Heirs-at-Large: Precarity and Salvage in the Post-Plantation Souths of Faulkner and Jesmyn Ward

The new histories of capitalism demonstrate how fully involved the antebellum US South was in an international system of colonial plantation economies, slave-trading, commerce in supplies, the growth of financial institutions like banking and insurance, and numerous other features of modern capital.¹ As a result of such scholarship, we may appreciate anew how minutely Yoknapatawpha manifests fundamental properties of slave capitalism.² I have argued recently that in Absalom, Absalom!, for example, fresh accounts of plantation economics illuminate historical dimensions of the novel such as the riverboat-mentality of Yoknapatawpha's frontier speculative scene, the impact of the Panic of 1837 on Sutpen's career, and Goodhue Coldfield's representation of merchants who migrated to the Deep South in hopes of making larger fortunes in slave capitalism, as well as formal elements such as the reflection of capitalist temporalities in Faulknerian narrative time.³ Faulkner's description of the post-Emancipation South suggests how the political, social, legal, and financial institutions that grew to uphold such a system also continued to safeguard the barriers between those who benefited and those whose subjugation was required for the extraction of profit from their labor. The Deep South's post-bellum agrarian economy remained structured by profound disparities between those restored to prosperity and others reduced to precarity.

Like a motherless child

Faulkner's rendering of Southern poverty in As I Lay Dying makes Addie's death a metaphor for broader losses suffered by an "expendable" class of Southern poor whites afflicted by the modernization of a racial, capitalist, plantation regime in the twentieth century: losses that included the slipping away of land ownership, reduction to wage labor, the enfeeblement of racial advantage, the weakening of blood ties.⁴ The Bundrens' precarious existence—imaged in Addie's encoffined body tottering over the onrush of a "looping" flood-time in its already belated passage to modernity—exposes the family as bereft of resources in the face of catastrophe (Faulkner, As I Lay Dying 146). Pretending to imagined self-sufficiency, the Bundrens openly reject help they actually depend upon, accepting mules and shovels and hospitality when they're offered, even as they pronounce themselves "beholden" to no one. Clinging to their tattered white privilege, they're triggered by even the tiniest insinuation that they might be indistinguishable from those of color in the Jim Crow South, taking offense at an insult they attribute to an unfamiliar "negro" (229) and recoiling from the blackening of their bodies during their transit to town (224 ff.). In short, poor whites such as the Bundrens, like Wash Jones in an earlier era, deny they are collateral victims of the plantation regime's racial capitalism, a regime now understood to be so globally dominant that it has been called the Plantationocene.⁵ The consequence is that the Bundrens mourn solipsistically for themselves—futilely, regressively—their only aim to disavow their loss, to hide that coffin away.

When the contemporary novelist Jesmyn Ward, one of Faulkner's most explicitly self-avowed literary heirs, sets out to write about another disadvantaged Mississippi family, this one in danger of being left behind by twenty-first century America, it is not surprising that she originates her novel as a recasting of As I Lay Dying. When Ward first read As I Lay Dying, as an aspiring novelist in her mid- twenties, she felt her career might be over before it began: "I thought, oh god, I should just quit. There's something he's captured about the south that I can't even articulate. I recognized it in my bones."⁶ Realizing later, however, that the black characters in Faulkner's other works were not "coming alive" to her, she became convinced that reading Faulkner critically would let her imagine what he had not. In rewriting As I Lay Dying, a novel tellingly absent of black characters, Ward honors what Faulkner accomplished in depicting her South; but by attending to the lives of poor blacks, she also frames Faulkner's novel in a way that illuminates...