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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
9 On Vodun, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Allison and Busby, 1982), 85-86.
10 See William Faulkner, "Appendix Compson: 1699-1945," in The Sound and the Fury (New York: Norton, 1987), 227.
11 Frey (note 3), 235. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black, White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 31.
12 Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1972), 91. In 1791 slaves revolted on San Domingo: "The world's richest colony" was over run in a black revolution whose forces "defeated the Spanish; inflicted a defea of unprecedented proportions on the British, and then made their country the graveyard of Napoleon's magnificent army."(1) By 1804 the Americas had their first black national state, the independent
republic of Haiti. In 1823 Thomas Sutpen leaves Virginia for the West Indies where, in 1827, he puts down an uprising among slaves on a French sugar plantation on Haiti. As due recompense, he marries the owner's daughter and achieves a son (1829). The dates are important since they indicate that Faulkner has the hero of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) earn the properties upon which he will eventually base his plantation "design," improperly. There were neither slaves nor French plantations on Haiti in 1827. Faulkner's chronology creates an anachronism that rewrites one of the key facts of nineteenth-century black American history, in what looks suspiciously like an act of literary counter-revolution.
Those Faulkner scholars who notice the anachronism urge error; I am unconvinced.(2) The Haitian revolution had lasting consequences for the slave holding states of the South where, during the 1790s, white panics about slave revolts were endemic. Indeed, "Saint Domingo [became] the symbol for black liberation struggles throughout the hemisphere and touched off a series of new insurrectionary attempts": Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vessey in 1822, Nat Turner in 1831; to turn to the major North American black rebellions is to discover allusions to Haiti.(3) Nor does the Haitian example fade with the onse of Civil War; in 1864, in Natchez, ex-slave Mississippi soldiers in the Union Army reacted violently when the city's military commander tried to force freedmen to work abandoned plantations: a Northern missionary, S. G. Wright, "trembled" fearing "blood equalling the day of vengeance in the island of Hayti."(4) Mary Chesnut's diary entry for 14 July 1865, notes that on our place our people were all at home--quiet, orderly, respectful and at their usual work In point of fact things looked unchanged. There was nothing to show that any on of them had ever seen a Yankee or knew that there was one in existence.
However, she follows her reassuring observations with a piece of unattributed gossip: "We are in for a new St. Domingo all the same. The Yankees have raised the devil, and now they cannot guide him."(5)
In the South, Haiti is synonymous with revolution, and whether that be positively or negatively viewed it is not something about which Southern author with an interest in antebellum history lightly make mistakes. Moreover, the evidence of Absalom, Absalom! suggests that Faulkner knows more than enough about San Domingo to put its revolution in the right century. He knows that Haitian soil is a cemetery on the grandest scale. Accounts of the colony's eighteenth-century slave population vary, but historians agree that death rates were extremely high; Rod Prince reckons the total number of slaves imported between 1681 and 1791 at 864,000, and adds that "some estimates have suggested that the equivalent of the entire number of slaves was replaced every twenty years."(6) Faulkner notes that the earth, "manured with black blood from two hundred years of oppression and exploitation ... cried out for vengeance."(7) H knows that French planters were leading purchasers in the eighteenth-century slave trade: C. L. R. James puts the figure for slave imports circa 1789 at 40,000 a year, a figure that translates into Faulkner's sense of an island poised between Africa, ravaged by slavers, and America, seat of rational slave production:
A little island ... which was the halfway point between what we call the jungle and what we call civilization, halfway between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood ... was ravished by violence and the cold known land to which it was doomed. (206)(8)
It is likely that he knows that Vodun (vodoo) was the initial language of revol on San Domingo (during the days prior to the insurrection, Sutpen finds signs made from pigs' bones, feathers and rags, signs which he does not recognize as such [207]), and that the French territory was adjacent to a Spanish colony (Sutpen's mother-in-law "had been a Spaniard" [207]).(9) Knowing even part of this, he surely knows "1791."
Why then pretend otherwise, when to do so implies that Toussant L'Ouverture's revolution didn't happen? The answer may, finally, prove anything but counter-revolutionary. Consider the manner in which Sutpen suppresses the anomalous uprising; on the eighth night of seige
he just put the musket down and had someone unbar the door and then bar it behind him, and walked out into the darkness and subdued them, maybe by yelling louder, maybe by standing, bearing more than they believed any bones and flesh could or should ... maybe at last they themselves turning in horror and fleeing from the white arms and legs shaped like theirs and from which blood could be made to spurt and flow as it could from theirs and containing an indomitable spirit which should have come from the same primary fire which theirs came from but which could not have, could not possibly have. (209)
Leaving aside the "maybes" for a moment, it seems that Sutpen triumphs by demonstrating white supremacy: what he suffers establishes an absolute separation between white and black in so far as their points of origin or "primary fires" differ. White proves stronger than black and causes black to vanish. However, allowing that Sutpen said only that he "subdued them," the "maybes" indicate that the fuller account derives from the story's line of transmission. The line is clear: Sutpen told General Compson (1835), who told i to his son, who told Quentin, who tells Shreve (1910). The options for anecdota elaboration are several, but since it is the general to whom we owe the detail of Haiti's bloody horticulture, and to the general that Sutpen shows his scars (207), it is probably the general who gives us the "spurt and flow" scenario. I which case, two planters of similar social origin talking in 1835, four years after the Turner rising, combine to construct a story that affirms their interest in clear cut racial mastery, albeit an authority tempered in rebelliou fires.(10) Given white "primary fire," insurrections will fail and revolutions fade. The supposition is General Compson's, and the recognition that slavery is an undeclared state of war, in which black revolution is a permanent risk, is Sutpen's. His behaviour as a slave holder in Mississippi is eccentric but plain on a regular and ritualized basis he organizes and participates in single comba with his slaves. While clearly slave-codes were designed to police the peculiar institution on the understanding that black conspiracy was a fact of planter life, and while it is certain that compulsory pass-systems, complex patterns of surveillance and "the obligatory involvement of all white members of the community in the implementation of the laws" indicate what one historian calls "a strung-out society," strung-out because the blacks were "in the South in suc numbers and in such manner as they were," that manner "was recurrently rebellious."(11) It is also undeniable that few southern planters, other than a times of disturbance, systematically viewed their slaves as black Jacobins. To do so would have been to credit them with a will quite beyond the capacity of chattel or a "Sambo." The peculiar institution peculiarly demanded that its managers view their slaves as a threat, but also, and simultaneously, as a chil of limited will (things are will-less: Sambo means "son of"). This contradictio produces the startling mood-shifts of which planters were notoriously capable. Genovese, discussing the slaveholders' need to love those whom they made suffer might be characterizing that state of mind produced by having to trust those wh are suspected:
[Planters] could deny to themselves that intact they did cause suffering, and could assert that their domination liberated the slaves from a more deprived existence. Such a view demanded "gratitude" [of the slave] ... and an intimacy that turned every act of impudence and insubordination--every act of unsanctioned self-assertion--into an act of treason and disloyalty, for by repudiating the principle of submission it struck at the heart of the master's moral self-justification and, therefore, his self esteem. Nothing else, apart from personal idiosyncrasy, can explain the ferocity and cruelty of masters who normally appeared kind and even indulgent.(12)
There is little of kindness in Sutpen, who has no time for Sambo, and his moods in so far as we see them demonstrated in his actions, are changeless: he fights African Americans out of Haiti who are physically his equal. As Haitians they embody that which the plantocracy most fears and must deny--the spirit of revolution. In the aftermath of 1791, North Carolina passed a law prohibiting the entry of all West Indian slaves over the age of fifteen, for fear that they might incite a general slave rebellion; three years later (1798) Governor Samue Ashe, "Seeking to suppress the ideology of the Haitian Revolution" issued a proclamation urging that the landing of all negroes from the islands be stopped.(13) To suspend the importation of bodies is not to block news of their acts; as late as 1840, slaves in South Carolina were interpreting information from Haiti as a projection of their own freedom.(14)
Sutpen imports his Haitian archaisms in 1832. In 1833 he appears in Yoknapatawpha county, "takes up land, builds his house" (313) and fights his slaves. The house is complete by 1835: the fighting continues, as far as I can tell, until about 1850. Sutpen's persistent and systematized combat is without historical precedent, as is Faulkner's dating of the San Domingo uprising. However, read together these anomalies make absolute historical sense. Given that Faulkner wishes to foreground the continuous potential for revolution within the institution of slavery, he needs Haiti, the only successful black revolution. Given that he wishes to characterize the plantocracy as a class who suppress revolution, he requires that his ur-planter suppress the Haitian revolution, and go on doing so. Had Sutpen's "design" needed only "money in considerable quantities" (200), as Sutpen claims, Mississippi, as a rapidly evolving frontier society, would have provided him with ample and historically accurate opportunities. Witness the career of Sutpen's contemporary General Compson, who in 1811 entered Yoknapatawpha in possession of "a pair of fine pistols, one meagre saddle bag.... [and] a stronghocked mare"; it is doubtful whether Sutpen's maritime wages amount to as much by the time he lands in San Domingo (approximately 1820), but neither arriviste arrives with more than a little, and both found dynasties.(15) Furthermore, had Faulkner merely wished t add the capacity to quell slave insurrection to the list of "design" "ingredients" (216) he could, with veracity, have located his hero's first forays, during the 1830s, almost anywhere in the lower South--though South Carolina or Mississippi would have been ideal, since with populations divided almost equally between black and white, opportunities for "impudence and insubordination" were many, and always liable to induce violent reaction.(16)
My point is finally a simple one: in Sutpen's slaves Faulkner creates an anomalous archaism; they are historically free and yet doubly constrained, by a fiction (Absalom, Absalom!) and by a counter-revolutionary violence (Sutpen's) that is necessary to the workings of the plantation system. Sutpen's fights giv true title to each measure of labor control in the antebellum South. Southerner might recognize that when Sutpen "enter[s] the ring" with one of his slaves, he does so with "deadly forethought," not merely to retain "supremacy [and] domination" (24), but to enact the pre-emptive counter-revolution, crucial to the authority of his class. Furthermore, the fights are staged...
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