These Thirteen (1931) contains “That Evening Sun,” one of the best of Negro stories. A Negro woman is shown waiting in dread suspense, certain that her husband is going to kill her. Nancy is truculent and cynical about humanity whether white or black. Her husband is likewise desperate:
I can’t hang around white man’s kitchen. But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I can’t stop him. When white man wants to come in my house, I ain’t got no house. I can’t stop him, but he can’t kick me outen it. He can’t do that.
“Dry September” is a powerful lynching story, but the stress is less upon the victim than upon the psychology of the mob, especially of the leader. No one knows whether the assault happened or was imagined, but the mob gets its man.
In Sanctuary (1929) the incidental picture of a jailed Negro murderer is striking:
He would lean in the window in the evening and sing. After supper a few Negroes gathered along the fence below—natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls shoulder to shoulder—and in chorus with the murderer, they sang ... “Fo days mo! Den dey ghy ’stroy de bes’ ba’ytone singer in Nawth Mississippi!”
Light in August (1932) has as its most interesting character Joe Christmas. A foundling, the son of a white mother and a Negro father, he is raised by his fanatical grandfather. Taken for white until the mystery of his birth is cleared up, he is silent, friendless and proud. After he murders a sex-obsessed Yankee woman, a relic of Reconstruction, he is pursued and killed. Although one character imputes his tragedy to the warfare in him of white and black, there is sufficient reason to see him as a victim of a hostile environment. He is more complex than Faulkner’s other Negroes, fully characterized, and one of Faulkner’s most memorable creations.
Faulkner is a naturalist, and sees humanity in a harsh light. Like the weak, mean, and degenerate white characters whom he has set before us, his Negro characters are shown unflatteringly. House-servants and farmers, loose women and murderers; whether in rocking ecstasy in church, or getting the third degree from a sheriff, or fearing to help out in an accident—“White folks be sayin’ we done it”—they are all equally convincing. Faulkner records Negro speech with complete accuracy, but more important, he gets into character with the uncanny penetration that makes him one of the most significant of the new novelists. His Negroes are a long way from happy-go-lucky comics. If they agree in anything, it is in their surly understanding of the bitter life that they are doomed to live in a backward, hate-ridden South. He does not write social protest, but he is fiercely intent upon the truth, and the truth that he sees is tragic.
In Tobacco Road, after a Negro has been run down by the crazy-driving of a poor-white, Jeeter philosophizes: “Wal, niggers will get kilt.” The same callousness is depicted in Caldwell’s first book, American Earth (1931). “Saturday Afternoon” tells of a mob’s filling a Negro “so full of lead that his body sagged from his neck where the trace-chain held him up.” The Negro was too smart a farmer. “Savannah River Payday” is even more gruesome. A Negro sawmill hand, killed in an accident, is being carried to the town’s undertaker. The drunk “crackers” driving the car hammer out his gold teeth and fight over them. Arriving in town, they go into a pool room and forget all about the corpse. We Are The Living (1933) contains Negro cotton-pickers, and servants whose attractiveness is a household problem. The stories are frequently humorous but the laughter of the Negroes is ironic at perplexed and inept “superiors.”
“Candy Man Beechum” in Kneel To The Rising Sun (1935) is about a travelling boy with flapping feet, who, on his way to see his gal, is shot down for nothing by a white policeman. “Blue Boy” is the ugly anecdote of a Negro idiot whose grotesque tricks entertain a group of satiated “high class ladies and gentlemen.” “Kneel To The Rising Sun”, probably Caldwell’s greatest short story, portrays the misery of short-rationed sharecroppers, the sadism of ignorant, bored landlords, the crushing force of an unjust system. Lonnie, a white man, made a whining coward by years of share-cropping slavery, betrays Clem, who has befriended him, to their mutual enemy the landlord, and his mob of lynchers. Clem is a doggedly courageous Negro, willing to take only so much before rebelling.
All Arch asked ... was for Clem Henry to overstep his place just one little half inch, or to talk back to him with just one little short word, and he would do the rest. Everybody knew what Arch meant by that, especially if Clem did not turn and run. And Clem had not been known to run from anybody, after fifteen years in the country.