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3  STOPPING ON A DIME Race, Class, and the“White Economy of Material Waste” in William Faulkner’s The Mansion and The Reivers In 940,William Faulkner offered a eulogy for Caroline Barr, his family’s longtimeAfricanAmerican retainer.1 In it,Faulkner credited Barr,to whom he referred as“a fount of authority over my conduct,” with teaching him many valuable lessons, including“to refrain from waste”(7). Such simple advice may seem only commonsensical,yet readers familiar with Faulkner’s late-career literary production—not only The Town and The Mansion (the second and third volumes in the Snopes trilogy) and The Reivers: A Reminiscence, but also a wealth of speeches, essays, and public and private letters—may perceive that Faulkner’s emphasis on this bit of practical wisdom presages his late 950s preoccupation with the role waste plays in the intersections of race, class, and economics. Indeed, in much of his late work, most significantly The Mansion, Faulkner probes this complicated relationship in order to understand more thoroughly the ills of a southern class system based on acquisitive, competitive individualism and to offer an alternative model of race and class relations based on communal need.2 An essay entitled“On Fear: Deep South in Labor: Mississippi, 956” suggests Faulkner’s shifting emphasis in his treatment of race toward the end of his career. Claims Faulkner,“it is our southern white man’s shame that in our present economy the Negro must not have economic equality; our double shame that we fear that giving him more social equality will jeopardise his present economic status; our triple shame that even then, to justify our stand, we must becloud the issue with the bugaboo of miscegenation ” (05). The casual dismissal of miscegenation as a “bugaboo” may initially seem surprising to readers accustomed to viewing Faulkner’s entire body of work through the lens of his ostensible“Major Phase”; after all, miscegenation lies at the heart of three of the works typically considered among his greatest—Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go 7 72 PLANTATION AIRS Down, Moses. Even if we question Edouard Glissant’s claim that“Creolization is the very thing that offends Faulkner: mestissage and miscegenation , plus their unforeseeable consequences” (83)—if it surely repulsed many of his characters, it less clearly repulsed the author—we must still acknowledge that in the 930s and 940s Faulkner accorded the concept more attention than any mere “bugaboo” would warrant. And, though Faulkner’s concern with the relationship between race, labor, and economics was certainly evident in those earlier works, as Richard Godden has ably pointed out, rarely did he articulate that concern so baldly as in this essay.3 For Faulkner, waste—or the lack of it—lay at the heart of his analysis of the reasons why white southerners feared economic competition from African Americans. In“On Fear” he argues that though the African American farmer has been free a scant ninety years, now he can own his land and farm it with inferior stock and worn-out tools and gear—equipment which any white man would starve with—and raise children and feed and clothe them and send them to what schools are available and even now and then send them North where they can have equal scholastic opportunity, and end his life holding his head up because he owes no man, with even enough over to pay for his coffin and funeral. That’s what the white man in the South is afraid of: that the Negro, who has done so much with no chance, might do so much more with an equal one that he might take the white man’s economy away from him, the Negro now the banker or the merchant or the planter and the white man the share-cropper or the tenant. (96) Thus, Faulkner locates the white fear of African American economic competition in the impressive and wholly necessary efficiency of African Americans, workers who, because of their subjugation, cannot afford to waste a breath, much less a dollar. As he succinctly puts it in his notorious interview with Russell Howe,“the Negro won’t come out on top because of anything to do with the race but because he has always gotten by without scope—when they are given scope they use it fully. The Negro is trained to do more than a white man can with the same limitations” (264). Similar sentiments appear...

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