Beke Boy

Béké Boy

“Light in August was originally
about white people: Lena Grove,
Gail Hightower, and Byron Bunch.”
—Aliyyah I Abdur-Rahman, “White
Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement,
And The Homoerotic In William
Faulkner's Light In August,”
The Faulkner Journal
10-01-2006

he be a béké boy—
a kid of the dinge delta
creole whitey hustler.

morne shack his home—
marooned in the swamp
he be quimbois queer.
______________________

french-speaking carib dinge delta jive:
who refused servile labor: to flee to the
swamp or bayou
morn: term for a hill or small
mountain in the Antilles
quimbois: objects and practices
of west indian sorcery or witchcraft.
__________________________

born merely subchief—
a mingo, one of 3 boyz
on his mother’s side.

the man, the chief—
hereditary landowner
male side of family.

the béké boy sneaky—
ceaseless darting glances
all-embracing, animalesque.

clytie’s kid got by—
his father on the body
of his own daughter.
___________________

damned impudent—
wiseass just asking for it
cute young murderer.

“don’t you see?”—
this whole land, all of it,
the deep south is cursed!”

“white and black both—
whom it ever suckled lies
under the delta curse.”

the unmistakable way—
the land lies open like an
open door, abandoned.

______________________

no body lives here—
not anymore, the dusk,
the dead delta darkness.

even the jasmine smells—
spiraea, honeysuckle dead,
rotting mausoleum magnolias.

verisimilitude of tediousness—
no escape even for white trash
tallahatchie trailer courts.
_______________________

cheap shoddy music—
cheap white flesh for sale
naked legs up in the tv night.

delta darkness heat made—
thicker by imminence of sex
harsh labor marooned land.

crooning, welling up—
submerged passion of the
creole race, nothing, everything.

motionless uprush of it—
strong constant dinge downflow
of the pines and dogwood.
______________________

unfolding beneath him—
like a map in slow-motion
slow groaning ejaculation.

flowing down by the levee—
thru cane fields and woods
umbilicus uncoiling down

circumcising the north—
outlining it with the contours
of the missouri muddy flow.

circumscribing america—
right down the middle like
the amazon & the congo rivers.
_______________________

going down on moses—
nobody owns the mississippi
it’s the dick of the dinge delta.

it just keeps coming—
and coming like a naked convict
in chains getting sucked off.

its deep rich black soul—
woods & streams for sighing,
for fish, game and big oil.

the kid crawled & lurked—
he felt up his big one and
could smell it now…

Senator Devane King of Alabama

Senator DeVane King of Alabama

rotting delta pariah-hood—
evocative of old weariness
and the death he wished for…

the old dying senator—
dead in cuba, buchanan's
lover, fag vice-president

but for now he lived—
in a swanky beltway mansion
full of young dinge slaves...

while my black race—
sweated in the hot cane fields,
I served my master in bed.

I was a young mandingo—
who'd die in the shade under
mosquito netting wad by wad.

why should I want to—
sweat in the fields when all
I had to do was come in style.

ancient & accursed lips—
wanting to know me and all
the carib cum in my big cock.

without moving below—
bending from my hips forward
violently like a striking snake.

senator devane king from—
alabama wasn’t deceiving anybody
tho, young negroes in his bed.

the whole beltway knew—
the butler, the horsemen, even
the valets, cute colored youths.

it sprang outta me—
flinging myself backwards
over the edge of the bed.

the old senator’s pale lips—
skin pallid and deadlooking,
his tragic, foreknowing eyes.

“maybe in a hundred—
or two hundred years the south
will rule america, but not now…”

I jerked back, shooting it—
the senator ogling in amazement,
pity & outrage, sucking me off.

it was then that I pretended—
my loins were a striking snake
full of poisonous cum for a king.

my blood rushed thru me—
a rising rocket’s gush of sparks
blackness oozing outta me.

leaning back in bed—
my black & blue dickhead
full of bugles, sabers, hooves.

the balding senator’s head—
seemingly surprised by each
gob & blob of sewage effluent.

sucking all my memory—
outta me, my plantation youth,
african boyhood, my babypaste.

black male sex slavery—
one of the overlooked secrets,
deep south discrepancies.

the purpose of these notes—
simply to notify the reader that
delta colored contradictions existed.

king jerked me off slowly—
getting the last squeeze of spluge
the last trembling jizzlette of cum.

senator king was a queen—
preferring young darkest dinge
male hyacinths from mobile.

“i’m in love with you, my son”—
“no you aint” i said to myself since
i was just a nigger he sucked off.

Delta Dinge Blues

Delta Dinge Blues

“The past is never dead.
It’s not even past.”
—William Faulkner,
Requiem for a Nun

When I got to Oxford, Mississippi—I felt a rush of dinge déjà vu. It was easy as pie to figure out the place: “Post and tree, window and doorway, signboard, each in its ordered way.”

He turned to me & said, “See? This is how it is. Even an idiot can sense the order, the Southern order of things. The main square, the sun, the lethargic way nothin has changed.

Time passes here just like it did with Lucas Beauchamp, the black intruder in the dust. Climbing the stairs to the office of his lawyer, Stevens. The two dollars the attorney said his services were worth.

The downfall of the McCaslin and Compson families—really no different than the Sutpen dynasty in the pages of Absalom. It doesn’t take the innocence of an idiot—to sense it.

The slumbering, inescapable reality—looking down at me from the Confederate monument. I didn't want to know about Southern damnation and fatality—but here I was.

The trip outta Louisiana took some time—I didn’t really much wanna go. It wasn’t no Harvard, but the Kingfish University did put on a nice show. That’s where I met Bon the Beautiful—in the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell dormitory on campus. He was my roommate.

Louisiana was still a Thirties Banana Republic back then. Closer to the Caribbean culture of the Antilles—with its plantation system, exquisite Creole languages, French linguistic background and insistent Negro slavery.

I’d heard stories about families fleeing the Haitian & French revolutions, taking their retinue of slaves and belongings. The cooking, the spices, the gombo zheb, red beans & pork.

The same music—zydeco Acadian with a jazz & rock rhythm. Cajuns, Black Indians. The unstoppable Creolization of America—despite misery, oppression, up & down the sluggish Mississippi.

But I guess I wanted to know the source of it—the tumultuous menacing Yoknapatawpha home that gave Faulkner the urgency of all his novels. The violence, theft, rape, insanity, infirmity & misfortune—of a world squeezed down inside a tiny postage stamp for everybody in the world to see.

No Best of Bad Faulkner—could possibly get close to the oddly amorphous, distorting mood of Dinge Delta Blues. Imitations, intrusions from the outside—only caused something to withdrawal even further.

I preferred the torments of closetry and str8t refusal—a refusal that dared not speak its name. And yet Faulkner spoke it—time & time again. He spoke his name—and his name was Shame.

Delta Dinge Blues II

______________________________________
I don’t know—was it really a literary question? A moral or psychosexual one? Why Faulkner sat so coldly & impersonally at his desk late at night there in Rowan Oaks. Writing, typing, waiting…

Sipping his whiskey, calmly waiting for the moment when they’d arrive. Each novel with its own discomfort and torment, its own incomprehensible characters lost in time just as much as he was.

All around him his family ruined by the Secessionary War, all those great southern families done in by confederate armies, carpetbaggers and lost fortunes. Sons & descendents from one generation to the next—the males in the family all failures & somehow ending up disappointed lovers.

He sat there, never expecting any official recognition. Instead a cold self-absorption with death—like Quentin and Shreve. Delving back into time—their Sutpen séances there in that cold Harvard dormitory room.

Faulkner replaying his secret pleasure—the one that possessed him with The Sound and the Fury. Free to write about what he wanted to write about—forgoing favors to publishers & critics. Not expecting anything of himself—except the moment. The moment when Benjy, Caddy, Quentin came into the room.

A Southern séance was like that... A chat with your antebellum past—the forbidden love of Henry Sutpen for his mulatto half-brother. That moment in another dorm room—this time at Ole Miss not Harvard. When two male lovers back then reached forward in time—to talk awhile with two other lovers in the future. A communing with dead lovers...

Such a brief male honeymoon for both couples—much more scandalous than the infamous str8t rape scene in “Sanctuary.” Alabama Red fucking Temple Drake all night long—there in Miss Reba’s crummy old Memphis whore house. With bug-eyed voyeur Popeye ogling, drooling, hanging onto the brass bed posts—howling like a dog at the goddamn moon.

Faulkner sat there coldly waiting—and finally they’d come. Thru the twisted bougainvillea, up over the rotting verandah, leaving a sickening trail of stinking over-sweet honeysuckle, trailing a path of drooping Spanish moss. They didn’t need an invitation—suddenly they were just "here."

Was it outta the primordial Mississippi Delta past—these imaginary ones that came to him late to haunt him in the humid night? Oozing up from the cemetery depths of the Tallahatchie, down from the slow, sluggish Yoknapatawpha.

Faulkner’s vast so-called “living map” outside his study—doubling with the dying aristocracy, crossbreeding with Snopesian monstrous harelipped pinheads. The simple-minded gimpy fools and delta bourbon plantation sex maniacs, the same old shameful, miscegenal, incestuous letters hidden away in secret dusty forgotten ledgers.

Rat-eared, tell-all bibles fluttering—their tissue-thin pages of obscene personal histories. The profane breeder's delta genealogies—the love of Uncle Buck for Uncle Billy. A typical antebellum gay couple.

Going Down on Moses—going down on young mandingo Mississippi men. Like kept boy Percival Brownlee. Who couldn't keep books or farm either. Finding his niche at last, in bed with Uncle Buck. They came flooding into the Rowan Oaks study—all the kept boys riding the sheer tremendous tidal wave of desperate living.

When I asked Faulkner how he wrote, he simply said: “Once there was a Queen. I needed little; nothing the Negroes couldn’t do.”

Without changing the inflection of his voice and apparently without any effort or even design, Faulkner went into a trance: “I became not Negro but "nigger," not secret so much as impenetrable, not servile and not effacing, but enveloping myself in an aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell.”

Faulkner looked away from me, and not for the first time: “I’m not only speaking with the tongue of Africa whose blood was pure ten thousand years ago but now with my own anonymous voice mixed enough to produce me."

He spoke thru them—Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon. Bon the Beautiful whispering in Quentin’s ear, as they made love at night there in the Ole Miss dorm room. “Why this particular young handsome Sambo?” Faulkner asked. “Cause Bon will beat us there because he had the capacity to endure and survive. Thru his son Charles Etienne De Saint Valery Bon...and then Jim Bond his idiot grandson.”

Reaching forward in time—Bon spoke to Quentin just as Quentin spoke to Faulkner. Because Bon the Beautiful had patience even when he didn’t have hope, the long view even when there was nothing to see at the end of it.

Bon the Beautiful was already halfway there...

Colonel Sutpen his slaver delta bourbon plantation father—Eulalia his Haitian mother. Faulkner was one of them—just as most of the Deep South people themselves were and are and would become someday. Creole representatives of a race alien and new—with a different appearance. An alien race enslaved—waiting for the whiteys to catch up. Because white trash was afraid of the alien race.

And so, late that night, sitting at his desk—Faulkner talked about his own delta blues battleground. The scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his own defeat.

He sat there at his desk—becoming his own selfprogenitive father. Reimagining the generations of his family, changing the spelling of his surname as Lucas did. Faulkner became his own ungendered progenitor—and his visitors at night helped him, guided him, told him stories to tell.

He began figuratively begetting and reconceiving his own fathers in advance across new creolized generations. Creating himself as Flem Snopes did—out of nothing, nowhere.

Like Bon the Beautiful, Faulkner started becoming philoprogenitive in the humid, breathing, delta moment. He started writing texts within texts—telling stories within stories. He began tracing them back to Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin who populated the ledgers with miscegenation, incest and a genealogical record of his cynical, seminal “Father’s will.”

Faulkner became son of Uncle Buck, husband of Uncle Buddy, lover of Percival Brownlee. Had they ever told him to do or not do anything that he ever paid any attention to? But still he listened to them, late at night.

They came drifting out of the fetid swamp, across the lawn & up over the decaying front porch—the Mississippi boyz gaunt, lean, hard, tireless and desperate; the Snopes youth thick, soft-looking, the apparent embodiment of the ultimate and supreme reluctance and inertia.

He became both Creole heir and prototype simultaneously of all the delta and river bottoms and Yoknapatawpha itself which fathered all the rest of them and their kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own.

On those nights the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride entered Faulkner. Based not on any value and honor. But from wrong and shame, descending into him.

Faulkner freed Bon the Beautiful from Sutpen—and then he freed them from the Compsons. He speculated on time and death—wondering if he’d just invented himself or something else did, giving himself an illusion of Nobel Prize greatness?

Eventually Faulkner was forgotten, his pride and belief in a legend about the South, the land he had wrestled from Yoknapatawpha and tamed. And so I found myself in Mississippi that night—not the old Mississippi but the Yoknapatawpha living map inside Faulkner’s head.

Yoknapatawpha leaned down over Rowan Oaks that night, not with a quality dangerous—but profoundly brooding, secretly tremulous, unattentive. Where Faulkner had sat in this separate lurking-place, pretending to be impartial and omniscient. That's where I sat that night…

Ike Snopes: Boy-Idiot

Ike Snopes: Boy-Idiot

“the slobbering mouth
in its mist of soft gold hair”
—William Faulkner,
The Mansion

It was the cow again: her big fat pudgy bovine womanlike simulacrum, waiting in the barn for the usual oversized primitive crude you-know-what treatment, dumb lame-brained Ike Snopes the pea-brain of Yoknapatawpha Country, the harelipped boy-idiot whose brains had for some strange reason meandered, migrated, taken up residence down there between his legs in that other futile outraged male head, leaving the kid up above with nothing but vacant idiotic dumbness.

Too slow to keep up with anything except that instinctual connection that all men have with that other head of theirs, the one that gets them in trouble, because their destiny is irrefutably caught up in the ancient male traditions and expectations dictated by the shape of it, the very simplicity of the male anatomy’s conflicts and battles, the denouement of which, except for a few irrelevant infinitesimal minute (too minute) brain cells, is the same with both geniuses & boy-idiots.

The different particulars between the dim-witted retarded boy-idiot Ike Snopes and most other men being not even worthy of mention, for neither geniuses nor boy-idiots can change themselves: all men are basically beasts whether dumb or smart in their irrevocable mutual pursuit without substance or intelligence or decency into and through immutable worlds of garish sex and the simplicity of smut.

Its very speciousness having always been its sole appeal and charm, the very existence of which is a refutation of human dignity upon which decent culture and conduct is based, the tasteless male frantic kinetic pace demonstrating the masculine folly which is not only unutterably predictable but that very predictability indispensable to our continued existence as despicable members of the human race.

The only one not outraged by the moo Oooooh’s!!! breaking the intractable miasmic male silence of the big red barn and then the beast’s slow emergence with inscrutable female satiated sexuality from her seemingly ubiquitous moo-hole without which all the ogling eyeballs from Varner’s store would seem useless and then her voice: the great moo uttered over the chronic and perpetual mastication of the absurd cud in her drooling inexplicably and certainly anachronistic way with her not so urban big fat lips.

How exasperating it was if not in fact infuriating, her sense and disregard for the impetuous male spirit and soul selfish again and again, furious but still impotent and immemorial frustration squeezing the trigger that she ignores, neglecting the force of the preordained retrograde blast of the young Snopes’ suddenly cuming bawling loudly obliterating himself: the eyes which stared ridiculously through the holes in the barn walls bulging in impotent and static amazement at the not-even-blushing, outrageous, totally amazing bored outrage of love.

Such a bestial pursuit: indistinguishable from that primal Garden of Eden scene between Eve and the Snake, the one immediately preceding the downfall that would lead at once to that ancient, sudden and inscrutable Exile and disappearance with a brief shake of the scolding almighty finger above, angered by all leftover messy evidence and traces and vestiges of spoiled, besplattered Eden-like innocence.

That it couldn’t or wouldn’t or wasn’t even remotely possible for Ike Snopes to have loved with any innocence like Adam or Eve simply because his face was blank, stupid as the cow, having no knowledge of sin or any possible reality other than whatever was his spurious cartoon-like naïve existence (which was never really any different that any of Varner’s ogling voyeurs)?

And so with futile predictability and with neither applause nor negation, the boy and the cow were immune, impervious, virginally ignorant of time, the passage of months years decades the same as simply their brief afternoon bovine soirée so that the immemorial abject desire for getting off by the kid with his rather ravaging and unabashed adolescent dignity and animalesque manhood ended up mocking and outraging all the local uppity Yoknapatawpha impudence, proceeding unchecked and irrevocable each afternoon in Madame Littlejohn’s big red barn, so that even that obscenely divine moo-cow moment was able to surpass the mere ignorance and apathy of the immemorial indestructible Mississippi moment.

Sick Southern Fiction

Sick Southern Fiction

Opening the Dinge Muse

“Faulkner’s old
preoccupation with
the psychopathology
of sex”—New York Times

naturally str8t critics—
were aghast, shocked, bored
infuriated with “absalom.”

such a strained, queer novel—
its deliberate grammatical errors
plus those high falutin words!!!

at least “sanctuary” was—
consistently shockingly str8t stuff
with whores & bloody corncobs!!!

but all this sick americana—
faggoty slithery southern decadence
queer delta bourbon dynasties?

surely the strangest, queerest—
longest, least readable, sickest
piece of southern fiction yet!!!

Faulkner’s Faggoty Imagination

“brutishly and
incredibly entangled”
—The New Yorker

and to think that our—
poor sophomore english class
had to endure such filth!!!

right there on campus—
held captive in allen hall by
faulkner’s sick imagination!!!

what’s a girl to do?—
but busily comb every page
for dirty sex & skanky details?

cheated tho of even that—
piecemeal sex eked out with
surmises and ghostly guesses.

not only bad syntax but—
also bad sex always hinted at
not like lady chatterley’s lover!!!

miss borges liked faulkner—
all that “baroque” foreplay fiction
the delays, postponed climaxes…

all those ambiguous—
fabulations and divagations…
detours of sex & sin!!!

Dinge Lit Romance

“this peculiar world
of the unvanquished is
consanguineous with
american history”
—jorge luis borges,
book reviews and notes

naturally or rather—
perhaps totally unnaturally
sick faulkner appealed to me.

i was an adolescent like—
bayard and i had a dinge
lover like “ringo” in bed.

beyond our apartment—
was a “living map” of what
miss faulkner wrote about…

it wasn’t just woodchips—
it was the “nigger” in the
woodpile all southerners had.

the shadowy dinge muse—
haunting the sutpen & satoris
plantations were my thing too.

i fell for a creole drusilla—
but leroy saved me from a
dinge-love nervous breakdown.

Riposte in Tertio

Riposte in Tertio

“Now she was looking
at me in a way she
never had before.”
—William Faulkner,
The Unvanquished

i didn’t know what—
it meant that dark humid night
but i’d soon find out.

scent of verbena—
oozing on the verandah
“kiss me, now,” she said.

“no,” i said to her—
“i’m not your big daddy like
all those other guys.”

i wanted to be though—
she's sexy & goodlooking
in her silk nightgown

“kiss me, kid” she said—
smoking her cigarette then
exhaling it in my face.

so i put my arms—
around her, knowing that she
was a guy in drag.

she had strong wrists and—
lots of elbow-power to
fuck my brains out good.
_______________

she was creole dark—
looked like a woman in her
eternal thirties.

ancient eternal—
pretty pouty big snake-lips
the wrap-around kind.

immitigable—
dark inscrutable summers
had come and gone by.

she’d ditched me real bad—
incorrigible femme fatale
of the big easy.

no longer virgin—
how many sugar daddies had
her drusilla lips known?

how could i forget—
back when i was a young man
desperate for her?
__________________

“sometimes i think”—
she said, "the finest thing that
can happen to a man…”

“is to love somebody—
a woman preferably,
hard harder than anything.”

“and then to die young—
because he believed what he
couldn’t help but believe…”

“what he couldn’t help—
(could not? would not) help to
believe and died for…”

drusilla and i walked—
in the garden, telling ourselves
things we didn’t believe.

drusilla made me—
kiss her and then i felt all
those feelings again.
_________________

impersonating—
all the forces i should’ve
defied, resisted.

so much for all that—
str8t integrity as well
as gay sanctity.

i wasn’t the same—
boy-narrator i was back
then when i loved her.

the pull of blood, lips—
creole queen cleverly disguised
back when i was a kid.

now she’s just a siren—
beautiful older woman
still hot for young stuff.