Wash+Jones

Like many of Faulkner's secondary characters, although he only appears in a handful of scenes, Wash Jones is a crucial character within //Absalom, Absalom!// whose actions have a major impact upon the Sutpen family. A "gaunt gangling man malaria-ridden" (AA, 69) who lives in the "abandoned and rotting fish camp in the river bottom" (AA, 99) on Sutpen's Hundred, Wash works as the handyman around the plantation. It is worth noting that Jones' story mirrors Sutpens in a number of ways and their fates seem inextricably bound. (Jones himself admits he has been "drug along where he went" (AA, 231)). Most importantly, the character effectively illuminate the hopeless delusions of the poor, white southerner. He first appeared in Faulkner's universe as the focal character in the shorty story, "Wash," published in //Harper's Magazine// in 1934. Regarded as the inspiration for //Absalom, Absalom!//, "Wash" was one of a number of stories Faulkner wrote to illuminate the lives of lower-class men and women in the South. The interactions between Jones and Sutpen are nearly identical in both works.

The reader is first introduced to Wash Jones through Rosa Coldfield's perspective. He comes to her on the day of Bon's murder and summons her to Sutpen's Hundred. She recounts to Quentin how she rode out to the plantation beside him, "that brute who until Ellen died was not even permitted to approach the house from the front - that brute progenitor of brutes whose granddaughter was to supplant me, if not in my sister's house at least in my sister's bed… brute who was not only to preside upon the various shapes and avatars of Thomas Sutpen's devil's fate but was to provide at the last the female flesh in which his name and lineage should be sepulchered" (AA, 107). Jones is essentially the epitome of "white what? - Yes, trash" (AA, 147), made clear by Rosa's aversion to the man whom she obviously considers far beneath the station she can barely continue to occupy herself. Of course, it is Rosa's refusal to Sutpen's insulting proposition and subsequent abandonment of Sutpen's Hundred which forces Thomas Sutpen to turn to Jones and his grandfather, Milly in one last desperate attempt to complete his design. The reader learns nothing about Jones' background. As John Rodden points out in ""The Faithful Gravedigger": The Role of "Innocent" Wash Jones and the Invisible "White Trash" in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!", "even the surname "Jones" underlines the commonness and invisibility of the family in society; moreover, the name "Wash," rich in symbolic meaning, suggests a man whose past is nothing more than a blank slate" (Rodden, 25). The entirety of the character is based on his admiration and dedication to his master, "the fine figure of the man as he called it" (AA, 226), whom he has served for twenty years.

The pathetic lot of Jones' life is made glaringly evident by the fact that even the black men and women around town are not afraid to laugh at him. "'Who him, calling us niggers?'" (AA, 226) they cackle in face. More pitiful is the fact that Jones "//who before '61 had not even been allowed to approach the front door of the house and who,//" while the Sutpen men are away at war, "//got no nearer than the kitchen door//" (AA, 149). Even Clytie, a black women, a bastard child, has the power to stop him. Regardless, he does not try. Ostensibly, he never has. The incident Sutpen experiences on the steps of that plantation, the turning point in his life, parallels this interaction presented between Clytie and Jones. Only, Jones is able to push past the insult. As a white man, he considers it beneath him to challenge her. As Shreve postulates, "he might have said to himself //The reason I wont try it aint that I refuse to give any black nigger the chance to tell me I cant but because I aint going to force Mister Tom to have to cuss a nigger or take a cussing from his wife on my account//" (AA, 226). Even when humiliated by an African American, Wash thinks only of Sutpen. The color of his skin, despite his utterly humiliating lot in life, allows him to cling to the delusion of sharing in some part of the plantation owner's pride and status.

Watching Sutpen gallop across the plantation, for a moment, "Wash's heart would be quiet and proud… maybe it would seem to him that this world… where he walked always in mocking and jeering echoes of nigger laughter, was just a dream and an illusion and that the actual world was the one where his own lonely apotheosis… galloped on the black thoroughbred, thinking… how the Book said that all men were created in the image of God and so all men were the same in God's eyes anyway, looked the same to God at least, and so he would look at Sutpen and think… //If God himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like//" (AA, 226). Sutpen and Jones are both clearly blinded by their dreams and illusions, remaining impervious to life's cruel realities by clinging to their delusions. In the same way that Sutpen objectifies the people in his life with "a certain utility quotient" (Rodden, 26), Wash objectifies Sutpen as the epitome of honor and bravery, even godliness. In many ways, the awe with which Jones regards Sutpen also mirrors "Sutpen's boyhood wonder at the opulence and omnipotence of the plantation owner… Quentin speculates that young Sutpen must have dreamed about having, like the plantation owner, “a broadcloth monkey to hand him the jug and to carry the wood and water into the cabin for his sisters.” Of course, in effect, Wash becomes the monkey: his duties are precisely to fetch Sutpen’s jug… and carry supplies up to the door of the Sutpen mansion" (Rodden, 28). By successfully obtaining such a faithful white servant, Sutpen manages to do the plantation owner one better, "and in the process reduced his own native class one notch lower. (Rodden, 28). Nonetheless, slave or no slave, Jones clearly believers there to be some kind of kinship with his master. "They aint whupped us yit" (AA, 150), he assures Sutpen over and over again, that pitiful "us" tying them together, giving them a common enemy, a shared destiny.

When Sutpen becomes involved with Milly, Wash's fifteen year old granddaughter, he does not protest but rather, "at the devil's command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith… helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues" (AA, 149). To Jones, their union essentially represents the union he believes himself to share with Sutpen, providing him with the reassurance that Sutpen will not betray him and will take care of Milly. His blind faith in the man is almost painful. After she becomes pregnant, Wash goes to Sutpen to reason with him. "I've knowed you for going on twenty years now," he says, "I aint never denied yit to do what you told me to do. And I'm a man past sixty. And she aint nothing but a fifteen-year-old gal… But you are brave… And I know that whatever your hands tech… that you will make hit right" (AA, 228). He willingly sacrifices his granddaughter's virginity proving, not only his dedication to Sutpen, but the very idea of Sutpen's design.

It is only on the fateful morning that Milly gives birth that Jones finally recognizes his reality. Sutpen rises early to oversee the birth of a new foal. When he finally enters Wash's cabin, he looks down indifferently at the young women and (his final failure) the new, baby girl she holds in her arms and says only, "Well Milly; too bad you're not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable" (AA, 229). Suddenly, Wash's entire world snaps. Sutpen's rejection of Milly irrevocably eviscerates twenty long years of reverence and false worship. There is no kinship, no union. "//That was what got him up. It was that colt. It aint me or mine either. It wasn't even his own that got him out of bed//" (AA, 231). Wash's disillusionment mirrors Sutpen's own in this moment so tremendously that the words describing Sutpen's experience could very well be perfectly applied to his own. "… he seemed to dissolve and a part of him turn and rush back… like when you pass through a room fast and look at all the objects in it and you tun and go back through the room again and look at all the objects from the other side and you find out you had ever seen them before, rushing back through… years and seeing a dozen things that had happened and he hadn't even seen them before" (AA, 186). Suddenly, he recognizes the truth in regards to his place in the world, the truth in regards to his perceived union with Sutpen, and he knows what he must do. Again, his experience mirrors Sutpen's almost exactly. "All of a sudden he discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do… because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life… fix things right" (AA, 178). Perhaps then, Quentin later speculates, "while he stood befogged in his fumbling and groping… there broke free and plain in midgallop against the yellow sky of dawn the find proud image of the man on the fine proud image of the stallion and that the fumbling and the groping broke clear and free too" (AA, 230). Unlike Sutpen therefore, who goes to the grave clinging to his innocence, the betrayal Wash encounters here awakens some vague, but nonetheless crucial, understanding of the basic human right of dignity which exists within each and every human being, despite their status or skin color, and it is this conviction, that each of us has some small shred of self‐respect which must not be set aside," which allows him to finally assert and defend his own dignity as well as Milly's. Thus, Wash Jones becomes "the faithful gravedigger who opened the play and would close it," (AA, 225). By killing Sutpen and finally murdering Milly and her daughter, Jones effectively //washing// away the sin and filth and destruction Sutpen has left in his path.

Faulkner, William. //Absalom, Absalom!//. Vintage International. New York, 1990. Print.

Rodden, John. "The Faithful Gravedigger": The Role of "Innocent" Wash Jones and the Invisible "White Trash." //The Southern Literary Journal//; 43, 1. The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Web.