough to recognize only in the final episode of the novel, "An Odor of Verbena"--and with Ringo's imaginative plan and support she swindles Yankees of mules and horses, sells them back for a profit, and distributes the illegal profits of her own war of Southern aggression at the local church. They found the body of Andre Jones hanging in a dank jailhouse shower stall, a black shoelace from his gray Air Jordan sneakers forming a noose around his neck, a day before he was supposed to start college at Alcorn State University. [page 277] State and Federal officials have ruled it a suicide, committed, they say, by a young man who was probably despondent about being caught driving a stolen vehicle and facing the prospect of going to prison. His family and supporters call it a lynching disguised as a suicide. And they say it is only one of many committed in the jails of a state where the terror of Jim Crow and the civil rights eras lives on in new forms. Civil rights groups and the United States Civil Rights Commission have called for a Federal investigation into Mr. Jones's death as well as those of 21 other blacks in Mississippi jails in recent years, all of them deaths by hanging. Versions of this charge lie behind many of the accounts that view Faulkner, at least in the 1920s, as being unthinkingly and unknowingly racist. However, for a white writer, to stay out of an African-American consciousness may not necessarily imply the assumption that there is no life there to characterize. Faulkner and Racism: A Commentary on Arthur F. Kinney's "Faulkner and Racism"
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4400
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page double spaced)
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