Percavil Brownly-- Condoned Injustice? (Talamante)

 I need some help understanding the entries concerning Percavil Brownly. Many of the entries were humorous, and Buck and Buddy clearly struggled to find a use for Percavil. The place where I got confused was how they handled him when they ran out of options. I cannot decipher what their final decision was, and how it exemplified "general and condoned injustice and its slow amortization"

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  1. Ms. BucherApril 25, 2021 at 5:37 PM

    They freed him. Which, when you think of the injustice of the first order, that they could buy him in the first place and decide what to do with him. This was the general and condoned injustice that the society generally accepted and approved slavery, as you know, and that the “value” of a slave was amortized over his lifetime of hard work. In the case of Percival, however, the amortization isn't slow, it's immediate, as his liability is far and away more costly than keeping him. It looks like the ledger says freed debit to McCaslin, $265 (is hard to tell what he means--he probably expects Percival to pay them back?). The act of freeing him, although odd, wasn't an act of mercy but a business decision. He had no value to them, and in fact, as a commodity (no man should be considered a commodity!), they perpetuated the economic injustice (to them) by throwing him away, so to speak.

    Only to him, as a free man, who will now face an uphill fight to survive as a free man, he will face a different kind of injustice, even though it looks like Percival eventually survives to become a fat owner of a brothel. Percavil was likely homosexual (see pp. 279-280), by several references “conducting impromptu revival meetings among negroes, preaching and leading the singing also in his high sweet true soprano voice” (279), as well as the notion of two men doing something illicit: “in the entourage of a travelling Army paymaster, the two of them passing through Jefferson in a surrey at the exact moment when the boy's father (it was 1866) also happened to be crossing the Square, the surrey and its occupants traversing rapidly that quiet and bucolic scene and even in that fleeting moment and to others beside the boy's father giving an illusion of flight and illicit holiday like a man on an excursion during his wife's absence with his wife's personal maid.” Finally, there is the use of gendering, “until Brownlee glanced up and saw his late co-master and gave him one defiant female glance and then broke again, leaped from the surrey and disappeared this time for good” (280). The twin brothers may have added this insult to their list of injustices.

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  2. Krishnan VenkateshMay 2, 2021 at 10:03 PM

    I think that's absolutely right, Ms. Bucher. The name they give him, "Spintrius," is Latin for "male prostitute," and I can't help wondering if Buck bought him for his own pleasure. Slaves were not allowed to be taught to read, so it's pretty unlikely he was really a "bookkeeper" ("Buck-keeper"?). Faulkner wouldn't have begun the ledger section with this page if it wasn't somehow important (and not merely for comic relief). Does Isaac not understand what is going on with his own father? Does he perhaps repress this, not looking too closely, because an account of general sexual license distracts from his efforts to locate a monster in the family?

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