It has been a summer of floods. Not just in the Texas Hill Country, where the rapid rise of the Guadalupe River led to catastrophe on the Fourth of July, but all over America. With images of these disasters in mind, I reread William Faulkner’s “Old Man,” a long story set during the devastating Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It’s the tale of two convicts at the state prison farm in Parchman who are sent to rescue a woman trapped in a cypress tree and a man stranded on the roof of a cotton house. Almost immediately, the convicts become separated. One ends up back at Parchman, but the other continues his quest. And though he cannot find the man atop the cotton house, he manages to save the woman, who is pregnant and soon goes into labor. After he helps deliver her baby, the three embark on an odyssey lasting nearly two months as the raging river carries them in their battered skiff down to Louisiana. The convict entertains no thought of escape. Driven by a force as resolute as Nature herself, he is duty bound to turn that skiff around, to get the woman and her newborn to safety and himself back to Parchman.
My earliest attempts at reading Faulkner were failures, but everything changed for me in September 1997, when I came across an article by Ken Ringle in The Washington Post. Ringle quoted University of Virginia English professor John Graham, who warned readers not to start their Faulkner journey with The Sound and the Fury—the writer’s most complex work. Start with “Old Man,” Graham said, to experience Faulkner’s mastery of language and storytelling. Then read The Unvanquished, an accessible novel that demonstrates its author’s sweeping sense of history. Proceed next to Absalom! Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, which portray the decline of the aristocratic white classes and the consequent effect on Black Mississippians. Following that, pick up The Hamlet, about the poor white Snopes family. “Then,” Graham said, “you’re steeped in Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County and its secrets of blood and history, and ready for all his other books.” Soon after reading this article, I followed its advice, beginning with “Old Man”—a revelation. For Ringle, Graham’s road map “finally unlocked William Faulkner.” And so it did for me.
