Evidently Faulkner had access to one of these, belonging to an ancestor of one of his neighboring friends in Mississippi. He spent a great deal of fascinated time with it, making notes, as well as ranting at the owner of the diary for his views on slavery and African Americans..
"The diary and a number of family stories seem to have provided the philosophical and thematic power for
Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in “Go Down, Moses.” Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in “The Sound and The Fury” (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in “Absalom.”"
2 comments:
By deep southern white standards of the time, Faulkner was a radical.But even he had great reservations about MLK and the Civil Rights movements, fearing that it was trying to go too far, "too fast." Of course, like virtually all deep southern whites, he had a curious notion of "far" and "fast," considering that Jim Crow had held southern blacks in terror and servitude for nearly a century.
As a fiction writer who locates one way or another in the historical past, I can feel, myself, the excitement, the fireworks of creative inspiration, that Faulkner received from this historical document that is part and parcel of the world he was re-creating, located in that world geographically and chronologically.
Love, C.
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