![]() ![]() Indeed, the story resonates certain abiding, indeed tragic themes of American history with which it is interwoven, and which are causing great turbulence in the social atmosphere today. In Faulkner’s hands, the uncomprehending drive of Brownlee's owners to "get shut" of him is comically instructive. Exasperating to his white masters because his aspirations and talents are for preaching and conducting choirs rather than for farming, Brownlee is "freed" after much resistance and ends up as the prosperous proprietor of a New Orleans brothel. In its benign manifestations, it can be outrageously comic-as in the picaresque adventures of Percival Brownlee who appears in William Faulkner's story The Bear. It is like a boil bursting forth from impurities in the bloodstream of democracy. It is a fantasy born not merely of racism but of petulance, exasperation, of moral fatigue. It is more like a primitive reflex, a throwback to the dim past of tribal experience, which we rationalize and try to make respectable by dressing it up in the gaudy and highly questionable trappings of what we call the "concept of race." Yet despite its absurdity, the fantasy of a blackless America continues to turn up. On the other hand, there is something so embarrassingly absurd about the notion of purging the nation of blacks that it seems hardly a product of thought at all. ![]() We allow it to come to the fore only during moments of great national crisis. While we are aware that there is something inescapably tragic about the cost of achieving our democratic ideals, we keep such tragic awareness segregated to the rear of our minds. ![]() THE fantasy of an America free of blacks is at least as old as the dream of creating a truly democratic society. "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks." Time, April 06, 1970. ![]()
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