transformed her from a kind of tentative wife of Solomon into a brood mare ... changed Solomon into a stud; and her child, if she and Solomon had a child, into a little animal.
She reasons correctly; she is ravished by Miltiades Vaiden who does not know that he is her half-brother. On the eve of secession she would have been sold to clear up her father’s debts if she had not escaped to the Yankee lines. Stribling’s pictures of the Reconstruction, especially of the Klan, are likewise unorthodox and authentic.
In The Store Gracie Vaiden, who has been the mistress first of the Yankee lieutenant who becomes governor of Alabama, and then of a white merchant, a pillar of the church, works so that her octoroon son can escape the shame she has met with as a Negro. From the start, however, we see that Touissaint is doomed. “The most despisable nigger in Florence,” he will not run from bullying white boys, hates shining shoes, and insists upon honest dealing in the store, standing up for a whole pound when “everybody knows a nigger pound is about twelve ounces.” Come of age, he tries to vote, but his blue eyes and blond hair do not prove that his grandfather was free; and he fights a “cracker” who insults his mother. Just as his mother was put on the block because her white half-sisters and brothers ran up bills at the store, so Touissaint loses all of his year’s work because his landlord (and father) messes up a business deal. As an end to his rebellious career he is lynched. While Gracie is cutting down his body, “A dozen drunken voices in the mob broke into laughter at the downfall of the Negro mother and her dead son.” His father furnishes the mules and wagon to carry him away. Other Negro characters are surly, cunning and aware of what is being done to them: “If dey shawt weight you too much, wras’le wid de Lawd about hit in prayah”.... “If a white man di’n fly into uh niggah tull he done somepin to him, all us niggahs be settin’ in easy chairs.” Stribling presents with fine sympathy the Negro urchin who announced the miracle: “I can write my name....” Lucy, Touissaint’s wife, prefers farming to domestic service. She thereby astounds the ex-planters to whom these “uppish” Negroes who want independence and education are “unnatural, highly affected and utterly absurd ... the new uncomfortable colored people.”
In Unfinished Cathedral the Negro characters are shown to be more and more progressive and educated, but still subjected to indecency from both upper-class and hoodlum whites. Militant Negroes are now in the picture; even beneath their grotesque robes, the lodge brothers carry guns. There is a frame-up very similar to the Scottsboro case; the bankers, realtors, sheriffs, judges, and even clergy are shown to be closely related to lynching mobs. One of the boys hustled off a train is Gracie’s great-grandson. To Miltiades Vaiden, now eminently respectable, Gracie cries out:
What colored relations? I was born to my mother, old Hannah, long after Old Pap sold off her husband Jericho! I’m not white for nothing! Aunt Creasy told me long ago that my father was Old Pap, the same as yours! Toussaint, the son I had by you, was nothing but a Vaiden on both sides. The child Lucy had by Toussaint, the son you hanged, I named Marcia; and Marcia’s boy you’re holding in jail this minute. Who would my grandchild come back to see except white people, Miltiades?
To these words the old Colonel replies: “Shame on you, Gracie ... talking disrespectfully like this.” In spite of some faults, such as the stretched coincidences, this trilogy is remarkable for the honesty, courage and sympathy with which a southern author has faced the past.
William Faulkner’s “The Raid” (1934) describes the blowing up of the bridges to destroy the Negroes following Sherman’s army, a scene relished by southerners as symbolic, but the slave boy Ringo and the doggedly marching contrabands are excellently done. Thoroughly conversant with the old South, Faulkner has created in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) a credible and powerful, if at times fantastic novel out of “a few old mouth-to-mouth tales” and old letters. From the bleak hills of western Virginia where the cabins were “boiling with children,” Thomas Sutpen comes to frontier Mississippi, “a country of lawless opportunity.” Naked, plastered over with muck against mosquitoes, he and his “wild Negroes tore a plantation out of the wilderness ... dragged a house and garden out of the virgin swamp.” But the Sutpen line is doomed. Charles Bon, Sutpen’s son by a woman in Haiti, who was discarded because she had a “spot of Negro blood,” is murdered to keep him from marrying Sutpen’s daughter (the incest was less abhorred than the miscegenation). The Sutpen fortunes decline, until at the last we see Jim Bond, Charles Bon’s mulatto grandson, lurking around the ashes of the destroyed mansion. A Mississippi “Fall of the House of Usher,” Absalom, Absalom! seems in part an allegory of slavery. Negro characters, whether the savages so like their wild master, or Clytie, Sutpen’s mulatto daughter, who could be neither tamed nor freed, or Charles Bon, most elegant cavalier and yet of Negro blood; or Charles’ son, who in self-laceration turns completely to Negroes, are original and convincing, “living creatures, living flesh to feel pain and writhe and cry out.”
Conclusion. A northerner in Absalom, Absalom! ironical at the tyranny of the southern legends, says:
What is it? Something you live and breathe in like air?... A kind of entailed birthright ... of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your children’s children produce children you won’t be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?
Faulkner himself has felt the fascination of the plantation birthright, but he determined to be honest in spite of tradition. Of a different order of genius, he still belongs with his fellow southerners Stribling and Evelyn Scott, who are trying above all else to give a truthful reinterpretation of the old South, and therefore of the Negro. Their work is by no means completely adequate, but together with the work of other honest, sympathetic writers, northern and southern, Negro and white, historical novelists or recorders of contemporary America, it gives promise that the Negro character in fiction may meet with the justice that has been so long deferred.