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he admits,   Yao, I am dead . . . . He wished to be where the drums were
(CS 330).
Drum calls of transition move the African to Middle Passage memories
of being a chained hunter preying on partly domesticated ship rats. The
slaveship memory works up and along a rat-Negro-native Yoknapatawphan
bio-economic chain of consumption, arriving topside at  the drunken New
England captain intoning aloud from a book. Against powers of univer-
salizing scripturalist consumption signified by  the single white garment
which the trader, a deacon in the Unitarian church, had given him (CS
330), the Guinea man has fashioned a medicine amulet from a mother of
pearl opera glass and a cottonmouth skull. In its hybrid refashioning of
whiteness and poison, the amulet offers remedial  flash of the spirit to see
and resist spectacles of consumptive white supremacy.14
Back at the big house, a congregation  in their Sunday clothes (CS
331) gathers for what will be if seen through the corrective medicine-
amulet of opera glass and cottonmouth skull a lynching as  public the-
atre, described by Leon Litwack as  voyeuristic spectacle to satisfy  the
emotional appetite of a festive crowd.15 When Issetibbeha finally gives
his last breath, his horse and dog are tied to a tree, and the dog begins
the howling soundtrack that permeates Yoknapatawpha. The chase be-
gins in full. When finally entrapped, the African in  caked mud mask em-
braces the white face of death and utters Faulknerian passwords to the
sublime,   Olé, grandfather,  before allowing a cottonmouth to slash him
repeatedly to give him the poison that will be medicine for his live entry
into the grave that will be slavery s afterlife (CS 334, 335).
Even more troubling than the Man s doom is the story s registration of
the damnation of those who carry the Man s litter,  carried through swamp
and brier by swinging relays of men who bore steadily all day long the
crime and its object, on the business of the slain (CS 335). Yoknapatawpha
natives are doomed for their carrying of the crime and its object (the red
 Ritual Carriers, Sacrificial Crises of Transition 85
slippers of political and consumer power) on the business of the slain (the
need to kill an African). The Man has gotten the people to carry his crime.
Indeed,  [t]o Moketubbe it must have been as though . . . he were being
carried rapidly through hell by doomed spirits which, alive, had contem-
plated his disaster, and, dead, were oblivious partners to his damnation
(CS 335). Moketubbe s carriers take on a death mask themselves as they
seek transference upon a black carrier of their crimes who must serve
the Man in slavery s afterlife. It is unclear whether the snakebit Guinea
man s sacrifice will be efficacious since  [w]e cannot send with Issetibbeha
one who will be of no service to him (CS 336). And since the text insists
 [t]omorrow is today  (CS 338), we see that hunting a carrier to open (or
close) earth s door for the Man is a recurrent task: whether in response to
Hurricane Katrina, in prisons that are heir to plantations, or in violent tales
of chthonic boundary-crossing marketed in Dirty South rap, we sustain
slavery s afterlife, its storehouses of broken furniture. Regarding the things
scapegoats carry and who does the carrying,  [t]omorrow is just another
name for today (CS 337).
The burial scene is anticlimax. The African joins the dog, horse, and
Issetibeha s corpse surrounded by Sunday-clothed clan guests. Rites of
the Ku Klux Klan are enacted. Like the Confederate dead in their white
egungun robes, who famously in Birth of a Nation pour a whole bucket
of water down their faces to signal a thirst unquenched since Shiloh, the
Guinea-man takes the gourd,  and they watched him try to drink. . . . his
throat working and the bright water cascading from either side of the
gourd, down his chin and breast. Faulkner repeats the scene, closing the
story as the natives surround their carrier:
Again they watched his throat working and the unswallowed water sheathing
broken and myriad down his chin, channeling his caked chest. They waited, pa-
tient, grave, decorous, implacable; clansman and guest and kin. Then the wa-
ter ceased, though still the empty gourd tilted higher and higher, and still his
black throat aped the vain motion of his frustrated swallowing. A piece of water-
loosened mud carried away from his chest and broke at his muddy feet, and in
the empty gourd they could hear his breath: ah-ah-ah.
 Come, Basket said, taking the gourd from the Negro and hanging it back in
the well. (CS 341)
Part born-again altar call (or baptism played backwards), part Klan lynch-
ing,  Red Leaves, like Soyinka s play, takes up sacrificial crises in slav-
ery s transitional afterlife. Moved by white panic like Pilkings in his blas-
phemous egungun cloth for the masque ball or the Klan in the sheets of
the Confederate dead Faulkner s  natives go atavistic in their Sunday
clothes. And their rites, yearning for purity and transcendence, move in
86 keith cartwright
the Satanic (nigh farcical) antiritual space of the Man s christening as
Doom. This may well be the state of religion in Faulkner s Yoknapatawpha
and our own.16
 Who Will Do Our Washing Now?
The Strong Breed of  That Evening Sun
If I appear to do violence to Yoruba sacred space and to the memory of
those traumatized by white Southern terror, I risk this only out of a call to
follow Soyinka s paths to his patron hunter/blacksmith deity of iron, Ogun.
It may be, as Biodun Jeyifo has observed, that  Ogun s creative-destructive
axis operates like Derrida s notion of the pharmakon: artistic signification
conceived in the pharmacological metaphor of the poison which could be
the saving prophylactic, the disease inseparable from its cure, or the symp-
tom which is indissociable from its prognosis. 17 Call it an Ogun-informed
hair-of-the-dog prescription, but I am convinced that ritual stagings of vio-
lences at our origins can offer therapeutic vaccine, and that Southern ef-
forts to reconfigure community must risk encounters with poisons that
are also remedy. Faulkner and Soyinka both offer quite a pharmacopeia.
Doom s poison powder and the presumed poison in Elesin s  charms
come to mind, and we can consider the function of cocaine in  That Eve-
ning Sun and the drugs of preparation used on the carrier in Soyinka s
The Strong Breed. As we know from our songs, Southerners live in loca- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]