February is Black History Month and as sure as the Earth turns, Black writer and thinker, James Baldwin becomes popular. Baldwin was a very homely, frail, towering Black American intellectual. Black and Gay…..he was driven from his Baptist roots ( his Father was a Minister) into exile in France. From there, he launched jeremiads against American racism, most notably in his book of essays, THE FIRE NEXT TIME.
One of the things that this Blogger finds most intriguing about Baldwin is his hatred of one of this Blogger’s favorite American novelists, Nobel Laureate Mississippi white supremacist, William Faulkner.
" Faulkner told the New York Herald Tribune that he longed for the return of the “benevolent autocracy” of slavery, in which “Negroes would be better off because they’d have some one to look after them.”
In 1956, he told a journalist that if the Federal government used troops to enforce integration in the South he would do as his Confederate great-grandfather had done before him. “If it came to fighting....I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.”
In a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Memphis, he suggested that justice was delivered by juries and lynch mobs alike and that no innocent man of any race had ever been lynched.
The outcry was swift. W. E. B. Du Bois challenged Faulkner to a debate on the steps of the Mississippi courthouse where Emmett Till’s murderers had been acquitted the year before. Faulkner declined, saying,
“I do not believe there is a debatable point between us.” He also issued a carefully hedged statement: the words attributed to him, he insisted, were ones “no sober man would make, nor, it seems to me, any sane man believe.” (Faulkner was a notorious drunk…) He also published an apologia in Ebony titled “If I Were a Negro,” calling for moderation on racial questions and appealing for civil-rights advocates to “go slow, pause for a moment.”
….James Baldwin excoriated him in the pages of Partisan Review, writing that Faulkner was exactly like “the bulk of relatively articulate white Southerners of good-will,” in that his arguments “have no value whatever as arguments, being almost entirely and helplessly dishonest, when not, indeed, insane.” Baldwin understood that there was no middle ground between segregationists and integrationists, and no reconciling the equal rights and freedoms articulated in the Constitution with the discrimination and oppression of Jim Crow. With regard to Faulkner, he asked, “Where is the evidence of the struggle he has been carrying on there on behalf of the Negro? Why, if he and his enlightened confreres in the South have been boring from within to destroy segregation, do they react with such panic when the walls show any signs of falling?...THE NEW YORKER.”
This Blogger came to appreciate Faulkner as a key example of the American conscious crisis concerning Blacks through the Mississippian grand historian, Shelby Foote. Foote was the premier historian of THE LOST CAUSE interpretation of the American Civil War.
What is the Lost Cause interpretation?
Faulkner and Foote believed that the South might have lost, but the North did not deserve to win.
In his private life and in his public life, Faulkner was a believer in THE LOST CAUSE. In his fictional works he was a savage crucifier of the Old South, memorializing that the Confederacy was both a military and a moral failure.
"The Civil War features in some dozen of Faulkner’s novels. It is most prominent in those set in Yoknapatawpha County, an imaginary Mississippi landscape filled with battlefields and graveyards, veterans and widows, slaves and former slaves, draft dodgers and ghosts. In “Light in August,” the Reverend Gail Hightower is haunted by his Confederate grandfather; in “Intruder in the Dust,” the lawyer Gavin Stevens insists that all the region’s teen-age boys are obsessed with the hours before Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. In these books, no Southerner is spared the torturous influence of the war,….THE NEW YORKER.”
This Blogger adores Faulkner; for he is the American character……so savage in his reality….and so virginal in his delusional dreams.
This Blogger believes his novel, INTRUDER IN THE DUST is his greatest artistic achievement.
But this Blogger suggests, the Reader skip the novel (Faulkner is dense) and watch the 1949 film, filmed in Faulkner's home town of Oxford, Mississippi, with abundant locals..
INTRUDER IN THE DUST is one of the great American films about American racism, along with BIRTH OF A NATION, MANDINGO and NO WAY OUT.
The film is towering, because of a magnificent performance by the great Black/Puerto Rican actor, Juano Hernandez. (Faulkner wrote him a letter saying he was the best actor ever, in one of the films based on his books).
Hernandez plays a defiant, independent, proud, Black farmer, LUCAS, in a small Mississippi town. He is accused of murdering a white man; a white man from a very racist family.
LUCAS knows who the actual murderer is; but he won’t tell his white lawyer.
A lynch mob forms, led by the racist brother of the racist murder victim ; it is held in abeyance by a steely old white woman. Who basically tells the lynch mob that if they want to lynch the Black man; they have to do it over the dead body of a white woman.
Two teenage boys, one Black and one white, join up to save LUCAS.
The conscious conflict in INTRUDER is over whelming; what is a white man to do ?He knows he is treating the Black man badly….but then again, they are inferior. What is a white man to do?
The body of the white victim must be exhumed, to determine what bullet was used to kill him.
Three scenes of Faulknerian conscious conflict are memorable.
1) The white lawyer asks the old white woman why LUCAS did not trust him with the truth. She answers with a great Faulknerian line: "you're a white man… worst of all you're a grown white man,"
2)At the end of the film, the vindicated LUCAS goes to the white lawyer's office to pay his bill. The white lawyer asks for nothing; instead tells LUCAS to pay his nephew, the white teenager who helped prove his innocence. The teenager asks only for TWENTY FIVE CENTS.
Which LUCAS pays him.
But LUCAS does not leave.
Perplexed and a mite ticked, the white lawyer asks LUCAS: "What else do you want?"
LUCAS replies: “A receipt.”
3)The top Faulknerian scene is in the graveyard, when they exhume the white victim’s body. The exhumation is being done by the white Sheriff and four Black convicts, doing the digging.
The white victim's father and two more of his brothers arrive, with guns. They do not want the body exhumed; they consider it desecration.
When the Racist white father shows up; the Black convicts start to flee; he has a rifle.
Then we get Faulknerian; the Racist Father tells them, not to flee, he has no anger against them. He is only angry at the Sheriff. Which means he is only going to shoot the Sheriff, leaving four Black witnesses to murder alive.
The Black convicts stay, taking the white racist at his word.
One cannot get more Faulknerian than that….“benevolent autocracy”? Or delusional?.
If the racist father had indeed shot the white sheriff, with four Black convicts present; who in Mississippi would have believed that the four Black convicts did not commit the crime?
Four more lynchings, for no innocent Black had never been lynched.
The Faulknerian dilemma, why can’t all Blacks be like Jackie Robinson, William Marshall, Juano Hernandez, Doug Wilder, Sidney Poitier? Do we really want to end justified lynchings, to save Billy Porter?
the great JUANO HERNANDEZ as LUCAS in INTRUDER IN THE DUST
James Baldwin
William Faulkner
Shelby Foote
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