Travels with Susan

 Mobility in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

I like to walk every day.  Sometimes I just get a short 10-minute walk in the morning to get me going. Sometimes I find a path at the park. In either case, I set my Apple watch fitness app to record my walk. At one mile, the voice in the watch announces my pace; 21 minutes a mile seems to be my average. Usually, I walk only a bit over a mile; on vacation hikes, I may be out on the trail for 3-4 hours at most. I say this to put the journeys of one of William Faulker’s characters, Molly Beauchamp, into perspective. There are two important places in Go Down, Moses where Faulkner mentions long walks that she made or may have made. One of these comes in the ending story, “Go Down, Moses,” when lawyer Gavin Stevens muses, “Only how under the sun could she have got to town from those seventeen miles. She may even have walked” (374).  Unlike my walks for health and pleasure, Molly walks for a purpose. In an earlier story, “Fire and Hearth,” she roams the woods looking for the money that has so obsessed her husband Lucas and later walks from her home to the commissary to tell Roth that she wants a divorce because he “stays out all night long every night . . .  hunting that buried money” (101). After she delivers her message to Roth Edmonds, “he watched her toil back down the road toward home . . .” (104) without offering to help “the negro woman who had been the only mother he ever knew” (99-100) with the return journey.  In “Go Down, Moses” she travels to Jefferson to find out about her grandson who had been “sold . . . in Egypt” by this same man: “Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin” (371). In the first story her walk results in a change in Lucas who finally gives up looking for buried coins and buys her a sack of candy as a peace offering. In the second story, though she sees her grandson buried, her request to have his obituary in the local newspaper is scoffed at by Gavin Stevens who puts her off by telling her, “Why, you couldn’t read it, Aunty” and by thinking that she just wanted the display and show of the funeral, “to ride through town behind [the hearse] in a car” (383). The narrative she wanted told, that her grandson was sold to Pharoah in the racist system that contrives to keep African Americans immobile, goes unheard by the patronizing men who end the story by simply going back to work after the young man’s funeral.

Part of what is astonishing is that the treks she makes, the long walk to Edmonds’ commissary and the seventeen miles to Jefferson, receive little attention from the author or the other characters. In both stories Molly/Mollie is an older woman, a mother of grown children and then a grandmother of a grown man, yet no one seems to be surprised that she has walked so far, as if this kind of trek by a Black woman was not unusual. Extrapolating from my one-hour recreational pace of 3 miles an hour, we can guess that if she did indeed walk the seventeen miles to Jefferson, it would have taken, at best, 5.6 hours, with no Nike walking shoes, water bottles, or breaks to make the journey easier.  After she delivers her message to Edmonds in “Fire and Hearth,” “he watched her toil back down the road toward home . . .” (104) without offering to help her with the return journey. Moreover, no one seems to know or care how she made these journeys or their effect on her. Unlike the detailed account of Eudora Welty’s Phoenix Jackson, the grandmother who walks a “Worn Path” to town for medicine, Faulkner declines to tell readers about the journeys this frail woman, “tiny, almost like a doll,” makes (104). What is Faulkner up to in this collection of stories etched by movement across the terrain? Thinking about Molly’s journeys and the other instances of travel and movement that etch paths in these stories may, as Michael Gorra puts it, “open a seam in our understanding” of Faulkner and his work (57).

Although readers do not see Molly journeying in these episodes, the tales nonetheless point to some of the ways Faulkner uses the road as a connective device to stitch places, people, and time together in the stories of Go Down, Moses. Not only does he cast his characters out on the road as a way of getting the plot moving, as he does when he sends Tomy’s Turl on his yearly run to the Beauchamp plantation in “Was,” Faulkner signals the importance of the road and movement in the title’s injunction to “Go” and its choral refrain, “Let my people go.” Indeed, the stories of Go Down, Moses are etched and plotted by paths and roads, by the comings and goings of characters. Lucas and George Wilkins wander the Mississippi brush looking for buried money; Lucas and Molly go between home and the Edmonds homestead and commissary; Molly goes to Jefferson to learn about her grandson who has been cast away to the North; Tomy’s Turl runs away, is  chased by Uncle Buddy, and returns home with Tennie; Rider ranges over the landscape seeking relief from his grief; Ike and Sam track the bear and the deer, returning at the end of day to the camp, repeating their forays each winter. These are the kinds of movements and paths that crosshatch the stories and that warrant some investigation.

Exemplifying Michel de Certeau’s claim that “Every story is a travel story” (89), Faulkner’s stories use spatial movement, travel, as an organizing principle that orders the trajectory of the stories, holds the plot points together, and connects people to each other and to place. Predominately following a pattern of going out from a foundation and then returning, of repetition and return in centripetal rather than centrifugal patterns of movement, the spatial plotlines also point to social practices, to themes that Faulkner is exploring and exposing. As Michael Gorra has noted, “. . . Faulkner is always a close observer of manners and social codes” (104), many of which are encoded in descriptions of movement, who gets to move where and how, and in the mobilities and immobilites the stories relate. While the pattern of return may signal the importance of home, of “fire and hearth” as it does for Lucas Beauchamp, too often it marks the immobility of the characters, geographically and socially. Most graphically reified in the lynching of Rider, the burial of Samuel Worsham Beauchamp, and the indifference of the whites who could but do not bear witness to the narratives of racism they witness, this inertia is “attuned to long-inculcated traditions about how individuals move in space and time” in Faulkner’s geographical imagination (Weinstein 26).

First, I want to show how consistently these stories of place, of his “own little postage stamp of native soil,” (Meriwether and Millgate 255) of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, are etched by roads, paths, and movement, and how these spatial trajectories propel the plot and move characters toward the tensions and resolutions of the stories. Known for his attention to local detail, for describing “his world with an unrivalled exactitude” (Gorra 93), Faulkner applies that exactitude in his descriptions of the road and the intricacies of travel.  Quick plot summaries of a handful of the stories in Go Down, Moses illustrate the preponderance of travel in Faulkner’s storytelling and the ways that movement and plot development are tied together.

“Fire and Hearth” begins with Lucas Beauchamp realizing that he needs to move his illegal liquor-making operation. To do so, he must “put his own mare to the single wagon and drive three miles to the still” and then “carry it another mile to the best place he could think of” (34). From that point on, Faulkner traces Lucas’s movements: “He was in the creek bottom now. . . . The spot he sought was a slight overhang on one face of the mound” (37). Digging into the abandoned Indian mound to hide his still, he finds a single coin, gold he is sure, and thus begins the hectic search for the buried treasure, perhaps the money that Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy had buried all those years ago. His nightly excursions prompt his wife Molly to quarrel at him, “Walking the roads all last night. Walking the roads all tonight . . .  You just wait unto Mister Roth—” (62), and then to journey to the Edmonds commissary to declare that she wants a divorce. Much of the present time of the story is taken up following Lucas, George Watkins, his new son-in-law, and the divining-machine salesman as they roam the area looking for the coins, driving one night “two hours to reach it, the road not even a road but a gullied overgrown path . . .” (91-93). Lucas’s obsession has led to him “borrowing” Roth’s mule as down payment on the machine, prompting Roth and two of his Black laborers to follow the mule’s tracks, going “back across the pasture, fording the creek, to the gap in the fence through which the mule had been led. From there they followed the tracks of the mule and the man in the soft earth along the edge of a cotton field, to the road” (83). Then, in an attempt to release Lucas from the hold the coins had on him, a stubborn Molly goes out intent on turning them up herself:  “Aunt Molly Beauchamp . . . She been missing since yestiddy. We been hunting her all night. We found where she went down to the creek and we been tracking her” (124). Shaken by her actions, “With Lucas and Molly in the back seat, [Roth] drove in to Jefferson and stopped before the county courthouse” where Molly could get the divorce she had requested. In the end, Lucas gives up the search, buys Molly a sack of candy, and they return home, to the fire and hearth, bringing the story and Lucas full circle to where they began. Inscribing much of the story on the roads and tracks the characters follow in search of money and the money seekers, and back and forth between Edmond’s place and the Beauchamp home, Faulkner not only demonstrates his familiarity with the Mississippi terrain but infuses movement, travel, with social meaning that circulates around issues of property, race, relationships, of issues of geography and biology (118).

In “Pantaloon in Black,” Faulkner traces Rider’s kinetic attempts to deal with his grief for his dead wife. Rider, whose name suggests motion, keeps walking to and through places, to the sawmill, to his home, to his aunt’s home, to the woods to find moonshine, and back to the mill for a deadly game of cards. After flinging dirt on his wife’s grave, he “began to walk away” (136); “stepping over the three-strand wire fence . . . [he] crossed the road and entered the woods” and later “emerged from them and crossed the last field” (137). Returned to his now empty home with the “narrow splay-toed prints of his wife’s bare feet” beneath the road’s dusty surface (137), he turns around and walks to the mill where he wrestled his grief by rolling logs. Then he walks to the “river swamp four miles away” (146) for a jug of moonshine, and on to his aunt’s home, and back to the mill: “He was moving again. But he was not moving, he was drinking” (151). Pulling a razor on a white man who joined the millworker’s card game, Rider ends up “hanging from the bell-rope in a negro schoolhouse about two miles from the sawmill” (156). A story filled with movement, it does not follow Rider on his last journey; instead, it ends in stasis—his body hanging and the deputy and his wife to whom he relates the story of the Black man’s death unmoved by the emotional trauma of the grieving man or the racist violence of the lynching. At the end, the wife plans to go out, to “the picture show” (159), unmoved by the tragedy as if it were entertainment, a “picture show.”

One more example. “Go Down, Moses,” traces competing narratives of movement, the circular journeys of Samuel Worsham “Butch” Beauchamp, who had been cast from Jefferson to Chicago and then returned to Jefferson in a casket, and of Molly, who travels the seventeen miles to Jefferson and back to see about her grandson. These narratives are set against Gavin Stevens’ movement, prompted by Molly’s request to find out about her grandson and backed up by the white woman, Miss Worsham, whose family had once owned Molly and her brother Hamp. Together with the newspaper editor, Stevens tramps around town soliciting funds to bring the young man’s body back: “. . . Stevens passed from store to store and office to office about the square” to “’bring a dead nigger home. It’s for Miss Worsham’” (378). And then he rides in the two-car funeral procession, Molly and Miss Worsham in one car, Stevens and the newspaper editor in the other, “into the square, crossing it, circling the Confederate monument and the courthouse,” and then out of town, “past the metal sign which said Jefferson. Corporate Limit. and the pavement ended . . . becoming gravel” (382).  At the end of the story, after all Stevens has done to get the young man returned home, his reaction to Molly’s request to the editor, “’Is you gonter put hit in de paper?’” registers his emotional immobility. Rather than heeding the story of institutional racism, of prison, betrayal, and prejudice that Molly Beauchamp knows only too well, he just says to his friend, “’Come on. Let’s get back to town. I haven’t seen my desk in two days’” (383). Plotted as a travel story, “Go Down, Moses” not only takes readers around Yoknapatawpha County, it reveals the social practices of place and time, the paternalism that prompts Stevens to both arrange the funeral and to dismiss its deeper meanings.

Perhaps an elegy for the diminished wilderness and the passing of the old, ritual ways of hunting, “Delta Autumn” is also a study of time tracked by movement. The opening passage in “Delta Autumn” reveals how the going forth is an organizing principle that joins what happens where with what happens when, how metaphors of travel map movement through space and time.  A chronotope, this going forth reveals not only the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” but the social practices, the “social contradictions,” that trouble Faulkner throughout Go Down, Moses (Bakhtin 84, 147). Initially written with the other stories of the novel to explore the “‘general theme [of the] relationship between white and negro races here’” (qtd in Buell 6), “Delta Autumn” also illustrates an abiding concern with time and space, which Michael Gorra observes “are always interchangeable” (Gorra 181). A play between the past and the present, punctuated by the words “then” and “now,” time and distance in the story are measured spatially as the distance to the hunting camp now is “two hundred miles from Jefferson when once it had been thirty” (343), and temporally as the elder Ike feels the retreat in land “in years, decades, back toward what it had been when he first knew it” (341). Recounting the trek to the annual camp, the last hunting story of Go Down, Moses begins: “Soon they would enter the Delta. The sensation was familiar to him.  It had been renewed like this each last week in November for more than fifty years. . . .  At first they had come in wagons: the guns, the bedding, the dogs, the food, the whiskey, the keen heart-lifting anticipation of hunting . . .  Now they went in cars, driving faster and faster each year because the roads were better and they had farther to drive” (335). Setting up a comparison with by-gone days, those related in the other hunting stories “The Old People” and “The Bear,” Faulkner demonstrates how travel through time and space is shaped by and betrays social practices that affect the ways characters experience the world, the environment, and each other.

The close intimacy of the “paths made by deer and bear” that the hunters in Ike McCaslin’s youth experienced is now replaced by speed and the new technologies of travel (340).  And the wilderness where they could hunt has been pushed back by the progress that the tractor and the lumber trains represent, the vast stands of virgin forests reduced by 1930 to only scattered remnants surrounded by farmland (Prewitt, 200). Comparing the view from the road as the hunters make their way to the camp, the narrator relates, “At first there had been only the old towns along the River and the old towns along the hills” where “planters with their gangs of slaves and then of hired laborers” had transformed the wilderness into fields and then plantations. “Now the land lay open . . . standing horseman-tall with cotton for the world’s looms, . . . up to the very doorsteps of the negroes who worked it and the white men who owned it” (340), the sharecropping system of the mid-twentieth century continuing the work of slavery. The drive now is marked by neon, by “broad plumb-ruled highways,” “the tremendous gins,” the “dynamite and tractor plows” and “mathematical squares of rank cotton.” Where once could be heard the “scream of panther” now is heard “the long hooting of locomotives” (340-41, 354) as the timber industry vies with cotton as Mississippi’s important cash crop.

Yet even as relations to the land changed with modernization, the old relations of race and class and sex between Black and white, owner and laborer, those who have and those who serve have remained static.  In the earlier journeys to the hunting camp, young Ike rides in the covered surrey with Major de Spain and General Compson, the local aristocracy (194).  The supplies for the camp, “the dogs and the bedding and food and guns,” Ike’s cousin McCaslin and Tennie’s Jim and Sam Fathers, “son of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw chief” (350), ride in the wagons, marking social distinctions even during this ritual of male bonding. That first autumn, Sam Fathers came in the wagon, waiting for Ike “wrapped in a quilt” before the two followed “no fixed path . . .  but a channel non-existent ten yards ahead,” entering the wilderness almost intuitively (195).  Fifty years later, in “Delta Autumn,” Ike, now the elder huntsman, rides in a car with Roth Edmonds, while the supplies and the men who served the hunters are brought in two trucks—“the one carrying the bedding and tents and food, the other the horses—” as they formed a caravan to the hunting grounds.  Roth “always drove” (340), consulting the others neither about the speed he drives nor the sudden stops he makes. A man who exercises control over others, who pays off the woman and shoots the doe, who runs roughshod over others as the lumber industry has done with the environment, Roth is detached from the road and the wilderness by the speed of going. The mode of transportation may have changed over the decades, but the social separations have not.

Moving off the concrete road and then the gravel one, “lurching and splashing and sliding among the ruts,” leaving civilization as they plunge into the wilderness, the hunters nonetheless retain the old social hierarchies. Blacks still serve the white hunters, Isham, the “oldest Negro” gets the four o’clock coffee for the hunters, and the youngest one feeds the heater during the night for the campers.  And the one woman who enters the camp, coming by motorboat, disrupts the social practices of the camp and reveals the contradictions of consanguinity. When she explains that her aunt took in washing, Ike realizes what the young Negro already knew, that she is Black (“’You’re a nigger!’” Ike cries [361]) and related to both him and the man with whom she has had an affair, repeating the old themes of sex and incest that haunt the McCaslin clan.  Roth has left an envelope of money to pay her and his infant son off, and Ike, understanding her inheritance, grabs the hunting horn wrapped in silver that General Compson had left him, “a private acknowledgement of what cannot be said in public” (Gorra 338-39), telling her at the same time to go North and marry a Black man, that the time is not ready for the new social, racial relations she represents (363). And then she was gone with the “pop and snarl” of the motorboat, leaving Ike musing about the destruction of the land, “the ruined woods” and the revenge to come (363-64).

The “something intangible” (357) about the woman that the young Negro reads as soon as he sees the woman approach in the boat, the unspoken knowledge of race and identity, points to another theme of the road: The road is a place where history and knowledge are imprinted in the tracks left by humans and animals that only some can read. This is evident when Lucas reads his daughter’s presence in the print of her “naked feet” in the mud and intuits the “something intangible” about her in the palpable print and whir of noise as “something crashed into flight” by the mound where he was searching for the buried coins (40-41). The dirt lane to Rider’s house, the prints and tracks of the week’s comings and goings “vanished but not gone” layered in the dust with the “narrow, splay-toed prints of his wife’s bare feet,” dead but “’wawkin yit,’” testifies to a history of loss and continuity (136-37). And the “man’s footprints” next to Alice the mule’s tracks, recognized by the Black laborers but not by Roth tells the story not only of Lucas’s nocturnal activities but of knowledge known but withheld from the white man (83-85).  Molly’s footprints along the creek, leading the men to her face down in the mud, the divining machine still in her hands, marks her intangible rage and Lucas’s responsibility, convincing him at last to give up his search for the coins and return to the fire he has kept going during his long marriage. These tracks in the dust and mud tell stories of love and grief, of family and community, and of knowledge. Concerned with narrative, of who tells what and who listens, Faulkner uses the road as another script, a place where stories are inscribed, asking readers “to read for the unspoken, for the stories that peep around the edges of the ones he’s chosen to tell” (Gorra 304).

These tracks also tell stories of wayfinding, not simply of finding the mule or Molly, but of finding the self and the self’s meaning, as they do for Lucas who is reminded of what is important and for the young Ike McCaslin who learns the imprint of the past. Tracing the young Ike’s progress to maturity and knowledge in a story of ritual initiation, “The Bear” follows him as he learns to read the forest, to find the deer and bear, until finally Ike can find his way in the woods without compass or watch, following that “something intangible” that tells him where he is. In Ike’s first hunting ventures Sam Fathers “taught the boy the woods, to hunt, when to shoot and when not to shoot, to kill and when not to kill, and better, what to do with it afterward” (171). Then, using the “compass his cousin had given him” (199), Ike learns to go to his stand alone, where he and Sam had stood their post for the deer. Later, he ranged the woods beyond his allotted spot looking for the bear, Old Ben. When Sam tells him, “’It’s the gun’” (206) that prevents him from spotting the bear, he tries going out with only the compass and a stick for the snakes: “He could go almost a mile before he would need to see the compass” (206). Finally, he relinquishes the compass and the “biscuit-thick silver watch which had been his father’s” so that he can experience the ephemeral, the intangible wilderness: “It was the watch and the compass. He was still tainted.” Only then, when he is lost and finding his way out of the woods, following the bear’s “crooked print” is he rewarded with a transcendent moment of recognition, of sight: “It did not emerge, appear: it was just there. . .  Then it was gone . . .  faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion” (209). Eschewing the tainted, constructed instruments of wayfinding, Ike learns to rely on his own cognitive map that will reveal not only the bear, but the history of place scratched in the family ledgers, to find his way to Sam’s grave and his own relinquishment. Punctuated by his first deer, its “hot smoking blood” wiped across his face (164), and the sudden emergence of Old Ben before him, Ike’s apprenticeship into manhood is finally complete when he reads (re-reads) his family’s relations to the land and the people who worked it in the commissary ledgers kept by his father and uncle and then his cousin Cass. Only now, after finding his way through the forest, does he finally understand them and “the buried history of his family’s past” (286). And as he relinquished the compass and the watch so that he could find his own way back to camp, he renounces and relinquishes the tainted inheritance, forgoing ownership of the land to find his moral way, weak though it may be, out of the morass of time.

What Ike discovered in his metaphoric travels in history, Buck and Buddy already knew, that old McCaslin had slept with one of his enslaved women and then with his daughter, making the man they will chase in “Was” their half-brother/property. As Ike would do, the brothers relinquished property, the plantation house, preferring to live in one of the cabins in the quarters where the enslaved people used to live. And yet, they play out the annual run by Tomey’s Turl to visit his sweetheart Tennie on Hubert Beauchamp’s plantation as if it were sport. Faulkner makes clear the connection between sport, enslavement, and fugitivity, the escape of the fox from its box in the twins’ house and the ensuing uproar of the dogs occurring in the story just before the brothers realize that Tomey’s Turl has run: “’Damn the fox,’ Uncle Buck said. ‘Tomey’s Turl has broke out again’” (5). With that, the story is off with Uncle Buck and the young Cass McCaslin chasing the fugitive to and around the Beauchamp plantation. The chase, the annual ritual of running, comes to an end when Beauchamp wagers five hundred dollars on the outcome of the race, ending with a hand of cards to decide who will buy whom: “’If you win, you buy Tennie; if I win, I buy that boy of yours’” (24).  In the end, Buck buys Tennie and the united couple return with Buck, and the fox once more escapes his crate. As in “The Bear” themes of relinquishment and historical guilt are played out in the plot’s movement from plantation to plantation. And yet the story is also about repetition as the plot comes full circle back to the house and the escaping fox. As its title suggests, the past, “Was,” “stays with us, irrevocable and unrecoverable” (Gorra 356), the circular movement of the story a cipher for the social stasis that holds the characters in a cycle they can never escape despite their efforts of repudiation.

Stories about travel, about movement through space and time, the tales of Go Down, Moses bring into focus the social practices of mobility and the abiding ecologies of immobility.  Interrogating the meanings of “go,” “was,” and “again,” the stories follow patterns of movement and inertia, of a society that remained, in George Washington Cable’s words, “’fixed, immovable, iron-bound’” (qtd in Gorra 96).

Works Cited:

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1981.

Buell, Lawrence. “Faulkner and the Claims of the Natural World.” In Faulkner and the Natural World, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996, pp.1-19.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage Books, 1940.

Gorra, Michael. The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020.

Meriwether, James B. and Michael Millgate, eds. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1968.

Prewitt, Wiley C. Jr. “Return of the Big Woods: Hunting and Habitat in Yoknapatawpha.” In Faulkner and the Natural World, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996, pp. 198-221.

Weinstein, Philip. “The Land’s Turn.” In Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, ed. Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 15-29