The House Behind Rowan Oak

We were in Oxford, MS this past weekend, gathered with others, family and friends, to see my sister’s youngest daughter marry, completing the set of in-laws for her parents; her two older sisters and younger brother had shown her the way.

Lots of people, family I see usually only at events of this sort, familiar strangers and tons of food washed down by rivers of refreshing beverages. A great party, beautiful bride and bridesmaids, all as it should be.

Not being of the immediate wedding party, we had Saturday before four in the afternoon free. Once again, in a morning of drizzle and mist this time, we wandered out Old Taylor Road to the outward and visible sign of a willful, somewhat arrogant and gifted man’s assertion of his and his family’s place in the world-Rowan Oak. William Faulkner, who earned little money in his life before a collection of his fiction, long and short, revived the critical attention he had never quite lost.  Faulkner  began his journey towards re-inventing his own family when revenue from an early book, Sanctuary, (to be the last profitable published work before the above mentioned revival) in 1930, allowed the purchas of a decaying house over which he sweated and scrimped and slowly wrested from oblivion over twenty years. He named the house “Rowan Oak” for the rowan tree, legendarily effective against evil.

From previous trips we were familiar with the various buildings on the grounds, and since our visit was earlier than the opening hours for the house proper, we wandered around, stopping in front of a decaying little house directly behind Rowan Oak, in sight of the kitchen door. This house made me think of Caroline Barr, “Mammy Callie” to the Faulkners, especially memorialized by William in The Sound and the Fury.

When she died, Faulkner had her funeral at Rowan Oak, and eulogized the old black woman whose life had been one of servitude, first as a slave, then as an engrafted part of the Faulkner family. In an epigraph of dedication to Go Down, Moses, published in that year, Faulkner summarized her eulogy thusly:

To Mammy

CAROLINE BARR

Mississippi [1840-1940]

Who was born in slavery and who

gave to my family a fidelity without

stint or calculation of recompense

and to my childhood an immeasur-

able devotion and love.

We stood in front of the little house, its porch damaged by damp and age, and looked back and forth between the two houses. I remembered the passage in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, in which Dilsey, the great character who so resembles Caroline Barr, wracked by age, arises to painfully cross the bare yard to the Compson house, there to prepare breakfast for the family. I excerpted that passage today for quotation in my Home Page

Like a flower growing in a barren dirt yard, love and compassion and selflessness managed to grow in the dark soil of Southern history’s greatest evil. Slavery did not destroy Caroline Barr. And Faulkner memorialized that greatness of spirit in Dilsey.

They endured.