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In that same interview, Faulkner insisted repeatedly that "the Negroes are right—make sure you've got that—they're right," and that Southern white racists "are wrong and their position untenable." But ripped from context, shooting in the streets made headlines. Negro Author James Baldwin condemned Faulkner, in large part for that statement, as "guilty of great emotional and intellectual dishonesty."
Faulkner himself followed up the headlines with letters to many newspapers insisting that he had been misquoted by Howe. What the letters naturally did not mention was the fact that at the time of the interview Faulk ner had spent several days working his way through a demijohn of bourbon, a bout set off by a running quarrel about the racial question with his brother John Faulkner, who was a diehard segregationist.
Stop a While. Not a call to arms for the South, but a plea to the North to "stop for a moment," to hold off forcible desegregation until the South had "a little time" to come to its senses and voluntarily grant the Negro's inevitable equality—this was Faulkner's concern in articles he wrote for LIFE and Ebony that same year. As early as 1948, Faulkner had put a similar plea in the mouth of Lawyer Stevens in Intruder in the Dust. And in a letter to a white student at the University of Alabama at the time of the riots over Autherine Lucy's admission, he wrote: "I vote that we ourselves choose to abolish [segregation], if for no other reason than, by voluntarily giving the Negro the chance for whatever equality he is capable of, we will stay on top; he will owe us gratitude; where, if his equality is forced on us by law, compulsion from the outside, he will be on top from being the victor, the winner against opposition. And no tyrant is more ruthless than he who was only yesterday the oppressed, the slave."
Such views hardly make a man a radical from the Northern point of view. But in Mississippi, Hodding Carter recalls, people who had always vaguely thought that "Bill Faulkner is one of us" by the mid-'50s were calling him "small-minded Willie, the nigger lover." He was the target of abusive mail and crank phone calls. Around Oxford there were stores and filling stations that refused to serve him.
They were wrong. No man was more fiercely loyal to his land and his people. But he wanted and demanded that the South cure itself. In the words of the rebellious Chick Mallison, looking at his relatives with sudden pride: "That was part of it too, that fierce desire that they should be perfect because they were his and he was theirs, that furious intolerance of any one single jot or tittle less than absolute perfection —that furious almost instinctive leap and spring to defend them from anyone anywhere so that he might excoriate them himself without mercy since they were his own and he wanted no more save to stand with them unalterable and impregnable: one shame if shame must be, one expiation must surely be but above all one unalterable durable impregnable one: one people one heart one land."