Social Debt Outside the “Common Run”: Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, Part One

Faulkner’s novel is many things at once: a murder mystery, a story of racial injustice on the eve of the civil rights movement, and something like picaresque become deadly serious. Faulkner is slippery. None of those things are as straightforward as they first appear. The story begins with Lucas Beauchamp, a black man, imprisoned in the county jail, accused of the murder of a white man named Vinson Gowrie. The story doesn’t begin there exactly, because the narrator explains why the main character, a sixteen-year-old boy named Charles “Chick” Mallison, has the bona fides to tell Lucas’ story: “Because he knew Lucas Beauchamp too—as well as that is any white person knew him. Better than any maybe unless it was Carothers Edmonds, on whose place Lucas lived seventeen miles from town, because he had eaten a meal in Lucas’ house”(3).

Faulkner uses the third person “he” for Chick, which can be dislocating, because the reader can get confused about just which “he” is being referred to in certain sentences. This “he” does important conceptual work, generating an imagined narrator distant from the events, setting the tale in the past. By way of “he” the novel reads like a contemporary moral fable. It first appeared in 1948, and the events it describes take place near then. (There is reference to the “atom bomb” later in its pages, for example.)

So Chick’s story with Lucas begins as the former sifts through his memory, explaining why he knows Lucas “as well as any white person knew him.” It all started when Chick went to the aforementioned Carothers Edmonds place to hunt rabbits. He’s accompanied by Aleck Sander, the son of the Mallisons’ housekeeper Paralee. At the Edmonds place, the two boys hunt with an unnamed “boy,” the son of one of Edmonds’ tenants. During the hunt Chick falls into a freezing creek. Lucas Beauchamp happens upon the scene, and he takes Chick to his home to dry his clothes, warm him up, and give him a hot meal. It’s an act of hospitality challenging certain features of the color line in Mississippi, yet any serious student of Southern history feels the unsaid things. Lucas does Chick a good turn, but he knows well enough the potential peril of the situation, that the Edmonds “boy” will catch hell if anything should happen to Chick, a privileged white boy in the company of two black boys.

Lucas Beauchamp is striking to Chick. He immediately recognizes the old man’s aura of authority:

“he could no more imagine himself contradicting the man [Lucas] striding on ahead of him than he could his grandfather, not from any fear or threat of reprisal but because like his grandfather the man striding ahead of him was simply incapable of conceiving himself by a child contradicted and defied” (8).

Necessity requires that Chick peel off all of his wet clothes before he freeze. Lucas orders him to do it.

‘Strip off,’ the man said.

‘No I—’ he said.

‘Strip off,’ the man said. So he stripped off the wet unionsuit too and then he was in the chair again in front of the now bright and swirling fire, enveloped in the quilt like a cocoon”(11).

Lucas then feeds the boys his own dinner to warm them up. Trouble ensues. Chick, embarrassed, disarmed—he had been naked as a jaybird for a moment in the presence of Lucas (by necessity, but nonetheless)—offers Lucas money for having taken care of him:

‘What’s that for?’ the man said, not even moving, not even tilting his face downward to look what was on his palm, for another eternity and only the hot dead moveless blood until at last it ran to rage so that at least he could bear the shame: he watched his palm turn over not flinging the coins but spurning them downward ringing onto the bare floor, bouncing and one of the nickels even rolling away in a long swooping curve with a dry minute sound like the scurry of small mouse: and then his voice:

‘Pick it up!’

Chick doesn’t pick it up, and so Lucas tells Aleck Sander and Edmonds’ “boy” to pick up the money and give it back. This is the decisive moment in the novel, and it happens only a few pages in.

Chick knows from that moment on he must make amends to Lucas. He has gravely offended him. He’s dishonored Lucas in his own home. Understanding the social order of which he’s a part in Jim Crow Mississippi makes Chick’s feeling of shame and guilt at the hands of Lucas even harder to take. He becomes utterly obsessed with it. Why on earth does he feel that way about a black man? And what is it about Lucas that makes him so commanding a presence? Why doesn’t Lucas know his place? Everyone around town knows about Lucas’ refusal to “know his place,” yet he manages to survive in this world nonetheless. How has he managed? Why are so many people in this strange world willing to allow him this space and why?

The answer is good and totally unsatisfactory at the same time. Lucas refuses his place and manages to survive in this violent corner of the world because he’s enormously shrewd and can pluck out every note of Southern etiquette, playing them all to near perfection. In the weeks and months after the incident at Lucas’ house, Chick attempts to do right by Lucas but comes up empty partly by accident and then again by design, as the latter outwits the former. Chick can’t escape his indebtedness to Lucas, his negative spot in the moral ledger of honorable Southern behavior, and so when Lucas needs him for serious matters, he can only come to his aid.

Intruder in the Dust is the story of a black man accused of killing a white man from an infamous, violent family of local outlaws. It’s lurid and sensationalistic, but at bottom it also involves the finer details of social etiquette among respectable people. The intensity of its concern with these very fine webs of human interaction remind me of Henry James in places. It being Faulkner and the American South, this concern lends the novel both its comedy and its deadly seriousness, its moral weight on a scale tipping from social offense to perilous risk of life. (The back and forth as Chick tries and fails to make amends to Lucas is comic before it gets serious.)

The totally unsatisfactory part comes from Lucas’ birthright and background. Lucas knows that most white folks are not his social betters. Chick knows about Lucas from a “fragment of the county’s chronicle which few if any knew better than his uncle: how the man [Lucas] was the son of one of old Carothers McCaslin’s, Edmonds’ great grandfather’s, slaves who had been not just old Carothers’ slave but his son too”(7). So Lucas’ aura of authority, his refusal to obey the etiquette of Jim Crow, comes from an older set of relations from before the Civil War.

Lucas’ sensibility lives on in a remnant of the Old South social order. So it’s not his blackness per se that makes him who he is, but his sense that he comes from something better, which he reenacts when he goes to town, dressing the part of a Southern grandee, refusing the insults of poor white trash, or for that matter refusing the money of some white boy from a family of reasonably respectable townspeople after showing him hospitality. Both are beneath him. If the stakes weren’t so high, and the courage of these characters so compelling, the reader could find the whole thing a satire at Lucas’ expense, as if he were a minstrel character putting on airs, ridiculously imitating the habits of white masters.

Yet, and this is a redeeming note, Lucas doesn’t live in some delusional fantasy world of Southern honor on the battlefield like other Faulkner characters (see Gail Hightower in Light in August, for example). He wears the mask. He understands clearly the stakes once he’s imprisoned for the murder of a white man, and he knows just who to ask for a favor once his life is under grave threat. He knows how Jim Crow works, and he gets how certain teenaged boys have fathers and uncles who tell them stories of Southern honor, valor, and courage. Chick must do the honorable thing and clear Lucas’s name. He owes him a debt ever since that moment with the coins in Lucas’ home. What Lucas asks him to do is outrageous, and yet Chick knows he must do it to restore his own honor. In a sparkling coup de grace, Lucas offers to pay Chick for his services: “‘I’m gonter pay you,’ Lucas said. ‘Name yo price at anything in reason and I will pay it’”(71).

The bullet in the back of Vinson Gowrie’s body did not come from Lucas’ gun. Lucas asks Chick to go out to the heart of Gowrie country, a place called “Beat Four”—the heart of violent, outlaw crackerdom—to retrieve Vinson Gowrie’s body from its grave, bringing it town so a coroner can prove his innocence. Lucas has refused to tell his story to the authorities, because understands Jim Crow justice. A black man, carrying a pistol and found over a white man’s dead body is guilty. It’s evidence enough. These, Chick tell us, are the “facts” of the case, and a white person would be delusional in that time and place to disregard them.

Lucas asks because he knows Chick is in his debt. The boy has a conscience. Lucas also knows something even more important, which Chick realizes after once again sifting through his memory for the right example, here a lesson learned from a black man named Old Ephraim. Ephraim’s lesson:

Young folks and womens, they ain’t cluttered. They can listen. But a middle-year man like your paw and your uncle, they cant listen. They aint got time. They’re too busy with facks. In fact, you mought bear this in yo mind; someday you mought need it. If you ever needs to get anything done outside the common run, dont waste yo time on the menfolks; get the womens and children to working at it (70).

Lucas’ charge made clear, Chick runs to his uncle Gavin for help. Gavin confirms what Lucas and Ephraim already know. Chick’s uncle is incredulous. He thinks Lucas is doing what any other murderer would do, namely lie. Rather than bother with exhuming Vinson Gowrie’s body for confirmation, in his capacity as Lucas’ lawyer, Gavin plans to work out a deal where Lucas pleads to manslaughter, which he thinks the District Attorney will accept. Gavin doesn’t want to see Lucas lynched, but he has no plans to go the extra mile on his behalf. This is the respectable position, the one where sometimes innocent men, if they happen to escape ritual murder, go to prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

Faulkner asks a difficult question for white Southerners in 1948. As generations move on and white supremacy can no longer be sustained by reasonable Southern white people, does any role remain for white Southern legend, for its tales of courage and honor in the face of overwhelming odds? Who will redeem the South this time around? Who will it be? And still, despite these peculiarities of time and place and Faulkner’s own complicated identity as a white Southerner, I think it’s safe to say that Intruder in the Dust, as a moral fable, resonates with events in our own time. It is women and children who must go “outside the common run” because white men cannot be made to believe.