Repudiation and Redemption in Go Down, Moses: Accounting, Settling, Gaming the System, and Justice

"that whole edifice intricate and complex founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity"

—William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

Go Down, Moses famously opens with a dedication: "To Mammy / Caroline Barr / Mississippi / [1840–1940] Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love." Inspired by this dedication, I open with a close reading that uncovers competing economies that are inscribed in this paratext and resonate throughout the novel. As the opening gesture of the novel, the dedicatory act signals a peculiar kind of gift. The author writes "to" someone, meaning not that the text is addressed to the person as the addressee or narratee of a communicative act, but rather is dedicated to that person or that person's memory, as in this case. The novel as a communicative act is addressed to a reading public, but marked from the outset as a kind of testimony of gratitude to a specific person. In this sense, the textual dedication resembles a kind of gift inasmuch as it enacts a donation that is not or cannot be reciprocated. In other words, the dedication is proffered to the memory of someone without any expectation of something in return.

But the interrogation of this gesture of dedication cannot rest here. The person to whom the text is dedicated is identified in multiple ways, including two names, as well as geographical and temporal specifications: Mammy, Caroline Barr, Mississippi, [1840-1940]. The names, first "Mammy" and then "Caroline Barr," situate the dedicatee within a racialized, hierarchical, historical system, which immediately problematizes the dedicatory "to" that precedes their inscription. What does it mean to dedicate or "give" a text to the memory of someone who is initially addressed (clearly invoking forms of address in the past) as "Mammy"? The other qualifiers, such as her legal name, state of residence, and (erroneous) birth (Sensibar, Faulkner 38) and death dates, serve to identify her for an audience of readers presumed to be ignorant of the individual's identity, absent such specificity. Indeed, the formality of the qualifiers creates dissonance in the text between the familiar, although ubiquitous and empty, form of address represented by "Mammy," and the reading public's distant relation to the individual, mediated by legal, geographical, and temporal markers.

The astute reader, noticing the birthdate, will not need to be told that she "was born in slavery," although those aware of the author's birthdate will realize that she was no longer a slave when he was born. Indeed, the temporal space between her birth in the early nineteenth century and his birth in 1897 marks a shift in status that the text elides with its subsequent characterization of her actions: "who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love," (although in his eulogy for her he acknowledged that she "was paid wages for this, but pay is still just money" ["Funeral Sermon" 117]). Returning to my opening characterization of the dedicatory gesture as a kind of gift, here Caroline Barr's behavior with respect to the Falkner family, and to William specifically, is qualified as donation. Yet we know from the previous few words that she was born in slavery. Through elision, Faulkner plants the idea that she was a slave to his family, a fiction he will develop in the essay "Mississippi" (Sensibar, Faulkner 118-9). Even if she was never a slave to the Falkners, can she "give," as in freely exchange or transfer goods or services, from a subordinate subject position shaped by slavery and its aftermath? The dedication is cryptic and laconic enough to invite the question. Even after emancipation, to what extent does an African American servant in a Mississippi household in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enact a form of agency and donation in performing her duties? Is donation the only way that such actions can be understood given the unquantifiable ("immeasurable") nature of them...