Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“What does he have?” and likely what Uncle Gavin wrote on the pad for that was Thats fighting talk here This is a place where you take it or leave it Just give him eight dollars or sixteen if you want 2. So next time maybe she came alone. Or maybe Uncle Gavin himself walked into the bank and on to that little room at the back and said, “Look here, you old fish-blooded son of a bitch, are you going to just sit here and let your only female daughter that wont even hear the trump of doom, drive alone up yonder to Jakeleg Wattman’s bootleg joint to buy whiskey?” Or maybe it was simple coincidence: a Wednesday afternoon and he—Mr Snopes—cant say, “Here, hold on; where the hell you going? This aint the right road.” Because she cant hear him and in fact I dont know how he did talk to her since I cant imagine his hand writing anything except adding a percent symbol or an expiration date; maybe they just had a county road map he could point to that worked up until this time. So now he had not one dilemma but three: not just the bank president’s known recognisable car driving up to a bootleg joint, but with him in it; then the dilemma of whether to let every prospective mortgagee in Yoknapatawpha County hear how he would sit there in the car and let his only female child walk into a notorious river-bottom joint to buy whiskey, or go in himself and with his own Baptist deacon’s hand pay out sixteen dollars’ worth of his own life’s blood.

Lost. Gavin told me how over a year ago the two Finn communists had begun to call on her at night (at her invitation of course) and you can imagine this one. It would be the parlor. Uncle Gavin said she had fixed up a sitting room for herself upstairs, but this would be in the parlor diagonally across the hall from the room where old Snopes was supposed to spend all his life that didn’t take place in the bank. The capitalist parlor and the three of them, the two Finnish immigrant laborers and the banker’s daughter, one that couldn’t speak English and another that couldn’t hear any language, trying to communicate through the third one who hadn’t yet learned to spell, talking of hope, millennium, dream: of the emancipation of man from his tragedy, the liberation at last and forever from pain and hunger and injustice, of the human condition. While two doors away in the room where he did everything but eat and keep the bank’s cash money, with his feet propped on that little unpainted ledge nailed to his Adam fireplace and chewing steadily at what Ratliff called his little chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air—the capitalist himself who owned the parlor and the house, the very circumambience they dreamed in, who had begun life as a nihilist and then softened into a mere anarchist and now was not only a conservative but a tory too: a pillar, rock-fixed, of things as they are.

Lost. Shortly after that she began what Jefferson called meddling with the Negroes. Apparently she went without invitation or warning, into the different classrooms of the Negro grammar and high school, who couldn’t hear thunder, mind you, and so all she could do was watch—the faces, expressions, gestures of the pupils and teachers both who were already spooked, perhaps alarmed, anyway startled and alerted to cover, by the sudden presence of the unexplained white woman who was presently talking to the teacher in the quacking duck’s voice of the deaf and then holding out a tablet and pencil for the teacher to answer. Until presently, as quick as the alarmed messenger could find him I suppose, the principal was there—a college-bred man, Uncle Gavin said, of intelligence and devotion too—and then she and the principal and the senior woman teacher were in the principal’s office, where it probably was not so much that she, the white woman, was trying to explain, as that they, the two Negroes, had already divined and maybe understood even if they did not agree with her. Because they, Negroes, when the problems are not from the passions of want and ignorance and fear—gambling, drink—but are of simple humanity, are a gentle and tender people, a little more so than white people because they have had to be; a little wiser in their dealings with white people than white people are with them, because they have had to survive in a minority. As if they already knew that the ignorance and superstition she would have to combat—the ignorance and superstition which would counteract, cancel her dream and, if she remained bullheaded enough in perseverance, would destroy her—would not be in the black race she proposed to raise but in the white one she represented.