JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI—An academic conference, “Incest, Murder and Mutes in Faulkner’s Early Fiction” was held here last week to discuss an astonishing development in the history of Faulkner scholarship—the possible discovery of a previously unknown Faulkner manuscript entitled Sons of the South. The novel, written during the years 1926-1928, will be published this month by the University of Mississippi Press. It is still not entirely clear whether or not the author was really Faulkner or some imitator.
Sons of the South tells the story of four generations of a great southern family, the McAlisters, as seen through the eyes of Uncle Slokum McAlister, one of the last of the line. As the novel begins, Uncle Slokum is dying, and babbling in a fit of delirium. Discovering him on death’s door is young Billy McAlister, an illiterate mute and distant relative, who nurses him into a state of semi-lucidity. Fortified by whiskey, Uncle Slokum begins telling his great-nephew the history of their family in Mississippi.
The McAlister dynasty begins when Colonel Robert Louis McAlister and his family arrive in Mississippi from South Carolina. We learn that McAlister (“Sweet Bobby Lou” to his lovers) is an insatiable philanderer and expert marksman, and this combination of traits provides him many chances to engage in dueling. Soon after arriving in Mississippi, McAlister dispatches an aging and heirless landowner with one shot, and assumes his estate. Colonel McAlister proves to be an unstoppable life-force who not only develops a mighty plantation, but also finds time to sleep with his wife, mistresses, and slaves, spawning a vast brood of children (ten sons and three daughters from eight different women—none of them his wife) within a fifteen year span.
Uncle Slokum is an expansive narrator, prone to digression, and willing to confess the most appalling incidents from his own life. We soon learn that Slokum himself is an eccentric and cad of regional reputation, whose own sexual predations rival even those of the great family patriarch, his grandfather, Colonel McAlister. There are strong suggestions of incest and hints at bestiality. Slokum, in his drunken delirium, even mistakes the unwashed Billy for a father confessor, there to absolve him or administer last rites. But Slokum’s own narrative drive keeps him going.
We finally learn that old Colonel McAlister makes his fatal mistake when he impregnates the wife of a wealthy banker, who ends McAlister’s life and dueling career with two quick shots. The death of Colonel McAlister causes a dynastic crisis, as he left behind ten young illegitimate sons, but no legitimate heirs. Seven of the ten sons were named Bobby Lou by their adoring mothers.
His wife Sarah’s quiet response to his serial philandering is to outlive Colonel McAlister by 44 years, during which time she sees this baroque family tree explode beyond the mental faculties of anyone (including the narrator, Uncle Slokum, and perhaps even the author) to keep track of. Editors have founds several drafts of family tree diagrams in his notes, but disagree on which one is final, and so none will be included in the novel’s first edition.
Uncle Slokum’s narrative ultimately reaches a point of hopeless confusion. With ultimately four generations of fathers and sons named Bobby Lou, Slokum’s erratic digressions through nearly 100 years of family history sometimes makes it impossible to determine even in which century certain incidents take place.
What is clear is that Colonel McAlister’s eldest, white, illegitimate son, Bobby Lou, assumes the helm of the family in this characteristic sentence fragment:
…and he, Bobby Lou, bayou born and bred, legitimate not by law but by default and lack of law; barely fifteen and a blushing boy virgin to whom the McAlisters’ rivals in Yoknapawtapha County paid neither heed nor mind nor tribute nor respect, clopped his new store-bought boots on the front porch of the plantation house to address the assembled congregation, his family and servants, many of them his half-brothers and sisters, likewise sons and daughters of freshly-dead Colonel Robert Louis McAlister—yet he, young Bobby Lou, the butt of boyhood games, a mere hook-baiter for his slave cousins Old Joseph, Corn Bread, and Hammer Joe, his seniors as men and fishermen, with a pipe too large for his beardless face, now their titular lord and master, in his first act of manhood, spoke to them in the sunshine of the May dawn… (Sons of the South, 445)
Bobby Lou the Eldest proves an able administrator, and the family’s wealth grows under his leadership. However, the Civil War breaks out and “Bobby Lou II” is killed at the siege of Fort Henry in 1862. Bobby Lou II leaves behind no male heirs, and so Juan Roberto Salvador (“Chico”) McAlister, Colonel McAlister’s second eldest illegitimate son through a Mexican prostitute, asserts his rights to the McAlister empire. Chico oversees the freeing of the slaves in 1865, but is soon deposed by the alliance of a freed slave woman JoJo (who seduces Chico), and Rufus McAlister, a distant cousin (who pole-axes him).
Rufus, a raging alcoholic even by McAlister standards, presides over the long, steady decline in the family fortunes, and his low wattage vitality yields only one son, Slokum, who is widely suspected of being adopted or a foundling.
Even without narrating his own early life, Slokum emerges as one of the most challenging narrators in 20th century literature. His nearly eight-hundred pages of McAlister family history clearly stands as a direct challenge to Joyce’s Ulysses as the most challenging read of the 1920s, if not the century. Slokum describes several key events, such as Colonel McAlister’s fatal duel, or his own whiskey-induced conversion to Catholicism, many times, and each telling varies in critical details.
Things are further confused by the author’s occasional intrusion in the narration (such as in the fragment above), which resembles Slokum’s style closely enough that we are sometimes not sure whether the author or Slokum is addressing us.
Finally, a now-senile Uncle Slokum comes to believe that he himself is the long-dead Colonel McAlister. He relates events in the first person (“When I fought against the Yankees…”) of which he has only third-hand knowledge from his grandfather.
Sons of the South suggests profound insights about the role of the narrator in literary fiction. By having Slokum relate the entire McAlister history to dumb and illiterate Billy, Faulkner elegantly comments on the one-sided nature of the writer-reader relationship: every reader is an end-in-himself—unable to propagate the tale being told, or even comprehend it.
How, we may wonder, does this text exist if Slokum tells it only to an illiterate mute just before he dies?
Only time will tell whether Sons of the South is studied with the same devotion as Faulkner’s avowed masterworks, but this new discovery may shed light on the development of one of America’s greatest novelists.