"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”

 

"Was" - Go down, Moses by William Faulkner

 

"Was" Go down, Moses by William Faulkner de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

"The Displaced Person" by Flannery O'Connor

 

"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor

 GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE

Try your knowledge of the events in the short story

with this Jeopardy Quiz 

exclusively elaborated for our reading club

JeopardyLabs

The Artificial Nigger by Flannery O'Connor

 

The Artificial Nigger by Flannery O’Connor.

Deriding Burlesque ...

The title of this short story refers to statues popular in the Jim Crow-era Southern United States (click here for further information), depicting grotesque minstrelsy characters (thanks Marián Machado for bringing up this reference).

The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, is an American theatrical form, popular from the early 19th to the early 20th century, that was founded on the comic enactment of racial, stereotypes. The tradition reached its zenith between 1850 and 1870. Although the form gradually disappeared from the professional theatres and became purely a vehicle for amateurs, its influence endured—in vaudeville, radio, and television as well as in the motion-picture and world-music industries of the 20th and 21st centuries. The earliest minstrel shows were staged by white male minstrels (traveling musicians) who, with their faces painted black, caricature the singing and dancing of slaves.Source: https://www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show

The word “caricature” immediately takes us to Flannery’s world. “The Artificial Nigger” opens up with Mr Head, ready to embark on a trip to show Nelson, his grandson, the ways of the world.  Initially portrayed with a questionable flair of superior moral guidance, he is launched center stage within the narrowing focus of the moonlight and, mockingly, compared with the great guides of men, “Dante, or better, Raphael, awakened by a blast of God’s light”(250).  We will later find that Mr Head’s name does not live up to the expectations of his assumed moral guidance due to an inherently flawed nature.

The narrator’s use of “as if” implies detachment from an omniscient role and a failure to acutely depict reality. This detachment undermines Mr Nelson’s perfunctory role as a man that “has entered into that calming understanding of life that makes him a suitable guide for the young” (249). His suit lying on a chair has a more noble air than he does. Old age does not pair up with wisdom. Many narrative moments will amalgamate the two characters in indistinct borderlines until an almost chiastic exchange takes place towards the end of the short story. Their ghost-like reflection on the window of the train indicates their unformed and unshaped existence:

"Mr Head looked like an ancient child and 

Nelson like a miniature old man." (269)

Before this moment, confrontation ensues as they contest for knowledge about the world, the city, about what a “nigger” looks like – Mr Head’s intent lesson--a concept Nelson fails to understand as the incipient tabula rasa he seems to be, and, therefore,  impervious to prejudice.

Both characters constantly appear at junctions, crossways, intersections, in an oneiric landscape in which a train glides phantasmagorically to lead them in a trip of “discovery,” a seemingly rite of passage for Nelson. However, rather than expertise, the trip is intended to function as a deterrent for Nelson’s inquisitive nature, and a lesson he will never forget as Mr Nelson puts it.

They wander in circles, shadows, tunnels, darkness, sewers, the bowels of the earth… They stroll through a black neighbourhood where Nelson feels drawn to “a large coloured woman leaning in a doorway”, a surrogate mother figure? (suggested by Begoña Rodríguez ) for the bereft child, a search for protection? (Xoel González), or even a concupiscent entrance in the ways of the world? (Marián Machado)

After the practical joke that Mr Head plays on Nelson in which he denies his grandson, (Biblical overtones) denial, expiation, guilt and remorse ensue. Nelson is emotionally void after being rejected, and the way in which he is described leads us to draw connections with some crafty fabrication:

“The child was standing about ten feet away, his face bloodless under the gray hat. His eyes were triumphantly cold. There was no light in them, no feeling, no interest. He was merely there, a small figure, waiting.”

Could Nelson be possibly “The Artificial Nigger”? Marcial suggested that the opening of the story had echoes of Nelson being a puppet and Mr Head a puppeteer: the boy sleeps in an obscure part of the room, on a pallet, in foetal position, still as the night and about to be relivened and string-pulled into a journey of non-discovery.

Is there any grace, mercy, expiation for Mr Head? The two characters are drawn together by the recognition of an artificial nigger in a white neighbourhood of iceberg-like houses. The characters vanish in the sunset which still holds traces of the night, get on a train in the suburbs and are dropped in another non - official stop at another junction.