Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

10. The Racial "Innocence" of Appalachia: William Faulkner and the Mountain South

The Racial “Innocence” of Appalachia 227 Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, is a long way from Southern Appalachia , and William Faulkner has never been noted as a chronicler of the mountain experience. But in at least two instances he did write of southern mountaineers, and in both he emphasized their isolation from the rest of the South, and in particular, from its black populace. In an early and little-known short story, “Mountain Victory,” and in what is arguably his finest novel—Absalom, Absalom!—Faulkner related the initial encounters of nineteenth-century highlanders with African Americans. In “Mountain Victory” it is a black man who intrudes upon an Appalachian family’s home. In Absalom, Absalom! it is a mountaineer who leaves his native environment and discovers in its lowland setting the peculiarities of the “peculiar institution.” The differences in these situations are considerable, and yet it is the similarities that are more revealing—for both scenarios involve white mountaineers traumatized by their first interracial confrontations and the drastic actions to which they are driven as a result. Probably no other American novelist has left us with as rich a body of work dealing with the subtleties, complexities, and ambiguities of southern race relations as has William Faulkner. According to Joel Williamson in his 1993 study of Faulkner as a southern historian, “race was central, integral, and vital.” This was particularly true of Faulkner’s fiction of the 1930s, works that “remain probably the ultimate indictment not merely of the injustices of the racial establishment in the South in and after slavery, but in its capacity for the often subtle, always brutal reduction of humanity, both black and white.”1 10 William Faulkner and the Mountain South 228 Race, War, and Remembrance Faulkner’s two attempts to apply these themes to the mountain South indicate that he was intrigued by what he believed to be probably the only group of white southerners never to have known blacks and whose lives had been untouched by the basic biracial character of the rest of the South. In applying this “brutal reduction of humanity” to mountaineers suddenly exposed to members of a second race, Faulkner provided some not so subtle insights into the anomaly of what he perceived as the racial “innocence” of Southern Appalachia. This chapter explores how Mississippi’s greatest writer dealt with that anomaly in his fiction and of the array of early twentieth-century sources from which he drew his assumptions of the racial dynamics of this southern region, a region so different from his own. “Mountain Victory” first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in December 1932 and was included two years later in Faulkner’s first short story collection.2 It is the story of a Confederate major, Saucier Weddel, who returns at the Civil War’s end to his Mississippi plantation from service in Virginia. Accompanied by Jubal, his black body servant, he approaches the cabin of a Tennessee mountain family and asks to spend the night. The rest of the story addresses the mixed reactions of the five-member family to the two strangers: the fanatical hatred of the eldest son, Vatch, a Unionist veteran who bitterly resents both “rebels” and “nigras”; his unnamed sister’s strong sexual attraction to this refined uniformed officer; the awe of his young brother Hule; and the wary distance and more muted hostility maintained by both parents. When his sister’s lust hardens Vatch’s resolve to murder both of the unwanted guests, his father warns them to leave immediately . But Weddel, though probably aware that a delay could cost him his life, refuses to leave until his black companion (temporarily immobilized by potent mountain corn whiskey) can go with him. When the two finally attempt a hasty retreat off the mountain the next morning, Vatch and his father ambush and kill them as well as young Hule, who is caught in their range of fire as he makes a last desperate effort to save his new hero. Despite the story’s intriguing premise and literary merit (Irving Howe called it “Faulkner’s best piece of writing about the Civil War”),3 “Mountain Victory” has been all but overlooked by most critics. The few attempts at analysis have recognized as major themes 229 The Racial “Innocence” of Appalachia either the clash between lifestyles of the plantation aristocrat and the poor white mountaineer;4 the contrasting loyalties between family...