"Free to Be Me":Reformulating Blackness in Absalom, Absalom!, Remembering the Legacy of Sr. Thea Bowman in Faulkner Studies1 Riché Richardson (bio) You ask why I, a black woman from Mississippi, am interested in William Faulkner? Faulkner has helped me understand my state. And it is my state. My people, as Faulkner records, helped build it, clearing wilderness, tilling land, building with brick and wood and water. And raising those children, and not just the black children. Faulkner has helped me to appreciate my state, both the glory and the shame of it. Faulkner also helped me to understand white folks, their ways of thinking and feeling and responding. And as a black child born in Mississippi, and as a black woman living in America, or anywhere, I need to understand white folks. Sister Thea Bowman, Are You Walkin' with Me?: Sister Thea Bowman The compelling short film Are You Walkin' with Me?: Sister Thea Bowman, produced by Lisa Neumann Howorth in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, reflects on Bowman's longstanding contributions to the Faulkner in Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford, Mississippi, spanning back to its first year in 1974. It incorporates archival materials such as early photographs of her, her parents [End Page 149] and childhood home, and their community, along with an interview of the renowned scholar Margaret Walker Alexander, who describes Thea Bowman as scholar, teacher, performer, religioso, and "as near a modern saint as we have come to see" (Howorth). The opening footage of her leading a choir of children clapping and singing the song "This Little Light of Mine" captures her in action doing what she did best and loved most—working with children. This is precisely how I experienced and remember Sr. Thea myself, from the perspective that I had as one of over 250 members of the student body at St. Jude Educational Institute of The City of St. Jude in Montgomery, Alabama, when she visited for a mass during my sophomore year in the spring of 1987. This was the very campus that had hosted Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers in 1965, the place where Viola Liuzzo had fellowshipped before making the trip back toward Selma on Highway 80, where she was tragically slain by the Ku Klux Klan. During the Civil Rights era, several tragic and horrible incidents made the state of Mississippi synonymous with terror and violence: the horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in 1955; the assassination of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers by white vigilante Byron De La Beckwith in 1963; and the gruesome murders of student activists who were advocating for Black voting rights, including Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white men, and James Chaney, a young Black man, in 1964, during Freedom Summer. The poverty in the Black Belt of Mississippi and the routinized violence and systemic abuse Blacks experienced were catalysts for the emergence of Black freedom movements developed to empower rural Blacks such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party co-founded by Fannie Lou Hamer. As a result of witnessing the dire conditions of Blacks in Mississippi, Sr. Thea cultivated an activist consciousness that prompted her tireless outreach to support and empower youth facing poverty, oppression, and violence. Her commitment to research and study of Faulkner spanning back to her dissertation, and her longstanding and ongoing participation in annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conferences—a premier event in Southern studies—are among factors that make Sr. Thea a useful and indispensable gateway into a discussion of Faulkner for me to reflect on themes related to antiracism and Blackness Sr. Thea long studied and researched William Faulkner, a Mississippi native like herself, who became her foremost influence in the world of literature. The epigraph above serves as a poignant reminder of how much Sr. Thea, whose activist legacy was rooted in the Black radical tradition and liberation theology, believed in the utility of drawing on Faulkner to ponder the US South as a region and questions of race, including relations between Blacks and whites. Sr. Thea affirmed Faulkner's continuing investment in examining various identities, underscoring the importance of recognizing intersectionality in constructing...