CC-V Racial hatred/violence/ antagonism in William Faulkner: Dry Septembar

 

  William Faulkner was Once decried as a writer of violence. His early work Sanctuary is scattered with violent scenes such as a college girl's rape by a corn stalk. "A Rose for Emily" portrays a spinster who kills her lover with arsenic and keeps his body in her bedroom all the rest of her life. Many readers are shuddered at the shocking and Violent scenes and think the writer as cruel and sadistic . However, these  brutal and extreme scenes are not simply for exposure but are described as component parts of reality. Faulkner's basic framework of violence is based on the relationship between white and black as shown in "light in August", "Go Down Moses" and "Intruder in the Dust". "Dry September" is no exception. In the story, a black man named will Mayes is suspected of raping a white woman Minnie cooper and a group of white men get angry at this and they kill him by lynching. The content of the story at once brings out the issue of racial hatred which the white men have against the black people for a long time.

                                 The story, set in the late 1920s or or early 1930s, starts with the scene of a barber shop in a small Mississippi town. It is a suffocating hot Saturday evening in September after sixty-two rainless days. The unnatural stifling hot weather evoking an inferno conveys the overall atmosphere of the story and plays an important role in the development of the plot. the weather contributes, to some extent, to the easily fanned frustrations and tempers of the town people who are not likely to act and judge normally. in the story, we see how the rumor spreads quickly( like "a fire in dry grass") and  the bloody colour of the twilight after a long drought seems to foreshadow the violence and death to come

                                   According to the rumor, something bad has happened to miss Minnie, a local spinster, a local spinster, at the hands of a black mar. none of them "knew exactly what had happened" but the white men gathered in the barber shop, with the exception of Hawkshaw,  they barber are not ultimately interested in what really happened but they are willing to accept the rumor as true. They conclude without any evidence that the black man is a rapist and the white women is a victim without hesitation. Obviously, the real basis of such hasty reactions of most of the customers in the barber shop is their racial prejudices.

                                 Under this social background, when most people in barber shop get excited over the rumor, only the barber Hawkshaw, who is "a man of middle age ... with a mild face " represents a rational voice. He defends the alleged rapist will Mayes saying that he is a good person. he continues to insists not only will did not do it but he does not believe anything happened at all on the basis that old ladies "without getting married don't have notions that a man can't..." Another man in the shop also questions the truth of Minnie's words saying that "This  ain't the first man scare she ever had...." . However, when Hawkshaw suggests that they should find out the facts first and let the sheriff deal with this, he faces a strong protest and is criticized as "you damn nigger-lover". It is noticeable that they are not interested in what really happened or the truth. What is important for them is to maintain racial purity and white supremacy. 

                   With the appearance of Mclendor, an extreme white supremacist, all discussion about the rumor is put to an end. For him, facts and truth or even justice does not matter. He wants to punish black people with violence at the slightest hint of violation of the racial order. so, he leaves the barber shop with a group of people to lynch will Mayes. We cannot see the direct description of the most violent action in the story but we can guess brutal killing of will Mayes is committed in the darkness. The reason Faulkner omitted the actual scene of murder may be to make our attention focus on the causes of the violence, not on the violence itself.

                  Thus, in the story, we find both verbal violence and physical violence rolled into one. Undoubtedly, these two forms of violence arise from inherent racial hatred of the white people for the black people. Minnie's verbal violence, though it looks passive, fuels the hostility of white men against black men and triggers physical violence

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