Slavery

While the legacy of American slavery always loomed large in the stories of Yoknapatawpha County, it is not until //Absalom, Absalom!// (1936) that Faulkner explicitly addressed slavery. Setting aside Faulkner’s next three novels – //The Unvanquished, The Wild Palms,// and //The Hamlet// – the seven interrelated short stories collected in //Go Down, Moses// (1942) provide readers with another close look at the system and culture of American slavery, specifically in the stories “Was” and “The Bear.” In these two texts, Faulkner explores the role of slavery as the driving force of the Southern economy. He examines slavery first through the story of Thomas Sutpen in //Absalom, Absalom!//, chronicling Sutpen’s rise from his poverty-stricken childhood in West Virginia to being owner of twenty slaves and a 100-acre plantation in Mississippi – the epicenter of antebellum, slave-owning aristocracy. Through Sutpen’s story, Faulkner both complicates the typical view of slave-owner as bucolic master and places that view as the ideal to which Sutpen strives but never reaches. Sutpen’s story is an allegory for the Southern plantation life – the exploitation and work that built it, the excess it created, and the war that destroyed it. In //Go Down, Moses//, Faulkner explores the slavery in a more personal manner. While //Absalom, Absalom!// provides, in many ways, a type of origin myth for American slavery, //Go Down, Moses// explores the reality that slaves were very much viewed as property – both economically and sexually, specifically through the characters of Eunice, Tomasina, and Tomey’s Turl. In both of these texts, Faulkner illustrates the correlation between slavery, Southern aristocracy, sexuality, and capitalism.

“Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color…with grouped behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men, in attitudes wild and reposed” ( // Absalom // 4). And so, the character of Thomas Sutpen is introduced in // Absalom, Absalom! // in the first pages of the text, a mythic figure appearing as if without a past. His richly descriptive entrance into the town offers a juxtaposition between Jefferson, appearing here as innocent and idyllic, and Sutpen himself, the inhuman man-horse-demon figure who arrives with his trail of “beasts half tamed” to taint the purity of this small-town Southern community. With this image, Faulkner begins his project of telling slavery’s backstory. Sutpen’s appearance, as if out of nowhere, without a past, only to have his true past and purpose later revealed, debunks the myth that slavery was inherently and intrinsically linked to the Southern lifestyle and economy. In reality, the bond between slavery and capitalism in the South was formed through a history of violence and exploitation.

In // The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders //, James Oakes attempts to debunk the myth that the wealthy, idle, aristocratic slave-owner that inhabits much of our nation’s imagination and collective memory of slavery was in fact very far from the norm: This legend has served the purposes of proslavery ideologues and post-Civil War romantics more than the cause of historical accuracy. It distorts the past by dismissing almost entirely the experience of the vast majority of slaveholders who were not planters and who rarely lived in bucolic relaxation. It further distorts by presenting an idealized image of the plantation divorced from the mundane and oppressive realities of everyday life. Most slaveholders, including the planters, would have recognized little in the legend that conformed to their own lives (51-2). Faulkner’s project is similar to Oakes’ in that he understands the problematic nostalgia inherent in this myth of the leisurely and aristocratic plantation life and attempts to reveal its fallacies. Sutpen falls victim to this myth when he finds himself on a plantation for the first time as a young boy, and sees the owner, “with his shoes off and a nigger who wore every day better clothes than he or his father and sisters had ever owned…who did nothing else but fan him and bring him drinks” ( // Absalom // 184). This is the first time that the boy Sutpen even becomes aware that this lifestyle of wealth and exploitation even exists. The shock that Sutpen feels in this scene reveals the important reality that this type of wealth was a rarity, and most southern whites were more likely to live lives of hard work and little wealth, closer to Sutpen’s childhood family, than the plantation owner being fanned in his hammock.

Through the vantage point of the boy Sutpen, Faulkner reveals the unnaturalness of slavery as a concept – that one single man would have such extravagant wealth on the work and lives of others. “He didn’t even know there was a country all divided and fixed and neat with a people living on it all divided and fixed and neat because of what color their skins happened to be and what they happened to own” (//Absalom// 179). Slavery here is described as both an economic and humanitarian fallacy. First, the young Sutpen is shocked that men would be so greedy as to divide the natural land into squares of property larger than necessary for survival and comfort, “because where he lived the land belonged to anybody and everybody and so the man who would go to the trouble and work to fence off a piece of it and say ‘This is mine’ was crazy” (//Absalom// 179). This is a criticism and comment on agricultural capitalism itself, of which American slavery was an extreme version. The young Sutpen is also shocked to see the race disparity, and cannot fathom how one man has everything while another has nothing, simply based on skin color.

After experiencing this moment of recognition, the young Sutpen leaves his home forever. Faulkner writes that he “never saw his family again” (//Absalom// 192). And thus, Sutpen begins his quest for the American Dream, to gain what he now knows is lacking from his identity as a southern white male – property, both in terms of land and slaves. This is an American Dream that is inherently linked to the exploitation of human beings, wealth accumulated on the unpaid labor of individuals denied basic human rights, and citizenship based on perceived difference in skin color. In //William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies//, Carolyn Porter notes the social contradiction inherent in American slavery that is revealed through Sutpen’s story, “the claim to social equality and the denial in practice of that claim because of both race and class” (125). In its simplest form, the American Dream is one of upward mobility. It is the idea that, through hard work and perseverance, a person can achieve prosperity through the accumulation of wealth and property. The contradiction that Faulkner illustrates through Sutpen’s story is the reality that the people who achieved this dream did so only by making that dream impossible for so many others. Only by amassing slave labor could a person reach the highest level of aristocracy in America.

James Oakes points out that, in 1860, the twelve wealthiest counties in the United States were below the Mason and Dixon Line, and Adams County, Mississippi, had the highest per capita wealth of any county in the nation (39). He also posits that, “the ownership of slaves became for many immigrants the single most important symbol of their success in the New World” (43). It is tempting to assume that, while writing //Absalom, Absalom!//, Faulkner was coming to a lot of the conclusions that Oakes later confirmed in his research on the American slaveholder. While Sutpen himself is not an immigrant, he shares that mentality of working his way up from the bottom through hard work and perseverance, and stakes his claim in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, assumedly a short distance culturally and geographically from the epicenter of plantation wealth in Adams County.

Situating Haiti as the location for Sutpen’s accumulation of slaves works to further complicate and strengthen Faulkner’s depiction of the American slave system. If the goal is to debunk the romantic narrative of slaveholder as bucolic, aristocratic master, Faulkner must not only answer the question, “What did it mean to be a slaveholder?” but also, “Where did one acquire slaves?” In the novel, Faulkner describes Haiti as the halfway point between Africa and America, both geographically and physically, “between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood, the black bones and flesh and thinking and remembering and hopes and desires, was ravished by violence, and the cold known land to which it was doomed” (//Absalom// 202). This description acts as a representation for the economic trading system known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, in which slaves were shipped from Africa and brought to the West Indies first, many of whom would later end up in trading markets in American port cities like New Orleans. Carolyn Porter reiterates the idea that the novel’s Haiti narrative points “to the larger scope of the economic forces that generated the development of slave labor in the Americas” (126). Comparing not only Sutpen’s backstory to the work of James Oakes, but also his experience as a slaveholder, further illuminates both Sutpen’s position in Mississippi society and the realities of the slave as property. According to Oakes, “The master-slave relationship varied enormously from one small slaveholder to the next” (52). The vast majority of slaveholders did not remain idle, sipping mint juleps under a live oak as dozens of slaves picked cotton systematically in the field. The more common image would be the one that Faulkner depicts in the early days of the building of Sutpen’s Hundred. “He and the twenty negroes worked together, plastered over with mud against the mosquitoes…distinguishable one from another by his beard and eyes alone” (//Absalom// 28). Sutpen’s slaves were still his property. They still provided labor without pay, without consent, and still obeyed his every command. However, Sutpen, penniless, knew that he could not afford to remain idle while his slaves built his mansion. A man raised in a poor, practically-minded home, Sutpen knew that the work would be completed faster if he helped out. At the same time, it is worth noting that, while Sutpen is distinguishable from his slaves by his beard and eyes only, the slaves themselves are indistinguishable from each other. Throughout the entire novel, Sutpen’s slaves remain nameless, referred collectively as “wild niggers” (4) or individually as “one of the niggers” (178) or “the negro” (17). Sutpen may produce labor alongside his slaves, but he alone is given individual status, while the slaves are labeled only by their usefulness as property.

Though Sutpen may work alongside his slaves, he is also careful to establish his dominance over them, and the most visible and visceral way that he does that in the text is through wrestling. “Perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of supremacy, domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes himself” (//Absalom// 21). Though some might argue that this is not proof of Sutpen showing dominance over his slaves because any half-intelligent slave would know better than to beat his master in a wrestling match, lest he face the consequences. However, the descriptions of the match suggest a serious fight on both sides: “…both naked to the waist and gouging at one another’s eyes…[Sutpen] standing there naked and panting and bloody to the waist and the negro fallen” (21). Faulkner clearly shows how these acts of brutal violence were successful in their aim – to display dominance by power, and respect by fear, if nothing else. After the match is finished, Sutpen stands talking with his wife, “his teeth showing beneath his beard now and another negro wiping the blood from his body with a towsack…while a third nigger prodded his shirt or coat at him as though the coat were a stick and he a caged snake” (21). After working alongside his slaves during the day, Sutpen organizes these nightly wrestling rituals to reestablish himself in the role of master.

The chosen method of wrestling as the way to establish dominance of his slaves is effective, in part, because it temporarily removes all social boundaries. Thadious Davis writes about the social function of games and sport in relation to Faulkner’s work. Davis writes, “In the social state of Faulkner’s text, sport and game derive meanings from an effort to duplicate the competition for and control of property within the circumscription of law” (9-10). Sutpen’s wrestling matches with his slaves suspend the master-slave relationship momentarily, “as if their skins should not only have been the same color but should have been covered with fur too” (//Absalom// 20-21). Sutpen reestablishes that relationship upon each win, and his slaves respond appropriately by wiping the blood and sweat from his body while his opponent lies on the ground. This scene begs the question: What would happen if Sutpen lost? However, Faulkner never provides the answer to the question, so one is left to assume that Sutpen never lost, and thus that power dynamic remains in place until he leaves to join the Civil War.

While Thadious Davis’ game theories apply to //Absalom, Absalom!// her work is focused much more specifically on //Go Down, Moses.// The first section of the novel, “Was,” contains multiple games, which both reveal and suspend the social relations inherent in slavery. The first game of the story involves Uncle Buck’s semi-annual “hunt” for Tomey’s Turl, a slave who runs away to be with Tennie, a female slave at a nearby plantation. While the common narrative of a slave hunt brings to mind scenes of angry slaveholders with a torch in one hand and a whip in the other, Uncle Buck seems resigned to his mission. The only reason Uncle Buck rushes to get on with the hunt when they realize that Tomey’s Turl has escaped, is because he doesn’t want Mr. Hubert, Tennie’s owner, to find him first. “If somebody didn’t go and get Tomey’s Turl right away, Mr. Hubert would fetch him back himself and…stay for a week longer (//Moses// 6). In this ritual, Tomey’s Turl breaks from his social role as the obedient, desire-free slave while Uncle Buck and Mr. Hubert break their roles as the feared master. However, all parties know that this suspension is temporary, whether Uncle Buck goes to fetch Tomey’s Turl or Mr. Hubert finds him first. At that point, the game is over and the normal master-slave relationship is resumed.

This semi-annual hunt for Tomey’s Turl also highlights the way that the slaveholder viewed slaves solely as property, their value judged only in economic terms. Faulkner notes that the easy solution to Tomey’s Turl’s runaway tendencies would be for Buck to buy Tennie or sell Tomey’s Turl. However: They couldn’t keep [Tomey’s Turl] at home by buying Tennie from Mr. Hubert because Uncle Buck said he and Uncle Buddy had so many niggers already that they could hardly walk around on their own land for them, and they couldn’t sell Tomey’s Turl to Mr. Hubert because Mr. Hubert said he not only wouldn’t buy Tomey’s Turl, he wouldn’t have that damn white half-McCaslin on his place even as a free gift, not even if Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board and keep for him (5-6). Tomey’s Turl’s affection for Tennie has no significance in Buck and Buddy’s decision of whether or not to purchase Tennie from Mr. Hubert. The matter is simple. They already have more slaves than they need, so why would they want more? Hubert’s reasoning is more complicated, but clearly, Tennie’s romantic notions towards Tomey’s Turl are not a factor in his decision. And so Tomey’s Turl and Tennie can act upon their romantic, inherently // human // desires and feelings only during this semi-annual tradition, this game. Their permanent position as property and economic value is temporarily suspended and they are allowed to be together as people, that is, until the end of the story, when Buddy wins Tennie in a poker match with Mr. Hubert. Davis writes that, “The emphasis on buying and selling underscores the correlation between slavery and capitalism, between the market economics of chattel slavery and marriage and sexuality” (52). Tomey’s Turl and Tennie are only allowed to marry because of the economic transaction that brought Tennie to Buck and Buddy’s plantation. In other words, their ability to marry is decided only when Tennie is won as a prize in a poker game.

Slavery has a much more personal role in //Go Down, Moses// than in //Absalom, Absalom!// While Sutpen’s slaves remain unnamed, the slaves in //Go Down, Moses// make up some of the novel’s most compelling and important characters. These personal narratives contribute to Faulkner’s project of showing the economics of slavery – the slave as property. “Was” illustrates this relationship between slavery and capitalism in a relatively lighthearted way, at least on the surface. “The Bear,” however, tells a much darker tale. As a young adult, Isaac McCaslin, discovers dark secrets by poring over the family ledger – most notable is the discovery that Isaac’s grandfather, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, slept with his own daughter, Tomasina, who was also his slave. The ledger, taken merely at face value, shows how the history and memory of slaves were known only through records of economic transactions. If it weren’t for the survival of the ledger, and the fact that Isaac was curious enough to parse through it, the truth of Isaac’s relationship with Tomasina and Eunice would be forgotten with time. Similarly, the lives of slaves like Pervacil Brown are remembered only in terms of economic value. The ledger comically chronicles a series of inscriptions from Buck and Buddy complaining about Brown’s lack of valuable skills: “//No bookepper any way Cant read. Can write his Name but I already put that down My self…Cant plough either Say he aims to be a Precher…who in hell would buy him//” (252-3). The ledger notes that Brown was originally purchased as a bookkeeper until it is discovered that he cannot read. The ledger traces Buck and Buddy’s attempt to find //some// value for their purchase, but in the end they show signs of frustration in trying to figure out what to do with him.

With //Absalom, Absalom!// and //Go Down, Moses//, Faulkner exposes two contradictions inherent in the slavery system both in his own Yoknapatawpha county and the American south. The contradiction inherent in //Go Down, Moses// is in the correlation between property and reproduction. By chronicling the ledger, Isaac reveals this contradiction, that through the exploitation of the slave as property via miscegenation, the slaveholder is, over time, erasing that which makes the slave eligible to be property. Thadious Davis’s description of this contradiction in //Game of Properties: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses// is worth a close reading:

Here is a confounding point: miscegenation that is also incestuous is a move toward the legal destruction of blacks as racially marked. With the erasure of bodily difference, then, the issue of property and ownership becomes more problematical and more subjective. Concomitantly, with the erasure of difference, slavery as the condition of the “Black Other” would challenge and disrupt the conventional social fabric, and slavery as “African Service” would be dismantled (94).

This contradiction speaks specifically to Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin’s sexual relationship with Eunice, which produces Tomasina. McCaslin then procreates with Tomasina, his daughter, who is half white. As a result, McCaslin and Tomasina’s son, Tomey’s Turl, is more white than black. Thus, McCaslin asserts his dominance over Eunice and Tomasina by exploiting them sexually, only to diminish the only thing that allows him to use them as property – black skin. The two contradictions that Faulkner explores in these novels are complicated, but they are useful in revealing some of the social trauma involved in viewing people as property to be used as labor, sexual or otherwise.

Thomas Sutpen’s attempt to vindicate himself in pursuit of the American Dream is inherently flawed because he does not understand the contradictions inherent within the American Dream – one man’s upward mobility on the back of another. Carolyn Porter argues that Sutpen is too innocent to see the flaws in his pursuit. Sutpen’s innocence “consists his retention of the belief in the rule of physical force, the rule he learned as a child on the frontier” (Porter 122). This is why he chooses wrestling as his preferred mode of establishing dominance over his slaves. Thus Sutpen tries to prove his worth and power by emulating what he saw on the plantation that day he was slighted as a young boy - the plantation owner in the hammock, sipping a drink, and being fanned by one of his slaves. What Sutpen does not realize is that his idealized vision of social equality does not exist, and that hard work alone will not make a man successful in capitalism. As Carolyn Porter writes, “He has no capacity to see [the contradictions] because they are frozen within the image he sets out to emulate” (125). The man in the barrel stave hammock (//Absalom// 184) got to his position only through violence, exploitation, and the use of human bodies as property. Though Sutpen himself follows this same route in his own journey to Haiti and back again, he never realizes that he has become a contradiction in pursuit of his own design. By placing these stories in Yoknapatawpha County, the financial and aristocratic epicenter of American slavery, Faulkner’s project becomes one involving not just the characters or the places in his novels, but the culture and economy of the entire American South.

–Cooper Marshall

Works Cited:

Davis, Thadious M. // Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses //. Duke University Press, 2003. Print

Faulkner, William. // Absalom, Absalom! // : The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

Faulkner, William. // Go Down, Moses: The Corrected Text //. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

Oakes, James. // The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders //. New York: Knopf, 1982. Print.

Porter, Carolyn. //William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies.// Oxford University Press, 2007. Web.