Mississippi Quarterly

Faulkner's Caspey, Black Soldiers, and the American South, 1917–1919

Nearly 400,000 African Americans became members of the US military during the First World War, and while their mobilization was inevitable (at ten percent of the nation's population, Black citizens represented a source of military manpower too large to ignore), it placed the War Department at the center of a political battle, as two groups struggled to influence military policy on race (Williams 65).² On one side stood civil rights advocates like the W. E. B. Du Bois, a prominent spokesperson for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who sought to parlay Black service during [End Page 5] a time of national emergency into political enfranchisement and genuine citizenship. On the other stood white southerners pledged to defend Jim Crow.

It proved an unequal contest. The need to preserve African American loyalty in wartime inspired at least some concessions to Black progressives—as when, for example, the US Army grudgingly established a training camp for Black officers at Camp Des Moines. Likewise, as a public-relations gesture aimed at mollifying communities of color, Secretary of War Newton Baker appointed the accommodationist Emmett Scott, formerly Booker T. Washington's personal secretary, to a highprofile advisory position on his staff. However, Black America's political muscle was feeble next to that of segregationist politicians in Washington (led by an openly racist southern Democrat in the White House), who loathed the very notion of African American military service. More than anything, fear drove the attitudes displayed by southern politicians toward African American mobilization—fear that putting Black men in uniform would destabilize the color line, thereby raising the specter of assaults on white women (the inevitable result, bigots argued, of granting supposedly hypersexual Black males freer rein), and further weaken the south's hold on cheap labor already beginning to slip northward via the Great Migration. Endorsed by Miss Jenny, who praises his reactionary opposition to the inclusion of African Americans in the draft, Mississippi's James Vardaman, for example, thundered on the US Senate floor about the terrible dangers to the racial status quo should southern Blacks become "inflated with military airs" (Williams 36).³ According to the senator, it was "but a short step" from an African American soldier's pride in patriotic service to his assertion that "his political rights must be respected" (32). Unless American war planners were careful, white hegemony would soon hang in the balance.

Though they couldn't block the inclusion of African Americans in the Selective Service system, politicians like Vardaman did help, at least indirectly, to shape the terms and nature of Black military participation, as codified by Army Chief of Staff Tasker H. Bliss in August 1917. Per Bliss's plans, the American Army created during the Great War was as rigidly segregated as any civilian community. Once drafted, African [End Page 6] Americans served exclusively in units designated as "colored." The familiar conditions of separate and unequal applied as well. While many soldiers of color looked forward to participating in the actual fighting, as a means of proving their physical courage and advancing their claims for full citizenship, the War Department made sure that the overwhelming majority performed noncombatant functions, usually the most thankless and demeaning available. Of the 370,000 men assigned to "colored" regiments or battalions during the First World War, 170,000 worked as laborers stateside, while an additional 160,000 performed necessary but ignoble tasks for the AEF's Services of Supply (Williams 108, 111). African American soldiers in France toiled as stevedores at places like Brest and St. Nazaire, built roads and bridges, constructed barracks, dug trenches, and when attached to the US Army's Graves Registration Service endured the terrible assignment of exhuming and reburying American war dead. Just two divisions of Black troops saw action as fighting soldiers.

Such is the broad historical context for Faulkner's Caspey, and it illuminates the character's treatment in several important ways. We should first note that in many respects this fictional African American World War I veteran comes straight from Senator Vardaman's rhetoric and can be read as a walking validation of white southern anxieties concerning Black military mobilization and its consequences. Caspey is indeed "inflated with military airs"—more so than any other veteran in Flags in the Dust—and his service as a uniformed soldier of the US Army has, as Vardaman warned, inspired him to challenge white authority and to claim his rights as a citizen. As Caspey shares his war stories with his family early in the novel, a moment worth examining in detail, he reveals precisely the kind of emergent political identity that Vardaman feared: "I dont take nothin' offen no white man no mo'. . . . War showed de white folks dey cant git along widout de cullud man. . . . And now de cullud race gwine reap de benefits of de war, and dat soon" (61).

Yet with the exception of just one comment (to which I will turn later), Caspey's oral memoir of his time abroad is too carefully coded for the novel's white readership as "humorous" to be taken seriously as a declaration of racial rebellion. In contrast with Vardaman's denunciation of Black conscription, couched in the familiar terms of racial fearmongering, the novel's largely dismissive appraisal of African American military service relies primarily on reassuring comedy. For instance, [End Page 7] Faulkner's problematic rendering of Black speech, played here for laughs, muffles whatever political resonance the former soldier's words might otherwise carry. And so does the omniscient third-person narrator's initial introduction of Caspey in a passage calculated to generate irony once the character begins to speak. Caspey, we are told, served in a "labor battalion" at "St. Sulpice" (a complex of docks constructed by the AEF near Boudreaux), where "he did what work corporals and sergeants managed to slough off onto his unmilitary shoulders and that the white officers could devise for him and which he could not evade." He returns from war "a total loss . . . with a definite disinclination toward labor, honest or otherwise, and two honorable wounds incurred in a razor-hedged crap game" (57). Thus, Caspey enters the text discredited from the start. Chronically lazy and identified with crap shooting and dueling with straight razors (the principal recreations enjoyed by Black soldiers in works written by white authors), he is at once a familiar figure from a minstrel show and, as Martin Kreiswirth notes, a close cousin of author Hugh Wiley's Wildcat, a popular caricature of the shiftless African American serviceman featured in comic short stories published throughout the 1920s (Kreiswirth 118).⁴

The more boastful and preposterous of Caspey's war stories are in keeping with the clownish and "unmilitary" character introduced by the narrator. For example, after asserting that "Black regiments kilt mo' Germans dan all de white armies put together," Caspey launches into a tall tale that owes more to the silent-era physical comedy of Mack Sennett than to reality (58). The story goes like this: when a U-Boat once surfaced next to a vessel that Caspey and his fellow stevedores were unloading (an improbability, to put it mildly), they supposedly resisted the German attack by hiding inside the ship and braining the enemy sailors, one after another, as they descended into the cargo hold on a narrow ladder. But this scene of Keystone Cops-style violence is hardly the most lethal of Caspey's fictions. He goes on to describe how, on another occasion, he stumbled upon "a whole regiment of Germans, [End Page 8] swimmin' in de river" and killed "clost to a hun'ed" enemy troops with a machinegun that happened to be nearby. For this act of courage, Caspey claims to have received a decoration, which he proceeds to exhibit for his gullible nephew—a "florid plated medal," the narrator disgustedly notes, "of Porto Rican origin" (59).

With his patently phony stories of derring-do and eagerness to show off a piece of counterfeit military regalia—what we would today call "stolen valor"—Caspey seems at first to function in the text entirely as a one-dimensional confirmation of Miss Jenny's reflections on the foolishness and absurdity of, as she puts it, "putting n-----s into the same uniform with white men." His chief role, in other words, is to prove by example that "Vardaman knew better" than Washington bureaucrats when it came to the desirability of African American military mobilization, especially in the South (62). However, a closer examination of Caspey's recollected war experience reveals some surprises. For example, except for the obvious tall tales described above, his narrative is, for the most part, believable, though not necessarily in ways that ennoble his character. Caspey openly admits to being assigned to a noncombatant role—"[w]e never had no guns wid us at de time"—and his account of going AWOL and wandering around the American sector with the assistance of some fraudulent travel passes is in line with the descriptions of similar escapades featured in realistic works of American First World War fiction such as John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers (1921) and Thomas Boyd's short story "The Kentucky Boy" (1925) (58–59).⁵

Moreover, when Caspey's haphazard journey finally brings him close to the front line, presumably in the Meuse-Argonne sector, he experiences the war in all its strangeness and modernity. Anything but self-aggrandizing, his rendition of his anticlimactic arrival on the battlefield is completely convincing:

We went on 'twell de road played out in a field. Dey wuz some ditches and ole wire fences and holes in de field, wid folks livin' in 'um. De folks wuz white American soldiers and dey egvised us to pick us out a hole and stay dar fer a while, ef us wanted [End Page 9] de peace and comfort of de war. So we picked us out a dry hole and moved in. Dey wasn't nothin' to do all day long but lay in de shade and watch de air balloons and listen to de shootin' about fo' miles up de road.

(60)

On one level, this passage gently mocks Caspey's obliviousness when it comes to modern warfare. The "holes" he sees are presumably shell craters (or perhaps foxholes), and the white troops hiding in them probably belong to an infantry company that is operating in support of the unit whose rifle fire he can hear in the distance. Everyone is keeping his head down because the "balloons" hovering above the horizon carry German observers connected by phone with artillery batteries. At the same time, however, the scene establishes a set of surreal contrasts. Like so much of modern warfare, it defies comprehension. Though Caspey is witnessing a battle, all is eerily still and peaceful in his immediate vicinity. The fighting is somewhere up the road, evidenced only by the sounds of gunfire (though one of the white soldiers adds to the scene's strangeness by attempting to convince Caspey that the shots he hears come from "rabbit hunters") (60). Relaxing in the shade, Caspey enjoys "peace and comfort" as he watches the "balloons"—a welcome respite from his backbreaking work as a stevedore. And yet it is precisely these balloons that threaten his life.

Here, in contrast with the passages that describe his fictional involvement in combat, Caspey appears to offer reliable testimony, and he does so for the remainder of his oral account. Nothing in this section stands out as exaggerated or obviously invented. Once the white troops leave their shell craters and join the advance, Caspey takes shelter with another Black soldier in a nearby "cave" (a dugout, that is), where they remain until inadvertently flushed out by a pair of "upliftin' ladies" (presumably women volunteers in the YMCA or a similar organization, such as the Salvation Army) looking for souvenirs. A "wagon-load of M.P.s" soon appears, and the two men quickly find themselves reassigned to a new group of stevedores, this time in the port city of Brest (61). After a scuffle with white military policemen that leaves one MP and two Black soldiers dead (this incident is certainly believable enough), Caspey returns to the USA and to the Sartoris household, where, as we will see, his newfound political identity leads to trouble—until "normalcy" eventually returns (207).

What then are we to make of this remarkable moment when Faulkner imagines World War I military service from an African American [End Page 10] perspective? As we have seen, the "humor" operative in this section of Flags in the Dust relies on painfully familiar racist tropes that place Caspey in the category of a lesser soldier (and lesser human being)—not only because of his noncombatant status, but because of his realistically rendered but unflattering dereliction of duty and his self-serving tall tales (though the latter constitute less of his oral account than one might think). Overall, Faulkner presents this Black veteran in a way that validates Vardaman's criticisms of African American mobilization, squares off against Black progressives like Du Bois who hoped to barter wartime loyalty for advances in civil rights, and plays, albeit via comedy, to white southern fears regarding the damage to Jim Crow inflicted by federal military policy. In short, Faulkner's deployment of caricature in this instance has everything to do with World War I era racial politics, and it betrays a position that can only be described as deeply reactionary.

At the same time, however, Caspey's narrative crackles with verbal energy and is intensely imagined by Faulkner, as seen in those remarkably vivid episodes set on the Meuse-Argonne battlefield. Indeed, we should note that Caspey's war stories are among the lengthiest provided in the novel and thus stand alongside Miss Jenny's perennially embellished tale of the original Bayard Sartoris's gallant demise and Old Man Falls's account of Colonel John Sartoris's evasion of federal troops. None of Yoknapatawpha County's other World War I veterans has Caspey's storytelling skills. Bayard Sartoris's defining war story—his account of his brother's disappearance above the Western Front—remains fragmentary and cryptic throughout most of the narrative. Horace Benbow relates few details of his overseas service with the YMCA, apart from his inspirational visit to a glass studio on the Island of Murano. And Buddy MacCallum, who seems to understand almost nothing about the war in which he fought, offers an account so unsatisfying that the narrator withholds it from the reader. We learn only that Buddy's was "a vague, dreamy sort of tale, without beginning or end and filled with stumbling references to places wretchedly pronounced" (341).

Caspey's prominence in this regard perhaps suggests an additional, albeit highly speculative, dimension to his character. As I have noted elsewhere, despite their obvious differences, Caspey resembles his creator in two significant respects: first, he experiences the war as a noncombatant, a source of shame, and second, he tells extravagant lies [End Page 11] about his service.⁶ Faulkner's personal misrepresentations in this regard are well-known. Although the declaration of the Armistice cut short his training with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Canada and he never soloed in an aircraft or went overseas, he refused, as David A. Davis writes, to let "his disappointment stand in the way in the way of a good story" (18). Discharged in January 1919, Faulkner returned to Oxford, Mississippi, with a stockpile of Caspeyesque yarns. To friends and family members, he described his participation in fictitious dog fights over the Western Front and explained that he had celebrated the Armistice by drunkenly plunging his SPAD fighter through the roof of a hanger. As a result, he now wore a steel plate fastened to his skull. A phony limp added credibility to the tale.

These fabrications had multiple causes. As John Lowe observes, Faulkner was bitterly jealous of his brother Jack, who served overseas in the Marine Corps and who was, in fact, feared to be dead during the time Faulkner pretended to be a former combatant! (78). Topping his sibling's credentials as a true southern warrior apparently meant so much to Faulkner that he carried his masquerade to the point of tastelessness. Yet cultural forces also played a role. Pressure on young American males, especially white southerners, to prove their manhood through exposure to military violence became all but inescapable during the First World War, even though, ironically enough, the need for soldiers in noncombatant roles grew as never before, a trend that would continue through World War II and the American war in Vietnam. Thus, we can read Faulkner's rewriting of his service record as more than adolescent self-aggrandizement or an expression of sibling rivalry: born of a sense of embarrassment and failure—of not having attained the war experience requisite for true manhood—his lies speak to the irresistible power of the martial ideals and models of gender operative in his culture.⁷ And the same perhaps applies to the compensatory falsehoods created by Caspey, a fictional member of the more than 300,000 [End Page 12] African American soldiers denied the manly experience of combat on the basis of race.

When considered from this angle, Caspey's portrayal suddenly appears as both a caricature born of reactionary racial politics and a subtle form of camouflage, behind which lurks an unspeakable affinity between the author and his dissembling character. Could Faulkner have been thinking of his own massive embellishments to his war record when imagining Caspey's? We will never know. But such a connection would hardly be surprising given the anxiety over noncombatant service (the ultimate mark of masculine failure) that surfaces in the novel's treatment of military costume and regalia, the subject to which we now turn.

Military Material Culture in Flags in the Dust

In terms of material culture, Flags in the Dust is a textual cabinet of seemingly endless curiosities, a novel so jam-packed with stuff that one could almost describe it as the work of a literary hoarder. Consider for instance, the breathlessly described "collection of indiscriminate objects" that covers Old Bayard's bookcases in his library: "small packets of seed, old rusted spurs and bits and harness buckles, brochures on animal and vegetable diseases, ornate tobacco containers, . . . inexplicable bits of rock and desiccated roots and grain pods—all collected one at a time and for reasons that had long since escaped his memory" (33). Or the bizarre clutter—"fishing poles, . . . old garments, bottles, a kerosene lamp, a wooden box of tins of axle grease, lacking one" and so on—that fills Dr. Lucius Peabody's office, a "room resembling a miniature cyclonic devastation mellowed peacefully over with ancient dust and undisturbed" (99, 98).

In each of these passages, it's the seeming randomness of the bric-abrac on display that stands out, with each item in the narrator's inventory of the "indiscriminate" or the "inexplicable" presenting a new nonsequitur. Elsewhere in Flags in the Dust, material objects become imbued with notions of the sacred and form a visual, tactile, even olfactory basis for narrative. For example, Johnny's possessions, which Young Bayard sacrilegiously burns, tell the story of a short life defined by Protestant ethos and manly outdoorsmanship: there's the bible that Johnny received from his mother at age seven, along with souvenirs of his "first bear"—a blood-stained hunting coat and a "withered" paw, [End Page 13] tied to a spent shotgun shell. Smell, that most memory-summoning of the senses, momentarily transforms these spectral souvenirs into agents of temporal distortion and even reanimation. As Bayard draws in the lingering odor of "saltpeter" from his brother's coat, he suddenly "look[s] swiftly over his shoulder" and then "recover[s] himself" (221). For a brief second, Johnny is alive again. Pearl James links this episode to the bizarre, hypermodern circumstances of Johnny's disappearance, which leave his family members in a state of cruel ontological limbo, rationally understanding that he has died, but without any sensory confirmation of the fact (189). Yet the scene also speaks to the uncanny power of physical objects to embody a past that, per Faulkner's famous aphorism, is "not even past" (Requiem for a Nun 73).

Similarly, as Old Bayard rummages through the collection of family memorabilia contained in an old "cedar chest" in the attic of the Sartoris Big House, the relics he handles bring the military (and paramilitary) history of his clan to life, albeit in a haphazard order that mirrors the chronological leaps and temporal ruptures characteristic of the novel (87). One of the first items he pulls from the chest is the oldest—an eighteenth-century rapier carried by an ancestor who seized the land of his "stealthy and simple neighbors" (i.e., Native Americans) in order to grow tobacco (88). Then comes the original John Sartoris's Confederate cavalry saber, cased dueling pistols, and, looking like a "cold and deadly insect between two flowers," the three-barreled Derringer that the Colonel wielding while murdering carpetbaggers in Jefferson (and preventing local African Americans from voting) during Reconstruction. Relics from the Mexican American War, which include a "blue army forage cap" and a "Mexican machete," surface next, thereby shifting this temporally zig-zagging narrative of family history via artifacts backwards to the 1840s, followed by a return to the Civil War era (88). The final two objects Old Bayard removes, before reaching the family bible, are especially supercharged memory fetishes—"a frogged and braided coat of Confederate gray and a gown of sprigged muslin scented faintly of lavender and evocative of old formal minuets and drifting honeysuckle among steady candle flames" (89). In these starkly gendered costumes from the time of the Cause, familiar to anyone who has seen The Birth of a Nation (1915) or Gone with the Wind (1939), we reach the central wardrobe, if you will, of Sartoris family legend and southern cultural myth. [End Page 14]

Thus, before returning to Caspey's federally issued wartime attire and its contested meaning, we need to consider, first, how the text weaves Confederate garments into its treatment of the southern warrior ideal, and second, what uniforms and military regalia (or, in some instances, their conspicuous absence) mean for Yoknapatawpha County's white World War I veterans. Faulkner first signals the importance of Confederate dress amid the mythologized account of Jeb Stuart's reckless raid, fatally joined by the original Bayard Sartoris, on the camp of his Northern adversary, General John Pope. Here, the salient metonym, in terms of costume, is Stuart's "plumed hat," which like his "long tawny locks" and elegant speech, establishes him as a chivalric figure of romance—the antithesis, in other words, of the "[b]lue-clad pigmy shapes" scattered by his horse or the "fat staff-major" whom he takes prisoner (14, 13). Unlike his federal adversaries, whose approach to war is coldly utilitarian ("No gentleman has any business in this war," declares the Union major), Stuart has style, and his flamboyant headdress, a throwback to the seventeenth-century British Cavalier, serves as an indispensable stage prop within a Lost Cause legend that celebrates gallantry and panache over practicality and brute force (17).

Elsewhere in the narrative, simple Confederate gray, uncomplicated by the kind of fashion nostalgia or individualized bravado displayed by Stuart, stands for the ultimate masculine rite of passage.⁸ No other can compare. Tellingly, Colonel John Sartoris CSA literally goes to his grave dressed in "gray regimentals," attire that, like his title, distills his complex identity (as, among other things, an agent of modernity via railroad construction and a murderer) into that of an unquestionably honorable Confederate soldier (55). While Sartoris's civic accomplishment as a railroad builder does receive public recognition in his stone monument, his burial dress signifies that he will forever serve as a loyal soldier of Dixie. Faulkner is also careful to link Confederate uniforms to white power and authority in the novel's present. When describing Jefferson's courthouse grounds, the narrator lingers over the community war memorial, the statue of a Confederate infantryman animatedly "shading his carven eyes with his stone hand," and then turns to the elderly "city fathers," also in uniform (either literally or metaphorically), seated [End Page 15] upon "benches about the green." The latter, we are told, still wear "the gray of Old Jack and Beauregard and Joe Johnston" (161). Stone and flesh, past and present, youth and old age—all comingle in this remarkable passage, which ties the hegemonic power of Jefferson's white male leadership to the unquestioned virtues of memorialized Confederate military service.

Thanks to its deep metonymic connection to cultural myth, Confederate costume carries a consistent set of meanings throughout Flags in the Dust. Put another way, it wraps all Confederate veterans in the same heroic cloth. The issue of combatant versus noncombatant service, literally (as we will see) inscribed upon the uniforms of American soldiers in the Great War and a source of anxiety for veterans like Caspey Strother and Horace Benbow, never surfaces in the novel's portraiture of men who came of age in the 1860s, in part because of fundamental differences between warfare during the Civil War and the more heavily industrialized and supply-dependent variety that followed a half-century later. Nor is there any significant weighing of battle honors or length of enlistment where Confederate veterans are concerned. Though still differentiated by social class and, to some extent, by wartime rank, veterans as varied as John Sartoris (a regimental commander), Old Man Falls (an enlisted volunteer in Sartoris's unit), and Virginius MacCallum (a boy soldier) all receive the same gray badge of courage. All wear the sacred vestments of a civic religion.

In contrast, military clothing and regalia from the Great War carry a multiplicity of meanings and reflect a breakdown in the southern warrior ideal—or, at least, the attainability of that ideal for all military personnel. For instance, Horace Benbow's overseas uniform, that of a canteen worker assigned to the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), signifies a wartime contribution nearly as unthinkable (from a southern Lost Cause perspective) as Caspey's. Here, historical context, never spelled out in the novel, matters immensely. Staffed largely with protestant clergymen (incongruous company for the irreligious Benbow, who is also something of a decadent aesthete), the YMCA offered commissary services for the AEF, peddling fruit, chocolate, cigarettes, and stationery to soldiers who often resented having to pay for such articles. At the same time, the organization served AEF commander John J. Pershing's almost obsessive campaign against venereal disease by offering unsolicited moral guidance and wholesome recreational opportunities for troops who might otherwise be lured into European [End Page 16] fleshpots.⁹ Thus, as a "Y man," as YMCA volunteers were somewhat contemptuously known, Horace would have spent his time overseas not fighting the Germans, but instead preaching the virtues of abstinence and clean living—a less-than-glamorous wartime role and a more than slightly hypocritical one given Horace's own sexual proclivities.¹⁰ Indeed, if the stone effigy of Colonel John Sartoris, that exemplar of decorously violent white masculinity in the novel, could speak, we know what it would say about Horace's flaccid version of "military service."

This historical background informs material culture references that will mean little to readers unversed in the finer points of American military insignia during the era of the Great War. When Horace steps off the train that carries him home to Jefferson in 1919, the triangular YMCA patch on his sleeve attracts the attention of a combat Marine, also just arrived, who spits "not exactly at Horace's feet, and not exactly anywhere else" (158–59). Witnessed by Narcissa, this embarrassing incident prompts Horace to ask whether he looks "ridiculous" in uniform, and while his sister offers reassurances, we never see him in khaki again (159). In Horace's case, once adorned with the shameful insignia of noncombatant service, military costume signifies not the attainment of true manhood, as it consistently does for Confederate veterans, but the opposite. In this way, Faulkner shows how the diversification of military duties during World War I, which included the kind of canteen work (and religious proselytizing) Horace ignominiously performs, pushed the Southern warrior ideal beyond the reach of many servicemen.

Yet in addition to the cultural analysis offered in this scene, there are arguably autobiographical resonances as well. As a member of the Marine Brigade attached to the AEF's Second Division, Faulkner's brother Jack would have worn exactly the same insignia as the Marine in this scene—a "Second Division Indian Head" sewn onto the left shoulder of his tunic.¹¹ Thus, in this fictional encounter between an [End Page 17] effete artist figure who "served" in wartime but who never heard a proverbial shot fired in anger, and a bona-fide veteran of bloodbaths like Belleau Wood and the Meuse-Argonne, Faulkner perhaps obliquely acknowledges the family dynamics that partially inspired his military masquerade in 1919. Once again, the author's anxieties regarding his personal credentials as a former soldier seem to bubble up in the text, just as they do in his offensively cartoonish but oddly frenetic presentation of Caspey.

In the case of Buddy MacCallum and Young Bayard Sartoris, it's the military items we don't see that matter. A member of the nearly allmale hillbilly clan to which Bayard retreats after literally scaring his grandfather to death with one of his automotive stunts, Buddy joins the AEF as a foot soldier at age seventeen and serves honorably in combat, even receiving a mysterious "charm" (the Medal of Honor, perhaps?) from the federal government (342). But lingering sectional discord complicates his homecoming. Buddy's father, Virginius MacCallum, a former Confederate volunteer, disapproves of his son's enlistment in the "Yankee" army and treats his overseas service as if it didn't happen. As a result, we never see the "charm" that Buddy presumably won in recognition of a feat of valor. He promises to show this medal, whatever it is, to Bayard when "pappy's outen the house," but the opportunity apparently never arrives (342). A decorated hero, Buddy may well have the most distinguished war record (and the most impressive war souvenir) in all Yoknapatawpha County; however, he can only contemplate his military experience furtively—ironically, because his father is still fighting the Civil War.

As for Young Bayard, he returns home from the Western Front without a uniform or military regalia of any kind, a clear warning sign, as Simon instantly recognizes, that something terrible has happened to the former fighter pilot. This detail emerges at the beginning of the novel, which opens on the day of Young Bayard's arrival, as Simon describes for the aviator's grandfather what he has just seen at the Jefferson depot. After noting that Young Bayard exited his train car on the "wrong side" and "lit out th'ough de woods" (thus shunning the hero's welcome that awaits him in town), Simon offers an even more ominous observation: this Sartoris has come back from war without his "sojer clothes" and looks more like a "drummer" than a combat veteran (7). Thus, Simon immediately wonders what "foreign folks" have done to [End Page 18] the once devil-may-care pilot. For the Sartoris family's oldest and loyalist servant (so loyal, in fact, that he helps squelch Caspey's postwar rebelliousness), the spectacle of Young Bayard "sneakin' into his own town" out of uniform inspires a sense of shock and momentary disbelief on par with what Miss Jenny feels when she sees Isom in uniform (7). In each case, the text presents an unsettling departure from southern military tradition. Young Bayard, we soon learn, is so afflicted with survivor's guilt and so haunted by the incomprehensible New Death of World War I that he can no longer bring himself to put on the "shiny boots," Sam Browne belt, and "light yaller pants" (the Jeb-Stuartesque plumage, if you will) that he wore during his visit to Jefferson in 1918, months before his twin brother's death (7). And by discarding his uniform and equipment, he will contribute nothing to the collection of martial memorabilia contained in the attic of the Sartoris Big House, thereby terminating the narrative of heroic southern masculinity embodied in family war relics.

Whether complicated by noncombatant status, lingering hostility toward the "Yankee" government, wartime trauma, or (as we will see) race, World War I era military costume in Flags in the Dust no longer carries the stable set of meanings once associated with Confederate garb. And, of course, Caspey's uniform stands as the most potentially destabilizing item in the novel's entire wardrobe. If a Black Mississippian can now wear the official costume of a US Army soldier, what has become of the Old South synonymous with Confederate gray? It's time to return to this specific set of garments and its introduction in the text. Erin Penner argues that Isom's appearance in his uncle's wartime attire symbolizes the inevitability of future military service, presumably in the Second World War that many Americans could see coming by the end of the 1920s (505–06). However, the scene perhaps also reflects Isom's awareness of what a federal military uniform had come to mean within African American visual culture. Despite the racism they encountered at every turn in the US Army, Black soldiers in World War I frequently displayed great pride in their uniforms, attire that they, along with leaders like Du Bois, hoped would come to symbolize a greater recognition of their masculinity and citizenship. The personalized photo-postcards mailed home by African American members of the AEF capture this aspiration. Black troops proudly posed for French photographers in studios or outside barracks, often brandishing firearms or displaying war trophies, proof, regardless of their actual duties, [End Page 19]

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Fig. 1.

A white supremacist's worst nightmare. This member of the AEF, identified as "A. Dugan" or "A. Dugar" from New Orleans, displays his Model 1917 service revolver. Author's collection.

[End Page 20]

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Fig. 2.

Two unidentified American enlisted men in an image taken "somewhere in France" in 1918. The soldier on the left holds a captured German flare gun. Note the high-collar tunics, overseas caps, and wrap leggings or puttees. Author's Collection.

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Fig. 3.

An unidentified noncombatant soldier in the AEF's Advanced Section Services of Supply. Note the shoulder insignia and six-months overseas stripe. Author's Collection.

[End Page 22] of their membership in an army at war (figs. 1 and 2). Studio portraits of these soldiers of color typically present the subject with his left shoulder turned toward the camera so that his gold service stripes, coveted symbols of overseas duty, and shoulder insignia, worn only by men in the AEF, can be seen and admired (fig. 3).

African American investment in the US Army uniform as a symbol of racial advancement only intensified when whites, predictably enough, attempted in some instances to deny Black soldiers proper military dress. For example, according to the historian Chad L. Williams, "black labor troops stationed at Camp Hill in Newport News, Virginia, were given old Civil War-era uniforms left over from the Union army" (79–80). Elsewhere, African American soldiers sometimes received no uniforms at all, only "work overalls," or uniforms already worn-out and discarded by white troops. In some cases, these tattered garments reached Black units bearing an official stamp from the Quartermaster's Department, which indicated their appropriateness for the "current colored draft" (80). And wherever the US military failed in its efforts to rob Black soldiers of the costume that signified federal service and participation in a common cause, groups of white thugs were happy to help. One typical example will suffice. While Lieutenant (and future novelist) George Washington Lee was walking down a street in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1917, he drew the unwelcome attention of several white soldiers, who instantly became outraged by the sight of a Black man in uniform. As the Cleveland Advocate later reported, these troops threatened to "tear [Lee's] clothes off if he did not leave the city" and then chased the officer into the "'Colored' section" of a movie theater, where he hid as a white mob gathered outside (Williams 90). Ultimately, local policemen escorted Lee out of the building. A graduate of the training program at Camp Des Moines, Lee would later draw upon this harrowing experience in his novel River George (1937), which ends with the lynching of an African American veteran.

Consistent with the text's reactionary racial posture, the narrator of Flags in the Dust joins, if you will, in this assault upon Black military dignity by anatomizing Isom's comic appearance in uniform, an indirect commentary, as it turns out, on the inappropriateness of a doughboy's costume for the teenager's uncle. As Miss Jenny gazes upon Isom's unexpected attire, the narrator zeroes in on one incongruous detail after another—the gaping collar, the sleeves that are too short, the baggy trousers, the wrap-leggings worn inside the boots, the overseas cap that [End Page 23] comes down too low on Isom's "bullet head," and so forth (49). In part, the scene creates "humor" by emphasizing the sixteen-year-old's ignorance and foolishness. Dressed in a costume that was not tailored for his adolescent frame and about which he understands nothing, Isom takes on the appearance of a minstrel clown.

However, broader political themes lurk in the narrator's imagery as well. If we place this scene within the volatile context of white southern resistance to African American mobilization, an additional message emerges: military dress simply doesn't fit the Black body. Or to put it differently, in this instance or any other involving a soldier of color, the clothes will not make the man. Note too that Black membership in the AEF is, according to the narrator's language, corrosive to the organization. The six-months service stripe on Caspey's tunic is "tarnished" (inexplicably so, since he would have sewn it on only recently), the overseas cap "soiled" (49).¹² While, as we have seen, the US Army during World War I excelled in the degradation of Black personnel, the language in Isom's description suggests the reverse: through his unwelcome participation in the war effort, Caspey has "tarnished" or "soiled"—debased, that is—the uniform that symbolizes patriotic national service.

Thus, even before Caspey has been introduced or allowed to provide his account of his experiences overseas, the text has already rendered his credentials as a veteran suspect via its meticulous attention to material culture. Indeed, once defined by Isom's comic awkwardness and by the narrator's negative imagery, Caspey's uniform leaves the realm of dignified military dress and comes to resemble the motley costume worn by the blind blues singer who busks on Jefferson's square—a costume comprised, in part, of "corporal stripes," "a Boy Scout emblem," a Liberty Loan pin, a piece of women's jewelry, and an "officer's hat cord." In the case of this Black musician's hodge-podge of accessories, [End Page 24] the meaning of military regalia becomes completely arbitrary. The signifiers no longer point to the signified. Divorced from a military context and never seen (or presumably selected) by the man who wears them, the pieces of insignia described here no longer function as insignia at all: they are merely colorful ornaments intended to draw passersby to the blind man's "tin cup" (118). Once again, the text suggests a fundamental discord between the Black body and the material trappings of service in the armed forces.

But what of the one moment in the novel when we see—or, as I will explain, half-see—Caspey in the very uniform momentarily worn by Isom? Here we must backtrack for a moment to Caspey's spoken narrative of his time overseas. At the close of his monologue, Caspey turns to the subject of sex, and, I would argue, suddenly transmogrifies (to use a Faulknerian term) from a comic fool, lazy and uncomprehending, into a character all but certain to alarm Faulkner's southern white readership: "I got my white in France," he announces, "and I'm gwine git it here, too" (62). Immediately following this ominous declaration, Caspey retrieves his uniform from Isom, puts it on, and heads to the front gate of the Sartoris residence, where he waits to catch a ride into Jefferson (presumably, given his incendiary attire, the Black area of town). Standing together on the veranda, Miss Jenny and Narcissa watch him pass by, but, tellingly, the text offers little description of the man's appearance in uniform, just a quick and pejorative reference to his "lounging khaki back" (62). Thus, the text never allows us to fully see Caspey's military dress on the body for which it was intended. As for Miss Jenny and Narcissa, both women immediately pick up on the note of defiance in the veteran's manner. Jenny, who wants her employee to work in the garden instead of trapsing off to town, calls out to him repeatedly, but he ignores her. And once Caspey takes up his position next to the gate, she warns Narcissa, who is about to leave, not "to stop for him" (i.e., give him a ride), an act that would represent a scandalous violation of the color line (63).

The sense of menace suddenly attached to Caspey reaches its climax when Narcissa drives home and sees him still waiting for a lift: "The negro had moved down the road, slowly, and had stopped again, and he was watching her covertly as she approached. As she passed he looked full at her and she knew he was about to hail her" (65). Narcissa responds to this effrontery by stepping on the gas, and the episode quickly ends. But its significance lingers. Is Caspey looking for more [End Page 25] than just a ride? Is Narcissa included in the "white" that he intends to "git"? If so, then this passage offers further evidence of Faulkner's endorsement of objections raised by Vardaman and other southern politicians to Black eligibility for conscription. Caspey has returned from France not only "inflated with military airs," but also corrupted by sexual experience with white women, experience that now drives his amorous ambitions in Jefferson and makes him a danger to the white community.

Not surprisingly, once it establishes Caspey as a sexual threat, the novel quickly and brutally puts this former soldier in his place Just a few pages after sharing his war stories with his family, Caspey acts on his rhetoric of postwar liberation and defies Old Bayard, prompting a violent response (albeit presented as light-hearted physical comedy). The latter knocks him down with a "stick of stove wood," a reaction regarded by Simon as befitting his son's "new-fangled war notions" and "n----r freedom talk" (80-81). Similar clashes presumably occur offstage because by Book Three, Caspey has (in a verbal echo of Warren G. Harding) "more or less returned to normalcy" (206–07). And when Narcissa joins Young Bayard, now her husband, on a possum hunt led by Caspey, perhaps six months or so after their encounter on the road, she feels completely comfortable in the Black man's presence, even praising the way that he knows the forested hunting ground like his own "back yard" (298). Now completely docile, apparently cured of taboo sexual desire, and reabsorbed into the familiar world of hunting and tracking, Caspey has returned to normalcy indeed. This moment is, in fact, his final appearance in the novel. Thus, it marks the ending of a remarkable subplot that opens with a set of metonymic objects (pieces of costume fraught with political symbolism on both sides of the color line) and concludes with a once-rebellious African American veteran left politically defanged and metaphorically castrated.

Conclusion

During the Harlem Renaissance, African American fiction writers offered their own take on the contested meaning of a Black soldier in uniform, nowhere more powerfully, perhaps, than in Claude McKay's 1925 short story "The Soldier's Return." Set in the fictional town of Great Neck, Georgia, in the spring of 1919 (the same time period as the [End Page 26] opening of Flags in the Dust), the story follows the vicissitudes of Frederick Taylor, an "octoroon soldier" just back from France, after he ignores the local mayor's injunction (directed at Black veterans only) to put his uniform away immediately (193). When the "half-witted daughter of the postmaster" becomes hysterical over Frederick's supposedly threatening appearance, he is arrested, nearly lynched, and then sentenced to "a few months" on a chain gang. "We will take the uniform of a soldier of the U.S. off you," explains the mayor, "and give you an outfit which is more appropriate for you" (194).

In a way, Flags in the Dust performs a textual version of the political repression depicted in McKay's bitter tale. Through what we might call a weaponized deployment of the racial imaginary, the text confirms the worst fears of southern whites opposed to Black wartime mobilization. And in so doing, it metaphorically strips Caspey of his uniform, an emblem of citizenship and masculinity mocked and discredited from the start (even though Faulkner may well have identified with this Black veteran's situation as a noncombatant and the lies he tells as a result).

At the same time, Caspey's scorned military attire forms part of a larger pattern of material culture references. As we have seen, the World War I era uniforms and items of martial memorabilia described (or, in some cases, conspicuously absent) in Faulkner's text mark an unsettling disconnect between the realities of combat in the Great War—or, perhaps even more importantly, America's federalized mobilization in 1917 and 1918—and a southern warrior ideal swathed in Confederate gray. The novel is decked out, if you will, with situations involving military clothing and regalia that signal cultural turbulence. Horace Benbow arrives in Jefferson wearing the despised costume of a "YMan," attire that reflects a radical and, in many quarters, unwelcome redefinition of what constitutes military service. Caught between conflicting notions of southern loyalty and honor, Buddy MacCallum ironically hides the medal that he earned for exceptional valor on the Western Front. And Young Bayard, the most socially prominent of the novel's former soldiers, breaks from community tradition (and signals the depth of his trauma) by returning from war unthinkably dressed as a civilian. The text's inventory of Caspey's "soiled" articles of military clothing ultimately adds to this sense of cultural upheaval by symbolizing the unwelcome intrusion of the Black body into white space (the US Army) and white costume (the federal uniform best reserved, the text implies, for Caspey's racial superiors). [End Page 27] Thus, Flags in the Dust warrants careful attention for reasons that go beyond its fictional world-building (as the first of the Yoknapatawpha novels) or its harrowing treatment of trauma linked to the New Death of World War I. In ways that are complex, fascinating, and disturbing, the novel also stands as an important document in the long and painful history of resistance on the part of white Americans to the dream of full racial equality within the nation's armed forces. [End Page 28]