You can almost feel the humidity and taste the failed ambition. Generational shadows cast secrets that linger like ghosts entwined and immutable in a past that is not only prelude, but forever. All of it stuffed into one imaginary locality: Yoknapatawpha County.
Quite a mouthful, Yok-na-pat aw-pha. No doubt it was easier to say if you were an Indian. There were no lack of Indians in the early days of Yoknapawpha County.
The Indians lived in sleepy, savage serendipity. Some plotted in silent devious ways against their tribal brothers, Some captured run-away black people so they could have slaves like the white-man. Most weren’t interested in doing much of anything at all.
Conniving, cupiditious, and slothful. The same might be said of the poor whites, Negro slaves, and various other Yoknapatawpha County walk-on players like cutthroats, gamblers, and thieves, except the cutthroats, gamblers, and thieves were anything but slothful.
Disenfranchised Scot, French, & English aristocrats were there too, seeking how they might build a new fortune, more glorious and substantial than the fortune they lost in battle with their usurpers.
These fallen aristocrats, added – ambitious - to conniving, cupiditious, and slothful.
The exiled grandees also brought with them sophisticated tastes in lifestyle, letters, and art. European sensibilities commingled promiscuously with the insensate tribal barbarism of African slaves, frontier whites, and Chickasaw Indians. All of which produced a curiously amalgamated culture found nowhere else but Yoknapatawpha County.
The often-caricatured phrasing of the Southern Gentlemen is an echo of the mannered phrasing of seventeenth-century ladies & Gentleman. It was the natural language of the first plantation owners. New plantation owners aspired to the old-family aura of the original planters, so they learned to speak as the original planters spoke.
Faulkner tells of such aspiration, ambition, and language in Absalom, Absalom.
A young man, Thomas Sutpen, living in the Tidewater region of Virginia is impressed by the majesty
of the sugar plantation for which his father works. He is dazzled by the Mansion, the liveried butler, the vast holdings, the slaves, and the power of wealth. He wants
the same for himself. He makes a plan - which he calls, “The Design”.
Young Sutpen saves his money, books passage on
a ship to Haiti, gets a job as overseer on a sugar plantation, eventually marries the plantation owner’s daughter, and buys twenty negro slaves of his own. A dozen years later, he moves to what would become Yoknapatawpha
County, Mississippi where he acquires one hundred square miles of real-estate from the Chickasaw nation in order to build a cotton plantation, complete with mansion and all the accessories.
There were bumps along the way.
Sutpen put aside his Haitian wife when he discovered she was mulatto. He left both her and their mulatto son behind in Haiti. Sutpen explains in his affected Southern Gentleman style - “She was not adjunctive to the furthering of The Design”.
Some have said Faulkner’s imaginary County is representative of Southern culture in general. I think it’s representative of human nature in general. Saints and sinners were interchangeable, not by class, but by force of personality. Rich planters, poor whites, Indians and Negro slaves are alternately villains or heroes. All have interesting stories.
All the stories unfold in dense combinations of past and present with little attempt to separate the difference. The effect sometimes seems hallucinatory, as well as poetic.
The effect is enhanced by Faulkner’s disregard for punctuation and paragraph breaks. Sentences can flow for pages without a stop. This creates a breathless quality reminiscent of James Joyce or Jack Kerouac. The technique mimics the flow-of-consciousness common to human thought. It pulls the reader into stories that throb with immediacy.
Memories in Faulkner’s stories flow from the battle of Culloden in 1745, to the fall of the South in the Civil War, to the first half of the twentieth Century.
All memories are treated as though they happened yesterday.
There are surprising family connections throughout. Family includes slaves, freed-slaves, rich planters, ruined planters, carpetbaggers - and former nobility whose progeny has fallen through the generations to the level of white trash.
Some critics label Faulkner a racist. They imagine this because he writes in the language of his story’s time and place. In truth, race and class matter to him only as plot devices in his ruminations on the fatalistic trajectory
of the human condition.
Faulkner’s villains and heroes come in no predictable categories of color or class.
What matters about each is their demonstrated personal character. The most admirable character in, The Evening Sun, is Nancy, a poor, freed-negro women who has always struggled to do the best she can for the only family she’s ever known.
Near the end of the story she is old, worn, near death, and unable to continue.
She says, “. . . done got tired. I just a nigger. It ain’t no fault of mine”. A white child, whom Nancy has served since his infancy stands nearby saying, “Father, who will do our washing now”?
Hardly the sort of story a racist would tell.
The Gothic canopy of Yoknapatawpha County is often pierced by the light of earnest souls like Nancy who struggle honorably with unwarranted recriminations, suspicions, and abuse. Faulkner’s characters, no matter race or class, are lauded or excoriated - as deserved.
One character - worth neither lauding or excoriating - is the Chickasaw Indian leader, Ikkemotubbe.
The early settlers thought the Indian word the tribe called Ikkemotubbe meant “Chief”. It did not. It meant “The Man” - which sounds curiously modern.
The Chickasaw had little need for any sort of leader. When they called Ikkemotubbe “the Man”, it was said with a slight edge of sarcasm.
Mostly, they called him “The Man’ because he occasionally made decisions. No one else wanted that job.
Sometime in the 1830’s, Ikkemotubbe took his cunning yet modest ambition on a brief visit by keelboat to New Orleans. Once arrived he fell into gambling adventures with a fallen Chevalier of France - Soeur Blonde de Vitry.
De Vitry quickly saw advantage in the “Title” possessed by his savage new gambling partner.
He thereafter introduced Ikkemotubbe as “De’Homme”: King of the Chickasaw.
The two unlikely partners prospered. Eventually,
the Chevalier returned to Paris and Ikkemotubbe returned
to Yoknapawpha County.
Ikkemotubbe decided to contract De’Homme to “Doom”. It was easier to say.
Doom did not return from New Orleans empty-handed. He brought his winnings back with him - jewels, gold, silver coins, and six negro slaves. Doom offers his slaves to the rest of the tribe.
No one wanted them. “They could work for you”, “We don’t have any work”.
Doom trades the gold, silver coins, and six negro slaves to white settlers in exchange for something useful.
The Chickasaw like the jewelry. They divide the shiny rings, stick-pins, brooches, and pendants, equally.
Ikkemotubbe, aka, Doom, appears in several stories, as do his offspring and many other generations of Blacks, Whites, Indians, and Mulattoes of various bloodlines.
The lives of all these characters are intertwined by blood or family - which amounts to nearly the same thing in Yoknapawpha County.
The Compson Family links most of the stories though, intermarriages, over generations.
The Compson lineage starts with Quentin and ends with Quentin.
The first Quentin escaped to American straight from the Battle of Culloden with little more than claymore and tartan.
The last Quentin, despite the male name, was
a teenage girl who pilfered the last seven thousand dollars of the Compson family fortune - then disappeared.
The girl-Quentin’s mother was Candace Compson. Candace was the last interesting Compson. She left Yoknapawpha County shortly after the birth of her daughter.
Candace was a great beauty who was certain she deserved more in life than Mississippi could offer. She married and divorced several men-of-means and was only seen by folks in the County when they spotted her in photographs that appeared in slick magazines featuring life-styles of the Rich & Famous.
Candace never returned to Yoknapawpha County
but readers can, by way of this man’s writngs:
William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962)