In honor of Oprah, I’ve been listening to Mark Hammer read GO DOWN, MOSES aloud in the car during commutes, a rendition of the novel that catches every nuance, every tingle, every shiver of recognition, especially in the freighted silences that explode inside the dialogue like landmines. Check WF’s definition of rock’n’roll, circa 1940:
“Yet it was not that Lucas made capital of his white or even his McCaslin blood, but the contrary. It was as if he were not only impervious to that blood, he was indifferent to it. He didn’t even need to strive with it. He didn’t even have to bother to defy it. He resisted it simply by being the composite of the two races which made him, simply by possessing it. Instead of being at once the battleground and victim of the two strains, he was a vessel, durable, ancestryless, nonconductive, in which the toxing and its anti stalemated one another, seetheless, unrumored in the outside air…” Faulkner describing Lucas Beauchamp in “The Fire and the Hearth,” page 104.