Faulkner, William

Typescript of a draft of the funeral sermon for Mammy Caroline Barr, 2 pages (11 x 8 1/2 in.; 278 x 216 mm), with additions and deletions in ink in the author's hand, deletions also in red pencil, [Oxford, Mississippi, early February 1940]; horizontal fold, very light browning at upper margin of recto of first sheet and on verso of second sheet.

Blotner, ed., Selected Letters, pp. 117–119; Meriwether, ed., Essays, Speeches & Public Letters (revised, 2003), pp. 117–118, 275–276; Sensibar, Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art, pp.  89–110

Condition as described in catalogue entry.
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"She was born in bondage and with a dark skin and most of her mature years were passed in a dark time for the land of her birth."  William Faulkner's stirring eulogy for Mammy Caroline Barr, who had looked after three generations of his family and was the dedicatee of his novel Go Down, Moses.

Caroline Barr (1840–1940) died at Oxford, Mississippi, on 31 January 1940.  At her request, her funeral was held in the parlour at Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak. Also at her request, he delivered the eulogy.  A choir sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."  After the service, the coffin was taken to what was then called the Negro Baptist Church for another service, which the Faulkners attended. The body was then taken to St. Peter's Cemetery and buried in the black section. The funeral took place on 4 February and a version of the eulogy was published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal the next day.  In Faulkner's Essays, Speeches & Public Letters (revised edition, 2003), editor James B. Meriwether includes both the newspaper version, which was "apparently what he delivered on February 4 …"  and the "revised" version. The revised version is based on the copy he sent to Robert Haas at Random House on 7 February.  Faulkner prefaced that version by saying, "This is what I said, and when I got it on paper afterward, it turned out to be pretty good prose."  The present draft represents an intermediate stage between the eulogy as taken down by the Commercial Appeal reporter and the version sent to Haas, which has become the definitive version of the text. 

Where the final text refers to Barr as "Caroline" in the opening sentence and "Mammy" in the second sentence, she is "Aunt Callie" in the present typescript.  In the famous line published as "I saw fidelity to a family which was not hers, devotion and affection to people she had not borne," here Faulkner has added "neither of which ever flagged" and then scored through it with ink.  Altogether there are about fifteen variants in this corrected typescript.

Critics and biographers of Faulkner has noted the influence of Caroline Barr, who was born into slavery in Mississippi, on Faulkner's writing as well as his personal life.  Elements of her character can be easily discerned in Mammie Cal'ine Nelson in Soldier's Pay and Molly Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses.  She is most closely associated , however, with one of Faulkner's most magnificent creations, Dilsey Gibson, the Compsons' cook in The Sound and the Fury. 

A compelling case can be made for this eulogy as the seed that produced Go Down, Moses (1942).  "He began forming his mental picture for Go Down, Moses … within houurs of Callie Barr's death, as he wrote her eulogy," writes Judith Sensibar in her chapter on "Caroline Barr and Faulkner's Poetics" in Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art.  "The Southern myths and realities he invoked in those three short paragraphs and, later, entered almost unaltered into Go Down, Moses pervade the lives of the Southern white boys and men that it's about, even when Faulkner masks them as black.  His eulogy is central to the argument of this novel.  It is part of what transforms Go Down, Moses into his first elegy for this black woman, one that mourns a loss he could never consciously acknowledge."  The dedication of the novel is also taken from the eulogy: "To Mammy Caroline Barr. Mississippi [1840–1940]. Who was born into slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love.  Faulkner ordered Barr's gravestone and had it inscribed, "Callie Barr Clark  | 1840–1940 | "MAMMY" | Her white children bless her."

Along with his mother and his wife Estelle, Caroline Barr was one of the three most important women to influence the life and art of William Faulkner.  Writing to Haas the day after the funeral at Rowan Oak, Faulkner remarked, "… the old hundred-year-old matriarch who raised me died suddenly from a stroke last Saturday night, lingering until Wednesday, so I have had little of heart or time either for work … [U]p to Saturday night she could hear perfectly and thread needles and sew by lamplight, and would walk several miles.  She didn't suffer."

An unknown variant of William Faulkner's first important public speech.