"Dry September" by William Faulkner (first published in Scribner's Magazine, January 1931; reprinted in Faulkner's collection These 13, 1931, and in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 1950; reprinted many times, including in Squire: A Man's Magazine, February 1955; Strange Barriers, edited by J. Vernon Shea, 1955; The Edge of the Chair, 1967, and The Graveyard Shift, 1970, both edited by Joan Kahn; Fiction 100, 1974 [and Fiction 100: Second Edition, 1978, Fourth Edition, 1985, Fifth Edition, 1988], edited by James H. Pickering; Twice-Told Tales: An Anthology of Short Fiction, edited by Gerard A. Barker, 1979; The Penguin Book of Horror Stories, edited by J. A. Cudden, 1984; Classic American Short Stories, edited by Douglas Grant, 1990; Stories, edited by Eric S. Rabjin, 1990; The Riverside Anthology of Short Fiction: Convention and Innovation, unknown editors, 1997; Short Fiction, edited by Charles H. Bohner & Dean Dougherty, 1999; now in the public domain and available in many places online, including at the link listed at the end of this post)
The story opens: "Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass: the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened, none of them, gathered in the barber shop that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the violated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of male pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what happened."
And that, with its exquisitely chosen words, tells you the entire story. But don't stop reading after the first paragraph; you need to read the full story, especially in today's charged climate.
Told ambiguously, so the reader has to do the heavy lifting.
There are rumors, vague and unsubstantiated, that Miss Minnie Cooper, a white woman, has been attacked (or, perhaps, merely insulted) has been attacked by a Black man. Something needs to be done to protect white women, and a group of men gather at the barber shop to discuss the matter. they decide without any proof that the guilty man must be Will Mayes. An objection to this logic was of the "will take the word of a Black man over a white woman" defense. More people arrive at the barber shop, adding fuel to an already hot fire. Something has to be done, if only to prove the white man's supremacy over the Black. The mob heads out to find Will.
Miss Minnie was a pleasant enough woman, not very attractive and not of any importance to the townspeople. a single woman taking care of her mother, many of the men in town assume that she could not attract a single man, so she must be guilty of adultery or of some other moral failure. Minnie enters a movie theater and begins to laugh hysterically, the laughter soon turning to screams. A doctor is called. Minnie's friends begin to wonder if the story. has any truth at all to it.
The barber, Hawkshaw (who later appeared in Faulkner's story "Hair"), goes along with the mob in an attempt to dissuade them. The mob finds Will, beats him, and pushed him into a car. Hawkshaw wants nothing to do with this and is pushed out the car. By the side of the road, he sees Will in the car...
The leader of the mob eventually returns home, yells at his wife for staying up, washes his hands, and goes to bed.
Twenty-four years after the story was published, Emmett Till was murdered. Thirty-two years after this story was published, four young girls were killed in a Sunday School bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Thirty-three years after this story was published, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered.; while dragging a river in search of the bodies, authorities came across the beaten and tortured bodies of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both nineteen and both dropped in the Mississippi while still alive, as well as the body of 14-year-old Herbert Oarsby and five other unidentified African-Americans. Sixty-seven years after this story was published, 21-year-old gay student Matthew Shepard was dragged behind a car and killed in Laramie, Wyoming, and James Byrd, an African-American man, was dragged behind a car and killed in Jasper, Texas. In 2026, many Southern states are gleefully gerrymandering their districts to deny Black people representation with the blessing of corrupt government yahoos and an out of control Supreme Court.
I weep for my country. I weep for the victims. And Phil Och's 1964 protest song "Here's to the State of Mississippi" keeps ringing in my head.
Read "Dry September" here:
https://southinblackandwhite.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/william-faulkner-dry-september.pdf
I went through a Faulkner Phase in the 1960s when I read most of his novels and short stories. Faulkner captured the tenor of the South and that may have affected his writing career. Faulkner will always be remembered for his screenplay for THE BIG SLEEP.
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