Travel

J. D. Carpenter’s American Odyssey

DAY 28 — JACKSON, TENNESSEE: One of my most fervent wishes for this trip was to make a pilgrimmage to Oxford, Mississippi, birthplace of the great novelist and short story writer, William Faulkner. We toured his home, Rowan Oak, an antebellum mansion he bought in 1930 for $6000 (in which are present his last, half-gone bottle of Jack Daniel’s; the outline for one of his later novels, A Fable, pencilled on his study wall; a photo of his daughter, Jill, sitting beside the family’s long-time nanny, Caroline Barr, who served as the model for Dilsey, one of Faulkner’s foundation characters), walked around the town square — where he set the final scene of his masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury –and visited his grave and the graves of various of his relatives (including that of his brother, Dean, who died at 28 in the crash of a small plane Faulkner had purchased for him, and whose ruined face Faulkner tried to reconstruct with sealing wax the night before the funeral) at St Peter’s Cemetery.

Faulkner and his wife, Estelle, had adjoining bedrooms; hers still contains the air conditioner she had installed the day after his funeral in 1962. His hatred of air conditioning was well known within the family. When I mentioned this to the young man who admitted us to the house, a history major at Ole Miss, he related the following story: “Apparently, one of the grandkids said to Estelle, ‘Wouldn’t Pappy be angry with you for putting in an air conditioner?’ to which she replied, ‘I am sure he would want me to mourn in comfort.’”

Tags: American, American Odyssey, language arts

About the author

J.D. Carpenter's Campbell Young novels have been nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award, appeared on national bestseller lists (The Globe & Mail), and received critical acclaim (The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The Edmonton Journal, Maclean's, Quill & Quire).