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"Barn Burning" Terms | Life | Times | Class Discussion | Group Questions | Links | Pictures | Quotes from Critics Terms to Know After 1865 most freedmen worked for their former owners on a year-to-year contract. These contracts usually offered food and a small monthly stipend in exchange for working under gang labor, which was too much like slavery for African Americans. They felt that freedom entitled them to break as far as possible from the world of prewar plantations. In great numbers, they broke their contracts and tried to lease small plots of land to live as independent farmers. One sympathetic observer wrote: "The sole ambition of the freedman at the present time appears to be to become the owner of a little piece of land, there to erect a humble home, and to dwell in peace and security at his own free will and pleasure." Rejecting plantation labor, the freedpeople and the plantation owners came up with a compromise, which was sharecropping. Once they settled on a parcel of land, the ex-slaves entered into credit relationships with local merchants and landowners. Over time, a relatively predictable system was established. Landowners gave freedmen the bare necessities to farm the land: seeds, tools, fertilizer, clothing, and food. In return for the use of the land, sharecroppers paid plantation owners or landlords a share of the yearly harvest, usually about half. The freedmen retained their portion of the crop to feed their families and to pay merchants (owners could also be merchants) for goods purchased on credit during the year. However, these goods were often sold at inflated prices and with high interest rates. Thus, by the end of the year the tenant generally owed so much to the landowner that the debt could not be entirely repaid. Essentially, freedmen moved from lives of chattel slavery to lives of debt peonage. Although sharecropping was especially common among African-American freedmen, it also affected white farmers. Yeomen who sought to participate in staple crop production were themselves caught in the web of debt that merchants could spin. This situation, which divided prosperous white landowners from indebted white and black people, created a potential racial problem for Southern leaders. The class divide between rich and poor white people held open a possibility that black and white farmers might unite politically. Racism put an end to cross-color unity. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan had formed as early as 1866, fostering white supremacy and solidarity. Because of this divide, sharecropping for white farmers proved a very different experience than for African Americans. Poverty was a serious problem, but white tenant farmers could count on the judicial system, community support, and family ties to help in their relationship with the owners. While sharecropping prevented African Americans from enjoying the economic benefits of emancipation they had expected, it was not slave labor, and it allowed a limited amount of independence and power. Gervase, Samantha Holtkamp. "sharecropping." In Waugh, Joan, and Gary B. Nash, eds. Encyclopedia of American History: Civil War and Reconstruction, 1856 to 1869 , vol. 5. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2003. American History Online. Yoknapatawpha County: Pronounced "Yok ´ nuh puh TAW ´ fuh." A county in northern Mississippi, the setting for most of William Faulkner’s novels and short stories, and patterned upon Faulkner’s actual home in Lafayette County, Mississippi. Its county seat is Jefferson. It is bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River (an actual river in Mississippi) and its southern boundary is the Yoknapatawpha River. It consists of 2,400 square miles, the eastern half of which is pine hill country. According to the map included in Absalom, Absalom! (published in 1936), the county's population is 15,611, of which 6,298 are white and 9,313 are black. Originally inhabited by the Chickasaw Indian tribe, white settlers first came to live in the area around 1800. Prior to the Civil War, the area was home to a number of large plantations, including Grenier's in the southeast, McCaslin's in the northeast, Sutpen's ("Sutpen's Hundred") in the northwest, and Compson's and Sartoris's in the immediate vicinity of Jefferson. The name "Yoknapatawpha" is apparently derived from two Chickasaw words: Yocona and petopha, meaning "split land." According to some sources, that was the original name for the Yocona River, also an actual river running through southern Lafayette County. According to Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha means "water flowing slow through the flatland." Arthur F. Kinney, however, postulates an additional possibility for the origin and meaning of the name. In Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time, he suggests Faulkner might have consulted a 1915 Dictionary of the Choctaw Language in which the word is broken down as follows: ik patafo, a., unplowed. Hence, Kinney suggests, the literal meaning of "Yoknapatawpha" in Choctaw would by "plowed or cultivated land or district" (21-22). From William Faulkner on the Web. <http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html> Stream of consciousness: a development of realism, influenced by modern psychological knowledge, is a method of the contemporary novel used to depict the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events, rather than the events themselves. As opposed to the usages of conventional plot structure, description, and characterization, the action is presented in terms of images and attitudes within the mind of one or more figures, often to get at the psychic nature of the characters at a level distinct from that of their expression of ordered, verbalized thought. The term was coined by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890) for psychologists but has long been applied to literature along with Edouard Dujardin's term, “interior monologue.” Poe, especially in such a story as “The Tell–Tale Heart,” and Melville and Henry James are considered to be among the American predecessors of the technique, even if Poe and James did not specifically practice it. Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) and Joyce's Ulysses (1922) are considered the real forerunners and influences. After the impact of Joyce's work, the technique became pervasive, and American novelists who have used it include Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Faulkner, Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, W. C. Williams, and Thomas Wolfe In Strange Interlude, O'Neill transferred this approach to the theater by the use of soliloquies and asides. "Stream of consciousness." The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature. James D. Hart. Oxford University Pess, 1986. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Ocean County College. 22 April 2009. The Fugitives and Southern Agrarianism: The 1920s were an age of the “little magazines,” cheaply produced and generally short-lived (but often handsomely designed) outlets for “new” and experimental writing, and many literary historians and critics, in search of a convenient point of departure, date the beginning of that immense burgeoning of creativity known as the Southern Renaissance from the first appearance of The Fugitive in the spring of 1922. To do so is to engage in a useful (if hardly necessary) fiction, but the choice of date is by no means arbitrary. The Fugitive, which ran for nineteen issues before ceasing publication in 1925, represented the arrival of literary modernism on the southern scene in a tangible and compelling way, and in time, four of the self-styled “Fugitives”—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Donald Davidson (1893–1968), Allen Tate (1899–1979), and Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)—would assume vital roles in the making of twentieth-century American literature, long after the death of the little magazine that launched their careers. Apart from their seminal influence as poets and critics, they would also formulate and seek (with little success) to implement a social philosophy—southern “Agrarianism”—that still holds appeal for a number of contemporary thinkers and writers, not only as a defense of tradition and community but also as a penetrating critique of scientism, industrial capitalism, and “the gospel of progress” inherent in mainstream American liberalism. For rest of essay, click here. The South: region including the present states of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, West Virginia, eastern Texas, and formerly Delaware. The area was explored and colonized by the French and Spanish during the 16th century, among their leaders being Narváez, Ponce de León, Cabeza de Vaca, De Soto, Ribault, Laudonnière, Jolliet, Marquette, and La Salle. The first settlement was made at St. Augustine, Fla. (1565), and Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries were prominent in the early colonization, although the settlers also included Huguenots. Roanoke and Jamestown were the first English settlements, the latter being founded by the Virginia Company. Except for the books of Sandys and John Smith, the English writing of this period was mainly promotional or descriptive, e.g. the works of Whitaker, Pory, Alsop, Hammond, Strachey, Hariot, and the authors of the Burwell Papers. From the beginning, the South was characteristically agrarian, and the second wave of colonists, including wealthy Cavaliers who came during the interregnum, stimulated the growth of the aristocratic plantation system, in which the staple crops of tobacco, rice, and later cotton were worked under the institution of slavery. There was little popular education, and, even after the founding of William and Mary (1693), education was mostly restricted to the upper classes. Southern culture thus tended to follow the aristocratic Cavalier tradition. The dominant Episcopal Church crushed dissent in most of the colonies, although Catholicism flourished in Maryland under the Calverts, Oglethorpe's Georgia was nonsectarian, and in the 18th century Virginia became comparatively tolerant. As a result of various restraining forces, art and literature in the early South were of little consequence. Most of the writing was historical, as in the works of Beverley, Lawson, Blair, Stith, and Hugh Jones, although there were also the satires of Tailfer and Ebenezer Cook, and the charming journals of Byrd. Southern patriot leaders in the Revolutionary struggle included Patrick Henry, Washington, Jefferson, the Lees, Madison, the Randolphs, Francis Marion, George Mason, and Pickens, and many battles in the later phases of the war took place in the South. These men continued as leaders of the new republic; of the first five presidents, four were Southerners, while Washington, D.C., became the capital of the U.S. For rest of essay, click here. The Life The Times The references to the confederacy show the cachet/romance that it still carried. The irony is that Abner, while nominally a confederate soldier, was in the war for his own gain: hence the "ball" -- lead ball from a rifle -- in his foot, compliments of a confederate provost, or military police. Sarty is named after Colonel Sartoris Snopes, a major figure in Faulkner's fiction and one of the central characters in the Yoknapatawpha mythos. The harsh reality of sharecropping life was well documented. In 1894, around the time the story is set, the Reverend Charles H. Otken, a Baptist minister and schoolmaster from Summit, Mississippi, published an expose on the South entitled, The Ills of the South or Related Causes Hostile to the General Prosperity of the Southern People. One of the main "causes hostile" he identified in his book was the sharecropper system perpetuated by de Spain. Otken, though recognizing that "credit is useful in an eminent degree"(42), argued that the way it was practiced in the South the crop-lien system was corrupt. He proceeds to list a catalog of social ills that this system engenders:
Otken, Charles H. From "The Credit System." A Populist Reader: Selections from the Works of American Populist Leaders. Ed. George Brown Tindall. New York: Harper, 1966. As you read the story, consider how Otken's comments bring out the class dimensions of the story. In an interview 16 years after "Barn Burning" was published, Faulkner made the following statements about the phenomenon of clannishness in the South:
He added that the ideas of blood-ties run
As with Otken, consider how this idea relates to the story. Finally, consider this sharecropper contract from the 1870s -- 80s.
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© David Bordelon 2009
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