It was September 25, or thereabouts, in what everybody said was 1897. Mississippi, of course; you knew that it had to be Mississippi. Or France. The winds were blowing toward bad times in France, but not for a while yet. It would be just in time for a youth born in 1897 in Mississippi to be the right age to get shipped off to France to see his friends and troop mates bleeding into their uniforms in the mud. He would see, as they lay dying, that the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close his friends eyes as they descended into Hades.
The generals would order their men to attack, and the other generals would do the same, over and over. But what if a youth from Mississippi became a corporal and ordered his troops to sit tight? Then the other side would sit tight too, and the six thousand troops eyeing each other across the blasted landscape would start to frown and rub their chins, muttering to themselves and to their mates that it took two sides to fight a war, and maybe this one just stopped, just like that, and all you had to do was sit still.
The generals wouldn’t be happy about that, and they’d get rid of the corporal. But he’d be back, maybe as a messenger, in more ways than one.
The Compsons, though, that was a story. Quentin meandering around Harvard and thinking about Caddy, the only one who really cared for Benjy. Benjy loved that old pasture; it was his favorite. But it was the one they sold to send Quentin off to school, so far away from Jefferson, where watching the Compsons dissolve in the Mississippi rain was the town recreation.
The McCaslins and the Edmonds were probably among ‘em. Even though the town differed, the county din’t, and you’ll know it by the reiving of the first car in Yoknapatawpha county so’s Boon and Lucius and, even though they didn’t know it, Ned McCaslin went too, could get all the way to Memphis to find Miss Corrie.
It was a good twenty years later that Lena hitchhiked into Jefferson. She was looking for Lucas, but he’d become Joe Brown and gone to ground. Byron helped her out, without saying much this way or t’other. Especially about Lena. Joe Brown turns up, like they say about a bad penny, along with that other Joe, Christmas was his unlikely name and it didn’t fit him one bit. Nasty piece of work, that Joe Christmas. He was finally cuffed in Mottstown where, not wanting the likes of him in the city limits, they shipped him back to Jefferson right quick.
They, all of ‘em, lived in spitting distance of Sutpen’s Hundred, that place from the last century that got shrunk to a dime by the odious carpetbaggers. The old estate burned when Clytie thought they were the Law. After that, they say, Jim Bond was the only one you’d find on Sutpen’s Hundred. But the twisted past of the place, and the Sutpens, leached out into Jefferson and you know the rest. It was all started by Thomas Sutpen hisself, that man who should have been named David.
So that’s the short of it, about September 25, 1897. Gave rise to all of it, and all because William Faulkner was born right down the road in New Albany.
Apologies if you haven’t read The Fable, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers, Light in August, or Absalom, Absalom. Those are the Faulkner books where all that stuff up there came from, more or less in that order, but if you don’t know them, this has probably been several minutes of nonsense. But come on, if you haven’t read them, get started! I’d say The Reivers would be the best first choice; that first chapter of The Sound and the Fury can be a bit daunting.
