FaulkneF Journal Chuck Jackson American Emergencies: Whiteness, the National Guard, and Light in August White Blood R ight before the National Guard emerges in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) as a bicycle-riding, uniformed Grim Reaper who packs a pistol and wields a butcher knife, the novel flashes forward so that the reader can meet Gavin Stevens, Jefferson’s “District Attorney, [who is] a Harvard graduate [and] a Phi Beta Kappa” (444). Stevens’s character serves two functions in the novel: to escort the exhausted Mrs. Hines and her de lirious husband, the raving white supremacist old Doc Hines, to Jefferson’s train station, and to rehearse the story of Joe Christmas’s death in order to prepare the reader for its direct narration in the pages that follow. Faulkner supplies Stevens with a ready listener, a nameless college professor and friend, who, coincidentally, disembarks from the train to pay the D. A. a surprise visit at the exact moment in which Stevens delivers the Hineses to their train car. As they travel from the train station back to Stevens’s home, Stevens spins a classically Gothic tale about the last moments of Christmas’s life as a panicky, interior struggle of blood against blood, fetishizing and racializinghis liquid interiors by repeating the terms “black blood” and “white blood” (448-49).' Christmas’s white blood, Stevens explains, provides him with moral reasoning, but his black blood rises against it, pushing him to pistol-whip Reverend Hightower and, ultimately, sweeping him into an ecstatic state in which “death is desire and fulfillment” (449). The District Attorneyrelies upon a Gothic encoding ofwhat he understands to be the divide between black and white, speaking the language of early-American writers for whom blackness, for the most part, signifies evil and the Devil’s work, and whiteness, usually, signifies purity and religious illumination.* 2 The lawyer’s re-presentation of early-American Gothic rhetoric as a modern dis ‘By “classic Gothic,” I mean a tale of terror designed to thrill its reader with its representations of evil, shadows, and fear. See Fiedler’s description ofthe early-American Gothic as a literature replete with “images of alienation, flight, and abysmal fear” (143). Toni Morrison explains racial fetishization as a narrative tech nique by which the author “evokjes] erotic fears or desires and establishes] fixed or major difference where difference does not exist or is minimal. Blood, for example, is a pervasive fetish: black blood, white blood, the purity of blood; the purity of white female sexuality, the pollution ofAfrican blood and sex. Fetishization is a strategy often used to assert the categorical absolutism of civilization and savagery” (68). 2Harry Levin and Fiedler, as well as the more recent work of Teresa Goddu, name Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, among others, as classic American Gothic writers. For a reevaluation of how Gothic blackness and whiteness must be understood in racial terms, in particularly in terms of the haunting of early-American literature by slavery, see Goddu and Morrison. 193 194 Chuck Jackson American Emergencies course of blood not only conflates the moral with the racial, but also, as spoken by the voice of law and education, authorizes such a discourse as learned, rea soned, and natural. Staged as a one-sided conversation between two ivy leagueeducated white men, Stevens’s monologue represents how the Gothic infiltrates modern racial thought, so much so that even Faulkner’s Harvard-educated, state-representative lawman speaks of mixed-race in terms of a mythic—one might say eugenic—battle between good and evil blood pools. The silence of the emergent professor, who never interrupts, signals that he accepts, or at least remains mesmerized by, Stevens’s fantastic narrative as a truth. Stevens’s interpretation of whiteness as the moral and racial force that drives Christmas away from the darkness of blackness emerges near the end of a novel that has already implicated whiteness in its Gothic structure. As Faulkner’s readers are already aware, and as I will explore later in this essay, Joe Christmas’s racial ambiguity colors the way that Jefferson’s townspeople understand themselves as occupying a normative whiteness that...