Chapter 6 of Absalom Absalom! by William Faulkner provides readers a look into the life of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, one of the novel’s minor yet fundamental characters for the fulfillment of Faulkner’s major themes. While his father and grandfather appear as more prominent figures in the various narrations of this multigenerational plotline, Charles E. St. V. Bon serves to drive home Faulkner’s argument that the history of the Southern United States is pervasive, lingering even as the rest of the country begins to uproot itself from its bloody foundations in the institution of slavery. The way that those who interact with Charles treat him—particularly Clytie, Grandfather Compson, and Judith—tells of a similar theme running throughout the novel; not only are Southerners particularly stuck in the nation’s shared past, they possess a distinct outlook on American society, wholly unlike that of the North. There is no room for optimism in the South, nor is there a way to achieve any semblance of moral perfection once the reality of uniquely southern sin is taken into account.
One passage on page 166 of the 1990 Vintage International Edition of the text, beginning with “‘But he has money; he will be—’” and ending with “negroes in the dice game,” best encompasses the ways in which Charles E. St. V. Bon is an essential figure, embodying the failure of Thomas Sutpen’s idealistic design within the dual tragedy of the American Southern dilemma. Any hope for the achievement of Thomas Sutpen’s impossible design—the creation of a world where no person is denied their humanity for the riches or social standing they lack—dies with the man himself one year before Charles E. St. V. Bon sets foot on Sutpen’s Hundred.
Charles E. St. V. Bon arrives to readers through Mr. Compson’s abridged narration of the story that unfolds after Charles Bon’s death, passed on by his own father, Grandfather Compson. Charles E. St. V. Bon first arrives at Sutpen’s Hundred as an “eleven-year-old boy who looked more like eight” (Faulkner, p. 157). He is there with his mother, the octoroon woman from New Orleans, and a black servant who has accompanied them in their travels to mourn over Charles Bon’s grave. The group soon departs from Sutpen’s Hundred, only for Charles E. St. V. Bon to return one year later in 1871, a French-speaking orphan who knows no English, moving now for good to the plantation where he will live out the rest of his life.
Charles E. St. V. Bon grows up learning to notice his own skin color, what it means to be one-sixteenth African American in the South, and to hate himself for being neither entirely black nor white. He spends his days working the garden for Judith and Clytie until, one day eight years later, he gets into a violent brawl with a group of young black men at a “ball held in a cabin a few miles from Sutpen’s Hundred” (p. 164). It is at this point that Grandfather Compson takes the young Charles E. St. V. Bon into his office, gives him a sum of money and tells him gently but absolutely that he must disappear. Grandfather Compson then rides to Sutpen’s Hundred after making his decree and begins to say to Judith, “’[b]ut he has money; he will be—’ and stopped” (p. 166). He will not finish this thought, presumably to say that Charles E. St. V. Bon “will be all right,” as he says to Charles moments earlier in his office (p. 165).
Grandfather Compson cannot tell Judith that Charles E. St. V. Bon will be all right because he knows it is not true. He is cut off, imagining “that forlorn little boy invisible between them who had come there eight years ago with the overall jumper over what remained of his silk and broadcloth, who had become the youth in the uniform—the tattered hat and the overalls—of his ancient curse” (p. 166). Charles E. St. V. Bon’s early childhood was not marred by constructs of social class or racial prejudices. He grew up in a “padded silken vacuum cell…where pigmentation had no more moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colored candle shades” (p. 161). Charles E. St. V. Bon would not even know to recognize the derogatory word ‘n—–’ having no such term in his native French. Charles E. St. V. Bon is in many ways a clean slate when he arrives at Sutpen’s Hundred for the first time in 1870. It is only through a continual process of adaption and initiation into the racism of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi—carried out perhaps by Judith, Clytie, or neither explicitly—that Charles E. St. V. Bon slowly and painfully learns of his “ancient curse,” meaning his tinge of black blood and accompanying irrevocable social positionality.
Charles E. St. V. Bon’s uniform, “the tattered hat and the overalls,” was slowly inherited over his time in Jefferson, beginning with his new birth into the home of Thomas Sutpen’s design (p. 166). When Charles E. St. V. Bon arrives on Clytie’s arm to Sutpen’s Hundred after the death of his mother, he already wears “the overall jumper over what remained of his silk and broadcloth” (p. 166). What remains of Charles E. St. V. Bon’s former life no longer exists when he leaves New Orleans as an eleven-year-old boy. It is as if all that he possessed in his childhood, his language, his memories, his family and any former concept of self have all disappeared, and he is left to rediscover himself in the eyes of two Southern women, one black and one white. What the people of Jefferson know about him confirms that he is nothing but a product of Sutpen’s ill-fated lineage. In the eyes of the town, Charles E. St. V. Bon seemed to have “emerged from the house for the first time at the age of about twelve years,” a young boy with no knowable past appearing as if out of smoke (p. 163).
The words ‘he will be alright’ are empty promises, and so Grandfather Compson does not speak them. Thinking of the young adult Charles E. St. V. Bon, “who had become the young man with a young man’s potence yet was still that lonely child in his parchment-and-denim hairshirt,” Grandfather Compson knows that he will never be safe, settled, or happy as long as he lives out the aftermath of a dead man’s impossible dream. He was born out of this failed design, and so it is fitting that he will die among its other successors in a world that will inevitably deny him his humanity on the basis of his race. Grandfather Compson fails to express hope that Charles E. St. V. Bon might leave Sutpen’s Hundred with the money he was given, start a new life somewhere else, and end up all right, for those would only be “lame vain words, the specious and empty fallacies which we call comfort” (p. 166). A character deeply rooted in the Southern tradition that Faulkner relays to readers, Grandfather Compson cannot imagine a brighter future for Charles E. St. V. Bon, whose mixed race dooms him within the context of pervasive Southern racism. Though it is not vocalized, Judith and Clytie share in his pessimism: “thinking Better that he were dead, better that he had never lived: then thinking what vain and empty recapitulation that would be to her if he were to say it, who doubtless had already said it, thought it, changing only the person and the number” (p. 166). There is no hope here in the Deep South following the Civil War. The optimism of the nation is neither shared nor feigned in this place where the past will never be left behind.
Charles E. St. V. Bon did leave with Grandfather Compson’s money, and reflecting the weak degree of optimism at his potential for success, returns: “[h]e returned to town. And now, next time, he was not sent for…Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, already returned (not home again; returned) before your grandfather learned how he had come back” (p. 166). Faulkner emphasizes the word “returned,” using it three times to highlight that his return is not a happy homecoming or the passive yielding of a deflated rebellious youth. This is a deliberately vengeful act by a man who has come back to Sutpen’s Hundred to die. His rebellion is all but over, Charles E. St. V. Bon “appeared, with a coal black and ape-like woman and an authentic wedding license, brought back by the woman since he had been so severely beaten and mauled recently that he could not even hold himself on the spavined and saddleless mule on which he rode while his wide walked beside it to keep him from falling off” (p. 166). In arriving with a woman much darker in complexion than his pale skin, Charles E. St. V. Bon retaliates with the most serious of Southern transgressions. He, a man who appears to be white, has traveled from his wife’s hometown, parading her “coal black” skin in front of those who were sure to take offense. Faulkner ensures that the severity of his actions is made clear. Miscegenation, marital relations between races, is the ultimate offense for which Henry Sutpen murders his half-brother Charles Bon; “so it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear” (p. 285). Charles E. St. V. Bon knows the gravity of the act and in unabashedly displaying his wife to Southern men and women, his white skin next to hers, considerable darker, his actions are a death wish.
Charles E. St. V. Bon, considerably battered, “rode up to the house and apparently flung the wedding license in Judith’s face with something of that invincible despair with which he had attacked the negroes in the dice game” (p. 166). Charles E. St. V. Bon is badly beaten upon return to Judith and Clytie’s doorstep, but he is able to complete his mission and deliver the irreversible insult of the wedding license. He will survive the beatings he received on his way to Sutpen’s Hundred, but he will not leave the ramshackle abode that he constructs on Sutpen land for himself, his wife, and eventually his son, Jim Bond, until he is stricken with yellow fever and dies.
Charles E. St. V. Bon’s brawl at the dice game on the day that he departed reflects his tormented years spent in Yoknapatawpha County and is repeated in his manner upon returning to Sutpen’s Hundred. On that day he fought in “furious protest, that indictment of heaven’s ordering, that gage flung into the face of what is with a furious and indomitable desperation” (p. 164). Now, upon his return, Charles E. St. V. Bon carries that same “invincible despair” because he cannot be more deeply injured than he already is. Nothing can mend the irrevocable damage done to him by the ultimate denier of humanity that is slavery and unrelenting racism. Sutpen’s design fails Charles E. St. V. Bon as much as it fails Wash Jones or Miss Rosa. He is the novel’s essential victim, demonstrating the futility in attempting to fly in the face of the immovable Southern social order.