I read too much Faulkner too early, and I didn’t understand much of it. I had an excuse for reading it: Faulkner and I were both born on September 25, different years but it seemed like Kismet. Kismet maybe, but Kismet didn’t aid comprehension. Do you know how incomprehensible Henry Sutpen or Joe Christmas can be to a young man? To an old man?
I had this notion that Faulkner would help me understand the South and what it meant to be Southern. Faulkner taught me many things: how to spell ya’ll, that classy folk come from Virginia and failed folk slide off to Texas, and that well-placed Southern dialect sholy is fun, if only in my head. He taught me that if a white guy had black ancestors then all sorts of hijinx will ensue, and that folk, black and white and in-between, are going to die violently. Because blood, maybe, or maybe just cultural failure.
I suspect you can’t be filled with a young man’s optimism and get much out of Faulkner, except maybe The Reivers (which oddly enough is his old man’s novel). Faulkner didn’t write about glories, he wrote about failures. Notwithstanding my expectations, Absolom, Absalom! wasn’t Gone with the Wind, Intruder in the Dust wasn’t To Kill a Mockingbird. He wrote about the failures of history, personal and social, old and new, and that’s not the sort of message a young man will understand. At least I didn’t.
I don’t remember Faulkner ever talking about fishing. Maybe Faulkner should have written about fishing. I would have understood not catching fish.
All that incomprehensible Faulkner gave me an early and perhaps strangely skewed focus on Mississippi. Other than my friend Byron and a couple of quick drive-throughs, I haven’t had a lot of personal contact with Mississippi except Faulkner, and Byron, an expat (once for money and once for love), always seemed equally entranced with and reticent about the place–and notwithstanding a strong literary inclination has refused to read Faulkner. I had at least one second great-grandfather who landed in antebellum Marshall County, Mississippi, near Memphis at the top of the state. He stayed there long enough to marry a second great-grandmother in 1845, apparently his cousin, and then the two slid off to Texas in time for the birth of my great grandfather in 1848. Their sojourn in Marshall County was pretty much a drive-through. They didn’t start in Mississippi and they didn’t stay long after they got there.
Immediately west of Marshall County the Mississippi Delta runs for 200 miles south from the Tennessee border along the east side of the Mississippi River, to Vicksburg. At its widest the Delta spreads east for 80 miles. It is an alluvial plain, and has the richest soil on earth. West of the river there’s the Arkansas Delta, culturally and geologically and economically similar to the Mississippi Delta, but nobody talks much about Arkansas. It’s Mississippi that grabs the imagination.
Delta wealth was built on slave labor growing cotton. Cotton is still rich enough, but agriculture is mechanized, and doesn’t require the labor force that in the 19th century worked the land. Of the Delta counties 42 are considered distressed, only four are not. Why is Arkansas glad there’s a Mississippi? Because Arkansas isn’t last on every list.
Mississippi isn’t old, which is another thing I didn’t understand in Faulkner. Antebellum Mississippi was still the Wild West, and Faulkner knew it. In the 1850 census there were 606,526 people, less my second great grandparents who had GTT, having boomed from a population of 7600 in 1800. By 1900, the population was 1.797 million, 2.967 million in 2018. Statewide the population is 59.1 percent white, 37 percent black. About one-third of the Mississippi African American population lives in the Delta, where the African American population is 46 percent of the total. Some Delta counties are 85 percent African American. On the other side of the state, in Alcorn County, the population is 87 percent white. It’s not important, except that it highlights what is often not obvious about Mississippi: Mississippi isn’t one thing.
But it is some things: it is the poorest state in the Union, between whites and blacks the most racially complex and more often than not the most tragic, the place where income, education, health care, poverty, life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, STDs, and history walk extreme racial and class divides. Within the state there’s a division between east and west, with the coast thrown in for good measure. A hundred years ago the Mississippi east was populist and progressive, and the Mississippi west was Dixiecrat planters controlling the votes of African Americans. Now things are flipped. In the 2016 presidential election Mississippi voted 57.86 percent for President Trump, but unlike much of the rest of the nation the split wasn’t urban/rural, the split was Delta and southwestern counties versus most of everybody else, black versus white. This map lays it out:
Mississippi is also the source of some of our best good things. It’s the place of the Blues, B.B. King, Jimmie Rodgers, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson. It’s the place of a good half-dozen of our finest writers, past and present, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and Jesmyn Ward, all are from Mississippi. There are whole hosts of novelists like John Grisham and Greg Iles who write pretty good if mostly forgettable novels. It can be argued that as the principal home of the blues it’s the principal home of rock-and-roll. It is certainly the home of Elvis (and directly across the River from Natchez in Louisiana Jerry Lee Lewis). All of this in one of the least literate states in the nation. Where the heck did all that come from?
Mississippi also gave us Jefferson Davis, the post-Reconstruction Mississippi Plan, 589 lynchings (539 of blacks–the most in the South), Emmett Till, and more than its fair share of the violence of the Civil Rights Movement.
We go to Ocean Springs in March to fish the salt marshes with Richard Schmidt. Ocean Springs is apparently the most charming city on that odd geographic panhandle that makes up the Mississippi Coast, Biloxi having been taken over by casinos, and it’s about an hour east of New Orleans. It is also the site of the 1699 French landing in Mississippi/Louisiana by Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville. Who doesn’t like to say Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville? The French accomplished many things in Louisiana, including the decimation of the Native American population by disease and warfare, the eradication of the Natchez Indians, and the introduction of African slavery. They didn’t accomplish permanent French settlement, losing out to the English who lost out to the Spanish who lost out to the new Americans, though the French did found Biloxi and Natchez. And New Orleans.
On pretty much a whim over the long Martin Luther King holiday we drove to Mississippi and visited Natchez, Vicksburg, and Jackson. Oddly, Natchez is closer to Houston than my hometown in Texas, but driving six hours west from Houston through Fort Worth and Wichita Falls is a decidedly different experience from driving through Louisiana and Mississippi. Natchez is full of sometimes pretty and sometimes magnificent Antebellum homes turned into bed and breakfasts, but as Byron had pointed out to me, nobody wants to stay in the slave quarters. We didn’t fish–it was cold, and there was flooding because of winter rains. At the Vicksburg National Battlefield, I realized that my Union great-great grandfather from Missouri via Eastern Tennessee was probably shooting at one or more of my Confederate great-great grandfathers. I could have ended right there on that battlefield more than 90 years before I got started.
At a popular restaurant in Vicksburg black and white Saturday night diners ate under decidedly Lost Cause paintings of the Siege. On the flip side, a popular country-clubby restaurant in Jackson populated by black and white churchgoers, Char, was decorated with old photos. Prominent in the entry of the place was a copy of a 60s photo of Medgar Evers. As I recall I had the catfish, or maybe the fried chicken. I definitely had the fried green tomatoes. I also kept wondering if I’d misidentified the portrait photo of Medgar Evers. It is a strange place, Mississippi, and the past there really is never dead. But black and white diners are eating happily at Sunday brunch under a photo of Medgar Evers. I reckon things are changing.
Maybe someday soon I’ll make my pilgrimage to Oxford and finally understand Faulkner.
