How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
I used to think that a Southerner had to be always conscious of n*****s. I thought that Northerners would expect him to. When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of them as colored people not n*****s, and if it hadn't happened that I wasn't thrown with many of them, I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. (2.56)
Race relations in the South are, for Faulkner, also always about the relationship between the North and the South.
Quote #8
That was when I realized that a n***** is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among. (2.56)
This is actually a pretty astute comment on the ways that society creates race. Of course, it’s also an observation on race articulated completely from a white point of view, but it’s still a rather surprising comment on the biases of the society Quentin lives in.
Quote #9
His eyes were soft and irisless and brown, and suddenly I saw Roskus watching me from behind all his whitefolks' claptrap of uniforms and politics and Harvard manner, diffident, secret, inarticulate and sad. (2.124)
Deacon makes his living preying on young white men in Cambridge. But, as he talks to Quentin, he suddenly becomes recognizable as a black man – one much like the man Quentin loved at home.