In “Pantaloon in Black,” Faulkner critiques indifference to racial violence by giving readers two iterations of Rider’s story which vary in how and how much they say about the man. From the moment he buries his wife until he kills Birdsong, the story is focalized through him and it is very detailed. It faithfully reports everything from his movement through the landscape to the unique physical sensation of the alcohol he imbibed. Readers should pity him because of his addiction and inability to cope with loss, both interconnected symptoms of his problematic understanding of self and masculinity. Through this sympathy he is thoroughly humanized as the story’s protagonist and as an African American male. In the second part of “Pantaloon in Black,” his suffering and inability to cope are minimized by indifference as the story is shortened and told through by the white deputy to his wife. Everything that humanizes Rider to the reader is reinterpreted as evidence of the inhumanity of all African Americans, “but when it comes to the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes. Now you take this one today–” (147). Here, he proceeds to tell a condensed version of the story in he really only recounts and emphasizes the parts of Rider’s last days that fully support his claim. As evidence of his claim that Rider might as well be a wild animal, he is sure to stress Rider’s brute strength in lifting the logs, ripping open the cell, and brawling with the prisoners. And how could he overlook Rider’s apparent lack of feelings and respect in picking up a shovel at the funeral and returning to work the next day. This is a dramatic reduction of Rider’s true story to a convenient narrative for a racist deputy to believe.
Upon finishing his account, he asks his wife what she thinks of it all to which she replies, “I think if you eat any supper in this house you’ll do it in the next five minutes…I’m going to clear this table then and I’m going to the picture show” (152). Her response is so routine, so ordinary that it is as if she had not just heard the violently tragic tale that her husband just told her, like she had not even listened to the twisted version he spun. It is the response of someone who is so desensitized to racial violence and is so convinced of the inhumanity of African-Americans that it effectively takes what was already a shortened account of Rider’s most traumatic hours and erases it from the world. Save for the fact that this fictional account of build up to a lynching has been recorded by Faulkner and included in this collection, the community that allows the response of deputy’s wife’s response will itself never hear his story again story again.
