SOURCE: Taylor, Walter. “‘Pantaloon’: The Negro Anomaly at the Heart of Go Down, Moses.” In On Faulkner: The Best from American Literature, edited by Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, pp. 58-72. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Taylor argues that Faulkner's portrayal of the experience of African Americans in the South ultimately fails to provide an accurate picture.

The “sense of how negroes live and how they have so long endured,” wrote James Baldwin in 1951, was “hidden” from white Americans. The barriers, he felt, were formidable; foremost was “the nature of the [white] American psychology.” For whites to accept the qualities of Negro life, that psychology “must undergo a metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable.”¹ The statement summed up years of Negro frustration at the fumbling efforts of white writers to portray Negro character. It remains a significant expression of...