He was in his eighties, a retired lawyer and part of a reading group that had traveled from Arizona to the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 50th annual conference in Oxford, Miss., in July 2024. The group had been reading William Faulkner for decades and wanted to share their experiences. They all looked to be of retirement age and were quite outspoken about what Faulkner’s work meant to them.

The retired lawyer spoke about a conversation he had with Cornel West, the black philosopher and activist often described as a public intellectual. This old, white male said to him, “You probably won’t like what I’m going to say: The greatest American novel about race is Absalom, Absalom!”

Earlier at the conference, a black scholar had been asked a question after her talk about which black characters Faulkner had handled well. She offered up Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury as the only black character she cared to say that he had handled “okay.” So I perked up waiting to hear what West had said to the aged white Faulkner reader. “I agree with you,” West told him, adding, “So does Toni Morrison.”

That Faulkner is an indispensable American writer to consult on race may come as a surprise to readers of mass-circulation magazines such as the Atlantic, which recently headlined a piece by the distinguished historian Drew Gilpin Faust “What to Do about William Faulkner,” as though his work were a problem to be surmounted before reading him.

I doubt that West and Morrison especially favored Faulkner’s depiction of black characters. I think they had something quite different in mind that can perhaps best be explained in the reaction of another black reader of Faulkner’s work. She was part of an online reading group I joined for a discussion of four Faulkner short stories. She was middle-aged and had just read Faulkner for the first time. She had a particularly powerful response to “That Evening Sun,” which she found devastating in its treatment of race. For the first time, she said, she truly understood how certain white people saw black people as less than fully human.

In the story, Nancy, a black woman, is kicked in the teeth by a prominent white citizen who has not paid her for sexual services rendered. She is pregnant by another man (probably white), not her husband, and she is in dread of her husband, who she believes will murder her because of the pregnancy. The white children she cares for watch as their father abandons the effort to save her. What ultimately happens to Nancy is not revealed; the point is that she is all alone.

The black woman reading the story for the first time confessed it had undone her because it called up troubling feelings that she had not articulated to herself before reading Faulkner. He had disturbed her, yet she was grateful to him for helping her to understand something about her place in the world. She seemed, at least in that moment I watched her, as alone as Nancy.

Faulkner’s recognition of the way race has defined black and white people takes on epic proportions in Absalom, Absalom!, the story of Thomas Sutpen, a Mississippi slavemaster and owner of the plantation Sutpen’s Hundred, who disowns his son, Charles Bon, because he is black, the offspring of an abandoned wife in the West Indies whose family had passed her off as white. At least that is what two Harvard students, Southern scion Quentin Compson and his Scots-Irish Canadian roommate, Shreve McCannon, think happened as they piece together, years later, what Quentin has learned from his father and others who tried to understand what happened to the Sutpens.

Henry Sutpen, Thomas’s son by a second marriage to a white woman, killed Charles Bon, his best friend and a fellow student at the University of Mississippi, who had arrived at Sutpen’s Hundred to court Henry’s sister, Judith, and to seek some sort of acknowledgment from his estranged father. The novel ends with Quentin and Shreve imagining that Henry Sutpen, who had idolized Bon, murdered him because of what Henry learned from his father.

Bon rarely speaks in the novel. Why he joins Henry in fighting for the South in the Civil War is never explained. But Bon leaves behind an eloquent letter to Judith affirming his commitment to their forthcoming marriage that is written in a style that is the equal of William Faulkner’s. Quentin and Shreve imagine Bon arriving at Sutpen’s Hundred seeking retribution against the father who had repudiated his mother, but then turning toward love, as expressed in his letter to Judith.

It is difficult to exaggerate what a turning point in American fiction and racial consciousness Absalom, Absalom! represents. The word for Bon’s behavior is “passing,” although it is never used in the novel. Thomas Sutpen at first reveals to Henry only that Bon is his half brother, and Henry comes to accept that Judith’s marriage to Bon would be incestuous. It is his father’s further disclosure of Bon’s race that is intolerable. Henry cannot bring himself to welcome into the family a half brother and brother-in-law who is black. Thus Bon dies as alone as Nancy, as alone in his humanity as some black readers feel when reading Faulkner.

Bon’s decision to belong to the Sutpen family, no matter how brutishly Sutpen has treated his mother and no matter how racist Sutpen’s actions have been, tells the story of black–white conciliation in America.

Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s rebuke to Thomas Jefferson, who could not imagine a future in which whites and blacks lived side by side as equals. Jefferson wanted to ship black people back to Africa or to places like Haiti, believing that ex-slaves could never assimilate as citizens of the United States. He feared that, even worse, because of their treatment as slaves, blacks would resort to violence against their former enslavers. He was not alone, of course. In 1936, when Faulkner’s novel was published, who did conceive of today’s world of blended families? No other American writer of Faulkner’s stature dared write such a novel at a time when the reading public preferred Gone with the Wind.

Charles Bon is one of the most fascinating characters in American literature. He is treated as a foreigner, an exotic, who nonetheless mesmerizes the white racists in Faulkner’s novel. Yet despite the aplomb Bon exhibits in his dealings with the Sutpens, only Judith can ultimately conceive of him as an equal or as someone to love. After Bon’s death, she cares for his son, the child of an octoroon in New Orleans, thus honoring Bon’s place in the Sutpen family.

Henry, as Quentin and Shreve portray him, is devastated by his own racism. Although Henry had worshiped Bon before murdering him, the knowledge that the brother he loves is black means Bon has to be treated as the other, as less than human. After running away, Henry returns to Sutpen’s Hundred many years later, to die looking like a ghost of himself, the consequence of denying Bon’s humanity and his own.

Faulkner’s novel is a tragedy, but it is also the story of a reconciliation. The Canadian Shreve tries to tell Quentin that his own Southern racism will be superseded — that in fact, in the future, black and white people will have descended from African kings because, in the end, American ancestry is not about separation but unity.

Outside his fiction, outside Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner sometimes sounded as conservatively Southern as the rest of his segregationist family. He believed in integration, but so difficult was the issue in his own time that he could imagine a reconciliation of the races only in some distant future, and in the pages of his fiction.

So why did Faulkner prove unequal to the insights of his greatest novel? For the same reason that Quentin cannot act on Shreve’s repudiation of racism. At the end of the novel, Shreve asks Quentin: “Why do you hate the South?” Quentin vehemently answers with his famous denial: “I don’t hate it. I don’t hate it!” Expressed in the negative, Quentin’s attachment to the South is as fraught as Faulkner’s.

Many of Faulkner’s fellow Southerners rejected his vision of the South and accused him of being a “n***er lover” who wrote for liberal Northerners. His own brother John talked about arming himself as he became increasingly vitriolic about the NAACP and the civil-rights movement. A distraught Faulkner had to make peace with a South and a family he could not leave, although he foresaw a time when he might have to choose exile, when his very life would be in peril if he continued to speak in favor of integration. So he coined that adjuration to civil-rights activists — “Go slow, now” — that seemed so retrogressive to readers of his fiction. The cautious Faulkner of the 1950s lagged behind his novel of the 1930s, way ahead of its time, even if the blending of families in that novel is put off to a distant future.

What is so moving and profound about Absalom, Absalom! is the tenderness of Bon’s feelings as evoked by Quentin and Shreve. He is their creation, emanating from their own intimacy as college roommates. By telling to themselves the story of Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen, Quentin and Shreve are telling the tale of their own bond, begun in Faulkner’s earlier novel The Sound and the Fury.

This linking of Henry and Charles, and of Quentin and Shreve, calls to mind James Baldwin’s comment on William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner: “He has begun the common history — ours.” Although certain black critics attacked Styron for appropriating their hero, for conveying the most intimate thoughts of a slave, Baldwin understood, as Faulkner did, that such convergences of black and white were the only way forward.