How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Afterward, Uncle Buck admitted that it was his own mistake, that he had forgotten when even a little child should have known: not to ever stand right in front of or right behind a n***** when you scare him; but to always stand to one side of him. Uncle Buck forgot that. (1.2.52)
The narrator here is basically saying that black men are irrational, superstitious, and easily startled, so stand back and don't get knocked down like Buck. Turl's filling the stereotype role of the "c***" Negro.
Quote #2
"How to God," he said, "can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he wont?" (2.1.2.51)
Zack and Lucas grew up together, but Lucas can't imagine approaching him as an equal, even when it comes to something as important as his marriage.
Quote #3
Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haught ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him (2.3.1.52)
This is a pivotal episode for Roth Edmonds. He turns his back on his childhood friend Henry, the son of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp, the black woman who raised him. He comes into his racist heritage. He later feels shame, but the damage has been done. Faulkner suggests that Roth had to do this in order to feel white, that is, superior to Henry. That was his heritage and his curse.
Quote #4
"You, n*****! Take off your hat!
"Are you the husband?"
"That's right," Lucas said.
"Say sir to the court!" the clerk said. Lucas glanced at the clerk.
"What?" he said. "I don't want no court. I done changed my—"
"Why, the uppity--" the clerk said. (2.3.2.51, 54-8)
This is slavery "gone underground." Lucas can hold his own with any white man, but in the eyes of the clerk, he's just an uppity "n*****" who doesn't know his place.
Quote #5
"Them damn n*****s," the deputy said. "I swear to godfrey, it's a wonder we have as little trouble with them as we do. Because why? Because they aint human. They look like a man and they walk on their hind legs like a man, and they can talk and you can understand them and you think they are understanding you, at least now and then. But when it comes to the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes..." (3.2.2)
Faulkner uses the deputy to express the average white Southerner's views. Remember, he's talking about a man (Rider) who murdered a crook in self-defense.
Quote #6
White man's work, when Sam did work. Because he did nothing else: farmed no allotted acres of his own, as the other ex-slaves of old Carothers McCaslin did, performed no field-work for daily wages as the younger and newer negroes did--and the boy never knew just how that had been settled between Sam and old Carothers, or perhaps with old Carothers' twin sons after him. For, although Sam lived among the negroes, in a cabin among the other cabins in the quarters, and consorted with negroes [...] and dressed like them and talked like them and even went with them to the negro church now and then, he was still the son of that Chickasaw chief and the negroes knew it. (4.1.13)
This is another example of how the justifying logic of slavery was still in effect after Abolition. Sam's Chickasaw "blood" means he doesn't have to do the "base" work that other ex-slaves agree to do. Even they know that Sam's different because of his racial background.
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.
Quote #10
Now he understood what it was she had brought into the tent with her […] Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America, he thought. But not now! Not now! He cried, not loud, in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage: "You're a nigger!" (6.92)
Isaac realizes that the young woman who comes to the tent is part black, and that the child she's borne to Roth is of mixed race. He's outraged because he knows that it will take generations for people to accept this. Faulkner once said that he didn't think miscegenation was wrong, but it was a mistake, because it brought suffering on the child. This is kind of Isaac's view in this scene.
Quote #11
[Stevens] was not surprised. He had known Hamp Worsham all his life, though he had never seen the old Negress before. But even if he had, he still would not have been surprised. They were like that. You could know two of them for years; they might even have worked for you for years, bearing different names. Then suddenly you learn by pure chance that they are brothers or sisters. (7.2.8)
Stevens is voicing yet another stereotype: that all African Americans belong to the same big family. They're individuals, but part of an intimidating whole.