On Fear: The South in Labor

By Scott Horton

You can find Oxford, Mississippi, on the map, but in the canon of American literature it lives under another name: Yoknapatawpha County, with its county seat of Jefferson. William Faulkner is the sole proprietor of the latter, which is ageless, and as to the former, I have no doubt that William Faulkner still lives there. A week ago on a magical early Spring day, I was down in Oxford, on a speaking invitation from Ole Miss. I took some time to walk about the square surrounding the county courthouse. The Confederate war memorial is there, looking just as described. The square itself is home to some bookstores, including a very good independent one—an increasingly unusual phenomenon in the South, or indeed anywhere else in the United States—called Square Books. I also made the trip out to Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, where the air was infused with the fragrance of two enormous magnolia trees in full bloom. The face of William Faulkner can be seen staring from most of the rooms, but it does take a bit of imagination to place Faulkner there. As is the case with most “home of the famous” museums, it's too neat and orderly. I told one of the student guides that they really needed an opened, half consumed bottle of bourbon in the library to give it that aura of authenticity. (Friedrich Schiller could only produce good work sitting in a room in which he could smell the sour-acid odors of decaying apples. To each his own.)

Faulkner still inhabits Oxford, every bit as much as Jefferson. But his thoughts and ways of seeing things were everywhere. We don't perhaps view Faulkner as a social writer on the order of Sinclair Lewis, but a deep concern about the troubled community of mankind lies at the heart of what he writes. In those few miles around Jefferson he finds and portrays a universe which has great social and even political moment. One thing he portrays with exceptional brilliance is the role and power of fear as a force driving man and society. He sees it as something that can drive great wrongs, but not if the fear is coupled with knowledge and wisdom.

In June 1956, Harper's published the greatest of Faulkner's essays, “On Fear: The South in Labor.” There is no doubt that this essay made Faulkner quite a few enemies among his white neighbors, even as it helped secure his position for posterity. Faulker's launching point is the decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the pending project of integration of public education in Mississippi. He sees the justice of the decision, the righteousness of the claims of Black people for equal treatment and full access to the state's services. But he approaches the issue with dread about a dying world and the prospect of rising fear and violence. He expresses concern that religious leaders of the white community have suddenly gone silent, for their calming voice and counsel against violence surely was needed. And then he appeals to his fellow Southerners to accept the inevitability of racial reconciliation and equality. It will come to Mississippi as surely as snow comes to Alaska, he wrote. Mississippians needed to realize the obvious: that they were long a single community, black and white. It was time for them to see their community in the context of a larger world with still more pressing problems.

Because it makes a glib and simple picture, we like to think of the world situation today as a precarious and explosive balance of two irreconcilable ideologies confronting each other: which precarious balance, once it totters, will drag down the whole universe into the abyss along with it. That's not so. Only one of the opposed forces is an ideology. The other one is that simple fact of Man: that simple belief of individual man that he can and should and will be free.

Faulkner saw this will to freedom as a common bond that would unite the people of Yoknapatawpha County, of Mississippi, the South, and the United States—and indeed of a community of free nations around the world.

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it; our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere--systems political or religious or racial or national--will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.

Half a century has passed since Faulkner wrote these words and his vision is certainly still not accomplished. But much has occurred to realize it. The faces in the lecture hall I addressed represented the population of Mississippi in race and gender. But the portraits on the walls around me consisted entirely of dead white men. It was, I thought, a perfect statement of the past and the future.