Since literature is made mainly by adults, you might think that adult characters and themes would predominate, and as far as I know that's mostly true. But the exceptions are often memorable. The greatest of the English novelists is probably Dickens, who, on account of his own blighted childhood, was obsessed with the lives of children, and the result is that we have Oliver Twist, Pip, Amy Dorrit, David Copperfield, etc., etc. What is the best American book? Maybe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, concerning the picaresque adventures of a 13-year-old. It's the sequel to Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the events of which occurred a year earlier, when the boys were 12. When Dickens was 12, he went to work in a shoe-blacking factory after his father was incarcerated for debt at The Marshalsea prison. Mark Twain's father died when he was 11, and the next year he left the fifth grade to go to work as a printer's apprentice.
William Faulkner might be an exception to the general rule that a writer, if interested in childhood, is consumed by it. His biography contains no early upheavals leaving permanent scars or demons to be exorcised. He is, though, the ambitious chronicler of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, in north central Mississippi, where some of the residents are kids. The story "That Evening Sun," about the dysfunctional Compson family, is just one installment in the Compson family saga, which is developed most notably in the novel The Sound and the Fury. In "That Evening Sun" the Compson kids are initiated into the South's racial caste system against the background sound of their murmuring, querulous, narcissistic, ineffectual parents. In "Barn Burning," another of Faulkner's most frequently anthologized stories, he turns his attention to another Yoknapatawpha family, the Snopeses.
First, the name: have you ever noticed that almost all English words starting sn- have negative, ugly connotations? One example would be snag, and, along this line, the Snopes family character on whom Faulkner lavishes the most attention is Flem Snopes. For background, here is Encyclopedia Britannica describing the family pedigree:
Through treachery and corruption, Flem Snopes gathers power in Frenchman's Bend, Miss. His cousins are emblems of depravity, including murderous Mink, pedophile Wesley, bigamist I.O., mentally disabled Ike, who lusts after a cow, and Launcelot ("Lump"), who sells tickets to view Ike's perverted scenes. The next generation includes a pornographer, a venal politician, a thief, and the uniquely honest Wallstreet Panic Snopes.
The main character in "Barn Burning" is Flem's younger brother Sarty, who is 10 years old. As the story opens, he's with his father, Abner Snopes, and an unnamed brother, which would be Flem, in a store where a justice of the peace has convened a trial. The complainant, a man named Harris, has charged that Abner burned down his barn. The story Harris tells is that Abner's hog wandered into his corn field. He returned the hog and told Abner that he should fix his pen. Next time he found Snopes's pig in his corn, he put it in his own pen. When Abner came to get it, he gave him some wire to mend his pen. Third time the pig got into his corn, he went to the Snopeses and saw the spool of wire he'd given Abner still rolled up in the yard. He now insisted Snopes pay him a small sum of money. That evening, Abner got a Negro to deliver the money to Harris, along with a message: "Wood and hay kin burn." Later that night, Harris's barn burned to the ground.
The Justice of the Peace is not wholly persuaded by this strong circumstantial case. Harris admits that the Negro who delivered the money and the message has disappeared, but suggests that the needed direct evidence could be supplied by Sarty, who has been listening while at the same time being distracted by the sights and smells inside the store. He's 10 and his dim perception of the proceedings is rendered by Faulkner, in part:
He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father's enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He's my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet.
As the Justice begins to question him, Sarty realizes that his father expects him to lie, and he means to lie even though he is in despair over it, but then Harris, too decent to feel good about pressing his case to this extent, withdraws his request that the boy testify against his father. Abner is acquitted of the barn burning, though the Justice also gives him some free advice: go somewhere else to live. Abner's reply, the first time he speaks, is "something unprintable and vile" and to the effect that he'd be glad to leave the area.
That's the first three pages. It establishes the low character of Abner Snopes. No reader can doubt who burned the barn down. Also, however, every detail helps fill in the picture. He sent a Negro with his money and his message about what can burn. He could have done it himself, but that would have deprived him of the degree of separation that ended up being the hole in Harris's case. Was he that sagacious? Then maybe that's part of his character, too. He's not an incompetent criminal. Also, he probably enjoyed sending a Negro on an errand for him. Harris is a better man than Snopes, but Snopes is good enough to send a Negro on his behalf. Not going to speak to you man-to-man. Got Negroes I can send to talk to you for me. That's how big a man I am.
The story is about Sarty Snopes, however. He's 10 and was going to lie for his father to the Justice of the Peace, whom he perceives to be an enemy of his family. The story is a dramatization of something that must happen to almost everyone without often making it into literature. You're born into a family. For awhile, it's all you know and your loyalty is absolute. In time, you get to know other people and families. They aren't like yours. Comparisons are inevitable. What if you're a Snopes? The family ways and values are inferior to the ones you are now for the first time discovering outside the only world you've known. The essential, or comparative, decency of Harris and the Justice of the Peace is not lost on the reader. The former declines to press his case. The latter acquits Abner out of devotion to some unnamed principle. Sarty Snopes might not have words for his apprehension but he apprehends, too. In the climactic scene of the story, another barn is about to be burned, and Sarty disowns the Snopeses. In Faulkner's ceaselessly expanding chronicle, he's never seen or named again. There is a trilogy of novels concerning the Snopeses, sometimes called The Snopes Trilogy, and in the first of them, The Hamlet, a character is describing the Snopes clan and mentions that once there was another brother, a little one he vaguely remembers seeing somewhere once. In Faulkner's fiction that is the only other allusion to the existence of Sarty, who declared his independence from the Snopeses at age 10.
According to one view, Sarty is a 10-year-old hero who chooses honor and decency over Snopes family values, but I'm not sure the part of the story I've skipped lightly over justifies that. Abner does move his family, and the wagon conveying their possessions receives the following description:
It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and sunbonnets were already in it, sitting on and among the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember—the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o'clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother's dowry.
They're poor tenant farmers, what is called white trash. When they arrive at the house of their new landlord, it seems natural to compare the life suggested by the contents of their wagon with the house of the new landlord, set back in a "grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs," beyond "a fence massed with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses." When Sarty finally sees the house, he's rapturous, and the narration includes his italicized thoughts:
. . . he saw the house for the first time and at that instant he forgot his father. . . . Hit's big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought into words, being too young for that: They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch. . . .
And then his father's flat and deflating assessment of the house, spoken like a Snopes:
"Pretty and white, ain't it?" he said. "That's sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain't white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it."
Crude, but is Abner altogether wrong, and Sarty wholly correct? The dispute that brings on the prospect of another barn burning arises when Abner tracks manure into the glorious house, staining an expensive rug delivered from France, and then, charged with cleaning it, takes the rug home and ruins it by washing it in lye. A deliberate and despicable act, but I anyway do not feel a lot of sympathy for the landlord either, the owner of that great house whose anger is kindled by the staining of a rug. It's possible to detect the author's two-mindedness, his grudging respect for Abner Snopes, somewhat in the manner that you might admire an ugly weed for being able to live and grow out of a crack in the cement. Flem, endowed with his father's calculating rapaciousness, survives and prospers. Sarty drops from sight.
In 1980, the story was made into a 38-minute movie starring a young Tommy Lee Jones as Abner Snopes; you can watch it at you.tube. The text of "Barn Burning" is here.
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