The Blackness of Benjy Compson?

It’s long been taken for granted that Faulkner based his most famous “feebleminded” character, that of Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929), on a white man in his 30s named Edwin Chandler. Chandler, whom Faulkner often watched as a boy bellowing and pacing behind the iron gate of his wealthy family’s antebellum home near the square, is believed to have had Down syndrome, and the connections are indisputable. But there may be more to the story. When I discussed my research with Jay Watson, a professor of English at Ole Miss and the president of the William Faulkner Society, he noted that Benjy’s predicament in the book evokes the black experience in several ways: Like a slave, Benjy is stripped of his given name and reassigned a biblical one; he is castrated after being accused of assaulting a white girl; his “domain” is on a former plantation; and so on. At one point in the book, the character of Versh even tells Benjy that he’s turning into a “bluegum,” an archaic derogatory term for blacks. Though Watson had never heard of Eugene Hoskins before, he found the possible Faulkner connection intriguing.