The Hearts of Wild Buffaloes

I frequently judge a story’s beauty on its ability to evoke feelings, because it seems to be that the greatest challenge in fiction is to create genuine feeling in the audience. Logic is easy, it can be planned and follows a pattern but emotion has to be organic, something that is much more difficult to fabricate. Pantaloon in Black managed to evoke some intense emotions, the two of which I thought were most powerfully written were grief and disgust.

Faulkner’s descriptions of grief are subtle and so well written that the reader has to take a step back from the novel to realize that it’s even happening. As Rider is walking back from the funeral he talks about looking at the wagon tracks on the path that “somewhere beneath them, vanished but not gone, fixed and held in the annealing dust, the narrow, splay-toed prints of his wife’s bare feet…”That single line sums up the entire process of grieving a loved one, of looking at time passing on after their absence, of knowing that they are no longer present but realizing deep down that they aren’t gone and never will be. The grieving process of course continues and the reader just gets sucked in along with him, we feel everything that Rider feels because the way Faulkner describes it, it evokes memories of our own grief.

The feeling of disgust is not so much guided by carefully structured empathy but by showing the exceptional ignorance and hatred of racism. We didn’t read my favorite passage in class, and looking at it I realized that taken out of context it makes me look like a racist myself. However, the passage I found to be one of the best in the story was the Sheriff telling his wife that he is done with “Them niggers…Because they aint human. The look like a man…but when it comes to normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes.” That passage caused my heart to shrivel up and my stomach bubble with that sick feeling you get when you look at the wounded puppies on those awful Humane Society commercials. The sheriff was so WRONG. Beyond being morally wrong Faulkner had just shown how much “them niggers” felt, how much Rider grieved Mannie, how much he cared and how truly human he was. I’m not sure if Faulkner was a part of any civil rights activism, but this piece is a really subtle slap in the face to all of those ignorant racist comments. It’s brilliantly executed. This was by far my favorite work we have read in this class