"For some whites, nothing changed with the end of slavery except slavery."

Just after I finished writing the previous blog, I picked up my copy of the New York Review of Books to read an article about my favorite author, William Faulkner.   Faulkner, who lived from 1897 to 1962, was a product of those years, growing up in Oxford, Mississippi in the shadow of a great-grandfather who had been a war hero of the Confederate army.

Faulkner was imbued with stories of the Old South, of the war, slavery, the KKK.  He emerged with an ambiguous, love/hate relationship with the South.   In some ways, he loved and respected some of the older Negro (the polite term at the time) men and women he came in contact with.   For example, perhaps the most important woman in his life was a black servant who helped raise him, and to whom he dedicated one of his novels.

At the same time, Faulkner often used the language and followed the customs of white supremacy and dominance.   But he was not insensitive to the suffering of slaves and the inhumanity of post-slavery Jim Crow laws that made conditions almost as bad. His fiction presented that whole panoply of white/black, love/hate in all its varieties of relationships and complexities of social structure.

The important thing, for literature, is that he was a great writer, and he wrote about the South, the good and the bad.  He won two Pulitzer Prizes as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.   His greatest work came in his writings of the 1920s and 30s.    His fiction recreated the Old South and the encroachment from outsiders that began to change the Old South.

In addition to being an innovative literary stylist, one of the early modernist writers experimenting with point of view and multiple narrative voices, his subject matter constituted a true microcosm of the South and its problems.

Going back to Faulkner is particularly appropriate right now, when we're debating the future of Confederate memorials, as well as our history and culture.   One of his four greatest novels, The Sound and the Fury, ends as a runaway horse drags the carriage carrying the retarded anti-hero of the novel round and round the Confederate statue that sits in the middle of the town square, completely disorienting and terrifying the feeble-minded Benjy into fits of screaming.  What a metaphor!

But now back to the article I wanted to read.   It's a review of a new book on Faulkner that examines the interplay of his life and his fiction:  William Faulkner:  A Life Through Novels.   The book's author is Andre Bleickasten, a French academic whom I once had the pleasure of meeting through my Georgia State literature professor friends, Tom and Pearl McHaney.   The review is written by novelist Thomas Powers.

Now, finally, here is the point I was aiming to get to:   In this review of Bleikasten's book on Faulkner, the reviewer, Thomas Powers, wrote this:

" . . . For many white southerners nothing changed with the end of slavery except slavery."

That strikes me as pretty profound in trying to understand the white supremacists.   Not, mind you, to excuse them.   But it sheds a ray of light on the their mind-set -- and on the current dilemma about Confederate memorials.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was issued more than 100 years ago.   It formally ended slavery.   And when we elected Barack Obama to be our president, some of us foolishly thought that we were entering a post-racist era.

We aren't there yet.   You can change laws;  you can elect presidents.   But a closed mind doesn't change.   That takes something more -- some experience that reveals the Other in an empathetic way as a fellow human being.  That can open a mind and heart to change.

Ralph