Eudora Welty, Home by Dark/Yalobusha County. 1936. Via. This is also the cover image for the 1990 Vintage edition of Go Down, Moses.
What follows is some thinking-out-loud that will be part of the chapter on Go Down, Moses and Tent of Miracles–specifically, an attempt to tie together land and cultural expression in the two novels. (Progress report: It’s coming along, but it has felt at times like I am a vulture circling high in the sky over an animal to make sure it is dead before I will alight on it. I’m pretty sure it’s dead now.)
It’s below the fold to spare those who won’t be interested; here, though, is the tl;dr version: 1) At the time he wrote it, Go Down, Moses was Faulkner’s most intimate exploration of not just black-white relations but of black lives and black interiority. Still, though, it is a novel that is ultimately more concerned with white attempts to come to terms with the post-bellum South. Thus, those glimpses of black lives we have are (mis)read by whites, but some of them resist any attempt to read them. This brings me to: 2) You can learn a heck of a lot about how to read Faulkner from Minrose Gwin.
Domestic Issue 