“Barn Burning”

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“Barn Burning”

THE LITERARY WORK

A short story set in Mississippi during the late 1800s; published in 1939.

SYNOPSIS

The ten-year-old son of a tenant farmer must choose between remaining loyal to his father and doing what he knows is morally right by alerting an intended victim of the crime his father is about to commit.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

The Short Story in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

For More Information

Born in 1897, William Faulkner spent his very early years in the country villages of New Albany and Ripley, Mississippi. When he was five years old, his family moved to Oxford and settled there. From the vantage point of the partly restored old mansion his father and mother bought on the town’s square, the young Faulkner was able to watch and listen to the parade of farmers that came into this town of little over a thousand citizens. Faulkner later bought his own estate just north of Oxford, where he continued to observe and reflect on the residents of the area. He also made use of his own family history, including ancestors who had led sometimes glorious, sometimes infamous lives in North Carolina and Mississippi. Drawing on these influences, he created many stories and novels set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha. Among them is the saga of the Snopes family, beginning with Abner Snopes in the short story, “Barn Burning.”

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

Reconstruction and beyond

The Civil War virtually destroyed the economy of the South. The resources of even the smallest landowner had, in many cases, been seized by the Confederate government in support of the war effort, and the invading Union army had destroyed land and other property as a means of winning the war. The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 freed the slaves but did not provide for their participation in land ownership. There was a plan in the U.S. Congress to confiscate all Southern farms larger than two hundred acres and divide them into fortyacre parcels for the ex-slaves, but this strategy never came to pass. After the war, lands were reclaimed by their former white owners without interference from Congress. Lawmakers insisted only on guaranteeing the ex-slaves the right to citizenship (the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868) and the vote (the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870).

In general, the federal government allowed issues concerning property and jobs to be worked out by the Southern people themselves. Since the breakup of the large plantations never did occur, Southern lands became concentrated into fewer and larger holdings than before the war, and Southern farmers restricted themselves more often to raising just one crop, usually cotton. In many cases, however, they no longer had resources to maintain the properties, and their slave labor force had disappeared.

New systems evolved. At a loss themselves, many ex-slaves at first signed work contracts and labored in gangs in the fields, but this system did not last long because of the ex-slaves’ thirst for land of their own and their desire to send their children to school. “Many blacks … broke contracts, ran away, engaged in work slowdowns or strikes, burned barns, and otherwise expressed their displeasure with the contract labor system” (Nash, p. 553). Replacing the contract labor system were the systems of sharecropping and tenant farming. In return for a plot of land, supplies, food, and clothing, the sharecropper pledged as much as 50 percent of his harvest to the landowner and used his own half to pay for goods purchased on credit at the landowner’s store. In tenant farming, the farmer promised to sell his harvest to a local merchant from whom he rented land and supplies. He too had to purchase necessities on credit at the merchant’s store. Both systems kept the farmers in debt from one year to the next, and at the end of their agreement with the owner, they found themselves once more landless. Moreover, since the terms of an agreement were from one crop to the next and there were frequent disputes, tenants often did not live long enough in a given area to gain any power by voting in local elections.

White tenants

Though tenant farming was undertaken by many former slaves, poor whites also became tenants in order to support their families after the war. They formed a large and resentful labor pool, possibly larger than that of the exslaves with whom they now competed. Oftentimes the white tenant clashed with landowners, convinced that he had been defrauded of his fair share. Like the black tenant farmers, the whites also tended to migrate from one area to another, and “after living a year or two on one place moved on” (Brooks, p. 17). As a result of the tenant system, the poverty and the self-esteem of many white farmers worsened after the Civil War. Prior to the conflict, the farmers had raised almost everything they ate. The greater amount of land devoted to growing cotton in the postwar years made it hard for them to produce food for their families; they had to purchase flour, meat, and other foods at the local store. The farmers tried to compensate by hunting, fishing, and raising corn and potatoes. Struggling to make ends meet, they often earned less than the black tenants.

The situation was a drastic comedown from conditions that existed before the war, when many of the poor whites lived in the “upcountry” region. The upcountry enveloped the mountains and hill lands where small communities of white families had lived under frontier conditions, largely isolated from the rest of the South until the Civil War. Self-sufficiency remained the primary goal of the area’s farm families—a large majority of whom owned their land and worked it by themselves. These people were proud of their independence.

The destructive war, however, depleted or ruined the resources of the upcountry as well as other parts of the white South. Additionally, postwar demand for cotton stimulated large investments in the upcountry. The lands of the small farmers were sought by those who wanted to establish cotton plantations, and a depression in the mid-1870s made it necessary for many upcountry families to sell their land. By 1880 one third of the white farmers in the cotton states were tenants.

The plight of the poor tenant farmer can be seen in Abner Snopes’s comment to his wife about his latest employer, Major de Spain: “I reckon I’ll have a word with the man that aims to begin tomorrow owning me body and soul for the next eight months” (Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” p. 10). Major de Spain confirms the helplessness of Abner’s situation, doing nothing to sweeten Abner’s temperament, when he says, “… you never had a hundred dollars. You never will. So, I’m going to charge you twenty bushels of corn against your crop” (“Barn Burning,” p. 17). The charge is for some damage that Abner did to de Spain’s costly rug, imported all the way from France. Though an atypical expense, the incident nevertheless illustrates the perpetual cycle of debt upon debt that shackled many tenant farmers, both white and black, to the service of one landowner.

Education

As early as 1801, Mississippi schools provided instruction for girls as well as boys. Parents who lived in the mountains and backwoods, however, generally had little or no education themselves and doubted that their children had a need for it. In any case, education interfered with such people’s lifestyles, for it required some free time in which the children could study, a luxury that seemed unaffordable to many. Schoolwork would have taken time away from real chores that put food in their bellies, such as raising crops and hunting. It is for this reason and because the tenant-farming Snopes family in the story had moved at least a dozen times within the ten years of Colonel Sartoris Snopes’s young life that education for him and his siblings was out of the question. They would more than likely have to move once again because of their father’s illegal activities. The Snopes children had no home to speak of, no sense of stability or lasting friendships. All of their concentration was centered on mere day-to-day survival. Still, there were in young Colonel Sartoris, as in many poor whites, noble values—loyalty to his father but also individual integrity, a sense of honor and decency. A decade after “Barn Burning” was published, Faulkner would win the Nobel Prize for literature. In his acceptance speech he explained that his fiction was preoccupied with the human heart in conflict with itself, a condition that plagues the central character in “Barn Burning.”

The Short Story in Focus

The plot

“Barn Burning” begins with ten-year-old Colonel Sartoris “Sarty” Snopes sitting in a makeshift court of the Justice of the Peace held in a dry goods store. Without sufficient evidence to convict Sarty’s father, Abner Snopes, of burning the barn of his last landlord, the case is dismissed and the family moves on to yet another farm. This one, however, is much grander than the small farms and fields Sarty’s family had lived on in the past. The boy has hope that maybe his father’s anger against his fate—life as a tenant farmer—will abate. On the day of their arrival, though, his father deliberately steps in horse manure, then tracks it on his new landlord Major de Spain’s hundred-dollar French rug.

In the background of the story are other family members—Sarty’s two sisters, his mother, his aunt, and his older brother. The morose father, Abner, has the daughters clean the rug with a harsh lye, which ruins it. Outraged, Major de Spain charges him twenty bushels of corn to be taken from Abner’s future harvest. Abner, placid on the outside, sues Major de Spain for leveling too severe a punishment. The Justice of the Peace reduces it to ten bushels, whereupon Sarty defiantly and loyally proclaims to his father that even that amount won’t be taken from them. The boy has already suggested a strategy: “We’ll gether hit and hide hit! I kin watch” (Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” p. 16).

Aware of the exploitation in tenant farming, angered and outraged by the insult of it to him personally, Abner is not as impressed by the splendor of his new landlord’s home as his son Sarty is. “Pretty and white, ain’t it?” he tells the boy. “That’s sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain’t white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it” (“Barn Burning,” p. 12). Sarty, however, perceives that it is wrong to hold Major de Spain responsible for the indignity his father suffers and to purposely destroy de Spain’s property. Soon after the hearing, Abner Snopes sets out to claim justice for himself and burn down de Spain’s barn in revenge for the punishment pronounced against him over the rug. Sarty, torn because of his loyalty to his father but driven by his own sense of justice, manages to warn de Spain of the impending fire, then runs away, presumably never to return home again.

Poor whites vs. blacks

In his book William Faulkner and Southern History, Joel Williamson makes an observation about Abner’s penchant for burning barns and its possible roots. He compares it with the tactics that the slaves used, “the threat to burn the master’s barn under the cover of darkness. Arson, it seems, has always been a favored form of retaliation by the powerless of the world” (Williamson, p. 329).

Though the tactic of barn burning may have been borrowed from the slaves, many poor whites had ill feelings for blacks in the late 1800s. This animosity resulted partly from the fact that the poor whites had to compete with blacks for sharecropping and tenant-farming jobs. Abner reflects this condition in his treatment of the black servant of his new landlord, Major de Spain. “Get out of my way, nigger,” Abner barks, flinging the house servant aside (“Barn Burning,” p. 11). His violence, though directed mostly at the landlord, finds a ready target in the black servant standing in his way.

White landowners often preferred black tenants to white ones, and “in very bad years in Mississippi … white tenants organized to drive black tenants off the land by violence” (Williamson, p. 154). When the violence escalated around the turn of the twentieth century, white landlords in Mississippi even hired some Pinkerton detectives to drive off poor whites. Property was at the heart of the frustrations of many poor whites and their dislike of blacks. Like the landowner, blacks interfered with the ability of poor whites to control property, which they equated with personal freedom. Limits on their power to transfer, acquire, or hold property were viewed as a personal affront, a destruction of their liberty.

Sources

Violence, frustration, and frequent moves marked the history of William Faulkner’s family. This legacy became a source of inspiration for stories such as “Barn Burning.” The family’s real-life saga included great-grandfather William Cuthbert Faulkner, who injured his brother in a fight in Missouri at age sixteen, suffered a beating from his own father, and ran away from home. He reappeared in Mississippi, hoping to live with an uncle who, at the time, was in jail. This great-grandfather became the first author in the family, writing a story about a reallife murderer that sold 2,500 copies the day the murderer was executed. The Old Colonel, as his family came to call him, went on to muster two regiments to fight in the Civil War, earned the respect of the community, and set up a successful law practice in Ripley, Mississippi. By 1868 William Cuthbert Faulkner had grown so prosperous that he decided not to have anything to do with the other Faulkners in the area, whom he considered “no-good.” He therefore changed the spelling of his own name to Falkner.

William Faulkner, who would restore the u in his family name, was born to Murry and his wife, Miss Maud, in New Albany, near Oxford. Even as a youngster, he avowed that his ambition was to be a writer like his great-grandfather. Thus the Old Colonel became a model for his great-grandson, as well as a character in some of his stories. Certainly the experiences of Faulkner’s family—its violent encounters, run-ins with Southern law, and uprootings from one place to another—fed the writer’s imagination and helped provide background for his fictional tales.

In addition to his own family members, Faulkner was influenced by other residents of the Oxford area, especially struggling farmers. In fact, in 1938, the year before “Barn Burning” appeared in print, he bought a second farm, Greenfield, and leased it out to tenants. “Bill found more than just a farm out there,” his brother recalled. “He found the kind of people he wrote about, hill people.... They fought over elections and settled their own disputes. We had a killing just across the creek from us, over redistricting a school zone” (John Faulkner in Blotner, p. 486).

Faulkner’s daughter, Jill, has recounted the story of life on their own farm, Rowan Oak, and the commissary Faulkner ran that served as a store for the tenant farmers and some of the neighbors as well. She noted that the place “smelled of cheese” and mentioned the cans of sardines and the other foods in the commissary (Williamson, p. 272). Her description evokes a scene duplicated by Faulkner’s description of what Sarty sees and smells as he sits in the general store awaiting the outcome of his father’s hearing at the beginning of “Barn Burning.”

Faulkner sets his story in the imaginary town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County. (The town and county are not named in “Barn Burning,” but other stories about the Sartoris and Snopes families place the action there.) Jefferson, in Faulkner’s imagination, was a town of four thousand citizens with a few wealthy plantation homes still marking the outskirts, some abandoned and decaying. Such a setting was reminiscent of Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi, with spots of wealth scattered among the ruins of plantations.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

The Great Depression

Faulkner chronicled an era just after the Reconstruction, a period that held many similarities to the Depression years of the 1930s, when “Barn Burning” was written. During both time periods, some wealthy people took advantage of dismal economic circumstances to increase their own fortunes, while many poor people grew poorer and their situations grew more hopeless. Many farmers, who had long depended on government support, lost their lands to bankers during the Great Depression, and large farm syndicates began to dominate American farming, much as the plantation owners grew to dominate Southern agriculture in an earlier era.

William Faulkner was personally acquainted with financial hardships, although he never descended into total destitution. His hopes to be recognized as a writer met with continual frustration for more than a decade until shortly after the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

The Depression meant the loss of jobs for millions of Americans. For Faulkner, it was an extension of his personal lack of fortune, but ironically he began to experience some professional success during the harsh decade. His novel Sanctuary appeared in the early 1930s. It was by Faulkner’s own confession an idea deliberately conceived to make money, and it did. The success of this steamy novel brought Faulkner literary fame and financial reward. His earlier short stories, written and rejected, now began to sell, and offers came in to write for the film industry in Hollywood.

The Depression lingered in the United States, but Europe was edging toward war. By 1939, when Faulkner was writing seriously about his own Mississippi experiences and fantasies, conflict in Europe seemed imminent and the resultant preparations improved the American economy. These conditions bring to mind the effect the Civil War had on the financial status of a character in “Barn Burning.” Sarty’s father, Abner, had gone into the war, the story admits, to improve his fortune, “wearing no uniform … going to war … for booty” (“Barn Burning,” pp. 24-25).

Publication and reception

“Barn Burning” was initially written as an introductory chapter to The Hamlet, the first in a trilogy of novels centered around the Snopes family. Faulkner later changed his mind and attempted to publish “Barn Burning” as an independent magazine story. First the Post rejected “Barn Burning,” then Redbook and The American Magazine declined the chance to publish it on the grounds that it was too depressing. Other rejections poured in before Harper’s purchased it for $400.

THE DISAPPEARING COLONEL SARTORIS SNOPES

Besides getting “Barn Burning” published in 1939, Faulkner managed also to complete the first volume of his trilogy about the Snopes family that year. Altogether it would take a decade to publish the trilogy, beginning with The Hamlet (1940), followed by The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). In none of these novels would Colonel Sartoris Snopes, who flees at the end of “Barn Burning,” ever reappear.

Proud of the story, Faulkner later wrote a treatment to turn “Barn Burning” into a film, but nothing came of the project. Although various characters in “Barn Burning” resurfaced in other fiction by Faulkner, young Sarty never appeared again. In retrospect, some critics consider “Barn Burning” one of the finest short stories in Faulkner’s entire repertoire. It was first printed in book form in the Collected Stories of William Faulkner, published in 1943. Many critics showered praise on the forty-two stories in the book, though some spoke of the variation in quality, singling out “Barn Burning” as a superior example. “These Collected Stories,” said the Atlantic, “certainly strengthen the case of those critics who have steadily maintained that Faulkner is the greatest living American writer” (James, p. 298).