Passion and Prejudice
This is a blazing novel of love and guilt, by one of America’s greatest writers, that movingly explores the passions and prejudices that exist in the deep South.
Trapped in a wave of mob hysteria. Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly Negro who is accused of the murder of a white man, is in danger of being lynched. Gavin Stevens, an eminent local lawyer, is determined to see justice done, but the stubborn old man refuses his help. Instead, it is to Gavin’s sixteen-year-old nephew, Chick, that Lucas confides the truth. To save the old man, Chick undertakes an eerie assignment—to invade the graveyard in the dead of the night and dig up the body of the man Lucas is accused of killing!
In a desperate race against time and the lynch mob’s fury, Chick unlocks the secret of the grave, only to disclose a further mystery that baffles the bloodthirsty townspeople.
This major American novel, by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is distinguished for its suspense, subtlety and gripping narrative power. Intruder in the Dust searches the conscience of the South as it wrestles with the demon of its guilt and love —its relationship to the Negro.
THIS BOOK IS A REPRINT OF THE ORIGINAL HARD COVER EDITION PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
Other SIGNET Books by William Faulkner
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
The Long Hot Summer (Book III of The Hamlet)
Knight’s Gambit
Pylon
Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun
Sartoris
The Unvanquished
The Wild Palms and The Old Man
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Intruder in the Dust
A SIGNET BOOK
Published by THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions
Published as a SIGNET BOOK
By Arrangement with Random House, Inc.
FIRST PRINTING, SEPTEMBER, 1949
SECOND PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1949
THIRD PRINTING, JANUARY, 1950
FOURTH PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1953
FIFTH PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1955
SIXTH PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1956
SEVENTH PRINTING, MARCH, 1958
SIGNET BOOKS are published by
The New American Library of World Literature, Inc.
501 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter One
IT WAS JUST NOON that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. He was there, waiting. He was the first one, standing lounging trying to look occupied or at least innocent, under the shed in front of the closed blacksmith’s shop across the street from the jail where his uncle would be less likely to see him if or rather when he crossed the Square toward the postoffice for the eleven oclock mail.
Because he knew Lucas Beauchamp too—as well that is as any white person knew him. Better than any maybe unless it was Carothers Edmonds on whose place Lucas lived seventeen miles from town, because he had eaten a meal in Lucas’ house. It was in the early winter four years ago; he had been only twelve then and it had happened this way: Edmonds was a friend of his uncle; they had been in school at the same time at the State University, where his uncle had gone after he came back from Harvard and Heidelberg to learn enough law to get himself chosen County Attorney, and the day before Edmonds had come in to town to see his uncle on some county business and had stayed the night with them and at supper that evening Edmonds had said to him:
“Come out home with me tomorrow and go rabbit hunting:” and then to his mother: “I’ll send him back in tomorrow afternoon. I’ll send a boy along with him while he’s out with his gun:” and then to him again: “He’s got a good dog.”
“He’s got a boy,” his uncle said and Edmonds said:
“Does his boy run rabbits too?” and his uncle said:
“We’ll promise he won’t interfere with yours.”
So the next morning he and Aleck Sander went home with Edmonds. It was cold that morning, the first winter cold-snap, the hedgerows were rimed and stiff with frost and the standing water in the roadside drainage ditches was skimmed with ice and even the edges of the running water in the Nine Mile branch glinted fragile and scintillant like fairy glass and from the first farmyard they passed and then again and again and again came the windless tang of woodsmoke and they could see in the back yards the black iron pots already steaming while women in the sunbonnets still of summer or men’s old felt hats and long men’s overcoats stoked wood under them and the men with crokersack aprons tied with wire over their overalls whetted knives or already moved about the pens where hogs grunted and squealed, not quite startled, not alarmed but just alerted as though sensing already even though only dimly their rich and imminent destiny; by nightfall the whole land would be hung with their spectral intact tallowcolored empty carcasses immobilized by the heels in attitudes of frantic running as though full tilt at the center of the earth.
And he didn’t know how it happened. The boy, one of Edmonds’ tenant’s sons, older and larger than Aleck Sander who in his turn was larger than he although they were the same age, was waiting at the house with the dog—a true rabbit dog, some hound, a good deal of hound, maybe mostly hound, redbone and black-and-tan with maybe a little pointer somewhere once, a potlicker, a nigger dog which it took but one glance to see had an affinity a rapport with rabbits such as people said Negroes had with mules—and Aleck Sander already had his tapstick—one of the heavy nuts which bolt railroad rails together, driven onto a short length of broom-handle—which Aleck Sander could throw whirling end over end at a running rabbit pretty near as accurately as he could shoot the shotgun—and Aleck Sander and Edmonds’ boy with tapsticks and he with the gun they went down through the park and across a pasture to the creek where Edmonds’ boy knew the footlog was and he didn’t know how it happened, something a girl might have been expected and even excused for doing but nobody else, halfway over the footlog and not even thinking about it who had walked the top rail of a fence many a time twice that far when all of a sudden the known familiar sunny winter earth was upside down and flat on his face and still holding the gun he was rushing not away from the earth but away from the bright sky and he could remember still the thin bright tinkle of the breaking ice and how he didn’t even feel the shock of the water but only of the air when he came up again. He had dropped the gun too so he had to dive, submerge again to find it, back out of the icy air into the water which as yet felt neither, neither cold or not and where even his sodden garments—boots and thick pants and sweater and hunting coat—didn’t even feel heavy but just slow, and found the gun and tried again for bottom then thrashed one-handed to the bank and treading water and clinging to a willow-branch he reached the gun up until someone took it; Edmonds’ boy obviously since at that moment Aleck Sander rammed down at him the end of a long pole, almost a log whose first pass struck his feet out from under him and sent his head under again and almost broke his hold on the willow until a voice said: