Doom and Deliverance: Faulkner’s Dialectical Indians

Most critics and historians agree that Faulkner’s Indian characters are outrageous mystifications drawn from popular misperceptions and unspoken ideologies. While he famously admitted that he “made up” his Indians, numerous scholars have wondered whether such a shrewd student of Mississippi history could have ignored the facts entirely. This chapter suggests that the reality lies somewhere in between—purposefully and revealingly so. Faulkner’s Indians occupy the dialectical space between the wreckage of the South’s colonial histories and the rapacities of the capitalist future; they are despicably “other” even as they are uncannily, frighteningly kindred. Departing from the standard focus on Faulkner’s so-called “Indian stories,” this chapter instead uncovers the obscure, uncanny Indians that lurk unseen in his major texts and within his most prominent families and novels. Collectively, these Indians comprise a surprisingly active and pertinent contingent in Faulkner’s modern South: specimens of America’s most luminous possibilities and haunting failures.

“A Promissory Note with a Trick Clause”: Legend, History, and Lynch Law in Requiem for a Nun

This chapter explores the conflicting versions of Jacksonian-era Mississippi history in the origin narrative Faulkner creates for Jefferson in the narrative prologues of his 1951 novel. In his account of the civic crisis that leads to the town's incorporation, Faulkner deviates from his primary historical source, Robert M. Coates's 1930 study, The Outlaw Years, to develop a “prominent legend about a transition from anarchic innocence to the burdens of civilization.” The prologues' “competing historiographic visions” anticipate the “rival visions of Mississippi's social order” at work in the main plot, where Gavin Stevens espouses an ethos of “civic obligation” and “paternalist racial hierarchy” that recalls his community's founding fathers, while Temple's ties to the criminal underworld evoke “the corrosive freedoms of the commercial marketplace”.

Project

The Mississippi History Project started in 1970 and received funding from the Southern Education Foundation. The Project sought to create a distinctively new type of history textbook that included the silent, the unnamed, and the dispossessed and that reflected modern historical scholarship. It wanted to correct the racial bias that dominate other textbooks. The radical book also featured original design and format features.

Writers

Jim Loewen, a sociologist, and Charles Sallis, a historian, assembled a diverse team of colleagues and students to produce a revisionist ninth-grade Mississippi history textbook. In addition to several disciplines, the group included black and white, male and female, northern and southerner. They drew on earlier tentative interracial contacts led by Ernst Borinski between the black Tougaloo College and the nearby white Millsaps College, both in Jackson, Mississippi. Loewen had published a book on the Mississippi Chinese, and Sallis had written about Mississippi politics in the late nineteenth century.

Controversy

After the Rating Committee for Mississippi history textbooks voted against Conflict and Change, the State Textbook Purchasing Board rejected it. Without the board’s approval, school districts could not purchase it with state funds. Racial issues, especially violence and lynching, caused the most objections from John M. Turnipseed, W. A. Matthews, and others. Loewen and Sallis’s appeals to the Board and to the governor failed.