The Columbia History of the American Novel

the racism within himself. Lucas enables Chick to transcend artificial boundaries separating the races and to restore a measure of justice in the interactions between blacks and whites. In all of these novels, Faulkner, though unconcerned with rendering African Americans outside of their relationships to white Southerners, nonetheless created a large number and a fairly diverse range of people of color, not all of them sympathetic representations.

Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, his contemporary from the Midwest who married a Southerner, Zelda Sayre of Alabama, Faulkner did not fear the rising up of people of color. Faulkner sought to explain and perhaps expiate the white South's destructive racial positions. Whereas Fitzgerald, heralded as the writer of the Jazz Age, removed his interest in the rhythms of jazz from that of the African Americans who first created it, Faulkner did not. While black characters are -428- noticeably absent from Fitzgerald's novels and negative racial views presented go unexamined, his notions about race were clear: 'The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race…. My reactions [to Europe] were all philistine, antisocial, provincial, and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man's burden. We [Americans] are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro.' Faulkner, on the other hand, while sharing his culture's traditional views of race, did not dismiss the centrality of race and the legacy of African Americans in that culture. Whatever his failings in representing race in his novels, Faulkner did not set out a simplistic assertion of the racial superiority of whites or a conflated representation of 'the Negro' as scapegoat for the vicissitudes of regional identity in a modernizing South. He attended to the problems and dynamics of race relations, caste privilege, and agrarian reform within the contexts of industrialization and urbanization in a region reluctant and resistant to change. Race, then, was one of the facets of regional continuity and regional transformation that he could not deny and would not ignore.

Faulkner's attention to African Americans in the maturation of white Southerners is one of his legacies to writers who followed him. In The Member of the Wedding (1946), Carson McCullers brought to bear her insights as a modern female within the culture who, in the process of revisioning the maturation of a young white female, Frankie Addams, considered as well the relationship of the African American surrogate mother, Berenice Sadie Brown, to that process. McCullers outlined the maturation of a young Southern girl in her season of budding awareness of self and difference. In portraying Frankie Addams, who grew too tall too quickly and who faced the puzzling problem of relating to her home and community when she longed for other worlds, McCullers valorized the role of the African American woman charged with Frankie's care by showing how Berenice represented difference and experience useful to maintaining a selfhood within a society expecting conformity. In the popular play adapted from the novel and also entitled The Member of the Wedding (195 1), however, McCullers draws weaker, less racially positive African American characters in a manner duplicating the myths and stereotypes of their lives; for example, the men are weak, dishonest, sexually aggressive, and drug-or alcohol-addicted, while the women -429- are superstitious, servile, and promiscuous. More recently, Kaye Gibbons in Ellen Foster (1987) concentrates not on the older nursemaid or housekeeper in the development of the white girl character but on the peer, the African American of the same age whose friendship functions to foster and to complicate the maturation process for the white friend. These novels suggest that though the cultural, racial, and gender dynamics have changed since Faulkner created Dilsey, Lucas, and Sam Fathers, his vision in rendering one of the major points of interaction in the black and white South has not gone unnoticed by subsequent writers seeking to portray in human terms the complexities of their region.

Though Faulkner remained in the South for most of his career, the exception being a few brief stints in Hollywood as a scriptwriter for motion pictures, white Southern writers like Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and, for a time, Flannery O'Connor more often fled their region because of its inadequacies for the development of their careers as professional writers. African American Southern writers fled out of another set of imperatives. Restricted to second-class citizenship, when their citizenship was acknowledged at all, blacks lived on the edge in their native region. Legally constricted by the resurgence of Jim Crow laws after World War I when black soldiers returning from Europe sought full access to the democracy they had fought to preserve on foreign soils, modern blacks found themselves no better off than their forebears at the end of the nineteenth century. Segregated in housing, education, employment, transportation, and every other social aspect of their lives, they found themselves marginalized and, if at all visibly resentful of their unequal treatment, endangered. The external codes and customs of a separated society deposited internally led to a dual vision of self within two sets of limitations; the one, that of the oppressive white society, and the other, that of the repressive black society. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and their contemporaries writing of the South from the perspective of the race traditionally seen as other struggled against the projected negative self-representations embedded in the ideology of race and racial difference used by whites to uphold their legal policies, moral beliefs, and literary practices. Simultaneously, they struggled with the social fragmentation and psychical fractures emanating from the accommodations made by African Americans to -430- retain their humanity and dignity. Separated from their white cultural and literary counterparts by what Richard Wright labeled 'a million of psychological miles' in 'The Man Who Killed a Shadow,' black writers in order to exist as creative beings felt compelled to leave the South in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Richard Wright's experience is perhaps paradigmatic. Born into a sharecropping family in Mississippi, Wright came to prominence as a writer during the 1930s when he both assumed and rejected a racial heritage based on subordination and difference. For Wright, the inescapable necessity was to distance himself from a humiliating, inferior position in a biracial hierarchy. Rage in his response to the South exacerbated fragmentation and division, emphasized it to a maximum and almost unbearable degree; nonetheless, rage, righteous and focused, was also the source of integrated action. Wright prevented his own disintegration by the process of remembering, despite the pain and shame of reenvisioning himself within the racist structures of his native region. He states in Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945):

I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that some day I might understand it, might come to know what its rigors had done to me, its children. I fled so that the numbness of my defensive living might thaw out and let me feel the pain — years later and far away — of what living in the South had meant.

Yet, deep down, I knew that I could never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South…. instilled into my personality and consciousness…. So, in leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently…. And if that miracle ever happened, then I would know that there was yet hope in that southern swamp of despair and violence, that light could emerge even out of the blackest of the southern night. I would know that the South too could overcome its fear, its hate, its cowardice, its heritage of guilt and blood, its burden of anxiety and compulsive cruelty.

As a result of this recognition, in his fictional texts Wright was able to ward off personal disintegration by creating powerful protagonists who are 'stripped of the past and free for the future,' as he asserted in White Man, Listen! (1957). Rather than transcendence, his aim was to control the rage so that it became creative energy, directed toward exposing the sources of his rage and toward expung-431- ing his individual sense of guilt for not having been able to do more in the literal rather than the literary world to change his condition.

At the same time, Wright transformed his shame at having been the victim of humiliations, perpetrated both by the external society of whites and by his immediate family of blacks attempting to survive. Survival has its costs, as he recognized in distancing himself from his family, his parental relatives and their heritage and folk culture, as well as from his maternal relatives with their dependency upon religion and their emphasis upon upward mobility within the land of the oppressors and in terms acceptable to their oppressors. None of his novels affirms folk culture and the African American family for their capacity to sustain the individual. In his fiction, Wright was the explosive in attacking all institutions (family, political parties, Southern segregation, economic systems, and racial hierarchies) that would deny his individual manhood. He refused to celebrate racial survival at all costs, as white writers such as Faulkner did with representations of exemplary black servants (Dilsey Gibson in The Sound and the Fury or Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust). Like the contemporary writers Alice Walker in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and Ernest Gaines in A Gathering of Old Men (1983), Wright insisted that survival is not enough. Walker's Grange, for instance, lives the life of a black Southerner emasculated by his environment but eventually struggles to regain his manhood through the next generation, specifically that of his granddaughter Ruth. Grange Copeland expresses his hard-won knowledge in the