The only thing that separated him from them was talent, and something uncanny happened whenever he faced a fictional page. He used racial epithets as a matter of course, and as a young man accepted the social order of the Jim Crow South. In his daily life William Faulkner shared many of his white neighbors’ values. He had two mounts shot from under him at the first battle of Bull Run, and later organized a troop of irregular cavalry in his home state, stealing horses and harassing the Union army.
As the war approached he organized Ripley’s young white men into a militia company called the Magnolia Rifles, and got himself elected Colonel of the regiment to which it was assigned. He was silver-tongued, and he needed to be, for he was also quarrelsome, killing two men in arguments and then talking his way out of the consequences.īy 1850 he owned a house and held five people in slavery in the north Mississippi town of Ripley, and he did a varied business, buying and selling land and people in addition to his legal practice. In 1845, when he was 20, he took down a murderer’s jailhouse confession, had it printed, and sold it beneath the gallows. He had grown up poor in Tennessee and then drifted south, learning just enough law to become a creditable attorney, while also finding more sensational ways to make money.
William Clark Falkner was a tall man-the order for his coffin specified 6’2”-and a talented one, good with a pen or a pistol, and with a balance sheet too. Even after the Civil War he had cash in his pockets, at a time when nobody else in Mississippi seemed to have any at all.
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