Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900-1965 1496832531, 9781496832535

Table of contents :
Cover
PECULIAR WHITENESS
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Note to Readers
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
ONE Tom and Friends: Thomas Dixon, White Supremacy, and Poor Whites of the Lost Cause
TWO “It Ain’t Hardly Worth the Trouble to Go On Living”: The Reaction to Abject Poverty in Erskine Caldwell
THREE “Crashing to Bits”: Autobiographical Recreations of the South
FOUR “It Aint Nothing but Jest Another Snopes”: Boundaries of Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha
CONCLUSION Maimed Souls: O’Connor, Disability, and the Future of White Trash
Notes
Bibliography
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Citation preview

PECULIAR WHITENESS

PECULIAR WHITENESS Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900–1965

Justin Mellette University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi. www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses. Copyright © 2021 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Portions of this work have appeared in altered forms in the following publications: Portions of chapter 4 appeared in Mississippi Quarterly (“‘It aint nothing but jest another Snopes’: White Trash in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 70/71, no. 1, 2019, pp. 41–60.) Portions of chapter 1 appear in the forthcoming The Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South from Cambridge UP (ed. Harilaos Stecopoulos). First printing 2021 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mellette, Justin, author. Title: Peculiar whiteness : racial anxiety and poor whites in southern literature, 1900–1965 / Justin Mellette. Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051351 (print) | LCCN 2020051352 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496832535 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496832542 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496832559 (epub) | ISBN 9781496832566 (epub) | ISBN 9781496832573 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496832580 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: American literature—Race identity—Southern States. | American literature—Southern States—20th century. | American literature—Southern States—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PS261 .M424 2021 (print) | LCC PS261 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/975—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051351 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051352 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To Cassie

CONTENTS

ix

Note to Readers

xi

Acknowledgments

3

INTRODUCTION

23

ONE

Tom and Friends: Thomas Dixon, White Supremacy, and Poor Whites of the Lost Cause 53

TWO

“It Ain’t Hardly Worth the Trouble to Go On Living”: The Reaction to Abject Poverty in Erskine Caldwell 91

THREE

“Crashing to Bits”: Autobiographical Recreations of the South 117

FOUR

“It Aint Nothing but Jest Another Snopes”: Boundaries of Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha 141

CONCLUSION

Maimed Souls: O’Connor, Disability, and the Future of White Trash 153

Notes

181

Bibliography

193

Index

NOTE TO READERS

One of the hopes of this project is to shed light on how the pernicious ideology of white supremacy weaponizes language. At times, the author felt it necessary to quote words that would be inappropriate in a spoken context in order to analyze how language functions in that instance. This is in no way an endorsement of the use of such slurs in a nonacademic context.

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I don’t hate the South, but I am bemused that, after living in South Carolina for twenty-two years, it took a change in residence for me to ever view my home as a possible focal point for my scholarly interests. To that end, I am grateful to those teachers who guided me along the path during my time in South Carolina, particularly Ken Adler, Donald Greiner, Mark Sibley-Jones, Anthony Jarrells, Catherine Keyser, Patrick Scott, Stan Whittle, and Qiana Whitted. This project arose from my time at Pennsylvania State University. I want to especially thank Aldon Nielsen for championing this project from its earliest days. Shirley Moody-Turner and Linda Furgerson Selzer also helped me foster the ideas that would result in this book. In addition, I owe thanks to the following, all of whom helped through coursework, conversation, or collegiality: Amy Barone, Michael Bérubé, Robert Edwards, Nicholas Joukovsky, Anthony Kaye, Shannon Sullivan, Sandra Spanier, and James L. W. West III. And whenever the chance arose to teach some of the texts I examine here in class, my students provided thoughtful and engaged feedback, helping me center my work. I received institutional and travel funding from Penn State as well, particularly from the University Graduate Fellowship that funded my studies. I also received funding from the Center for American Literary Studies, under the direction of Sean Goudie, which provided travel funding for my visit to look at the Margaret Bourke-White Papers, housed at the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. The university also provided travel funding where early versions of chapters were presented, and I am grateful to the scholarly communities that helped question and challenge my ideas, resulting in a much stronger work. The Auburn University English department has been a welcome home the past several years, and I am indebted to the support and feedback I have received. In particular, I am grateful to Craig Bertolet, Jeremy Downes, Ben Fagan, Charlie Lesh, and Erich Nunn for their encouragement and friendship. The University Press of Mississippi’s commitment to critical race studies and southern literature has been a boon to scholars and teachers everywhere, and I am thankful for their faith and support in my work. I am especially grateful xi

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to Katie Keene for her editorial assistance. Also, my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who provided incisive and constructive feedback that helped transform this work into what it is today. I also want to express my deep gratitude to all my colleagues, friends, and family, with whom I discussed portions of this work. Special debts of friendship are owed to Patrick Allen, Jacob Hughes, Kris Lotier, and Paul Zajac, with whom many boisterous and provocative conversations were had. The final stages of this work would have been impossible to complete without Cassie, and my thanks to her know no bounds. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Tommy and Joyce Mellette, for instilling in me a love of reading from my earliest years and for their insistence that I embrace my longtime dream of becoming a teacher. In a work about the South, it is impossible to overlook my own family’s role and history, and I am grateful for the support they have always shown me, especially my grandparents, and my uncles, Scott Green and Rusty Mellette. A special thanks to my Uncle Allen, who did not see this book come to publication, but whose rustic wisdom and constant insistence on fairness and justice has—and will continue—to inspire me for years to come.

PECULIAR WHITENESS

INTRODUCTION

Between 1934 and 1940, during the heights of American unemployment during the Great Depression, an estimated seven million people watched a Broadway and road production of an adapted novel featuring the type of farming family struck the hardest by bank failures, environmental degradation, and an inability—or refusal—to adapt to a new economic paradigm.1 While Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road met with some acclaim upon publication, it was not until the Broadway run that his work became an outright sensation and perhaps colored, more than any other work of art of its era, the popular perceptions of poor white southerners. The Lesters, suffering from abject poverty and related effects such as malnourishment, were variously regarded as objects of curiosity, as monstrous, as laughingstocks, as pitiable victims, and most of all, as an unusually anxiety-inducing group of people that stretched the boundaries of dehumanizing language. John Donald Wade, responding to Caldwell’s novels and newspaper work in the 1930s, wrote in a 1936 issue of Southern Review that readers and playgoers “have learned a great deal about an alien and primitive people. And they have had their vanity flattered (never was a New Yorker so depraved) and their consciences set easy (if the people whom the Civil War disrupted were of this stamp, then disruption was what was the best for them.”2 Jonathan Daniels, in the Saturday Review of Literature, called Caldwell voyeuristic, “like a man watching an ant hill full of creatures far less intelligent than ants.”3 And another contemporary reviewer, publisher Bennett Cerf, remarked in a Contempo review, “I do not doubt for an instant that there actually exist people like the characters in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. I simply say that if almost any one of them were to march, unannounced, into the world that I travel in, he would create about as great a sensation as a wild elephant or a naked cannibal brandishing a spear.”4 Meanwhile, none other than Ralph Ellison, invited by Langston Hughes to the Broadway play, recalled his own complex reaction to the play; when describing Lov and Ellie May’s “horsing,” he writes, “I was reduced to such helpless laughter that I distracted the entire balcony and embarrassed both myself and my host. It was a terrible moment, for before I could regain control, 3

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Introduction

more attention was being directed toward me than at the action unfolding on the stage.” Summarizing the events decades later, Ellison saw in the Lester family a reminder of his time spent in Alabama, calling Jeeter someone who provoked not “disgust and hopelessness in the audience” but rather a “wave of cathartic laughter,” concluding that he was “made to act the clown in order to save his audience’s sanity.” Ellison concludes that in stripping poor whites down to their basest level, Caldwell ultimately “shocked me into recognizing certain absurd aspects of our common humanity,” as Ellison, removed from the more open prejudice of the South, could laugh at poor whites in a manner that would have been impossible for a young black man in the South.5 From Ellison’s incisive remarks about the relationship between his experiences as a black man navigating a world dominated by whiteness to the raw attendance numbers generated by those bemused, appalled, shocked, or fascinated by “horsing” and the Lester family’s depravity, the play’s wide popularity gestures toward the wider curiosity surrounding poor whites. In addition, the fascination introduces the realm of the troubling language used to dehumanize them, as the Lesters are likened to a “primitive” people, to ants, and to cannibals, language that resembles the harsh racialized language we generally associate with white supremacy. Caldwell’s reputation underwent something of a resurrection by the time of his death in 1987; even so, it could still be said that “more people know of him than actually know his work.”6 Yet today, as critical race studies—and especially whiteness studies—provide the tools to revisit past depictions, even flawed ones, of race and class, Caldwell is just one author whose work provides promising new avenues for reconsideration. Throughout his life, and even after his death, Caldwell was criticized by those who thought he exaggerated his portrayals of poor white southerners for laughs and dollar signs; today, recalling the complexities and myriad reactions toward the initial popularity of his work provides an opening salvo in our understanding of how prejudice manifested itself beyond what we typically think of when we consider race in the South. As these wide-ranging reactions to Caldwell’s work and legacy remind us, people of color were not the only targets of prejudice in southern letters during the first half of the twentieth century. Novelists and memoirists catalogued groups of poor whites, the physically disabled, and foreigners as somehow inferior to the perceived ruling class—what might have once been considered the planter aristocracy. To be clear, the history of prejudice against these marginalized groups is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in this country. Yet in the creations of a multitude of white writers, those individuals and groups signified as “white trash” suffered a dehumanizing process with an uncomfortable resemblance to the racially

Introduction

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charged language leveled at blacks and other individuals of color. The poor whites in Caldwell’s fiction are scarcely considered human, while Faulkner’s Snopeses are compared time and time again to vermin: rats, termites, snakes, and wolves. Thus, while these poor whites could not be said to have been racialized in the same way that blacks were, the language used to describe them still marks them as racial inferiors. The degree to which these writers were successful, and the degree to which other writers, including black writers, explored these topics, are core aspects of this inquiry. Examining the ways in which writers sought to marginalize these groups helps combat a totalizing view of how whites early in the twentieth century perceived difference, and asks that we regard how cultural, class, and physiological differences play a role in the development of racial thought. In addition, examining the various ways that whites express racially induced anxiety provides an opportunity to scrutinize how these differences affect whites’ belief in their inherent normativity, which often extends into a belief in innate superiority. Analyzing prejudice in American literature is, among other things, an unceasing process of interrogating racially induced anxiety, particularly the ways in which whites react with trepidation, fear, uncertainty, and anxiety when confronted by those whom they deem racial inferiors. Despite the famed slipperiness in providing any biological definition of race, scholars have long examined how whiteness plays a foundational role in public discourse, as human interactions can never be severed and divested from racial concerns. In his seminal study The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen provides an analysis of the historical foundations of racism and the social construction of whiteness, placing emphasis on economic exploitation, claiming that “racial oppressions” were “introduced as a deliberate ruling-class policy,” later offering the extension that the “hallmark of racial oppression in its colonial origins and as it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, a status beneath that of any member of any social class within the oppressor group.”7 Similarly, Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White explores the social construction of race: “The only logical conclusion is that people are members of different races because they have been assigned to them,” stressed the social construction of race in his examination of “how the Catholic Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland, became part of an oppressing race in America.”8 Historically, whiteness has led to the constitution of de jure and de facto racial hierarchies, from the openly traceable structures of slavery and colonialism to the less visible yet no less pernicious reality of white privilege in, for example, a socioeconomic setting, as George Lipsitz has effectively articulated: “whiteness has a cash value” based on its privileged access to, say, “housing secured in discriminatory markets.”9

6

Introduction

The historical legwork provided by such scholarly examinations of whiteness offers important context for an examination of southern literature, which frequently is defined by—and defines itself in relation to—specific historical epochs in American history, particularly the shifting dynamics of racial interactions in the wake of the Civil War, from Reconstruction era remorse and nostalgia through a vein of defiance which runs through the onset of the civil rights era nearly a century after Appomattox. Authors have long depicted racially mediated interactions as struggles for identity construction, recognition, and—especially in the literature of the American South—anxiety. Authors writing in myriad genres, from Reconstruction era plantation literature to the Southern Renaissance and into the dawn of the civil rights era, have represented that region’s tumultuous racial heritage and white racial anxiety with complex investigations of how racism manifests itself. Often, white authors reveal anxiety, all the while seeking to project a more powerful view of racial superiority, an aspect that black authors frequently strove to unpack and unmask. Recently, scholars such as Tara McPherson have yearned for a “reconstruction of southern studies, a study of the South that can shake us free from those tired cold clichés of southernness,” in an attempt to challenge “a monolithic portrait of the region.”10 One response to such a claim, that scholars move beyond prototypical analyses of the South, is a specific consideration of the ways in which cultural norms developed as both part of—and separately from—American society considered at large. Jennifer Rae Greeson has urged that we regard the South as integral and intrinsic to our understanding of American national identity: “Wherever US citizens were born, wherever we presently live, whatever our personal experience of the southeastern states—for all of us, knowing about our South is part of knowing what it means to be an American. This South that we hold collectively in our minds is not—could not possibly be—a fixed or real place. It both exceeds and flattens place; it is a term of the imagination, a site of national fantasy.”11 Scholarly emphasis on the South must consider both the region’s standing history regarding American race relations, illuminating ways in which southern racism elides classification in any monolithic manner, as well as examining the troubled relationship and treatment of those demarcated as poor white trash. Peculiar Whiteness builds upon whiteness studies and southern studies scholarship to investigate the disturbing parallels and underexamined history of the bizarre fascination and disgust of those individuals widely regarded as both biologically and socially inferior. This project thus identifies the ways in which prejudice in the South, particularly that expressed by whites, is a result of omnipresent anxiety, stemming from a variety of ideological locales, from the nostalgic and romantic yearning for an antebellum society with clearly

Introduction

7

defined social and racial hierarchies, to the impending fears of the rise of “white trash,” the arrival of foreigners, or even the existence of the disabled, “impure” body. While literary criticism has taken into account the ways in which authors have depicted the South’s particular racial concerns, considering the framework provided by whiteness studies scholars opens broader avenues for critical exploration of class, as Dyer suggests in his remark that “the South seems to be the myth that both most consciously asserts whiteness and most devastatingly undermines it.”12 White anxiety is a central tenet of the South’s peculiar brand of prejudice, emanating from the dual burdens of identity felt by many southerners: being white and being southern. While black/white racial strife is perhaps the most obvious and readily locatable source of anxiety in southern literature—a reality fanned in large part over white fears of black male sexuality—it is best understood as but a single face of a variegated crystal. Recently, in the works of scholars such as Matt Wray, Annalee Newitz, and John Hartigan, the concept of “white trash” has taken a foothold in scholarship surrounding race and regionalism. This project extends that scholarship beyond sociographic discourse with an eye toward illuminating the often unconscious bias against poor whites. What puts the trash in white trash? In contrast to the proliferation in recent decades of comedic and light-hearted approaches to poor whites—think Jeff Foxworthy and the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and publications such as The White Trash Mom Handbook and White Trash Cooking—terms like “white trash,” “redneck,” and “cracker” have historically had a much more pejorative connotation.13 Dating back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, “white trash” is an immensely intriguing epithet, enveloping both class and racial components.14 As Newitz and Wray succinctly state, “‘white trash’ is not just a classist slur—it’s also a racial epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves.”15 The claim here is quietly remarkable; how can whites racialize whites? The prospect could easily be read as equating treatment of poor whites to racism against people of color. In response, Wray and Newitz explain that the term “is racialized (i.e., different from ‘black trash’ or ‘Indian trash’) and classed (trash is social waste and detritus),” and that white trash “speaks to the hybrid and multiple nature of identities.”16 Critical race theorists have asserted that authors often view race not necessarily as an essentializing but rather as a manifest literary trope, to which this project contends we can extend to how authors treat the subject of poor whites. A quarter century ago in Was Huck Black?, Shirley Fisher Fishkin argued that literary criticism needed to continue to acknowledge the “mixed literary bloodlines of American fiction,” and that Twain’s presentation and development of Huck was intentionally racialized, thoughts that also shape

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Introduction

the key arguments in Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations, that the “complex dialectic between ‘white’ and ‘black’ cultures” had shaped a “national literature, particularly its treatment of racial interactions.”17 In The White Image in the Black Mind, Jane Davis argues for paying increased attention to how black authors treat white characters and interrogates “whites’ maintenance of their privileges and delusions of superiority.”18 To extend this argument, examining how both black and white authors comment upon poor whites provides a further illustration of this “delusion of superiority,” which continues to resonate with the antiracist project of critical race studies. Ellison, discussing such race-baiting films as Birth of a Nation aptly points out, “Obviously these films are not about Negroes at all; they are about what whites think and feel about Negroes.”19 And Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, urges for a reconsideration of the oftunnamed black presence in American, and to regard the “impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions.”20 Thus in sum, these various theorists and writers stress the ways in which racism permeates literary texts, not merely as a demonstrable offense toward people of color but also as a textual representation of racist tropes, including power, control, and self-perceived superiority over minority groups. The prejudice leveled against poor southern whites in literary texts may not be identical to that used to terrorize blacks and other racial minorities, but as a trope, it manifests itself in disarmingly similar ways. In addition, looking at how various black authors like Charles Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Richard Wright commented upon these matters shows their ability to illuminate and attempt to disarm white prejudice, in whatever means they might find it. They, like the scholars mentioned above, want us to examine hierarchies of power in relation to whiteness, even when that marginalized group is other whites. Regarding the history of the term “white trash” and the representation and attitudes toward poor whites in the American South reinforces the arguments and central tenets of critical race theory, namely that it uncovers and critiques hierarchies of power. Much of whiteness studies scholarship has been invested in uncovering and interrogating its status as invisible, yet omnipresent; Julian Carter frames the question, “In what sense is whiteness both invisible and the dominant representation? How has it come to stand for the nation as a whole and also for its ‘best,’ most threatened part?”21 Poor whites are a useful avenue for consideration in American culture as they trouble this construction and attract a bevy of attention, often negative. Wray and Newitz note that “white trash is, for whites, the most visible and clearly marked form of whiteness.”22 They also attest to how white trash can be considered a threatened group: “because white trash is a classed and racialized identity degraded by dominant

Introduction

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whiteness, a white trash position vis-à-vis whiteness might be compared to a ‘racial minority’ position vis-à-vis whiteness. Such a comparison—however problematic it may be—bespeaks certain commonalities between oppressed whites and oppressed racial groups.”23 Acknowledging the similarities without equating them is significant, and further attests to the development of white privilege and how those in power subjugate others. Language meted out against poor whites—especially as we see it in Dixon’s, Caldwell’s, and Faulkner’s works—often locates them along a primitive/civilized scale all too often applied to slaves and other people of color in the South. Matt Wray’s historical assessment of the phrase “white trash” further attests to its relationship to power structures associated with whiteness; the term “conjures images of poor, ignorant, racist whites,” the types of people that it is “hard to care about.”24 Wray poses a significant question, asking, “does white modify trash or is it the other way around?” and suggesting that whiteness studies, which “has failed to bring the term white trash into focus” could draw on its interdisciplinarity status to push past simple class-based reasonings for the prejudice against poor whites.25 Indeed, the originators of the term “white trash” itself are likely slaves (dating to the 1830s), who would obviously not benefit from shifts in the hierarchical power struggle between privileged whites and poor ones. But while slaves might not benefit from this power structure, other whites certainly could; “white trash,” Wray notes, “must have seemed to many of them an apt term for those whites who did not rise or live up to their ideals of industry, laboring not at all, or only in the most degrading jobs, toiling beneath or alongside the slaves.”26 Along this vein, John Hartigan’s work also explores the boundaries of whiteness and the implication of the signifier “white trash,” noting “whiteness is not simply a racial identity and that race is not an absolute social condition. No single cultural figure makes this clearer than ‘white trash.’”27 Whiteness, then, is not only a racial category, but an inherently social one that allows for complexities and divisions and, in the case of poor whites, marginalization. Hartigan traces the term’s historical trajectory from its use by slaves to describe white laborers to a nationally charged epithet, noting how even the likes of Frederick Douglass commented upon the term, often sympathizing with these whites as other victims of the brutal ecosystem surrounding slavery.28 This project takes as its starting point not the term’s historical origins, but rather the artistic and cultural development of poor whites from the dawn of the twentieth century (the height of Lost Cause–era literature) through the height of the civil rights movement, as authors, notably William Faulkner, struggled to come to term with the shifting dynamics of whiteness in the South. Thus, just as blacks are held up as “Other” in certain works, so, too, are those classified as “white trash.” Faulkner himself gestures toward both the racial and

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Introduction

class differences in a discussion of dialect among his white characters, noting that the “educated semimetropolitan white southerner” speaks differently from the “hill backward southerner.”29 Specifically, the Snopes family were a veritable thorn in the author’s side from the time he started writing fiction in the mid-1920s through the publication of the final novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Mansion, in 1959, just three years before his death. While the Snopeses are frequently greedy, murderous, perverted, exploitative, and manipulative—a veritable smorgasbord of unpleasantness—a more complex picture arises when we consider how Faulkner depicts the town of Jefferson’s reaction to the family. Indeed, while the Snopeses often behave in a deplorable manner, too often they are the victim of marginalizing, othering language that casts them as inherently inferior and lesser than other whites in the town of Jefferson: more sinned against than sinning. Similarly, the aforementioned Lesters of Caldwell’s South are not simply buffoons and reprobates; they are victims of the brutal socioeconomic conditions facing farmers during the Great Depression, while works by the notorious white supremacist Thomas Dixon in the first decade of the twentieth century also go to great lengths to classify poor whites as inferior. What these varied examples help to illuminate about southern whiteness is that the idea of a homogeneous, united South is more myth than reality, even for whites. Whiteness is often described by scholars as being invisible, as never having to “speak its name” or “acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations,” and that “to be unmarked means to be invisible—not in the sense of ‘hidden from history’ but, rather, as the self-evident standard against which all differences are measured: hidden by history.”30 And Richard Dyer observes that white people have the freedom to regard themselves as “just people,” and believe in a monochromatic ontology, knowing that any conversation including the signifier “people” is a means of addressing “white people.”31 Whiteness creates a system where whites are hierarchically advantaged, whereas blacks, in Dyer’s words, “can be reduced (in white culture) to their bodies and thus to race.”32 To this, we can add that the poor white body is another that is reduced, stereotyped, and maligned as a marginalized subset of whiteness. One of the chief particularities of southern whiteness is tied into such awareness and invisibility, a factor this project strives to illuminate through an examination not solely of fiction, but also nonfiction and autobiographical texts which present contemporaneous accounts of race relations. As whiteness differs, so, too, does white anxiety; each chapter in this project, which progresses on a roughly historical trajectory, interrogates the differing modes of whiteness and white supremacy portrayed in a text and most importantly, the ways in which white anxiety is embodied and illustrated in relation to poor whites. Whiteness is frequently defined by what it is not; in the case of the

Introduction

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texts selected here, white anxiety is revealed by characters’ violent and derisive encounters with marginalized whites, while also locating moments where this treatment aligns with racism against blacks or dehumanizing comments about foreigners, the disabled, and women. While examining poor whites remains the central aim of this project, prejudice seldom occurs in isolation; indeed, it would be negligent to observe the treatment of poor whites of Thomas Dixon’s Klan novels, for example, without attempting to chart and measure the codependent relationship between white supremacy and the brutal treatment of blacks in those works alongside the perceived class superiority leveled against poor whites. This intersectional approach is not an attempt to equate these types of prejudice but rather argues that understanding the depths and reasoning behind such attitudes toward poor whites enriches our understandings of the peculiarities of white racism and power structures in the South. Of critical importance as well is the difficulty in naming what stands in opposition to whiteness; nonwhite, for example, is a convenient term, though one that reinforces the belief of whiteness as normative, with the descriptor ‘non’ being a necessary component of differentiating whites from those who, by virtue of race, foreignness, disability, or class, are deemed not white. Southern literature scholars, not unlike the authors whom they study, have long sought to delineate and demarcate the boundaries of southern literature. In Tell About the South (1983), Fred Hobson maintains, “any study of self-explanation must have boundaries, for in essence all writing about the South, fiction or nonfiction, seeks in one way or another to explore and explain the region.”33 An overview of southern literature reveals the varieties of whiteness presented by various authors; rather than just a black/white dichotomy, we see how whiteness, especially in relation to those regarded as white trash, operates on a sliding scale. Similarly, others deemed nonnormative, such as the mentally and physically disabled, are regarded as less whole, less socially acceptable, and ultimately less white by those in power. While southern whites reap the material and social benefits normally associated with whiteness, there exists in southern literature a constant anxiety to reify and assert this whiteness. The South’s legacy of violence toward the black body also melds into critical attempts to offer interpretations of whiteness as an active force: “one of the central uses of white violence and terror is to make a display of white privilege and to assert the power to subjugate others.”34 Characters throughout southern literature are fiercely combative about their whiteness, insisting upon their superiority by fighting, maiming, exploiting, and murdering those whose presence riddles them with anxiety and fear (from a nonviolent perspective, as in the work of William Alexander Percy, this anxiety manifests itself as a reiteration in the belief of white intel-

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Introduction

lectual and moral superiority). The nonwhite body in these texts is one that, in the eyes of the ruling class whites, must be restricted and controlled, lest it threaten white livelihood. Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 story “The Displaced Person” provides a compelling prefatory example of how white racial anxiety, along with class and nationalistic fears, dominates a specific locale. The complicated emotions that permeate O’Connor’s southern farm illustrate in miniature the perplexing mix of suspicions and superiority that fuels white anxiety. Specifically, the story charts how a white person of a perceived higher class shifts her classification and understanding of a foreign family, eventually equating them with white trash. As the denizens of Mrs. McIntyre’s farm witness the arrival of the titular subject—a Polish refugee, along with his family—O’Connor displays the omnipresent and all-consuming reality of white anxiety, as the Guizacs are immediately marked as angst-inducing Others. Even before the Guizacs’ arrival, race relations are presented as being especially vexed on the farm; McIntyre has variously employed black laborers as well as lower-class white tenant workers, described variously with the euphemistic “good country people,” but also with the more pejorative labels of “trash” and “poor white trash.” The entrance of a foreign family into this conglomeration serves to complicate relationships, as the long-standing denizens find themselves uncertain of the ways in which their inclusion alters the precarious balance scarcely maintained on the farm.35 In the opening pages, uncertainty and trepidation toward the foreigners is revealed in language that traces the ways in which various characters interpret the Guizacs’ arrival. For example, Mrs. Shortley, the lower-class white employed by Mrs. McIntyre, reflects upon Mrs. McIntyre’s self-presentation to the newcomers, observing that she “had on her largest smile” and was “wearing her best clothes and a string of beads,” all in an attempt to display immediately to the newcomers the preexisting social hierarchies on the farm.36 Later, Shortley will comment on this matter to her husband in an attempt to emphasize the Guizacs’ inability to recognize American race relations, specifically relations between blacks and whites: “When Gobblehook first come here, you recollect how he shook their hands, like he didn’t know the difference, like he might have been as black as them.”37 As Mrs. Shortley notes, however, Mrs. McIntyre’s attitude is precipitated by her concern about the foreigners; “even from her distance” Shortley could “detect a nervous slide” in her employer’s smile.38 Part of their immediate nervousness is a result of their ignorance regarding the Guizacs’ Polish origins; Rachel Carroll observes that the “statelessness of the Displaced Person renders him strange and ominous on American soil.”39 Mrs. Shortley and her husband are the latest in a long line of white servant-class workers on Mrs. McIntyre’s

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farm and, while Mrs. Shortley often envisions herself as a peer and equal to her employer, the narration frequently makes clear her anxiety about the newly arrived Poles. As the story’s opening section is told largely through her point of view, her initial comments regarding the Poles set the tone for the story’s examination of racial difference: “The first thing that struck her as very peculiar was that they looked like other people. Every time she had seen them in her imagination, the image she had got was of the three bears, walking single file, with wooden shoes on like Dutchmen and sailor hats and bright coats with a lot of buttons.”40 Her crudeness here extends from an earlier conversation with Mrs. McIntyre, where she recalls that the two of them “had been calling them the Gobblehooks all week while they got ready for them.”41 In other words, Mrs. Shortley originally imagines the foreigners as being outside the human race; the curious phrasing here—with the emphasis that the arrival of the Guizacs is something that must be prepared for, as if invaders are arriving to stake a claim in her land—is a motif throughout the story, often coupled with Shortley’s attempts to racially demean the Poles. Indeed, she criticizes their names constantly, remarking that the daughter’s name—Sledgewick—“sounded to Mrs. Shortley like something you would name a bug, or vice versa.”42 By imagining the family as bugs, choosing an animalistic name for them, and reflecting explicitly on Sledgewick’s name, Mrs. Shortley repeatedly racializes the Polish family through a process of dehumanization fueled by her own anxieties about her relative status as a white laborer on the farm. Similarly, while recalling “a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap,” Mrs. Shortley reaches not a moment of empathy, as one might expect or hope upon witnessing images of the Holocaust, but rather anxiety, as she expresses concern over her “sudden intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place.”43 Her response is striking; rather than acknowledge the barbarous genocidal acts perpetrated against the Guizacs and other Poles, Mrs. Shortley instead attempts to shift blame and portray the family themselves as the ones who would carry out these “murderous ways.” To Mrs. Shortley, Poles are markedly inferior to Americans; they are invasive vermin from Europe, a place which “stretched out in Mrs. Shortley’s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiment station.”44 So pervasive is her anxiety that she constructs a scenario in her mind where the foreigners have replaced the blacks and poor whites. Regarding the possibility of another Polish family arriving at the farm, she fears that, “with two of them here, there would be almost nothing spoken but Polish! The Negroes would be gone and there would be the two families against Mrs. Shortley and herself! She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing

14

Introduction

and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty.” Again, Shortley’s fear overwhelms any sense of empathy, as she connects the image of dead bodies she recalled earlier with “all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like in the newsreel.”45 In addition, her comments emphasize the ways in which her anxieties and prejudices are not universal; the fact that the Poles would replace her black tenants is particularly anxiety-inducing, as they represent a foreign and heretofore unseen threat to the ordered hierarchy of her farm. While Mrs. Shortley vocalizes the story’s most direct and obvious focalization of racial anxiety, the narration makes clear that preexisting class and racial tensions have long been in place on the farm. Despite Mrs. Shortley’s declarations to the contrary—she believes herself to be on equal ground with her employer—Mrs. McIntyre holds a longstanding bias toward servant-class workers. Not long after the Guizacs’ arrival, she remarks, “At last . . . I’ve got somebody I can depend on. For years I’ve been fooling with sorry people. Sorry people. Poor white trash and niggers,” that she claims have “drained me dry.”46 Though she makes these comments to Mrs. Shortley, who believes “if Mrs. McIntyre had considered her trash, they could have talked about trashy people together. Neither of them approved of trash,” the comment merely illustrates Mrs. Shortley’s lack of insight into her employer’s conception of social hierarchy.47 In spite of McIntyre’s own comments denigrating white trash and blacks (about the latter, she proclaims, “They lie and steal and have to be watched all the time”), Mrs. Shortley naïvely believes she is somehow exempt from McIntyre’s racial taxonomy.48 While hardly wealthy, Mrs. McIntyre does maintain a semblance of control on her homestead, at least as far as this hierarchy is concerned. After the Shortleys’ departure, the narrative focus transfers chiefly to Mrs. McIntyre, and readers quickly sense her particular concept of racial categorization, as she claims that the Shortleys “had been not quite trash.”49 Talking with her oldest black worker, Astor, McIntyre recalls previous tenants; about one family, the Ringfields, she exclaims, “None of that kind want to work.”50 The disparaging reference to ‘that kind’ racializes the Ringfields as separate from both McIntyre and, for the moment, Astor and his fellow blacks (though Astor remains acutely aware of his own status and rank in McIntyre’s racial hierarchy). Astor plays a significant role in this scene, as he comments upon his understanding of his difference from the foreigners. As Mrs. McIntyre still staunchly defends the displaced family at this point in the narrative, Astor correctly understands the precariousness of his situation and attempts to identify the Guizacs’ status as outsiders and vocalize his opinion. “He from Pole,” Astor remarks, and, upon being corrected, “from Poland,” by Mrs. McIntyre, refuses to actually name the country, continuing, “In Pole it ain’t like it is here. . . .

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15

They got different ways of doing.”51 After being challenged by Mrs. McIntyre, Astor subtly subverts the Guizacs’ usefulness, with his cryptic comment, “We ain’t never had one like him before is all.”52 Like Mrs. Shortley, who feared a world filled with unclean Europeans supplanting her position, Astor is aware that his status is in jeopardy and seeks to convince Mrs. McIntyre to return the farm to its former racial hierarchy—one where his position, if not overly prosperous, is at least secure—by continuously racializing and dehumanizing the Guizacs as different from both the current white and black tenants of the farm. Throughout the conversation, Mrs. McIntyre seeks to reaffirm her status above Astor, whom she regards as attempting to become overly familiar because “he was the only one of her Negroes who had known the Judge and he thought this gave him title.”53 The phrasing here is important, as Mrs. McIntyre claims that Astor is “one of her Negroes,” a clear echo of slave ownership that directly ties into one the story’s sharpest instantiations of whiteness—the omnipresent figure of Mrs. McIntyre’s late husband, the Judge. Throughout the story, characters quote the Judge’s aphorisms, often without grasping their subtext, which largely represent ideas of racial and class superiority. Mrs. McIntyre recalls that the Judge “said he deplored money. He said the reason you niggers were so uppity was because there was so much money in circulation,” to which Astor responds, “Judge say he long for the day when he be too poor to pay a nigger to work. . . . Say when that day come, the world be back on its feet.” The point of this conversation is not, as Mrs. McIntyre believes, that the Judge truly believes “money is the root of all evil.” Instead, the Judge is insinuating that a return to slavery, where payment—which of course diminishes profit—is not required for black service is something to be longed for.54 Though his wife does not seem to share the full breadth of his bigotry, she transfers much of his ideology upon the new workforce in the South; “white trash” and, in the case of the Guizacs, foreigners she will soon equate with trash. Mrs. McIntyre’s adulation of the Guizacs in relation to her previous workers evaporates when Mr. Guizac expresses his hope to bring his cousin to America to marry the young black worker, Sulk. Upon being informed of the plan by Sulk, she says aloud, “They’re the same. It’s always been like this,” immediately relocating the Guizacs into the category of trash.55 She reiterates her newfound belief shortly after confronting Mr. Guizac: “They’re all the same . . . whether they come from Poland or Tennessee. I’ve handled Herrins and Ringfields and Shortleys and I can handle a Guizac.” Significantly, she had earlier exempted the Shortleys from this categorization, insisting they were not quite trash. The reference to her entire life is one of the story’s clearest markers of the ways in which racial anxiety—specifically, Mrs. McIntyre’s palpable distrust of her black and poor white workers—is an ingrained facet of southern life. The problem

16

Introduction

with trash, as Mrs. McIntyre illustrates it, is that she identifies it with blackness; the potential marriage creates palpable anxiety for Mrs. McIntyre, who fears that white trash will live up to their title by failing to keep whiteness white. Mrs. McIntyre’s confrontation with Mr. Guizac is the story’s most focused presentation of her anxiety, as she bellows to the Pole, “You would bring this poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger! What kind of a monster are you!”56 Here, unlike her other references to her black employees, Mrs. McIntyre uses a racial slur, which, coupled with calling Guizac a “monster,” is arguably her most dehumanizing exclamation in the text. Mr. Guizac remains oblivious to her commentary, instead emphasizing the girl’s current abject living conditions: “She in camp three year. . . . From Poland. Mamma die, papa die. She wait in camp. Three camp.”57 While Guizac’s motivation is his cousin’s well-being rather than any grandiose attempt at racial reconciliation (earlier, the narrator reveals his workdriven personality leads him to feel that “nothing was done quick enough to suit him. The Negroes made him nervous”), he still does not openly condemn the blacks.58 Marriage may be a means to an end, but the fact that an interracial marriage is not abhorrent to Mr. Guizac distinguishes him from his employer. As we will see in various other examples, such as Lillian Smith’s recollection of her childhood in Killers of the Dream and Chick Mallison in Faulkner’s Snopes novels, a frequent motif in southern literature is the way in which racism is regarded as a learned behavior. Though blacks may make him “nervous,” Mr. Guizac is removed from certain aspects of southern racial anxiety, namely, the pervasive fear of black male sexuality and, by extension, miscegenation. McIntyre attempts to defer to societal norms in defense of her racism, telling the priest who arranged for the Guizacs’ arrival that “I didn’t create this situation, of course” and that Mr. Guizac “didn’t have to come here in the first place.” Her attempt at displacement is ignored by the priest, who instead deifies Mr. Guizac, telling her “he came to redeem us.”59 McIntyre is undaunted, however, and as the story reaches its conclusion, she allies herself with Mr. Shortley, Astor, and Sulk’s collective anxiety over the Guizacs’ presence. Mr. Shortley’s anxiety is revealed in detail as he reflects upon his military service, which he believes should shield him from the influx of those he deems racial inferiors. Mr. Shortley (his wife recently deceased) finds himself bemoaning his present condition “to every person he saw, black or white.” He offers his service in World War II (“Gone over there and fought and bled and died and come back on over here and find out who’s got my job—just exactly who I been fighting”) as rationale for his concern. His deeply ironic conflation of the Polish Guizac with the people he was fighting, particularly a “little man with eye-glasses just like his. Might have bought them at the same store. Small

Introduction

17

world,” reveals not merely naïveté but also unwillingness to consider the Guizacs as having a specific culture or identity at all. Similarly, he questions Sulk as to why he doesn’t return to Africa, remarking, “That’s your country, ain’t it?” Sulk’s response, that he’s afraid that “they might eat me up” if he went there offers a darkly comic yet no less troubling ignorance of global culture, one based on fear of the unidentified Other.60 Continuing, Shortley proceeds to outline how his anxiety differs from Sulk’s, claiming that if he ever traveled, it would be “to either China or Africa. You go to either of them two places and you can tell right away what the difference is between you and them. You go to these other places and the only way you can tell is if they say something.”61 What makes the Guizacs anxiety-inducing is their uncanny similarity to Shortley himself; he claims it was a “mistake” for Americans to have taught foreigners English, as that breaks down cultural boundaries, in a manner reminiscent of his wife’s fear of both the “dirty” words spoken by the Poles as well as her comparison between the DPs and invasive vermin.62 By collapsing racial and cultural distinctions, Mr. Shortley perpetuates the dominant ideology of the farm, one committed to upholding and affirming whiteness as the central propagator of value systems, a fact that Shortley is abundantly aware of, as he remarks to Mrs. McIntyre, “A white man sometimes don’t get the consideration a nigger gets . . . but that don’t matter because he’s still white.”63 As the narrative stretches forward into its seemingly preordained conclusion (consider the priest’s numerous allusions to the Displaced Person as a Christ figure, as well as Mrs. McIntyre herself, who coldly tells him, “As far as I’m concerned . . . Christ was just another D. P.”), the farm’s various tenants unite in both spoken and silent accord regarding the Guizacs’ status as perpetual outsiders. While the story has showcased the farm’s racial hierarchies throughout, with Mrs. McIntyre clearly asserting her belief in her racial superiority, here at the end the white trash Shortley and black Sulk find themselves united with the white woman, as the trio witness Mr. Guizac’s accidental death.64 As a tractor begins its slow descent down an incline, “calculating its own path,” Mrs. McIntyre simply looks at Mr. Guizac, thinking to herself that “she had started to shout to the Displaced Person but she had not.” Sulk is described as jumping “silently” out of the tractor’s way, while Mr. Shortley turned his head “with incredible slowness” to “stare silently.” The narrator passes judgment on this omnipresent silence, with especial focus on Mrs. McIntyre: “She had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley’s eyes and the Negro’s eyes come together in one look that froze them in collusion forever.”65 In spite of the farm’s rigid racial taxonomy, marked in particular by its inability to adjust for the presence of foreignness, its denizens can reach a collective accord against the Displaced Person, both vocalized, with prejudices aired throughout, and silent, as they

18

Introduction

elect to not warn Mr. Guizac of his impending doom. The story concludes with the departures of Mr. Shortley, Sulk, and Astor, leaving only a bedridden Mrs. McIntyre, condemned to face the disembodying and controlling gaze that she has so long aimed at others: “She felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives, and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried away in the ambulance.”66 Mrs. McIntyre’s moment of epiphany, her “revelation,” to echo similar moments in O’Connor’s corpus, presents the culmination of white anxiety and fear, which literally paralyzes her, rendering her unable to effectively run her farm, the former site of perceived white superiority and control.67 Ironically, Mrs. McIntyre’s anxiety, which leads to her paralysis, also turns her into a form of Other, one who is physically disabled and is left regarding herself through the eyes of others, who see her as they would see natives. As the discussion of “The Displaced Person” showcases in an introductory gesture, the complex history of race relations in southern literature provides fertile grounds for expanding critical examinations of varying degrees and ideas about whiteness. Linking critical race theory, particularly that concerned with whiteness, and southern studies allows for focalized consideration of the ways myriad authors have depicted variegated worlds where whiteness is presented as both in control but also vexed, powerful yet under constant threat, where those marked as white both hold power but also face pervasive anxiety at the precariousness of their situations. In conjoining the fields of whiteness and southern studies, we can more easily grasp the important similarities between the two, particularly recent critical endeavors to strive toward a less homogeneous utilization of terms such as “white,”“whiteness,”“South(s),” and “southern.” O’Connor’s story offers a compelling microcosm of disparate branches of American race relations—specifically, the story offers an overview of the ways in which white racial anxiety is manifest in literary texts and how anxiety over the encroachment of an outsider results in viewing the group alongside a more readily identifiable marker such as “trash.” The violence of the story is particularly apt for discussions of whiteness: bell hooks describes the surprise many whites feel when learning that they are subject to a critical gaze, that they “do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness representing goodness.”68 Critical race theory has embraced the interrogation of whiteness over the past quarter century, as scholars have analyzed the ways in which whiteness operates as a systematic power structure that, for centuries, has created and upheld an uneven relationship between whites and nonwhites, granting the former tangible benefits in political, socioeconomic, and legal power. Locating whiteness as an arena of

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19

perpetual inequality with long-standing effects has long been a central concern of the field, as Charles Mills suggests in his observation that “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.”69As O’Connor’s story and our overview of whiteness studies and southern studies scholarship makes clear, whiteness in the South is always in flux, always precarious, always in danger of being usurped. While not attempting to oppose George Lipsitz’s analysis that “as the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations,” this project stresses that whites in the South often suffer from a hyperawareness of their whiteness, which manifests itself in their encounters with nonwhites, encounters often marked by violence, ignorance, fear, and anxiety.70 The texts discussed in Peculiar Whiteness reveal differing treatment of poor whites, stemming from disgust to pity to fear to uncertainty. Throughout, we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status; often, as in “The Displaced Person,” by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of white trash. By focusing on twentieth century texts, from the era of Lost Cause mythmaking through civil rights advances and a shifting class and racial demographic in the South, we can bear witness to the evolution of power struggles between groups of whites and note the mounting fear and anxiety faced by those clutching to the paradigm of southern white exceptionalism.71 These feelings of superiority, of course, often mask an overriding sense of fear and anxiety; in Faulkner’s case, for example, whites in Jefferson fear the encroaching Snopeses not solely because of Flem’s often treacherous actions but out of concern that their town’s respectability is being ravished and torn asunder. In accordance with the traditions surrounding new southern studies, this project emphasizes the importance of decentralizing the notions of homogeneous southernness and homogeneous whiteness. Chapter 1 locates the treatment of poor whites in the new plantation tradition of post-Reconstruction southern literature, with especial focus on Thomas Dixon’s work; though best known for his notorious defenses of lynch laws and white supremacy, his oft-neglected consideration of poor whites reiterates how the toxicity of racism breeds prejudice in a multitude of dynamics. Sutton Griggs, his respondent, often defends the very figures Dixon maligns and acknowledges the ways in which poor whites’ fury and racism is stoked by their class superiors. In addition, Charles Chesnutt’s 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream shows an extended confrontation between the titular colonel and his new antagonist, the businessman William Fetters, emblematic of the ascendant poor whites in the early decades of the twentieth century.

20

Introduction

In chapter 2, we regard Erskine Caldwell’s Depression-era writings. As the writer whose career is perhaps most intimately tied to poor southern whites and who, at one point, could claim the mantle of America’s best-selling novelist, Caldwell’s work warrants expanded consideration. As the initially scandalous material, particularly in regard to sex and violence, of his novels eventually came to be regarded as passé, Caldwell’s reputation floundered, and even today he receives some mixed evaluations, as his work toes the line between sympathy and exploitation, realism and exaggeration. By regarding his fictional work alongside his writings for the New York Post, we see the variations and evolution of his own treatment of poor white southerners, one that, while always sympathetic to their economic plight, toes the line of being racially demeaning in its portrayal of poor whites. Contrasting his work in the burgeoning phototext genre with the likes of Richard Wright, James Agee, and Walker Evans provides relevant consideration for the ethical questions surrounding ideas of authenticity and exploitation. Chapter 3 centers on autobiography and the degrees of whiteness discussed by the likes of William Alexander Percy and Lillian Smith. The 1940s are a curious decade in southern letters, particularly the veritable explosion of autobiographic texts; in addition to the above, works by Richard Wright and W. J. Cash presented stark portraits of southern life. In examining the ways in which Percy offered nostalgic portrayals of wealthy whites alongside totalizing condemnations of a class of supposed ignorant, backward whites, we see a mid-twentieth century era of southern mythography, one that evolves beyond the Lost Cause ideal championed by Dixon and his ilk. Percy’s palpable anxiety over the shifting tides of southern life and the early rumblings of a more pronounced fight for civil rights are also subject to stark critique and a firm rejoinder by Lillian Smith, who argues that the same white supremacy that fosters racism against blacks is intermingled with an ideology that exploits the poor and fetishizes the so-called “purity” of white women to their detriment. Chapter 4 provides an extensive overview of poor whites in William Faulkner’s work, focusing chiefly on the Snopes trilogy (the family haunted Faulkner from the unfinished Father Abraham in the 1920s to The Mansion, published in 1959), but also the Bundrens and Thomas Sutpen, thus illustrating that any clustering or generalizations about poor whites in Faulkner or southern literature writ large runs the same risk as overly general discussions of other races. As the trilogy spans the breadth of Faulkner’s career, a lengthy overview of the family provides us with a perspective of how Faulkner’s own views shifted from his early to later writings, while also gesturing toward how his approach remains in conversation with his contemporaries. At times, the Snopeses are met with degrading language similar to that used against the Lest-

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ers, while elsewhere they are met with the kind of sympathy noted by Smith, who argues that poor whites are themselves victimized by the more well-to-do. Finally, in the conclusion, we return to Flannery O’Connor in order to gesture toward future avenues of southern studies scholarship, one that pushes past familiar discussions of “the grotesque” and instead offers an interdisciplinary consideration of race, class, and disability, bringing to further light whiteness’s obsession with its own sense of purity. In addition, Peculiar Whiteness considers the South’s relationship to the nation at large, with a specific identity both intrinsically tied to American culture yet also distinct, as W. J. Cash insisted in his renowned work on southern identity, that “there exists among us by ordinary—both North and South—a profound conviction that the South is another land.”72 One of the key differentiating factors between the South in particular and America in general is the region’s specific manifestation of prejudice, not only against blacks, as has been well documented, but by its attitudes against the poor whites who so often themselves victimize and attack the blacks whom they deem inferior. By focusing on the anxiety that results in such fear and disgust in regard to poor whites, we can achieve a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which whiteness operates as both an oppressive norm in southern literature as well as the location of entrenched fears and anxieties about the presence of the racial Other, even when that other defies conventional understandings of racial prejudice.

ONE

TOM AND FRIENDS Thomas Dixon, White Supremacy, and Poor Whites of the Lost Cause

Thomas Dixon’s white characters are terrified: completely and debilitatingly terrified of threats to their whiteness. Ultimately, only a unified Klan, its members safely protected and hidden by the unbroken, overbearing whiteness of their costumes, can alleviate the community’s anxiety; the white sheets adorned by Klan members erase all difference with their encompassing, all-consuming whiteness. The rhetorical message is clear—whiteness is homogeneous and unified and any threat or difference must be violently abolished. But throughout Dixon’s work, as well as that of several of his post-Reconstruction literary forebears, there exists an undercurrent of flawed logic that undermines what whiteness represents in those works. In addition to white fear and anxiety over free blacks and miscegenation, which those texts confront directly, Dixon unwittingly shows southern whites delineating hierarchies of power and order, ones that castigate the poor and fundamentally undermine any belief in an untarnished, unsullied whiteness. Ultimately, for all of Dixon’s pronouncements regarding white unity, a closer look at his work reveals a fundamental disdain for poor whites that, while lacking the outright violence against blacks we see in his works, nevertheless resembles the racist language meted out against blacks. Contextualizing Dixon’s Lost Cause–era writings also reveals that the plight of poor whites in the decades following the Civil War vexed authors, even as they sought to (re)imagine the South as a bucolic ideal of plantations and benevolent gentry. This chapter provides a brief overview of elements of the new plantation tradition that go overlooked, namely, its attempt to disassociate itself from poor whites, particularly in Thomas Nelson Page’s work. From there, we turn to Dixon; while his early novels are mostly remembered for their lauding of the KKK and the brutal lynching scenes, they also seek to hierarchize whiteness, 23

24

Thomas Dixon, White Supremacy, and Poor Whites of the Lost Cause

showing various groups, like northerners and poor whites, to be worthy of condemnation. In closing, we regard two black authors responding and further illuminating power dynamics that the white authors fail to understand fully; both Sutton Griggs and Charles Chesnutt, writing contemporaneously with Dixon, openly critique the rationale that demeans and vilifies poor whites. Together, they remind us that such attacks and criticisms of poor whites are concomitant with the type of white supremacy championed by Dixon. No single locale more readily introduces southern anxiety than that of the plantation, the haunted symbol of the South laden with collateral ideologies of romantic idealization and Lost Cause anxiety. In earlier southern literature, the plantation was imagined as the site of romance, the ideal locale for the Cavalier tradition, embodied in a variety of works, from John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) to the flood of “anti-Tom” novels published in the wake of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): works such as Mary Eastman’s Aunt Phyllis’s Cabin (1852) and William Gilmore Simms’s The Sword and the Distaff (1852). In the years following the Civil War and the emancipation of former slaves—coupled with a reduction in the plantation’s traditional monocrop system—the manor house began to morph from a site of gentility into an apologia and a defense mechanism for southerners. For a generation of southerners, the plantation and its accompanying fictional representations, became a noble Lost Cause, a virulently racist ideology that mourned the antebellum era and embraced a premise that the greatest victims of the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction-era policies were not former slaves but rather southern whites (and wealthy ones, at that). So widespread and pervasive was this ideology, this replacing the gritty reality of violence perpetrated against the black body with a nostalgic yearning for a bygone era that existed only in the most perverse dreamings, that reverberations of it are manifest today, in Confederate iconography and the rise of white supremacy and nationalism. The resultant new plantation tradition, embodied especially in figures like Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, is effectively a rhetorical attempt to reimagine, repurpose, and reconstruct the image of the plantation in both the southern and American consciousness, championing whiteness as its underlying purpose. Since the end of the Civil War, the American conception of “plantation” has been surprisingly difficult to define. In the 1920s, Francis Pendleton Gaines noted that authors like Page sought to redefine the idea: “the plantation underwent, then, in the ebullient writings of authors who never knew it or of those who remember it in a passion of loyalty, a sea-change ‘into something rich and strange.’”1 Page and Dixon, born 1853 and 1861, respectively, worked to create such “strange” representations, where whiteness is inviolate and indomitable, in spite of the reality both men must have realized: that the

Thomas Dixon, White Supremacy, and Poor Whites of the Lost Cause

25

plantation itself was by the time of their adulthood an economic relic. In a 1968 account, Sidney Mintz explains that the plantation was a “politico-economic invention, a colonial frontier institution, combining non-European slaves and European capital, technology, and managerial skill with territorial control of free or cheap subtropical lands in the mass, monocrop production of agricultural commodities for European markets.”2 Yet in a 2016 special edition of the journal The Global South on plantations, Amy Clukey and Jeremy Wells chart the term’s shifting reality from a simple economic placeholder to one with a more clearly demarcated history of race and violence, noting that the signifier “plantations” exists in the realm between “metaphor and metonym,” taking on the associations and ideologies of those writing about it.3 Thus, plantation fiction is rightly noted as a whitewashing of historical circumstance, where the abhorrent enslavement of blacks is replaced with representations of a bucolic and noble past.4 Yet this revisionism also obscures other harsh realities of the plantation aristocracy, namely, that it further hierarchized whites, leading to frequent denunciations and critiques leveled against the poor for—allegedly— sullying whiteness’s purity.5 Thus, in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, southern authors were in full force, installing a vision of the plantation that never existed. And while we most readily associate that work with the racist reimagining of black-white relationships (a “world innocent of politics,” as John Grammar explains), a closer look at white characters in these fictions paints a more complicated picture, one that more fully ties together our understanding of how white supremacy both affects minorities and further hierarchizes whites in an attempt to redefine and narrow the boundaries of whiteness.6 As this valuable scholarly work attests, the plantation is a site that continues to haunt the American consciousness. Interrogating the breadth of how the plantation has been used as a location to consolidate white supremacy remains vital, as we can see how the system functions to categorize whiteness. Few writers are more associated with the plantation tradition than Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page (both men were born on plantations). But while the former’s Uncle Remus stories reinforced stereotypes of racial amity in the post–Civil War landscape, Page’s ideology broadens to encompass a class and racial hierarchy that, at different moments, either stigmatizes poor whites or elides their existence. One of the most prevalent yet oft undiscussed paradigms of Lost Cause–era revisionism is how reductive the proposed binaries are, erasing various groups of minorities or whites into an either/or, black/white dichotomy. Take, for instance, the following excerpt from Page’s 1893 essay collection The Old South, an archetypal Lost Cause defense tract, yet one that collapses whites into a single bloc:

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Thomas Dixon, White Supremacy, and Poor Whites of the Lost Cause

Something more than twenty years ago there fell upon the South a blow for which there is no parallel among the casualties which may happen to an individual, and which has rarely in history befallen nations. Under the euphemism of reconstruction an attempt was made after the war to destroy the South. She was dismembered, disfranchised, denationalized . . . The South was believed to be no more. It was intended that she should be no more. But God in his providence had his great purpose for her and he called her forth.7

Standard revisionism, yes. But the rhetorical situation of this passage sheds more light on Page’s message; the preceding is presented as a hypothetical speech to students at Washington and Lee University, thus, a more well-to-do class of whites (those of Page’s own stature or similar) than a universal ideal. Just as much of the essays in the volume present a homogeneous view of blacks (as brutes, as rapists, as “the most dangerous problem which confronts the American people”), so, too, does he oversimplify white people.8 Like many others of his time, Page expressed anxiety over miscegenation, which he referred to as, “the peril of contamination from the overcrowding of an inferior race,” which is not particularly surprising.9 What is curious, however, are the moments of slippage that occur in Page’s works, moments where the cracks of whiteness’s rectitude begin to bleed through his Lost Cause mythmaking. Page’s most celebrated work, In Ole Virginia (1887), consists largely of stories set to quell anxieties over newly freed blacks, stories like “Marse Chan,” where faithful former slave Sam (in)famously declares about slavery, “Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes’ Sam ever see!”10 His story, told to a visiting northerner, is a paean to the myth of slave fidelity. This theme also runs through the story “Ole ’Stracted,” where an aging slave, returning home after suffering from years of memory loss, expresses contentment at the thought of being reunited with his master: “‘Oon marster be glad to see me?’ he asked, presently, in pathetic simplicity. ‘You knowed we growed up togerr? I been waitin’ so long I ’feared dee ’most done forgit me.’”11 In Ephraim’s dying moments, his white master is conflated with God: “His Master had at last come for him, and after his long waiting, Ole ’Stracted had indeed gone home.”12 Yet in one notable anomaly, Page’s story collection puts aside nostalgia and instead pushes the brutality of the slave system to the fore. “No Haid Pawn” is In Ole Virginia’s undeniable black sheep, a seemingly incongruous ghost story which reads as a Gothic critique of normative plantation fiction. Its inclusion in a story collection largely invested in reaffirming notions of white supremacy and the halcyon days of plantation life is noteworthy in that, alone amongst the tales, it appears openly critical of slavery. In addition, it is the only tale that presents whiteness as something that is not universally

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pure, and its vilification of a white man bears stark similarities to the language we see Page mete out against blacks elsewhere in his writings. Taylor Hagood notes that while Page “gave no known intimation that he was up to something more complicated,” the story functions to “hint at an awareness of the sham of the Peculiar Institution on the part of the narrators if not Page himself.”13 The story begins with an unnamed narrator immediately setting a dark tone with his description: “It was a ghostly place in broad daylight, if the glimmer that stole in through the dense forest that surrounded it when the sun was directly overhead deserved this delusive name. At any other time it was—why, we were afraid even to talk about it!” Interestingly, the narrator cites blacks for his worldview; he recalls following “the earnest advice of those whom we children acknowledged to know most about them,” recalling the comment, “Don’t you neer go nigh dyah, honey; hit’s de evil-speritest place in dis wull.”14 Here, the blacks are identified solely by dialect, though a few pages later, he identifies them more clearly, vocalizing the slaves’ beliefs at the expense of his parents: We were brought up to believe in ghosts. Our fathers and mothers laughed at us, and endeavored to reason us out of such a superstition . . . but what could they avail against the actual testimony and the blood-curdling experiences of a score of witnesses, who recounted their personal observations with a degree of thrilling realism and a vividness that overbore any arguments our childish reason could grasp! The old mammies and uncles who were our companions and comrades believed in the existence of evil spirits as truly as in the existence of hell or heaven15

The parallels with black storytellers such as Uncle Remus are obvious, though the content of the story here is presented as darker and bleaker than his supernatural tales, such as “A Plantation Witch.” Indeed, as the narrator is quick to point out, No Haid Pawn’s very name is tied into the “evil destiny” that “had seemed to overshadow the place from the very beginning.”16 And as Hagood observes, the narrator, a seemingly aristocratic white, is influenced by “the testimony of his black ‘family,’” setting the stage for the discomforting slippages of whiteness in the tale.17 Significantly, this “evil destiny” largely concerns violence perpetrated against blacks, a far cry from the “good ole times” of slavery described in “Marse Chan.” One of the black slaves (euphemized as “negro builders” in the tale) is accidentally decapitated, though the narrator remarks that “tradition was handed down that he was sacrificed in some awful and occult rite connected with the laying of the corner-stone.”18 This ominous metaphor for slavery and its inherently rapacious, violent nature is presented in a much darker manner

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than elsewhere in Page’s oeuvre; and in addition to the unfortunate slave, those laboring in the surrounding swamps “sickened and died by dozens.”19 If the story’s willingness to confront the death and devastation wrought by slavery is surprising so, too, at first glance is its willingness to confront the legacy of the white plantation owner. Though carpetbagging Yankees are often indicators of anxiety throughout Page’s works, “No Haid Pawn” is directly concerned with critiquing a man known for brutality toward his slaves. The narrator describes a stranger (not the plantation’s progenitor, but instead a white West Indian), calling him “more gloomy than strange, and more sinister than any who had gone before him.”20 Continuing, he recalls the man’s brutish power—“He could fell an ox with a blow of his fist, or in a fit of anger tear down the branch of a tree, or bend a bar of iron like a reed”—all the while stressing his foreignness, noting, “but he was a West Indian” and “his life was a blot upon civilization,” lines which seek to disassociate the man from the Anglo-Saxon whiteness so treasured by Page and his ilk. What makes the narrator’s mixture of curiosity, repugnance, and fear most intriguing is the man’s ostensible white racial identity. The narrator tells us, “It was said, among other things, that he preserved his wonderful strength by drinking human blood, a tale which in a certain sense I have never seen reason to question,” a fictional parallel to Page taken aghast at the selling of “human flesh” in Haiti, which he discusses in his “Negro Question” essay in The Old South. Here, though, the perpetrator is a white man, whose fate culminates in “a final orgy of ferocity and fury, in which he was guilty of an act whose fiendishness surpassed belief.”21 This act—beheading one of his slaves, followed by dragging it upstairs and placing it “before the open window in his hall, in the full view of the terrified slaves”—results in public excoriation, and the West Indian is eventually hanged.22 The South’s record on such matters is not spotless—many a white owner escaped justice for even the most heinous and exceptionally cruel and unjust acts leveled against slaves. What, then, can be said to account for this empowered response against the man’s cruelty? The narrator recalls, “It was one of the curious incidents of the trial that his negroes all lamented his death, and declared that he was a good master when he was not drunk.”23 The story does not include these black voices, of course, so the claim may not be true, though their lamentation mirrors the themes of Page’s other stories. Regardless of the slaves’ views, however (which, in any case, would have been inadmissible in a court of law), the area’s white denizens seek to put the West Indian to death. Rather than accepting the man’s gross mistreatment of the corpse as the rationale behind the trial and execution, we should consider the ways in which the West Indian acts as an open affront to normative whiteness. In addition to his obvious foreignness, the man acts with unbridled passion, a far cry from the

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cool, collected ideology of the Cavalier tradition, which apotheosized honor and personal restraint as cardinal virtues. The West Indian stands for not just a marginalized, “othered” sense of whiteness, however.24 His actions demarcate him as too open about the inherent privileges of whiteness; the public display of the mutilated black body is, surprisingly, a step too far for the other plantation owners. Though the story is set in the antebellum period and thus decades before the bloodiest days of lynch law, it hardly stretches credulity to consider the possibility that the fellow owners would be willing to participate in such actions. Where the West Indian errs is in making white privilege too visible, too easy to be soundly criticized as unjust and, in the case of the murder, barbaric. Southern whiteness is highly exclusive; the West Indian, by flaunting his power in an overtly cruel manner (coupled with his already anxiety-inducing otherness as a foreigner, akin to what we have seen in O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”) must be silenced for abusing its privileges. If the West Indian is executed for being, in a manner of phrasing, too white, he is also killed because he represents, in Lucinda MacKethan’s phrase, “what happens to the plantation ideal when unworthy beings attempt to imitate its concepts,” a phrase which could just as easily be used to describe a much later plantation owner with a background in the West Indies, Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen.25 While the West Indian owns slaves, he is noted as laboring alongside them, more akin to a lower-class overseer than a plantation scion watching from a respectable distance. The story’s narrator also questions the West Indian’s specific brand of slavery, one that seems to rely not on the tranquil, domestic slaves so lauded by Page elsewhere, but on those regarded as savage and terrifying. For example, one escaped slave is described as “the most brutal negro I ever knew,” markedly different from the region’s other slaves, “without either superstition or reverence,” causing the narrator to attempt to reclassify him racially: “he differed so widely from the rest of the slaves in that section that there existed some feeling against him almost akin to a race feeling.”26 Similarly, the narrator discusses the palpable degree of excitement produced by the presence of abolitionists and their ability to stir up the types of slaves purportedly under the West Indian’s control, claiming, “It was as if the foundations of the whole social fabric were undermined. It was the sudden darkening of a shadow that always hung in the horizon.” Here, the narrator is discussing the ever-constant threat of a slave uprising. These thoughts, coming on the heels of his discussion of the particularly brutal escaped slave, create a microcosm of white anxiety over slavery as a sustainable institution. Continuing, he summarizes the dilemma: “The slaves were in a large majority, and had they risen, though the final issue could not be doubted, the lives of every white on the plantations must have paid the forfeit. Whatever the right and wrong of slavery might have been, its

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existence demanded that no outside interference with it should be tolerated. So much was certain; self-preservation required this.”27 This passage begs the question as to why Page included such an open depiction of white fears in a story collection largely dedicated to quelling white anxiety. One possible response lies in the story’s climax, where the narrator comes face to face with the ghost of the West Indian: “Directly in front of me, clutching in his upraised hand a long, keen, glittering knife, on whose blade a ball of fire seemed to play, stood a gigantic figure in the very flame of the lightning, and stretched at his feet lay, ghastly and bloody, a black and headless trunk.”28 Regarding this scene, James Christmann demonstrates the importance of the “rebellious, African-rooted black man who is decapitated—silenced utterly—by a white slave master.” Christmann observes that “Page, through his narrator, confronts the pestilential house of slavery as it often was,” in addition to the author confronting “an image of himself as the silencer of a black subject that speaks resistance in a language marked by both abolition and his homeland.”29 This reading highlights the complex interplay between critiquing slavery and silencing resistant black voices in the story, and we can add that the narrator’s horror at the spectral presence of the West Indian reiterates the consensus that the man presented a threat to normative whiteness through both his foreignness and his actions that made white privilege too open and visible. The constant discussions of his physicality and raw power aligns the West Indian not with a more removed sense of “proper” whiteness but rather as a lower class laborer, a man who, while not “white trash” in our generic understanding of the term, is regarded as more aligned with his slaves than with other whites. That the story ends with the house’s collapse by burning, akin to the devastation wrought in the finales of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Absalom, Absalom! is curious, as it seemingly symbolizes the realities that slavery’s brutality eventually and inevitably leads to its own violent destruction, in the guise of the Civil War, and thus further undermines Page’s attempts elsewhere in his writings to regard whiteness as beyond reproach. The curious case of “No Haid Pawn” belies some normative assumptions scholars hold about the uniformity of Lost Cause–era literature, a reality that is further manifest in a revisit to Thomas Dixon’s Reconstruction Trilogy, particularly the oft-overlooked final volume, The Traitor, where the greatest threats to southern civilization are not blacks but rather ambitious poor whites, prefiguring the kind of anxiety later seen in Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy. That Thomas Dixon was racist, by the standards of his time and today’s, is obvious; what is perhaps less obvious is how his racism is tied into representations of whiteness that ultimately reveal its precarious nature. By simply writing off Dixon’s works as poorly written racist screeds and propaganda, we fail to

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consider the complexities of how white supremacy and Lost Cause–era ideology also hierarchizes whiteness. In addition to his well-known loathing and fear of miscegenation, a closer examination of Dixon’s Reconstruction Trilogy reveals an abiding concern over the rise of poor whites and moments where such people are likened to the blacks whom Dixon made it his life goal to condemn, to attack, and to vilify. Thomas Dixon closes the Historical Note at the start of his 1902 novel The Leopard’s Spots with the curious defense, “I have tried to write this book with the utmost restraint.”30 After a career as a minister, Dixon believed that fiction offered a platform for a wider audience. He responded to criticism with staunch defenses of his work: “I claim the book is an authentic document, and I know it is the most important moral deed of my life. There is not a bitter or malignant sentence in it.”31 In an oft-quoted passage from his posthumously published autobiography, Dixon reiterates, “I made no effort to write literature. It has always seemed to me a waste of time to do such work. Every generation writes its own literature. My sole purpose in writing was to reach and influence with my argument the minds of millions. I had a message and wrote is as vividly and simply as I knew how.”32 For most reviewers and readers, this has been entirely understood as referring to his understanding of race in the South. Lilian Bell, writing for The Saturday Evening Post, praised the novel’s depiction of “the hitherto silent misunderstood South,” adding that “the general mass of readers will condemn the book as too radical, prejudiced and highly colored. I, for one, from absolute knowledge of my facts, do not hesitate to say that the book is moderate in tone considering what might have been written.”33 In addition to this spirited defense of Dixon, some reviewers expressed optimism; Reverend Henry W. Battle noted that the novel discussed the “most stupendous problem in American history” and optimistically proclaimed “the book will accomplish good—much good, we hope, in certain quarters.”34 Such supporting views were balanced by those critical of Dixon, however, as in the following from the New York Times: “It is really difficult to see any purpose that is to be served by this novel. Pleasure it cannot give. One refuses to believe that it expresses the best thought of the South in regard to the negro, and certainly it does what in it lies to accentuate the bitterness of the races.” The Times review ends on a damning note which certainly would have made Dixon bristle if he was aware of it: “As an antidote to its pessimism Booker T. Washington’s ‘Up From Slavery,’ a volume as full of hope as this is of despair, sufficiently meets the arguments and rebukes the spirit of ‘The Leopard’s Spots.’”35 This idea of despair versus hope runs throughout Dixon’s work. For Dixon, we might imagine that the first two volumes of his trilogy, The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, would account for the author’s optimism that the South had righted

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its course, thanks to the guiding hand of the “Invisible Empire” of the Klan. Yet by the end of the lesser-read final volume, The Traitor, this optimism had been greatly tempered, as a new version of the Klan—led by members derided as white trash—supplanted the version that, in Dixon’s estimation, had saved the South from freed blacks.36 A closer look at a few key scenes in the first two novels and a lengthier discussion of The Traitor reveals the ways in which the rise of poor whites served as an anxiety-inducing measure in their own right, further complicating—and ultimately undermining—Dixon’s goals at lauding whiteness as pure and beyond the possibility of encroachment. A reading of the various assault scenes in The Leopard’s Spots highlights the fragility of whiteness, staunchly at odds with the author’s white supremacist underpinnings, and lays the foundation for The Traitor’s exploration of varying degrees of worthy (and unworthy) whites. Raymond Cook summarizes the novel by noting that “the primary goal of the emancipated Negro, as portrayed by Dixon, is sexual union with any convenient white woman. The immediate popularity of the novel indicated the deep-seated fear and widespread ignorance of the Negro as a human entity.”37 Dixon was not alone, of course, in his condemnation of mixed-race relationships; consider South Carolina governor Ben Tillman’s vitriolic comment that he would not allow any black man to “gratify his lust on [white] wives and daughters without lynching him.”38 The white characters of The Leopard’s Spots subscribe fully to the form of white supremacy espoused by the likes of Tillman, although their continuous anxiety reveals the paradoxes in their racist ideology. As Scott Romine summarizes, “the biological fragility of whiteness—its susceptibility to contamination by one drop of Negro blood—helps to make white identity tenuous.”39 Dixon attempts to imbue whiteness with purity and sanctity, and yet the fact that whiteness can be compromised by a single drop of black blood undercuts his beliefs. If Dixon meant for his Klan crusaders to come across as untarnished knights, they can instead be read as representative of desperate attempts at holding onto a shattering identity.40 And while Dixon doubtless sought to extend the romanticizing of white women, he did so in a manner that regarded them as defenseless, weak, and prone to assault.41 Women in Dixon’s works are mere objects to be protected, with little autonomy. During the first of two assault sequences in The Leopard’s Spots, Annie, daughter of Confederate veteran Tom Camp, is attacked by a group of black troopers. The scene opens with the ominous line, “Suddenly a black shadow fell across the doorway,” followed by the black trooper entering the house as he “cocked his gun and presented it toward Tom,” the gun an obvious phallic symbol.42 After her husband Hose is knocked to the floor, the group of black men drag Annie out of the house. Tom quickly assembles a group of men (who

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are described, it bears noting, “crowding round Tom with their pistols in their hands,” which is to say, impotent without further instruction and motivation. While one man fears that they may unintentionally hit Annie if they shoot, the veteran exclaims, “Shoot, men! My God, shoot! There are things worse than death!”43 When a bullet inevitably kills Annie, the tone is not melancholy or remorseful, as one might expect, but rather nigh triumphant and indicative of a palpable release from anxiety. Just as Tom was unable to name rape as the “thing worse than death,” the specter of sexual assault is again only implied; Tom thanks the men by stating, “It’s all right, boys. You’ve been my friends tonight. You’ve saved my little gal. I want to shake hands with you and thank you. If you hadn’t been here—my God, I can’t think of what would ’a happened! Now it’s all right. She’s safe in God’s hands.” To his wife, Tom utters something similar, telling her “don’t cry so,” and that “it might have been worse. Let us thank God she was saved from them brutes.”44 This scene makes clear the all-consuming anxiety whites felt regarding black sexuality; only when they come to the realization that a white woman’s maidenhood is at stake does the impotent group of young men give chase to the assailants, while Tom’s relief overshadows his grief over his daughter’s death.45 As an additional contradiction to this supposed protection of a white woman’s purity, the constant references to white male impotence—especially in contrast to overt black sexuality—presents the anxiety-inducing possibility that, given free will in the matter, a white woman might actually choose a relationship with a black man, especially over an impotent and ineffectual white one. In case Tom Camp had not suffered enough, late in the novel his other daughter, Flora disappears. In a chapter ominously entitled “The Unspoken Terror” (referring to the unnamable act of rape), Dixon strives once again to diffuse potential anxiety by emphasizing the ways in which whites come together. As the town sets out to search for the lost woman, Dixon writes, “In a moment the white race had fused into a homogeneous mass of love, sympathy, hate and revenge. The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the banker and the blacksmith, the great and the small, they were all one now.”46 At the start of the novel, Dixon had described the trepidation of returning Confederate soldiers, noting, “In every one of these soldiers’ hearts, and over all the earth, hung the shadow of the freed Negro, transformed by the exigency of war from a Chattel, to be bought and sold, into a possible Beast to be feared and guarded. Around this dusky figure every white man’s soul was keeping its grim vigil.”47 Thus, Dixon’s novel operates structurally around a simplistic pattern: present an anxiety-inducing scene regarding black men and white women, followed by a clarion call to action by white men, who serve as judge, jury, and executioner for blacks, thus alleviating said anxiety.

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Whiteness in Dixon is dependent upon action as much as ideology; the moment when whiteness is at risk (and, as the novel frequently makes clear, whiteness is extremely precarious; the preacher notes that Anglo-Saxons cannot grant blacks “equal social rights” because it would be tantamount to “suicide. One drop of Negro blood makes a Negro”), then action must be taken in order to cleanse and purify the race.48 The impending lynching is intended as a cleansing act; though not an outright supporter of the practice, Thomas Nelson Page had argued that the “underlying principle of the people who commit these barbarities” is “the determination to put an end to the ravishing of their women by an inferior race.”49 Anthony Hoefer discusses the important cultural fixation on lynching and how it affirms whiteness: “lynching maintains the absolutely bivalent differentiation of white and black, despite the contradiction posed by the reality of hybridity and undifferentiation. Most immediately, the ritual violently and murderously expunges the threat to the bifurcated cosmology,” even when lynching was used as a supposed palliative against the perceived threat of black rape: “White southerners projected the fundamental instability of their construct (and displaced the repressed histories of transracial sexual contact) onto an imagined epidemic of rape of white women by black men. Black men, then, were located as the preeminent threat to social fabric of the white community.”50 Lynching in Dixon’s works, then, stands for a defense of whiteness on the whole; protecting white women becomes the cause from which white unity can be forged, and lynching allows a form of ritual purging of white racial anxiety. Yet curiously, Dixon undercuts universal ideas of white superiority in his description of the lynch mob that executes Dick, who is accused of Flora’s murder. The hastily assembled mob, gleefully reveling in their extrajudicial violence (“Fair trial—hell! We’re just waitin’ for er can o’ oil. You go back and read your law books—we’ll tend ter this devil,” exclaims one participant), is portrayed in a grotesque and disturbing manner, one that again undermines Dixon’s depiction of whiteness as pure.51 Dixon writes, “Under the glare of the light and the tears the crowd seemed to melt into a great crawling, swaying creature, half reptile, half beast, half dragon, half man, with a thousand legs, and a thousand eyes, and ten thousand teeth, and with no ear to hear and no heart to pity!”52 While Dixon’s poor math (four halves makes two whole “creatures”) is perhaps the most notable aspect of this passage, he resorts to calling whites animals here, rather than blacks. While the act of lynching is designed to ameliorate white anxiety, this passage could be read more as an attempt at instilling fear in blacks (the lynching scenes would do this as well) and reinforcing whiteness as terror, as whiteness studies scholars have suggested. The close of the chapter further disrupts ideas of white purity and reiterates its fragility. Tom Camp, having witnessed the assault and death of both of his daughters,

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suffers a mental breakdown: finding him at the cemetery (Tom had insisted a second grave be dug for his daughter, as the initial one had been dug by a black man), the preacher finds that the veteran had worked through the night and pulled the coffin up out of the ground. He had broken his finger nails all off trying to open it, and his fingers were bleeding. At last he had given up the effort to open the coffin, sat down beside it, and was arranging her toys he had made for her beside the box. He had brought a lot of her clothes, a pair of little shoes and stockings, and a bonnet, and he had placed these out carefully on top of the lid. He was talking to her.53

The chapter closes with the preacher leading Camp away, referring to him as “a hopeless madman.”54 While it would be easy to cast this scene as maudlin or simply designed to instill further hatred toward blacks, doing so overlooks the complexity of Camp’s actions; he literally yearns to recreate his daughter’s childhood, bringing children’s clothing and toys, an attempt to return Flora to a virginal state. In addition to reemphasizing Dixon’s obsession with female sexuality (across his novels, his lovers are remarkably restrained and chaste), the scene provides the novel’s most concentrated depiction of the paralyzing nature of white anxiety and how easily whiteness can be compromised. While the town can unite under the guidance of the Klan, too much damage has been done to Tom Camp; he is left a shell of a human, stricken both by grief for his daughters’ deaths and by his desperate need to maintain his whiteness and restore his children’s. While the above example vilifies blacks, not poor whites, it helps establish how demonstrably fragile whiteness is, as the white men involved are horrified by the threat of blackness. At the climax of The Leopard’s Spots, protagonist Charles Gaston gives a speech supposedly extolling white supremacy but which in fact further destabilizes whiteness and hints at the cracks explored more fully in The Traitor. While utilizing contemporary whiteness studies scholarship to criticize Dixon’s ideology may seem revisionist, considering the inherent un-Americanness of whiteness helps to point out more of the inconsistencies to be found in Dixon’s professed views. Though, chronologically, the Spanish-American War occurred after the events in Dixon’s novel, the author’s exuberant support likely played a role in developing his sense of national unity. James Kinney has commented that after the war, Dixon “assumed that national unity had been achieved. He argued simply that the nation must look to the only threat facing the Anglo-Saxon mission of divinely inspired world leadership—the inevitability of racial suicide if blacks were allowed to coexist on this continent.”55

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Gaston’s speech draws on his claims that America needs a new Declaration of Independence, one that responds to the oft-repeated ominous question “Shall the Future American be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto?”56 Befitting the tone of the rest of the novel, Gaston utilizes language intended at first to create anxiety and tension, referring frequently to “this hour of crisis” caused by “ten millions of semibarbaric black men.”57 Gaston illustrates here C. Vann Woodward’s summation of Lost Cause mentality that it was less concerned with the fall of the aristocracy than with the fact that “the South suffered from a prevailing sense of inferiority and a constant need for justifying a position,” though it is clear that Gaston’s imperialist bombast stems from envisioning himself and his class at the apex of expanded white civilization.58 At the same time, Gaston extols the greatness of the white race, proclaiming that “the Anglo-Saxon is entering the new century with the imperial crown of the ages on his brow and the scepter of the infinite in his hands.”59 But Gaston understands his audience; immediately following the line about Anglo-Saxons, he defers to the unique greatness of southerners (wealthy ones, at least), intentionally placing himself and his peers on an esteemed pedestal: “The Old South fought against the stars in their courses—the resistless tide of the rising consciousness of Nationality and World-Mission. The young South greets the new era and glories in its manhood.”60 Proceeding, Gaston resorts to outright fear-mongering, stating that the Negro’s “insolence threatens our womanhood, and our children are beaten by Negro toughs on the way to school.”61 So convincing and pride-instilling is Gaston’s speech that he finds himself nominated for governorship of North Carolina, with the support of the Klan fully behind him; he inspires his audience to dress in “scarlet shirts” and ride “silently through the streets in solemn parade” as “six thousand Negroes watched them with fear.”62 Thus, Gaston inspires his fellow southerners through a carefully constructed rhetoric of white supremacy, depicting blacks as subhuman and at the same time lauding southerners as inherently superior beings, but the very fact that he does so reveals Dixon’s own belief in hierarchies of whiteness. Whiteness cannot both be indomitable and permeable; it can either be pure, or it can be open to compromise. Rather than simply regard these lapses as the faults of a politically motivated writer who cared little for artistry (as true as that is, and as loath as one is to extol any aspect of Dixon’s writing), we can more productively understand these lapses as undermining Dixon’s beliefs and prefiguring his fear and anxiety regarding poor whites. While The Clansman continues the lines of thought we see in The Leopard’s Spots, worth mentioning is Dixon’s further instantiation that whiteness is not solid but rather functions on a sliding scale or hierarchy. Most memorable is his demonizing description of Austin Stoneman, a thinly veiled caricature

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of Thaddeus Stevens. In particular, Dixon emphasizes Stoneman’s physical deformity—a clubfoot—in order to establish him as less purely white than the novel’s other characters, which the author uses as twisted, sordid evidence for undermining the congressman’s beliefs. The novel’s initial description of him is intended to dehumanize: “His walk was a painful hobble. He was lame in both feet, and one of them was deformed. The left leg ended in a mere bunch of flesh, resembling more closely an elephant’s hoof than the foot of a man.”63 The text is replete with similar descriptions of the clubfoot, as well as one of Arthur Keller’s illustrations, where Stoneman is depicted in stark contrast to Lincoln during an argument. Jeremy Wells offers a useful succinct summary of this idea, noting, “In short, most of Dixon’s white characters who wield power as a result of Radical Reconstruction are physically unfit to rule.”64 Dixon accentuates the clubfoot in order to exclude Stoneman from the likes of the novel’s other white characters; in perhaps the novel’s most pointed physical description of Stoneman (which occurs during his attempt at removing Andrew Johnson from office) he is carried by two black men: “Suddenly through the dense mass appeared the forms of two gigantic negroes carrying an old man. His grim face, white and rigid, and his big club foot hanging pathetically from those black arms, could not be mistaken.”65 The narrator describes the scene with the utmost disgust: “No sculptor ever dreamed a more sinister emblem of the corruption of a race of empire-builders than this group.”66 Even at the end of the novel, when Stoneman is defeated and broken in spirit, he is described in an unflattering manner, lacking the joie de vivre of the more magnetic southern characters: “The old man’s strange colourless eyes stared straight in front, wide open, and seeing nothing, as if the soul had already fled through them into eternity.”67 While Stoneman’s race is never questioned, he is perhaps forgiven from Dixon’s perspective for denouncing his mixed-race lover Lydia Brown as a “yellow vampire.”68 Still, the constant emphasis on his disability and association with blacks serves to distance him from all other whites in the novel, including his son Phil, who, in spite of being a northerner, vocalizes Dixon’s insistence on the innate superiority of southerners. Phil reflects upon the southerner’s “genius for command, the deep sense of duty and honour, his hospitality, his deathless love of home, his supreme constancy, and sense of duty.” And, in opposition to his father, Phil is shown to have, in Dixon’s reckoning, the proper disdain toward blacks: “the laziness and incapacity of the Negro had been more than he could endure. With no ties of tradition or habits of life to bind him, he simply refused to tolerate them.”69 Since Stoneman stands as a rebuttal to the white supremacist ideology professed throughout the novel, Dixon seeks to undercut him by any means possible, from paying especial attention to his physical deformity to utilizing his own son against him. This, coupled with the novel’s

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depiction of blacks as barbaric and subhuman, sets southern whiteness apart as a romanticized ideal. The constant focus on Stoneman’s physical deformity implies a sense of anxiety and awareness on Dixon’s part, one he expected his readers to share. Southerners, by contrast, are resplendent, beautiful, and stolid, fit and worthy to lead the new South. Yet in The Traitor, the final volume of the trilogy, Dixon’s fever dream of white supremacy is consistently undermined, and the easy villains of his earlier works—rapacious blacks and the malformed Stoneman—are replaced with a new, more insidious and troubling one: poor whites. Unlike the blockbuster success of the earlier novels and eventually Birth of a Nation, The Traitor is less often read, so a brief summary of the plot may help. Like all of Dixon’s work, The Traitor shows little attention for style and bears the signs of being hastily written. John Graham, a Confederate veteran and former leader (“Grand Dragon”) of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, has urged his followers to disband at the behest of the national leader (“Grand Wizard”), an act that includes symbolically burning their robes. Unlike other Dixon protagonists, Graham is a flawed, more ambiguous character, a heavy drinker at the start of the novel, and presented as having struggled financially since the end of the war. His home has been overtaken by a local politician, Judge Butler, whom Graham will continuously deride as white trash. The novel then follows Graham’s rival, Steve Hoyle, who reorganizes and remodels the Klan, drawing not on past Confederate veterans but rather on mountain folk and others deemed trash. Hoyle, hoping to consolidate his power (and out of jealousy because his love interest is infatuated with Graham), orders the Judge murdered by robed Klansmen, and Graham quickly becomes the chief suspect due to his known hatred of the Judge. Despite various minor characters’ attempts at unraveling the crime, Graham is found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to five years in prison. Hoyle’s treachery goes unpunished, and the novel ends on a melancholic note, as Dixon reveals he eventually made his way to be seated on a federal court. While the novel’s conclusion is not completely despairing, it does mark a shift in Dixon’s rhetoric from the earlier volumes, which end with all villains rightfully destroyed and clarion calls for Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Abhorrent as Dixon’s beliefs are, there is a tonal consistency throughout The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, despite the aforementioned examples where he undermines his belief that whiteness is pure and beyond reproach. In The Traitor, however, the protagonist falls short of the ideals of his earlier protagonists, and blacks, while still presented in a racist, grotesque manner (replete with mammy stereotypes in particular), are far more marginal figures. Indeed, what strikes one most throughout The Traitor is the palpable sense that Dixon did not know how to vilify whites. In The Clansman, for example, Dixon easily

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slanders Austin Stoneman, drawing on the widespread southern hatred for Thaddeus Stevens, but The Traitor presents Dixon with a problem far beyond his limited capacities as a prose stylist. Judith Jackson Fossett explains, “By the third novel of Dixon’s trilogy, The Traitor, there is no black presence or threat; the novel instead becomes a meditation on whiteness, a contest between the ‘good’ Klan and the ‘bad’ Klan.”70 This differentiation, between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ whites, comes to represent hierarchies of whiteness, one where the planter class represented by Graham stands as more worthy of the mantle and responsibilities of whiteness than Judge Butler or the upstart Steve Hoyle and his motley band of new Klansmen. In charting this theme across the work, we see that by the end of the trilogy, Dixon’s attempts at proclaiming whiteness as inviolable are shallow, inconsistent, and ultimately doomed to failure. From the outset, Dixon makes it clear that Judge Butler, despite his esteemed status in Reconstruction-era North Carolina, is a figure worthy of the utmost disdain because of his classification as white trash. Though Steve Hoyle and his renewed Klan eventually come to dominate the narrative, the novel’s first half details the Judge’s inferior status. On the very first page, John Graham derides him as a “Scalawag,” and their first meeting is replete with imagery that dehumanizes him.71 In this early scene, the Judge suffers an especially humiliating characterization at the hands of a black woman. Aunt Julie Ann, his current servant, is described in the typical racist manner we ascribe to Dixon, as a physically imposing mammy—Graham tells us her “huge form waddled after him”—and as someone who holds the Judge in contempt: Dixon writes, “She served him for his money and her love for the old house, but secretly she despised him as she did all poor white trash.”72 What stands out here is the implied hierarchy; while the term “white trash” likely derived from slaves, the fact is striking that a racist as committed as Thomas Dixon is willing to hierarchize the Judge as worthy of a black character’s contempt. And to add to the perceived critique, when Graham confronts him (Judge Butler is currently living in the house Graham’s family lost because of the war), he is further dehumanized, described in animalistic terms that we will later see Faulkner use in descriptions of the Snopeses: “His shifting bead eyes sought the floor, and then he suddenly lifted his drooping head like a turtle, approached John, in a fawning, creeping, half-walk, half-shuffle, and extended his hand.”73 Physical touch is one of the key sites of anxiety in Dixon’s work, though normally the locus of concern deals with black men touching white women. Graham’s refusal to shake Judge Butler’s hand, his refusal to touch him, bears an uncomfortable similarity to the many other instances that abound in Dixon’s work. Later in the novel, Graham talks with his senile father, who also holds the Judge in low esteem, calling him “a man of low origin and no principle. . . . I wouldn’t lower

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myself by speaking to such a man.”74 While we could regard these scenes as emblematic of a sort of southern pride standing firm in the face of hardship, the excessive imagery that animalizes Butler shows that Graham and his father regard him as biologically inferior: a lesser type of white. Because this is a Thomas Dixon novel, there is a virginal, pure white woman featured prominently. Judge Butler might be denigrated as white trash, but his daughter somehow overcomes his limitations into an almost comical exaggeration of white purity, a fact that further belies Dixon’s supposed treatment of all whiteness as sacrosanct. Fittingly, throughout the novel Stella Butler sides with Graham over her father, threatening at one point to cut all ties with the latter. In the meantime, the Judge is further maligned and stigmatized; regarding his background, the narrator remarks, “in spite of his fawning ambitions as a turncoat politician and social aspirant, he was still poor—so poor in fact that he could scarcely keep up appearances in the Graham mansion.”75 In order to further differentiate daughter from father, the narrator later tells us of Stella, “Her mother was of the old regime of the South, an aristocrat of aristocrats to her finger tips. Her people had blotted her very name from their memory for her marriage to Butler.”76 While it might be easy to read these cases as simple class anxiety, a hoity-toity, Dickensian family turning their noses up at an upstart, the fact that such disdain comes in a work by an author who revels in exacerbating racial difference complicates that idea. When we couple this anxiety with the frequent demeaning and dehumanizing descriptions perpetrated against the Judge, this hatred seems to have a stronger foundation than simple class anxiety. Just a few pages later, Alex Larkin (labeled as “the Carpetbagger” in the text and subject to Dixon’s usual criticisms of such men) is actually compared favorably to the Judge during a fight between the two: “Personally the Judge cut a poor figure beside him with his slouchy ill-fitting clothes, his fawning shuffling walk, his drooping head, shifting eyes, and his vague professions of platitudes.”77 While the first section reeks of class anxiety, emphasizing the Judge’s disheveled appearance, the remainder of the description accentuates physical weakness and difference, more akin to Dixon’s standard descriptions of blacks than other whites (the novel’s mammy figure, as noted above, is always described as “waddling”). Finally, when the Judge is killed by Klansmen halfway through the novel, he is not awarded narrative sympathy; instead, he is described as “trembling.” He offers little physical defense before dying, where Dixon draws attention to his “long awkward arms.”78 In his final moments, physical difference is what Dixon wants readers to see, minimizing our sympathy with a man so regularly derided as white trash. The novel’s proper “villain,” as it were, is Steve Hoyle, head of the new version of the Klan, who eschews his predecessor Graham’s ideology in favor of

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violence considered uncouth and unbecoming of the organization. As The Traitor does not share plot or characters with the earlier novels in the trilogy, its version of the Klan is less invested in terrorizing blacks and restoring white supremacy than it is in navigating the economic aftermath of the war, as carpetbaggers and radical republicans supposedly blight the land before the end of Reconstruction in 1877. After Graham (per orders from national Klan leaders) dissolves the North Carolina version, Steve Hoyle announces he will lead a renewed version, to Graham’s dismay. After Graham instructs his followers to burn their robes and to disband, Hoyle jumps in and calls for a meeting the next day in order to “organise a new order of patriots,” a declaration that leads to resounding agreement. Curiously, Graham retorts, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” but Hoyle is not dismayed, and his followers, while ostensibly many of the same men who had served with Graham, begin a campaign of terror, aimed not just at blacks—“We have rescued our state from Negro rule,” Graham had announced moments earlier—but also at Jews and, in one case, a white woman purported to be “of low origin.”79 While Steve Hoyle is noted for his wealth—“the richest young man in the county,” Dixon tells us—his association with new members of the Klan sullies him in Graham’s reckoning and in that of his love interest, Stella Butler. Her interest in Graham is what leads Hoyle to frame Graham for Judge Butler’s murder and emphasizes how quickly whiteness can be hierarchized. While much of the second half of the novel details Stella’s attempts to uncover the truth behind her father’s murder, Hoyle’s new Klan looms large in the background, gathering strength from supposed sundry types of whites. In addition, his physical appearance begins receiving more criticism, in a manner not unlike Dixon’s efforts to present Austin Stoneman/Thaddeus Stevens as grotesque. In his first appearance, the narrator notes Hoyle is “slightly given to fat, but his complexion was red and clean as a boy’s,” but during Graham’s trial, the narrator instead tells us, “the court room was thronged with liars, perjurers and sycophants who hung about his fat figure with obsequious deference.”80 And in the novel’s final scenes, Graham, having been found guilty of conspiracy but not murder, is subject to ridicule and condemnation by Hoyle in a manner that Dixon implies is rife with disgust over Hoyle’s character and associates. The day that Graham is to begin his prison sentence, Hoyle arranges for his Klan followers, derided as “low white trash” as well as “a gang er niggers” to “hoot and yell and make fun of him all the way to the train.”81 Hoyle’s willingness to associate with these groups tarnishes him in Graham’s and, by extension, Dixon’s eyes. Graham meets this group with his head held high, even telling one of his supporters not to kill him, even though “God lets a lot of such trash cumber the earth.”82

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The novel ends on a far less triumphant note than do Dixon’s earlier works. Gone are the hopeful pronouncements for a new Declaration of Independence and absent are images of fearful blacks, shamed and terrified by the indomitable power of the Klan. Instead, Dixon’s trilogy closes on a decidedly anxious and mixed note. While Dixon notes that “time slowly healed the poisoned wounds left by the fierce struggles of Reconstruction,” the likes of white trash, the vestiges of Judge Butler or Steve Hoyle, seem to dominant this particular version of the South.83 While one might expect Hoyle, the titular “traitor” to the South, to receive his comeuppance, he is instead rewarded: “Poetic justice demanded that Steve Hoyle should pay the penalty of his treachery. But Time plays many a joke on Justice. The Honourable Stephen Hoyle is now one of our fattest, most solemn and most dignified judges of the Federal Courts.”84 While Graham turns to manufacturing cotton goods, his political influence has evaporated, and the fate of his—and Dixon’s—South in left unclear. Dixon himself would continue to struggle with his concerns, as in his 1912 novel The Sins of the Father, where an entire white family is annihilated, and a once-proud patriarch and Confederate veteran kills himself out of disgrace for having fathered a child with a black woman. While the rousing success and acclaim for Birth of a Nation in 1915 would further embolden his racism, it remains clear that, for a time, Dixon struggled and ultimately failed in his hopes to present whiteness as pure, unsullied, inviolate, and dominant, with his own work undercutting such claims. And regarding Dixon (to his great chagrin, one imagines) alongside black authors of the time, we can further see the inconsistencies in his work and the pervasive trouble brought about by poor whites. While Sutton Griggs is perhaps most remembered for the proto-Afrofuturist novel Imperium in Imperio (1899), his denouncement of Thomas Dixon in The Hindered Hand is a valuable contribution to the rich tradition of works combatting white supremacy. Like Chesnutt, who framed his conjure tales in part as responses to works like Thomas Nelson Page’s Old South stories and Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, Sutton Griggs’s direct response to Dixon illustrates the continuing importance of regarding these authors in conversation. Though we know comparatively less about Sutton Griggs’s life than we do of Dixon’s, the extant biographical evidence links the pair in a manner that has proven fruitful for students and scholars of racism and literary history. Griggs, a renowned minister, was hand-picked to pen a rebuttal to Dixon; as Finnie Coleman summarizes, “at the 1903 meeting of the National Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, the delegates voted unanimously to commission Sutton Griggs to publish a response to Thomas Dixon’s particularly vitriolic novel.”85 Griggs’s The Hindered Hand, or, The Reign of the Repressionist, published in 1905, is a visceral indictment of Dixon’s racist propaganda and a

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summation of his own ideology; in the words of Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth Warren, Griggs believed “that cooperation between the races remained the best and most effective policy” for ameliorating race relations.86 Since Dixon’s work offers, at best, a hope that blacks return to Africa and abandon any opportunity at coexisting with white Americans—manifest, as we have seen in the constant sexual anxiety regarding miscegenation in his works—it is somewhat ironic that the very existence of Griggs’s antiracist novel is so dependent upon Dixon’s writings. This fact is of particular significance when regarding “The Hindering Hand,” an appendix included in the third edition of the novel which roundly and explicitly damns Dixon’s ideology. Indeed, Hanna Wallinger remarks that “the relationship of Sutton Griggs and Thomas Dixon was one of mutual dependency as both southerners and Baptist preachers in a Jim Crow United States,” while Susan Gillman has amusingly referred to the pair as “procrustean bedfellows.”87 What has been less understood and discussed in Griggs’s work is an attention to the rise of poor whites; not a fear, as in Dixon, but a regard of the circumstances that have resulted in the post–Civil War landscape and the ways in which the treatment toward poor whites exacerbates the larger dynamics of race relations in the South (namely, the brutal lynch law perpetuated by such whites against blacks). Before the novel’s infamously brutal lynching scene, Griggs is attuned to the shifting demographics. As early as the novel’s second chapter, Griggs draws attention to the tension between different classes of whites: “‘This is a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.’ Such is said to have been the character of the sentiment that was widespread in the ranks of the Confederate army during the late Civil War.”88 As Griggs goes on to explain, the collapse of slavery should actually have worked in the favor of poor whites: “it is very evident that the highest interest of the ‘poor whites’ who bore the brunt of the fighting was to be conserved by the collapse rather than the triumph of the cause for which they fought with unsurpassed gallantry. For, with the downfall of the system of enforced labor, the work of the world became an open market, and the dignity of labor being restored, the ‘poor whites’ had both a better opportunity and a more congenial atmosphere to begin their rise.” What becomes clear as the novel progresses, however, is that this “rise” does not come ultimately at the expense of other whites (as Dixon suggest in his works) but rather in the further entrenchment of the brutalities of lynch law. The Hindered Hand’s most infamous scene is the brutal lynching of Foresta and her fiancé Bud Harper. After being wrongfully accused of murder and fleeing town, the pair make the curious decision to move south from Tennessee to Mississippi, under the rationale that “a land reputed to be so destitute of hope for the Negro would be searched last of all for Negro refugees.”89 The rationale

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for their eventual murders relates to Griggs’s discussion of poor whites. Because Bud and Foresta are able to purchase a farm in an impoverished town, they are immediate targets in the eyes of local poor whites, who quickly come to regard them as “rather undesirable neighbors.”90 The narrator emphasizes the degree of groupthink present amongst the whites, claiming that “thousands of individual murders, and lynching by mobs, had so blunted the sensibility of these whites that they reached this decision without any qualms of conscience.”91 When a struggling farmer confronts the couple without cause—telling Foresta they have “the big head”—he opens fire without provocation. Bud retaliates, the farmer is killed, and the pair are on the run before being captured, tortured, and executed in a visceral scene. Interestingly, in the lynching chapter, forebodingly entitled “The Blaze,” Griggs briefly shifts perspective to a young white boy, Melville Brant, who begs his mother to attend the lynching.92 Though his mother locks Melville in the attic and expresses outrage at the thought of burning Bud and Foresta, her protests stop there, and she fails to offer a mounted critique of her fellow whites. Melville escapes, hears Bud confess—Bud rightfully claims his actions were in self-defense—and witnesses the couple’s brutal lynching. The scene ends with narrative commentary on young Melville, who had procured himself “a piece of the charred flesh in the ashes.”93 Returning home, the narrator mockingly refers to him as “The future ruler of the land!” thus emphasizing the ways in which racism is inculcated amongst the South’s youth, and how, in spite of his present circumstances, Melville can perhaps rise above his poor status at the expense of the black body.94 While the backdrop of poor whites’ brutality permeates the novel, it is not until the appendix, added in the work’s third edition, that Griggs more directly discusses the political and social ramifications that influenced his novel and attacks Dixon by name (in earlier versions of the novel, characters had criticized Dixon in dialogue). The first section of “The Hindering Hand” is entitled “The Poor White and the Negro” and begins with a curiously sympathetic and humanizing rationalization for the hatred that these whites felt for blacks: “From the door of a squalid home, situated mayhaps upon a somewhat decent spot in a marsh or upon the very poorest of soil, the poor white man of the South, prior to his emancipation by the Civil War, looked out upon a world whose honors and emoluments cast no favoring glances in his direction.”95 In Griggs’s reckoning, the poor whites’ attitude stems, however, from the judgment leveled upon them by their supposed superiors: “Between the poor white and his every earthly hope stood the Negro slave. As his thoughts now and then stole upward toward the higher social circles, he realized that the absence of slave quarters from his home entailed his absence from those upper realms. If in the marts of toil he offered the labor of his hands, he felt his cheeks tingling from the

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consciousness that others regarded him as being upon a level with slaves.” This idea, that other whites equate them with slaves, emphasizes that whiteness is not necessarily stolid and dominant. Griggs notes that even slaves understand this weaker form of whiteness: “So utterly forlorn was the condition of the poor white that the enslaved Negro felt justified in meeting his protruding claim of racial superiority with contemptuous scorn. In the very nature of things the strongest sort of repulsion developed between this class of whites and the Negro slaves.”96 Griggs maneuvers readers to understand that this attitude was inculcated into poor whites by the wealthy, that because of the fact that they also were forced to labor “on the plantations of the more wealthy whites” that “it thus came to pass that the poor white man registered it as his duty to wreak vengeance upon this unbowing, scornful Negro standing between him and all that was dear to his heart,” an attitude that would be passed “from father to son, from generation to generation,” until it reached the time of the present, where lynch law reigns supreme.97 Perhaps Griggs’s most incisive point regarding poverty in his appendix comes from an insinuation that Dixon’s vilification of poor whites derives from a sense of personal shame and deflection. He notes that Dixon “does not hail from the more wealthy and more friendly element of southern whites, but from mingling with the poorer classes. . . . For, before Mr. Dixon’s marriage he was a poor man and was viewed by the Negroes of Raleigh, NC, as one belonging to the class of their hereditary enemies.”98 He notes that Dixon’s work is an attempt to “stir up the baser passions of men” and to continue the marginalizing ideology that Dixon will fall victim to in his ability to present whites as a solid front standing against blackness in The Traitor. After a thorough breakdown of Dixon’s racism, Griggs closes the section with a memorable imaginary epitaph for Dixon: This misguided soul ignored all of the good in the aspiring Negro; made every vicious offshoot that he pictured typical of the entire race; presented all mistakes independent of their environments and provocations; ignored or minimized all the evil in the more vicious element of whites; said and did all things which he deemed necessary to leave behind him the greatest heritage of hatred the world has ever known. Humanity claims him not as one of her children.99

While imagining Dixon’s response to this inspires schadenfreude of the most delicious variety, it bears noting that Griggs is not simply calling out Dixon as a racist, but rather presenting this epitaph as the culmination of a widespread condemnation that also considers Dixon’s treatment of poor white characters, as seen in his prolonged discussion of such southerners above. Thus, despite the

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obviously propagandistic tone of the appendix and the entirety of The Hindered Hand, Griggs successfully demonstrates the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of white supremacy, noting an inability to reconcile hatred and anxiety over poor whites with racist thought. As we will see, among black authors, Griggs was not alone in understanding these ideological gaps; Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream presents a prolonged and complex discussion of the relationship between white supremacy and prejudice against poor whites. While Chesnutt’s responses to the plantation genre remain his most popular and well-read texts, his novels also provide rich considerations of not only the hardships facing African Americans but also the hypocrisies present in the works of his white contemporaries. While his 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream is not a direct response to Dixon in the manner that Griggs’s The Hindered Hand is (or how Chesnutt’s conjure tales respond to Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales), the work thoroughly interrogate the hypocrisies underlining white supremacy, in particular the disgust toward poor whites. While the titular Colonel Henry French is hardly a virulent racist in the mode of Dixon’s characters, his form of benevolent, patronizing racism further underscores and sheds light upon southern ideology of the time. As detailed in the opening pages, French is an ex-Confederate soldier turned wealthy New York businessman; worth mentioning is that from the outset, a recently concluded deal is noted as beneficial for him and not for his employees: “The clerks were not especially cheerful; the impending change meant for them, at best, a change of masters, and for many of them, the loss of employment.”100 After the introductory parlay (which leaves him financially set in perpetuity), French returns to his hometown of Clarendon, North Carolina, with his son to see how the town has developed over the years. What transpires for French is both a masterclass in white liberal racism and paternalism, as he seeks to reinstall the supposedly “good” parts of antebellum life, all the while revealing a growing prejudice toward fellow whites, if they happen to be poor. The Colonel’s Dream presents conflicting approaches to post-slavery southern economics; benevolent paternalism (read, liberal racism) espoused by Colonel French, and more direct exploitation at the hands of William Fetters, a formerly poor white man who has achieved great success from the convict labor system. Throughout the early sections of the novel, Chesnutt presents French’s paternalism and desire to reinstate an Old South ideology that he considers more desirable than the current racial exploitation currently taking place at the hands of upstart white men like Fetters. In crafting French as a supposed liberal white, someone disgusted by current mistreatment of blacks, Chesnutt ironically comments upon the colonel’s ultimately naïve and misguided belief in his own moral superiority to the poor whites whom he openly despises.

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Whereas French believes in the myths of the Old South, of the supposed possibility of benevolent slave ownership, Fetters does not; instead, he is a keen and shrewd adept to the evolving systems of segregation, profiting on the black body without French’s half-hearted scruples. From the first moments of his arrival, French sets out to reestablish his identity as a southern aristocrat. With the novel’s antagonist Fetters in the backdrop in these early chapters, French’s desire to recreate the Old South is presented in a manner that slowly reveals the racist paternalism that fuels his interests, thus undermining the very “dream” of the title. While some trappings of the past remain—for example, the narrator remarks “we shall henceforth call him the colonel, because the scene of this story is lain in the South, where titles are seldom ignored, and where the colonel could hardly have escaped his own, even had he desired to do so”—the colonel must implement and reinsert others.101 The first and most obvious example arises from his interaction with his old family slave, Peter, whom he spots taking care of the family cemetery. French engages Peter in conversation, granting the latter the opportunity to espouse his sense of “family pride”; for example, he has kept the French last name because “it wuz good ’nuff fer me, suh; dey ain’ none better,” an expostulation of loyalty which, as the narrator remarks, “to the unsympathetic outsider might have seemed grotesque,” though the colonel is moved “deeply.”102 Each in its ordered place, then, for the colonel, who revels in this opportunity to imbue his son with the trappings of aristocracy and class supremacy he holds dear; in addition, the narrator reveals that French “had taught Phil to call the old man ‘Uncle Peter,’ after the kindly southern fashion of slavery days.”103 Later, the colonel decides to throw a housewarming soirée that reflects antebellum traditions, stating he wants “an old-time party” with “old-time amusements. We must have a fiddler, a black fiddler to play quadrilles and the Virginia reel.”104 The party is replete with nostalgia, including Peter playing the role of butler, as well as “an old-time Negro fiddler, whom Peter had resurrected from some obscure cabin.”105 Shirley Moody-Turner explores the colonel’s investment in the past, both here and elsewhere: “French, in effect, is attempting to restore/create the antebellum South of his imagination by repossessing symbols of the past to ease his own modern anxieties; the authenticity, vigor, and vitality he associates with the past serve as a panacea for the sterile and inauthentic present.”106 French’s disdain for this present stems not only from his nostalgia—he laments the fact that the “loquacious, fun-loving Negroes of the colonel’s youth seemed to have disappeared,” but also his growing antipathy to the new southernness exhibited by the likes of Fetters.107 Fetters, a labor contractor who is offstage for much of the first half of the novel, represents an element of the New South that French is loath to admit

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exists. Fetters’s class ascendancy is troubling to the colonel, who recollects that “Fetters had been a character in Clarendon—not an admirable character, scarcely a good character, almost a bad character; a necessary adjunct of an evil system, and, like other parasites, worse than the body on which he fed.”108 The colonel immediately recognizes his love interest Laura’s disdain for the man; as she describes the family’s recent history, he detects “a touch of bitterness in her tone, the instinctive resentment (the colonel thought) of the born aristocrat toward the upstart who had pushed his way above those no longer strong enough to resist.” However, at this juncture the narrator remarks that, in spite of being a gentleman, the colonel “had lived too many years among those who judged the tree by its fruit, to think that blood alone entitled him to any special privileges” and that “he was glad Fetters had got on in the world.”109 This is a significant statement as it is later revealed, when the colonel finally converses with Fetters, that he had once “chased [Fetters] down Main Street”—an incident Fetters claims he has never forgotten.110 His experience in Clarendon will compromise his statements early in the novel, illustrating the colonel’s belief, despite his statement to the contrary, in the natal endowment of aristocratic privilege which has been dismantled in the New South. Gone are the days when aristocrats could chase their supposed class inferiors through the streets. As the colonel becomes more entangled with Clarendon and his drive to improve the town, he becomes aware of Fetters’s profound stranglehold on the area: “Fetters had begun to worry the colonel. He had never seen the man, and yet his influence was everywhere. He seemed to brood over the country round about like a great vampire bat, sucking the life-blood of the people. His touch meant blight. As soon as a Fetters mortgage rested on a place, the property began to run down.”111 After again referring to Fetters as a “parasite,” the colonel envisions himself a savior, out to “rescue Clarendon from the grasp of Fetters,” acknowledging that he has entered into the “spirit” of an “undefined contest” with the man.112 While Fetters is clearly an unscrupulous character, dedicated to his own economic livelihood above all else, the colonel’s certainty about the morality of his own actions illustrates his aristocratic elitism; gone is the thought that he was pleased for Fetters’s class ascension, replaced instead by an inherent distrust of the upstart who has risen above his lower class origins. This attitude will later gain traction in Faulkner’s analysis of the white trash Snopeses, as Flem, reprehensible though he may be, faces outright criticism from the town of Jefferson long before his most ruthless actions. French’s anxiety about Fetters’s class mobility reinforces his nostalgia for a bygone and romanticized era of an aristocratic and benevolent planter class, one that kept not only blacks in their place, but also the likes of Fetters.

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Perhaps most significant is French’s own problematic response to the convict auction. While the colonel takes umbrage at the idea that men can bid to free convicts in return for months or years of servitude (and lining Fetters’s pockets), he fails to note its obvious similarity to slavery. In bidding for his own family’s former slave Peter (who had been arrested for the dubious charge of “vagrancy”), French is further enmeshed in the same system that Fetters champions. French continues to ignore the obvious parallels to Fetters that Chesnutt is drawing: both are aggressive businessmen—consider the plight of the clerks at the opening of the novel, many of whom are preparing to lose their jobs—and both men seek to remodel and control Clarendon’s economy as best they see fit. The colonel’s surprise at Fetters’s appearance is telling in that it emphasizes his willful ignorance: He had expected to meet a tall, long-haired, red-faced, truculent individual, in a slouch hat and a frock coat, with a loud voice and a dictatorial manner, the typical southerner of melodrama. He was a keen-eyed, hard-faced, small man, slightly gray, clean shaven, wearing a well-fitting city-made business suit of light tweed. Except for a few little indications, such as the lack of a crease in his trousers, Fetters looked like any one of a hundred businessmen whom the colonel might have met on Broadway in any given fifteen minutes during business hours.113

Since the colonel himself is a hybrid figure, a southern gentleman turned northern businessman turned virtual carpetbagger and reformist, he should not be surprised at Fetters’s appearance, but his insistent belief in the innate superiority of the aristocratic class continues to blind him to the new realities of the town and the South at large. Ironically, although the colonel expected Fetters to be a southern gentleman, he frequently proclaims himself superior to his rival without noticing their abundant similarities as businessmen; Ryan Simmons remarks that both men are “exemplary capitalists” who are “defined by an economic system that is blind to its consequences and bending to its adherents’ ethical ideas.”114 Fetters’s success over the colonel, however, is largely due to his greater sense of pragmatism, even if it is based in ruthless selfpreservation and racism. The Colonel’s Dream culminates in the untimely deaths of the colonel’s son, Phil, and his loyal retainer, Peter. Seeking to honor his son’s wishes, French hopes to bury the pair next to one another, with the naïve (and patronizingly racist) belief that because “Old Peter’s skin was black, but his heart was white as any man’s!” the town would accept this gesture of racial solidarity. Even though the colonel’s own championing of whiteness is evident here—he continues his appeal by stating “when a man reaches the grave, he is not far from God, who

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is no respecter of persons, and in whose presence, on the judgment day, many a white man shall be black, and many a black man white,” which makes clear his belief in the inferiority of blackness—he fails to acknowledge the town’s overtly racist mindset.115 Fittingly, it is not one of the colonel’s class peers who openly critiques him, but rather members of the cemetery board, including the town mayor, who “had sprung from the same class as Fetters, that of the aspiring poor whites, who, freed from the moral incubus of slavery, had by force of numbers and ambition secured political control of the State and relegated not only the Negroes, but the old master class, to political obscurity. A shrewd, capable man was the mayor, who despised Negroes and distrusted aristocrats.”116 Though these words are spoken by the narrator rather than French, the passage does mark “aspiring poor whites” as a powerful class, one that, both politically and socially (the mayor’s distrust of aristocrats), poses a threat to French’s livelihood and which have disgusted him the entire novel. The mayor and his companions attempt to talk French out of his convictions, declaring, “The attitude of the white people on the Negro question is fixed and determined for all time, and nothing can ever alter it.”117 The colonel, holding firm to his convictions, buries Peter in the cemetery and finds himself surprised at the inexorable outcome— Peter’s exhumation, along with a note nailed to the front of the coffin: “Kurnell French: Take notis. Berry yore ole nigger somewhar else. He can’t stay in Oak Semitury. The majority of the white people of this town, who dident tend yore nigger funarl, woant have him there. Niggers by there selves, white peepul by there selves, and them that lives in our town must bide by our rules. By order of CUMMITY.”118 The note is worth quoting in full both because of the way in which the idiosyncratic spelling marks the perpetrators as likely being lower class and poorly educated, but more importantly, in its insistence that French has willfully overlooked and ignored the influence of such citizens in town society, instead subscribing fully to the moral uprightness of his own decisions. Earlier, he had been warned by Laura that the town would hardly accept even the mildest notion of racial equality when he seeks to build a public library. When she had asked the colonel if blacks would be permitted to use it, the colonel replied, “Why not? . . . Do they not need it most?” After Laura tells him that whites “wouldn’t wish to handle the same books,” the colonel immediately acquiesces, stating “then we will give the colored folks a library of their own, at some place convenient for their use. We need not strain our ideal by going too fast.”119 When it comes time to bury Peter, however, French once again overlooks the whims of the lower class, believing his class superiority has granted him an elevated sense of morality. In closing, Chesnutt’s ironic commentary about the similarities between racism and class prejudice manifests in one other noteworthy example. Graci-

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ella (Laura’s niece) has frequently turned down marriage proposals from Ben Dudley, whose father has nearly lost his mind looking for buried gold. Having rejected him because of his supposed financial inability to care for her and a family, Graciella at times turns her eye toward the colonel, in spite of his stated interest in her aunt. This of course does not come to pass; French, dispirited over the town’s actions and his dismay that he has apparently been bested by the likes of Fetters, has slinked back to New York. Resigned to life with Ben, Graciella offers a wry commentary on the novel’s climatic events. After Peter’s exhumation, she exclaims, “Peter was a good old nigger, and it wouldn’t have done anybody any harm to leave him there. I’d rather be buried beside old Peter than near any of the poor white trash that dug him up—so there!”120 While the line offers a mild critique of the town’s racism, this is compromised both by her condescending reference to Peter as merely a “good old nigger” and in her class bias against those who dug him up, who are denigrated and labeled as trash. Ben agrees, and tries to comfort her a few weeks later, when Graciella is despondent over what she perceives as a future of poverty married to Ben, a future as “a poor white man’s wife.” Ben counters with, “No, Graciella, we might be poor, but not poor-white! Our blood will still be of the best.”121 By boasting that their blood “will still be of the best,” Ben implies that his class inferiors are also his racial inferiors. Here, in more concrete terms than the colonel or any of Dixon’s protagonists was ever willing to admit, two white characters acknowledge their own racial anxiety toward lower class whites, a theme explored even more fully in the next several decades of southern literature.

TWO

“IT AIN’T HARDLY WORTH THE TROUBLE TO GO ON LIVING” The Reaction to Abject Poverty in Erskine Caldwell

Though his childhood did not mirror the horrors faced by the Lesters, Waldens, or any of his other literary creations, Erskine Caldwell grew up acutely aware of the crippling poverty endemic to millions in the South. As Dan Miller describes it, Caldwell “saw families of fourteen crammed into dilapidated tarpaper shacks and thirteen-year-old girls (themselves with children of their own) bent and aged from the effects of malnutrition. He observed the offspring of incestuous unions—toddlers with blank stares and birth defects” during many of his trips throughout the countryside with his father, a minister with a lifelong commitment to raising awareness and helping the impoverished.1 In addition to witnessing abject poverty, Caldwell gained from an early age an insight into the South’s complex racial ideology; in his memoir With All My Might, Caldwell recalls times when, as a teenager, he would mingle with black mill workers who, in rare unguarded moments, would tell stories “startling with insight and implications that revealed the inherent anxiety of black people living in the shadow of white people.”2 Throughout his career, particularly in his best-selling novels Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, Caldwell provided a glimpse into some of the ugliest aspects of southern race relations, with considerable attention paid to the treatment of those deemed white trash. In addition, Erskine Caldwell’s writings as an eyewitness reporter stems from a desire to offer a corrective to the nostalgia he felt had dominated and obscured the true hardships of life for so many of the region’s rural residents. This chapter explores the crippling poverty facing Caldwell’s white trash characters alongside the author’s other efforts to shed light on the rural South, revealing his hope that with widespread awareness, the nation at large could no longer ignore the plight of so many poor southerners. 53

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Writing only a quarter century after the likes of Dixon, Caldwell was part of the tradition in southern letters that emerged in the wake of H. L. Mencken’s infamous 1917 “The Sahara of the Bozart” essay. Mencken, it bears noting, scarcely hides his disdain not merely for southern culture in general but the poor in particular, as he derides those currently living on “worn-out farms” and notes that while “the Ur-Confederate had leisure. He liked to toy with ideas. He was hospitable and tolerant. He had the vague thing that we call culture,” there exists in the area now “only a mob of peasants on the field.”3 He notes that “Georgia is perhaps the worst” of the South, and characterizes it as “crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious,” before specifically damning poor whites as being of “the worst blood of western Europe.”4 Mencken notes that because “poor white trash” have “never been investigated scientifically,” then the generalization that they “are purely Anglo-Saxon in blood” is likely false.5 He even notes the anxiety surrounding poor whites in direct relation to blacks; he claims that because southern gentry preferred “mulatto mistresses,” then their “best white blood of the South, and perhaps of the whole country” never comingled with that of poor whites, who exist solely to be despised.6 Mencken’s essay, of course, has been resoundingly critiqued by both contemporaneous southerners and contemporary scholars, particularly for its pseudoscientific racism. Yet the essay still stands as a fulcrum linking southern literature from the nostalgia so noted in the Lost Cause through the modernist flourishing of the likes of Faulkner, Wolfe, and Roberts in the 1920s and early 1930s. And while these figures have rightly been seen as productively and emphatically responding to Mencken’s totalizing condemnation of the South, viewing Erskine Caldwell’s work in light of Mencken’s specific disdain for the poor further establishes the novelist’s significance as a southern literary figure of the era and also provides a significant rejoinder to Mencken’s claims. Though the southern literary renaissance has been championed in light of its relationship to modernist experimentation, Caldwell’s writing more closely aligns with late nineteenth-century realism, with the Gilded Age metropolis replaced by an unvarnished regard for the plight of poor whites in the rural South. Writing in the early years of the Depression, Caldwell’s work is stripped of the kinds of nostalgic yearning that proliferate in Lost Cause–era literature and focuses on a deeply uncertain future. Though as we will see, Caldwell’s attitude toward the poor is complex—at times sympathetic, at times disgusted—his work provides an important advance in southern depictions of the poor, one that moves beyond the tensions noted by Dixon and his ilk and one that responds strongly against Mencken’s brash contempt. While both Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933) met with critical acclaim, it was not until the 1933 Broadway production and subsequent nation-

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wide tour of a theatrical version of Tobacco Road that Caldwell’s popularity skyrocketed, with over seven million people estimated to have seen the play. While Jack Kirby, in a discussion of William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (which chronicled the citizenry between North Carolina and Virginia) notes that Byrd is often “credited with invention of the ‘poor white trash’ stereotypes when he encountered shiftless ‘lubbers’ (as he termed them) in the Great Dismal Swamp,” Tobacco Road served as America’s chief literary encapsulation of the poor white experience of the early twentieth century.7 Regarding Byrd, Robert McDonald adds that his texts “helped form the stereotype of the poor white as idiotic, immoral, and—above all—inert” and that he “also established precedents for the two opposing ethical positions that would later be taken by an array of literary and political partisans. Environmental determinists would blame ecology, climate, disease, and diet, while genetic determinists would argue something closer to inherent depravity.”8 The conflict between environmental determinism and inherent genetic inferiority is displayed throughout Tobacco Road. Caldwell, aware of the nationwide willful ignorance regarding the plight of many southerners during the Great Depression, felt prompted to engage his audience through both his fiction as well as articles and interviews where he defends his texts and further condemns the tenant farming system and lack of government assistance. Indeed, surveying contemporary reviews underscores the idea that critics and readers felt anxiety regarding the Lesters’ actions. Reviews also corroborated the treatment of Caldwell’s characters as subhuman, with many reviewers echoing the attitudes made by outsiders regarding the Lesters and revealing the pervasiveness of their own anxiety. In his review in the Saturday Review of Literature, Jonathan Daniels regards Caldwell as voyeuristic, claiming, “Like a man watching an ant hill full of creatures far less intelligent than ants, Erskine Caldwell, in his new novel, Tobacco Road, has written the story of the degraded life of a poor white family in the sand hills of Georgia. He has undertaken the supremely difficult task of presenting at the same time both the starvation and the ludicrousness in the lives of these people, and in general he has succeeded.” Caldwell’s aesthetics are judged here by his ability (or lack thereof) to apply realism to people regarded by the reviewer as ludicrous, an attitude further illustrated in the succeeding quote: “Dealing with characters too sodden of mind and slothful of body to possess positive vigor of any sort, Mr. Caldwell seems to have no intent that his book should be dramatic or moving.”9 Caldwell also faced criticism from Edward Dahlberg, writing for the New Republic, who remarked, “Not until Mr. Caldwell has learned to make poverty, hunger and sex something that can be nostalgically mistaken for art rather than truth will his writings be widely praised—at least that is one reader’s guess.”10 This curious comment seems to

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downplay Caldwell’s aesthetic capability while ignoring the possibility that Caldwell wished to emphasize a type of gritty realism in his development of the family’s plight. And yet, despite the aforementioned criticism, several critics acknowledged Caldwell’s attempts to force readers to acknowledge a side of American culture they were all too willing to ignore. J. H. Marion offers a critique of earlier southern literature as being overly concerned with romanticism: “Until recently southerners have been much too sentimental, on the whole, in their views of literature. If one must read books, we have said, let them be scented with fragrance of honeysuckle! Let stories be written with the perfume of magnolias flooding the author’s nostrils! Let the odors of injustice and vice be carefully sealed in the bottle of social indifference.” Afterward, he celebrates Caldwell’s realism, lauding it as an affront to the moonlight and magnolias school and thus an evolution in southern literary aesthetics: “Frankness is no longer the sin against gentility it once was. Erskine Caldwell digs around in southern muck, flings the muck into the literary sky (smack among the magnolias!) and the South—part of it, anyway—watches. . . . With no pretense of being a prophet or reformer (he would laugh if you called him either!) Caldwell throws a beam of uncolored light upon one segment of a demoralizing social system.”11 James Gray acknowledges the general public’s willful ignorance regarding the nation’s poverty: “We are blandly unconscious in America of the squalor that exists in hidden corners. Tobacco Road should be read aloud to everyone who has ever made a glib, ignorant generalization about the high standard of life in the United States.”12 John Donald Wade offers perhaps the most useful summary of responses to Caldwell’s material: The well adapted and superbly acted play based on the book has for several years kept New Yorkers and their visitors interested in a matter they might otherwise have forgotten. As ordinary human beings they have been exhilarated by the special quality of the book that the liberal courts of our time are always busying themselves to declare within the bounds of decency. They have learned a great deal about an alien and primitive people. And they have had their vanity flattered (never was a New Yorker so depraved) and their consciences set easy (if the people whom the Civil War disrupted were of this stamp, then disruption was what was the best for them).13

Wade hints at a chief tenet of Caldwell’s fiction, namely, that all who observe the likes of the Lesters and the Waldens regard them as subhuman. Elsewhere in his analysis, however, Wade provides reactions which validate Caldwell’s decision to portray such alienating characters. In his summary of the novel, he

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voices what these characters often only hint at; of the Lesters, he states, “Liars and thieves, they are filthy, lazy, blasphemous and cruel, and as lecherous as monkeys. They are everything, in short, that the human creature is when he abandons all of his restraints and inhibitions.”14 And in an even more direct revelation of anxiety, Bennett Cerf, whilst reviewing God’s Little Acre, remarks, “I do not doubt for an instant that there actually exist people like the characters in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. I simply say that if almost any one of them were to march, unannounced, into the world that I travel in, he would create about as great a sensation as a wild elephant or a naked cannibal brandishing a spear.”15 The “naked cannibal” line is especially interesting, equating the Lesters and Waldens with a group of people—undoubtedly black, in Cerf ’s reckoning—who would be commonly understood as racially inferior. Cerf further distances himself racially from the Waldens by stating they are “a foreign species to me, with emotions and reactions that I not only have never experienced myself, but have never even heard of before.”16 Prevailing throughout these considerations of the novel is a sense that Caldwell was writing about a group of people utterly alien to proper sensibility. While whiteness may not be named here, our understanding that the characters are white heightens the tension; reviewers shy away from aligning their plight with economic concerns that run throughout America in the 1930s and instead seek to marginalize and denigrate Caldwell’s creations as Other, as inferior, and as trash. One of the elements that runs throughout the early reviews and analyses of Tobacco Road is the difficulty for readers to sympathize with the Lesters, which results in an implicit understanding that the family causes anxiety for readers forced to acknowledge the existence of the squalid universe which houses the family. In a reader-response driven analysis of Tobacco Road, Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. observes that, “to realize a bond of sympathy and identification with the Lesters is not a flattering experience for anyone. The typical reader will go to any length to resist such a move by holding fast to his detached and condescending stance.” Regarding the townspeople who denigrate the family, he notes that, “their laughter at and abuse of the Lesters and Bessie is a grotesque manifestation of the attitudes of the unsympathetic reader who also laughs at the Lesters.”17 Readers are thus aligned with various characters in the book, nearly all of whom make fun of or take advantage of the Lesters. What goes unstated in these views is the acknowledgment that the anxiety and concerns regarding the family are somehow biologically inferior, and thus a “lesser” representation of whiteness. Delving into the novel itself brings to light the ways in which Caldwell upsets reader expectations by treading the fine line of making the Lesters human characters with ambitions, hopes, and desires, and also something less

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than human, objects or creatures that are to be leered at by voyeuristic outsiders, incredulous at what they witness. The famed opening scene immediately establishes the Lesters as, in the limited perspective of Lov Bensey, more animal than human. Lov observes that, “four or five of the Lesters were standing in the yard,” followed shortly thereafter by Lov being sure “not to allow any of the Lesters to come too close” to the turnips which he has just purchased.18 The repeated reference to them as “the Lesters,” along with the indeterminate notation of their quantity and Lov’s uneasiness at their presence likens the family to some type of animal, particularly a scavenger or pest. The narration quickly brings to light Lov’s anxiety around the Lesters, telling us that whenever he walked by “with any kind of food,” he “left the road half a mile from the house and made a wide circle through the fields, returning to the road a safe distance beyond.”19 The Lesters are thus further established as pests or vermin, a type of characterization later used to describe Faulkner’s Snopes family. And yet as the reasons for Lov’s expedition to the Lesters’ come to light—namely, that he wishes for Jeeter to make his daughter Pearl, Lov’s wife, sleep with him—it is Lov, not Jeeter or his family, who comes across as depraved or immoral, especially once we learn that Pearl is only twelve years old. Most damning is the narrator’s revelation that Lov “kicked her, he poured water over her, he threw rocks and sticks at her,” to the point where “she cried a lot, especially when she was seriously hurt.” The narrator’s ironic follow-up, that Lov did not consider crying as “conversation” emphasizes the man’s brutishness and his chauvinistic and possessive attitude toward women. As with the Snopes family, readers immediately gain a perspective regarding the Lesters—that they must be avoided lest they steal Lov’s food—and yet the narrative frame from which this information is garnered is itself problematic and latent with hypocrisy. Throughout the opening scene, the Lesters do reveal themselves to be worthy of Lov’s trepidation, as Jeeter ends up ravenously eating the turnips, but Caldwell carefully intersperses details about their lives and financial situation, rendering them pitiable and more human than Lov is willing to acknowledge. As Lov bemoans his inability to communicate with his wife, the Lesters stare hungrily at his sack of turnips; the narrator tells us, “There had been very little in the house again that day to eat; some salty soup Ada had made by boiling several fatback rinds in a pan of water, and corn bread, was all there was when they had sat down to eat. There had not been enough to go around even then, and the old grandmother had been shoved out of the kitchen when she tried to come inside.”20 While Jeeter’s constant questioning of where Lov got his turnips from is exasperating, the narrator’s remark does reveal a bit of Jeeter’s past, namely, that financial security has always been foreign and untenable for the family: “It did not occur to him that Lov had bought them with money; Jeeter

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had long before come to the conclusion that the only possible way a quantity of food could be obtained was by theft.”21 As many reviewers and critics noted and Caldwell illuminates through Jeeter’s lengthy ruminations, the tenant farming system earns the bulk of Caldwell’s ire. While the introduction establishes the Lesters as impoverished to the point of starvation, the opening scene is coupled with a depiction of the family’s, chiefly Jeeter’s, animalistic greed, which makes reader identification with Jeeter difficult. Elsewhere, however, Caldwell seeks to elicit sympathy for the family, with Jeeter serving as the (perhaps) surprising vessel for his aims. Most poignant is Jeeter’s recollection of his father’s death; while reflecting on his present condition—the narrator tells us, “There was nothing Jeeter could find to do in the sand hills that would pay him even a few cents a day for his labor. There were no farmers within twenty miles who hired help, because practically all of them were in Jeeter’s condition, some of them in an even worse one.”22 Though Tobacco Road is a fictional case study for one family, the narrator confirms that they are not alone in their plight, so it becomes more difficult to regard the family as unique or exceptional in their depravity. Jeeter’s personal history adds a layer of complexity that raises reader sympathy; we are told that his hope that his son Tom would give him some money is his “sustaining strength,” but that behind that belief “lay his fear of dying without a suit of clothes to be buried in. He had developed a growing horror of dying in overalls.”23 Adding to this fear, Jeeter’s wife Ada—who, along with the grandmother, suffers from pellagra—“believed she would die almost any day” and was “usually surprised to wake up in the morning and discover that she was still alive.”24 Jeeter’s fear of death is memorably tied to the horrific circumstances surrounding his father. After the elder Lester—who, it bears noting, lived in the same house as Jeeter, implying the generational nature of the family’s poverty—died, his body, lying in the corn crib, was partially consumed by a giant rat, a fact revealed moments before the burial. Jeeter’s reaction is moving: “Jeeter closed the lid and had the box lowered into the grave immediately. He had never forgotten that day.”25 Caldwell also uses Jeeter as a tool in his blistering critique of the tenant farm system which has left the Lester family in such a state that they and their kind are considered biologically inferior. Before returning to various characters’ reactions toward the Lesters, we can consider the moments where Caldwell turns Jeeter into a symbol of, if not quite resistance, at least proletarian defiance. For all Jeeter’s faults and in spite of his unparalleled laziness, his abiding love of the land is undeniable: “The warm late February days had kindled in him once more the desire to farm the land. Each year at that season he made a new effort to break the ground and to find means of buying seed-cotton and guano on credit from the merchants in Fuller.”26 The narrator puts this even more

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bluntly when stating, “There was an inherited love of the land in Jeeter that all his disastrous experiences with farming had failed to take away. He had lived his whole life there on a small remnant of the Lester plantation, and while he realized it was not his legally, he felt that he would die if he had to move away from it.”27 Coupled with Jeeter’s almost romantic infatuation with the land is Caldwell’s damning investigation of the nature and outcome of tenant farming. As Jeeter goes through his annual ritual of setting out to plant a cotton crop—which he has not succeeded in doing in some time—he reflects upon the manipulative nature of loan companies; we are told that after Jeeter was unable to pay his initial interest, “they added the interest to the principal, and charged him interest on that, too.”28 The conclusion, which reduces Jeeter’s plight into a quantifiable, economically locatable state, reveals the height of Caldwell’s ire: Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars, and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year’s labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and he had furnished the land and mule, too. He was even then still in debt, because he owed ten dollars for the hire of the mule he had used to raise the cotton. With Lov and Ada’s help, he discovered that he had actually lost three dollars.29

Jeeter reacts strongly, condemning the “rich people in Augusta” and expressing hope that God “ain’t so liking of you rich people as you think He is. God, He likes the poor.”30 We sympathize here with Jeeter, even as he remains steadfastly resistant to those who tell him to abandon farming and instead work in a mill or factory. But Jeeter is intrinsically tied to the land, foreshadowing a theme memorably displayed later in the decade in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, where Grandfather Joad dies almost immediately after the family has piled into the truck to head west. Of Jeeter, the narrator explains the “urge he felt to stir the ground and to plant cotton” was “greater than the pains of hunger in his stomach. He could sit calmly and bear the feeling of hunger, but to be compelled to live and look each day at the unplowed fields was an agony he believed he could not stand many more days.”31 Returning to the opening scene with knowledge of Jeeter’s uncharacteristically poignant thoughts about the land opens up our interpretation of his actions and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the novel’s racial hierarchy. That the family faces class-based prejudice is obvious; that they face racially motivated denigration is at first less clear. In his preface to the novel, Lewis Nordan gestures toward this: “When we accused others of living on Tobacco Road, we were distancing ourselves from a sociological stratum of society that we were afraid of being associated with, for that is how we—or I, anyway—

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understood Tobacco Road, as a sociological statement about a region.”32 In addition to Lov’s trepidation regarding his wife’s family, the opening scene reveals the reactions of a number of unnamed black observers. Racism against blacks abounds in Tobacco Road. Most memorable is Caldwell’s echo of Huckleberry Finn; in Twain’s novel, Huck, responding to a question if anyone was hurt in a steamboat incident, answers “No’m. Killed a nigger,” emphasizing his awareness that a black death would scarcely be noteworthy in the South’s ontology. In Tobacco Road, Dude, happily driving Bessie’s new car and blasting the horn for all to hear, runs into a wagon driven by a black man. Bessie describes the scene: “The nigger driving it ought to have had enough sense to get out of our way when he heard us coming,” to which Dude adds, “It was that nigger. . . . If he hadn’t been asleep on the wagon it wouldn’t have happened at all. He was plumb asleep till it woke him up and threw him out in the ditch.”33 Jeeter asks if he was hurt, only to be told the black man was “lying in the ditch,” his eyes “wide open all the time” after his wagon overturned and landed on him. Jeeter’s callous response is the novel’s clearest encapsulation of racism and insensitivity: “Niggers will get killed. Looks like there ain’t no way to stop it.”34 Later, Jeeter will join the chorus of Dixon’s characters in expressing his anxiety that if Ellie May “stayed here at the house by herself the niggers would haul off and come here by the dozens. The niggers would get her in no time, if she was here by herself.”35 Jeeter’s racism is not surprising, of course, but his inability to note the potential similarities between himself and the blacks is striking; the latter seek to distance themselves from Jeeter’s pitiable condition, while he holds fast to the belief that his whiteness marks him as superior; this idea will be explored more fully by the likes of W. J. Cash and Lillian Smith, who comment at length about how wealthier whites stoke racism amongst the poor. With white racism against blacks firmly established, the idea that various blacks in the novel judge the Lesters would be an especially harsh reality for readers and further ties together the way prejudice functions in the region. Lov introduces the idea of racial hierarchy as he bemoans the fact that “all the niggers make fun of me” because of Pearl’s refusal to sleep with him.36 Later, Lov reflects how he had actually liked Ellie May more than Pearl but “he did not want to have a wife with a harelip. He knew the negroes would laugh at him.”37 Here, the idea of “negroes” is inchoate, as Lov believes that an entire race will mock him. Shortly thereafter, as Ellie May continues her single-minded seduction of Lov, the narrator describes a group of blacks walking up the road where, spotting Lov and Ellie May, they ceased their conversation and “stopped and watched.”38 Dude yells at them, one of whom mockingly calls out, “Howdy, Captain Lov,” and the narrator then explains the blacks’ mindset: “Negroes passing the house were in the habit of looking at the Lesters, but very few of them

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ever had anything to say. Among themselves they talked about the Lesters, and laughed about them; they spoke to other white people, stopping at their houses to talk. Lov was one of the white persons with whom they liked to talk.”39 The narrator here describes the blacks delineating a racial hierarchy, one where the Lesters, who are worthy of laughter and being talked about, are clearly below “other white people” such as Lov. Karen Keely discusses the impact this might have on readers: “to Caldwell’s contemporary, predominantly white audience, the sight of black characters laughing at the Lesters would have been a sign of just how debased the family had become to create such a scene of social inversion.”40 Using laughter as a barometer of the family’s depravity is especially useful. The narrator notes Pearl’s jealousy of the “laughing and carefree” girls who work in the cotton mills, a far cry from her origins: “Down there on the tobacco road no one ever laughed. Down there girls had to chop cotton in the summer, pick it in the fall, and cut fire-wood in winter.”41 And while Ada is correct in surmising that “niggers has got more sense than trying to interfere with white-folks’ business,” that does not preclude the fact that the blacks will laugh and mock the family openly. After Jeeter absconds with Lov’s turnips, the narrator describes the observers: “The negroes were laughing so hard they could not stand up straight.”42 To ensure that readers do not miss his points about the blacks adhering to a racial hierarchy that marginalizes the poor white Lesters, Caldwell tells us, “they were not laughing at Lov, it was the actions of the Lesters that appeared so funny to them.”43 In a brief later scene, Caldwell reveals that the Lesters are considered so marginal that blacks not only do not fear laughing at them but are also willing to challenge them verbally.44 After Bessie’s car stalls, a group of black men drive by, one asking, “What’s the matter with your automobile, white-folks? It looks like it ain’t going to run no more.”45 He repeats the disrespectful “white-folks” line after Jeeter angrily calls him a “nigger,” but before Jeeter is able to establish any sort of verbal or physical dominance, they drive away. Jeeter may be white, but he is not white enough to revel in all of the tangible social and cultural benefits of whiteness. By being openly challenged by blacks who should, in the South’s reckoning, be undeniably inferior to the Lesters, Jeeter’s whiteness is diminished. Louis Palmer observes that the “whiteness of Caldwell’s characters, like that of Faulkner’s poor whites, does not provide them with protection, nor does it provide a characteristic of shared identity for the reader.”46 Jeeter is thus impotent in the face of such difficulty and unable to capitalize on the social worth of his race. White characters, too, regard the Lesters as depraved and inferior. While Lov walks out of his way to avoid interacting with the family, others regard them with a disdainful, mocking eye. When Bessie and Dude head to town to purchase a new automobile, they are treated as objects of curiosity, akin

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to animals in a zoo. The salesmen—like many other characters—are utterly fascinated with Bessie’s boneless nose, as well as the several-decade age gap between her and Dude. Rather than addressing Bessie, the salesman beckons a coworker to gawk at her and Dude: “‘Come here quick, Harry!’ he said. ‘I got a real sight to show you.’”47 While Bessie and Dude stand there, the salesmen argue about them: “‘Has she got any money?’ Harry asked him. ‘Don’t waste no time fooling with her if she ain’t. There’a a lot of them just like her who come in here from the country and never buy nothing.”48 The repeated use of “them” continues as Harry accuses country people of being dishonest when he says, “Some of them people out in the country do some tricky things sometimes. She might have found the checkbook and filled it out herself.”49 Similar to the constant denigration of poor whites elsewhere in literature, like Faulkner’s Snopeses, here Caldwell shows how people in a more comfortable financial situation, working as salesmen, derisively mock their perceived inferiors. Most egregious is their decision to blatantly swindle Bessie, by telling her that the first car they spot costs eight hundred dollars, which is the exact amount of money Bessie told them she had. Bessie and Dude’s next stop, at a clerk’s office to arrange their marriage, results in more prejudicial treatment. Upon hearing that Bessie cannot write, the clerk “was about to say something,” only to be stopped by first noticing her nose, which causes him to open his eyes “wider and wider.”50 The clerk then attempts to talk the pair out of getting married on account of Dude’s youth, but Bessie invokes her sense that the clerk, rather than go through a prolonged process, would prefer the matter be handled as quickly as possible. Somewhat cleverly, Bessie takes advantage of a belief that the man will let the age limit slide, as Dude is too young to marry without his parents’ consent. After Ada names Jeeter as the boy’s father, mentioning that he would not care about the marriage, the clerk responds, “Sure, I know Jeeter Lester, and I don’t reckon he does care. Nor his wife, either. I had to give Lov Bensey a license to marry one of the young girls, because Jeeter said he wanted it done. She wasn’t but twelve years old then either, and it was a shame to marry her so young. But it’s in the law, and I had to do it.”51 The clerk is not drawn as negatively as the car salesmen, but his condemnation of the Lesters hints at an unspoken prejudice, particularly regarding his perception of Bessie’s ignorance and his disdain for her desire to marry a sixteen-year-old. Caldwell’s artistic decision to construct a motley arrangement of characters who at times stretch readers’ credulity was a common focal point for early critics and reviewers. In addition to those who commented upon the difficulties of identifying with the family, other critics began offering disapproval of Caldwell’s methods, especially as his oeuvre expanded. In a review of Caldwell’s 1944 novel

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Tragic Ground, Jonathan Daniels wryly notes that Caldwell utilizes humor as a way of garnering readers; he opens his review with the reflective comment, “It seems to me that it is time for some decision as to whether Erskine Caldwell is a writer concerned with the socially significant in the lower depths of American life or whether he has found modern pay dirt in comedy at the expense of the half-wit and the deformed, which so delighted audiences long ago.”52 Daniels, while not entirely castigating Caldwell, notes that his work seems more successful in appealing to readers’ prurient tastes than stirring their consciences, noting, “it is doubtful whether ‘Tragic Ground’ will stir thoughtful readers as much as it pleases those who love a loud and bawdy tale,” and closing by stating, “The American lower depths are very funny, indeed. In ‘Tobacco Road’ they amused more people than even ‘Abie’s Irish Rose’ did. ‘Tragic Ground’ emphasizes the faith that there are still customers who like to laugh at the deformed.”53 Harrison Smith, following along Daniels’s commentary, observes that “almost any critic who attempts to be fair about any of Mr. Caldwell’s latest books has to curb his wrath at his obvious attempt to get a laugh out of the sick souls, the moral delinquents, rapists, idiots, and sadists whom he has turned into cartoon strips of citizens in the South.”54 His language focuses on the most prurient aspect of Caldwell’s literature and undermines its worth by denigrating his characters as “sadists” and “cartoon strips.” The latter comment would have been especially irksome to Caldwell, who sought to justify his work throughout his career. In a letter published in the New Republic, Caldwell claims Tobacco Road “is, in a way, my reaction to the dishonesty of the South Carolina college which taught, by suppression and censorship, that the southern point of view was the true version of the history of the Civil War. And, too, it is my reaction to the present-day attitude in the South of covering up any phase of life that might cast reflection upon southern institutions and people.”55 The latter half of the quote, where Caldwell admonishes his fellow southerners, is a clear encapsulation of his dual political and aesthetic concerns. The realism in Tobacco Road is denied by southerners who believe in romanticizing the current state of the region, a matter no different in Caldwell’s reckoning than those who mythologize the Civil War. Similarly, in an article in the New Leader, he remarks, “One of the reasons why even those Georgians who protest the most loudly against ‘Tobacco Road’ do not know what they are talking about is that they are ignorant of this life either because they are uninformed or because they do not wish to be informed. Of the latter, little else need be said.”56 Caldwell makes it abundantly clear he has little patience for those who derided his work as exaggerated and unrealistic. He also vocalized his interpretation of his audience’s reaction; in an interview discussing the theatrical version of Tobacco Road, he remarks, “When people laugh at the antics of Jeeter Lester, they’re only

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trying to cover up their feelings. They see what they might sink to,” adding part of its appeal is that “everybody sees something of himself in it.”57 The edge to Caldwell’s tone in the interview is more pronounced in his lengthier proclamations about the South as a region, sharing attitudes inculcated in him by his father. Ira Sylvester Caldwell served as a minister in the Associated Reformed Presbyterian church and moved his family around the southeast throughout Erskine’s childhood. From his father, Caldwell gained insight into the daily lives of the poor, and as he grew up, he accompanied his father during the latter’s goodwill missions to assist the denizens of various tobacco roads in Georgia. When Ira began publishing articles denouncing lynching and chain-gang labor, Caldwell voiced his support.58 Perhaps most influential for Caldwell’s career was Ira’s 1929 attempt to help a family of destitute farmers. That year, a family was brought to live in the town of Wrens; as Dan Miller summarizes, “The clan was marked by illiteracy, incest, feeblemindedness, hookworm—all the attendant tragedies of grinding rural poverty. The children were put in school, the father was given a job at the local mill, new clothes and regular meals were donated by the community, and the whole family was encouraged to attend services at the A. R. P. church.”59 Ira’s hopes for the family’s integration into society were thwarted, however, as “within a few months, the children had stopped attending classes, the father had quit his job, and the family had quietly moved back to their dilapidated hovel and barren farm.”60 Ira ultimately expressed his disappointment and anger at the sociological conditions of the region in a five-part article entitled “The Bunglers,” which appeared in the magazine Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment. Whereas many contemporary eugenicists considered inferior genes a rationale for poor whites’ degradation, Ira, and later his son, instead regarded environment as chief among the causes of the “dwarfed intelligences and lean souls that one sees in these humble people.”61 “The Bunglers” certainly influenced Caldwell; not only did his sensitivity toward their economic plight resonate, but he even named characters in Tobacco Road after members of the family, specifically Dude and Jeeter (Dude was the family patriarch, switched to Jeeter in the novel).62 Other families with whom Ira had associated also appear in the novel, and while Caldwell echoes his father’s observations of the family’s amorality and lechery, his work stands more as a stolid reminder of the social injustices and cruel economic practices that have led to their current state. Karen Keely recounts the influence of Caldwell’s father on his thinking: “Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his father’s failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia’s poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution.”63

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As Caldwell continued writing and became recognized for his distinct sense of character, he continued to come under fire, largely by southerners. In addition to scathing letters from readers, which ranged from criticisms of Caldwell’s character to death threats, he faced public opprobrium at the hands of Braswell Deen, a Georgian Congressman, who, when the Tobacco Road tour arrived in Washington, bellowed on the floor of Congress that the play unfairly criticized the region’s inhabitants and was “based on a condition that never existed.”64 The text itself contained “filth, debauchery, vulgarity, and flirtations with immorality,” according to the congressman.65 The New York Post provided Caldwell an outlet in which he could vent his frustrations at critics through the means of writing a series of investigative reports about the state of sharecroppers in the South.66 The articles ultimately argue that environmental degradation and a lack of government support are to blame for the poor state of the South’s citizenry, not any innate sense of inferiority, as is implied by townspeople and others in Caldwell’s works. In his initial article, Caldwell writes that “the State of Georgia provides no direct relief ” and later offers a defense of the state’s citizens: “There is hunger in their eyes as well as in their bellies. They grasp for a word of hope. They plead for a word of advice. . . . None of them wishes to kill and steal. He wishes to work, to secure food for his children, medicine for his wife, clothes for warmth in a winter temperature of 12 degrees below the freezing point.”67 And in the last article of the series, Caldwell uses grotesque imagery to emphasize how much tenant farmers suffer, not as a means, as his critics often suggested, to elicit laughter. He shares a bleak scene: “After a while the girl spoke to the dog and the animal slunk away from the warmth of the fire and lay down again beside the two babies. The infants cuddled against the warmth of the dog’s flanks, searching tearfully for the dry teats.”68 Closer to home, Caldwell found himself under fire by the Augusta Chronicle, which, in response to the New York Post articles remarked, “In his ‘Tobacco Road,’ Caldwell portrayed the ignorance, poverty, depravity and degeneracy of a white family that lived not far from Augusta. That the picture was grossly overdrawn we have always believed.”69 This editorial’s title is noteworthy: “What Will Good People of Jefferson County Say of This?” Such an emphasis creates a clear demarcation between “good people” and not-good people; it implies that the characters in Tobacco Road are inferior to the “good” people of Jefferson County. The anonymous author then turns defensive and attempts to distance the citizenry of Jefferson from the likes of the Lesters, not as a way of critiquing Caldwell but instead as a means of making their own sense of identity and community clear: “Could such horrible condition as Caldwell describes exist in any civilized community? . . . We know many outstanding

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citizens of Jefferson County and we do not believe that they would allow such human wretchedness, poverty and depravity to exist. We have in mind Judge B. F. Walker, of Wrens, Judge John R. Phillips, Mr. Robert Bethea, Dr. John R. Lewis, Mrs. Virginia Polhill Price and other outstanding citizens of Jefferson County.”70 Naming specific citizens, almost certainly prominent white citizens (their numbers include judges and doctors), assures readers that no such poor whites sully the whiteness of their home county. At the end of the article, the author, with an undeniably patronizing and judgmental tone that maintains the sense of distance between well-to-do and poor whites, remarks, Certainly we know that there is poverty, ignorance and consequently the accompanying vices of filth and depravity, among some of the wretched poor whites of our section and we should bestir ourselves to improve the situation, but we cannot believe that a condition exists anywhere in this section of the South such as Erskine Caldwell depicts in his sensational article. And once proven not to be true let’s tell the world about it, so that millions of people in this country may not believe that we are heartless heathens.71

While the author does remark that people should “bestir” themselves and help their poor brethren, the remark rings hollow and is clearly secondary to disproving Caldwell’s depiction of the region. One finishes reading that statement and comes away convinced that the author is far more concerned with telling the world how not depraved, not ignorant, not vice-ridden the South is; in other words, in assuring people that the citizens, by virtue of not possessing such negative traits, are undeniably white. So upsetting was Caldwell’s work that citizens of Jefferson County organized a probe in order to investigate the author’s depictions of rural life, thus taking an organized, institutional stance to maintain (or reclaim) the area’s sense of whiteness.72 Caldwell’s own whiteness also came into question; one letter writer to the New York Post, after stating, “please inform Caldwell that Georgians would prefer that he cease referring to Georgia as his birthplace,” adds “Caldwell’s claim that [Georgia] Governor Talmadge is a dictator may be discounted along with everything else he says. These almost pure-blooded people of Anglo-Saxon strain believe as much as ever in rights.”73 The closing remark that the governor, being of “pure-blooded” “Anglo-Saxon strain,” is infallible in his belief in “rights” (not specified by the letter-writer), shows a willingness to acknowledge race as an arbiter of morality, with the not-so-subtle implication being that Caldwell himself is racially inferior and not pure-blooded. Other readers fail to appreciate Caldwell’s point entirely, and take umbrage at the author’s presentation of anxiety-inducing poor whites; one reader claims the

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author “is seizing upon an isolated instance or two of injustice to tenant farmers by Jefferson County landowners to paint the county as a sink of iniquity.”74 This writer is particularly invested in defending himself and his peers: What Caldwell would term the bourgeoisie of that county are cultured, kindly and humane people. Their attitude toward, and relationship with, the tenant classes, white and colored, is friendly and sympathetic in the highest degree. To be sure there are cases of social injustice in Jefferson County, as there are in every county in every State in the Union. But I have yet to see the community with as low a percentage of social injustice as that one which Caldwell would hold up to the world as a horrible example.75

A strong vein of defensiveness runs through this letter, including the fact that the author attempts to dispel notions that the South is more racist than other sections of the country. Caldwell found some vindication in the series of articles which appeared in the Augusta Chronicle, though the consensus was that Caldwell had indeed exaggerated some of his claims. The anonymous author notes that the report concluded “that there exist families in utter need of rehabilitation, not typical of Jefferson County alone, but such as are to be found in all parts of the country.”76 Still, though, the report makes its own claims which racialize the county’s citizens. Note the frequent use of “they” and “them,” which put the people at arm’s length: “Most of these people are not only poor but wretched, living in want and squalor, victims of their own shiftlessness and ignorance. Their like, authorities point out, are everywhere, the unfortunate substratum of any region’s population.”77 Referring to the impoverished as “the unfortunate substratum” creates an undeniable hierarchy that marginalizes their existence in relation to the writer’s assumed audience of middle-class whites. The hierarchy is then stigmatized from both a class and racial perspective. While the tone of the Augusta Chronicle’s articles includes racially denigrating language, they are generally more neutral and fact-based. What does exist, though, is an element of defensiveness that is also present in various letters from readers. In the fourth article of the Chronicle series, the author writes, “In summing up his survey of county work, Dr. Lewis said ‘no one suffers for food, clothes or medical attention in Jefferson County if we know they are in need,’” which serves as a rebuttal to the condition described in Tobacco Road.78 In addition to defensiveness, we have letter writers playing the role of harsh realists; a reader named L. E. Holmes writes, “Having been a social worker for many years, and dealing with the class of people about whom Mr. Caldwell writes, I submit a suggestion. These people can not be lifted to any standard of normal life as long as they are permitted to control themselves. There should be a place, not

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a prison, but some kind of institution where they may be placed under the law, and forced to stay.”79 Holmes’s letter presents a clear sense of anxiety, where he explicitly desires that this “class of people” be separated from normative (white) society by means of institutionalization. So abominable and disturbing is their presence that Mr. Holmes remarks, “I also suggest a campaign to burn or tear down all the wretched old huts and shacks that are such an eyesore on every farm in the state. If these people could not find these hovels to crawl into, they would not tarry long.”80 Again, we see a dehumanizing reference to the poor as “these people,” along with a comparison to animals seeking shelter. In the letter’s closing lines, Holmes writes of the poor impersonally and without sympathy: “There is no use to be sentimental about the matter. If a patient has a cancer it is cut out. These people are a cancer on society, a menace to themselves and the state; and to perpetuate the condition only increases their number.”81 A similar sentiment was echoed in an editorial in the paper, and, if it can be believed, goes even further in distancing the letter writer and his assumed white and middleclass audience from his subject matter. The author refers to the nigh-impossible “salvation of a small but almost hopelessly degenerate part of the race.”82 But rather than offer sympathy, the author instead sets out to ensure that readers understand the true depths to which this class of people has fallen: “Their brand is not poverty, for the poor are always with us. Weakness is their stigma. They are people incapable of caring for themselves. What their origin was and why they have failed to develop forward, perhaps the social sciences can tell us. That is not our problem.” More dehumanizing uses of “they” and “their” combine with a blatant refusal to offer assistance or support. Insults follow: the author claims the poor live “in squalor and primitive ignorance,” are “breeders of disease and imbecility,” and “are shorn of almost every trace of moral responsibility. In truth, they are humanity’s dregs.” Not surprisingly, the writer also concludes that sterilization “of the unfit” and “institutionalization of the totally irresponsible” would remove the “ugliest blots” of civilization.83 The degree of anger expressed in articles and letters such as these exceeds any sense of threat which usually accompanies fear. What is at stake for writers such as these is the definitional status of humanity; the poor are often described as being subhuman which, in the racial hierarchies of the time, implies a sense of being less than white. Normative middle-class whiteness could not produce such people as the Lesters, the writers seem to argue. And rather than offer sympathy or conciliatory remarks, the majority of those in conversation with Caldwell set out to either discredit him or else manipulate his text as a means of accentuating the inferiority of a particular class of people with whom he held deep sympathies. Caldwell remained undaunted by the criticism and set out to further make clear the importance of acknowledging the presence and conditions of the

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region’s poor. In late March 1935, while traveling through the South in preparation for a second series of articles in the New York Post, Erskine and Ira “were chased out of a county in Alabama, and in Georgia, Erskine had to restrain a knife-toting man who was angered by reports in the Chronicle.”84 And though Caldwell did receive letters of support from farmers, many of whom would have been the direct object of Caldwell’s sympathy, he continued to express his anger both publicly and in print.85 In an April 1935 issue of the New York Post, he responded to critics who felt he had exaggerated his claims: “I could tell of families thrown out of their houses plodding along the public highways of Georgia and dragging their possessions on the ground behind them. I could tell of men, with tears in their eyes, begging fruitlessly while their children starved. I could tell of teenage girls without job or home, offering ‘french-dates’ for a quarter on the streets of the editor’s own city. I could continue these items until he hollered ‘enough!’”86 Ira supported his son, offering a defense telegrammed to Time: “ERSKINE CALDWELL’S STORY ESSENTIALLY TRUE. NO INVESTIGATION MADE, EFFORTS BEING MADE TO COVER UP FACTS. NEWSPAPER PROPAGANDA IS BEING SENT IN EFFORT TO HIDE FACTS IN CASE. PEOPLE NOT ON GROUND DENOUNCE THE STORY AS FALSE.”87 Ira’s message is clear: those who have witnessed the horrid conditions of tenant farmers acknowledge their existence, while others deny the facts entirely. Ira had also responded to the reports in the Augusta Chronicle, urging readers to accept the conditions his son had described so viscerally: “Of course unthinking people will dismiss the subject by saying that these unfortunate people are the authors of their own misfortunes. . . . The families depicted by the staff men of The Chronicle are the products of our social institutions.” He also mildly chastises the paper itself, noting that “unfortunately The Chronicle writers counted the unfortunate by tens when they ought to have counted by hundreds or thousands. It is to be hoped that the revelations made will suffice to end once and for all time the foolish cover-up policy that has kept society from sensing the imminent danger in which our social order stands.”88 The second series of articles is invested more in providing a quantitative approach to the tenant farmers’ condition, as Caldwell paints a detailed picture of how the loan system works (Jeeter Lester had reflected upon this in Tobacco Road). He also critiques various government institutions, including the shortlived Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) implemented by Herbert Hoover in 1932. Caldwell does not mince words about the plight of southern blacks, claiming that “the Negro is a slave of the large landowner, the plantation holder who has perhaps 2,500 acres of rich river-country land.”89 Regarding workers in Alabama, Caldwell writes that in spite of the state’s fertile land, “Alabama’s human beings are among the most exploited of any in America.”90 The

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tenant system is described as particularly vicious; Caldwell writes that they “are threatened, cheated and whipped in efforts to extract the last penny of profit.”91 Added to this are the unspoken but widely accepted codes of whiteness latent in the South; Caldwell tells how a “stranger who would stop and sympathize with one of the tenants, runs the risk of being escorted to the county line and left there with the silent but unmistakable warning not to come back again.”92 Caldwell then tells how landowners patently refuse to provide their black tenants with government rent checks and that blacks who complain run the risk of being beaten or run off the property. In his final Post article, he places further blame on the tenant system as well as government agencies, claiming that “local administrators have in many cases been reluctant to recognize these tenant families,” many of whom are victims of staunch racial hierarchies: “It is astonishing to find in this Jim Crow State that the economic condition of this class of white tenant is lower than that of the Negro. His standard of living is lower, his education is more limited and his health is worse. The Negro can be threatened into submission; the white tenant still thinks he should have what he earns and as a result he is discriminated against.”93 These eviscerating portraits, like the rest of Caldwell’s writings, stirred up antipathy and angst-filled rebuttals: Charles Malcolmson writes of South Carolina senator Ellison Smith, who claimed Caldwell’s description of sharecroppers’ lives was “vicious propaganda and gross exaggeration.”94 Smith then, seemingly without irony, offers pity in regard to the landowners: the sharecropper “pays no taxes except some slight personal tax. He has no expense of up-keep. It is heads I win and tails the landlord loses.”95 With commentators like Smith—who served in the Senate from 1909 to 1944 and was known for his mantra, “Cotton is king and white is supreme”—the necessity of Caldwell’s work becomes all the more apparent.96 In a perhaps encouraging note, the New York Post, in an editorial announcing the conclusion of Caldwell’s series, remarked simply that Caldwell’s South “is not brisk and bustling Atlanta, nor rapidly growing Birmingham, nor quiet, leisurely Montgomery” but instead “the South of the tenant farmer, which can, without the slightest exaggeration, be termed a hell on earth”; the article closes by stating, “The South has special problems which may be beyond the power of any one Administration to solve. But, at the very least, officials of the AAA should see to it that their policies do not aggravate an already frightful condition.”97 Caldwell’s work, derived in large part from the lessons garnered from his father, at the very least had started a conversation and forced people, many of whom remained staunchly unwilling, to acknowledge the daily struggles of poor whites in the South. Caldwell has long gone underappreciated as an author willing to interrogate difficult racial themes in his novels, ones more complex than contemporary

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critics noted. Caldwell’s class concerns are evident throughout his works, though considering them through a racialized lens further reveals the intricacies of his work; the racial hierarchies in Caldwell’s universe are complex, and nowhere is this more evident than God’s Little Acre. Like Tobacco Road, the novel portrays a poor white family (though, considering the Walden’s black laborers do on occasion produce a crop and the family has a functioning vehicle, they are not quite as destitute). Class and racial tensions abound in the novel; Jim Leslie, the son who left to marry a society woman, is openly ashamed of his family. The patriarch Ty Ty describes his disappointment regarding his son’s treatment of his mother, who had wanted to see him one more time before she died: “So I took her up there and went to his big white house on The Hill, and when he saw who it was at the door, he locked it and wouldn’t let us in. I reckon that sort of hastened his mother’s death, his acting that way, because she took sick and died before the week was out. He acted like he was ashamed of us, or something. And he still does.”98 Jim Leslie’s big “white” house, reminiscent of Major de Spain and Thomas Sutpen’s plantations in Faulkner’s world, is designed with exclusion in mind; Jim Leslie’s shame is tied to his family being not quite white enough to enter, whereas, by virtue of marrying a woman of a higher class than himself, Jim Leslie believes he has transcended such racial and class limitations. One other moment of interfamily racial tension bears noting. Buck and Shaw, Ty Ty’s other sons, constantly refer to his brother-in-law Will as a linthead, earning the latter’s ire: “He did not mind being called a lint-head by people of his own world, but he could never stand being called that by Buck and Shaw.”99 Again, someone connected to the Walden family regards them as below him; since linthead is a racially demeaning term, Will implies that he regards his in-laws as his inferiors. What is equally disturbing and, for our purposes, interesting is not the treatment the family faces at the hands of outsiders, but instead the way in which they racialize Dave the albino. The plot of God’s Little Acre centers upon Ty Ty’s decades-long quest to unearth gold which he believes is buried on his property. Though he has found a few nuggets over the years, Ty Ty’s singleminded determination has left him the laughingstock of the community and a source of shame, as mentioned above, for his son Jim Leslie. Early in the novel, the portly and hilariously lazy Pluto Swint arrives at the Walden farm in order to canvas votes. While watching Ty Ty labor in one of the dozens of holes on his property, Pluto remarks, “What you folks need is an albino to help you out. . . . They tell me that a man ain’t got as much of a chance as a snowball in hell without an albino to help.” Ty Ty is perplexed, asking, “What in the pluperfect hell is an albino, Pluto? I never heard of one before. Where’d you hear of it?” to which Pluto responds, “He’s one of these all-white men who

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look like they are made out of chalk or something just as white. An albino is one of these all-white men, Ty Ty. They’re all white; hair and eyes and all, they say.”100 The emphasis on all-whiteness here is juxtaposed with Ty Ty’s earlier comment about “darkies”: “I reckon there’s enough to complain about these days if a fellow wants to belly-ache some. Cotton ain’t worth the raising no longer, and the darkies eat the watermelons as fast as they ripen on the vine. There’s not much sense in trying to grow things for a living these days. I never was much of a farmer, anyway.”101 The blacks on the farm, of course, are the only ones who raise any crops, making Ty Ty’s commentary, which hints at his disappointment at the end of slavery (where blacks would not be free to eat all the watermelons around and would instead be forced to focus on laboring) all the more ironic. The blacks’ labor, unsurprisingly, is thankless; merely a few pages later, Buck asks, “What about the rations for those darkies, Pa? . . . Black Sam said at dinner-time that he’s all out of meat and corn meal at his house, and Uncle Felix said he didn’t have anything at his house this morning to eat for breakfast. They told me to be sure and say something to you about it so they could have something to eat for supper tonight. They both looked a little hollow-eyed to me.” Ty Ty is too preoccupied to consider his tenants’ plight: “Now, son, you know good and well I ain’t got the time to be worrying about darkies eating.” After Buck remarks that Black Sam had considered slaughtering their mule, Ty Ty exclaims that if he does so, “I’ll take out after him and run his ass ragged before I quit.”102 Ty Ty’s insensitivity also manifests in his attitude toward the albino, as the idea of an all-white man immediately results in Ty Ty’s racializing comments. His initial reaction centers on describing Dave in completely dehumanizing language: “I reckon I could use one though, if I knew where to find it. Never saw one of the creatures in my whole life.”103 Dave is referred to first in an offhand manner as “one,” followed by the racializing “creature,” which accentuates Ty Ty’s established racial insensitivity. Pluto, for his part, encourages Ty Ty’s attitude by continuing to regard albinos as a spectral phenomenon, with blessed powers of divining. He emphasizes that it is Dave’s whiteness that makes him valuable; after Ty Ty hopes the man is “big enough to do some good,” Pluto corrects him, claiming that color is all that matters: “Oh, sure. It’s not the size that counts, anyway. It’s the all-whiteness, Ty Ty.”104 The emphasis on “allwhiteness” here clearly juxtaposes Ty Ty’s insensitive comment about “darkies” not having enough to eat; the connection makes his racial prejudices even more transparent. Chris Vials summarizes the ways in which Dave’s presence upsets the current hierarchy (in a manner not unlike that of the Displaced Person in O’Connor’s story): “As an albino, Dave represents a type of whiteness that is unsettling, and thereby confuses the racial binaries around which southern

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culture is constructed. Ty Ty attempts to create a new racial category for Dave by repeatedly referring to him as an “all-white man,” and he inscribes this new category with the rigid boundaries of the familiar, historical, black-white relationship of Jim Crow.”105 Ty Ty, in spite of his own lower-class status, has found an opportunity to ensure his poor white status does not sink him to the lowest rung of whiteness. After a brief delay, Ty Ty and his sons head out and successfully capture Dave, in a comically horrific manner. As Ty Ty relates the story, as soon as Dave answers the door, he is grabbed, shoved to the ground, and tied up. Though white-on-white crime is abundant in southern literature, the nature of the abduction is presented as being justifiable because of Ty Ty’s belief in Dave’s racial inferiority, as a lesser form of white. Regarding the kidnapping, Ty Ty relates how Dave’s wife confronted the Waldens with displeasure: “She was his wife, I reckon, but I can’t see what an albino has got business of marrying for. It’s a good thing we brought him away. I hate to see a white woman taking up with a coal-black darky, and this was just about as bad, because he is an all-white man.”106 Ty Ty’s comment is worth unpacking; first, his grievance with Dave’s marriage reveals a fear of miscegenation, as he immediately thereafter nearly equates “all-white” with “coal-black.” By emphasizing that these categories are examples of extreme racial difference, Ty Ty insinuates that he is only comfortable with some form of nonthreatening middle ground, a blasé, uncorrupted whiteness which he associates with himself. Ty Ty’s anxiety when relating the story of Dave’s capture is complicated by his description of him in the present. Though even the narrator describes Dave in an exoticizing manner—“there was another man beside him, looking like a ghost in the flickering light”—Ty Ty makes a curious comment regarding his newfound acceptance of Dave.107 While the family continues to regard him as subhuman (Will wonders aloud whether or not Dave can even talk), Ty Ty claims “I ain’t scared of him no longer, either. He’s just like me and you and everybody else, Will, only he’s all-white, including his hair and eyes.”108 Worth noting, of course, is that Dave first appears—and Ty Ty makes these comments—as Uncle Felix prods him forward with a gun to his back. This image is presumably ameliorating and comforting to Ty Ty; one of his loyal black tenants, to whom he refuses to provide ample food, maintains the farm’s racial hierarchy by making it clear to Dave that his status as an albino is inherently beneath the Waldens. Through Ty Ty, God’s Little Acre presents a more concentrated analysis of one man’s racism; whereas Jeeter can easily brush aside the death of a black man, Ty Ty reveals moments of racial awareness and, if we are being generous, understanding and improvement. In an unsurprising turn of events, Dave and

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Ty Ty’s daughter Darling Jill are immediately attracted to one another. Darling Jill and Rosamond’s fascination is presented as an interest in the exotic; Jill teases Pluto, telling him she’s “just crazy to see” the albino.109 After Ty Ty brings Dave to dinner, the narrator remarks, “Darling Jill and Rosamond had been looking at the strange man without taking their eyes from him. Rosamond was a little afraid of him, and she drew back in her chair involuntarily. Darling Jill, though, leaned forward and gazed steadily into his eyes.”110 Her fascination with him is surprising to Ty Ty, who has the sudden revelation that his daughter’s sexual attraction to Dave humanizes him: “Up until then Ty Ty had not for a moment considered Dave a human being. Since the night before, Ty Ty had looked upon him as something different from a man. But it dawned upon him when he saw Darling Jill’s smile that the boy was actually a person. He was still an albino, though, and he was said to possess unearthly powers to divine gold. In that respect, Ty Ty still held him above all other men.”111 Though pages before, Ty Ty had equated an albino being married to a white woman as similar to black-white intermarriage, upon actually witnessing the sexual tension between Dave and Darling Jill, he backs off from his previous attitude. Dave becomes human for Ty Ty, because he was always human for the sexually confident and aggressive Darling Jill. Ty Ty’s education continues when he witnesses the pair having sex; worried that his captive has escaped, Ty Ty searches his homestead frantically and finds the two on the ground. Ty Ty is scolded by Rosamond and Griselda for watching the act, though Ty Ty declares he did not understand what was going on: “I only thought they was lying there hugging one another. That’s the truth if I know it. I couldn’t see a thing in that pale light.”112 Whether or not we take Ty Ty at his word here is beside the point; his voyeurism is not portrayed in as scathing a manner as was the Lesters’ interest in Dude and Bessie or Lov and Ellie May but rather as more curious and surprised. Observing the pair’s sexual activity humanizes the albino for Jeeter and largely marks the end of his racially demeaning commentary toward albinos. Sex is used by Caldwell in another sly moment which underscores the author’s commentary on race in the novel. Throughout the novel, Jeeter discusses his unabashed sexual attraction toward his daughter-in-law Griselda, couched in unsubtle language describing how he wishes to perform cunnilingus on her: “The first time I saw you, when Buck brought you here from wherever it was you came from, I felt like getting right down there and then and licking something. That’s a rare feeling to come over a man.”113 This desire is announced a few more times but never more memorably then when the idea is placed into the mouths of Black Sam and Uncle Felix. The pair engage in comic banter about their attraction to the white women on the farm; regarding Griselda, Sam exclaims, “I was born unlucky. I wish I was a white man myself,” adding that the sight

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of Griselda through a window “made me want to get right straightaway down on my hands and knees and lick something.”114 Caldwell’s black characters are not often developed with a deep level of complexity; in this scene, however, Caldwell broaches a larger point about the similarities between them and Ty Ty, similarities the white man, even as he comes to accept Dave’s humanity, may not acknowledge. After their jibing, Black Sam says to Ty Ty, “Somebody shot the male man,” in response to the latter urging the blacks not to confront Buck for being out all night.115 As this somewhat puzzling scene continues, we see Caldwell presenting a heretofore unexamined side of his black characters: Ty Ty wheeled around. “What did you say?” “Yes, sir, boss. Yes, sir. We won’t say nothing to him.” He started up the side of the hole. “He can’t prick them no more.” Ty Ty stopped. Suddenly he jumped from the side of the crater, turning around in the air. “What in the pluperfect hell are you darkies saying?” “Yes, sir, boss. Yes, sir. We won’t say nothing to Mr. Buck. We won’t say nothing at all.” Once more he started climbing to the top. “Trouble in the house,” Black Sam said aloud. Ty Ty stopped for the third time, but he did not turn around. He waited there, listening.” “Yes, sir, boss. Yes, sir. We won’t say nothing to Mr. Buck. We won’t say nothing at all.” “He’ll be down here in a little while, and I want him left alone. If I hear you talking to him about staying out all night, I’ll come down in here with a singletree and knock your blocks clear off your shoulders.” “Yes, sir, boss,” Black Sam said. “Yes, sir, white-boss. We ain’t saying nothing to Mr. Buck.” Ty Ty climbed up the side of the hole, leaving the colored men silent. He was confident that they would obey his orders. They were smart negroes.116

This conversation bears quoting at length in part because it shows a remarkably direct extension of the attitude of the black characters glimpsed briefly in Tobacco Road. In the earlier novel, Caldwell is content to show readers how, because they are laughed at by blacks, the Lesters are truly considered to be bottom dwellers in the South’s racial hierarchy. In God’s Little Acre, however,

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we have a more fleshed-out conversation that serves to showcase Ty Ty’s dwindling control over his corner of the world. Though earlier he grumbled and threatened in response to his tenants’ demands for food, Ty Ty is overruled by his son Shaw, who offers Black Sam some food once Ty Ty has left home to capture the albino. And while capturing the albino leads to a bevy of racializing and exoticizing comments from Ty Ty, his voyeurism results in him garnering an understanding of Dave as a person. But in this scene, we see Black Sam unafraid to criticize and even mock Ty Ty outright. The repeated use of words like “boss” results in their meaning being obfuscated and marginalized. Ty Ty has not earned Sam’s respect, and the latter comments upon that manner directly and without fear of reprimand. Chris Vials also notes the black characters serve Caldwell as ways to critique Ty Ty’s racial cosmology: their presence, and their status of dependency on figures as flawed as Ty Ty and Pluto (who, we are told, also exploits black sharecroppers) ultimately “serves to critique racial privilege by highlighting white pretensions to supremacy.”117 Sam’s confidence here corroborates this point, suggesting that, as this novel has progressed and Ty Ty has gained a semblance of racial sympathy, he has also shorn himself of some of the established privileges of whiteness. His word, as a white man, should be the unquestioned, unimpeachable law of the land but instead, Ty Ty finds himself an object of mockery, disrespected by those whom he considers his racial inferiors. Ty Ty’s repeated stopping shows his anxiety and uncertainty about the situation; he has lost control, he understands, though he cannot convincingly reassert his racial dominance. God’s Little Acre ends tragically, as Buck shoots and kills his brother Jim Leslie, who had arrived at the Walden house demanding to have sex with Buck’s wife Griselda. After Jim Leslie dies, a despondent Ty Ty can only mumble “blood on my land,” eventually remembering “that God’s little acre had been brought back to the house, and all the more acutely he realized that Jim Leslie had been killed upon it.”118 The novel ends with Buck walking out to the edge of the family’s land, presumably preparing to kill himself, with Ty Ty mentally urging God’s little acre to follow him. Ty Ty offers a closing proclamation on his family’s fate: “There was a mean trick played on us somewhere. God put us in the bodies of animals and tried to make us act like people.”119 As ever, Caldwell urges readers to acknowledge his characters’ inherent humanity, rather than cast them aside as subhuman detritus. Noteworthy here, though, is Ty Ty’s own acknowledgment of his family’s racial status. Both the Lesters and Waldens bristle when faced with the racializing gaze of others, who deride the two families as white trash. Ty Ty, in his grieving state, actually closes the novel wishing not for death, as might be expected, but that he and his family had not been made human: “If He had made us like we are, and not called us people, the last one of us would

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know how to live.”120 Though Ty Ty goes on to discuss religion, his first point here relates largely to race and Ty Ty’s realization that his prejudices toward the black characters and the albino (importantly, the narrator relates how, after the shooting, Ty Ty “remembered then that he had not seen Dave since early that morning. He did not know where Dave had gone, and he did not care. He could get along somehow without him”) are no longer viable.121 In an introduction from a 1949 reprint of the novel, Caldwell tells readers it is “merely a story about a man who wanted to find gold on his land, and happiness in the hearts of his children.” Our relationship with Ty Ty, argues Caldwell, “gives us the satisfaction of knowing that we have been permitted to live for a little while in a world we were privileged to enter only because Ty Ty opened the way for us. After we have lived in it for a while we recognize it as being the very same world we have lived in all our lives, but as only seeming different and more desirable because its spiritual and material values have been changed to reveal their real worth.”122 Caldwell may wax romantic here in regard to his character, as he exaggerates the degree to which Ty Ty and his family seem happy (consider the seemingly insurmountable divide between Ty Ty and his estranged son Jim Leslie), but his point is clear. If we deny Ty Ty and company their humanity, for all of their flaws, then we as readers fail to acknowledge a connection with them, limiting, Caldwell seems to suggest, our capacity for sympathy regarding their condition. Similarly, in an introduction to Tobacco Road penned a year earlier, Caldwell claimed his “credo” and “desire to write” stemmed from his belief that “the manner in which the everyday lives of the people I knew were falsified and perverted by novelists who arbitrarily forced human beings to conform, and perform, to artificial plot and contrived circumstance.” Tobacco Road, then, arose out of his desire to “write about people as they actually lived, not as readers had been misled by ingenious novelists to think they existed.”123 Though the texts discussed above were Caldwell’s most popular and focused novels about poor whites in the South, elements of racial anxiety, especially in noting how white supremacy permeates throughout society, appears elsewhere, notably in his 1940 antilynching novel, Trouble in July. Though the novel centers on black-white interactions, culminating in a young boy being lynched for allegedly assaulting a white woman, the work reminds us of how white supremacy functions in part by heightening divides between groups of whites. From the start, Trouble in July’s comically inept sheriff notes the ways in which not all whites in his jurisdiction are alike; upon hearing about the alleged assault, his response to hearing the news is, surprisingly, to criticize the whites for their violent reaction and hypocrisy: “‘Some of those folks up there in those sand hills beyond Flowery Branch raise girls that never have

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drawn the color line,’ he said. ‘It’s not an easy thing to say about brother whites, but it has always looked to me like them folks up there never was particular enough about the color line.”124 Though the sheriff insinuates his displeasure for miscegenation (it bears noting he had slept with black women himself), he does not condemn outright Sonny’s purported actions: “However, a nigger man ought to be more watchful, even if it is one of those white girls up there in the sand hills.”125 In addition to not condemning Sonny for his interest in white women, the sheriff also tacitly expresses his belief in Sonny’s innocence (or, at the very least, a healthy dose of skepticism that he actually raped the girl in question, Katy Barlow). Subtly, then, the sheriff ’s ire is leveled more at the kind of whites who might refuse to “draw the color line” than at the alleged black perpetrator.126 Despite his crippling laziness and overriding sense of self-preservation, McCurtain at times reveals a greater sense of morality than many of Caldwell’s other characters when faced with racial adversity. He sympathizes with the accused boy’s plight, and takes prompt action when Sam, another black man, is captured whilst Sonny is on the run, telling the vigilantes who take Sam from his jail cell (Sam had been imprisoned overnight for illegally selling cars), “Sam Brinson ain’t done no harm to nobody,” only to hear the rejoinder, “We’ll just take him along in case that other one don’t turn up.”127 The sheriff is disgusted and rails against his position which puts him at odds with his fellow whites, stating he “wouldn’t go against the will of the people if they want to catch that Clark nigger, but I’ll stand up for Sam Brinson any day. Sam ain’t never done anybody harm in all his life, and I ain’t going to let nothing happen to him.”128 Though the first half of his quote is obviously problematic, the remainder reveals that McCurtain, unlike his current antagonists, is willing to recognize black individuality and to reveal a separate racial sensibility from his fellow whites. Ultimately, Sonny will be lynched, though McCurtain saves Sam (remarking somberly he was glad at least he could save “one of the two”).129 When he arrives at the scene of the lynching, however, he is shocked to watch the group of white men murder the accuser Katy Barlow after she admits to lying about Sonny (she had in fact propositioned him, though the pair did not have sex). Her death at the hands of various white men confirms the patriarchal attitudes that seek to confine and dictate women’s sexuality, while also recalling the fears of an “impure” white woman. Unlike Dixon, who would never allow his white women to suffer and instead kills them off as martyrs, Caldwell attempts to investigate a more complicated and vexed reality. Similarly, while the sheriff hunts for Sam, Harvey Glenn, a poor young farmer, locates Sonny and wrestles with his conscience before deciding to turn him over to the mob. Whereas the characters in the lynch mob are

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single-minded and virulently racist—Caldwell includes an extended scene of them abusing a black couple, trying to get the man to admit he would want to harm a white man who raped his partner and then tying down the woman and pouring turpentine on her naked belly—Harvey is depicted as complex and conflicted, torn between his morality and his sense of obligation toward his race as a white man. Earlier, Caldwell depicted Sonny as almost excessively passive and naïve; after Katy’s allegation has spread, Sonny talks to his friend Henry, bemoaning his fate on account that he “didn’t do nothing.” Henry responds, “Makes no difference with white folks, if touching was done. . . . They ain’t going to stop and figure like you and me. They going to step out and do something big, and then figure afterwards.”130 When Harvey confronts him, Sonny tells him, “I didn’t do that thing you mentioned,” Harvey rebuts, “You wouldn’t call a white woman a liar, would you?” Sonny agrees, but adds, “I didn’t do nothing at all.”131 The narrator demonstrates that Harvey is unaware how to handle a paradigm where Sonny, the purported rapist, does not fit into his preconceived notions: “Harvey watched him closely. He could not keep from his mind a surging belief in the Negro’s earnestness.”132 Andrew Leiter, while discussing Caldwell’s commitment to antilynching campaigns, notes that the author knew “many southerners genuinely believed that black males were prone to rape, and part of the antilynching agenda entailed accounting for this exaggerated perception.”133 After asking that Sonny clarify the fact he has never slept with a black girl, Harvey is silent, pacing uneasily, before Sonny begins asking about his fate, only to be told “I don’t know” by the white man.134 Harvey’s indecision is markedly different from the one-dimensionally racist hive mind of the lynch mob, and Caldwell goes to great detail to summarize the man’s mental state: “I don’t know,” Harvey said uneasily, pulling his hat hard over his eyes. “I just don’t know.” “What don’t you know, Mr. Harvey?” the boy asked hopefully. Harvey did not answer him. He went back to the path and looked down the ridge for a long time. Sonny did not move from his tracks. It was difficult for him to make up his mind. First he would tell himself that he was a white man. Then he would gaze at Sonny’s black face. After that he would stare down upon the fields in the flatlands and wonder what would happen after it was all over. The men in the hunt-hungry mob would slap him on the back and praise him for having captured the Negro single-handed. But after the boy had been lynched, he knew he would probably hate himself as long as he lived. He wished he had stayed at home.135

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This moment marks the novel’s most concentrated consideration of white racial anxiety. Harvey, at this point, is convinced of Sonny’s innocence, but that ultimately does not eradicate his fear of letting down his fellow whites and maintaining his belief in his power and control as a white man. The scene ends with Harvey serving as a mouthpiece for the white South, attempting to rationalize his decision to turn Sonny over to the mob: “If I don’t turn you over to the white men who’ve been combing the country for you ever since day before yesterday, they’ll call me a nigger-lover when they find out I turned you loose,” though he adds, “I hate like the mischief to have to do it, Sonny.”136 His defense is platitudinous and weak, deferring to the racial paradigm as an excuse for his cowardice: “this is a white-man’s country. Niggers has always had to put up with it, and I don’t know nothing that can stop it now. It’s just the way things is, I reckon.”137 The scene ends with Harvey walking down the hill, Sonny trailing along—not running or attempting to escape—and asking Harvey to kill him, to which the white man pathetically responds, “I ain’t got a gun to do it with.”138 Sylvia Cook describes this scene’s “patent absurdity,” noting Sonny’s obedient following illustrates that he “does not know how to act like a criminal any more than Glenn has the taste to be an executioner.”139 Richard Wright, too, comments upon this scene in his review of the novel: “Some of the most laughable, human and terrifying pages Caldwell has ever written deal with Sonny trotting with doglike obedience at the heels of Glenn, who is trying to decide what to do with him.”140 In addition to these concerns, this scene shows a white man, Harvey, desperately clinging to the racial paradigm that supports his cowardice. Though his complicity in Sonny’s death cannot be overstated, his actions here show the feebly desperate attempts to maintain racial superiority regardless of his class status. Throughout his career, Caldwell would face criticism that his work did not push his critiques far enough, especially as his literary output surged in the forties and early fifties. In a review of God’s Little Acre, Edwin Rolfe tepidly lauded Caldwell for his “ability to select his material,” but ultimately concluded that his work was “definitely of a minor character,” on account of his supposed unwillingness to construct larger critiques of capitalism and exploitation.141 Though commercially successful, many of his later works were universally panned by critics, as lacking the merit of his early writings. Yet as Caldwell aged, he continued to critique his native land for its adherence to dated economic and social paradigms that he considered unfit for the twentieth century. In autobiographical works such as In Search of Bisco, discussed in detail in the next chapter, Caldwell continued to offer nuanced criticisms of white racial supremacy. Perhaps Caldwell’s most famous work after his two early novels, however, is his phototext collaboration with photographer and future wife Margaret

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Bourke-White. During his research for the second series of New York Post articles, Caldwell took numerous photographs, envisioning a dual visual/ verbal document to capture the state of the South. He then embarked on an eighteen-month journey with Bourke-White throughout the South, eventually publishing You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937 at a time when advances in technology had made such mixed media texts more viable. The 1930s are well noted for the rise of propagandistic texts à la Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, and the viability of photographic expression only bolstered the opportunity for writers, artists, and activists to shine further light on major concerns.142 As William Stott has noted in his memorable work on documentary efforts in the era, “the primary expression of thirties America was not fiction but fiction’s opposite.”143 Though Caldwell and Bourke-White’s work has been eclipsed in reputation in subsequent decades by works such as James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—of which more will be said soon—their work initially met with some acclaim and widespread attention. You Have Seen Their Faces ostensibly sets out to document and record southern life during the Great Depression; Bourke-White’s photographs are accompanied by text captions, usually dialogue, provided by Caldwell. Of the captions, the authors note at the outset of the work, “The legends under the pictures are intended to express the authors’ own conceptions of the sentiments of the individuals portrayed; they do not pretend to reproduce the actual sentiments of these persons,” which will later come to be seen as one of the work’s primary flaws.144 Tom Jacobs provides a useful analysis of the phototext’s rhetorical possibilities: “If the photograph seems to provide an objective resource of information about the lives and cultures of others, presenting a universally accessible snapshot of alterity, the verbal component of these hybrid works seeks to interrupt the pleasure of visualizing racial or class differences and to problematize it into an experience with some political utility.”145 What the pair, particularly Caldwell, did set out to accomplish was to create an informative account of southern life for curious (or, more likely, ignorant) citizens of other parts of the country; on the opening page of text (preceded by images), he writes, “Mark against the South its failure to preserve its own culture and its refusal to accept the culture of the East and West. Mark against it the refusal to assimilate the blood of an alien race of another color or to tolerate its presence. Mark against it most of, if not all, the ills of a retarded and thwarted civilization.”146 The prose here is undeniably ornamental, lacking the terse directness of Caldwell’s fiction. As Stott notes, the captions are designed to elicit specific emotions: “the captions, like the rest of the book, reduce the lives and consciousness of the tenant farmers to force the audience to pity them.”147 And as we will see, this attempt to universalize the southern

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experience, to collapse the lives of poor whites into a unified whole, is at stark odds with the more celebrated work by Agee and Evans. The text’s visual opening more directly relays a message about the South’s hardships, including the pervading attitude of pity, as Stott points out. BourkeWhite’s photo is of a young boy, hard at work behind a plow, his face largely obscured by shadow, though the photographer’s grasp of composition allows viewers to see the boy’s furrowed brows and intense glare. Another early image is of a grizzled, elderly couple who refuse to look directly at the camera, a possible form of representational defiance (the accompanying text reads, “A man learns not to expect much after he’s farmed cotton most of his life”).148 In these and other pictures, we see elements of hardship but also of hope and endurance. And while an optimistic approach might have seemed more palatable to the authors than an overly bleak perspective, this tone whitewashes the region’s hardships, with the subtle implication that hard work and determination might be enough to overcome crippling poverty. The opening image, for example, provides a positive spin on what is, in actuality, unrestrained and extreme child labor; Bourke-White, camera positioned near the ground, captures a young boy hard at work, brows furrowed, determination on his face. The caption reads, “My father doesn’t hire any field hands, or sharecroppers. He makes a lot of cotton, about sixty bales a year. Me and my brother stay home from school to work for him.” Ostensibly neutral in tone, the caption is powerful more for what is left unsaid, namely, that the family requires their children’s labor in order to produce enough crops to survive and that their education is expendable. A few pages later, we see a young boy eating a watermelon, with the accompanying cheerful caption, “My daddy grows me all the watermelons I can eat,” one of many moments that seek to universalize the southern experience. Doing so may cause readers to sympathize with the subjects, but it also eliminates the important distance between reader and subject. What makes Caldwell’s fiction an important arena of recording white anxiety is its willingness to force readers to confront people so debased that they appear inhuman. By depicting, say, a young boy enjoying a watermelon, Caldwell and Bourke-White strip their subjects of an important sense of individuality and present a more palatable generalized image, one perhaps less likely to cause readers discomfort and anxiety. Bourke-White’s photographic decisions met with some criticism. As Dan Miller notes in his biography of Caldwell, “Bourke-White made no effort to bring back objective images. Like Caldwell, she was motivated more by passion and a sense of drama than calculated or objective sociological method.”149 Though Caldwell was normally in accordance with her methods, he criticized her “for rearranging the possessions on a poor black woman’s bureau in order

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to achieve a certain effect.”150 To Bourke-White’s credit, she acknowledged how she had intruded upon the woman’s space, claiming, “This was a new point of view to me. I felt I had done violence.”151 The pair’s chief rivals in the phototext genre, James Agee and Walker Evans, whose Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, released to a much more tepid response in 1941, were openly critical of Caldwell’s methodology. Agee, according to Jefferson Hunter, “could not forgive Bourke-White and Caldwell for making money out of appalling poverty.”152 Alan Trachtenberg also discusses the later work’s wider critical appeal in recent years: “To admirers of James Agee, Caldwell’s prose now seemed simplistic and callous, and against the stern eye of Walker Evans, Bourke-White’s looked excessively theatrical and manipulative.”153 Donald Davidson was particularly damning in his review, mockingly entitled “Erskine Caldwell’s Picture Book”; in it, he wryly (and accurately) notes, “Two general features of the photographs are worth some special note. First, they probably magnify the art of photography a good deal more than they magnify the social ills of the sharecropping system. They are camera studies done with a fine eye for composition and for the possibilities of the subject; they are not candid camera shots.”154 And William Stott, during his unfavorable comparison of Caldwell and Bourke-White with Agee and Evans, writes that Caldwell “diminished—brutalized—the sharecropper because his audience expected such a picture, not because of fully believed it,” though he acknowledges Caldwell “knew that to convince them otherwise would take enormous imaginative labor on his part and theirs and undermine his polemical purpose.”155 Thus, to a far greater extent than Caldwell’s earlier work, the phototext led to broad criticism of exploiting for profit the types of poor whites that Caldwell elsewhere sought to defend. While the book had some sustained popular appeal, these criticisms are indeed valid, and You Have Seen Their Faces is now regarded as a dated and problematic presentation of poor whites. Despite these issues, there remains a somewhat underexplored antiracist subtext, where Caldwell once again examines white racism as being representative of anxiety and fear. He discusses the vexed relationship landowners have with blacks; on the one hand, he notes that the “landowner in the rich plantation country wants a man who can be subjected to his will by means of fear and intimidation,” which results in blacks feeling that “every white face he sees is a reminder of his brother’s mutilation, burning, and death at the stake. He has no recourse at law, because he is denied the right of trial before his peers. The Negro tenant farmer on a plantation is still a slave.”156 At the start of the third chapter, Caldwell, using a technique to which he will return in In Search of Bisco, writes in the voice of an angry white southerner, aggressively defending the South: “Every time a nigger kills a white man or rapes a white woman, they say we’re railroading

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him because he is a nigger. We know how to take care of the niggers, because we know them better than anybody else.”157 Returning to his reportorial style, Caldwell begins explaining the ways in which racist antipathy has been fostered amongst the lower classes (seen also in Trouble in July). The worker, Caldwell argues, has been diminished by the toils of exploitative sharecropping: “The white tenant farmer has not always been the lazy, slipshod, good-for-nothing person that he is frequently described as being. . . . This same white tenant farmer grew from child to boy to man with many of the same ambitions and incentives that motivate the lives of all human beings. He had normal instincts. He had hope.”158 Rather than identify the white landowners as perpetrators of an endlessly exploitative cycle, however, poor whites directed their ire toward their perceived inferiors, out of an anxiousness that cheap black laborers had supplanted their usefulness: “In a land that has long gloried in the supremacy of the white race, he directed his resentment against the black man. His normal instincts became perverted. He became wasteful and careless. He became bestial. He released his pent-up emotions by lynching the black man in order to witness the mental and physical suffering of another human being.”159 He expands upon these points, criticizing white attitudes toward blacks: “Most of them thought, and said, the Negroes ought to be run out of the country. Nobody thought to ask why the landlords should not be held responsible for their condition. For one thing, the landlords were white men like themselves. The landlords went to church and prayed and sang hymns just as they did. All white men were superior, and resentment had to be taken out on people who were held to be inferior.”160 Beyond the references to perceived superiority, Caldwell also discusses sexual anxiety, which he explored in more detail a few years later in Trouble in July. Again speaking in the voice of an anxious southerner, Caldwell writes, “I reckon folks from the North think we’re hard on niggers but they just don’t know what would happen to the white people if the niggers ran wild like they would if we didn’t show them who’s boss. . . . This nigger that raped that white girl is a mean one. Of course, that girl is a whore, and everybody knows it, and for all I know she led him on, but just the same she was a white girl and he was a nigger, and it just wouldn’t do to let him go.”161 In addition to the interesting compositional note that this passage prefigures scenes in Trouble in July, these lines are significant in that Caldwell’s imagined southerner, by admitting his opinion of the woman’s chastity, acknowledges tacitly that whites believe black male sexuality must be constrained, repressed, and controlled in order to relieve their own anxieties over female sexual autonomy. After the chapter opening with the imagined southerner, Caldwell voices his concerns about the South’s distinct brand of racism and its heightened difference from other regions of

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the country: “The South, as long as it remains traditionally the land of cotton, will never be completely understood by the rest of America.”162 Caldwell again ties southern identity into economic production, as he has in Tobacco Road, although here he adds a distinct racial component, remarking that as “long as cotton is grown, it will continue to be the symbol of the lost cause.”163 While Caldwell claims that the South “perpetrated a feud, which was excusable in the beginning,” that day has passed, leaving the region defensively isolationist and combative: “The South has so little in common with the East and the West that it is remarkable that it has remained a part of the Union.”164 Even decades after the height of Lost Cause–era mythmaking, Caldwell argues for the ideology’s dominance over southern life and regards it as deeply problematic and troubling. Caldwell then examines the South’s “reactionary” attitude as being a result of its “self-imposed isolation,” which resulted in a particular economic phenomenon—raising cotton—that was the crux of black slave labor.165 In Caldwell’s reckoning, the South’s racism is difficult to comprehend for northerners who have not shared the same legacy of conflict; Caldwell explains that “many a sheriff has been elected to office on the statement that he alone among all the candidates can by means of intimidation keep the Negroes from raping the wives and daughters of the voters,” and earlier has his imagined southerner proclaim (ostensibly talking to Caldwell himself, as if he was a reporter), “If I was you I wouldn’t go back up North and say you saw us down here trying to catch a nigger to lynch. It just wouldn’t sound right saying it up there, because people would get the idea that we’re just naturally hard on all niggers all the time.”166 Ultimately, we can see that from a structural standpoint, You Have Seen Their Faces is at war with itself, as Bourke-White’s often idealized photographs mesh uneasily at best with Caldwell’s starker prose. While some of the captions do provide keen insight into matters of racial and sexual anxiety, their presentation as being universal are problematic and ultimately less insightful than the longer prose sections. As Adam Sonstegard explains, “The captions, which they wrote collaboratively, identify the subjects and themes of her photographs; but no such photographs illustrate or authenticate the specific details Caldwell mentions in his paragraphs. Caldwell’s prose never alludes directly to the pictures in the same volume, and the voices in his essays never mention the trips the author and photographer took together in the South.”167 Even the extended prose chapters are often at odds with the images. In the closing paragraphs, Caldwell offers a summary of what has preceded that overlooks his more astute observations (such as those on race) and instead provides a rote summary with an unenthusiastically optimistic finale: “Ten million persons on southern tenant farms are living in degradation and defeat. They have been beaten and subjected. They are depleted and sterile. All has been

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taken away from them and they have nothing. But they are still people, they are human beings. They have life.”168 The final lines, too, eschew Caldwell’s more combative prose—found both in the fiction and, as will be discussed, in his memoir In Search of Bisco—for a vaguely optimistic outlook: “When fear has been banished, and self-respect restored, America will wake up to find that it has a new region to take pride in.”169 While Hudson Strode praised Caldwell’s evolving prose style, noting that “in the present book he has discarded grotesque emphasis and tricks to attract attention and offered powerful evidence of this blot on American culture in the manner of a humane and superior diagnostician reporting on a disease. Both he and his cause gain immeasurably by the restraint and dignity of his new manner,” other commentators have regarded the text as being more problematic.170 Robert van Gelder, for example, in his review remarks that “Miss Bourke-White’s pictures allow for the confusion of reality. They capture beauty and reveal the existence of ease, sometimes of contentment, of courage, even happiness, in settings where Mr. Caldwell’s mind refuses to admit that these qualities exist.”171 Though Bourke-White is regarded here as moderating Caldwell’s bleaker outlook, her pictures are ultimately too romantic, too idealized to capture the struggles which Caldwell depicted with greater force and impact in his fiction.172 Stuart Kidd notes that, in the end, “the idealization and objectification of southern subjects, contradictory points of view that alternate in the photographers’ contemporaneous descriptions and subsequent recollections, reveal more about the photographers themselves than about those they photographed.”173 The closing handful of images offer haunting captions: “I suppose there is plenty to eat somewhere if you can find it; the cat always does”; “Sometimes I tell my husband we couldn’t be worse off if we tried”; “I’ve done the best I knew how all my life, but it didn’t amount to much in the end”; and the final one, “It ain’t hardly worth the trouble to go on living.” Despite these bleak statements, the accompanying pictures do more to reveal Bourke-White’s impeccable eye for lighting and composition than the region’s social misfortunes. Even the most negative captions—which of course were written by the authors and are not actual quotes from the subjects—are somewhat undermined by the supposed beauty of the photographs and present a stark contrast with what has become the chief phototext document of poor southerners. Looming over any discussion of Caldwell and Bourke-White’s work is James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Originally envisioned as a Fortune magazine assignment, it was rejected at first before being published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941. The book, however, sold abysmally: “only approximately six hundred copies selling in the 1940s before it was remaindered.”174 The work was reissued in 1960 and, bolstered in part by James Agee’s growing

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reputation in the wake of his posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize, its popularity “exploded,” and it “became one of the core texts for young participants in the civil rights movement and the war on poverty.”175 In the past half century, the work’s reputation has only grown; William Stott’s 1973 Documentary Expression and Thirties America held Let Us Now Praise Men as a “remarkable” work that could “transcend the documentary genre.”176 In 1990, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson’s And Their Children After Them—a work which revisited the area and families from Agee and Evans’s work—received a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. And even more recently, the work continues to draw frequent critical attention, as in Michael’s Lofaro 2017 collection of edited essays Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75. What, then, has accounted for this shift? Whereas You Have Seen Their Faces bolstered Caldwell and Bourke-White’s careers—they would go on to produce more phototexts together—Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had no comparable effect at the time for its creators. Curiously, however, perhaps Agee’s greatest fear about the work is now commonly cited as its greatest strength. Agee worried about his proximity to his subjects (indeed, the author’s sexual gaze has long been noted in the work) and that his localized focus on three families was too limited, and perhaps just as exploitative as he felt that Caldwell and BourkeWhite had been. But this individuality has since been championed. Stott notes the work’s reputation rests in part on the fact that it “insisted that its subjects, rather than being average or representative types, were each unique.”177 The work’s famously ironic title and its physical nature attest to the fact; rather than the interspersed image with accompanying captions as seen in You Have Seen Their Faces, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men opens with Evans’s photographs, which appear even before the work’s title page. Coupled with the title—nothing is famous about the individuals until the work was published—the images make clear that these are actual people, with families and homes and livelihoods. Agee’s subsequent text hammers this reality home, and, unlike Caldwell and, as we will see, Richard Wright in 12 Million Black Voices, keeps the focus on the individual rather than a collective society. As David Moltke-Hansen explains, “Most writers saw cotton tenants differently—as victims, not bearers of humanity and history and history. This perception made sharecropping a compelling subject for them. How awful, such writers and their readers said. How remote and, yet, but turns how fascinating and distressing, as well as exotic.”178 Whereas Bourke-White’s photographs imply a sense of the hidden, a sense that the camera is an invisible eye privy to the raw, naked lives of its gaze, Evans’s is markedly noncandid; subjects stare directly into the camera— directly at the reader—and thus the work acknowledges the circumstances of its creation. Thus, Evans’s photography itself discloses information about

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these families; no captions can or should be concocted that would attempt to somehow alter or pervert our understanding of that information. That Agee and Evans do not seek to hide their presence and instead readily make it clear that they were observers and recorders of the lives of the subjects, stands as the core of their critique of Caldwell and Bourke-White. As noted before, the pair detested the earlier work, not simply out of jealousy or a sense that their own work had been preempted but because of their strong aesthetic and philosophic divisions. While some early reviews critiqued Caldwell and Bourke-White, Agee was not content to let their work go without a jab of his own. In the “Notes and Appendices” section after the text proper of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee reprints an article from the New York Post which discusses Bourke-White’s seemingly glamorous lifestyle, represented by a “superior red coat.”179 Even Stott acknowledges, “Agee’s reprinting the article strikes one who reads the book today as a mean and gratuitous taunt” and that Evans himself called Agee’s decision to include the reprint “vicious.”180 And, indeed, in some ways the fact that Caldwell and Bourke-White became a relatively famous celebrity couple in the years following their work with the rural poor was ripe for criticism. Yet, as Paula Rabinowitz notes (in a chapter playfully entitled “Margaret Bourke-White’s Red Coat; or, Slumming in the Thirties”) while the attacks on her were “fully justified” and that her photographs “pandered to middle-class sympathy,” she also “resisted the vision of the powerful masculine worker who fired the imagination of the male intellectuals.”181 While still acknowledging Bourke-White’s status as privileged outsider, Rabinowitz draws our attention here to the gendered critiques that she was met with, and the realm of anxiety prevalent when men are forced to conceive of women in labor roles that defy their normative expectations. In the end, while critical history has seen the respective fates of these works shift, each one attests to arenas of anxiety over southern poor whites. Unlike Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (and Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, discussed in the next chapter), You Have Seen Their Faces is ultimately committed to producing an idealized portrait of the poor southern white, one that is not as anxiety-inducing as, say, the Lesters, Waldens, or Snopeses. Whereas the text urges readers to recognize the South’s deplorable economic situation and offers critiques of race relations, the pictures linger more forcefully in readers’ memory. Bourke-White, in seeking to portray southerners’ indomitable will, creates an optimistic palliative to Caldwell’s prose, even with the accompanying captions—especially the final few—that would seem to suggest a sense of hopelessness and despair. As a secondary effect, the photographs are attempts to universalize the southern condition, an attempt to gloss over the anxiety-inducing conditions and lifestyles of poor whites so memorably depicted in the fictions of Caldwell and Faulkner. While one can

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hardly fault Caldwell and Bourke-White for offering a sense of optimism in their collaborative efforts, the uneasy combination of image and text overlooks the anxiety that poor whites cause, romanticizes their condition, and universalizes them, rather than presenting them as a specific group of people. Caldwell himself, later in life, perhaps admitted some of the limitations of his work and acknowledged the wide trajectory of opinions on his reputation over the course of his career. While none other than William Faulkner once ranked Caldwell among the greatest of his contemporaries, he was often victim of bitter criticism, as in a poetic review of This Very Earth which opens, “Hail to Caldwell, the Knight of the Muckraking Pen! / Hooray for these zombies he’s exhumed again!”182 But as the years passed, interest waned, and even books that sold well were considered dated; in an otherwise positive 1956 essay, Carl Bode notes that the “slabs of social significance” in Caldwell’s early work were “today merely interruptions to the narrative.”183 Caldwell himself, when asked about some renewed interest in his work in 1980, remarked, “I know that my books will never be contemporary again because what I wrote was contemporary only at the time.”184 And in a 1986 interview, Caldwell said of You Have Seen Their Faces, “I was trying to use the impressions I would get or had already gotten from people in certain situations, like landowners or prisoners or field workers or whatnot. . . . So you can call that fiction if you want to, but it was based on prior experience with the people I was dealing with.”185 This final rumination, on the tenuous line between truth and fiction, is one that haunts the entirety of the documentary genre. In exploring memoir and autobiography in the following chapter, we see how other artists sought to represent and confront the legacies of prejudice and racism in their youths, some in a similar vein of romanticization and others in a strong vein of anger.

THREE

“CRASHING TO BITS” Autobiographical Recreations of the South

The realm of autobiography has granted southerners the opportunity to come to terms with the complexity of their own lives and the peculiarity of their region in relation to America at large. As Fred Hobson observed in his seminal Tell About the South, southerners have long believed in the importance of their “uniqueness,” a mindset forged by their belief that the South “is the only American region to have been a separate nation, the only region to have suffered military defeat on its own soil and to have withstood occupation and reconstruction by the enemy. The South has been and remains the most homogeneous of regions, the most provincial, the most insular—and, until recently, the most insecure.”1 That this mindset eschews considering displaced Native Americans or the brutal abduction of blacks from Africa is not surprising and, indeed, heightens the distinctive southern bent toward autobiography. These southern remembrances seem to imply that whiteness is universal and unassailable but upon closer consideration also reveal lingering resentment toward poor whites. Unlike the outright white supremacy of Dixon’s work and others, writers such as William Alexander Percy show anxious paternalism and an inability to cope with the encroaching civil rights era. The 1940s mark a curious decade in southern letters, from bold new voices like Carson McCullers, whose The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter provided a variegated look at aspects of southern life, such as disability, which had often gone undervalued, to Flannery O’Connor, whose stories of southern grotesques began appearing at the end of the decade, to Richard Wright, who provided raw, realist examinations of black southern life. In addition to this new flourishing beyond the modernist tradition of the Southern Renaissance, the decade is curiously rich in autobiographic remembrances and considerations of the era, as a wide selection of authors tackled a breadth of concerns and anxieties. 91

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From newspaper reporter W. J. Cash, who veers toward a reportorial tone far more neutral than either Percy’s elitist haranguing or Lillian Smith’s sympathetic response (one that links treatment of the poor to the foundation of racism and white supremacy), we can better understand how southern authors wrestled with a pivotal transitional era in southern history: the 1940s, as World War II helped drag America out of the depths of the Depression while the southern economic system crawled along toward the early rumblings of the civil rights era. Hobson notes that the southern tendency toward writing about the region is predicated in part on anxiety and repression: “To some psychologists amateur and professional the South has been a neurotic society, one that repressed its true feelings about the Negro and constructed defense mechanisms to conceal its guilt over slavery.”2 Examining a multitude of autobiographical texts can help us break down our inclinations to assume automatically that “southern” is enough of a modifier to establish difference or, indeed, to signify an entire category of whites. By considering texts by authors of drastically different backgrounds—the aristocratic William Percy, the fiery Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, who suffered constant firsthand oppression, and Erskine Caldwell, writing near the end of his career—we can trace the ways in which those backgrounds create drastically altered ideas and definitions of racial anxiety, from W. J. Cash’s more dispassionate commentary through the elitist notions handed down to William Percy and on to his respondents, in the likes of Lillian Smith.3 W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941), adapted from his earlier article of the same name, has been cited by both contemporaneous critics and recent scholars for its significance in defining the South, particularly the famed opening pronouncement, “There exists among us by ordinary—both North and South—a profound conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation, and exhibiting within itself a remarkable homogeneity.”4 While The Mind of the South often speaks of groups of southerners in a totalizing, reductive matter (in the introduction to the 1970 British edition, Denis Brogan observes, “One last weakness in The Mind of the South, more and more obvious today, is the almost complete neglect of the Negroes. ‘The South’ is the white South”), it provides further frank descriptions of poor whites that, at times, shows sympathy, and at others provides the same sort of stigmatization we see in other autobiographical remembrances.5 While not a memoir in the truest sense, The Mind of the South, like the other works considered here, offers lengthy ruminations on the divisions present in southern life, the boundaries between myth and reality. Near the beginning, Cash distinguishes the plantation aristocracy from the poor whites; of the former, he writes, “They dwelt in large and stately mansions, preferably white

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and with columns and Grecian entablature. Their estates were feudal baronies, their slaves quite too numerous ever to be counted, and their social life a thing of Old World splendor and delicacy,” one that was “dominated by ideals of honor and chivalry and noblesse—all those sentiments and values and habits of action which used to be, especially in Walter Scott, invariably assigned to the gentleman born and the Cavalier.” And in a passage worth quoting at length, he then describes poor whites: Beneath these was a vague race lumped together indiscriminately as the poor whites—very often, in fact, as the “white-trash.” These people belonged in the main to a physically inferior type, having sprung for the most part from the convict servants, redemptioners, and debtors of old Virginia and Georgia, with a sprinkling of the most unsuccessful sort of European peasants and farm laborers and the dregs of the European town slums. And so, of course, the gulf between them and the master classes was impassable, and their ideas and feelings did not enter into the make-up of the prevailing southern civilization.6

Cash offers these distinct portraits as a means of combatting what he deems the “legends” that ultimately “bear little relation to reality,” and he goes to lengths throughout his work to combat some of these ideals, all the more significant in that his work shares a publication year with William Percy’s book-length apologia for the Old South and its way of life.7 Cash’s work proceeds to detail some of the ways in which poor whites have been vilified, as well as how they have become victims of economic exploitation in the early twentieth century. Without providing the type of eyewitness accounts Caldwell does (though he does claim that Caldwell and Faulkner can be called “romantics of the appalling”), Cash offers an overview that notes how quickly stereotypes had become codified by the time of his writing.8 When discussing settlers in Virginia—whom he notes “were not generally Cavaliers in their origin”—Cash claims that regarding the indentured servants, prisoners, and others compelled to labor in the early years, “there is no convincing evidence that, as a body, they came of congenitally inferior stock.”9 Such clinical language, particularly when used to describe the seventeenth century, is a seemingly self-aware response to the issues surrounding such claims of biological determinism. As he moves forward, Cash elaborates on the condition of nonslaveholding whites. Their supposed inferior status is not biological or racial, as others have noted, but rather due to limited economic possibilities. Cash writes that the general myth and history discusses an overriding sense of weakness and lack of fortitude:

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the poor whites in the strict sense were merely the weakest elements of the old backcountry population, in whom these effects of the plantation had worked themselves out to the ultimate term; those who had been driven back farthest— back to the red hills and the sandlands and the pine barrens and the swamps—to all the marginal lands of the South; those who, because of the poorness of the soil on which they dwelt or the great inaccessibility of markets, were, as a group, most completely barred off from escape or economic and social advance.10

While the emphasis here is on the economy, not race, Cash gestures toward the idea that some sense of overriding weakness is what has accounted for the twentieth-century plight of poor whites. The argumentative thrust is that poor whites have acceded to their superiors and meekly accepted inferior land and no access to economic opportunity. He adds that supposedly “not a few of the more abject among them were addicted to ‘dirt-eating’” and that “very often an entire family of a dozen” would live together in a “single room.”11 Cash notes that these are stereotypes, that this image “no doubt has given rise to the whole classical notion of the poor whites as belonging to a totally different stock from the run of southerner and particularly from the ruling class,” are easy to discard, though the familiarity of these descriptions, as seen in both Caldwell and in William Percy’s memoir, emphasizes their pervasive influence.12 Cash’s rejoinder to the sweeping stereotyping of poor whites is a sly commentary on the supposed foundations of any inferiority, as he claims, “Not only is it true that he sprang from the same general sources as the majority of the planters, but even that, in many cases, he sprang from identical sources—that he was related to them by the ties of family,” capping this description with, “The degree of consanguinity among the population of the old southern backcountry was very great.”13 It is not a great leap to note the similarities between this “consanguinity” and the rampant fear of miscegenation that dominates the work of white supremacists like Dixon. For Cash, who famously comments, “if it can be said there are many Souths, the fact remains that there is also one South,” collapsing whiteness is a productive tool that seeks to combat rampant stigmas against poor whites, a stigma that is at the rhetorical core of William Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee.14 From the opening lines of the foreword, Percy makes evident the idea that his memoir will embrace sentiment and nostalgia, opening with the maudlin declaration, “The desire to reminisce arises not so much I think from the number of years you may happen to have accumulated as from the number of those who meant most to you in life who have gone on the long journey.” He continues, introducing from the beginning the notion that his work reflects his understanding of what the South has lost since the Civil War: “So while the

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world I know is crashing to bits, and what with the noise and the cryings-out no man could hear a trumpet blast, much less an idle evening reverie, I will indulge a heart beginning to be fretful by repeating to it the stories it knows and loves of my own country and my own people.”15 A primary concern of the text is just how Percy chooses to define his “country” and “people”; though at first it appears he refers to the South and southerners in a universal fashion, as the work progresses it becomes apparent that Percy’s worldview is strongly hierarchical; as Benjamin Wise notes in his biography of Percy, his “self-acceptance and love of place coexisted with his prejudice and conceit. He shared a sense of racial and class superiority with other aristocratic white people.”16 In the first line of the memoir proper, Percy claims, “My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country,” which immediately demarcates a specific section of the South as worthy of discussion, an opening barrier to set him and his class apart. On the particularity of Mississippi, William Andrews remarks, “Mississippi recognized selfhood not as a function of the subject but of the object, namely the racial other, whose looming presence dictated the need for self-differentiation,” and, indeed, much of Lanterns deals with Percy’s efforts to differentiate himself racially from poor whites all the while presenting himself as a benevolent aristocrat.17 One of Percy’s key strategies in establishing himself as an aristocrat is his attempt at outlining racial difference and, specifically, creating distance between himself and the racial other; as the text progresses, it becomes clear that this source of anxiety for Percy concerns not only blacks but also groups of whites whom he regards as meddlesome and inferior. Indeed, Bertram Wyatt-Brown summarizes the memoir as Percy’s attempt to “keep alive a South of plantation ease and perfect decorum that had never really existed,” a task clearly at odds with his contemporaries writing “modernistic psychological realism” about the region.18 In the opening chapter, Percy is decidedly uncritical of slavery in its first mention: “Such was my country hardly more than a hundred years ago. It was about then that slavery became unprofitable in the older southern states and slave-holders began to look for cheap fertile lands farther west that could feed the many black mouths dependent on them.”19 The noteworthy remark is that Percy’s sympathies—here, as elsewhere—are with white aristocrats, not those who toiled under slavery, as he mentions that westward expansion was due to the need to feed blacks who were “dependent” on whites. A few pages later he adds, “When the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation was realized by the slaves, they became restless, unruly, even dangerous.”20 Again, the emphasis is on their threatening status to whites rather than the importance of their liberation. A similar example occurs later when Percy reflects upon Reconstruction era politics, lauding local white men who “bore the brunt of the

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Delta’s fight against scalawaggery and Negro domination during reconstruction, who stole the ballot-boxes which, honestly counted, would have made every county official a Negro, who had helped shape the Constitution of 1890, which in effect and legally disfranchised the Negro.”21 And lest readers garner the wrong impression from the sepia-tinted opening pages, he is quick to offer a reminder of the supposed hardships his class faced on account of its smaller size: “I may seem to have implied that all Delta citizens were aristocrats traveling luxuriously up and down the river or sitting on the front gallery, a mint julep in one hand and a palm-leaf fan in the other, protected from mosquitoes by the smudge burning in the front yard. If so, I have misinterpreted my country. The aristocrats were always numerically in the minority; with the years they have not increased.”22 In attempting to evoke sympathy for his class, Percy implies that an as-yet-unnamed rise in a different class of whites is threatening this nostalgic past ideal. Worth noting before turning to Percy’s prolonged discussion of poor whites and his disdain for them is just how fragile is his presentation of whiteness. Lanterns on the Levee is noted for Percy’s racial paternalism, represented in moments such as his declaration, “I would say to the Negro: before demanding to be a white man socially and politically, learn to be a white man morally and intellectually—and to the white man: the black man is our brother, a younger brother, not adult, not disciplined, but tragic, pitiful, and lovable; act as his brother and be patient.”23 He reveals that this patronizing attitude is inculcated from birth; in an early chapter on his childhood, Percy offers the dictum, “Any little boy who was not raised with little Negro children might just as well not have been raised at all.”24 His reminiscence is tinged with maudlin nostalgia, as he refers to Skillet, his “first-boon companion,” as “the best crawfisher in the world,” adding “and I was next.”25 The whitewashed memory and joyful recollection is not surprising; as Benjamin Wise notes, “Percy’s memory illuminates not only Percy’s identification with and love of black people; it also demonstrates a psychological conceit necessary for the maintenance of segregation: blacks were fit for childhood companionship but not for adult political equality.”26 Yet Percy’s own association with black individuals accentuates his selfdoubt and how easy whiteness can be compromised. He spends a long time in Lanterns discussing his black servant (formerly caddy and chauffer), a man named Ford. Early in the chapter entitled “Fode” (Percy explains patronizingly, “He pronounces his name ‘Fode’ with enormous tenderness, for he is very fond of himself ”), Percy offers the following defense of southern race relations: The righteous are usually in a dither over the deplorable state of race relations in the South. I, on the other hand, am usually in a condition of amazed exultation

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over the excellent state of race relations in the South. It is incredible that two races, centuries apart in emotional and mental discipline, alien in physical characteristics, doomed by ward and the Constitution to a single, not a dual, way of life, and to an impractical and unpracticed theory of equality which deludes and embitters, heckled and misguided by pious fools from the North and impious fools from the South—it is incredible, I insist, that two such dissimilar races should live side by side with so little friction, in such comparative peace and amity.27

This passage merits quoting at length to showcase just how much ink Percy is willing to spill to argue for the existence of congenial race relations; the author doth protest too much, indeed. Again, he emphasizes white superiority, calling blacks centuries behind in mental discipline and referring to equality as “impractical.” Though he states that “in the South every white man worth calling white or a man is owned by some Negro, whom he thinks he owns, his weakness and solace and incubus,” Percy’s rationale for doing so is not to stress a belief in equality but rather to reemphasize his claims that blacks are a mental burden to their white peers in the South.28 He tells readers that “for no good reason,” Ford became his chauffeur and eventually his “retainer,” implying a closeness that eventually becomes unbearable for Percy. The moment when he decides to fire Ford is ripe for attention: noting that it was a “subtler infamy” than misbehavior that caused his termination, Percy explains, “I was in the shower, not a position of dignity at best, and Ford strolled in, leaned against the door of the bathroom, in the relaxed pose of the Marble Faun, and observed dreamily: ‘You ain’t nothing but a little old fat man.’” Percy’s response is a weak, unwitty rejoinder, “You damn fool,” prompting Ford to grin and respond, “Jest look at your stummick.”29 The description of Ford’s attitude and physicality here, as he stands casually in the bathroom grinning at his employer, implies a level of comfort with whites that Percy had overlooked before; the suddenness of Ford’s jest then shatters Percy’s sense of racial hierarchy and, as a result, Ford must be removed from the premises. William Andrews also comments upon Percy’s anxiety at this moment, observing, “Percy was not so vain as to deny the truth of Ford’s physical characterization of him. But could Percy accept the existential validity of Ford’s image of his bare humanity, stripped of the caste signifier, bereft of all the accoutrements of his social dignity?”30 This moment, far more than Percy’s lengthy bloviations on southern nostalgia, reveals the limits of his racial thinking and paints whiteness as fragile and not protective of southern dignity as he proclaims but rather subject to encroachment and humiliation, both by blacks and, later, poor whites. While the section on Ford and a succeeding chapter, “A Note on Racial Relations,” occur near the end of the text, they shed light on the ideology

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that colors Percy’s understanding of hierarchies in other walks of southern life. Interestingly, the condemnations against whites will in many accounts be stronger than those he levels against blacks. If blacks exist in Lanterns on the Levee as the cause of lingering anxiety and patronizing condescension for Percy and the aristocratic class he represents, poor whites stand as oppressive interlopers, Snopesian intruders into his revered Delta country. From their first mention, poor whites are demarcated as subhuman and inherently inferior to Percy and his ilk; in language befitting the town of Jefferson’s responses to the Snopeses or Augusta’s treatment of the Lesters, Percy writes, “Another element leaving almost as little impress, though still extant, is the ‘river-rat.’ He is white, Anglo-Saxon, with twists of speech and grammatical forms current in Queen Anne’s day or earlier, and a harsh ‘r’ strange to all southerners except mountaineers. Where he comes from no one knows or cares.”31 The comparison here is to Indians, about whom he remarks, “The Indians left not a trace except the names of rivers, plantations, and towns, the meaning of which we have forgotten along with the pronunciation.”32 That the poor whites, the “river-rats,” are described as almost forgettable demarcates them near the bottom rung of the social hierarchy; Percy claims that nobody cares where they come from (though he does briefly explain “Some find in him the descendant of those pirates who used to infest the river as far up as Memphis. It seems more likely his forefathers were out-of-door, ne’er-do-well nomads of the pioneer days”), though their presence, particularly in his later description of his father’s political career, is clearly a site of contention for the author.33 His physical description of them is critical and insulting: “Illiterate, suspicious, intensely clannish, blond, and usually ugly, river-rats make ideal bootleggers. . . . They lead a life apart, uncouth, unclean, lawless, vaguely alluring. Their contact with the land world around them consists largely in being hauled into court, generally for murder. No Negro is ever a river-rat.”34 The “usually ugly” remark is significant in that it again creates a hierarchy of whiteness, where, despite his Anglo-Saxon origins (as a contrast, Percy discusses his own family’s French origins more favorably), the “river-rat” is markedly inferior to Percy’s family. The “murder” comment paints poor whites as impulsive and rash, prone to make too visible their presence in society, not unlike the West Indian of “No Haid Pawn” who faces retribution for his overt whiteness. Later, Percy describes the “three dissimilar threads” that compose the “basic fiber” of the Delta as “the old slave-holders,” “the poor whites, who owned no slaves, whose manual labor lost its dignity from being in competition with slave labor,” and “the Negroes.”35 But while this trajectory seems to clearly place poor whites between Percy’s class and blacks, the truth is more vexed, as Percy frequently defines these whites

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in relation to blacks. Of blacks, Percy makes an early comment akin to a patient parent scolding children: “Just now we are happy that the brother in black is still the tiller of our soil, the hewer of our wood, our servants, troubadours, and criminals. His manners offset his inefficiency, his vices have the charm of amiable weaknesses, he is a pain and a grief to live with, a solace and a delight.”36 Part of what makes blacks tolerable—here as elsewhere in the memoir—is Percy’s hope that they as a group “know their place” and perform functions considered too menial for his class. The aristocracy is defined through their relationship to the labor that props them up and maintains their position, from the historical plantations to the remnants of that culture, such as the continued employment of black nannies, caretakers, and servants. Blacks are anxiety-inducing when they begin to seek a path upward and beyond these strict social paradigms, as when they desire camaraderie (wishing to dine with Percy during his time in the military) or jest in a manner that assumes too much familiarity (Ford). But poor whites cause consternation because their own place in society is more difficult to pin down; they should not, Percy seems to suggest, occupy the same labor sphere as blacks, yet their upward mobility and urge to distinguish themselves from their perceived inferiors is troubling to him. He writes: “Intellectually and spiritually they are inferior to the Negro, whom they hate. Suspecting secretly they are inferior to him, they must do something to him to prove to themselves their superiority. At their door must be laid the disgraceful riots and lynchings gloated over and exaggerated by Negrophiles the world over.”37 In addition to the highly troubling remark that attention to lynchings has been “exaggerated,” Percy’s entire statement here is ironic; he observes that poor whites face anxiety in regard to blacks, without recognizing that his text serves as testament to the anxiety that upper-class whites face in response to poor whites and blacks. His language here is suspiciously vague; he fails to describe in what manner these whites would feel inferior to blacks, instead attempting to lump them together as a homogeneous class with a single shared mindset. By precluding the possibility of individuality, Percy shifts blame for lynchings and other racial violence onto the lower class, ignoring the fact that well-to-do whites share culpability, either by participating themselves or by fostering a culture in which lynch mobs could operate without fear of reprisal. As he continues to define the lower class, Percy asks exasperatedly, “The poor whites of the South: a nice study in heredity and environment. Who can trace their origin, estimate their qualities, do them justice? Not I.”38 He is to be commended for his honesty; poor whites are nuisances to Percy, both threatening and disgraceful to his class of whites. In order to distance himself from the poor, he racializes them, marking them as biological inferiors: “Pure English stock. If it was ever good, the virus of poverty, malnutrition, and interbreeding has done

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its degenerative work: the present breed is probably the most unprepossessing on the broad face of the ill-populated earth.”39 In addition to this attitude of labeling them as inferior, he apotheosizes himself to create yet more distance between the classes: “I know they are responsible for the only American ballads, for camp meetings, for a whole new and excellent school of southern literature. I can forgive them as the Lord God forgives, but admire them, trust them, love them—never.”40 Poor whites are thus worthy of Percy’s disdain in spite of their acknowledged cultural achievement, which is at least more than, say, Thomas Jefferson wrote of Phyllis Wheatley or Ignatius Sancho, an admittedly low bar to clear. Percy’s ire is rationalized only with vague criticisms—it will be made more specific in his discussion of James K. Vardaman—while his laudatory comments toward his own class come with more specificity. He claims that “the Delta was not settled by these people; its pioneers were slave-owners and slaves,” which ignores lower-class financial straits and marks the class as shiftless and lacking the ambition so embodied by Percy’s ancestors, such as the swashbuckling Don Carlos, the “first Percy in our part of the South” who “blew in from the gray or blue sea-ways with a ship of his own, a cargo of slaves, and a Spanish grant to lands in the Buffalo country south of Natchez.”41 Ultimately, as Scott Romine remarks, Percy’s particular characteristics allow him to “rationalize the social order. Although much of his narrative concerns the poor white, the nature of this group provides little resistance to Percy’s worldview.”42 After this broad generalization of poor whites, Percy turns to his father’s political career as a microcosmic encapsulation of the anxiety produced by poor whites usurping their way into the New South’s political culture. After the death of Senator Anselm McLaurin in 1909, the Mississippi legislature opted to fill the empty seat which, at the time, was favored to go to the race-baiting demagogue James K. Vardaman, known as the “Great White Chief.” In Percy’s reckoning, he was “a kindly, vain demagogue unable to think, and given to emotions he considered noble.” In addition to this critique of his intelligence, Percy regards him as a purely uncritical rhetorician: “his oratory was bastard emotionalism and raven-tressed rant.”43 He was also for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment as a means of reaching the “common man”; as Percy explains it, “he did love the common man after a fashion, as well he might, but although he hated the ‘nigger,’ as he called the Negro, he had never studied the effects of the abolition of the Fifteenth Amendment and he had never considered by what verbiage the Fourteenth Amendment could be modified. He stood for the poor white against the ‘nigger’—those were his qualifications as a statesman.”44 This extended description is used to emphasize differences between him and Percy’s father LeRoy, whom he regards as an incisive, fair man; though LeRoy at first viewed Vardaman as a “splendid ham actor” and

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merely a “mischievous” race-baiter, his son presents him as unable to abide the idea of such a demagogue in office.45 In contrast, LeRoy is described as an idealistic alternative: “Father wanted to be a force for good government, but he did not want to hold office. He did not want to be senator from Mississippi, but he wanted to keep Vardaman from being. Vardaman stood for all he considered vulgar and dangerous.”46 Only a paragraph after coloring Vardaman as a buffoonish character, Percy alters the story to mark Vardaman as vaguely threatening. The circumstances surrounding the election provide hints as to the nature of this threat: since Vardaman would undoubtedly receive a plurality of votes in the special legislature sessions, a group of men, LeRoy Percy included, opted to run as a cabal of anti-Vardaman candidates in order to receive a majority of the votes. The planter class thus joined together in order to keep Vardaman, who had already served as governor, out of the seat. Eventually, LeRoy was determined to be the strongest anti-Vardaman candidate and was elected by the legislature, ushering in “the end of a period in which great men represented our people.”47 The subsequent description of the next election between Percy and Vardaman hinges on future governor Theodore Bilbo. Bilbo, a Vardaman supporter, claimed that “one of Father’s supporters had bribed him to vote for Father, that he had accepted the bribe money in bills, that he had taken them home and kept them in his safe, that he was now returning them intact to the grand jury.”48 Interestingly, Percy refuses to even name Bilbo, considering his actions too reprehensible to warrant the respect of being named, though he does call him a “pert little monster, glib and shameless, with that sort of cunning common to criminals which passes for intelligence.”49 With palpable disdain, Percy describes how his family was “stunned,” even after noting that they knew the “shady reputation of the accuser.”50 In spite of his proclamations that the accusation was a lie, the story is damning for LeRoy’s reputation, and the impending election becomes centered upon class, specifically, as a critique of the Percy family’s aristocratic notions, as voters began peppering him with questions about his home life or church attendance, rather than about matters of policy. Percy uses the frenzy surrounding the election to make more pointed critiques of lower-class whites; whereas his father’s “integrity, courage, and intelligence” mattered in a past “world of honor,” he describes a new world, the “golden age of demagoguery, the age of rabble-rousers and fire-eaters,” granted life by the kinds of people who would vote for the likes of Vardaman (and later Bilbo).51 Such people are described as sordid and barbaric; Percy recalls a campaign stop where the crowd gathered with hampers of eggs ready to toss at LeRoy:

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I looked over the ill-dressed, surly audience, unintelligent and slinking, and heard him appeal to them for fair treatment of the Negro and explain to them the tariff and the Panama tolls situation. I studied them as they milled about. They were the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were undiluted Anglo-Saxons. They were the sovereign voter. It was so horrible it seemed unreal.52

Percy portrays himself and his father here as outsiders, looking down upon their inferiors and telling—not showing—them what is best for their lives. Percy also reveals physical anxiety here; he is openly repelled by the vibrant lustiness of the crowd—their fighting and fornicating—and his awareness of their physicality stands in contrast to his own stationary, reserved role as spectator. In another instance, the crowd is portrayed as uncivilized, whooping and yelling until the “din was insane and intolerable. . . . Obviously the crowd was determined to make it impossible for him to speak at all.”53 Throughout Lanterns, Percy makes clear that part of the masculine code—which is obviously coded white—of the Delta is the importance of restraint and control; the “obscene pandemonium” of the crowd flies in the face of said code and marks the start of a new era where the gentility has been replaced by inferior stock. After LeRoy loses the election, the family opts for a vacation to Greece, a site far removed from this New South, where father and son can mutually reconnect to a noblesse oblige that has long colored their views on race and class. One final case study for Percy’s complex views on race and class can be found in the ways he situates the aristocracy’s ideology as being fundamentally opposed to the philosophies spouted by the Ku Klux Klan, whom he associates with the types of poor whites noted above. Percy opens the discussion by citing one of his own unpublished letters sent to the New Republic in 1919: “You in the North always assume there are two attitudes toward the race question— one preempted by the enlightened benign citizen of Northern birth, the other peculiar to the narrow heartless citizen of southern birth. There is no such difference.”54 By making this claim, Percy attempts to collapse American racial difference without taking into consideration the complex claims he has made throughout the text to present the South as being culturally different from the rest of America. When he mentions the KKK, he even makes clear that the Klan once adhered to southern notions of honor and righteousness: “We had read in the newspapers that over in Atlanta some fraud was claiming to have revived the old Ku Klux Klan which during reconstruction days had played so desperate but on the whole so helpful a part in keeping the peace and preventing mob violence. This Atlanta monstrosity was not even a bastard of the old organization

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which General Forrest had headed and disbanded. This thing obviously was a money-making scheme without ideals or ideas.”55 Whereas the original Klan is portrayed in a manner akin to their savior status in Thomas Dixon’s world, the new iteration is regarded as money-grubbing and opportunistic, without a second look at the unforgivable violence that the original ‘helpful’ Klan had perpetrated against blacks. As Percy begins detailing the Klan’s activities in his town—he notes their ire was directed largely at Catholics—he discusses an election for sheriff between a Klan member and a “Kentucky aristocrat,” George B. Alexander.56 Percy portrays the Klan’s desire to control the law enforcement as a means of exercising their desire to “flout the law and perpetrate such outrages as appealed to them.”57 That the candidate they support is an aristocrat is unsurprising and ties back into their racial politics and criticism of the likes of Vardaman and Bilbo. Both LeRoy and William Percy criticized their brand of inflammatory racism and demagoguery, because they believed that their own racial ideology—portraying and believing themselves to be benevolent paternal figures—was ultimately more valuable for maintaining their accustomed way of life. Their candidate won the sheriff election, which Percy refers to as “a ruthless searchlight on character.”58 Benjamin Wise notes that the family fought the Klan for their own sake: “For the Percy family, this was more than a local victory; it was a vindication of their class interests and view of racial hierarchy. They opposed the Klan because they thought it was hateful, intolerant, and crass.”59 Moving forward, we can glean that, even during William Percy’s life, other writers were offering alternate retellings of growing up in the South, concerned not with Percy’s anxious, nostalgic yearning but rather with a clear-eyed and honest consideration of what it meant to grow up in this era. In the chapter entitled “The Stolen Future” in Lillian Smith’s 1949 memoir Killers of the Dream, the author includes a menagerie of defensive quotes about the South, penned by writers such as William Percy, Richard Russell, and Cole Blease. She then asks readers, “Why can words such as these, which our politicians use whenever the issue of civil rights comes up, stir such anxiety in men’s hearts?”60 While this moment occurs well into the text, it provides a useful starting point in summarizing Smith’s mission, an in-depth look at the process of indoctrination that warps the ways in which southerners view race and sexuality, leading up to an adult idea of white southern exceptionalism that teeters on a razor’s edge, always precarious and always threatened. While Killers of the Dream may not have been written as a direct response to Percy’s Lanterns, at least not in the manner that The Hindered Hand was a rebuttal to Dixon’s tracts, Smith’s tone and the overall organization of her work, from the dedication through the conclusion, reveals that Percy’s voice looms over the text, a ghostly reminder of the aristocracy so vilified by Smith.61 Whereas

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Percy, in spite of subtitling his work “Recollections of a Planter’s Son,” never quite comes to terms with his father’s dominating presence, Smith applauds her parents as rebels. Consider her dedication: “In memory of my Mother and Father who valiantly tried to keep their nine children in touch with wholeness even though reared in a segregated culture.”62 By stressing her family’s focus on wholeness, Smith implies that southerners fixated upon the necessity of segregation lead inherently fractured lives, caught up in the anxiety that results from obsessing over racial purity. In her foreword to the 1961 revised edition, she claims that she wrote the memoir “because I had to find out what life in a segregated culture had done to me, one person; I had to put down on paper these experiences so that I could see their meaning for me.”63 In spite of this description, Killers of the Dream is an unconventional memoir, far less focused upon the particularities of Smith’s life as Percy’s is, a fact she acknowledges when stating, “I realize this is a personal memoir, in one sense; in another sense, it is Every Southerner’s memoir.”64 Scott Romine comments upon this aspect of her work, noting that one of her strategies is in “constructing oneself as a southern outsider, one who has impeccable credentials as a southerner but who has eluded southern constraints on verbal expression,” ultimately rendering herself as a “Southern Everywoman.”65 Later, Smith will state, “I shall not tell, here, of experiences that were different and special and belonged only to me, but those most white southerners born at the turn of the century share with each other.”66 Rather than discuss the specifics of her life, Smith designs her memoir to showcase how ideologies are passed on to the younger generation, up to and including attitudes toward poor whites. On southern defensiveness, she explains that “the breathing symbols we made of the blackness and the whiteness . . . the metaphors we created and watched ourselves turning into” morphed into the “shaky myths we leaned on even as we changed them into weapons to defend us against external events.”67 And while Smith does not include specific descriptions of racial violence in the manner that various fiction writers have done, she does discuss the ways in which such events became magnified in children’s minds: Now, suddenly, shoving out pleasures and games and stinging questions come the TERRORS: the Ku Klux Klan and the lynchings I did not see but recreated from whispers of grownups . . . the gentle back-door cruelties of “nice people” which scared me more than the cross burnings . . . and the singsong voices of politicians who preached their demonic suggestions to us as if elected by Satan to do so.68

Killers of the Dream is noted for Smith’s attention to the relationship between racism and sexism, and her coupling of the two also relates to her understand-

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ing of how poor whites are positioned in society (in this case, as the ones best suited to complete the dirty work aligned with maintaining white supremacy). Near the outset of the text, Smith observes that “Neither the Negro nor sex was often discussed at length in our home,” adding later that she had learned “a terrifying disaster would befall the South if ever I treated a Negro as my social equal and as terrifying a disaster would befall my family if ever I were to have a baby outside of marriage.”69 She also discusses how patriarchal regulation started basically from infancy: in a chapter entitled “The Lessons” from Part Two (fittingly entitled “The White Man’s Burden”) she explains that “by the time we were five years old we had learned, without hearing the words, that masturbation is wrong and segregation is right, and each had become a dread taboo that must never be broken, for we believed God, whom we feared and tried desperately to love had made the rules concerning only Him and our parents, but our bodies and Negroes.”70 When it comes to regulating women and policing such sexuality, Smith will show that it is rich whites who coerce the poor to fulfill this specific white supremacist ideal. Smith notes that this attitude toward sex and race led to a realm of “mass hysteria,” colored by their “terrifying complex of guilt, anxiety, sex jealousy, and loneliness,” which resulted in institutions such as the Ku Klux Klan, which could fuse such ideas into communal celebrations of whiteness. The Klan could serve, then, as a corrective to male anxiety by letting its members destroy blacks who threaten the realm of white female purity which, again, was molded and concocted by sexually anxious whites. Smith comments upon the lynch act, noting that “the lynched Negro becomes not an object that must die but a receptacle for every man’s dammed-up hate, and a receptacle for every man’s forbidden feelings.”71 The devastating endpoint of sexual anxiety is unrestrained, ritualistic, or orgiastic violence: “Sex and hate, cohabiting in the darkness of minds too long, pour out their progeny of cruelty on anything that can serve as a symbol of an unnamed relationship that in his heart each man wants to befoul,” she writes, before offering a gruesome example. 72 Just as she earlier noted how men give in to their desires for black women, here she regards the violence as emblematic of their failure to practice restraint. So extreme are the men’s actions that she notes that after men cut off their victims’ genitals, the practice of distributing them amongst the perpetrators “is no more than a coda to this composition of hate and guilt and sex and fear, created by our way of life.”73 As an important corollary to her exposition of white male anxiety, Smith discusses the ways in which women actively sought to dispel the myths placed upon them by men. She describes the formation in 1930 of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, noting that they set out to “commit treason against a southern tradition set up by men” as a response to

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white male dominance and hypocrisy, particularly sexual hypocrisy.74 She lambasts men who had “whipped up lynchings, organized Klans, burned crosses, aroused the poor and ignorant to wild excitement by an obscene, perverse imagery describing the ‘menace’ of Negro men hiding behind every cypress waiting to rape ‘our’ women,” all in the name of defending “sacred womanhood,” “purity,” and “preserving the home.”75 After correctly identifying these loci of anxiety, Smith takes matters a step further by proclaiming that women do not, in fact, need protection: “They said calmly that they were not afraid of being raped; as for their sacredness, they could take care of it themselves; they did not need the chivalry of a lynching to protect them and did not want it.”76 Such an attitude would of course be antithetical to the core of southern white male identity; without relying on the flimsy rhetoric regarding rapacious black sexuality, white men would have to face the truth of their brutal treatment of blacks. The idea of outspoken women, too, was a signal of possible anxiety, as Smith writes, “No one, of thousands of white men, had any notion how much or how little each woman knew about his private goings-on. Some who had never been guilty in act began to equate adolescent fantasies with reality, and there was confusion everywhere.”77 Most significantly, Smith links this ideal to the treatment of poor southerners which she explores in a lengthy section of her book, “Giants in the Earth,” which builds on her earlier thesis that poor whites are frequently victimized by demagogues who “fatten on the poor man’s vote” by preaching what the poor wish to hear, namely, that they are superior to the blacks whom they hate and whom the wealthy whites are afraid of, lest the groups unite out of class solidarity.78 At the beginning of “Giants in the Earth,” Smith attempts to push back against elite yet often geographically distant commentators like Percy, noting, “only a man or woman who has traveled in childhood the old sand or clay roads of the South in buggy or wagon, who has stayed in the country after nightfall, can know what distance and darkness meant in the making of the rural mind of the South.”79 In Smith’s reckoning, the relationship between rich and poor is predatory, though not in the manner seen in Percy or Faulkner’s reckoning; instead, poor whites are manipulated and have their base impulses fed to serve the political and economic benefit of their supposed superiors: “Southern culture has put few words in the mind to make the difference between human and animal. The words in the white mind are words that turn the Negro into animal, words deliberately fed to people to place the Negro beneath the level of human, to make him not only animal but a ‘menace.’”80 The emphasis on whites being “deliberately fed” this knowledge is not necessarily a novel observation from Smith, and her extended discussion seeks to note that such behavior and beliefs that have been inculcated in the poor are a means of suppression.

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In noting the “terrifying ignorance” that pervades the rural South, it might seem that Smith adheres to the same tropes as Caldwell or Percy. But unlike Caldwell, who suggests that the circumstances are nigh hopeless for the Jeeters and those like them (or Percy, who simply vilifies and blames the poor for their conditions), Smith seeks to elicit sympathy without the hyperrealist (or tawdry, to some) descriptions from Caldwell’s work.81 She asks rhetorically, “What good does it do to repeat illiteracy figures to readers whose minds have been nourished well since they were born? How can we who were fed so bountifully feel what it means to live with a mind emptied of words, bereft of ideas and facts, unknowing of books and man-made beauty?”82 Smith goes on to argue for what amounts to near separatism: “It would have been far better for them had they been ignored, as were most of the peasants of the world until communism’s recent efforts,” but that politicians “needed the rural people and used them as ruthlessly as Negroes were used when they were needed.”83 This further accentuates and details the idea of hierarchization that so often colors treatment of poor whites, particularly when it came to establishing the “worth” of white skin: Smith notes that white skin became “the poor white’s most precious possession, a ‘charm’ staving off utter dissolution” that allowed one to “forget that you were eaten up with malaria and hookworm” and “lived in a shanty and ate pot-likker and corn bread, and worked long hours for nothing. Nobody could take away from you this whiteness that made you and your way of life ‘superior.’”84 Smith’s commentary leads to another sweeping assessment of the history of poor whites, noting that “those on the other side of the chasm from the large slave owner—and that was most of the South—came to be called ‘poor whites’ and ‘crackers,’ ‘red necks,’ ‘hill billies,’ and ‘peckerwoods,’ and a startling lack of sympathy for them slipped into speech and writings and hearts of the planter class,” who ultimately “denied Tobacco Road” and “wrote off the man who lived on Tobacco Road as a liability to democracy for it is his vote that keeps the demagogue in power. Now, today, they fear him because they helped make him what he was.”85 And unlike many others, Smith offers a personal account noting her own sympathy for the poor: “Having lived my early life in a Deep South town and much of my recent life in the mountains, I have a bond with rural people which I cherish. The stereotypes built of them by those who are trying to manipulate them, are partly true, of course; but partly false. They do have little learning and can be stubborn as mules; but they have conscience,” adding that she fears them less than the “demagogic leaders who shoulder the people intimately but exploit them ruthlessly.”86 The divide between the rich and poor white is discussed at length in Killers in a chapter entitled “Two Men and a Bargain,” which tells a metaphoric tale of “Mr. Rich White” and “Mr. Poor White” and the agreement between

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the pair: as Mr. Rich White explains, “There’re two jobs down here that need doing: Somebody’s got to tend to the living, and somebody’s got to tend to the nigger. . . . You boss the nigger, and I’ll boss the money.”87 Even more obvious rhetoric comes into play, when Mr. Rich White expands upon his rationale for the class divide: “If you ever get restless when you don’t have a job or your roof leaks, or the children look puny and shoulder blades stick out more than natural, all you need do is remember you’re a sight better than the black man.”88 Mr. Rich White has an imperative need to maintain a divide between poor whites and blacks lest their position be threatened: “It never occurred to Mr. Poor White that with a bargain the Negro could help him raise wages.”89 The simplicity of the metaphor (one also utilized by W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South) reveals that while racist treatment of blacks was based upon a myriad of reasons, it was at its core nearly always predicated on anxiety, prompting whites to maintain segregation in order to maintain their economic dominance or, in the case of poorer whites, to hold onto notions of honor built upon a belief in natal white superiority. Authors such as Smith, who presented women as indignant at the patronizing treatment they received, help bring to light the widespread pathology of southern anxiety. As Lillian Smith, W. J. Cash, and others have made clear, one of the chief ways the white planter class was able to sustain power was to spread racist dissent amongst the poor whites, keeping them from allying with blacks similarly victimized by an exploitative labor system. In the decades after the height of the Harlem/New Negro Renaissance, authors like Richard Wright and Ann Petry provided naturalist accounts of black life, from the South to urban centers throughout the country. Wright in particular, well known for his raw consideration of both rural and southern and urban and northern black life, also provided wry commentary on the relationship between blacks and poor whites. Thus, while his memoir Black Boy has come to be known as an almost monolithic discussion of the poor black southern experience, Wright’s phototext 12 Million Black Voices extends the ideas of these white commentators and provides a separate perspective and understanding of the relationship between poor whites and blacks. Asked to provide text for a work comprising photographs selected from the Farm Credit Administration, Wright set out in earnest to chronicle the black experience he felt he had fled with his move north (as recounted in Black Boy). As David Bradley notes, Wright’s enthusiasm can be appreciated through his dedication to his craft as an author; though the text was supposed to be a mere twenty pages, that “quickly became more than fifty” as Wright “went through as many as six revisions of each section.”90 Though it was the immediate success and popularity of Native Son that led to Viking Press requesting that Wright

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take part in the project, Benjamin Balthaser is correct in noting that 12 Million Black Voices “is not merely the nonfiction companion to Native Son as it was advertised, but rather the culmination of Wright’s own contradictory and dialectical concerns with the politics of black representation.”91 Though Wright himself did not take the photographs and instead was left with the task of penning the accompanying critical commentary, he still relies on the use of a communal ‘we’ which is later manifest in the universality of his memoir’s title. Indeed, 12 Million Black Voices prefigures Black Boy in that it seeks to offer a portrait of black life that is at once individual (through the uniqueness of the individuals photographed) and communal, as evidenced by the ubiquitous we, which is often framed as a way of separating rural blacks from poor whites, whom he also cites as existing in their own oppressed/oppressor roles. As Jeff Allred notes, “invocations of ‘the people’ in 1930s culture generally conform to a racial profile: rural whites with tattered clothes and empty bellies whose mouths are nonetheless filled with a rough eloquence. Invisible in this profile of the worthy poor are various others deemed less worthy of notice.”92 And as it pertains to Wright himself, David Bradley makes an interesting speculative point that Wright might have seen himself in the various images, from the lynched man to the face of the black youths and sharecroppers: “There, but for the grace of God was Richard Wright.”93 The opening text of 12 Million Black Voices sits below a picture of an elderly man, with a grizzled beard and contemplative eyes, staring out at the reader. Regarding this beginning, Balthaser claims the opening line “explicitly challenges the gaze implicit in a documentary regime of knowing, denying that the white viewer can know anything about the black subject by the very means that the book has organized to display the African American’s life.”94 It is curious why an elderly man should occupy this opening image; Wright subsequently proceeds to discuss the “weird and paradoxical birth” of blacks in the Western Hemisphere, perhaps stressing the man’s endurance and lasting strength.95 The second chapter, “Inheritors of Slavery,” opens with an image of a portly white man, the clearest encapsulation of Wright’s moniker “Lords of the Land,” standing with one foot propped aggressively up on a car, while a number of black men sit behind him on the steps, one with his legs crossed, another leaning against a pole with his arms folded behind him shyly. The accompanying text reveals Wright’s belief that the designation “Negro” is “not really a name at all or a description, but a psychological island whose objective form is the most unanimous fiat in all American history.”96 The island metaphor here accentuates the distance between the white man and the black men in the photograph; though the relationship is not specified, the implication that the blacks are subject to his whim is implied, and his confidence and physical

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comfort imply a sense of power; later, Wright will note that when conversing with whites, “always we said what we thought the whites wanted us to say.”97 In these various examples, Wright sets out to accentuate the divide between blacks and whites, setting the stage for the various moments where he will explicitly locate white racial anxiety as being of central importance in the treatment of blacks. Regarding the we (black) / you (white) divide implied, Jeff Allred notes, “Black Voices posits a set of antagonistic subject positions: a (white) you whose routine misrecognitions mistake the outer ‘garb’ for the inner self of the other and a (black) we who speaks to readers from the far side of a racial, social, and narrative divide.”98 Many of the most noteworthy moments of 12 Million Black Voices occur when Wright explicitly labels white racism as being predicated upon anxiety, specifically tying it to the same type of hierarchization noted by Cash and Smith. For example, he discusses the ways in which the “The Lords of the Land” help spread the doctrine of white supremacy to “the poor whites who are eager to form mobs,” adding that in their “hysteria,” mobs will seize blacks, innocent or guilty, and lynch them, making “certain that our token-death is known throughout the quarters where we black folk live.”99 The succeeding page depicts an image of a lynching, with a group of white men staring intently at the camera, foregrounded by a large, tall, well-dressed man—hat, shirt, tie, jacket, and vest—leading against the tree, his hand inches from the dead man’s mutilated body. Worth noting is that aside from this figure, the other whites, while still looking into the camera, are largely obscured, hiding behind one another or blocked by the tree or the dead man. By and large, the other men are also more simply attired than the principal man, perhaps suggesting a class divide. This image, then, can be read as a static encapsulation of the ways in which white supremacy could be inculcated and spread amongst the lower class, who seem to garner what little confidence they have only by standing in the shadow of the presumed leader. Earlier, Wright notes that the expansion of slavery was the obvious starting point for this dissent, as the imported blacks “continued to squeeze the poor whites to lower levels of living.”100 He observes that the plantation economy meant that “the poor whites decreased in number as we blacks increased,” because white labor had been “rendered indigent and helpless” in the wake of chattel slavery.101 He adds, “to protect their delicately balanced edifice of political power, the Lords of the Land proceeded to neutralize the strength of us blacks and the growing restlessness of the poor whites by dividing and ruling us, by inciting us against one another.”102 Wright uses this overview to emphasize the present-day antagonism between the groups, as he notes the failure of the similarly exploited groups to band together because of the poor whites’ racism, stoked as it is by the “Lords of the Land.” He writes that “each

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poor white face begins to look like the face of an enemy soldier,” adding that “when we black folk are alone together, we point to the poor whites and croon with vindictiveness: I don’t like liver / I don’t like hash / I’d rather be a nigger / Than poor white trash.”103 Wright is quick, however, to observe that such twoway racial antipathy is a result of the ways in which the white ruling class has spread dissent: “There is something ‘funny’ about the hate of the poor whites for us and our hate for them. Our minds fight against it, but external reality freezes us into stances of mutual resistance.”104 While Wright eschews presenting an alternate, fantastical idea of racial and class solidarity, as he might have briefly hoped for in his early days in Chicago as a student of communism, here he merely observes the tragic irony that in spite of their antagonism toward one another, both poor whites and blacks “are spoken of by the Lords of the Land as ‘our men.’”105 Unlike You Have Seen Their Faces, 12 Million Black Voices forces readers to adopt the mindset of various groups of individuals; while some have criticized the text for ostensibly collapsing the black folk experience, Wright uses the ideas as a launching point for the complex duality present in Black Boy, where his individual nature is presented at times as being a microcosm for black southern life. In a similar vein, we can now return to Erskine Caldwell who, in his 1965 memoir In Search of Bisco, presents an account of his search for his black childhood friend Bisco, whom he refers to as the “only playmate” from his youth.106 The text follows Caldwell’s attempts at locating his friend decades later, as he interviews a menagerie of people, from prejudiced white southerners to various black individuals, with the bulk of each chapter displayed as dialogue ostensibly in that person’s voice. Like Black Boy, In Search of Bisco uses an individual experience as a launching point for discussing southern race relations as a whole, though, as always in Caldwell’s work, with an explicit focus on the distinct role of poor whites. In 1933, John Gould Fletcher published an article entitled “Is This the Voice of the South?” in which he wrote of blacks, “But we are determined, whether rightly or wrongly, to treat him as a race largely dependent upon us, and inferior to ours. . . . We believe that under our system the great majority of the race are leading happy and contented lives. But our system, we admit, has one defect. If a white woman is prepared to swear that a Negro either raped or attempted to rape her, we see to it that the Negro is executed.”107 In a letter to Maxim Lieber, Caldwell responded, “I myself am a southerner, I was born here, I have lived here most of my life, and I shall probably die here. But if being a southerner carries with it the implications of Fletcher’s letter, then I will renounce whatever birthright and heritage I may have, and give my allegiance to some other country.”108 Though written decades later, In Search of Bisco offers readers a

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glimpse of Caldwell’s attempts at examining his heritage with a critical eye and reveals him as an author not solely concerned with the extreme depictions of poor whites for which he had become known. While ostensibly a nonfictional account of his ambitions to locate his childhood friend, In Search of Bisco is better read as a memoir replete with artistic license; whether or not Bisco existed is of little concern to readers, but Caldwell using the idea of a long-lost friend allows him to ventriloquize southerners from all walks of life, utilizing the rhetorical strategies available to memoirists. Published in 1965, a year after passage of the Civil Rights Act, Caldwell still carefully notes the ways in which full equality and desegregation in the South is an ongoing process. He opens the work, much like Wright with Black Boy, with a recounting of his youth, though he is even quicker to cite the formative moments of his early awareness with race. Indeed, the opening line reads, “The scenes of my first becoming aware of the existence of color differences among people was my birthplace on an isolated farm deep in the piney-wood country of the red clay hills of Coweta County in Middle Georgia. My introduction to the reality of a dividing line between white-skin people and black-skin people was abrupt.”109 The moment Caldwell refers to is his mother forbidding him from going to Bisco’s house anymore “because I was white and he was Negro, and that I was old enough to learn that we had to live in separate houses,” yet another example of the ways in which racial views are inculcated in youth.110 After introducing Bisco via the anecdote in the first chapter, Caldwell offers the following definition of the South, calling it “a state of mind—a local purgatory or an earthly paradise—and often an economic iniquity, a social anachronism, a political autocracy, and a racial tyranny.”111 In contrast to other white southerners defining the South, namely William Percy, Caldwell is quick to point out that “above all, this is Bisco Country,” calling blacks “the unrewarded southerner, ” one with a “rightful claim to his share of inheritance so well and deservedly earned after more than two hundred years of sweat, travail, hardship, and degradation. An equitable sharing of the reward is long past due.”112 The chapter then presents Caldwell’s first interview subject, a black truck driver (he, like subsequent interviewees, will be unable to recall Bisco, emphasizing the ways Caldwell uses him as a symbol for black and white southerners to consider the race situation rather than as a true character in his own right). In ventriloquizing these individuals, Caldwell draws on both his reportorial and authorial background, using the characters as types as much as he presents them as individuals. Caldwell incorporates a number of voices; outright racists, a black college professor, a black family who cares for him after an accident. It becomes evident that they all serve as mouthpieces of a particular class type. The first white interviewee, for example, offers platitudes, such as southern

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whites being the “best friend the Negro American will ever have in this world,” and that this relationship depends upon blacks accepting the fact that only segregation sustains this relationship.113 And the first black voice we hear seems designed to ward off any white anxiety rather than provide any provocation or challenge. The truck driver tells Caldwell his dream is simply to “rent me a house I’d be proud for my family to live in. And it wouldn’t be over there in the white folks’ part of town, neither. I’m just proud enough in my own right to segregate myself over here on this side with my own people.”114 The man seems to state here that black upward mobility can be purely economic, without infringing on long-held traditions of social inequality (a parroting, perhaps, of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise). Even when he criticizes whites who have the “habit of having their way about things,” he adds the ameliorating addendum, “I don’t say all whites are like that. A lot of them are on our side,” in order to avoid coming across as overly abrasive.115 Through the various other characters, moments of tension regarding class and poverty bubble up, often foreshadowed by Caldwell’s initial descriptions of their background. A member of the White Citizens’ Council, for example, claims that he and his brethren must keep an eye on both poor whites and blacks, whom he mutually accuses of blurring the color line: “We’re working like hell to save the whole white race from getting wiped off the map. If we don’t have segregation, and have it now, this’ll be a nation of mongrels—not white like us and not black like them.”116 The man’s urgent tone aligns with the fierce rhetoric found in the likes of Dixon, whose characters often speak with a fire and brimstone immediacy to their racist beliefs. Another white interviewee is more sympathetic, telling Caldwell, “The Negroes are even worse off now in these days than a lot of white people were in the worst days of the depression thirty years ago.”117 He adds the self-aware note that, “if you mention my name around here, you’ll hear me called a lot of names. You’ll hear me called a crackpot, a trouble-maker, a lunatic, a nigger-lover.”118 What helps make this man stand out is that Caldwell introduces him as a theoretical contemporary in age and background to some of his own poor white, Depression-era characters. But rather than focus on the man’s exploitation, Caldwell, over a quarter century later, yearns for a sense of reconciliation as the South progresses past the depths of the Depression. He recalls that “the fertile farm land of East Georgia was a desolate expanse of human poverty in the nineteen-thirties,” but that now, “in the nineteen-sixties, a full generation later, the rich mulatto land from the Savannah to the Flint rivers has the appearance of a country untouched in all its history by adversity and a younger generation has come of age knowing of the past only by hearsay.”119 The interviewee, rather than blame blacks, as do many of the other subjects in the book, hints at their

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similar connection, noting that in spite of him achieving financial comfort since the end of the Depression, his experience working alongside both blacks and whites has resulted in his own relative success. And in one last example, Caldwell interviews a black professor, introducing him as a stark opposite to poor whites. Caldwell explains, “The plight of the uneducated and prejudiced white southerner, or poor buckra, as he was sarcastically named by the Negro long ago, is a pitiful one. This man of ill will is between forty and sixty years of age, barely literate due to lack of educational advantages in his youth, who is economically handicapped in life because he is now and has always been an unskilled laborer,” and he is noted for a “gullible eagerness and fanatical desire to be duped by inflammatory exhortations of the designing, scheming, rabblerousing, opportunistic, professional politician.”120 At first, this seems an odd entry point for an interview with a black professor, but Caldwell notes that the poor white is differentiated from such blacks because of a burgeoning education system (in Atlanta, in this instance). While Caldwell does not comment fully on the educational inequalities that plagued—and still plague—majority black communities in the South, the professor notes the poor, rural whites are similarly victims to limited opportunity, and that this perceived inequality, one that maintains “a pool of subservient people to work at the lower possible rate of pay,” maintains the racism and fear that characterize poor whites’ hatred of upwardly mobile blacks.121 This situation, as the professor notes, only serves to keep blacks and whites struggling against one another, though he ends with a hopeful sense that “a change is on the way” on the backs of education for blacks and whites.122 The memoir closes with Caldwell finding an elderly black man who claims to recall Bisco. Since it is unclear whether or not Caldwell ever actually knew a Bisco in the first place, the old man’s description can be read as offering a generalized take on one possible fate for black men in the South. He tells Caldwell, “I just can’t think exactly what that boy’s trouble was about—except maybe talking back to a white man out of turn.”123 That Bisco apparently survived talking back to a white man offers a sense of optimism; white anxiety throughout southern literature—and history, of course—has presented a much bleaker and violent outcome as the normative response to such behavior. In the final pages of the memoir, Caldwell calls for an increased understanding of the plight of both blacks and whites: “The difference between being white-poor and Negro-poor in such an environment is that the former has had freedom of opportunity and the latter has been a prisoner of discrimination,” along with the further note that “poverty actually began when the human spirit of the Negro American was impoverished by the denial of the rights of citizenship.”124 That Caldwell, who had once been America’s best-selling author, would encourage,

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not condemn, civil rights–era radicalism is significant, even when his prose at times shows elements of semipatronizing white liberalism. Caldwell thus builds upon his earlier work in attempting to understand and rationalize the actions and circumstances surrounding poor whites, aligning himself with the likes of Smith and Wright and distancing himself from the nostalgic conservatism that so defined William Percy’s work. Caldwell, through the lens of fictive memoir, closes his text looking forward with perhaps as optimistic an eye as we have seen from an author invested in tackling the social horrors haunting the South.

FOUR

“IT AINT NOTHING BUT JEST ANOTHER SNOPES” Boundaries of Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha

Despite the noticeable absence of major black characters in the novels, As I Lay Dying and the Snopes trilogy still offer fertile ground for analysis regarding the racial concerns that Faulkner interrogated throughout his career. Thadious M. Davis describes Faulkner’s “treatment of white people, within the normalizing, universalizing elision of racial identity, but with the complexity of the burden of racial subjectivity is an extraordinary achievement” and goes so far as to remark that As I Lay Dying and the Snopes trilogy, novels with “no visible black presence at all,” are the “most racialized of Faulkner’s work.”1 Rather than confronting the lingering specters of slavery or society’s inability to stomach the idea of miscegenation, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion expose anxieties over whiteness, specifically, the rise of white trash in Yoknapatawpha. An analysis of the Bundren and Snopes families reveals how those deemed normative in Yoknapatawpha seek to dehumanize these poor families as bestial and inferior. While class prejudice obviously plays a huge role in these attitudes, the degree of trepidation and ire expressed by the town through marginalizing and othering language ultimately seeks to present the family as somehow “less white” than the other denizens of Yoknapatawpha. In contrast to the old aristocratic families in Faulkner’s fictional world—the Sartorises, McCaslins, Compsons, Greniers, and de Spains—the Snopes family seemingly arrives out of nowhere in the ruined vestiges of the post-Civil War South.2 (The comic blandness of their name itself seems to suggest an inferior bloodline.) Even Ab Snopes, the pater familias, is described as “never anything but a jackal” by Faulkner in a discussion of Snopes’s mercenary actions during the Civil War.3 As opposed to, say, the lineage of the Compson family, which stems from 1699 and includes both a general and a governor, the Snopeses are 117

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introduced to readers as having no relevant ancestry, dismounting in Yoknapatawpha as little better than pests invading a fallen land.4 While many Snopeses do act perniciously in the stories in which they appear, their presence is most notable in that it triggers the bigoted mindset of the community at large that regards them as racially inferior. Writing about poor whites occupied Faulkner throughout his career, and tracing his developing treatment of poor characters—just as the South at large and figures like Caldwell wrestled with their own shifting ideologies and understandings of poor whites—reveals the author’s own often contradictory approach, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes derisive, and almost always provocative and insightful. What is frequently at stake in Faulkner’s depiction of poor whites is the ways in which they are viewed and described by others. A prefatory discussion of the Bundren family will illuminate aspects of Faulkner’s treatment of poor white characters before we turn to the Snopeses. As I Lay Dying memorably traces the Bundren family’s comically inept and disastrous trek to Jefferson to bury their wife and mother, Addie. Published in 1930, a year after The Sound and the Fury, the novel replaces the latter’s depiction of a waning aristocratic family and focuses instead on the plight of poor white farmers struggling at the outset of the Depression. While neither the Bundrens nor the myriad other families they encounter seem to be facing the debilitating poverty later explored in Caldwell’s novels, As I Lay Dying does present a sense of the racial and class-based objectification of its subjects. Julia Leyda is worth quoting at length on the family’s depiction as white trash: Anse Bundren is figured by Faulkner’s text as lazy, dishonest, self-righteous, duplicitous trash, and many observers in the novel attribute various of these characteristics to his children as well. Anse as white trash allows the other white farmers to see themselves as hard-working, honest white men somehow constitutionally or biologically different from the white trash5

One of the most insidious aspects of regarding whiteness as normative is that such a belief feeds into a desire to extend perceived superiority. The Bundren’s neighbor Cora Tull provides one such example. The novel’s second narrator and first nonfamily member, her description of the family provides early context for how readers regard the Bundrens. While ruminating on baking eggs and cakes to sell in town—“So I baked yesterday, more careful than ever I baked in my life, and the cakes turned out right well”—Cora tells readers that her prospective buyer had changed her mind about throwing a party and purchasing her goods. Cora’s daughter Kate’s response is telling: “She ought to taken those cakes anyway. . . . But those rich town ladies can change their

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minds. Poor folks cant.” Cora remains firm in her stance that such matters are theological, thinking to herself, “Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.”6 But Kate’s more embittered reaction sets an early tone regarding the ways that the town holds economic sway over poor whites, a matter explored further in the Snopes trilogy. Shortly thereafter, Cora attempts to level judgment against the Bundrens in order to create a hierarchy where her family supersedes theirs, illustrating not simply religious hypocrisy but also an important aspect of white anxiety: whiteness is secure only so long as there is someone or some group lower on the totem pole. Of Anse, Cora remarks, “A Bundren through and through, loving nobody, caring for nothing except how to get something with the least amount of work.”7 Jolene Hubbs comments upon this aspect of whites critiquing whites, making the point that “looking at rural poor whites as necessarily out of step facilitates the creation of social distinctions within a largely homogeneous white population. For indeed, the Bundrens are looked down upon by those with whom they come in contact despite the relative uniformity of the segment of Yoknapatawpha society depicted.”8 For Cora, her whiteness is secure so long as she is at liberty to degrade a family, unfairly citing Anse’s laziness as a means of leveling judgment against the entire family—Cash’s dedication to his craft as a carpenter or Jewel’s nocturnal field work, for example, should exempt them from such judgment. This attitude of abjection seen throughout the text is shown to have been inculcated amongst all family members. While Anse is a largely unsympathetic character, Darl does reveal his youthful hardships (and reminds us that Anse’s present laziness in part stems from the harsh labor he performed in his youth): “Pa’s feet are badly splayed, his toes cramped and bent and warped, with no toenail at all on his little toes, from working so hard in the wet in homemade shoes when he was a boy.”9 Anse is aware of how he and his family are regarded: of Darl’s laughing, he thinks, “How many times I told him it’s doing such things as that that makes folks talk about him, I dont know. I say I got some regard for what folks says about my flesh and blood even if you haven’t.”10 He also comments briefly upon the plight of poor farmers, a reflection that, when coupled with Darl’s remarks about the near-crippling labor of his youth, adds an element of sympathy to his character: “Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit. I takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats. It aint the hardworking man, the farmer. Sometimes I wonder why we keep at it.”11 While Anse is not quite honest and hardworking at this stage of his life, this scene, which foreshadows similar comments made by Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road, does emphasize the ways in which Anse is intimately aware of the social stratification in Yoknapatawpha.

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The family’s youngest members, too, know of their abject status in society. Vardaman expresses eagerness regarding bananas early in the novel, associating Jefferson, with its readily available material goods, with luxury: Dewey Dell said we will get some bananas. The train is behind the glass, red on the track. When it runs the track shines on and off. Pa said flour and sugar and coffee costs so much. Because I am a country boy because boys in town. Bicycles. Why do flour and sugar and coffee cost so much when he is a country boy. “Wouldn’y you ruther have some bananas instead?” Bananas are gone, eaten. Gone. When it runs on the track shines again. “Why aint I a town boy, pa?” I said. God made me. I did not said to God to made me in the country. If He can make the train, why cant He make them all in the town because flour and sugar and coffee.12

This stream-of-consciousness meditation is unexpectedly tragic, as even a child as young as Vardaman is acutely aware that, as a country boy, he has no access to what boys in town do. Poignantly, however, he does not simply desire luxury items—a bicycle, a toy train—but rather simple foodstuffs. Closing his thoughts with the disheartened “because flour and sugar and coffee” implies the hardships the Bundrens have likely faced. In addition to his emotional instability, Vardaman hints at malnutrition or, at least, an impoverished diet. His unanswered pleas to his father and God suggest his awareness of the injustice of the situation; Vardaman, too, knows his family is subject to critique from others. Fittingly, the next chapter Vardaman will narrate is one of the novel’s most famous: “My mother is a fish.”13 Finding his desperate, impassioned thoughts too difficult to sustain, Vardaman sinks instead into a bewildered trance regarding the belief that he played a role in his mother’s demise. The earlier commentary, however, suggests that Vardaman’s state of mind is due not only to a lack of maternal (or paternal) support but also the painful knowledge of his family’s poverty and poor health from an inadequate diet. “It’s because I am alone,” remarks Dewey Dell when considering how Doctor Peabody could perform the abortion she seeks.14 While Dewey Dell’s pregnancy and her lack of knowledge about the nature of abortions is treated in a darkly comic manner, it also suggests ways in which such knowledge was not readily available for her. Like Vardaman, Dewey Dell reveals how the idea that the Bundrens are inferior has been inculcated within her: “I dont see why [Peabody] didn’t stay in town. We are country people, not as good as town people. I dont see why he didn’t.”15 The novel’s two scenes depicting Dewey Dell’s attempts to convince shopkeepers to help her regarding her pregnancy provide corroborating evidence as to why she would hold such views. The first, Moseley, frequently refers to her with degrading, dehumanizing language. The opening

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description is telling: he mentions seeing her outside his shop, “just standing there with her head turned this way and her eyes full on me and kind of blank too.” To this initial commentary, he adds, “She kind of bumbled at the screen door a minute, like they do.”16 Moseley also makes immediate assumptions about her class, assuming “that she had a quarter or a dollar at the most,” adding the racializing comment that “she would maybe buy a cheap comb or a bottle of nigger toilet water.” Her eyes, too, are described as a means of dehumanizing her: Moseley remarks they are “about as black a pair of eyes as ever I saw” and that “in the eyes all of them look like they had no age and knew everything in the world, anyhow.”17 When the pair actually begin interacting (after Moseley has added the mocking comments “you have to let them take their time” and “you have to humor them. You save time by it”), it takes some time before the shopkeeper is able to deduce what it is that Dewey Dell wants.18 After stating forcefully that he will not sell her anything, Moseley comes to a brief moment of sympathy: “Then I looked at her. But it’s a hard life they have; sometimes a man . . . if there can ever be any excuse for sin, which it cant be. And then, life wasn’t made to be easy on folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die.”19 He then attempts to convince Dewey Dell to go back and marry Lafe, which, while not negating his dehumanizing commentary, reverts instead into a patronizing tolerance, as he regards the young woman’s actions to be a result of her white trash origins and perhaps beyond her ability to control. The second encounter includes similarly dehumanizing moments, though in this case it stems from MacGowan—a drugstore clerk—reducing Dewey Dell solely to the status of sexual object. Jody, a fellow clerk, informs MacGowan that a woman is outside, referring to her simply as a “country woman,” which, for MacGowan, serves as a template for their impending interaction (in a manner reminiscent of how the car salesman will react to Bessie and Dude in Tobacco Road). MacGowan manipulates Dewey Dell into having sex with him in exchange for what he calls his “knowledge and skill.”20 The phrase is interesting in that it offers an extension of MacGowan’s critique of poor whites; earlier, after asking Dewey Dell if she was married, he observes, “I never saw no ring. But like as not, they aint heard yet out there that they use rings.”21 Later, he makes the dark joke, which seemingly goes over Dewey Dell’s head, that the “operation” he will perform on her for an abortion is an example of “hair of the dog.”22 Sadly, Dewey Dell remains largely silent about this scene; in the succeeding chapter, narrated by Vardaman, she says simply, “It aint going to work. . . . That son of a bitch.” Vardaman does make one telling observation which hints at the fraught state of his sister’s mind after the coercive sexual manipulation: “‘I just know it wont,’ she says. She is not looking at anything. ‘I just know it.’”23 The “not looking at anything” line, which serves as a dark parallel to Moseley’s

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commentary about her blank stare, emphasizes Dewey Dell’s isolation at the novel’s conclusion. Her final narration, the novel’s penultimate chapter, offers further instantiation of her helplessness in the face of overbearing, abusive men, as Anse emotionally belittles his daughter in order to take the ten dollars given to her by Lafe: “God knows, I hate for my blooden children to reproach me.”24 Dewey Dell ends the novel, then, subjugated not only by ever-judgmental residents of Jefferson but also her own father, who resorts to archaic notions of patriarchal rights to limit his daughter’s independence. In her posthumously narrated chapter, Addie Bundren, too, reveals her awareness of the reproaches aimed at poor whites. A schoolteacher—and thus, in the eyes of Jefferson, of higher social standing than Anse—Addie describes how her suitor would drive “four miles out of his way” in order to see her.25 Addie herself resorts to aspects of subjugating white trash; she admits openly to being impressed that Anse has “a house and a good farm” and, in her succinct retelling of events, takes him as a husband in part because he was not destitute. Anse, too, reveals his lifelong awareness of social stratification (and, considering the young Anse has risen from abject poverty to build a house and farm, he speaks with more sympathy than at the time the novel takes place) with his remark, “I’m forehanded; I got a good honest name. I know how town folks are, but maybe when they talk to me. . . . . . .”26 The trailing ellipsis, in particular, emphasizes his feelings of shame and embarrassment, long imbued into him by the nonfarming class. Throughout her memorable, embittered narrative, Addie discusses her desire to get back at Anse after her pregnancy with Darl. At first, she states, “Then I believed that I would kill Anse,” but replaces this fevered desire with a cold dish of revenge instead, resorting to her awareness of class strife: “my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge. And when Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died.”27 Cheryl Lester summarizes Addie’s rationale: “By making Anse, who has not been to Jefferson in twelve years, promise to bury her there, Addie forces her family to suffer the disapproval of town folks after all.”28 Indeed, disapproval greets the Bundrens as they progress. During the stop at Mottson, Moseley narrates the town’s reaction to the family’s arrival. By now, Addie’s decomposing body reeks to the point where the group is sensed long before they arrive anywhere. The town’s reaction is one of revulsion and anger: “the wagon was stopped in front of Grummet’s hardware store, with the ladies all scattering up and down the street with handkerchiefs to their noses, and a crowd of hard-nosed men and boys standing around the wagon, listening to the marshall arguing with the man.” Of Addie, he notes, “it had been dead eight days,” reducing her from human to an “it.” In a manner that prefigures

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the treatment leveled against the Snopeses, the family at large is noted as having arrived seemingly out of nowhere: “They came from some place out in Yoknapatawpha County, trying to get to Jefferson with it. It must have been like a piece of rotten cheese coming into an ant-hill, in that ramshackle wagon that Albert said folks were scared would fall all to pieces before they could get it out of town, with that home-made box and another fellow with a broken leg lying on a quilt on top of it.”29 In addition to more references to Addie as an “it,” she is compared to rotten cheese, while the wagon and Cash’s homemade coffin are considered shoddy and representative of the family’s abject status. One final scene illustrates the complex racial hierarchy at play in Yoknapatawpha. Just outside Jefferson, the family crosses paths with three black men and one white man. Jewel has been listening to the group; Darl tells us his ear had taken on “a still deeper tone of furious red.” His anger comes to a head moments later: “When we pass the negroes their heads turn suddenly with that expression of shock and instinctive outrage. ‘Great God,’ one says; ‘what they got in that wagon?’”30 The “instinctive outrage” is left somewhat ambiguous; while the smell of Addie’s corpse is the most immediate explanation, the family’s shoddy appearance is also a valid possibility. For the blacks, whites who comport themselves as the Bundrens do are exotic, and unlike the middle-class denizens of Jefferson (a motif we saw in Caldwell’s Tobacco Road). Jewel is apoplectic. Like his siblings, he is intimately aware of how others judge him (earlier, he had refused to let his horse eat any of Samson’s feed without paying, lest he feel beholden to him): “Jewel whirls. ‘Son of a bitches,’ he says. As he does so he is abreast of the white man, who has paused. It is as though Jewel had gone blind for the moment, for it is the white man toward whom he whirls.”31 Darl’s remark is intriguing for a multitude of reasons; first, he expresses surprise that Jewel turns to the white man rather than one of the black ones. Darl is aware that in the South’s racial hierarchy, Jewel is at liberty to question the black men, whereas confronting the white townsmen is a surprising, transgressive moment. By calling Jewel blind, Darl also reveals a degree of his own racism; despite the fact that it was one of the black men who made the comment about the wagon, Darl is shocked that Jewel would not confront one of them rather than a white man. As Jewel did not see the speaker, he operates on the basis of assumption; his ire is directed toward his perceived nemesis, spitting out, “Thinks because he’s a goddamn town fellow.”32 Like his father, Jewel names the type of racial criticism aimed against his family. While Addie’s pungent body is often cited as the reason for their harsh treatment at the hands of those they come across in their trek to Jefferson, Faulkner consistently insinuates that various characters’ othering gazes (particularly those leveled against Dewey Dell) are in fact aspects of their anxiety, discomfort, and perceived superiority over the poor whites.

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Addie’s corpse, putrid, rotting, and omnipresent, thus comes to stand for the ways in which middle-class whites frequently dehumanize and degrade those they deem their racial inferiors, even—or perhaps especially—other whites. The ideology of whiteness may dominate social discourse in Yoknapatawpha County, but as the Snopes trilogy illustrates, phenotypical whiteness does not preclude the possibility of racial subjugation.33 Elements of racism against blacks occur across Faulkner’s oeuvre, but acknowledging that prejudice toward poor whites occurs opens up a wider critical lens with which to understand the racial ideology of Yoknapatawpha. Expanding discussion on this matter is important, lest we overlook the pernicious invisibility endemic to whiteness. Sharon Paradiso reminds us that while “the novels in which African Americans do not appear, or in which they figure only tangentially, are not considered to be ‘about’ race,” in actuality, “they are about the race that, as it were, dare not speak its name: the white race.”34 What establishes whiteness as dominant is its seeming normativity; George Yancy writes that such normativity easily produces supremacy, since “the black body is by nature criminal, because the white body is by nature innocent, pure, and good.”35 Failing to regard whiteness itself as an object worthy of study inculcates its status as normative. Scholars considering white trash have tweaked Yancy’s argument by considering the fact that whiteness cannot bear the thought of its being sullied or tarnished not only by blacks but also by other whites who fail to live up to standards of propriety. In addition, as Jacqueline Zara Wilson notes, “a central question in considering the label ‘White Trash’ is to what extent it is a racial term, as opposed to a term merely signifying class; and as a corollary, within the parameters of that ‘racial’ aspect, whether it is intrinsically or potentially a racist tag.”36 Throughout the Snopes trilogy, deep-seated anxieties come to light over the presence of the Snopeses; their arrival, first in the village of Frenchman’s Bend and then the town of Jefferson, is viewed as an invasive act, an intrusion into space clearly demarcated toward a certain class of people—middle-class whites. While discussing Flem Snopes early in The Town, for example, Chick Mallison remarks that “we had not yet read the signs and portents which should have warned, alerted, sprung us into frantic concord to defend our town from him.”37 This idea, that a town must be defended from Flem Snopes—Flem here serving as the embodiment and representative of all white trash—has been explored by Dina Smith, who notes that “common trash” is “Snopes trash: angry, defiant, resolutely poor southern labor” that must be watched, lest they dare “to move on America’s new roads, dangerously invading middle-class spaces.”38 As the trilogy progresses, characters voice anxieties over the ever-increasing “threat” of Snopesism, often expressing their trepidations through increasingly degrading epithets. As Newitz and Wray maintain, “the category of white trash is marked

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as white from the outset. But in addition to being racially marked, it is simultaneously marked as trash, as something that must be discarded, expelled, and disposed of in order for whiteness to achieve and maintain social dominance.”39 Analyzing characters that could be considered white trash in Faulkner’s texts helps eviscerate any notions of a pure, homogeneous whiteness in his works. Before turning to the Snopeses, a brief discussion of Wash Jones and his relationship to Thomas Sutpen will serve as another gateway to situate Faulkner’s depictions of poor whites. The short story “Wash” (1934), later revised for Absalom, Absalom! (1936), was at one point considered by Faulkner a possible “induction toward the spotted horse story” in The Hamlet, and thus relates to Faulkner’s career-long investment in the Snopes saga.40 Wash Jones is one of Faulkner’s most memorable ancillary characters, notably due to his murder of Thomas Sutpen. The opening description of Wash establishes him as an inferior, nearly subhuman being: “a gaunt, malaria-ridden man with pale, questioning eyes, who looked about thirty-five, though it was known that he had not only a daughter but an eight-year-old granddaughter as well” who tells all in earshot “I’m looking after the Kernel’s place and niggers” after Sutpen rides off at the outset of the Civil War.41 For this statement, he is chastised by Sutpen’s slaves, who laugh at him and taunt, “Why ain’t you at de war, white man,” even challenging Wash’s ability to utilize the epithet “nigger”: “Who him, calling us niggers?”42 Historically, the term “poor white trash” has been attributed to slaves: in her journals, published in 1835, British actress Fanny Kemble writes, “In the south, there are no servants but blacks; for the greater proportion of domestics being slaves, all species of servitude whatever is looked upon as a degradation; and the slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash.’”43 Wash is unable to establish any sense of racial or class dominance over the slaves, who reveal that his shack at the outskirts of Sutpen’s property is one “dat Cunnel wouldn’t let none of us live in,” suggesting just how low an estimation of Wash Sutpen maintains.44 Perhaps most significant in defining Wash’s inferior status is his inability to enter the colonel’s home: in both “Wash” and the novel, he is turned away from the door, with the refrain “Stop right dar, white man. Stop right whar you is. You ain’t never crossed dese steps whilst Cunnel here, and you ain’t ghy’ do hit now,” in spite of the fact that Wash and Sutpen “had spent more than one afternoon together on those rare Sundays when there would be no company in the house.”45 Significantly, the narrator reveals that the two “were the same age almost to a day.”46 This resemblance between the men is strengthened when considering Sutpen’s own poor upbringing. As revealed in Faulkner’s genealogy to Absalom, Absalom! Sutpen was born in the “West Virginia mountains . . . of poor whites, Scotch-English stock.”47 As recollected by Quentin Compson,

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Sutpen learned “the difference not only between white men and black ones” but also “that there was a difference between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room,” knowledge garnered in large part due to his experience delivering a message to the “big house” of the plantation owner and being barred from the door by a “monkey nigger.”48 As John N. Duvall states, Sutpen “comes to see that his being Caucasian is a necessary but insufficient condition to enjoying the status of southern Whiteness.”49 This moment, Quentin maintains, is pivotal in understanding Sutpen’s stated desire for his grand design, as the latter insisted that he was not mad, but that “he knew that something would have to be done about it; he would have to do something about it in order to live with himself for the rest of his life” and that it was “the rich man (not the nigger)” that Sutpen regards as the instigator for his shame.50 Ultimately, Sutpen builds “a house even bigger and whiter than the one he had gone to the door of that day.”51 What lies at the core of the house’s whiteness is not size, however, but rather the owner’s—be it the “rich man” or Sutpen himself—ability to bar those unworthy of entrance, namely, blacks and poor white trash. As Walter Benn Michaels summarizes, Sutpen’s “design” is based around the desire “to become someone on whom no one can look down.”52 This motif—the rise from white trash to wealthy, powerful member of the community—will be repeated in the Snopes trilogy as Flem moves from store clerk to bank president. And, like Sutpen before him, Flem will go to great lengths to subjugate the poor whites from whom he arose, exiling his family members from Jefferson, supposedly in the name of “respectability.” In “Barn Burning,” we see another iteration of the poor white tenant barred from the front door of his superior’s home. Ab Snopes is immediately established as a threatening force by the story’s narration: “There was something about his wolflike independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral which impressed strangers, as if they got form his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his.”53 Ab is acutely aware of the reality of his economic situation, as he refers to Major de Spain as the man “that aims to begin to-morrow morning owning me body and soul for the next eight months.”54 The coded language of ownership reveals that Ab knows that his position in relation to de Spain strips him of personal autonomy in a manner not dissimilar from his understanding of slavery. His ire at this reality manifests itself as he tromps through a pile of horse manure on his “absolutely undeviating course” to de Spain’s front door.55 As was the case with Sutpen and Wash, Ab is halted by a black man: “Wipe yo foots,

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white man, fo you come in here.”56 Unlike his predecessors, however, Ab forces his way in, intentionally dragging his foot across de Spain’s hundred dollar rug before leaving. Ab regards himself as both victim and opponent of de Spain’s class, as he snidely describes the house: “Pretty and white, ain’t it? . . . That’s sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain’t white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it.”57 Ab, for all his crudeness and seeming barbarity, offers an astute observation here: only with the combination of “white sweat” and “nigger sweat” will de Spain’s house be “white enough” for him.58 John N. Duvall goes as far as to say that Ab’s reading of the house shows that he “sees that his own and other white sharecroppers’ labor (sweat) is identical to exploited black labor.”59 The “white sweat” needed to complete the house, of course, will not be that of de Spain’s class but rather that of the poor white trash represented here by the Snopeses. Worth mentioning, too, is the role of young Colonel Sartoris “Sarty” Snopes, first seen in the story hungrily eyeing cheese and canned goods in the story’s opening scene, akin to Vardaman’s longing glances into store windows in As I Lay Dying.60 During the story’s climax, Sarty bursts into de Spain’s home (thus crossing the same threshold his father did earlier, though still uninvited) and attempts to warn the Major about the imminent barn burning. Curiously, de Spain is referred to by the narrator as “the white man” while Sarty remains simply “the boy.”61 In spite of his selfless action in choosing to warn de Spain and align himself against his father, the narrator still draws a line of racial demarcation between the characters. Sarty also yearns for a degree of acceptance of his father’s actions, telling himself, “He was brave! . . . He was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry!”62 Earlier, the Justice of the Peace in the case of barn burning at the story’s outset proclaims, “I reckon anybody named for Colonel Sartoris in this country can’t help but tell the truth, can they?”63 The narrator, however, rebukes Sarty’s perception of his father, revealing that Ab gave “fidelity to no man or army or flag” but went to war “for booty—it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own,” factors substantiated by Ab’s actions in The Unvanquished.64 Rather than serving as an honorific or memorial to the colonel, Sarty’s name is a subversive act of defiance, indicating a sense of invasiveness—if people of Ab’s ilk can reappropriate the names of their white superiors, perhaps, too, they can establish an ascendant foothold on the class (and racial) ladder. For young Sarty, unaware of this reality, all options are equally bleak in the face of his father’s actions; rather than stay and implicitly support the barn burning, he lights out on his own, leaving behind his father’s solitary war against the upper class. The rise of Snopesism and the encroachment of white trash upon Yoknapatawpha will not include Sarty, as the narrator closes the story with finality: “He did not look back.”65

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From the opening pages of The Hamlet, Faulkner makes it clear that Frenchman’s Bend is hardly a bastion of racial tolerance. The village (built on the remnants of a grand plantation, and thus inheriting that legacy of racial and class subjugation) is described as “definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither,” suggesting its unity is based as much around ideology and common belief as it is by geography.66 As for the local populace, “they were Protestants and Democrats and prolific; there was not one negro landowner in the entire section. Strange negroes would absolutely refuse to pass through it after dark.”67 Defining the kinds of people who inhabited this New South was of tantamount importance to Faulkner, burdened as he was with the specters of his own family’s Confederate heritage. As his friend Phil Stone remarked in a letter to James Meriwether, “The core of the Snopes legend was an idea I gave Bill,” specifically, that “the real revolution in the South was not the race situation but the rise of the rednecks who did not have any of the scruples of the old aristocracy.”68 Writing about poor whites being judged as racialized, inferior beings relates to Nell Painter’s observation that there is an “age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior.”69 In Faulkner’s unfinished early manuscript attempt at a Snopes novel, Father Abraham, he expounds upon this figure in a variation of his later description of Frenchman’s Bend’s residents: “County officers do not annoy them save at election time, and they support their own churches and schools, and sow the land and reap it and kill each other occasionally and commit adultery and fear God and hate republicans and niggers.”70 By noting that county officers have little to do with these residents, Faulkner implies that the more well-to-do citizens regard the members of the hamlet as decidedly beneath them, a race apart. These residents extend this ideology, as the narration specifically mentions “niggers” as recipients of their hatred, rather than the white townsfolk who abjure and avoid them. As we will see throughout the saga, social hierarchization and stratification is at play here. As Theresa Towner summarizes, “Frenchman’s Bend is irrecoverably, ideologically white from the first pages of The Hamlet.”71 Enter Ab Snopes, a “complete stranger,” who quickly encounters Jody Varner, son of the area’s wealthiest landowner.72 Shortly after brokering a deal, Jody learns that Ab may have been “mixed up in that burnt barn of a fellow named Harris over in Grenier County two years ago.”73 Immediately, Varner looks for a way to rid himself of Ab and his family, remarking “Burning barns aint right. And a man that’s got habits that way will just have to suffer the disadvantage of them.”74 Barn burning, of course, is morally reprehensible, although Varner is basing his decisions entirely off hearsay—his unwillingness to trust Ab from the outset stems from an inherent distrust of his class inferiority. Varner

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has immediately focalized Ab as different (and implicitly inferior), noting he wore a “frock coat too large for him” and had “a pair of eyes of a cold opaque gray between shaggy graying irascible brows and a short scrabble of iron-gray beard as tight and knotted as a sheep’s coat.”75 While these descriptions are not explicitly racially marked, Varner is clearly wary of Ab’s class difference (the oversized coat) and his not-quite-humanness (the opaque eyes and beard that resembles a sheep).Whether or not the Ab of The Hamlet was a barn burner—and all testimony, secondhand though it may be, strongly implies that he was—the matter is of secondary importance in relation to the ways in which the text reveals the deep-seated anxieties the community has for the kind of people they perceive as barn burners: white trash.76 A glance at Faulkner’s first prolonged description of the family in Father Abraham provides a useful foundation for the ways in which the narration presents the hamlet’s reaction to the family: The Snopes sprang untarnished from a long line of shiftless tenant farmers—a race that is of the land and yet rootless, like mistletoe; owing nothing to the soil, giving nothing to it and getting nothing of it in return; using the land as a harlot instead of an imperious yet abundant mistress, passing on to another farm. Cunning and dull and clannish, they move and halt and move and multiply and marry and multiply like rabbits: magnify them and you have political hangers on and professional officeholders and prohibition officers; reduce the perspective and you have mold on cheese, steadfast and gradual and implacable77

The strong degrees of racialization that will come into play throughout the trilogy are readily apparent even at this early stage.78 The opening line oozes irony; the family sprang “untarnished” from what is described as a separate race, one that is “rootless” and abuses the soil like a “harlot.” As the passage goes on, we see early racializing descriptions, intended to dehumanize the family. The Snopeses are referred to as “they,” and are compared unfavorably to rabbits. Perhaps most insulting, however, is the comparison to molding cheese; mammals are at least sentient. As various Snopeses materialize in Frenchman’s Bend, Faulkner reveals the townspeople’s blatant denigration of the family through frequent descriptions of them as animals.79 Excepting the land-owning Varners, the denizens of the hamlet are universally poor and would likely be labeled as white trash themselves by outsiders, though that does not deter them from attempting to asperse those they deem as inferior. Those quoted might well have hailed from Frenchman’s Bend, considering the distrust of Snopeses that runs rampant throughout the community. The fact that various Snopeses often commit

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heinous, exploitative acts (such as Lump setting up a peep show for people to watch his cousin Ike sodomize Houston’s cow) does not counteract the fact that the language leveled against them is openly dehumanizing. After hearing of Mink Snopes’s ferocity, Ratliff remarks, “So Flem’s got some more cousins still. Only this here seems to be a different kind of Snopes like a cotton-mouth is a different kind of snake.”80 Later, Saint Elmo, son of I. O., is caught eating out of a candy case. The store clerk yells at the boy, treating him as if he were no more intelligent than an animal: “You, Saint Elmo! . . . Stand up! . . . Git on home,” he yells, before remarking, “He’s worse than a rat, aint he?” Varner responds, “Rat, hell . . . He’s worse than a goat. . . . By God, I’ve done everything but put out poison for him.”81 While the scene is presented with the usual comedic tone of the novel, it does further establish the motif that whenever readers are laughing, the townspeople are openly denigrating the Snopeses. The earlier version of this scene, as published in Father Abraham, extends the animal motif, as Varner bellows “And if I ketch him hangin’ around yere again, I’m a goin’ to set a bear trap fer him.”82 Such disparagement of lower class whites has been noted by scholars; Annalee Newitz remarks that they are frequently “racialized, and demeaned, because they fit into the primitive/civilized binary as primitives.”83 The novel’s narration provides an apt example; while in court, Lump Snopes is described as “staring at the Justice with the lidless intensity of a rat—and into the lens-distorted and irisless old-man’s eyes of the Justice.”84 While the old man is hardly described in a complimentary manner, he is at least human; Lump is but a rat. The curious case of Ike Snopes merits attention as well; though a great deal of the slurs against Ike relate to his mental disability (indeed, even critics often refer to him simply as “the idiot”), the language leveled against Ike reveals attempts to demean him that encompass multiple categorizations of Ike’s identity, including race. When Ike first appears, his Snopes-like qualities are readily apparent to Ratliff and the farmer Bookwright, who, in his “harsh short voice,” disparagingly refers to him as “another one of them” and that “he aint the first” Snopes to arrive unannounced.85 That Ike is indeed a Snopes is significant; from a narrative perspective, Faulkner could have easily excluded his character and the comic/grotesque chase of Jack Houston’s cow. By making him a Snopes, Faulkner adds another layer of potential critique and subjugation for him; in addition to degrading Ike for his mental disability, the townsfolk regard the fact that he is disabled white trash as making him all the more detestable. Interestingly, the narration in Ike’s opening passage, rather than the characters’ dialogue, does the most work in terms of dehumanizing Ike, as he is consistently referred to simply as “the creature” and later “the idiot.”86 To attribute this derogatory attribution to Faulkner would be a mistake; since the narration

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reads, “Ratliff watched the creature as it went on,” Faulkner offers a focalization of how Ratliff regards Ike.87 In addition, Bookwright reveals that Ike sleeps in Mrs. Littlejohn’s barn, implicitly comparing him to livestock: “She feeds him. He does some work.”88 Later, Faulkner unveils the depths of Ike’s desire for Houston’s cow: “he following again, speaking to her, trying to tell her how this violent violation of her maiden’s delicacy is no shame, since such is the very iron imperishable warp of the fabric of love.”89 The lines are grotesque, considering the subject of bestiality, but at the same time, their heightened sense of lyricism, used to describe the depth and single-mindedness of Ike’s devotion, stands in stark contrast to the forcefulness of Houston’s proclamations against Ike, as he yells, “Get out of there . . . Now git! Home! Home!”90 As with the language leveled against Saint Elmo, Ike is regarded as nothing more than an animal. Faulkner’s apparent sympathy toward Ike advances his critique of those characters who judge him based either on race or disability. Stylistically, the Ike section is the novel’s most lyrical, reminiscent of Benjy’s opening section in The Sound and the Fury.91 Though some characters choose not to harass Ike, including Ratliff, who eloquently proclaims, “I am stronger than him. Not righter. Not any better, maybe. But just stronger,” most of Frenchman’s Bend regards Ike as the corporeal embodiment of the poor white intruders in their homeland.92 Ike’s presence is disconcerting and humiliating for the town; though it is Lump who sets up the peep show in an attempt to profit off his kin, the process briefly flourishes due to the town’s desire not only to see Ike in such a bestial position but also because the peep show keeps him fenced in and contained, no longer free to roam the town as a representative of his supposed inferiority. The Snopes presence cannot be contained or cordoned off, however; white trash is there to stay in the hamlet. Flem may ride off toward Jefferson in the closing pages but his presence and that of his family remain entrenched in Frenchman’s Bend. What Ike ultimately exposes are the hierarchies of racial subjugation; the poor whites in the novel denigrate the white trash Snopeses who themselves denigrate Ike, labeling him as subhuman and treating him in a manner akin to a circus sideshow. Only Ike, who lacks the mental faculty to bear such judgment, is free from such prejudices. Regardless of circumstance, it seems there is always someone lower on the ladder of racial inferiority in the eyes of the hamlet. As the trilogy moves squarely into Jefferson, Faulkner introduces Gavin Stevens as a guiding force in the crusade against Snopesism. Whereas The Hamlet is narrated by an outside voice, The Town offers first-person accounts by Gavin, Ratliff, and Gavin’s young nephew Charles “Chick” Mallison. Though The Hamlet introduced deep-seated anxieties regarding the presence of poor whites, this worldview is not cemented until The Town, as revealed in the

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language used by Gavin and Ratliff, often filtered through Chick’s narration. The multiplicity of narrative viewpoints in the novel often obscures how we as readers respond to the Snopeses; though various actions incite negative feelings, including Montgomery Ward’s pornographic shop and Flem’s ascent into the bank presidency, the degree to which Gavin and Ratliff respond to the Snopeses feels predicated as much on their own beliefs as on the Snopeses’ actions. Owen Robinson offers the reminder that as readers, “we observe Ratliff and the chorus reading Flem Snopes, but our own necessary uncertainty with regard to reading them reminds us of the doubt at every level from writer to character to narrator to reader.”93 This narrative instability comes to the fore in The Town. Gavin’s narration is clouded by his self-proclaimed title as protector of Jefferson’s honor, be it from poor whites or, as in the case of his comic fights with Manfred de Spain, the honor of a woman who asked for no such protection. Gavin regards himself as a modern-day Galahad, protecting the town by establishing the Snopeses as a viable threat, often through derogatory language akin to that seen in The Hamlet. Early in the novel—and thus before Flem’s most egregious actions—Gavin tells Ratliff to “hold the fort” against the Snopeses, whom he refers to as akin to a “herd of tigers” that would be better to keep “shut up in a mule-pen” than “roaming and strolling loose all over ever where in the entire country.”94 Gavin’s hyperbolic language overstates the threat posed by Flem and his kin—at this point, the worst the family has shown is Montgomery Ward’s illicit shop (which, of course, requires that the men of the town pay to view the pornographic postcards he displays) and Flem’s failed brass stealing scheme, detailed in the novel’s opening chapter. In describing Gavin’s point of view, John Bassett observes, “As it is for Ratliff, ‘Snopes’ is a self-created threat to Gavin, the ‘other’ that denies those abstractions on which he depends.” Consequently, he and Ratliff set themselves up as “the self-proclaimed protectors of Jefferson against Snopes.”95 For Gavin, the Snopeses represent classlessness and depravity, unfit for the “hallowed” lands of Jefferson.96 Their lack of familial bond is especially repugnant to Gavin’s old-fashioned mindset. In perhaps the trilogy’s most memorable description of the family, Gavin claims, “they none of them seemed to bear any specific kinship to one another; they were just Snopeses, like colonies of rats or termites are just rats and termites.”97 The fact that both animals are invasive pests is significant; to Gavin, the Snopeses are unwelcome intruders, no better than vermin. In Mark Leaf ’s analysis, Gavin’s views represent a fading era, and the old families of Jefferson—such as the de Spains and the Stevenses—“are no longer fitted to maintain the ascendancy of their class. . . . The assurance of the aristocracy they so inadequately represent has disintegrated into shabby flamboyance or romantic gesture and loquac-

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ity.”98 Gavin’s conception of whiteness is no longer adapted to fit the modern world, represented by the Snopeses, a family lacking the privileges and benefits of class and heritage and thus abhorrent to Gavin’s linking of whiteness with middle- and upper-class respectability. In contrast to Gavin, who comes from a well-to-do background, Ratliff is an itinerant salesman, better off than the farmers of Frenchman’s Bend but a far cry from Jefferson’s elite families. Ratliff ’s opinion on the perniciousness of Snopesism is somewhat surprising; while he is an astute observer of the reprehensible nature of various individual actions, his universal disdain for the family is complicated by his own heritage. Eula Varner Snopes reveals to Gavin in The Town that Ratliff ’s real name is “Vladimir Kyrilytch” and that his Russian ancestors became poor farmers in Virginia; thus, Ratliff hides his name because “nobody named Vladimir Kyrilytch could make a living as a Mississippi country man.”99 In Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner describes Ratliff ’s ancestry even more explicitly: his ancestor, the first Ratliff (then Ratcliffe) in Jefferson was “son of a long pure line of Anglo-Saxon mountain people and—destined—father of an equally pure line of white trash tenant farmers who never owned a slave and never would since each had and would imbibe with his mother’s milk a personal violent antipathy not at all to slavery but to black skins.”100 This “white trash” lineage does not result in Ratliff gaining an overriding sense of empathy for the Snopeses, however; instead, he is a frequent crusader against them (much more so than in The Hamlet, possibly a result of his having been tricked by Flem at the end of that novel). And if we are to accept the racist claim in Requiem for a Nun as applicable to the Ratliff of the Snopes trilogy, his motivation toward keeping the Snopeses—who, as white trash, are still racially inferior—out of Jefferson takes on a more sinister tone.101 Throughout The Town, Chick Mallison adopts his uncle’s and Ratliff ’s mindset, becoming inculcated in Jefferson’s totalizing view of whiteness. Ratliff ’s influence is particularly powerful, as Chick remarks, “And I dont know how Ratliff did it and of course I cant remember when because I wasn’t even five yet. But he had put into my mind too, just like into Gowan’s, that idea of Snopeses covering Jefferson like an influx of snakes or varmints from the woods and he and Uncle Gavin were the only ones to recognise the danger and the threat.”102 In addition, Chick recalls Gowan’s comment that “Snopeses had to be watched constantly like an invasion of snakes or wildcats.”103 Comedy aside, the comment perpetuates the dehumanizing characterization of Snopeses as animals, emphasizing the reality that racial subjugation is learned, rather than innate. The town believes its views are normative, thus representing George Lipsitz’s comment that “whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.”104 Chick, then,

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has inherited the town’s views of whiteness through a form of social osmosis; without any lectures or descriptions of hierarchies of whiteness, he learns that the poor white Snopeses are inferior to him and his family. Chick’s racial views are most clear in the final chapter of the novel, which details the arrival of Byron Snopes’s children, shipped from Texas. Though Faulkner referred to the episode as “just a funny story,” it offers a resounding final word regarding the town’s views on whiteness.105 From the moment Byron’s children arrive in Jefferson (by way of the train implemented by Colonel Sartoris, it is worth noting), they are regarded as less than human. Chick remarks, “Then four things got off. I mean, they were children.”106 At this point, the children have yet to commit any violent acts against the town, and so the judgment leveled against them—that their humanity is subsidiary to their status as “things”—is based entirely on their disheveled appearance. Continuing, Chick notes that the children include a small boy “in a single garment down to its heels like a man’s shirt made out of a flour- or meal-sack or maybe a scrap of an old tent” (emphasis mine). Chick’s extended description of the children illustrates the innate trepidation he feels at their arrival and presence in town: Because they didn’t look like people. They looked like snakes. Or maybe that’s too strong too. Anyway, they didn’t look like children; if there was one thing in the world they didn’t look like it was children, with kind of dark pasty faces and black hair that looked like somebody had put a bowl on top of their heads and then cut their hair up to the rim of the bowl with a dull knife, and perfectly black perfectly still eyes that nobody in Jefferson (Yoknapatawpha County either) ever afterward claimed they saw blink107

Most disturbing here is the emphasis on their lack of humanity, as Chick consistently repeats that they “didn’t look like children,” and, thus, didn’t look human. The snake comparison will later be used to describe Mink Snopes; from his lawyer’s point of view, Mink is “slight and frail and harmless-looking as a child and as deadly as a small viper—a half-grown asp or cobra or krait.”108 In contrast to Mink, who has already committed murder by the time of his lawyer’s characterization of him, the children act violently only after they are met with racialized judgments (specifically killing and eating a purebred Pekinese, knifing Dewitt Binford, and tying Doris Snopes—familial bond notwithstanding—to a tree in preparation for burning him). Before the children are sent back to Byron via train, Jody asks Ratliff and Chick, “Would either of you gentlemen like to go down with me and watch what they call the end of a erea, if that’s what they call what I’m trying to say? The last and final end of

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Snopes out-and-out unvarnished behavior in Jefferson, if that’s what I’m trying to say.” Chick then tells readers, “There was a considerable crowd around them, at a safe distance,” while Ratliff adds that the food packaged for the children’s journey should be set on the ground and shoved to them with a stick.109 Though he means this line as a jest (and he and Chick do hand out the food to the children), the joke offers a final reinforcement of the judgment leveled upon the children by the town. By the time of The Mansion, Flem Snopes is comfortably ensconced in his position as bank president, an unthinkable role considering his origins. Throughout the trilogy, Flem is described by various characters as being nearly subhuman. In his first appearance, Jody Varner describes him as having a face “as blank as a pan of uncooked dough,” featureless and amorphous.110 The initial descriptions of him in Father Abraham make him seem even less human: “He chews tobacco constantly and steadily and slowly, and no one ever saw his eyelids closed. He blinks them of course, like everybody else, but no one ever saw him do it. This is the man.”111 And later: “His eyes were all surface and were the color of stagnant water, and you never saw his eyelids closed over them, even momentarily, and his tobacco pouch seam of a mouth was slightly stained at the corners with snuff.”112 The constant focus on Flem’s eyes implies a sense of anxiety, as if his gaze is so dominating and oppressive to the townsfolk that they are unable to meet his eyes and, thus, have never had the opportunity to see him blink, flinch, or otherwise back down from a statement or belief. In a 1938 letter to Robert Haas, Faulkner provides an outline for the Snopes trilogy, referring to Flem as a ravenous predator: the first volume (originally entitled The Peasants), “has to do with Flem Snopes’ beginning in the country, as he gradually consumes a small village until there is nothing left in it for him to eat.”113 He continues the metaphor, explaining that by the time of the final volume (originally to be called Ilium Falling), “Flem has eaten up Jefferson too,” to the point where “there is nothing else he can gain, and worse than this, nothing else he wants. He even has no respect for the people, the town, he has victimized, let alone the parasite kin who batten on him.”114 This accounts, too, for Flem’s curious refusal to arm himself against Mink despite being warned about his approach by Gavin; with nowhere higher to climb, Flem has seemingly accepted his fate. Here, Faulkner not only sets Flem apart from the town, largely on account of his extreme avarice but also refers to the fellow Snopeses as parasites, leeching what they can from Flem, as they follow him from the hamlet to Jefferson. In contrast to much of his family, Flem appears uninterested in the farming lifestyle, as he parleys his father’s reputation as a barn burner into a position as clerk in Varner’s store, thus instigating his decades-long climb into the upper

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echelon of Jefferson society. What makes his rise all the more spectacular is not merely his own poor beginning but his awareness of the prejudices and fears arrayed against him and his family. Flem comes to understand the necessity of respectability as the trilogy progresses and begins the process of removing his kin from Jefferson, understanding that their white trash status is potentially damaging to his reputation and success in the eyes of the town. Flem’s attempt to cast aside his white trash identity represents the trilogy’s inevitable conclusion of the proliferation of anti-white trash sentiment. As Matthew Lessig mentions in a discussion of Faulkner’s treatment of sharecropping in his works, “Characters like Flem Snopes, former tenants who rose to become large-scale entrepreneurs, were an historical anomaly.”115 Flem’s tenacity and ruthlessness, casting aside, in Mink’s words, the “ancient immutable laws of simple blood kinship” in favor of his own financial and social success, has resulted in his anomalous and prestigious position in town.116 As Lessig points out, “many of the South’s rural poor followed Flem Snopes to the town, but exceptionally few made it to the mansion.”117 The chief reason for the lack of Snopeses in The Mansion is Flem’s realization that respectability is a necessary component in obtaining the money he desires above all else. In Faulkner’s characterization of him, Flem “just wanted to get rich,” in contrast to, say, Sutpen’s “grand design.” The only rationale for Flem’s sudden desire for respectability (largely absent in The Hamlet) is that he needed that to achieve the financial success he desires, and that “he would have done without it if he could.”118 Notably, Myra Jehlen has stated, “Flem becomes a threat only after he discards his agrarian poor-white identity, and his kinfolk back on the farm suffer from his predatoriness along with everyone else.”119 Indeed, by the time of The Mansion, Flem has done his best to expel his kin: his alleged barn-burning father lives outside of town, the murderous Mink is in jail, while Montgomery Ward the pornographer and I. O. the bigamist are banished from town. The Snopeses who do remain are those who can help enhance his respectability, such as Watkins Products Snopes, the carpenter who works on Flem’s mansion, and Wallstreet Panic Snopes, who operates a wholesale grocery store.120 Much of The Mansion’s plot details the continuing drive to rid Jefferson of Snopeses. In addition to their long-standing opposition to Flem, Ratliff and Gavin continue their crusades against other members of the family. As before, Faulkner’s depiction of the family is mixed in regard to the level of threat that they represent. Senator Clarence Egglestone Snopes, for example, runs largely on a campaign of racial intolerance, so his defeat at the hands of Ratliff (who arranges for a dog to urinate on the senator’s leg, prompting Will Varner to

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bellow, “I aint going to have Beat Two and Frenchman’s Bend represented nowhere by nobody that ere a son-of-bitching dog that happens by cant tell from a fence post”) is seemingly not based on sentiments of racial or class antagonism.121 At one juncture in the novel, Ratliff rejoices at the general lack of Snopeses, remarking that he and Gavin can rest for a while because “for the first time in going on twenty years, Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County too was in what you might call a kind of Snopes doldrum.”122 But later, however, Gavin bemoans the ongoing ubiquity of the Snopes presence: “It’s hopeless. Even when you get rid of one Snopes, there’s already another one behind you even before you can turn around,” to which Ratliff responds, “That’s right. . . . As soon as you look, you see right away it aint nothing but jest another Snopes.”123 In Theresa Towner’s reckoning, “the pernicious ideology of whiteness at the heart of Frenchman’s Bend in The Hamlet is finally laid bare in The Mansion.”124 On the one hand, respected citizens like Gavin and Ratliff continue their vendetta against Snopeses that are often not predicated on anything beyond simple class and racial antagonism. On the other hand, The Mansion continues Flem’s program, which started in The Town, in acquiescing to Jefferson’s ideological beliefs. To make money, Flem must have respectability; to have respectability, Flem must eliminate his nonrespectable relations. What makes these relations nonrespectable is not their questionable actions; Jason Compson, for example, in spite of his cold-hearted decision to institutionalize his brother Benjy and, as revealed in The Mansion, his manipulation in acquiring Ike McCaslin’s hardware business, is not openly reviled by the townsfolk, due to the privileges that come from belonging to a bloodline that has included a Civil War general and Mississippi governor. What makes the likes of I. O., Mink, and Montgomery Ward particularly pernicious is their lack of such an esteemed bloodline—an inferiority, Flem comes to realize, that must be eliminated in order for him to achieve the success he craves. From the unfinished Father Abraham to the publication of The Mansion over three decades later, the Snopes family occupied Faulkner for nearly the entirety of his literary career. Noting that he has “hated them and laughed at them and been afraid of them for thirty years now,” Faulkner offers an extended, complex history from their origins to Flem’s ascendancy to respectability in Jefferson.125 Though seemingly stated in jest, Faulkner’s comment that he was “afraid” of the family perhaps hints at his own ideological position regarding the changing South in the decades he spent writing about the family, recalling in a way Colonel French’s antipathy toward the upstart Fetters in The Colonel’s Dream. And as we saw when discussing southern memoirs, Faulkner’s comment here prefigures the language of William Percy, whose reflective writings

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openly yearn for an earlier South and bemoans the types of shrewd, lower-class men successful in the first decades of the twentieth century, a key theme of the Snopes trilogy. Despite the length of time he spent writing about the family, Faulkner’s characterization of various family members reveals his own conflicted response toward them. Always critical of Flem, Faulkner claims he never “felt sorry for him” and that Flem was “ridden” by the “petty demon” of greed.126 To take a counter example, however, Faulkner’s approach to Mink Snopes drastically altered over the course of the trilogy, as the character transforms from a simple, small-minded murderer to a tragic figure arguing for the rights of his class in his one-man vendetta against Houston.127 In the closing lines of The Mansion and, thus, the trilogy, Faulkner offers this poignant description of Mink’s dying moments: And in fact, as soon as he thought that, it seemed to him he could feel the Mink Snopes that had had to spend so much of his life just having unnecessary bother and trouble, beginning to creep, seep, flow easy as sleeping; . . . leaving the folks themselves easy now, all mixed and jumbled up comfortable and easy so wouldn’t nobody even know or even care who was which any more, himself among them, equal to any, good as any, brave as any, being inextricable from, anonymous with all of them: the beautiful, the splendid, the proud and the brave, right on up to the very top itself among the shining phantoms and dreams which are the milestones of the long human recording—Helen and the bishops, the kings and the unhomed angels, the scornful and graceless seraphim.128

Earlier in the trilogy, similar language was used to describe Ike Snopes, whom Faulkner referred to as a character embodying the “honesty” and “courage” that drives man’s emotions in spite of his condition and limited perception of the world around him.129 Throughout the trilogy, the Snopeses are often denigrated as subhuman, scarcely better than animals, an invasive plague on Yoknapatawpha County. Here, at the end of the saga, Faulkner presents a rebuttal to the criticisms leveled against the family on the grounds of racial inferiority; the Snopeses, like all of Faulkner’s creations, represent the all-important “verities of the human heart” that Faulkner held dear: “courage, honor, pride, compassion, pity.”130 By analyzing the ways in which various characters in the trilogy, including, ultimately, Flem himself, seek to subjugate the Snopeses based on their racial and class composition, we can understand more fully the omnipresent ideology of whiteness that dominates discourse in the town. Their dominant presence is made fully clear near the conclusion of The Mansion; during Flem’s funeral, Gavin looks around and notices several previously unseen Snopeses

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in the crowd. While Flem, the “bigger wolf, the boss wolf, the head wolf, what Ratliff would call the bull wolf ” is dead, Snopeses are in Yoknapatawpha to stay.131 Frequently, members of the Snopes tribe are villainous, greedy, petty, and voracious, but this hardly provides a rationale for the seething rhetoric they are greeted with upon their arrival. Whiteness prevails in Yoknapatawpha but, as the Snopes trilogy makes clear, all shades of whiteness are not created equal.

CONCLUSION

MAIMED SOULS O’Connor, Disability, and the Future of White Trash

I have been asked more than once why I write about the South. The fact that, despite having been raised in South Carolina, I have a rather mild accent only led to more raised eyebrows when I attended graduate school in Pennsylvania. In a modernism course, while reading The Sound and the Fury, the professor asked if there were any southerners in the room. I was the only one, and the professor looked at me quizzically, asking, “Is this what it’s like there? Was your family like the Compsons?” Well, no. But behind the sort of willful ignorance that leads one to ask such a question and assume that I must be better off now that I had arrived in Pennsylvania, I was reminded of the innate curiosity and probing that southerners have long undergone. Southern pride, southern shame, these weren’t general concerns for me; my father’s side of the family was from Rhode Island (my grandmother and her family arrived from Lebanon in the early 1920s). But after being asked in a graduate class, I thought a bit more about my mother’s side, and how that might have affected my own interests in critical race theory, class, and whiteness. My mother’s side is indeed southern, South Carolina based as far back as my genealogical digging has found. The photograph on this book’s cover, a germ of sorts for this entire project, is one of my great-great uncle, Harold Lee Jordan, known, I am told by my grandmother, as Petey Lee, pronounced Peedalee. His father, Arthur, was not akin to many of those I have written about here; a small cotton farmer—think, more Ty Ty than Jeeter—he actually employed one white sharecropping family on his small parcel of land, whose names, in spite of my asking those few remaining family members from this time, I have been unable to determine. My family’s more colorful legends stem from this particular generation of the 1910s and 20s. How two brothers got drunk in a barn, with one falling out of the loft and becoming paralyzed from the waist down. Well, that did not sit well, and the 141

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now paralyzed brother, from the safety of a moving car, attempted a drive by against his own brother, hit him, and paralyzed him as well. The former ended up in jail. Or the grandmother who dragged chains around the small house to frighten her children to sleep, claiming that “Bloody Bones” was coming to get them. But for all these legends, I have long found myself most drawn to the story of Petey Lee. When a relative came back from World War I, he gave the boy his blanket. Subsequently, Petey Lee grew sick, but resolutely stoic about his fate, to an extent beyond even the most “Christ-haunted” O’Connor character. “I’m dying, but don’t bury me in the boneyard,” he’d say. He wanted to be buried underneath the porch steps, so he could always be near his family. When he died, of what the family assumes was diphtheria, brought back on the blanket from overseas, his father instead buried him in the cemetery and was haunted by dreams of his son for the rest of his life. Would that we all had such dignity in the face of death. While my grandmother has long said her family was “white trash,” I do not know if I am comfortable with the label or what it reveals about us and where we came from, especially after learning they themselves had employed sharecroppers. But they were the last generation of farmers in my family, as the encroaching depression era hastily eliminated that type of small-scale farm in our region of South Carolina. But as this book has hoped to present an understanding of how southern poverty and white racial identity have always been intertwined, perhaps this anecdote serves as a means of responding to those who have asked why I write about the South. In tracing the development of southern literature from the first half of the twentieth century into the civil rights era, Peculiar Whiteness has argued against offering a totalizing view of poor whites that collapses the experiences of the disparate people(s) considered under such terms as “white trash.” So, too, have we considered the intersectional complexities that arise when texts pair class and race, resulting in prejudice against the poor that is variously rooted in anxiety, fear, nostalgia, or a pervasive disdain for a supposed lesser form of whiteness. A more complex understanding of the history of twentieth century whiteness is central to a more nuanced understanding of southern— and American—cultural history, one that hopefully extends the antiracist and antitotalizing ideology of new southern studies. As a final example, by returning briefly to Flannery O’Connor, who so keenly forces our gaze onto the poor, disabled body, we can gesture toward the future work that remains in southern studies and its adjacent fields. Of “Good Country People,” Allen Tate wrote to Flannery O’Connor that “it is without exception the most terrible and powerful story of Maimed Souls I have ever read.”1 The story is frequently noted for its complex representation of the grotesque in southern fiction, perhaps the critical term most readily

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associated with O’Connor. While disability and physical difference abound in O’Connor’s oeuvre—“The Lame Shall Enter First,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Wise Blood—“Good Country People” in particular reveals the ways in which disability connects to our understanding of racial and class anxiety. And while a full analysis of the links between disability and whiteness is beyond the scope of this project, returning to O’Connor will hopefully ignite future discussion and bring to light the ways in which disability causes anxiety in a manner that resembles the prejudice leveled at inferior white trash characters throughout southern literature. In her famed essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” O’Connor shows her awareness of the distance that she imagines readers create between themselves and her characters. While the term “grotesque” is not necessarily synonymous with disability, O’Connor makes the comparison clear by anticipating and identifying reader anxiety: “I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs.”2 O’Connor readily acknowledges the divide between artistic creation and reader response: “Even though the writer who produces grotesque fiction may not consider his characters any more freakish than ordinary fallen man usually is, his audience is going to; and it is going to ask him–or more often, tell him–why he has chosen to bring such maimed souls alive.”3 Just as Caldwell, in his letters and articles about poor whites in Georgia, understood that his readers regarded his artistic creations as gross exaggerations, subhuman freaks who would be feared and misunderstood, so too does O’Connor note that fiction provides an outlet to interrogate these moments of anxiety. While the black body and the foreign body are obvious examples throughout her fiction, the use of physical disability, which somehow tarnishes the pristine nature of whiteness in “Good Country People,” also helps expand our understanding of white racial anxiety. While Josephine Hendin has remarked that O’Connor’s fiction reveals that she “regards the body itself as repulsive,” “Good Country People” instead showcases how physical disability becomes a site of anxiety and perplexity for whites.4 The story opens with the narrator’s limited perspective on Mrs. Hopewell, who joins a line of O’Connor characters noted for conservatism and an inability to respond to the world around them in any manner deeper than the most mundane platitudes (Hopewell is particularly fond of “Nothing is perfect” and “that is life!”).5 Another, “Everybody is different,” is remarkably ironic, as the opening pages detail her disdain for white trash—the narrator remarks, “She had had plenty of experience with trash,” and that the wives of tenant farmers “were not the kind you would want to be around you for

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very long”—and, more importantly, her discomfort around her daughter, first described as “a large blonde girl who had an artificial leg.”6 Whereas her nosy friend Mrs. Freeman takes a macabre delight in Hulga’s appearance—the narrator remarks that she “had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable”—Mrs. Hopewell is puzzled and disheartened by all aspects of her daughter’s existence.7 Of her decision to change her name from Joy to Hulga, she can only think that it is the “ugliest name in any language,” one that is so dehumanizing that it reminds her not of a person but rather the “broad blank hull of a battleship.”8 In addition to her dehumanizing attitude, she constantly infantilizes her daughter, thinking of her “as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated.”9 This attitude is forged out of Mrs. Hopewell’s inability to approach Hulga’s disability with any form of emotional capacity beyond pity: “She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times.”10 O’Connor’s italics emphasize Hopewell’s obsession with normalcy. Hulga’s wooden leg, intentional name change, education, and lingering heart malady are all ultimately too strange, too foreign, too complex for Mrs. Hopewell to handle. O’Connor has already hinted at Hopewell’s obsession with “trash,” implying class and racial objectification; the fact that her daughter would take an explicitly foreign-sounding name, as well as study philosophers who are not, to her point of view, “good country people,” hints at a vein of racially infused anxiety. As Laura Behling notes, “for Mrs. Hopewell, the divorced woman with a disabled daughter and ‘white trash’ as her closest friend, Hulga’s difference is too much to bear.”11 While this attitude is not perhaps as loathsome as that of other characters—Mrs. McIntyre’s racist remarks about the Guizacs in “The Displaced Person,” for example—she does offer another form of white racial anxiety, one that manifests itself in uncertainty and denial. Hulga herself may relish affirming her mother’s anxiety; Mrs. Hopewell is convinced her daughter could walk without making an awful stumping noise but that she did it intentionally “because it was ugly-sounding,” and Behling notes, “Hulga’s refusal to cover her artificial limb forces those who see her to acknowledge her difference.”12 Whereas Mrs. Hopewell’s attitude toward her daughter is marked by anxiety and disgust, Manley Pointer, the conniving Bible salesman, exhibits profound curiosity bordering on exoticizing obsession. Though Mrs. Hopewell is at first annoyed by his arrival, he is quickly able to enact the kinds of personality and comfort that puts her at ease, referring to himself as “good country people” and vaguely and cheerfully stating he is “not even from a place, just from

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near a place.”13 Hulga, at first disgusted by his presence and then intrigued, believes she can seduce him as part of an intellectual challenge to herself. But Pointer’s interest in her leg quickly surpasses her understanding of his nature; as he leaves after dinner, the narrator notes, “He was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a new fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he had run a great distance to reach her.”14 He even masks his obsession by presenting himself as not anxious or uncomfortable around her, but as sympathetic, even nurturing: “‘I see you got a wooden leg,’ he said. ‘I think you’re brave. I think you’re real sweet.’”15 Ultimately, in the story’s memorable conclusion, he reveals that his interest is in Hulga’s exoticism: “Nothing seemed to destroy the boy’s look of admiration. He gazed at her now as if the fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to kiss her again and she walked on before he had the chance.”16 He repeatedly asks to see where the leg connects, telling Hulga the leg is “what makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else.”17 After Pointer removes the leg, in a scene described in the manner of a striptease, he ultimately leaves Hulga abandoned, mocking her supposed cynicism by claiming, “I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”18 O’Connor herself notes the importance disability plays in Hulga’s outlook on the world: “by the time the Bible salesman comes along, the leg has accumulated so much meaning that it is, as the saying goes, loaded. And when the Bible salesman steals it, the reader realizes that he has taken away part of the girl’s personality and has revealed her deeper affliction to her for the first time.”19 Pointer’s role, in this regard, is to serve as an alternative interpreter of Hulga’s disability; his obsession and desire to touch and, indeed, possess Hulga’s leg (he has also acquired a woman’s glass eye, he tells us) is in stark contrast to Mrs. Hopewell’s uneasiness.20 Since Pointer, so far as the reader is aware, is lacking Mrs. Hopewell’s other biases, his exoticism, disturbing as it may be, is markedly different from Hopewell’s race and class prejudices and disdain for her daughter’s apparent physical and intellectual foreignness. “The Lame Shall Enter First” provides a final glance into O’Connor’s presentation of disability’s relationship to anxiety regarding the poor white body. Throughout the story, O’Connor juxtaposes light and dark, in order to demonstrate Sheppard’s deep anxiety regarding Rufus’s poverty, juvenile delinquency, and physical difference. Sheppard, described as a “young man whose hair was already white,” opens the story talking to his son Norton about Rufus Johnson, a youth he has been trying to help at a reformatory for a year.21 In spite of his seemingly benevolent proclamations of wanting to help the boy, Sheppard’s attitude is shown to be laced with judgment; in his opening dialogue, he tells

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his son that he saw Rufus “in an alley” with “his hand in a garbage can. He was trying to get something to eat out of it.” Adding to this, he tells his son that despite Rufus being four years older, “I’m sure your shirts would fit Rufus” and that “when I saw him yesterday, he was skin and bones.”22 While this is framed initially as Sheppard attempting to instill a sense of sympathy in his son’s behavior, when considered alongside his later anxiety about Rufus’s foot it is clear that the sight of Rufus’s poverty and hunger disgusts him. Sheppard also reveals his own prejudice when he thinks his delinquent behavior is “the kind of thing he found where boys had been transplanted abruptly from the county to the city as this one had,” suggesting that Sheppard is yet another O’Connor protagonist with preformed judgments about those deemed trash.23 The story chronicles Sheppard’s firm belief that Rufus’s indiscretions are the result of him compensating for his club foot, which the youth adamantly denies, instead pointing to Sheppard’s own hypocrisy and mistreatment of his son Norton, whom Sheppard neglects.24 Hovering spectrally over both concerns is the sharp class divide between man and boy, with Sheppard’s uneasiness constantly on display. Sheppard’s borderline obsession with the wayward youth manifests in his constant focus on the boy’s foot: “He leaned back in his chair and lifted a monstrous club foot to his knee. The foot was in a heavy black battered shoe with a sole four or five inches thick. The leather parted from it in one place and the end of an empty sock protruded like a gray tongue from a severed head. The case was clear to Sheppard instantly. His mischief was compensation for the foot.”25 During the course of Sheppard’s time with Rufus, we are told that Sheppard believes himself to be, well, a shepherd, wanting to “give the boy something to reach for besides his neighbor’s goods,” to “stretch his horizons,” and to allow him to “see the universe, to see that the darkest parts of it could be penetrated.”26 Again, part of Sheppard’s concern is his anxiety over Rufus’s hunger and poverty, which he continues to connect to the foot. The narrator never implies that Sheppard is aware of the peculiarity of his linking of physical difference and his disdain for Rufus’s poverty and status as a displaced country youth. He instead simply obsesses over the foot as a problem to be solved; O’Connor suggests that Sheppard’s blindness relates to any broad and blasé approach to “fixing” the problem of poverty. While Sheppard claims he believes that Rufus’s behavior is a means of compensating for a supposed inferiority complex, his constant reiteration of the boy’s difference reveals a level of anxiety over class that he refuses to acknowledge until the story’s climax. He takes Rufus to a shop to get fitted for a shoe that provides more balance, erroneously believing that “Johnson was as touchy about the foot as if it were a sacred object.”27 Since buying the shoe is an attempt to erase the boy’s difference, Sheppard’s attitude stems from an inability to acknowledge disability

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as anything but a rectifiable problem. He believes the shoe is “going to make the greatest difference in the boy’s attitude. Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.”28 When Rufus’s shoe is prepared, however, the boy is thrilled that it does not fit: “The clerk had obviously made a mistake in the measurements but the boy insisted the foot had grown. He left the shop with a pleased expression, as if, in expanding, the foot had acted on some inspiration of its own. Sheppard’s face was haggard.”29 Sheppard’s inability to understand the boy is never clearer than it is here, as his obsession with normalcy overrides his acknowledgment that Rufus may have a personality and desires of his own, rather than exist solely as the mental construct Sheppard has made him out to be. Laura Behling describes Rufus’s mindset in detail: “Rufus Johnson’s old, ill-fitting shoe represents for him a last semblance of autonomy, control, and uniqueness, as does his juvenile delinquency. For Rufus, his clubfoot is precisely what sets him apart as a human being, sets him apart from the Nortons of the world, and provides a method of self-propulsion through life that is remarkable, noticeable, and different.”30 Behling’s note that this separates Rufus from “the Nortons of the world” readily relates to the man’s class anxiety and disgust at the boy’s actions. The palpable anxiety Sheppard has attempted to contain through his efforts to “fix” Rufus finally comes to a head as Rufus is confronted by a policeman who accuses him of peeping into someone’s kitchen (the policeman accusingly mocks Rufus by staring at his foot and noting, “It ain’t everybody makes tracks like you”).31 Sheppard defends the boy, who even offers a statement of thanks, before upending the man’s naïve optimism by calling him a liar, claiming he is no smarter than the accusatory cop, and pointing out—correctly, in spite of the man’s protests—that he “don’t believe in me. You ain’t got no confidence” and that “when things get hot, you’ll fade like the rest of them.”32 Sheppard’s response is sudden, and vivid: “A chill of hatred shook him. He hated the shoes, hated the foot, hated the boy. His face paled. Hatred choked him. He was aghast at himself.”33 The pair fight, and, from this point on, Sheppard’s obsession finally reveals its ugly inner nature. No longer able to stomach his anxiety over the boy’s difference, he instead begins wishing “he had never laid eyes on the boy.”34 As Donald Hardy explains, “Sheppard cannot face the reality of Johnson’s spiritual and physical disabilities until it is too late. When the old shoe is going to be taken off, the narrator hits us in the face with the significance of the symbolic club foot and Sheppard’s inability to face reality.”35 Eventually, Rufus is caught by the police and, upon being brought to Norton, offers his most damning condemnation of him, even claiming he let himself get caught in order “to show up that big tin Jesus!”36 He accuses Sheppard of making “Immor’l suggestions,” and throws Sheppard’s own difference against him, calling him a “dirty atheist.”37

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And as the narrator describes Sheppard’s “last desperate effort to save himself,” he urges the boy to “tell the truth,” and says he doesn’t “have to make up for that foot,” earning him the impassioned rejoinder from Rufus, “I lie and steal because I’m good at it! My foot don’t have a thing to do with it! The lame shall enter first!”38 Rufus is led away and the story concludes with an abrupt aboutface from Sheppard in regard to his son, whom he has largely neglected (save for the ominous moment when Sheppard had beaten Norton after the latter had complained about Rufus sleeping in his dead mother’s bed). The story ends tragically as the boy has broken his neck after jumping from attic beams in a desperate attempt to reach heaven. That it takes Rufus’s complete absence for Sheppard to take anything at all resembling a sympathetic view of his son is significant; his obsession and pervasive anxiety about making the boy “normal” and helping him ascend from poverty and the reformatory has destroyed his ability to fulfill his paternal role. Though O’Connor famously stated, “whenever I’m asked why southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one,” “The Lame Shall Enter First” provides an important glimpse into the dangers of obsession over physical and class homogeneity.39 Since Rufus, marked by disability and poverty, exists as a continuous site of anxiety for Sheppard, O’Connor makes clear that those who are absorbed in maintaining normative whiteness often do so at the expense of their own mental well-being. In coming full circle with Flannery O’Connor, we see how white anxiety and prejudice against the poor is manifest in a multitude of ways, from the conflation of a foreigner with “trash” to the troubling coupling of physical difference and poverty. As her stories are replete with anxiety over poor whites—recall Mrs. Turpin of “Revelation” imagining a scenario where she would have to choose “either be a nigger or white-trash,” to which she responds “make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one”—O’Connor helps compel readers into the future of the South and, by extension, enhances our understanding of the troubling relationship between poor whites and those who deem them inferior.40 The connection with physical difference is one that also extends beyond the prejudice that aligns poor whites with blacks in the eyes of many whites. In Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for example, the deaf-mute John Singer is the fulcrum for a variegated bevy of characters seeking support and guidance, yet his friend Spiros Antonapoulos is frequently derided and noted for his physical grotesqueness, reminding us that southern prejudice extends far beyond any simple racial categorization. Peculiar Whiteness has argued for us to consider the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences can be. Often, poor whites are unacknowledged

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background figures, their plights of little concern to those better off than they find themselves (for example, the run-of-the-mill Snopeses, the ones without Flem’s power and ambition). Elsewhere, they are on full display, as in Caldwell’s works where, despite the author’s sympathetic—if at times conflicted—reactions to poor southerners, families like the Lesters are openly mocked, derided, taken advantage of, and regarded as subhuman. In autobiographical and nonfiction remembrances, poor whites run the gamut from outright villains in the eyes of William Percy, planter aristocracy scion, to pitiable and misled victims of crass economic exploitation, as Lillian Smith argues. Earlier, in Thomas Dixon’s reckoning, poor whites were the reason why the supposed light and grandeur of the Ku Klux Klan had been extinguished, while, similarly, a benevolent racist businessman considers poor whites the scourge of his now bygone old southern home. And when poor whites are aligned in close proximity to blacks or with other troubling conditions like physical difference, they are regarded as all the more grotesque and anxiety-inducing. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (“white trash,” tenant farmers, or simply people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. The past half century has further complicated our understanding of whiteness and its relationship to class. In Dorothy Allison’s Trash (1988), Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and Cavedweller (1998), poor white characters navigate the boundaries of class with heightened attention on gender and sexual identity. More recently, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) received widespread popular attention (and criticism), particularly for its supposed explanation for the rural Appalachian and Rust Belt poor whites who were so instrumental in Donald Trump’s candidacy and election. Following a roundtable on Hillbilly Elegy at the 2017 Appalachian Studies Association conference, Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll coedited Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, compiling a breadth of contributors who both comment directly on Vance’s work and also writers telling narratives of their own in order to both respond and provide their own “snapshot of a place that is at once progressive, haunted, depressed, beautiful, and culturally and spiritually rich.”41 In their introduction, the editors discuss Vance’s appearance at the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association conference as well as organized protests in response to his presence. They explain, “Postelection America has made it strange to be from Appalachia. Many of us have not liked the way that Hillbilly Elegy has been used as a shorthand way to explain the Trump phenomenon. While it is frustrating to have one person speak for a place, it is worse to have so many people listen to that one person and assume that he’s right and representative of all of Appalachia.”42 Their work shows that the debates over the boundar-

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ies of whiteness, the ways in which poor whites and regions of America like Appalachia are depicted and talked about, will remain vibrant and in flux for years to come. The recent proliferation of texts penned by Asian American authors about living in the South also helps broaden these discussions, forcing readers and writers to consider the guiding question asked by Monique Truong: “How does one write about the South being neither black nor white?” Readers and scholars have been charged with the task of recognizing the global implications of the southern racial ideology. Works by Truong and Cynthia Kadohata illustrate the ways in which characters of Vietnamese and Japanese heritage, respectively, are faced with the reactions of a perplexed southern populace, one facing anxiety over their inability to fit the Asian characters into the South’s ironclad black/white binary, with their labor status being a particular focal point of concern. Whereas Truong’s works—particularly the epistolary short story “Kelly” and her 2011 novel Bitter in the Mouth, both set in North Carolina—look at the experiences of a single individual navigating her Vietnamese heritage, Kadohata’s The Floating World (1989) and Kira-Kira (2004) depict small but tight-knit Japanese American communities in works that force readers to ponder the global economic implications of their presence (specifically, the families Kadohata depicts are chicken sexers, workers who separate chickens by sex at birth, a condition that recalls the types of labor limitations placed on blacks and poor whites post Reconstruction). These works avoid collapsing their characters’ experiences into a homogenous, universal whole, destroying stereotypes of a singular “Asian experience” by providing readers the opportunity to scrutinize the specific, and peculiar, reactions of whites to the Vietnamese adoptee in Bitter in the Mouth as well as the working-class Japanese families in Kadohata’s works. And extending beyond the realm of literary studies, the South is perhaps less “solid” than ever, particularly as more attention is paid not simply to a North/ South divide but rather an urban/rural one. While this divide is nothing new— the very titles of Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy remind us of this fact—increased public attention has brought this into the cultural sphere, particularly in the political arena. After Hillary Clinton infamously referred to some of thencandidate Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” (a phrase that has spawned its own Wikipedia page and enough thinkpieces to fill a library), many people who felt targeted took the label as a term of resistance and endearment, and the Trump campaign further smeared Clinton for a supposed disdain of an imagined rural, hardworking American base rather than her announced criticism of the elements of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia that had proliferated throughout Trump’s campaign. Elsewhere, the rural/

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urban divide continues to hold sway over popular thought surrounding both the election and its political aftermath. Reid Wilson of The Hill, for instance, in an article entitled “America’s Urban-Rural Divide Deepens,” published after the 2018 midterm elections, noted that “virtually unprecedented” numbers of rural voters came out in support (generally) of Republican candidates, while suburban voters veered strongly toward Democrats, with exit polls showing “three-quarters of voters said Americans are becoming more divided.”43 In an earlier piece for New York Magazine, Justin Davidson notes, “The political gulf between city and noncity has deepened even as the physical boundaries between them have blurred,” noting that while Trump might have pointed to crime rates and inner-city poverty statistics in a “halfhearted plea” for black votes, urbanites routinely criticize their fellow rural Americans, as the “new inner city” where “social pathologies collect.” Davidson notes, too, that it is not a North/South divide, but this rural/urban one that is the inevitable outcome of the Constitution, which creates the “deliberate imbalance” that gives voters in Wyoming “nearly four times the clout in a presidential election of a voter in California.”44 Peter Grier, in noting the long demographic shift from rural to urban in America, reminds us is was not until 1920 that a census showed more Americans living in urban rather than rural areas, a period that aligns with the growing sense of disdain toward poor people—already percolating in Dixon’s work—in Caldwell’s examinations of Depression-era farmers. Grier, like Davidson, notes that a chief current division in contemporary politics is “between geographic areas based on population density, not on states sorted between red and blue.”45 Lyndon Johnson might have famously declared of his party that they had “lost the South for a generation” after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but perhaps even his Texan background might not have prepared him for the continuing and ever-growing divide found not necessarily in North/South politics but rather rural/urban. Southern identity may not necessarily be weakening in some quarters, but as cities like Atlanta and Charlotte continue to show explosive population growth, it becomes clear that looking at southernness in isolation, without an intersectional and interdisciplinary glance at demographics and class, will provide only a partial picture of the region. As southern literature continues to respond to the modern world it will not ignore the lingering impact of the Civil War, the grand narrative examined throughout Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha mythos, and the Southern Renaissance but will instead build upon these foundations in order to offer an even more encompassing and open view of the South, one that offers fuller considerations of the broad spectrum of the region’s denizens. In a world where news anchors can condemn a Whiteness Studies course at Arizona State University, hopefully

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Peculiar Whiteness serves as one such response to those ignoring the pivotal role whiteness has played in American consciousness.46 Regarding whiteness not as a unified whole also serves to fracture any reductive understanding of race, and while the frustration over, say, the unscrupulous actions of a twenty-first century Snopes, Lester, or rural “deplorable” will not likely subside, hopefully a more thorough and pronounced discussion and understanding of the varying shades of southern whiteness will lead to a more open and productive dialogue on race, region, and American culture.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 199. Regarding the end of the original run, Miller writes, “In March 1941, Tobacco Road closed on Broadway after its 3180th performance, over 900 more than any other play in American history” (202). A 1941 film version directed by John Ford also achieved financial success. 2. John Donald Wade, “Sweet Are the Uses of Degeneracy,” Southern Review 1, no. 3 (1936): 454. 3. Jonathan Daniels, “Poor Whites,” Saturday Review of Literature 8, no. 33 (5 March 1932): 568. 4. Bennett A. Cerf, “Review of God’s Little Acre,” Contempo 3, no. 7 (15 March 1933): 1. 5. Ralph Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 646, 648, 655. 6. Robert L. McDonald, Reading Erskine Caldwell: New Essays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Publishers, 2006), 2. 7. Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1994), Vol. 1, 23, Vol. II, 177. 8. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1. 9. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Revised and Expanded Edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), vii. 10. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 10. McPherson’s comment echoes the important earlier declaration made by C. Hugh Holman in his essay “No More Monoliths, Please: Continuities in the Multi-Souths,” where he argues that scholars and critics have had “too limited a view of what southern writing has been and is.” 11. Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1. Continuing, Greeson also stresses the necessity of complicating our considerations of the South, remarking, “I am not even sanguine that the notion of a monolithic South can be recuperated in US cultural studies in a useful way. . . . ‘The South’ is, first and foremost, an ideological concept rather than a place” (10). 12. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 36. 13. Michelle Lamar and Molly Wendland, The White Trash Mom Handbook: Embrace Your Inner Trailerpark, Forget Perfection, Resist Assimilation into the PTA, Stay Sane, and 153

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Keep Your Sense of Humor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008) and Ernest Matthew Mickler, White Trash Cooking: 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2011). 14. For a detailed history of the term’s origins and predecessors, including “lubber” and “cracker,” see Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 21–47. 15. White Trash: Race and Class in America, eds. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–2. 16. White Trash, 4. 17. Shirley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 140–41. Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–2. 18. Jane Davis, The White Image in the Black Mind (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 1. 19. Ralph Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 306. 20. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 11. 21. Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 156. 22. Wray and Newitz, 4. 23. Wray and Newitz, 5. 24. Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1. 25. Wray, 3. 26. Wray, 43. 27. John Hartigan Jr., Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 59. 28. See Odd Tribes, 61–63. 29. William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959), 125. 30. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 1. Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1. 31. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 3. The ability to control racial discourse is a function of white privilege; earlier Dyer notes, “There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Race people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race” (2). 32. Dyer, 9, 14. 33. Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 12. 34. Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 12. 35. Randy Boyagoda has observed that what is partly at stake in this story is the shape of American democracy in relation to diversity. Mr. Guizac stands outside the culture of the farm’s long-term American residents and defamiliarizes it.” See “A Patriotic Deus Ex Machina in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person,’” The Southern Literary Journal 43, no. 1 (2010): 67.

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36. Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 194–95. 37. “The Displaced Person,” 207. 38. “The Displaced Person,” 194. 39. Rachel Carroll, “Foreign Bodies: History and Trauma in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person,’” Textual Practice 14, no. 1 (2000): 102. 40. O’Connor, “The Displaced Person,” 195. 41. “The Displaced Person,” 196. 42. “The Displaced Person,” 195. 43. “The Displaced Person,” 196. Kathleen Lipovski-Helal offers a useful examination of the role of the Holocaust in this story, particularly her observation that the story “depicts the plight of DPs so realistically that for some, it is as good as history” and that it presents “an American community that is just beginning to renegotiate its understanding of racial difference in general, and review its policies toward DPs in particular.” See “Flannery O’Connor, The Holocaust, and the Evolution of Catholicism,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 21, no. 3 (2010): 206. 44. O’Connor, “The Displaced Person,” 205. 45. “The Displaced Person,” 209. 46. “The Displaced Person,” 202. 47. “The Displaced Person,” 203. 48. “The Displaced Person,” 211. 49. “The Displaced Person,” 214. Carole K. Harris has discussed O’Connor’s tendency to collapse her characters’ attempts to distinguish poor whites with the varying monikers “good country people” and “white trash”: “In the world of O’Connor’s fiction the phrase ‘good country people’ is one in a repertoire of euphemisms or benevolent-sounding clichés used by landowning whites whom they have hired and with whom they interact on a daily basis.” See “The Politics of the Cliché: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Revelation’ and ‘The Displaced Person,’” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 9, no. 1 (2011): 112. 50. O’Connor, “The Displaced Person,” 215. 51. “The Displaced Person,” 215. 52. “The Displaced Person,” 216. 53. “The Displaced Person,” 217. 54. “The Displaced Person,” 215. 55. “The Displaced Person,” 220. 56. “The Displaced Person,” 222. 57. “The Displaced Person,” 223. 58. “The Displaced Person,” 202. 59. “The Displaced Person,” 226. 60. “The Displaced Person,” 232. 61. “The Displaced Person,” 232–33. 62. “The Displaced Person,” 233. 63. “The Displaced Person,” 228. 64. Betsy Bolton argues cogently that “The proliferation of violence within ‘The Displaced Person’ is motivated in part by the characters’ failure of comprehension and communication.” See “Placing Violence, Embodying Grace: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Displaced Person,’” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 1 (1997): 92. 65. O’Connor, “The Displaced Person,” 234.

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66. “The Displaced Person,” 235. 67. William Burke analyzes the end of the story as a depiction of the disintegration and failure of community: “What occurs on the dramatic level is a process of human communities forming and dissolving until at the conclusion we are left with the odd couple of the garrulous and persistent Father Flynn and the mute, dying Mrs. McIntyre. The implication is that the displacement of human beings occurs not only in relation to place but also in relation to community.” See “Displaced Communities and Literary Form in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person,’” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 32, no. 2 (1986): 219–20. 68. bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 341. Jerry Phillips has also commented explicitly on the nature of violence and literature: “The involvement of the literary text in the political meaning of whiteness creates a relationship between literature and violence, literature and oppression, literature and evil.” See “Literature in the Country of ‘Whiteness,’” in Mike Hill, ed. Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 333. 69. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1. 70. Lipsitz, 1. 71. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese offers a useful analysis of earlier literature, observing that “Antebellum southern literature does not offer stories of heroes wracked by anxiety or beset by existential dilemmas. . . . Typically, the southern hero owes his identity to his identification with society, rather than his struggles against it.” Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Anxiety of History: The Southern Confrontation with Modernity,” Southern Cultures 1 (1993): 76. 72. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), vii. One: Tom and Friends: Thomas Dixon, White Supremacy, and Poor Whites of the Lost Cause

1. Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), 63. 2. Sidney W. Mintz, “Caribbean Society,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills. Vol 2. (New York: Macmillan), 311. 3. Amy Clukey and Jeremy Wells, “Introduction: Plantation Modernity,” The Global South 10, no. 2 (2016): 3. 4. Take, for example, Matthew Guterl’s comment that the plantation today is something “fixed in time, as an expression of the slaveholding South,” which locates race as central to the plantation’s ontology. See Matthew Pratt Guterl, “Plantation,” in Keywords for Southern Studies, ed. Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016), 22. 5. Along this vein, Elizabeth Russ asks us to consider the symbolic ramifications of the plantation, calling it not simply a physical place but rather “an insidious ideological and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told and retold.” Elizabeth Christine Russ, The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 6. John M. Grammer, “Plantation Fiction,” in A Companion to The Literature and Culture of the American South, ed. Richard Gray and Owen Robinson. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 58. 7. Thomas Nelson Page, The Old South: Essays Social and Political (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 4.

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8. The Old South, 280. 9. The Old South, 284. 10. Thomas Nelson Page, In Ole Virginia (Ridgewood, NJ: The Gregg Press, 1968), 10. 11. In Ole Virginia, 159. 12. In Ole Virginia, 161. 13. Taylor Hagood, “Ghosts of Southern Imperialism: Caribbean Space, Functions of Fiction, and Thomas Nelson Page’s ‘No Haid Pawn,’” Mississippi Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2013): 139. 14. In Ole Virginia, 162. 15. In Ole Virginia, 164 16. In Ole Virginia, 167. 17. Hagood, 150. 18. In Ole Virginia, 167. 19. In Ole Virginia, 168. 20. In Ole Virginia, 168. 21. In Ole Virginia, 169. 22. In Ole Virginia, 171. 23. In Ole Virginia, 170. 24. Hagood notes that Page having the new owner hail from the West Indies is significant because he was “well aware that the Haitian Revolution had powerfully entered the slaveholding aristocracy’s imagination” (148). 25. MacKethan, 45. 26. In Ole Virginia, 172. 27. In Ole Virginia, 174. 28. In Ole Virginia, 185. 29. James Christmann, “Dialect’s Double-Murder: Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia,” American Literary Realism 32, no. 3 (2000), 240. 30. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard’s Spots (Ridgewood, NJ: The Gregg Press Incorporated, 1967), n. p. 31. Thomas Dixon Jr., “An Author’s Answer to His Critics,” New York Times (9 August 1902), 538. 32. Southern Horizons: The Autobiography of Thomas Dixon, ed. Karen Crowe. (Alexandria, VA: IWV Publishing, 1984). Qtd. in Anthony Slide, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon, (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2004), 27. 33. Lilian Bell, “The Leopard’s Spots,” The Saturday Evening Post, CLXXIV (12 April 1902), 15. 34. Reverend Henry W. Battle, “A Southern View of it: ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ Thomas Dixon’s Race Novel, Reviewed by Virginia Clergyman,” Springfield Republican, (13 May 1902), n. p. 35. “Mr. Dixon’s ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’” The New York Times (5 April 1902), 234. Interestingly, perhaps sensing a potential ally in Washington, Dixon actually sent him a copy of The Leopard’s Spots along with a request for a review: “I hope that you will enjoy it, and if you can find time to say a word in review I will appreciate it very much.” Washington chose not to review the book, however, and Dixon later wrote that Washington was “silently preparing us for the future of amalgamation.” Qtd. in Mark Bauerlein, “The Tactical Life of Booker T. Washington,” Chronicle of Higher Education (28 November 2003): B12. Thomas Dixon Jr., “Booker T. Washington and the Negro,” Saturday Evening Post 178 (19 August 1905), 1. 36. When discussing his specific aims, he remarked, “In all my novels and plays dealing with the race problem, I try to bring my audience up against a dead wall. I want them to see

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that the conflict between the two races is absolutely irreconcilable.” “Thomas Dixon: Novelist, Playwright, Actor, and Host,” interview by Louella Parsons, New York Dramatic Mirror (12 July 1911), 5. 37. Raymond Cook, Thomas Dixon (New York: Twayne, 1974), 68. 38. James F. Davis, Who is Black: One Nations’ Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 190. As a senator, Tillman was equally dedicated to white supremacy; his constitutional convention determined “that those carrying one-eighth a former slave’s blood in their veins should be classified as Negroes.” W. Scott Poole Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 175. 39. Scott Romine, “Thomas Dixon and the Literary Production of Whiteness,” in Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 129. 40. Jeremy Wells offers a useful reading on the infamous white garb donned by the Klan which further criticizes Dixon’s inconsistency as a writer: “Behind their robes, Klan members can be whiter than they ever could otherwise, and they can permit such a writer as Dixon to dislocate and disseminate whiteness across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways much more effective than actual ‘white’ characters in their everyday garbs.” See Romances of the White Man’s Burden: Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature 1880–1936 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011), 133. 41. As Kim Magowan remarks, Dixon’s South “is placed in the role of the rape victim, the assaulted white woman.” Magowan, “Coming Between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin: The Pressures of Liminality in Thomas Dixon,” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (1999): 86. Magowan also notes that, for all of their professed protection of white women, the Klan’s motives were rigidly patriarchal by nature: “by insisting to white women that without Klan guardianship they would be defenseless to sexual attack, the Klan strove to keep white women from challenging efforts to contain them” (94). 42. Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 125. 43. The Leopard’s Spots, 126. 44. The Leopard’s Spots, 127. Glenda Gilmore provides the compelling biographical reading that “Dixon projected his own insecurity about the sexual penetration of the impenetrable Southern white woman onto black men, whom he routinely portrayed as rapists” (97). Considering the chasteness of Dixon’s heroines and their male suitors, the fact that the only moments of heightened sexuality are related to sexual assault further emphasizes Dixon’s inability to construct female characters as anything more than objects meant for protection and male salvation. 45. As Gilmore notes, “To redraw southern whites as victims, Dixon empowered African Americans with hypersexuality,” further undermining whiteness’s supposed virility and strength. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, “‘One of the Meanest Books’: Thomas Dixon, Jr. and The Leopard’s Spots,” North Carolina Literary Review 2, no. 1 (1994): 88. 46. Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 372. 47. The Leopard’s Spots, 5. 48. The Leopard’s Spots, 338. Scott Romine has commented upon this phenomenon in Dixon, noting that he “offers whiteness not as essence, but as action; not as purity, but as purification; not as fact, but as affect; not as noun, but as imperative verb” (126). 49. Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 100.

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50. Anthony Dyer Hoefer, Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012), 37, 41. 51. Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 382. 52. The Leopard’s Spots, 384. 53. The Leopard’s Spots, 384. 54. The Leopard’s Spots, 384. 55. James Kinney, “The Rhetoric of Racism: Thomas Dixon and the ‘Damned Black Beast,’” American Literary Realism 15, no. 2 (1982): 153. 56. Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 161. 57. The Leopard’s Spots, 439. 58. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 157. 59. Dixon, Leopard’s Spots, 439. 60. The Leopard’s Spots, 439. 61. The Leopard’s Spots, 440. 62. The Leopard’s Spots, 450. 63. Thomas Dixon Jr. The Clansman (Ridgewood, NJ: The Gregg Press Incorporated, 1967), 39. 64. Wells, Romances of the White Man’s Burden, 130. 65. Dixon, The Clansman, 170. 66. The Clansman, 171. 67. The Clansman, 368. 68. The Clansman, 371. 69. The Clansman, 277. 70. Judith Jackson Fossett, “(K)night Riders in (K)night Gowns: The Ku Klux Klan, Race, and Constructions of Masculinity,” in Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 43. 71. Thomas Dixon, The Traitor, (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1907), 3. 72. The Traitor, 14, 16. 73. The Traitor, 18. 74. The Traitor, 155. 75. The Traitor, 28. 76. The Traitor, 77. 77. The Traitor, 82. 78. The Traitor, 132–33. 79. The Traitor, 53–54, 96. 80. The Traitor, 27, 306. 81. The Traitor, 320. 82. The Traitor, 323. 83. The Traitor, 330. 84. The Traitor, 330–31. Again, Hoyle’s fatness is used to marginalize him. 85. Finnie D. Coleman, Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 22. 86. Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W. Warren, introduction to Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 6. 87. Hannah Wallinger, “Sutton E. Griggs Against Thomas Dixon’s ‘Vile Misrepresentations’: The Hindered Hand and The Leopard’s Spots,” in Chakkalakal and Warren, 167. Susan

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Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 75. 88. Sutton E. Griggs, The Hindered Hand, or, The Reign of the Repressionist (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 19. 89. Griggs, 124. 90. Griggs, 124. 91. Griggs, 125. 92. James Baldwin expertly captures this motif in his famed story “Going to Meet the Man,” which places great emphasis on sexual anxiety, as the white men celebrate their solidarity at having castrated their victim. 93. Griggs, The Hindered Hand, 134. 94. Griggs, 135. 95. Griggs, 303. 96. Griggs, 303. 97. Griggs, 304. 98. Griggs, 304–5. 99. Griggs, 332–33. 100. Charles Chesnutt, The Colonel’s Dream (New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2004), 9. 101. Chesnutt, 19. 102. Chesnutt, 25. 103. Chesnutt, 135. 104. Chesnutt, 91. 105. Chesnutt, 93. 106. Shirley Moody-Turner, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013), 152. 107. Chesnutt, 107. 108. Chesnutt, 34. 109. Chesnutt, 36. 110. Chesnutt, 213. 111. Chesnutt, 110. 112. Chesnutt, 111–12. 113. Chesnutt, 211. 114. Chesnutt, 120. Ryan Simmons, Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 120. 115. Chesnutt, 241. 116. Chesnutt, 250–51. 117. Chesnutt, 251. 118. Chesnutt, 268. 119. Chesnutt, 153. 120. Chesnutt, 271. 121. Chesnutt, 274. Two: “It Ain’t Hardly Worth the Trouble to Go On Living”: The Reaction to Abject Poverty in Erskine Caldwell

1. Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 30. 2. Erskine Caldwell, With All My Might (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1987), 43

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3. H. L. Mencken, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” in The American Scene: A Reader (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 158. 4. Mencken, 161–63. 5. Mencken, 163. 6. Mencken, 165. Mencken adds the racist claim that those blacks who have achieved some type of merit are the result of having mixed-race blood from the white gentry. 7. Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 117. Caldwell’s depiction of poor whites would be joined by Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (published in 1939, film version 1940), and while the latter text deals with migratory Oklahomans, both texts serve to counter the “moonlight and magnolias” school of southern fiction embodied in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (published in 1936, film version 1939). 8. Robert L. McDonald, The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 4. 9. Jonathan Daniels, “Poor Whites,” Saturday Review of Literature 8, no. 33 (5 March 1932): 568. 10. Edward Dahlberg, “Raw Leaf,” New Republic 70 (23 March 1932): 160. 11. J. H. Marion Jr. “Star-Dust Above ‘Tobacco Road,’” Christian Century 53 (16 February 1938): 205. 12. James Gray, “New Realist Depicts South’s Poor Whites’ Pitiable Existence,” St. Paul Dispatch, (16 February 1932): 8. Similarly, Kenneth White describes the novel’s characters as “a people who ignore the civilization that contains them as completely as the civilization ignores them.” See “American Humor,” The Nation 135, no. 3496 (6 July 1932): 16. Vernon Loggins also comments that, in Caldwell’s work, social organizations, namely “a frowsy religion” or “false standards in education” are not to blame for the plight of his characters; rather, “it is poverty.” See I Hear America: Literature in the United States Since 1900 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1937), 222. 13. John Donald Wade, “Sweet are the Uses of Degeneracy,” Southern Review 1, no. 3 (1936): 454. 14. Wade, 455. 15. Bennett A. Cerf, “Review of God’s Little Acre,” Contempo 3, no. 7 (15 March 1933): 1. 16. Cerf, 1. 17. Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., “Is That You in the Mirror, Jeeter? The Reader and Tobacco Road.” Pembroke Magazine 11 (1979): 50. 18. Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 1. 19. Tobacco Road, 1–2. 20. Tobacco Road, 6. In addition to comments regarding the lack of food, the narrator also discusses the dilapidated house, which “sat precariously on stacks of thin lime-rock chips,” also noting that the “centre of the building sagged between the sills,” and that the “shingles had rotted” (7). Dude’s incessant throwing of the ball against the side of the house does not help its ramshackle state. 21. Tobacco Road, 5. 22. Tobacco Road, 70. 23. Tobacco Road, 70. 24. Tobacco Road, 71 25. Tobacco Road, 73. Regarding the idea that Jeeter’s poverty is part of an unceasing lineage, Sylvia Jenkins Cook, while discussing Dude’s hope after his father’s death to “grow me a crop of cotton this year” notes, “At the end we see the whole futile process beginning again

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in the hands of an even more incompetent generation. The unfittest have survived, and we are left with a sense, not of admiration at the endurance of humanity, but of shame at the perpetuation of such lives.” See Cook, From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 71. 26. Cook, 67. 27. Cook, 68. 28. Cook, 114. 29. Cook, 115. 30. Cook, 115–16. 31. Cook, 119. 32. Lewis Nordan, preface to Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), vi. 33. Caldwell, Tobacco Road, 123. 34. Tobacco Road, 123. 35. Tobacco Road, 171. 36. Tobacco Road, 8. 37. Tobacco Road, 25. 38. Tobacco Road, 28. 39. Tobacco Road, 28. 40. Karen A. Keely, “Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road,” Journal of American Studies 36, no. 1 (2002): 29. 41. Caldwell, Tobacco Road, 31. 42. Tobacco Road, 34–35. 43. Tobacco Road, 35. 44. Keely uses these scenes to emphasize the difficulty in reader identification and the ways in which Caldwell’s aesthetic choices dictate our understanding of the family: “Tobacco Road offers no characters with whom the reader can comfortably identify. Critics frequently complain that all of the people in the novel are grotesque and inhuman. Much as one feels sorry for the Lesters and regrets their poverty and hunger, it is difficult to align oneself fully with peripheral characters in the novel who also stare in horror at the Lesters and their physical, mental, and moral deformities.” See Keely, 27. 45. Caldwell, Tobacco Road, 138. 46. Louis Palmer, “Bourgeois Blues: Class, Whiteness, and Southern Gothic in Early Faulkner and Caldwell,” Faulkner Journal 22, nos. 1–2 (2006): 134. Palmer also offers mild criticism of Caldwell’s decision to portray the Lesters in such an extreme manner, one that compromises their whiteness: “Caldwell’s white-trash characters exhibit a myopic egotism— obsessed with the primitive needs and desires of the body, or monomaniacally pursuing a single idea. They make it too easy for the reader to separate himself (of herself—gender is another vexed issue in Caldwell studies) from the determining social and economic context and to separate out the situation in a way parallel to the way that Caldwell individualized his characters” (133). 47. Caldwell, Tobacco Road, 89. 48. Tobacco Road, 90. 49. Tobacco Road, 90. 50. Tobacco Road, 94. 51. Tobacco Road, 96. 52. Jonathan Daniels, “American Lower Depths,” Saturday Review of Literature 27 (14 October 1944): 46.

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53. Daniels, 46. Not all critics took as negative a view regarding Caldwell’s artistic creations. Hamilton Basso, writing in the New Masses, states “I have some slight knowledge of the Tobacco Road country in Georgia and, because of that, I have often been asked if there are people really ‘like’ those who appear in the novels and short stories of Mr. Erskine Caldwell.” Continuing, he counters what readers and other critics had stated regarding Caldwell’s grotesques, and calls Caldwell “not a realist at all” but rather “a very fine and sensitive artist whose characters are idealistic creations.” See “Sunny South,” New Masses, 15 (11 June 1935): 25. 54. Harrison Smith, “Comic Citizens of the South,” Saturday Review of Literature 32 (10 September 1949): 14. Interestingly, even contemporary critics have often written of Caldwell’s characters in a manner that emphasizes a belief in their apparent inferiority and subhumanness. As John M. Bradbury describes them, “Caldwell’s characters never come across the printed page as people, but only as absurdly amusing or grotesquely fascinating examples of a new subhuman species.” See Renaissance in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 101. Even more starkly, Jay Watson, while discussing Jeeter’s diatribe against the worms who have ruined his past turnip crops, writes, “Jeeter cusses out these worms at least half a dozen times (one would think he might feel at least a twinge of sympathy for his fellow parasites), his language growing more and more monotonous— barren as his turnip patch.” See Watson, “The Rhetoric of Exhaustion and the Exhaustion of Rhetoric: Erskine Caldwell in the Thirties,” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Culture 46, no. 2 (1993): 221. 55. Erskine Caldwell, “Mr. Caldwell Protests,” New Republic 79 (27 June, 1934): 185. 56. Erskine Caldwell, “Tobacco Roads in the South,” New Leader 19 (13 June 1936): 4. 57. Interview in Washington Star, (25 February 1941). Karen Keely concurs with Caldwell’s beliefs, noting, “Caldwell’s sensationalist style appeals to the prurience in all of us” (28). She then goes on to observe, “Caldwell repeatedly claimed that he wrote Tobacco Road as an experiment in realism, to depict the lives of southern tenant farmers as they were actually lived, but the widely seen reincarnation of these characters was as raucously funny hillbillies designed to be laughed at by viewers” (32). Caldwell himself bristled at the idea that humor was central to his works; in a letter to I. L. Solomon discussing Tobacco Road, he expressed annoyance at “the way so many readers and reviewers went blah-blah about what they said was comedy, and not a word about the theme of the book.” Caldwell to ILS, 26 March 1933, I. L. Solomon Papers, Collections of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Quoted in Miller, 172. 58. See Miller, 123–24. 59. Miller, 124–25. 60. Miller, 125. 61. Ira Caldwell, “The Bunglers,” Eugenics 3 (October 1930): 337. 62. Miller, 129. 63. Keely, 23. She continues, remarking, “In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor—in both money and breeding—will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving their plight or eradicating them” (24). 64. Dan Miller includes excerpts of letters in his biography; particularly noteworthy is an incensed woman writing, “How much better for the world, had you never learned to read or write!” while another writer claimed he “would be prouder to claim Jesse James or John Dillinger as fellow citizens than you.” Lastly, a writer exclaimed, “White trash like you should die a thousand deaths. And maybe you will. I hope so.” Racializing Caldwell as white trash

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achieves the same outcome in this letter as it does in Caldwell’s fiction, namely, that the letter writer is attempting to instantiate a racial hierarchy where those who cause him anxiety are inherently inferior. Mrs. Russell Taylor to Caldwell, undated; William T. Freeman to Caldwell, 18 March 1940; unsigned letter to Caldwell, undated. All letters in Erskine Caldwell Collection, Special Collections, Baker Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Quoted in Miller, 209–10. 65. US Congress, Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 2nd sess., 1936, 80, pt. 5: 5010. 66. The articles would later appear in a pamphlet entitled Tenant Farmer and again in Caldwell’s Some American People, both published in 1935. 67. Erskine Caldwell, “Georgia Poverty-Swept, Says Caldwell,” New York Post (18 February 1935): 7. While anger is a constant theme in the series, Caldwell also seeks to inspire a sense of pathos amongst readers: “hundreds of families go to bed hungry. Families of five, ten, fifteen, twenty, crowd into quilt-covered corners and try to get a little sleep on empty stomachs.” See “US Aid Forces Out Georgia Share Croppers,” New York Post (19 February 1935): 24. 68. Erskine Caldwell, “Starving Babies Suckled by Dog in Georgia Cabin,” New York Post (21 February 1935): 20. 69. “What Will Good People of Jefferson County Say of This?” editorial, Augusta Chronicle (4 March 1935): 4. 70. “What Will Good People of Jefferson County Say of This?” 4. 71. “What Will Good People of Jefferson County Say of This?” 4. 72. The announcement for the investigation appeared in an article entitled “Caldwell Story Called Untrue; Probe Ordered,” Augusta Chronicle (5 March 1935): 1. 73. James Barlow Jr., “Share Cropper Conditions Denied,” letter to the editor, New York Post (6 March 1935): 10. 74. Warren H. Pierce, “Caldwell’s Hog Wallow,” letter to the editor, Time (25 March 1935): 8. 75. Pierce, 8. 76. “Investigation is Made to Determine Basis Caldwell Had for All His Writings,” Augusta Chronicle (10 March 1935): 1. 77. “Investigation is Made,” 1. The author continues, relating how “we were met by dull, stolid, stupid people, seemingly unaware of all their ills save hunger.” The author ends by commenting upon the sterilization debate: “The consensus seems to be that, in many instances, scientific sterilization would play a great role in removing from society its worst enemy, the dregs of itself.” 78. “Erskine Caldwell,” Augusta Chronicle (13 March 1935): 3. 79. L. E. Holmes, “From a Social Worker,” letter to the editor, Augusta Chronicle (17 March 1935): 4. 80. Holmes, 4. 81. Holmes, 4. 82. “Investigation—Now What?” Augusta Chronicle (17 March 1935): 4. 83. “Investigation—Now What?” 4. A second editorial, published a week later, also calls for institutionalization, though in a more measured tone: “The only possible hope for the adults of this hopeless class is for them to become wards of the state and federal governments, with institutional care, or closest of supervision outside, with insistence upon cleanliness in better homes than the shacks and shanties they now occupy.” “The Caldwell Issue and Long Range Rehabilitation,” Augusta Chronicle (24 March 1935): 16.

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84. Wayne Mixon, The People’s Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South (Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia), 101. 85. It bears noting that Caldwell did receive some support from readers. One remarked, in a letter to the Augusta Chronicle, “let us thank Erskine Caldwell for an effort to open our eyes, and now instead of criticisms, let’s do something about it.” J. T. Avret, “Mr. Avret Writes,” letter to the editor, Augusta Chronicle (17 March 1935): 4. 86. Erskine Caldwell, “Georgia Tenants, Ousted by Landlords, eat Dirt as Change from Bread and ’Lasses,” New York Post (20 April 1935): 4. 87. Ira Caldwell, “Father,” letter to the editor, Time (25 March 1935): 8. 88. Ira Caldwell, “Mr. Caldwell Writes,” letter to the editor, Augusta Chronicle (17 March 1935): 4. 89. Erskine Caldwell, “Landlords Chiseling South’s Poor on FERA,” New York Post (18 April 1935): 1. 90. Erskine Caldwell, “Negroes Who Ask Pay Beaten in Alabama,” New York Post (19 April 1935): 19. 91. “Negroes Who Ask,” 19. 92. “Negroes Who Ask,” 19. 93. Erskine Caldwell, “Georgia Tenants,” 4. 94. Charles Malcolmson, “Share-Crop Life A Bed of Roses, Senator Holds,” New York Post (19 April 1935): 19. 95. Malcolmson, 19. 96. Lewis L. Gould, The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2005), 140. 97. “Hell on Earth,” New York Post (22 April 1935): 10. 98. Erskine Caldwell, God’s Little Acre (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 12. 99. God’s Little Acre, 97–98. 100. God’s Little Acre, 5. 101. God’s Little Acre, 5 102. God’s Little Acre, 7–8. 103. God’s Little Acre, 6. 104. God’s Little Acre, 7. 105. Chris Vials, “Whose Dixie? Erskine Caldwell’s Challenge to Gone with the Wind and Dialectical Realism,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 48, no. 1 (2006): 84. 106. Caldwell, God’s Little Acre, 81. 107. God’s Little Acre, 77. 108. God’s Little Acre, 78. 109. God’s Little Acre, 83. 110. God’s Little Acre, 86. 111. God’s Little Acre, 86–87. 112. God’s Little Acre, 96. 113. God’s Little Acre, 30. 114. God’s Little Acre, 194. 115. God’s Little Acre, 195. 116. God’s Little Acre, 195. 117. Vials, 80. 118. Caldwell, God’s Little Acre, 205, 209. 119. God’s Little Acre, 208.

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120. God’s Little Acre, 208. 121. God’s Little Acre, 205. 122. Erskine Caldwell, Introduction to God’s Little Acre (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949). 123. Erskine Caldwell, Introduction to Tobacco Road (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1948). 124. Erskine Caldwell, Trouble in July (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1940): 18. 125. Trouble in July, 18. 126. Sylvia Cook notes that in crafting McCurtain, Caldwell “created someone who was clearly conscious of the consequences of his actions in terms of others’ suffering and his obligations to his society, as well, of course, as his own self-interest.” Sylvia Jenkins Cook, Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 143. 127. Caldwell, Trouble in July, 107. 128. Trouble in July, 108. 129. Trouble in July, 235. 130. Trouble in July, 45–46. 131. Trouble in July, 217. 132. Trouble in July, 218. 133. Andrew B. Leiter, “Sexual Degeneracy and the Anti-Lynching Tradition in Erskine Caldwell’s Trouble in July,” in Reading Erskine Caldwell: New Essays, ed. Robert L. McDonald (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 211. Leiter also discusses the ways in which Caldwell’s novel aligns with the work of black novelists: “Efforts to undermine the image of the ‘black beast’ rapist had been a staple of African American fiction and nonfiction for years, and Caldwell’s emphasis on white female sexual depravity and his protests against lynching make Trouble in July an important text for understanding the converging concerns of white and African American authors of the South” (204). Leiter also aptly summarizes the lynching as being not motivated by a sense of actual justice, but rather as having “everything to do with alleviating a sense of violated racial supremacy” (207). For more on Caldwell and antilynching campaigns, see Edwin T. Arnold’s essay in the same collection, “Erskine Caldwell and Judge Lynch: Caldwell’s Role in the Anti-Lynching Campaigns of the 1930s.” 134. Caldwell, Trouble in July, 219. 135. Trouble in July, 219–20. 136. Trouble in July, 223–24. 137. Trouble in July, 224. 138. Trouble in July, 226. 139. Cook, Fiction of Poverty, 150. 140. Richard Wright, “Lynching Bee,” New Republic 102 (11 March 1940): 352. 141. Edwin Rolfe, “Review of God’s Little Acre,” New Masses (February 1933): 26. 142. As Tom Jacobs explains, “new developments in printing technology made it possible for the first time to efficiently print higher quality photographs on a mass scale for magazines like Life, which had a circulation approaching 500,000.” See “Poeticizing the Political Image: Caldwell, Bourke-White, and the Recasting of Phototextual Expression,” in Reading Erskine Caldwell: New Essays, ed. Robert L. McDonald (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 95. 143. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), xi. 144. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995).

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145. Jacobs, 93. 146. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 1. 147. Stott, 221. 148. Caldwell and Bourke-White. There are no page numbers accompanying the images in the text. 149. Miller, 233–34. 150. Miller, 234. 151. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 126–7. 152. Jefferson Hunter, Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photography and Texts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 70. 153. Alan Trachtenberg, Foreword to You Have Seen Their Faces (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), vii. 154. Donald Davidson, “Erskine Caldwell’s Picture Book,” Southern Review 4 (1 January 1938): 17–18. 155. Stott 219–20. 156. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 11. Caldwell also notes the continuing perpetuation of racial violence: “Peonage, like lynching, is not condoned in theory; but conditions, usually best described as local, are sometimes called upon to justify it in practice. And when a plantation-owner feels the urge to beat and whip and maul a Negro, there are generally several within sight or sound to choose from” (10). 157. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 17. 158. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 19. 159. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 19. Earlier, in a caption beneath a picture of what appears to be a white landowner—the man wears a clean-looking collared shirt and a wellmade hat—Caldwell had recorded his imagined thoughts as, “Folks here wouldn’t give a dime a dozen for white tenants. They can get twice as much work out of the blacks. But they need to be trained. Beat a dog and he’ll obey you. They say it’s the same way with the blacks.” 160. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 31. 161. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 35. Regarding lynching, Caldwell acknowledges, “There was nothing like a lynching to put the fear of God into Negroes and scare the daylight out of their souls” (32). 162. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 35. 163. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 36. 164. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 35–36. Caldwell also notes the perplexed attitude that the rest of the country holds in regard to the South: “The Union itself is so unsure of the South’s loyalty that it does not attempt to enforce its hard-won amendment to the Constitution, and pretends to be looking in another direction when southern legislatures pass conflicting Jim Crow laws” (36). 165. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 36. 166. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 38, 35. 167. Adam Sonstegard, “Rivals in Photo-Realism: James Agee vs. Margaret BourkeWhite,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South, 18, no. 1 (2011): 61. 168. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 48. 169. Caldwell and Bourke-White, 48. 170. Hudson Strode, “Pictures of the South, Drunk on Cotton,” New York Herald Tribune Books (21 November 1937): 5.

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171. Robert van Gelder, “A Compelling Album of the Deep South,” New York Times (28 November 1937): 11. 172. Bourke-White, too, would produce work of a far grittier and less romanticized form, particularly her haunting photographs from the Buchenwald concentration camps. 173. Stuart Kidd, “Dissonant Encounters: FSA Photographers and the Southern Underclass, 1935–1943,” in Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, 1918–1939, ed. Richard Godden and Martin Crawford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 29. 174. Michael Lofaro, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays. Ed. Michael A. Lofaro, (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2017), 2. 175. Lofaro, 2. 176. Stott, 25. 177. Stott, 291. 178. David Molkte-Hansen, “‘Consider the Ancient Generations’: Sharecropping’s Strange Compulsion,” in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2017), 33–34. 179. Reprinted in James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 398. 180. Stott, 222. 181. Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (New York: Verso, 1994), 70–71. 182. “Vice is What Sells!” Hartford Courant, August 29, 1948. 183. Carl Bode, “Erskine Caldwell: A Note for the Negative,” College English, March 1956. Reprinted in McDonald, Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell, 171. 184. Quoted in Conversations with Erskine Caldwell, ed. Edwin T. Arnold. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 1988), 204. 185. Conversations with Erskine Caldwell, 284. Three: “Crashing to Bits”: Autobiographical Recreations of the South

1. Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 9–11. Though as many Californians could point out, the same could be said for Alta California. 2. Hobson, 11. 3. John C. Inscoe has argued recently for expanded consideration of southern memoirs, noting, “Autobiographers then, as both historians and storytellers, have much to tell us about what it has meant to be southern, whether black or white, male or female, rich or poor, at various times and from various locales, all of which allows us to see and understand the region and its people in ways that elude more conventional treatments drawn from more traditional sources.” See Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2011), 1. 4. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), xix. 5. Cash, xii. 6. Cash, xxi. 7. Cash, xxii. 8. Cash, 378. 9. Cash, 6–7. 10. Cash, 23. 11. Cash, 23–24.

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12. Cash, 24. 13. Cash, 26. 14. Cash, xx. 15. William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941). 16. Benjamin E. Wise, William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2012), 8. 17. William L. Andrews, “In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies,” The Southern Review 24.1 (1988): 50. 18. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Will Percy and Lanterns on the Levee Revisited” in Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South, ed. Jason Phillips (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 14. 19. Percy, 5. 20. Percy, 9. 21. Percy, 68–69. 22. Percy, 16. 23. Percy, 309. 24. Percy, 46. 25. Percy, 46. 26. Wise, 33. 27. Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, 286–87. 28. Percy, 287. 29. Percy, 287. 30. Andrews, 54. 31. Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, 16. 32. Percy, 16. 33. Percy, 16–17. 34. Percy, 17. 35. Percy, 19. 36. Percy, 21. 37. Percy, 20. 38. Percy, 19. 39. Percy, 19–20. 40. Percy, 20. 41. Percy, 20, 39. 42. Scott Romine, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 115. 43. Percy, 143. 44. Percy, 143–44. 45. Percy, 144. 46. Percy, 144. 47. Percy, 146. 48. Percy, 147. 49. Percy, 147–48. 50. Percy, 147 51. Percy, 148. 52. Percy, 149. 53. Percy, 150. 54. Percy, 237.

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55. Percy, 231–32. 56. Percy, 237. 57. Percy, 237. 58. Percy, 241. 59. Wise, 187. 60. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 79. 61. In a review published in her journal North Georgia Review, Smith referred to Lanterns as a “tasteless though muted expression of white arrogance” and an “anachronism with a highly rubbed expression of white arrogance.” Qtd. in Hobson, 286. 62. Smith. 63. Smith, 13. 64. Smith, 21. 65. Scott Romine, “Framing Southern Rhetoric: Lillian Smith’s Narrative Persona in Killers of the Dream,” South Atlantic Review 59, no. 2 (1994): 96. 66. Smith, 27. 67. Smith, 12, ellipsis in original. 68. Smith, ellipsis in original. 69. Smith, 27–28. 70. Smith, 83–84. 71. Smith, 162, italics in original. 72. Smith, 162. 73. Smith, 163. 74. Smith, 144. 75. Smith, 145. 76. Smith, 145. 77. Smith, 145–46. 78. Smith, 121. 79. Smith, 159. 80. Smith, 161. 81. Smith, 163. 82. Smith, 163. 83. Smith, 164. 84. Smith, 164–65. 85. Smith, 171. 86. Smith, 174. 87. Smith, 176. 88. Smith, 177. 89. Smith, 179. 90. David Bradley, Preface to Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988), xiv. 91. Benjamin Balthaser, “Killing the Documentarian: Richard Wright and Documentary Modernity,” Criticism 55, no. 3 (2013): 358. 92. Jeff Allred, “From Eye to We: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, Documentary, and Pedagogy,” American Literature 78, no. 3 (2006): 549. 93. Bradley, Preface to 12 Million Black Voices, xvi. 94. Balthaser, 372. 95. Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 12.

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96. 12 Million Black Voices, 30. 97. 12 Million Black Voices, 41. 98. Allred, 552. 99. Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 43. 100. 12 Million Black Voices, 17. 101. 12 Million Black Voices, 16–17. 102. 12 Million Black Voices, 17. 103. 12 Million Black Voices, 46. 104. 12 Million Black Voices, 47. 105. 12 Million Black Voices, 47. 106. Erskine Caldwell, In Search of Bisco (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 3. 107. John Gould Fletcher, “Is This the Voice of the South?” The Nation 137, no. 3573 (27 December 1933): 734 108. Robert L. McDonald, Erskine Caldwell: Selected Letters, 1929–1955 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 157. 109. Caldwell, In Search of Bisco, 3. 110. In Search of Bisco, 7. The next racial moment Caldwell recalls is the lynching of a black boy for the alleged rape of a white woman. The boy’s name, Sonny Brown, likely prefigures the falsely accused Sonny Clark in Trouble in July. Regarding lynchings, Caldwell eerily notes that “such happenings were not unusual in the hot months of summer and early autumn” (10). And in another gesture that prefigures his novel, describes how “for a long time afterward I wondered how a Negro boy anywhere would have a chance to prove, before he was lynched, that he was not guilty of raping a white girl who enticed teen-age boys of both races to give her some candy in exchange for sexual intercourse” (10–11). 111. In Search of Bisco, 17. 112. In Search of Bisco, 17–18. 113. In Search of Bisco, 27. 114. In Search of Bisco, 26. 115. In Search of Bisco, 26. 116. In Search of Bisco, 110. 117. In Search of Bisco, 51. 118. In Search of Bisco, 51–52. 119. In Search of Bisco, 49–50. 120. In Search of Bisco, 60. 121. In Search of Bisco, 67. 122. In Search of Bisco, 68. 123. In Search of Bisco, 205–6. 124. In Search of Bisco, 214. Four: “It Aint Nothing but Jest Another Snopes”: Boundaries of Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha

1. Thadious M. Davis, Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 254. 2. In 1939, George Marion O’Donnell contrasted the Sartorises and Snopeses, remarking that “the Sartorises act traditionally; that is to say, they act always with an ethically responsible will. They represent vital morality, humanism,” whereas the Snopeses “do not recognize

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this point of view; acting only for self-interest, they acknowledge no ethical duty. Really, then, they are amoral; they represent naturalism or animalism.” “Faulkner’s Mythology,” Kenyon Review 1 (1939): 286. 3. William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959), 250. 4. See especially Faulkner’s appendix to The Sound and the Fury, written in 1945 and first published in The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1946). 5. Julia Leyda, “Reading White Trash: Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 56, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 40. 6. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 7. 7. As I Lay Dying, 22. 8. Jolene Hubbs, “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism,” Mississippi Quarterly 61.3 (Summer 2008): 464. 9. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 11. 10. As I Lay Dying, 105–6. 11. As I Lay Dying, 110. 12. As I Lay Dying, 66. This scene also foreshadows the opening of “Barn Burning,” where young Colonel Sartoris Snopes eyes groceries and cheese with mouthwatering desire. 13. As I Lay Dying, 84. 14. As I Lay Dying, 58. 15. As I Lay Dying, 60. 16. As I Lay Dying, 198. 17. As I Lay Dying, 198–99, 201. 18. As I Lay Dying, 200. 19. As I Lay Dying, 202–3. 20. As I Lay Dying, 246. 21. As I Lay Dying, 244. 22. As I Lay Dying, 247. 23. As I Lay Dying, 251. 24. As I Lay Dying, 256. 25. As I Lay Dying, 170. 26. As I Lay Dying, 171. 27. As I Lay Dying, 173. 28. Cheryl Lester, “As They Lay Dying: Rural Depopulation and Social Dislocation as a Structure of Feeling,” Faulkner Journal 26, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2005–Spring 2006): 43. 29. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 203. 30. As I Lay Dying, 229. 31. As I Lay Dying, 229. 32. As I Lay Dying, 230. 33. Critical discussion of the Snopes trilogy tends to focus on Flem Snopes’s inhumanity or the multiplicity of narrators Faulkner employs, from the chivalric grandiloquence of Gavin Stevens to the rustic wisdom of V. K. Ratliff. Flem’s nefariousness has been of critical concern for decades: in James Gray Watson’s important early work on the trilogy, he refers to Flem as “a character so completely resistant to moral definition as to be literally inhuman.” Similarly, Joseph Gold wrote that to the villagers of Frenchman’s Bend, Flem represents “an uncontrollable and alien force,” and Donald J. Greiner notes that Flem’s shrewdness marks

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him as fully capable of manipulating human behavior, calling him “the better man when it comes to greed,” as Flem easily outmaneuvers the townsfolk in the spotted horses deal. 34. Sharon Desmond Paradiso, “Eula’s American Dream: White Womanhood in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy,” Modern Language Studies 32, no. 1 (2002): 71. 35. George Yancy, “Fragments of a Social Ontology of Whiteness,” in What White Looks Like, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9. 36. Jacqueline Zara Wilson, “Invisible Racism: The Language and Ontology of ‘White Trash,’” Critique of Anthropology 22, no. 4 (2002): 388. 37. William Faulkner, The Town (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 15. 38. Dina Smith, “Cultural Studies’ Misfit: White Trash Studies,” Mississippi Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2004): 382–383. 39. Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, “What is ‘White Trash’? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 169. 40. William Faulkner, Selected Letters, ed. Joseph Blotner (Ney Work: Random House, 1977), 197. 41. William Faulkner, “Wash,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1950), 536. 42. “Wash,” 537. 43. Frances Anne Butler (Fanny Kemble), Journal of a Residence in America (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1835), 232. 44. Faulkner, “Wash,” 536. Still, as John Rodden establishes, “Wash Jones is a pivotal character whose actions have far-reaching impact upon the outcome of the Sutpen story and whose plight, along with that of his granddaughter, Milly, extends beyond an individual tragedy to reveal the delusions and helplessness of the ‘poor white trash’ of the Civil War South.” See “‘The Faithful Gravedigger’: The Role of ‘Innocent’ Wash Jones and the Invisible ‘White Trash’ in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Southern Literary Journal 43, no. 1 (2010): 23. 45. Faulkner, Collected Stories, 537. In “Wash,” the speaker is referred to simply as a “Negress,” while in Absalom, Absalom! it is Clytie who denies Wash entrance. 46. Faulkner, Collected Stories, 538. 47. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 307. 48. Absalom, Absalom! 183. 49. John N. Duvall, Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 11. 50. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 190. 51. Absalom, Absalom! 209. 52. Walter Benn Michaels, “Absalom, Absalom! The Difference Between White Men and White Men,” in Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2000, eds. Robert W. Hamblin and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 143. 53. William Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1950), 7. 54. “Barn Burning,” 9. 55. “Barn Burning,” 10. 56. “Barn Burning,” 11. 57. “Barn Burning,” 12. As John T. Matthews remarks, “Ab understands his economic situation as a tenant farmer to be a straightforward case of class disadvantage,” though Ab also

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recognizes the racial component of his situation. See “Faulkner and Proletarian Literature,” in Faulkner in Cultural Context: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1995, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 172. For more on Ab’s class consciousness, see Mauri Skinfill, “Reconstructing Class in Faulkner’s Late Fiction: The Hamlet and the Discovery of Capital,” Studies in American Fiction 24 (1996): 151–69. 58. As David Roediger forcefully states in a discussion of southern industry, “Ultimately there was no class consciousness, here or elsewhere in the industrializing US, which was not also race and gender consciousness as well.” See Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class and Politics (New York: Verso, 1994), 131. 59. John N. Duvall, “‘A Strange Nigger’: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness,” in Faulkner and Whiteness, ed. Jay Watson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 102–3. 60. Sarty has been the focal point for a great deal of criticism on the story. Edmond L. Volpe claims that the story “is not really concerned with class conflict” but rather Sarty’s “emotional dilemma.” A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner: The Short Stories (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 233. Marilyn Claire Ford considers Sarty’s exit at the end of the story in “Narrative Legerdemain: Evoking Sarty’s Future in ‘Barn Burning,’” Mississippi Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1998): 527–40, while family bonds are discussed by Oliver Billingslea, “Fathers and Sons: The Spiritual Quest in Faulkner’s ‘Barn Burning,’” Mississippi Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1991): 287–308. 61. Faulkner, Collected Stories, 23. 62. Collected Stories, 24. 63. Collected Stories, 4. 64. Collected Stories, 25. Interestingly, the language used to describe Ab’s role in The Unvanquished is evocative of the extremities of vigilante justice and perhaps even a lynching: after Grumby murders Rosa Millard, Ratliff tells how “Colonel’s boy Bayard and Uncle Buck McCaslin and a nigger caught Ab in the woods and something else happened, tied up to a tree or something and maybe even a doubled bridle rein or maybe even a heated ramrod in it too though that’s just hearsay” (32). 65. Faulkner, Collected Stories, 25. 66. William Faulkner, The Hamlet (New York: Vintage Books, 1940), 3. 67. The Hamlet, 5. 68. Phil Stone to James Meriwether, February 19, 1957, in Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection, eds. Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 207. 69. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 396. 70. William Faulkner, Father Abraham, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1983), 16. 71. Theresa M. Towner, Faulkner on the Color Line: The Later Novels (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 87. 72. Faulkner, The Hamlet, 8. 73. The Hamlet, 10. 74. The Hamlet, 13. 75. The Hamlet, 8–9. 76. For a discussion of the textual history of “Barn Burning” and Father Abraham, see Hans H. Skei’s chapter on “Barn Burning” in Reading Faulkner’s Best Short Stories (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 55–68.

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77. Faulkner, Father Abraham, 19–20. 78. According to James Meriwether, Faulkner likely wrote the twenty-four-page manuscript in late 1926. See his introduction to Father Abraham. 79. Scholars have frequently examined historical views of blacks as racially inferior beings. The polygenesis argument, stating that humanity descended from multiple lineages, is considered by George M. Fredrickson in The Black Image in the White Mind (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 71–96, and Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1–40. 80. Faulkner, The Hamlet, 101. 81. The Hamlet, 251, 352. 82. Faulkner, Father Abraham, 70. 83. Annalee Newitz, “White Savagery and Humiliation, or A New Racial Consciousness in the Media,” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, eds. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997), 134. 84. Faulkner, The Hamlet, 358. 85. The Hamlet, 90. 86. The Hamlet, 90, 95. 87. The Hamlet, 90. 88. The Hamlet, 90. 89. The Hamlet, 192. 90. The Hamlet, 194–95. 91. Faulkner’s own comments on the character look past his disability and race: “To me Ike Snopes was simply an interesting human being with man’s natural, normal failings” (Faulkner in the University, 132). Early critics also took sympathetic approaches to Ike; Cleanth Brooks notes, “The idiot, Ike Snopes, is also a kind of pure quantity—pure adoration, pure love of nature, pure responsiveness, without inhibitions, responsibilities or self-consciousness,” Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963), 190. James Gray Watson remarks, “The bare fact of the idiot’s sodomy is pathetic, even repulsive, but the poetry given this story obscures no depravity. Rather, it elevates Ike’s inchoate virtues of gentleness, love, and devotion to a standard against which all other lovers are implicitly judged,” The Snopes Dilemma: Faulkner’s Trilogy (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1968), 47. 92. Faulkner, The Hamlet, 219. 93. Owen Robinson, “Interested Parties and Theorems to Prove: Narrative and Identity in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy,” Southern Literary Journal 36, no. 1 (2003): 61. 94. Faulkner, The Town, 102. 95. John E. Bassett, “Yoknapatawpha Revised: Demystifying Snopes,” College Literature 15, no. 2 (1988): 141, 143. 96. Susan V. Donaldson makes the cogent point that “what wins out in Faulkner’s saga of the Snopeses and their adversaries is not the competitive individualism of Flem Snopes but a reduced, domesticated, commodified form of masculinity represented by Gavin Stevens and his ally V. K. Ratliff.” See “Ratliff and the Demise of Male Mastery: Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy and Cold War Masculinity,” in White Masculinity in the Recent South, ed. Trent Watts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 236. 97. Faulkner, The Town, 40. 98. Mark Leaf, “William Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy: The South Evolves,” in The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, ed. Warren French (Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1970), 57.

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99. Faulkner, The Town, 322–23. 100. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, in Novels 1942–1954 (New York: Library of America, 1994), 501. 101. In a discussion of this quote, Theresa Towner writes, “Clearly Faulkner had devoted some consideration to the history of the racial sentiments of his sewing-machine salesman in the eleven years separating the two books, and by the time of his final appearance eight years later in The Mansion, Ratliff not only understands Jefferson’s dominant racial ideology, manifested in the person of Senator Clarence Snopes, but he also successfully challenges it and removes it from power” (81). Though Towner is correct in remarking that Ratliff does challenge the town’s racial hierarchy as it refers to a white/black dichotomy, successfully derailing the bigoted Clarence Snopes’s political ambitions, this view does not preclude the possibility that Ratliff also does not want a “white trash” Snopes politician representing Jefferson. 102. Faulkner, The Town, 111–12. 103. The Town, 106. 104. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 1. 105. Faulkner in the University, 100. 106. Faulkner, The Town, 359. 107. The Town, 360. 108. William Faulkner, The Mansion (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 45. 109. Faulkner, The Town, 370. 110. Faulkner, The Hamlet, 24. 111. Faulkner, Father Abraham, 14. 112. Father Abraham, 19. 113. William Faulkner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York: Random House: 1977), 107. 114. Selected Letters, 108. 115. Matthew Lessig, “Class, Character, and ’Croppers: Faulkner’s Snopeses and the Plight of the Sharecropper,” Arizona Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1999): 106. 116. Faulkner, The Mansion, 5. 117. Lessig, 106. 118. Faulkner in the University, 97–98. 119. Myra Jehlen, Class and Character in Faulkner’s South (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1976), 141. 120. While Flem does try to buy out Wallstreet’s business in The Town, the fact that he is unsuccessful does little if anything to affect his own financial position in Jefferson. 121. Faulkner, The Mansion, 319.Indeed, Gail Mortimer goes as far as to say that Flem “is not a villain” but “simply someone who takes advantage of the gullibility and cupidity of his ‘victims.’ He mirrors, rather than initiates, the materialistic society.” See “Evolutionary Theory in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 40, no. 4 (1986): 196–97. 122. Faulkner, The Mansion, 152. 123. The Mansion, 349. 124. Towner, 79. 125. Faulkner in the University, 201. 126. Faulkner in the University, 119–20.

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127. In the front matter of The Mansion, Faulkner notifies readers of the “discrepancies and contradictions” that he hopes readers will not mind “due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago.” That these lines refer at least in part to Mink, who both opens and closes the novel, is doubtless. 128. Faulkner, The Mansion, 435–36. 129. Faulkner in the University, 132. 130. Faulkner in the University, 133. 131. Faulkner, The Mansion, 421. Conclusion: Maimed Souls: O’Connor, Disability, and the Future of White Trash

1. Tate to O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor Collection, Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, 22 February 1955. Qtd. in Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 255. 2. Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988), 814. 3. “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 816–17. O’Connor also makes a wry comment about the differences between northern and southern responses to her work: “When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” 4. Josephine Hendin, The World of Flannery O’Connor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 28. 5. Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 272–73. 6. “Good Country People,” 273, 271. Of her best friend Mrs. Freeman, Mrs. Hopewell notes that her family did not instill such anxiety in her: “The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people” (272). Her conclusion about the family is more wishful than anything, as Mrs. Freeman’s obstinacy (she “could never be brought to admit herself wrong on any point”) and gossipy nature (she is described as “the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth”) could clearly mark her as trash from Freeman’s perspective (271–72). 7. “Good Country People,” 275. 8. “Good Country People,” 274. 9. “Good Country People,” 271. 10. “Good Country People,” 274. 11. Laura L. Behling, “The Necessity of Disability in ‘Good Country People’ and “The Lame Shall Enter First,’” Flannery O’Connor Review 4 (2006): 91. 12. “Good Country People,” 275. Behling, 90. 13. “Good Country People,” 278–79. 14. “Good Country People,” 283. 15. “Good Country People,” 283. 16. “Good Country People,” 286. 17. “Good Country People,” 288. 18. “Good Country People,” 291.

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19. Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 99. In a similar vein, O’Connor reveals that the theft was an “inevitable” outcome of the story (100). 20. Ralph C. Wood comments upon the sexually charged imagery and hint of rape in the story’s climax, noting that Pointer “discerns instinctively that the way to penetrate Hulga’s virginity is not sexually but intellectually. With acute moral insight, Pointer discerns what Hulga loves most: it is not her maidenhead but the emblem of her crippled condition, her wooden leg. As the outward and visible sign of her bitter inward grievance, the prosthesis is far more precious than her virginity.” Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-haunted South (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 207. 21. O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” Collected Stories, 445. 22. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 445. 23. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 449. 24. From Sheppard’s one-sided point of view, “Johnson had a capacity for real response and had been deprived of everything from birth; Norton was average or below and had had every advantage” (449). He is especially harsh to his ten-year-old son regarding his mother’s death, thinking it was “part of his selfishness” and criticizing him because she “had been dead for over a year and a child’s grief should not last so long” (447). 25. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 449–50. 26. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 451. 27. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 459. 28. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 459–60. 29. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 466. 30. Behling, 95. 31. O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 472. 32. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 473. 33. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 473. 34. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 474–75. 35. Donald E. Hardy, The Body in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction: Computational Technique and Linguistic Voice (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 15. 36. O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 480. 37. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 480. 38. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 480. 39. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” 817. 40. O’Connor, “Revelation,” in Collected Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 491. 41. Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, eds. Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019), 4. 42. Harkins and McCarroll, 13. 43. Reid Wilson, “America’s Urban-Rural Divide Deepens,” The Hill, 7 November 2018, thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/415441-americas-urban-rural-divide-deepens. 44. Justin Davidson, “Cities vs. Trump: Red State, Blue State? The Urban-Rural Divide is More Significant,” New York Magazine, 18 April 2017, nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/ the-urban-rural-divide-matters-more-than-red-vs-blue-state.html. Davidson also notes that this is in fact part of a worldwide phenomenon: “The Brexit vote shocked Londoners into the realization that they are outnumbered. The right-wing party of Marine Le Pen represents rural France’s revenge on Paris. Tokyo grows while Japan’s population shrinks, and India’s exploding cities are leaving its villages ever poorer, sicker, and less educated.”

Notes

179

45. Peter Grier, “The Deep Roots of America’s Rural-Urban Political Divide.” Christian Science Monitor, 26 December 2018, www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/1226/The-deep -roots-of-America-s-rural-urban-political-divide. 46. Fox News’s “Fox and Friends” segment focused on ASU’s course, entitled “The Problem of Whiteness,” in January 2015. See Roque Planas’s coverage of the event: “Fox News Raises Alarm Over College Course About Race,” The Huffington Post, 24 January 2015, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/24/fox-news-whiteness_n_6538986.html.

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Photo by Michael T. Davis Photography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Justin Mellette is a visiting lecturer at Northeastern University. He earned his PhD from Penn State University and has also been a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Auburn University. His work in American and African American literature has appeared in African American Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, Southern Cultures, and the Southern Quarterly, among other venues.