"Same as a Nigger on an Excursion": Memphis, black migration, and white flight in sanctuary.

Lester, Cheryl

Critical attention to Sanctuary is often focused on the rape of Temple Drake or the despair of Horace Benbow, middle-class characters that Faulkner often treats with unrestrained venom. (1) Like the playthings of a pathologically cruel child, Temple and Horace are thrust into a landscape and train of circumstance for which they are little prepared and from which they ultimately flee in moral defeat. Like the readers to whom this novel appeals, these characters come from urbanizing and suburbanizing communities in Mississippi not, as residents of Yoknapatawpha County are traditionally viewed, from "an isolated rural community, distanced geographically, economically, culturally, and ideologically from [Faulkner's] predominantly urban readership" (Kreiswirth 163). (2) Their excursions to the hinterland and the vice district in Memphis articulate middle-class fantasies and fears about race, safety, social position, sexual boundary crossing, and physical and symbolic violence. Such fantasies and fears were familiar cultural tropes deployed in response to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eastern European immigration to US cities and were recycled in literary constructions of black urban migration. (3) The disruption of the sheltered, spoiled lives of Temple and Horace as they venture northward from their homes captures anxieties that were shared by middle-class readers across the nation. Appealing to the anxieties of a national readership, these middle-class protagonists ultimately retreat (Horace to Kinston and Temple to Paris) from a "black" and criminal urban presence that the novel figures metonymically as the American city.

As an understated element of the novel's background, Memphis and the urbanization and suburbanization of the Mississippi Delta offer a context for connecting the excursions of the primary characters of the novel to geographic mobility, mass black migration, emerging black autonomy, and embattled white supremacy. Sanctuary figures the increasing geographic, economic, cultural, and ideological interconnections of Yoknapatawpha County to Memphis as sources of contradiction and anxiety. (4) It projects these connections, anxieties, and contradictions--and their association with the compression of space and time--onto themes and elements of the plot as well as onto figures, for example, of increasingly widespread and rapid flows. New modes of transportation, economic exchange, communication, and cultural production shifted and intensified struggles over the imposition of Jim Crow across rural and urban space. Thus, the metropolis functions not merely as an urban space but also as a locus for transformations--particularly the migration of black Southerners that gained momentum throughout World War I and continued in the 1920s-that were urbanizing the entire region. Without placing the experience of black migrants at the forefront, Sanctuary nevertheless figures migration, urbanization, and suburbanization in Yoknapatawpha County and the Mississippi Delta as a decisive break with the past. (5) In this regard, Sanctuary is consistent with contemporary and retrospective commentaries that note the enduring significance of black migration "for racial practices and habits of mind at every level of American society" (Gottlieb 2).

In Sanctuary, as I propose in this essay, Memphis is associated with anxieties about migration and its impact on racial practices and habits that provided structural foundations for racial hierarchy and white privilege. By foregrounding the nearby presence of Memphis, Sanctuary establishes the proximity of Yoknapatawpha County to a city whose development as a black metropolis and history of white-on-black violence is connected to its importance as a target of black migration beginning with the Civil War. (6) The degraded landscape and culture of the city's famed underworld mediates the figuration of an increasingly national struggle, brought to the fore by black migration, over white supremacy and privilege in urban space. Although violence, corruption, and hypocrisy are featured in the foreground of the narrative, they are strangely detached from the salient pressure of race that was intensified by urban black migration. The rape of Temple Drake and the mob violence to which it leads are presented as if rape and lynching were not signifiers of racial violence in Mississippi, Memphis, and throughout the nation. With the lynching of Lee Goodwin, the white character wrongly accused of the rape of Temple, the novel at once signals and obscures the racial valence of lynching. It retreats from its own evocation of the lynching of black men on the pretext of sexual assault against white women. Besides the lynching of Nelse Patton in Oxford in 1905, thirty-eight African American men were lynched in Shelby County (where Memphis is located) between 1890-1930, and nine of them were accused of having sexually assaulted white women. (7) Sanctuary's presentation of an environment pervaded by fear, corruption, and violence captured regional and national anxieties of a readership that was deeply concerned about urban black migration as a threat to white safety and privilege.

In contrast to the figuration of race and racial violence in Sanctuary in connection with pervasive, if unspoken fears of an increasing African American urban presence that resonated throughout the nation, African American William Pickens described white-on-black racial violence in the Mississippi Delta with "unprecedented frankness" (Andrews xi). A native of Arkansas who graduated from Yale University and became a field secretary for the NAACP, Pickens accentuated the violence of the Mississippi River Valley from Memphis to the Delta by naming it "the 'Congo' of America" in his expose in the Nation on the 1921 lynching of Henry Lowry. Pickens blames the system of sharecropping "for all of the massacres of colored people and for nearly all of the horrible lynchings and burnings of individual Negroes that have lately taken place" (426). Lowry's effort to negotiate a fair settlement with a cruel landowner in the context of an unjust labor system, Pickens explains, was enough to cause his violent and tragic death. (8) Pickens describes in detail the torture and burning of the victim, the flagrant contempt of the public for the law, and the complicity of the Memphis newspapers in "the sadistic carnival which has become an approved and established ritual in the South at regular intervals throughout the year" (428). The straightforward treatment of racial violence in Pickens's journal article offers a striking contrast with the dissemblance of racial violence and its underlying function as an appeal to white urban anxieties about black migration in Faulkner's novel.

Whereas Faulkner treats the intersection of race, sexuality, and violence as an explicit site of ritual injustice in "Dry September" (1931) and Light in August (1932), he obscures its racial valence in Sanctuary. Memphis gangster, murderer, and rapist Popeye wears a black suit, has eyes that look like "knobs of soft black rubber," and even "smells black" (S 181, 184). (9) Popeye is the primary figure of the city as a product of mobility, source of menace, and object of derision, yet his traces of blackness do not bring his racial identity under suspicion or become salient to his execution. Popeye's traces of blackness emphasize challenges to the binaries of racial formation in the context of increasing migration in the Mississippi Delta. However, the enforcement of racial difference, intensified by unprecedented black migration, remains an inexplicit element in a narrative about rape and lynching in the Jim Crow South.

By treating black figurants and characters in marginal images that are not readily assimilated with the plot line, Sanctuary evokes racism and racial subordination as sources of unspoken anxieties and inarticulate feelings rather than as objects of articulate thought and critical discussion. As a reflection of anxiety about black urban migration, the "negro murderer" offers the novel's most prominent image of black immobility, arrest, incarceration, and restraint (S 258, 264, 266, 269, 271). The murderer's importance is suggested by the fact that Faulkner originally placed him at the opening of the novel, only moving it to chapter sixteen in his revision. (10) It offers a visual, sonic, and spatial display of racial segregation and criminalizes black self-assertion in the figure of a sensational domestic murder rather than in the daily calculations and performances that Richard Wright describes as "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow." The haunting leitmotif fills a void created by Faulkner's figuration of a lynching--the ritual form of white-on-black violence in the region at the time--as if it had nothing to do with race. At the same time, the murderer's crime and insistent vocalization appeal to anxieties and fears--Northern and Southern--about the increasing presence of African Americans in the city.

The motif of the "negro murderer" opposes a concise figure of black immobility and white safety to the narrative's extended figuration of black mobility and white danger. The "negro murderer" signifies racially regulated spaces threatened with disintegration under the pressure of increasing black migration throughout the Mississippi Delta and especially to Memphis. He sings in chorus with "a few negroes ... natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls shoulder to shoulder" or is joined by "one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes with delivery baskets like as not." They entertain the white people who "slowed and stopped ... to listen to those who were sure to die and him who was already dead" or were "sitting in tilted chairs along the oil-foul wall of the garage across the street [and] would listen above their steady jaws" (258). A source of entertainment for a distanced white audience, the confinement of the guilty murderer offers reassurance that the leisured space of the square in Jefferson is still a safe zone for whites, despite the urbanizing threat of "a few negroes [in] natty, shoddy suits" among those in the "sweat-stained overalls" of rural black laborers.

The narrative's focus on the murderer as "already dead" and on the chorus of sorrow singers as "sure to die" offers a reassuring figure of black immobility, fatality, and resignation to Faulkner's urban readership. This figure also promises to contain the threat that black migration could lead to mobilization, vocal protest, and collective self-assertion. It offers a reflection on the structures and practices that make the streets of Jefferson safe and secure for white residents, like those who slow and stop to listen to the spiritual songs as depoliticized vocalizations of men who were "sure to die" or "already dead." The white bystanders in the square appear unconcerned about the prisoner, who is reassuringly confined for an act of violence that was reassuringly directed at a black rather than white victim. However, the sudden focus on Goodwin, who is lynched for his alleged rape of Temple, undercuts the security of black confinement and white indifference asserted by the motif of the "negro murderer." Only Goodwin, who becomes the target of anxieties that remain unspoken in the narrative, expresses irritation with the insistent presence of the "negro murderer": "Damn that fellow ... I aint in any position to wish any man that sort of luck, but I'll be damned" (258). The disproportionate attention devoted to the confinement of the "negro murderer" and the figuration of white indifference suggests an anxious focus that is displaced onto Goodwin and onto narrative emphases on mobility, danger, and white anxiety.

Far more expansive than the motif of the "negro murderer," the figure of Memphis also signifies persistent anxieties about black self-assertion in the context of black urban migration. Memphis was the third largest city in the South at the turn of the century, when fourteen percent of its population already consisted of migrants from Mississippi. "Popular observations of the day," notes Memphis historian Robert Sigafoos, "were that the State of Mississippi's major export product was 'people to Memphis'; or that Memphis was the capital of North Mississippi" (97). During the unprecedented peak of black migration that began during World War I and continued throughout the 1920s, Memphis was the destination or temporary stopping point for many of the nearly 200,000 African American migrants who left Mississippi between 1910 and 1930. (11) The African American population of Memphis nearly doubled in those twenty years, growing from 52,440 in 1910 to 61,238 in 1920 and 96,550 in 1930. Owing to white migration, the percentage of African Americans in Memphis remained at around 38 percent throughout this period. (12) Sanctuary's constant if understated attention to Memphis as the site of urban migration, and to the encroachment of Memphis on Delta life, resonated with anxieties about urbanization, racial violence, black self-assertion, and white privilege across the nation.

Sanctuary treats the Memphis underworld and the increasing flow of traffic in the Mississippi Delta as provocations for anxieties about the enforcement of racial difference, social mobility, and the destabilization of social hierarchy. Written during the same period, Faulkner's short story "The Big Shot," which was published posthumously, works with the same figures and anxieties. (13) Rather than presenting the Memphis tenderloin from the perspective of white middle- and lower-class sojourners, as in Sanctuary, Faulkner broadens his presentation of Memphis to feature the frustrated social ambitions of Dal Martin, a white migrant who has risen from his origins as the son of a tenant farmer to become a wealthy bootlegger. Apart from the appearance of a thug named Popeye, who works for Martin, and who accidentally runs over his daughter, a young woman who in some respects resembles Temple Drake, "The Big Shot" suggests that Dal Martin's success in the underworld cannot gain him entrance to the Memphis social elite. To gain a higher status in the racialized social hierarchy of Memphis, Martin believes that he needs to employ black domestic help, but he lacks the "conviction of superiority" to do so: "Not negroes yet, mind you. He was not ready for them. He had the house, the outward shape and form, but he was not yet certain of himself, not yet ready to affirm in actual practices that conviction of superiority" (513). Sanctuary highlights unappealing performances of that "conviction of superiority" as signifiers of white privilege in the private lives and movements through public space of characters like Temple Drake, Horace Benbow, Narcissa, and Gowan Stevens. Yet Sanctuary suggests that the "conviction of superiority" and the racial subordination that it commands depends on a racial order weakening with increasing black mobility and migration.

Sanctuary appeals to an urban readership faced with an influx of black migrants through images of white dependence for comfort, nourishment, and care on the subordination of Southern blacks. At the same time, it arouses the fears of this readership through a series of muted figurations of the emergence of black autonomy and of degraded forms of urbanization and through the prominent condensation of these figurations in Popeye and the Memphis underworld.

Miss Reba's brothel, a supervised playground for rich and powerful white men, serves as a focal point for the assertion of urban nightlife in the era of Prohibition--with its colorful bootleggers, prostitutes, gangsters, corrupt politicians, and gamblers--and as a context for appealing to anxieties about black migration. As a space where African American community and life flourished in spite of racial discrimination and violence, Beale Street is mentioned sparingly, although it is just a few blocks from Miss Reba's. (14) A narrative focus on brothels and vice--in preference to businesses, public parks, churches, and schools--associates Beale Street with criminal and disreputable urban activities rather than with black commercial, political, and cultural autonomy and plays on the fears and anxieties aroused in an urban readership by black migration. (15)

As in many earlier and contemporary writings on black migration to the city, Memphis functions in Sanctuary primarily as the locus of a corrupt and corrupting vice district. (16) In Sanctuary, it appears as the source of the gangsters and prostitutes who carry unsavory and illegal goods and services to Jefferson and the hinterland. At the edge of the central business district and its expensive hotels, the landscape of the Memphis tenderloin is "grassless," "forlorn," "shabby," "gaunt," "stunted," and "cadaverous." Appealing to anxieties about urbanization, Faulkner fashions a humiliated urban landscape of "smoke-grimed frame houses with tiers of wooden galleries," the "rear ends of garages," and "a scrap-heap in a vacant lot." The cityscape is dominated by buildings, electrified traffic, crowds, and clatter: "beyond a line of office buildings terraced sharply against the sun-filled sky" is "a sound of traffic--motor horns, trolleys--passing high overhead on the river breeze" and of "a trolley [that] materialized in the narrow gap [at the end of the street] with an effect as of magic and [that] vanished with a stupendous clatter" (277). The traffic and bustle offer noisy reminders that Miss Reba's good-time brothel as well as the "row of automobile sales-rooms" around the block create linkages with the places from which they secure raw materials, e.g., lumber from Kinston or moonshine from Jefferson (311). (17) Amidst the sights and bustling sounds of urban commercial life that signal Popeye and Temple's arrival in Memphis, the vice district and the famed black metropolis, settings for Temple's captivity and debasement, are metonymically figured as a black prostitute: "On a second storey gallery a young negress in her underclothes smoked a cigarette sullenly, her arms on the balustrade" (277). Just as the clatter of the trolley serves as an understated sonic figure for urban electrification, commerce, and the increasing circulation of people and traffic, the young "negress" serves as an understated visual signifier of sexuality and race as focal points of middleclass anxieties about urban black migration. This young woman suggests, in a pattern of passing glances at the city, a space of transgression from whose dangerous freedoms Temple and Horace will ultimately retreat.

One more concise reference to the African American commercial district materializes when "a street of negro stores and theaters" comes into view as Clarence Snopes accompanies his cousins to a black brothel, three or four blocks from Miss Reba's, where they are lodging. Their excursion to the black brothel--a "room filled with coffee-colored women in bright dresses, with ornate hair and golden smiles"--reduces the black commercial district to urban stereotypes about degraded forms of African American entrepreneurship available for white male consumption. The black metropolis offers the women "in bright dresses, with ornate hair and golden smiles" a limited space of autonomy, however disreputable their step toward self-determination. Yet the agency of their urbanized wage work and self-presentation is subjected to Virgil's crude gaze and consciousness and reduced to an offensive epithet--"Them's niggers" (316). Here, racial antagonism appears as a strategy deployed by lower-class whites like Virgil Snopes to shore up his lack of what "The Big Shot" describes as a "conviction of superiority." Thus, while playing on the racial fears of an urban middle-class readership, Faulkner also points to lower-class whites as the bearers of the most virulent racial antagonism. Writing to a national urban readership, Faulkner opposes the threat of emerging black autonomy with the promise of continued black subservience. Sanctuary briefly figures spaces where new urban forms of black autonomy can emerge but more frequently dwells on rigid forms of black subordination. African Americans are primarily confined to subservient roles and identified by their labor and solicitude; they provide care and assistance throughout the region, e.g., at train stations, on the road, at hotels, in brothels, at dance halls, in homes, and in the garden. As porters, drivers, waiters, maids, or prostitutes, they practice rigorous self-restraint, although there is little indication of the conditions in which they worked, whereby a loss of self-control could put them at risk of reprisal, intimidation, or worse. As the providers of labor and care--who, for example, mow the lawn, drive the car, or bring the bedclothes--they are often presented as nothing other than the function they fulfill. For example, in her mounting terror at the Old Frenchman place, Temple grasps at the memory of her father "sitting on the porch at home, his feet on the rail, watching a negro mow the lawn" (213). Horace, travelling from the Delta without fear of bodily harm, relies on hospitality and lodging "at a negro cabin" (190). In an effort to register his dissatisfaction and assert his independence from his sister Narcissa, he rejects the "bundle of bedclothing" delivered to him at the old family home in Jefferson by the "negro driver" (256). These representations of white responses to black subservience offer reassuring images to a readership anxious about the urban influx of black migrants.

Less reassuring, however, are suggestions of attitudes of the alertness, cautious deliberation, and guarded self-restraint with which African Americans provide support to the privileged whites of Sanctuary. A striking example is the "negro with a broom" on the deserted platform of the train station where Gowan was supposed to have met Temple before she boarded the train. The worker apprehends danger in the unseemly appearance and erratic behavior of the approaching white man, who is still drunk after having spent a night passed out in a coma on a public street. He greets Gowan with a concise expression of alarm and fear: "Gret Gawd, white folks." With the sudden appearance of an unpredictable and potentially harmful white man, who has lost his bearings and self-control, the worker must exercise caution and deliberation. The encounter may quickly become violent or lead to further intimidation. Volatile encounters of this sort frequently turned into provocations for mob violence--not only Southern lynchings--but also Northern urban race riots. The platform worker quickly comprehends the intention of the white man's urgent, fragmented speech, before Gowan shapes his words as a question or command: "'The train' Gowan said, 'the special. The one that was on that track.'" The platform worker grasps the meaning of his question and offers a terse reply: "Hit done lef. Bout five minutes ago" (203). The menial labor and vernacular speech of the "negro with a broom" figure him as harmless and insignificant, yet his cautious and measured response also signifies his deliberate self-restraint and even dissemblance. (18)

The worker's measured verbal and gestural response projects his careful deliberation and strategic restraint in the context of a volatile encounter that could easily have developed into an allegation of some offense and from thence into a pretext for humiliation, intimidation, beating, or lethal violence. At the same time, he camouflages his vigilance by holding his broom in an attitude of passive subservience. In the moment of uncertainty and danger, he is poised to return to sweeping the platform, but he could also use the broom in self-defense: "With the broom still in the arrested gesture of sweeping he watched Gowan turn and run back to the car and tumble into it" (203). The worker remains vigilant until he can be assured that Gowan definitively leaves the scene.

Set in the mobile context of the train station, with its historical links to black urban migration, the encounter also appears in a pattern of passing glances at the role of black figurants and characters in flows of people, goods, money, desires, and information. Narcissa's driver Isom appears in the narrative exclusively in the service of such flows; he transports people, brings bedclothes, fetches milk, and delivers information. He drives Narcissa, Horace, and even Ruby--who addresses him as "boy"--all over Jefferson, e.g., to Narcissa's house, Horace's parents' house, the square, the railroad station, to a party (264). Horace points out, emphasizing the dependence of his mobility on the assistance of Isom, "I never did learn to drive [an automobile]" (263).

Minnie plays a comparable role at Miss Reba's brothel, but her frequent, participatory vocal presence and her life history are more prominent and suggest that the city provides opportunities for black expression and economic advancement. Minnie is a participant and an informant in the brothel, who monitors and controls the flow inside it. She is knowledgeable, conversant, and even voluble about the business and personal affairs of the proprietor: "Mr Binford was Miss Reba's man. Was landlord here eleven years until he die bout two years ago. Next day Miss Reba get these dawgs" (286). She occupies a position of subordination at Miss Reba's, but she is frequently presented in terms of her access to authority, information, goods, and money. For her husband, Minnie's job benefits are not enough to compensate for the damage to social standing associated with the disreputable environment in which she works. Like Dal Martin in "The Big Shot," Minnie's husband wants to gain entrance into a higher social class; for this reason, he "quit her. He didn't approve of Minnie's business. He was a cook in a restaurant and he took all the clothes and jewelry the white ladies had given Minnie and went off with a waitress in the restaurant" (323). His hypocritical theft is at once an instance of racial mockery and a reassuring signal that the petty deceitfulness of Minnie's husband--which Faulkner codes as black--will prevent him from climbing any higher on the social ladder.

Minnie acts at times as Miss Reba's delegate, making telephone calls on her behalf or sharing her feelings: "Minnie's done took a crying spell tonight, over that bastard that left her, and me and Miss Myrtle was sitting here, and we got started crying too. Me and Minnie and Miss Myrtle. We drunk up a whole new bottle of gin" (365). Signifiers of Minnie's subordination are countered by this image of Minnie as she shares intimate sentiments and gin with Miss Reba and Miss Myrtle. Although generally subordinated to Miss Reba, Minnie vocalizes her distinct opinions and influences the thoughts and observations of others. When she brings supper and assistance as Temple settles into her room, the dogs rush "under the bed and crouched, whimpering" (285). Her explanation of Miss Reba's sometimes cruel treatment of the dogs leads Temple to contemplate their circumstances, as expressed in the following allegorical passage:

   [Temple] thought of [the dogs], woolly, shapeless; savage,
   petulant, spoiled, the flatulent monotony of their sheltered lives
   snatched up without warning by an incomprehensible moment of terror
   and fear of bodily annihilation at the very hands which symbolized
   by ordinary the licensed tranquility of their lives. (286-87)

The passage reflects on the dogs' vulnerability to Miss Reba's mercurial and impulsive care, which turns suddenly if not unpredictably from excessive kindness to excessive cruelty. As an allegorical account, the passage offers suggestive commentary on the dynamics of racial subordination. The figurative language of the passage is heavy with the history of racial signifying and embedded in words like "woolly," "savage," "sheltered," and "spoiled." Although it is slippery as a racial allegory, it appears to me to assign the "terror and fear of bodily annihilation" that it describes not to African Americans, who were in actual fact the targets of racial violence, but to those who secured privileged and sheltered lives through their position in a social hierarchy based on racial subordination. Sanctuary wished to appeal to fears aroused by black migration and the steady emergence and organization of urban black power. As a figure for the anxieties of urban middle-class whites in the context of an influx of black migrants, the allegory of Miss Reba's dogs offers an ironic commentary on the fears of those who actually occupied social positions with the greatest safety. (19)

This feeling of fear is elaborately treated in connection with Temple, whose venture into the dangerous urbanizing landscape begins as a pleasure excursion by train to a college baseball game in Starkville. Faulkner is particularly venomous in characterizing the collegiate culture that Temple seeks to escape, jumping out of her dorm to date boys from Oxford and out of the train to join Gowan. Among other loud, rude, vulgar, and thoughtless behaviors, which Horace observes on a train ride to Oxford, the privileged collegians boast about travelling by train "a thousand miles without a ticket" (295-97). The collegians could hardly be more indifferent to the challenges and importance of managing a single train ride, e.g., from Jackson to Memphis or from Memphis to Chicago, to millions of migrating Southern blacks. As part of the pattern of passing glances at the agency of these millions of blacks, African Americans appear on the train only by way of the "gusts of talk and laughter [that] blew back [from the Jim Crow car] and kept in steady motion the blue acrid air in which white men sat, spitting into the aisle" (296). The source of anxiety explicitly associated with trains and new opportunities for mobility is rather fixed on male collegians as callow and morally bankrupt, like those Horace observes on the train and has already mentioned in criticizing the amorous adventures of his collegian stepdaughter, Little Belle:

"I said, 'Honey, if you found him on the train, he probably belongs to the railroad company. You cant take him from the railroad company; that's against the law, like the insulators on the poles.'

"'He's as good as you are. He goes to Tulane.'

"'But on a train, honey,' I said.

"'I've found them in worse places than on the train.'" (188-89)

The train serves here as a source of urban anxieties about unregulated social contact and sexual behavior in the context of urbanization. The focus on the irresponsibility and hypocrisy of the collegians provides a context for understanding Temple's lack of preparation in view of dangers less explicitly associated with the urbanizing environment. Her view of Gowan, after she jumps from the train, recalls that of the vulnerable worker with his broom; they each grasp that Gowan's condition may place them in danger:

   She turned and came toward him, walking swiftly. Then she paused,
   stopped, came on again, staring at his wild face and hair, at his
   ruined collar and shirt.

   "You're drunk," she said. "You pig. You filthy pig."

   ... [Gowan] wore a cheap blue workshirt beneath his dinner jacket.
   His eyes were bloodshot, puffed, his jowls covered by blue stubble.
   (203-04)

Like the platform worker, Temple is "watchful" as she assesses her situation. Unlike the worker, she feels free to respond with summary commands that might restore her safety and security: "'You'd better take me back to Oxford,' she said.... 'You'd better'" (204). Temple quickly manifests the alertness that is aroused by imminent danger and that figures in the characterization of the "negro with a broom"; however, her unrestrained language and excessive physical movement demonstrate her lack of preparation for self-defense. In the course of this excursion, beginning with Gowan, Temple experiences a loss of the authority, privilege, and protection she relies on in Oxford, where the worst consequence of her transgressions has been her placement "on probation" (217). As a figure of middle-class urban fears, Temple meets the hazards that await privileged female collegians who diverge from that "steady stream," as Horace views them, "of little colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes, above the savage identical paint upon their mouths" (298). Ill prepared to adjust to the circumstances she encounters at the Old Frenchman place, far from the "steady stream," Temple's language, behavior, and expectations fail to yield the protection and privilege they customarily and, from her viewpoint, almost magically provide in Oxford.

Similar to her earlier command that Gowan take her back to Oxford, Temple's report--that she is scared, along with her failed effort to pay Popeye for a ride--illustrates that, in the face of a Memphis gangster she describes as "that black man," she is unable to make strategic adjustments to her expectations, behavior, or strategies (207). When she realizes that her imploring efforts are ineffective, she resorts to a juvenile verbal attack. Exhibiting behavior typical of the petulant, spoiled collegian culture from which she has fled, she mocks Popeye for his tight, urban gangster suit: "What river did you fall in with that suit on? Do you have to shave it off at night?" (213). She is unable to restrain her movements and hardly ceases to run ("Even her flapping coat did not overtake her"), except to cower in a corner and cry (211, 213-14). Most important, she cannot imagine that she might escape by using her own two feet. As Ruby suggests: "Do you know how I get my water? I walk after it. A mile. Six times a day. Add that up. Not because I am somewhere I am afraid to stay" (215). By contrast with figures like the worker with the broom and Ruby Lamar, a middle-class character like Temple has few strategies for navigating danger in an urbanizing environment. Escaping a dangerous environment on foot may be a last resort, but this strategic and affirmative step was taken by the millions of Southern blacks whose movement to cities northward aroused the middle-class fears at the center of Faulkner's effort to write a popular novel.

In the previous pages, I have indicated that, while Memphis is a figure of black mobility and agency, African Americans in the narrative appear to be largely immobile. On one hand, the presentation of African American immobility dissembles the affirmative steps that were actually taken by the thousands upon thousands who left Mississippi and the hundreds and hundreds of thousands who left the South to move to cities northward. On the other hand, immobility serves as a figure for the strategic self-control and deliberate dissemblance that African Americans often adopted to protect and defend themselves. Figurants such as the "negro murderer," the "coffee-colored women," and the "negro with a broom" offer inverted reminders of black mobility, cultural dexterity, and self-determination as sources of urban anxieties.

Despite the presence of the black metropolis, which accommodated emerging black autonomy and social betterment of the sort demonstrated, for example, by Minnie's achievements and her husband's aspirations, Memphis remained a Jim Crow city whose history of virulent racial hostility and violence was linked to the history of the Mississippi Delta. Faulkner locates Temple's rape at the Old Frenchman place, places her captivity at Miss Reba's brothel in Memphis, and sets the lynching of Goodwin in Jefferson. He projects a figure of racial violence as a coordinated effort, that is, orchestrated and carried out in connection with broad networks and infrastructures. The still at the Old Frenchman place, Popeye's mob, Judge Drake in Jackson, the "Memphis jew lawyer" (363), the prosecuting attorney, the sheriff, the drummers, Horace Benbow, his sister Narcissa, Clarence Snopes, the Memphis newspapers, Reba Rivers--these are only a few of the principals involved in what Temple considers early on as "the train of circumstance in which she had become involved" (205). With its figuration of the connections that link Memphis and the rest of the region, Sanctuary develops a narrative in which anxieties about the flow of people, goods, money, and information move the train of circumstance toward mob violence.

Horace approaches yet ultimately withdraws from the middle-class anxieties about urbanization that are illuminated by his excursions. His adventures fill a gap created by the novel's treatment of African Americans not as participants in urban migration, as they were, but as sources of the unspoken anxiety that their movement precipitated in whites. Horace departs from his home in Kinston, on a sudden impulse and without notifying his wife, without cash (having forgotten to stop at the bank), without a driver or a train ticket, and without a clear purpose or destination. His impulsive departure deploys racially coded tropes that became commonplace in the discourse on black vagrancy and migration during World War I. In 1917, muckraker Ray Stannard Baker wrote in the World's Work "of instances in which Negro teamsters left their horses standing in the streets, or deserted their jobs and went to the trains without notifying their employers or even going home" (315). The same descriptive language of sudden flight circulates in Zora Neale Hurston's 1934 novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine:

"Houses empty eve'ywhere. Not half 'nough people tuh work de farms--crops rotting in de ground. Folks plantin' and ain't eben takin' time tuh reap. Mules lef' standin' in de furrers. Some de folks gone 'thout lettin' de families know, and dey say iss de same way, only wurser, all over de South." (150)

Hurston situates this passage in the context of examples of white resistance to black departures that explain why "Folks hafta slip off" (150). By contrast, Faulkner decontextualizes the political significance of black urban migration and characterizes it as a flight of fancy or "frolic." In "There Was a Queen," the black servant Elnora complains that Narcissa "thinks she can pick up and go to Memphis and frolic, ... same as a nigger on a excursion, without even telling why she was going" (CS 733). Faulkner attributes this same strategic obfuscation to Narcissa in Sanctuary when she blames Horace for having suddenly left home, "just like a nigger" (254).

As if he were a black migrant, Horace leaves home without a penny and has "been walking and bumming rides ever since. [He] slept one night in a sawdust pile at a mill, one night at a negro cabin, one night in a freight car on a siding" (190). The focus on figuring Horace as if he were a black urban migrant, despite his free and relatively safe passage through the landscape, contributes to Sanctuary's articulation of an appeal to unspoken anxieties about black migration and black autonomy.

On his excursion, Horace becomes increasingly aware of the invisible connections that link Memphis to the flows responsible for the booming economy of the Delta, where "the very winds seem to engender money," and where "you wouldn't be surprised to find that you could turn in the leaves off the trees, into the banks for cash" (189). He complains to Tommy that the presence of gangsters like Popeye in Mississippi is a disturbance of the peace: "Why cant those Memphis folks stay in Memphis and let you all make your liquor in peace?" Tommy is among the first to offer Horace a lesson in the flows of an urbanizing environment:

"That's where the money is," Tommy said. "Aint no money in these here piddlin little quarts and half-a-gallons. Lee just does that for a-commodation, to pick up a extry dollar or two. It's in makin a run and gettin shut of it quick, where the money is." (193)

As further evidence of his naive understanding of these flows, Horace suggests that Ruby return to the city to improve herself: "'Do you like living like this?' he said. 'Why do you do it? You are young yet; you could go back to the cities and better yourself without lifting more than an eyelid'" (190). Popeye responds, offering Horace additional lessons, in a sarcastic address to Ruby about her position and opportunities:

   You can quit. I'll take you back to Memphis Sunday. You can go to
   hustling again.... You're getting fat here. Laying off in the
   country. I wont tell them on Manuel street.... I wont tell them
   that Ruby Lamar is down in the country, wearing a pair of Lee
   Goodwin's throwed-away shoes, chopping her own firewood. No. I'll
   tell them Lee Goodwin is big rich. (185)

The economic and social circumstances that link Ruby's life with Goodwin to her life on Manuel Street demonstrate the increasing flow of traffic and exchange between city and region. The urbanization of Memphis not only puts moonshiners like Goodwin to work in the outskirts of Jefferson making illegal alcohol that bootleggers like Popeye can sell in Memphis, but also provides alternatives for rural black Mississippians who wished to escape, as Ruby put it, "somewhere [they were] afraid to stay" (215). Yet Memphis is not figured as an alternative for the black man awaiting execution in Jefferson or for the others who are executed, lynched, or "sure to die." Nor does Memphis offer any sanctuary to the privileged travellers who experience it as a site of danger and degradation.

In the end, Horace and Temple retreat--she to Paris with her father the judge, he to Kinston with his wife Belle--from the violence of the Memphis underworld. As Horace awaits the night train to Kinston, however, a lynch mob seizes Goodwin from the Jefferson jail and burns him alive after the ritual fashion that Pickens described as a "sadistic carnival." With the lynching of Goodwin, Jefferson is revealed as a place where some people might be afraid to stay. At the scene of Goodwin's lynching, Horace himself is threatened with violence: "Put him in, too. There's enough left to burn a lawyer." Yet Horace "couldn't hear them. He couldn't hear the man who had got burned screaming. He couldn't hear the fire, though it still swirled upward unabated" (384). As he writes in a subsequent letter to Narcissa, in material excised from the revised Sanctuary, it was "more reality than I could stomach." Also excised was the figure of Horace's retreat as that of a horse returning to the barn, having

shed the ultimate cockleburr of errant itch and the final mudflake of the high pastures ... and so into the old barn and the warm twilight and the old stall fitting again to the honorable trace-galls, and, ay, the old manger lipped satin-smooth by the old unfailing oats. (SO 281)

According to this conceit, Horace's excursion was like a horse's wild daytime adventure in the high pastures, followed by his safe return at twilight to food and shelter in the old barn and confirmed old habits. As a flight from the violent lynching and its coded response to urban migration and black autonomy, Horace's retreat is figured as natural and instinctive.

In contrast, additional material excised from the revised ending of the novel constructs his retreat to Kinston as cultural and social. After all his exposure to narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, Horace withdraws, as is underlined in his exchange of letters with Narcissa, to a parrot-like adoption of the intransigent racial practices and habits of mind his excursion might have led him to resist.

"Dear Narcissa--

"I ran. Once I had not the courage to admit it; now I have not the courage to deny it. I found more reality than I could stomach, I suppose. Call it that, anyway. I don't seem to care. Only I wish Belle had stayed in Kentucky. At least, that's out of the whole damned state where such things can happen.

"She was at home.... Thus (your own words) like a nigger I left her; like a nigger I returned (via the kitchen); entered the house and stood in the door while she laid her magazine down and watched me from her pink nest. (SO 281)

Narcissa replies, conflating racial subordination with white privilege and the comforts of home, with the complaint that "Sundy will let [her son Bory] eat green fruit. A nigger is the ruin of any white child. I dont know what to do. I cant say anything, because Miss Jenny is so foolish about the darkies" (SO 284). With the figure of Memphis in eclipse, racial subordination and white privilege recur as if they were no longer viewed as collapsing pillars of domestic life. Horace and Narcissa's discourse of hyperbolic racial subordination serves to close the door on the ominous recurrence throughout the narrative of black figurants poised in the balance between subservience and opposition, confinement and movement. With the turn away from Memphis, the order of racial subordination in Mississippi seems once again securely fixed in place. The letters that Faulkner excised from the revised novel to provide a coda to Horace's retreat to Kinston project Horace's regression to a discourse and regime of racial superiority whose stability the narrative has challenged. Memphis looms in Sanctuary as an imminent space and time in which African Americans are no longer confined to serving as figures of the "licensed tranquility" of privileged white folks or as sources of anxiety and fear for the novel's urban readership.

As we have seen, what seem to be disconnected and indigestible narrative features of Sanctuary can be understood as elements of an anxious middle-class response to the increased mobility and increasing autonomy of black Southerners. Memphis serves as a figure of a mobile and mobilized environment of volatile social encounters. The city provides an imaginary setting for constructing the anxieties and fears of the privileged characters at the center of the narrative. In Memphis, these characters relinquish the protection of their privileged social location, while characters like Minnie and her ex-husband achieve more autonomy, are less confined to ritual performances of subservience, and have more opportunities to relax their self-restraint. Although discrimination, intimidation, and violence were still commonplace methods for enforcing the subordination of African Americans, Memphis posits the decreasing effectiveness of such measures to forestall black autonomy.

The city serves as a figure for the anxieties and fears of Faulkner's urban readers, to whom black migration and black agency appear as threats to the sanctuaries of their privileged personhood. These effects are not limited to Southern readers or even Southern city dwellers but address anxieties that were felt across the nation, in cities like Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. In flight from an urban population increasingly figured as threatening, Faulkner's middle-class readers were beginning to reside in new developments outside the city. In keeping with a suburban literary tradition that emerged in the 1920s, Sanctuary constructs middle-class identity in terms of a defensive retreat from "a colonizing presence that is metonymically figured as the city" and a self-pitying figuration of the emotional and cultural impoverishment of that privileged and prosperous retreat (Jurca 7). (20) Horace's house, described when he retreats to Kinston, "was new, on a fairish piece of lawn, the trees, the poplars and maples which he had set out, still new.... [His wife] was reading in bed, a broad magazine with a colored back. The lamp had a rose colored shade. On the table sat an open box of chocolates" (386). Perhaps the most self-abasing note in the novel--a reinscription of the fear and emotional distance that still mark race relations in the urban and suburban US--is struck by Belle's final words on this night: "The light from his wife's room fell across the hall. 'Lock the back door,' she said" (387). From the shelter of her "pink nest" in Kinston, Belle's insistent command echoes middle-class racial anxieties that situate Horace's brief Memphis "frolic" within the framework of a literary tradition inspired not only by new migration to the city but also by increasing white flight to the developing suburbs.

University of Kansas

WORKS CITED

Andrews, William L. Introduction. Bursting Bonds: The Heir of Slaves: The Autobiography of a "New Negro" 1923. By William Pickens. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2005. xi-xxviii.

Baker, Ray Stannard. "The Negro Goes North." World's Work July 1917: 314-19.

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Biles, Roger. Memphis in the Great Depression. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1986.

Blotner, Joseph, and Noel Polk, eds. William Faulkner: Novels 1930-1935. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1985.

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed. Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.

Carothers, James B. "'Going to Memphis': The Secular Quest in Faulkner's Fiction." 1981. MS.

Church, Annette E., and Roberta Church. The Robert R. Churches of Memphis: A Father and Son Who Achieved in Spite of Race. Ann Arbor: Edwards, 1974.

DuBois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. 1899. Ed. Elijah Anderson. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. 1902. New York: Signet, 1999.

Duvall, John N. "Faulkner's Black Sexuality." Faulkner's Sexualities: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2007. Ed. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010. 131-47.

Edwards, Justin D. "Strange Fugitive, Strange City: Reading Urban Space in Morley Callaghan's Toronto." Studies in Canadian Literature 23.1 (1998): 213-27.

Faulkner, William. "The Big Shot." Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner. Ed Joseph Blotner. New York: Vintage, 1981. 504-25.

--. "Dry September." Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1977. 169-83.

--. Light in August. 1932. The Corrected Text. William Faulkner: Novels 1930-1935. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1985. 399-774.

--. Sanctuary. 1931. The Corrected Text. Blotner and Polk 179-398.

--. Sanctuary: The Original Text. Ed. Noel Polk. New York: Random, 1981.

--. "There Was a Queen." Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1977. 727-44.

Goings, Kenneth W., and Gerald L. Smith. "'Unhidden' Transcripts: Memphis and African American Agency, 1862-1920." JUH 21.3 (1995): 372-94.

Goldsby, Jaqueline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.

Gottlieb, Peter. Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-30. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.

Green, Laurie Beth. Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.

Gregory, James N. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005.

Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Hamilton, G. P. The Bright Side of Memphis. Memphis: n.p., 1908.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Jonah's Gourd Vine. 1934. New York: Harper, 1990.

Johnson, James Weldon. "The Lynching at Memphis." Crisis May 1917: 185-88.

Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth Century American Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

Kreiswirth, Martin. "'Paradoxical and Outrageous Discrepancy': Transgression, Auto-Intertextuality, and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha." Faulkner and the Artist: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1993. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. 161-80.

Langford, Gerald. Faulkner's Revision of Sanctuary: A Collation of the Unrevised Galleys and the Published Book. Austin: U of Texas P, 1972.

Lightweis-Goff, Jennifer. Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus. New York: SUNY P, 2011.

Matthews, John T. "The Elliptical Nature of Sanctuary" Novel 17 (1984): 246-65.

McHaney, Thomas L. "First Is Jefferson: Faulkner Shapes His Domain." Mississippi Quarterly 57.4 (2004): 511-34.

McKee, Margaret, and Fred Chisenhall. Beale Black & Blue: Life and Music on Black America's Main Street. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Miller, William D. Memphis During the Progressive Era: 1900-1917. Memphis: Memphis State UP, 1957.

Pickens, William. "The American Congo: Burning of Henry Lowry." Nation 23 Mar. 1921: 42628.

Polk, Noel. "The Space Between Sanctuary." Intertextuality in Faulkner. Ed. Michel Gresset and Noel Polk. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985. 16-35.

Putzel, Max. "Faulkner's Memphis Stories." VQR 59 (1983): 254-70.

Rossky, William. "The Pattern of Nightmare in Sanctuary; or, Miss Reba's Dogs." MFS 15.4 (1969): 503-16.

Sayre, Robert Woods. "Artistic Self-Theft as Obsession and Creative Transformation: The 'Memphis' Stories and Beyond." The Faulkner Journal 13.1-2 (1997/1998): 37-56.

Shay, Frank. Judge Lynch: His First Hundred Years. 1938. New York: Biblo, 1969.

Sigafoos, Robert A. Cotton Row to Beale Street: A Business History of Memphis. Memphis: Memphis State UP, 1979.

Thompson, Julius E. Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865-1965. Jefferson: McFarland, 2007.

Tolnay, Stewart E., and E. M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

Tucker, David M. Lieutenant Lee of Beale Street. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1971.

Urgo, Joseph R. "Temple Drake's Truthful Perjury: Rethinking Faulkner's Sanctuary." American Literature 55.3 (1983): 435-44.

Vandiver, Margaret. Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006.

Watson, Jay. "Introduction: Situating Whiteness in Faulkner Studies, Situating Faulkner in Whiteness Studies." The Faulkner Journal 22.1-2 (2006/2007): 3-23.

Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth. 1945. New York: Harper, 1993.

--. "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow." Uncle Tom's Children. 1938. Harper, 1993. 1-15.

--. Native Son. 1940. Harper, 1998.

Zecker, Robert M. "'We Never Locked Our Doors at Night': Newark on the 'Net, Minus the Mob." Journal of American Culture 31.4 (2008): 361-72.

(1) I wish to acknowledge the discerning criticism and support of many colleagues who helped me develop this essay. I owe special debts of gratitude to Peter Lurie, Brian Donovan, and my colleagues in the Hall Center for the Humanities Seminar on Respectability, Philip Barnard, James B. Carothers, and Shawn Alexander. I also thank Michael Sweeney, Pete Williams, Aaron Gilbreath, and Andrea Clark for research assistance. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the support of the American Studies and English Departments and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Kansas.

(2) For rigorous analyses of Faulkner's use of regional materials to project a textual domain, see Martin Kreiswirth and Thomas L. McHaney.

(3) By drawing on familiar urban tropes such as gangster, brothel, crime, and bootleggers, Faulkner appealed to the readership attracted to novels like Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer and the hard-boiled fiction of pulp magazines like Black Mask. Drawing on increasingly familiar instances of retreat and alienation from the city and emotional and cultural impoverishment in the suburban home, Faulkner appealed to the readership attracted to novels like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes and Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt.

(4) An unpublished presentation by James B. Carothers, which he generously shared with me, catalogues and analyzes the presence of Memphis as a "secular quest" in Faulkner's fiction. See John T. Matthews for an early perception of Popeye's connection to "the underside of urbanization and modernism invading the South from Memphis, Chicago, and the North" (263).

(5) A note in Sanctuary on the placement of the fictional town of Kinston, "about twenty miles west of Water Valley," describes the Mississippi Delta as "that part of the river's flood plain extending roughly from Memphis, Tenn., to Vicksburg, Miss" (Blotner and Polk 1030).

(6) On the emergence of black commercial and cultural life in Memphis see, for example, Annette E. and Roberta Church, G. P. Hamilton, and David M. Tucker. On black migration to Memphis from the Civil War to the civil rights era and black self-assertion as a provocation to white-on-black violence, see Kenneth W. Goings and Gerald L. Smith and Laurie Beth Green.

(7) Along with Margaret Vandiver's study of lynching in Shelby County, see also Julius E. Thompson's study of lynching in Mississippi.

(8) On the lynching of Lowry, see Nan Elizabeth Woodruff 110, James Weldon Johnson, and Frank Shay 168-78. On Ida B. Wells's campaign against lynching in Memphis, see Gail Bederman 45-76. On lynching in the South, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage. On lynching in literature, see Jaqueline Goldsby and Jennifer Lightweis-Goff.

(9) On racial ambiguity in the description of Popeye and on the significance of whiteness studies to Faulkner, see John N. Duvall and Jay Watson.

(10) On the complex revision of the novel, see Gerald Langford.

(11) For a comparative chart of black migration in ten Southern states by decade between 1900 and 1930, see Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck 214. On black migration within and beyond Mississippi, see James R. Grossman and Neil R. McMillen. See Wright's Native Son and Black Boy for narratives of migration from Mississippi to Memphis and Chicago.

(12) On black migration to Memphis, see Roger Biles 89-90 and David M. Tucker 14. On the Southern diaspora, an account of both black and white migration from the south, see James N. Gregory (xii).

(13) On the Memphis stories, see Max Putzel and Robert Woods Sayre. On the composition of Sanctuary, see Noel Polk 16-18 and Joseph Blotner and Polk 1024. Faulkner drew material for the Memphis stories from Mrs. Walter B. McLean, his beloved Aunt Bama. McLean's niece Bessie Byrd McLean was the wife of Mayor Ed Crump, a Mississippi migrant who rose to wealth, respectability, and power in Memphis.

(14) On the black metropolis in the South, see Gregory 129.

(15) For a concise and rigorously documented presentation of the social context of race relations and racial violence in Memphis, see Vandiver 895-901. On Beale Street, see Church, McKee and Chisenhall, and Tucker.

(16) See, for example, W. E. B. DuBois's Philadelphia Negro (1899) and Paul Dunbar's Sport of the Gods (1902).

(17) As sources of raw materials transported for manufacture or for consumption in the city, places like Jefferson and Kinston are depicted as degraded as a consequence of the exchange. Toward the beginning and the ending of the novel, Horace comments specifically on the traffic in illegal alcohol in Jefferson and the booming lumber business in Kinston as unwelcome signs of urbanization (193, 385).

(18) A similar defensive posture appears in Light in August, in which the voice of the innocent black man as he is beaten during an interrogation is described as "a little sullen, quite alert, covertly alert" (614).

(19) For other metaphorical readings of the dogs, see William Rossky and Joseph R. Urgo.

(20) Catherine Jurca's examination of literary constructions of racial anxiety, the construction of whiteness, and suburbanization begins in the 1920s, particularly with Edith Wharton, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Sinclair Lewis. On literary anxieties of the 1920s related to race, urbanization, and suburbanizaton, see also Justin D. Edwards and Robert M. Zecker.