A general store, canned goods lining the
shelves, townspeople come to observe the trial packing the room. Mr. Harris,
one of their own, the plaintiff; the other, a man “stiff in his black Sunday
coat donned not for the trial but for the moving.” Snopes. The verdict,
delivered by the Justice of the Peace: “’This case is closed. I can’t find
against you, Snopes, but I can give you advice. Leave this country and don’t
come back to it... Take your wagon and get out of this country before dark.’”
Thus begins Faulkner’s Barn Burning,
published in 1939 but offering insights into contemporary America.
Snopes and his household: wife, her sister,
and two boys. Poor tenant farmers, sharecroppers. White, but with no landed
property of their own, thus occupying the lowest stratum of southern white society
in the 1890s. Better off than Blacks, maybe, in the mind of Snopes and those like
him. White Lives Matter. A source of bitterness and resentment. And so, to revenge himself on a
white society that does not respect him, arson: barn burning.
The opening scene in the store, its sights
and smells, revealing about the younger Snopes boy. He observes “dynamic shapes
of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant
nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and silver curve of fish- this,
(and) the cheese which he knew he smelled...” Unable to read, Colonel Sartoris,
but viscerally aware through sight and smell of delicacies seen and unseen.
And, the reader suspects, the boy dimly aware that such things occupy a world,
an existence forever closed to him. And so for the boy, the man representing
that world, presiding over the trial of his father, is the “Enemy”.
The verdict delivered, the Snopes banished,
the crowd parts, and the boy follows his father out of the store, Snopes a
“wiry figure walking a little stiffly from where a Confederate provost man’s
musket had taken him in the heel on a stolen horse thirty years ago.” A detail
recalling Achilles, perhaps, the Greek hero of Homer’s Iliad, but one nearer in
significance, I believe, to the vulnerability of another character in American
Literature, Captain Ahab of Moby Dick,
whose amputated leg and ivory prosthetic, like Snopes’s limp, is a constant
humiliation and reminder. But unlike Ahab, whose quarrel is cosmic and
resentment arises from his inability to bend all things to his will, Snopes’
argument is with white society, not white whales. Tellingly, the marksman is a
Confederate soldier, not a Union, Snopes shot not as enemy but scofflaw.
Snopes’ bitterness prefigures that of
present-day whites, whites without university education, resentful of the
educated establishment, of liberals lecturing them illiberally on guns, God,
the environment, minority rights, identity politics, sensitivity training,
masking- the list is long. Bitterness over condescension distilled in the
“basket of deplorables” of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Liberal elites who, in this telling, orchestrated the dismantling
of the labor unions that were a bulwark against the predations of neoliberal
economic policies championed by the Clintonistas.
Inside the Snopes wagon, “the battered
stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which
would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and forgotten
day and time...” Emblematic, the broken clock, of a mind unable to adapt to
time’s passage, to evolve with societal change. Make America Great Again.
Their destination known only to the father,
as on the twelve previous occasions the boy could remember. Arrival on the
second day, their new home “a paintless two-room house identical almost with
the dozen others it had stopped before even in the boy’s ten years”. That of
Snopes’ new employer- “the man that aims to begin tomorrow owning me body and
soul for the next eight months”- looks, in the eyes of the boy, “big as a
courthouse”.
The boy experiences a “surge of peace and
joy”, the reason for which he is too young to articulate, but which the
narrator renders: “They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of
this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing
was capable of stinging for a little moment but that’s all; the spell of this
peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to
it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive...” The spell not broken by
the father’s undeviating stride through fresh droppings on the walk.
Undisturbed by the “ravening and jealous rage” in his father’s breast.
The house reached, the door opened, Snopes,
rebuffing the servant’s order to clean his shoes, strides across a blond rug
into the interior. The lady of the house appearing to inform him of the absence
of the man he seeks, and requesting Snopes to leave, the latter remains silent,
hat on head, eying the splendor. Then, “the boy watched him pivot on the good
leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of turning, leaving a final long
and fading smear.” To exit the house, cleaning his boots as he stepped off the
porch. To observe, as he turns for a final look, “Pretty and white, ain’t it?
... Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it.”
Resentment of privilege. Contempt for the
things it affords. Disdain for refinement. As Anne Midgette writes in the
Washington Post, “I suspect that
the more that Trump’s opponents, or the media, attack Trump on this front — for
having bad taste, for being boorish, for his lack of intelligence and
refinement — the more these voters are, or shall I say were, inclined to
embrace him.”
Major de Spain later appears with his
servant and the rug. The washing kettle set up, the rug folded in, a variety of
stone from the field added. Prompting Snopes’ wife to speak: “’Abner. Abner.
Please don’t. Please, Abner.’” The Major, the following morning, the ruined rug
returned overnight: “It cost a hundred dollars. But you never had a hundred
dollars. You never will. So I’m going to charge you twenty bushels against your
crop.”
The opening scene repeated, the curious
faces watching, parted for Snopes’ passing, the Justice of the Peace, beside
whom Major de Spain, amazed “at the incredible circumstance of being sued by
one of his own tenants.” Dignity and peace ruffled by this incomprehensible,
implacable visitation from another world. Evidence heard, the verdict
delivered, twenty bushels reduced to ten. “’He won’t git no ten bushels
neither. He won’t git one.’” “’You think so?’”, replies Snopes to the elder
boy.
That night, “’Abner, No! No! Oh, God. Oh,
God. Abner!’” And, “’Go get that oil.’” Later, a shot. Then, two more. “At
midnight, (the boy) was sitting on the crest of a hill... there was no glare
behind him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had called home for four
days anyhow...” His cry a whisper, defiant in the still night: “‘He was
brave!... He was in Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry’, not knowing that his father had
gone to the war... wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving
fidelity to no man or army or flag...”
For the MAGA supporter, the Stars and
Stripes a decorative prop, the US Constitution a socialist screed. Militias and
QAnon for the radicalized. The anarchy of fidelity to nothing other than
oneself, to blood. “’Maybe he will feel it too’”, the peace and joy, the boy
had mused as he paced through oaks and trees in flower.
“The slow constellations wheeled on” above
the boy where he sat on the hill. With the dawning he rises, stiff and cold,
setting off, not looking back.
