Posted on Saturday, February 12, 2005 - 05:03 pm:

To Howe, who didn't know him, Faulkner appeared perfectly sober. In fact, he was so excited and drunk that he made wildly inconsistent remarks. The South, he warned, was armed for revolt. All it needed was an incident to set it off. "If that girl goes back to Tuscaloosa," Faulkner told Howe, "she will die. Then the top will blow off. The government will send its troops and we'll be back at 1860. They must stop pushing those people. The trouble is the North doesn't know that country. They don't know the South will go to war."
Yet the Negro had a right to equality, he said. That was inevitable, "an irresistable force." Still, Faulkner didn't like enforced integration any more than enforced segregation. "As long as there's a middle road, all right, I'll be on it. But" -- and now his brother's remarks burst out of Faulkner's mouth -- "but if it came to fighting I'd fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I'm not going to shoot Mississippians."
"You mean white Mississippians?" Howe asked.
"No," Faulkner retorted. "I said Mississippians -- in Mississippi the problem isn't racial. Ninety percent of the Negroes are on one side with the whites, against a handful like me who believe that equality is important."
He said, "We know that racial discrimination is morally bad, that it stinks, that it shouldn't exist, but it does. Should we obliterate the persecutor by acting in a way that we know will send him to his guns, or should we compromise and let it work out in time and save whatever good remains in those white people?" This seemed a loose paraphrase of King's nonviolent message from Montgomery. "The Negroes are right," Faulkner went on to say; "make sure you've got that -- they're right." He had always been on their side and would go on saying that southern whites were wrong, their position unsupportable.
But if he had to make the same choice as Robert E. Lee, he would make it. Faulkner's great-grandfather had owned slaves and "must have known it was wrong," yet he fought in the Confederate Army, "not in defense of his ethical conviction but to protect his native land from being invaded."
Faulkner conceded that his middle-of-the-road position was vastly unpopular in Dixie. His fellow southerners sent him a lot of hate mail; some even phoned him at three and four in the morning and threatened to kill him.
"Do you carry a gun?" Howe asked.
"No," Faulkner said. "I don't think anyone will shoot me, it would cause too much of a stink. But the other liberals in my part of the country carry guns all the time."
When the interview appeared in the March 22 issue of The Reporter, it created a sensation. Time and Newsweek printed excerpts, including the remark about gunning down Negroes. Reporters hounded him for statements. Black novelist James Baldwin declared him "guilty of great emotional and intellectual dishonesty" in adhering to some chimerical middle of the road and then offering to shoot blacks in the streets. By then, Faulkner was sober and horrified. Surely he hadn't said that! He wrote Time that he had been misquoted. He hadn't seen the interview before it had appeared in The Reporter. "If I had, quotations from it which have appeared in Time could never have been imputed to me, since they contain opinions which I have never held, and statements which no sober man would make and, it seems to me, no sane man believe. That statement that I or anyone else in his right mind would choose any one state against the whole remaining Union of States, down to the ultimate price of shooting other human beings in the streets, is not only foolish but dangerous."
He sent The Reporter a similar denial. Unhappily for him, both The Reporter and Time published a rebuttal from Howe, who insisted that he'd recorded exactly what Faulkner had said. Saxe Commins, who was present during the interview, did not dispute Howe. Drunk and desperately concerned about his region and his country, Faulkner had blurted out things that would haunt him for the rest of his life. No wonder he thought that man's greatest curse was the ability to speak.
His only consolation was that Autherine Lucy elected not to return to the University of Alabama and almost certtain violence at the hands of its rabid segregationists; at least the country was spared the agony of something terrible happening to her. Still, Faulkner could not shake the image of crowds rioting on the Alabama campus. He wrote a prointegration student there that segregationists seemed only to function in mobs, because they were afraid to cope with problems singly and in daylight. By then, he thought enlightened college students the best hope of his embattled homeland.

Bill Faulkner can write a million Letters to the North as he did recently in LIFE, but for one thing he forgets that the people that he's talking to are Negroes and they're everywhere in the States and without sectional allegiance when it comes to the problem. The next thing he forgets is that Mose isn't in the market for his advice, because he's been knowing how to 'wait-a-while' -- Faulkner advice -- for over three hundred years, only he's never been simply waiting, he's been probing for a soft spot, looking for a hole, and now he's got the hole. Faulkner has delusions of grandeur because he really believes that he invented these characteristics which he ascribes to Negroes in his fiction and now he thinks he can end this great historical action just as he ends a dramatic action in one of his novels with Joe Christmas dead and his balls cut off by a man not nearly as worthy as himself; Hightower musing, the Negroes scared, and everything, just as it was except for the broodining, slightly overblown rhetoric of Faulkner's irony. Nuts! He thinks that Negroes exist simply to give ironic overtone to the viciousness of white folks, when he should know very well that we're trying hard as hell to free ourselves; thoroughly and completely, so that when we got the crackers off our back we can discover what we (Moses) really are and what we really wish to preserve out of the experience that made us.