Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary (Southern Literary Studies)

Ledgers of History s ou t h e r n l i t e r a ry s t u di e s Fred Hobson, Series Editor Ledgers of History William...

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Ledgers of History

s ou t h e r n l i t e r a ry s t u di e s Fred Hobson, Series Editor

Ledgers of History William Faulkner an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary Memories of Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III

Sally Wolff

louisiana state university press baton rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press Copyright © 2010 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing de s ig n e r : Mandy McDonald Scallan t y p e fac e s : Whitman, text; Runic MT and Concorde Nova, display p r i n t e r a n d b i n d e r : Thomson-Shore, Inc. Portions of the text were first published in The Southern Literary Journal and appear here courtesy of The Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature. Reprinted with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Francisco, Edgar Wiggin, 1930– Ledgers of history : William Faulkner, an almost forgotten friendship, and an antebellum plantation diary : memories of Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III / Sally Wolff. p. cm. — (Southern literary studies) Interviews conducted with Edgar Wiggin Francisco in 2008. The interviews focus on his father’s friendship with William Faulkner and includes information about the Francis Terry Leak diary, which was familiar to Faulkner. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8071-3701-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Sources. 2. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Friends and associates. 3. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Settings. 4. Francisco, Edgar, 1897–1966—Friends and associates. 5. Leak, Francis Terry, 1803–1863 or 4—Diaries. 6. Francisco, Edgar Wiggin, 1930—Interviews. 7. Holly Springs (Miss.)—Biography. 8. Plantation life—Mississippi—History—19th century. I. Wolff, Sally. II. Title. PS3511.A86Z783255 2010 813'.52—dc22 2010020515 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. ∞

To Anne, with love —E.W.F. To Elaine Wolff, Dr. Sam Wolff, and Dr. Frederick King, with gratitude and love, and in loving memory of Haskell Wolff —S.W.

So he entered his heritage. He ate its bitter fruit. —w i l l i a m fau l k n e r , “The Fire and the Hearth,” in Go Down, Moses

The curse is slavery, which is an intolerable condition. —w i l l i a m fau l k n e r , in Frederick Gwynn, Faulkner in the University

[The ledgers] probably contained a chronological and much more comprehensive though doubtless tedious record than he would ever get from any other source. —w i l l i a m fau l k n e r , “The Bear,” in Go Down, Moses

Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Faulkner, the Franciscos, and the Leak Diary 1 Conversations with Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III 65 Notes 181 Works Cited and Consulted 195 Index 207

Illustrations follow page 64

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Preface Faulkner Country and Emory University

Since the 1950s, Faulkner country has been a part of the curriculum at Emory University. Students in the English Department have had the opportunity, first under the direction of Dr. Floyd Watkins, Candler Professor of American Literature, and now as a part of my courses, to travel to Mississippi in search of William Faulkner. Dr. Watkins traveled there to meet Faulkner in 1959, and in the 1970s he began taking his southern literature classes to Oxford, Mississippi, to see Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, and its environs. I was then an Emory graduate student in English and participated in one of the early excursions. Dr. Watkins and I later extensively interviewed Faulkner’s nephew James M. Faulkner, and, in 1996, I published a book of additional interviews.1 This literary pilgrimage to Faulkner country—now a fifty-year tradition—takes us into the world that gave rise to the author’s stories and novels. We set the tone for a weekend of southern exploration by lunching at the Golden Rule, a barbecue restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama. We stop at Elvis Presley’s shotgun-style birth home in Tupelo, Mississippi, for a look at the songwriter’s modest, intensely southern roots. We trek deeper into Faulkner territory. In Oxford, Meg Faulkner Du-

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Chaine—daughter of the late James M. Faulkner, and great-niece of William Faulkner—hosts our annual trip along with her husband, John DuChaine. They welcome us to their pre–Civil War home and share family stories about their famous great-uncle. They display and discuss family heirlooms that belonged to William Faulkner, including items that belonged to his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, such as the family Bible and a handwritten genealogy; sailing equipment from Faulkner’s sailboat, the Ring Dove; and their first editions of Faulkner’s novels. She leads us on a tour of Faulkner’s home, which he named Rowan Oak, as well as her own home, designed by the same architect. Both are antebellum structures with long histories. We visit other sites in town and around the county that Faulkner wove into his stories, including antebellum houses such as the Chandler House, which Faulkner may have used as one model for The Sound and the Fury. Out into the county we pass by an old, weathered, never painted, wooden home that is perhaps reminiscent of one portrayed by Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! We visit the St. Peter’s Episcopal Cemetery, where the Faulkner family members are buried, and we pay our respects at the graves of William Faulkner and his wife, Estelle. The tour continues to College Hill Presbyterian Church, where Faulkner was married. This church figures in Absalom, Absalom! We stop at Square Books, a bookstore on the town square that specializes in Faulkner editions and other southern literature titles. Finally, the group dines on fried, broiled, or blackened catfish at a down-home country restaurant known as Taylor Grocery, a landmark steeped in lore, with walls plastered with mementos of the past. Although much of what Faulkner knew in the area has now deteriorated or disappeared completely, through our class preparations, studied observations, thorough examination of the writer’s home environment, and, finally, the opportunity to hear his relatives tell their tales, Faulkner’s time and place become more accessible to students. “I Can’t Go on the Trip, but I Knew William Faulkner”: Meeting Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer this journey to Faulkner country not only to Emory students but also to alumni of the university. In re-

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sponse to an e-mail invitation to alumni in the Atlanta, Georgia, area, I received this intriguing message: “I can’t go on the trip, but I knew William Faulkner.” Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III sent that note. I called and asked to interview him—he agreed. I visited Dr. and Mrs. Francisco at their home in Norcross, Georgia. Their son, Ted, joined us as well. For two hours on March 15, 2008, Dr. Francisco told captivating stories about his father, Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr., who, along with his son—my interlocutor, Edgar Francisco III—were great-grandson and great-great-grandson of Francis Terry Leak, a mid-nineteenth-century Mississippi plantation owner. As this book goes to press in 2010, Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III is seventy-nine years old. He holds six degrees from several academic institutions, including a bachelor’s degree from Southwestern at Memphis, in Tennessee, now Rhodes College; a master’s degree in psychology from Emory University; a master of science in industrial management from Georgia Tech; a master’s degree in public health from the Yale School of Medicine; and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University. His career focused on health-care policy management, and he was part of a team that authored the Title 18 and 19 sections for Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Francisco spent many years living in Vermont, but he never forgot his deep Mississippi roots. He is shy, courteous, and modest. Over the years, he kept his vivid memories of his childhood to himself. He grew up at McCarroll Place, his family’s pre–Civil War house in Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of Oxford. John McCarroll, his great-great-grandfather on his father’s mother’s side, built the house in 1833. Dr. Francisco’s father and William Faulkner were friends. Dr. Francisco remembers that William Faulkner was a frequent guest at McCarroll Place during the late 1930s and that his father said Faulkner had been his friend for thirty years. After two hours of interviewing, during which we discussed his family’s background and lineage, and Dr. Francisco offered personal, but general, reminiscences about how William Faulkner and his father became friends, Dr. Francisco said, “Well, we haven’t scratched the surface.” I knew more stories would come. Then his wife, Anne Salyerds Francisco, said, “Why don’t you show her the diaries?” “What diaries?” I asked. He replied, “The diaries of my greatgreat-grandfather, Francis Terry Leak.” He disappeared from the room and

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returned momentarily with a single bound volume—one of a number of typescript volumes, he explained, written originally in longhand in the 1800s by his ancestor, who had owned plantation lands in north Mississippi. He handed the volume to me. I opened it and looked at the typescript pages. Among them were some facsimiles of an original diary, handwritten on ledger paper. The handwriting was in the nineteenth-century style and difficult to decipher. Seeing the ledger instantly brought to mind the ledger sections in Go Down, Moses. One entry especially caught my eye—a list of the amounts of money paid for individual slaves. I began to ask more questions. “Have you read much of William Faulkner’s writing?” Dr. Francisco answered, “Not much.” “Have you read Go Down, Moses?” “No.” “Did your father read much that Faulkner wrote?” “No.” “Did William Faulkner ever see this diary?” This time the answer was “Yes.” In that moment, I sensed that “The Diary of Francis Terry Leak” may have influenced not only the ledger and slave sale records depicted in Go Down, Moses but also—what careful study has suggested even more strongly—that the diary also may have been an important source for much more of William Faulkner’s work. My first interview with Dr. Francisco occurred on March 15, 2008, and interviews, conversations, and e-mails between us have occurred periodically since that day. Some material in the second part of the interview section, titled “Holly Springs,” comes from a three-day visit Dr. Francisco, his wife Anne, and I made to the town from August 30 through September 1, 2008. This visit included extensive videotapings of interviews at McCarroll Place and some other sites. The material appearing in the section of the book titled “Conversations with Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III” is organized by topic rather than chronologically. Such a method seemed to me the best way to achieve clarity and succinctness in the presentation. All the comments presented under a particular topic were not necessarily made during the same interview, since in several cases I had follow-up questions later, and Dr. Francisco or his wife offered additional comments after further reflection. For the sake of history and academic scholarship, we are planning to deposit at a museum or library the interviews and other relevant materials collected in the preparation of this book.

Acknowledgments My deepest gratitude and thanks go to my mother, Elaine Wolff; my husband, Dr. Frederick A. King; and my brother, Dr. Sam Wolff, for their support, constancy, and help. To my beloved father, Haskell Wolff, who recently passed away, I offer my most heartfelt devotion and dedication. To Dr. Marie Nitschke, who was enjoying her retirement from her role of reference librarian at the Emory University Woodruff Library until I called her with many special reference requests associated with the preparation of this volume, I offer my great thanks. She graciously devoted time to researching and responding to complex reference questions, locating difficult-to-find information, conducting genealogical research, and offering expert advice at every turn. To my mentors, Drs. Floyd Watkins, William Dillingham, Peter Dowell, Ronald Schuchard, David Minter, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Bill Gruber, and Irwin Hyatt, all of whom I knew at Emory University, I offer my deep and lasting appreciation for your wisdom, fine teaching, and inspiring research. To Dr. Dillingham, I extend special thanks for reading multiple drafts of this manuscript, commenting often, and offering vital advice. To Mary Ellen Templeton, also a retired Emory librarian, I offer my gratitude for the many ways she assisted, including transcribing the videotapes, conducting complex research, and problem solving in manuscript

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preparation. To Dr. Conrad DeBold and Dr. Virginia Ross Taylor, thank you for reading drafts and for your expert advice, comments, and suggestions. To Erin Mooney, instruction and reference librarian at the Woodruff Library at Emory, my thanks for your assistance in locating materials and responding to many questions. To Janet Jones of Benton County, Mississippi, I offer most sincere thanks for assisting with genealogical research. To Anne Salyerds Francisco, we offer thanks for urging Dr. Francisco to respond to my alumni invitation and accept my request for an interview. Without her persuasive encouragement, we would not have a book, which the Franciscos now look forward to being read by grandchildren Edgar Wiggin V (T. J.), Madison Elyse, and Jack McCarroll Francisco. To Edgar Wiggin Francisco IV (Ted) we offer thanks for his support and his participation in the interviews and the gatherings in Holly Springs. To John Courtland Francisco we offer thanks for his support and his photographs of furniture from McCarroll Place. Our gratitude also goes to Connie and Harvey Payne and Pauline Evans of Holly Springs, Mississippi, for hosting our group for dinner during a research trip there. We appreciate your generous hospitality. I also extend my gratitude to Emory Vice President Gary S. Hauk, Emory College Dean Robert A. Paul, and English Department Chairs William Gruber and Richard Rambuss for their generosity in funding annual class and research trips to Mississippi and support of my work; and to my brother Sam Wolff, Steve Sencer, Chris Kellner, Thomas Todd, and Harold Marquis for their superb advice and legal counsel on difficult matters. Our thanks go to George Nikas of Atlanta for his excellent photographs of various subjects included herein and for his videography of Dr. Edgar Francisco. I express my gratitude, too, to Mr. Tim West and Mr. Matt Turi, and the librarians at the Wilson Library, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for their assistance with research materials. I gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from the Francis Terry Leak Papers in the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During book preparations, we hosted a special occasion in Holly Springs. We arranged with Laukhauf’s, stained-glass experts from Memphis, to produce a replica of the original window pane at McCarroll Place that contained Ludie Baugh’s etching. Three renowned scholars, Dr. Jay Watson, University of Mississippi; Dr. John Lowe, Louisiana State University; and Dr. Noel Polk, Mississippi State University, gathered to view Ludie’s window. We are most appreciative of their contributions to the project. Ms.

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Pauline Evans prepared refreshments. Dr. Lowe, who officially read and evaluated the book manuscript for LSU Press, offered remarks. Lois Swaney Shipp and her husband, Ira Shipp, representing the Marshall County Museum, attended, and we are especially appreciative of Lois’s opening the museum that weekend. We thank Rev. Milton Winter, who lived at McCarroll Place for many years and who has been helpful in our research, for joining us that evening. We also thank Harvey and Connie Payne, who have been very helpful throughout the project, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Todd, Mary Ellen Templeton, and George Nikas for joining us as well. After the presentations we hosted a dinner at Montrose, and we thank Diane Greer and Maia Miller for catering a delightful meal. Mayor André DeBerry joined us for dessert.


Ledgers of History


Faulkner, the Franciscos, and the Leak Diary In the interviews in this volume, Dr. Edgar Francisco III states unequivocally that as a child in the 1930s, he witnessed the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” in the hands of William Faulkner. Dr. Francisco says that Faulkner not only read the diary, but that he “pored over” it “many times” during the course of approximately twenty years.1 Careful study suggests that Faulkner drew from the Leak Diary for his fiction. The diary evinces strong connections to some of Faulkner’s most powerful ideas and themes, and some of his best-known fictional characters seem to be derived, at least in part, from the real people whose lives he read about there. In many instances, these people were slaves on the Leak plantation. For 155 years, the McCarroll/Francisco family lived continuously in the same home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and, indeed, they still own McCarroll Place. The hand-hewn logs John R. McCarroll used in 1833 to construct the original three-room log cabin are still holding their own in their 177th year. A family history of the home notes that “McCarroll Place was built before Holly Springs took its charter,” and says it is “the only residence in the city owned and occupied continuously by five generations of one family,” with “John R. McCarroll being the first” and Dr. Edgar Francisco III, whose interviews follow this essay, the fifth generation.2

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William Faulkner was fascinated with this family because of their longevity in the same house, their participation in plantation life and slavery, and the effects of the Civil War on their lives and community. Faulkner apparently found captivating and affecting the diary of their ancestor, Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy Mississippi plantation owner who, between 1839 and 1862, hand-wrote extensive farm ledgers, or diaries, that record the day-to-day details of life on the plantation. The McCarroll/Francisco family preserved this set of diaries at McCarroll Place until 1946, when they donated the original manuscript of the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the manuscript is now held in the Southern Historical Collection of the Wilson Library. Faulkner frequently ventured to Holly Springs to visit his good friend Edgar Francisco Jr. at home. The men’s childhood friendship had endured into adulthood; they often hunted together and socialized at McCarroll Place. There, as a child, Dr. Francisco witnessed Faulkner reading and rereading the Leak Diary, taking notes from it, and even angrily addressing the diarist. Faulkner’s study of the diary became a regular part of his visits to McCarroll Place; after socializing with his friend, Faulkner would request a particular volume of the diary, which Edgar Jr. would bring out. As Faulkner immersed himself in reading the old leather-bound ledgers, Edgar Jr. and his young son knew that the social part of their visit had come to an end. The interviews with Dr. Francisco also bring to light Faulkner’s fascination with some of the stories that Edgar Jr. often told when they met at McCarroll Place. Faulkner seems to have enjoyed hearing and discussing the stories from the McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family history and from their own childhoods as much as Edgar Jr. liked telling them. “Tell me again, Edgar,” is the refrain that Dr. Francisco remembers hearing from Faulkner as the men relaxed while sharing the familiar tales. Some of these stories, too, as recounted by Dr. Francisco, seem to have found their way into Faulkner’s fictional work. Francis Terry Leak and his plantation diary, the history of the McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family, and Faulkner’s relationship with the Franciscos as described in the interviews receive full attention here. Faulkner’s long familiarity with and study of the Leak Diary necessitates a thorough study of the possible connections to the diary in individual works by Faulkner. The McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family stories that Dr. Francisco describes at length in these interviews—stories that

fau l k n e r , t h e f r a n c i s c o s , a n d t h e l e a k di a r y 3

Faulkner delighted in hearing and discussing over many years at McCarroll Place—receive due consideration, too, as does their apparent influence, and that of McCarroll Place and its environs, on Faulkner’s work. The “Diary of Francis Terry Leak”

Francis Terry Leak lived from 1803 to 1863 and resided in Rockingham, North Carolina, his obituary states, “until 1834, when upon the opening of the Chickasaw section in North Mississippi, he removed and settled near Salem.”3 He developed plantations in Mississippi and Arkansas and became wealthy. His original diary, consisting of handwritten ledger books, covers the period from 1839 to 1862. The Leak Diary primarily contains the accounting ledgers for daily business involving the Leak plantations, including food and goods bought for consumption and use—such as sugar, coffee, molasses, and clothing and shoes for the white family and the slaves—as well as lumber and other building materials purchased for the construction of the house and other structures, various implements, and other farm equipment. The Leak Diary is a fascinating document in its own right. Its detailed entries, written over almost a quarter of a century, provide a compelling portrait of antebellum plantation life. Leak not only carefully recorded his own financial transactions, but he also apparently acted as the executor for other estates. Wealthy enough to serve almost as a banker, he lent money to fellow farmers, friends, neighbors, and others; throughout the diary, he tracked the debts each person owed him and when the debt payments came due. Displaying a gift for written expression, the diarist recorded the purpose and content of his constant correspondence with others, and he annually listed amounts of cotton picked, shipped, and sold. Although many of his diary entries seem dispassionate, or at least emotionally understated, he sometimes took pen to paper to describe for posterity his deep reservoir of feelings—the joy, grief, worry, and satisfaction that he felt at the births and deaths of family and community members. He recorded with sorrow and stoicism his son Henry’s death and the all-too-frequent deaths of other children. Trained as a lawyer, Leak regularly transacted land and slave sales; adjudicated the wills and estates of those who sought out his judgment and expertise; initiated, fought off, and settled lawsuits; and engaged in other

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complex legal and financial transactions on his own behalf and on behalf of others. His clear, straightforward, legalistic prose shows him to have been a shrewd lawyer and businessman. In keeping with a plantation owner’s concerns, Leak also used his diary to monitor and record many matters including the weather conditions: temperature, wind, monthly and seasonal climate changes, and rainfall and snowfall levels. He accurately described the appearance and trajectory of two comets that he saw with the naked eye. He recorded his impressions of the work of his slaves (whom he referred to as “the negroes”), hog killings, reports of earth tremors, his purchase of Choctaw land, and his responses to the coming Civil War. He carefully documented the medical conditions of his family, slaves, friends, neighbors, and himself, as well as of livestock. He detailed the disorders and noted the treatments that were essayed and the cause of death of those who perished. The frequent accounts of death in the diary entries are particularly poignant. Leak expressed his fervent support of the Confederate cause in the diary, including his early commitment of five thousand dollars to the Confederate States of America, followed by other donations. He also notes his having contributed clothing to the regiment of Colonel Falkner—William Faulkner’s great-grandfather. Leak won the gratitude of Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials with his loans and gifts. His death in 1863 was directly related to the effects of the Civil War. An obituary states that Leak lived in Salem, Mississippi, until “the approach of the Abolition army made it unsafe for a man of his known devotion to the interests of the South to remain any longer. Banished from his home, he sought a place of refuge from the enemies of his country, and temporarily stopping with a friend of his youth and a relative, he was seized with a fever, which terminated his earthly existence. His disease was the result of exposure, coupled with anxiety in regard to a beloved son, a prisoner among the enemy, who fell, severely wounded, at Perryville, Ken[tucky], in October last.”4 In 1946, the Francisco family agreed to give the original, handwritten copy of the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” to the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; in return, the family asked the library to prepare a typed transcription of the original and give Edgar Francisco Jr. a set of the bound volumes.5 Chapel Hill seemed the fitting repository to the Francisco family because Leak, a native of North Carolina, had been admitted to the North Carolina bar, and his son Walter John Leak


had graduated from Chapel Hill.6 The donation went forward, and Chapel Hill produced a typescript of the manuscript. Both Emory University and the University of Mississippi purchased a microfilm copy of the typescript sometime after University Publications of America produced microfilm entitled Records of Ante-bellum Southern Plantations in 1985 and offered it for sale in 1991. The original oversized, handwritten ledgers remain in the Wilson Library, some under seal because of their fragile condition. The manuscript of the diary has been available from the time of its donation in 1946, and scholars of southern history, including Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, have studied it for its general significance as a typical plantation diary.7 The Leak Diary is part of the tradition of diary writing that arose in the plantation culture. Hundreds of planters kept records in some form that primarily dealt with the running of their plantations. A large number appear as diaries, and many are extant. James Oakes notes that the growth of a “literature of the plantation management” also included articles and manuals, and that this tradition “flourished in the South in the three or four decades before the Civil War.”8 The main goal of the writing and record keeping was an efficiently run plantation, and diaries assisted farmers by noting successful farm practices, advice, and instruction for plantation owners. James Oakes sees capitalism in the foreground of every such diary: “every tedious journal entry recording the weather, the conditions and whereabouts of the field hands, or the number of rows planted, weeds dug, or bales packed was sparked by the capitalist world’s demand for cotton.”9 He further notes that “slaveholders learned the value of detailed recordkeeping. In the 1760’s the Jerdone family of Virginia maintained records of its slave holdings under a ‘list of tithes.’ After the Revolution, it simply became a ‘list of taxable property.’”10 Francis Terry Leak saw the value in list making; his diary includes many lists—from the amount of money paid for slaves; the items of clothing ordered for each one; quantities of food bought, including goods such as coffee, sugar, and molasses; to the amount of cotton picked, the number of bales shipped downriver, and those registered as received in New Orleans. Plantation diarists generally discussed in their writings the realities of plantation management: the plagues and other illnesses that befell the members of their community; planting practices; the cotton price fluctua-

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tions, which some considered to be beyond their control; what they paid for slaves; the typical and/or unusual punishments for slaves who violated their rules; the prices of sugar, coffee, and other goods; the weather and other meteorological conditions and their effects on farming practices; religion; God; travel; their social lives, and the approach of the Civil War. James Oakes describes M. W. Philips as a successful farmer who wrote about some of these issues: “As a planter in Hinds County, Mississippi, Philips was undoubtedly a spectacular success. . . . He seems to have run his farm as closely as possible to his managerial ideals, but he was periodically bothered by foul weather, bad overseers, and high rates of sickness and death among his slaves.”11 Similar circumstances plagued Francis Terry Leak, who wrote in his diary of these and other problems. He was meticulous in recording all purchases, and much more, but especially in tracking the amount of cotton produced on, sold, and shipped from his plantation. Leak also liked to invent, and he considered and outlined ways to make improvements in the farm equipment and practices of the day. He envisioned a gun for the soldiers that would fire five bullets at one blast and proposed it for the Confederate army. Life during the Civil War was arduous for most people in the South. James Roark writes that “shortages of food and clothing, of credit and money, became common on most plantations.”12 One Louisiana plantation owner recorded in 1862 “no shoes, no clothing[,] nothing to eat. . . . Famine stares us in the face I fear.”13 Diarists eventually began to describe other aspects of the war and noted the burning of their own lands and cotton to prevent the Yankees from profiting from their product. Leak, too, described this practice in his diary. As did many of his neighbors, he burned his own crops to prevent Yankee appropriation of them. Diarists also recorded rules for slave behavior and noted the activities they undertook to ensure certain outcomes. James Oakes points to the “Highland Plantation in southern Louisiana,” in which “Bennet Barrow copied a typical set of rules into his diary in 1838. ‘The very security of the plantation requires that a general and uniform control over the people of it should be exercised. . . . Because the slaves could not leave, they should be made ‘as comfortable as possible.’”14 Barrow did engage in violent behavior, however, toward slaves who disobeyed his rules. Leak, by contrast, describes giving whippings only on rare occasions, and he made a point of


officiating at slave weddings on his plantation and hosting barbecues for enjoyment of the slaves. He noted these events in his diary and seemed pleased by the festive occasions he sponsored on behalf of his slaves. Some of the names found in the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” that also appear in William Faulkner’s works are present in other Mississippi diaries produced during the same time.15 Faulkner could have encountered these names in the Leak Diary or in other, similar diaries of the period—or heard them elsewhere. Bills, Malone, Mercer, Ruffin, Turnbull, Ervin, Bowman, and Kiger were planters who lived in relatively close proximity to Francis Terry Leak during his lifetime. Their diaries and plantation books treat issues of plantation management similar to those detailed by Leak. Mississippi and Tennessee diaries, for example, focus on rules and guidelines for slaves, the weather and planting information, lists of items dispensed to slaves, slave lists, and lists of animals killed for food. Francis Leak’s diary includes similar topics and detail. In the “Diary of William Ethelbert Irvin,” the planter lists rules that he devised: “Rules to be observed on my place from & after the first of January 1847”: Each family to live in their own house The husband to provide fire wood and see that they are all provided for wait on his wife The wife to cook & was for the husband and her children and attend to the mending of cloths failure on eather [sic] part when proven Shall and must be corrected by words first but if not reformed to be corrected by the Whip.16 Ervin’s diary, like that of Francis Terry Leak, records weather and planting progress, in which he notes how many slaves are working on a specific activity: “Wednesday Clear, ploughs finished 50 acre field Brother Schafer preached 3 commenced in Hodge’s field 6 commenced behind the hoes.”17 John Houston Bills (1843–1871) kept track of weather and disease outcomes: “Weather is still fine & health generally good, many cases of colds commonly called the ‘Tyler Grippe’ which are very distracting for about 24 hours; but in no case fatal.”18 The James H. Ruffin Records detail the number of wagon loads of corn and include a list of the hogs killed this year and their weights: “1841 Commenced hauling corn at the other place October 6th and finished the 8th/Williams waggon 37 loads. Jacobs waggon 36 loads./Jacobs waggon had to be repaired which threw him behind. . . .

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A list of the hogs killed this year and their weights/Dec. 6th Killed 4 wild hogs, weights as follows. Llbs. 117. 112. 85. 125.”19 William B. Turnbull, in the Turnbull-Bowman-Lyons Family Papers, lists slave ages and purchase prices: “Negroes purchased by Mr Wm B. Turnbull”: William Curtis 30 Brick Layer Jerry 35 700 Joshua 24 900 .......................... Sarah 22 700 Fanny 21 700 .......................... Jim Bartlett 48 Carpenter 20

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Farm diaries like these may have been available to Faulkner and could have had an impact on his work. For example, Don Doyle noted that William Faulkner wrote in a letter that he had “borrow[ed] John Spencer Bassett’s book on Polk’s overseers,” which Doyle identifies as The Plantation Overseer. Doyle adds that, “Whether or not [Faulkner] would call this researching the story, it was informed by the accounts of Chunky Jack, Gilbert and the rest.”21 Joseph Blotner reminds us that Faulkner kept his own farm diary, in which he listed “all the purchase entries for half a dozen Negro families.”22 Blotner suggests that Faulkner’s diary, and others like it, may have been the inspiration for the fictional commissary-style farm diary in Go Down, Moses. That Faulkner bought an antebellum house, restored it, lived in it, and kept a diary with purchase entries may indicate his desire to see himself as a part of the plantation tradition. An assortment of letters reprinted in the Bassett volume demonstrates the varying degrees of literacy of plantation overseers. This fact alone might make them plausible models for the colloquialisms and spelling errors that Buck and Buddy make in their ledger entries in Go Down, Moses. Francis Terry Leak, by contrast, only occasionally misspelled in his ledgers. The few misspellings in the Leak Diary, however, are remarkably similar to those Faulkner assigns to his characters in his novel. In this way, he resembles Buck and Buddy, the chronic misspellers of Go Down, Moses. Leak’s evident literacy, his business acumen, his law degree and use of legal language,


and his significant land ownership, however, are suggestive of Faulkner’s fictional grand landowners John Sartoris and Thomas Sutpen. The Leak Diary covers an extensive time period in voluminous detail. William Faulkner’s ready access to this particular set of ledgers, his repeated readings of it, as well as his close friendship with its owner make this particular plantation diary a likely source of material for his fiction. Not only could Faulkner sit and read these ledgers at his leisure, but he could also discuss, over many years, their nuances with his friend Edgar Jr., greatgrandson of the diarist. He could listen to Edgar Jr. tell the family stories that made the life and times of the diarist even more real and illustrated more fully the close connection of history with the present. These tales, a number of which have their roots in the plantation activities described in the diary, must have seemed to underscore for Faulkner his view that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”23 McCarroll/Leak/Francisco Family History

The McCarroll/Leak/Francisco family history is crucial to understanding the relationships discussed in the accompanying interviews with Dr. Francisco and their implications for Faulkner’s work. John Ramsey McCarroll was the great-great-grandfather of Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III. John McCarroll owned a large farm in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Francis Terry Leak owned one of the largest plantations in north Mississippi; he was also an influential and prominent member of the community. The McCarroll farm was 160 acres; Leak’s landholdings, located in Salem, Mississippi, and the surrounding area, not far from Holly Springs, included approximately 1,350 acres, with additional lands in Arkansas. Leak and McCarroll became connected when Leak’s son, Walter John Leak, married McCarroll’s daughter, Amelia, in 1866. Amelia moved from the McCarroll Place homestead to the Leak plantation, which was still in operation and presumably being run by Walter John. In 1872, Walter John Leak died at age thirty-eight. Amelia and Walter John had lost their son but had one child who lived: Betsy Leak, who married Edgar W. Francisco Sr., Dr. Francisco’s grandfather. Amelia returned home to McCarroll Place, and Dr. Francisco reports that his father seemed reluctant to discuss why Amelia had come home, and said only that it had been a very unhappy situation. When asked if not having produced a male heir could have been the prob-

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lem, Dr. Francisco replied, “Yes.” Amelia had brought her young daughter, Betsy, back home with her. Amelia also brought the original, handwritten “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” with her to McCarroll Place, and family members passed it down through the generations. Edgar Francisco Jr. inherited the diary from his mother during the long years of his friendship with William Faulkner. Dr. Francisco—the great-great-grandson of both Francis Terry Leak and John R. McCarroll—was present as a young boy in the McCarroll/Francisco household during some of the years when William Faulkner and Edgar Jr. were friends. He heard the two men talk about the past—about Edgar’s landowning great-grandfathers, the McCarroll and Leak plantations, slavery, and the Civil War as it affected the area as a whole, and the Leak and McCarroll families in particular. As a boy listening to the two men, “Little Eddie”—as Faulkner then called Edgar III—knew that if he missed one of the stories, the cycle of storytelling would begin again on another occasion, and he would have another chance to hear it. William Faulkner and Edgar Francisco Jr. became friends through the close acquaintanceship of their mothers. Maud Butler Falkner and Betsy Leak Francisco took their sons to each other’s birthday parties as small children. The boys soon outgrew the birthday parties arranged by their mothers, but their friendship endured. The Faulkner family brought young Will—as the Francisco family knew Faulkner—north from Oxford to the McCarroll homestead to spend the day at McCarroll Place when his other family members journeyed on to Memphis. Will and Edgar, as boys as young as ten and then as young men, hunted together—first for rabbit, then squirrel, and later quail. As young adults, they attended dances with girls in Holly Springs. As men—both small in stature—they had much in common, including their interests in dancing, tennis, and especially hunting. Will and Edgar enjoyed sitting together on the gallery at McCarroll Place and telling stories and drinking beer.24 In middle age, they still reminisced about family, their boyhood years, and the pre–Civil War past of Edgar’s family—the McCarrolls and the Leaks. Faulkner was particularly taken with the story of “Ludie’s window” at McCarroll Place; with the tale about the buried McCarroll family silver; and with the childhood reminiscence of the oneeyed pony that Faulkner, Edgar Jr., and their friend Lenso had tried to ride as boys. These stories were told and discussed over and over, while Little Eddie, the future Dr. Francisco, listened unobtrusively—but intently. 25


The friendship between Faulkner and Edgar Jr. would thrive for thirty years, until, just after World War II, the two men, then in their forties, went their separate ways. They did so partly as a result of the normal course of life, since they had less time for hunting and visiting. Another reason for the rupture in their relationship, however, according to Dr. Francisco, was that Edgar Jr.’s wife, Ruth Bitzer Francisco—every bit the daughter of a staunch Presbyterian minister—utterly disapproved of William Faulkner.26 According to Dr. Francisco, his mother’s negative opinion of Faulkner began the day she returned to Holly Springs, in 1929, as the new Mrs. Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. Ruth and Edgar Jr. had been married the day before in North Carolina, and the couple had a one-day honeymoon before departing for the long, dusty trip back to Mississippi. They arrived at McCarroll Place to find William Faulkner lounging in a rocking chair on the open gallery—his usual place when visiting Edgar Jr. He had come to welcome the newlyweds home but was already partaking of some of the iced-down beer he had brought along. He held up a couple of squirrels he had shot for the occasion that he had planned to skin for dinner as a presentation to the newlyweds. According to her son, the new Mrs. Francisco was shocked and appalled to see this man waiting there, liquid refreshment in hand, on the gallery of what was to be her new home. Then, too, she was rather repulsed by his string of dead squirrels. To her mind, he was none too well attired, either. To make matters suddenly and precipitously worse, however, Will shouted out to Edgar his admiration of the “cute little filly Edgar had caught himself,” of the “spirited little filly” he had found: “a live one, Edgar, you’ll have to break her in.”27 Mrs. Francisco was deeply offended by Faulkner’s language and behavior, and, according to her son, she never recovered from her initial impression of him.28 Over the years, other conflicts arose between William Faulkner and Ruth Francisco, including Faulkner’s opposition to the Holly Springs Pilgrimage, an annual spring celebration during which the townspeople dress in Civil War period costume and open their antebellum homes to visitors—one of Ruth Bitzer Francisco’s favorite activities. Ruth Francisco had been one of the prime movers in organizing the Holly Springs Pilgrimage and devoted much time to developing it over many years. Faulkner objected to what he considered to be the romanticized portrayal of the Old South. He disapproved of the Pilgrimage women wearing hoop skirts, for example. “These women are beautifying history—

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and the hoop skirts—it’s fake, Edgar,” Faulkner would say. “Keep the hoop skirts and plug hats out,” he reiterated later to one of his book publishers as he described his intended focus in Absalom, Absalom!29 Eventually, Ruth Francisco would ask that neither her husband nor her son admit to their friends in Holly Springs that they even knew William Faulkner. Father and son acceded to her wishes. Indeed, for long decades Dr. Francisco refrained from acknowledging to anyone his relationship, or that of his family, with William Faulkner. “Little Eddie’s” reasons for avoiding talking about “Will” and reading his works reach deeper into memory, however: “My mother’s admonition didn’t have much to do with it, but my own feelings of responsibility for my great-great-grandfather’s slave ownership did,” he says, recalling his own emotional response. Only as he approaches his eightieth year has Dr. Francisco been willing, for the sake of history and academic scholarship, and at the urging of his wife, Anne Salyerds Francisco, to discuss the friendship of his father with Faulkner— and the diary that had fascinated the writer. Holly Springs

The McCarroll/Francisco family had resided legally in Holly Springs, Mississippi, since March 1, 1833, the date that John R. McCarroll, great-grandfather of Dr. Francisco, was allowed to build.30 McCarroll was preceded there by only a few other people, notably Robert Burrell Alexander, who, as the historian William Baskerville Hamilton records, was “the first white settler,” arriving in 1830 and building a “two-room log cabin.”31 Other early settlers, whose names resonate in Faulkner’s fiction, were Alex T. Caruthers, Anthony P. Armstead, and William L. Baird.32 The land around what is now Holly Springs was frontier, primarily forest, with Indian inhabitants and a few trading posts, until the Chickasaw Cession of 1832.33 Settlers who moved into the area, predominantly from Virginia and North Carolina, found a large spring surrounded by holly trees. The spring was “about thirty feet wide and ten deep” and, according to early descriptions, was deep enough for “swimming a horse.”34 The longevity of residents in this area is also noteworthy. Alice Long and Mark Ridge note that some residents still live “on land their ancestors purchased in the 1830s during the Chickasaw Cession.”35 Over the decades, the McCarroll/Francisco family has added rooms to


the house John McCarroll built as a three-room log cabin in Holly Springs. The original kitchen was a freestanding structure outside the main house. Distancing the kitchen from the rest of the home in this manner was a common practice in the nineteenth-century South. The purpose was to minimize the risk of fire in the living quarters. McCarroll also added a gallery to the west side of the house; here Faulkner and Edgar Jr. would sit, over the years, talking, reminiscing, and telling stories. Another large spring, once about ten feet wide and knee deep, ran close to McCarroll Place. Dr. Francisco recalls that family members, workers, and others would stop at the flowing spring for a drink of water. Workers on the place would fill buckets of water there. Dr. Francisco and his father would stop there for a drink of water. Well-established Indian trails went down from the road to and from the spring. Passersby would also stop for water. Dr. Francisco remembers sitting by the spring located down the hill from his house. It was “so quiet at the spring—a tranquil, peaceful, and quiet place. It made you feel like you were in another world. No houses were anywhere around, and you could almost imagine that you were totally alone. Nobody was there at all. Then suddenly it was back to reality—a car would go by on the road at the top of the hill, as someone traveled from Memphis to Tupelo. Will and Dad would go to this spring for water before they went hunting. They had to walk through the pasture to reach the woods, and the McCarrolls kept cows and calves in that pasture (EWF interviews, 149).36 William Faulkner begins his novel Sanctuary with a strikingly similar description of a spring: “From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking. A faint path led from the road to the spring. Popeye watched the man . . . emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring. . . . The spring welled up at the root of a beech tree and flowed away upon a bottom of whorled and waved sand. . . . twice more invisible automobiles passed along the highroad and died away” (3). The McCarroll Place spring, with its quietly flowing water—a kind of sanctuary in a verdant wood, accessible by an old Indian trail leading to it—may well be the model for the scene Faulkner depicts in Sanctuary. To the pastoral scene, Faulkner introduces the quiet but ominous character of Popeye at the spring. Holly Springs became a thriving cotton-producing town where slavery was an accepted part of life. In the 1850s, townspeople built magnificent

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homes. Gerald Sweitzer and Kathy M. Fields note the “ancient cedar-lined walkways” that “lead to white-columned Greek revival homes graced with grand circular stairways, medallioned ceilings, hand-cut Bohemian glass windows, and carefully tended, elegant gardens.”37 Many of the homes still harken back to a time in history when the prosperity of planters permitted this kind of grandeur. Dr. Charles Bonner was a physician in town and owner of one such mansion. In his diary, Francis Terry Leak refers several times to Charles Bonner, presumably this man, a likely antecedent of Faulkner’s character Charles Bon. Holly Springs was not spared from the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. Don Doyle records that the disease “spread quickly along the avenues of trade, up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Memphis and along the railroad lines that emanated from both cities.”38 The Holly Springs town elders were convinced that mosquitoes could not survive at the altitude of Holly Springs. Olga Pruitt recalls that many believed that “Holly Springs was too high and too healthy for the spread of an infectious disease.”39 Believing it cruel to close the town to the disease victims who were fleeing northward from Grenada, Mississippi, Holly Springs residents allowed the influx of travelers. The disease spread and cost the lives of many inhabitants: 1,400 took ill, and 314 died.40 The Civil War took a deep toll on Holly Springs. Some of the townspeople gathered at a “Southern meeting” to express their support of secession: “if we have to choose between a disgraceful submission . . . and secession from this Union, we prefer the latter.”41 Ruth Watkins’s “Reconstruction in Marshall County” describes the kinds of raids that occurred in town after the war began: “Holly Springs of course suffered horribly during the war, undergoing around sixty distinct Yankee raids. The Yankees had to be driven out by the Johnny Rebs, so the amount of fighting can be appreciated. . . . At the end of the war the people found themselves without money, cotton, horses, provisions—nothing but an indomitable will.” 42 In 1860, Marshall County, of which Holly Springs is a part, had produced “49,348 bales of cotton, more than any other similar division of land in the world, 43 but after the war, that changed. The McCarrolls exemplify how families coped with the loss of resources at the end of the war. The cows and pigs were confiscated by one army or another: the soldiers “were all hungry,” Dr. Francisco surmises in retrospect. His great-grandmother Amelia had hidden a patch of corn, and her family subsisted on that, along with pecans grown on their trees, for some


time. Out of this meager fare, they made pecan pies, but not much else. Van Dorn’s Raid is one famous encounter that the town memorialized in a street named for the general. Don Doyle summarizes the event: [The Union forces] had been in Lafayette County for about three weeks when a sudden blow at the main supply depot in Holly Springs not only forced a hasty retreat from Lafayette County but derailed the plan for Sherman’s advance on Vicksburg. Confederate general Earl Van Dorn led a surprise raid on Holly Springs early on Sunday morning, December 20, and destroyed more than a million dollars worth of Union supplies. Grant had been notified of the movement of Van Dorn’s troops flanking to the east through Pontotoc, but he was unable to intercept them. The Union commander in charge at Holly Springs, apparently taken by surprise, surrendered without resistance. He was later dismissed with charges of “cowardly and disgraceful conduct,” but it was too late, and Grant’s plans to take Vicksburg were dealt a severe blow.44 Hamilton’s account is similar: “In 1862, Grant, with Vicksburg as his objective, had established his headquarters at Holly Springs, moving himself and his family and . . . began amassing an enormous store of ammunition and supplies for the Vicksburg offensive. General Van Dorn surprised his army in his absence late in the year, thus delaying the attack on Vicksburg.”45 In its post–Civil War life, Holly Springs, located between the thriving cities of Oxford and Memphis, retains what some refer to as charm or quaintness. Many of the old prewar homes are still standing and in good repair. The owners open their homes to the community during the Pilgrimage, begun in 1936 by three or four women, one of whom was Ruth Bitzer Francisco, and continuing each spring. Cotton is no longer the enormous cash producer it once was, and the town leadership is working on the restoration of the town square. William Faulkner visited Holly Springs fairly often throughout his life. His regular visits to see his boyhood friend Edgar Francisco Jr. were occasions to visit, talk, go out on double dates, attend dances at some of which W. C. Handy played, go hunting, meet his friend at his father’s insurance company office on the town square, and hear firsthand from a longtime resident of the area stories of how the war had affected the family. Faulkner travelled to Holly Springs at other times, too, to hunt with

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town residents such as Ed Rather. Faulkner also went to Holly Springs to meet Joan Williams. They were acquaintances and eventually lovers. He arranged to meet her there—approximately half way between her home in Memphis, and his in Oxford. Joel Williamson notes that “Joan took a bus to . . . Holly Springs, and Faulkner drove up from Oxford. They found a wooded lake where they could be alone.”46 Later in The Wintering, her novelistic treatment of her relationship with Faulkner, Williams also depicts these encounters.47 In Holly Springs, Faulkner found and maintained longstanding friendships, including at least one that had endured from boyhood; watched people on the town square, pursuing his innate interest in humankind; and went to meet his lover. The town and the people of Holly Springs played an important role in Faulkner’s life and in his understanding of the history of his area of the world. Faulkner and the Leak Diary

Dr. Francisco recounts in these interviews that during William Faulkner’s frequent trips to Holly Springs to visit his good friend Edgar Francisco Jr. at home, Faulkner would talk with Edgar Jr. for a while and then ask to see the Leak Diary. Edgar Jr. would then get up and go to the drawer where his mother—and his grandmother before her—kept the farm ledgers. He reached in and pulled out the ledgers with their meticulous detail of plantation life from 1839 to 1862. By that time, the large volumes with cracked leather bindings were already generations old. Dr. Francisco reports that William Faulkner was aware of the Leak Diary as early as the 1920s. As a child, Dr. Francisco observed that Faulkner already knew these ledgers well. Faulkner had not only perused them before but had seriously studied them. He noticed that, when Faulkner would sit to read them, he “always had a pad” and “was always scribbling. He did a lot of note taking.” Faulkner would reveal that he was familiar with the material. He often asked to see a specific ledger again: “Not that one. I want to see the fat one,” he would say to Edgar Jr., who would then hand him the one he wanted. Faulkner knew exactly where to turn in the ledgers to find a particular passage. Sometimes Faulkner would remain absorbed in the Leak Diary for hours, and Edgar Jr. would leave the room to continue other activities, while Faulkner continued reading. Dr. Francisco was a child when he witnessed Faulkner reading and tak-


ing notes from the diary during the 1930s. He remembers that Faulkner sometimes reacted to what he was reading by speaking out loud as if he were upset. Faulkner’s disputation with the diarist suggests that he was arguing with a time and a place in American history that is almost inaccessible now. Presumably Faulkner seemed to engage in heated debate with the long-dead diarist because of the diarist’s proslavery stance, his readiness to secede from the Union, and his willingness to offer substantial financial support to the Confederate States of America at the advent of the Civil War. These were topics about which Dr. Francisco remembers Faulkner’s expressing strong opinions. To the modern ear, Faulkner’s heated response to the diarist may seem to exhibit his indignation as he confronted a slaveholder’s stark words. As he read and reread these ledgers, Faulkner encountered an entire world of philosophies, theories, ideas, powerful and compelling images, stories, and also facts and plentiful cultural details of southern plantation life. At some point, Faulkner—who could be inspired by a single image48—appears to have turned to the Leak Diary as a source of information and ideas for his fiction. Perhaps Faulkner’s long study of the Leak Diary contributed to his discovery that his native place offered a “gold mine” for his literary work: “Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other peoples, so I created a cosmos of my own.”49 Faulkner’s middle and late works seem to reflect the influence of the Leak Diary more than do his very early works, but that early assessment may need further consideration. Flags in the Dust and The Sound and the Fury seem to indicate Faulkner’s familiarity with the diary, and much in his later fiction suggests that the Leak Diary remained an important imaginative and factual source. The analysis that follows explores several of Faulkner’s major works and details possible connections in each to the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak.” The Sound and the Fury (1929) In The Sound and the Fury, perhaps Faulkner’s most personal and autobiographical prose work, Faulkner seems to have drawn names, images,

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themes, and ideas from the Leak Diary. Most of the correspondences between this novel and the diary occur in Typescript volumes 3 and 6. Candis and Ben were slaves on the Leak plantation. They are mentioned in the diary: “Candis aged about 25” (Leak, TS vol. 6: 64). Candace is the sympathetically portrayed, poignant heroine of Faulkner’s novel. The names Benj Collins and Ben that appear in the diary (TS vol. 6: 146) evoke Faulkner’s character Benjy Compson, who is also called Benjamin. Benj Collins appears as a land agent in Leak’s ledgers, but Ben is a slave who is described as “not sound”: “Ben was priced at $800 because he is not sound” (TS vol. 6: 147C). Faulkner may have found in these diary lines a topic and theme: like Leak’s slave, his Benjy is not sound—he is mentally impaired. Faulkner’s possible focus on Benjy’s soundness may also shed further light on his use of the Shakespeare quotation “full of sound and fury,” usually taken to refer to the bellowing sounds that Benjy makes. Caroline is the name of a slave mentioned in the Leak Diary, and this name also appears in the novel (TS vol. 6: 110). The name Meek appears in both diary and novel, as does Dalton (TS vol. 3: 76). Some objects in the diary match those in the novel. Leak orders “slippers”; again Faulkner adds an emotional component to the image: in longing and love for his sister, his Benjy carries around his sister Caddy’s slippers for many years after she marries and leaves home. Ordinary details in the novel have counterparts in the Leak Diary. While Faulkner could have encountered such details in any contemporary description of plantation life, his familiarity with the Leak Diary makes it plausible that he mined the old farm ledgers for detail to add verisimilitude to his work. Leak orders “1 pr Cut Ring Qt Decanturs” (TS vol. 1: 25); Father Compson in the novel instructs his servant Versh to “Take the decanter and fill it” (53). Leak orders oil of cloves in the diary (TS vol. 3: 177); in the novel, Uncle Maury uses oil of cloves to cover the smell of alcohol on his breath. The Leak farm has an apple and pear orchard, and these fruiting trees appear in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner also planted an apple and pear tree in the backyard at Rowan Oak. Such correspondences may be coincidental or purposeful. Gayoso Avenue, which Faulkner mentions in The Mansion as Gayoso Street, and the Gayoso Hotel, a grand old Memphis hotel, appear in the Leak records as well as in several of Faulkner’s works. Leak mentions the Gayoso in reference to a paid bill (TS vol. 1: 95). The Gayoso appears in The Sound and the Fury (289); The Mansion (63); and The Reivers (95–96).


As on many area farms, Leak’s workers killed hogs regularly to supply the meat for the farm family and workers. Leak records that his workers: “Killed 44 hogs” (TS vol. 2: 218). The Franciscos also had pigs in the back pasture of McCarroll Place, and hog killings occurred there—some no doubt in the presence of Will Faulkner, according to Dr. Francisco, who also participated in the slaughter and curing of hogs. Perhaps Faulkner, like Caddy Compson, the heroine of The Sound and the Fury, sympathized with the pigs: “I expect they’re sorry because one of them got killed today” (3). Francis Terry Leak regularly records the effect of temperature on landscape. For example, he notes: “The ground was slightly frozen” (TS vol. 6: 58); in the novel, Faulkner seems to recast the phrase and offers a more stylized, specific description: “The ground was hard, churned and knotted” (3). Among several of Francis Terry Leak’s several long-standing medical problems was that he suffered painful headaches. He recorded them in the diary as occurring frequently. In the novel, Jason Compson suffers from Leak’s malady: “I’ll . . . have to go back to town smelling like a camphor factory so my head wont explode right on my shoulders”; “I couldn’t think about anything except my head” (293–94, 300). Even though the diarist Francis Terry Leak also complained regularly of his diminished hearing, he detected that he could still hear “the ticking of a watch,” a simple observation that perhaps struck Faulkner’s imagination and became a source for Quentin Compson’s focus on the ticking of his grandfather’s watch: “I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s. . . . I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear” (28). Faulkner seems to add symbolism and metaphor to the detail that Leak provided—the sound of a ticking watch— to reflect more broadly on the nature of time, a central theme of the novel. The buying and selling of cotton, and market prices rising and falling, consume a great deal of Francis Terry Leak’s time, according to his entries in the diary. He records therein his letters and conversations about the value of his cotton, usually on the New York market: “Recd a letter from T.H. & J.M. A & Co saying that the cotton market was active” (TS vol. 6: 238). Jason Compson complains about the cotton market in New York in The Sound and the Fury: “Cotton is a speculator’s crop. They fill the farmer

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full of hot air and get him to raise a big crop for them to whipsaw on the market” (237).

k As I Lay Dying (1930) Faulkner seems to have derived ideas great and small for As I Lay Dying from Typescript volume 3 of the Leak Diary. One central narrative in the novel—the transport of a deceased body in a wagon across territory over a few days—appears to originate in the Leak Diary. The similarity of names in the two texts once again provides a good starting point. Mr. Tull is the name of a soldier in the diary (TS vol. 7: 557); in the novel, a farmer bears this name. Adeline is a slave in the diary (TS vol. 2: 59; vol. 3: 247); Addie is the novel’s main character, mother of the Bundren children. Addie is also the name of Dr. Francisco’s great-grandmother, and her death without symptoms recalls the similar fate of Addie Bundren.50 Other names also suggest a connection. “Mr. Alford” appears both in Faulkner’s text (50) and in the diary (TS vol. 3: 261, 288). Thomas Cash is an acquaintance in the diary; for Faulkner, Cash is an important character, son of Anse and Addie Bundren. In As I Lay Dying, the family sets out to bury their recently deceased mother, and they take her body by wagon on a multiday trip to the nearby town for burial. The family in As I Lay Dying experiences problems with the stench of the mother’s body as it travels in the casket in the heat over a period of several days. The Reverend H. C. Parsons also describes an action in the diary that is key for the novel. Francis Leak must bring “the corpse of W. R. Leak” from Memphis to Wadesboro. This trip involved Francis Leak leaving by wagon from Memphis on Tuesday night and arriving in Wadesboro on Friday night. The next diary entry, written after a four-day journey by wagon, reads: “The coffin was not opened upon the advice of SW Cole . . .” (TS vol. 6: 79). In other words, the four days of the journey would have been sufficient time for the body to decompose and become malodorous. This event described in the diary likely inspired William Faulkner to write about the challenges of moving a deceased family member in a casket across country in the nineteenthcentury South. The result appears to have been Faulkner’s depiction of the death, decaying corpse, final journey, and burial of Addie Bundren.


Francis Terry Leak employs the nineteenth-century terminology for the tools needed to build a coffin. He orders a “1 Foot Adz” (TS vol. 1:151), and Cash Bundren uses an adz in making his mother Addie’s coffin.51 Leak’s diary states that his workers have “Commenced lathing” (TS vol. 1: 93), and Faulkner’s character Cash uses a lathe in building Addie’s coffin.52 Likewise, Leak “made Coffin for spencer” (TS vol. 1: 78). Other contemporary farm terms used in Leak’s diary, such as trace chains, swingle trees, and weatherboards (TS vol. 1: 112, vol. 2: 200, 237), lend authenticity to Faulkner’s novel. Heavy rains affect the rivers in both the novel and diary. Leak notes that “the heaviest rains I have ever recorded fell in the afternoon” (TS vol. 3: 294), and he remarks on the rising rivers. In the novel, too, Faulkner notes the rains and rising rivers: “They hadn’t never seen the river so high, and it’s not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn’t never seen nor heard of it being so in the memory of man” (101).

k Absalom, Absalom! (1936) Many scholars consider Absalom, Absalom! to be Faulkner’s most complex and impressive novel. This novel, too, may have been enriched by the Leak Diary. Faulkner seems to have focused on the ledger Typescript volumes 3 and 6 while creating the central stories and images for his book. Names again appear consistently in both the Leak and Faulkner texts, and Faulkner may well have drawn the idea of building a grand plantation house from the diary. Old Rose, Henry, Charles, Tom, Ellen, and Milly were slaves on the Leak plantation. Leak records the purchase of shoes for Old Rose. Ellin (also spelled “Ellen”) is a slave who is “lying up” in Leak’s diary (TS vol. 2: 59, 78). Tom appears (TS vol. 2: 3). Leak orders a pair of shoes for Milly (TS vol. 1: 3). He mentions hiring Milly and notes the “Cash paid for Milly for attending on Emmy” (TS vol. 2: 261, 286). In Absalom, Absalom! the character Milly is the daughter of the man who will eventually murder the plantation owner. Rose, Ellen, and Milly are common southern names, to be sure, and they are slave names in this and other diaries of the time, but in the Leak Diary they appear close together in the slave lists. Perhaps their names and circumstances caught Faulkner’s attention and prompted him

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to imagine their lives more fully. They seem to be strong prototypes for the major female figures of Absalom, Absalom! Charles Bonner is a less common name that appears in the Leak Diary (TS vol. 4: 112) with a parallel—slightly shortened to “Charles Bon”—in Faulkner’s novel.53 Dr. Charles Bonner was an important citizen of Holly Springs at the time of the Civil War. He was a well-known and respected physician in the area who established the hospital in town that would treat wounded soldiers from Shiloh and Corinth, among other places. Bonner built one of the large mansions in Holly Springs and died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878.54 Leak’s mention of him in the diary is understandable since they lived nearby one other. The similarity of their names—and the association with “Charles the Good”—make Dr. Charles Bonner seem a likely antecedent of Faulkner’s Charles Bon. In Absalom, Absalom! Henry and Charles, the sons of Thomas Sutpen, are crucial characters. In the Leak Diary, Henry and Charles are slaves whose names appear next to each other in several Leak slave lists. Leak also refers to “my negro man Henry” (TS vol. 1: 65). In close proximity to the mention of these references to Henry, Leak recounts the killing of one man by another: “a negro fellow . . . was accidentally shot to day by another one of his negro fellows. The gun was pointed at the negro killed, & the trigger pulled, under the belief that it was not loaded” (TS vol. 3: 149–50). This event may in part account for Faulkner’s crafting the scene in which Henry shoots and kills Charles: “Henry spurred ahead and turned his horse to face Bon and took out the pistol; and Judith and Clytie heard the shot” (358). In the novel Faulkner focuses the scene not between two people of one race, but rather—as is more typical of the writer—between races. Francis Terry Leak, as he appears in his diary, seemed for the most part emotionless, even when he described situations that might generally have elicited an emotional response. The narrative in the diary about Francis Terry Leak’s infant son Henry Booth Leak, who died in infancy, however, is one of Leak’s few demonstrations of deep emotion. He expresses intense grief at the loss of Henry Booth: “my little son, Henry Booth, departed this life . . . it grieves my heart to give him up” (TS vol. 3: 138). In Faulkner’s novel, Sutpen also appears to have little emotion, even regarding family members. The high emotionalism in the novel reaches an apex when Henry kills Charles. Henry and Charles are half brothers, and Charles is a mulatto. Henry ultimately murders Charles to protect the purity of his family name


from what he perceives to be racial tarnishing. In both factual and fictional accounts, each Henry perishes. Especially within the context of the title of Faulkner’s novel, Leak’s strongly expressed emotion over his son Henry’s death may have figured in Faulkner’s creation of the relationship of Thomas and Henry Sutpen. Early in Absalom, Absalom! Thomas Sutpen and his slaves begin to build Sutpen’s grand plantation house. Faulkner appears to have derived some of the details of that project from Leak’s description of how his plantation house was constructed. Cedar and brick are the primary materials Leak used to construct his house, and the forty thousand hand-made bricks required suggest the vast extent of the undertaking: “Employed Mr Tabler to make 40,000 brick & do my brick work for $100 The work will embrace four chimneys, the necessary pillars & a cellar” (TS vol. 1: 80). Leak’s men “Make Brick & Build Kitchens . . . Cover back Portico. Build Piaza” (TS vol. 3: 37). To do so, they must first prepare “a Brick Machine & a brick yard to day—making brick molds, sand box for the well in the yard, &C. Getting boards for Brick shelter” (TS vol. 3: 52). Leak’s slaves make tens of thousands of bricks. In preparation for brick making, Leak takes measurements for and prepares “the Kiln” that his workers will need to make bricks (TS vol. 3: 71). The kiln, Leak writes, “is in length, equal to the length of the thickness of 120 brick & has 4 arches or fire places & is about 7½ or 8 feet high” (TS vol. 3: 71). Likewise, Faulkner writes in Absalom that “Sutpen had built a brick kiln” (36) so that his slaves could make the bricks for his house. At first, the Leak slaves make “a few hundred” bricks, but they then increase productivity: “Moulded 3000 brick to day.” Still later, their production again dramatically increases: “We have now, in the yard, . . . about 20,000 brick.” Later Leak determines that “we have now about 39,000 brick” (TS vol. 3: 56, 60, 69). Sutpen, Faulkner’s fictional grand landowner, has his men, “plastered over with mud against the mosquitoes,” build the house of brick and plank (37). He watches “his mansion rise, carried plank by plank and brick by brick out of the swamp where the clay and timber waited” (37), and eventually the house appears: “Unpainted and unfurnished, without a pane of glass or a doorknob or hinge in it, twelve miles from town and almost that far from any neighbor, it stood for three years more surrounded by its formal gardens and promenades, its slave quarters and stables and smokehouses” (39).

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Leak’s plantation home, a likely model for Sutpen’s, required “25 thousand shingles to be made out of heart Cypress” (TS vol. 1: 72). He ordered “21 Cedar plank 15 feet long, 11 Inches wide & 2 inches thick” and “70 feet Cedar posts” (TS vol.1: 103, 167). He remarks on its progress: “Smith, my brick mason, commenced putting pillars under my kitchen to day about 11 o’clock.” Leak includes at least one smokehouse on his property: “Got the smoke house up about 2 feet from the ground” and “Began in the afternoon to raise my Smoke House, for the purpose of putting a brick wall under it” (TS vol. 3: 105). To furnish the house, Leak ordered various items: “1 Banister French Bedstead” (TS vol. 1: 159); “Sash Catches” (TS vol. 1: 95); “1 Trundle” (TS vol. 1:159). Faulkner’s Absalom lists not only the materials Sutpen required for building the house, but also the “chandeliers and mahogany and rugs” and the “furniture and the curtains and the rugs” that fill its rooms (43–44).55 The term “Bill of Lading,” a bill associated with loading freight, may have been a common phrase of the era and does appear in at least one other diary of the Leak time period. Leak refers to the term on several occasions in the diary (TS vol. 2: 24); so does Faulkner. As is characteristic of Faulkner, although he may draw facts from the diary, what he adds to his stories are essentially human components—here, conscience: “Sutpen sat in the office that afternoon after thirty years and told him how his conscience had bothered him somewhat at first but that he had argued calmly and logically with his conscience until it was settled, just as he must have argued with his conscience about this and Mr Coldfield’s bill of lading (only probably not as long here, since time here would be pressing) until that was settled” (262). Words, terms, and phrases in Absalom closely resemble those in the Leak Diary. When his house is completed, the fictional Sutpen serves “scuppernong claret” (123), reminiscent of the “scuppernong wine” that Francis Terry Leak orders (TS vol.1: 47). Leak also orders “curry combs” (TS vol. 3: 275), and Faulkner includes “curry-combs” in this novel (45), as well as in two others: As I Lay Dying (174) and Sartoris (51).56 Leak records that he has “Killed a beef to day” (TS vol. 5: 488). Faulkner infuses his description of Henry’s act with colloquialism and metaphor: “Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as a beef” (133). Similarities continue: Leak buries his dead in the family cemetery, which he refers to as “my grave yard” (TS vol. 3: 245), and “sets out four Cedar trees” there. Faulkner’s Sutpen likewise has his own family cemetery


among the cedars. Quentin “knew the house, twelve miles from Jefferson, in its grove of cedar and oak, seventy-five years after it was finished” (38). He sees the grove of cedars as he approaches the house: “[Quentin] looked up the slope before them where the wet yellow sedge died upward into the rain like melting gold and saw the grove, the clump of cedars on the crest of the hill dissolving into the rain as if the trees had been drawn in ink on a wet blotter—the cedars beyond which, beyond the ruined fields beyond which, would be the oak grove and the gray huge rotting deserted house half a mile away” (187). Quentin stands at the family cemetery and observes the graves: “It was dark among the cedars, the light more dark than gray even, the quiet rain, the faint pearly globules, materializing on the gun barrels and the five headstones . . . the two flat heavy vaulted slabs, the other three headstones leaning a little awry, with here and there a carved letter or even an entire word momentary and legible in the faint light which the raindrops brought particle by particle into the gloom and released” (188). Legal terminology used in the diary finds its way into the novel. Francis Terry Leak was a lawyer who owned land in two states, and he often bought and sold property for himself and on behalf of others. He adjudicates estates and claims for others and frequently uses terms like “Quit claim deed” or “Quit claim title” (TS vol. 3 [pt. 1]: 224). Phrases such as “warranting against the claims of the heirs” and “against the claims of my own heirs” also appear (TS vol. 3: 224). In one instance, he writes that he looks for a “suitable person to be entrusted” with the collection of debts (TS vol. 3: 154). In another, he proposes in a letter that “I claimed all the lands under deeds . . . but proposed in order to avoid litigation . . . the relinquishment of their claims that I paid to the other parties” (TS vol. 3: 271). Legal terms like “relinquishment,” “relinquish,” “parties,” “claims,” “possession,” and “heirs” appear in both Leak’s and Faulkner’s texts (TS vol. 3: 271; vol. 6: 207). In Absalom, Thomas Sutpen uses a number of these terms when he explains his need to make financial reparations by “signed testimonials” with the wife he has left behind: “I declined and resigned all right and claim to this . . . by so providing for the two persons whom I might be considered to have deprived of anything I might later possess: and this was agreed to, mind; agreed to between the two parties” (264). Leak notes that Judge Sutton established a “guardian of his own child” (TS vol. 4: 4); Thomas Sutpen establishes a legal guardian for his son. How to know and understand the past, and how to understand and

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assess the truth about history—especially when people are gone, the documents are fading, and stories and legends intertwine—are crucial themes of Absalom, Absalom! Quentin and the various narrators of the novel delve into the past to recover the story of Thomas Sutpen and his family. Quentin locates information and pieces together scattered facts in his quest to understand the truth about their ancestors. Among his fictional characters, Faulkner identified most with Quentin Compson, and perhaps Quentin is a figure for Faulkner and his search to understand the truth of history, especially the Mississippi history closest to him. In this novel, Faulkner seems to think through and develop an idea of the ephemeral nature of truth expressed in the Leak Diary: “truth of facts occurring in our own time & in our own neighborhood is with difficulty got at” (TS vol. 3: 99–100).

k The Unvanquished (1938) Broad themes, as well as names and important vocabulary, are close or identical in the Leak Diary and Faulkner’s novel The Unvanquished. The approach of the Civil War is a powerful presence in the diary, in which Leak describes over many pages the political atmosphere, the congressional meetings, and the philosophical underpinnings that led up to the war. He recorded the battles as they occurred and the outcomes as the news of them reached him. He described the approach of the Yankee troops—as they arrived first in his area of the country, then into neighboring towns, and then in his own town. The encroachment of the Yankee troops into a town and how one family dealt with them are central topics in The Unvanquished. Leak refers on several occasions to an acquaintance named Baird and also to “Wm. L. Baird” (TS vol. 2: 222, 287) and “Mr. William L. Baird, a very worthy man, [who] died on Sunday the 23rd” (TS vol. 4: 103). Faulkner’s main character in The Unvanquished is Bayard Sartoris. Baird is a common southern name—and Faulkner dated a woman named Helen Baird—but the presence of the name Baird in the diary, in association with a pistol incident, suggests that Faulkner may have noted this diary entry: George Caruth, son-in-law to Wm. L. Baird, “killed himself a day or two ago by the accidental firing of a pistol” (TS vol. 3: 306). Faulkner again alters the details: Bayard faces at close range his foe’s loaded pistol and its discharge, but his enemy deliberately misses him.


Key words like blockade, retreat, skirmish, vindication, and requisition appear in the Leak diary and also find their way into The Unvanquished. For example, “skirmishes” is a word used in the diary that refers to minor Civil War battles: “Genl J. Thompson, besides several skirmishes, had another fight with the enemy at Frederickstown” (TS vol. 7: 408). Faulkner distills the phrase into: “Skirmish at Sartoris.” Leak reports that the enemy “was compelled to retreat, which he did in good order” (TS vol. 7: 408). Faulkner’s short story and later chapter in The Unvanquished is titled: “Retreat.” Leak writes of a man “having shot at a Yankee Officer at the distance of some 400 or 500 yards” (TS vol. 7: 564). In the novel, Bayard and Ringo shoot at a Yankee but miss and hit a horse. Further possible connections are evident: “old Granny” is a slave whose name appears in the Leak Diary (TS vol. 1: 12), and in Faulkner’s novel, a white “Granny” hides her children so that the Yankee soldiers will not kill them. The name Louisa appears in the diary (TS vol. 2: 197); there is an “Aunt Louise” in the novel (230–33, 235–36). Philadelphia is a town in Mississippi, and in the diary, Leak frequently mentions his business transactions in Philadelphia; he orders goods to be sent from Philadelphia (TS vol. 3: 114). Faulkner names a female slave “Philadelphia” in The Unvanquished. Corinth and Canaan, both Mississippi place-names and battlegrounds, appear in both Leak text and novel. Leak refers to the “Clay Bank mare” (TS vol. 2: 21, 80), and Faulkner writes of a “claybank stallion” (The Unvanquished, 8). Leak’s library has “Humbolt’s cosmos,” and the library of the fictional John Sartoris contains a “treatise on astrology” (TS vol. 6: 1). Leak’s son John attends college, and several entries in the diary describe John’s progress: “Started John off to College at Oxford 1 Feby 1849” (TS vol. 3: 133). His servant accompanies him (TS vol. 3: 133). John later returns “home last night from College, having taken his degree” (TS vol. 3: 203). Other notations read: “My son John set out for Chapel Hill to night” (TS vol. 2: 184), and “my son W. J. Leak . . . at Chapel Hill” (TS vol. 1: 181). Leak’s son graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Faulkner’s John Sartoris in The Unvanquished also has a son in college, and the young man rides forty miles to reach it: “The horses took the gait which they would hold for forty miles” (244–45). The forty miles in Faulkner’s fictional cosmos that Sartoris has to cover to reach the college at Oxford could place his point of origin near Salem, in northern Mississippi, in Tippah County—the site of the plantation of Francis Terry Leak.

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The characters in the novel read by lamplight. Leak uses both lamp oil and lampblack (TS vol. 1: 47, 92). A Professor Wilkins appears in the novel, and Francis Terry Leak mentions professors who are teaching his children. He writes to them personally and asks that they look after his sons and daughters and secure their education.

k The Snopes Trilogy The Snopes Trilogy, too, shows evidence of connections to the Leak Diary. In The Hamlet, for example, a Mr. Huston appears, a name that also appears in the diary (TS vol. 2: 275c). Sheriff Verner is mentioned in the diary, and the Varner family takes center stage in the Snopes Trilogy (TS vol. 4: 17). The diary, with its enumeration of such needed farm equipment as trace chains, halter chains, hames, and a cross-cut saw, may have provided Faulkner with some of the realistic detail found in The Hamlet (TS vol. 1: 112, 60, 150; vol. 3: 230). Leak also notes that he paid McDougald’s Mill “by giving them credit in the store” (TS vol. 1: 187), and Faulkner describes tenant farming and the practice of lending of credit at the store in a number of stories and novels, including The Hamlet. Names across the novels and stories also seem drawn from diary episodes. Horace, Louisa, Emeline, Monk, Ward, and Jones are names of characters in various Faulkner novels; most of these names are listed in the diary describing Leak slaves (TS vol. 2: 278, 79, 18; vol. 1: 57; vol. 7: 473). Situations, too, carry over from the diary to Faulkner’s works. Returning home from a trip out of town, for example, Francis Terry Leak records that he had traveled “in a road wagon, the stage having broken down, & been left behind” (TS vol. 3: 178). He later notes: “My wife and myself were in the rain, returning from Mr. Wright’s. I got quite wet, one of our buggy shafts having broken, & thus rendering it necessary for me to get out in the rain” (TS vol. 3: 214). Faulkner’s characters likewise encounter an unpleasant breakdown in The Reivers. Trading mules, mares, and colts are activities described in the diary. Leak “Swapped a mule with Burke for a mare & colt promising to pay him $35 difference at Christmas” (TS vol. 2: 247). Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses” begins with a similar trade. Leak purchases a “singer’s sewing machine” (TS vol. 6: 205), and that simple notation may have inspired the emphasis Faulkner gives to the sewing machine and traveling sewing-machine


salesman. Leak spends considerable time building a school for his young children and those of his neighbors and then recruits a teacher (TS vol. 6: 14). He interviews many candidates for the position and eventually hires a teacher. Over the course of the years, he must hire and fire a number of them for various reasons. He builds a schoolhouse and plasters it (TS vol. 6: 91). Faulkner’s schoolteacher Labove may have roots in these similar diary entries. The raising of a gin house and placing of shingles on the roof recalls Faulkner’s story “Shingles for the Lord,” in which his characters make shingles for the roof of the church (TS vol. 3: 228). These and other correspondences appear with noteworthy regularity in Faulkner’s works.

k Go Down, Moses (1942) fac i ng t h e l e d ge r s of h is t ory

In Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, after a long delay, Isaac at last opens the family farm ledgers and reads their old, yellowed pages. Isaac seems always to have known that he would someday take the old ledgers out and read them: “As a child and even after nine and ten and eleven, when he had learned to read, he would look up at the scarred and cracked backs and ends but with no particular desire to open them, and though he intended to examine them someday” (268). Isaac avoids examining the ledgers, however, because he intuits what he will find—evidence of his family’s slave ownership: “Then he was sixteen. He knew what he was going to find before he found it” (268). The family farm ledgers, written in the “brown thin ink” of the diarist’s hand, seem to him to be “harmless”: “it would only be on some idle day when he was old and perhaps even bored a little since what the old books contained would be after all these years fixed immutably, finished, unalterable, harmless” (268). At the tender age of sixteen, Isaac dreads what he knows the ledgers will contain and postpones as long as he can the inevitable moment. Eventually Isaac determines to face the truth inscribed in the ledgers; he reads them carefully and begins to comprehend their full effect on his life and family: He realised that they probably contained a chronological and much more comprehensive though doubtless tedious record than he would ever get from any other source, not alone of his own flesh and blood

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but of all his people, not only the whites but the black ones too, who were as much a part of his ancestry as his white progenitors, and of the land which they had all held and used in common and fed from and on and would continue to use in common without regard to color or titular ownership . . . (268) Once fully engaged with the ledgers, Isaac pores over “the yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” as he turns them “in their fading and implacable succession.”57 He begins to grasp what he has suspected all of his life—that slave ownership taints his family’s heritage. Only recognition, awareness, and acknowledgment can gird him for action to purge himself of the sins of the fathers as best he can. Faulkner’s references to the physical appearance of the diary match precisely that of the old Leak Diary, written in brown, thin, fading ink. Faulkner apparently was literally describing the old Leak ledger books with their odd, irregular sizes and their cracked, yellow, leather bindings. His most extensive engagement with the Leak Diary occurs in Go Down, Moses. In crafting Ike McCaslin’s reaction to his first reading of the McCaslin ledgers, Faulkner may have given fictional form to his own emotional response to reading the Leak Diary. Another model for Ike’s response, however, may also have been Little Eddie, who as a boy had an intense reaction to the discovery of his family’s slave ownership, and Faulkner witnessed this reaction (EWF interviews, 99–100). As Faulkner perused the pages of the diary, he found the details he needed to convert the “actual into the apocryphal.” The Leak plantation ledgers seem clearly to constitute a basis for the crucial “Part 4” of Faulkner’s famous story “The Bear,” a keystone of Go Down, Moses. The diary’s title page reads: Diary of Francis Terry Leak 1803–1864 Mississippi Faulkner’s dedication page in Go Down, Moses reads: To Mammy Caroline Barr Mississippi [1840–1940]


The similarity of this dedication that commemorates the life of his “mammy,” Callie Barr, to the title page of the Leak Diary may serve to show the connection of the two documents. na m e s a n d p e r s o na l i t i e s

A surprising number of Leak Diary names are readily recognizable in Go Down, Moses: Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Ellin, Charles, Henry, Rose, Milly, Horace, Mollie, Edmund, and Worsham. Leak also mentions the Boon Indians, and Boon is an important character in the novel. Although some of these are common names, others, such as Caruthers, Toney, and Worsham are less so. Faulkner uses all these names (or names almost identical) for his characters. That Faulkner would see in the diary the names of slaves and then weave not only their names but many of the situations of their lives into his novels and stories suggests his deep empathy for their plight. Faulkner did not seem to use many of the names of the white people he found in the diary for his fictional characters. Perhaps he felt less empathy for them, or he may have wished to avoid using the names of white members of Leak’s community. Remembering the past, however, is a significant Faulknerian theme, and that may well have been his ultimate aim as he incorporates into his fiction the names—and stories—of the Leak slaves. He illustrates in Go Down, Moses and in other works what Mississippi plantation life was like for whites and, especially, for slaves. Faulkner gives the names of the male Leak slaves Sam, Isaac, and Moses to the protagonists of a major novel. He assigns the names of female slaves like Old Rose, Old Granny, Ellin, Toney, or Candis to characters who have become some of the most admired in American literature. Perhaps by transforming their names and stories in his fiction, Faulkner intended to raise these souls from their resting places to tell their stories and thereby honor their lives. Faulkner depicts the slaves as they go about their daily lives—making brick, working the land, plowing the fields, harvesting the crops, submitting to the whims of the plantation owner, and birthing the children with little assistance, except from each other. The slaves live again in his fiction; they are, for a time, the people they once were—with names, personalities, and identities. They work for little or no pay; celebrate holidays, however sparely; consummate their marriages; bear and raise children; and lose them and each other to disease, with all ultimately succumbing to what

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Faulkner called “the dark harsh flowing of time.” It may be that, in recovering their names, stories, and the details of their activities, he commemorates their lives and marks their graves. He has, in essence, memorialized a forgotten people. Isaac was the name of one of Leak’s slaves and also the name of one of Faulkner’s most compelling protagonists. Named “Long Isaac” in the Leak Diary, the slave was also nicknamed “Long Ike,” presumably for his height or his longevity. Long Ike may have had a son, referred to as “Little Isaac” and “Little Ike.” Perhaps Little Ike’s son came to be called “New Ike.” The diary lists the slaves in this manner: “Long Ike, Little Ike, Old Ike, New Ike.” Leak’s diary also records the name of a (presumably) different man: “Old Uncle Miller Isaac,” who dies later in the diary (TS vol. 5: 359). Isaac, the first name of Faulkner’s main character in Go Down, Moses, Isaac McCaslin, may be a composite of the names of this group of Leak’s slaves. Faulkner may have derived the last name, McCaslin, from McCarroll, the ancestor of Faulkner’s friend Edgar Francisco Jr. On this character, whose name also reflects the southern biblical naming tradition, Faulkner will bestow the powerful vision to understand the sins of the past. In the diary, Leak documents the purchase of shoes and clothes for Long Ike and Little Ike: Isaac Dr 1 pr Shoes 1.50 Miller Isaac Dr. 1 pr Shoes for Rody $1.50 Little Ike 1 pr shoes 1.50 (TS vol. 1: 1–2) Later, Leak’s ledgers record funds given to Long Ike and Little Ike in connection with work associated with baling and ginning cotton: Long Ike 12 Bales Cotton Cash $1.00. . . . Little Ike ginning 1.00 (TS vol. 1: 62) Faulkner’s Isaac is “past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more”—and he is an uncle: “a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one” (3). As Faulkner’s novel progresses, however, he refers to the young Isaac through flashback. As such, the literary antecedent for the old and young Uncle Isaac may be a composite of the slaves Long Isaac, Little Isaac, Old Ike, New Ike, and Old Uncle Miller Isaac of the Leak Diary.


Isaac, Sam, Moses, Milly, Ellen, Horace, Henry, Adeline, Tom, and Old Rose all appear in these same pages in a list of slave names and accounts for which Leak expends small sums of money to buy shoes and clothes and other necessities: 1 pr Shoes for Moses $1.50 . . . Henry 1 pr shoes 1 50 order to McDonald $5 . . . Adeline 1 pr shoes 1 50 order to McDonald . . . Milly 1 pr shoes 1.50 . . . Old Rose D. 1 pr shoes $1.50 . . . Paid Tom in full of all demands 4.37 . . . Moses 1.00 Long Ike $5 00 . . . Henry 2.50 . . . 50 Horace 62 . . . Little Ike 2 50 . . . Sam 12½ (TS vol. 1: 1–4: 51) References to a slave named Sam on the plantation owned and run by Leak’s son are evocative of Faulkner’s character of the same name—and of his similar fate. Leak records that Sam became ill: “Rec’d a letter from my son, W.J.L. dated 24 April, saying that the paralysis of Sam’s arm may be the effect of a long-standing venereal disease” (TS vol. 5: 335). The diary ledger entry soon records that “Sam is no better” (TS vol. 5: 355), and that, shortly thereafter, Sam, “who had afflicted with palsy for some months, had died” (TS vol. 5: 370). Sam’s name and fate may have provided Faulkner with the basis for his character known as Sam Fathers. As a child, Sam is sold into slavery, along with his mother. Later, in adulthood, and after a powerful role in helping Isaac learn and mature, Sam sickens, declines, and quietly dies, as did his real-life counterpart—Sam, the slave on the farm of Francis Terry Leak. In his novel, Faulkner focuses on Sam’s ethnicity, including his African American, Native American, and Caucasian heritage. Sam Fathers has skin the color of copper: “They undressed him. He lay there—the copperbrown, almost hairless body, the old man’s body, the old man, the wild man not even one generation from the woods, childless, kinless, peopleless— motionless” (236). The Leak text describes another slave named Charles as “not copper-colored” (TS vol. 5: 476). Sam’s mixed blood and slave heritage, his copper colored body, and his illness and death may have been the

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salient features that Faulkner drew upon as models for both the physical description and the death of Sam Fathers. Moses is another slave whose name and activities Leak records. Leak occasionally notes the dates and occasions of community events, such as weddings, as they occur around him, both among the whites or slaves. He writes that: “Moses & Pol were married tonight. I record the ceremony used on the occasion, for future use” (TS vol. 5: 292). He performs the marriage ceremony for the two of them: “Moses, do you agree to take Pol as your wife?” (TS vol. 5: 293; Leak’s emphasis). Leak also mentions that he bought shoes for Moses and other slaves, including Isaac and “Little Ike” (TS vol. 1: 1–2). The Moses of the Leak Diary is a slave with a biblical name. The lists in the diary of slaves with biblical names, such as Isaac, Sam, and Moses, likely inspired Faulkner. The Leak slaves with those names seem to have been compelling models for Faulkner’s profound commentary on repression, slavery, and freedom. They invoke the haunting slave spiritual that informs the book title—Go Down, Moses: “Let my people go.” Another relevant name—Toney—appears in the diary. She is the daughter of a slave, and the entry about her is wrenching, indeed: “Creesy’s child Toney was found dead in the bed this morning, supposed to have been smothered” (TS vol. 5: 331). Although mothers have been known to roll over on or otherwise accidentally smother their children, slave mothers sometimes intentionally smothered their children to spare them from growing up as slaves. Leak notes that Toney seems to have died by smothering—but he does not mention the possibility that she may have been killed by her own mother or family member. Leak adds no further commentary: the tragedy of Toney’s fate goes unlamented. Faulkner’s “Tomey” (also spelled “Tomy”) is an equally tragic character, and—true to form—Faulkner focuses on the emotional impact of her life and death on her mother. He begins by altering slightly the diary name spelling from “Toney” (TS vol. 5: 331)58 and the details of her death as he crafts his story in Go Down, Moses. His Tomey is not an infant, but she produces one. Both real and fictional female slaves die. Faulkner’s Tomey dies in childbirth: she “dide in Child bed” [sic] (269). Leak’s slave Toney, an infant, dies at birth. To underscore even more dramatically the circumstances of Tomey’s doomed life, however, Faulkner adds incest and the perfidy of her white


owner, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. Not only has she died while giving birth to McCaslin’s child—but Tomey is his own daughter. Faulkner fuels the complexity of the owner/slave relationship with incest and miscegenation. When Leak sells a mother slave to “the owner of her daughter” (TS vol. 3: 212), he may have provided Faulkner not only the names but the circumstances needed for the dark heart of part 4 of “The Bear.” Although Faulkner’s story varies somewhat from the facts offered in the Leak Diary, both fiction and diary record the violence of slavery. Where Leak’s accounts of his slaves are matter-of-fact and usually emotionless, Faulkner adds face and voice to his depiction of the emotional landscapes as he re-creates the lives of slaves. In doing so he elicits sympathy and human understanding for them. In Go Down, Moses, Tomey’s mother, Eunice, commits suicide by walking into the icy creek on Christmas Day (267). The fictional Isaac questions why she takes this action. The scene has a wintry chill; the landscape mirrors Eunice’s emotional devastation. Eventually the text reveals itself: Eunice realizes Tomey’s difficulties—that Eunice’s own first lover, her owner, L.Q.C. McCaslin, planter extraordinaire, sexually exploits and impregnates their daughter, Tomey. In utter grief, Eunice takes her own life. In the diary, an ice pond is located on the plantation. Leak writes that he is “Putting up Ice to day from the Ice Pond. . . . The ice is fully 1½ inches thick. Some of it is 1¾ or more” (TS vol. 5: 420). In Faulkner’s version, the pond becomes the “icy creek” in which Eunice ends her days. Additionally Leak mentions that a slave owned by a Mr. Miner “drownd on his plantation” (TS vol. 3: 294). Faulkner may have consolidated these details to produce a winter landscape symbolic of Eunice’s emotional stupor and eventual suicide by drowning in the cold December water: “Eunice Bought by Father in New Orleans 1807 $650. dolars. Marrid to Thucydus 1809 Drownd in Crick Cristmas Day 1832” (267). Faulkner charges the scene with emotion. Both Buck and Buddy, Isaac’s father and uncle, the ledger writers of the novel, ponder why Eunice killed herself. They debate the question but do not know the answer. Isaac seeks further and follows their questions with his own: “But why? But why?” (267). To find the answer, he must scrutinize the ledger entries for the reason for Tomey’s demise and Eunice’s subsequent suicide. Isaac uncovers the clues buried in the ledgers until he understands the truth: miscegenation and incest have destroyed both mother and daughter. Faulkner weaves

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together his story that may have begun with a simple name, image, or idea that he found in the diary. Still other Leak Diary names appear in Go Down, Moses. Mollie is a slave on the Leak plantation, and Faulkner brings her name unchanged into the novel. Leak says that “Priam is the sire” of a horse that foaled (TS vol. 2: 33). In his story “The Bear,” Faulkner assigns the full mythological significance to the big bear in referring to him as “Priam, bereft of his wife and outlived all his sons.” Leak speaks of “Worsham House” (TS vol. 7: 483). Faulkner uses the name Worsham in Go Down, Moses, including Hamp and Samuel Worsham (253). Faulkner’s repeated use of the uncommon name Worsham strongly suggests that he drew from the diary as a source. Joseph A. Crawford is another name that Leak often mentions, and Dr. Crawford appears in “The Bear.” The name A. N. Edmonds appears in the diary, and the character Roth Edmonds appears in the novel. A slave named Edmund also appears in the diary. Leak records that he will hire “her boy Edmund two months” (TS vol. 1: 84). Faulkner’s fictional plantation owner and the primogenitor of the dominant male line in Go Down, Moses is Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. He arrives in Mississippi, establishes a plantation, and owns and farms the land with slaves. The name Caruthers in the Leak Diary is a plausible model for the fictional Carothers (MS vol. 4: 141). Sam Caruthers, one of the first settlers in Holly Springs, arrived in the 1830s and was an early physician there. His is another possible connection with the name. Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (L.Q.C. Lamar) has long been considered a source for Faulkner’s fictional landowning slaveholder. The similarity between the names Lucius Quintus Carothers and Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus is unmistakable. McCaslin seems a very close approximation of McCarroll, the last name of the great-grandfather of Faulkner’s friend Edgar Francisco Jr. Faulkner’s creation of the fictional name L.Q.C. McCaslin may derive from the convergence of the name L.Q.C. Lamar with that of the McCarroll ancestor. The presence of the name Caruthers in the diary supplies a convincing layer of evidence to establish the name, and to some extent the fictional characteristics, of Old Carothers McCaslin. L.Q.C. Lamar was a Georgia-born lawyer and judge who married the daughter of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. Lamar and his wife moved to Mississippi when Longstreet became president of the University of Mississippi, where Lamar also taught. He eventually rose to prominence as a state


senator, later secretary of the interior, and eventually, justice of the United States Supreme Court.59 Although scholars have recognized that Faulkner knew of Lamar’s preeminence and his activities in and around Oxford, Mississippi, Francis Terry Leak’s frequent letters to Lamar on matters of business and politics probably provided Faulkner a keener awareness of the statesman and his political position in pre– and post–Civil War Mississippi. Leak typically wrote to Lamar on business matters. He did so, for example, “informing him that it was the wish of the people here . . . that a change should be made as to hours of arrival and departure of the mail between Ripley & Lagrange” (TS vol. 5: 417). Francis Terry Leak also wrote often to William C. Falkner, William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, who was a colonel in the Civil War. Faulkner depicted Colonel Falkner in several fictional works. At the beginning of the Civil War, Leak records having written to H. W. Strickland to inquire about clothing for Colonel Falkner’s regiment: “I enquired of him whether steps would be taken to furnish the soldiers with the clothing called for in Col. Falkner’s regiment, &, if so, whether the expense would be paid out of the special tax recently authorized, or by voluntary subscriptions[.] I told him that my wife was knitting socks, & that we would furnish some overcoats also, if individual contributions should be the plan relied upon to supply them” (TS vol. 7: 381). Later Leak describes the role of his wife in making clothing for the soldiers: “Mrs. L. had prepared just double the above quantity of clothing for Col F’s regiment; but overcome by the appeals in behalf of the brave but destitute men under the gallant Genl. Jeff Thompson, she sent half her supply to them” (TS vol. 7: 395). In a third entry, Leak records the contents of his letter to Colonel Falkner: “Wrote a letter to Col. Falkner, last night . . . [saying]: ‘I need not tell you that all of our hearts are with you, and that we are proud to have such noble men as our representatives on the battle field of our beloved Country.’” He continues: “the overcoats & pants are of quite rough material, but will be found warm and durable, as they are thoroughly lined. Mrs. L. regrets very much the quality of the goods, but they are the best she had, or could procure, at the time. She is sorry, too, that she cannot, at this time, send you a larger supply, but she will come cheerfully to the aid of your men as often as you may make an appeal” (TS vol. 7: 396). Such diary entries, filled with realistic detail, could only have piqued William Faulkner’s interest in his own ancestor. The familiar tone Leak

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employs in these letters speaks to the cordiality of his relationship with Colonel Falkner. Faulkner thus may well have used the diary as a source of information for his portrayal of his great-grandfather and his circle of acquaintances at the outset of and during the Civil War. In the Leak Diary, the possessive after a name indicates slave ownership. “Harvey’s Tom,” “Floyd’s Emmy,” “John Miller’s Harriet,” “Frank’s Mary’s child,” and “Floyd’s Miles” are five examples among others from the diary (TS vol. 5: 349; vol. 3: 31; vol. 6: 332; vol. 7: 370; vol. 4: 55). In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner uses the possessive in this way to establish the relationship between two people, and he indicates either slave ownership or motherhood. Tomy’s Turl and Tennie’s Jim are examples of this pattern found in the novel. The handwriting in Leak’s diary calls to mind Faulkner’s description of the “bold cramped hand far less legible than his sons’ even” of Old Carothers McCaslin in Go Down, Moses (269). Both Leak and his son wrote in the diary. Faulkner’s McCaslins follow suit. In the novel, Isaac learns to distinguish the handwriting of his father in the ledgers. Details that Faulkner assigns to the McCaslin family records are also apparent in the Leak ledgers, which also delineate the economic and political issues of the day and reveal some of the developing ideology that led to the secession of the southern states. The great value of the diary as a source for Faulkner, however, may be that it reveals with so much clear detail the operations of the slave-based plantation society, the state of racial relations, and the importance of key landowning southern families. t h e vo c a b u l a ry o f p l a n tat i o n l i f e

As Leak became a wealthy Mississippi planter, his farms required a constant supply of materials and goods for the support of family members and slaves. He carefully accounts for the clothing—including shoes, coats, pantaloons, blankets, and other items—that he purchases for each person and keeps meticulous records of what items go to each person. Much of the detailed vocabulary related to plantation life and farming that Faulkner uses in Go Down, Moses may have derived from the Leak Diary and other such plantation ledgers he read. Leak describes the supplies that he requires and purchases, including meat, bread, flour, sugar, and coffee (TS vol.3: 223), as well as farm implements and machinery such as plows, hames, harrow teeth, and trace chains. Faulkner’s text echoes with: “barrels and kegs of


flour and meal and molasses and nails . . . plowlines and plow-collars and hames and trace-chains” (255). The Leak Diary contains many, often long, lists of materials, sometimes with prices, that Leak ordered and bought for plantation use. A short sample indicates how they appear on the page: 1 Hearth Rug 6.00 2 pr carpet Binding . . . 40 .80 1 Hearth Brush 1.00 (TS vol. 1: 199) Such simple terms as “hearth Brush” and “hearth rug” ultimately made their way into famous Faulkner stories such as “Fire and the Hearth” (TS, vol. 1: 199). Faulkner takes such details and endows them with an intense vitality. To a coat, otherwise an inert item of merchandise, Faulkner adds human sensation. A coat will shield “against rain and cold”: “almost that many years, the slow, day-by-day accrument [sic] of the wages allowed him and the food and clothing—the molasses and meat and meal, the cheap durable shirts and jeans and shoes and now and then a coat against rain and cold—charged against the slowly yet steadily mounting sum of balance (and it would seem to the boy that he could actually see the black man, the slave . . .)” (266). Faulkner’s stark images of cold and hunger are palpable: he creates empathy for those suffering these deprivations. In addition to the shoes and coats, the planter routinely ordered items such as “pantaloons” for those living on his expansive lands. One ledger entry confirms such an order: “Shoes pantaloons & vest for Cudjo” (TS vol. 2: 237). The term “pantaloons”—a word from a bygone era—refers to breeches or trousers. Judith Sensibar asks questions and posits theories about the source of “pantaloon.” She suggests that the word links to the commedia figure and to Faulkner’s early poetic imagery: “Why does the structural conception of Go Down, Moses also hark back to those years as Faulkner realizes in prose the elliptical and lyrical form of his early poem sequences? What do these haunted and haunting commedia figures from his difficult and protracted years as a would-be poet have to do with a suicidally grieving black mill worker from Yoknapatawpha County? Why, in short, in a novel about loss and mourning, does Faulkner return to this ghost from his own imaginative life: And why, now, is he figured as black?”60

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Indeed, Sensibar asks the salient question: “why, now,” is the character “figured as black?” She argues debatably that Faulkner’s use of pantaloon might be attributable to terminology of the commedia dell’arte but convincingly that Go Down, Moses is “Faulkner’s last great novel about loss and mourning,” set “in the racially charged cultural terrain of . . . his own North Mississippi.” He “invokes what seems at first an equally stultifying convention, his earliest persona, an alienated pierrotiste.”61 In “Pantaloon in Black,” she writes, “the authorial voice dons a commedia mask from his literary childhood to slip inside a mythically endowed young man.” She continues: “like the actors and white audiences of black minstrel shows, with which he was familiar, Faulkner has formed a text, Rider the Pantaloon, in the image of his own racial unconscious. . . .”62 Finding the word “pantaloon” repeated in the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” locates the origins of Faulkner’s story more firmly in slave history. Noticing the word in the diary, Faulkner could have seen in it implications for people who had once lived close by—the slaves on the ancestral land of his childhood friend. The single image of the pantaloons that Leak bought for his slaves may have highlighted for Faulkner how completely the slave owner dominated a slave’s life, even purchasing the pants to cover his nakedness. Readers and scholars have long observed that the focus of this story is the effects of slavery. Some other impressive critiques include that of Thadious Davis, who has recently resituated Go Down, Moses with her book Games of Property: Law, Race and Gender and Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses” by examining slavery and race in the novel from a legal and political perspective. Linda Wagner-Martin notes that “the integrity of a captive people— subject to inhuman treatment but still believing in salvation—is the keystone image for this novel.”63 John T. Matthews plumbs the “grief and rage” in “Pantaloon in Black” and the futility of the lives of the characters Rider and Butch.64 Minrose Gwin sees a “cultural space of enclosure” in the focus of the novel on incest and miscegenation.65 The new information provided by the Leak Diary will further support readings like these and suggest new considerations. t h e h e av e n s

Francis Terry Leak was meteorologically attuned. Like other planters in his area, Leak noted rainfall measurements, wind patterns, temperature


changes, and the like, as might be expected of men whose living depended on the health of their crops. He calls lightning an “electric fluid” that “struck” during the night (TS vol. 5: 343). Leak was well aware of a comet in the sky as it passed over his plantation, and he described it accurately. In one instance, he notes that “A comet has been seen in the west (North of west) for a few evenings past” (TS vol. 3: 230). In a later year, he describes another one: “The Comet is traveling South very rapidly. It has now reached a point South of West. When first seen a few weeks ago it was at a point near North West. Writers in the Newspapers call it the Donati Comet” (TS vol. 5: 481–82). The comet blazes through Go Down, Moses as well, and Faulkner’s fictional ledgers record this natural phenomenon as “Yr stars fell” (269).66 t h e s l av e l e d g e r s

As a part of the business and legal matters that Francis Terry Leak regularly recorded in the ledgers, he set down in great detail the buying and selling of slaves, whom he referred to as “the negroes.” He clearly considered them to be property. As a slave owner, Leak took responsibility for providing the people who worked on this plantation with clothing, shelter, and simple foods: “meat and bread, a Barrel of flour and some sugar and coffee” (TS vol. 3: 223). For example, he ordered: 43 gal molasses 30 12.90 248 lbs sugar (Bble.30c) 8 20.14 1 Bble flour . . . 4.25 1 sack salt . . . 1.50 6¾ Bushels Corn 50c 3.37 Leak documents the allocation of pork, beef, and other food that he provides for the slaves. Leak mentions a slave whipping a few times over a period of the twentythree years of diary notations, but even those few entries are chilling and revolting to the modern reader. On the other hand, Leak did perform the marriage ceremonies for at least some of his slaves, and he held festive occasions for their social recreation. Also he did advocate for his slaves. In the case of one young man who ran away from Leak’s plantation, Leak wrote

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several letters in defense of this man and argued for justice on his behalf, although to no avail. Others hanged the man for alleged rape. Although Leak was a lawyer and member of the North Carolina bar, he nonetheless spells some words incorrectly, such as “burried” (TS vol. 3: 183). This word appears in slightly altered form in Buck’s and Buddy’s ledger entries in Go Down, Moses as “burid” and “burd” (266). Francis Terry Leak efficiently and without apparent emotion maintained the accounts for the buying and selling of slaves to work his plantation. He carefully notes the ages, gender, health of his slaves and the price he would pay or receive as they are bought and sold: ta bl e 1 No 1 Men

19 to 24 years old

$950 to 1000

Best Plow Boys 16 " 19 "

"

$850 " 950

"

"

750 " 825

"

"

13 " 16 "

Leak writes to neighbors and acquaintances to let them know when he is interested in acquiring slaves. One entry provides a typical example: “purchased . . . Six negroes for which I gave them my note for Two thousand & Seventy four dollars ($2074.00)” (TS vol. 1: 80). In another entry: the price of “negroes” had changed “from $100. to $200. & . . . the number for sale was large” (TS vol. 5: 391). Later, Leak “Rec’d a letter from James C. Bryan proposing to sell to me a lot of negroes consisting of a man 28 to 30 years of age, a boy about 16, a woman about 27 with a son about 9, & a girl about 16 with her first child about 4 months” (TS vol. 5: 441). In another entry, Leak records his purchase prices for slaves. Of one, he notes: “She had been an invalid for many months—nearly ever since . . . I purchased her” (TS vol. 6: 21). Leak notes prices again: “Rec’d a few days ago a letter from T. H. Woodson giving me the prices of negroes in Richmond, Va. as follows: No 1 Men 19 to 24 years old $950 to 1000/ Best Plough Boys 16 [to] 19 [years old] 850–950” (TS vol. 5: 400). At various times, he sends and receives other similar correspondence. Leak further details his purchase and transport of slaves. In Memphis, for example, he purchased “nine negroes” and then “four others.” “For the first lot I paid


$6565.00. . . . For the second lot I paid $4100.00 in a bill of the same date. . . . These negroes I shipped on the ‘Jennie Whipple’ ”) TS vol. 6: 110–11). Faulkner’s ledgers in Go Down, Moses are similar to these entries. As Isaac describes the ledgers he has found in his father’s commissary, he alludes to the same details of farm life described in the Leak Diary, especially the outflow of funds to pay for the food and equipment needed on the plantation: “The barrels and kegs of flour and meal and molasses and nails, the wall pegs dependant with plowlines and plow-collars and hames and tracechains, and the desk and the shelf above it on which rested the ledgers in which McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and ginned and sold . . . and the old ledgers clumsy and archaic in size and shape, on the yellowed pages of which were recorded in the faded hand of his father” (255–56). Early in the novel, the focus is on the relationship between Isaac and Sam Fathers, who is of mixed blood and whose mother is a slave. She and her young son are sold as slaves. Faulkner describes one such sale: “two years later [he] sold the man and woman and the child who was his own son to his white neighbor, Carothers McCaslin” (166). The ledger entries in part 4 of “The Bear” record the buying and selling of slaves that takes place on the McCaslin plantation. The Leak Diary also records the births and deaths of mulatto children: “Mol’s mulatto child died yesterday of teething and whooping cough” (TS vol. 5: 467). Runaway slaves receive frequent attention in the diary. In one instance, Leak notes that his son “Frank had runaway” and later writes that: “I would send him off & sell him if he ran away from him again” (TS vol. 5: 406). Presumably Frank owned a slave who had run away. He will sell this slave for repeated misbehavior: he will sell him if he “ran away from him” again. Both diary and novel focus on runaways. Tomey’s Turl, in Go Down, Moses, is especially noteworthy, since Turl is both Carothers’s son and grandson, and he runs away repeatedly. Although whipping occurs infrequently in the diary, running away does incur this punishment on Leak’s plantation. Leak learns of the “running away of the boys” and charges his overseer to “whip them when they come in but to be as merciful as the case would admit of” (TS vol. 5: 424). In the case of another “runaway,” he instructs: “go or send after the boy” (TS vol. 5: 475). When Faulkner’s characters run away in Go Down, Moses, they usually go to Arkansas. In the diary, that is also the case, and Leak also sends his slaves back and forth from his farm in Arkansas. He records that one of

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his neighbors, “John W. Crawford[,] wrote to Stewart last night to bring his negroes back from Arkansas” (TS vol. 3: 146). Faulkner’s opening story in Go Down, Moses, entitled “Was,” focuses on the runaway slave: “When he and Uncle Buck ran back to the house from discovering that Tomey’s Turl had run again, they hear Uncle Buddy cursing and bellowing in the kitchen. . . . ‘Tomey’s Turl has broke out again. Give me and Cass some breakfast quick. We might just barely catch him before he gets here’” (4). The story is comic in many ways. In the chase scene that ensues, Tomey’s Turl defeats his white owners by successfully influencing a hand of poker. Faulkner gives his runaway a charming personality and a clever wit—more than his white owners possess—with which he bests his master. These characteristics—the superior wit and quick, clever mind— are missing from the account of the runaways in the Leak plantation ledger. Other similarities between diary and novel are noteworthy. The diary mentions two puppies: “Got two hound puppies from Bostwick’s day before yesterday” (TS vol. 3: 50). Within a very short time, Leak records a discovered attempt to poison an overseer and his family (TS vol. 3: 52): “Went down to James W. Crawford’s place to enquire into an attempt on the part of some of the negroes to poison Covington (the overseer) & his family with blue stone[.]”67 In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner may be translating these details into his portrait of Ikkemottube, who poisons puppies to magnify his power to those around him. The diary also makes clear that Leak wrote some of his entries to someone in particular, or so that someone else (not named), would read them. He uses the word “you” on numerous occasions. His sons—or his overseers—are the likely persons he was addressing in these ledger entries. In some cases, in the later years the diary was kept, the overseers made entries, as well, and they were perhaps writing to Francis Terry Leak or to his son Walter John, who was also a plantation owner in his own right at that time. For example, one entry reads: “Cash handed you to send to yr mother” (TS vol. 1: 4). Another reads: “Cash handed you some time ago” (TS vol. 1: 67). Other similar entries are: “Cash paid you” (TS vol. 2: 243); “amt. your brother’s note” (TS vol. 2: 268); “Your a/c [account] with Leak and McDonald/ Cash handed you to day in full of balance 65 72.” Another records payment: “By your services as Overseer for 1844 $400” (TS vol. 1: 69). In Go Down, Moses, Uncle Buck and Buddy similarly write in their farm ledgers, and each knows that the other will read the entries and reply. Their


entries record an ongoing conversation between the two of them, reminiscent of Leak’s diary entries addressed to another (264–65). The handwriting of the diarist is distinct from that of the others who make entries. Even this detail Faulkner seems to capture as Isaac “learned to distinguish” his father’s handwriting from his uncle’s, “the hand which he now recognized . . . when he could see them both on the same page” (252–53). The Leak Diary mentions sawmills and gristmills; McDougald’s Mill, Dickerson’s Mill, and Walker’s Mill are examples: “Sent 224 lbs. of wheat, neat, to Dickerson’s Mill & got 132 lbs. Flour, equal to 35 lbs. flour, to the bushel of wheat” (TS vol. 4: 18). Leak’s mills suggest the one at which Rider works in “Pantaloon in Black.” t h e d e bat e

Faulkner refers to Columbus and his discovery of the New World. He posits that in approaching the new continent, settlers made a new beginning to discover “a new world where a nation of people could be founded in humility and pity and sufferance and pride of one to another.” Isaac laments in Go Down, Moses, however, that it would take “three generations” to rectify the mistakes and sins of the past and “set at least some of His lowly people free” (259). Faulkner suggests that the difficulties of attaining true freedom persisted even after the close of the Civil War: “for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free” (255). In the diary, Francis Terry Leak engages in an extended debate with his brother, W. F. Leak, and this dialogue parallels a debate over slavery between Ike and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds. The Leaks’ discussion concerns God’s purpose for the Arkansas bottomlands and, specifically, whether “negroes” will fare well physically there (TS vol. 6: 22). Faulkner seems to have taken inspiration for the fictional debate between Ike and his cousin from the conversation between the Leak brothers. In the diary, Francis Leak writes: “I agreed with him in the final sentiment, but maintained that there are no good grounds for such a belief in the case of settling negroes on the Arkansas bottom, contending that the proof is to the contrary. What proof I deduced from the declarations of planters who have settled plantations there, nearly all of whom concur in the statement that their negroes enjoy as fine health there as they ever did in the uplands; & from my own experience” (TS vol. 6: 22). Later, Francis Leak summarizes

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the opposite views that each brother takes: “I first gave a summary of our respective positions prior to his last letter. . . . [H]e reasserts that the lives of negroes are shortened by settling them in the bottom” (TS vol. 6: 46). The debate takes a religious tone, too, as Leak details his views in contrast to those of his brother. The conversation turns to “the purpose of the Creator,” “objects of creation” and the theological “reason for the dence [sic] forests that abound in the bottoms” (TS vol. 6: 47–48): With regard to the latter sentiment I enquired of him if it were not wrong, in any blind mortal to avow a willingness to sweep out of existence anything that the Creator had made; & if it were not more becoming, & reverent to suppose that nothing had been created in vain & so supposing humbly to seek to find out the uses of all of God’s works. I then pointed to the evidences that the bottoms were created for a wise purpose which were found in the peculiar adaptation of the soil to the growing of cotton sugar & corn, which adaptation showed that they were designed to be cultivated. I also contended that the peculiar fitness of the negroes constitution for the cultivation of these rich alluvial lands as shown by experience was a clear intimation likewise, that they were designed for that particular labor &c &c &c. (TS vol. 6: 22) The debate in Go Down, Moses between Isaac McCaslin and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds is very similar, but Faulkner once again shifts the topic somewhat. Faulkner often seems to introduce such variations when he is drawing source material directly from the diary. Faulkner changes the argument between the Leak brothers from the topic of whether the bottomland provides a healthy environment for slaves to a related topic—and one that Faulkner gave deep consideration—whether God intended humankind to own land. Isaac claims the position that God did not intend for humans to hold land as property for themselves, but to share it communally: “and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth . . . not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood . . .” (257). McCaslin takes the opposite point of view, arguing that the land, fought for and paid for, in their case by their grandfather, can and has been owned.


“Grandfather . . . did own it. And not the first. Not alone and not the first since, as your Authority states, man was dispossessed of Eden. . . . That nevertheless and notwithstanding old Carothers did own it. Bought it, got it, no matter; kept it, held it, no matter; bequeathed it” (257–58). The debates continue for pages in both the Leak Diary and Faulkner’s novel. At one point in the diary, Leak’s brother, W. F. Leak, theorizes that “facts are stubborn things, and will not yield to theory or isolated cases” (TS vol. 6: 35). Faulkner seems to echo this idea in an interview when he says, “I don’t have much patience with facts” and “facts have very little connection with truth.”68 The Leak Diary and Go Down, Moses seem quite closely connected. From the character names (such as Carothers, Sam, Isaac, and Mollie—and Moses) to the story lines, plot details, settings and locations (such as the Ice Pond, Corinth, Canaan, and the sawmill), to the long debate about the creation of the world, freedom, endurance, and the purpose of humankind, Faulkner appears to have drawn some of his most memorable characters from—and found some of his most powerful themes in—the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak.”

k “Barn Burning” Striking correspondences are also apparent between the Leak Diary and Faulkner’s story “Barn Burning.” Most of the Leak references that Faulkner appears to use for this story appear in Typescript volume 3. Leak names Mr. Harris as a man currently renting land from him (TS vol. 3: 344). Another man named Abner Shettles writes to Leak and requests to rent land: “Rec’d letter from Abner Shettles, Cherry Creek P. O. Pontotoc County, repeating his wish to rent the land Mr. Harris cultivates this year” (TS vol. 3: 334). Leak notes: “Wrote to Mr. Shettles saying that I would probably visit Pontotoc in the course of a few weeks, when I would inform him whether he could get the land he wants, that the land will be to rent for the next year” (TS vol. 3: 334). Later, Shettles again writes to Leak requesting to “rent the place Mr. Harris is on” (TS vol. 3: 344). Leak does not state in writing whether he agreed to rent the land to Shettles, although Leak usually documents his actions meticulously. The absence of an entry in the affirmative may indicate the negative. The next entry by Leak notes with much alarm that his cotton gin house

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has burned: “Yesterday morning about 9 or 10 o’clock, one of my Gin houses caught fire & burnt up, destroying about 25 bales Cotton, 2 Gin stands, a Mill, Cotton Feeder, Threshers, Fan, 100 to 200 bushels oats, some tools, and a large quantity of Cotton seed. Total loss about $1800. or $2000. We saved, probably, some 8 bales seed Cotton in a damaged state, or the loss would have been upwards of 30 bales. . . . When the fire was discovered, the hands . . . spent the balance of the day in efforts to extinguish the fire & save Cotton” (TS vol. 3: 344–45). In a few more days, Leak writes letters to his son and to others in which he describes the burning of the gin house. Although he expresses little, if any, overt emotion about the incident, as is typical in his ledger entries, he nonetheless conveys his distress by the number of references he makes to the gin burning and in the letters he writes describing the incident. Leak neither expresses nor implies a possible connection between Shettles’s visit and the burning of the gin house, but Shettles’s visit occurs close in time to the gin house burning. Whether this fact suggests to Leak that Shettles may be culpable is unclear. Later, Shettles writes to Leak again, this time requesting “permission to put a School House on my land” (TS vol. 3: 13), and Leak replies in the affirmative. Faulkner’s famous story “Barn Burning” bears a strong resemblance to this portion of the Leak text. Names again are among the most obvious likenesses. Mr. Harris is the name of the man who brings the claim of the barn burning to the circuit court. Harris’s name appears near that of Abner Shettles. The similarity of the names Abner Snopes and Abner Shettles is especially noteworthy. Faulkner seems to use details from Leak’s ledgers to create a new story with his usual focus on the emotional and psychological. In the Leak Diary, the landowner describes his gin house burning; Faulkner writes of the burning of a barn. He changes other details, too: he presents this story from the point of view of the barn burner’s child. Abner Snopes, like his apparent counterpart, Abner Shettles, has come into the community to rent farmland. Although the community suspects Snopes of burning a barn, in the story, the circuit judge considering the case cannot prove him guilty, and the judge closes the matter without resolution, except that he directs Snopes to leave: “Leave this country and don’t come back to it” (Collected Stories, 5). Faulkner seems to draw the main idea for his story from Leak’s gin burning as he described it in the diary. As is typical of Faulkner, however, he


focuses his fictional account on the emotional and psychological—in this case, the trauma and incomprehension of the barn burner’s son. Faulkner effectively articulates the confusion and turmoil that ensues in the life of the young and impressionable boy. Faulkner and the McCarroll/Francisco Family Stories

That William Faulkner and Edgar Francisco Jr. could have conversed and shared stories over approximately forty years and then passed them on to Edgar’s young son is typical of the southern oral storytelling tradition, and yet this extended and expansive conversation is, in itself, quite remarkable. The act of the two male friends talking also finds its way into Faulkner’s fiction. Will and Edgar Jr.’s intellectual and philosophical relationship echoes in a number of Faulkner’s novels and stories in which two men rely on and confide in each other. Gail Hightower and Byron Bunch; Thomas Sutpen and Mr. Compson; Isaac McCaslin and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds; and Quentin Compson and Shreve are examples. Faulkner’s frequent travel of the thirty miles to Holly Springs to talk with his good friend Edgar suggests his desire for personal and intellectual companionship, reminiscence, historical study of their region, and philosophical debate with his friend, especially about the matters that had so affected and changed their home country. In the interviews that follow, Dr. Francisco—“Little Eddie”—tells family stories that are immediately recognizable in Faulkner’s fiction. In these stories, further possible connections to Faulkner’s work become readily apparent. The Mouth Washing One day, while Will Faulkner and Edgar Jr. were visiting, Little Eddie heard Faulkner refer to a “damn squirrel” and began to mimic the author’s words around the house. Hearing curse words issuing from the lips of her young son, his mother yanked Eddie up and dragged him off to the kitchen for punishment. The same scenario had occurred twice before, when Little Eddie was two and three. This time, at age six, when Eddie emerged from the kitchen blowing bubbles, William Faulkner was laughing. Dr. Francisco recalls that Faulkner said to him, “When are you going to learn . . . not to repeat what I say to your mother?” (EWF interviews, 70). Later in Dr. Fran-

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cisco’s childhood, William Faulkner turned to him and said, “I wrote you up” in one of the stories, adding that the boy should not fret about it: “Don’t worry, Little Eddie. I didn’t use your name” (EWF interviews, 70). Still later, when Dr. Francisco visited Faulkner on his way to college, Faulkner told him that he had memorialized the mouth-washing incident in the stories that initially appeared in the Saturday Evening Post as “Ambuscade” and “Retreat” and later were included in The Unvanquished, and that he had put “a dozen references to your family in them” (EWF interviews, 78). Dr. Francisco’s story is evocative of the mouth-washing scene in The Unvanquished. As Little Eddie did in the aftermath of his soaping, Bayard and Ringo come out rinsing and spitting the soap from their mouths. The gallery on which the two boys are standing seems reminiscent of the similar gallery at McCarroll Place. The location and scene could be among the “dozen references” Faulkner made to the McCarroll/Francisco family: [The] sun shone almost level into our faces while we stood at the edge of the back gallery, spitting, rinsing the soap from our mouths turn and turn about from the gourd dipper, spitting straight into the sun. For a while, just by breathing we could blow soap bubbles, but soon it was just the taste of the spitting. Then even that began to go away although the impulse to spit did not, while away to the north we could see the cloudbank, faint and blue and faraway at the base and touched with copper sun along the crest. . . . [but] it was gone now—the suds, the glassy weightless iridescent bubbles, even the taste of it (39–40). “Augur” and “Ogre” Will Faulkner visited the Franciscos often. When Little Eddie was small, he could not pronounce Will Faulkner’s name clearly. He said “Augur,” for “Faulkner.” One day while Will was visiting, Eddie looked at him and said “Augur.” Later he said to me, “Well, I told your dad, as long as you didn’t call me ‘Ogre,’ it was okay” (EWF interviews, 67). The words “augur” and “ogre” appear on the same page in Absalom, Absalom! (62), which Faulkner was composing during this time period. The word “ogre” occurs numerous times in the novel with accompanying word variations, including: “that


ogre-face of her childhood” (62), “ogre’s hand” (164), “ogre-bourne” (167), “ogre-world” and “ogre-tale” (22), “ogre-shape” (13), “two half-ogre children” (13), and “ogre or a djinn” (23). Perhaps hearing Little Eddie’s mispronunciation of Faulkner’s name at McCarroll Place was the simple aural cue that stirred Faulkner’s imagination. Some of these word groups could be self-referential. One instance, for example: “not the ogre; villain true enough, but a mortal fallible one less to invoke fear than pity: but no ogre; mad true enough” (167) may be self-descriptive, as if Faulkner were imagining how his “ogre” visage might appear to a child like Eddie. Presumably the author hoped that his countenance evoked “pity” rather than “fear.” Faulkner’s plethora of “ogre” images accrue meaning and implication as he applied them to the dark, shadowy, and complex character of the fictional Thomas Sutpen. Adeline Wiggin Francisco As Faulkner listened to his friend’s multigenerational stories about the Francisco and McCarroll families he often asked Edgar Jr. to repeat them with the phrase, “Tell me again, Edgar.” Dr. Francisco remembers Faulkner scribbling notes as he listened, over and over, to the familiar tales. One McCarroll family name that Faulkner seems to have woven into his fiction belonged to Adeline Wiggin Francisco, whom the family called Addie. “Great-grandmother Addie Wiggin Francisco just went to bed and died,” Dr. Francisco recalls. “She did not seem to be sick. She just didn’t want to get up out of bed, and a week later, she was gone. Dad would talk about her death often, and I am certain that Will was there and heard him.” Faulkner’s character Addie Bundren, in As I Lay Dying, dies in the same way, with no obvious disease or symptoms. She just goes to bed and soon thereafter dies. The stoic and inexplicable death of the family’s ancestor Adeline may well have been the unforgettable story that led to the creation of Faulkner’s central character in As I Lay Dying. Ludie’s Window The story of Ludie’s window recounts how the McCarrolls’ beautiful and frail niece Ludie Baugh etched her name with her diamond ring on the

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glass windowpane at McCarroll Place in Holly Springs. William Faulkner depicts a similar story in several of his novels. Although the McCarroll and Francisco family members have openly discussed the story of Ludie with others in the community and with at least one scholar (Jane Isbell Haynes), Dr. Francisco’s interview here documents, for the first time, Faulkner’s awareness of and intense interest in this particular family story. Ludie Baugh was a niece of John and Elizabeth McCarroll and the daughter of Richard Baugh, the mayor of Memphis. Ludie’s mother had died, and in 1860, as the nation was careening toward civil war, her father sent her to live with her aunt and uncle in Holly Springs. He did so in part because he felt she would be safer there, but also because he thought her aunt could help prepare her for young womanhood. Ludie was beloved in Holly Springs because of her comeliness, and her frail health engendered sympathy. According to the family story, one day she was looking out from her sitting room in McCarroll Place, across the open gallery toward the road. She was watching the actions of soldiers—perhaps Confederates but more likely state militia or other troops who later became part of the Confederate army—moving back and forth. As she looked on, perhaps contemplating her future, she etched her name, “Ludie,” into the window glass with her diamond ring. Later, as she and her mother were handing out pecan pies to the soldiers passing by, the beautiful Ludie caught the eye of a soldier. About three years later, he returned to Holly Springs to find her. They married and left town. Since communications were poor after the war, the townspeople did not know where Ludie and her new husband had gone. Members of the town were terribly sad when they eventually learned that Ludie had died soon after her marriage. Ludie’s name is still visible in the antique glass overlooking the old gallery at McCarroll Place. The story fired Faulkner’s imagination. In his work, the girl catches the eye of a poor Confederate soldier, who returns after the Civil War to find her. They depart with only a bag of seed corn, surely a symbol of fertility and hope for a soldier and his bride envisioning a new life after the war. Faulkner recounts the tale in no fewer than three of his novels: Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, and The Reivers. Faulkner scholars have long known and debated the various possible sources of this story. Jane Cook and Cecilia Farmer are the two names most frequently associated with the legend of a young girl’s name etched into a


windowpane. Jane Cook apparently carved her name into a window in Oxford, Mississippi. E. O. Hawkins published an article in 1965 that explored the question of whether William Faulkner was aware of the Oxford window etching. Hawkins concluded, without any direct evidence, that the likelihood is high that Faulkner knew about or maybe even saw this window pane. Hawkins was prescient, however, in his assertion that the legend seems narrated by a person who was “showing a visitor the historic sites”: She was the daughter of the jailer, a helpless, anemic only child. She scratched her name on the window pane in 1861, then spent the next four years gazing out the window most of the time, it seemed. Once, in 1864, just before the town was burned by Union troops, she caught the glance of a Confederate officer during a skirmish through the town. He returned in May of 1865 with a mule and a bag of seed corn as his only possessions, asked for her hand, married her, and departed in the space of a few hours. The story is related as if a townsman were showing a visitor the historic sights, telling him of local legends. Indeed, the story of Cecilia seems to be almost legendary to the townsman.69 Hawkins’s version bears a strong resemblance to Ludie’s story as narrated to Faulkner by Edgar Francisco Jr., who did so as a guide would describe a historic site to a tourist. Hawkins’s mention of the “anemic” girl also resonates with Dr. Francisco’s account that Ludie was beautiful but “frail.” William Faulkner echoes that suggestion of her frailty in his novels. Noel Polk further interprets Faulkner’s use of the etching in his 1972 essay “Faulkner’s ‘The Jail’ and the Meaning of Cecilia Farmer” and helpfully reminds readers of the language Faulkner employs in the “plate-corrected fourth printing” of Requiem for a Nun. Polk says the language carries the “monumental cadences of Cecilia Farmer’s faint window-scratched testament” in Faulkner’s words: “Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.” Polk reiterates Michael Millgate’s perception that Cecilia “may remind us of Faulkner’s definition of the artist as one who ‘knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on the wall’ . . . that somebody a hundred, a thousand years later will see.”70 These sentiments are consistent with the McCarroll/Francisco version of this legend, in which Ludie Baugh, the beauti-

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ful, frail, homebound niece of John McCarroll, destined to die young, etched her name in the glass window at McCarroll Place, lest she be forgotten. Cecilia Farmer captured Polk’s further critical attention. He adds to his earlier analysis that “Faulkner builds a veritable domestic and historic epic around Cecilia Farmer’s diamond-scratched signature in the window.”71 Polk interprets her etching as the very symbol of her entrapment, a simple name and date on a fragile piece of glass that locate her in time and space. Her writing evokes for generations of Jeffersonians and visitors her face in the window, which becomes a magical summons to viewers to recreate her life in terms of the romance of her departure from Jefferson, as the wife of a Confederate soldier from Alabama, who saw her in one fleeting moment as he rode through town fleeing the Yankee army and returned at war’s end to claim her, to take her away to Alabama to start a new life. . . . [No one] stops her from marrying a stranger and moving to a land where they will probably never see her again.72 Ludie Baugh’s fate was tragic, indeed. After her marriage, Ludie returned to Memphis with her young husband, but she died of acute gastritis and possibly bore a child the year she died.73 The sympathy expressed in the obituary for Ludie in the Holly Spring Reporter is a testimonial to the deep feeling of the townspeople for the lovely young girl who enshrined her identity in enduring glass on the gallery at McCarroll Place. Her obituary in the Memphis Appeal gives the account of her death: “Died at the residence of her father, R. D. Baugh, in this city, yesterday evening, at 7¼ o’clock, Mary L., wife of Henry H. Booth, after a brief illness. . . . The bereaved and grief-stricken relatives, especially her husband and her father—who by her death, is left childless—have the fullest sympathies of the public.” A separate death notice, several days later, listed her cause of death: “M. L. Booth, 25 years, female white, acute gastritis.”74 Dr. Francisco says that no one knew where Ludie had gone or, when news of her death arrived, where she had been buried. The absence of a body, and no spot on which to place a stone, led Amelia to want some mention of Ludie somewhere, so she thought she would add it to Emily’s grave stone by noting that Emily was the mother of Ludie, but she did not have


the funds to do so. Dr. Francisco summarizes: “Ludie was gone, vanished, her whereabouts unknown, so only the etching remained. She managed to leave that evidence of her having existed for Will Faulkner to stare at seventy years later and say ‘She is still here.’” Ludie’s window drew more critical attention in 1986, when Jane Isbell Haynes interviewed “Little Eddie’s” mother, Ruth Bitzer Francisco, who had so disliked Faulkner. Over the years, her son recalls, Mrs. Francisco had always been “happy to show Ludie’s window” to interested parties, including Haynes. Ruth Francisco continued to deny, however, that she ever knew Faulkner, or that her husband had ever been Faulkner’s friend. She simply refused to inform her visitors that the two men had over the years often sat close by the etching and pondered its meaning. As William Faulkner sat in the rocking chair on the gallery and viewed Ludie’s etching, he would say that he always saw her name in reverse. Edgar Jr. would ask why Will would not want to go into her room to see her name as she etched it, from inside looking out. Faulkner would answer that he believed that Ludie was standing there. Edgar Jr. would retort that Ludie was not there. Will would complete the sequence with a haunting, Faulknerian reply: “Edgar, you may be immune, but I know that Ludie is standing there.” Scholars still debate whether Faulkner was a religious man—whether he believed in God. He went to church on special occasions—Christmas and Easter, weddings and funerals—and he suggested that he did not believe in the afterlife. Faulkner, however, was known for his fondness for ghost stories and his focus on the past. His response to Ludie’s etching reemphasizes his belief that the past and present coexist. Moreover, Faulkner’s statement about Ludie’s extracorporeal presence reinforces his view of the fluidity of time and existence: “time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was—only is.”75 Dr. Francisco recalls that later, just before leaving for college, he visited Faulkner at his home in Oxford, Mississippi, and Faulkner said, “Is Ludie still there?” “She’s still there,” Edgar III replied. Faulkner still remembered her story. The One-Eyed Pony The repeated and unsuccessful attempts to break in a one-eyed pony is another McCarroll story that Faulkner transmuted into fiction. In this story,

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though, Faulkner himself plays a role. When Faulkner and Edgar Jr. were children, a pony farm operated in the area of Holly Springs. One pony at the farm could not be broken or ridden, so he was given to the Franciscos, who could accommodate the pony on their land. Edgar Jr. and his friends would have a pony to ride if only it could be tamed. Will Faulkner, Edgar Jr., and their African American friend Lenso, who lived on the place, all tried. As each of the boys attempted to ride the pony, it whirled around in a circle, and the boys would find themselves thrown. Lenso tried especially hard but failed repeatedly. Edgar Jr. would tenaciously hold on as the pony whirled, but the pony would force him off by scraping his leg against the fence or a nearby tree. Eventually the boys realized that the pony was blind in the left, or “near,” eye and that their mistake had been to attempt mounting him from the blind side. The pony would spin around and try to use his good eye to see who was attempting to ride him. Once the boys discovered his blindness in one eye, they were more successful, but even so, the pony proved intractable, and they were never able to enjoy riding him. Lenso said of the pony, “He’s sorry, ’tis” (as if to say, “ ’tis a sorry pony”), and so the young Faulkner named their pony “Sartis.” Faulkner soon insisted that the spelling of the name not include the d, as in the nearby town of Sardis, but with a t for “terrible pony.” Some believe that Faulkner’s inspiration for the name “Sartoris” came from the town “Sardis,” which is near Oxford, but this story adds a new source for Faulkner’s creation of the word. Eventually the Francisco family gave the animal away, but Faulkner immortalized his boyhood friendships and their pony in his short story “Ambuscade.” The details of the pony story that Dr. Francisco recalls today match well with those of Faulkner’s fiction. Dr. Francisco uses the term “near-eye,” and Faulkner employs the similar “nigh-eye.” Faulkner once said that he had “grown up with a Negro boy like Ringo in The Unvanquished.”76 The story Dr. Francisco tells in these interviews strongly suggests that Lenso was a crucial model for Faulkner’s Ringo in “Ambuscade,” first published as a short story and subsequently as a part of The Unvanquished. Dr. Francisco explains that his father and Will Faulkner thought Lenso to be more adept and mature than they were. In The Unvanquished, Bayard says of Ringo’s growing maturity: “I had to do most of the changing just to keep up with him”; “I would never catch up with him” (136–37). The name Ringo is very close—both in sound and number of letters—to the name


Lenso, Faulkner’s boyhood friend. Faulkner also told Dr. Francisco that he used the one-eyed pony and Lenso in his story and acknowledged that he could not have “made up” that story. Apparently Faulkner had, as he told Dr. Francisco, put “a dozen references” to the McCarroll family into his stories. The McCarroll Silver Lore circulates in Oxford, Mississippi, that during the Civil War, citizens buried family silver, gold, money, and other property to prevent plundering by Yankee soldiers. The McCarroll family also has such a story. Faulkner made references to buried or hidden money in several of his works. What suggests the story of the buried McCarroll silver as a source for Faulkner’s “Ambuscade” and The Unvanquished, however, is Dr. Francisco’s clear recollection of Faulkner’s sitting in the rocking chair listening to Edgar Jr. tell the story and of Faulkner’s discussing the details of this legend with Edgar on numerous occasions. As Dr. Francisco relates the story, Amelia McCarroll, daughter of John McCarroll, buried the family silver in a small chest in the orchard at the outset of the Civil War, lest the Yankees overrun their plantation and seize their valuables. The chest, Dr. Francisco asserts, “was not a steamer trunk” but rather “a small chest that would hold the family silver and flatware.” At some point, the family retrieved their treasure. John McCarroll reportedly considered taking the silver to Memphis so that it could be shipped to New Orleans for sale as a contribution to the war effort. McCarroll said that after the war, they would no longer have use for the silver and “no one to polish it.” Today the family is thoroughly convinced that Amelia did bury the silver; they are less convinced that any of it was sold in New Orleans. More likely, says Dr. Francisco, his great-grandmother Amelia sold the silver to someone east of Holly Springs. Stories appear in Faulkner’s “Retreat” and, later, in The Unvanquished with language and action strikingly reminiscent of this Francisco family legend. Obviously, the McCarrolls suffered during and after the war. Their hogs were stolen by soldiers moving through the area, and horses were also commandeered. The only food they had to eat came from a small patch of corn that Amelia had hidden in the woods. She augmented this meager fare by foraging for mushrooms and picking pecans from their orchard trees.

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In telling her story now, Amelia’s descendant especially focuses on the strength of character she needed to sustain her family during and after the war. She shared the food with her neighbors and managed to provide for other family members living with her at McCarroll Place. William Faulkner’s Granny Millard in The Unvanquished exhibits an indomitable character suggestive of Amelia’s wartime fortitude. Faulkner had other female role models in mind, no doubt, including his own mother, Maud Butler Falkner, and his Aunt Tee.77 Amelia McCarroll’s courageous struggles may have passed down to William Faulkner via the stories her grandson Edgar Jr. told as the men sat looking out at the road where the Yankee soldiers had once trooped by. Faulkner may have, at least in part, derived from Amelia the personality of his valiant and resourceful Rosa Millard, who, during the desperate times of the Civil War, generously shared with those most in need around her what food and goods she could obtain. The stories about Amelia and her family members thus offered to Faulkner a constant and valuable source, like the free-flowing spring at McCarroll Place. Amelia and her sister Sallie McCarroll bear a close resemblance to the female sisters Ellen and Rosa in Absalom, Absalom! The photographs of Sallie McCarroll and her cousin Ludie, lovingly preserved down through the generations by the family, have been kept neatly in a drawer. In their sturdy black metal cases, these family photographs have stood the test of time. As such, these photos seem the authentic equivalents of one in a metal case that Faulkner describes in the novel: “What she held in that lax and negligent hand was the photograph, the picture of herself in its metal case which she had given him” (142). In other remarkable correspondences, Faulkner describes Rosa in “eternal black” with “the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat” (7, 8) and again later with “the wan triangle of lace at wrists and throat” (11). Sallie McCarroll’s photograph, carefully preserved in its metal case, clearly shows her attired in black with lace appearing as if in a triangle—at both wrists and throat. Also, Aunt Sallie was small in stature—she was short, according to Dr. Francisco. Perhaps Faulkner further memorialized these characteristics of hers in his depiction of Rosa: “sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor” (7). As a child, Dr. Francisco saw the dresses of Sallie and her sisters on display during Pilgrim-


age. They were so small that he asked if the dresses were for children. He was told: “No, the aunts were small. People were smaller then.” Faulkner similarly uses the image of “children’s feet” in describing her (7). Sallie, who never married, seems the perfect model for Faulkner’s description of the “old flesh long embattled in virginity.” That she told stories to Edgar Jr. and to Will makes one or both of them seem candidates for the “idle boy” who must listen to Rosa tell her long story in Absalom, Absalom!. Dr. Francisco recalls, for example, that Edgar Jr.’s friends asked him whether his aunts bothered him. He said that they did not, and he spent many hours sitting and listening both to Amelia and her sister Sallie’s stories. Perhaps this situation, or the story about it, evoked Faulkner’s description in the novel of Rosa: “the old woman who made you spend a whole afternoon sitting indoors . . . when you wanted to be out among friends of your own age” (10). Amelia died on October 31, 1909, and Bettie on January 11, 1913. Aunt Sallie lived to tell the story, much as Rosa Coldfield does in Faulkner’s novel. Sallie died on February 9, 1917. Talking about Slavery Dr. Francisco’s family stories seem to have found their way into Absalom, Absalom! as well. William Faulkner and Edgar Francisco Jr. talked often about slavery, and especially about the role it played in the development of sentiments and actions that led up to the Civil War. According to Dr. Francisco, they lamented the very fact of slavery—that it had ever existed gave them both pain. They decried the slave owners’ collective inability to resolve the slavery issue in time to prevent the outbreak of war and discussed with regret the Confederate leadership’s focus on states’ rights. They could see in retrospect that the southern response to Lincoln’s rallying “united we stand, divided we fall” became a call to arms instead, as southerners became “arrogant, stubborn, and mindless” in their “determination to defend the right to secede.” Then, too, Will and Edgar talked over John McCarroll’s “Fair 50–50 Plan,” in which slaves would be manumitted and given wages instead. Prior to the war, McCarroll apparently wrote to Francis Terry Leak, who was in an influential position with the Confederate leadership, and recommended implementation of this plan as a way of resolving the issues about slavery and thereby staving off a war. Leak apparently never replied to McCarroll’s letter.

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Under the terms of McCarroll’s “Fair 50–50 Plan,” according to Dr. Francisco: A slave would become an indentured servant at an indenture of no more than 50 percent of purchase price, or less, depending upon prior years of service to that owner. A fair wage would be calculated, with half going to pay for housing, food, and clothing, which the slave was already getting, and half crediting against the indenture, which should pay it off in five to seven years, or if not paid off in that time, the balance would be forgiven, since any balance left then would mean the owner had paid too much or had set the fair wage too low. McCarroll thought the plan could be sold for its economic benefits and would avoid any discussion of the morality of slavery, which would surely make most owners defensive. The plan built in some time for learning and adjusting to the changes for owners and slaves, but most politically important, time for white day laborers to adjust to competition from free blacks joining the labor pool. (EWF interviews, 95) Faulkner’s description in Absalom, Absalom! of Coldfield’s manumission of his slaves is very similar: Even the two negresses were gone now—whom he had freed as soon as he came into possession of them (through a debt, by the way, not purchase), writing out their papers of freedom which they could not read and putting them on a weekly wage which he held back in full against the discharge of their current market value—and in return for which they had been among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops. So when he died, he had nothing, not only saved but kept. (84) Faulkner’s novels seem indebted to the conversations about slavery between Edgar Jr. and William Faulkner and reflect sentiments shared by these two men. Faulkner and McCarroll Place

The words Faulkner once spoke to Edgar Jr. at McCarroll Place acknowledge his awareness of the family’s endurance: “Nothing has changed in


this house in a hundred years.” Faulkner seems to have memorialized McCarroll Place and the McCarroll/Franciscos in more than one work, but his description in “There Was a Queen,” in which the family who had come to Mississippi from Carolina and whose several generations had lived and died in the same house, and who carried the same names generation after generation, is especially noteworthy:78 “[The] house, the premises lay somnolent, peaceful, as they had lain for almost a hundred years, since John Sartoris had come from Carolina and built it. And he had died in it and his son Bayard had died in it, and Bayard’s son John and John’s son Bayard in turn had been buried from it even though the last Bayard didn’t die there” (Collected Stories, 727). Scholars postulate that Faulkner based John Sartoris on his own great-grandfather, and that is in part true. Faulkner’s family did not reside in one location for a hundred years, however, and several generations of his family did not die in one house, as was true for the McCarrolls, so the McCarrolls also seem a likely model. Dr. Francisco’s description of the McCarroll property as it was at the time Faulkner was visiting the family also suggests connections with The Sound and the Fury. McCarroll Place is at the top of a steep hill, which at the time of Faulkner’s visits led down to a large fenced pasture, and then on to a flowing spring. Cows and pigs grazed in the pasture, and as children, Little Eddie and his friends went through a gate and fence and through the pasture to play in the woods. The street forming the western border of the house is named “Maury.” The Strickland Place was right next door to McCarroll Place, and the neighbors, Pearl and Frank Strickland, were relatives—they were the grandchildren of Francis Terry Leak, and their mother was Janey Leak. Pearl and Frank were linked thus to the Leak side of their neighbors at McCarroll Place. As children, the Stricklands and McCarrolls visited back and forth between the two houses and played together. Pearl’s brother Frank was mentally disabled. Luella Gibson was the servant in the Strickland home. She carried notes back and forth between the residents of the two houses.79 Similar locales, personalities, and events seem to find their way into The Sound and the Fury. The Compson children spend time outside and cross the yard to get to the neighbors’ house. The mentally impaired Benjy enjoys the pasture, and the fence corrals him. When Benjy becomes inebriated with champagne at Caddy’s wedding, he falls down the hill as his mind spins and swirls. McCarroll Place has a corresponding hill. Benjy and Caddy carry notes back and forth across the yard between Uncle Maury’s

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and the neighbors’ houses. The mammy in the novel is Dilsey Gibson, a likely link with Luella Gibson, just next door, who also took notes back and forth between the families. The street name “Maury” at the corner of McCarroll Place also appears in the novel: Benjy’s given name is “Maury,” and in the novel, mother Caroline’s brother is named “Uncle Maury.” Perhaps Faulkner drew this name from other sources, but he could have simply looked out the west window at McCarroll Place, while visiting there, and noted the street name. Exhibiting behavior considered risqué during that era, Pearl left Holly Springs as an adult, unmarried woman and toured Europe with a German man, Gerard Badow. They returned, married, in 1927, and resided in her large home in Holly Springs. According to Dr. Francisco, Will Faulkner would have been aware, during his visits to McCarroll Place at that time, of these activities of Pearl and Gerard Badow. Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury thus may have an antecedent at the McCarroll and Strickland Places. The time period for these events also corresponds with Faulkner’s development of The Sound and the Fury, which he published in 1929. In the appendix to The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner reveals that Caddy has left town, and later the local librarian notices a photograph of Caddy with a German man. This situation seems strongly suggestive of the story that unfolded right next door to McCarroll Place—that of Pearl Strickland and her travels abroad with her German lover/husband, Gerard Badow. Pearl, her brother Frank, and her husband Gerard, as such, may provide heretofore unrecognized models for Caddy and Benjy Compson, as well as for Caddy’s lover, the German man who appears in the appendix of the novel. Although Faulkner’s own Mammy Callie Barr partly inspired the fictional mammy in the novel, Luella Gibson, who worked for the Stricklands, and who delivered notes back and forth between the neighboring houses, at least in part, may have provided Faulkner with a model for Dilsey Gibson in The Sound and the Fury. Other locations, such as the Thompson-Chandler mansion in Oxford, Mississippi, and the family who lived there, have long appeared to be models for Faulkner’s fictional family. Given the new information, however, the McCarroll house, lot, pasture, fence, gate, and hill—as well as the Strickland neighbors, may have more closely informed the portraits of the Compson and Gibson families in The Sound and the Fury. In both The Unvanquished and As I Lay Dying Faulkner describes a spring


very similar to the one just down the hill at McCarroll Place. Dr. Francisco mentions in the interviews that his family’s house was at the top of a hill, and people who worked and lived in houses down along the slope of the hill came to drink from this spring and fill their buckets. Dr. Francisco is sure that Faulkner, too, had been to that spring. In The Unvanquished, Bayard decides to “go to the spring with the water bucket” (223). A woman coming up the hill seems drawn from the scene Dr. Francisco describes at McCarroll Place: “I saw Louvinia come up the hill from the spring, carrying her cedar water bucket and singing” (226). In As I Lay Dying, the spring also appears “down the hill”: “In the afternoon . . . instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring. . . . It would be quiet there then, with the water bubbling up and away and the sun slanting quiet in the trees” (169). These correspondences further suggest that McCarroll Place was an important presence in Faulkner’s stories and novels.

k Faulkner’s fiction makes evident the significance of his decades-long encounter with the Leak Diary. He seems to have mined this document, as well as the McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family stories he discussed for so many years with his friend Edgar Jr., to create a vibrant fictional place and time closely aligned with both personal and regional history. Faulkner’s response to Ludie Baugh’s etching of her name on a window at McCarroll Place, as described by Dr. Francisco in these interviews, shows what separates Faulkner from the historian and yet links him so strongly to history. Faulkner insisted on seeing Ludie’s name “in reverse.” He saw her as she was and, through the looking glass of history, imagined her world. The gallery window that Faulkner looked through at McCarroll Place is the same window at which Ludie stood to look out at the troops passing by on their way to war. Ludie’s story—with its history, romance, and the resonance of legend—fascinated Faulkner, and illustrates his strongly held belief that the past lingers on, never dissipating, and ever infusing the present with meaning. Looking from the outside in, Faulkner viewed the etching of the beautiful Ludie, who seemed to call to him across the annals of time. Lovely to behold, yet physically frail, she caught the eye of her future husband but was destined to disappear in the aftermath of the Civil War. Her tragic story, emblematic of love, loss, and the chaos of war, com-

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memorated in the name etched in glass by her own hand at the bedroom window, so fascinated Faulkner that he memorialized it in three novels. “Tell me again, Edgar,” Faulkner would say as he requested retellings of this and other stories from his friend Edgar Jr.—descendant of the McCarroll family and then the guardian of the family home, stories, documents, and the Leak ledgers. Faulkner shows himself to be a careful listener and observer of the history he found around him in his transformation of much of what he saw and heard into symbolic and mythic literary works of art. The captivating stories of the McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family—told to Faulkner by his friend Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. and overheard by Little Eddie, the shy child listening attentively as his father conversed with and told stories to his hunting buddy—are important new Faulkner sources, as is the eighteen-hundred-page “Diary of Francis Terry Leak,” a document hidden in plain sight until these interviews and evaluations revealed its literary importance. That William Faulkner had a prolonged interest in the Leak/McCarroll/Francisco family and their stories, diary, and family home, and wove these raw materials into his fiction over many years, suggests new paths of literary inquiry.

The McCarroll Place about 1948. Courtesy Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III. Photograph prepared for publication by George Nikas.

Edgar Francisco Jr. and his wife, Ruth, in about 1930. Courtesy Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III. Photograph prepared for publication by George Nikas.

“Little Eddie,” six years old, in costume for the Holly Springs Pilgrimage. Courtesy Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III. Photograph prepared for publication by George Nikas.

The rocking chair in which William Faulkner often sat when visiting McCarroll Place. Photograph by John Courtland Francisco. Prepared for publication by George Nikas.

E. W. Francisco & Son Insurance Company, on the town square in Holly Springs, ca. 1939. Faulkner sometimes visited Edgar Jr. here. Courtesy Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III. Photograph prepared for publication by George Nikas.

Mary L. (“Ludie”) Baugh. Courtesy Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III. Photograph prepared for publication by George Nikas.

Ludie’s etching on the window pane at McCarroll Place. Photograph by George Nikas.

Sallie McCarroll, Edgar Jr.’s great-aunt, who often told stories to Will Faulkner and Edgar when they were boys. Courtesy Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III. Photograph prepared for publication by George Nikas.


Conversations with Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III Will Faulkner and Little Eddie

SW: Will you tell me about your education and career? EWF: I graduated from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). My master of arts degree from Emory University was in psychology, 1956. Anne was there at the same time and earned an M.S. in biology. I then received an M.S. from Georgia Tech in management and stayed there and taught statistics. Anne and I married in 1960 and left for Carnegie Tech, where I worked on a doctorate degree in economics. I was there one year and then transferred to Yale to continue my study in economics on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. I then obtained a master of public health (M.P.H.) from the Yale School of Medicine and taught in the Yale School of Epidemiology and Public Health, and received my doctorate in 1971 from the Graduate School at Yale. I was on the faculty there from 1965 to 1971. I was a member of the health team that wrote much of Title 18 and 19 [Medicare and Medicaid]. We went to Vermont to work with the Regional Medical Program developing health-care programs in heart, cancer, and stroke. Then we formed Designations in the interview text for Dr. Francisco will be EWF; for his wife, Anne Salyerds Francisco, ASF; and for the interviewer, Sally Wolff, SW.

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a not-for-profit corporation, Health Resources Development, and started over fifty health programs and projects, including Emergency Medical Services, high-risk infant care, and mental health. SW: Where were you born? EWF: I was born in Memphis on November 23, 1930. I was born at the Baptist Hospital in Memphis. My dad, grandmother, and great-grandmother were born at home, McCarroll Place. As far as I know, I was the first generation born in a hospital. SW: Where did you grow up? EWF: I grew up in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in the family home at McCarroll Place. The house I grew up in was built by my great-great-grandfather, John Ramsey McCarroll. Between 1820 and 1830 he had met Sam Love, a Chickasaw. They hunted together and built a cabin at Sam’s favorite spring, but McCarroll always claimed that he legally built his double pen there and added a third room after the March 1, 1833, ratification of the Cession. Then, in 1836, he rolled up the old part of the house that had initially been down by the spring to its current location on Maury and Van Dorn Ave. and added two rooms on the north end. They rolled it on logs up the hill about two hundred yards. Originally, the house faced on Maury, which was laid out as a main street. It’s quite a steep hill. I have no idea how they did it, but they rolled it up and connected it to the newer part of the house—the two new rooms becoming a north wing—and there was an open gallery on the east side. The town didn’t get many settlers until 1834, but he and several others were there much earlier. The family used that spring (together with a well dug on the east side of the house in about 1845) for their source of water until about 1880. SW: When were you last in Holly Springs? EWF: We’ve been back and forth occasionally to see about the house, which I still own, and to see about the furniture, and also to see about times that people have broken into the house—but to be there, to be involved in the town—it’s been sixty years. So when I hear someone’s name, I think that must be the son or daughter of someone we knew, but it turns out to be the granddaughter, instead. I try to think that a generation has gone by when really it’s two. So it’s been a long time. As far as the town is concerned, we’re really totally out of touch with what’s happening there, but the house is pretty much unchanged. Will Faulkner would look around when he was at the house and say to my dad, “Edgar, nothing has changed in this house

c on v e r s a t ion s w i t h dr . e d g a r w ig g i n f r a n c i s c o i i i 67

in a hundred years.” A lot has changed in the last thirty, however, with the house being pretty much empty, but what he said probably was true. Very little changed for a hundred years. My mother moved in—married and moved in—in 1929 and set about to refinish furniture and do things to the house, and she was there until ’88, but no one in the family has lived there since ’88, so that is twenty years that it has been rented by someone else. So everything has pretty much changed inside. SW: How old was your mother when she married your dad? EWF: She was born in 1895, so she would have been thirty-four when she got married. I was born a little over a year later. SW: How did you meet William Faulkner? EWF: My earliest recollection of Will Faulkner is about the same as my first memories of anyone, any member of my family. He is probably my earliest memory, aside from Mom and Dad. I have a concept of—and at the time I called them Mommy and Daddy—and Pop, my grandfather, and somebody in the sunroom, a man sitting in a rocking chair. SW: Who was that man? EWF: William Faulkner. SW: What is your earliest memory of William Faulkner? EWF: My earliest clear recollection of Faulkner is 1936. He was always sitting in the same spot, usually in the same rocking chair. Dad told me that at age two or three, if anyone asked me who someone was, I could say Mommy, or Daddy, or Pop (Grandfather), Julie (the cook) or Will Faulkner, whose name I stumbled over and finally settled for Will. I couldn’t pronounce the name “Faulkner” at the time, so I said “Augur.” That’s what I called him. Later he said to me, “Well, I told your dad, as long as you didn’t call me ‘Ogre,’ it was okay.”1 But later, I couldn’t place any of them in specific time-place memory until the first grade in the fall of 1936. That’s when I recall walking home from school with Mom talking about school; swinging in the backyard with Pop, who told about seeing snow in May; watching Julie cook; and listening to Dad and Will talking, especially about escapades when they were just a little older than I was. However, I was told that Will had been rocking in that same spot from long before I was born. SW: When did you call Mr. Faulkner “Augur”? EWF: When I was five—in 1935. SW: How often did you see him?

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EWF: He went quail hunting with my father most weekends, in season, on McCarroll Farm.2 After hunting they came home and talked and had a couple of beers in the sunroom. I think I began to listen to their conversation at about age six. SW: What did they talk about? EWF: They talked about where the quail were and that the rabbits were getting scarce. I knew that these were men, and I had better pay close attention to what they were saying and doing. I thought to myself that this is the only way I will get to be a man. This is what they do—hunt quail and squirrels and talk. I remember that one day they had a couple of squirrel as well as quail, and I was fascinated with the dressing out of them. I wanted to skin a squirrel. I asked them several times to show me how. They would not let me touch the quail, but finally I was allowed to skin a squirrel. SW: Why would they not allow you to touch the quail? EWF: Dressing out a quail is delicate business—not for a child—but it’s hard to mess up on a squirrel. Quail is a delicate bird. First of all, it’s harder to get quail. You could always get a squirrel and cook them up. Squirrel was a common staple of everybody—black and white. They were plentiful. Dad loved to broil squirrel for breakfast. So if you could flush a few quail, they were prized. SW: What would they do with the quail? EWF: They didn’t skin them. They plucked the breast feathers and roasted the breasts with skin on. SW: How do you skin a squirrel? EWF: The skin is pliable and loose. Once you cut it at the neck, then along the stomach line, the skin is loose and comes right off—like taking off a garment. Beautiful and clean. Then you open [the squirrel] and get the guts out. SW: Mississippi still has a hunting culture? EWF: In the 1800s through the 1940s, hunting wasn’t a sport for most people. It was a source of protein. It was food for the table. They ate the squirrels and the quail. We did, too. SW: How did they cook squirrel? EWF: Dad and Will would make a stew. They put in some water. They didn’t boil it, exactly—more like a poach. SW: What else would go into the stew besides the squirrel? EWF: Celery and onion. That’s all they added.


SW: Did your mother help? EWF: No. Just the three guys—Dad, Will, and me. Mother was absent. SW: She did not participate in any way? EWF: No. She wouldn’t touch it; she wouldn’t eat it; she wouldn’t participate in the cooking; she wouldn’t come in and be jolly. She would get furious. Quite agitated. She was anxious over it all. ASF: What did she do while y’all were cooking? EWF: She would putter around in another room—and do anything to keep herself busy. SW: So you cooked and ate the squirrel? EWF: Yes. Anyway, one day they showed me how to skin a squirrel, and I did it—not very well—but I did it. I pronounced myself the “squirrel skinner.” My mother did not care for Will Faulkner at all. It took me years to figure that out. The Mouth Washing EWF: One day I’d been listening to Dad and Will talk when they were back in the sunroom. They’d been drinking their beer and cursing away and carryin’ on, and so I was wandering around in the back of the house and muttered some expression that Faulkner had said. I said, “goddamn squirrel,” a phrase I had picked up from Will. Suddenly there was Mother, reaching for the soap, and saying that the Lord’s name would not be taken in vain in her house. The next thing I knew I was being jerked up and the soap gotten, and I got my mouth really washed out with soap. My mother took me in the kitchen and washed my mouth out with soap because of my cursing. When I stumbled back to the two men, I was rubbing my tongue with a wet washcloth. Faulkner was laughing. SW: What did William Faulkner say to you about this incident? EWF: So I stumbled back to the two men and rubbing my tongue with a wet washcloth, sort of blowing bubbles. My tongue was burning from it, and I was probably in tears. I was six that time, and Will was sitting there just laughing, and he said, “She got you again, didn’t she?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “You got your mouth washed out, didn’t you?” I said, “Yes.” He says, “You know, it’s not the first time.” I said, “I can’t remember it.” I sort of vaguely remembered one other time. I said, “I sort of think it happened to me once before.” He said: “Hell, little Eddie! This is

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the third time you got your goddamn mouth washed out with soap for saying something I said to you. When are you gonna learn to keep your mouth shut and not repeat things I say to your mother?” SW: Do you know that a washing-out-of-the-mouth incident appears in The Unvanquished? EWF: Yes. SW: Do you know how often Faulkner used you as a model? EWF: No. I didn’t know at that time when I took the Lord’s name in vain, but Will told me he had already put me in a story—because this was my third mouth washing. The last time I saw him, after I had been off to college, he said McCarroll Place was in his writings at least a dozen times, not me, so much, but Sartis and Ludie—the stories Dad told—and memories associated with McCarroll Place. My first awareness that he wrote stories and had included me would have been with that third mouth washing in 1937. I had started the first grade, so I would have been six. SW: What else did he say to you? EWF: Will said, “Hell! This is the third time—the first time was before you were three, and I wrote you up in a short story.” He said, “I wrote you up twice for it in the Saturday Evening Post.” That would be in the two short stories which were published in the fall of 1934—“Ambuscade” and “Retreat”—but I did not know that at the time. “Now they are in a book,” he said; “I’ve already written you up once for it, but don’t worry. I’m not telling who you are. Don’t worry, Little Eddie.” That’s what he called me. “I didn’t use your name.” So that was when I first knew that Will was somebody just other than a friend or someone that came and just talked and that was that. I said, “You write?” He said, “Yes. I wrote you up in a story.” That’s the first time I found out that he wrote. Before that I had no idea the man wrote stories, and he’d written something about my mouth washing. ’Course I hadn’t read them, and I wondered what he was talking about. But that was the introduction to me that he wrote instead of just sittin’ there drinkin’ beer with Dad. SW: Which room did you have your mouth washed out in? EWF: The kitchen. SW: Did you tell Mr. Faulkner what the mouth-washing experience was like? How the soap tasted? EWF: Oh, yes. This time, I came out trying not to cry and blowing bubbles through the washcloth I was rinsing with.


SW: When did each mouth-washing episode take place? EWF: Will told me that the first time was 1933, before I was three. The second time was probably 1936, but I only remember the third and last time, before my seventh birthday, and that is one of my very early memories. SW: In The Unvanquished, Granny says, “Go to the kitchen and get a pan of water.” Then she says, “Get the new soap,” and Ringo later says, “Get the soap.”3 Did William Faulkner quote your mother directly? EWF: Mother said, “Get the soap,” but she didn’t say anything about a pan. SW: Did she wash your mouth out without water? EWF: Yes, she just took the soap and rubbed my tongue, and all around inside my mouth, with it. [Even now, in the immediacy of the recollection, Dr. Francisco closes his eyes, grimaces, and purses his lips, as if he still tasted the soap.] I was in the kitchen, and she had the soap and said, “Stick out your tongue.” I obediently stuck out my tongue. SW: Did you consider disobeying? EWF: Once she had said, “Stick out your tongue and get it washed with soap,” I figured I might as well go and do it and get it over with. So I stuck my tongue out and got it covered with soap. ASF: Didn’t he remind you of the mouth washing when you went to visit him? EWF: Yes. Two more times after. ASF: When you were older? EWF: Before I went to college in 1948, I went to Oxford to find him. In fact, as soon as I got my driver’s license, I decided to drive down and visit. Probably the first place I went with a car was down to see him, and so I went down and found where he lived and talked to him a little while and then after college went back again. I went to his house and knocked on the door. He was reclusive by then. He liked to drink and party and hunt with anybody, but he didn’t like strangers or knocks on the door. He didn’t like to answer questions about himself or his work. When I went in he was real—a real shy man. I remember knocking on the door several times, was about to leave, and a curtain moved at the window, and someone peered out. “Who is it?” he asked. “Ed Francisco,” I said. “Who?” he said again. “Ed Francisco.” Then he recognized me and said. “Little Eddie, come on in!” So in I go. “Have you had your mouth washed out with soap anymore?” “What?”

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I said. I had forgotten it, but he had remembered. “Is Ludie still there?” he said. “Yes, she’s still there.” “She’s going in another book,” he said. He says: “Had your mouth washed out lately? I just put you in another story.” So he kept up with us. But I hadn’t seen him since—probably since 1939. That’s when I’m talking about now would have been. I guess it was summer of 1948 instead of 1947, but before I went to college, but he still remembered about that mouth washing. So that’s the story of the mouth washing. So, yes, Will did tell us that there are a dozen references to our family in these two stories. SW: Do you know what the dozen references are? EWF: No. SW: Would you read the two stories now to see if you can identify the dozen references? EWF: Yes. I’ll be glad to. [Dr. Francisco took time to reread the two stories, and then provided the following comment.] EWF: The references that Will made to McCarroll Place stories in “Ambuscade” include the story of Ludie Baugh. He tells the story of the young girl who watched Confederate troop movements through the McCarroll Place window, and etched her name in the glass with a diamond ring. In this story, he names the young girl Celia Cook (Faulkner, “Ambuscade”). The next reference is to my having my mouth washed out with soap for cursing and using obscene language (25–26). Ringo’s saying, “Git the soap” (38), and again in “Retreat” (47), “get the soap,” I think refer back to my own soaping incident. SW: I notice that you don’t curse now, except when quoting William Faulkner. Is that the outcome of your mother’s teaching and influence? EWF: [laughter] Not really. Dad didn’t curse either, so I think it’s probably more Dad. Our kids really don’t curse much. We tried to teach them that that’s not a very intelligent form of communication. They can probably think of something brighter to say than curse words. SW: So the mouth washing did not really take? EWF: No, I don’t think so! Interesting question, though. I can see why you’d wonder. But no, I don’t think it has anything to do with the mouth washing.


My avoiding cursing was more the quiet influence of my father, who didn’t use cursing as a means of expression either. SW: Mr. Faulkner seems to have portrayed your mother in the mouthwashing scene, too. EWF: Perhaps. SW: Like your mother, Granny is taking her action for a reason. EWF: Yes. SW: Mr. Faulkner depicted a strict, moral upbringing. EWF: Yes. SW: Granny washes out the mouths of the boys after they curse. She takes them in and washes their mouths out with soap. She is trying to teach her children certain behavioral principles. EWF: Yes. SW: Uprightness. EWF: Right. She’s a very devout, very religious person. SW: She tells them to get down on their knees to pray. EWF: Yes. Right. SW: Do you think that could be derived from your mother? Granny says, “Kneel down.” Did your mother kneel down to pray? EWF: Yes. SW: You know what happens to Granny, finally. EWF: Yes. Right. SW: Perhaps Mr. Faulkner was symbolically writing your mother out of the picture. EWF: [laughter] Yes. I’ll have to think about that and go back and reread that. SW: When I interviewed Eudora Welty, I asked her why a certain character drowns in her story, and she said, “Well, I had to think of some way to get rid of him.” EWF: Interesting. There was great animosity between Mother and Will. SW: What other McCarroll family stories appear in Mr. Faulkner’s work? EWF: Our family story of burying the McCarroll silver appears in “Ambuscade” as the story of the silver chest. The first mention is the burying of the chest in the apple orchard (18–19), and then again in “Retreat,” in the description of the lanterns and shovels, and the chest on its way to Memphis. Will devoted pages to the description of travel in the wagon—’til it’s taken.

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In “Raid,” the story continues: Granny goes to find Colonel Nathaniel Dick and requests the return of the chest and two slaves. The One-Eyed Pony EWF: The one-eyed pony that Will named “Sartis,” and that Dad, Will, and Lenso rode together appears in “Retreat,” when Bayard’s father provides horses (63). That was true. The line, “We all stopped to watch Ringo trying to get on his horse” is a direct quotation from the conversations that I recall hearing between Will and Dad. They would stop and watch their friend Lenso trying to get on the pony. The description of the horse that “whirled completely around” is also a direct quotation from their storytelling. As soon as Lenso would try to mount him, the pony would whirl completely around, and he knocked Lenso flat on his face. The other references to our pony story are Father saying, “He’s blind in his near eye” (43); Ringo’s “half-blind beast” (45); Ringo’s trying to mount on the “nigh side” (43); and Ringo’s horse, with “his blind eye looking big as a plate” (45–46). Ringo is McCarroll Place’s Lenso. Faulkner and Dad “all stopped to watch” Lenso try to get on Sartis, who whirled around and knocked Lenso down. Sartis was blind in his “near” eye and wouldn’t let anyone mount him on that side. In my opinion, Will told his own personal story through the words of Bayard Sartoris, son of John Sartoris. In his story, Will seems to me to be Bayard.4 Will played with Lenso as Bayard did with Ringo. Will’s remarks about Lenso taking over and showing more maturity than Bayard match what Dad and Will talked about. Dad and Will seemed fascinated with how much Lenso seemed to know, though he had very little formal education. They were aware of maturity and leadership in Lenso, and his know-how, which they did not have. The remarks they made about what they observed in Lenso as they grew up together match remarks Bayard makes. These stories match McCarroll Place family stories and those shared between Dad and Will. SW: Will you explain who Lenso was, exactly? EWF: Dad and Will had a friend who lived behind Dad’s house—a black kid, Lennie’s son. They called him Lenson. Dad and Will shortened it to Lenso. Lennie’s claim to fame was that his grandfather made the bricks for the McCarroll Place’s new brick kitchen in the 1840s. Lennie’s grandfather


was known for his skills in working bricks. He made the brick molds, but it took several years to make enough. From the mold, the bricks would then go into the kiln. In the 1840s, they built a two-room brick house to have an indoor kitchen. Prior to that, the cooking was outdoors. When the new brick building was finished, they had an indoor kitchen in a separate, almost fireproof structure. This was a big family event. SW: Was this new kitchen inside the main house, or in a separate outbuilding? EWF: It was a separate outbuilding, so if a fire did occur, it would not damage the main house. He and my dad would tell this story over and over. Will would start it: “Edgar, you know we nearly lost her when the pony almost kicked the window out.” The pony almost kicked out the glass window that has Ludie’s etching on it. SW: When did that occur? EWF: I have to give you a little background. In January 1897, Dad was born. Will in September—eight months later. Their mothers were friends before they were born. SW: What was your grandmother’s name? EWF: Betsy Leak. One of her grandfathers was Francis Terry Leak. The other was John Ramsey McCarroll. Probably starting with Will’s second birthday—Dad went to New Albany to Will’s birthday party, and then the Falkners came to Holly Springs to Dad’s birthday party the next year. They did that a couple of times. I do not know how many. Of course, Dad had told me what his mother had told him. Somewhere in there the Falkners moved to Oxford, and they apparently had a break in communication. Dad’s mother and Faulkner’s mother knew each other, apparently, before either one of them was married. New Albany’s not that far away. New Albany’s no distance at all away—very close by. Dad recalled also that on other occasions he and Will would get together when someone would bring Will up from Oxford to McCarroll Place at times when someone was going to Memphis. They would then come back through and pick him up. I have assumed the visits were for the weekend because whenever I stayed with an out-of-town friend, it was for the weekend, but these visits could have been just for the day. As I think about it, Will and Dad never told stories about evening or night events when they were children. All the stories were daytime activities—hunting rabbits and trying to ride the pony.

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SW: What else do you recall about the pony story? EWF: Someone gave Dad a pony. The pony couldn’t be kept at the pony farm because he would not let children ride him, so he was given to Dad. We had a fenced-in backyard with a shed, a shelter for the cow, a feeding trough, and plenty of room for the pony. They said, “We’ll just keep the pony back there in the shed with the cow.” Dad and Will would try to ride the pony. Faulkner would later reminisce: “Edgar, you damn fool, you just held onto that pony. You let that pony scrape off your leg!” The pony couldn’t buck Dad off, so it would scrape him off by rubbing against the side of a tree. They had no control over the pony. “You got your whole leg scraped off,” Will would recall. Will and Dad would tease Lenso. He was their friend, but teasable. Lenso would be knocked off the pony the same way, but Lenso would keep trying over and over. Dad said he and Will would stop and watch as Lenso put on a show in trying to mount the pony. He’d keep doing it. Dad and Will would be laughing, and the more they laughed, the more Lenso tried to do it. Then they discovered that the pony was blind in the near eye. That’s why they couldn’t mount him on that side. When he felt someone trying to get on him from his blind side, he spun around so he could look at him from his good eye. So once they figured that out, they could get on him, but he still wouldn’t let them ride him for very long. They could get on him if they mounted on the other side. Dad would reminisce, “The pony would buck you off and scrape me off.” They would go over and over it. Eventually they just had to give the pony away. They couldn’t ride it. They couldn’t do anything with it. So I’m sure the pony ended up killed. SW: What would your father do? EWF: Dad would try to hang onto the pony, and I guess they all had short pants on, and so forth, and the pony would just scrape against that tree until he scraped Dad off. Dad would have this bleeding leg from where he tried to stay on the pony. SW: Is that the end of the story? EWF: They joked a lot about the pony. Will would say to Dad: “Do you think that pony might have been a mule? He was stubborn enough.” Will told us that he had worked “part of this animal” into a story. Then Dad and Will would tell how they decided to try to name the pony. Will would recall saying, “We have got to come up with a name for that damn pony.” They named him Sartis. S-A-R-T-I-S. They had been saying,


“That’s a sorry pony,” and Lenso said, “He’s sorry, ’tis.” So Will said, “Okay, that’s going to be the name—Sartis.” Dad had heard of a town called Sardis with a d and said, “You mean S-A-R-D-I-S?” and he said, “No, not with a d but with a t, for ‘terrible.’ For ‘Sorry, ’Tis’ and ‘Terrible Pony.’” So S-A-R-T-I-S became the name of the pony. SW: What else do you recall about the pony story? EWF: Dad and Will’s early memory of naming the pony reveals for me Will’s early interest in words. Will still seemed just as enthusiastic almost thirty years later about how they named the pony “Sartis,” and honored Lenso’s opinion of the pony as “sorry, ’tis.” Will named the pony based on Lenso’s comment. The name did not seem to matter to Dad. Dad didn’t focus on words. In the story about naming the pony, for instance, to Dad, it was just naming him. For Will, naming him had to mean something. Sardis with a d would have been fine with Dad, but Will had insisted it be with a t for “terrible.” Faulkner had literary interest from way back. Lenso was eleven or twelve years old. Dad remembered that he was a year or two older than Dad was, and they started hunting together when Dad was ten. He went along with them in hunting. When they went squirrel hunting, Dad got a little single-shot .22, and Lenso had his throw stick. Lenso could throw accurately enough. Sometimes Lenso would play like he couldn’t get the rabbits, but he could. Dad at least would try. Dad would try to make a stick, and he would just try to target hit with it, and he had trouble “even hitting the tin can with the thing,” he said. Dad couldn’t figure out how Lenso could do that. Will would say: “You don’t need to. He’s been practicing a lot more than you have. After all, he doesn’t have a .22 rifle. So he’s spent hours practicing to use it—use his stick.” I don’t know if that’s mentioned anywhere or not. Faulkner had a huge imagination and could create a short story out of a much briefer story that Dad would tell him. He used a lot of material from right around here, and his first short stories were about McCarroll Place. SW: So the pony nearly kicked out Ludie’s window? EWF: One day, Dad was on the “sorry pony” and right at the gallery of the house, and the pony leapt up a foot onto the gallery deck, and his hoof kicked right at the bottom of the frame of the window with Ludie’s name scratched on it. Dad said that his mother and grandmother got a kick out of telling the story. Dad never let the pony go near the gallery again. SW: Your grandmother and great-grandmother would tell this story?

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EWF: Yes. Dad was on the pony and was ten. His mother and grandmother seemed to delight, in his opinion, in retelling the story to other people, much to his embarrassment. They told him many other stories of events before he was born, which he retold to me. I think that he had an extraordinary interest in events about family, home, and town, and a great memory for them. Dad was captivated by the family and the house and the Civil War. It’s almost as if it was right then—happening then. SW: Was Faulkner there when the pony nearly kicked out the window? EWF: I would hear Will and Dad joking about it, but whether Will was there or had been told later, I don’t know. I never asked the question. I assume he was by his telling of the story. So Dad and Will would say, “Well, we almost lost Ludie.” Ludie had already been there quite a long time. Sartis almost broke the window in— probably 1908 or 1909. Ludie did that etching between 1860 and 1862. Ludie was part of the family, so they treasured having the etching there. So they were very careful to never again attempt to ride the pony anywhere near that window. Then the gallery got enclosed. After Mother moved into the family, they closed that gallery into what they call the sunroom. It had been an open breezeway between one side of the house and the other before that. The gallery got enclosed in 1930 after Mother moved into the family. SW: Did your father know the pony story appeared in The Unvanquished? EWF: Yes, Will told us. When Dad did not appear to have recognized the reference, Will told him to read more carefully. I went down to see him before I left for college. At that time, in referring to the first stories, Will said, “I have put a dozen references to your family in them.” The references are to situations, names, and stories my dad told him and of their adventures together, plus my mouth washings. I asked him if the one-eyed horse John Sartoris had for Ringo to ride was about Sartis. He said: “Of course. I could not have made up that story if I had not watched Lenso trying to mount that crazy, one-eyed Sartis.” SW: How often did they hunt together? EWF: Dad and Will would go squirrel hunting when Will would be brought up for a stay at McCarroll Place. Dad had a single-shot .22. Later, when they were adults, I remember they hunted quail most every Saturday during season, but it could have been less, and other Saturdays he just came over for beer and conversation.


SW: Did William Faulkner use your dad’s gun? EWF: I suppose they shared it. I don’t recall it being mentioned. Lenso, who was a year or two older, would go with them. They were about eleven or twelve. Dad remembered several times but not a lot of times. Enough, however, for Dad and Will to discuss the events at length, especially Lenso’s ability to kill a rabbit by hurling his knock stick. I was told that Lenso moved to Chicago with several of his family when Dad was about fourteen. I do not recall any talk of later teenage events, or during the First World War. They talked about going to dances in Holly Springs in their twenties and hunting quail in season. The hunting continued from the ’20s through the 1930s to probably the 1939 season. Then Mother’s opposition got too much for them, and grandfather came down with TB. Faulkner continued to hunt. Ed Rather, who was vice president, at the time, at the First State Bank, hunted with him, and perhaps others. SW: Where did your father and Will Faulkner hunt? EWF: We still had 160 acres of McCarroll land. It was an easy walk from the house. The McCarrolls had acreage before the Civil War in Arkansas, also referred to as the Lake Place. Francis Terry Leak also had a large farm in Arkansas in the same area, I understand. SW: What animals did they hunt? EWF: Quail mostly, but often a couple of squirrels and occasionally a rabbit would be thrown in. SW: Did they always drink beer, or did they drink other kinds of liquor, too? EWF: I can only imagine what they drank in the ’20s. I was first aware of the drinking about 1938, and by then it was obvious that Mother had clamped down severely on their fun. Will would sneak in a Mason jar of “white lightning.” I was admonished to “see no evil and say no evil,” or the party was over and the lights were out! SW: Is that what Mr. Faulkner said to you? EWF: Yes, and Dad also. SW: Did your dad drink often? EWF: Dad probably didn’t do much drinking other than when he was with Will. It was just something he did with his buddy. SW: Did your mother know that your dad sometimes drank? EWF: She was probably not aware until they were married that he liked to go hunting and have some beers.

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SW: What else did your father and Mr. Faulkner do? EWF: They sat on the sun porch and told stories. SW: Were you there, also? EWF: Yes, they would start on the stories, and I would listen. I began to realize that if I missed one, the sequence would start over again later. I never got to sit there the whole time, but they would tell the same stories again and again. SW: Where was your mother during this time? EWF: Mother would interrupt and lure me away from them. She would say something like, “Well, I need you to help me with the cookies.” If that did not move me, she would suggest something more urgent, like, “I don’t have the pecans ready and the chocolate drops won’t wait.” I liked the chocolate drops that she was making, so I wanted her to finish them, and that would lure me away. SW: Why were the stories that your father and Mr. Faulkner told so compelling to you? EWF: They were exciting, some funny, some filled with adventure and hunting, some very sad, but I felt a part of the action, like a big guy. This was my portal to manhood. Ludie’s Window SW: What other stories do you recall hearing from your father and Will Faulkner? EWF: Faulkner would say, “Edgar, tell me some more about Ludie.” He was referring to the window pane with “Ludie” on it. Dad was quite willing to tell the story. SW: Will you tell the story now? EWF: A family named Eddins moved to Holly Springs, almost as early as John McCarroll. My great-great-grandfather, John Ramsey McCarroll, had already built there in 1833. He married Elizabeth Eddins. Elizabeth’s sister Emily married Richard Baugh, who was also from Holly Springs before he moved to Memphis. There are a number of McCarrolls who have lived in Memphis for several generations. All the Memphis-area McCarrolls I know of are descendants of the John R., who built McCarroll place, and the first three generations lived there until moving to Memphis. SW: Is Memphis where Ludie lived at that time?


EWF: Ludie lived in Memphis and attended boarding schools. In 1860, she was sent to live with the McCarrolls in Holly Springs, and this would have been her first extensive stay in a family home. She was named Mary Louisa Baugh—Mary, for her grandmother Mary Lipscomb Eddins (Emily’s mother), and Louisa, for her aunt (Emily’s sister). Emily Eddins married Richard Baugh, and they had only one surviving child, Ludie, who was born in 1844. I do not know when Richard and his daughter, Ludie, moved to Memphis. Elizabeth and John McCarroll had a number of children, one of whom was named Emily, for Elizabeth’s sister Emily.5 SW: What was Ludie’s relation to you, exactly? EWF: The relationship was that John R. McCarroll married Elizabeth Eddins, and Elizabeth Eddins’s sister Emily married Richard Baugh of Holly Springs and later mayor of Memphis. So his daughter, Ludie, was the niece of John R. McCarroll and Elizabeth Eddins, who were my great-great grandparents—my McCarroll great-great-grandparents. I am Ludie’s first cousin, thrice removed. Richard Baugh and Ludie came frequently to Holly Springs to visit their Eddins and McCarroll relatives. I never heard mention of any other Baughs living here. In 1857, Baugh had become the mayor of Memphis. His wife, Emily, had died when Ludie was very young. He was trying to raise a daughter who was a teenager in Memphis, right when it was about to be invaded, so he thought it would be safer for Ludie in Holly Springs. Troops were amassing in Memphis. They said to themselves, “We’ve got to get her out of here.” In 1860, at the age of sixteen, Ludie moved to Holly Springs to live with her aunt Elizabeth and uncle John. She lived here from the beginning of the war until the war was over. The town absolutely fell in love with her. She was frail but beautiful. She was the daughter of the mayor of Memphis. She was lovely and fragile. It was a heroine-type story. SW: When did she etch her name on the window? EWF: During the war, the town changed control six times, I understand— Confederate, then Union, then Confederate—but reoccupations were for brief periods of time, just raids and skirmishes. So it was probably before the first Union occupation that she etched her name, and I imagine it was soon after she arrived. She was watching the troop movements. She was standing in the sitting room looking east, out the open gallery and watching the troops move back and forth on the road to the depot. This road was

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later named Van Dorn Avenue for the Confederate general. She inscribed her name on the window, and the pane of glass is still there. SW: What was Mr. Faulkner’s reaction to this story? EWF: He was fascinated by it. He would say to my father, “I always see her name in reverse, Edgar.” SW: What did he mean? EWF: He was always in the rocking chair on the “outside” of the glass window, looking in, so he saw the name from the back side. My parents had enclosed the open gallery in 1930 and made it into what they called the sunroom. Prior to that, Will and Dad had sat on the gallery looking “into” the house. Now, their visits were indoors, but the view of Ludie was still the same. Will would sit in the rocking chair in the sunroom, but he was looking at the window pane in reverse—from the outside, looking in. He talked about how the etching represented changelessness and eternity and continuity. He was fascinated by her life. Ludie was out in the yard on occasion with Dad’s grandmother when the troops went by, and the two women passed out little pecan pies that they had made. They were counting groups of soldiers going through, and they made marks on the house with lumps of coal. The coal marks were there until the house was painted. Dad told me that his grandmother thought the Confederate soldier Ludie married was one of the soldiers they had talked with while handing out the pies. In any case, six months after meeting a soldier in Holly Springs, Ludie married him, and immediately after the war, they left. No one ever saw either of them again, much to the distress of everyone in town. SW: Would you describe conditions for your family during the Civil War? EWF: They had no food. Their hogs and chickens had been taken. Dad’s grandmother Amelia had a patch of corn and some sorghum hidden back in the woods. This together with a number of pecan trees was their food and used to make the pecan pies. She also harvested roots for tea and wild mushroom and had a patch of cabbage well hidden. SW: How did they make these pecan pies—at a time when so little was available? EWF: Cornmeal, pecans chopped up with sorghum and baked. The Confederates were going through, and Ludie offered them these pecan cakes. That was probably early in the war before the cornmeal ran out.


SW: What else did your father and Faulkner say about Ludie? EWF: Will would say: “Edgar, I feel as if she is standing in the middle of the room. Edgar, she’s right here. The past doesn’t die, Edgar. It’s right here. Ludie is right here. Nothing in this house has changed in a hundred years.” SW: What did your father say in reply? EWF: My father said, “Ludie isn’t here.” SW: How did Faulkner respond? EWF: Will said, “Edgar, you may be immune, but I know that Ludie is standing there.” SW: Does this example show your father’s practical, rational side and also Mr. Faulkner’s spiritual, imaginative side? EWF: Many people expressed certainty about spirits and told stories about encounters, but I do not recall any such expression from my dad. SW: You heard your father and Faulkner tell this story often? EWF: That wasn’t the first time I had heard it. It was about the fifth time I had heard it. SW: When did you first hear this story? EWF: Probably about age six, but I kept hearing it ’til about age nine. SW: What was your reaction? EWF: It was a shock to me—that Will really thought that Ludie could be standing there. It froze in my memory. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot of what Will said, but that really sticks with me. Other people in town talked of ghosts and spirits, but I had not heard a close friend of Dad’s express this. SW: What else did they say about this story? EWF: Faulkner seemed certain that one of the soldiers who got the pecan pies was the one that Ludie married six months later. Dad said he did not know. Dad did not spend time thinking about the drama of it, but he was not writing stories. He was, however, obviously very touched by his memory of his grandmother’s emotion when she told the story of Ludie’s death. Amelia, several years older and much stronger, took frail Cousin Ludie under her wing to protect and feed during six years of devastation and total loss of their lifestyle, and then she lost her.6 SW: When did Ludie die? EWF: In 1869, the town received word that she had died. No one knew where she had gone, or where she was buried. No one could get in touch with anyone who knew. After the war, all connections that would have al-

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lowed them to find her were gone. The South Reporter carried a very touching memorial to her (“In Memoriam”).7 SW: You knew that Faulkner used the story of etching on the window in his novels, right? EWF: Yes, I think the story appeared in one of the same short stories in the Saturday Evening Post, “Ambuscade.” Ludie was called “Celia Cook.” Will accurately described her as a young woman looking out at soldiers marching. He changed what would be Van Dorn Avenue in Holly Springs to South Street in Oxford, and he changed Van Dorn’s troops (no one ever said that she saw Van Dorn himself) to General Forrest. Apparently he had told Dad about this in 1934 and retold it to me when I was old enough to remember. Will seemed fascinated by the Ludie story. Some years later, he told me about each of the other two books that included Ludie—actually by coincidence, he was telling me soon after each book came out. “I’ve Got the Game for Dinner” SW: Where was your mother during the storytelling? EF: My mother was appalled by Faulkner. She was appalled by his language and his drinking. My mom’s dad, Dr. Bitzer, was a Calvinist Presbyterian minister. Dad would recall Dr. Bitzer thinking through a Sunday sermon and exclaiming: “an abomination in the sight of God.” He was a powerful preacher, and his personal life code was very strict: “Thou shalt not drink or curse.” My mother inherited these values.8 SW: When did your mother first meet William Faulkner? EF: Dad told me it was August 5, 1929. Mother and Dad had just gotten married in Montreat, North Carolina, on August 4, 1929. They had a oneday honeymoon at a hotel in Asheville and drove back to Holly Springs the next day—a hot, dusty, twelve-hour drive. They arrived in the late afternoon. They had their plan to enclose the gallery, but at that time, it was still open. A man was sitting on the open gallery when they arrived. “I’ve come to celebrate, Edgar,” he said. “Come on—I’ve got the game for dinner.” He just popped in and thought that they would be home in time to make an evening of it, to make a party and cook and celebrate, and it didn’t quite work out that way for him. Apparently, he’d come over with this bucket full of ice and beer, and they didn’t get in until almost twilight, so he had had time


to sit there and chill the beers and to see if they were pretty good, whether they were cold or not. So by the time my mother and dad arrived, he was ready to party! There sat Will, with a beer in one hand and—as I recall Dad’s account of it—a dead rabbit and a couple of dead squirrels that he had shot in the other. Quail season was not open, so he came with what he could find. So he had beer in one hand and several undressed squirrels in his other hand. He had put a lot of effort into the event. He had obviously been waiting for some time, and had managed to procure a lot of beer, and had them iced down, and had been checking them out. So it was quite a scene. When my mother saw Will, she said to my father: “What is THAT?” My father said, “That is my hunting buddy.” Will then used some strong language about what a cute little girl my dad had gotten. SW: If you don’t mind my asking, what exactly was the strong language he used? EWF: He related her to a fine mare, “a cute little filly, a spirited little filly, a live one. You’re gonna have to break her in.” This was language that was pretty derogatory to her but came from his love of horses and love of hunting, and so forth. So he meant it to be complimentary, but it just didn’t come through that way to her. My mother was quite shocked. She had never heard herself referred to in terms that had to do with a horse. She was also appalled by the drinking and the cursing. She was offended by him until her dying day. SW: That day, did William Faulkner just come to see your dad? He didn’t know that they were on their honeymoon? Or did he know? EWF: Oh, he knew. He was there to welcome the newlyweds home. It wasn’t part of a routine trip or visit or anything. He came especially to bring dinner. I don’t know who he thought was going to fix the dinner. I guess he and Dad usually dressed out the quail or squirrels. So he came prepared, with dinner and beer, and he thought they would set about cleaning the squirrels and cooking them, but he was probably counting on them to arrive there much earlier in the day than they arrived. So it was a bit past time for dressing and preparing squirrels, which of course added to the problem of what to do with them. Also, I think my parents had already stopped and had dinner. It was a surprise. SW: So what your mother never really got over was that when she arrived at her new home on the first day of her married life, she was greeted by, un-

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expectedly, William Faulkner, who was drinking and had dead squirrels. EWF: That’s right. That was not the way she wanted to start married life in Holly Springs. SW: You told me earlier that she never really liked William Faulkner. That introduction was part of it, but it went beyond that, didn’t it? EWF: Yes, it went beyond that, but that played a good part or role in it. SW: Did your mother object to your father’s spending time with Faulkner? EWF: Her view was that Edgar had a job and had to go to work. That’s the way she thought it should be. Faulkner did not appear to have a job. In my mother’s view, he was not a suitable friend. SW: Did you ever hear William Faulkner and your dad talking about their marriages? They were both married the same year, right? EWF: I know now that they were married the same year. Of course, I did not think about things like that then. They might have talked about it—I don’t recall. Children pick up on things that they have some reason to relate to, and probably their talk about marriage experiences would not have been something that I would have tuned into. SW: Did they ever reminisce about their marriages? EWF: No, except to talk about, a couple of times, what a shock it must have been to my mother to meet Will. He had no idea that it would shock her so because he was just doing what he normally does, which is drink beer and curse and brag about the quail he just killed or something, but to her that was quite a shock. So he and Dad did talk about that. SW: They reminisced that she had been shocked when he first arrived? EWF: Yes, they talked about that a couple of times. How she never really got over it. She never really got over her first experience with him, and he’d just say, “goddamn, Edgar.” The Pilgrimage Controversy EWF: Then, pretty soon after that, Mother started talking about a Pilgrimage in Holly Springs. Finally, in 1936, she was one of three women in town that started the Pilgrimage. She devoted a good deal of her time for the next fifty years to the Holly Springs Pilgrimage. It was modeled after the Natchez Pilgrimage, but there actually were a lot more houses that predated the Civil War in Holly Springs than Natchez. Grant had established


his wife in Holly Springs, and by his order, no houses were to be burned. Union troops had occupied three rooms in McCarroll Place, but did not burn it when they left. Mother became totally wrapped up in promoting the Pilgrimage in Holly Springs, and that whole enterprise was something that Will Faulkner was—it really seemed to infuriate him. It was, as he called it, dressing up a past that lived in most people’s imaginations and had not really occurred. Dad would say, “Well, the houses were here.” Will would say, “Yes, but people couldn’t have been wearing all those hoop skirts around and sitting around.” Dad would say, “Well, if everybody had worn hoop skirts, nobody would want to see ours. We ended up with more great houses and more great old hoops than anybody, and they want to see ’em. It’s our history. We need to celebrate what was good that we have preserved, and how we have dismantled some that was not, and the celebration allows us to see what is still left to do.” Their arguments of this subject made them appear farther apart than they were. I finally realized that they were both torn by conflicting emotions about the South they loved. They both had pride and regret, love and disgust, hope and despair. They both had absolute admiration for the South, but hated that it had to do with slavery. They had affection and dismay. They agitated over these issues. They were loyal southerners but upset with the expressions of racial prejudice all around them. They felt the contrast between the beauty and ugliness of the culture.9 The Pilgrimage promoted a picture of the past that Will was opposed to displaying, and so they differed on this point. Dad positioned himself between Mother and Will in supporting and appreciating her favorite enterprise, while understanding Will’s reaction to it. SW: So the Pilgrimage was a distinct point of conflict between your mother and William Faulkner? EWF: Yes, the Pilgrimage was a point of conflict. My mother and four other women had taken the tour in Natchez and concluded that Holly Springs had far more pre–Civil War homes than Natchez. Mother had gone to the board and persuaded them to have a centennial celebration with a tour of old homes in 1936.10 It was so successful that the next year the Pilgrimage became an annual event. The oldest homes had not changed much in the hundred years. Most had much of the original furniture, so it was easy for the women to establish an unwritten rule that all purchases of furniture for the

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homes which expected to open would be pieces made during the early Victorian period—no reproductions! The Pilgrimage appeared to reach a peak in the ’50s. The ’60s and ’70s was a down period for such events, but it appears to have renewed interest and is certainly an important event for the city. Of course, today when people renovate and refurnish the old homes and plan to show them off at Pilgrimage, they must depend to some extent on authentic period reproductions since sufficient numbers of quality antiques are not available. Mother was quite adamant about the house. She wanted all furniture and other items in the house to be prewar. Mother only bought a few pieces, and as an antique dealer, she could maintain her pre-1860 standard, but that was over thirty years ago. The exception might have been a pair of statues which were on the mantel in the parlor, which were wedding presents to grandfather and Betsy Leak in 1890. Mother suspected that they were not old enough, but she avoided finding out. SW: So William Faulkner’s criticism of the Pilgrimage was that it portrayed the Old South in a favorable light? EWF: Will took his text on the subject of the Pilgrimage. “It’s a bunch of damn foolishness, Edgar,” he would say. “Most houses before the [Civil] War were not painted, and there was little landscaping. These women are beautifying history—and the hoop skirts—it’s fake, Edgar.” Dad would say, “The houses are authentic, and so is the furniture and the history, and most people couldn’t afford paint for fifty years after the war, but now it’s good for the town’s pride.” Will would say: “You know it must have been awful to be a slave and almost as bad to be a poor white with no land and no slaves. Few had time to wear hoop skirts! This Pilgrimage invites folks to look through rose-colored glasses at one hundred years ago, rather than face up to doing something about the economic and social problems right here today. Nonsense—that’s what it is.” Dad would say that people need to feel good about what they have accomplished in order to be free to move forward. But for Mother the Pilgrimage was her year-round work, which required her to reject totally Will Faulkner’s views.11 Julie EWF: A lot seemed to change in 1937. Establishing the Pilgrimage as an annual event stimulated Mother to begin refinishing the furniture, piece


by piece, a project which lasted a good twenty-five years. In the same year, she undertook to learn to cook. This came about when Julie, the cook, announced her departure. Julie had been born a slave in the 1850s or earlier, and she lived on the place all of her life. Her mother was born a slave. Her mother cooked for the family before Julie. Then one day Julie said she was leaving to live with a granddaughter. She would have been in her eighties when she left. Julie had not allowed Dad’s mother or my mother into “Julie’s kitchen.” She was a tiny person, less than five feet tall—maybe about four-and-a-half feet—always wearing a large white handkerchief on her head. She let me sit on a stool and watch her cook, occasionally; then she would tell me it was time for me to go. Mother would make a suggestion to Julie for what meals she should prepare. Julie would look at her with a blank stare, as if to say, “Who are you?” She would not reply at all to my mother, and then she would proceed to cook whatever she wanted. Mother would get really upset. Julie ran the kitchen. Mother didn’t get control of the house ’til 1937, after Julie left. Will Faulkner and Ruth Bitzer Francisco EWF: So Mother and Will never really got to be friends at all, and that might have been why I haven’t talked about this before, but actually no one until you has asked me about it. In later years, Mother would go back over with me how stressful it had been to her to move every two or three years as part of a minister’s family and try to fit into a new place as a minister’s daughter and never really feel that the local little clique of girls her age really accepted her because she was the minister’s daughter. That was compounded by Dr. Bitzer’s insistence that everybody was being watched every minute as the ministerial family, and they had to measure up to his standards. When Mother moved, finally, to Holly Springs, she was certain that this was going to be her home for the rest of her life, and she was going to make friends and be a part of the town, but she still carried with her this father’s urging that she be a model person. So at the very first arrival in Holly Springs, she was being met by a man who was drinking and cursing, and that was just something that her father, Dr. Bitzer, preached against frequently. So it was: “Oh, my. What am I going to do? This is no way to

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start my life here.” I think it scared her. So she never got over it. SW: Was Faulkner’s reputation around town was so bad that she didn’t want to be associated with him? EWF: No, no, I don’t think she had ever heard of him. No one knew him in Holly Springs in 1929. In 1929, only a handful of singles and young married couples would have known him through the occasional dance he attended in Holly Springs. More people might have in Oxford, but he had only been to Holly Springs a little. He was such a loner. He had come up to go quail hunting in the ’20s when they were both single men, but he didn’t talk to other people in town. Dad would mention that. He would say, “I never knew Will Faulkner to initiate a conversation with anybody.” He never went up to anybody and engaged them in questions. He might stand around looking at people, but people didn’t know who he was. So his contact with Holly Springs was really just to go quail hunting with Dad in the ’20s and way back in childhood. So she didn’t know him, and nobody in town knew him. It was strictly that here was a man drinking and cursing—and he was a hunting buddy of her husband. She knew nothing about him as a writer. SW: You mentioned that as time went on, she still did not want to be associated with him. EWF: It was very much her own personal response to him, and by that time had gotten to be such a habit to say to people that she didn’t know him, and then she just stuck to that story and wouldn’t change it. SW: Didn’t you say earlier that she prevailed upon your dad not to see William Faulkner anymore? EWF: Probably every time that he came over, she became agitated about it and upset and was unhappy about it. So eventually they just stopped seeing each other. I don’t know that she ever told him he couldn’t see him again, but it just bothered her so much that they saw each other less and less. Then, in 1939, my grandfather came down with tuberculosis, and they were both fairly occupied with their growing family responsibilities. Soon after that, we were into the Second World War, gasoline rationing restricted nonessential driving, and after that they just didn’t get back together at the house, as far as I know. Dad told me, however, about the several occasions when Faulkner dropped by the office. Faulkner would walk in and sit down, usually with no spoken word of greeting. Dad would stop what he was doing and sit with him. Then they would talk. Dad understood that Faulkner felt no need for


small talk like, “Hello, I’ve come for a visit.” That was obvious. No need to waste time expressing it. What was different about Will Faulkner, though Dad had come to expect it from him, was that everybody else said something when they walked in. They didn’t just walk in and sit. Their conversations would occasionally be interrupted by a phone call that Dad had to take. Sooner or later, during one of those calls, Dad would look up, and Will would have left. He never politely waited ’til Dad was off the phone to say “good-bye” or “see you later” or anything. When Will was moved to leave, he just left. Dad would catch a glimpse of him standing on the sidewalk outside the office just watching people. Then Will would disappear—sometimes for months. Then there he would be, sitting in the chair. Dad never asked where he had been or what he had done, understanding that his friend did not like to answer questions, and Will rarely volunteered such information. Dad would be overjoyed to see him, and they would pick up their conversation where they had left off, as if it had been only an hour ago. SW: Did you say that your father had a tennis court? EWF: Dad maintained a clay tennis court at McCarroll Place. SW: Did Mr. Faulkner play tennis with your dad at McCarroll Place? EWF: I’m sure Will must have played tennis there, but their stories were about hunting, horses, and dances. By 1920, they were two eligible bachelors. SW: What was bachelor life like for them? EWF: Faulkner was dating a girl in Holly Springs, and Dad was too. SW: Do you remember the name of the girl Faulkner was dating in Holly Springs? EWF: I do not remember. SW: So did they dance? EWF: Will Faulkner and Dad went to a lot of dances with their dates. They double-dated. W. C. Handy would come down from Memphis. At the end of the time, Faulkner would say, “Let’s ask him to play another hour.” If they passed the hat, for a quarter apiece, they could have enough for him to play another hour. Just think how many quarters it would take today to hire a group like W. C. Handy’s. But not back then. SW: Then they continued as friends after their marriages. About how many years do you think into the marriages they were before they stopped visiting?

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EWF: I think 1939 was probably the last time that he came over, and they went quail hunting. So their friendship does cover a long time—over thirty years. SW: You said that your dad liked to tell family stories and told a lot of stories to William Faulkner, and I assume it was vice-versa—that they liked to talk to each other and tell stories to each other? EWF: Dad really enjoyed telling stories, and Faulkner seemed to love to sit there and scribble with his pen and record them. I don’t remember Faulkner telling anything about himself. He was very much the writer or the recorder, scribbling notes of what other people said. He was a very keen listener and encouraged Dad with his storytelling more than most people did. It was as if he could listen all day to Edgar’s stories. That’s sort of the relationship they had—Dad telling the story, and Faulkner would say, “Tell me again, Edgar.” He would ask to have some story repeated, and Dad was happy to tell it again. SW: Did your dad not mention to your mom his friendship with William Faulkner before they were married? It was a surprise that they were close friends? EWF: I don’t know whether he told her or not, but if he did, it just didn’t sink in that it was any special thing. I mean, what Dad and Will did in the ’20s—they went to dances together, along with some other singles and couples. Then they went hunting on several weekends during quail season. There would be really no reason why he would discuss it. Dad had a friend who went hunting with him occasionally, and that would not necessarily come up for discussion, but certainly she was not aware of what a day of hunting entailed. So it was very much of a surprise to her. I’m sure she knew he did some hunting, but it wasn’t the main thing he did, so it was certainly not something that she thought defined him or anything like that. I think the whole connection—she suddenly became aware of it when they got home from the wedding. SW: Did they hunt deer? EWF: No. Not to my knowledge. I never heard anything about deer. They didn’t talk about dogs, either. They would just walk out with their guns. SW: What age were Mr. Faulkner and your father when they started hunting together? EWF: I understand that they were ten or eleven when they started going squirrel hunting. They could just walk into the woods back of McCarroll


Place. After World War I, when they were twenty-one, that’s when they started quail hunting. They could walk to the 160-acre McCarroll Place farm through the woods, or cut over to the railroad and follow the tracks to the west side of the farm. That is when I understand they were together the most. Soon they had a car and were bachelors on the town and went to dances in Holly Springs. SW: How many years did they hunt together? EWF: I understand they hunted quite frequently during the ’20s, less in the ’30s, but still we saw him frequently until 1939, and then I didn’t see him but two times after that. SW: What was your father’s work? EWF: He had joined his father in the insurance agency that Grandfather had established in 1908. SW: Your mother didn’t want you to spend time with Faulkner either? EWF: When I started being fascinated with Will—that was a picture she did not want for her son. SW: Did your mother ever read any of William Faulkner’s books? EWF: She refused to allow herself to look at his writing. He continued to pop in to visit Dad at his office, however. Faulkner was away for a while, and then the impact of Mother’s opposition to him got to be too much to deal with. Grandfather died of TB in 1940, after a six-month illness. Prior to that, he had kept the office on Saturdays during quail season so Dad could go hunting with Faulkner. After Grandfather died, Dad had to keep the office. SW: Tell me more about “the office.” EWF: There were some old notes that called the initial three-room house by the spring “the office,” and Dad sometimes called the back end of the house the “old office.” His grandmother had called it that.12 I don’t know why since it was where McCarroll lived until it was rolled up to Van Dorn. Perhaps it was a carryover from when John McCarroll thought of the house as having been the office and would be that again when the big house was built. But to me, the office was always the insurance office on the square. Dad’s father’s parents had a hat business in Nashville. They both died when he was sixteen, and he was on his own. So he sold a line of hats in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Somehow, he met Grandmother Betsy Leak in Holly Springs, and they were married in 1890. He continued the hat business for a while and then opened his insurance busi-

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ness in Holly Springs in 1908. Dad joined him in the 1920s. The office was on the square. In 1908, he had an upstairs office. He had a rolltop desk. So “Francisco and Son, Insurance” started out in a second-floor office on the north side of the square. Will seemed to like to just suddenly appear unannounced. I hated those noisy stairs. The old, worn wooden stairs creaked all the way up, squeaked loudly, announcing my progress up them. I would walk on the sides of the stairs to avoid the creaking. The office had blinds that closed, like shutters. Will probably went to this office before dances in the 1920s. SW: When you saw Mr. Faulkner after college, did he mention your dad? EWF: He loved to recall the stories of the silver chest, the one-eyed pony, and Lenso trying to ride it, and what a powerful force of a woman Dad’s “Gramaw” [Amelia] was. He spoke of Dad with great fondness and of their boyhood and young-adult adventures. No mention of Mother, who was clearly the cause of their loss of contact. SW: Do you know why your dad and Mr. Faulkner enjoyed each other’s company? EWF: I remember that Dad and Will were physically about the same size. Dad was slight and small. So was Will. They almost looked alike sitting side by side. They both loved to hunt and ride. After the First World War, those interests must have brought them back together, and they added an interest in dancing. Neither was involved much in team sports like football, as far as I know. They had common interests in hunting, horseback riding, dancing, and tennis. But what I saw was two men drawn together by the stories. Dad dearly loved to tell his stories, and Will was certainly his attentive and expressive audience, sitting there scribbling away on his pad. Slavery SW: Did you hear your father and Mr. Faulkner discuss other topics? EWF: They spent much time lamenting what they called the tragedies of the South, which included slave owners’ lack of attempts to resolve the slave issue on their own and the influx after the war of landless outsiders who had “no love of the land.” SW: What did they lament, exactly? EWF: They lamented that slavery ever existed. Their lament was the leader-


ship’s emotional preoccupation with the issue of “states’ rights.” While they regretted slavery, they recognized its inevitability in the development of a cotton-based southern economy. Slavery had been worldwide. Slaves were brought to New England prior to the nineteenth century but did not thrive there. Slavery thrived in the South and became a key part of the initial growth of the cotton farms, or plantations. Their lament was also that the preoccupation with “states’ rights” precluded any attention to the suggestions to move from slavery to indentured servants to free men, in spite of the growing opinion of many that in addition to being immoral, slavery was inefficient, unnecessary, wasteful, and expensive, compared with hiring free labor as needed. Their lament was that none of the suggestions to move from slavery to other options was ever given widespread consideration. Repeatedly I heard Will Faulkner and Dad talk about how reasonable it was for southern leadership to assume a state had the right to secede since many southerners had postured about leaving from the time they joined, without hearing much opposition to the idea. Lincoln’s rallying call of “United we stand, divided we fall” caused most southerners to react with arrogant, stubborn, and mindless determination to defend the right to secede no matter what the cost. John Ramsey McCarroll had a plan he called the “fair 50-50 plan.”13 A slave would become an indentured servant at an indenture of no more than 50 percent of purchase price, or less, depending upon prior years of service to that owner. A fair wage would be calculated, with half going to pay for housing, food, and clothing, which the slave was already getting, and half crediting against the indenture, which should pay it off in five to seven years, or if not paid off in that time, the balance would be forgiven, since any balance left then would mean the owner had paid too much or had set the fair wage too low. McCarroll thought the plan could be sold for its economic benefits and would avoid any discussion of the morality of slavery, which would surely make most owners defensive. The plan built in some time for learning and adjusting to the changes for owners and slaves, but most politically important, time for white day laborers to adjust to competition from free blacks joining the labor pool. McCarroll purportedly wrote a letter in about 1850 to Francis Terry Leak about the proposal. The two men were well acquainted through a number of dealings. McCarroll was a much smaller slaveholder than Leak, who was

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one of the largest in the area. The McCarrolls felt that if they could have enrolled Leak in the plan, they could have gotten it off the ground. Apparently, Leak did not respond favorably, if at all, probably because most people were becoming focused on the other issue: the right to secede. Will and Dad believed that without the “states’ rights” emotions, the slaves would have been freed without a war. Anyway, it would appear that this was the first of several animosities to develop between the two families, and the two men did not communicate much after that, even though one of McCarroll’s daughters (my great-grandmother Amelia) married one of Leak’s sons, Walter John, in 1866, according to the marriage license you found.14 They had one surviving child, Betsy Leak, my grandmother Leak, who was Dad’s mother. Walter John died in 1872. Apparently, soon after that Amelia moved back with her daughter, Betsy, to her home, McCarroll Place. Dad would only say that things were bad, and her husband died young.15 While he could recall in great detail what Gramaw [Amelia] told him, he seemed to know nothing of the details of exactly why she came home and just said that things had been very bad. There was no mention of why she did not stay on the Leak plantation where they had been living and where Walter John had been in charge since his father’s death. He was very much aware, however, that Gramaw Amelia had come home abruptly and brought her young daughter, Betsy, with her. Dad felt that Amelia might have been hurt if the remaining males in the family indicated that she was no longer needed or welcome on the Leak plantation. She felt insulted and came home. SW: Do you think your father would have told Mr. Faulkner the exact reason she left? EWF: Yes, if he knew. They obviously confided in each other more than with others. Certainly that seemed true with Dad. Each seemed to know what the other was about to say, like two surviving members of a secret order. SW: Is it possible that part of the insult was that she had not produced a living male heir? EWF: Yes, it’s possible.16 They were married only six years. The first child, a male, died, but it’s possible that she could have produced another son if Walter John had not died in 1872. SW: Do you know what year she moved back home? EWF: I assume it was 1872 because it was almost immediately after Walter John died.


SW: Francis Terry Leak died in 1863, according to one obituary. We know that his death was a direct result of the Civil War. EWF: And that he went to Alabama. SW: But not exactly how he got there. EWF: Right. Good question. SW: At some point during the war, he left his plantation, and left the state because of difficulties associated with the war. We know that much. EWF: Yes. SW: He didn’t go back home alive.17 EWF: Right. I don’t know where he’s buried. SW: What was the basis for the other animosities between McCarroll and Leak? EWF: Amelia tried to claim her share of Leak property as the second wife of Walter John. She considered legal action but decided she could not win against a number of Leaks who were living near or on Leak’s property. Dad said that his grandmother was very upset that all she had from her marriage to Walter John, other than the blessing of her daughter, Betsy, was a bunch of ledgers and farm journals, which she kept safe in a bottom drawer. She thought they contained evidence of the extent of the Leak property to which she felt she had a claim. The farm ledgers, which later became known as the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak,” appear to contain some entries by Walter John, who seemed to be using the journal entries, as did his father, to document conversations with each other. Walter John kept his father’s records after his death in 1863, no doubt to identify the many people who owed his father money, as well as for the useful record of past weather and farm productivity. Obviously, ongoing farm records were being kept in a different format. Amelia brought the original ledgers with her when she and Betsy returned home to support her claim to a share of his estate. My understanding from Dad is that Amelia never received a positive response from her letters inquiring about Walter John’s estate. SW: Were the McCarrolls and the Leaks on good terms at the time of Amelia’s marriage to Walter John? EWF: Yes, I believe the other family members were on good terms by then. John McCarroll and Francis Terry Leak were not communicating with each other from a couple of years before the war until Leak died in 1863. SW: Because of their disagreement about whether and how to free slaves? EWF: Yes.

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SW: The marriage went forward anyway? EWF: Yes. I don’t recall any mention of any objection from McCarroll. After all, Amelia was twenty-eight when she married and was very independentminded. SW: Was the marriage fine at the beginning? EWF: As far as I know, it was. Later, Dad said, “Things were very bad.” So after Walter John died, Amelia came home to McCarroll Place to raise her daughter, Betsy. Her sisters Sallie and Betty were also at home. SW: Tell me more about these sisters. EWF: Dad had two unmarried spinster great-aunts. Aunt Sallie and Aunt Betty were always there. Dad’s grandmother Amelia and his great-aunts were the women who raised Dad, more than his mother. SW: Did William Faulkner meet these sisters? EWF: Oh, yes, they were two very old, ancient women. He was around and certainly aware of them in the 1910s when they were there. Will had Aunt Sallie around for a long time. She died on February 9, 1917. As boys, he and Dad would have listened to Grandmother Amelia’s and Aunt Sallie’s stories. One time when Dad was a boy, his friends came over to play, and they said to him, “Do the aunts bother you a lot?” Dad did not understand what they were talking about. He thought his friends were talking about the ants on the ground near where they were playing. He said, “No, the ants don’t bother me.” Finally his friends realized the misunderstanding. They said: “We’re talking about the old women in the house. Do the aunts bother you?” SW: How did your dad respond? EWF: He said, “No, they don’t bother me.” It never occurred to him that the aunts would bother him. They did not bother him except perhaps that they hovered a bit too much and warned him a lot about what to do and not do. They didn’t have much to do. They were around being nervous a lot. Aunt Sallie told stories, but Gramaw Amelia was the real storyteller. Dad would sit for hours and listen to Gramaw tell stories.18 SW: Do you have a photograph of Amelia? EWF: We might have one. ASF: Here is a picture of her sister Sallie McCarroll. I can’t find the one of Amelia. [She hands SW the old family photograph, held in a metal case.] SW: Oh, my! Faulkner’s description of Rosa in Absalom, Absalom! resembles Sallie in some ways. In this picture she is wearing black, with white lace at the wrists and neckline. Faulkner’s description of Rosa is that she wears


“eternal black” with a “faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat” (7, 8). I see that you have preserved Sallie’s photograph, and Ludie’s, too, down through the generations in this black metal case. In the novel, the cherished family photograph also appears in a metal case (114).19 These are startling correspondences. Do you know why these sisters did not marry? EWF: All the men were gone, or fighting, or dead. These women came of age and were hoping to get married just at the time when the war came. The whole generation born around 1840 was affected. Dad used to say that the town was full of elderly spinster women. Years later he realized these women did not get married because there were no men.20 SW: Have you read much of Faulkner’s work? EWF: I would have to confess that I haven’t read a fraction of what Faulkner wrote because it has been too emotional for me. SW: Why? EWF: The stories remind me too much of their anguish over slavery—the difficulty of the races getting along together after the war. SW: Whose anguish? EWF: Dad’s and Will’s. So I didn’t really read Faulkner’s work very much. I kept putting it off until college, and then I started with The Unvanquished. I realized I knew several of the stories very well, having heard Dad and Faulkner go over and over the sad parts and laugh over the few humorous parts. Then, it just got too painful for me. The reading reminded me too much of their anguish over the destruction of the South, largely from its own leaders’ stubborn pride and unwillingness to compromise. Will said, “Just like Sartis, and we know what happened to Sartis.” As I read, I felt the pain I had felt listening at age nine. SW: What happened at age nine? EWF: When I was nine, Dad and I were talking, and Will stated reading from the diary out loud. Will was reading it, and he got upset. SW: What upset William Faulkner, exactly? EWF: He was reading in the diary about one of the slave situations. He was upset by what he was reading in the diary. So that upset me, too, and I said to myself: “It’s our fault. It’s our family’s fault.” SW: What exactly did you think was your fault? EWF: Suddenly I realized that slavery had occurred in our family. I thought that slavery was our fault—my family’s collective fault—that slavery had oc-

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curred so close at hand. I thought, “Yes, this has something to do with me.” SW: You thought slavery was your fault, personally? EWF: Yes, I thought that it was my fault as much as the other members of my family. I remember also that day I bolted from the room. I went to my room and closed the door, and I didn’t come out for a long time. SW: Did you talk to your father about your feelings that day? EWF: No. We didn’t talk about it that day. It overwhelmed me, and it’s bothered me ever since. I feel guilty about slavery. I never talked much. Dad didn’t either. It’s still painful to me to recall how I had sat listening to Dad and Will talk about the slavery issue. That overwhelmed me with sadness, and I was totally unable to shield myself from the pain, as adults learn to do, and was helpless to do anything about the problems. Later, Dad tried to console me. He came in and said: “It’s not your fault. You should not feel responsible for it.” SW: Did you know that William Faulkner’s story “The Bear” is about a boy who reads in the farm ledgers that his family participated in slavery, and he feels intense guilt? EWF: No. SW: Do you still have the same feelings you did when this incident occurred when you were nine? EWF: I still feel guilt for my great-great-grandfather’s deeds, and that is pretty Old Testament. SW: Did your dad grieve over the fact that his great-grandfather was a slaveholder? EWF: I certainly did, and I assume he conveyed those feelings to me. The subject never came up, however, except when Will was there. Will would get very angry that slavery had ever existed, but Dad never expressed anger about anything. The two men seemed quite different in that way. Dad would show sadness, but Will was very verbal in expressing his anger against slavery. SW: What was your father’s view of slavery? EWF: He didn’t express his views or emotions much. He praised John R. McCarroll for his attempts to end slavery and avoid a war. SW: How do you feel when you read the diary now? EWF: I’ve always had a reluctance about the diary. I don’t know why. I don’t read it, and I don’t volunteer to show it to people. I showed it to you because Anne asked me to. I had put the connection with Will Faulkner completely out of my mind. As I came down the stairs with a volume of the


diary, I was bringing it with reluctance and apprehension and wondering why Anne wanted to show it. Then I remembered the great amount of time Will spent reading the diary and taking notes. But during those times, Dad and I had been really bored since Will shut us out, when he was totally engrossed in conversation with the diarist. It was not the fun that it was when Dad was telling stories about McCarroll Place events. The McCarroll Silver EWF: Will seemed fascinated with the stories of what happened to the McCarroll silver. There is the ongoing saga in a couple of Will’s stories about when John Sartoris was off fighting, and Granny decided to dig up the silver chest and carry it to Memphis in the wagon to contribute to the war effort, needing to run through Yankee lines to do this. The real story—that is, the McCarroll family story—is that John McCarroll first buried the silver in a chest under the fruit trees south of the house. Then the story continues that he announced he was digging it up and taking it to Memphis to be placed on a Confederate barge along with silver collected from many sources, to be floated down the river to New Orleans where French merchants would exchange it for credit to buy weapons—moving through Yankee lines all the way, of course. The family thought he made up that story to convince people that the silver had left the premises, so no one would come trying to dig it up. SW: Did your great-great grandfather [John McCarroll] bury the silver? EWF: We have no doubt that he buried the silver in a chest in the orchard. This story is true. But did he dig up the silver, and then take it by flatboat to New Orleans? No one in the family believed it, although reports of such plans widely circulated. I am not aware of any historical evidence that silver chests ever left Memphis for New Orleans. SW: Do you think he sold the silver? EWF: McCarroll is supposed to have said that after the war, they would not have food worthy of sterling silver and no one with time to polish it, so he would contribute it to the Confederacy. McCarroll’s daughter, Amelia, told Dad a different story from the one about going to Memphis. She said that the sale would have been to someone east of Holly Springs who took it to Charleston, and the cash contributed to the Confederacy, not the silver itself. No one knows the truth, but neither Will nor Dad really cared. It was a wonderful story, full of possibilities, which Will captured with great zest.

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Will might have heard other stories about buried silver, but he delighted in hearing Dad tell the McCarroll story over and over. SW: Was the chest a trunk? EWF: A wooden chest, most likely. The silver chest was not a steamer trunk that might be taken on board a ship, but a smaller chest that would hold the family silver pieces and flatware. SW: What else do you recall about the silver story? EWF: At the time Will was writing, until the time Dad died, people would ask Dad for permission to dig for the buried silver.21 He would explain that we kept a milk cow fenced in that area and didn’t want to disturb the cow or leave a hole to endanger it, and later when we had no cow, it was because of the calves. People dug in that area anyway. Dad had to fill the holes for fear the calves might break a leg. SW: Word was out in town that people were looking for the silver? EWF: Yes, and interest still continues. The silver was supposed to have been buried back of the house, and might have been dug up and might not have been dug up, and people persist in thinking that maybe it wasn’t ever dug up and is still buried back there. Garrie Colhoun, who owns a dry cleaners here in town, a real Civil War buff, was one of the ones convinced he could find the silver if he got permission to look for it. He asked Dad several times could he look for it. Dad had said, “Oh, we’ve got calves back there, and we don’t want a lot of holes dug around in the pasture.” Garrie asked the preacher Rev. Milton Winter, who was living here years later, if he could just take his metal detector and go back through there and see if he could find where the silver was buried. So Milton said, yes, he could do that. He’s Presbyterian, a member of Milton’s church, so he said, “Sure, go look.” Soon the metal detector signaled a large metal object the size of a huge trunk of silver. Several people came. They started digging. Finally they dug up an old galvanized tub that had been used to mold lye soap. The hot lye soap would be poured into the tub for cooling before cutting into large cakes. I’m sure I watched the making of the last batch of lye soap, most of which was given away to anyone who wanted some. Mother saved a bunch back for stripping furniture. It would take the old black walnut varnish right off. The walnut stain actually came from dried walnut husks from trees on the place. Nobody would use this last batch of lye soap to do laundry, some of which until 1937 was still done in the yard in a tub with a


washboard. That’s the way Julie insisted it be done by whoever she got to do it, but they said the lye soap burned their hands. After that last episode of lye soap, the tub had been thrown back there in the pasture and gradually sank down in the dirt and got covered up more and more, and Garrie was able to unearth the tub and perhaps prove that the silver is gone. Garrie is a treasure for his detailed knowledge and research on Civil War history. Milton devoted a column in the South Reporter to the story. It shows how legends about buried silver just persist. People think there’s buried treasure here. Harvey was just talking about people looking for buried things: buttons and items of value.22 So I guess the metal detector’s the new way. In the old days, people were going back there with a shovel and just digging a little here and digging a little there. So that’s part of the story about the silver. Two descendants of Leak lived next door at the Strickland Place. They were the children of William Strickland and his second wife, Janie Leak Strickland, daughter of Francis Terry Leak. At the time, I had no idea that Pearl was grandmother Betsy Francisco’s first cousin, therefore my first cousin, twice removed. Betsy was the daughter of Amelia McCarroll and Walter John Leak of Salem. Betsy, born in 1868, and Pearl, born in 1869, grew up together. When I was a child, Pearl Strickland Badow and her brother Frank Strickland lived there. She supported herself and Frank by teaching group and private lessons in elocution. I was enrolled before my third birthday. Many Holly Springs children got Pearl’s elocution treatment. Lois Swaney Shipp has written several times of her experiences with Pearl’s elocution recitals.23 Coming along a couple of years later, I had to memorize many of the same poems and stories. Pearl got married late in life to a German immigrant named Badow. The “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” ASF: Why don’t you show her the diary? SW: Whose diary? [Dr. Francisco goes out of the room and returns with a bound volume.] EWF: This is one volume of the seven volumes. It’s a typed translation of the original handwritten diaries of the farm. The diary records the daily

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business and personal transactions that occurred on the Leak farm. Money was dispatched to buy flour, for example. One entry recorded a letter sent to his agent which read something like: “My man carried 128 bales of cotton in Memphis to board the flatboat. When you counted it in New Orleans, it was 125 bales. You were a few bales short.” Another entry will record the sale of slaves: “Sent payment today for young females.” So these are accounting ledgers, as well as notes on planting schedules and letters received and sent. SW: Did you know that ledgers appear in Go Down, Moses and resemble the material in these volumes? EWF: No. SW: You said you have not read much that William Faulkner wrote? EWF: No. SW: Have you read Go Down, Moses? EWF: No. SW: Did your father read much that Faulkner wrote? EWF: No. SW: Do you recall whether William Faulkner saw this diary? EWF: Oh, yes. Will looked through these diaries at the McCarroll Place. He studied them. SW: William Faulkner studied the Leak Diary? EWF: He pored over them; that is, he studied the original handwritten ledgers. I doubt if he saw these typed copies of the journals. SW: Mr. Faulkner “pored over” the Leak Diary? EWF: Yes. SW: Did he talk to your father about the diary? EWF: Yes. I remember Will discussing it with Dad. He was more interested in it than Dad. Will would pore through each volume. My dad did not pay much attention to them. After all, they were Leak’s journals, and the McCarrolls had little or no contact with the Leaks after Amelia came home. The journals represented to Dad a time of family frustration, and his grandmother Amelia thought that these volumes, the personal property of her husband, Walter John, would document the extensive properties of the Leaks, information her husband had not shared with her, and this would support her claim to his share of it. The journals were kept even though they had not been helpful. The complete set of volumes of the diary had been housed at McCarroll


Place by Amelia McCarroll, my great-grandmother, who brought them with her after she came home with Betsy, her only daughter, after the death of her husband, Walter John Leak. Francis Terry Leak owned land in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Mississippi. His son, Walter John, married McCarroll’s daughter, Amelia, in 1866, so Dad’s mother, Betsy, was named Leak. But Will was enthralled. You can see the whole process of a year there— the process of buying sugar, tools, materials. It records that a farm owner borrowed twenty-five pounds of sugar and then repaid it—just as one example. It’s surprising that they would have to borrow that much. SW: Were you present in the room when Mr. Faulkner was reading the Leak Diary? EWF: Yes, I was present when he read them. He was fascinated with the journal. SW: How often did you see Mr. Faulkner pore over the volumes of the diary? EWF: Many times. SW: Did he ever borrow them and take them home? EWF: I doubt it. Faulkner was there at the house often enough to read there. I would watch Dad carefully put them back in the drawer. SW: Did Mr. Faulkner take notes while he was reading them? EWF: Oh, yes. He was always taking notes. He would turn right to the page he wanted to reread and take more notes. He knew the volumes well. SW: Did anyone else you know read them? EWF: Hodding Carter was a close friend of Dad’s. He said he would like to write a book using the material in the Leak Diaries, which recapture 1830 to 1860, and give a flavor of what plantation life was like at the time, but he never did. Hodding Carter wrote about Holly Springs and the McCarroll Place, but said he was saving the diaries for a full-length book. Every year at the Pilgrimage a few people would actually engage Dad in conversation about the history of the period, and if Dad thought they were interested enough, he might pull one of the typed, bound volumes with its red cover from the library shelf where they were kept after the transcribing and show it to the visitor. Since 1950, only Carter expressed great interest in the volumes. SW: Did your dad talk to Hodding Carter about the fact that Will Faulkner was interested in the diaries? EWF: No. Dad would never have done that. Dad would only bring the diaries out and show them to people who expressed great interest in them,

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but Dad would consider it extremely rude to tell the present guest about someone else who had shown interest. To do so would imply that a person not present was on Dad’s mind and therefore more important to him than the person who was present. Dad would never have been that rude. For example, Mayor Crump, whose family was from Holly Springs, came by to see the Ludie etching and said he came out especially to see it and hear about the daughter of the former Mayor Baugh. I am sure that Dad never mentioned the mayor’s visit to anyone else who was viewing the window since it would imply that the person at that moment was not worth the full attention. Name-dropping was always an impolite put-down. SW: Did William Faulkner comment on the Leak Diary to your father? EWF: To say he commented on it would be a great understatement. Dad would be sitting right there with him as he read, except when Dad had to take a phone call. I was there sometimes. Will said the diary made him sad and angry about how things were and how they ended. Will said they bring back a lot of the raw unhappiness about the way things were. He bemoaned the fact that there was ever slavery. In addition to his comments to Dad, I remember sitting for what seemed like an hour listening to Will read aloud, then curse and yell at the diarist, and scribbling with fury all the while. SW: Would you say a little about who Francis Terry Leak was and your relation to him? EWF: Francis Terry Leak was another one of my great-great grandfathers, and his son Walter John married my great-great grandfather McCarroll’s daughter, Amelia. SW: So Francis Terry Leak was your great-great-grandfather on your father’s side, and he wrote the diary? EWF: Yes. He was a grandfather of Dad’s mother, Betsy. No doubt his eldest son, Walter John, took them over for reference and made his own entries, since he managed the farms after his father’s death. Then they passed down to his wife, Amelia. SW: Then passed down to Betsy Leak? EWF: Yes. Grandmother Betsy’s two grandfathers were John R. McCarroll and Francis Terry Leak. SW: Then to Betsy’s son, your father, Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr.? EWF: Right. SW: Then to you? EWF: Yes. There was no mention of it in a will, but everything not specifi-


cally listed in Dad’s will was left to Mother and then to me. There is a will that says everything of Mother’s was left to me. SW: How would you describe the diary? EWF: They looked like old ledgers. They looked more like Dad’s and Grandfather’s office ledgers. They really didn’t look like diaries. It’s just a ledger. SW: So they had ledger paper with lines and columns? EWF: I remember some columns, and lines, more like ledger paper, but they weren’t uniform. The ledger books were different shapes. Some books were more elongated and narrow than others. I remember that one was quite different—the last one, I believe.24 SW: You saw the original handwritten diaries written in longhand? EWF: Yes. Really tried to read a little of it and gave up. I just thought, I can’t read any of this. Could make out few words. SW: The handwriting is hard to read. EWF: Certainly hard to read, and when you’re eight or nine years old, you’re not motivated to read it, and I thought, “Who would want to read this stuff?” So I was sort of amazed at why Will was so engrossed in trying to read something that was almost illegible. Why would you be reading it? But Will was obviously fascinated with it. SW: Could you tell when he first became aware of the diary and when he observed them and how often? EWF: I have no idea. He would say, “Let me look at those diaries.” He would ask for a particular one. Dad would bring it out, and Will would start flipping through it. He knew where to turn, what he wanted to see—obviously he was real familiar with them. So I would say probably all through the 1920s he’d been reading them. Dad would dutifully go and get them when Will asked for them, but Dad had no more interest in them than that they were just there. They had been his mother’s and had been kept, like everything else. Now once they got them printed, and he had them bound and could put them in the library, then when people would show a lot of interest in the house, Dad would say, “Let me show you this diary,” and then he would bring it out and show it. But I think it really took the earlier Faulkner interest for him to think the diary might be of interest. He didn’t just pull them out for everybody. It had to be someone that really hung around the Pilgrimage, and really asked questions, to show a lot of interest in the house and things, and he’d say, “OK, I’ll show you something,” and bring them out.

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SW: How would you describe what’s in the diaries? EWF: Well, they’re family history, and a farm history, a mixture—as an interesting blend of farm records, purchases and sales, and then personal events. It’s just a chronology. Leak didn’t seem to keep a separate diary for farm records and another separate one for personal records, or anything. He would be recording what had been purchased, what had been plowed that day, and right after it, receipt of letters, and mailing of letters, personal things just all mixed in there together. SW: Commodities bought and sold for the farm and for the people who worked there? EWF: Yes, so it was a combination of a farm journal and personal journal. So it was more like a diary, but you don’t think of a diary containing details on what sugar cost and so forth. So he just blended it all in one set of books. There’s this one that seems to be separated out that has mostly farm entries. You probably saw that. SW: Yes. EWF: So one book seems to be set aside strictly for those entries. As far as I’ve known there’s just one that did that all the way through. The rest sort of mix it all together. SW: I asked you this before, but have you, before we started talking, had you read Go Down, Moses? EWF: No, I had not. I had read just the individual stories in The Unvanquished. I had not read Go Down, Moses at all. SW: The diaries also record the buying and selling of slaves. EWF: Yes, they do. Yes. SW: They note how much money was paid per person. EWF: There’s not a lot of emphasis on that because it obviously was a fairly infrequent part of operation of the farm and everything, but there are some entries for that—actually, surprisingly few. I don’t know how many. It would take a lot to go through the whole thing and really categorize how many entries for this and that there are. There are many entries about correspondence—a lot of detail about correspondence. SW: How large was the plantation of Francis Terry Leak? EWF: There were over a thousand acres, plus his land in Arkansas. I don’t know the total. SW: What was Francis Terry Leak’s personality like? EWF: Dad said he must have been a difficult man to live with, but Dad


got that impression from his grandmother. No one else had contact with him. I got this impression from the diary—that he was an autocratic type of person. In his diary, he would say that “he” was having guests for the weekend. He did not say “we,” to include his wife, for example. He made the decisions. He was smart, but tough. SW: Did Leak bring slaves with him when he arrived in Mississippi? EWF: Yes, he brought slaves with him. He came well supplied with slaves he got somewhere else. SW: Do you know where they came from? EWF: They came with him from Rockingham, North Carolina.25 SW: Did Leak work in the fields? EWF: Yes, he would go out to plant. He worked in the fields, but only long enough to determine what a man could accomplish per hour, and then that set his expectation for the others by his own work. He was begrudging. Obviously, he could work at a fast pace for a few hours, but others could not sustain that pace for several days. SW: Did William Faulkner listen to the conversations about Leak and his family—and this story about Amelia coming home? EWF: Yes. SW: What happened to the Leak land after the war? EWF: I do not know. Leak had land holdings in Mississippi and Arkansas. Amelia assumed that her husband, Walter John Leak, inherited a substantial amount of land and cash from his father, but Amelia was never able to confirm that. Dad said she never received anything from his estate. There was resentment, and the two families had little further contact. I would guess that Amelia was expressing general disappointment over unrealized expectations rather than a specific focus on the Leak family’s handling of Walter John’s estate. She had a reputation for her capability, and she expected to be able to maintain a postwar Leak plantation. But I believe she really underestimated the impact of the total destruction of Salem and the disarray on the plantation resulting from the war and the death of Francis Terry Leak, who had been the driving force, as evidenced in his diary. Then Amelia and Walter John lost their son about 1870. Two years later, Walter John died. The plantation had not been able to support all of this family, as evidenced by three of Walter John’s sisters going to live in Holly Springs—the oldest, Janey, to marry next-door neighbor William Strickland, and the youngest two to live with the Stricklands. I feel certain

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that Amelia would have played a role in these events, probably during the first year of her marriage to Walter John. With the death of Walter John, Amelia returned to McCarroll Place, with Betsy and the farm journals, kept by Walter John but with no entries for the decade after Francis Terry Leak died. Years later she would tell Dad, “Things there were very bad.” SW: Would you say more about how you came to have the Leak Diary? EWF: The diary became the possession of Walter John after his father’s death. I assume that he continued to maintain farm records, but in new or different formats, not in his father’s journal. Amelia brought the journals with her after Walter John died to help her identify what should be hers. It is my understanding that Amelia packed up the journals along with Betsy.26 Nothing was ever received, and the journals were wrapped in a bundle of hurt and placed in a bottom drawer. However, the reality probably was that the Leaks had no money to give her. Dad said that the diary reminded Gramaw and him of the difficulties of living in the totally destroyed town of Salem and on a plantation struggling after the war; of the death of Amelia’s only son in infancy; of the death of her husband; and of the need to return home—the shattering of her hopes and dreams. SW: What year or years do you recall William Faulkner’s studying the Leak Diaries? EWF: I personally saw him looking at them in 1937, 1938, 1939, but I understand that he had studied them much earlier, as early as the 1920s, when he came over after quail hunting. By the time I came along, Will and Dad had been sitting around looking at the diaries for years. Will would say, “Let’s go back over a few things.” On several occasions, I heard Will ask Dad if he could see the diaries, and I watched Dad go get several volumes for Will to read. Dad got them from a drawer in the guest room. Of course, that was after his mother had died. Will would say to Dad, “No, I don’t want that one—I want the fat one.” It was almost as if he had memorized them. He knew which volume contained what information. So he and Dad had been looking at them from 1920 on. SW: Do you know of any stories of mixing of the races in the Leak family? EWF: No, but I know very little about the Leaks. SW: Did your farm have a commissary? EWF: “Commissary” might not be a good term for it, but the two-room brick house had stores of supplies in it and a full barn door on the west side of it, with a double door, that was large enough for a wagon to back up to it


and unload salt, flour, cornmeal, and sugar for the cooking for everybody, but it never turned into a store, since town stores were just two blocks away. Pictures show that wagon entrance into the 1920s. SW: I’ve noticed in the diary several letters from Francis Terry Leak to L. Q. C. Lamar. EWF: Yes. SW: A few letters to Mr. Falkner. I don’t know which Mr. Falkner he was writing to, but I assume it was the Old Colonel Falkner. EWF: I haven’t seen that, but in that last book, he included a good bit about the legislature and who was in the government. SW: Yes. EWF: Congress. He listed everybody in not just Mississippi but the United States, all the people who were in Congress at the time. So there was a lot of interest in that sort of thing. You mentioned L. Q. C. Lamar. I just remembered that one of his lists in one of the volumes, he listed L. Q. C. Lamar as one of the representatives in Congress that year. Also, I am fascinated by the last two volumes. I was just flipping through them, and a remarkable number of people we all know from history were in the Congress that particular year. SW: Yes. Then the war, of course, is a topic that comes up toward the end. EWF: Yes. SW: Do you remember your dad and Mr. Faulkner talking about the war? EWF: Yes. That was probably the part of the diary that fascinated Dad the most. He wasn’t all that interested in the farm records, but the letters about troop movements and reports from the front of Leak’s son missing or wounded—he really read that part. You could see the Union troops actually getting close as it gets toward the end of that diary, and that’s pretty dramatic writing. He was fascinated by that. SW: Mr. Faulkner sometimes used the “n” word in his fiction. Why do you think he did so? EWF: I think he used the “n” word to capture the way people talked at that time. I think he was enraged by the attitudes he heard reflected in conversations. When he used the “n” word, it was out of his need to convey the way some people were talking at that time. He was saying that it was painful to talk about slavery and painful to write about it. Will and Dad believed that years before the Civil War, a number of people were realizing that slave labor was undesirable on economic as well as

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moral grounds, in that slave labor was less productive and more expensive than hiring farmhands either full-time or by the day as needed. Proposals were being floated for the transition. Dad would add the comment that John McCarroll was supposed to have been promoting the shift to freemen, talking about how his people were skilled brick makers, masons, and carpenters, in addition to their strength and endurance. McCarroll noted that he had several times as many hired by the day as he had slaves. So a farmlabor market existed by 1850 with plenty of folks wanting to work, which had not been the case initially when the South was first opening up and needed more farm labor than was available, so turned to the slave market. With an orderly transition, the South would have continued to make huge profits from cotton because the competition was way off in Egypt. Some of Will’s views on this I really feel I began to understand by age nine, but a lot was filled in for me by Dad, after that and before I left for college. Will thought that the first talk about secession was not said in seriousness, but rather like a kid saying, “I don’t want to play with you anymore.” Most people thought that, having joined the Union voluntarily, they could leave voluntarily. So when the northern leadership declared that secession was not allowed, suddenly the right to secede and the right to self-determination became an emotional, all-consuming battle cry, which diverted attention from the slavery issue. That is when the tragedy began to unfold— with no one having both the leadership ability and the courage to stop it. Will was painfully aware that the attitudes generating the battle cries of “states’ rights,” which continued to the end of his life, were the greatest deterrents to economic and cultural progress in the South from about 1850 on. This grieved and angered Will because of his love for his Southland. He seemed totally driven to convey this theme through the characters he wrote about. SW: What else do you recall of their conversation about slavery? EWF: Will Faulkner said that those who could have led the South out of slavery, instead became like that damn mule pony—Sartis—so stubborn and blind that he got himself killed. He said: “Sartis was the South—proud, arrogant, stubborn, and half-blinded by their righteousness of self-determination,” he would say. “Still true!” he would say. He and my dad grieved about why people couldn’t avoid the coming tragedy. “Just like Sartis,” Will said. He added: “That pony was given away. He refused to allow himself to be ridden. That pony got killed. That stubborn, blind pony. That is exactly


what happened to the South—so blind and stubborn it couldn’t change and destroyed itself.” SW: Did your mother know that William Faulkner planned to use your family as a model? EWF: Not until after it was published. Mother refused to read much of his writing. Eventually she read only enough to think she recognized one or two characters as coming from stories Dad told, and that families of these people would not like how they were portrayed. The word would get out that Dad had told Will many stories about Holly Springs people and events, and she would lose her friends. Dad loved to tell stories and said that Holly Springs had been blessed with more than its share of colorful, if not eccentric characters, and he lovingly recounted their goings and comings. Dad would try to assure Mother that Will’s stories and characters were a composite of many stories and characters, none of whom were her friends, but if they were, they would be thrilled to be in a story. SW: So your parents viewed Mr. Faulkner very differently. EWF: Yes, but also Dad was perplexed by Will’s introspective nature. Dad was the opposite. I would watch Dad on vacation. If we stopped five minutes to stretch our legs, Dad would look around until he spied someone, and then he would side right up and start asking questions about him, his family and interests. Soon he knew the man’s life story, and loved being in that present moment of communication with his new friend. Meanwhile, Mother would be fretting over the expectation that we should be somewhere on time. I think it is important to fully explain this because otherwise her reactions would not make sense, even in the context of the 1920s, much less today. Mother did not know much about Will Faulkner. Her emotional response at that moment to Will came from her past history, as I understood after she confided bits and pieces of that history to me during my teens and twenties. Dr. Bitzer EWF: Beginning at about age three, each of the eight children in Mother’s father’s family was escorted one at a time into him—Dr. Bitzer—in his study for the dreaded Friday afternoon accounting and reckoning of how time had been spent and talents had been used during the week. As the

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daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she found that moving every two or three years was extremely hard on her. Recounting some of it brought tears to her eyes. She felt that as the preacher’s daughter, she was not as easily welcomed into the social circle of her peers. Just as she was finally accepted, the family would be packing to move. From his pulpit, Dr. Bitzer was God’s warrior with a mission to make people uncomfortable and save souls. In the community he was in the service to meet whatever needs he encountered. Everywhere he went, people responded to him with respect, awe, and love. As a result his children felt they had been commissioned into “the service” by birth. Most of them strived mightily for life to fulfill this obligation. So, back to Mother’s story. On Friday afternoon, everyone seemed to be terrified, or at least she was. I’m sure he meant to be helpful and loving and fatherly and all the good things, but he would ask each one questions. He would say—my mother would quote him saying, “Daughter, what have you done this week to better yourself?” She would have to describe what she had spent her week doing, and he would have advice for her. He meant to encourage them, get them to become all they could be and so forth, but I think it was difficult for her. Mother had a sister, Mary, who was extremely talented in music, and she would emerge from her session with her father having told her that she could do much better at her music than she was doing, and more would be expected from her. There was another sister, Helen—marvelous in math— and she would be told she could do better than she was doing. Mother said that she would go in, and she didn’t feel that she had special talents or intelligence, and her father would just say, “Well, you’re doing the best you can.” She would come out feeling crushed because she had been complimented, but it wasn’t really—it was as if he were saying: “You poor thing. There’s no need to tell you to do better yourself. Just take care of your sisters.” Again, that could have been her own personal remembrance of it, but she always felt that she had to do something a little better than she was doing. So she carried that, I think, to Holly Springs, and so Faulkner was a real threat— real scary to her. SW: Because he seemed to represent the abandonment of discipline? EWF: Yes. SW: The principles that she had internalized? EWF: Right, I’m sure she would think, “Father would be very upset.” He


was still the minister in Holly Springs when she married. In fact, he performed the ceremony in the Bitzer cottage in Montreat, North Carolina. He was the minister of the Presbyterian church until he died. I’m sure she was thinking that he would be very upset if he knew we were having anything to do with a person like this. So it’s not that the man had a reputation—she did not want her husband or son around a man who cursed and drank so much. SW: Do you know whether her father, Dr. Bitzer, ever met William Faulkner? EWF: I doubt it because he was just over there occasionally, to go quail hunting with Dad during quail season. He certainly would not have introduced himself to Dr. Bitzer. So, no, I would say they didn’t know each other. SW: Do you think William Faulkner heard stories about Dr. Bitzer from your dad? EWF: I am sure he did because Dad would tell stories about his having to go around behind Dr. Bitzer, in order to keep the insurance business. He was very much afraid that he would lose customers because Dr. Bitzer was not one to be gentle with people. He was very outspoken about people’s behavior. Dr. Bitzer made a point of going to the local theater on the town square on Saturday afternoon to view the usual cowboys and Indians movie. Not anything terrible by today’s movie standards at all, but Dr. Bitzer would go to the movie, and as he came out of the theater, invariably the movie had something that he disliked, and he had a cane. The owner of the theater was always standing back behind his plate-glass counter in the lobby of the theater. Dad had a special insurance policy covering that plate-glass counter— special plate-glass coverage. That theater was probably his biggest risk and premium customer in town because, you know, theaters tended to catch on fire and the film burned, and it burned down more than anything— more than a restaurant or dry cleaners. Dr. Bitzer would come out from the movie and slam his cane down on the plate-glass counter and say something in a stern voice, like: “This is a horrible movie. I plan to preach about it in my sermon tomorrow.” Dad would be behind him, shaking and coming up to the owner of the theater and giving him a little pat or wink, as if to say, “Oh, it’s okay, it’s okay!” He would sort of feel the glass counter and say: “Is it cracked? No, it’s not cracked. Okay?” They would go through that

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every week. So I’m sure that Dad told Will Faulkner some of these stories. He told them to me, and I’m sure he told them to people around town. He was in sort of awe and fear of his father-in-law, no doubt about that.27 If Faulkner had met and gotten to know Dr. Bitzer, I think he would have admired the warrior in Dr. Bitzer. Dad did but wished he would not use the movie theater plate-glass counter as a pulpit. Faulkner would have admired Dr. Bitzer’s loving ministry to all in need throughout the community. Mother remembered accompanying him each week to visit the prison wherever they lived. His prison ministry, begun about 1900, was exceptional at that time. At the height of the 1918 flu epidemic Dr. Bitzer heard that many soldiers were sick and dying at a camp in Arkansas, so he rushed there to minister for weeks. Upon arriving in Montreat in late summer, he and every member of the family came down with the flu. Mother remembered being too weak to walk, so she crawled from bed to bed feeding broth through a glass straw to her younger brothers and sisters who were too weak to move. They all survived. Also Faulkner would have admired the Calvinistic drive that Dr. Bitzer displayed in action and that he instilled in his children. His expectations of them probably contributed to their accomplishments, but at a cost. SW: What cost? Would you explain more about your mother’s attitudes? EWF: It’s hard to understand today. It would be hard to even understand then if you didn’t understand her background and her insecurity when she came there and her personal experiences. SW: Do you mean her intense Presbyterian upbringing? EWF: Yes, yes. I think the expectations she internalized regarding her behavior were quite a burden for her. SW: What expectations? EWF: Dr. Bitzer’s expectations. SW: Her minister and father? EWF: Yes. So Mother, who after a dozen moves in thirty years had landed in Holly Springs, meant this move to be forever. Whether it was true or not, she had felt that in a dozen towns, she was outside looking in, and desperately wanting to belong. She would be moving into her husband’s family home, in his hometown, but she was determined to be a part of this place. So, returning to this home, after one day of marriage, she meets Faulkner sitting there, looking completely at home, with beer, the “game” for dinner,


and a matching vocabulary. Recounting her introduction to Faulkner still overwhelmed her many years later. Denying William Faulkner Righteously SW: Your father did not share your mother’s view of the importance of “fitting in.” Is that right? EWF: That is right. Dad never gave a thought about fitting in or belonging there or earning a “membership,” which seemed to have been lifelong concerns of Mother’s. After all, Dad was born in McCarroll Place, as was his grandmother.28 His family was there before the town, and he had never lived anywhere else. Dad tried to soothe Mother, saying that people would be delighted to be in Will Faulkner’s books. The reality was perhaps that Faulkner’s characters were drawn from several sources. Mother would not be soothed. She asked Dad never to tell that Faulkner came to our house. She said, “That goes for you, too, Eddie,” but I don’t think I replied. I think her concern was not with what he wrote but his personal behavior. Apparently people came around after Will died. They came to Holly Springs and said that they heard that Will had been there. They wanted to look at the etching of Ludie and asked whether Mother knew if Ludie was Will’s inspiration for several etchings on windows. Mother was perfectly happy to show them the etching and tell them the story of Ludie, but when it came to “Did Faulkner use it?” she had no idea, she would say—she didn’t know. So she never would—she just never would say that she knew him. Mother never admitted that she knew him. That is so sad. SW: Does that seem sad to you because if she had been more forthcoming, others would have established sooner your father’s close friendship with Faulkner? EWF: No, that is not the reason at all. I would never have thought to mention this family story if you had not publicized your visits to Oxford and then started asking your questions. I probably would never have thought of it again. There were only two people to whom I ever mentioned our relationship with Faulkner—before you. One was Dr. John Wolf, who was an English professor at Southwestern [now Rhodes College] in Memphis when I was a student there.29 I was taking his course in the American novel, which included excerpts from Faulkner. I mentioned the Ludie window,

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which Faulkner had written about, and said that I had recently been down to visit Will Faulkner. Wolf told me he had made the pilgrimage also and by the hardest got a brief visit with Faulkner. Apparently Wolf saw nothing unusual about my association with Faulkner—not enough to ask a question of me—and I did not expect it. I think that in 1950 anyone who was good at hunting or riding was welcomed by Faulkner to spend hours with him, but not an English professor wanting to talk about his writings. Wolf noted that he made a mistake in presenting himself as a professor and critic of American writers because that seemed to irritate Faulkner, who proceeded to challenge Wolf’s credentials to be teacher, much less critic. I never thought about any of this again until you started our interview, except that Rev. Milton Winter [of Holly Springs] showed me a copy of an article by a woman who had visited McCarroll Place and suggested that the Ludie window might have been Faulkner’s inspiration for this story. I told Milton that she was right, and I wondered out loud if I should call or write to her to say so. He said I should, but I never did. I feel sad for Mother because she missed out on an opportunity to be in conversation with a literary genius as he was recording and reacting to what he perceived to be the realities of life in the South over a hundred years ago leading up to the time he was writing. Dad, with his vivid memories of his grandmother’s stories, was certainly one of the links that carried Will all the way back through those hundred years. She missed an opportunity to learn more about Dad’s family history, too, since otherwise he did not talk much about it with her. SW: She did not see her refusal to admit that she knew Faulkner as a falsehood on her part? EWF: She felt that it was a righteous denial on her part. It was not appropriate to know him. She did not consider him to be an appropriate friend. SW: Why have you not talked about your family’s and your relationship with Faulkner before now? EWF: My first thought was of my mother’s strong objections, but that is really not true. As Dad and I, joking, asked each other: “To whom could I tell this secret?” No one other than Mother cared or was interested in how much Will Faulkner drank or cursed. Most at that time did not know who he was. Neither of us would discuss Will because we knew that the response would be either “Who is he?” or “So what?” Then, after Anne and I moved to New England, I became occupied with


economic studies, family, and lobbying for passage of Medicare and other health-care reforms. Dad’s friendship with Will Faulkner and my connection with him faded out of my mind. I feel sure I never would have thought to mention him again, had you not urged me to discuss it and asked me for these interviews. I’m still uncomfortable talking about Will’s and Dad’s friendship. Dad’s friendship with Faulkner is not important to me, personally. That was Dad’s friendship, and it was important to him, and he was actually a very private person. I had never thought Will to be such a significant part of my life that I wanted to tell about it. SW: When did you realize who William Faulkner was? EWF: It was a little boy’s gradual recognition. Probably I first realized he was writing stories when he told me that he had written me up over the soaping I got at age two. Of course, I did not understand the significance of his writing. I was in college before I realized the extent of his acclaim, but I did not have the time then for much pleasure reading, and what I read made me sad because the reading always placed me back in the sunroom at age nine and feeling the anguish of the two men over the subject matter of Will’s writings. So now, over fifty years later, I am removed enough from those memories to thoroughly enjoy reading him, mostly for the first time. I am amazed by his genius. This person was Dad’s friend. Mother’s objection to him made me see him as more exciting. SW: What else do you recall? EWF: On Saturday mornings, people, mostly black, would start to gather in the backyard before breakfast and would mill about until Dad finished and came out. Then they would line up and present their problems. I was very impressed that Dad seemed to treat each as his friend and peer and never rebuked or judged any one, which I recognized as quite different from what I was hearing from some other people. That continued through the 1950s. During hunting season, Will would sometimes show up before Dad was finished. Years later, Dad told me that Will had said, “Edgar, if they voted, you would be mayor.” SW: “They” meaning the African Americans in your town? EWF: Yes. Dad said he told Will that if they voted, they would not need his help, and would not know to vote for him, even if he wanted to be mayor, which he did not. Dad was the alderman for Ward 3 and would continue to be reelected unopposed until he decided to retire.

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SW: Were commissaries common in your area? EWF: We did not have one, and had no need for a commissary since we were living so close to town. I remember spending weekends with my friend Jack Wittjen. They had a big farm out in Hudsonville, and they had a commissary, but they were way out in the country, or it seemed way out then, and they needed some supplies close by. McCarroll Farm was much smaller than that, and it was right in town. I mean, it was just right on the edge of Holly Springs. There was no need to try to store anything there on the place because you could just go to town to buy what was needed and distribute it directly without storing it—that is, before the war. After that, they stored things just for their own use. In our two-room brick house, the former kitchen was open wide enough at one end for a wagon to drive right in. Until about 1937, they stored bags of corn and flour and staples like that in there. Just for the use on the place. SW: Well, I think on some farms, the owner doled out supplies from the commissary to the people who stayed on the place. EWF: What did occur up until she left in 1937, Julie, our cook, would prepare a huge amount of food, more than we ate. Then someone who lived in one of the two or three houses down below us would come and pick up what they wanted. Julie lived down there, so she cooked about three times as much as we needed, and then her family and probably some other extended family would come up and carry off big trays full of food and take them down the hill. So the house sort of became a place where a lot of cooking went on for a lot of people other than us. That relationship ended when Julie left. SW: Which relationship? EWF: The one that probably started earlier with supplying them with food products that they took home. I never heard it described as a commissary. People just came and got meal and flour and stuff from the bags in that area. Julie actually cooked all this food. I guess she was the person left that liked to cook, so she might as well cook enough for everybody. When Julie left in 1937, they all stopped coming up, and soon moved away. SW: So the people who came to take away food were her relatives? EWF: Yes, and everyone else that lived down the hill from our house. Three houses’ worth. SW: Did they work for your family?


EWF: Yes. SW: Were they descendants of slaves? EWF: Julie was born a slave and was in her eighties in 1937. Probably some were descendants of McCarroll’s slaves. I was just vaguely aware that a number of people lived down there and worked around the place and were considered to have always been there. Julie was considered part of the family. SW: What do you mean “part of the family”? Do you mean a possible mixing of the races in your family? EWF: No, but it’s interesting you should ask that. I’ll tell you what I remember. Growing up, Dad would tell the story about how Julie had spoken sharply to him as a kid and hurt his feelings, and he didn’t think she should do that. But his grandmother would always say, “Julie is family.” Dad said Will Faulkner picked up on that right away. He was fascinated by Julie’s authority. Dad would explain that his grandmother had said Julie belonged, and the kitchen was Julie’s, and that was the way it had always been since Julie’s mother died. William Faulkner was convinced. It made sense to him. He was certain that Julie was related to us—that John McCarroll had probably had a relationship with one of his slaves—and Julie was the result of that, or her mother was the result of that. Will would say: “Edgar, she lives in one of the houses down below you. She acts like she owns the place. Isn’t it a possibility that she is descended from John R. McCarroll?” SW: How did your father respond? EWF: Dad said he certainly did not ever ask that question, that it never occurred to him to ask while his mother and grandmother were alive, and he never heard it discussed and had no reason to believe it was true. Dad said he assumed that Grandma meant Julie had always been there since she was born and that made her a part of the family. But Will clearly relished the idea and thought it a significant and real aspect of southern life. SW: William Faulkner relished the idea that white and black may have mixed? EWF: I don’t know about that, but he thought that the concept deserved a place in his writings. Will seemed to get notions in his head that he was convinced about. That was one of them. Another was he couldn’t understand how a cook could have that much control over a kitchen. Dad would say: “Well, she’s always been there. She’s always run the kitchen, and her

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mother ran the kitchen before her, and that’s the way it is.” Will said: “Well, there’s got to be more to it than that. There’s got to be something more to it than that.” I rather doubt it. I think it was just his story. SW: Although such relationships did occur. EWF: Yes, I’m sure they did. SW: How long had Julie been a member of the family? EWF: Dad remembered Julie being the cook when he was a child. She would have been in her forties when he was born and probably had been cooking for twenty years already. He recalled being told that Julie’s mother had died, and her father had gone north soon after the war. SW: You do a lot of the cooking for your family, right? EWF: Yes. SW: Do you think you learned to cook by watching Julie? EWF: Oh, I don’t think so. I just enjoyed watching her. I learned to cook what Julie cooked, but later I realized that everything was cooked too long. SW: For example? EWF: Well, beans would be put on in the morning and cooked all day until noon. Turnip greens—several hours of cooking turnip greens. I probably undercooked them because I practically just wilted things like that. SW: Did you watch Julie cook? EWF: Yes. I would crawl up on a stool and watch her cook. She would bring in piles of wood to go into the fire. It was a hot kitchen. We had a big black iron stove. The kitchen had been added onto the house, as I understand it, at least by 1880. I don’t know what year the town got running water, but prior to that someone carried water up the hill from the spring. Julie probably helped her mother cook back when cooking was in the two-room brick kitchen, still standing back of the house. SW: What else did she cook? EWF: Cornbread, corn, beans, black-eyed peas, fried chicken, and biscuits with gravy, blackberry cobbler for dessert. There was more milk from our cow than we could use, so the extra was given away. Not much need to refrigerate it since more came every morning. There was frequent churning with butter pressed into molds. Maybe that was what was kept in the icebox because ice came every morning. SW: Will you explain the term “icebox”? EWF: The icebox was a handsome oak box with a metal-lined compartment


for the ice. I was told that from age two, I took responsibility for telling the iceman that we needed fifty pounds, and I did not understand that the square sign on the door with “50” on the top already conveyed the message. I would shout “ifty ouns,” since I was unable to pronounce either f or p at that age. Until Julie left, the icebox was unused except for some of the molds of butter and a bottle of whole milk that she filled up from a bucket for me. I liked cold milk. Julie saw no other reason for an icebox. People came around almost every day selling farm produce: the roasting ears [of corn], peas, beans, tomatoes, turnip greens, and she cooked them up for a big, hot, midday meal, which Dad came home for. She left enough for leftovers that evening, and then she carried the rest down the hill. Sometimes, two or three people would show up to help her take off trays of cornbread and chicken and vegetables. No need to put one thing in the icebox. Next morning, she started all over, fresh. SW: Do you mean she made enough to share with other members of her community, or her acquaintances? EWF: I don’t know who they were. I think children observe and remember but rarely think to ask who, when, how come, much less why. They came up from down the hill. I assume from the three houses we had on the place. SW: Do you still prepare these foods in your household? EWF: The foods Julie cooked remain soul food for me. A plate full of turnip greens remains my idea of a full meal and nourishes my soul. Of course, I cook turnip greens only about fifteen minutes, compared with Julie’s four hours. I learned from Julie how people cooked a hundred years ago, but of course, nobody cooks that way today. Some kids have memories of going to a grocery store with family. I don’t remember that in early childhood. We did not go, I realize. I know that sometimes a trip must have been made for flour, cornmeal, sugar, and coffee. But that was about all. Someone came up the hill most every day to chase down a couple of chickens. They were cooked and eaten that day with leftovers returned down the hill. All vegetables came to the door. Even the blackberries arrived in a basket and were picked from the field below the house. The leftover cobbler carried back down. Someone came up to milk the cow, and the excess milk and butter was carried back down. There were several hogs in the pen. Several hams were smoked each fall, and sides salted down. Van Dorn Avenue was the southmost street laid out in the vicinity of our house. Directly south of us was our land, houses and

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people. South of that was open woods. Prior to Julie’s leaving in 1937, I was witness to life that had not changed much for the last one hundred years, which is exactly what Will Faulkner observed. All that changed in 1937, when Julie left. Mother worked at learning to cook. When she was successful, the leftovers went into the icebox for the next day. The icebox proved inadequate and was soon replaced with an electric box. The people down below eventually stopped coming for Julie’s leftovers and drifted away. The cow was sold and Hurdle’s Dairy delivered milk in bottles. People with no connection to the old families offered to rent the houses on our property. The past faded quickly after Julie left. SW: Will Faulkner called you “Little Eddie.” Did he give you that name? EWF: No. Most everybody called me “Little Eddie” to distinguish me from the two other Edgars. Grandfather was called “Mr. Francisco,” Dad was both “Edgar” and “Ed,” so I had to be something else. Mother called me “Eddie.” Eventually I asked to be called “Ed,” but “Little Eddie” stuck until college. The last year I lived there was sixty years ago. Holly Springs

On the Road to Holly Springs EWF: This is pretty exciting. We’re on our way to Holly Springs to visit the home I grew up in. It was built by my great-great-grandfather, John Ramsey McCarroll, who came to this area early and found a spring and built a little three-room house. That was just after the Chickasaw Cession of 1832. He didn’t finish a fourth room until the spring of 1834. John Ramsey McCarroll was born in 1804 in North Carolina. The family most closely connected to early McCarroll family history was the Eddins family. John Eddins (b.1784) was married to Mary Lipscomb. Three of their daughters are important to the story. Elizabeth Eddins (b. 1813) married John R. McCarroll. The McCarrolls’ first daughter, Mary (b. 1834), was the only child to live in the four-room log cabin home at McCarroll Place when it was down by the spring. Louisa Eddins (1811–1845) married Byrd Hill, who got the corner lot at Maury Street and Depot Street when the town was surveyed in 1836. The family used that spring, together with a well, for their source of water until about 1880. Then in 1836, John McCarroll rolled the four-room house up to its current location at the corner of Maury Street and Depot Street, later named


Van Dorn Ave. He added the two rooms on the north end. The house faced toward Maury Street at that time and until about 1880. The loan of the lot from Hill, his brother-in-law, was to be temporary until McCarroll purchased a lot and accumulated brick and lumber for a larger home. In 1840, McCarroll decided this location was good, so he bought the lot from Hill. So, the house you’ll see has been emptied of all of our furniture, and it is rented, but the house should still look the same on the outside as it has for many years. So I really look forward to being there and telling you a little about it. . . . The house is pretty much unchanged. Will Faulkner would look around when he was at our house and say, “Nothing has changed in this house in a hundred years.” SW: Do you think your dad did not tell your mom about his friendship with William Faulkner before he married her? It was just a surprise that they were close friends and that he was a hunting buddy? EWF: Mother had moved to Holly Springs with her father when he came to be the Presbyterian minister. So, she and Dad had dated in Holly Springs for about a year. She would have known that he went quail hunting in season and perhaps that a friend came up from Oxford. Dad probably would not have mentioned the name, but if he had, it would not have meant anything to her. They went to some dances together, but he did that with some other singles and couples as well. They hunted quail, but that would just be several weekends during quail season. There would be really no reason why he would discuss it. Dad would not have thought, at that time, to discuss his friend, since he did not perceive him as talented, rude, or different. Dad was surprised by his wife’s reaction to his friend. SW: She was surprised by your dad’s drinking? EWF: She was probably not aware that he liked to have some beers after hunting until they were married. At McCarroll Place SW: What year was this part of the house built? EWF: This back part was built in 1833. It was down the hill at the spring and then rolled up here. He then built an addition in 1836, added a kitchen in 1880. The gallery was enclosed in 1930. So the house is in one, two, three pieces, plus the gallery enclosure, which occurred in 1930. For many years, the Pilgrimage sign dated the house at 1834 because that was the

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finishing date for the original four-room section for which construction began in 1833. We have Pilgrimage pictures showing that 1834 sign in the foreground. A later addition should not change the original date. I do not know why the new sign shows 1836 or who changed it. [Entering front of house] EWF: Each of these two rooms has a chimney on each end. That’s a chimney outside there and one on the other side. Then once these rooms were here, the rest of the house was brought up to join this part, and the area out here that you see was the open gallery that has been enclosed since then, and we’ll get to that. We can walk from the parlor back to the library, which was originally a bedroom and the first room of the three-room house that was rolled up from down the hill. This room was originally a bedroom. The two sections of the house lacked this much—about two feet—of meeting. The space was sealed off and gave the impression that there was a very thick wall there. Then, in 1940, Mother was tapping around and decided that this was worth opening up, and so she built these shelves in here and changed this into a library and added double doors to connect the parlor to the library. So there’s a step down here from library to parlor, going from parlor to gallery—now the enclosed sunroom—there is a step down. This original bedroom, which we changed to the library, and the next bedroom to the south have an original double chimney shared by both rooms. Also both bedrooms open off the open gallery and did not have a connecting door. The third bedroom connected to the second and had its fireplace/chimney on the south side. So the original structure was these rooms in a row with a chimney between the first two and another at the end of the third. When Mother got inside the wall here, she found a lot of leftover Civil War equipment. She found several bayonets, and at least one sword, which my son still has, and just things the army left. This house was occupied by the Union army after they pushed south of Memphis. Holly Springs was Grant’s headquarters for the siege of Vicksburg. The family was allowed to live in the back rooms, and the military took over this whole front part of the house. Obviously they discovered the hollow wall and opened it up to store equipment. We had the sword and bayonets and all that on display for the Pilgrimage. The town changed hands many times. After Van Dorn’s


Raid, which delayed the siege of Vicksburg, there was a pullback of Union troops for a time. SW: Would you explain about the floors and the chandelier—anything else in here that’s prewar? EWF: The floors are original. It’s amazing they’ve held up this well because they’re thick pine. They were all hand-hewn on the property, and you’d normally think pine is too soft to use for flooring, but it’s so thick. It’s been refinished, sanded couple of times, but it’s held up extremely well. The wide boards and all were all handmade—each one individually sawed and hewn. The other side of them is very rough wood. This light fixture was added later. Mother found it in an antique shop and decided it was close enough. It probably dates from 1870. Originally it was a gas light, and she wired it for electricity. And maybe that’s about it for these two rooms. SW: You previously said she wanted only pieces in the home that were pre–Civil War. EWF: Right. Right. Any furniture she brought into the house she was pretty certain was before 1860. What she found here was pre-1860 when she got here, so things that she found in shops she brought in. So not all the furniture was original McCarroll furniture. There’s not a single original piece in the house now. Well, I believe there is this one set of spool shelves. We had a couple of robberies that took off some things, and then after that, we moved absolutely everything out. Some pieces are with us in our home, some are at Ted’s home, and some at John and Megan’s home, but we have pictures of what some of the rooms looked like. We’ve got a lot of those pictures. Right now you’re just going to see a house that’s bare of the furniture that was here before. The thief cut the chandelier out of the dining room. I mean, he didn’t just take furniture—he took the chandelier out of the dining room. SW: That’s too bad. SW: [Referring to the spool shelves] What is the history of this piece of furniture? It appears to have several levels of wood and holds objects or books on shelves. EWF: It could have been here originally, but I don’t know. She [his mother] never told me much about it, so I don’t have any history of that piece. It’s been in the house all of my life. That’s about all I can say. SW: Would you talk about the different layers and the doweled wood? EWF: Yes, OK—I can do that. This piece of furniture may be the only one currently in the house that was here when I was a child. We moved every-

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thing else out. This is all doweled wood. This all comes apart: one, two, three, four, five, six shelves, and these all unscrew, and it’s all wooden. There are no nails or anything, and it’s all wooden doweling, and then all comes apart layer by layer and can be put in a small box and transported. Mother kept little demitasse cups. She had a collection of little demitasse cups and saucers and old glass slippers, and those were the things that she kept on it. The exact age of it, I don’t know, but I don’t think it was called “original,” by which they meant acquired up to 1860, so it would be as late as 1870, since Mother refused to have anything later than 1870 in the house, except of course, bathroom and kitchen fixtures and one comfortable couch in the sunroom. It wouldn’t have been here if it didn’t go back to about 1870 at least, but whether it was an original piece or not, I don’t know, but it was certainly here all of my lifetime. [Moving into the library] EWF: These books are what is left of the library. Most everything has been moved out or replaced, but those books on the top shelves are what remains of a collection that extended top to bottom on both sides of the room. We’ve moved what’s left to the top shelves, so the tenant can use the other shelves. It’s just a mixture of family books. There are some of Dr. Bitzer’s books, some McCarroll books, and some Francisco books. SW: Were these cabinets built when this room was built? EWF: These cabinets and shelves were built in when the room was converted to a library in 1940. This room at one time was my grandparents’ bedroom. Then, when he died in 1940, this room was converted into a library. The bookcases and cabinets between this library and the parlor were built into the space left between the 1833 part and the 1836 part, space that had been sealed off. We talked before about finding a sword and other items in that space when we put in the shelves. Yankee soldiers used the space for storage during the occupation. This was a working fireplace—one of six from two double chimneys and two single chimneys. Originally they all burned wood. They gradually were adapted to burn coal, which required a grate to hold coal, and in some cases a fire brick liner for the firebox. Dad said he remembered mostly coal when he was young. The only wood I remember was used to kindle the coal and in the kitchen stove. SW: What material is in the fireplace mantel?


EWF: I don’t know. It seems to be a cast iron. Think it’s a cast iron. I’m not sure when that was put in, but it was probably about 1880 to 1890, when they started mainly burning coal. SW: This other fireplace, was that wood-burning also? EWF: It was wood originally, and then they put propane logs and then natural gas logs in there. SW: Does the mantel go back to the original home? EWF: That’s the original mantel, I believe. That was a wood-burning fireplace first, and then it was coal-burning and then propane gas and then natural gas. This reminds me of Dad’s struggle to start the church furnace. I remember being awakened, in what seemed like the middle of the night, in the dead of winter—and winters, believe it or not, here were cold—at least to me as a child in the ’30s. Mornings were cold in the winter. We’d get up in the dark, and I’d go with Dad up to the church, and we would have spent the week chopping up kindling, carrying buckets of coal up there, and we’d go up, and we’d try to get this furnace to start. You had to put paper in there and light it by hand and then gradually put kindling on. Put too much, and it would all go out. Then you start putting the coal on there. Put too much, it’d all go, smoke. Then finally we’d get it going, blazing, and we’d come home and have breakfast. Then about two hours later we’d go back to church. It took that long to get the church to warm up. We did that all through the ’30s and ’til about 1945. That’s my first memory of the church—going in the side door in the dark and turning on a little bitty light bulb at the door, must have been about a fifteen-watt light bulb. We had to walk down this long hall in the basement. It was ground floor, but it was dark. My childhood memory was this is a terribly dark, scary place. At the end of it was this old furnace. I was certain there were ghosts in that church, and I would feel them right behind me, walking in. I never told Dad that I thought it was full of ghosts. Finally I did confess that “I think there are ghosts here because this is the last place they were, and some of them are still hanging around in this church.” He was a deacon, and his job was to get the church furnace going, and we would arrive back in time for services in the morning and hope the place was not full of smoke and hope at least the chill was off of it. SW: Was Dr. Bitzer the minister there? EWF: No. Well, Bitzer was the minister ’til ’34. I probably don’t remember doing that ’til probably the next year, about ’35. I don’t really remember

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things much before then, but one of my early memories was that I was freezing, and we’d go up and get that fire going. We did that ’til in the ’40s, and then another crew of young deacons came in. Dad became an elder. The new deacon that got the job of doing the furnace, he called a special meeting of the church. He says: “There’s no way we can use that furnace. It doesn’t work, and we gotta have a new furnace.” So Dad had made it work, but the next deacon tried to start it and couldn’t start it, and so the church got a new furnace with a dial you just turned. The postwar modern age had begun. The church has had several furnaces since then. The heating and cooling has been redone several times, but back in the ’30s we started the coal with kindling. Then you just stood back and threw in buckets of coal. It was a monster. Now and then we’d come back, and the church would be full of smoke because the fire had gone out, or the church was cold as it could be and full of smoke. Everyone would say: “What’s the matter, Edgar? Can’t you start a fire?” That’s just an early childhood memory, but it is similar to my memories of the house. We had to start each fireplace with paper, kindling, and then the coal. SW: You said that William Faulkner was in your house many times. Was he out and about in Holly Springs, too? EWF: Apparently his contact with Holly Springs beyond that was pretty limited. SW: Is the sloping floor just due to this house having settled over many years? EWF: I think it’s the combination. The front two rooms have settled. The step up and down are the result of how the two sections were joined. Apparently the original floor of the open gallery sloped down following the slope of the land to connect the back part of the house. When the gallery was enclosed it would have been almost impossible to level it. SW: Did your family build the house themselves? EWF: Oh, yes. Built by the family. The family built these two north rooms, with the help of slave labor in 1836. The old part, the modified double-pen log cabin, was built by John McCarroll himself with a little help from a Chickasaw Indian friend. SW: What kind of curtains do you remember here from your boyhood? EWF: The first curtains I remember were heavy, velvet-type drapes. Mother changed the curtains a number of times. SW: May we look at other rooms? EWF: This is the other front room with the other fireplace and the same type floors that were original floors. All of these doors are original doors.


It’s been painted over several times, but it’s all original brass hardware. This door also has original brass on it. The bathroom here was all added. When Mother married Dad and moved here, they built this little bathroom from part of the open gallery. Before that, this whole area was the open gallery. The door from the bedroom to the bathroom must appear strangely thick and heavy to you, but it had been an outside door opening onto the gallery. SW: This room was your parents’ room? EWF: Right. When they were first married. It had been great-grandmother Amelia’s room. You see this strange area here [referring to the opening from parlor to sunroom]? This north wing was originally two bedrooms. It was McCarroll’s second double pen with chimney on each end. Apparently, as an afterthought, someone wanted both rooms to open onto the gallery. To accomplish this, they enclosed the two-part space between sections on an angle to connect the bedroom door to the gallery. So we have this second heavy outside door opening halfway onto a step down to the gallery level and halfway onto an angled wall. So, all five rooms opened onto gallery with a step down. SW: All right. This gallery was like a porch. EWF: Yes. It was floored. Floor and a roof over it, but otherwise wide open. So all this to that door over there was the open gallery. [Standing at Ludie’s window at McCarroll Place] SW: So this is the place where Dad and Will would sit and talk? EWF: Right. They’d sit out here. This was an outside door—one of these heavy old doors [referring to the door from the sunroom to the library]. This was all outside wall [the wall between the sunroom and the library]. Here is the window that has Ludie’s etching in it. SW: Have you taken a picture of Ludie’s window before now? EWF: It just says “Ludie.” That’s all. We never took a picture. Ludie was a first cousin of great-grandmother Amelia McCarroll. So now we are standing at Ludie’s window. She scratched “Ludie” on the glass window with her diamond ring between 1860 and 1862, but probably in 1860. Why would we photograph it? It’s always been there—and it’s just “Ludie.” We’ll have to get the drapes open so you can see it. This window was an outside window at that time, looking out onto an open area. That bathroom wasn’t there so you could get a clear view of the street from this window. This bedroom was actually at that time the sitting room right off the front

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porch, facing Maury. It’s now the side porch. So she was on the sitting room side here looking outside this way and etched her name. SW: Where exactly would your father and Mr. Faulkner sit? EWF: Right here on what was then the gallery. SW: In what kind of chairs? EWF: Will always sat in the same spot, looking out this window, and talking about it. Much of the time, the same rocker was in that spot, but Mother had a need to swap two rocking chairs on occasion. Whichever chair was in that spot, he sat in it. We still have both. He would walk in and go straight to the window. Not even a nod or “hello.” He would stare at the window and then through it and say, “Ludie is still there.” It was his one indulgence of the obvious. Then he sat down and talked about Ludie. I came to expect this ritual before conversation ranged unpredictably and astonishingly. The diaries were kept in the front bedroom dresser. At some point, Dad would bring one back here when it was requested. This became a little sunny sitting area after the 1930 enclosure of the gallery that was our sort of informal room, and they would sit right here side by side. Usually I’d sit over here and listen to ’em. Less than a year after my parents were married this room got enclosed. Before that this was an open gallery where Dad and Will liked to sit. Dad said they enclosed the gallery, and Will continued to sit in the same place he’d been sitting, but now the room was enclosed. [Walking into the bedroom that in 1860 was the sitting room, with the front door opening onto what had been the front porch, or gallery] EWF: We are just getting pictures of the Ludie window from the “inside” of the window, which used to be a sitting room, and Ludie would have stood in this room looking out this window. She was looking through this window out to an open gallery and down the street watching troops move back and forth on the road to the depot, and that’s when she put that etching on this pane. [Moving back to the gallery, now the sunroom, where the etching appears in reverse] EWF: This sunroom was formerly an open gallery until 1930. This is also the spot where my cousins Sarah Doxey Greer and Helen Tyson30 liked to


stand during the Pilgrimage to point out the Ludie etching and tell the family story. Many visitors were from Memphis and enjoyed hearing about the connection to their mayor. SW: How long did Ludie live here? EWF: She lived here from 1860 to ’66. Will would sit here and speculate on when Ludie met the soldier, and when they got married, and what happened to them, things like that. He said he ended up putting parts of the story in terms of the etching on the window in three different books talking about etching on a glass. Now, he never used the name “Ludie” in his work, but he made it clear he wrote about Ludie. In fact, he told us, “I used Ludie three times. I got Ludie in three different stories.” So he was very much inspired by that story. He never would walk into the room where Ludie stood to do the etching, which is fascinating. He always viewed it from the gallery, looking in. SW: Why would Mr. Faulkner not go into the room? EWF: Dad would say, “Go around and look at Ludie from the other side.” Will would say, “No, I look at Ludie in reverse through the window.” Dad would say, “Well, you can walk right around the corner into the room and see her,” and Will would say, “Hell, Edgar, nothing has changed in this house in a hundred years. I think Ludie’s standing back there now. I don’t want to bother her.” So he was a man that had a huge imagination. SW: What did your dad say in reply? EWF: Dad had lived with it all, and he just sort of gets big-eyed and looked around: “I never have seen her. Just stand there and look at her from the other side.” Will would say: “No. I’m not going to do that, Edgar. I always want to remember looking at Ludie from the outside looking in.” [In the front room of McCarroll Place] SW: Dr. Francisco, would you read aloud from the diary of your great-greatgrandfather? EWF: Right, right. It comes alive that way. I was thinking back to when Will Faulkner would come in after quail hunting, and he and Dad would settle down to a beer or two, and Faulkner would say, “Bring me out one”— and he would try to describe one of the ledgers, and Dad would bring one. If it wasn’t the right one, he would have to go back. Will would say, “Naw, it’s that other one,” and he would go back, and then Faulkner would pull

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out his notes and turn directly to a page in the diary, and he would read and add to his notes. He used to take notes, not just read out loud. But I’ve got a copy here of some things. Here is something Will and Dad talked about, so I’ll read this one. It was dated January 2, 1856, and says: “Also arrived a letter from my son, W. J. L., dated twenty-third December in which he says . . . that . . . he had shipped thirty-one bales more to the same house paying down the river for freight $4.00 per bale for some and $3.50 for some and expected to send more . . . for $3.00.” So this is all about what Leak had to pay to ship. He’d bought pork at five cents, that’s five cents a pound, for pork, and some of his cotton would be shipped to the same house. He mentions a letter from his son Walter John Leak, who was Francis Terry Leak’s oldest son, and my great-grandfather. At that time, Walter John was twenty-two years old, had finished college, and established a farm of his own, but the father was frequently urging him to get land closer to Salem, Mississippi, where Leak lived. Ten years later in 1866, Walter John would marry Amelia McCarroll, and they had a daughter, Betsy, my grandmother. [Dr. Francisco continues reading and offers interpretations of some of his great-great-grandfather’s statements (shown in square brackets)]: “Thermometer at six degrees this morning. Reached twenty-six today.” [So that’s the middle of their winter]. “That the meat of the west side of the square at Ripley included W. R. Coles house was burned on Friday the first. The fire occurred at the day time in the saddler’s shop, and they would begin to hang up a second killing of meat this evening.” [That would be, no doubt, pork.] “I’m a little apprehensive that it may have taken in salt too much as the weather had been intensely cold most of the time it’s been lying in bulk.” [So they were hanging the second killing of pork.] Will Faulkner would just turn to the page he wanted in these books and read and read and take notes. We have a complete set of the diary. This section goes from September 17, 1855: “Received a letter on Saturday from Robert Dortsch respecting his land and negroes. He values the negroes at $700 each and gives their names and ages as follows (list follows in original). The land, he thinks, ought to sell for $10.00 per acre, but at $15,000 for land and negroes, it is priced at a fraction over $8.00.” [So I guess he’s saying it looks like a bargain because it ought to be worth ten, and the way he’s priced it for that fifteen thousand, it’s just a fraction over eight.] (See pages 26 and 27 in the original manuscript.) [Dr. Francisco


continues reading from the diary]: “My valuation is to the left of the names amounting to $7550. to which add interest at 8 percent on ¹⁄³ for 2 years, ¹⁄³ for 1 year, equal $300.00 $7550 plus $300 is $7,850.” [OK, that’s interesting.] [Continues reading]: Riding through the Dickinson Pond yesterday, where the cotton is very large and green, and not opening much. I skimmed several of the stalks near the ground, & cut off the others, for the purpose of ascertaining whether the opening could not be hastened by either mode. These stalks cut off were set in the ground again. I wish to repeat the experiment a few weeks later. EWF: So he was trying to figure out what you’d have to do to make cotton open faster. Very interesting. So he’s going through a lot of detail of evaluating each person and then the land, and maybe he’s coming up with a figure to propose to buy it. 1855. The next day, September 18, 1855, Leak writes to Mr. Dortsch declining to buy and saying his wife was too sick for him to travel to see the land and that Dortsch’s figures seemed too high. In fact, over the next two months, Leak writes about offers to buy or sell land between three and five dollars per acre. Entries in 1855 seem to reflect the peak of Leak’s interest in buying with no expressed comprehension that slaves might be free in the near future or that land values could fall, much less that the land boom would end with over 90 percent loss in values. Within a year, however, all entries are regarding selling at reduced prices and indicate that some apprehension was settling in. I remember Will reading the 1855 and ’56 entries and talking about this particular part. It certainly was a regrettable period in our history, wasn’t it, that any of this was going on? We’re very sad about it, but Leak wrote about it just like it was part of business as usual. So that’s the way things were then. Faulkner got very upset about it. He was really a very angry man over a lot of what he read in the diary. I think that bothered him a great deal. SW: I think you said before that your dad wasn’t too upset about it. He was kind of used to the diary. EWF: Dad did not show how upset he was the way Will did. Until Will Faulkner discovered this diary and wanted to study it, I doubt that Dad had paid much attention to it. The volumes were in a drawer and were so hard to read that probably Dad had not read much of the diary until

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Will Faulkner got interested in it. If you had gone through the house back then, you would understand why the volumes of the Leak diary did not stand out as unique. The house was filled with stacks of documents, diaries, and letters that filled drawers, shelves, and boxes. Dad’s mother had saved boxes of clippings and letters from the same time period, including letters her mother had received. Grandfather Francisco apparently saved most letters he received, neatly bundled by year from 1910 to 1939—thousands of them, filed away and never read again. He had maintained a huge correspondence. SW: You don’t remember a particular reaction from your dad, but your dad and Mr. Faulkner read the diary together many times. Did Mr. Faulkner have a reaction? EWF: Will Faulkner was very angry about it. I remember being startled because I had never seen anyone get that angry, certainly not my dad. SW: Why did Mr. Faulkner have a stronger reaction? EWF: I think that Dad obviously felt the same way, but Dad did not verbalize the emotions he felt. He wasn’t writing, and he just didn’t agitate over things the way Will did. But they agreed, basically, on it. It’s just that Will was driven to write about it. SW: They agreed. Do you mean that your father and Mr. Faulkner agreed that slavery was wrong? EWF: Oh, yes, of course. I feel the anger in Will Faulkner’s writing when I read it now. SW: When we were talking about the ledgers, and I asked you if you had read Go Down, Moses, and you said you said, “No,” you had read some short stories. Were you referring to the short stories that were in The Unvanquished? EWF: Right. That’s what I had read. SW: Do you know which of Mr. Faulkner’s writing your father read? EWF: He read the short stories in The Unvanquished. I believe that was probably the extent of it. At least those stories are the only ones I remember hearing them discuss, and there’s a lot of McCarroll Place in those stories. So they would talk about the characters and the way the stories were developed. I don’t believe he read Go Down, Moses or any of the others, but he did read those short stories. Dad said he read the first two short stories as they came out in the magazine and eventually got a copy of The Unvanquished. That may be all he ever bought and read.


SW: Do you think he read them because Mr. Faulkner told him that he had made some references to your family in those stories? EWF: I don’t know, but I would guess that he read the short stories because he was excited that his friend had got something published that was getting attention. SW: Since I’ve met you and have listened to you talk about your dad and Mr. Faulkner’s friendship, the more I know about the Leak Diary, it seems clearer that Mr. Faulkner was documenting the history of his area and illustrating what life was like for people there before the Civil War, at the advent of war, and in the few years immediately following the war. EWF: Right. Right. I’m beginning to understand that Faulkner wanted to show the transition from what it was like before and through the war by following interconnected families for several generations. Creating an entire county was really quite remarkable. SW: Do you know where the Leak plantation was? EWF: I have an idea where Salem was, but I have not gone looking for it. SW: Where is Amelia buried? EWK: Amelia’s right there in Holly Springs. SW: We didn’t see her grave, did we? EWK: We didn’t see that grave. We saw a different area. There’s another McCarroll plot that has Amelia and John R. McCarroll and Elizabeth Eddins McCarroll and several of the children. SW: I guess we don’t know where Walter John is buried. EWF: No, that’s true, we don’t. SW: Granny is also very generous. She goes about getting and giving supplies to people in the community. EWF: Right. SW: Do you think it fair to say that may have been part of your mother’s character? EWF: Well, I guess she was generous, but I’m not sure he perceived that. He might have gotten it more from what Dad told him about his grandmother, Amelia, because she shared everything she had with people during the war. When they were short of food, she would give whatever she could gather together. So she was very generous, very sharing. Maybe he’s blending those things together. SW: Do you remember any specific stories about Amelia’s sharing? EWF: Just whenever they harvested any extra corn at all, she would carry it

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over to a neighbor. Then they made the little cakes and handed out all the cakes that they made to the troops going through. SW: Are there any stories in your family about crossing enemy lines and bringing mules back, or horses? EWF: Nothing about bringing mules back, but the part of the story Faulkner and Dad laughed about so much was that part of the family story that the silver was supposed to be put in a wagon, and we’d try to get through enemy lines to Memphis to put it on the barge. That was obviously quite a poor choice of ways to do it, but that Will would enlarge on that story until 110 mules were being brought back through the lines instead of only the two requested in the letter of introduction—that just takes a great deal of creativity to develop all that out of where Will Faulkner starts from, and they chuckled a lot over that. Granny asked that two mules named “Old Hundred and Tinney” be returned to her, and the soldier wrote down a request for “all 100 and ten.” SW: Would you explain more? EWF: They talked a lot about McCarroll silver buried in the orchard, and the legend that McCarroll decided to dig it up and take it to donate to the cause of the Confederacy. Dad and Will spent a great deal of time talking about how they were planning to take it to Memphis and put it on a barge along with a lot of other silver, and it was to be floated to New Orleans. Then a merchant there was going to buy the silver and provide credit to the Confederacy. That was a very far-fetched story that was probably made up to throw people off track from what was really going to happen. The silver was probably sold to some nearby merchant for money, and then the money was donated. The story about this floating it all down the river was definitely Faulkner’s inspiration for his story about Granny, who dug the silver up, and took it off, and tried to get through enemy lines to get the silver somewhere and that whole thing about it being captured and going to get it back.31 I remember that. That was probably ’39, and one of the last things I remember Will laughing about was that story, and Dad was amazed at how Will could make up a story about recovering two mules named “Old Hundred” and “Tinney” and have a Union orderly understand Granny to be saying “all one hundred and ten.” They did discuss that a lot— back and forth—and laughed about it. SW: Your dad and William Faulkner?


EWF: Yes. Dad would say: “How did you come up with 100 plus 10? Why not 200 or 1,000 plus 10?” Will would say, “Never heard of a mule named ‘Old Thousand,’ and anyway, Edgar, I didn’t come up with it, I just wrote down what happened!” Faulkner would add: “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, she couldn’t have managed 1,000. That’s too many.” So Dad would say, “Well, 50?” “No, that’s not enough. That wouldn’t be impressive.” So there was a lot of discussion about what was the right number. Then they would move on to the chests of silver. But was fifty chests of silver reasonable? What’s a reasonable number of silver chests to bring back? Will would almost shout back, “Hell, Edgar, most things that happen aren’t reasonable!” So in the story, Colonel Dick had asked Granny to describe what she came to get back, so his orderly could write it down. She said there was “the chest of silver tied with hemp rope.” That got translated as ten chests of silver. She asked for “Two darkies Loosh and Philadelphy and two mules, Old Hundred and Tinney.” That got translated by the orderly, who could not understand Granny’s southern accent, as “a hundred and ten mules from Philadelphia, Mississippi.” On several occasions, I watched Will and Dad laughing over the saga of Granny trying to get all those mules, wagons of silver, and the people who came along back home. The story goes on for pages, and Dad would read aloud and chuckle his way through it. Earlier in the story was the description of the tragic drowning of many people trying to cross the river. That part Dad seemed to ignore. He did not seem to want to read about the horror of all the people trying to get across the river. SW: People admire The Unvanquished as an intensely personal depiction of the Civil War. William Faulkner does not so much describe battlefields with hundreds of soldiers, and what they were doing. He describes a family and what they are going through—different actions that happen in the life of a few people. EWF: Right. SW: The more I talk to you the more I’m convinced that it was largely based on your family. EWF: Yes. Just the personalizing of it. Getting that bonnet to put on to make the trip. Granny had to have the parasol and the hat. She had to be properly dressed to go. SW: Faulkner’s mother did dress like that, too.

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EWF: Sure. They all did. SW: So perhaps William Faulkner is drawing a composite of a southern matron. EWF: Yes. Women wouldn’t start out on a journey unless they were properly dressed—with a proper hat, parasol, and all that. Amelia McCarroll was supposed to have been an expert dressmaker and seamstress. She did a lot of knitting and crocheting, designed and made her own clothes and hats—had a lot of them, sort of doted on making her own hats. I guess it served her well because after the war when no one had any revenue coming in, money or anything, she set about designing clothes, making clothes. She and the sisters partly supported themselves making clothes for people.32 SW: She liked to make her own hats? EWF: Yes. She had a collection of hats, liked to make her own hats. SW: Did she wear her hat squarely on the top of her head? That’s how it’s described in The Unvanquished. EWF: That was almost a symbol for his description of how determined she was—single-minded. Granny wore that hat straight on her head because she was about important business. SW: Having a lot of gumption and negotiating with Yankee soldiers and Yankee commanders—does that look back to Amelia perhaps? EWF: Oh, yes, I think so. She held the family together, according to Dad. She was a tough lady and bargained to get food and negotiated, tried to swap pecans for flour and other things. She did some tough bargaining to even stay in the house. The Union officer wanted to stay in the whole house, and Dad would quote her as having said: “No. You can have three rooms and that’s all. We’re back here. You’ll have to kill us all to get us out. I’ll give you three rooms, or you’re going have a lot of women to bury.” So she was pretty tough. “Spunky” may be a better word than “tough.” Dad always described her that way. She was a very spunky, outspoken, strongwilled woman. She apparently was the matriarch. Of course, Dad was quoting what his grandma had told him, which apparently did not include much of what John R. or Elizabeth, her parents, were doing. Dad also said she was much stronger-willed than her daughter, Betsy, and in much better health. Amelia was the one that said what they were going to do. She was the strong, fearless one, and as an old woman, she still had the energy to tell the stories to a very attentive and enthralled grandson. By contrast, Betsy was frail and sickly—apparently not available much


to Dad. Will Faulkner’s Granny seems a lot more like Amelia than anybody else to me. The stories of her courage are legend. SW: Perhaps she is a composite of the two women, since the mouth-washing episode is very suggestive of your mother. EWF: Yes, I don’t think Amelia would have done that. SW: You mean the trait of trying to impart a Christian upbringing? EWF: Right. Dad never talked of having any religious instruction from Amelia. She sang Irish songs. Her father was supposed to be a Scotsman, but they had the Irish music, Irish culture, it seemed like. They had the Presbyterian religion, but they seemed to be more interested in Irish history and music. So Dad would sing the Irish songs. He learned them from his grandmother. SW: How early in their lives do you think William Faulkner heard your dad tell his family stories? EWF: Well, of course, they experienced the pony story themselves when they were ten or eleven years old. I imagine that he began to pick up stories that Edgar told pretty soon after that. I don’t know how much interest he had in them, but Dad told stories about when he was a little boy. Grandfather told me that he was constantly hearing McCarroll stories from his son, my dad, which he had picked up from Grandma. Dad was very much filled with the story of the family and the Civil War, and he grew up on it. So when he talked about an event, you could think it must be just happening, but it could be something his grandmother told him happened in 1865 or in 1870. He seemed to live on those stories. So I’m sure that Faulkner was very much aware of these stories during the ’20s. Those were probably the main years he was picking them up. SW: You said earlier that Mr. Faulkner would pore over the Leak Diary. EWF: Will seemed to know exactly where to look for things. He obviously had read the diary so many times that he wasn’t just turning through them for the first time. He was pulling a volume, and he was going right over to what he wanted to read and taking notes on that particular thing. So I got the impression that he’d been studying them forever and knew them almost by heart—obviously a lot better than anybody else did. SW: You were present in the room when you saw him reading the diaries. EWF: Right. SW: You witnessed his reading them and taking notes. EWF: Right. I was just eight or nine, but I remember all that pretty well be-

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cause it happened a number of times. It wasn’t just one occasion. It would be more probably in the fall after quail hunting, but sometimes he would just pop in off season from quail and take a look at the diaries. Now that you are asking about the diary, I am recalling an unusual aspect of his visits. A visit was in two separate parts, which I have never thought to analyze or verbalize. The first part was his visit with Dad— relaxed, drinking beer, retelling stories and happy remembrances. Then Will would pull out notes and ask for a particular volume of the diary and turn to the page he wanted. Then he seemed to totally change. He became sober, focused, sometimes agitated and angry, and talked to the writer of the diary. Thinking of it now, it was as if he were back with Francis Terry Leak, as Leak was writing, and Will talked angrily to him. He was in conversation with Leak, to the total exclusion of Dad and me. Dad would sit awhile watching him and never dreaming of interrupting him or trying to enter the time and space where Faulkner seemed to be, but Dad would get restless and slip out of the room. Sometimes I did also, but I remember one time sitting transfixed and watching Will. I never saw anything like it before or since. Usually Dad would slip back in the room unnoticed. So Will really had two visits. One was a happy visit with Dad. Then a second one, either intense or agitated, was a visit with Leak. Then Faulkner would close the diary, put up his notes, stand up and start for the door without another word. Dad would show him out. We would resume our day without any comment about it, and perhaps without any recognition that the visit was unusual because it was usually that way. I expected Will to borrow a volume, but . . . SW: But he did not? EWF: No. SW: As far as you remember, he did not take them out of the house? EWF: No. SW: To his house? EWF: I don’t think he ever asked for it, and I guess Dad would probably have said it was all right, but he didn’t. I’m pretty sure he never took them off because he would come back and ask for one book, and it would be brought out. So the impression was it was all sort of like a treasure being brought out to look at, and after Will left, Dad would carefully put it back. The diary was never just left out lying around on tables or anything. It was


kept in a bottom drawer in a chest in this front bedroom, which had been Grandma’s room. Just thinking about it, Will Faulkner was probably amazed that he was reading from the original, handwritten journals, written between the 1830s and 1860s, and he was probably the only person other than Francis Terry Leak and Walter John Leak who had ever read them. It’s nice that we’ve got these diaries, and they have been carefully saved, but until he came along, nobody really sat down and read them. Probably he was the only person who had really read these diaries since they were written—which is sort of amazing, really. Equally amazing, the bundle of diaries remained wrapped up and undisturbed from about 1872 to Faulkner’s discovery of them sometime in the 1920s—over fifty years later. He read and took notes over about a ten- to fifteen-year period. They were back in the drawer until donated and typed. Since then, many people could and did read them, in the library and at McCarroll Place during the Pilgrimage, but not until you did anyone have enough interest in the relationships to ask questions. Only you read with enough knowledge to connect the dots. SW: Thank you. [Walking around outside to the back of the house] SW: May we look at the outbuilding? EWF: This brick building was finished between 1840 and 1850. There was one man that was pretty good at it, and he hand-made the bricks in some little molds, and he had his own little kilns, and everything and finally got enough bricks to build the two-room house. SW: Do you remember his name? EWF: He was Lennie.33 The friend that Dad and Faulkner played with was his grandson, called “Lenny’s son,” and they shortened it to Lenson or Lenso. Lenso had been born here, and he lived right down the hill in one of the three houses along what was a dirt road. His grandfather had made the bricks. He had the skill to make the bricks. He knew how to do it and just did it himself, and they’ve held up very well. These bricks have held up pretty well. They’ve been tuck-pointed at least one time—about 1950. Someone came and cleaned out the mortar and put in about an inch of new mortar, and it’s all giving way again, but for the most part, the bricks have remained good.

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Just the mortar is giving away. Some of the bricks are going now, too. We put a new roof on, but otherwise, and the inside needs to be completely redone. A few of them are beginning to deteriorate because the kiln was bound to be very uneven in its temperatures, and it obviously is in great need of restoration. As far as I know, this two-room separate brick kitchen is one of the only two such structures left in this whole area that was made by slave labor. SW: One of the two in this town? EWF: Yes, since construction started in 1836, it is probably the oldest brick separate kitchen structure. SW: Did it have another purpose? EWF: Storage of items such as cornmeal. For the years before this was finished, they cooked almost outside over an open fire pit, inside a temporary shed. No one wanted a kitchen touching the house because kitchens tended to catch on fire, but this one—nothing ever burned here. There was never a fire in the brick kitchen. No woodwork burned or anything. The precaution was to keep it separate enough so that it wouldn’t burn the house down if a kitchen fire got out of hand. One room had a kitchen in it. The other room pretty much had storage things. SW [looking at the brick kitchen]: Are these beams original to this structure? EWF: Some of the beams are original beams. Some are hand-hewn. Some of them have been replaced because the roof got so bad it began to deteriorate, and we had to replace fairly recently a number of them, but there are a few original beams. Here’s one of the original beams right here. SW: This one with the crack? EWF: Yes. That’s original. All that was hand-cut. Not necessarily on this place. It’s all local wood. SW: Was there a mill near here? EWF: Yes, but not necessarily on the place. The sawmills tended to move frequently since they could be picked up and relocated. The wood for the old part of our house was all hand-hewn by McCarroll, sawed, and planed with hand planes. The beams for the 1836–1850 construction of the kitchen probably were cut somewhere else. SW: Do you remember Mr. Faulkner talking about this old kitchen or coming out to look at it? EWF: I don’t remember that. He wasn’t interested in its construction. He focused on the other things we’ve talked about, but when Mother fixed it up and added it to the tour, he was enraged. I’ll have to tell you about that later.


There was a bell here that was used to call people in that could be heard for several hundred yards probably, and our son John has it now. They’d ring a bell when meals were ready. Just like any old farm then. SW: It would call in the people working on the farm? EWF: People working around this place. We’re probably a little too far from the farm itself. People lived out there, but people anywhere on this six- or eight-acre area would come in to eat. SW: You mentioned a sorghum mill. Will you say more about it? EWF: The making of sorghum syrup that I observed on McCarroll Farm in the late 1930s and into the 1940s was apparently the same process used over the previous century. The sorghum stalks, stripped of their leaves, were pushed through a rotating crusher powered by a mule. The mule was attached to a long pole which was attached to the crusher, which rotated as the mule walked the circular path around and around. The extracted juice was then boiled down to syrup. Sorghum, an annual grass, is one of the six top cereal crops in the world along with wheat, oats, barley, rice, and corn. It is both extremely droughttolerant and thrives in hot tropical/semitropical climates. So, it should be no surprise that it originated in Africa and became the major source of grain for their cereal and bread. I understand that the grain was brought to the United States by African slaves and/or in the slave ships. While there are many varieties, it was the sweet sorghum varieties that were cultivated in the U.S. for the syrup since corn apparently was preferred for grain. I remember seeing the crushed stalks stacked up to dry for animal fodder. I do not remember any discussion of using the grain for bread. There were two reasons for that. First, the stalks for syrup production were harvested when the plants were still juicy and before the grain would have ripened. Second, the varieties favored for grain were different from those used for syrup. The nineteenth-century South really missed an opportunity to cultivate the sorghum varieties for grain, since it is a very high protein rich grain. SW: Thank you. Let’s talk a little more about the diary. Your great-great grandfather Leak mentions his health often. EWF: Yes. SW: He mentions partial blindness often. I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that. It could have been strokes, but there are several other causes. He mentions having a hernia. EWF: Yes. Quite common. Much more common in previous generations

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than now. I guess people on farms would lift things they shouldn’t lift, didn’t really go for any development exercises or anything, so they didn’t get a workout at the gym. They didn’t concentrate on strengthening abdominal muscles—just reach down and pick up a hundred-pound sack of flour or something, and, yes, it’s a hernia. SW: Your great-great-grandfather Leak also had a lot of headaches. EWF: Yes. I saw those references to headaches. SW: He makes a lot of home remedies. Sassafras was mentioned. EWF: Yes. Sassafras was, apparently, Amelia McCarroll’s favorite remedy for a lot of things, also. She made a lot of sassafras tea, but she also used sassafras, dried and ground up, in various in ointments and things. Dad said that she had several different roots that she dried and leaves that she dried and ground up and used them for ointments and just applied them to an inflammation or a wound. She apparently had a whole shelf full of things that she had dug up or picked and experimented with to see if they worked. SW: Leak’s mule had blind staggers. EWF: Yes. Also, there are several stories they tell about when Mrs. Grant decided to invite the ladies of the town in for tea. She would also have Dad’s great-grandmother Elizabeth and her daughter Amelia in for tea. Then there was a need to invite Mrs. Grant to McCarroll Place for tea. So the problem was that nobody had any tea, so all that she could scrape together for Mrs. Grant was sassafras tea. So they served Mrs. Grant sassafras tea, and the story is that she was very complimentary about it. Mrs. Grant served real tea out of Mrs. Walter’s cups. It’s amazing the way the war was fought. It was the deadliest, bloodiest war ever, and yet it occurred on this genteel basis. The ladies were meeting together and having tea, and the Confederate officer did not ransack Grant’s bedroom to look for papers that could maybe have saved thousands of lives. Interesting. SW: The Unvanquished does reflect these wartime attitudes and practices. Colonel Dick is courteous to Granny and almost chivalrous in his interactions with her. She’s not killed by a Yankee soldier—when she’s killed, it’s by a ruthless bushwhacker, so that the sense that the Yankees were decent to the southerners—women, anyway—carries through in the novel. ASF: Well, in Pensacola, the Confederates called a truce every day at noon and took a little rowboat over to Fort Pickens to take the Yankees their mail. No one fired on each other during that hour.


EWF: Right. Same thing. Good story. SW: The McCarroll Farm is a mile away? EWF: Just about. Probably less than that. SW: Did you say it had a barn? EWF: It had a barn and two houses on it at one time, and in my lifetime. The family didn’t farm. Dad rented it out to two different families, and they farmed maybe twenty acres each in cotton or peas and corn. I remember going out there as a child and seeing sorghum being made—watching the mule go around and around in a circle crushing the sorghum and big vats being used to boil it down and make syrup, and that’s probably the way he paid his rent. He paid a little cash, some fresh corn, and then a gallon jug or something of syrup. Then eventually he didn’t farm it anymore. SW: Did Mr. Faulkner go there as well? EWF: Will and Dad hunted there. For a long time you could still see some foundations from one of the houses. After we put in pine a couple of times, it’s pretty hard to get into it. Kudzu has grown into the edges of it. It only gets cleaned out when someone comes in and harvests the pine. SW: Do you remember the names of the tenant farmers? EWF: No. Sometime ago I remember running across a book that had some entries about the rent. The names were in there, but I can’t remember them. SW: Did your great-great-grandfather McCarroll say what his Civil War experience was like? EWF: I believe he was the sheriff all through the whole war. I don’t remember any stories about anything unusual about it—which is interesting because there should have been some discussion about what does the sheriff do when the town is occupied by opposing forces. Obviously after the war, Reconstruction started, and he was booted out as sheriff, and the occupational forces took over the reconstruction with their own police protection. John R. McCarroll thought of himself as the sheriff and was sheriff for thirty-three years, according to what I have read. Farming was a sideline—big, big difference between McCarroll and Leak, who had a very large plantation. [Walking around the back of the house] EWF: The spring was used by everybody, which at first was only the McCarrolls and the Chickasaws. As the three houses were built on our property

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down the hill, sources of water were added for the people who lived there. Dad said a cistern was put in next to the first house. I remember looking at the down spout coming off the roof and drawing into the cistern. With the second and third house, a well was dug, so they shared a well, a cistern, and a spring. Back to the story of that washtub. That was used as a mold for the lye soap. They had a big old black cooker that they cooked up the lye soap in, and then they poured it in that old bathtub. Then when it set up, they’d cut it up into cakes. They actually used that lye soap. The first batch I watched being made turned out to be the last. Dad decided to make a batch of lye soap. He and somebody helping made this big batch of lye soap, and had all these cakes, and Dad was so proud of it. They had about a hundred bars of lye soap, and he hadn’t seen any made in thirty years, and he said, “Here’s some original recipe for lye soap we’re making,” but either something was missing from the original recipe, or store-bought soap had spoiled us. Nobody would use the lye soap. People said it burned their hands when they tried to use it for cleaning or laundry. We kept a few cakes of it, and Mother found it would take the old finish off of the furniture that she was refurnishing. She could just rub that lye soap on, let it sit there a day or two, and the old stains, old shellacs, and varnishes would start just melting away, and she just had to scrub a little bit and that’d clean it off. You know, it is fun to be here, really is, [to] come back and see it. It’s amazing the house is still here. We think we need to replace all the foundations. ASF: We did repair the sunroom floor just last winter. EWF: Yes, that floor was added in 1930, and the joists were not as durable as the original 1833–34 joists, which are as good and sound as new. We do need to replace the original brick foundations with new supports. We believe that the man who made the bricks for the foundation is the same one who made the bricks for the separate kitchen. This house was treated for termites for a number of years until about ten years ago. No one sees any activity under the house or around the sides. SW: Was the orchard out this way? EWF: Yes. This first section was pecans, and the fruit orchard below the pecan trees was down where that road cuts through, that goes to the Catholic school. Dad remembered about eight pecan trees here when he was a child. This last one was a young tree when Dad was a young child. So the


mature pecan trees in 1860 are long gone. We’ve had three sets of pecan trees there. That last old one is not bearing much anymore, if at all. It’s about 120 years old. SW: This is where Ludie would have gotten pecans that she used to make the cakes? EWF: Yes. Yes. Right down there. The area was fenced as a pasture for the cow and a couple of calves. [Moving into the side yard] SW: Did you say that this was the original front entrance to the house? EWF: Yes. This was the front. The house faced on Maury with the expectation that Maury would continue south as a major street connecting with streets running to the west side of town, but when the town started paving the streets, the paving of Maury stopped at Van Dorn Avenue. Dad got the town to put some gravel on the Maury right-of-way down to our back driveway. The gravel turned into our driveway and made the road appear to be our private driveway. As a child, I thought it was. There were no vehicles on that road except to visit us or deliver ice, etc. South of us was only a dirt path leading to the few houses down there. The path dropped down steeply with deeply eroded ditches along it, caused by the spring rains, which washed down the path in a red clay torrent. So, no one thought it unusual for us to have several fenced acres of pasture south of us for the cow, the calves, the pig pens, and the chicken houses. SW: Tell me more about the pasture. Did you have the pasture in 1928–29?34 EWF: Yes. Soon after 1836, the pasture was fenced for a cow and calves. We had our own cow for milk until 1937, when we first got pasteurized milk delivered, but we still had a calf, pigs, and chickens. SW: So when you were growing up this was your front door? EWF: No. This was the front door until after the Civil War, when this street north of us was renamed Van Dorn, and it was quite clear that things were going to go back and forth on Van Dorn. In fact, Highway 78 from Tupelo to Memphis went right through town on Van Dorn Ave. before the bypass. So this became the main drag, sort of. So the house was reoriented toward Van Dorn Ave., and a little front porch was added facing that way. SW: About what year was it reoriented?

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EWF: My guess is before 1880. SW: May we go and look at the current front entrance? EWF: Sure. We can walk around this way. SW: I see one cedar. You mentioned cedars last night. EWF: Yes. Originally there were cedars all lining the front walkway from Van Dorn right to the house, and there were cedars leading to the Strickland Place next to us as well. The town had a lot of cedars at one time, and I never really knew why. I understand that people thought it had something to do with repelling mosquitoes just like cedar-lined closets repel moths. Supposedly kept away the malaria mosquito, but that was soon found to be untrue. We had a whole line of them. There must have been four cedars on each side of the walk at one time, and gradually they got diseased and died out. When I was a child, there were just two left at the front, and all the rest were gone. I’ve got a lot of pictures of those old cedar trees. As they died out they didn’t get replaced. I guess people had figured out it didn’t work for mosquitoes and went to some other kind of trees. SW: How old is the magnolia? EWF: I planted that magnolia in about 1943—just a little sprig I found somewhere and set it out there. So it’s had plenty of room and just growed good! The windows at the front from here on around, these two in the front and around the other side are all original windows. I think maybe one pane of glass got broken sometime, but otherwise they’re the wavy glass. You can still see the stumps still left from two of the cedar trees. One, two three— there must have been four on each side. Want to walk on around? SW: Yes, please. So when Mr. Faulkner came over, he would come in this door? EWF: No, he came in the one around on the east side, after the gallery was enclosed. A tennis court was over there. That flat area was the tennis court. Dad played a lot of tennis. He was in lots of state competitions when he was in his teens and twenties. SW: Do you know whether Mr. Faulkner played tennis? EWF: That was not something they talked about doing. I imagine he was over here for tennis sometime, but he was mainly interested in quail hunting. When Will would come over, this was not here [referring to the low stone wall that was a base for a wrought-iron fence with a gate in it that separated the front yard from the garden area]. All this was added later. Mother added all the wrought iron and this rock wall probably in about 1941. When Will would come to visit, he would just walk right in through here. This was the


open gallery until 1930. Will would just walk in and sit there and wait ’til Dad got here. SW: So the day your parents were married and came home, he was sitting here? EWF: The day they were married and came home Faulkner was sitting right where we were inside, according to Dad. This was all open, and he was sitting right between here and the other wall. He had his rocking chair, and he had his bucket of beer and his squirrels and everything, and that’s where he was waiting for them. ’Cause they would clean—they would use this area out here to clean the squirrels, and prep the quail. This was all open, and they even had some grills out here and cooked out here. There’s a pond back there. Not much to see, but there was a little goldfish pond, and we had a house right over in there that was a screened summer house, we called it. My mother had a lot of planting in here, which is pretty well gone. She spent a lot of time keeping these flower beds up. So this was her garden, and she actually won some garden club prizes for the garden back in the 1940s. I went swimming in it when I was two years old, so it was 1930 when the pond went in, before they put the goldfish in. I think they started it to be a little outside pool for me to swim in. It’s just this big, so I outgrew it pretty quick. They kept some goldfish in there ’til they were about thirty years old. We had thirty-year-old solid-white goldfish by the time they all died. They used to have a little grill out here at the summer house. This was fixed up real nice at the time—1930s to 1970s. This brings us back to the—we’re just continuing around—to the kitchen. SW: What other family stories did your dad talk about often? EWF: My great-grandmother was Addie Wiggin. Her name was Adeline, but everyone called her Addie. My grandfather was Edgar Wiggin Francisco Sr. His mother was Addie Wiggin. Edgar (Grandfather) was a teenager when his mother died. She just went to bed and just died. He and his brother were then out on their own. My dad wondered about why she had died that way. He would ask himself why. She did not seem to be sick. She just didn’t want to get up. SW: Have you read As I Lay Dying? EWF: No. SW: The main character is Addie Bundren, and she goes to bed and then just dies. EWF: Will would have known that story. Dad talked about it a lot—what had happened to his grandmother.

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Tour of Walter Place EWF: Now we’re coming up on Walter Place. SW: Oh, my goodness. EWF: I wanted you to see the inside of one of the mansions, and fortunately for us, the Walter Place is open for tours today. SW: Who lives here now? EWF: Mike and Jorja Lynn bought Walter Place in 1983, restored and furnished it beautifully. Jorja is a Holly Springs native, and she urged Mike to buy it. They retired in 1992 and made this their home. SW: What recollections do you have about this house? EWF: Well, the earliest recollection about this house is coming in to swim. They’ve got a swimming pool in the back, and several kids would be invited to swim when Phoebe and her mother, Fredonia Johnson Moss, came here in the summer. SW: Dr. Francisco, what year did you go swimming here? EWF: Up to about 1945. SW: Do you know what year it was built? EWF: 1859. The Walter Place was the last of the mansions built in Holly Springs just before the Civil War. Colonel Harvey Washington Walter built Walter Place. He and his wife, Fredonia, had a number of children. There were three sons who, along with Colonel Walter, died of yellow fever in 1878. There was Anne, who was thirteen in 1878. She met and married Dr. Fearn while she was practicing medicine in China. The youngest was Irene, who married Oscar Johnson, who moved to St. Louis and opened another store, which became International Shoe, and bought the Walter Place from his mother-in-law, Fredonia. I remember Dad talking about Irene and her two sisters and what lovely ladies they were and good friends of his mother and grandmother. Fredonia Johnson was Oscar and Irene’s daughter and named for her grandmother. Hope I have all that correct. Anyway, in the 1930s and 1940s, the house was being tended by caretakers. The Johnson brothers occasionally used it as a hunting lodge. Otherwise it was not occupied when Fredonia Johnson Moss came with daughter Phoebe to open for a while in summer. Fredonia became one of Mother’s best friends when Fredonia moved to Holly Springs and bought her own home. All of the large, brick homes here were built between 1850 and 1859.


The south part of our house, McCarroll Place, is the only remaining example of the earliest type of construction, a modified double-pen log cabin finished in 1834. There are several wonderful cottages built beginning in 1836 through about 1850. The north rooms of McCarroll Place were added in 1836. Then suddenly, in 1850, several of these large houses started getting built. So we are talking about a ten-year building boom. Fredonia bought a house on Salem and filled it with beautiful Chinese works of art that had been sent to her from Dr. Anne. She was very close to her aunt Dr. Anne Walter Fearn, who was going to practice medicine here in Holly Springs, wasn’t accepted, so she went to China and was quite an influence in China in medicine.35 SW: I found it fascinating to learn recently that Estelle Oldham Franklin [Faulkner] and Dr. Anne Walter Fearn were friends when they both lived in Shanghai.36 EWF: Yes, that helps in understanding Faulkner’s connection to Walter Place. SW: I’m glad to know that Bill and Estelle Faulkner went to a dinner party at Walter Place. EWF: Yes, and the China connection is clearer. We do not know how long Estelle or her family had known Dr. Anne or the Walter family prior to their friendship in China, do we? SW: No, but it does make sense that Faulkner not only visited and dined at Walter Place but had a personal connection to it. It’s known that Faulkner had contacts in Holly Springs, but his close connection to McCarroll Place, you and your dad, and the Leak Diary is information that has not been clearly understood. EWF: From early childhood, I remember Fredonia talking about Dr. Anne. That was long before I realized that Dr. Anne was her aunt, as well as her hero, and of course, I was not aware of the connection, long established by then, between Will Faulkner, Estelle, and Dr. Anne and possibly other members of her family. I am sure Fredonia was aware of it. SW: Did you ever meet Miss Estelle? Anytime you went to the house? EWF: Not that I know of. Anne, do you remember when we had dinner at Fredonia’s house? ASF: Yes. We also had cocktails at the Walter Place. EWF: Yes. After we were married, Fredonia invited us, and Mother and Dad, too, right?

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ASF: Yes. EWF: The four of us went to Walter Place and had cocktails and dinner with Fredonia. Fredonia was very generous with the use of Walter Place, and Mother and Dad were over a great deal, and when I came home from college, we had dinners over there, or at Fredonia’s home. ASF: I loved it. At the Hillcrest Cemetery EWF: We need to find the line of flags that the cemetery staff so kindly placed for me from one gate to the old McCarroll-Eddins plots. I had said I would have trouble finding the plots after so many years. Harvey Payne is waving. I think he has found the flags. We must have come in at a different gate. So here we are at the earliest McCarroll and adjoining Eddins plots. This grave is that of Emily Eddins. The inscription on this later, second tombstone reads: “Wife of Richard D. Baugh, mayor of Memphis, 1857–1861.” SW: That’s Ludie’s father—Richard Baugh? EWF: Yes. SW: “Wife of Richard”—that’s Ludie’s mother? EWF: Yes, while mayor from ’57 to ’61, Richard Baugh sent Ludie to Holly Springs in 1860. He was out of the mayor’s office in 1861, but I guess he still didn’t think she should come back to Memphis, but needed to be raised by her aunt and cousins in Holly Springs. SW: Ludie’s husband is buried in Memphis. EWF: She had a very sad ending. Now look at this earlier tombstone for Emily. Hard to read. SW: This stone would be Emily’s; this is Ludie’s mother. EWF: Yes. This is Ludie’s mother. We are looking at the older first tombstone probably put up at the time of Emily’s death. Dad told me that his grandmother Amelia told him that years later, when she was back at McCarroll Place in 1872 and after Ludie died in 1869, she saw to getting the second tombstone made to commemorate her aunt Emily as wife of the mayor. She had wanted to add another line to note that Emily was mother of Ludie, but the stone wasn’t big enough to include Ludie. The story of the two tombstones for Emily fascinated Dad and seemed to fascinate Will Faulkner, as Dad told it over and over. Emily Eddins and Dad’s great-grandmother Elizabeth Eddins had been very close sisters. Their daughters Ludie


and Amelia were very close cousins. Amelia took full charge of raising her young cousin after Ludie came to live at McCarroll Place. Amelia never seemed to get over the death of her young cousin at age twenty-five, and perhaps Dad didn’t, either. Amelia had protected Ludie for six years of war and occupation, crowded into three rooms at the south end of the house, and years of gathering food from the woods to feed nine people. Then, in 1866, Ludie married her soldier and moved away, and Amelia married Walter John Leak and moved to the Leak Plantation where the town of Salem had been before its devastation. After giving birth to Betsy, Dad’s mother, in 1868, Amelia learned of Ludie’s death in 1869. Amelia lost her newborn son the following year. Then Walter John died in 1872. Returning to the McCarroll Place that year with Betsy and the Leak Diaries, she wept that all remaining of Ludie was the etching. For a long time she cried when she glanced at the etching. The six years after 1866 were sadder than the six years beforehand.37 SW: When did Emily die? EWF: I cannot read the date on this tombstone. My best current guess is either 1857 or 1859. There is a Web site by someone who read the tombstone, listing it as 1875, which cannot be right, since Ludie was sent here at least by 1860, and Dad said that Emily died when Ludie was very young. John Eddins and Mary Lipscomb Eddins had six children, and three of the daughters had important connections with the McCarrolls. Elizabeth married John McCarroll. Louise married Byrd Hill. The third daughter was Emily, who married Richard Baugh, who was living in Holly Springs. They named their only daughter, Mary Louisa (b. 1844), for grandmother Mary Lipscomb Eddins, who died the next year (1845), and for Aunt Louisa Eddins Hill, who also died in 1845.38 SW [reading]: Emily L., daughter of J. R. and E. C. McCarroll. EWF: Yes. SW: Here is the grave of Emily, daughter of John and Elizabeth McCarroll? EWF: Yes. The McCarrolls named a daughter “Emily” for Aunt Emily, who married Richard Baugh. Little Emily McCarroll didn’t live long. I can’t read the dates. So this is Emily L., daughter of John R. McCarroll and Elizabeth McCarroll, who died when very young. The oldest McCarroll plot is side by side with the Eddins plot. This is just where the children are. There’s another McCarroll plot around here, and we don’t really have to find it—

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where John R. McCarroll is buried and where Elizabeth is buried, and a couple of the other daughters. They had one son named John (b. 1854), the last child after five daughters. Dad got the impression that John died very young, and that was all his grandmother ever said about him. We have not found a tombstone, but this is true of a couple of others as well. Dad felt that his family was sad that his great-grandfather had no descendant with the name McCarroll.39 ASF: Where are your mother and father? EWF: They’re over here, in the Francisco plot. We can go look. SW: Are they buried together? EWF: Yes. The Franciscos are all together: Pop and Betsy, and Mom and Dad. SW: Dr. Bitzer was your mother’s father? EWF: Yes. Here we are. Here is Ruth Bitzer Francisco. There’s Mother. There’s Dad, Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. This is Pop—Edgar Wiggin Francisco Sr.—and Betsy—that’s Grandmother, Betsy Leak Francisco. Betsy’s father was Walter John Leak. SW: I see “Leak,” finally. Dr. Francisco, was this a segregated cemetery? EWF: There was a period of time when it was. SW: Is it still? EWF: Oh, no. Absolutely not, and it was not in the beginning. Hiram Rhodes Revels is an example of a highly respected black man buried at Hillcrest. He was a Methodist minister who had attended the Quaker Seminary. I believe he was a state senator in 1870, U.S. senator, 1870 to 1871, and secretary of state in 1873. All during the Union occupation, of course, but he wrote to General Grant telling him of the corruption prevalent among the carpetbagger occupation and sought help for the plight of the South. He remained highly respected till his death in 1891 and was buried in Hillcrest, and there are others. SW: Is there an African American section now, or are people just mixed in together? EWF: All mixed in together in the new parts. This area up here is the oldest part and was filled up—that is, there were no vacant plots for sale a long time ago. We are all together now. ASF: Thank God. EWF: Yes. There are cemeteries all around here. SW: Different cemeteries?


EWF: Yes. There are several. They tend to be grouped around churches. Every church had their own cemetery. Some of them pretty big. On the Town Square [Circling the town square] ASF: This is where your dad’s first office was. EWF: Yes, here is the first insurance office. SW: So your father’s office was here? EWF: Yes. Right. This building right there was where it was. The office was upstairs over here to start with. You see this first block, the end building there on the first block, second floor? That was the office. SW: With the gray detail? EWF: Yes. Right. That was Grandfather and Dad’s office. Dad was over on the south side of the square later, but this is where it started in 1908. SW: So when Will Faulkner came to visit your dad, he would have gone up? EWF: Up these steps. Those steps. Now they’ve got a glass enclosure. SW: I see. EWF: It used to just be open stairs, and very creaky stairs going up there. On Saturday, early, for a fall quail hunt, Dad would say that he would look out the window from his office, and he would see Will Faulkner. He would arrive, and he would not come upstairs to the office yet, but he would just be standing around on the street by the steps going up to the office. SW: William Faulkner would just be standing around? EWF: Yes. He would just be standing around looking at people. I don’t think he ever walked up to anyone and started a conversation, but he must have picked up a great deal from just being observant of what was going on. Then he would come up and say, “Let’s go,” and they would go out to do some hunting. SW: Your dad was in there often? EWF: Yes, they opened that office in 1908, and Dad joined the firm in about 1920. SW: So his father would have called it the office also? EWF: Yes. My grandfather started the business in 1908 and was active in it until ’39, when he came down with tuberculosis. SW: William Faulkner would come to this office?

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EWF: Oh, yes, he would come up the steps to pick Dad up and say, “Let’s go.” I don’t think he hung out there. The two men were quite different. SW: In what way? EWF: Dad talked to everybody, and when we would go on a vacation, and we would pull over, just to look at the scenery for a minute, Dad would get out of the car and look around. If he saw anybody else out looking at the scenery, he headed straight for them without a moment’s hesitation. He would say: “Where are you from?” or “Where are you going?” The first thing you know, the guy would be telling him his life story, like they had known each other for years. But as he said, he never knew Will Faulkner to do anything like that. Will picked up his stories much more indirectly than through that kind of communication. At least as far as Dad knew. Maybe down in Oxford he talked more to some people; certainly he had tons of material he got from somewhere. But he didn’t obtain his information the way Dad did. They were very different people in terms of their extravertedness or introvertedness. SW: So your dad was the extravert and Faulkner the introvert? EWF: Absolutely. Yes. SW: They liked each other, nonetheless, these two men did, right? From boyhood to their mid-forties? EWF: Yes. SW: What would you say they liked about each other? EWF: They did not participate in team sports much, such as football, as far as I know. They were both small men. They enjoyed hunting, especially. Dad loved to tell stories, and Faulkner seemed to love to listen to them. That was the bond between them that I saw. Faulkner loved to talk about horses, and Dad listened appreciatively. That was the one subject I remember on which Will initiated the conversation. SW: Did they like to ride horses? Would you tell me a little more about that? EWF: Will loved to talk about his horses and riding. I understand that they rode together some around Red Banks and loved to talk about it. But they hunted quail on foot. Sometimes they could flush quail in the first hundred yards and didn’t need to walk all the way to the farm. Horses and dogs were not needed. I also understand that later on Faulkner hunted with other Holly Springs men driving to further-out locations and hunting with dogs. Also, he continued to ride in the Red Banks area, I heard.


SW: Do you remember your dad commenting on that or saying anything about William Faulkner’s death? EWF: We were in New England and very occupied with graduate studies. I didn’t hear about it for some time. Dad and Mother were on vacation when it happened. Sometime later he did mention it but just said, “Will Faulkner is dead.” They hadn’t seen each other at the house for years, as far as I know, and only occasionally when Will came into the office and sat down. SW: Do you remember whether your father commented on the fact that William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize? EWF: Yes, oh yes. He talked about it. SW: Do you remember what he said? EWF: Just that he finally got real famous. Just that he was real proud of him. Like he would have wanted for his friend. SW: You already said that they were not in contact at that time, so he wouldn’t have congratulated him? EWF: I feel sure he did on the occasions when Will stopped by the office. SW: You mother did not, I assume. EWF: She really wasn’t interested in his work and did not like what he wrote about, and I doubt she saw him after the Nobel Prize. SW: Your dad did read some? EWF: I think he did. He certainly read the stories in The Unvanquished and recognized a lot of those stories. SW: Recognized them as? EWF: Familiar stories. They were stories that he knew. SW: The town has an attractive courthouse. EWF: Yes. SW: What year? EWF: The county was established in 1836, and soon after they built the courthouse, but I don’t know the year. As a child I used to go up there, up into the belfry, and some of us would try to ring the bells, and change the time and things. So we got in a good bit of trouble for changing the time on the clocks. Well, to tell the truth, after the second time, we were disappointed that nobody seemed to notice, so we stopped. EWF:[looking at an old photograph of Holly Springs on Saturday night]: That was the tradition: everybody came to town just on Saturday because they worked all week long. So they would come in on Saturday and do their

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week’s shopping. I guess they just continued their tradition even after people had cars. They could have come probably any day. SW: Your town grew cotton? EWF: I think of four reasons why Holly Springs grew rapidly after 1836, The first was cotton. Large plantations created prosperity. There’s a time when there were at least eight gins within a few miles of Holly Springs. The second was railroads crossing her to make this a transportation center. The elevation was the third reason. It’s the highest point in the state and was considered safe from yellow fever. Finally, there were a number of people interested in education, and several academies were formed very early. Altogether Holly Springs had an early reputation as a center of culture. For a brief time, we might have been larger than Memphis, which soon grew from the barge traffic of cotton. ASF: What was that machine that went “boom”? EWF: That was the cotton compress. ASF: He didn’t think to tell me about it because it was so much a part of life for him. That doesn’t happen in Florida. Early in the morning, “boom, boom.” EWF: Just right down at the depot, just a couple of blocks from us, was a compress. That’s where the cotton was pressed into bales. That was the sound of the compression. The town was full of springs. I guess that’s how it got named Holly Springs. ASF: Holly trees and springs. EWF: People depended on the springs for a long time. Well water was fairly close to the surface here for some reason, so you could dig a fairly shallow well and also get groundwater that way. SW: Tell me about the houses that were still part of McCarroll Place when you were a boy. EWF: There were three houses down the hill from McCarroll Place during my lifetime. I remember rainwater was drained into an adjacent cistern. Two of the houses had a dug well between them. I have an early memory of people drawing buckets of water from our backyard faucet, especially in dry seasons. Apparently that had gone on since city water came as far as our house but not down the hill. There was one well down there and one by our house. All of us drew well water and used the spring. It was so quiet at the spring—a tranquil, peaceful, and quiet place. It made you feel like you were in another world. No houses were anywhere around, and you could almost imagine that you


were totally alone. Nobody was there at all. Then suddenly it was back to reality—a car would go by on the road at the top of the hill, as someone traveled from Memphis to Tupelo. Will and Dad would go to this spring for water before they went hunting. They had to walk through the pasture to reach the woods, and the McCarrolls kept cows and calves in that pasture. SW: In the book A Vanishing America, in his essay on Holly Springs, Hodding Carter says that the spring in Holly Springs was at that time thirty feet wide and ten feet deep.40 Is he describing the spring near McCarroll Place, or did the town have more than one spring? EWF: There were many springs in and around Holly Springs. Wall Doxey State Park, a few miles south, is a huge spring-fed lake, fed by multiple springs, and was called Spring Lake when I was young. Many farms still maintain spring-fed ponds for cattle. Hodding probably was referring to the spring which at one time was in the hollow in the middle of town. It was about that size at one time. I assume he was not talking about the McCarroll Place spring, or I would have heard. Amelia described to Dad that the spring was once as deep as a person and three times as wide. It had a rock bottom and was set in a ravine between rock ridges. The Indians had been completely dependent on these springs, and no doubt kept them cleaned out and silt-free. Initially they had dug them out and down to rock in some cases. To maintain a spring one must clean out leaves and trash every week and rake out the silt at least once a season— more if the banks are sandy. What happened was white settlers started building cisterns at the house to catch runoff, and digging wells near the house—both closer than the nearest spring, and they probably neglected the spring and let it begin to silt in. John McCarroll continued to use the spring for delicious drinking water but was not completely dependent on it. Dad said that when he was a boy, the spring was about two feet deep and six feet across. That is when Amelia told him it had been larger, and flowed out of breaks in the rock bottom. When I saw it, the spring was a trickle, and the silt was covering it probably by another several feet. I experimented enough to dig it out about a foot, and the flow increased substantially. I estimated that over the years the ravine had silted in a couple of inches per year on average. I imagine the spring is still down there. So the short answer your questions, (1) probably not, and (2) yes. SW: What else do you recall about water use?

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EWF: Ever since we got city water, people would come up from the three houses to our faucet in the backyard and draw water and take it down. When I was about twelve, I suggested, “Dad, why don’t we run the pipe down to the houses down there?” Well, he hadn’t thought of it. So he said, “Oh, OK.” So down went the pipe. But things changed very slowly. In 1943, I was observing people coming to draw water as they had been doing for many, many years—probably since soon after city water was put in. No one thought that it could or should be any different. City water was treated better than the well. The spring was substantially dried up. When Dad’s mother extended a water pipe to the backyard and invited people from the three houses to draw water, she probably believed she was being very thoughtful, and in the context of the times, I believe she was thoughtful. But after 1937 the situation had changed, with the old people moving on soon after our cook, Julie, left. Now the occupants were all new and had started paying rent. I remember when it was two dollars a month. So about 1943, when I remarked that I hated to see them having to walk up for water, Dad readily agreed that they should have running water—running in the yard, that is, not inside the houses, now that they paid the rent. Also it is interesting that no one thought those three houses needed meters. That would have been laughable, a joke. Of course, today there is probably no similar situation within the city, but if there was, the city would consider whether the revenues from the meters justified city water being run down the street right-of-way. If not justified, the houses would have to depend on their wells until a few more houses got built. That’s true not just recently, but probably any time since about 1948, but in 1943 everybody—the city, Dad, and the renters—considered it Dad’s responsibility to put down the water pipes to the houses because they were part of “the Place.” I mention this because I’ve come to realize that this is an example of what Faulkner was observing when he said nothing had changed here in a hundred years. Of course, all the houses are gone now, and that pipeline has been disconnected. Back at McCarroll Place SW: Which room at McCarroll Place was your bedroom? EWF: The little back bedroom, the last room in the house before the kitchen—the back bedroom.


SW: Your parents were up front? EWF: In the middle bedroom. They kept that front bedroom for a guest room by the parlor, and their bedroom was in the middle of the house next to mine. The house was hard to heat, so those front two rooms were pretty well in the winter shut off. We didn’t try to heat them unless it was for a couple of days at Christmas or something. We’d open it up and heat it at Christmas. SW: Did you need to light a fire at your house in the winter? EWF: We kept the fires going. When I was a little boy, someone came in and had the fire going before I even woke up. But later on I was expected to get up and start the fire. I’ve forgotten right now what year we got the floor furnaces. ASF: There was a gas heater back there when we got married. Later on, our son John backed up too far. He didn’t understand about open fire, and he backed up and almost caught on fire. EWF: Yes. I’m trying to remember the year those went in. ASF: Well, the floor furnaces were there when we got married. EWF: I think it was probably ’48 before we brought in the natural gas. Before that we used coal. So all the way through high school we heated with coal. We started it with . . . we didn’t have an automatic lighter or anything—just those grates you had to put paper in and kindling, get it started and put the coal on it—just like at the church only it was a lot easier. Then that would go out in the night. In the winter, the house got cold at night. I remember times when a cup of water by the side of my bed would ice over. The next morning there would be ice on top of the water cup. SW: Oh, my. EWF: The outside temperature would have to go down to twenty or fifteen to do that, which was rare, but when that happened, there wasn’t enough insulation to keep heat in. Once the fire went out we really cooled off quickly. Then, about 1946, a ton of insulation was blown in the attic and in the walls wherever possible. SW: Will you show us where the orchard was? EWF: There’s a road that goes through to the Catholic school next door. Mother gave permission for that road to go through, that cuts the property in two. Probably just about in the middle of that road is where most of the orchard had been, just below the pasture and pecan trees. Now the pasture is all overgrown because no one has grazed it. There hasn’t been a calf there in a long time.

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SW: Would you show us where you think the silver was buried? EWF: I only know what Dad told me. SW: Just in the orchard. EWF: His grandmother told him where she thought the silver had been buried. SW: There are similar stories in Oxford. Yours is very compelling, especially because you and your father remember talking directly with William Faulkner about it. EWF: Oh, yes, we certainly did. We talked about the McCarroll story of silver. Of course, Faulkner may have heard other stories about silver and sort of pieced them together. This is a common theme. SW: Right. EWF: Apparently, everything people had of value was being given to the Confederate cause. Rings and diamonds and jewelry of all kinds were being taken and sold to support the Confederacy. So it would stand to reason that people were doing the same thing with all the silver they had. The South was rich in land and farms but not in cash. So jewelry and silver were the only things they could really trade in for money because they couldn’t trade in the land for money. SW: Jimmy Faulkner said his family tried to hide livestock to prevent their being taken by the Union soldiers. EWF: The McCarrolls’ equivalent to their story of trying to hide the livestock is that they finally ended up with only one good horse, and they took the two-room brick building that was at the back of the house, and took all the featherbeds from the house and put them out there so that the sound of the horse’s hooves wouldn’t be heard and tried to keep that horse hidden back there. It must have been a pretty awful mess after a while, on the floor, with the horse and the feather beds. I never heard any mention of where they cooked when the horse was in the new kitchen, but outside, I guess. Apparently it was not successful for very long, and someone led the horse away. All the mules were long gone. I would ask a question like: “Well, what did they do with the mattresses? Could the featherbeds be restored?” Dad would say, “Well, I don’t know.” He always knew where to end a story. Never let it go on into the tedious details about what happened after that. He left that to your imagination. The only item that was successfully hidden through the whole war was Dad’s mother’s—we call her Grandma—patch of corn way back in the


woods. They had a pecan crop and the corn—that’s about all they had to eat. But she managed to keep hidden that patch of corn in the back, and she knew where some wild mushrooms were and sassafras roots. They made little pies with the cornmeal and pecans. That’s about what they had to eat—was pecan pies. They might have raised some potatoes back there or something, too, way back in the woods. SW: Will you remind me how the pecan pies were made? What they used? EWF: Molasses and pecans and cornmeal. I guess they made little cakes from just cornmeal and water. They could bake that and make a mixture of molasses and chopped up pecans, and they basically had a pecan pie. It probably tasted pretty good, actually. SW: I bet it did. EWF: Molasses could be stored for years. It kept very well. SW: What was it stored in? EWF: The big crocks. It stored for a long time. Plus it’s so strong, you wouldn’t know when it had gone bad. It’s pretty strong-tasting, straight molasses. SW: Wooden crocks? EWF: No, clay. There was a plant right in Holly Springs that predated the Civil War. There’s a lot of clay in Holly Springs, and there was always some plant that made clay pottery. Growing up around the house, there was a huge number of pottery jugs that were inscribed with “Holly Springs” on them, that had been made at that plant. They stored a lot of things, all different size shaped jugs. They stored pickles in the jugs, and I guess mainly they had pickle jugs and sorghum. They had a whole line of jugs. I remember a whole line of these jugs in the kitchen, and they stored peas and beans, flour and sugar, even in my lifetime. SW: Was there a barn? EWF: Not on McCarroll Place. There was a barn out on McCarroll Farm. A barn and two houses at one time. But not right on our property in town. There was the old kitchen and a couple of sheds for livestock but no barn. SW: I’ve been reading the Leak Diary, and I noticed that the word “mulatto” does appear a number of times, especially when he lists the births of slave children. Do you know who these mulatto children were? EWF: Oh, no. The diaries are the Leak farm story. So when I read them, it’s just like when you’re reading them. I don’t have any knowledge of the background for any of that. There were communications between Leak and

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McCarroll, especially regarding dealings with McCarroll when he was sheriff. They tended to be more legal matters where he needed the sheriff. The diaries certainly do show the communication between the two families. SW: So there are no stories that you know of that Francis Terry Leak fathered mulatto children? EWF: No. Dad’s stories are about the McCarroll side of the family, not the Leak side, with which we had very little connection after Amelia McCarroll Leak came back to McCarroll Place. Amelia told Dad stories about the McCarrolls, but nothing, as far as I know, about the Leaks, and I never heard any story about mulatto children. I’m sure Faulkner’s view was that if he could imagine it, it could have happened. SW: Tell us about this outbuilding. EWF: That brick building served a lot of different purposes. Its last use was by Mother, who had her antique shop in it from about 1948 ’til she had a stroke. Since her death, the roof fell in and the insides, the flooring all decayed and rotted out. Since, I’ve put a new roof on it, but the insides have not been restored. We got a new roof on it, but the insides haven’t been cleaned up or fixed. Before 1948, it was my brooder house for my chicken farm for about six years. I kept one thousand at one time, buying one hundred a week and selling them at ten weeks. The two years before that, 1940 and 1941, I decided to experiment with using it as a smokehouse. We had several hogs, so I decided that I would try smoking the hams and trying to keep them through the winter and into the summer, like in the old days. So I would sugar cure some, and I tried using just smoke with some and both with some, and I tried salting some. We kept them hanging there into the summer. Believe it or not, the outside of the ham by August turned green, but you could skin all that off, and the ham underneath—it was still good ham. So without refrigeration, and in the heat of Mississippi, from November right through to August, the hams kept reasonably well. So I see how, with a little more practice, it could have been done safely. SW: So the curing really works? EWF: The curing really works. The combination of sugar curing with smoke was best. The salt brine worked fine, but it was probably very bad to eat that much salt. Before I made a smokehouse, I discovered the house as a little kid, as a place that was not being used. I announced in the summer of 1939 that I was going to move out, and that would be my room. I was tired of being in the house. Mother and Dad said OK, to my surprise. So I


set up a bed and a table out there, and at bedtime every night I would say goodnight, and I would go out to my house for the night and come back in for breakfast. That went on for one summer. I think when it began to get cold, I decided I would like to move back in and live in the house. Just before that, at the very first rush of Pilgrimage, my parents decided that they would open it up and show it, as if it had been a slave quarters. It never was. It was a kitchen, but it seemed to fit in. It was exactly like something Will Faulkner would have been so infuriated about, but all of Mother’s friends thought it was a wonderful addition. There was a big open fireplace where we hung a great big pot. There had been great big pots there before, when it was a kitchen. It was obviously a kitchen. They moved a big old rocking chair in, and an elderly man was asked to sit there for the day, and he sat there smoking his pipe. Pilgrimage visitors could tour the house, and then the “slave quarters.” One day a group was back there, and they looked at this man sitting there, and they said to him, “How long have you been here?” He said, “Oh, I’ve been here about an hour.” “Well, where were you before that?” “Oh, I was at my house. They just come pick me up and ask me to sit here for an hour.” Apparently Dad overheard the conversation, and decided not to do that again. They had intended to depict the past as it might have been, but Mother could not resist the urge to decorate with fresh paint, new curtains, and, in the corner, an antique table with a fine china wash bowl and pitcher set on a crocheted doily. SW: What William Faulkner objected to was that people in the area were trying to show aspects of the culture to others that weren’t realistic depictions of the past? EWF: Well, they wanted to tell the story, but not the whole story. “Tell the best and forget the rest” makes for a happier story. So Will and Mother of course had a good bit of “discussion” about that. Dad would tell the story, a little sheepishly, as a joke on himself. SW: What exactly was the nature of the discussion? EWF: Mother knew that building hadn’t been slave quarters, but she thought it could have been. She thought people coming to the Pilgrimage would want to see how it could have been, but Will was opposed to the way it had been fixed up as a very attractive sitting room. Once she got going on it, Mother could not resist decorating that room as a very comfortable, quaint room. I do not think she intended to present a false picture of the

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past, but it took Faulkner to point that out. So that was just another example of their disagreement. The building has been tuck-pointed a couple of times to try to keep it going. I think probably the last time was about 1950. Someone was hired to clean out the mortar, going in about an inch or two and trying to put more in there. It’s going to need that again. SW: The outbuilding? The old kitchen? EWF: Yes, some of the bricks may be at the point where it’s not just the mortar between the bricks, but the bricks themselves are deteriorating. It’s amazing to me that the bricks have lasted this long because they were made right here on the place by slave labor starting in about 1836. It took a long time to make the bricks, and the kitchen was not finished for several years. They weren’t using techniques that they use for bricks today. Their kiln couldn’t have been well controlled in terms of temperature or anything like that. There couldn’t have been a uniform firing of the bricks. One thing they did have was good-quality clay. Supposedly, they dug the clay right off the property. There are some beautiful veins of clay in Holly Springs, and there’s always been some kind of a brick plant here until very recently. My son thinks he could fix up the house. He would need to completely redo the foundation. It would cost a great deal to restore the house, but it is either the oldest in town or one of the oldest. McCarroll was living in the oldest part in 1833 with the third room completed in 1834. “1834” was the date on the Pilgrimage sign for many years. The new two-room addition came in 1836. Kitchen and dining room renovations occurred in 1880. With McCarroll living in the three-room house in 1833, I would think that the occupancy date of 1833 would date the house, rather than 1834, when a room was added. Moving the house to its current location in 1836 should not have changed the date for the house. SW: Are there more antebellum homes in Holly Springs than in Natchez? EWF: I believe there are more in Holly Springs that are original homes built prior to 1860 than in Natchez. None was destroyed at all in Holly Springs during the war, and so many in Natchez were. A lot of Natchez is reconstructed. If you go there and tour the old areas, you’ll find a lot of houses are described as built in a certain year, burned by Yankees, and rebuilt on the same spot. Natchez was under siege and damaged greatly. We have been driving around looking at a number of the beautiful old homes in Holly Springs. In Dad’s day (and when I was a child), people


visited each other more. Dad would take any possible excuse to go visit a friend, and I’m sure he dragged Will Faulkner along. SW: Who did your dad and Mr. Faulkner visit? EWF: Will Faulkner would certainly have gone with Dad to visit Kate Clark and Miss Nettie Fant Thompson, and they almost surely would have visited several other people in these old homes as well. SW: Would you tell us about them and about their homes? EWF: There are a good number of homes to cover, but I can write you out something about them and the stories surrounding them, just based on what I remember and on what I’ve read. SW: That would be great. Thank you. What follows is the information Dr. Francisco wrote out on the homes that Edgar Jr. and Will Faulkner probably visited. For the purposes of your study, I will describe only those homes that Faulkner might well have visited and heard the most about and that therefore could have been models for his stories. I included only homes built by close friends of John McCarroll—people he talked about with stories handed down—or where Dad was likely to have taken Faulkner on a visit. Also, I should point out that the information I provide here, especially regarding the dates and the builders, comes from my recollections and from what I have heard and read over the years. I do not claim to be an expert in these matters. The oldest part of McCarroll Place is what is called a “double-pen house,” but with one chimney doubled to add a third room on the end. McCarroll claimed to have built his part legally in 1833 and anything before that was by Sam. A fourth room was added at the birth of Mary McCarroll in 1834. Since the 1930s, McCarroll Place has been the oldest home still owned by the family that built it. White Pillars, 1838–1850, started as a one-story house. Thomas Falconer, editor of Holly Springs’ newspaper, the South, had Spires Bolling remodel and enlarge it in 1850. His son Kenlock Falconer, secretary of state in the 1870s, came home in 1878 to help with the yellow fever and died along with his brother and father. Dad owned the house in the 1930s through the 1950s and rented it for many years to Mrs. Olga Pruitt. He would have taken Faulkner through it.

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There are several beautiful raised-basement houses. One is the Featherston Place, 1837, built by Alexander McEwen. John McCarroll worked with General Featherston for years trying to recover land taken during Reconstruction. There was much correspondence, and McCarroll kept all letters sent back to Featherston in reply. Grandfather discovered these saved letters in 1890, when he married Betsy and moved in. I still have them. McEwen was from Scotland and one of McCarroll’s best friends. McEwen’s daughter Elizabeth married Winfield Scott Featherston. The Rand-Norfleet House, 1845–1859, is where Oscar Rand lived ’til he went to St. Louis with Oscar Johnson. Then Lessie Norfleet was there until he moved to Memphis. In 1847, Patrick Hamilton Thornton, another Scotsman and friend of McCarroll, built the house that his great-granddaughter Miss Nettie Fant Thompson lived in when we would visit with her. She did the pen-and-ink drawing of McCarroll Place that mother used for her informals. The Walthall-Freeman Home, 1848, a log house, was built by Bennett Walthall, owned by Gen. Edward Walthall and then his great-niece Kate Freeman Clark when we would visit her. I spent hours trying to figure out why this prolific painter, whose mother held her brushes, never (it is alleged) picked up a brush or painted again after her mother died. This house, now a museum, contains many of her paintings. Miss Kate had strings of beads hanging in doorways instead of doors, and hats (now in the museum) on top of every lamp. Will Faulkner would have gone with Dad to visit her as well as Miss Nettie. The Finley Place, a Greek Revival with signature Spires Bolling octagonals, was built by Rufus Jones, whose daughter married Dr. Shuford. I remember once-a-month family visits there to see good friends Tom and Ruth Finley. An early Holly Springs family, the Finleys had bought the place in 1906. Dad took Will by to see and probably visit. The house was donated to the Audubon Society. The Fant House, built by Judge Jeremiah Clapp in 1858, makes the “Faulkner List” because General Absolom Madden West lived there for some time. West was a study in contrasts and independence. He was certainly McCarroll’s closest friend who shared his opposition to secession. Yet at the outbreak of the war, the plantation-owning West became a general. After the war he was president of the Mississippi Central Railroad but spent most of his time as a labor organizer, including organizing railroad


workers. He organized the southern wing of the National Party, which was a coalition of emerging union groups and the Grange movement. At the 1880 convention he barely lost the vice-presidential nomination to Benjamin Chambers, but he lobbied successfully to broaden the party platform to include the first party plank supporting women’s right to vote. The party was also called the Independent Party and the Anti-Monopoly Party. It opposed the National Bank Act of 1863, which they thought gave power to the banks and large corporations at the expense of labor and farmers. Dad told Will Faulkner about how McCarroll lovingly called his friend “the generally maddened West,” while fully supporting all of his populist views.41 Grey Gables, with its 1870 enlargement and complete renovation by Spires Bolling for James House, in Italianate, postwar style, is in contrast to the 1850s architecture. Sold by House in 1875, it was occupied for several generations by the Roberts and the McGowan families. The original structure was built by James Henry Nelson and Maria Courtney Goodrich Nelson, sister of A. C. Goodrich, in 1849. They had come to Holly Springs and gotten married in 1840. Their first son, William Cowper Nelson, born September 7, 1841, enlisted in the Confederate army as a private but rose to the rank of second lieutenant. His extensive letters to his mother have been edited into a book entitled The Hour of Our Nation’s Agony, by Jennifer Ford.42 He was part of the Mississippi regiment sent to Fort Barrancas to defend it against the northern forces across the bay at Fort Pickens. His drawings of the area are impressive. After surviving many of the war’s major battles, he returned to Holly Springs on May 6, 1865, to learn that his father, a clerk in Hugh Winborn’s store, had just been killed by renegade soldiers as he attempted to open the store as they had ordered. Several diarists record the events in detail, including Cora Watson; Carey Freeman, mother of Kate Freeman Clark; and Belle Strickland, daughter of William and Martha Mildred Thomson Strickland. Lois Swaney Shipp owned the home for years and raised her family there. She says that the ghost of the murdered James Nelson gave them several scares when he crawled through her daughter’s bedroom window and pushed open the door to her bedroom. There are several beautiful Gothic Revival homes, including Airliewood and Cedarhurst. Charles Bonner, father of Sherwood Bonner, built Cedarhurst in 1857. The Belks bought Cedarhurst in 1900. William Henry Coxe

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built Airliewood, which was owned by the Deans when Dad would have taken Will by to see it. William F. Mason built Magnolias in 1850. He was treasurer of the Mississippi Central Railroad. I understand that he was closely associated with Faulkner’s grandfather. We have already visited and discussed the Walter Place, which was designed by Spires Bolling, who had previously built White Pillars, the Finley House, and the Bolling House. Montrose, 1859, was built by Alfred Brooks for his daughter, who married Robert McGowan, and was finished just before Walter Place, which was the last built before the war. In conclusion I should add that we have looked at and discussed only a handful of the many wonderful old homes in Holly Springs, but every house and every name mentioned is deeply embedded in McCarroll history with friendships continuing down to Dad’s generation (and, in most cases, to me). In the display of antebellum architecture, Faulkner would have recognized Holly Springs as the gold mine in Mississippi.

EWF: We have pictures of several of McCarroll’s best friends. One of Dad’s favorites is a posed portrait of three well-dressed Scotsmen: John McCarroll, Hiram McCrosky, and Robert McGowan.43 There was another picture of McCarroll and Alexander McEwen. Many of the early settlers were of Scottish descent. Dad would have taken Faulkner next door more than once to visit at the Strickland Place, now torn down. Pearl Strickland lived there with her mentally challenged brother Frank. I heard that she had been a beautiful young lady. She ran off to Germany and got married to a German named Badow.44 SW: Who else lived at Strickland Place? EWF: Luella Gibson. She was the servant. She lived in the house. She carried notes back and forth between the Strickland Place and the McCarroll Place. When I was observing it the notes were from Pearl Strickland Badow to my mother. I was told that Pearl had been sending notes over for years. At first they were sent to Betsy, her first cousin and my grandmother, until she died. Then they came to Mother. I do not know who the messenger was before Luella. 45 SW: What would these notes say?


EWF: I remember at least once Pearl asked for a cup of sugar, which I was told happened frequently, but sometimes she was trying to plan some event. SW: Was Faulkner present when Luella was there? EWF: He was there during the years that notes were delivered by Luella. I heard Dad and Will joking about the situation several times, but I do not know if Faulkner was ever at the house when a note was actually delivered. They found it very amusing because Julie did not like Luella. SW: Why did Julie not like Luella? EWF: I don’t know. Dad and Will pondered this also. Perhaps Julie considered her a newcomer, or perhaps it was pecking order. Luella cowered before Julie. Perhaps it was something none of us understood. SW: So Faulkner knew about the notes going back and forth? EWF: Yes. I remember describing one encounter between them when I was in the kitchen. Luella knocks, and Julie said “Git!” Luella said “I got a note,” and Julie said “I ain’t studyin’ you, Luella.” So, Luella goes to the side door and stands a distance away and in a pitiful small voice calls out “Miss Ruth.” The note requested sugar, which Mother measured out in a paper bag and handed it out to Luella while Julie sulked. Mother measured out three cups, saying that was what Pearl always needed, so you might as well send it all in one trip. SW: Did Luella Gibson take care of the Strickland children? EWF: There were no children when I was aware of the notes. But long before Luella, someone else had delivered notes back when Pearl was a child. This had been a long tradition, I understand. SW: When Faulkner saw her, was Luella living at Strickland Place? EWF: Yes. She certainly lived at Strickland Place when Dad and Will were teenagers. They would describe with glee seeing Luella coming through the gate. They would run around to the back to listen to the fireworks from this ancient animosity of unknown origin. Luella was not living in Strickland Place when I saw her. She had lived in it perhaps into the 1920s. Later, she worked over there infrequently. But when she came by, Pearl would send her over with a note or to borrow something. EWF: There are probably a number of Faulkner connections to Holly Springs to uncover. His mother, Maud Butler, came to Holly Springs to visit family as well as Betsy. Dr. Jasper F. Butler had been an early druggist in town. There were a number of Butlers and Butler relatives in town when Maud visited, and she possibly came to visit this Butler family. Will

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Faulkner hunted with Ed Rather, who was a grandson of Dr. Butler. SW: Did you hear any stories about the first time people voted after the war? First black vote after the war? EWF: I don’t think so. That’s really sort of a blank period in there—no discussion of it that I remember. ASF: I was just reading about something that happened then. There’s a story that after the war Spires Bolling told James Wells, a former slave and his employee, how to vote. Jim Wells voted for the candidate he thought was best. Since political parties had differently shaped ballots at that time, Bolling found out how Wells voted and fired him.46 SW: Can you think of other stories that your father and Will Faulkner told each other? EWF: Yes. Well, we touched on it one time, about Lenso and the fact that Lenso seemed to just have a maturity to him, even though he was just a year old than Edgar or Will. And were wondering how did Lenso get that edge on him so that he seemed to know more about what was going on, and yet he hadn’t had the education advantages that they had, and yet when they were out in the woods or going around together just as three young boys, Lenso seemed to sometime take the lead. They wondered about that, you know—how did Lenso get to do that? Well, they pondered it: how does Lenso know so much? I think later on they figured out he really didn’t know that much. He just had been on his own more, and he’d had to fend for himself more, and he’d had to grow up faster. They were more protected and looked after. I think that’s what they were sensing—that they had been sheltered and protected, and Lenso had not, and that plus the fact he was a year older, he just seemed more mature than they did. SW: Ringo’s maturity appears in The Unvanquished. Bayard implies that Ringo is more mature than he is. EWF: OK. Dad thought enough about it to repeat it several times to me that Will pondered what it was about Lenso. Then, of course, at about age sixteen, Lenso went with some other people to Detroit, and Dad was thinking, at that age he wouldn’t want to have to go to Detroit, you know, but Lenso seemed to be very excited about going, wanted to go, looked forward to it. There was just that difference. SW: Yes, I see. When I was reading the diaries, it struck me how many times Leak wrote letters to L.Q.C. Lamar. EWF: Yes.


SW: The similarity of [the] name[s] “McCarroll” and “McCaslin” is noteworthy. EWF: I’m sure Will wanted to get it in somewhere. So L.Q.C. McCaslin . . . SW: Could be a conflation of . . . EWF: Yes. SW: L.Q.C. Lamar and your grandfather. EWF: Yes. That’s quite possible. SW: L.Q.C. Lamar was known around Oxford, too. EWF: Oh, yes. SW: Lamar Street is one of the main drags downtown. EWF: Right SW: So certainly the diary is not the only place Faulkner ran into Lamar’s name. EWF: Right. SW: But the fact that he was reading the diary so often makes it a little bit more convincing. There are a number of similarities. EWF: Sure there are. SW: What additional thoughts or stories would you be willing to disclose? EWF: The talk about early dates reminds me of how amused Dad was at the shift in emphasis after the first several years of the Pilgrimage. At the beginning, when his dad was in the office, he had been able to be at home when the house was open, and had told the story of the early years. But in later years, he could not be there and only occasionally was in to catch a bit of what was being said, which began with the building of the front rooms with slave labor in 1836, the section of the house which looks very much like a number of cottages built between 1836 and the 1840s. That fit in with what people had heard elsewhere. Oh, a hostess would know that the older part had been rolled up, but the details were unknown or untold. The early days were what Dad loved to talk about. Upon arrival, McCarroll had met several Loves, members of a prominent Chickasaw family. One, named Sam Love, offered to help him build his log house. At first it appeared that the help would be limited to Love’s companionship as he sat under a shade tree. In time, McCarroll came to realize that the help was in approval or blessing, and in what Sam taught him about the Chickasaws. Sam was baffled by the white man’s belief that Chickasaw treaties ceded ownership. Since the Chickasaw did not own the land, what they ceded was use and responsibility. He would point to the spring and note the water bubbling up, flowing a distance, and disappearing into the sand. He would say that the spirit lifts up the water and then turns it loose. So it is foolish for us to imagine we own that which belongs to the spirit. Sam said that if

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man attempts to control the waters, the waters will control man. McCarroll was familiar with this concept, but thought it impractical for the building of cities and towns. Several years later, however, when reading a title to a slave, Sam’s words came back to haunt McCarroll. Sam had said also that behavior based on notions of ownership would not only be selfish, it would be self-destructive and would destroy the land. McCarroll gave Love the credit for starting him to think and soon conclude that a slave culture will enslave the owner more than the slave, since it enslaves the mind and soul of the owner. McCarroll began promoting his plan to move slaves to freemen by going through a period of indenturing. He successfully denied he was an abolitionist, or else he would not have continued to be reelected sheriff, a position I understand he held for thirty-three years, saying that he was just proposing a better way to farm. He denied he was a Unionist, but said he just thought it was foolish to fight a war, which would surely be lost, over the right to secede, especially if another reason was slavery, which was about to be phased out from its own inefficiencies. Dad noted that in telling him this story, beginning in about 1906 and repeated as long as she lived, his grandmother Amelia whispered, conveying to him that these views would still be considered “unpatriotic.” For the first four years of the Pilgrimage, Dad told this story to select groups when he could be there. Then the story of Sam disappeared. I was intrigued as Dad and Will Faulkner discussed these family stories as current events. Much later, I realized that Will would have heard these stories directly from Amelia. They had grown up together on those stories, and in the 1930s were still sitting around having agitated discussions over and over, amplifying each other’s views on what they considered had been the most dramatic period in southern history. Some family stories were humorous, especially their recollections of boyhood adventures, but occasionally they came up to date, gloomily discussing the slide into Jim Crow. They acted like the last two surviving members of a secret order.47 Afterword

EWF: Now I see that Faulkner was apparently at work during these sessions incorporating this material into his writings. I’ve said that Dad and Will were similar in size and interests, but they were twins in attitude and opinion. The big difference that Dad noted with admiration was Faulkner’s


ability and willingness to express his anger. Dad would keep his feelings bottled up while telling about something he had seen or heard, but Will knew how he felt and let it all out for him. Their friendship was not a secret, but it was highly private and intense, perhaps too personal to share. I know that is hard to understand if you did not observe it. I was startled when you first asked me why I had never talked about Dad and Will because I had never thought to talk about it. The quick and partial answer is that only one person ever asked me. Rev. Milton Winter showed me an article suggesting that “Ludie” might be the inspiration for one of Faulkner’s stories. I immediately said it was. I changed the subject, and he did not push me with further questions. I thought I should contact the author of the article, but I did not. Why I did not is harder to understand or explain. SW: You told me that after the interviews were finished, you suddenly recalled more of the trauma you experienced when you were nine—a memory you had repressed since then. Would you tell me about it? EWF: I feel that I should try, although I do not fully understand it yet. Dad had conveyed to me how important family was to him and his great admiration for his grandmother Amelia, and her grandfather John McCarroll. He never mentioned her other grandfather. I had watched Faulkner for two years as he got very angry reading some old farm journals and cursing the writer. I had come to dislike the diarist as much as Faulkner did. I had only the vaguest idea of what was upsetting my fascinating friend, but I was ready to punch out the diarist. Then suddenly I realized that this man I had learned to hate was family, not past history, but my family now. Dad talked of eighty-year-old events as if they happened that morning. Faulkner thought Cousin Ludie was standing at the window now. I thought that Faulkner, the most fascinating man I knew, had learned something so bad that he probably would never speak to me again. I fled to my room and would not come out. I told you about the part I remembered, which I had not thought of in fifty years, the part about Faulkner being upset over the slave entries, and my conclusion that it was my fault. Since that was what I remembered, I assumed that was the cause of my inability to read Faulkner’s books. But now I remember the rest of the story. That Saturday afternoon about seventy years ago, I vowed never to touch those old diaries and never to talk about or think about any of that again. My nine-year-old self could not cope with the overwhelming sense of loss, the loss of approval from this person

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so important to me. The problem was not what made Faulkner angry, an issue about which I had only the vaguest understanding at age nine, but as an adult assumed that was the problem. But it was the fear of abandonment by this person so important to me that I bottled up and totally repressed it for seventy years. When memory of the vow and the anguish of the fear I felt so long finally popped back into conscious memory, I was astonished that the anguish I felt was just as fresh and overwhelming as when that feeling of abandonment was bottled up and hidden away. I would not believe this could happen if I had not experienced it. I will probably want to delete this discussion. I am uncomfortable revealing so much of myself, especially a part that most people cannot understand because they have not experienced it. If I leave it in, it will be for those who have had an experience which they have repressed. I would like to go over with you how I think this repressed experience has impacted my behavior just in the last two years as we have worked together. When you sent out your e-mail about your annual class visit to Oxford, inviting alumni to come along, Anne was ready to go, and she thought I should tell you that we owned an old house in Holly Springs which the class might want to see. I said I was too busy. Anne brought it up every day until I finally agreed to contact you. Finally, I thought I had to put an end to it with the message that we could not go, but that I did know Faulkner. I expected a response of, “That’s nice—maybe next year.” To my chagrin, you wanted an interview. I told Anne I was too busy. She said that would be impolite, so you were welcomed. I was happy to tell you a few stories about the “Ludie” window and Dad’s friendship, but then Anne suggested that I show you a volume of the diary. I remember drawing a blank. Why would I show that? Just an old diary from McCarroll Place. I said I did not know where it was, which at that moment was true. Anne said where it was, so I went up for it, feeling confused and uncertain. On the way down with it, I remembered that Faulkner had studied it and how upset he was and how sad it made me, and I broke out in a sweat and did not want to bring it down, but it was too late to stop. In response to your questions, I recalled and told you in detail about Faulkner’s study of the farm journals, being completely unaware of how much I did not recall. Soon you told us that you were planning a visit to see the original journals at Chapel Hill and we could come along. Anne was excited, so I agreed with great apprehension. As we got nearer to the date, I started worrying


about the expense of the trip. That did not work with Anne, so I argued that I did not want to get overly tired just before important medical tests already scheduled to follow. That worked, so we canceled out. Next up was the annual visit to Oxford. As soon as we agreed to go, I started my list of reasons not to. Two days from departure, I had a headache and stomachache. By the night before departure, I was in bed with the flu. I was really physically very ill when I called to cancel out. After several anxiety attacks, I decided to tell you that I wanted to leave out all mention of the diary, but eventually I realized that Faulkner had two separate visits with us. The first was the happier visit with Edgar, retelling McCarroll family stories and growing up together. The second was a serious study of and angry confrontation with Leak, and I should not leave that part out just because of the trauma it has caused me and the difficulty I have talking about it. The last episode has been the wonderful visit you planned to Holly Springs. It began with a plan to meet with Laukhauf’s expert glass renovators from Memphis to replace the original window pane containing the Ludie etching with a replica. Then you decided that some Faulkner scholars should see the original in its setting before removal. You invited three renowned scholars, who all agreed to come. So how did I handle this? I haven’t told you yet that two days before the event I decided we did not need three family members to supervise the changing of a window pane, so I would stay at home, and Anne and Ted would go to Holly Springs. Anne persuaded me to pack. We were dismayed that you had to go home the night before because of your dad’s illness, but we were glad you could be with him when he died the next morning. We carried on. Mary Ellen Templeton read your prepared remarks at McCarroll Place, and Dr. John Lowe described the book and your research in glowing terms. Then we proceeded to Montrose for a beautifully prepared dinner. The evening concluded with a toast to you given by Dr. Jay Watson. We were so sorry that you missed it. As you know, we would not have met if Anne had not pushed me to contact you. Then you would have had the McCarroll family and Holly Springs half of the book, but not the Leak Diary half, since I feel sure I would never have mentioned the diary if Anne had not brought it up. So, I would like to conclude with a toast to Anne Salyerds Francisco.


Notes Preface 1. Sally Wolff, with Floyd C. Watkins, Talking about William Faulkner: Interviews with Jimmy Faulkner and Others (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Faulkner, the Franciscos, and the Leak Diary 1. See the Edgar Wiggin Francisco interviews in this volume, 65–179. Hereafter cited parenthetically as “EWF interviews.” 2. Ruth Bitzer Francisco, “The McCarroll Place,” Marshall County [WPA Project], TS Microfilm (n.p.: Works Progress Administration for Mississippi, 1938), 101. 3. “Civilian Marriages & Obituaries,” Fayetteville Observer, 9 March 1863, 3 (microfilm). 4. Ibid. 5. Leak’s diary is contained in the various volumes of manuscripts and typescripts comprising the “Francis Terry Leak Papers, 1839–1865,” found in the Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina. Their “finding aid” locates the manuscripts and typescripts that comprise the diary. Citations to the Leak Diary appear by the designation “Leak,” “TS” (typescript) or “MS” (manuscript), and refer to the volume numbers used in the finding aid. 6. The 1954 University of North Carolina Alumni Directory (Durham, N.C.: Seeman Printery, 1954) includes this entry on page 519: “Walter John Leak, 1858 (AB) Salem, Miss. (d. 1872).” 7. Genovese mentions Francis Terry Leak in both The World the Slaveholders Made and in Roll, Jordan, Roll. According to Genovese, Leak was “a rustic resident planter with that

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certain awkwardness which betrayed his simple origins and limited horizons” (The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, 120–22). That appraisal, however, depicts Leak incompletely. Francis Terry Leak was an articulate and prolific diarist who describes in amazing detail twenty-three years of pre–Civil War farm life. He was also a lawyer trained in North Carolina who adjudicated significant and complex estate transactions. He insisted on the education of his children, built his own school, hired his own teachers, and sent his children, both male and female, to college. Leak’s occasional spelling errors, such as “burrid” for “buried,” and “staid” for “stayed,” were typical of the less regularized spelling of the time, and his views on race are more reflective of those held by most educated southern landowners of that time than of Leak’s “limited horizons.” Genovese notes the presence in the diary of Moses, a slave on the Leak plantation, and quotes from the marriage ceremony of “Moses and Pol,” which took place on the Leak plantation. Along with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, his wife and colleague, Genovese again cites Leak, first in The Mind of the Master Class and again in Slavery in White and Black, where they analyze Leak’s general views on history and race. In her In the Plantation Household, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese also refers to the Leak Diary as it exemplifies daily plantation life in the Old South. Economists, sociologists, and other scholars, such as Olmstead and Rhode, Richard H. Steckel, Jacob Metzer, and John David Smith, also studied the diary to make an assessment of plantation life, infant mortality rates, and cotton production totals. These works stand in a rich context of critical commentary about slavery and plantation life. John Spencer Bassett’s The Southern Plantation Overseer as Shown in His Letters (1925) is an older volume that presents and explains letters written by overseers. Early considerations of slavery include Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), which was criticized as apologetic of slavery but eventually took its place in southern historical scholarship as a valuable presentation of historical facts. Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) and John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom (1947) are classics. Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (1956) also supplanted Phillips by offering a substantial and unadorned look at slavery. More recent historical considerations of slavery in the South include books by James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1978); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1978); James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (1991) and The Ruling Race (1998); Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1998); Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (2000); William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House (2003); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview (2005). 8. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York and London: Norton, 1998), 153. 9. James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 53 10. Oakes, The Ruling Race, 165 11. Ibid., 169.

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12. James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 1977), 50. 13. Quoted ibid. 14. Oakes, The Ruling Race, 180. 15. See, for example, Bills, Kiger, Ruffin, Turnbull, Malone, Ervin, Jones, Mercer, and Bowman diaries and plantation books, all on microfilm in Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War (University Publications of America): Bills, Reel 17, Frames 00186, 00252, 00253; Kiger, Reel 28, Frame 00093; Ruffin, Reel 7, Frame 00342; Turnbull, Reel 36, Frames 00444, 00446; Malone, Reel 8, Frames 01128, 01129; Ervin, Reel 17, Frame 0924; Jones, Reel 5, Frame 0056; Mercer Reel 8, Frame 00552; Bowman, Reel 36, Frames 00679, 00680. 16. Ervin, Reel 17, Frame 0874. The spellings used in the diaries are carefully reproduced here. 17. Ibid., Frame 0860. 18. Bills, Reel 16, Frame 00537. 19. Ruffin, Reel 7, 00269. 20. Turnbull, Reel 36, Frame 0446. 21. Don Harrison Doyle, Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 379. In The Southern Plantation Overseer, John Spencer Bassett published the letters of a number of overseers to their planters. In “A Source for the Commissary Entries in Go Down, Moses,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14.3 (1972), Joseph Brogunier also posits that the diary of Dr. Martin Phillips, edited by Franklin L. Riley in 1909 and published as “Diary of a Mississippi Planter, January 1, 1840, to April 1863,” “is a likely source for the commissary entries in Go Down, Moses,” although he acknowledges that “whether Faulkner read the ‘Diary’ [of Martin Phillips] cannot at this time be demonstrated absolutely” (545). 22. Joseph Blotner further notes that “old ledgers were common in commissaries and rural stores (the one at Taylor bore an entry for Carothers Edmonds), but he had done more than just glance at them. There was the one in his own commissary. It was a small loose-leaf notebook rather than the huge old ledger he was writing about, but it served precisely the same function. In 1940 and 1941 he had made all the purchase entries for half a dozen Negro families” (Faulkner: A Biography [New York: Random House, 1974], 2:1091). 23. For more than half a century, scholars have analyzed where, from whom, and how William Faulkner obtained and used his sources. Some of the early critics who considered geographical sources, biographical influences, and the kind of mental map it must have required for Faulkner to create Yoknapatawpha County include Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country and Yoknapatawpha and Beyond; Ward Miner, The World of William Faulkner; Hyatt Waggoner, William Faulkner: from Jefferson to the World; Robert Coughlan, The Private World of William Faulkner, Arthur F. Kinney, Critical Essays on William Faulkner; and Elizabeth Kerr, Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner’s Little Postage Stamp of Native Soil. Gerald Langford’s Faulkner’s Revision of “Absalom, Absalom!” and James Early’s The Making of “Go Down, Moses” also provided useful background for this study. A number of works focus on Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford and the surrounding area, the people who lived there, their stories, and what effect they had on Faulkner. Herman

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Taylor’s Faulkner’s Oxford offers a guided tour of the Faulkner homes and other places that Faulkner knew; in William Faulkner of Oxford, editors James W. Webb and A. Wigfall Green present short pieces on Faulkner by people who knew him. Louis Daniel Brodsky, James Watson, and Joseph Blotner look closely at letters Faulkner wrote and received. Thomas McHaney’s “The Falkners and the Origin of Yoknapatawpha County: Some Corrections” and Isbel Haynes’s books on Lafayette and Tippah Counties add important source information about the area of Faulkner’s birth and early years. Calvin Brown’s A Glossary of Faulkner’s South is indispensible for anyone seeking to understand the colloquial terminology Faulkner uses. Robert Kirk’s Faulkner’s People is a handy reference. Nancy Dew Taylor’s annotated Go Down, Moses is impressive and useful. More recently, Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie collected essays in Faulkner and His Contemporaries that address some of the historical sources, places, and people whom Faulkner encountered and the relationships he had that influenced his writing. Biographers and critical biographers, including Joseph Blotner, Andre Bleikasten, David Minter, Joel Williamson, and Jay Parini have made lasting contributions to the understanding of Faulkner’s life and the influences upon him. Williamson’s discovery of a “shadow family” in the “Falkner yard” is especially relevant to this study, as is John Lowe’s assessment of it: “Joel Williamson’s recent biography of Faulkner has revealed that the Old Colonel, for whom Faulkner was named, sired a black family. The white Faulkner family—even the racially crusading novelist—never adopted these embarrassingly real blood relatives of a darker hue, preferring Mammie Callie and Uncle Ned, their ‘like one of the family’ retainers” (Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. John Lowe [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005], 250) . Other important source studies are Don Doyle’s “The World That Created William Faulkner” and The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha County, which trace the history of Lafayette County from its origin in Chickasaw country through settlements by whites and others, and from slavery to the Civil War and beyond. He finds here the origins of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. James M. Faulkner also highlighted some locations that Faulkner frequented and recorded family stories that shed light on his personality (Wolff, Talking about William Faulkner). Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, eds., offer essays in Faulkner in Cultural Context that examine Faulkner generally in his milieu, with topics including Faulkner and history, sexuality, war, in comparison with Flaubert, and the post-Confederate South. Biographical information provided by the Faulkner family enhances the understanding of Faulkner. His brothers John and Jack (Murry) Falkner give primary information in their biographically oriented books My Brother Bill and The Falkners of Mississippi. Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to The Portable Faulkner and also his edition of The Faulkner-Cowley File document the letters, ideas, sentiments, plans, and dreams that flowed so readily between Faulkner and his editor. Other critical strands have taken Faulkner studies in important new directions. Particularly relevant to this work have been a number of books and articles that focus on Faulkner’s places and sources. Noel Polk’s essay “Faulkner’s ‘The Jail’ and the Meaning of Cecilia Farmer,” which elucidates his analysis of the window etching story, and his knowledgeable Children of the Dark House are impressive studies among others of Polk’s long and illustrious

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career in Faulkner studies. Michael Millgate’s Faulkner’s Place analyzes the “conceptually unified world” of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. James C. Hinkle and Robert McCoy’s Reading Faulkner: “The Unvanquished” was particularly helpful in elucidating difficult details and concepts in the novel. Fred Hobson’s William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!”: A Casebook presents a series of invigorating and provocative essays that consider important issues in Absalom. Thomas L. McHaney’s arrangement of Go Down, Moses is very useful for understanding the novel. Philip Weinstein, in What Else but Love: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, delves deeply into the race issues in Faulkner and Toni Morrison and notes rightly that Faulkner’s “great texts focus on slavery” ([New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964], 41). In Linda Wagner-Martin, ed., New Essays on “Go Down, Moses,” prominent scholars such as John T. Matthews, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, Minrose Gwin, Thadious Davis, Judith Sensibar, and Linda Wagner-Martin offer important new, critical interpretations of the central concerns of Go Down, Moses. They have recently resituated the novel with their thoroughgoing assessments. In Faulkner and Love, Sensibar presents new information and interpretations of Faulkner as he approached and avoided love in its various forms and analyzes how his early experiences with family and “mammy” shaped his responses to love in life and in fiction. In Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender and Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses,” Thadious Davis considers slavery, especially as it relates to issues of property and law, and various kinds of games and races, as they intermingle in the novel, and further elucidates Faulkner’s themes of freedom and bondage. The Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, held annually at Oxford, Mississippi, produced important essays recorded in Faulkner’s Inheritance, edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie. Go Down, Moses, they assert, “Faulkner’s epic novel of race relations, hinges . . . on matters of inheritance” (Faulkner’s Inheritance, papers presented at the Thirty-second Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, 2005 [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007], ix). Noel Polk’s essay in that volume points to the importance of the historical context that Faulkner inherited: “A powerful flood of history bore down on [Faulkner] from long before his birth to overdetermine him into a particular time and space, sat him astraddle a fiery historical comet that he was to ride until the end of his days” (5–6). For Faulkner “the past,” Polk summarizes, “is never solid, never substantial. It is always evanescent, fragmentary, ‘shadowy, paradoxical,’ and most often available only in traces.” The “fragments—memories . . . give us only a partial, incomplete” picture of the past (10, 12). The extraordinary work of the critical community in Faulkner studies over the last fifty years, with its myriad voices and rich interpretations, is the solid touchstone by which to analyze the “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” as it illuminates more and more traces of the past. 24. The gallery is the outside porch, which is, in this case, along the east side of the house, and has since been enclosed. Faulkner depicts a gallery in The Unvanquished (34) and other works. 25. See Dr. Francisco’s recounting of these stories, 80–84, 101–103, 74–78. 26. See the stories about Dr. Bitzer in the EWF interviews, 113–117. Dr. Bitzer may have been well known to Faulkner. Since Edgar Jr. and Faulkner married in the same year, they likely exchanged stories about their fathers-in-law. Bitzer’s zeal could have shaped the way Faulkner portrayed religious zealots in his “Presbyterian novel,” Light in August.

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27. See the EWF interviews, 85. Faulkner uses similar language in Absalom, Absalom! when Sutpen says to Milly: “too bad you’re not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable” (286). 28. Other wives also disapproved of their husbands’ association with Faulkner. Dolly Faulkner, wife of William’s brother John, strongly disliked her brother-in-law, whom she saw as partly responsible for her husband’s heavy drinking (personal correspondence with Dr. John Lowe, November 4, 2009). 29. Faulkner to Harrison Smith, February 1934, quoted in Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 244. 30. In his novel Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner includes the arrival of Thomas Sutpen to Mississippi in 1833. 31. William Baskerville Hamilton, Holly Springs, Mississippi, to the Year 1878 (Holly Springs, Miss.: Marshall County Historical Society), 1. 32. Ibid., 5. Faulkner varies the name spellings but includes Carothers, Armstid, and Bayard in Go Down, Moses and The Unvanquished, among other works. Names from other locations in the area also appear in Faulkner’s fiction. For example, several graves in the College Hill Presbyterian Church cemetery bear such names. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Ibid., 1. 35. Alice Long and Mark L. Ridge, Holly Springs (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2006), 7. 36. The Sound and the Fury includes such a pasture behind the family home. 37. Gerald W. Sweitzer and Kathy M. Fields, The 50 Best Small Southern Towns (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 2001), 183. 38. Doyle, Faulkner’s County, 304. 39. Olga Pruitt, It Happened Here: True Stories of Holly Springs (Holly Springs, Miss.: South Reporter Printing Company, 1950), 78. 40. Doyle, Faulkner’s County, 304. 41. Hamilton, Holly Springs, 25. 42. Quoted ibid., 35. 43. Ibid., 23. 44. Doyle, Faulkner’s County, 208. 45. Hamilton, Holly Springs, 35–36. 46. See Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, 284. See also Lisa C. Hickman, William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 2006), 66. 47. After a long restricted period, Faulkner’s letters to Williams are now open for scholarly inspection at the University of Virginia. 48. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), 245. 49. Ibid., 255. 50. See a full account of this story in the EWF interviews, 151. 51. An adz is a “cutting tool that has a thin arched blade sharpened on the concave side and set at right angles to the handle and is used principally for rough-shaping wood”

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(Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged [Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1993], 32). 52. A lathe is “a machine in which work is rotated about a horizontal axis and shaped by a fixed cutting, boring, or drilling tool while being held in a chuck, faceplate, or mandrel or between centers in headstock and tailstock” (ibid., 1276). 53. Sometimes the name appears in the diary as “Charles Bonner,” and sometimes, perhaps simply less legibly, as “Charles Bonnen,” and sometimes with a separation between the letters of the name: “Charles Bon ner.” 54. Robert Miller Winter, Shadow of a Mighty Rock: A Social and Cultural History of Presbyterianism in Marshall County, Mississippi (Franklin, Tenn.: Providence House Publishers, 1997), 177, 247; see also Hamilton, Holly Springs, Mississippi, 97. 55. Robert Coughlan points out that the furnishings in the plantation aristocracy were ornate, “with fine furnishings brought from New Orleans, New York, and abroad” (The Private World of William Faulkner [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954], 83). 56. A curry comb is “a comb made of rows of metallic teeth or serrated edges and used especially to curry horses” (Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary [Springfield, Mass.: Merriam, 1963], 204). 57. See the EWF interviews, 107; and Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 261–71. 58. In one of Faulkner’s stories, the spelling changes to “Tomy,” and the possessive appears variously as “Tomey’s,” “Tomes,” or “Tomys.” In “Was,” the spelling is “Tomey,” but in “The Bear,” the spelling alters to “Tomy” (see Go Down, Moses, 5, 269). 59. See, for example, Wirt Armistead Cate, Lucius Q. C. Lamar: Secession and Reunion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935). 60. Judith Sensibar, “Who Wears the Mask?: Memory, Desire, and Race in Go Down, Moses,” in New Essays on “Go Down, Moses,” ed. Linda Wagner-Martin (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101. “Pantaloons” are described in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable as “Breeches, trousers, underdrawers or pants [that] get their name from Pantaloon, a lean and foolish old Venetian of 16th-century Italian comedy, who was dressed in loose trousers and slippers” (1029). The argument that Faulkner’s character Rider in “Pantaloon in Black” is related to “Pantalone,” however, depends upon the assumption that this Italian comedic character who typically lusts after women is relevant to Rider’s essentially tragic character and situation. Perhaps simple farm clothing is the more likely reference for Faulkner’s “pantaloon.” 61. Judith Sensibar, Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 97, 109. 62. Ibid., 100, 103. 63. Linda Wagner-Martin, ed., New Essays on “Go Down, Moses” (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. 64. John T. Matthews, “Touching Race,” in New Essays on “Go Down, Moses,” ed. WagnerMartin, 28. 65. Minrose Gwin, “Her Shape, His Hand: The Spaces of African American Women in Go Down, Moses,” in New Essays on “Go Down, Moses,” ed. Wagner-Martin, 89. 66. The Leak Diary mentions several comets in different years. One is Donati’s Comet of

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1858. Roberta J. M. Olson provides further information and a description of the watercolor painting of the comet by Samuel Palmer. She explains that Donati’s Comet “is said by many people to have been the most beautiful comet in history. It made its first and only recorded appearance in 1858, discovered telescopically on 2nd June by the astronomer Giovanni Battista Donati (1826–73). By 19th August the comet was visible to the naked eye, remaining so until 4th December 1858, and still discernible by telescope until 4th March 1859. Its fame derives from its wonderfully unusual profile, characterized by the aforementioned large, curving, scimitar-like dust tail and two thin plasma tails (not rendered by Palmer, and perhaps difficult to see in England because of the more humid English air). It is estimated that at the time Donati’s Comet passed in front of Arcturus, close to the time when Palmer rendered it, the comet’s tail measured fifty million miles in length and spanned around forty degrees. The comet’s total magnitude by 2nd October (magnitude of -1) was almost that of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, becoming somewhat reduced (magnitude of 0.5) by 5th October and comparable to Arcturus” (“A Water-Colour by Samuel Palmer of Donati’s Comet,” Burlington Magazine, November 1990, 795–96). 67. Blue stone, or hydrated copper sulfate, has several uses as fungicide and algaecide; in the nineteenth century, it was also used as an application to wounds, but it can be poisonous to humans (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 242; Alexander Wynter Blyth, Poisons: Their Effects and Detection [London: C. Griffin, 1884], n.p.). 68. Lion in the Garden, 252. 69. E. O. Hawkins Jr., “Jane Cook and Cecilia Farmer,” Mississippi Quarterly 17.4 (1965): 249. 70. Noel Polk, “Faulkner’s ‘The Jail’ and the Meaning of Cecilia Farmer,” Mississippi Quarterly 25.3 (1972): 305. 71. Noel Polk, Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 92–94. 72. Ibid., 93. 73. See Jane Isbell Haynes, “Another Source for Faulkner’s Inscribed Window Panes,” Mississippi Quarterly 39:3 (1986): 365–67; and Hawkins, “Jane Cook.” 74. “In Memoriam: Ludie Baugh,” Holly Springs (Miss.) Reporter, 15 January 1869, in personal collection of Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III; death notices for Mary L. Booth, Memphis Appeal, 12 and 18 January 1869. 75. Lion in the Garden, 255. 76. See H. Edward Richardson, William Faulkner: The Journey to Self-Discovery (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969), 26. 77. See, for example, Wolff, Talking about William Faulkner. 78. See also “Family in Same Residence for Ninety-two Years,” Holly Springs (Miss.) South Reporter, 1925, in personal collection of Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III. 79. Pearl Strickland was born in 1869 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and was the daughter of Janey Leak Strickland and William Strickland. Pearl’s brother, Frank, was born in 1873. Gerard Badow was born in about 1880, and by 1930 was head of the household, with “Perla” as his wife and Frank a household member. Luella Gibson, the household servant, was born in about 1882. Pearl and Gerard appear to have traveled to Germany and then returned, mar-

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ried, in 1927. (Janey L. Strickland, Pearl Strickland, and Frank Strickland, U.S. Census, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930). Conversations with Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III 1. Faulkner uses the words “augur” and “ogre” together on the same page in Absalom, Absalom! He also uses the phrase “that ogre-face of her childhood,” which may be a selfreference. In addition, the terms “ogre,” “ogre’s hand,” “ogre-bourne,” and similar references appear repeatedly throughout the novel—including five times on one page. “Ogre-face,” “ogre-tale,” “ogre world,” and “ogre or a djinn” also appear (62, 22, 22, 23). 2. Dr. Francisco pointed out that “quail season varies from state to state and from year to year. In Mississippi, the season is usually open between Thanksgiving and March 1, sometimes a week or so longer. This season has been well enforced since about 1950. In the 1920s, landowners could count on going hunting without being noticed, but the hunters would still roughly follow that time frame to avoid damage to their flocks.” 3. Faulkner, The Unvanquished, 24. 4. Robert Coughlan similarly theorized that Bayard Sartoris “is to some extent a projection of Faulkner’s romanticized picture of himself” (The Private World, 74). 5. Since the interviews, Dr. Francisco has found out additional information about what he calls “Ludie’s tragic life.” Ludie apparently initially lived in Holly Springs, but a tornado hit the town in 1845 and killed all of her immediate family except her father. At least four of Ludie’s family members died immediately or within days of injuries sustained in the tornado. Her grandmother, Mary Lipscomb Eddins; her mother, Emily Eddins Baugh; her only sibling, whose name we have not found; and her aunt, Louisa Eddins Hill. Ludie was one year old. Her cousin Amelia was seven. Ludie’s father apparently then returned to Memphis with Ludie, and she lived there until her 1860 return to Holly Springs. These facts and details help explain Faulkner’s attraction to Ludie: her painful loss of so many family members, the absence of home life until her return to McCarroll Place, and her desperate need to claim as hers this home, have a place, and be remembered—by etching her name on the window pane. 6. This story bears a resemblance to Rosa Coldfield’s in Absalom, Absalom! in which Rosa takes her sister’s children under her wing and cares for them. 7. Ludie’s husband, Henry Booth, and their young child are buried in Memphis. 8. Dr. Bitzer’s religious zeal may be a model that Faulkner used, especially in Light in August. Dr. Bitzer’s daughter Ruth may figure in a number of characters and scenes. 9. In language and theme, these words bear a resemblance to Faulkner’s closing lines of Absalom, Absalom! in which Quentin repeatedly says that he does not hate the South. But he protests too much, and his deep ambivalence is clear. 10. Rita Cochran’s typescript “Paper for the Thursday Club,” titled “Birth of Holly Springs Pilgrimage—Oct. 22, 1936,” states: “In the spring of ’36, Ruth Francisco, Marjorie McCrosky, Miss Nina Craft, my Sister and I journeyed to Natchez for the pilgrimage. Included in our itinerary was the Vicksburg Pilgrimage also” (1). She goes on to recount that on the ride home, the women discussed Holly Springs, “her history, her white pillared mansions, her

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quaint cottages” and decided that their town had “far more than Vicksburg” and also that it “compared favorably with Natchez” (1). As a result of their work and planning, a Holly Springs Centennial Celebration occurred, and the Pilgrimage was born. Cochran records that “Fourteen homes” opened for the tour in 1936: the Cox-Dean Place, now known as Airliewood; Gray Gables; Freeman Place; Strickland Place; McCarroll Place; Crump Place; Polk Place; Featherston Place; Walter Place; Bonner-Belk House, now known as Cedarhurst; Box Hill; the Pines; and two Red Banks homes: Maplewood and Summer Trees (6). See also Freda Hutchinson Dodd, “Holly Springs Holds Open House,” Holland’s The Magazine of the South, April 1950, 16–19. 11. William Faulkner said in a letter to a publisher that in writing one of his novels (Absalom, Absalom!), he wanted “to keep the hoop skirts and plug hats out” (Faulkner to Harrison Smith, February 1934, quoted in Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, 244). 12. At the beginning of Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner describes the setting in very similar language: “they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that” (3). 13. Faulkner refers to this plan in Absalom, Absalom! when Mr. Coldfield manumits his slaves and, as Cleanth Brooks summarized it, “provides them with a weekly wage and thus allows them to purchase freedom when they have accumulated enough credit to balance what they would bring on the slave market” (see William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond [1978; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990], 295). 14. “Amelia McCarroll and Walter John Leak,” marriage license, Marshall County Courthouse, Holly Springs, Miss., 1866. 15. Walter John Leak, born 1834 in North Carolina, died 1872, Benton County, Mississippi. See Descendants of Matthew* (John) Raiford, 30. 16. Cf. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! in which Colonel Sutpen insults Rosa Coldfield in such a manner. The details of the Faulkner story differ slightly, but the striking similarities between the McCarroll/Leak family story and the novel—especially regarding the aged great-aunts, the sisters Amelia and Sallie—make it a possible source. Will Faulkner and Edgar Jr. listened for hours to the stories told by these two women. In the family story, Amelia McCarroll Leak married Walter Leak and moved to the Leak plantation, even though her father did not speak to his father for at least the last five years of Francis Terry Leak’s life. The marriage eventually went bad, and at some point, purportedly after her husband’s death, Amelia returned from the plantation to her family home, McCarroll Place. She had lost a male child but then had a daughter who survived. She did not produce a male heir. In the novel, Sutpen proposes to Rosa that they marry, but only after she produces a male heir. Rosa declines and then leaves the plantation, where she had been caring for Ellen’s children. Dr. Francisco says Amelia had been caring for a number of Leak children, the younger siblings of Walter John, as well as Leak’s children by his first wife. In the novel, Rosa and Ellen carry these roles. Amelia may have left the Leak plantation because Walter John had wanted a living male heir. Without such a male Leak heir, nothing supported her position at the Leak plantation after Walter John’s death. Dr. Francisco says Amelia was insulted by the lack of support and the discontinuation of welcome by the Leak family after Walter John’s death, and so she returned to her family home, McCarroll Place.

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17. One obituary for Francis Terry Leak states that he left his home when “the approach of the Abolition army made it unsafe for a man of his known devotion to the interests of the South to remain any longer.” He “sought a place of refuge from the enemies of his country” with a friend and relative, “General Robinson,” near Benton, Alabama. He contracted a fever “which terminated his earthly existence” on January 27, 1863, at the “home of General Robinson.” See “Civilian Marriages and Obituaries,” Fayetteville Observer and North Carolina Standard, 3. “General Robinson” was likely Cornelius Robinson, “planter, representative in Confederate congress,” and “son of Todd and Martha (Terry) Robinson” and a relative of Francis Terry Leak (Dictionary of Alabama Biography, 1451). 18. Faulkner may have had this story in mind when he describes Aunt Rosa in Absalom, Absalom! as “the old woman who made you spend a whole afternoon sitting indoors and listening . . . when you wanted to be out among friends of your own age” (10). 19. The passage reads, “the photograph, the picture of herself in its metal case” (114). 20. Cf. Faulkner’s line in Absalom, Absalom!: “‘Ah,’ Mr Compson said. ‘Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?’” (7–8). 21. Dr. Francisco’s stories about the interest in buried silver that the Holly Springs townspeople continue to show—including the use of a metal detector—relates to the similar activities of Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses and Henry Armstid and Ratliff in The Hamlet. 22. Harvey and Connie Payne are friends of the Franciscos who accompanied us on our tour of Hillcrest Cemetery and the houses in Holly Springs. Harvey Payne is one of the town’s aldermen. 23. Lois Swaney Shipp is the curator of the Marshall County Historical Museum in Holly Springs. She is a life-long resident of the town and a weekly contributor to the Holly Springs South Reporter. 24. Review of the original “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” in the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill confirms Dr. Francisco’s boyhood memory that the diaries Francis Terry Leak wrote are on lined ledger paper, with leather binders now yellowed and cracked with age. The ink that Leak made by hand from natural ingredients, however, has proven indelible. 25. Faulkner’s portrait of Thomas Sutpen is similarly drawn. Sutpen comes into the country with slaves he obtained elsewhere. 26. Here Dr. Francisco notes the fact that the Leak Diary did not stay in the Leak line but instead descended via the distaff—that is, from Amelia Leak to her daughter, Betsy—into the Francisco family. This pattern of inheritance is in keeping with the history in Go Down, Moses of the L.Q.C. McCaslin legacy, which goes to the Edmonds family: “Edmonds was descended by a female line and five generations back” (101). 27. Since Dr. Bitzer, a Presbyterian minister, was likely a part of the conversation between William Faulkner and Edgar Jr., the preacher’s zeal could have shaped the way Faulkner depicted the religious zealots in his “Presbyterian novel,” Light in August; since Faulkner and Edgar Jr. married in the same year, they could easily have spent time discussing their respective fathers-in-law. 28. Dr. Francisco notes that his father’s mother, Betsy, was also born at McCarroll Place. Amelia left the Leak plantation to return home long enough to give birth to Betsy there.

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29. John Quincy Wolf, the English professor at Southwestern, was a noted expert on Ozark folk musicians. 30. Sarah Doxey Greer and Helen Tyson are first cousins of Dr. Edgar Francisco III; they are also the granddaughters of Dr. Bitzer and nieces of Wall Doxey, who was a U.S. senator from 1942 to 1946. Their father was Hindman Doxey, a Holly Springs attorney. He was a student at the University of Mississippi when Faulkner was there and had parts in stage productions that Faulkner wrote. The Greer, Tyson, and Doxey families were prominent early settlers of Marshall County and Holly Springs. 31. These stories seem to have become a part of “Ambuscade” and “Retreat” in The Unvanquished. 32. Some of these comments also make Amelia a possible source for Grandmother Millard, who shared what she had with the community during the war and wore her hat squarely on top of her head. 33. The name “Lennie” appears in Faulkner’s story “Barn Burning,” and Lenso may have informed the portrait of Ringo in The Unvanquished. 34. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner describes a pasture, fence, hill, cow, and pigs. One of the characters is Uncle Maury. Maury is the name of the street that runs alongside the McCarroll Place. The house, grounds, yard, and street may have been on Faulkner’s mind as he wrote his most famous novel. 35. The physician Anne Walter Fearn was a student at the Cooper Medical School in San Francisco and graduated from Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia in 1893. She was a Holly Springs native and daughter of the plantation owner and lawyer Colonel Harvey Washington Walter. She practiced medicine in China and, over the course of a forty-year career, established new medical and educational facilities there, along with delivering more than six thousand babies. She authored My Days of Strength (1939) and was celebrated in the exhibit Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating American Women Physicians, sponsored by the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health, and the American Medical Women’s Association (see Bruce Coleman, “Women Medical Pioneers: Anne Walter Fearn,” UMC News, 17 December 2007). 36. See Judith Sensibar’s discussion, in Faulkner and Love, of Estelle Oldham Franklin [Faulkner]’s friendship with Dr. Anne during the time they both lived in Shanghai, during Estelle’s marriage to Franklin. 37. Amelia’s protection of Ludie and weeping for her bear a resemblance to Ellen’s weeping and Rosa’s protection of the children in Absalom, Absalom! 38. See note 5 above, regarding the tornado. 39. On 11 May 2009, the Franciscos’ son John Courtland, and his wife, Megan, became parents of a son they named Jack McCarroll Francisco. 40. In his essay “A Proud Struggle for Grace: Holly Springs, Mississippi,” Hodding Carter notes that the town is nestled in a “holly grove” with a “large spring that measured 30 feet wide and 10 feet deep, so high was the water table” (in Thomas C. Wheeler, ed., A Vanishing America: The Life and Times of the Small Town [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964], 57). 41. How tempting it is to see plantation owner Absolom West as a potential model for Faulkner’s main character, or at least his name, in Absalom, Absalom!

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42. Jennifer W. Ford, ed., The Hour of Our Nation’s Agony: The Civil War Letters of William Cowper Nelson of Mississippi (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007). 43. Faulkner uses the name “McGowan” in Intruder in the Dust. 44. These personalities and events are strongly suggestive of Caddy and Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. 45. The neighbors were relatives: Pearl Strickland and her brother, Frank, who was mentally impaired, lived next door to the McCarrolls, and as children played together in the adjoining yard. Luella Gibson worked for them. As a grown woman, Pearl left the community and toured Europe with a German man whom she eventually married. These people and details, too, seem reflected in Caddy Compson’s ultimate fate in The Sound and the Fury and make Pearl and Frank Strickland and Luella Gibson possible models for Caddy, Benjy, and Dilsey Gibson in The Sound and the Fury. 46. Wells opened his own carpentry shop and was successful. He had learned his trade because his former owner had apprenticed him to a carpenter. His wife, Elizabeth, could not read or write. They were the parents of Ida B. Wells, born in 1862. Ida attended Freeman’s School, Shaw University, now Rust College. When her parents died of yellow fever in 1878, she got a job teaching to support the family. Her career as a civil rights crusader and journalist began in 1884 when she refused to move to the “Jim Crow” car. After being forcefully removed from the train she sued the railroad, and her famous career had begun. See Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 47. Faulkner’s characters Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon, among others, here again resemble Edgar Jr. and Will Faulkner, two friends engaging in long and emotional discussions about the past.


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Index Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 12, 21–26, 186n27, 189n1, 189n9; Coldfield’s manumission of slaves in, 60, 190n13; description of plantation furnishings in, 24, 187n55; high emotionalism of, 22–23; the “idle boy” in, 59 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), borrowings from the Leak Diary found in: Charles Bonner as antecedent to Charles Bon in, 14, 22, 191n18; family cemeteries in both diary and novel, 24; Henry and Charles in both diary and novel, 22–23; Milly in both diary and novel, 14, 21–22; plantation building and brick-making in both diary (Francis Leak’s plantation house) and novel (Thomas Sutpen’s plantation house), 23–24; similar legal terms in both diary and novel, 25; similar words and phrases for miscellaneous items in both diary and novel, 24; similarity of Amelia and Sallie McCarroll to the characters of Ellen and Rosa in, 58, 98–99, 190n16 Airliewood, 171, 172 Alexander, Robert Burrell, 12

“Ambuscade” (Faulkner), 56, 72; Ludie Baugh as antecedent for Celia Cook in, 84; the story of the McCarrolls’ buried silver as a source for, 57, 73 Armstead, Anthony P., 12 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 20–21, 62–63; Adeline Wiggin Francisco (great-grandmother of EWF), as antecedent for Addie Bundren in, 20, 51, 151 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), borrowings from the Leak Diary found in: coffin-making (using an adz and lathe) and transporting of coffins in both diary and novel, 20–21, 186–87n51, 187n52; heavy rains in both diary and novel, 21; Mr. Tull, Mr. Alford, and Cash in both diary and novel, 20, 21 Aunt Tee (aunt of WF), 58 Badow, Gerard, 62, 188–89n79 Baird, William L., 12, 26 “Barn Burning” (Faulkner), borrowings from the Leak Diary found in, 47–49, 192n33; Abner Shettles as antecedent to Abner Snopes in, 48; burning of TFL’s cotton

208 “Barn Burning” (continued) gin house as source of the barn burning in, 48–49; Mr. Harris in both diary and novel, 47, 48 Barrow, Bennet, 6 Bassett, John Spencer, 8 Baugh, Ludie (Mary L.), 51–55, 72, 80–84, 154–55, 177, 189n5; as antecedent for Celia Cook in “Ambuscade,” 84; death of, 54, 83–84; death notice and obituaries of, 54; etching of her name into a window at McCarroll Place, 52, 81–82, 117, 131–33; WF’s preference for always viewing her etched name “in reverse,” 55, 63, 82; at the McCarrolls’ in Holly Springs, 81; recounting of her story in Intruder in the Dust; Requiem for a Nun, and The Reivers, 52; WF’s vision/belief in Ludie Baugh’s “ghost,” 55, 83 Baugh, Richard D., 52, 54, 80, 81, 154, 155 “Bear, The” (Faulkner), 30, 35, 36, 43, 100, 187n58 Bills, John Houston, 7 Bitzer, Dr. (Rev. George L. Bitzer, D.D.), 89, 113–17, 129–30, 185n26, 189n8, 191n27 Bitzer, Mary, 114 Blotner, Joseph, 8, 183n22 blue stone, 44, 188n67 Bolling, Spires, 171, 172, 174 Bonner, Charles, 14, 171, 187n53; as antecedent to WF’s fictional Charles Bon character, 14, 22 Bonner, Sherwood, 171 Booth, Henry H., 54, 189n5 Brooks, Alfred, 172 Butler, Jasper F., 173 Carter, Hodding, 105, 161, 192n40 Caruthers, Alex T., 12 Caruthers, Sam, 36 Cedarhurst, 171, 190n10 Chambers, Benjamin, 171 Chickasaw Cession, 12, 66, 124 Chickasaw Indians, 175–76 Civil War, the, 80–82, 146; creation of widows

i n de x and spinsters as a result of, 99, 191n20; effect of on southern resources, 6, 14–15, 82. See also Van Dorn’s Raid; Vicksburg, Mississippi Clapp, Jeremiah, 170 Clark, Kate Freeman, 169, 170, 171 Colhoun, Garrie, 102, 103 commissaries, 110–11, 120; farm commissary ledgers in Go Down, Moses, 8, 43, 44–45, 104 Cook, Jane, 52–53 Coughlan, Robert, 187n55, 189n4 Coxe, William Henry, 171–72 Crawford, James W., 44 Crawford, Joseph A., 36 Davis, Jefferson, 4 Davis, Thadious, 40 “Diary of Francis Terry Leak,” 1, 3–9, 40, 103–13, 181n5, 191n24; burning of his cotton gin house described in, 47–48; debate with his brother (W. F. Leak) in, 45–46; description of comets in, 4, 41, 187–88n66; difficulty of reading the original handwriting in, 107, 135; donation of to the Wilson Library (University of North Carolina), 2, 4–5; guidelines for slaves recorded in, 6–7; as an imaginative and factual source of WF’s fiction, 17, 63–64; medical conditions recorded in, 4; meticulousness of, 6, 16, 38; microfilm version of, 5; as a mixture of farm and family history, 108; mulatto children mentioned in, 165–66; possible entries made by Walter John Leak in, 97; preservation of by the McCarroll/Francisco family, 2, 104–5, 106–7, 110, 191n26; as primarily an accounting ledger, 3; purchase price of slaves listed in, 42–43; question of who the diary is addressing, 44; as a record of weather conditions, 4, 40–41, 134; references to the work of slaves (“the negroes”) in, 4; slave ledgers in, 41–45, 108; WF’s access to, 8–9, 16–17, 104, 105, 107, 133–34, 141–43; WF’s anger concern-

i n de x 209 ing parts of the diary, 135–36. See also Dortsch, Robert, value of his land and slaves as recorded in the Leak Diary “Diary of a Mississippi Planter, January 1, 1840, to April 1863” (Phillips), 183n21 “Diary of William Ethelbert Irvin,” 7 diary/diaries. See plantation diary writing Dortsch, Robert, value of his land and slaves as recorded in the Leak Diary, 134–35 Doyle, Don, 8, 14, 15, 184n23 DuChaine, Meg Faulkner and John, ix–x Eddins, Elizabeth, 80, 81, 124, 137, 154, 155, 156 Eddins, Emily, 80, 81, 154, 155, 189n5 Eddins, John, 124, 155 Eddins, Louisa, 124, 155, 189n5 Eddins, Mary Lipscomb, 81, 124, 155, 189n5 Eddins, Mary Louisa, 155 Edmonds, A. N., 36 Falconer, Kenlock, 169 Falkner (Colonel [WF’s great-grandfather]), 4, 37–38, 111, 183–85n23 Falkner, Dolly (WF’s sister-in-law), dislike of WF, 186 Falkner, John (brother of WF), 186n28 Falkner, Maud Butler (mother of WF), 10, 58, 173 Fant House, 170–71 Farmer, Cecilia, 52, 53, 54 Faulkner, Estelle Oldham (wife of WF), 153 Faulkner, James M. (Jimmy), ix, x, 164, 184n23 Faulkner, William (WF), 1, 153, 173, 176; availability of farm diaries to, 8; borrowing of names from plantation diaries, 7; comparison of the South to the stubborn/blind pony “Sartis,” 112–13; conflicts of with Ruth Bitzer Francisco, 11–12; criticism of the Holly Springs Pilgrimage, 86–88, 167–68; dancing of, 10, 15, 79, 91, 92, 93, 94, 125; death of, 159; drinking of, 10, 68, 69, 70, 78, 79, 86, 125, 133, 142; friendship of with Edgar Francisco Jr., 10–11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 49, 55–56, 63–64, 75, 90–93, 94,

119, 157–58, 176–77, 193n47; influence of the McCarroll Place on, 61–64; on the local setting of his writing, 17; love of horses and riding, 158; love of hunting (for rabbit, squirrel, and quail), 10, 68, 78, 79, 92–93, 94; proposed sources for his stories and novels, 183–85n23; reasons for his fascination with the Leak family, 2; relationship with Joan Williams, 16, 186n47; religious beliefs of, 55; tennis playing of, 10, 91, 94, 150; use of local names in his fiction, 12, 186n32; use of the “n” word by, 111; views of secession and states’ rights, 112; views of slavery, 59–60, 94–101, 111–12; visits of to Holly Springs, 15–16, 130. See also “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” Faulkner, William (WF), use of specific McCarroll/Francisco family stories by, 49, 63–64; the McCarroll family’s buried silver, 57–59, 73, 101–3, 138, 164, 191n21; mispronunciation of WF’s name as “Augur” by EWF, 50–51, 67; mouth washing of EWF, 49–50, 69–74; of the mules “Old Hundred” and “Tinney,” 138–39; naming of the one-eyed pony as “Sartis,” 56, 76–77; the one-eyed pony incident, 55–57, 74–80. See also Baugh, Ludie (Mary L.) Fearn, Dr. Anne Walter, 152, 153, 192n35 Featherston, Winfield Scott, 170 Featherston Place, 170 Fields, Kathy M., 14 Finley, Ruth, 170 Finley, Tom, 170 “Fire and the Hearth” (Faulkner), 39 Flags in the Dust (Faulkner), 17 Ford, Jennifer, 171 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 5 Francisco, Anne Salyerds (ASF [wife of EWF]), 12, 65, 101, 118, 178–79 Francisco, Dr. Edgar Wiggin, III (EWF), 9, 12, 55, 59, 60, 62–63, 192n30; childhood anxiety of concerning WF’s anger, 177–78; childhood remembrances of WF, 1, 13,

210 Francisco, Dr. Edgar Wiggin, III (continued) 16–17, 49; earliest memory of WF, 67; education and career of, 65–66; recollections of Mississippi hunting culture, 68–69. See also Faulkner, William (WF), use of specific McCarroll/Francisco family stories by; McCarroll Place Francisco, Edgar Wiggin, Jr. (father of EWF), 2, 4, 10, 53, 106, 176; dancing of, 10, 15, 79, 91, 92, 93, 94, 125; discussions of slavery with WF, 59–60, 94–101; election of to public office, 119; friendship of with WF, 10–11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 49, 55–56, 63–64, 75, 90–93, 94, 119, 157–58; insurance business of, 93–94, 115, 157, 176–77, 193n47; marriage of to Ruth Bitzer, 11; mutual interests with WF and, 94; relationship of with his aunts, 59; WF’s “welcoming” of Edgar and his new bride after their honeymoon, 11, 84–85, 116–17, 151; writing of WF read by, 136–37. See also Faulkner, William (WF), use of specific McCarroll/Francisco family stories by; Julie (Francisco family cook) Francisco, Edgar Wiggin, Sr. (grandfather of EWF), 9, 151, 156 Francisco, Ruth Bitzer (mother of EWF), 11, 15, 55, 67, 156; denial of having known WF, 118; disapproval of WF, 11–12, 55, 73, 84, 90; first meeting of with WF, 84–86; and the Pilgrimage controversy with WF, 86–88; strict upbringing of, 89–90 Freeman, Carey, 171 Games of Property: Law, Race and Gender and Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses” (T. Davis), 40 Genovese, Eugene, 5; description of FTL, 181–82n7 Gibson, Luella, as antecedent of Dilsey Gibson in The Sound and the Fury, 62, 172, 173, 188–89n79, 193n45 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), 29–31, 108, 136, 186n12; depiction of slaves in, 31–36; miscegenation and incest in, 34–36; relationship between Isaac and Sam Fathers in,

i n de x 43; significance of the word “pantaloons” in, 39, 40, 187n60; terminology of the commedia dell’arte in, 39–40 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), borrowings from the Leak Diary found in: common terms of plantation life in both diary and novel, 38–41; debate between FTL and his brother (W. F. Leak) in diary and fictional debate between Ike McCaslin and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds in the novel, 45–47; farm commissary ledgers in the novel a reflection of the Leak Diary, 8, 43, 44–45, 104; farm commissary ledgers in the novel as a reflection of the Phillips Diary, 183n21; the Leak Diary as antecedent to Isaac’s reading of the McCaslin family ledgers in the novel, 29–31; Leak Diary names used as character names in the novel, 31; misspellings in diary echoed in the novel, 42; the name Caruthers in the diary and Carothers in the novel, 36–37; names of slaves (Isaac, Sam, and Moses) in the Leak Diary occurring as names of major characters in the novel (Isaac McCaslin, Sam Fathers, and Moses), 31, 32–34; particular person(s) the Leak Diary and the fictional farm ledger are addressed to, 44–45; poisoning in both diary and novel, 44; runaway slaves in both diary and novel, 43–44; sawmills and gristmills in both diary and novel, 45; similar recording of comet sightings in both diary and novel, 41; tragic life of Toney in Leak Diary and tragic life of Tomey (Tomy) in the novel, 34–35; use of the possessive for slave names in both diary and novel, 38 Grange movement, 171 Grant, Mrs. Ulysses S., 146 Grant, Ulysses S., 15, 86–87, 156 Greer, Sarah Doxey, 132–33, 192n30 Grey Gables, 171 Hamilton, William Baskerville, 12, 15 Hamlet, The (Faulkner), 28

i n de x 211 Handy, W. C., 15, 91 Hawkins, E. O., 53 Haynes, Jane Isbell, 52, 55 Highland Plantation, 6 Hill, Byrd, 124 Hillcrest Cemetery, 154–57 Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1, 9, 12–16, 66, 113; acceptance of slavery in, 13; early settlers in, 12; effect of the Civil War on, 14–15, 82; epidemic of yellow fever in, 14; famous homes of, 169–72; growth of due to the cotton industry, 160; in post–Civil War times, 15–16; springs near, 12, 161, 192n40; tornado in, 189n5; town square of, 157–62; types of homes built in, 13–14; Union and Confederate control of during the Civil War, 81. See also Holly Springs Pilgrimage; Van Dorn’s Raid Holly Springs Pilgrimage, 11–12, 15, 58–59, 133; controversy concerning, 86–88, 167–68; creation of, 189–90n10 Hour of Our Nation’s Agony, The (Ford), 171 House, James, 171 hunting, 10, 77, 78, 79; culture of in Mississippi, 68–69, 189n2 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner), 52 James R. Ruffin Records, 7–8 Jerdone family diary, 5 Johnson, Oscar, 152, 170 Jones, Rufus, 170 Julie (Francisco family cook), 89, 120–21, 173; sharing of the food she cooked, 123; sources of the food she cooked, 123–24; types of food she cooked, 122; WF’s fascination with her authority, 121–22 Lamar, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, 36–37, 111, 174–75 Leak, Betsy (daughter of WJL; grandmother of EWF), 9, 10, 52, 75, 88, 93, 96, 98, 103, 105, 106, 110, 156; birth of, 191n28; poor health of, 140–41 Leak, Francis Terry (FTL), 2, 3, 5, 28, 44, 75,

106, 181–82n7; death of as indirect result of the Civil War, 4, 97, 109, 191n17; emotionless nature of, 22; health of, 145–46; interest of in meteorology, 40–41; landholdings of, 9, 79, 108; landholdings of in Arkansas, 3, 9, 43, 45, 79, 105, 108, 109; legal career of, 3–4; letters of to L.Q.C. Lamar, 37, 111, 174–75; literacy of, 8–9; personality of, 108–9; relationship of to his slaves, 41–42; slave holdings of, 95–96, 109; support of the Confederate cause, 4, 17. See also “Diary of Francis Terry Leak” Leak, Henry Booth (son of FTL), 22 Leak, W. F. (brother of FTL), 45 Leak, Walter John (WJL [son of FTL]), 4–5, 44, 104, 106, 109, 110, 134, 156; death of, 9, 96, 97, 98, 105, 155; marriage to Amelia McCarroll, 9, 155 Lenson (“Lenso”), 10, 55, 74–75, 76, 77, 143, 174, 192n33 Light in August (Faulkner), 191n27 Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 36 Love, Sam, 175–76 Lowe, John, 179 Ludie’s Window. See Baugh, Ludie (Mary L.) lye soap, 102–3, 148 Lynn, Jorja, 152 Lynn, Mike, 152 Magnolias, 172 Mansion, The (Faulkner), 18 Marshall County, Mississippi, 14, 66 Mason, William F., 172 Matthews, John T., 40 McCarroll, Amelia Leak (daughter of JRM), 9–10, 14, 54; as antecedent of Ellen Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! 96, 97, 98, 104, 105, 131, 146, 154–55, 161, 166, 176, 177, 189n5; ability of as a seamstress, 140; birth of her daughter Betsy, 191n28; burial place of, 137; burying of the McCarroll’s family silver by, 57, 101, 138; generosity of, 137–38; possession of the Leak Diary, 191n26; strength of character of,

212 McCarroll, Amelia Leak (continued) 58, 140–41; unrealized expectations of, 109–10 McCarroll, John Ramsey (JRM [great-greatgrandfather of EWF]), 1, 9, 12, 52, 54, 57, 66, 75, 80, 81, 93, 106, 112, 137, 140, 155, 156, 170, 177; best friends of, 172; building of the McCarroll Place by, 124–25, 130; “Fair 50–50 Plan” of regarding his slaves, 60, 95–96; marriage to Elizabeth Eddins, 124; as sheriff, 147, 166; and the story of the McCarroll family’s silver, 101–3 McCarroll, Mary (daughter of JRM), 124 McCarroll, Sallie (daughter of JRM), as antecedent of Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! 58–59, 98 McCarroll Farm, 165; curing of hams on, 166–67; livestock of, 166 McCarroll Place, 1, 66–67, 93, 124–25, 153; additions to, 12–13, 125, 153; bedrooms of, 126, 131, 162–63; building dates of, 125– 26, 168; Civil War equipment found in, 126; “double-pen” construction of, 130, 153, 169; family stories concerning, 11; fireplaces of, 128–29; front entrance of, 149–50; furniture of, 127–28; gallery of, 10, 11, 13, 50, 52, 66, 77–78, 82, 125–26, 130, 131–33, 150, 185n24; heating of, 163; houses adjacent to, 160–61; influence of on WF, 61–64; library of, 126, 128; occupation of by both Union and Confederate troops, 126–27; orchards of, 148–49; outbuilding of (brick kitchen), 143–44; pond and gardens of, 151; sorghum mill of, 145; spring of, 13, 58, 61, 62–63, 66, 122, 124, 147–48, 160–62, 175. See also Baugh, Ludie (Mary L.) McCarroll/Francisco family, 1; effect of the Civil War on, 82; survival of during the Civil War, 164–65. See also Faulkner, William (WF), use of specific McCarroll/ Francisco family stories by McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family, 2–3, 63; conflicts between the Leak and McCarroll

i n de x families, 96, 97–98; history of, 9–12; survival of during the Civil War, 14–15 McCrosky, Hiram, 172 McEwen, Alexander, 170, 172 McEwen, Elizabeth, 170 McGowan, Robert, 172 Memphis, 14, 15, 18, 20, 52, 54, 57, 66, 80–81, 101, 126, 133, 138, 154, 179, 189n7; growth of, 160 Millgate, Michael, 53 Montrose, 172 Moss, Fredonia Johnson, 152, 153–54 Moss, Phoebe, 152 Natchez Pilgrimage, 86–87, 189–90n10 Nelson, James Henry, 171 Nelson, Maria Courtney Goodrich, 171 Nelson, William Cowper, 171 Norfleet, Lessie, 170 Oakes, James, 5, 6 Olson, Roberta J. M., 187–88n66 oral storytelling, tradition of in the South, 49 Oxford, Mississippi, 15, 16, 27, 37, 52–53, 57, 75, 84, 90, 117, 158, 164, 178, 183–85n23 “Pantaloon in Black” (Faulkner), 40, 187n60 Payne, Connie, 191n22 Payne, Harvey, 103, 154, 191n22 Philips, M. W., 6 plantation diary writing: capitalist nature of, 5; recording of the realities of plantation life in, 5–6; rules for slaves recorded in, 6–7; as slaveholder records, 5; tradition of in plantation life, 5 Plantation Overseer, The (Bassett), 8 Polk, Noel, 53, 54 Pruitt, Olga, 14, 169 “Raid” (Faulkner), 74 Rather, Ed, 16, 79, 174 “Reconstruction in Marshall County” (Watkins), 14 Records of Ante-bellum Southern Plantations (University Publications of America), 5

i n de x 213 Reivers, The (Faulkner), 18, 28, 52 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner), 52, 53 “Retreat” (Faulkner), 57, 72, 73 Revels, Hiram Rhodes, 156 Roark, James, 6 Salem, Mississippi, 3, 4, 9, 27, 134, 153, 155; destruction of during the Civil War, 109, 110 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 13 Sartoris (Faulkner), 17 sassafras, 146 Sensibar, Judith, 39–40, 185n23 Sherman, William T., 15 Shettles, Abner, 47, 48 “Shingles for the Lord” (Faulkner), 29 Shipp, Lois Swaney, 103, 171, 191n23 slavery, 3, 13, 59–60, 94–95; slaveholder records, 5; unproductive nature of slave labor, 111–12; violence of, 35 slaves, 6, 21; buying and selling of, 8, 41, 42–43, 108; depiction of in WF’s fiction, 31–36; rules for, 6–7; runaway slaves, 41, 43–44; whipping of, 6, 41, 43 Snopes Trilogy, similarities to the Leak Diary, 28–29 sorghum, 145 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 17–20, 61; Benjy Compson in, 61, 62; Caddy Compson in, 19, 61; Dilsey Gibson in, 62; Pearl Badow as antecedent to Caddy Compson character in, 62 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), borrowings from the Leak Diary found in, 17–18, 192n34, 193n45; Benj Collins as antecedent for Benjy/Benjamin Compson in, 18; Candis as antecedent for Candace in, 18; the cotton market in both diary and novel, 19–20; Francis Leak’s medical problems reflected in the characters of Jason and Quentin Compson, 19; killing of hogs in both diary and novel, 19; the names Caroline, Meek, and Dalton in both diary and novel, 18; ordinary details appearing in both diary and novel, 18–19

“Spotted Horses” (Faulkner), 28–29 Strickland, Belle, 171 Strickland, Frank, 61, 62, 188–89n79, 193n45, 193n45 Strickland, H. W., 37 Strickland, Janey Leak, 103, 109, 188–89n79 Strickland, Martha Mildred Thomson, 171 Strickland, Pearl (later Pearl Badow), 61, 103, 172, 173, 188–89n79, 193n45; as antecedent to Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury, 62 Strickland, William, 109, 171, 188–89n79 Sweitzer, Gerald, 14 “There Was a Queen” (Faulkner), 61 Thompson, Jeff, 37 Thompson, Nettie Fant, 170 Thornton, Patrick Hamilton, 170 Tippah County, Mississippi, 27 Turnbull, William, 8 Turnbull-Bowman-Lyons Family Papers, 8 Tyson, Helen, 132–33, 192n30 Unvanquished, The (Faulkner), 26–28, 62–63, 108, 136, 146, 159, 186n32; Bayard Sartoris as romanticized projection of WF in, 189n4; Granny Millard in, 58; the McCarroll family as model for the family in, 139–40; mouth washing incident in, 70, 71; one-eyed pony story in, 78; Ringo in, 56, 174; the story of the McCarrolls’ buried silver as a source for, 57 Unvanquished, The (Faulkner), borrowings from the Leak Diary found in, 99; Amelia Leak as antecedent for Granny Millard in, 192n32; college experiences in both diary and novel, 27–28; key words from the diary found in the novel, 27; similar place names in both diary and novel, 27; William L. Baird as antecedent to Bayard Sartoris in, 26 Van Dorn, Earl, 15 Van Dorn’s Raid, 15, 126–27 Vanishing America, A (Carter), 161

214 Vicksburg, Mississippi, 15, 126, 127 Vicksburg Pilgrimage, 189–90n10 Walter, Harvey Washington, 152 Walter, Irene Johnson, 152 Walter Place, 152–54, 172 Walthall, Bennett, 170 Walthall, Edward, 170 Walthall-Freeman Home, 170 “Was” (Faulkner), 44 Watkins, Dr. Floyd C., ix, xiii Watkins, Ruth, 14 Watson, Cora, 171

i n de x Watson, Jay, 179 Wells, Ida, 193n46 Wells, James, 174, 193n46 West, Absolom Madden, 170–71, 192n41 White Pillars, 169, 172 Williams, Joan, 16, 186n47 Williamson, Joel, 16 Winborn, Hugh, 171 Winter, Milton, 102, 103, 118 Wintering, The (Williams), 16 Wolf, John, 117–18, 192n29 yellow fever, 14, 22, 152

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