Race Relations

It is accepted, even expected, that a "Southern" writer will deal with the difficult questions of race relations.  The complex questions of how those who were once slaves and masters relate to each other both then and now is fertile ground for exploration.

William Faulkner certainly deals with this part of Southern culture.  He displays all the ambiguities of two races of people living in close enough proximity to form relationships that transcend and subvert their culturally assigned roles.

He treats the African-American characters in his novel with honest depth.  They can be saints and sinners.  Sometimes they are oppressed and other times they are actually in charge of their situation in spite of what their oppressors think.

Ultimately, he sees the blacks and the whites of the South bound together in a complex web of relations that is slowly destroying them all just as the Old South is slowly limping to its own destruction.

Unlike many other Southern writers, Faulkner was concerned with another race that inhabited the region.  He named his fictional Mississippi county "Yoknapatawpha" which he made from two Chickisaw words.  "Yocona" and "Petopha" which mean "split" and "land."  Faulkner claimed the combinations meant "water flowing slow through the flat land."

The whites did not arrive in the land until early 1800, before their arrival, it was the territory of Native Americans.  Faulkner haunts his stories with this first presence.  Their being pushed from the land is the first sin of the white people who would found their business on the backs of others.

William Faulkner understood that many of the South's problems were based on the long history of racial misunderstanding and domination.  Faulkner doesn't provide easy answers to the questions he asks, but he reminds his readers that their fates are intertwined.  Any progress will only come when all the races move ahead.