"The Fire and the Hearth" / "Go Down, Moses" by William Faulkner

"THE FIRE AND THE HEARTH" (chapter 2)

Source for painting: click here

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ”

―T.S. Eliot,The Waste Land

Reading the second chapter of “Go Down, Moses,” T.S Eliot’s apocalyptic landscape of the “The Waste Land” resonates: ” the roots that clutch.” What is most buried and concealed surges through pain and trauma, and spring, and when the snow melts, and the lilacs grow out of the dead land, stirring memory and desire, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot’s lines. It is necessary to grasp the past to understand the present, therein, the necessity to uproot, to dig, to bring to surface in order to understand. This is how “Go Down, Moses” feels.

In the opening lines of “The Fire and the Hearth,” digging metaphors ensue. We find Lucas Beauchamp digging, finding, concealing, rambling in the night, moaning about his loneliness, about his working single-handed...exposed to the elements, far from his hearth and fire, but rather a sinister angry man who stirs the land. This land, he says, has belonged to and expropriated from the Indians. He remembers in a time where men were men, nor white nor black.

Whereas “Was,” the first story of the collection renders, in David Walker’s words,“a nostalgic tale of the Old South”which serves as a backdrop on which the grim dramas of the rest of the book are projected”, “a momentary ruffling of the surface” (click here for source); “The Fire and the Hearth” bespeaks of rage, revenge, usurpation, frustration. These profoundly retorting emotions sting the Lucas Beauchamp of the beginning of the narrative and prod him into action and revolt,  in deep contrast with a a more appeased Lucas Beauchamp at the end of the story.

The opening strife revolves around hectic action in connection with the primary character of the narrative, Lucas Beauchamp attempts at hiding his illegal business; he tries to incriminate George Wilkins so he might not marry his daughter; he abandons his wife Molly to trace the land with his divining machine to find a treasure hidden in bygone times; he faces Roth Edmonds and challenges him from a position of pride.

Lucas claims not to need money but he requests Roth’s help to engage him in his pursuit of treasure finding. The story does not give an account, at this stage, of why Lucas, who hoards money in the bank, requests Roth’s purchasing power. Stung by pride, but tied-handed, the narrative conceals Lucas' deprivation. At the times, Jim Crow laws (click on) backlashed against Afro-American population through discriminatory laws that undermined basic human rights.

Lucas’ deep anger anchors back in 1898 when Henry, his son, and Roth Edmonds, Zack’s child, were born. Zack’s wife dies in childbirth and requests Molly, Lucas’ wife, to nurse the newly-born, Roth. Molly abandons her own hearth and fire for the sake of breastfeeding and nursing Roth and moves to the “white man’s house.” She turns to be a surrogate mother for Roth Edmonds who seems to be specially attached to her.

Through Lucas’ conscience, we have access to this moment that is described in apocalyptic terms:

“He would never forget it—that night of early spring following ten days of such rain that even the old people remembered nothing to compare it with, and the white man’s wife time upon her and the creek out of banks until the whole valley rose, bled a river choked with down timber and drowned livestock until not even a horse could have crossed it in the darkness to reach a telephone and fetch the doctor back. And Molly, a young woman then and nursing their own first child, wakened at midnight by the white man himself and they followed then the white man through the streaming darkness to his house and Lucas waited in the kitchen, keeping the fire going in the stove….to find the white man’s wife dead and his own wife already established in the white man’s house. It was as though on that louring and driving day he had crossed and then recrossed a kind of Lethe, emerging, being permitted to escape, buying as the price of life a world outwardly the same yet subtly and irrevocably altered” (pages 45-46).

This “pathetic fallacy” (literary device in which the landscape and surroundings reflect how the character feels inside) bespeaks of the inner turmoil Lucas feels when forsaken by his wife, and his loneliness to keep the fire of his own hearth alive. This event lies at the core of this short story, “a world that seemed to be the same but altered with no remedy."

Similarly to “Was,”: “Damn the fox,” Uncle Buck said. “Go on and start breakfast. It seems to me I’ve been away from home a whole damn month,” which takes us to the beginning of the narrative where it all started,  Lucas’ energy subsides to a resigned acceptance of the unchangeable drive of history and family bonds. Roth escorts Molly to court so she can obtain a divorce from her “decentered” husband, but Lucas reclaims her back and yields to an irrevocable fate:

“I reckon to find that money ain’t for me”