THE JAIL
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from the serried identical ranks of two-room shotgun shacks in which
lived in droves with his family the Negro tenant- or share- or fur–
nish-hand who bridled him (the mule) in the lot at sunup and fol–
lowed
him
through the plumb-straight monotony of identical furrows
and back to the lot at sundown, with (the man) one eye on where
the mule was going and the other eye on his (the mule's) heels; both
gone now, the one, to the last of the forty- and fifty- and sixty-acre
hill farms inaccessible from unmarked dirt roads, the other to New
York and Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles ghettos, or nine out of
ten of him that is, the tenth one mounting from the handles of a
plow to the springless bucket seat of a tractor, dispossessing and dis–
placing the other nine just as the tractor had dispossessed and dis–
placed the other eighteen mules to whom that nine would have been
complement; then Warsaw and Dunkerque displaced that tenth in his
turn, and now the planter's not-yet-drafted son drove the tractor: and
then Pearl Harbor and Tobruk and Utah Beach displaced that son,
leaving the planter himself on the seat of the tractor, for a little
while that is-or so he thought, forgetting that victory or defeat both
are bought at the same exorbitant price of change and alteration;
one nation, one world: young men who had never been farther from
Yoknapatawpha County than Memphis or New Orleans (and that not
often), now talked glibly of street intersections in Asiatic and European
capitals, returning no more to inherit the long monotonous endless
unendable furrows of Mississippi cotton fields, living now (with now
a wife and next year a wife and child and the year after that a wife
and children) in automobile trailers or G.!. barracks on the outskirts
of liberal arts colleges, and the father and now grandfather himself
still driving the tractor across the gradually diminishing fields between
the long looping skeins of electric lines bringing electric power from
the Appalachian mountains, and the subterrene steel veins bringing
the natural gas from the Western plains, to the little lost lonely farm–
houses glittering and gleaming with automatic stoves and washing
machines and television antennae;
One nation: no longer anywhere, not even in Yoknapatawpha County,
one last irreconcilable fastness of stronghold from which to enter the
United States, because at last even the last old sapless indomitable
unvanquished widow or maiden aunt had died and the old deathless
Lost Cause had become a faded (though still select) social club or
caste, or form of behavior when you remembered to observe it on the
occasions when young men from Brooklyn, exchange students at Missis-
