The Curse of the Land

William Faulkner and Batman

My grandmother told me William Faulkner was for grownups, and I shouldn't pick him up until I was old enough. My grandfather said that Faulkner was a distant cousin and mapped out his relatedness in a way I haven't been able to trace on Ancestry-dot-com, but that he didn't attend homecoming or any other clan meetings or activities (notice I said clan, not Klan). He said that Faulkner was a "troubled man," which, in my grandfather's generation, was code for alcoholic, which was probably accurate.

I did pick him up when I was old enough. My grandmother encouraged me to read Eudora Welty and even allowed me to speak to her when she came to play bridge. As I grew older, I recognized that even Miss Eudora saw Faulkner as a sort of troublesome elder god.

In several instances, Faulkner wrote of “The Curse of the Land,” which he seemed to believe in actuality, not just as a literary device. As a literary device, he talks about the golden age of the Chickasaw and how the fall of the land began when Ikkemotubbe sold some of the land to French settlers, who then took the rest by force. Drawn by the fecundity of the soil, white men came generation after generation, adding to the curse on the land.

One of Faulkner's most controversial aspects is that he uses miscegenation as a metaphor for the degradation of the human spirit that came with the curse of the land and mixed-race children as a visualization of that degradation. While I won’t defend what Faulkner did, I will posit that he probably was a victim of the curse on the land himself, as am I, as are very likely many of you. I would also add that an artist should feel free to use anything at their disposal to make their point, even if it’s disgusting. To the citizens of Yoknapatawpha, nothing could have been worse than being black, and that’s exactly what they were becoming, generation after generation.

Here’s where I jump from literature to comic books.

Bruce Wayne spends his life in a crazy costume fighting the innate corruption of his home, a place so corrupt that it spawned even crazier criminals in even crazier costumes. All the while, he’s peeling back the infinite onion layers of his family, trying to discover their involvement in how Gotham became so corrupt to begin with.

The many writers of Batman explore this “curse of the land” mythology, seeking a more optimistic outcome than what Faulkner foresaw. Faulkner never allowed for the concept of a Man-Bat to come and redeem the people on the land, and battle the corruption.

There’s this myth that my home, Jackson, Mississippi, was once golden and virtuous and peaceful and noble, but liberal policies and liberal, race-mixing governmental officials brought on a fall, and now Jackson is this corrupt, unredeemable cursed hell.

Normally, I use the word “myth” in its original sense as “stories of the gods,” which is a metaphor for the memes we build culture on, not in the sense that “myth” means “not true.” In this case, though, I do mean it as “not true.”

If you include race hate and racial injustice, including murder, in the category of “corruption,” then, much like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Jackson has been corrupt since Louis LeFleur bought land from the Choctaws, who had been using the bluffs of the Pearl River to trade for untold generations before the white man came to this country, but that some people where shielded from that corruption by virtue of their race, at the direct expense of people not of that race.

I’m no Batman, but I do feel like I’m fighting the costume crazies of the current corruption with one hand, while peeling back the onion layers of how we got here digging through my own family history. Whether I’m actually virtuous or fighting off feelings of guilt for not protecting a dead father is a question I can’t answer.

What I do know is that most people think I’m needlessly over dramatic about these things, just as my grandfather thought our possibly-cousin Faulkner was overly dramatic in his books.

For many in Mississippi, Faulkner’s “Sanctuary” and its Temple Drake established Faulkner as a sick, sick man, and somebody to be avoided, until he started winning awards toward the end of his life. From my perspective, Faulkner was trying to describe some deeper truth about Mississippi—a deeper truth he must have felt like he wasn’t ever getting quite right because he kept returning to it.

I lose shallow-level friends all the time because I write about the curse of the land so much. I very nearly ended up as “that drunk at the end of the bar that doesn’t talk to anybody” like Faulkner did.

For many years, I hid myself from life while struggling to remain alive because, as Henry David Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

When the final word is writ, I probably will have lived and died without ever moving the needle on my own curse of the land, but at least when people remember me, they might say, “he did try.”