Faulkner--Dry September

The horrifying subject matter of this short story is conveyed in Southern gothic high drama through a suspensive structure. The third sentence is fantastic for revealing the structure which is to inform the action: "Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened." The only two people in the story who should rightly feel "attacked, insulted, frightened" are Will Mayes and Minnie Cooper, if in fact she was attacked. However, the sentence begins by putting the emphasis on the men in the barber shop, who feel threatened by what they perceive as a racial threat against their women. We are never really told how Minnie Cooper feels. We can only infer through her bizarre behavior, trembling in public and laughing hysterically. This sentence is an unusual example of sentence pattern 3, compound sentence with explanatory statement, but because a series of mostly prepositional phrases interrupts the subject and verb, which should explain the three inflamatory feelings layed out at the beginning, the sentence explains more in the following clause than appears at the surface. By punctuating the sentence with a colon, Faulkner draws attention to the subsequent clause that seems to explain little, except to conjure the room in which the men heatedly ponder their action. In fact, the details about the stale and stationary air and the odors of the men serve to emphasize the gossip that is swirling, until the sentence comes to the disturbing conclusion that none of the men actually know the details of the supposed crime that they all are prepared to carry out justice in the name of. Throughout the story, air, speech and breath are referred to as "hissing" informing the gothic tone of the story and establishing the sinister nature of the gossip.

Leaving the reader perilously holding on to find out what is going to happen to Will Mayes, and without any power to stop the men, Faulkner jumps to describe Minnie Cooper in section II. Faulkner does an excellent job of characterizing Minnie Cooper, as he does in this breathless cumulative sentence, "When she was young she had had a slender, nervous body and a sort of hard vivacity which had enabled her for a time to ride upon the crest of the town's social life as exemplified by the high school party and church social period of her contemporaries while still children enough to be unclassconscious." Throughout the story, Faulkner makes up illuminating composite adjective such as unclassconscious, the mouthful of the word having a sort of illustrative onomatopoeic quality.

The beginning of the "white folks" violent confrontation with Will Mayes has the gothic suspense of a horror movie, simultaneously captivitating the reader and making her loathe to read on. "Below the cast the wan hemorrhage of the moon increased. It heaved above the ridge, silvering the air, the dust, so that they seemed to breathe, live, in a bowl of molten lead. There was no sound of nightbird nor insect, no sound save their breathing and a faint ticking of contracting metal about the cars." This is the moment in the horror movie when everything goes completely silent and you know something bad is about to happen; in fact, suddenly suspicious noises are heard creeping up the road! How predictable, and yet utterly new. Faulkner plays with the reader's sympathies. We want to be afraid for Will Mayes, but the narrative point of view tells us we should be afraid for the men who have ostensibly come to kill him. Faulkner takes the reader on a journey closer and closer to the awful conclusion, and then refuses to show it to us. The action does not play out as we expect; Will Mayes escapes, but we do not know for how long.

At the moment when the barber and Will Mayes both jump out of the car, Faulker unites the two of them in plural pronouns:

"The barber began to tug furiously at the door. "Look out, there!" the soldier said, but the barber had already kicked the door open and swung onto the running board. The soldier leaned across the Negro and grasped at him, but he had already jumped. The car went on without checking speed."
So, evidently, "the Negro" jumped out of the car after the barber. Straightforward enough.
"The impetus hurled him crashing through dust-sheathed weeds, into the ditch. Dust puffed about him, and in a thin, vicious crackling of sapless stems he lay choking and retching until the second car passed and died away. Then he rose and limped on until he reached the highroad and turned toward town, brushing at his clothes with his hands. The moon was higher, riding high and clear of the dust at last, and after a while the town began to glare beneath the dust. He went on, limping. Presently he heard cars and the glow of them grew in the dust behind him and he left the road and crouched again in the weeds until they passed. McLendon's car came last now. There were four people in it and Butch was not on the running board."
In this paragraph that follows, we take the unnamed "him" to be Will Mayes, since he jumped out of the car in the previous sentence. We wonder what happened to the barber. Then, Faulkner switches to "them." While the them is obviously standing for the two cars, it can also figuratively stand for both Will Mayes and the barber, since we have been lead to believe that they both jumped out of the car and don't know what happened to them.
"They went on; the dust swallowed them; the glare and the sound died away. The dust of them hung for a while, but soon the eternal dust absorbed it again. The barber climbed back onto the road and limped on toward town."
Finally, we find out that it is only the barber who continues on his way. All this elaborate suspensiveness leads us to the question, WHAT HAPPENED TO WILL MAYES? which is never directly answered.

Faulkner interrupts the naration again, leaving the reader to ponder what happened to Will Mayes and to the barber who pathetically stood up for him in section III, and moves on to narrate Miss Cooper's apparently traumatic trip to the movies in section IV. During Miss Cooper's trip in to town, we learn the only further bits of information to help answer the question through the nonchalant gossip of the men, "What did they do with the nigger? Did they--?" "Sure. He's all right." "All right, is he?" "Sure. He went on a little trip." While this statement could mean that Will Mayes fled, we are lead to infer that the man is referring to the sort of untimely trip that racist Southerners of this period would refer to in that way. We never know for sure. Faulkner's gothic descriptions contribute to the construction of the story as a sort of extended suspensive sentence.