These people who lie about and conceal the ownership of land and property in order to hold relief jobs which they have no intention of performing, standing on their constitutional rights against having to work, who jeopardize the very job itself through petty and transparent subterfuge to acquire a free mattress which they intend to attempt to sell; who would relinquish even the job, if by so doing they could receive free food and a place, any rathole, in town to sleep in; who, as farmers, make false statements to get seed loans which they will later misuse, and then react in loud vituperative outrage and astonishment when caught at it.

(“The Tall Men,” 46)

. . . with the rest of the world all full of pretty neon lights burning night and day both, and easy, quick money scattering itself around everywhere for any man to grab a little, and every man with a shiny new automobile already wore out and throwed away and the new one delivered before the first one was even paid for, and everywhere a fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA and a dozen other three-letter reasons for a man not to work.

(“The Tall Men,” 58)

“That first year, when county agents was trying to explain the new system to farmers, the agent come out here and tried to explain it to [the McCallums], explaining how they would cut down the crop, but that the Government would pay farmers the difference, and so they would actually be better off than trying to farm by themselves.

“‘Why, we’re much obliged,” Buddy says. ‘But we don’t need no help. We’ll just make the cotton like we always done; if we can’t make a crop of it, that will just be our lookout and our loss, and we’ll try again.’ . . . [They] hauled it all the way into Jefferson before they found out they couldn’t sell it because, in the first place, they had made too much of it and, in the second place, they never had no card to sell what they would have been allowed. So they hauled it back.”

(“The Tall Men,” 55-56)

“Only even when they didn't raise cotton, every year the county agent’s young fellow would come out to measure the pasture crops they planted so he could pay them for that, even if they never had no not-cotton to be paid for. Except that he never measured no crop on this place. ‘You’re welcome to look at what we are doing,’ Buddy says. ‘But don’t draw it down on your map.’

“‘But you can get money for this,’ the young fellow says. ‘The Government wants to pay you for planting all this.’

“‘We are aiming to get money for it,’ Buddy says. ‘When we can’t, we will try something else. But not from the Government. Give that to them that want to take it. We can make out.’”

(“The Tall Men,” 57)

“That’s our trouble. We done invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules and recipes that we can’t see anything else; if what we see can’t be fitted to an alphabet or a rule, we are lost. . . . Life’s a pretty durn valuable thing. I don’t mean just getting along from one WPA relief check to the next one, but honor and pride and discipline that make a man worth preserving, make him of any value. That’s what we got to learn again. Maybe it takes trouble, bad trouble, to teach it back to us.”

(“The Tall Men,” 60; emphasis added)

SS

Faulkner to Malcolm Franklin, July 4, 1943

There is a squadron of negro pilots. They finally got congress to allow them to learn how to risk their lives in the air. They are in Africa now, under their own negro lt. colonel, did well at Pantelleria, on the same day a mob of white men and white policemen killed 20 negroes in Detroit. Supposed you and me and a few others of us lived in the Congo, freed seventy-seven years ago by ukase; of course we cant live in the same apartment hut with the black folks, nor always ride in the same car nor eat in the same restaurant, but we are free because the Great Black Father says so. Then the Congo is engaged in War with the Cameroon. At last we persuade the Great Black Father to let us fight too. You and Jim say are flyers. You have just spent the day trying to live long enough to learn how to do your part in saving the Congo. Then you come back down and are told that 20 of your people have just been killed by a mixed mob of civilians and cops at Little Poo Poo. What would you think?

A change will come out of this war. If it doesn’t, if the politicians and the people who run this country are not forced to make good the shibboleth they glibly talk about freedom, liberty, human rights, then you young men who live through it will have wasted your precious time, and those who dont live through it will have died in vain.

(Selected Letters of William Faulkner, 175-176)

How . . . can we hope to survive the next Pearl Harbor, if there should be one, with not only all peoples who are not white, but all peoples with political ideologies different from ours arrayed against us—after we have taught them (as we are doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours. . . . Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.

(Press Dispatch on the Emmett Till case, September 9, 1955)

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

(“On Fear: The South in Labor,” Harper’s, June 1956)

So I would say to the NAACP and all the organizations who would compel immediate and unconditional integration: “Go slow now. Stop now for a time, a moment. You have the power now; you can afford to withhold for a moment the use of it as a force. You have done a good job, you have jolted your opponent off-balance and he is now vulnerable. But stop there for a moment; don't give him the advantage of a chance to cloud the issue by that purely automatic . . . sympathy for the underdog simply because he is under.”

(“A Letter to the North,” Life, March 5, 1956) 

FAULKNER: . . . I don’t like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation. If I have to choose between the United States government and Mississippi, then I’ll choose Mississippi. What I’m trying to do now is not have to make that decision. As long as there’s a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it. But if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians.Q.You mean white Mississippians.

(Interview with Russell Howe, The Reporter, March 22, 1956)