Title: “The Debts of History: Southern Honor, Affirmative Action, and Faulkner's
Intruders in the Dust”
Author(s): Erik Dussere
Publication Details: Faulkner Journal 17.1 (Fall 2001): p37-57.
Source: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence
J. Trudeau. Vol. 170. Detroit: Gale, 2006. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
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Full Text:
[(essay date fall 2001) In the following essay, Dussere suggests that Faulkner's attempt
to describe history as a "reservoir of sin" is an economic model in which sin, crime, and
guilt involve the notion of a debt that must be repaid. Noting that the sociopolitical policy
of affirmative action also evokes cultural sin and debt, Dussere explores the tension
between repaying debt on an honor model and repaying debt on an economic model in
Intruder in the Dust and contends that the tensions first expressed in this work are
developed in such later novels as Go Down, Moses and Light in August.]
The novels of William Faulkner, in their evocation of an American South haunted by the
memory of slavery, compel us to recognize the persistent force of the claims made by the
past upon the present. These novels conceive slavery and its aftermath as a historical
debt, owed by whites to blacks and still unpaid, perhaps unpayable. Any narrative
approach to slavery foregrounds certain concerns, viewpoints, and material conditions;
Faulkner's narratives consistently foreground this overpowering debt, with its emphasis
on money and property, responsibility and reparation. In doing so, they draw our
attention to the variety of ways in literature, culture, and law that American racial history
has been thought of as a debt inherited by successive generations. What, then, does it
mean to talk about history in terms of debt; what are, what have been, the various
directions such a discussion might take when the history under consideration is that of
slavery? I will argue that these questions require us to consider the material and
ideological differences between the American North and South, and specifically the
tradition of honor, by which Southerners have differentiated themselves culturally from
the North and the Federal government. Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust is a crucible within
which this differentiation is brought to bear on the competing Northern and Southern
approaches to the impending desegregation of the South. Each approach relies on the
notion that slavery represents an enormous debt, but the contentious questions of what
sort of debt it is, who owes it, and how it is to be repaid, strike at the heart of America's
troubled relationship to its own past and national origins.
To consider the institution of slavery in the nineteenth century is inevitably to consider
the history of the South itself, whose conception of itself as a separate region, one distinct
from and often hostile towards the industrial North, has led to the creation of a
multilayered cloak of myth, propagated both from within and without, which surrounds
the region. In this essay I will be concerned primarily with the South's understanding of
itself as a society distinct from the North and uncontaminated by the industrial capitalism
that the North symbolizes. It is by now a matter of common understanding among
scholars of Southern history that the antebellum Southern aristocracy's conception of
itself as a society founded on codes of honor and propriety worked among other things to
disguise the capitalist economic basis of the plantation system.1 Faulkner's fiction itself
argues this point powerfully if inconsistently: Absalom, Absalom! strips away the
Southern myth layer by layer to reveal the economics of racial injustice, and "The Bear,"
where the horrors of that injustice are inscribed in the plantation ledgers, makes the
argument in almost didactic terms. It is a commonplace to revile the capitalistic evils at
the heart of the aristocratic South; my goal here is, rather, to examine the ideological
apparatus by which the South has disavowed the economics at the heart of its antebellum
social systems.
In his important 1982 study, Southern Honor, Bertram Wyatt-Brown suggests that among
planters in the antebellum South, debts fell into two distinctly differentiated categories:
the business debt and the debt of honor, the latter having far greater significance. The
debt of honor was most commonly a debt incurred through gambling, through a contest
between two men of equal--aristocratic--standing. This sort of debt existed on an entirely
separate level from the business debt, which was simply the fabric of everyday life in the
antebellum Southern economy:
the tendency was to look upon debt as a permanent condition of life and therefore
something that should be made to serve other ends than just financial transaction [i.e.
solidifying community and family ties]. ... The gaming debt, however, was ordinarily one
that could not draw upon these social ties of deference and condescension or sheer
friendship; rather it was an arrangement between equals, with triumph and defeat at
wager the sole bond. The obligation had to be paid so that the relationship between the
players could be terminated.(345-46; emphasis mine)
Thus, in Wyatt-Brown's analysis, gaming debts were one of the central rituals upon
which Southern planter society was built. Whereas business debts could be extended
indefinitely and in fact provided a kind of glue with which to cement familial and
communal ties, the debt of honor had to be discharged in order to maintain the
functioning of another kind of social glue: the system of honor by which Southern
gentlemen recognized their way of life as distinct from and superior to that of the North.
This demarcation is felt precisely in the distinction between debts, which identifies
business debts as a Northern concern and debts of honor as specifically and authentically
Southern: "The more 'American' or Yankeefied the white Southerner was, the more he
feared losses as a moneymaker. The more Southern he was, the more honor icily gripped
his thoughts" (Wyatt-Brown 329).2 This distinction underlines a larger Southern sense of
the difference between the regions, in which an agrarian, aristocratic South is the
civilized alternative to an industrial capitalist North that concerns itself only with getting
and spending and thus reveals itself as debased and dishonorable, with no system of
values outside of the dollar. Proud of distinguishing itself in this way--"'Strictly
speaking,' boasted Governor Whitemarsh Seabrook of South Carolina, 'there are no
capitalists among us'"--the South's regional identity was and in some ways still is founded
on its claim to being anticapitalist (Wyatt-Brown 183). As Kenneth Greenberg observes
in Honor & Slavery, in the South professional gamblers were reviled (and on at least one
occasion, lynched) for being both outsiders, located in no particular community, and
businessmen, representatives of the foreign and unpleasantly democratic logic of the
marketplace:
What distinguished the gamble of the marketplace ... from the gamble of men who bet
on thoroughbred horses or dueled with each other? For one thing, the marketplace was a
world of strangers--people with undetermined positions in the social structure [and] For
men of honor, the money that flowed to them from a successful gamble was not an end,
but a symbol of honor earned by assuming risk and having one's word and judgement
confirmed.(145)
This distinction makes itself felt throughout Southern culture; consider for example the
notion of Southern hospitality, which depends on a corresponding belief in Yankee
stinginess, a faith that the divisive alienations between people which capitalism has
engineered have not penetrated the Southern home or homeland.
Although Faulkner's unflinching and revisionary historicism is clearly at odds with the
South's ongoing mythology of itself, I will suggest that his work consistently follows in
the Southern tradition of distinguishing between different sorts of debt. This
differentiation is highlighted in his fictional approach to slavery. Faulkner's classic critics
rightly point to the way that slavery acquires a central significance in Faulkner's fiction as
the original "sin" or "crime" which must be expiated by contemporary white Southerners,
the sin which is the source of the South's woes--its "curse" or "doom."3 It is no accident
that C. Vann Woodward writes, in 1960, of The Burden of Southern History, or that
Irving Howe argues sympathetically that Faulkner yearns for release from "the burden of
his whiteness" (119).
Faulkner reiterates this theme throughout his fiction. In Absalom, Absalom! the burden
manifests itself in the character of Jim Bond, of a legal deed by which present and future
generations of white Southerners are bound to the repayment of a contract their ancestors
did not know they were signing when they enslaved the Africans who are now
Americans. This burden is what Ike McCaslin seeks to escape in giving up his inheritance
in Go Down, Moses; it is what transforms the black Lucas Beauchamp of Intruder in the
Dust into "tyrant over the whole county's white conscience" (195). But its most vivid
expression is appropriately, eponymously, put into words by Light in August's Joanna
Burden herself, the descendant of abolitionists who were killed during the Reconstruction
era for advocating voting rights for freed slaves:
I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. ... But after that I seemed to see
them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived,
all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever
into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew
breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. ... I saw all the little
babies that would ever be in the world, the ones not yet even born--a long line of them
with their arms spread, on the black crosses.(253)
Here the idea of racial history as burden mingles with the language of sin, evoking future
generations of whites for whom the "black shadow" takes the form of crucifixion for their
ancestors' sins. The metaphor of the shadow appears elsewhere in Faulkner as well--most
notably as the shadow that falls on Ike McCaslin in "Delta Autumn"4--and it is only one
of the many metaphors and narratives he employs in order to evoke and emphasize the
force that the legacy of slavery exerts upon white Southerners. The extent to which this
legacy is the controlling concern of Faulkner's fiction about race and slavery is made
clear by the very number of strategies by which he tries to understand and represent the
past sin and ultimate resultant doom of the South.
I would suggest that the Faulknerian attempt--perhaps any attempt--to describe history as
a reservoir of sin inevitably depends on some notion of debt and, therefore, some hope
for the possibility of repayment: sin, crime, guilt--all are ways of understanding the world
in economic terms, in the language of debt.5 As Philip Weinstein writes of Joanna's
speech about the black crosses,
the burden [Joanna] carries here is ... generally Faulknerian ... blacks, because of what
those who are white have done to them in the United States before we were ever born,
will forever live inside us, owed a reparation beyond our capacity to repress or repay ...
an overdetermined and internalized debt.(102-03)
In describing slavery as a burden or bond, however, Faulkner draws upon a specific idea
of debt--upon the notion of a "debt of honor" that dishonors Southerners as long as it
remains undischarged and binds Southern blacks and whites forever through the
immovable burden that rests on the whites: like the gambling debts of antebellum days,
"the obligation had to be paid so that the relationship between the players could be
terminated." This is the burden that confronts Faulkner's white characters: the burden of
being forever indebted to and thus bound to their black contemporaries, which ensures
that all the white babies will forever be bound to their black crosses.
As we find so often in Faulkner, Joanna Burden's metaphor is interested solely in the
concerns of whites: while these are actual babies, blacks remain purely symbolic--not
people but instead the crosses upon which whites are crucified. It is never clear whether
blacks are willing or unwilling keepers of the white conscience because they remain
unexamined, representative but unrepresented. Faulkner's concern, as always, is with the
white passion, confusion, and suffering that circles around the still and inscrutable black
symbol. Moreover, I am suggesting that even as they debunk Southern honor, Faulkner's
fictions seek to preserve it. Preserving it necessarily means acknowledging and settling
the debt of honor, and in setting out this thesis Faulkner is faithful to the old traditions,
both by casting the problem of race in terms of debt and by opposing his debt of honor to
an alternate, Northern conception of debt. To illuminate this opposition, I suggest that
affirmative action represents an alternative model for figuring race and slavery in terms
of debt and repayment--a model that represents the Northern or federal "interference" in
affairs Southerners frequently claim to be theirs alone, and one that is still very much a
topic of argument at the end of the twentieth century.
Affirmative action exists on a continuum with the government policies and strategies for
desegregation to which Faulkner and other Southerners responded so vehemently. The
term "affirmative action" almost certainly did not come into popular use until after
Faulkner's death, and affirmative action as we know it did not take root in policy until the
sixties and Civil Rights. But the seeds had been planted in a variety of quota systems and
anti-discrimination laws of the thirties, which led up to Roosevelt's establishing the Fair
Employment Practices Committee in 1941, as increasing numbers of black workers
entered the defense industry.6 By 1948--the year of Intruder in the Dust--black
organizations were becoming more vocal in the movement toward Civil Rights, and the
Federal government was beginning to lean that way too; and Faulkner was worrying
about how the debt of what James Baldwin called "more than two hundred years in
slavery and ninety years of quasi-freedom" would be paid back, and by whom (100).
Intruder in the Dust has generally been read as a politically and stylistically retrograde
text, one that fails to achieve the radical insights into race of Faulkner's novels written
during the 1930s.7 This is not an unreasonable judgment, but with the partial exceptions
of Requiem for a Nun and "Delta Autumn," it is also Faulkner's only attempt to bring
America's racial drama up to date, to cope imaginatively with the possibility of
desegregation in the postwar forties. In doing so, it provides the most consistent example
in Faulkner's work of a historical vision structured by the twinned ideas of debt and
repayment. This debt model begins in the local, the murder mystery that drives the plot of
the novel, and reaches outward to encompass the larger, national stakes involved in the
young Civil Rights movement. Because policies and initiatives such as desegregation and
affirmative action involve the intervention of the Federal government, the South
responded to these policies as the actions of a foreign power--hence the clashes between
state and federal troops in the fifties over the issue of desegregation. Faulkner, in his
public speeches and essays of the fifties, spoke against racial injustice in matter-of-fact
terms: "To live anywhere in the world of A.D. 1955 and be against equality because of
race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow" (ESPL [Essays, Speeches
and Public Letters] 146). But he also objected to the implementation of equality by the
Federal government on the grounds that the job of "giving" equality to Southern blacks
rested solely with Southern whites, who could only thus--to cast it in the terms I have
been using--repay their debt of honor.
The logic of affirmative action--that achievement of the Civil Rights movement which
remains embattled to this day, under attack from conservatives who claim for America a
mythical "color-blindness"--is essentially a logic of debt and repayment. It is a radical
acknowledgment that slavery and its legacy of white racism have made conditions in
America such that black Americans do not have equal opportunities to employment and
education. As Cheryl Harris puts it,
affirmative action embodies aspects of both corrective and distributive justice. Ronald
Fiscus has described the corrective (or compensatory) argument in affirmative action as
"the claim to compensation for discrete and 'finished' harm done to minority group
members and their ancestors"; distributive justice "is the claim an individual or group has
to the positions or advantages or benefits they would have been awarded under fair
conditions."(1781)
As such, affirmative action embraces a logic of repayment that is based on numbers, on
balancing the books by balancing the ratio between white and black workers in any given
arena: workplaces, industries, schools, positions of prestige and power. Gertrude Ezorsky
emphasizes "the need for numerical remedies in firms and industries where recruitment
by personal connections had been practiced. Numerical targets also act as a powerful
deterrent against overt racism. A racist employer under pressure to hire a definite number
of blacks will hesitate before victimizing a black applicant" (36). Such arguments invoke
debt through the language of bookkeeping as a path to social justice, keeping the numbers
even, representative, through a compensatory redistribution. This invocation of debt is
precisely what angers conservatives today, who do not acknowledge that there is a debt to
be paid; if we inhabit a color-blind nation, then the debt is cancelled and can be forgotten.
These critics, working from a different set of historical circumstances fifty years after the
publication of Intruder in the Dust, take a position opposite to Faulkner's: while they
would eradicate the past entirely in favor of a color-blind future that they disingenuously
announce in the present, Faulkner is unable even to imagine a future emerging from the
racial divides of the forties and turns instead, always, to the past.
More even than Faulkner's other books, Intruder recalls the homily about the movement
of glaciers: in order to advance a single plotted foot, Faulkner's text recedes five feet into
the past. The first page sends us into a flashback, and we are not brought back to the
present moment until forty pages later, at the end of chapter two. This flashback
introduces the debt which will both call forth and structure the narrative: having fallen in
a frozen creek nearby, the book's young, white protagonist, Charles Mallison, is given a
meal and hospitality by Lucas Beauchamp, a black descendant of Carothers McCaslin-the slave owning patriarch of Go Down, Moses. Knowing that one cannot accept
hospitality from a "nigger" as one would from white people, Charles tries to pay Lucas
with what money he has. In doing so, he finds himself aligned with the whole white
community of Yoknapatawpha county:
he was already thinking of the man ... as within the next year he was to learn every
white man in that whole section of the country had been thinking about him for years: We
got to make him be a nigger first. He's got to admit he's a nigger. Then maybe we will
accept him as he seems to intend to be accepted. ... the Negro who said "ma'am" to
women just as any white man did and who said "sir" and "mister" to you if you were
white but who you knew was thinking neither and he knew you knew it.(18)
Note how the movement from "to women" to "to you" in this passage implicates the
(male) reader, hails the reader as white, as identified with the white community. This
communal insistence upon making Lucas "be a nigger" is what motivates the plot of
Intruder.
At the book's outset, Lucas has been accused of killing a white man, and the community
("the Town") is quietly jubilant: at last Lucas has done something recognizable as
"nigger" behavior and now the Town can lynch him and everything will be sensible and
orderly again. However, Charles's troubles with Lucas have taken a different path: in his
desire to make Lucas be a "nigger" he has done his best to pay Lucas back over the years
for his hospitality, but in a particularly hostile version of a potlatch economy each "gift"
he has sent has been answered with a gift from Lucas. Thus by making a fair and even
exchange and insisting that his hospitality is outside the scope of such exchange, Lucas
refuses to act as a black man should. The murder provides Charles with a chance at last to
do a favor for Lucas--proving his innocence--which will cancel the favor Lucas did for
him. This, Charles hopes, will be his final, unanswerable gift to Lucas.
Kenneth Greenberg argues that gift giving was central to the Southern language of honor
precisely because it took the form of a contest for superiority, a game of mastery and
submission. The exchange of gifts existed, like all honorable behavior, as a way of
cementing family and communal ties--again, much like the potlatch practices described
by Marcel Mauss in The Gift. But to offer a gift could also be an insult or an assertion of
superiority, and offers of generosity or hospitality that could not be reciprocated served to
prove the social status of the "giver."8 For Greenberg, this ritual and all rituals of
Southern honor are based upon the master-slave relationship:
The language of the gift was frequently the language of mastery. "Gave" may have
been the single most common verb used by planters to describe their relations with
slaves. Thomas Chaplin of South Carolina wrote many diary entries in a form echoed by
planters throughout the South: "Gave the Negroes a part of the morning to get their corn";
"Gave ... [potatoes] out to the Negroes for allowance"; "Gave out the cloth." ... Masters
gave; slaves received. ... The gift relation was just as deeply imbricated in emancipation
as it was in slavery ... masters could liberate individual slaves only by awarding them
freedom as a gift. Slaves could never purchase themselves in market transactions because
they could give nothing to their masters. Masters might permit slaves to purchase
themselves, but that was only a roundabout way of giving slaves a valuable gift.(66)
To give a "gift" to a slave is to reassert that a slave does not own him/herself--that one's
self can only be given as a gift by the master. Thus to give an unanswerable gift to an
equal is to put the recipient in the position of an inferior, of one who cannot give anything
and thus must submit.
This explains what is at stake in the contest between Lucas and Charles; having been
given the gift of Lucas's hospitality, Charles is now metaphorically in the position of
social inferior to a "nigger"--a situation Lucas emphasizes by sending one gift to Charles
via a hired white boy. At the same time, Lucas must continue the exchange of gifts in
order to prevent being a "nigger": one who receives everything and can give nothing
(because of his youth, Charles would never consider himself an equal worthy of
participating in gift-exchange with a white gentleman). In this novel, which casts slavery
in terms of debt, Charles and Lucas act out an allegorical racial drama of the nineteen-
forties in which white and black are locked in a struggle, the one to retain mastery and the
other to refuse submission.
As Greenberg's argument makes clear, this struggle centers on the epithet "nigger" as a
focal point for the problem of property. Both in Intruder and Light in August--where the
mystery of Joe Christmas's identity is resolved for the community once they can identify
his actions as those of a "nigger"--the word is a means of fixing and understanding
identity. As Gavin puts it,
Lucas ... blew his top and murdered a white man ... and now the white people will take
him out and burn him, all regular and in order and themselves acting exactly as [they are]
convinced Lucas would wish them to act: like white folks; both of them observing
implicitly the rules: the nigger acting like a nigger and the white folks acting like white
folks and no real hard feelings on either side.(48)
Here, and in Light in August, the maintenance of the white community (the Town)
depends upon the certainty of knowing who the excluded, the "niggers," are, a term
defined through behavioral conventions as much as physical appearance. As Allen
Douglas has argued, the communal insistence on such certainty reveals the property
interest in whiteness, consisting in Albion Tourgée's words of "the reputation of being
white."9 Tourgée's argument in Plessy v. Ferguson claims that whiteness is a legally
protected property, and in Faulkner's text it becomes clear that this claim is the basis of
codes of Southern honor, that the rituals maintaining that honor are constructed as
ongoing reiterations of the property interest in whiteness.
In this interrogation of the way that subjects are defined through their relationship to
property, the novel provides a clear indictment of Southern racism through its
demystification of the term "nigger." Intruder is committed to working through Quentin's
observation in The Sound and the Fury that "a nigger is not a person so much as a form of
behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among" (86). Through
the figure of Lucas, the novel consistently replaces white assumptions about the "natural"
qualities pertaining to blacks with historicized terms for understanding these qualities.
While Charles is in Lucas's house he begins to think that the smells and foods he has
always assumed to be inherent to "negroes" are in fact historically contingent:
that unmistakable odor of Negroes--that smell which if it were not for some thing that
was going to happen to him within a space of time measurable now in minutes [i.e.,
Lucas's refusal to accept payment] he would have gone to his grave never once pondering
speculating if perhaps that smell were really not the odor of a race nor even actually of
poverty but perhaps of a condition: an idea: a belief.(11)
Returning to the endless deferral of the present perfected in Light in August and
Absalom, Absalom!--"within a space of time measurable now in minutes"--that drives
this murder mystery forward by forever pulling it back, Faulkner dramatizes the crucial
moment of revelation. If not for the encounter with Lucas, if not for Lucas's refusal to
accept payment, Charles would never have thought to question those reified racial
assumptions that are "a rich part of his heritage as a Southerner ... as the pipe smoker
long since never did smell at all the cold pipereek which is as much a part of his clothing
as their buttons and buttonholes" (12). Charles's awakening is at the core of the novel;
wrapped in the murder mystery is the story of a young white Southerner who learns to
recognize and abhor the omnipresent and unquestioned racism that surrounds him.
Throughout, the novel insists that (white) women and children are open to ways of
understanding that white men, their minds cluttered with facts and logic, cannot see. Even
Charles Mallison would never have begun to question if not for Lucas. But it is for
precisely this reason that we begin to see how Lucas embodies the political contradictions
of the novel.
In order for Lucas to challenge the racist structures of Charles's (the Town's) thinking, he
must be exceptional, one of a kind, unlike all the other blacks in the county (the other
blacks, we are told, "were acting exactly as Negroes and whites both would have
expected Negroes to act at such a time" [94-95]). This exceptional status is enabled by his
aristocratic white lineage: with the exception of Ike McCaslin, he is the most direct
descendant of the plantation patriarch Carothers McCaslin. Intruder suggests that this
aristocratic blood, rather than the blackness or whiteness of the blood, is the salient factor
in considering Lucas's character. Faulkner compares Lucas on every possible occasion to
Charles's model of a Southern gentleman: his grandfather. These comparisons to
Charles's grandfather enforce a certain kind of color-blindness while emphasizing Lucas's
aristocratic manner and bearing: Lucas keeps in his mouth
a gold toothpick such as his own grandfather had used: and the hat was a worn
handmade beaver such as his grandfather had paid thirty and forty dollars apiece for, not
set but raked slightly above the face pigmented like a Negro's but with a nose high in the
bridge and even hooked a little and what looked out through it or from behind it not black
nor white either, not arrogant at all and not even scornful: just intolerant inflexible and
composed.(12-13)
Faulkner manages a neat sleight-of-hand here, making Lucas into a Southern gentleman
of no particular color, and thus glossing over the fact that the first property possessed by
any Southern gentleman is his whiteness (tied ineluctably to his maleness). Slaves were
in fact strictly--and by law--forbidden from the aristocratic sport of gambling in the
antebellum South, for the perhaps obvious reason that slaves were forbidden to own
property, and therefore to allow blacks to gamble would upset the hierarchies constructed
by planter society.10 It is a move that Faulkner must make, then, in order to establish
Lucas as a legitimate player in the battles of wits and nerves he enters in this narrative.
He insists that the game must be between men--the men in the book complain incessantly
and stereotypically that it is impossible to compete with women because they refuse to
observe the rules of game, sport, or warfare--but eliminates the racial lines that seem so
powerfully drawn in his novels of the thirties.
As we have seen, gambling was the sport of honor, the sport that engendered the debts by
which a Southern gentleman's honor was measured. In "Was" from Go Down, Moses,
Faulkner seems to suggest that slavery and the mixture of races it has violently wrought
ultimately disrupt these games between gentlemen, render them pointless.11 But in
Intruder, the game is played on equal turf between two gentlemen who are competitors on
more than one playing field; they are the book's dual and dueling father-figures to
Charles: Lucas and Charles's uncle, Gavin Stevens.12 They are opposites in many ways-Gavin is talkative and excitable; Lucas is calm, composed, and taciturn--and their
meetings in the book are described as battles of wits and, more to the point, poker games:
watching [Lucas and Gavin] he thought remembered an old lady ... sitting at the card
table on her screened side gallery ... she would wet her fingers and take a card from her
hand and lay it on the table, her hand not still poised over it of course but just lying
nearby until the next player revealed exposed by some movement or gesture of triumph
or exultation or maybe by just simple increased hard breathing his intention to trump or
overplay it.(59)
Although this is a card game played by children and an old woman, a few minutes later
the stakes grow higher as it becomes a game between men: it is "no childhood's game of
stakeless Five Hundred. It was more like the poker games he had overlooked" (59).
These battles of wits between the two men are crucial to their respective roles as father
figures to Charles. We have seen the extent to which Lucas challenges Charles's racist
assumptions, but Gavin is equally important in shaping the conscience of the young man.
Gavin provides Charles with a Southerner's moral education, and in doing so he speaks
about race in the language of debt and repayment. His long speeches on the changing
South and desegregation are by now infamous, in part because they echo so startlingly
Faulkner's own public statements about race in the fifties. Gavin argues that
desegregation cannot and should not be implemented by the Federal government because
it involves Northern interference in an economy, a history, that belongs solely to the
South. He invokes the familiar Faulknerian debt that Southerners owe to the descendants
of the slaves. But in Intruder we witness a remarkable change: whereas the tragic novels
that precede it insist upon the radical impossibility of paying that debt,13 Gavin asserts
that it is the responsibility of the white Southerner to provide payback. This is the
conservatism of his vision: in order to avoid conflict between North and South, black and
white, Gavin recommends the continuation of Jim Crow and the other humiliations of
second-class citizenship until the time when white Southerners (who are assumed to be in
agreement with him) are able to achieve equality between the races in an organic,
agrarian South: "the injustice is ours, the South's. We must expiate and abolish it
ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice" (199).
This return to a mythical vision of the South--to the antebellum South's selfrepresentation in terms of honor, which Absalom lays bare so powerfully--indicates that
the debt Gavin speaks of is an old-fashioned "debt of honor." When Charles suggests that
the townspeople should at least look Lucas in the face and apologize by buying him a can
of tobacco, Gavin uses that metaphor to represent the Northern, Federal approach to
repayment for the debt owed to black Americans:
The can of tobacco? That would have been enough?--Of course it wouldn't. Which is
one reason why Lucas will ultimately get his can of tobacco; they will insist on it, they
will have to. He will receive installments on it for the rest of his life in this country
whether he wants them or not and not just Lucas but Lucas: Sambo. ... So Lucas will get
his tobacco. He wont want it of course and he'll try to resist it. But he'll get it.(194)
In Gavin's narrative, Lucas is no longer an exceptional figure: he becomes representative
of all Southern or American blacks, whom he describes as "the ones called Sambo."
Gavin's insistence upon the tobacco not being "enough" hinges on his mystical certainty
that the retributive measures provided by the North, the American government, are
commodified and insufficient because they disrupt the--ostensible--honorable contract
between Southern black and white. As James Baldwin said of Faulkner's own public
statements about desegregation, Gavin "is not trying to save Negroes, who are, in his
view, already saved. ... He is trying to save 'whatever good remains in those white
people'" (106).
In setting up the debt of honor as the imperative to "give" contemporary blacks equality,
Intruder reveals its own contradiction, its paradoxical effort to cling to the traditions of
honor. It casts Southern whites in the role of slaveowners with the power to give blacks
the "gift" of equality eighty years after emancipation. Employing the master's tools,
Faulkner is unable to dismantle the master's house because the property interest in
whiteness remains. In contrast, Cheryl Harris has argued, the repayment model set up by
affirmative action operates precisely by attacking the idea of whiteness as a form of
property:
affirmative action is required on both moral and legal grounds to de-legitimate the
property interest in whiteness--to dismantle the actual and expected privilege that has
attended "white" skin since the founding of the country. Like "passing," affirmative
action undermines the property interest in whiteness. Unlike passing ... affirmative action
de-privileges whiteness and seeks to remove the legal protections of the existing
hierarchy spawned by race oppression. ... The fundamental precept of whiteness--the core
of its value--is its exclusivity. But exclusivity is predicated not on any intrinsic
characteristic, but on the existence of a symbolic "other," which functions to "create an
illusion of unity" among whites. Affirmative action might challenge the notion of
property and identity as the unrestricted right to exclude.(1779, 1789)
By implicitly eliminating the category of "nigger," then, affirmative action attacks the
foundation of whiteness as a property by eliminating the right of exclusion and
exclusivity. As I have suggested, affirmative action is essentially based on a model of
debt that insists on balancing the books through numerical compensation. It is precisely
for this reason that Gavin attacks the Civil Rights process--just as antebellum Southerners
attacked the "Yankeefied" concern with business debts--as Northern and thus degraded
by the marketplace.
At this juncture, we are forced to reconsider Faulkner's work on slavery and race in terms
of his adherence to this code of honor. Intruder is clearly not concerned with the
problems of remuneration raised by the slave economy, with the radically unpayable
money or property value that might be owed to slaves--who were robbed of so much--or
their descendants. Rather, Faulkner provides an alternate set of terms within which any
discussion of money or property would be unthinkable, inappropriate. The necessity of
paying back the debt on the honor model rather than a numerical or business model
depends upon the assertion that there is something intangible that cannot be
comprehended in the process of economic or numerical redistribution. But as I have
argued, that intangible something, that honorableness, consists of the notion that blacks
should allow Southerners to retain the right to give them the gift of equality, thus
retaining the value of honor and the property interest in whiteness that attends it. Like
Tom Sawyer insisting on a romantic "rescue" of Jim in Huckleberry Finn, Gavin argues
that racial equality should be delayed for the sake of a white boys' game.
Gavin's views are given a great deal of authority and textual space, and ultimately he
triumphs over Charles's objections to his assertion that the South must repay its own
debts--but the book also suggests that Gavin is not to be trusted completely. This is
surprising, given that Gavin's endless speeches seem to form the polemical core of the
book, and that, Charles tells us, Gavin "had for everything an explanation not in facts but
long since beyond dry statistics into something far more moving because it was truth"
(49). But the book's failure to endorse Gavin's views on race makes sense in the context
of Faulkner's other books. Throughout his career in Faulkner's fiction (with the possible
exception of Requiem for a Nun), Gavin appears as the very image of the obtuse liberal:
certain that he knows what is best for Southern blacks, his pronouncements are forever
undercut by the actions of black characters in the text. Gavin, we are shown, never learns
what Charles Mallison realizes early in his acquaintance with Lucas: "thinking with a
kind of amazement: [Lucas] was grieving. You dont have to not be a nigger in order to
grieve" (25). It is through black people's grief and tragedy that Gavin's authority as a
reader is most radically undercut in Light in August and Go Down, Moses, and his
remarkable failure as a reader of social situations in general continues to fascinate
Faulkner throughout the forties and fifties. As V. K. Ratliff remarks of Gavin's analysis
of the community goings-on in The Town, "he missed it. He missed it completely" (135).
Although Faulkner consistently fails to create fully realized black characters, he succeeds
formidably in creating subtle, startling portraits of his white characters' inability to see or
comprehend black people because they see only what they have been taught about how
blacks are and act.14
Gavin's textual authority is undercut most dramatically in his encounter with Lucas at the
end of the book, which returns us to the issues of debt that structure the entire narrative.
In the book's final scene--which Charles attends--they wrangle over how much Lucas will
pay Gavin for his ostensible services as his lawyer, although since Gavin has done no
legal work he is actually offering payment for Charles's role in proving his innocence. At
the outset Charles had hoped to clear his account with Lucas by performing this favor,
but Lucas insists throughout the book that he intends to pay for any services rendered.
Gavin seeks to gain control of the situation by refusing to take any money or to allow
Charles to take any, finally allowing, with exasperated irony, that Lucas can pay Gavin's
expenses: a pen he broke while pondering the case, worth two dollars. But once he has
paid, Lucas has the final word on this matter, and the final word of the book:
"Now what?" his uncle said. "What are you waiting for now?""My receipt," Lucas
said.(241)
In all of their exchanges, even when Lucas is facing imminent lynching, Lucas remains
detached and calm while Gavin inevitably becomes flustered and angry--and this scene is
no exception. What enrages and frustrates Gavin most is Lucas's insistence at all times
that he will provide payment for whatever services are rendered--in other words, Lucas's
preoccupation with business debt and repayment. By insisting upon such monetary
transactions, Lucas draws attention to the fact that Gavin seeks to elide: that the structure
and rules of honor are designed specifically to exclude blacks from participating. In order
to preserve his honor, he must "pay his way" without allowing any white man or boy to
give him charity. In this scene, Faulkner suggests that for Lucas, the project of liberation
and self-definition is linked to an appropriation of strict business accounting, of
capitalism as a means to equalization. By insisting upon a receipt at the very moment that
Gavin tries to make light of the transaction as an absurdity, Lucas refuses the possibility
that there is an intangible element in the repayment of debts, a code of honor that
transcends the banal economic transaction. The entry into the economic sphere suggests
the horizon of freedom and self-ownership.15
Although this final scene articulates the possibility of a resistant capitalism, in doing so it
is at odds with the tone of the novel as a whole. Because Lucas's insistence upon
repayment is presented within the context of his Southern gentlemanliness, because his
authority to insist is derived from his aristocratic lineage, he is able to make such a
demand without actually challenging the structure of honor. Rather, the final scene
cements the image of Lucas as superior rather than equal; the contradictions of his
character are subsumed within a larger sense of his incorruptibility. Possessing largerthan-life status, Lucas is not a radical figure; rather, he is a version of the perfect Negro
Faulkner invokes in his public writings, the one who is required to be superior to white
people in order to be deserving of equality:
[If I were a Negro] I would say this to the leaders of our race: "... We as a race must lift
ourselves by our own bootstraps to where we are competent for the responsibilities of
equality, so that we can hold on to it when we get it. Our tragedy is that these virtues of
responsibility are the white man's virtue of which he boasts, yet we, the Negro, must be
his superior in them."(ESPL 112)
Lucas's economic independence can be reinterpreted as Faulkner's vision of the good
Negro--who pays his own way, pulls himself up by his bootstraps, while still remaining at
heart a Southerner.
Intruder is a conservative book, one that proposes but ultimately subsumes moments of
transformative political possibility. This conservatism is to be found less in Gavin's
speeches than in the narrative's relinquishing of the unresolvable tensions that Faulkner
posits elsewhere in his fiction. I have suggested that we can see this letting-go in the way
that Intruder alters the Faulknerian debt model, replacing desperation in the face of an
unpayable debt with a facile assumption of repayment to be offered in the indeterminate
future. This alteration is felt in the scene that spurs Gavin to begin his meditations on race
and desegregation. In Go Down, Moses Faulkner expresses his belief that because of the
forced labor of slaves, the very land, the soil, of the South has been cursed. This vision
becomes a far less troubling relation to land in Intruder. Driving through the countryside
with Gavin, Charles sees a man driving a horse and plow and cries, "There's a nigger."
This black man, toiling on the land, represents for Charles a vision of the South and its
way of life, of the timeless, ahistorical relationship between land and humanity:
the land's living symbol--a formal group of ritual and almost mystic significance ... the
beast the plow and the man integrated in one foundationed into the frozen wave of their
furrow tremendous with effort yet at the same time vacant of progress, ponderable
immovable and immobile like ... wrestling statuary set against the land's immensity.(144)
The description quietly erases racial troubles--note that man, beast and plow are
"integrated"--by positing a pure agrarian relation between the (black) man and the
(Southern) land. This tableau, in which the black man at the plow becomes pure symbol,
absolute myth, reveals the concern that ultimately supplants race in Intruder.
This black man, like the white Southerner, is "homogeneous," as opposed to another kind
of black man, who is "trying to escape not even into the best of the white race but into the
second best--the cheap shoddy dishonest music, the cheap flash baseless overvalued
money, the glittering edifice of publicity foundationed on nothing like a card-house over
an abyss" (152). It is this other black man or woman who is the real threat to the world of
Intruder: not Lucas, whose connection to the land and the past is true and honorable, but
the modern man, the "New Negro." And in this way, Faulkner reveals the actual
preoccupation of this novel: not race, for which the text always has an answer, whether in
the words of Gavin Stevens or the actions of Lucas Beauchamp, but capitalist
Northernization. The use of the debt model to describe race relations in the South loses its
purchase as a radical vision once that debt is seen to be payable, especially since it is only
payable in the indeterminate future. Rather, in Intruder, the use of the "debt of honor"
presages the concerns of Faulkner's late novels; the honorable Southern logic is
contrasted with the Northern logic of the marketplace, of industry and capitalism. This
shift is a telling one, since after Intruder and Requiem for a Nun Faulkner moves away
from racial issues and concentrates primarily, in his later novels, on the conflict between
Southern and Northern value-systems and between social classes in the New South.
Intruder itself is loaded with diatribes against the New South as represented by changes in
Jefferson like the new subdivisions,
where the prosperous young married couples lived with two children each and (as soon
as they could afford it) an automobile each ... and the patented electric gadgets for
cooking and freezing and cleaning and the neat trim colored maids in frilled caps to run
them and talk to one another from house to house while the wives in sandals and pants
and painted toenails puffed lipstick-stained cigarettes over shopping bags in the chain
groceries and drugstores.(118)
The horror of this passage derives from the sense that the South has become
indistinguishable from America, represented by a consumerist middle-class existence
(which is figured here as a grotesquely commodified femininity) that is the antithesis of
honor. In such descriptions Faulkner has already turned the page on race, is looking
ahead to the two Snopes novels of the fifties in which Gavin is the most forceful, though
still quite obtuse, presence. Together he and Charles will analyze and worry over the
career of Flem Snopes, representative of the new Southern mercantile spirit, whose
manipulation of business debts to accumulate money and power will make him
Faulkner's most famous villain.
Notes
1. One version of this argument exists in the controversial 1974 work Time on the Cross:
The Economics of American Negro Slavery, by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L.
Engerman, although many of that book's findings and conclusions overall have frequently
been disputed. Interestingly, the debates over this book have hinged largely on its use of
quantitative statistical and numerical methods to produce historical analysis. For a more
extensive historical treatment, see Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois
Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and
Eugene D. Genovese. Eugene Genovese, of course, is also a controversial figure for
reasons that are interesting in the context of my essay. Having established himself as an
important Marxist historian of the South, he now professes his admiration for the
agrarianism and honor of the Southern planter class--maintaining his rejection of
capitalism despite the move from left to right.
2. Jason Compson of The Sound and the Fury provides an excellent portrait of the
"Yankeefied" Southerner, his sole purpose lying in the accumulation of money by bits
and pieces, his greatest tragedy and outrage being the loss of that hoarded money when
Caddy's daughter steals it. As opposed to Quentin and Mr. Compson--who are
aristocratic, honorable, useless, and doomed--Jason wants nothing more than to be
"American" in the sense of middleclass. Unlike all the other Compsons, he gets his wish-so we are told in Faulkner's 1946 "appendix." Although he may not conquer Jefferson,
like the banker Flem Snopes, his identification with America rather than the South saves
him from the Compson doom.
3. I have in mind the work of important early critics such as Robert Penn Warren, Irving
Howe, and Cleanth Brooks. However, these classic too often adopt Faulkner's own
biblical, mystical terminology as their own, rather than analyzing the rhetoric it implies.
4. I refer here to the remarkable passage in "Delta Autumn" in which Ike McCaslin's
rumination on the joys of his annual hunting trip is interrupted:
this tent with its muddy floor and the bed which was not wide enough nor soft enough
nor even warm enough, was his home and these men, some of whom he only saw during
these two November weeks ... were more his kin than any. Because this was his land-The shadow of the youngest negro loomed. It soared, blotting the heater's dying glow
from the ceiling ... the glow, the flame, leaped high and bright across the canvas. But the
negro's shadow still remained, by its length and breadth, standing, since it covered most
of the ceiling, until after a moment he raised himself on his elbow to look. It was not the
negro, it was his kinsman.(335-36)
The odd conflation of "negro" and "kinsman" enabled by the shadow recalls the specific
curse which hangs over Ike's head as a result of American slavery: his grandfather, the
plantation patriarch Carothers McCaslin, raped one of his slaves and then, years later,
raped his daughter by the first slave and had a child by his own daughter. Thus many of
Ike's kinsmen are Negro.
5. In this very different, specifically American, context it is interesting to consider the
argument Nietzsche sets out in On the Genealogy of Morals that morality, law,
civilization, and Christianity are founded on the existence of guilt, and that "the major
moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its origin in the very material concept Schulden [debts]"
(62-63). Following this notion through his eccentric telling of "prehistory," Nietzsche
concludes that the debt concept has its most profound structural effects in the relationship
of a present generation to its past: "it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments
of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and ... one has to pay them back with sacrifices and
accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater" (89). This
process continues to reach backward until God is posited as the point of origin and thus
as the ultimate creditor--"the Creditor," as Shreve describes God in Absalom, Absalom!.
6. For a full account of this history, see Robert J. Weiss's 1997 book "We Want Jobs": A
History of Affirmative Action.
7. While Go Down, Moses has gained a great deal of attention and Absalom, Absalom!
and Light in August have come to seem the apex of the Faulkner canon, Intruder has not
been greatly revived by recent waves of interest in Faulkner's literature of race. Booklength studies on race and Faulkner tend to deal with Intruder as an afterthought, lumped
together with the other late novels; see for example James Snead's Figures of Division
and Thadious Davis's Faulkner's "Negro": Art and the Southern Context. In Faulkner:
The House Divided, Eric J. Sundquist sums up the common feeling neatly, arguing that
Intruder "is generally a ludicrous novel and a depressing social document" (149).
Interestingly, Intruder was the first of Faulkner's books to be both critically and
commercially well received. Published at the moment when Faulkner was being critically
reevaluated and coinciding with Malcolm Cowley's publication of The Portable Faulkner,
Intruder became his first "successful" book. The movie, which Ralph Ellison lauded in
"The Shadow and the Act" as one of the few Hollywood films dealing with race "that
could be shown in Harlem without arousing unintended laughter" (281), still stands as
one of the most thoughtful Hollywood films dealing with racial issues. For a detailed
account of the circumstances surrounding Faulkner's critical re-evaluation in the late
1940s and the success of Intruder, see Lawrence Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's
Reputation.
8. For an extensive discussion of the power play involved in the giving of gifts, see
Greenberg, Chapter Three: "Gifts, Strangers, Duels, and Humanitarianism."
9. Douglas's argument, in "'The Most Valuable Sort of Property': American Legal
Discourse and the Boundaries of Whiteness, 1880-1950," is based in part on his reading
of Albion Tourgée's brief in the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case. Tourgée sought to argue
that Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was being deprived of the "reputation of being
white" when he was forced to ride in the Jim Crow car of a train. The court decided that
because Plessy was not white, he could not possess that most valuable property--the
reputation of whiteness.
10. See Greenberg, Honor & Slavery.
11. The scene I have in mind is the poker game at the end of "Was," in which two white
slaveowners gamble to settle the fate of two slaves who are in love--one owned by one
owner, one by the other. The outcome of the game is assured by the fact that the cards are
dealt by Tomey's Terrel, one of the slaves in question, who is presumably dealing the
cards in such a way as to ensure that he will be united with his lover. The text draws
attention to Terrel's mixed race (he is the son produced by Carothers McCaslin's rape of
his own slave daughter) as the factor that makes the fair gamble between two men
impossible; the repression of whiteness-as-property as the basis of Southern honor (in the
form of the poker game) makes itself known in the "parchment-colored" hands which are
all that is visible of Terrel as he stands next to the table and deals the cards, hands "that
were supposed to be black but were not quite white" (28).
12. For more on Gavin and Lucas as father-figures, see Weinstein 123-26.
13. Perhaps the best example of this unpayable debt is presented in "The Bear." Ike
McCaslin recognizes that the debt owed as a result of slavery cannot be repaid; in fact he
argues that the very principle of property ownership is tainted at its source. Ike repudiates
property while seeking to maintain or create anew for himself the honor that his ancestors
failed to uphold. He continues the rituals of honor, particularly in the case of the all-male
hunt. But his attempt to redeem the ideal of honor in his own person without the taint of
property is a failure because, as I have argued in this essay, the maintenance of a property
interest based on slavery is in fact the whole point of structures of Southern honor--honor
without property is no more than a hollow shape.
14. The first significant instance of Gavin's "missing it" is during his brief appearance in
Light in August, where he appears just long enough to provide a glib synopsis of Joe
Christmas's actions and motivations based on his theory that Christmas's white blood and
(supposed) black blood were at war with each other. The novel's account of Joe
Christmas's life story, and his complex motivations, gives the lie to this explanation.
Then, in the final story of Go Down, Moses, Gavin acts the good liberal by helping to
provide a funeral for the grandson of Lucas and Mollie Beauchamp. In providing this
favor for Mollie, Stevens evinces convictions about blacks that echo the racist sheriff's
deputy of "Pantaloon in Black," whose narrative of events is designed specifically to
evoke the gap between a black man's grief-induced actions and white people's misreading
of such actions because of their inability to see blacks as humans with the capacity to
grieve. Gavin notes of black people: "They were like that. You could know two of them
for years; they might even have worked for you for years, bearing different names. Then
suddenly you learn by pure chance that they are brothers or sisters" (354). This assertion
of the way "they" are, this claim that black familial ties are invisible, is reversed when
Gavin is forced to witness another scene of black grief. The grandson has been executed
for the murder of a policeman that he may or may not have committed. But Mollie insists
that Roth Edmonds, whose plantation she lives on, "sold my Benjamin. Sold him in
Egypt. Pharaoh got him" (353). Thus she evokes the slave spiritual of the title, "Go
Down, Moses" ("Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt's land / Tell old Pharaoh to let my
people go"). Through the metaphorical vehicle of the spiritual, Mollie links the fate of her
grandson, dying in a prison in the urban North, to a history rooted in slavery, a family
legacy. Faced with the assertion that slavery has not stopped producing misery, Gavin
breaks down physically in his attempt to escape: "He went down the hall fast, almost
running. ... Soon I will be outside, he thought. Then there will be air, space, breath"
(362).
15. This essay was originally part of a longer piece that looked at these questions of
Northern and Southern debt in both in Intruder in the Dust and in Toni Morrison's Song
of Solomon. The comparison with Song of Solomon enables a more extended discussion
of the perils and possibilities that (Northern) capitalism offers for African Americans
(and the Seven Days, the secret society devoted to countering each murder of blacks by
whites with a corresponding murder, offers an unusual twist on the debt-based logic of
affirmative action). While Faulkner--as I have argued here--concerns himself with the
debt owed by whites to blacks, Morrison is more interested in the debts owed within
black communities and owed by the people of those communities to the past.
Works Cited
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Doubleday, 1961. 100-06.
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Louisiana State UP, 1983.
Douglas, J. O. Allen, Jr. "'The Most Valuable Sort of Property': American Legal
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Source Citation
Dussere, Erik. "The Debts of History: Southern Honor, Affirmative Action, and
Faulkner's Intruders in the Dust." Faulkner Journal 17.1 (Fall 2001): 37-57. Rpt. in
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J.
Trudeau. Vol. 170. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 Mar. 2012.
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