What is a Mulatto?

If the letter “t” is removed, a mulato is a mule. Or so states the Oxford English Dictionary. Amazon’s Alexia says a “mulatto” is a person born of the racial mix of black and white. And in William Faulkner’s novel, Light in August, a reader cannot be certain what Joe Christmas is… only that he passes for being white.

And “passes” is what’s on my mind today. Earlier in my library, I located The Human Stain by the late Philip Roth. This novel, written in 2000, is a haunted parable about modern times. The novel’s main character is an aging professor of the classics at an Eastern college. He is appalled at what has happened in the academic world, and he laments and criticizes the laziness of his students, especially those who are black. Ironically, Coleman Silk is forced to retire after being accused of being a racist. Eventually the reader learns that Professor Silk has spent his life as a white man, despite the reality of a black mother. No one knows his secret until a biographer discovers the truth.

It was Roth’s novel that made me recall a movie from 1959. Imitation of Life has a young woman who passes for being white, who must deny her background if she wants to live an entirely other life. To read a synopsis of the movie’s plot today is to be amazed that such a farcical soap opera could have left me so deeply affected.  But it did. I also learned today that Lana Turner’s wardrobe for the movie cost one million dollars, and that Imitation of Life was the 6th money-making film that year.  And in 2015 the BBC named this movie the 37th greatest American movie. Goodness, the facts we learn from the internet.

But this movie made me think about the lives of those who were of mixed race then. A set-up, you might say, for masterful tales like Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain.

On a less desultory note, I will end by saying that before the title page in Roths ’novel are two lines from Oedipus the King by Sophocles. I find them pertinent for Roth’s Coleman Silk and for the central character in Faulkner’s Light in August.

Oedipus: What is the rite/ of purification? How shall it be done?

Creon:  By banishing a man, or expiation of blood by blood…

This quote has meaning for Faulkner’s mysterious character, Joe Christmas. To be continued…

William Faulkner, the Hieronymus Bosch of Prose

I’ve borrowed this claim about Faulkner from an article I found folded inside Light in August.  

I know I’ve mentioned before my personal filing system; and Light had several articles inside it. One was “Demon-Driven” by Casey Cep in The New Yorker, November 30, 2020: a four-page review of a book by Michael Gorra: The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.

I’ve returned to Faulkner because the RCC-RILL book club will read Light in August for our next meeting in September, along with Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I first read William Faulkner during college and later used his short stories & novels in high school and college courses. Yet, after my recent read of Light, William from Oxford makes me yearn to understand his fiction much more deeply than before, and now in the context of our country today.

In “Demon’s” second paragraph is a statement about a central character from Light in August.  It says, “Reverend Gail Hightower is haunted by his Confederate grandfather.” This character’s name gives me pause. I don’t recall a man named Gail that I’ve read about or met. Early in Light, the reader learns that Hightower is no longer standing above his parishioners in the Presbyterian Church of Jefferson, Mississippi. Hightower, a tangled fallen man, who “with his religion and his grandfather shot from the galloping horse all mixed up, as though the seed which his grandfather had transmitted to him had been on the horse that night and had been killed too and time had stopped…” Again,again, again… a tragic invocation, the word  resonating because it “suggests that what was has simply gone on happening, a cycle of repetition that replays itself, forever.”

Just now, writing these words, I spoke Faulkner’s U.S. state aloud, spelling it out, the way we did in fifth grade when we learned every state and its capital. Always laughter in Mr. Moore’s class as we chanted… Miss iss ippi. This was in 1953, and no images of the South in our minds then in southern California. But in 1961, James Meridith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi in Faulkner’s hometown.

At age 64 Faulkner died, and his death was only months before The Battle of Oxford (state against federal intervention) over Meridith’s enrollment.

Recurrence is why Faulkner remains so important.

Next week: Light in August with mulatto Joe Christmas…

A Quote to Memorize and Repeat Daily as a Mantra

Webmaster Ilona sent me a Milan Kundera quote last year. It is one I will use in a presentation tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock in the Lancaster Library in Kilmarnock.

Kundera died last July in Paris at age 94. The quote I am using comes from his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (The film version of his novel is worth seeing.) 

Here is the quote I will use tomorrow in my address on Tennis Talk of a Nobody.

“We call serendipity—the gladsome coincidence of two events, rendered meaningful by the emotional weight of each and the infinitesimal cosmic odds of their co-occurrence.

But these highly improbable gifts of chance are also rendered meaningful by the focus of our attention, by choosing to attend to those particular elements of reality amid the myriad others swarming us at the same time—for how we choose to pay attention renders the world what it is.”

AI wants a change “particular elements” and has highlighted it in purple.  I choose not to pay attention to it.

Until next week and back to literature I love….