Preface.
Matthews, John T.
As callous as it is to say it, some lynchings are more horrible
than others" (Arnold 267). With that sentence "Chip"
Arnold begins his remarkable essay on the lynching of Sam Hose, perhaps
the grisliest, most barbaric event in the sorrowful history of lynching
in this country. Chip's research on lynching in America--of which
this is an early assay--must have compelled him to reflect deeply on the
mystery that such acts of utter savagery could be performed by a society
that defended its right to commit ultimate violence against persons as,
according to the Newnan Herald & Advertiser, a "civilization
[that] is distinctively Southern" (qtd. in Arnold 274; emphasis
mine). In Newnan, Georgia, Hose had been charged with murdering a white
farmer, Alfred Cranford, and raping Cranford's wife. He fled, and,
for the nearly two weeks during which he eluded expanding search parties
and escalating rewards, his liberty struck terror into the white
population of the surrounding countryside. As Chip does not fail to
notice, though, this state of affairs terrorized the Negroes of the area
as well; any one of them might be mistaken for the fugitive. Death lay a
second away on some nervous trigger finger. When Hose was finally
captured, he was escorted by vigilante guard back to Newnan to confront
Cranford's widow, who pleaded for his immediate lynching.
Hose's murder by a white mob on April 23, 1899, unleashed a
ferocious outpouring of racial rage, sexual panic, and depthless
anxiety. Hose was hanged, stabbed, and finally incinerated by bonfire,
but not before his torturers, some of whom were children, managed to
amputate his fingers, toes, and genitals. It was discovering a charred
finger of Hose on display in an Atlanta store window that convinced W.
E. B. Du Bois, as he recounts in a shaken passage of The Souls of Black
Folk, that he could no longer live in the South.
Du Bois recognized that the very survival of the Negro was the
issue of modern America: the reason the color line mattered was that it
sought to divide the living from the dead. Given a decline in the Negro
family's economic and reproductive vitality under Jim Crow, the
murderous assault on black men in the lynch-happy South, not to mention
the burial of urban Negroes under northern prejudice, Du Bois concluded
that the American state was at least passively contemplating the
sacrifice of an entire race--held to be defective--to the rejuvenated
national union. Black morbidity became a theme of Du Bois's joint
intellectual investigations--sociological, historical, and imaginative.
When Chip quotes Governor Allen Candler on the lynching of Hose, he
points to the monstrous saturation of state power with racist ideology:
in Chip's words, Candler "called on 'good negroes'
to speak out against the sort of crimes that 'provoke'
lynchings" (276; emphasis mine). Giorgio Agamben has explored the
way that state power is consolidated around its blunt capacity to
dispose of human or "bare life," that is, simple fleshly
existence. For Agamben, the figure of "homo sacer," the sacred
man, embodies the power of the state, beginning with its classical
origins. Homo sacer is defined by two conditions: he is the individual
who may be killed without punity, and he is the dead who may not be
mourned. As such, his extinction by the state displays the arbitrary
authority of the state over individual persons: a life that may be taken
without cause; a life that must not be redeemed into any system of
higher values or meaning, lest the sheer unreasoning power of the state
be compromised. This is the moment at which the politicized body
originates, according to Agamben, and it would be difficult not to see
the intensification of modern state power that he charts as sharply
illustrated by the coincidence in the US of a reunited modern national
state--pivoting on the reconciliation of North and South in the exercise
of military state power in the Spanish American War--and the exercise of
subjugation over the black body under American apartheid. In
Faulkner's Light in August state power blurs with the
quasi-official deputization that warrants Percy Grimm's execution
of Joe Christmas under conditions reminiscent of Hose's,
particularly Grimm's castration of Christmas and Faulkner's
ghastly image of the slaughtered body rising upward on a burst of firey
sparks--however fantastic. A literal lynching by bonfire disposes of Lee
Goodwin in Sanctuary, an event that eerily displaces the conventional
racial assignments of such vigilante executions, but one that
nevertheless combusts confidence in "the law, justice,
civilization" (132).
If Faulkner attests to the permanence of Christmas's effigy in
the minds of those witnessing his death--a permanence, albeit suspended
in ambiguity--the rest of his fiction dedicates itself to the endlessly
unrewarding task of recollecting what too many wish to leave unrecalled,
to interrogate the forgetting that enables all remembering. The four
essays selected for this special issue of The Faulkner Journal on
Faulkner and Death take up aspects of this riddling relation between the
past and the future, as memory and movement encounter each other in the
passages of death. All four essays figure death as a shade of the past
troubling the embrace of the modern in Faulkner's liminal next
South. Tamara Slankard examines the multiple capacities of the
fetish--as anthropological, sexual, and commodity device--to negotiate
the transfer from a melancholic fixation on the decayed agrarian past,
corporealized in the dead body of Addie, to a regional modernity's
grudging work of mourning that enables change. The fate of all
representation to fail in its effort to memorialize what once existed
concerns Tim Bielawski as he explores what it means for Faulkner to
associate writing with death in his most sustained meditation on the
revivification of the past, Absalom, Absalom! Like Slankard, Bielawski
ultimately understands Faulknerian representation as a practice of
equivocation; we might be tempted to say that Addie's dead body,
produced for Slankard by the work of history, here corresponds to the
embalmed body produced by writing itself: an uncanny simulacrum that at
once disfigures as it preserves what is to be salvaged from the passage
of time. Faulkner's aspiration remains the resolution to move, to
change, to inspirit the essence of life that is motion, as he said, in
the strangely animated, partial embodiments of his prose. Michelle Moore
might link such zombie-like incarnation to the spirit of vampirism she
identifies in other reaches of Absalom. Faulkner's evocation of
Bram Stoker's Dracula in one of his little-known film scripts,
Dreadful Hollow, suggests an extensive meditation on the modern
South's fearful acknowledgement of its history of vampiric
predation on the blood of black slaves. Narrative itself becomes
contaminated by this deadly past, the contagion of unwanted knowledge
made especially graphic in Quentin's feverish capitulation to the
story of Sutpen in Haiti. Through such portals death enters the very
lifeblood of the American South. Without overstating the harmony of
these four pieces, I might suggest that Erich Nunn's concluding
essay finds in the musical performances of Sanctuary fresh examples of
the ways the South's past might be modulated. In the country
ballads played on town radios, Faulkner notes a nostalgia for a fading
agricultural regime, the racialist melancholy of which is tempered by
the racial crossovers among performers and audiences. Next, the
narrative seeks to neutralize the soulful protests of the Negro
murderer's baritone renditions, but even whites could have heard
more than old-time "spirituals" in the black man's songs
of racial suffering. Finally, Red's funeral--celebrated to the tune
of popular blues and jazz songs--encapsulates the unevenness of cultural
and social progress through inadvertent hybridity: on the one hand,
there is the refusal to surrender the past, intimated by the
gangster's too-present corpse; on the other, the certain
impermanence of racial distinction, hinted at by the dislocation of jazz
from racial origin and use.
These essays show Faulkner attempting to do what many who inherit
the witness of past injustice fail to do: name and memorialize.
Chip's report on the murder of Sam Hose is as concerned with
present indifference to the atrocity at Newnan as with the historical
event, awful as it was. "Across the Road from the Barbecue
House" uncovers the immediate appropriation of the facts of
Hose's lynching to polemical debate: a New York Herald investigator
accepted the story offered by white authorities nearly at face value,
while Ida B. Wells-Barnett's informant entirely exonerated Hose of
any act but self-defense. Dispassionate as he negotiates the
difficulties of Hose's crimes, his victims' provocation and
possible mendacity, the press's complicity, the governor's
perfidy, the mob's savagery, and eventually the town's
determination to forget the lynching, Chip finally allows a great
sadness to take over his final paragraphs. It is the absence of any
physical memorial to Hose and the miscarriage of lawful justice at the
site of his lynching that eventually seems to call the personal response
from the reporter. Giving in at last to the unbearable irony that the
standard town landmark for locating the overgrown lynching field is
Sprayberry's, a barbecue restaurant across the street, Chip
observes that
Histories, as we have learned, will not stay hidden, any more than
Sam Hose could be relegated to jars or shoe boxes or faded
photographs. Perhaps a marker will one day be posted at this site
... and perhaps people will journey here, out of curiosity or in
honor of a black martyr or in expiation of a collective racial
guilt. But for now it sits anonymous, an island of jungle in an
urban landscape, a cordoned sanctuary where once none was to be
had. (290)
I recall an intensely pleasurable conversation with Chip in May of
2008, in San Francisco, during the American Literature Association
conference. At lunch with a small group of Southern lit folks, in the
shadow of the Bay Bridge, looking out on the Embarcadero, Chip shared
the details of his recent work on lynching. I doubt the ironic interplay
of our present comfortable situation and the suffering he was writing
about was lost on either of us; it was a subtext after all of his report
from Newnan. The stroke last year that took away much of Chip's
language capacity was an unreckonable cruelty. When I was asked to
oversee the final stages of preparation for this volume, I accepted with
the hope that some of Chip's organizing vision for it, which I take
to be powerfully related to his project on lynching, might carry
through. I thank the contributors for their patience in negotiating an
improvised path to production, Noel Polk for indispensable editorial
contributions, and Heather Reagan and Dawn Trouard for their
forbearance. I hope Chip will be happy with the outcome.
Boston University
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
Arnold, Edwin T. "Across the Road from the Barbecue
House." Mississippi Quarterly 61.1/2 (2008): 267-92.
Faulkner, William. Sanctuary. 1931. The Corrected Text. New York:
Vintage International, 1993.
