Interested for a long time in the indirect methods Faulkner employed to weave undeveloped topics into those that emerge in his work as prominent themes, I ultimately began to link Faulkner's methods of indirection to his everpresent yet superficial examination of African-American history and life, an examination that testifies, as I read it, to the profound impact that 20th-century Black migration had on relationships, identities, and culture in the South.5 Given my efforts to flesh out this underdeveloped thematic in Faulkner's writing, and to place it in historical and cultural context, it is a surprisingly short leap to Elvis, who was born into and shaped by the same historical environment. Rather than simply opposing the elite Faulkner to the working-class Elvis, or claiming that either figure in any way stands for African-American experience in the South, I would like to explore the ways in which each related to and deployed the racialized markers of southern identity, particularly as the meaning and value of these markers was renegotiated during the 50-odd-year-period (1915-60s) of mass Black migration. Racialized markers of deportment, for example, included the way a person dressed, held his or her body, walked, directed or averted his or her gaze, used terms of address, etc. Both Faulkner and Elvis revealed that what was Black and what White in southern culture, fixed as Jim Crow sought to make it, was particularly hard to delineate, and although both drew expectations, behaviors, practices, and styles from a shared fund of racialized signifiers, neither drew freely from this fund. Family history, as I will suggest, led them to adopt and relate to racialized markers of identity with different degrees of freedom and constraint. Faulkner frequently appeared in public wearing raggedy old jackets and trousers, for example, although such clothing was a marker of poverty and rural Blackness, yet he would never have dressed in the flashy brightly colored clothing Elvis bought on Beale Street, racial markers of urbanized African-American identity.
     Within the context of the broad period from the settlement of the southwest frontier to the development of newly discovered electronic frontiers, the recording and broadcasting industries, I want to briefly sketch out the history and life of two families, William Faulkner's and Elvis Presley's. Both families trace their ancestry to Scotch-Irish immigrants and to a pioneering male descendant who joined the 19th-century mass migration from the coastal south to the southwest frontier. Renowned and colorful, Faulkner's paternal great-grandfather William C. Falkner, known as the Old Colonel, bequeathed to his great-grandson and namesake a contradictory and inexhaustible legacy of entrepreneurship, authorship, soldiering, landholding, empire-building, railroad owning, office holding, lawyering, slaveholding, murdering, bastarding, horsing, drinking, and hunting (see figure 1). First and foremost, however, he bequeathed his financial and cultural capital to an eldest son J.W.T. Falkner (Faulkner's grandfather) who was able to keep it. Lawyer, statesman, inheritor of a railroad (which he sold), and founder of a bank, this man's success as a lawyer, solid citizenship, and financial conservativism succeeded in maintaining the elite status that was bequeathed to William Faulkner, despite the perception in Oxford that he was an outsider, drank too much, and couldn't trace his family back farther than the Old Colonel.6
     The closest comparable forefather in Elvis's ancestry is his maternal great-great-great grandfather William Mansell (d. 1842) (see figure 2). After fighting in Andrew Jackson's campaigns against the Creeks and the Seminoles, Mansell ironically married the full-blood Cherokee Morning Dove White (1800-35), with whom he migrated from Tennessee to Alabama, bought farmland, and built a substantial home. Morning Dove died giving birth to their third child. Of these children, the most prosperous was the middle child, Morning Dizenie Mansell (b. 1832), who married the town doctor, a large landowner. Of their twelve children, the males included three farmers, one minister, a merchant, and two doctors. William and Morning Dove's eldest son John, from whom Elvis is descended, also had at least a dozen children, but his children did not fare so well.
     Seven years old when he lost his Cherokee mother, perhaps John Mansell was unable to reconcile the conflicting legacy that descended to him as the eldest son of a White Indian fighter and a Cherokee mother. Appetitive and profligate, John fathered children by several women before abandoning the family farm and his wife, her sister his mistress, and his numerous offspring. According to Elaine Dundy, who conducted the research on Elvis's maternal ancestry, he ran off with another woman and relocated in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1880, under the name of Colonel Lee Mansell.7 If so, then Faulkner's great-grandfather William C. Falkner, who was murdered in fall 1889, and his son J.W.T. (1848-1922), are likely to have known the man who dissipated (squandered or renounced?) Elvis's birthright.
     Faulkner derived from his family a materially fading yet culturally vital legacy of wealth and achievement, whereas Elvis inherited from his a legacy of false starts, abandonments, and dispossessions. Whereas four generations of Falkners moved from one large house to another, with roots and property in Oxford, Mississippi, Elvis's maternal and paternal descendants were ever and always on the move, sharecroppers for more than four generations (see figures 2 and 3). Moving as often as once every two years, it is dizzying to count the number of residences Elvis's mother Gladys occupied during her childhood and adolescence before settling, after the untimely death of her father and at the age of 19, in East Tupelo, Mississippi, where she met and married Elvis's father Vernon. In short, whereas the property and social status acquired by one pioneering ancestor did devolve to William Faulkner, in the case of Elvis, the legacy followed a different course. Thus, although Elvis's family shared a history of immigration, pioneering, military service, and professional distinction with White southern families like the Falkners, a history that depended on the "forced removal" of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans, their history of landlessness, dispossession, and itinerancy intersected with that of White southern families like Faulkner's Snopeses and with those of the Native American, African American, and mixed race southern families that Faulkner left largely underrepresented and nameless.
     In order to emphasize here the intersection of Elvis Presley's family history with that of millions of Afro-southerners, I must mention briefly the development of the so-called New South, a name that signified the relatively belated post-World War I arrival to the southern states of the changing political economy associated with modernization, rural-to-urban migration, industrialization, and proletarianization. With World War I also came the first peak of Black mass migration from the South, a phenomenon that resulted by the 1960s in a net out-migration of around six million Afro-southerners. Already associated with Afro-southerners because of their poverty and landlessness, southern families like the Presleys were coded Blacker still when, beginning in 1915, hundreds of thousands of Black southerners managed for the first time in history to leave the South or to move from the rural South to the city. For hundreds of years, Southern culture had depended on the immobilization of Afro-southerners, so it was radically destabilized by the newfound mobility and sudden departure of hundreds of thousands of African Americans.
     Yet this destabilization and recirculation of racial markers served to profit Elvis Presley, who in the forties and fifties drew upon previously taboo signifiers of Blackness to capitalize on and introduce into the repertoire of Whiteness a new and unheard of identity and style. William Faulkner, on the other hand, confronted this destabilization of racial identity from a different vantage point. For Faulkner, the unsettling impact of Black migration on the racialized signifiers of southern identities threatened to erode his privileges and opportunities. His sensitivity to this environment as a threat made him particularly attentive to the sudden motility of southern identities, and he used his writing to construct portraits of characters in various states of self-making and undoing, with varying capacities for resistance or adaptation to change. (What suddenly comes to mind, perhaps because of my dozen years in the state of Kansas, is the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy conquers the Wicked Witch of the West by dousing her with a bucket of water. I hear the Witch screaming as she melts, dissolving as she cedes her former domain.) Faulkner's sensitivity to this destabilized context informs such dissolving and reconstituting racialized characters as the Compsons (and their servants) in The Sound and the Fury, Temple Drake and Popeye in Sanctuary, the Reverend Hightower and Joe Christmas in Light in August, the Sutpens, legitimate and illegitimate, in Absalom, Absalom!, etc. As both Faulkner and Elvis demonstrate, each in his own way, this period of destabilization was felt not only as a shortage of labor in the fields and in some people's homes but also as a crisis or turning point at the core of personal identities, an upheaval of the long and elaborate chains of signifiers that once served to maintain the interconnected and assymetrically empowered distinctions that separated Black from White. Thus, the specific experience of change in the post-World War I South, although it intersected with the disillusionment of an entire "lost generation," was uniquely enmeshed with the newfound mobility of Afro-southerners and the destabilization of racialized identities that it brought about.
     Among the southern identities destabilized by increasing Black mobility was that of the ancestral pioneer, whose descendants looked to that ancestor to legitimate the proprietary privileges and rights they claimed in the South. The legitimacy of this figure was destabilized when Blacks became as mobile and potentially pioneering as the White ancestral pioneer of the southwest frontier. The clash of the various meanings associated, on the one hand, with the heroic White pioneers of the so-called frontier and, on the other, with the ignoble Black southerners venturing to leave the South with similar hopes for bettering their fortunes, produced insoluble contradictions. This once resilient image of the pioneering southwestern settler, which had not been tarnished by the forced migration of African slaves or by the wars of extermination and forced dislocation of indigenous peoples, was suddenly collapsing. Black migration seems to have opened a festering wound, that was perhaps already brought to a head by the turn-of-the-century influx of millions of "swarthy" eastern and southern European immigrants, eroding the heroic signification of mobility in American culture.
     Twentieth-century mobility, associated with sharecropping in the South and with factory jobs within and beyond the region, was not a strictly Afro-southern phenomenon. As sociologist John Shelton Reed pointed out at the 1995 Elvis Conference, "[b]y the beginning of the twentieth century, many of the South's white yeomen had lost their land and had joined the great majority of southern blacks as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Half the South's farmers--two-thirds of all cotton farmers--didn't own the land they farmed, and half of the South's tenants and sharecroppers were white." Reed also emphasized that many of these white southerners migrated, as the Presleys did, to southern cities, and thus participated in one of the largest mass migrations in history, ten million people by 1960, of whom Reed counts two-thirds White (90). Yet the unprecedented inclusion of masses of African Americans in this migration, however one calculates the racial percentages, fundamentally altered the cultural significance of mobility.
     For reasons I have tried to suggest, Faulkner's writings register this change. Published by Random House in an edition of 6,000 copies just a few months before Elvis's birth, Faulkner's 1936 Absalom, Absalom!, for example, depicts the eroding impact of racial markings in the life of the wannabe ancestral pioneer, Thomas Sutpen. Moving as a child from the coastal south to the southwest frontier, Sutpen's migration narrative reveals, behind his determined effort to achieve higher status, Sutpen's anxious desire to distinguish himself from Blacks. According to this allegorical narrative, the racialized displacement and disorientation of his surviving descendants, who are all isolated, deranged, lost, or incompetent, can be blamed on Sutpen's single-minded design. Notably, Faulkner confines his attribution of cause for what he recognizes as a crisis in the values of racialized markers of identity to the overreaching of white men, failing to mention the threat levelled against White southern identity when millions of Black men and women began to succeed in migrating from the South. For me, Faulkner and Elvis come together in this narrative, in which I would cast Colonel Lee Mansell as the ferociously determined Thomas Sutpen, whose belatedness and outrageous extremity ennobles those slightly better established families like the Compsons who, if read as stand-ins for later fictional families like Faulkner's McCaslins or for actual families like the Falkners, had also left behind and repudiated "shadow" families.8
     In Faulkner, migration in the lives of post-Reconstruction white tenant farmers or sharecroppers like the Bundrens or the Snopeses no longer has any connection to empire-building but is embedded in the degradations of modernization, urbanization, industrialization, and Northernization in the South. In As I Lay Dying, "Barn Burning," If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and the Snopes trilogy, Faulkner emphasizes the outrage of poor white folks, with little opportunity to move from the rural environments in which they were tenant farmers or seasonal migrant laborers, except by abandoning agrarian life and joining the degraded economy and culture Faulkner associated with the city. At times, the racialized encoding of these figures is so fluid that it becomes difficult for readers to be certain about which characters in Faulkner are White and which Black, an uncertainty Faulkner thematized in Light in August. As much to assuage his own guilty part as to reflect first-hand knowledge of the ubiquity (call it universality) of bitter feelings and dashed hopes, Faulkner's writings not only reveal the intensified crossing of racialized markers of identity but also the anxiety that attends this crossing on all sides of the divide. Outraged folks -- aggressive, self-destructive, desperate, stubborn, shortsighted -- increasingly cross gender, class, and racial lines in Faulkner, expressing the underlying anxiety that drove all the deeply divided people who had a share, however unequal, in the past. Bayard Sartoris, Jason Compson, Anse Bundren, Rosa Coldfield, the tall convict, Lucas Beauchamp, Mink Snopes, William Faulkner, Elvis Presley -- something of the same anxiety drove them all as they sought to hold on to or acquire a viable position in life in or, failing that, to find a way to even the score for their disappointments.
     For all their differences, both Faulkner and Elvis, an eldest and an only son (whose twin brother was stillborn), were sensitive to the disappointments of their parents. Faulkner's father Murry, like his son William, was not a motivated student at the University of Mississippi. He was more interested in, even passionate about, the family concern, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad and, after two years at the University, he quit school to work on the line. Shovelling coal in 1888, when he first began, Murry had been an engineer for six years when he eloped with Maud Butler, against her mother Lelia's wishes, in 1896. Two years later he had two sons and a promotion, and by 1901, when his third son was born, Murry owned a farm, where he raised horses and bird dogs, and a share in the Ripley pharmacy. His father J.W.T.'s professional life was also prospering (a state senator and Universtiy trustee, he owned a farm, other real estate, and was involved in a developing telephone company), and, for reasons no one has fathomed, he decided to sell the profitable railroad, his eldest son's passion. Murry, who lived another thirty years, never seems to have recovered from this unexpected dislocation and, according to Blotner, never forgave his wife Maud for having refused at this point to leave Mississippi and move West on the uncertain hope that he would find a way to become a cattle rancher.
     Faulkner's mother Maud had reasons of her own for refusing to leave home and family in pursuit of her husband's fantasy. Little was known about Maud's family until historian Joel Williamson, who also disclosed the African-American "shadow family" of William C. Falkner, discovered more about the marital indiscretion and hot-tempered feud that led Maud's father Charles E. Butler, the turn-of-the-century town sheriff, to leave Oxford, where his father had been the town surveyer and a large property owner, and abandon his family (see figures 1 and 4). Left penniless and forced to turn for support to extended family members, it was Maud and not her elder brother Sherwin who assumed responsibility for their mother Lelia. Maud was unwilling to relinquish the financial security and social respectability her marriage to Murry had promised. When her husband's fortunes changed and he lost his will to renew them, Maud must have turned redoubled expectations upon her sons, particularly her eldest William, to recuperate the fragile family legacy.
     Notoriously spoiled, Elvis's maternal grandmother Doll grew up in the unstable, crowded, tumultuous environment her father White devoted his life to overcoming. Having resettled in Lee County, Mississippi, with two of his brothers, White had already married and had four children, including Doll, by the time his father ran off to Oxford ten years later. Tenant farming afforded him a large enough home to accommodate his mother, her sister, and their offspring, and his home was also large enough to take in his sister Ann and her children when Ann left her husband. White remarried after his wife died in 1887 but lost his house in the panic of 1890, leaving his extended family to shift as best they could as sharecroppers, forced to reside in an endless string of tiny, crowded, run-down houses. Doll's life changed little when, at the ripe age of 27, she married her first cousin Robert Lee Smith, a poor sharecropper but a renowned moonshiner. Neglected by her neurasthenic mother, Elvis's mother Gladys, one of eight children and reputedly lazy like her mother, was cared for by her elder sisters. Gladys's often-remarked nervousness, a byproduct of the constant movement to which she was compelled to adjust, became temporarily debilitating when she lost her father; for some time, she suffered uncontrollable shakes whenever she tried to leave the house.
     Elvis's father Vernon, however, was descended from a different sort of woman (see figure 3). When Elvis paternal great-great grandfather abandoned his multiple wives and their children, his daughter Rosella (Elvis's great-grandmother) became a sharecropper herself and, although she had ten children, including Elvis's grandfather J.D., she never told any of them the identity or identities of their father(s). While one of her sons, Noah, became a generous, public-minded grocer in East Tupelo, who was elected as mayor in 1936, Elvis's grandfather J.D. was known as a good-looking but bitter n'er do well. Repeating the pattern, J.D. also had a "good" and a "bad" son, and the latter was Elvis's good-looking father Vernon. As good as his forefathers, J.D. in time abandoned his wife and children, who fell predictably into the care of his "bad" son Vernon and thus ultimately to his grandson Elvis.
     One anecdote can serve to illustrate the disappointment and desperation of Vernon Presley, who resembles various characters in Faulkner. First, some necessary background. Seventeen-year-old Vernon married Gladys Love Smith shortly after she lost her father, secured a factory job, and for a very short time assumed responsibility for some members of her scattered family, whom she briefly reunited in a single residence in East Tupelo. At the time, Vernon lived nearby with his father J.D., a sharecropper for Orville Bean. Perhaps owing to repeated displacement, poverty, and desertion, as well as their Scottish and Scots-Irish ancestry, the Smiths and the Presley's faced adversity with the expectation that some extended family member would offer them shelter and support whenever necessary. They were accustomed to frequent moves, sometimes to live with relatives and sometimes on their own, but never far from family. Gladys and Vernon slept on the floor of a friend's house until Vernon borrowed enough money from landowner Orville Bean to build a house on Old Saltillo Road, next door to his family's house. This home, where the Presleys lived for only a brief time, is the well-known birthplace of Elvis.
     A short while after baby Elvis was born, Vernon was arrested and jailed for forgery. Apparently, he had disagreed with landowner Orville Bean over the price of a hog Vernon was selling. When Bean gave Vernon a check for $4.00, Vernon and two others, including his brother-in-law Travis Smith, in an impotent expression of anger, resentment, and defeat, changed the amount shown on the check. They soon found themselves in Tupelo jail, where Vernon remained until they were tried and sentenced to three years at the Parchman Farm State Penitentiary. Vernon's father J.D. posted bail for Gladys's younger brother Travis, but he refused to post bail for his son. Faulkner's Mink Snopes, sentenced to Parchman Farm in 1908, the year Nelse Patton was lynched in Oxford, would still have been there during the eight months Vernon spent at Parchman in 1938 and '39. Although Vernon was repudiated by his father, Gladys remained loyal to her husband and succeeded in winning his pardon.
     Faulkner's Mink Snopes, who murdered Jack Huston after a quarrel over the boarding of a cow, offers insight into the desperate and stubborn mental processes that must have led Vernon Presley to forge that check. Perhaps, like the tall convict in "Old Man," Vernon was inspired to commit such a preposterous, self-destructive act by some fantasy derived from popular culture. Or perhaps, like The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson, he forged that check in an effort to even a familial score in which he almost came out last. Or again, like the Lucas Beauchamp of Go Down, Moses, who threatened to kill Zack Edmonds for presuming too much of Lucas's wife Molly, perhaps Vernon's blatant forgery was motivated by outraged pride and wounded manhood. Beyond differences in class, race, and even gender (think, for example, of Absalom, Absalom!'s Rosa Coldfield), Faulkner points us to a shared legacy in the post-Confederate South of outraged dispossession, which I associate with the shifting terms of racialized identity and with the privileges that accrued from these identities.
     Faulkner and Elvis explored and expressed an anxiety characteristic of the South yet did so by way of different cultural expectations, opportunities, sensibilities, tastes, behaviors, and practices. Faulkner's entrenchment in a cultural landscape that was losing dominance made him reluctant to embrace new dimensions of the cultural milieu, specifically those involving electronic transmission, like the phonograph and the radio, through which Elvis achieved success, fame, and wealth. Conversely, the motility of the Presleys made Elvis anxious to find a foothold in what had remained for his family a stubbornly inhospitable environment. For Elvis, the virtual frontier opened up by electronic media provided the homestead that his sharecropping farming family had never managed to secure in the South.
     Linked to the rearticulation of class-, racial-, and gendered- identities, the emergence of new cultural forms in response to changing political economies affects individuals according to their present status.9 Thus, for instance, the process of modernization, urbanization, industrialization, migration, and proletarianization in the South offered new opportunities to great numbers of people, including many who were formerly disenfranchised by the dissolution of former ways of racializing southern life. In the 1920s, the recording industry, which recognized in Black migration new opportunities for commodification, began a special line of so-called race records.10 A small but visible segment of Afro-southerners who were eeking out their livelihoods as sharecroppers or domestic servants in the South took advantage of new opportunities in the emergent music business that developed as a consequence of Black migration. Faulkner was disturbed by phonographs and radios, which had the capacity to introduce Black and lower-class cultural forms and practices into private and public spaces that were formerly out of their reach and to render once-dominant cultural practices and forms obsolete. Conversely, the dominance these new cultural forms were achieving represented an opportunity for Elvis.11
     The recording and broadcasting industries had been developing and transforming with unequaled rapidity throughout Faulkner's lifetime, and included the evolution from photography to motion pictures and from recording technology to broadcast radio, talking movies, and television. The wire telegraph, whose transcontinental cables were lain in the late 19th century, introduced a modern transmission system that would shrink the globe. Radio, the wireless telegraph, continued a process whose rapid and continuous transformation we are still experiencing today. From where we sit, President Woodrow Wilson's depiction of the world created by the burgeoning technology of transmission systems as "one single whispering gallery" was as astonishingly sanguine as it was misguided about our future capacity to interpret anything as either singular or quiet!12
     From one pioneering station in Pittsburgh (KDKA) in 1920, commercial broadcasting was originating from 508 radio stations by the year 1922. Within the next seventeen years, the number of families owning radios went from 60,000 to almost 14 million.13 In addition to the fact that rapid internal migration, and especially Black migration, were occuring simultaneously with the rise of these new modes of transmission were the facts that both phenomena were developing rapidly, transforming space and time and in consequence giving rise to new cultural practices. Even the relationship between the president and the public was affected; Roosevelt's "fireside chats," which began in 1933, broadcast his voice to 60 million listeners dispersed across the country. On the ground, the development of radio shows began to provide gathering places for local musicians and to attract others who were passing through. Attracted to these shows as a listener and hopeful participant, the young Elvis Presley frequented Tupelo's WELO, which began broadcasting in 1941. There, a poor boy with working parents and no cash could listen to and learn from Mississippi Slim's live Saturday afternoon show entitled Singin' and Pickin' Hillbilly.14
     In the 1920s, so-called race records had already begun to transform the production, distribution, and consumption of Black musical forms, just at the moment when Black mass migration had reached its first peak. At the same time as hundreds of thousands of rural Afro-southerners were finding opportunities to change their lives by relocating to southern and northern cities, Afro-southern musical forms were becoming commodity forms, transforming material life and upsetting and rearticulating the very meaning of location and culture. Even as Alan Lomax was making his way to "the land where blues began" to record the music of African Americans (music we can now hear without even travelling to Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC but simply by visiting a web site anytime night or day), the relationship of the music to the southern field as the location of its production and consumption was undergoing radical upheaval. As the German-Jewish cultural theorist Walter Benjamin observed in his famous essay entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," cultural objects were losing what he called their "aura," or in other words, their necessary link to a given time, place, or cultural context. As popular as the so-called race records of the twenties were, there was no race radio station established in the South until 1949 -- almost thirty years into the history of radio -- when Memphis station WDIA began to broadcast all-Black programs, dubbing itself "The Mother Station of the Negroes."15 Increasingly, race music was making its way into places forbidden to the musicians who produced it, crossing boundaries in a manner neither Jim Crow nor any other privileged place or social order was prepared to prevent.16
     When Elvis's mother Gladys Love Smith was born in 1912, Faulkner was 15 years old, and by the time she was 15, she was interested in recorded music. Too poor to own a Victrola, Gladys -- like the young Billie Holiday, who worked in a house of prostitution -- first discovered the Victrola when she got a job working as a domestic. With ample opportunity to listen to musical recordings, Gladys distinguished herself during this period as a remarkable dancer, especially when she danced to Jimmie Rodgers' "Corinna, Corinna." "When one says she was dancing," wrote Elaine Dundy,