Loosh

Loosh is a slave within the Sartoris household, who is Philadelphy’s husband, Joby’s son, and Ringo’s uncle. Secretive and intelligent, Loosh pursues his own freedom and reveals the family's hidden cache of silver to the Yankees. While he has been read as an incidental character who illustrates black defiance and resistance, the question of his personal agency is troubled by his return to the Sartoris home (to the same domain of servitude) in //An Odor of Verbena//. While Barbara Ladd reads Loosh’s narrative as an expression of “Faulkner’s discomfort with the containment of black voices as well as black bodies in the white plantation tradition,” the tension yielded by his varying appearances in the stories suggest that not only is his body a site unable to be contained, but also one imperfectly reconciled within a simplistic frame of freedom (Ladd 140).

Loosh’s “freedom” from containment is also manifest within the structure of the text. His appearances are frequently depicted as irruptive, rarely linked to preceding or following action, but occurring as sudden movements or immediate emergences. In his appearance in //Ambuscade//, Bayard “suddenly” notices “Loosh…standing there, watching us” (Faulkner 4). As Loosh intrudes upon the boys’ play, he “suddenly…stooped before Ringo or [Bayard] could have moved, and…swept the chips flat” (5). The repetitive reference to his suddenness foregrounds the dislocating nature of his presence, and also shows a brief inversion of power dynamics. Loosh’s interruption of the boys’ play-acting Vicksburg is demonstrative of his superiority of knowledge over Bayard, the young (white) Sartoris boy. Further, before Loosh speaks, he “laughed” (4). When he does speak, his initial comments are neither deferential nor indirect. For example, after demolishing their miniature Vicksburg, Loosh says, “There’s your Vicksburg. […] And I tell you nother un you aint know” (5). Loosh’s language is strong and aggressive, even as he speaks to a white child, and further reinforces his authority in explicitly referencing the knowledge he possesses which the boys lack.

This defiant authoritative manner of speaking not only marks his relationship with the boys, but also with other members of his family. His use and expression of language demonstrates his developing self-possession, frequently described in terms of his volume and manner of response, which the others attempt to restrain, mitigate, or silence (to little or no effect). For example, when he shares the details of the incoming Union army with his family, Philadelphy asks, “‘You mean they gwinter free us all? …We gonter al be free?” Loosh responds “loud, with his head flung back” despite repeated calls by the others for him to be quiet (23). Barbara Ladd connects this to black oratorical style, noting that he is not even necessarily speaking //only// to the other black inhabitants, but rather “as a part of and //to// an invisible black world beyond the cabin interior, that population from which the singing, chanting road-walkers will soon begin to come” (Ladd 138). This reading lends his unrestrained voice even more power; through speaking, he not only defines the parameters of selfhood for himself, but calls forth numerous others to join him. Further, Ladd distinguishes Loosh’s “mode of speech” as “Oratory out of his own black Solitude…that gives him some narrative agency” (138). His volume and decisiveness then reflects his belief in the powerful image of his own immediate future after emancipation, one which explicitly confronts and challenges the existing structure of power. For example, in his parting exchange with Granny, his final words to Granny are marked by emphatic oratory and, as Irving Howe notes, particular “vehemence”: “‘You ax me that?’ Loosh said. ‘Where John Sartoris? Whyn’t he come and ax me that? Let God ax John Sartoris who the man name that give me to him. Let the man that buried me in the black dark ax that of the man what dug me free’” (Faulkner 75). His use of rhetorical questions creates an emotional build within those few sentences, even as it speaks to larger concerns of slave-ownership. By the final line, the use of the imperative emphasizes the contrast in his metaphor, one constructed around an image of containment (“buried”) and its opposite (freedom).

Yet, despite Loosh’s pronouncements, his acts of defiance are not so easily reconciled with his textual appearances. As Irving Howe examines Faulkner’s representations of blacks in his works, he considers Loosh as a figure “singled out for ridicule and distrust, and [his] rebelliousness is hardly taken seriously” (Howe 1). The other black characters, to whom Loosh often appeals, are frequently the ones who censure him, specifically through references to his blackness. When Loosh speaks to Ringo and Bayard, taunting them by posing a rhetorical question, “’You think he at Tennessee?’”, it is Philadelphy who responds by crying, “’Hush your mouth, nigger!’” (Faulkner 6). In the cabin, when he begins to shout about their imminent freedom, it is his mother, Louvinia, who “crossed the floor…and hit Loosh across the head hard with her flat hand” (23). The use of physical aggression and racial slur are intended to refresh Loosh’s awareness of his own position within the existing power dynamic. By his act of speaking, loudly and defiantly, requires a simultaneous act of disciplining.

These acts, however, are seldom performed by the white characters. When Bayard advises his father of Loosh’s knowledge of the movements of the army, John Sartoris’ response is to repeat his name: “‘Loosh?’ Father said. ‘Loosh?’” (11). Further, when Granny has a premonitory dream of a man who will reveal the location of the buried silver, she notes that it is “a black man” (39). It is Louvinia who clarifies by asking, “’A nigger?’” (39). Granny then agrees. The subtle shading of difference between those two figures—the “black man” vs. the “nigger”—implies a moral tainting conveyed by the act of betraying the family; however, the figure who appropriately "names" the actor is Louvinia.

By //An Odor of Verbena//, Loosh has resumed his place within the Sartoris household. In his reappearance, he does little and says nothing; what Bayard reveals about Loosh’s position is only through his actions of servitude. He brushes down a horse in one reference; in another, Bayard reflects on how Loosh’s and Ringo’s actions would have differed. Loosh’s final words to Granny in //Retreat// get to stand; if his comment, as Ladd argues, both “represent[s] and…critique[s] the discursive economy of slavery,” the critique, like Loosh, is ultimately only a momentary eruption of voice and agency in a system that will seek to restrain, discipline, and silence him. His reappearance in the text suggests it does so. Although Loosh’s “dream of freedom” is not realized, the intensity of his initial appearance and the passion of his final words do not imply their complete collapse either. Loosh’s defiance exists as a visible, spoken event, one that momentarily upends the household state; its subsequent success/failure appears to speak less to his act of defiance than to the environment of factors that surround it.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. //The Unvanquished.// First Vintage International, 1991.

Howe, Irving. “William Faulkner and the Negroes: A Vision of Lost Fraternity.” //Commentary Magazine,// Oct. 1951, []. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Ladd, Barbara. “Race as Fact and Fiction in Faulkner.” //A Companion to William Faulkner//, edited by Richard Moreland, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, 133-147.