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Burden remembers the time when her abolitionist father took her to the family graves and told her: "Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of. A race doomed and cursed to be for ever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins. Remember that. His doom and his curse. Forever and ever. Mine. Your mother's. Yours, even though you are a child. The curse of every white child that ever was born and that ever will be born. None can escape it."
And Joanna remembers: "I had seen and known Negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep. But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath."
On the Floor. Faulkner has explored this thesis in myriad ways, but none is more touching, or echoes the experiences of more Southerners, than the story of seven-year-old Roth Edmonds in Go Down, Moses. In all Roth's young life, his constant companion has been a Negro boy named Henry, son of a nearby Negro farmer. They have played and fished together, eaten the same meals and often slept in the same bed. "Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him." Roth decrees that Henry must sleep on a pallet on the floor. This primal wrong and first denial of equality leaves Roth in "a rigid fury of the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit." Just how far Mississippi's troubles extend back into history is examined in Absalom, Absalom! That history is inexorably racial. The novel mercilessly strips away the romantic Southern mythology to reveal the brutal repression of slavery, the arrogance of plantation owners who could summon Negro girls to their beds as if they were ordering the carriage brought around to the door, the guilt behind the Southern obsession with "purity of blood," and the consequences down through the generations of the white man's refusal ever to recognize his Negro offspring, his inability ever to say "my son, my son," to his dark-born child.
In a panting, difficult prose, the several 20th century narrators of Absalom, Absalom! pursue the story of Thomas Sutpen, who came to Mississippi with wagonloads of savage blacks in 1832 determined to change a lOO-sq.-mi. piece of virgin forest into a plantation. Sutpen is a creature of high-flown words and naked will—and perhaps the closest to a tragic hero in the classical Greek sense that U.S. literature has produced.