Brush fires and nooses

What causes violence and aggression?  Faulkner lays it on the line in "Dry September."  As anyone who has graduated from high school knows, sometimes it's just the weather.  Don't you remember how suspensions escalated, detentions spiked, and fights always seemed to break out along with the break of spring?  And it only got worse from there.  Heat makes people crazy.  And irrational prejudice, combined with the whole "Southern Belle" mythology, doesn't help.

The saving grace of what seems to be a pretty trite story is that, like the mob, we don't know the facts.  We are a captive audience, crowded into a swelting barber shop, stuffed into a car skidding across dusty roads at midnight.  Perhaps, as the reader, you're with Hawkshaw.  Will Mayes is a good man, or at least a good nigger.  He couldn't have done this.

Perhaps you're with another anonymous speaker, whose voice clings to some semblance of rationality even within the amoebic mob: "We'll get the facts in plenty of time to act."  Of course, as things go, you're already acting, and then you've acted, and the facts never seemed to materialize.

Minnie is both a contemptible and sympathetic character in the story.  She's approaching old maidhood, and this terrifies her.  What better way to stir interest than a harmless little rape accusation, born of desperation, and directed against an expendable member of society?  And it seems to work just fine; when last we see her, Minnie is carried, as if on a palankin, to a bed, where she is fawned over in an almost orgiastic scene.

When all is said and done, all that's left is a dead black man, a sad spinster, and a bunch of pathetic, impotent white dudes.  McLendon goes home to his gilt, cramped little shack and smacks his wife around.  A war hero with nothing left to fight for, he likely feels ashamed of himself as "cooler heads prevail" and Faulkner's narrative camera pans out and away into the cold sky.  The heat is gone, and so is the frenzy.