William Faulkner and Southern History

TWILLIAM FAULKNER AND SOUTHERN HISTORY

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WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SOUTHERN HISTORY

Joel Williamson

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

New

York

Oxford

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1993 by Joel Williamson First published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1995 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and southern history / Joel Williamson, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-507404-1 ISBN 0-19-510129-4 (Pbk.) 1. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962—Knowledge—Southern States. 2. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962—Biography. 3. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Southern States in literature. 5. Southern States—Civilization. 6, Southern States—Biography. I. Title. PS3511.A86Z98574 1993 813'.52—dc20 [b] 92-22780 Permissions are listed on p vi.

For Anna

I am grateful to the following writers and publishers for permission to reprint selections from previously published works and to use selections from previously unpublished works: Random House, Inc. For excerpts from: Light in August by William Faulkner. Copyright 1932 and renewed 1960 by William Faulkner. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. The Hamlet by William Faulkner. Copyright 1940 by William Faulkner and renewed 1968 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner. Copyright 1942 by William Faulkner and renewed 1969 by Jill Faulkner Summers. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner. Copyright 1977 by Joseph Blotner. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Copyright 1946. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. The Reivers by William Faulkner. Copyright 1962. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. The Mansion by William Faulkner. Copyright 1959. Reprinted by permission of Randon House, Inc. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. Copyright 1936. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner. Copyright 1948. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. The Town by William Faulkner. Copyright 1957. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Faulkner: A Biography by Joseph Blotner. Copyright 1974, 1984. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. University Press of Mississippi. For excerpts from: William Faulkner: A Life on Paper, script by A.I. Bezzerides, introduction by Carvel Collins, adapted and edited by Ann Abadie. Copyright © 1980. Count No-Count, Flashbacks to Faulkner by Ben Wasson. Copyright © 1983. University of Tennessee Press. For excerpts from: Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters, ed. Charles E. Modlin. Copyright © 1984. University of Texas Press. For excerpts from: William Faulkner: Life Glimpses by Louis Daniel Brodsky. Copyright © 1990. By permission of the author and the University of Texas. Seajay Press. For excerpts from: William Faulkner: His Tippah County Heritage by Jane Isbell Haynes. Copyright © 1985. The Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Howard Mumford Jones. Copyright 1953 by Eleanor Anderson. Copyright renewed 1981 by Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson. The Viking Press. For excerpts from: Writers at Work: The Paris Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley. Copyright 1958. Dun and Bradstreet and the Baker Library of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. For excerpts from: The R. G. Dun & Co. Collection. Writer to writer, I am also grateful to the following: Ann Abadie Joseph Blotner Louis Daniel Brodsky Robert Hamblin James Meriwether Michael Millgate Joan Williams

Contents OUT OF THE GARDEN

ONE

Ancestry

1. The Falkners 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

11

The Colonel The Butlers Flight

TWO

41 77 111

Biography

Youth, 1897-1918 The Artist as a Young Man, 1918-1929 The Middle Years, 1929-1950 The Search, 1950-1956 The Virginia Years, 1956-1962

THREE

3

141 184 225 275 315

The Writing

A Faulknerian Universe 10. Sex in the Sylvan Setting 11. Community

355 365 399

THE GARDEN

427

Acknowledgments Notes Index Genealogy

435 439 483 511

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WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SOUTHERN HISTORY

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Out of the Garden

Himself "Born?" he said, repeating the question. "Yes. I was born male and single at an early age in Mississippi. I am still alive but not single." William Faulkner, in 1931, was being flip and fighting for his privacy as he answered the questions of Marshall Smith, a reporter from the Memphis PressScimitar, Faulkner had leapt suddenly into the popular eye with the publication of his book Sanctuary. In writing that story, he later said, he had deliberately set out to create not a great novel, but merely a lucrative one. His goal, at age thirty-three, was to publish a book that would sell 10,000 copies. None of his several earlier works had sold more than 2,000. By his own account, Sanctuary did not represent a heavy investment of time; he wrote the manuscript, he sometimes boasted, in three weeks. In reality, it was written in several months over a two-year period.1 The story featured sex and violence—the two meeting most memorably when a gangster-bootlegger-villain named Popeye raped a seventeen-year-old University of Mississippi co-ed, Temple Drake, with a corncob and subsequently held her a not entirely unwilling captive in a Memphis brothel. Sanctuary won instant attention, including some significant acclaim as a work of genius and general condemnation as a dirty book. Ironically, critics at large had only grudgingly noticed Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, a work that many literary scholars eventually came to see as America's

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greatest twentieth-century experiment in the art of the novel, one that compared favorably with James Joyce's highly celebrated Ulysses, published in 1922. Neither were they impressed, at first, with another masterpiece, As I Lay Dying, published in 1930. William Faulkner's writings abound in paradox, and so too does his life. He craved fame and fortune, but he hated the scrutiny that success brought to his personal life. Usually mannerly, sometimes engaging, even warm and easy with children, some relatives, and a few friends, he grew reticent and ultimately surly and insulting when he felt that his own life was under inspection. When forced to emerge into public view against his will, he often stood behind a shield of impeccably correct manners and a reticence that approached taciturnity. At other times, he exhibited a Faulkner manque, a persona, a Faulkner that was neither appealing nor, objectively considered, very real. The Memphis reporter had traveled the seventy-five miles southeast to Oxford, Mississippi, to visit Faulkner at Rowan Oak, his home on the southern edge of the village. It was summer and Sunday in the midst of the Great Depression. The interview began with Faulkner, unshaven, casual, a small, slight, dark man, squatting on the kitchen floor, siphoning homebrew into used ginger ale bottles out of a cracked churn. A neighbor, a black man, was helping him. Another black man came to the back door. Standing barefooted on the porch, he mumbled something about "two bits" and needing some "cawn meal." He left, flipping a quarter into the air, catching it, flipping it again. Faulkner and the reporter carried cool pitchers of beer out into the yard and sat under cedars planted for the pleasure of Rowan Oak's antebellum mistress. Faulkner had bought the house a year before. It was built in the 1840s, the landscaping of magnolias, cedars, and crape myrtle designed and executed, tradition insisted, by an English architect specially imported for the task. Once considered a grand mansion for its time and place, with a portico and four two-story columns, it was now gray and decaying. Faulkner was bringing Rowan Oak to life again, doing much of the work himself, installing support beams, plumbing, heating, and wiring day by day after he had finished a morning of writing. The interview ran through one pitcher of beer and into another. The reporter asked Faulkner what he thought about education. The writer confessed to having spent five years in the seventh grade (metaphorically true in that Faulkner had very little interest in school beyond his seventh year). He continued his biography. "Quit school and went to work in Grandfather's bank," he said, dropping to a style of omitting the personal pronoun. It could have been an outline of a story, or a parody of the clipped language of entries in Who's Who in America. "Learned the medicinal value of his liquor. Grandfather thought it was the janitor. Hard on the janitor." World War I saved Faulkner from the bank and brought him out of Mississippi. "Liked British uniform. Got commission R.F.C. pilot. Crashed. Cost British government 2000 pounds. Was

Out of the Garden still pilot. Crashed. Cost British government 2000 pounds. Quit. Cost British government $84.30. King said, 'Well done!' Returned to Mississippi."2 The persona that Faulkner offered the reporter was one of a highly talented and unpretentious writer, cosmopolitan in experience but still a country man, a farmer, hunter, and fisher—and a naturally good storyteller. Nothing of the "Smart Set" about William Faulkner, no lacing of language with French phrases, no hint of racing sports cars or smooth-legged flappers, no Hemingway or Fitzgerald here. Indeed, he was unique. Perhaps no American writer between the World Wars wrote so well without leaving home, and probably none was so deeply unknowable. Over the next twenty years particularly, Faulkner would remain very much a man of mystery. When pressed, he offered stories that were, in effect, deceptive, and made statements that contradicted themselves or were so elliptical as to be nearly meaningless. Virtually no one, it seems, ever knew the real Faulkner. But they certainly knew his work.

His Wor{ In the year 1931 Faulkner was in the second of three major phases of his life as a publishing writer. The first began in 1924 when he produced a book of poems entitled The Marble Faun. It is often alleged that Faulkner changed the spelling of his family name at that point from the traditional "Falkner" by simply accepting and adopting an error in printing. It is much more likely that Faulkner, himself, deliberately chose to change the spelling in 1918 when he was posing as an Englishman and plotting to join the Royal Air Force. For several years thereafter, sometimes his name would be spelled with a "u" and sometimes not. Whenever and however the switch occurred, Faulkner afterward embraced a change that set him slightly and subtly apart from his family, and through his writing he brought high honor and global fame to that chosen name. In 1925, at the instigation of his friend, the writer Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner authored, in six weeks, the original draft for his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926). This story was a relatively shallow reflection of the mood of the writers of the "lost generation," people such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald who were disillusioned with the fruits of World War I. In 1927 he ended this first phase with Mosquitoes, a parody rather bitterly attacking the superficiality of New Orleans society and its pretensions to cultural sophistication. Within these two novels, there were suggestions of genius, but no one could have guessed what was to come. In 1929, when he was barely thirty-two, Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury. Most of his early works were written in a matter of months, and sometimes with very little or no rewriting. The Sound and the Fury took three years,

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so he said, from inception to completion. In reality, it was less than a year. But he rewrote it five times, and he certainly labored at it with an intensity and a concentration he had not previously achieved. It was a labor of love; he never expected the story to be published successfully, and by the time he finished the manuscript he had even surrendered hope of earning his living as a writer. Later, he prized that book above his other works and declared that it was the most painful of all to write. Its appearance marked a high point in the ten-year period between 1926 and 1936 in which Faulkner enjoyed a productivity unmatched, perhaps, in brilliance in American literature. Out of that labor came three of America's great novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936); and seven monumental characters: Thomas Sutpen, Joe Christmas, Dilsey Gibson, and the Compson children: Benjy, Jason, Candace, and Quentin. In these three novels, Faulkner accomplished a remarkable array of literary achievements. Most importantly, he laid out the natural and human geography of the mythical Mississippi county, Yoknapatawpha, that was at the core of his work. Fourteen of his nineteen novels centered on the people and culture of Yoknapatawpha. It was the "little postage stamp," as he said, of native soil that he knew so well and which he peopled with men, women, and children who seemed to have lives of their own, independent of the author. It was as if he had only to look in upon them from time to time to see what they were doing and thinking, often himself to be amazed, amused, or appalled by what he saw. He listened well to them, and they told him all—or nearly all—in a multitude of voices. Appropriate to that mood, he often said that he never named his characters. They told him what their names were, and if they did not, he did not give them names. Obviously, he was a superb listener; if told, he got the names right; if not told, the characters were no less true. The stage happened to be the South, the subject was the human condition, and the play was on-going and without end. For Faulkner, his literary world was a theater in the round of humanity, visible to him from every point of view, true from every point of view, at once divisible into individual lives and indivisible as a social organism. Stories could never be totally told from a single perspective, or by a single person, and sometimes perhaps they could not be fully told at all. In the effort of telling, however, he was fantastically adventurous, almost suicidal in his willingness to cast aside traditional modes of writing. He was boldly innovative in structure and style. Like Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, he rode full tilt and heedless of hazard, furiously inventing language to capture the plenitude of life. The genius as artist faded after 1936, but the craftsman lived on in the third and final phase of his life as a writer. In 1938 he published The Unvanquished, a series of stories in which the child Bayard Sartoris grew from youth to manhood during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and in 1939 The Wild Palms,

Out of the Garden two stories woven together counterpunctually to explore the implications of choosing a life that presses at the limits of either human freedom on one side or human order on the other. In 1940 with the publication of the first novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, Faulkner, at age forty-three, exhibited the qualities of a mature, practiced, and superbly controlled writer. He continued the saga of the transplantation of Southern dirt farmers physically to the towns and culturally into modernity in The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). At the same time, he turned to address the race question powerfully and pointedly in Go Down Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Requiem for a Nun (1951). Race was central, integral, and vital in the three great novels of the earlier phase of his work. Indeed, in the characters Dilsey Gibson, Joe Christmas, and Charles Bon these works remain, probably, the ultimate indictment not merely of the injustice of the racial establishment in the South in and after slavery, but of its capacity for the often subtle, always brutal reduction of humanity, both black and white. Simultaneously, however, these novels offer the contrary capacity of humanity at large to survive and transcend the most devastating afflictions. Criticism of race relations is implicit in the early novels; in the later novels it is explicit. In this last phase, Faulkner recapitulated the essence of his writing in two superb stories. In 1942 the master was at work in a quiet and sober mood in "The Bear." This is the story of a boy, Isaac McCaslin, becoming a man in the post-Civil War South. It is a beautifully crafted, tight, crystalline story, one clear, smooth face, touching another at angle after angle to form a flawless gem that one can turn in one's hand. In the year preceding his death in 1962, Faulkner wrote The Reivers in a very different mood. It is profoundly humorous, yet deeply serious, and perhaps the most appealing of all his tales. It, too, is about a young boy, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Priest, coming of age in the modern world, but the mood has shifted dramatically. Whereas "The Bear" ends with death and despair, The Reivers ends with birth and a new life. "The Bear" longs for a return to nature, to the Garden of Eden, while The Reivers faces the reality that we are now and forever out of the Garden and manifests a faith that we will, indeed, endure and prevail.

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PART ONE

Ancestry

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ONE

The Falkners

The Land Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County was, of course, his own Lafayette County, Mississippi, and the surrounding counties. Like Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha had regions. In the river bottoms the land was flat, dark, and rich, made rich over the ages by the rushing waters that tore away topsoil from the undefended flanks of hills and mountains, flooded over the banks and levees, spreading, slowing, and as it slowed gently dropping a rain of fresh soil onto those broad acres soon to be filled with black people and white cotton—dropping, as it were, money into the pockets of the cotton aristocracy, the Compsons, Sartorises, Sutpens, and McCaslins of Faulkner's fictional world. In the hill country, the soil was red and thin. It bled easily and profusely at the touch of the plow, and ran eventually to gullies, to farm houses unpainted and weathering, and to the plain folk of the Old South and the New—the lean and tendon-tough Cowries, Quicks, Workits, Bundrens, and McCallums. Yoknapatawpha was Mississippi, and it was also all of the South. The black belts, those areas where the black population stood near a majority or more, extended up and down the vast level lands alongside the Mississippi River and its major tributaries, skipped to form a jagged-edged belt across central Alabama and Georgia, then skipped again to run generally along the eastern coastal plain from northern Florida through low country Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. The black belts were heavily 11

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12

peopled by African Americans because slavery had commanded the best lands, and these lands were, each in its time at least, the best. For the most part, large slaveowners were successful business people who would not work a thousanddollar slave on fifty-cent land. Slavery also seized upon and moved with the most profitable crops, first in the colonial era with tobacco in the Chesapeake Bay area and rice and indigo along the Carolina and Georgia coasts, then, after the 1790s, with cotton in the upcountry of the Carolinas and Georgia, spreading westward over the decades and, by the 1850s, filling eastern Texas and Arkansas. Broadly speaking, from the beginning of slavery in the South to its end, valuable slaves worked valuable lands to turn maximum profits. Even emancipation did not change the congruence of rich soil and dark people in Dixie — nor has it yet. What the demise of slavery did do, paradoxically, was turn the richest counties in America in 1860, those most slave, to the poorest in 1870, and that result, too, has persisted. Relatively less rich lands in the South— those in the piedmont, the mountains, the "pine barrens" and the "wire grass country" of the coastal plains — tended to be populated by white majorities. Most of these people owned no slaves, lived on farms, worked hard, raised families, and went to church. Roughly two-thirds of all Southern whites belonged to this element. There were great slaveholders in the white belts just as there were yeoman farmers in the black belts. But wherever they were, the great slaveholders tended to dominate economics, politics, and society generally. On the wastelands of the South, down in the swamps and high in the mountains, lived the so-called poor whites, a third element that probably constituted less than a hundredth of the total white population. Usually they were squatters living on land that they did not own, and usually the women tended small gardens and raised animals while the men fished and hunted. The structure of antebellum Southern society was complex, but, taken as a whole, it was pyramidal with slaves and free blacks constituting a caste and forming a base. At the bottom of the white caste were the poor whites who were generally despised by both blacks and other whites and sometimes referred to by them as "poor white trash." The great mass of white Southerners were yeoman farmers who might, indeed, own one or more slaves but who turned their hands to the very same tasks as their slaves. At the top stood the large slaveholders (often identified as those owning fifty slaves or more) whose work was management and who were somehow able, usually, to enlist the support of other whites in the defense of the system from which they derived great power and wealth. In the last years of slavery, there were perhaps 50,000 people belonging to some 10,000 families that constituted the slaveholding elite. A surprisingly large number of leading ministers, lawyers, politicians, physicians, businessmen, and intellectuals were members of these families, even though they might, themselves, own few or no slaves. There was among these people a generalized

The Falfyners

sense of superiority—manifested most signally in a reluctance to marry beneath their station. But they did not often boast publicly of their elevation over others. On the contrary, usually they were very adept at running a rhetorical line that preached democracy for whites and slavery for blacks as an ideal for Southern society. The war and the loss of the war brought the great slaveholders rudely down. Some lost out in wealth and power altogether, and their lands and places in the social hierarchy were sometimes taken by the more ambitious, able, and fortunate members of the postwar yeomanry, whom Faulkner called "The Peasants." Others persisted, reduced in wealth and power but still palpably the local "quality." These, if they stayed in the South, were doomed perpetually to be major players in the minor leagues. The truth is that military defeat for the rebels in the Civil War led inexorably to the reduction of their political and economic power in the nation, and so, too, that of their children and their children's children. Over the two generations after Appomattox, the South became imperial America's first colony. The reduction was effected by discriminatory tariffs and railroad freight charges, by high interest rates and low wages, and by holding the South to the production of low-priced raw materials and the consumption of relatively costly finished goods produced in the North. The decline began with the loss of political power in the nation. It is perfectly symbolic that eight of the first twelve presidents of the United States were Southerners, and that all eight were not just slaveholders, but very large slaveholders. Moreover, their collective tenure was long while that of Northern-bred presidents—two Adamses, Van Buren, and Harrison—was short, comprising all together only slightly more than twelve of the sixty-one presidential years between 1789 and 1850. After the Civil War, more than a hundred years would elapse before a "true" Southerner would occupy the White House again. Andrew Johnson (1865-69) was a Tennessean who chose the Northern side during the war. Two generations later, Woodrow Wilson was president. He was born in Staunton, Virginia, and reared in the South, but he was president of Princeton and governor of New Jersey before he was president of the United States. Harry S. Truman was from Independence, Missouri, but Kansas City was his metropolis and he was more Midwestern than Southern. Lyndon B. Johnson was born and reared on the southwestern-most edge of the South, so far in that direction in fact that his second language was Spanish. Finally, it was Jimmy Carter who brought the South again to the presidency, but he, like the two Adamses and Van Buren, enjoyed only a short tenure. In sum, the South was vastly reduced after the war, and only recently—five generations later—are there signs that it might rise again to some parity in national power. If there has been anything like a thoroughly Southern state in these United States in the last hundred and fifty years, Mississippi is it. This is true, in large part, because Mississippi drew upon the older areas of the South for its peopling

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and its culture. For example, in the nineteenth century very few South Carolinians migrated to Virginia and vice versa, but both centers of eastern culture sent their representatives to Mississippi in great numbers. On the eve of the Civil War, Mississippi was filled with the descendants of the primal stock that had first settled the South Atlantic seaboard. Sometimes those migrants came the distance in one generation, sometimes in two or three, and often they came west and south by way of Tennessee and Alabama. Mississippi could be thus representative because it was new. It filled with people and formed its collective identity only in the last generation before the Civil War when the civilization of the Old South was maturing and coming to full bloom. As late as the 1830s the northeastern two-thirds of the state was still a raw frontier. Indians, roving whites, and blacks had mixed in the area even before the American Revolution, but it was only in the 1790s that the first permanent settlers came, and later still the flood. In the days of the early republic, much of northern Mississippi was Indian territory. In 1830, in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, the Choctaws signed over claim to their lands in middle Mississippi in return for lands in Oklahoma and money. They acted reluctantly upon advice given by one of their chiefs, Greenwood Leflore, a man who was himself the son of an Indian mother and a white father and who received gifts from the United States government for his work. Two years later, King Ishtahotapa of the Chickasaws led his people to yield their lands in northern Mississippi in the Treaty of Pontotoc.1 It was cotton, of course, that brought both whites and blacks to Mississippi, cotton to feed the burgeoning textile mills of New England, England, and Europe. Pioneering settlers poured into the state in the early and middle 1830s as the price of cotton rose and land remained relatively abundant. The panic of 1837 and the depression that followed gave pause. But recovery in the mid18405 brought a new and greater influx from the slave-rich, land-poor upper South and Southeast. With cotton selling fairly steadily at ten to twelve cents a pound in the local markets, the 1850s were high times in Mississippi, and it seemed as if the bubble would never burst. In the spring of 1860, the future looked so sanguine to the clerk of court of Lafayette County sitting in Oxford that he could not refrain from opening the March term of court with a celebratory entry in one of his record books: . . . good Times in our County Cotton worth 103/4 Corn one dollar per bushel Bacon 15 cents per Ib. Negroe men 1500 to 2000-hundred dollars and woman [sic] from 1300 to 1800 and times Still looking up So press up Boys2

The First Mississippi Falkner Family tradition says that William C. Falkner, the first Mississippi Falkner, walked into Pontotoc, a village some thirty miles east of Oxford, about 1842. He

The Falfaers was a penniless teenager, his family having fallen upon hard times in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and he was searching for his uncle by marriage, John Wesley Thompson. William had left home, the story goes, because of a fight in which he had cut his brother Joe's scalp with the blade of a hoe and been punished.4 William Falkner was born in 1825 near Knoxville, Tennessee, the first child of Joseph Falkner and Caroline Word. His parents had married in 1816 and had come west from their home in Surry County, North Carolina, on the eastern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. The spelling of family names often varied and drifted in these times; Falkner sometimes became Forkner or Faulkner, and in North Carolina members of the clan usually called themselves Forkner. Given names in the family, however, did not vary greatly. For males, William and John were highly favored, while Henry, James, and Thomas were frequent.5 Census and other records indicate that the Falkners continued to live in Tennessee into the year 1837, when William would have been twelve, and then moved to Missouri.6 John Wesley Thompson, the uncle whom William sought in Mississippi, had married Justianna Dickinson Word, William's mother's sister, in 1834. Their father, Thomas Adams Word, had been the sheriff of Surry County, a justice of the peace, a lieutenant colonel in the militia, and a substantial landowner near the village of Mt. Airy. His father, Charles, had joined Colonel George Washington's Virginia Blues as "a mere boy" and barely survived Braddock's defeat (1755) in western Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War. Charles Word, however, did not survive the Battle of King's Mountain (1780) during the American Revolution. Charles's youngest brother, Cuthbert, also met his end in that struggle. He was captured by the Tories and British and died as a prisoner of war aboard the ship New Jersey. Charles and Cuthbert's father, also named Charles Word, had come to Virginia from the city of Landaff in Glenmorgonshire in Wales before the French and Indian War, and probably settled in Pittsylvania County on the southwestern frontier. After the War of 1812, Thomas Adams Word moved with some of his family to Clarkesville in Habersham County in northern Georgia. There, in the fall of 1834, John Wesley Thompson, his son-in-law, got into a fight and killed a man with a knife. From surviving family papers, we catch first-hand impressions of that drama. In the October term, 1834, the Habershham County grand jury found that John Wesley Thompson, aged twenty-five, had indeed thrust "a certain Knife of the value of one dollar" into the belly of Calvin J. Hanks inflicting a mortal wound two inches wide and six inches deep. "Aiding, abetting and assisting" Thompson were three other men, including Cuthbert Word, Thompson's brother-in-law.8 Justianna, then nineteen, visited her husband in jail once and wanted to return but was prevented from doing so by his desire to spare her the pain of again witnessing his incarceration. Instead she sent a letter, urging him to allow

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her to provide him with bed clothes and "a cloke" because there was no fire in the jail. Apparently "Wesley," as she addressed him, persisted in playing a proud role and scorned creature comforts. "Mother wanted Cuthbert to carry . . . a cloke to you and he said you did not want it," Justianna wrote. Wesley replied on the same sheet of paper, brushing past matters of logistics and asking her to save some of his recent letters to her "as a fond Memento of him who found but one on Earth whom he loved without alloy and you are She." He went on to declare his undying love for Justianna in the grand and flowing language of the Romantic era. "The mighty Globe on which we live and move will in its destined round wane, and sink and disappear;" he wrote, "but we Shall Survive its break; and live in immortal youth; twined together by the Silken Cords of mortal love; such bonds as can not be broken."9 Justianna was hardly less romantic than her husband. A decade before she had written a poem entitled "A Nosegay" for a gentleman friend: I'll pull a bunch of buds and flowers, And tie a ribbon round them, If you'll but think (in your lone hours) Of the little Girl that bound them.10

John Wesley Thompson was acquitted by the Georgia court and subsequently moved to the village of Ripley in Tippah County, in northeastern Mississippi. In 1838, John and Justianna were joined in Tippah County by Justianna's sister Elizabeth and her husband Charles W. Humphreys. According to one version of the family legend, in 1842 John was away from home teaching school in Plenitude in Pontotoc County when he fell into an affray and killed yet another man. When William arrived in the village of Pontotoc, the county seat, he found his uncle in jail awaiting trial for murder, and, of course, not well situated to help his nephew. Young William, tired, ragged, and barefooted, sat down on the steps of the local hotel, dropped his head into his hands, and began to cry. A little girl named Elizabeth Vance befriended him, and the next day she and her mother arranged for him to journey by stage to Ripley to stay with his aunt Justianna. Eventually, Lizzie Vance became William's second wife. The legend says that John Wesley Thompson studied law while in jail and successfully defended himself against the charge of murder. Once free, he returned to Ripley, became a lawyer, and prospered. The court record indicates that John Wesley Thompson was never even charged with—much less jailed for—murder or any other crime in Pontotoc County. On the other hand, he was indeed an early settler in Tippah County. He was listed on the very first tax roll in 1837 as owing a tax bill of 37'/2