Relationships

I am re-reading Go Down Moses for my meeting with Mark Lucas this Friday.  Even though I read it for Bob's bookbag a few months ago, it is a work that has plenty of fresh ground the second time through.  The first read is like driving your car around a new town.  You establish the lay of the land and the major landmarks.  But when you come to the book a second time, it is more like a leisurely stroll.  Details that slipped by in a blur the first time around gain new context and importance.

Faulkner's novels are dense and complex.  One thing that returning to the novel has done for me is that it has helped me straighten out the family relationships in it.  Faulkner certainly understood that in a small town everybody is related to each other.  It really is no more than one degree of separation in both Georgetown and Yoknapatawpha County.

As I have witched out the relationships between Edmonds and McCasslins in Faulkner's world, I have discovered the same truth in Scott County.  I found out a few years ago that Mark Lucas was from Georgetown.  I think it was at Sis Curry's house and she told me that her daughter had dated him in high school.

Then when I announced my plans for sabbatical study, Horace Hambrick, Rick and Betty Covington and others told me that they remembered the man I first knew as Dr. Lucas as just a high school classmate.  They had lots of things to tell me about my professor who had existed to me less as a human being with history than as a role (fortunately they were all positive!).

So when I met with Mark (I'm making a conscious effort to use his first name--old habits die hard), I mentioned the greetings from his Georgetown compatriots.  Mark began to share with me some of his Georgetown stories.  They included his grandfather Armstrong, whose name graces the Old Armstrong subdivision.  This same grandfather had once lived in and owned Ward Hall.

It didn't stop there though, I went out to dinner that evening and was glad to see Brian Bergman.  Without prompting, he told me that Mark had given him some tennis instruction when he was young.

Sometimes its hard to tell which is easier to unravel, the relationship of Faulkner's characters or the web of Georgetown past and present.