The Saddest Words by Michael Gorra

Author:Michael Gorra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2020-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

FAULKNER SET HIS MOST suggestive accounts of the war’s end hundreds of miles away from Yoknapatawpha itself. “Mountain Victory” (1932), one of his finest short stories, takes place in the hills of eastern Tennessee and describes the attempt of a Confederate major named Saucier Weddel to return to his Mississippi home. His right sleeve is empty, and his horse lacks a saddle, but the horse is a thoroughbred, and so is he; his face may be gaunt but its expression seems arrogant still. Weddel’s body servant, Jubal, boasts to the poor whites with whom they spend a night that they come from a place named “Countymaison,” a plantation the size of a county. The major himself calls it “Contalmaison” and explains his own dark skin by saying that his father is of mixed French and Choctaw ancestry, a chief who holds a remnant of the tribe’s land as his own. And such a man did in fact exist. His name was Greenwood LeFlore, and he owned four hundred slaves on a great demesne in the middle of the state.

The major has, however, picked exactly the wrong house at which to stop. Every state in the Confederacy had areas of resistance to Richmond’s central authority, usually populated by small farmers who owned little besides their land and saw the conflict as a slaveholders’ war, fought to preserve an institution from which they got no benefit whatever. In Mississippi the best-known was the “Free State” of Jones County, a swampy district in the forested lowlands of the state’s southeast. Most such places, however, were in the upland hills, and among them the peaks and hollows of eastern Tennessee were an extreme case. Unionist sentiment ran so high in that part of Appalachia that early in the war the region had talked of seceding from secession, as had the counties that became West Virginia; its young men were as apt to join the Federal forces as they were the Confederacy’s.

To an outsider the loyalties of any individual household remain unreadable, and Faulkner’s Weddel has no idea that he’s chosen a Unionist farm as his shelter for the night. Indeed the family’s oldest son, Vatch, has served with the Yankee army, and that night, after several glasses of colorless, explosive whiskey, he takes a vicious pleasure in describing his battlefield murder of a wounded Southern officer who had asked him for water. He hates Weddel’s uniform, and he also hates the mixed blood that makes him see the major as a “nigra.” And Weddel is in turn appalled by this family’s hilltop isolation, its suspicion of all outsiders, and quickly realizes that he shouldn’t risk a night in this treacherous land. Jubal is soon too drunk to sit a horse, however, and Weddel won’t leave him behind, not with people who detest and fear black folk with a violence he has never seen in the Deep South itself. It’s dawn before they ride off, and he knows that Vatch will be waiting in the woods to send a bullet after him.

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