FAULKNER AND THE SOUTH TODAY
when no people dare risk division by using federal laws and federal po–
lice to abolish Lucas' shameful condition ...." and again, "I'm defend–
ing Sambo from .... the outlanders who will fling him decades back not
merely into injustice but into grief and agony and violence too by forcing
on us laws based on the idea that man's injustice to man can be abOlished
overnight by police ...." and, "I only say the injustice is ours, the
South's. We must expiate and abolish it ourselves, alone and without
help nor even (with thanks) advice."
Faulkner acknowledges the Negro's moral victory over the South,
yields and desires his total civic equality ("Someday Lucas Beauchamp
.... will vote anywhen and anywhere a white man can and send his
children to the same schools anywhere the white man's children go and
travel anywhere the white man does as the white man does it"), scorns
as he always has the depraved Southern murderer, the Percy Grimm
who killed and emasculated Joe Christmas, and whose portrait Faulkner
has drawn with a passionate condemnation not achieved to my know–
ledge, by any other writer.
This perception of the final emancipation of the Negro is real and
historical, a fact and a victory only Stalinists and certain liberals feel
compelled to underestimate. The sadistic passion these people take in
disowning every triumph of the Negro in America, in predicting greater
and greater injustice to him, is one of the most detestable aberrations
of their minds. One can only believe they want violence in order to
prove themselves right, as the deluded maniac, faced with the infuriating
reason of the doctor, wishes to have a great bloody wound the next day
to testify to the actual existence of his imaginary attackers. And when
the Negroes. are won over to the Communist Party have they not fallen
in love with their own misfortune, since at no time is there so much dis–
cussion of lynchings, humiliating segregation, such delicious examination
of white deceitfulness as between Stalinists and Negroes? The one never
tires of "exposing" to the other an endless chronicle of dangers past
and to come, as if the Negro did not know them well enough but had to
taste, touch, and fondle them over and over until both are in a frenzy
of indescribable perversity.
Faulkner's best intuitions have something to do with this pheno–
menon and there is at least a measure of psychological truth in his under–
standing that a cruel, lost South is necessary to the idea of America
held by certain radicals. This intuition partly informs his plea that the
South be allowed to redeem itself. Unfortunately he was not content
with psychological perceptions, but had to compose a states' rights, leave
us alone, don't be coming down here and telling us what to do, pamphlet
1133
