Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

45. Slavery & Southern Guilt --Faulkner's Intruder

                                                                            Intruder in the Dust

         "But then no more, it will be finished; the shame will still be there of course but then the whole chronicle of man's immortality is in the suffering he has endured, his struggle toward the stars in the stepping-stones of his expiations" (Faulkner 101). In essence, despite the laws and promises, the South will never purge itself of the suffering and guilt associated with the institution of slavery. This is William Faulkner's premise in his novel Intruder in the Dust (1948).   At the beginning of the narrative, Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly African American accused of murdering a man by shooting him in the back, lies in jail in Faulkner's imaginary  Yoknapotampha County, Mississippi. The suspect was found  holding a  pistol and standing over the dead man. The sheriff refuses to listen to his account of the story; however, Lucas persuades the narrator, a young law student whose uncle works with the sheriff, that his revolver did not murder the man, and persuades him to dig up the body of the deceased to prove it. Responding to this dilemma, Faulkner says ,"That's what we really are defending: the privilege of setting him free ourselves; which we will have to do for the reason that nobody else can since going on a century ago now the North tried it and failed. So it will have to be us. Soon  now this sort of thing wont  even threaten anymore. It shouldn't now. It should never have" (Faulkner 100).  In essence, Lucas Beauchamp symbolizes the racial prejudice existing throughout the South at the time. In the novel, the narrator, the sheriff, his uncle, a friend, and an aged lady named Habersham, who was a close acquaintance of Lucas' deceased wife Molly, exhume the body and find an empty grave. In a sense, the grave represents the empty promises that Southerners have used to exploit and victimize African Americans for so many years. To Faulkner, the North offered no solution to the problem of slavery. According to him, "That's why we must resist the North: not just to preserve ourselves nor even the two of us as one to remain one nation because that will be the inescapable byproduct of what we will preserve: which is the very thing that three generations ago we lost a bloody war in our own back yards so that it remained intact: the postulate that . . . [the African American] . . . is a human being living in a free country and hence must be free. That's what we are really defending."  Faulkner suggests that the mere fact that Beauchamp is accused, and many more like him will probably be accused is the South's tragic shame and humiliation. In the end of the novel, the protagonist goes free after a week of worry and consternation over the possibility of his being hung. In the author's words, "Someday Lucas Beauchamp can shoot a white man in the back with the same impunity to lynch-rope or gasoline as a white man; in time he will vote anywhen and anywhere a white man can and send his children to the same school anywhere the white man's children go and travel anywhere the white man travels as the white man does it" (101).  This is Faulkner's optimism, yet until that time, the African American will continue his struggle for equal justice, and  a struggle which for his white brother which begins with understanding, suffering and expiation.  Speaking through the persona of the uncle, Faulkner says toward the closing of the novel, "Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper  nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them" (133)

                                                                                         Works Cited

Faulkner, William. Intruder in the Dust. New York: New American Library, 1948.