Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart

By John S. Sledge and Walter B. Edgar

Southern Bound represents a running conversation on books, writers, and literary travel written for the Mobile Press-Register Books page from 1995 to 2011 by John S. Sledge. The collection includes more than one hundred of the best pieces culled from Sledge's total output of approximately seven hundred columns. Numerous classic authors are celebrated in these pages, including Homer, Plato, Gibbon, Melville, Proust, Conrad, Cather, and Steinbeck as well as modern writers such as Walter Edgar, Tom Franklin, and Eugene Walter.

While some of the essays are relatively straightforward book reviews, others present meditative and deeply personal perspectives on the author's literary experiences such as serving on the jury in the play version To Kill a Mockingbird; spending the night alone in a Jesuit college library's venerable stacks; rambling through funky New Orleans bookshops; talking to Square Books owner Richard Howorth while overlooking the Oxford, Mississippi courthouse; rereading Treasure Island on the shores of Mobile Bay; and remembering a beloved father's favorite books. Engaging and spirited, Southern Bound represents the critical art at its most accessible and will prove entertaining fare for anyone who loves the written word.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611172362

John S. Sledge

John S. Sledge is senior architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He holds a bachelor's degree in history and Spanish from Auburn University and a master's in historic preservation from Middle Tennessee State University. Sledge is the author of six previous books, including Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart; The Mobile River; and These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War.

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The South

It was no accident that my column was titled Southern Bound. Early on, Bailey Thomson established an emphasis on the South, primarily because it is home ground, of course, but also because its literary heritage is so distinguished and there are still so many important and good books being written on the region.

This section presents a mix of typically Southern subjects—slavery, rivers, agriculture, Faulkner, race, and working folks—diversely rendered in memoir, history, poetry, fiction, biography, and art. Some of these books garnered a great deal of attention, like Edward Ball’s extraordinary Slaves in the Family, while others, Margaret Sartor’s Miss American Pie, for example, certainly deserved more. The only theme here is the enduring appeal of the South as a subject that is sometimes difficult, sometimes delightful, but never dull.

Essence of the South Remains Hard to Define

"Tell about the South. What do they do there?

Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?"

William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom!

The study of the American South is a minor academic industry. Historians, geographers, folklorists, sociologists and poets all grapple with the question of what makes this region different from the rest of America. The titles of some of the hundreds of published works indicate anything but consensus. General works include The Solid South, The Other South, The Southern South and The American South. For the negative side, one can read The Benighted South, The Provincial South, The Horrible South and The Squalid South; conversely, there are more optimistic tomes such as The Growing South, The Advancing South and The Arisen South. Likewise, The Vanishing South and The Passing South counterpoise The Lasting South and The Enduring South. The Hesitant South and The Uncertain South uneasily share shelf space with The Fighting South and The Militant South. The Silent South is challenged by The Singing South, and The Lazy South and The Erotic South leave no doubt as to their themes.

Many identify climate as the clue to Southern distinctiveness. Such attempts include It Never Snows and Clarence Cason’s classic study of Alabama, 90 Degrees in the Shade. Yet broiling summers are not unknown outside of Dixie, and the climates of northern Virginia and the Gulf Coast are radically different. Steamy temperatures do not the South make.

Closely tied to climate, however, is agriculture, and here we begin to close in on the South’s singularity. For it was the cultivation of cotton by black slaves that set the South apart during the antebellum years and made her wealthy. The cotton lands of Alabama and Mississippi produced hundreds of thousands of bales annually before the war, and cotton remains an important crop in the region. It was slavery before the war and Jim Crow afterwards that defined the South. Indeed, during the 1920s, the historian U. B. Phillips proposed race as THE central theme of Southern history. To Phillips, the institution of slavery and the subsequent maintenance of white supremacy were crucial components of Southernness. States rights, one-crop agriculture, plantations and free trade were all important, but not the essence, argued Phillips. Sociologist Howard Odum concurred when he bluntly stated, No South, No Negro, No Negro, No South.

Another seminal work in the study of the region was Wilbur J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, published in 1941. A North Carolina journalist, Cash lambasted his native region as a schizophrenic mix of Calvinism and hedonism, hospitality and violence, individualism and conformity. Cash’s Southerner was a rustic, a direct product of the soil with a chip on the shoulder swagger. Cash’s unflattering view was heavily influenced by the Bad Boy of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken. Mencken’s 1920 essay, the Sahara of the Bozart was a devastating cultural critique of the region. He wrote that the South was almost as sterile artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.

Up East intellectuals delighted in Mencken’s colorful assault, but Southerners were stung and rushed to their own defense. Mencken’s attack may have played some role in sparking the remarkable Southern literary renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, unleashing what one author has termed the Southern rage to explain.

Yale historian C. Vann Woodward, a native Arkansan, offered his interpretation of the region’s distinctiveness in The Burden of Southern History, published in 1960. Woodward portrayed a region with a history more in common with the lot of mankind, than that of the North. To begin with, the South had a long acquaintance with poverty, from the Civil War to at least World War II. Confederate defeat ran counter to the American legends of success and invincibility, only recently tarnished by the debacles of Vietnam and Challenger. Wrote Woodward, The South’s preoccupation was with guilt, not with innocence, with the reality of evil, not with the dream of perfection. Its experience in this respect, as in several others, was on the whole a thoroughly un-American one. Yet Woodward insisted this was a historical dimension America very much needed. In a real sense, Southerners were less peculiar in their experience than modern Americans.

The debate and analysis continue, with more and more scholars arguing for No South as tremendous changes transform the region. Whether the South will indeed pass away, endure, or rise again, only time will tell.

Mobile Press-Register, John Sledge, June 25, 2000.

© 2000 Mobile Press-Register. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Slaves in the Family

Issues of race and family intertwine in complex and too often rarely acknowledged ways in the Southern past. A new and deeply personal book, Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) by Edward Ball, effectively amplifies the lingering reverberations of the American South’s violent history as a slave society.

When Ball was growing up, his father told him there were five things the family never discussed, Religion, sex, death, money and the Negroes. Though his parents’ circumstances were modest, Ball’s lineage was a distinguished one. His first American ancestor had settled along the Cooper River in South Carolina in 1698 and established himself as a rice planter. Between then and 1865, when the Civil War swept it all away, the extended Ball clan owned over 20 plantations and 4,000 slaves.

As he matured, Edward Ball wondered about the history of his own family, but more so about the story of their many slaves. When he asked elderly relatives what they knew, he got the familiar haiku of Charleston genealogy, that is, extended strings of white forebears’ names and how they were related to one another. As Ball writes, On one side stood the ancestors, vivid, serene, proud; on the other their slaves, anonymous, taboo, half-human. It was the slaves’ side that Ball determined to explore.

Black genealogy presents myriad difficulties. Tracing families forward from or backward to specific plantations is not always possible. Ball was fortunate, however, in that his ancestors were excellent record keepers. Indeed, the Ball Family Papers consist of over 10,000 pages of documents (letters, slave ledgers, diaries, wills, etc.) in numerous libraries and archives. Furthermore, by his own conservative estimate, Ball guessed that there must be some 75,000 living African Americans descended from the family slaves. Chances were, many of these people still resided in the Charleston area.

Ball made little secret of his suspicion that, Surely there was, somewhere, a black clan with a bloodline that led to a Ball bedroom. Understandably, not everyone in his immediate family was thrilled at this prospect. What you are doing can only cause trouble! one cousin shouted at him. It will produce dissension, or worse!

Ball effectively interweaves the history of the family plantations with his modern interviews. Though his older relatives contended that the family slaves had been well treated, Ball discovered a darker reality. There were beatings, dismemberments, and, in one case, an ancestor who kept a black common-law wife in Charleston.

Indeed, over the almost two centuries that the Balls owned slaves, there was race mixing aplenty. In a particularly moving passage, Ball meets with a black woman his own age and informs her of the possibility that they are distantly related. She is silent for a moment, and then replies, the only thing that can cure what’s happened is for us to administer love.

Portions of this book are extraordinarily powerful. In his descriptions of the pest house on Sullivan’s Island, where slaves were first landed after the terrible Middle Passage, Ball reveals himself to be a haunted man. As a child, he tells us, he had played with a sand bucket where the pest house long ago stood. Now, he cannot shake his adult knowledge of the horror that happened there. I sometimes shovel graves in my sleep, he writes.

Slaves in the Family loses some of its punch and focus over the course of 500 pages. Furthermore, academic historians may question the trustworthiness of so many oral accounts. As one must in such a book Ball often speculates, using phrases and words like I now suspected, must have, perhaps and if.

This should not detract from what is an admirable, even heroic effort, however. As one black man grudgingly tells Ball, Someone has to break the ice. I gotta give you credit, you were man enough to do it.

Mobile Press-Register, John Sledge, April 5, 1998.

© 1998 Mobile Press-Register. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Ball’s Book Strikes Personal Chord with Historian

Like Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family, I, too, am a descendent of slaveholders. Though my forebears were not as fabulously wealthy in land and human chattel as Ball’s ancestors, they were nevertheless firmly within the planter class. Their devoted adherence to the values of that class led to the destruction of all they held dear. They emerged from the turmoil of Civil War bewildered and bitter. Their former slaves, whom they believed to be inferior beings, were no longer bound by their will.

Partly because I am an historian, I have long been interested in the history of my family, particularly during the antebellum period. Fortunately, there are both public and private documents by which to trace their story. But what of the slaves? How to accurately reconstruct their lives? Is it even possible, given the lapse of so many years? They could neither read nor write and appear in the historical record only as their masters and hostile laws presented them. They were considered property first, human beings second, if at all.

If one is judicious, a great deal can be gleaned from a careful reading of the historical record alone, however. Some speculation and supposition beyond what may be strictly supported by the facts are perhaps allowable, depending on the question at hand. It is extremely difficult to know when one has strayed too far, however. Oral tradition, which Mr. Ball depends upon so heavily, is the least trustworthy method by which to reconstruct the distant past. Though it cannot and should not be entirely discounted, a healthy dose of skepticism is recommended. Speculation built upon supposition built upon an elder’s yarn equals a castle in the air. Edward Ball’s book inspired me anew to try and understand what life was like not only for one of my long-deceased planter-forebears, but for his slaves as well.

Robert Sturdivant was a great-great-great-grandfather on my father’s side. He was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia in 1789, son of a Revolutionary War veteran. In 1819, married and with two children (there would eventually be 10), Robert Sturdivant moved to Valley Creek, a small nucleus of cotton planters in Dallas County, Alabama, a few miles north of Selma.

Valley Creek proved a good place to settle. The hamlet steadily grew, and in 1841 became the site of the Centenary Institute, a Methodist school. In 1845, the name of the community was changed to Summerfield, lest the old name conjure images of a swampy and unhealthy place. By 1850, Summerfield’s population stood at some 300 whites and over 600 black slaves. There was a bank, dry goods store, and blacksmith shop.

Sturdivant’s fortunes paralleled those of his community. He built the first gristmill in Dallas County and owned the blacksmith shop and the bank. He served on the board of trustees of the Centenary Institute and lived in a tasteful Federal style residence at the corner of Centenary and Main streets. He also maintained a large plantation on the nearby Cahaba River. He owned 68 slaves, 10 of whom lived in Summerfield. His was a full and busy life.

One morning in 1856, Sturdivant arose, bathed and dressed in a brown linen suit. Minutes later he died of apoplexy, at the age of 67. The Dallas Gazette remembered him as kind, liberal and hospitable—a sincere Christian.

After his death, a complete inventory of Sturdivant’s property at Summerfield and the Cahaba plantation was taken. This extraordinarily detailed document provides an invaluable glimpse into the lives of an Alabama planter, his family and slaves.

The inventory clearly reveals that the Summerfield residence was not a working plantation, but rather a place of retreat. The house contained many of the finer things of life, including a piano, several paintings, good furniture, silver candlesticks and imported china. In the yard were 16 pigs and two cows, a not unusual number of animals for even urban Southern domiciles. To tend these few animals and keep the house were 10 slaves valued at almost $10,000. The youngest were two girls, Ella and Mary, ages 5 and 6. The oldest was Hetty, 43. There were only two men Tom, 37, and Clayton, 23, who no doubt did the heavy labor around the house and yard. The others were older adolescents who probably polished silver, swept the house and generally tidied up after the Sturdivant brood.

Things were far different on the Cahaba River property. There were 59 slaves there, 15 mules, 12 cows, three oxen, a bull, 57 sheep, 200 hogs and several horses. The fields were planted in cotton and corn and there were wooded thickets that needed clearing. To handle all of this the slaves used log chains, axes, plows, iron tooth harrows, spades and butcher knives. Their clothing would have been tattered and their hands callused.

The Cahaba River slaves were a mixture of ages and sexes. There were Old Handy and Young Handy (father and son?), Elvira, Dinah, Hal and Solomon. Unusually, two of the slaves had last names, Stephen Irby and Arthur Smith. In this respect at least, Stephen and Arthur could set themselves apart not only from the other slaves, but from the mules and horses as well, which all had first names. In subtle and not so subtle ways were men and women in bondage made to feel their condition.

Robert Sturdivant did not live to see all he had worked for swept away. That would be his children’s unpleasant lot. How his one-time slaves felt about their freedom and their ex-master (would they have called kind, liberal?) and how they and their progeny fared over subsequent decades are unknown to me. Their stories are out there, however, perhaps yet retrievable by a gifted and diligent researcher.

Mobile Press-Register, John Sledge, April 5, 1998.

© 1998 Mobile Press-Register. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Rivers of History

As a boy, I used to accompany my father, a biologist, on bird counts in rural Dallas County. We would begin at daybreak and cover a 20-mile route. Our last stops were in Molett’s Bend on the Alabama River. This was the part of the trip I looked forward to the most. The bend was named for the Molett family, who had come to the area in 1817 from South Carolina. William Page Molett built a plantation house in 1835, and his son, John Ulmer Molett, built another in 1860. Both houses survive, Molett Sr.’s being one of the earliest frame buildings in central Alabama. High-water marks from past floods are still visible in the hallways. A nearby cemetery contains the grave of a Confederate veteran hung during Reconstruction.

Despite this difficult history, the people who lived in the bend were invariably warm and friendly, eager to talk to a biologist about the flora and fauna of the region. How well I remember the year they captured the 10-foot alligator by lowering tractor discs on its back. The beast was chained to a pine tree and was a less-than-content prisoner. Our trip always ended with a walk to the river-bank for a look at the Alabama itself. Wide and muddy, lined with moss draped trees, it was romantic and sinister and endlessly fascinating. Like many Alabamians, I was captivated by the river and drawn to it.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that the history of Alabama is the history of its rivers. From earliest times, Alabama’s rivers have played a pivotal role in the economic and social development of the state. Despite the importance of these rivers, few books have addressed them directly. Hardy Jackson’s Rivers of History redresses the imbalance.

Jackson, head of the history department at Jacksonville State University, is well qualified to chronicle the story of these streams. A native of Clarke County, he grew up chasing alligators and observing submarines along the Alabama River. As a historian, he is a dynamic and talented storyteller. In his attempt to write a scholarly study for the general public, Jackson focuses on people rather than institutions. The result is a warm portrait of the rivers and the people who have inhabited their banks.

Rivers of History profiles the Alabama River system, made up of four streams. The Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers begin in the northeast quarter of the state and join to form the Alabama River at Wetumpka. The Cahaba River begins in suburban Birmingham and joins the Alabama at Cahawba in Dallas County. The Alabama itself flows from Wetumpka to the Tombigbee cutoff, an inglorious end, not far from Fort Mims in Baldwin County. As a result, Mobile features only incidentally in this narrative.

Jackson’s descriptions of the rivers before white settlement are masterful. The Coosa and Tallapoosa were wild streams, falling several hundred feet over their courses. They teemed with sturgeon, trout, perch, rock, red horse, and were host to hundreds of species of mollusk, many now extinct. The Cahaba ran over a beautiful bottom of solid rock, and its banks were lined with mulberry, sugar tree, maple, white and red oak, and in the spring, there was the lily that would bear the river’s name. The Alabama itself was sluggish with size and cut larger bends, wide and sweeping to accommodate its bulk as it moved west and south.

Long before the white men came, Indians lived along the rivers and altered them to suit their purposes, constructing massive stone weirs to divert spawning fish into traps and nets. Then the Spanish came, bringing desolation and disease to the Indians, followed in the 18th century by the French and British and decades of forest diplomacy. With American hegemony came waves of settlement and the Creek War. Some of the most colorful episodes in Alabama’s history took place during this war, including the Canoe Fight, the massacre at Fort Mims and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Jackson does not romanticize what was in reality a dirty, vengeful war.

With the Americans came steamboats, plantations and slavery. Foreign visitors were often surprised at the scarcity of towns along the Alabama River. This scarcity was due to the fact that most planters imported what they needed through factors in Mobile and had their own steamboat landings for loading cotton. There were more than 200 landings between Montgomery and Claiborne. This made for frequent stops for steamboat travelers bound for Mobile.

The Civil War brought scenes of strife to the rivers. The Confederates established a prison camp at Cahawba, site of the old capitol. Selma was attacked by Union raiders in April of 1865, and its arsenal and niter works burned. Retreating Confederates dumped cannon and supplies into the Alabama River. In Montgomery, more than 80,000 bales of cotton were burned to keep them out of federal hands, and panicked citizens looted stores. The mayor surrendered the city without a shot fired on the morning of April 12, three days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

The postwar period was lean, but river people fished, hunted and dead-headed, that is reclaimed sunken timber, to scrape together a living. Because earlier radical Republican efforts at public works did little more than reward cronies, conservative Democrats hobbled the state’s ability to develop the rivers by adding a clause to the constitution prohibiting state funds for such work. Alabama would thus be dependent on the federal government for many years for the improvement of its rivers.

Foremost among improvement efforts were attempts to tame the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers through the construction of locks and dams. These would create slack lakes in place of rapids and provide for more effective flood control. Though railroads lessened the importance of rivers for transportation, the streams became indispensable sources of power. Jackson describes the founding and growth of Alabama Power Co. during the early 1900s and its final triumph over the Coosa in 1966 with the completion of the Neely Henry Dam. He credits Alabama Power with organizational ability, engineering skill, and political savvy that goes unappreciated to this day.

Modern industrial development of the rivers and attendant problems with pollution are treated with balance and care, but the reader comes away with a sobering sense of what has been lost. The Cahaba, still in a relatively natural state without a major dam, is threatened by pesticides, discharge from waste treatment plants and mining operations. It has recently been listed as one of America’s 10 most endangered rivers. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management is portrayed as at best inept and at worst complicit with major industry in pollution of the rivers. Fundamentally, the problem lies in the fact that Alabama’s rivers are regarded as economic rather than natural resources. Jackson contends that only when Alabamians demand stricter management will things improve.

Irrevocably altered by man and bent to his purposes, the rivers still provide scenes of breathtaking beauty. The slack lakes that have replaced the crashing rapids of the Coosa are enjoyed by thousands every weekend. The Tallapoosa’s power is awesomely displayed at the Thurlow Dam. The Cahaba purls along as it has since time immemorial while the sluggish Alabama rolls on down mostly in solitude. Harvey Jackson has given us an engaging, well written history of these rivers and the people who have struggled with them. The book should appeal to every reader with an interest in Alabama and its resources.

Mobile Press-Register, John Sledge, September 17, 1995.

© 1995 Mobile Press-Register. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Bumper Crop of Poems Celebrates Life on the Land

Most Southerners no longer make their living on the land. Crowded into the region’s booming cities, laboring at office or factory jobs, their historic association with the soil is broken. But even as suburban or urban dwellers, they affectionately tend backyard garden patches with tomatoes or squash ripening in the sun. Memories of the farm and the pleasures of moist earth between the fingers are not so easily muted.

Working the Dirt (NewSouth, $20), a delightful new poetry anthology compiled and edited by Jennifer Horne, honors Southerners’ profound connection to the land. The book consists of more than 75 poems organized into six categories that move the reader through the agricultural history of the South, from The Farm to Fruits and Vegetables to Yards and Gardens. In a recent telephone interview from her Tuscaloosa home, Horne, a poet and former editor at the University of Alabama Press, said that she began the project as a collection of garden poetry, but I kept coming on all these farm poems. Her appreciation for the connection between Southern gardening and farming was enlarged and is beautifully reflected in the present volume.

The poets one would expect to find in such a collection are mostly here—Wendell Berry, Robert Penn Warren, Fred Chappell and Randall Jarrell—along with quite a few talented lesser-knowns. The selections include a mix of traditional and free verse and are without exception comprehensible (hardly a given where modern poetry is concerned), appropriate to their category, and fairly short.

The farming poems are especially vivid in their evocations of place and of hard work. In Delta Rain, Lily Peter sets a scene that any rambler of the countryside will instantly recognize: Across the brown delta loam / the thin green cotton rows run to woods along the bayou, / where the bullfrogs bellow among the cypress knees / in the cool dimness of the cloudy May afternoon. // A finger of lightning reaches down to the treetops / where the south wind whips up the leaves like ivory lace / against the hyacinthine blue of the rain clouds, / and the rain follows with its silver shadow. In Starting a Pasture, Walter McDonald describes building a fence: Sun going down, / the last hole dug, the last post dropped / and tamped tight enough to hold three strands of wire, / I toss the digger in the pickup between bales / of barbed wire ready for stringing, . . . But it is pitiless economics that dominates the poet’s thoughts rather than any satisfaction in a job well done.

There is good imagery in abundance, as demonstrated in The Farmer by Ellen Bryant Voigt: In the still-blistering late afternoon, / like currying a horse the rake / circled the meadow, the cut grass ridging / behind it. Elsewhere, dramatic skies serve as backdrops for weathered tools and abandoned buildings, trucks jounce through dust, and families take solace as they amble over tilled ground.

Not surprisingly, history both personal and grand is conjured in many of these poems. This is appropriate since it would be hard to imagine a single acre in the South that wasn’t once inhabited by American Indians, or farmed by pioneers, or fought over during the Revolution or Civil War. Robert Penn Warren’s Kentucky Mountain Farm recalls struggle and sacrifice: In these autumn orchards once young men lay dead— / Grey coats, blue coats. Young men on the mountainside / Clambered, fought. Heels muddied the rocky spring. // Their reason is hard to guess, remembering / Blood on their black mustaches in moonlight, / Cold musket-barrels glittering with frost. // Their reason is hard to guess and a long time past; / The apple falls, falling in the quiet night.

Things change, but there is no escaping the past, as Fred Chappell declares in My Grandmother Washes Her Feet: Nothing new gets started without the old’s / Plowed under, or halfway under. We sprouted from dirt, / Though, and it’s with you, and dirt you’ll never forget.

There are quiet pleasures here, too—savoring vegetables, opening a pickle jar, and wandering amid colorful flowers. In Root Cellar, George Scarbrough describes preserved peaches glowing like faint heat lightning / filtered through clouds on a sagging, cobwebbed shelf.

Working the Dirt is a useful reminder of the South’s agrarian past as well as a hymn to growing things. Jennifer Horne’s love of gardening and poetry has borne marvelous fruit in this tasteful collection.

Mobile Press-Register, John Sledge, January 4, 2004.

© 2004 Mobile Press-Register. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Faulkner’s Blood and Thunder Novel Endures

It was a gorgeous fall afternoon. The air was crisp and clean, the sky a brilliant blue and the Chinese Tallow trees ablaze with red and yellow. I was working along my back fence, clearing away the dry tangle of privet, kudzu and thorn that had run riot all summer. With broad strokes of the sling blade I hacked away at the dense mass, sending twigs and broken bits of vine flying. The westering sun shot golden beams through the debris-filled air, and there was no sound but the crash of the blade. My barn jacket felt good in the chill, and my dog sat nearby, waiting for me to finish. At that moment it struck me—I must read some Faulkner.

Certain authors suit certain moods, and this was clearly a Faulkner moment. My choices were limited, however. I have only two Faulkner volumes in my personal library, a collection of short stories and a Library of America edition featuring his four later novels—Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951) and A Fable (1954). I didn’t want to read a short story, desiring something more substantial, but Requiem for a Nun and A Fable both seemed too long. Having read Go Down, Moses before, I settled into a chair with the volume opened to Intruder in the Dust.

When Faulkner asked his publishers for an advance to write this book, he told them that it was to be a blood and thunder mystery novel that would deal forthrightly with the issue of race. Its underlying theme was to be, he wrote, the relationship between Negro and White . . . the premise being that the white people in the South, before the North or the govt. {sic}—or anyone else, owe and must pay a responsibility to the Negro. Faulkner wrote the novel in just over a month, and revised it in three.

Reviews were mixed, but widespread, and Intruder in the Dust sold 15,000 copies. It was Faulkner’s first commercial success. Despite critical acclaim for his earlier books, they had been sluggish sellers. MGM bought the movie rights for $50,000, and Faulkner used the money to buy a sailboat and enlarge his beloved Rowan Oak.

Subsequent critical opinion on Intruder in the Dust has been mixed as well, but the general consensus is that it lacks the emotional force and power of Faulkner’s earlier works. The novel is set in Yoknapatawpha County and centers on a black man, Lucas Beauchamp, who is accused of murdering a white man. The determination of the white population to lynch Beauchamp is thwarted by an unlikely alliance of two teen boys (one white and one black), an old spinster and a conscientious small-town lawyer (both white).

Intruder in the Dust features Faulkner’s signature stream-of-consciousness prose, maddening in its twists and turns and changes of focus. Even so, the tale is more straightforward than most of his stories (there are few significant temporal digressions, for instance) and the narrative drive is strong. The book is, in short, a page-turner.

There are also a number of memorable passages, none more famous than the Gettysburg fantasy. As Faulkner wrote, For every Southern boy 14 years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on the July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet. . . .

If Intruder in the Dust lacks the gravitas of Absalom, Absalom! or Light in August, no matter. Passages like the foregoing make it well worth the read. Those approaching Faulkner for the first time ought to consider this novel. It is lean and fast and sometimes even dazzling. It certainly satisfied me on an autumn evening.

Mobile Press-Register, John Sledge, January 9, 2000.

© 2000 Mobile Press-Register. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Oprah Makes Brave, Bold Choice with Faulkner

If you have not read this author, you cannot say you have been baptized as a real reader. So said Oprah Winfrey earlier