Requiem for a Nun

314 WILLIAM FAULKNER

And now the paint is preparing to weather from an anti-tank howitzer

squatting on rubber tires on the opposite flank of the Confederate monument~

and gone now from the fronts of the stores are the old brick made of native

clay in Sutpen's architect's old molds, replaced now by sheets of glass

taller than a man and longer than a wagon and team, pressed intact in

Pittsburgh factories and framing interiors bathed now in one sbadowless

corpse-glare of fluorescent light; and, now and at last, the last of silence

too: the county's hollow inverted air one resonant boom and ululance of

radio: and thus no more Yoknapatawpha's air nor even Mason and Dixon's air,

but America's: the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female

vocalists, the babbling pressure to buy and buy and still buy arriving more

instantaneous than light, two thousand miles from New York and Los Angeles;

one air, one nation: the shadowless fluorescent corpse-glare bathing the

sons and daughters of men and women, Negro and white both, who were born to

and who passed all their lives in denim overalls and calico, haggling by

cash or the install ment-pl an for garments copied last week out of Harper's

Bazaar or Esquire in East Side sweat-shops: because an entire generation of

farmers has vanished, not just from Yoknapatawpha's but from Mason and

Dixon's earth: the selfconsumer: the machine which displaced the man because

the exodus of the man left no one to drive the mule, now that the machine

was threatening to extinguish the mule; time was when the mule stood in

droves at daylight in the plantation mule-lots across the plantation road

from the serried identical ranks of two-room shotgun shacks in which lived

in droves with his family the Negro tenant- or share- or furnish-hand who

bridled him (the mule) in the lot at sunup and followed him through the

plumb-straight monotony of identical furrows and back to the lot at sundown,

with (the man) one eye on where the mule was going and the other eye on his

(the mule's) heels; both gone now: the one, to the last of the forty- and

fifty- and sixty-acre hill farms inaccessible from unmarked dirt roads, the

other to New York and Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles ghettos, or nine

out of ten of him that is, the tenth one mounting from the handles of a plow

to the springless bucket seat of a tractor, dispossessing and displacing the

other nine just as the tractor had dispossessed and displaced the other

eighteen mules to whom that nine would have been complement; then Warsaw and

Dunkerque displaced that tenth in his turn, and now the planter's not-yet-

drafted son drove the tractor: and then Pearl Harbor and Tobruk and Utah

Beach displaced that son, leaving the planter himself on the seat of the

tractor, for a little while that is