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Dr. Bordelon's American Lit II On Campus

"Barn Burning"
William Faulkner
(1938)

Terms to Know
Sharecropping: (my comment: while this definition focuses on African-Americans, economic oppression ignores color lines). Sharecropping replaced slave gang labor after the Civil War. The cotton plantations were cut up into small parcels, usually less than 40 acres, with the parcels farmed by free African-American families. The cotton grown by the former slaves was divided between the planter, the merchant, and the farmer. The conditions of sharecropping often brought black laborers into dependency and debt, making it difficult for them to improve their economic position in the New South.

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.
patafa, pp., split open; plowed, furrowed; tilled.
yakni, n., the earth; ...soil; ground; nation; ...district....
yakni patafa, pp., furrowed land; fallowed land.

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
In addition to the textbook introduction, you can read the Paris Review interview of Faulkner.

The Times
Setting and time is important here. The story is set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional area in north Mississippi Faulkner populated with eccentric and gothic and "normal" characters. During and after reconstruction, the South remained an economically depressed era, and as such, was subject to twin specters of low education and demagogues. Rejected by the industrial North, investors (both northern and southern) did not set up shop in the South; instead they were content to treat it as a colonial possession, good for natural resources and cheap labor.

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:

it enslav[es] the people, and, by its insidious operations, concentrat[es] productive wealth in the hands of the few. It reduces a large body of people to a state of beggary, fosters a discontented spirit, checks consumption, produces recklessness on the part of the consumer, places a discount on honesty, and converts commerce into a vast pawning shop where farmers pledge their lands for hominy and bacon on ruinous terms in harmony with the pawning system. (42)

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:

Yes, we are country people and we have never had too much in material possessions because 60 or 70 years ago we were invaded and we were conquered. So we have been thrown back on our selves not only for entertainment but certain [sic] amount of defense. We have to be clannish just like the people in the Scottish highlands, each springing to defend his own blood whether it be right or wrong. Just a matter of custom and habit, we have to do it; interrelated that way, and usually there is hereditary head [sic] of the whole lot, as usually, the oldest son of the oldest son and each looked upon as chief of this own particular clan. That is the tone they live by. But I am sure it is because only a comparatively short time ago we were invaded by our own people – speaking in our own language which is always a pretty savage sort of warfare.

He added that the ideas of blood-ties run

through[out] what we call the "South." It doesn't matter what the people do. They can be land people, farmers, and industrialists, but there still exists the feeling of blood, of clan, blood for blood. It is pretty general through the classes.

As with Otken, consider how this idea relates to the story.

Finally, consider this sharecropper contract from the 1870s -- 80s.

THE GRIMES FAMILY PAPERS A Sharecrop Contract

The ending of slavery and the impoverishment of the South in the aftermath of the Civil War seriously disrupted Southern agriculture. Five years after the war’s end, Southern cotton production was still only about half of what it had been in the 1850s. The large plantations, no longer tended by gangs of slaves or hired freedmen, were broken up into smaller holdings, but the capital required for profitable agriculture meant that control of farming remained centralized in a limited elite of merchants and larger landholders. Various mechanisms arose to finance Southern agriculture. Tenants worked on leased land. Small landowners gave liens on their crops to get financing. But the most common method of financing agriculture was sharecropping. Agreements like the Grimes family’s sharecrop contract determined the economic life of thousands of poor rural families in the southern United States after the Civil War. Families, black and white, lacking capital for agriculture, were furnished the seed, implements, and a line of credit for food and other necessities to keep them through the growing season. Accounts were settled in the winter after crops were in. Under these conditions a small number of farmers managed to make money and eventually became landowners, and the larger part found them- selves in ever deeper debt at the end of the year with no choice but to contract again for the next year.

To every one applying to rent land upon shares, the following conditions must be read, and agreed to.

To every 30 or 35 acres, I agree to furnish the team, plow, and farming implements, except cotton planters, and I do not agree to furnish a cart to every cropper. The croppers are to have half of the cotton, corn and fodder (and peas and pumpkins and potatoes if any are planted) if the following conditions are compiled with, but — if not — they are to have only two fifths. Croppers are to have no part or interest in the cotton seed raised from the crop planted and worked by them. No vine crops of any description, that is, no watermelons, muskmelons, squashes or anything of that kind, except peas and pumpkins, and potatoes are to be planted in the cotton or corn. All must work under my direction. All plantation work to be done by the croppers. My part of the crop to be housed by them, and the fodder and oats to be hauled and put in the house. All the cotton must be topped about 1st August. If any cropper fails from any cause to save all the fodder from his crop, I am to have enough fodder to make it equal to one half of the whole if the whole amount of fodder had been saved.

For every mule or horse furnished by me there must be 1000 good sized rails. . . hauled, and the fence repaired as far as they will go, the fence to be torn down and put up from the bottom if I so direct. All croppers to haul rails and work on fence whenever I may order. Rails to be split when I may say. Each cropper to clean out every ditch in his crop, and where a ditch runs between two croppers, the cleaning out of that ditch is to be divided equally between them. Every ditch bank in the crop must be shrubbed down and cleaned off before the crop is planted and must be cut down every time the land is worked with his hoe and when the crop is "laid by," the ditch banks must be left clean of bushes, weeds, and seeds. The cleaning out of all ditches must be done by the first of October. The rails must be split and the fence repaired before corn is planted.

Each cropper must keep in good repair all bridges in his crop or over ditches that he has to clean out and when a bridge needs repairing that is outside of all their crops, then any one that I call on must re- pair it.

Fence jams to be done as ditch banks. If any cotton is planted on the land outside of the plantation fence, I am to have three fourths of all the cotton made in those patches, that is to say, no cotton must be planted by croppers in their home patches.All croppers must clean out stables and fill them with straw, and haul straw in front of stables whenever I direct. All the cotton must be manured, and enough fertilizer must be brought to manure each crop highly, the croppers to pay for one half of all manure bought, the quantity to be purchased for each crop must be left to me.

No cropper to work off the plantation when there is any work to be done on the land he has rented, or when his work is needed by me or other croppers. Trees to be cut down on Orchard, House field & Evanson fences, leaving such as I may designate.

Road field to be planted from the very edge of the ditch to the fence, and all the land to be planted close up to the ditches and fences. No stock of any kind belonging to croppers to run in the plantation after crops are gathered.

If the fence should be blown down, or if trees should fall on the fence outside of the land planted by any of the croppers, any one or all that I may call upon must put it up and repair it. Every cropper must feed, or have fed, the team he works, Saturday nights, Sundays, and every morning before going to work, beginning to feed his team (morning, noon, and night every day in the week) on the day he rents and feeding it to and including the 31st day of December. If any cropper shall from any cause fail to repair his fence as far as 1000 rails will go, or shall fail to clean out any part of his ditches, or shall fail to leave his ditch banks, any part of them, well shrubbed and clean when his crop is laid by, or shall fail to clean out stables, fill them up and haul straw in front of them whenever he is told, he shall have only two-fifths (~) of the cotton, corn, fodder, peas and pumpkins made on the land he cultivates.

If any cropper shall fail to feed his team Saturday nights, all day Sunday and all the rest of the week, morning/noon, and night, for every time he so fails he must pay me five cents.No corn nor cotton stalks must be burned, but must be cut down, cut up and plowed in. Nothing must be burned off the land except when it is impossible to plow it in.

Every cropper must be responsible for all gear and farming implements placed in his hands, and if not returned must be paid for unless it is worn out by use.

Croppers must sow & plow in oats and haul them to the crib, but must have no part of them. Nothing to be sold from their crops, nor fodder nor corn to be carried out of the fields until my rent is all paid, and all amounts they owe me and for which I am responsible are paid in full.

I am to gin & pack all the cotton and charge every cropper an eighteenth of his part, the cropper to furnish his part of the bagging, ties, & twine.

The sale of every cropper’s part of the cotton to be made by me when and where I choose to sell, and after deducting all they owe me and all sums that I may be responsible for on their accounts, to pay them their half of the net proceeds. Work of every description, particularly the work on fences and ditches, to be done to my satisfaction, and must be done over until I am satisfied that it is done as it should be. No wood to burn, nor light wood, nor poles, nor timber for boards, nor wood for any purpose whatever must be gotten above the house occupied by Henry Beasley — nor must any trees be cut down nor any wood used for any purpose, except for firewood, without my permission.

From America Firsthand

Class Discussion

What's so bad about burning a barn?
What kind of person is Abner?
What kind of person is Sarty?
Why does Abner rub his feces laden foot on the rug?
Note the description of de Spain's house by Sarty: which words seem symbolic?
Why does Abner emphasize the whiteness of de Spain's house?
What does Sarty stumble over in the road at the end of the story?
What's the glare at the end of the story?
At what three points does Sarty have to test his conscience?
Why he struggle against is mother?
What's the function of the italicized wording?
What's the purpose of the court scenes? Both from an organizational and thematic perspective?

Group Questions

Joseph C. Murphy argues that "Faulkner demonstrates in his fiction many of the qualities typically attributed to literary modernism: experimenting with narrative structures, temporal frameworks, narrative voices, and symbols; exploring inner consciousness as a major theme; adapting the abstract methods of modern painting to literature; embracing communities steeped in tradition and history (both Western and “primitive” traditions) as a relief from the upheavals and alienation of modernity."

Do you see these elements in "Barn Burning"?

How does Otken's comments on sharecropping (see above) play out in the story?
Does Faulkner want us to admire or accuse Abner? Is he meant as a figure of admiration or scorn . . . or somewhere in between?
What systems of justice are at work in this story (think in terms of family, Justice of Peace, and individual)? Does the story imply one is better than the other?
Does the language of the last paragraph – "The slow constellations wheeled on" – suggest a positive or negative resolution to Sarty's conflicts? Why or why not? Quote specific words and discuss how their connotations suggest positive or negative outcomes
What connections can you make between this story and Zora Neale Hurston's work? Differences?

Links
One of the best Faulkner sites is "Faulkner on the Web." While a designer's nightmare, the content is very strong.

Pictures, Pictures, Pictures

This covered bridge over the Yocona River, photographed in the early 1900s, was one of several covered bridges in Lafayette County. Old maps depict the slow, muddy river as the "Yockney-patafa" River, from which Faulkner derived the name of his fictional county. A mule-drawn team such as the one depicted brings to mind the ill-fated crossing of the flooded Yoknapatawpha River in Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying.

Sharecropper's House circa 1910.

Quotes from Critics