How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
The other stood now, the unfrayed garments still ministerial even if not quite so fine, the book closed upon one finger to keep the place, the lensless spectacles held like a music master's wand in the other workless hand while the owner of it spoke his measured and sonorous imbecility of the boundless folly and the baseless hope: "You're wrong. The curse you whites brought into this land has been lifted. It has been voided and discharged. We are seeing a new era, and era dedicated, as our founders intended it, to freedom, liberty and equality for all, to which this country will be the new Canaan—"
"Freedom from what? From work? Canaan?" He jerked his arm, comprehensive, almost violent: whereupon it seemed to stand there about them, intact and complete and visible in the drafty, damp, heatless, negro-stale negro-rank sorry room […] (5.4.114-115)
So here's Isaac, supposedly the most enlightened guy in the novel, enemy of slavery and exploitation, who can't seem to escape his own racism. And look at the description of Fonsiba's husband. He wears lensless spectacles, speaks in elevated language about freedom and equality, but he doesn't work and he lives off his father's pension. His wife's hungry and neglected. The question we should ask here is not whether people like this man existed, but rather why Faulkner chose to portray the only well-educated African American male character as a complete fool who speaks of freedom but still relies on welfare.
Quote #8
[…] and [God] saw the rich descendants of slavers […] to whom the black they shrieked of was of another specimen, another example like the Brazilian macaw brought home in a cage by a traveler, […] to whom the outrage and the injustice were as much abstractions as Tariff or Silver or Immortality […]. (5.4.137)
Just in case we think that only Southern whites were racist, Faulkner reminds us that Northerners, who didn't really live among African Americans, saw them as an exotic species even as they were giving lofty speeches and passing laws about abolition and equality.
Quote #9
[…] "Even my dress! Even my dress!" loud and outraged in the barren unswept hall; a face young and female and even lighter in color than Tomey's Terrel for an instant in a closing door […]and his uncle again, pained and still amazed […] "They're free now! They're folks too just like we are!" and his mother: "That's why! That's why! My mother's house! Defiled! Defiled!" and his uncle: "Damn it, Sibbey, at least give her time to pack her grip." (5.4.172)
There's that "slavery gone underground " again. Well, not very far underground. Sibbey is horrified at the possibility that her brother is sleeping with a black woman.