Ah, that’s where William
Faulkner helps. Consider this theme line in “Go Down, Moses,” that goes a long way
to humanizing an understanding from the mind of my kind of Southern Man:
“He’s more old
Carothers than all the rest of us put together, including old Carothers. He is
both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and climate and
biology which sired old Carothers and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad,
countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself,
intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all
blood black white yellow or red, including his own.”
Next: Running for Your Life: Fall Rhythms
