In Go Down, Moses Faulkner traces the root of a family past and a regional history. With the family ledgers, he aims not only to represent the slave experience and life in the South, but to expose the social, cultural trauma, racism and slavery as the legacy that has circulated within the tormented souls of his characters, including the white Southerners, the black and mulatto slaves. Faulkner’ efforts to represent slave history manifests his willingness to confront the agonizing racial legacy caused by racism of the South, and his vision to lift the racial wounding out of the margin and move it into the center stage. Go Down, Moses, given its historical, social and cultural contexts, provides a window for viewing the issue of race and exploring the discourse on racism. For Faulkner’s idea of racism in Go Down, Moses and the subsequent novels is associated with racial relationship, white supremacy and black subordination on the basis of racial difference. His text is a representation of the rigidly constructed Southern society, a society that is racially demarcated.
Racial demarcation out of biological differences often leads to the practice of racism that has long permeated in the South. In tracing the origin of the discourse on racism and race, Christian Delacampagne indicates the fact that the effect of racism has occurred in history prior to the coming of the word itself and that “[racism] begins when one makes (alleged) cultural superiority directly and mechanically dependent on (alleged) physiological superiority, that is, when one derives the cultural characteristics of a given group from its biological characteristics. Racism is the reduction of the cultural to the biological, the attempt to make the first dependent on the second” (85). According to Delacampagne, racism derives from the biological characteristics and differences, which are ascribed to the cultural superiority and thus contributes to the pernicious effects and legacy of slavery inscribed in Southern
history. The practice of racism characterizes the notions of biological superiority and inferiority, and formulates the notion of the black Other as naturally different in biological and cultural terms. The Southern black slaves are, in this way, forced and claimed by the white as “inferior” in social status due to the biological and racial differences.
Slavery actually is an imbalanced institution based on racism, which exists in a pseudo-scientific form and practice with a biological referent. The institution of slavery mirrors the white-black relation with a conception of racial hierarchy or inequality. Since such racism represents the human beings as divided biologically, the black as constructed by this racial demarcation are often faced with exclusionary violences and constrained by the labor market. This institutional racism in slavery not only marks hierarchy and exclusion, but also reflects the practice and relationship made to sustain the advantage of the dominant group and the disadvantage of the subordinate group. As Go Down, Moses demonstrates the racial difference marked by slavery, it centers on the racial relationship and tension between the dominant white and the subordinate black by presenting the imbalanced relationship of white supremacy and black subordination under the racist practice of slavery. Faulkner’s text magnifies this racial difference and tension in the systematic imbalance of power relations. In particular, it demonstrates that white domination within the historical and economic condition in the Southern region is impervious to any attempted constraints on the desire of the white. That is, in representing the McCaslin family history, Faulkner foregrounds the notion of racial difference with the dichotomous white-black division in the white culture, and also explores the discourse of racism and white supremacy as racial privilege and heritage. In the first story “Was,”
Faulkner’s characters, among the white Southerners, black slaves and mulattos, in the tableau of games mark the racial subjects. Starting from the “hunting game” of
Tomey’s Turl to the gambling of cards and dice, Faulkner deploys the games as the constructions of chance and strategy, yet he intends to mirror both racial difference and racist ideology within the games.
The three white men, Uncle Buck, Buddy and Hubert Beauchamp as plantation owners and slaveholders, are active in determining the fate of the slaves Tennie and Tomey’s Turl. They are dominant in the social, political and economic conditions of the antebellum South. They stand in a relatively higher social position of the presence of the card players as racially marked, since the winning of the land and black people is ultimately the white men’s game. The Southerner Hubert Beauchamp in particular designates the black as animals, for he said while gambling: “[b]ring the first creature that answers, animal mule or human, that can deal ten cards” (Faulkner 25). Hubert’s remark suggests his mindset of juxtaposing animals and slaves. Despite Tomey’s Turl as the half-brother to the white McCaslin twins, Hubert regards him as a socially and culturally inferior “nigger” so as to divide himself from the legally defined slave. The card games therefore account a lot. They are “not only gendered masculine but racialized white, because they are a means of maintaining hegemony and of exerting social control” (Davis 66). The card games are utilized by the white men to sustain white supremacy and privilege in the economic and social domination over human beings for ownership.
The Southerner’s racist mindset not only exists in Hubert Beauchamp, but also in Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the McCaslin plantation founder and slave owner.
From the commissary ledgers, Ike has deciphered and discerned the link between the black slave Eunice’s death and the birth of Tomasina’s son later: old Carothers McCaslin’s sexual domination and racial exploitation of his slave Eunice and their enslaved daughter Tomasina and his fathering of her son, Tomey’s Turl. Eunice is physically and sexually exploited by her white master and married off to a black slave
Thucydus while pregnant. And such an act of miscegenation is enacted again and becomes incest when their daughter Tomasina is sexually abused by the white master.
The ledgers record the family history and provoke the issues of ownership and property under white supremacy in a narrative of enslavement and racism. Tomey’s Turl then becomes a reminder of the unacknowledged sins of old Carothers McCaslin in the slaveholding and patriarchal culture. However, Tomey’s Turl is a silent rebel against his condition of enslavement and racism. As a descendant of miscegenation and incest, he is a constant referent of racial hybridity that calls into question the black-white racial binary and the racist ideology in the South. He is a game player who uses the chase games as a site of resistance to white supremacy while running away, and as an attempt to deregulate the white’s claim of ownership. He too is an active and decisive participant as a card dealer in determining his autonomy. His mulatto identity is thus established between his precarious social condition ascribed to the political economy of slavery and his individual autonomy in struggle with the market value of slaves. In both the chase and card games, Tomey’s Turl can be seen as a rebel and an agent, who has negotiated between and has been “constrained by two sets of circumstances: the racist ideology [that informs] the conceptions of ‘nigger’
and enslaved property, and the game strategy of silence” that disallows him to articulate his desire and love in a racialized society (Davis 44).
The relation between the white master and the black slave becomes more violent after the Civil War, and the tension between the white and black remains unresolved even after the Emancipation. The imbalanced relation between white supremacy and black subordination under slavery finds its poignant expression in stories of Go Down,
Moses. The games in “Was” can be associated with the craps game in “Pantaloon in
Black.” In the Southern states, the black slaves during slavery and after were forced into a more subordinate position on the plantation. They were asked to spend“practically all the time on the plantations of their owners, and had few contacts with the mass of the White population” (Banton 138). Albeit as a means to social and economic force at work in the Southern region, the black slaves were treated as chattels while the whites tried every possible means to maintain their supremacy. As Michael Banton observes, “[u]nder the slavery regime, individual Whites had been allowed to exploit individual Negroes in any way they wished provided it did not threaten the social system”(138). It was not until the early twentieth-century that “the ideology of social distance and racial difference” (138) stops haunting the modern Southern land. Yet the white continued to exploit and suppress the black laborers, including free blacks like Rider.
As a local laborer and occasional gambler, Rider violates not only the “rules” of the gambling but of the social and political contexts that govern the relationship between the white and the black. In other words, Rider’s attempt to trespass the boundary of social distance and racial difference prompts him to become a victim of the senseless violence against the black. In the dice game, he tried to disclose the white man’s cheating, yet was borne down and lynched. Rider’s case reflects that in the post-Reconstruction era, caste system has replaced slavery in the modern South, and that black people are “held in economic peonage and social subordination” (Davis 71), and “unprotected by law” (71). From the description of the gambling, we can see Faulkner’s emphasis on the racial difference and the racial identity of whiteness:
still smiling at the face of the white man opposite, then, still smiling, […]
as the white man covered the bets, watching the soiled and palm-worn money in front of the white man gradually and steadily increase, watching the white man cast and win two doubled bets in succession […], [Rider] moved as the white man moved, catching the white man’s wrist before his hand reached the dice, […]. (Faulkner 148; my
emphasis)
Within the narrative, this passage emphasizes the racial difference and identity as Birdsong is repetitively stressed as the “white man” and Rider is unmarked. This also suggests the imbalanced power relations between the black laborer and the white supervisor in the social and economic order.12 As Rider acts aggressively against the cheating, he intends to break the racial and social codes that have long bounded the black in the South. And his response to the white player’s cheating is actually a reflection not only of the social and economic subjugation, but of the racial oppression and hatred that always excludes the black out of the centre. As an outsider, Rider has no choice but to hold the loss of his wife along with racial oppression under the exploitative economy.
As racism involves the problems about racial injustice, hostility and inequality, Rider’s case manifests the combination of these problems—racial prejudice, discrimination and institutional inequality. In fact, racial prejudice and hatred became worse from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. There were more discrimination and hostility of the white toward the black than ever before, so the black often became helpless and powerless victims. When the maddening Rider was borne down by the weight of his fellow prisoners, the sheriff’s deputy found him
“lying there under the pile of [the other prisoners], laughing with tears big as glass marbles running across his face and down past his ears and making a kind of popping sound on the floor like somebody dropping bird eggs, laughing and laughing and saying ‘Hit look like Ah just cant quit thinking. Look lack Ah just cant quit’”
12 Thadious M. Davis explains that “the hierarchy of power in the relations between the black workers and the white foreman remains intact in the dice game,” and “the societal rules governing race are not suspended because of the nature of the game, its false rules, the rigged, crooked play of the white supervisor.” Therefore, the black workers remain in a subordinate relation to the white men. “Exploited in their labor and victimized in their entertainment, the black workers accede to the hierarchy of power” (72-3).
(Faulkner 154). This bitter scene illustrates the black in a poignant and defenseless entrapment. But the more violent racial prejudice and hostility of the white are often shown in the exertion of outrage: lynching. Michael Banton states that “[l]ynchings in the South increased rapidly from 1882 up to 1890, and showed a further sharp rise in the early nineties when the white South began to legislate the subordination of the Negro” (140). Lynching was not a way appropriate and effective for preventing the black from crimes; rather it was used by the white “as a sanction reinforcing all sorts of everyday exploitation and intimidation” (141). It is obvious that the black under the unprotected political and social system becomes more defenseless and subjected to the ruthless outrage of the white men. Rider’s case makes clear this “legal sanction”
for racial exploitation and intimidation in support for the white privilege.
However, racial antagonism exists not simply within the physical violence against the black, but also in the narrative and racist ideology that permeates the soul of the Southerner. The cases of Roth’s unnamed mistress and Rider illustrate racial ideology infiltrated in the whites. Roth’s treatment of the light-skinned woman suggests his aversion to miscegenation, an interracial marriage, for he told Ike to give the visitor an envelope and a message: “Tell her I said No” (Faulkner 339). Roth’s act of repudiation parallels old Carothers McCaslin’s strong denial of the mulatto descendant out of their deep-rooted racist ideology. Even when Ike learned her lineage, he cried out the realization that brings into relief his rigid and poignant racial prejudice, “in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage: You’re a nigger!” (344).
Seeing the old Carothers’s act had been re-enacted, Ike gave the woman his advice:
“Go back North. Marry: a man in your own race. That’s the only salvation for you […]
you could find a black man who would see in you what it was you saw in him, who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than that, if it’s revenge you want” (346). Ike’s advice reflects his patronizing, racial discrimination
with white McCaslin privilege in strongly denying the woman’s love and respect for Roth. She then responded to Ike, suggesting that in his old age, he is a man who has never known or felt or even heard about love.
The white McCaslins’ racist narrative and ideology can be seen outside the family members. The white deputy reported to his wife Rider’s killing and behavior as simply a “subhuman” act. He said that
Them damn nigger, […] they aint human. They look like a man and they walk on their hind legs like a man, and they can talk and you can understand them and you think they are understanding you, at least now and then. But when it comes to the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes” (149).
Insisting that Rider’s refusal to grieve as a sign of his sub-humanness, the deputy ignores Rider’s deep sentiment for the loss of his wife. He is incapable of recognizing a free black man’s love and humanity that have come to affect his behavior; rather he denigrates Rider’s body, mentality and dignity. Seen from the perspective of race, the incident indicates that there exists a wide gap of mutual understanding between the white and the black. The deputy’s account of Rider implies that the racist mindset of the white has long infiltrated into the Southern context and discourse. It shows the white’s racial prejudice in animalizing the black. What is perceivable here are two aspects of the Southern “legal inheritance” under slavery: the black people are the white man’s property, not human beings, and thus are subhuman or inhuman, and the black ones are immoral and thus are not subject to the social mores of the white man.
Rider’s lynching eventually illustrates the modern South’s lingering legacy of racism.
The white man’s biased reading of the murder not only reflects his own twisted
“theory” of black sub-humanity, but the cultural and social misunderstanding and
interpretation of the black as Other through “biological heterogeneity” (68). The exercise of denigration and exclusion on the basis of race is an enactment of white privilege. Lucius Outlaw explains the concept of race:
‘race’ is not wholly and completely determined by biology, but is only partially so. […] the definition of ‘race’ is partly political, partly cultural.
[…] The biological aspects of ‘race’ are conscripted into projects of cultural, political and social construction. ‘Race’ is a social formation.
(Outlaw 68; italics original)
Therefore, in understanding the workings of race, it is important to incorporate cultural, political and social factors into the historical context in order to examine the operation of racism that often involves the dichotomous white-black racial relations.
As Outlaw defines race as a “social formation,” such effect of cultural, economic and political interactions ascribed simply to biological discrepancy as a referent oversimplifies the pernicious racial relations historically legitimized or often obscured, and this obscurity of multi-faceted formations gradually develops white supremacy and black deference and subjugation in view of skin color. This phenomenon can be discerned through Faulkner’s text. In “Fire and the Hearth,” Lucas Beauchamp’s subordination to the McCaslin family is an example of black-white racial tension. As a black laborer working on the McCaslin plantation, Lucas challenges Zack Edmonds’
power and privilege. For Zack claims Molly as a wet nurse to his new-born son Roth and presumably a surrogate wife as well. A plantation owner’s claiming of a black woman’s body implies a white man’s presumption of power and domination exerted out of the racial privilege of white supremacy and property right. Zack regards Molly as his property in appropriating her labor and body. This privilege and custom of exploiting a female black body account for what Banton has indicated in Race
Relations. In the Deep South, where white control was most secure and intense, “the
superior power of the upper category is likely to be utilized by its males to obtain access to the women of the lower category” (Banton 156).13 The black male, treated as lower in class and “inferior” in race, is not only reminded of his subordinate situation, but also “emasculated by his powerlessness when Whites took his wife”
(156). The exercise of white man’s supremacy in relation to black women not only constitutes the black man’s sense of inferiority, but represents a pervasive dictation of racial segment in the post-Emancipation era of Southern society. This prompts Lucas to lament aloud: “How to God […] can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man
(156). The exercise of white man’s supremacy in relation to black women not only constitutes the black man’s sense of inferiority, but represents a pervasive dictation of racial segment in the post-Emancipation era of Southern society. This prompts Lucas to lament aloud: “How to God […] can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man