Porches: Stories: Power: Spatial and Racial Intersections in Faulkner and Hurston

William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God remind us that, at its most fundamental level, the house porch has historically served in Southern culture as an escape from the stultifying heat of summer.1 With the appearance in 1702 of the first gallery in Old Mobile,2 through its widespread popularity in the nineteenth century, and until the beginning of its demise in the 1960s after the ascendence of air-conditioning, the porch has served as "a shady transition between indoors and out where one [can] relax and sip iced tea, talk with a friend on the swing, or eat summer suppers" (Moore, et al. 24). Virtually synonymous with summer socializing, the porch has been a place where individuals can sit to watch the community go by, occasionally welcoming people to climb the steps for conversation and storytelling. Indeed, even as it has given way to central air, concrete patios, backyard decks, and to what Sue Bridwell Beckham has called "mean little houses" (87), memories of the porch as a dynamic storytelling site linger in the contemporary collective Southern consciousness.3 But Faulkner and Hurston also show that the porch does much more than offer, at 92 degrees in the shade, a relatively cooler place to swap tales. Socially, politically, and psychologically significant, the porch is a transitional space between public and private spheres where individuals can negotiate an identity within a community of shared customs, largely through the stories they tell. Facilitating yet limiting access to others, the porch inextricably links community storytellers to each other, while restricting the degree of intimacy and power they can realize. Bringing together "the porch" and "storytelling communities," this work grounds itself in the intersection of "spatial" and "social" practices to explore what Edward Soja has called "the social production of space" (136). And because in the South, the "racial" is part and parcel of the spatial and the social, my more specific purpose here is to examine how the intricate interplay of race and culture is intensified by its relation to "space" and culture. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau defines "place" (lieu) as an established, stabilized "configuration of positions" which has been structured by the dominant order; "space" (espace), on the other hand, is "composed of intersections of mobile elements," and is produced when individuals are able to make creative use of an already controlled "place." "Space" is thus "practiced place" (117). In this work, I will borrow de Certeau's distinction in order to trace how the porch functions as a "practiced place" in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. As these novels confirm, the power of storytelling porches can be doubled-edged: If, at this "place," individuals are unable to resist the authority of the dominant community, the overpowering constraints of the porch can virtually quash an individual's identity; if used productively, however, storytelling porches, situated between public and private worlds, can furnish a "space" where individuals tell stories to seize and display power in the face of an already imposed social order. In both of these novels the porch links storytellers to their own separate racial communities. But because "black" and "white" cultures converge on it, the porch in these texts is also situated at cross-racial intersections, and these intersections can either erect or efface racial and cultural boundaries. In Faulkner and Hurston, the porch is both a "place" and "space" where a storyteller can, if dominant structures are resisted and genuine plurality is acknowledged, negotiate an identity within and across racial communities. In Absalom, Absalom!, the Compson porch represents the destructive power of Quentin's "[white] father's talking" amidst an inscrutable, racially vague, community voice; it is a "place" for generating narratives that exclude authentic stories from either black or white communities. …