The bloodhounds and a Southern Mississippi posse are after Joe when he awakens and has this realization:
“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral greyness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. ‘That was all I wanted,’ he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. “That was all, for thirty years. That didn’t seem to be a whole lot to ask for in thirty years.”
Joe Christmas was 33 when he expressed this thought on page 246 in my two-tone hard-cover copy of Light in August. I mention the mixed tones of red as reflective of Faulkner’s novel. Joe was named Christmas because he was left at the door of an orphanage (a white one) as a baby, and later taunted as being of mixed race. Even at the end of the novel, a tragic one, he has no absolute proof that his blood is both white and black. Nor does the reader, with anything that can be called certainty. Yet Joe Christmas lived as if cursed by the mingling of one blood with the other. He says on page 344, “If I’m not (of mixed blood), damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.”
Just now, Saturday evening, I spent time reading an NPR piece, “What Do We Call People of Multiple Backgrounds?” I appreciated in this printed version of a radio presentation, a reference to Barack Obama. He, tongue in cheek, called himself a mongrel and mutt. Yet before I read this quip by a former President, I’d already considered a blog that posed the question: What if we all knew our roots and ethnic origin?
In my case, I knew of my English, Scottish- Irish heritage. But what delighted me was to learn I have both Iberian Peninsula and Jewish blood in me. I ask: Who is pure anything? Dogs with AKA papers, perhaps. And giving a nod to Obama, I ask: Who isn’t a mongrel? And asking this question brings to mind what Ishmael in Moby Dick asks: Who ain’t a slave?
My parental name is Wilson from my father. This connotes Son of Will. Serf or slave? Who knows? But one thing is certain. I do not come from the aristocracy. Yet it is doubtful Prince Harry can claim that either. -😊
All I know from Faulkner’s remarkable novel is that Joe Christmas has spent his life without being able to answer the question: Who am I? He becomes the outcast, the wanderer, the man without ties to land or family, a searcher, an enigma to others. It is true that Joe Christmas kills two persons: His adoptive father, the truly mad Presbyterian Evangelical, Mr. McEachern; and the Yankee, Negro-loving Joanna, who makes the fatal mistake of asking to pray for Joe Christmas.
What a reader will experience in Light in August is William Faulkner’s artistry and genius. He creates a sympathetic character, whose heinous death is unwarranted as it occurs. The novel’s relevance to our times unnerves me: a novel that etches itself on mind and body.
To be continued…
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