Sally Wolff-King

LITTLE ROCK — When Mississippi writer William Faulkner died in 1962, he left behind an imposing literary legacy that includes 13 novels as well as a number of short stories, essays and other writings. Faulkner’s death also marked the beginning in earnest of Faulkner scholarship, as professors from universities in the United States and around the world combed over every inch of the writer’s life and times in order to make sense of the dense, imaginary worlds created in The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and other celebrated works.

This year-after-year delving into all things Faulkner was so extensive and exhaustive that it was reasonable to assume there were no great discoveries to be made. Then Sally Wolff-King, an Emory University professor specializing in Southern literature and a native of Dumas, was handed a journal of a Mississippi plantation owner written in the mid-1800s.

“I opened it up and looked down and saw the word Isaac,” recalls Wolff-King. “When I saw Isaac, I thought of [Faulkner’s novel] Go Down Moses instantly. But it was a common name and so I dismissed it. I turned a few more pages and saw the word Moses. I turned more pages and saw the word Sam. Those are the three main characters in Go Down Moses. So I thought I was in a parallel universe and I couldn’t understand why I was seeing Faulkner names in this antebellum Southern plantation journal.”

It turned out that Wolff-King had in her hands a neglected piece of the puzzle on William Faulkner. After deep study of the journal, she concluded that Faulkner had indeed used it as a major source for Go Down Moses and other works.

Wolff-King published this sensational finding in 2010 in Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship and an Antebellum Plantation Diary (Louisiana State University Press). This connection shook up the world of Faulkner academics. Since Ledgers of History, Wolff-King has lectured at the Library of Congress and her achievement was noted in The New York Times.

“Sally’s discovery is a monumental contribution to the scholarship,” says Charles Chappell, a retired English professor of 41 years at Hendrix College. Chappell introduced a Faulkner course at Hendrix in 1983. “She really has the minute details right. She demonstrates how passages in the ledger provide the names of characters and places. She does a beautiful job with it.”

The discovery was of such magnitude that even Wolff-King didn’t believe it at first.

“It took me a while to be sure I was right,” Wolff-King says. “The Faulkner scholars are very well read. I thought surely they all know about this and I don’t. So I read for months. Eventually I became convinced that this connection was something that hadn’t been realized.”

GOLD LETTERS

Wolff-King’s childhood in Dumas in the late 1950s and early 1960s was one marked by few restrictions and many delights of small-town life in the Delta.

“We had a lot of freedom back then,” Wolff-King says. “Our parents weren’t afraid for us to go out. There was a drugstore downtown and we had lunch there sometimes. It was one of those soda fountain-type drugstores. I had a great childhood.”

She grew up in a small household with one brother. Her family owned the Wolff Brothers Department store in downtown Dumas and the store “was a central feature of my life at that time.”

But even at an early age, Wolff-King gravitated toward books. Her family supported and encouraged the habit of reading.

“My family valued education and learning,” Wolff-King says. “We always read books. My parents often ordered books for us. I remember the first book I liked was Peter Rabbit. The pictures are still vivid in my imagination. I read Eudora Welty a lot now, and she has a similar recollection of reading fairy tales and seeing the curving gold letters at the beginning of each story.”

As an educator, Wolff-King is happy to talk about her years in the Dumas school system. She remains close with many of her former teachers and is not shy in handing out praise for how she was taught.

“We had great teachers and they taught us and we learned,” Wolff-King says. “The system worked. I am proud of them. They did a great job with all of us. It was a fun school.”

English was Wolff-King’s favorite subject and she excelled in those classes. But she wasn’t completely buried in books while in school.

“I was a cheerleader and homecoming queen,” Wolff-King says. “I think there’s a picture of me with a crown. The ceremony was out on the football field right before a game. My dad was a football player in high school and also a Razorback. So he was pretty focused on football and pretty pleased to be out there that night.”

She loved animals and toyed with the idea of becoming a veterinarian. That notion didn’t last long.

“I worked for a time with the veterinarian in town, but he worked mostly with large animals like cows,” Wolff-King says. “So a calf was born on the property of the vet’s office one morning. Pretty soon the vet had his whole arm inside the cow pulling out a breeched calf. After that I thought maybe this isn’t for me.”

A WARM BATH

Wanting to be near Dumas influenced Wolff-King’s decision to go to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., to college. She doesn’t remember being homesick much during her first year. She was especially relieved to find that she fit in just fine.

“I was afraid that I would not be educationally ready, but I was,” Wolff-King says. “There were students from Exeter and Andover and they really didn’t study so they didn’t do as well. So I was very happy when I discovered my Dumas education put me in good standing.”

Vanderbilt was where the young co-ed from Arkansas was introduced to the novelist from Mississippi. The two hit it off right away.

“We read The Sound and the Fury,” Wolff-King said. “Honestly, it felt like taking a warm bath. I felt like I was at home. That this person could write about what I have lived and express it this well — it’s still thrilling. I decided that Southern literature is my thing.”

With her academic path set, Wolff-King soon moved on to graduate school at Emory University in Atlanta. There she would get her first taste of what her life would be like as a professor. It wasn’t an easy go right at the start, because she felt like the undergraduates she was teaching then didn’t respect her. She asked around for advice.

“I was pretty young when I started teaching at Emory in graduate school,” Wolff-King says. “I was not much older than my students. My dad said, ‘Wear a hat.’ So one day in class, I wore a hat. I chose a funny one on purpose to heighten the effect. The students were so shocked by it but they started to pay attention. It worked beautifully.”

Now having taught hundreds of classes, Wolff-King is quite comfortable leading students through the work of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Welty and others.

“I call on students by name and try to make sure everyone talks, not just a few,” Wolff-King says. “The same few do tend to answer but, if you call on them all, they get used to answering. That seems to work. That makes for a more active class.”

IN THE IN-BOX

Unpacking the mystery of Faulkner and the plantation journal has dominated the last couple of years of Wolff-King’s life. The winding path to the discovery started with an e-mail.

“For years we had been taking the students on trips to Oxford [Mississippi] to talk to Faulkner’s nephew and tour the sites there,” Wolff-King says. “One year I decided to invite alumni of Emory to go along on the trip. Sixteen of them went and they had a great time. But one of the alums wrote me and said, ‘I cannot go on your trip but I knew William Faulkner.’ That was one line in my in-box and so I was very interested.”

Edgar Wiggin Francisco III of Atlanta was the alumnus who e-mailed. It was only after a long interview that Wolff-King even knew of the journal, which was written by Francis Terry Leak, Francisco’s great-great-grandfather. She then was told that Faulkner used to read it frequently and make notes about the contents.

This journal is no small pamphlet. A typescript of it is 1,800 pages long and goes into painstaking detail of what life on a Mississippi plantation was like in the mid-1800s.

“The diary is a fascinating document,” Wolff-King says. “The old planter was a writer as well as planter and he wrote down everything. He wrote down everything he bought for his family and his slaves. He had 90 slaves. He wrote what he bought them to eat and what he bought for them to wear. He noted rainfall levels and medical treatments by the doctors. If the slaves had a wedding, he was there and officiated the wedding. I think that is why Faulkner was interested in it. It is full of detail and is amazing in and of itself.”

Wolff-King had to not only dive into the astonishingly long journal but also go back to the works of Faulkner to find what the writer had used. After this painstaking research, Wolff-King was to come to some conclusions.

“This is one source among many that Faulkner used,” Wolff-King says. “I think it also shows something about Faulkner’s writing process. He drew from the diary. He drew character names. Interestingly, he did not use many names from white people in the community. You can talk a lot about why he did that. But I think he was trying to resurrect the slaves’ stories and memorialize them. I think he wanted his stories and novels to be authentic and to be historically realistic.”

Despite the intense research, Wolff-King doesn’t seem the least bit fatigued or any less fascinated by her chosen subject matter.

“Yes, my interest in Faulkner is still strong,” Wolff-King says. “I learn more and more each year and still have a lot to learn.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Sally Wolff-King

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH 1954, Little Rock THE BEST KIND OF VACATION IS In Charleston, S.C. MY FAVORITE FOOD IS Anything from Galatoire’s in New Orleans I CAN’T START THE DAY WITHOUT A smile. NOBODY KNOWS THAT I AM A FAN OF The Bee Gees. A RECENT BOOK THAT I READ FOR PLEASURE WAS John Updike’s Higher Gossip. A SUCCESSFUL COLLEGE CLASS DEPENDS ON Lively interaction among all participants. WHAT MOST PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND ABOUT WILLIAM FAULKNER IS He liked women, but too often they did not like him. A PHRASE THAT SUMS ME UP Both serious and lighthearted.